Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode, So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Happy Monday, and we have a very special Monday episode.
Speaker 2: We're doing a return of our Shitty Mayor Monday episodes
Speaker 2: for this Monday, June.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 2: The date is, twenty sixth, during the sixth week of
Speaker 2: action in Atlanta to stop Cop City, so that is ongoing.
Speaker 2: We're recording this is lightly ahead of times so that
Speaker 2: we can release it during the week. So we don't
Speaker 2: know what exactly how exactly.
Speaker 4: Things are going to get this report. Nobody's been arrested
Speaker 4: so far, everything's gone great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's sure. So yeah, we don't quite know what
Speaker 2: the first kickoff rally is going to be quite yet,
Speaker 2: but we do want to talk a little bit about
Speaker 2: a certain mayor for this Shitty Mayor Monday, and I
Speaker 2: have convinced Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective to
Speaker 2: do my work for me this episode by writing probably
Speaker 2: too many words about may Or Andre Dickens.
Speaker 4: It was only a little over what you told me
Speaker 4: to write.
Speaker 3: That's good. That's good. That's good.
Speaker 2: So yeah, let's hear about. Let's hear about mister Dickens.
Speaker 2: Matt to take take it away.
Speaker 4: All right, So Andrea to Shawn. Dickens was born June seventeenth,
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy four, the younger of two children. His mother
Speaker 4: divorced Dickens's birth father before he was born, but stepfather
Speaker 4: adopted him and his sister when Dickens was seven. Working
Speaker 4: as an airline mechanic, Dickens' stepfather taught him how to
Speaker 4: take things apart and put them back together, creating an
Speaker 4: early interest in engineering for young Andre. He grew up
Speaker 4: in Adamsville neighborhood, which went to Benjamin E. Mays High School,
Speaker 4: which is in southwest Atlanta. Dickens says the neighborhood kids
Speaker 4: were rough around the edges, as he told Atlanta Magazine
Speaker 4: and quote, we fought often, but when the fighting escalated
Speaker 4: to bats and brass knuckles, he changed course and turned
Speaker 4: to baseball in books instead. At age sixteen, Dickens decided
Speaker 4: that he wanted to be mayor after watching then Mayor
Speaker 4: Andrew Young. This is about the time he also met
Speaker 4: Shirley Franklin, whose son he played baseball with. Franklin was
Speaker 4: Mayor Young's chief administrative officer at the time and spent
Speaker 4: time mentoring Dickens as a teenager. She would also go
Speaker 4: on to become mayor herself.
Speaker 2: Okay, so Andrew Young, I know that name because that's
Speaker 2: the street where the hard Rock Cafe is.
Speaker 4: Is the street where the hard Rock Cafe is. He
Speaker 4: went on to become an ambassador, ambassador to the hard
Speaker 4: Rock to the hard Rock Cafe. That's also where the
Speaker 4: Swat vehicle hung out across the Hooters exactly. Yeah, very
Speaker 4: notable street in Atlanta.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: After a week long Minorities Interested in Technology and Engineering
Speaker 4: program at Georgia Tech this summer before his senior year,
Speaker 4: someone from the program handed him an application to Georgia Tech,
Speaker 4: which he filled out while waiting on his mom to
Speaker 4: pick him up. Tech was the only college that Dickens
Speaker 4: applied to.
Speaker 2: Huh, I mostly know Georgia Tech as the place that
Speaker 2: like Raytheon and Lackey Martin go to recruit a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of their employees.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, it's it's the tech engineering school of
Speaker 4: the South, and all the good weapons manufacturers need to
Speaker 4: get their good Southern engineering. Yeah, he did not go
Speaker 4: that route, But it is kind of rare for black
Speaker 4: politicians in general to come from schools outside of the HBCUs.
Speaker 4: We've got that like big HBCU district here in Atlanta.
Speaker 3: Can explain what that is.
Speaker 4: Perfect historically black college and universities. There are a group
Speaker 4: of them in kind of just off downtown Atlanta in
Speaker 4: an area called the Atlanta University Center, So they're all
Speaker 4: kind of together in that area and that is where
Speaker 4: most of are like elected officials who become mayor come from.
Speaker 4: Dickens is only the second mayor since nineteen seventy four
Speaker 4: not to graduate from one of those HBCUs. But Dickens
Speaker 4: did join Kappa Alpha Psia, historically black fraternity when he
Speaker 4: went to Tech and was a member of the student government,
Speaker 4: kind of keeping his dream of being mayor alive. But
Speaker 4: after graduations, he briefly left the state before returning home
Speaker 4: in two thousand and two to take care of his
Speaker 4: ill mother. This is around the time that he started
Speaker 4: his public service career and he joined NPUD NPUs our
Speaker 4: Neighborhood Planning Units. Atlanta is broken up into twenty five
Speaker 4: of these neighborhood units and they're each given a letter
Speaker 4: of the alphabet. So they are advisory boards that give
Speaker 4: input to the city, but they can issue like zoning
Speaker 4: variances and some MPUs have built up like considerable power
Speaker 4: over their neighborhood. So this is where a lot of
Speaker 4: people like first plug into Atlanta government.
Speaker 2: Okay, So it's like, is this like really like the
Speaker 2: zoning board process?
Speaker 4: And yeah, if you need to get approval to have
Speaker 4: a bigger awning than you're supposed to have, you got
Speaker 4: to go through vmp to get it.
Speaker 3: Got it?
Speaker 2: Okay, So I'll consider that for when I want to
Speaker 2: expand my awning.
Speaker 4: Yes, you're onning or build your onning Okay, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: At this point, Dickens and his sister also founded a
Speaker 4: business called City Living Home Furnishings, and the company is
Speaker 4: exactly what.
Speaker 3: It's a It's a furniture store. You found furniture.
Speaker 4: In an interview with Georgia State University later in his life.
Speaker 4: Dickens reflected that this is where he determined that he
Speaker 4: needed to act rightly to ensure his good reputation.
Speaker 2: What furniture store teach him this lesson?
Speaker 4: Oh well, he said, Imagine I'm on TV saying trust me,
Speaker 4: and all the people would have to do is call
Speaker 4: the Atlanta Journal, Constitution or radio and say your furniture
Speaker 4: was trash your history to somebody who are all these
Speaker 4: places that you know, You've really got to be consistent.
Speaker 4: It's what he said. And you know, it turns out.
Speaker 5: I have to know.
Speaker 4: Woh spoiler, he goes bankrupt. It turns out the AGAC
Speaker 4: wouldn't be much of a problem for Dickens, as we've
Speaker 4: learned years later, the paper would be on his side,
Speaker 4: bobbing those easy questions and helping him build support for
Speaker 4: cop City. So, like I said, the family business failed
Speaker 4: in twenty ten, you can't actually blame Dickens for it
Speaker 4: was a product of the of the Great Recession.
Speaker 2: Okay, So I wonder if we can still find any
Speaker 2: of his furniture lying around.
Speaker 4: So there's there's actually a store called City Living Home
Speaker 4: Furnish Furnishing, And I don't know if it's like.
Speaker 3: Somebody delayed at or Yeah.
Speaker 4: I tried to look it up and I couldn't like
Speaker 4: figure out if it was just somebody using the same
Speaker 4: name or not. But there's one that exists in like
Speaker 4: West Midtown.
Speaker 2: Okay, oh boy, sorry, we're gonna I'm gonna get a
Speaker 2: lot of comments from people in Atlanta down because you
Speaker 2: said a West Midtown.
Speaker 4: West Side or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 2: It's it's a Southwest Piedmont. I don't know.
Speaker 4: There's there's also so no like south of North. Yeah,
Speaker 4: we have all of these these fun little street or
Speaker 4: neighborhood names. But so after the failing business, he changed
Speaker 4: course and went to GSU for a master's of Public
Speaker 4: Administration in economic Development. So this was after twenty ten, Yeah,
Speaker 4: after twenty ten. In twenty eleven he started attending his
Speaker 4: master's program at Georgia State University, and then he graduated
Speaker 4: in twenty thirteen, just in time for the municipal election season.
Speaker 4: So Atlanta City Council, as we've learned now, is comprised
Speaker 4: of twelve district seats and three city wide seats or
Speaker 4: what we call at large seats, and so Dickens ran
Speaker 4: for post three against an incumbent named h Lamar Willis.
Speaker 4: Dickens kind of historically when he has these campaigns, either
Speaker 4: has really good fortune or good insight in choosing his
Speaker 4: opponent or opponents. A month prior to the election, Willis
Speaker 4: was disbarred after the Georgia Supreme Court found that he
Speaker 4: violated numerous professional conduct rules, including it in two thousand
Speaker 4: and nine placing a settlement money from a child injury
Speaker 4: case into his personal bank account instead of giving it
Speaker 4: to the parents. Wait, really, yes, this guy, this guy
Speaker 4: is now back in Georgia government. He is he's part.
Speaker 2: Of like the beltline that that makes.
Speaker 4: Sense management program. So like this happened earlier this.
Speaker 3: Year stealing money from injured children.
Speaker 4: I think he gave it to the child eventually. But
Speaker 4: you're supposed to put these in like escrow accounts and
Speaker 4: not in your own account.
Speaker 3: To your personal account.
Speaker 6: No, So.
Speaker 4: Former Mayor Sureley Franklin indoors Dickens in the twenty three race,
Speaker 4: or former Mayor Surely Franklin indors Dickens in the twenty
Speaker 4: thirteen race, which drew iron attacks by both Willis, who
Speaker 4: called Dickens out for his bankruptcy of the furniture business,
Speaker 4: and what Willis alleged was quote unlawful use of Georgia
Speaker 4: Tech government property. So on the bankruptcy, Dickens went to
Speaker 4: about a million dollars in debt and had some taxlinges
Speaker 4: against him, which he's now discharged through both bankrupts in
Speaker 4: settling the tax leads. But the unlawful use of Georgia
Speaker 4: Tech Georgia government property, what is that? I have no idea.
Speaker 4: I don't know what they I searched pretty hard to
Speaker 4: try to find it, and I can't. Like other than
Speaker 4: Will willis making the claim, I found no evidence like.
Speaker 2: A computers who like what is.
Speaker 4: I'm assuming like, you know, probably something like he went
Speaker 4: to a computer lab and used it off hours for
Speaker 4: some personal, weird business. But yeah, I found nothing that
Speaker 4: actually really backs up the claim against him. So he
Speaker 4: won the election in November with fifty three percent of
Speaker 4: the vote, which is surprisingly strong victory for like a
Speaker 4: relatively unknown candidate like Dickens was at the time. During
Speaker 4: his first term twenty thirteen to twenty seventeen, Dickens worked
Speaker 4: pretty quietly, but towards the end of his term he
Speaker 4: started to introduce legislation make a name for himself, so
Speaker 4: he created a forty million dollar affordable housing bond, as
Speaker 4: well as a study to raise the minimum wage for
Speaker 4: city employees to fifteen dollars an hour, which ultimately led
Speaker 4: to the city enacting that wage. Diggins ran for his
Speaker 4: second term unopposed, so naturally he won.
Speaker 3: So that's twenty seventeen.
Speaker 4: Now we're a twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one, and
Speaker 4: this is where the story starts to get interesting. We'll
Speaker 4: see the themes that will play out in this first,
Speaker 4: you know, a couple of years as mayor.
Speaker 2: Well and we will learn about that story after these
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Speaker 3: All right, we are back.
Speaker 2: I'm strumming away on my on my electric gold plated bass.
Speaker 4: Doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound like it's supposed to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Daniell cut cut out all of the all of
Speaker 2: the bad bass. Actually, I can go get my accordion
Speaker 2: and play that instead.
Speaker 3: Do you want let's not all right?
Speaker 4: Well continue, So we're in twenty eighteen now, so in
Speaker 4: twenty normal year, it completely normal year for Atlanta. Nothing
Speaker 4: happened anywhere else in the world. One of the biggest
Speaker 4: conversations that was going around in Atlanta in twenty eighteen
Speaker 4: revolved around an area of downtown called the Gulch. So,
Speaker 4: this is the area that's surrounded by most of our
Speaker 4: sports team venues, kind of like where Centennial Olympic Park is,
Speaker 4: and the streets are all elevated in that area around
Speaker 4: above ground level and at the bottom of the ground level,
Speaker 4: it's like these early twentieth century like railway lines, but
Speaker 4: it's mostly parking lots for those those to the stadiums
Speaker 4: for the stadiums. And it's known as the gulch because
Speaker 4: you know, kind of which is a break in the ground.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it looks it looks it's like a gulch kind of.
Speaker 3: So back in it's like, ooh wow.
Speaker 4: Back in twenty twenty twenty twelve, then Mayor cassim Re
Speaker 4: present in an idea to give a Los Angeles based
Speaker 4: firm a million dollars to build the Gulch into a
Speaker 4: mixed use high rise area. The legislation finally passed in
Speaker 4: twenty eighteen, but Andrea Dickens voted against it, saying correctly
Speaker 4: that there wasn't enough focus in the development plans on
Speaker 4: the housing affordability and this helped cement Dickens's reputation as
Speaker 4: a housing affordability advocate.
Speaker 2: And yeah, because he also did that forty million dollars.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he just did that forty million dollars bond. And
Speaker 4: we'll have some more affordable housing stuff later. But you know,
Speaker 4: I should say, we're like five years on now and
Speaker 4: the Gulch hasn't be gone, but they're they're trying to
Speaker 4: get it done. But before the World Cup comes in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're also it seems like they've been preoccupied with
Speaker 2: another another construction construction project that's getting much more of
Speaker 2: the mayor's attention, which oddly does not have anything to
Speaker 2: do with affordable housing.
Speaker 4: No, it just not. Dickens also introduced legislation that led
Speaker 4: to the creation of the Atlanta Department of Transportation, which,
Speaker 4: if I'm being fair, was a good idea and pretty
Speaker 4: necessary to help address bennis decaying road infrastructure. Proven no,
Speaker 4: the roads.
Speaker 3: You're fine.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you drove on you complained when we had
Speaker 4: this last week of action about Decab Avenue and all
Speaker 4: of the potholes. Yeah, and that is now repaved. That
Speaker 4: got repavedy a couple of weeks ago. They're in the
Speaker 4: process of repaving it.
Speaker 3: So the infrastructure working.
Speaker 2: It's my favorite part. My new favorite part is Moreland
Speaker 2: is that usually around Moreland's Drive there's an area where
Speaker 2: you're where you're trying to get to the Wanti Forest
Speaker 2: that just is always constantly flooded no matter what. And
Speaker 2: that's that's my favorite area of Atlanta.
Speaker 4: And I hear that if you get rid of a forest,
Speaker 4: that will improve flood helps it flooding because there's more
Speaker 4: space for the dirt to soak in water exactly.
Speaker 3: Yea, that is how that works. It is science.
Speaker 4: So in twenty nineteen, Dickens introduced legislation to create a
Speaker 4: task force to decide how to repurpose the Atlanta City
Speaker 4: Detention Center or a CDC, which is really weird. Every
Speaker 4: time I hear a CDC, I think of this thing,
Speaker 4: it's jail, and everybody else is talking about something entirely different.
Speaker 5: Huh.
Speaker 4: So it was built in ninety nine. He's leading up
Speaker 4: to the Olympics, and replaced an older jail that now
Speaker 4: serves as our primary homeless shelter.
Speaker 3: So that's what ACDC is now.
Speaker 4: It's called the Gateway Center. Now that was the old jail.
Speaker 4: ACDC is the current jail.
Speaker 3: Okay, Okay.
Speaker 4: So, in a press release, after Bottom signed this legislation
Speaker 4: to create the task force.
Speaker 3: Who's bottom? Who's Bottoms?
Speaker 4: So from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one, Atlanta had
Speaker 4: a mayor name Lance Bottoms, and she was great and
Speaker 4: did not approve legislation about cop City at all.
Speaker 3: She did not. She did, she did, she did. So
Speaker 3: it was a lot. You just lied. I lied.
Speaker 2: You already purposely spread misinformation on my news podcast.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: So Michael Smith was Bottoms press secretary and also currently
Speaker 4: serving as Dickens press secretary. So he wrote that this
Speaker 4: legislation that authorized the task force actually authorized Bottoms to
Speaker 4: close the jail, but the order and it did not
Speaker 4: create that authorization, only authorized this task force to recommend
Speaker 4: future uses of the site should it close, And this
Speaker 4: is going to be important. The task force met for
Speaker 4: about a year before turning into options which brings us
Speaker 4: to June twenty twenty. We're going to skip straight over
Speaker 4: there with all of this going on.
Speaker 2: So what was happening in June twenty twenty in Atlanta?
Speaker 4: There were some protests going on, which we're going to
Speaker 4: key in just after the jail fight. But the task
Speaker 4: force offered four options, and the city indicated that was
Speaker 4: going to go with the second cheapest of the four,
Speaker 4: which was redoing the facade of the jail and turning
Speaker 4: the interior into a center for diversions. So instead of
Speaker 4: having a city jail, we would have this multi storied
Speaker 4: diversion center to stop people from going into the criminal
Speaker 4: justice system. And in the middle of the summer of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: This was how is that not just a jail, it's you.
Speaker 4: Don't enter the criminal legal system. Yeah, so you don't
Speaker 4: talk to you're not in front of a judge, you
Speaker 4: are not techly arrested. You are given resources, and you
Speaker 4: are given options to you know, attend courses or counseling
Speaker 4: or whatever you need instead of entering like the criminal
Speaker 4: justice And so we have a diversion program here called
Speaker 4: Policing's Alternatives and Diversions or PAD, which operates in every
Speaker 4: zone of the city, and is is you know, if
Speaker 4: somebody gets arrested, like stealing basic substance stuff, they are
Speaker 4: supposed to contact PAD and enter them into a diversion
Speaker 4: program where they get help instead of going to jail.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: And it works to the extent that the city of
Speaker 4: or it works to the extent that APD actually does
Speaker 4: contact PAD. And it depends on kind of the zone
Speaker 4: how effective it is. But basically, at this point everyone
Speaker 4: agreed that the jail was going to end its time
Speaker 4: as a carceral space and become this diversion center to
Speaker 4: help people avoid entering the criminal system. So put it
Speaker 4: in that that is the plan.
Speaker 3: Okay. This is during June of twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: During June of twenty two nation Okay, because of course,
Speaker 4: the bigger news of the summer of twenty twenty was
Speaker 4: the George Floyd uprising, and at that point in Atlanta,
Speaker 4: the killing of Rayshard Brooks by Garrett Rolf at the
Speaker 4: Wendy's in Southeast Atlanta.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So after the killing of Brooks, Dickens posted on an
Speaker 4: Instagram saying, quote, I am saddened to start this day
Speaker 4: with news of another black person killed by police and
Speaker 4: especially dismayed to see it happen in our city. Police
Speaker 4: must de escalate situations like these before they turned deadly.
Speaker 4: Once the suspect fled, unarmed and intoxicated through a parking
Speaker 4: lot of bystanders, this could have become an investigation rather
Speaker 4: than a shooting. So, undoubtedly spurred by the fervor and
Speaker 4: uproar of that summer, Dickens also co sponsored legislation with
Speaker 4: fellow council members Antonio Brown and Michael Julian Bond that
Speaker 4: would prohibit APD from using crowd control munitions in military
Speaker 4: style vehicles against protesters. Okay, this legislation, though, unsurprisingly, went nowhere,
Speaker 4: and we were shop by ever balls for you know,
Speaker 4: the rest of the summer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they still are using them.
Speaker 3: To this day. Yeah.
Speaker 4: But this is also happening at the tail end of
Speaker 4: budget season. So our budget season goes from like March
Speaker 4: to or April to June of every year. And the
Speaker 4: biggest debate in Council that summer was about withholding seventy
Speaker 4: three million dollars, or about a quarter of the Atlanta
Speaker 4: Police Department's funding, and so we were actually positioned police
Speaker 4: defund the police, and while the legislation was under debate
Speaker 4: in City Council, thousands of residents called in for public comment.
Speaker 4: This is the only time that i've the only time
Speaker 4: estenment I've seen for this public comment was about seventeen
Speaker 4: hours according to mainline zine, I seem to recall it
Speaker 4: being longer, but around that, which is around seventeen.
Speaker 2: Comparable to the last public comment session related to COP city.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and comparable even to the first public comment.
Speaker 2: Session also seventeen now, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: So the actual vot happened on the a's especially called
Speaker 4: Saturday session of City Council. At the time, like all
Speaker 4: other municipalities, Council was meeting remotely through zoom. So the
Speaker 4: actual vote happened on a especially called Saturday session of
Speaker 4: City Council at the time, like all of the municipalities,
Speaker 4: Council was meeting remotely through zoom because of COVID. And
Speaker 4: we're going to play a clip of one of the
Speaker 4: few things that Dickens said during that debate and to
Speaker 4: set the scene. Council Member Dustin hillis one of the
Speaker 4: very pro COP members of council, proposed a much smaller
Speaker 4: cut to the budget in the amount of like a
Speaker 4: few million dollars to remove just quote unquote non essential
Speaker 4: expenditures from abd's budget, sure without risking cutting into actual
Speaker 4: pay for police or the raises to police stalary that
Speaker 4: Council and the Mayor's office previously promised. Because this was
Speaker 4: a special session on Saturday, Dickens was driving around his mother,
Speaker 4: so there's going to be a bit of background noise
Speaker 4: and the quality is not super outstanding, and it has now.
Speaker 7: As much as I'm trying to figure out a way
Speaker 7: to support it, if did come down to being two
Speaker 7: million dollars or three million dollars or each five million dollars,
Speaker 7: it just is so sort of reimagining. You can't reimagine
Speaker 7: something that's almost three hundred million and only take to
Speaker 7: the bombing and to reimagine it right and to kind
Speaker 7: of think through what all needs to be done at
Speaker 7: it send a strong signal that we want reform and
Speaker 7: we want change.
Speaker 4: What we hear in this clip is Dickens really doing
Speaker 4: what he's going to continue to do for the rest
Speaker 4: of his career. Make overtures to the public while still
Speaker 4: ensuring that at the end of the day, the police
Speaker 4: are taken care of He really wanted APD to know
Speaker 4: that their personal salaries were not only safe, but they
Speaker 4: were going to grow, and he would always be a
Speaker 4: champion of that. So we're going to skip here over
Speaker 4: at the Copsity vote in twenty twenty one. At this point,
Speaker 4: I think it's been If.
Speaker 2: You're listening to this show, you're also probably somewhat from there.
Speaker 4: There are several episodes that you can pause here and
Speaker 4: go back and listen to it to kind of catch
Speaker 4: up yes on on how that happened in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 4: So suffice it to say that Dickens did not fight
Speaker 4: against the legislation in its council phase and what was
Speaker 4: one of the ten votes to approve the Cops City
Speaker 4: lease in September of twenty twenty one. If anything, Dickens
Speaker 4: was one of the quieter members of council when it
Speaker 4: came to debating Cops City lease. He didn't really say
Speaker 4: much while the debates were happening. So the last few months,
Speaker 4: of course, of the Cops City fight happened during election season,
Speaker 4: and instead of running for a third term as council member,
Speaker 4: Dickens threw his hat in the ring for mayor which
Speaker 4: was an open race, with Mayor Bottoms withdrawing her candid seat.
Speaker 4: All the way back on May six a mid rumors
Speaker 4: that she was on the short list to be Biden's
Speaker 4: nod for VP.
Speaker 3: Which did which did not happen, which did not happen.
Speaker 4: So to understand how Dickens won this election, because spoiler,
Speaker 4: we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Dickensity mayor Monday Mayor Dickens, We've got to talk about
Speaker 2: how Atlanta runs its municipal elections and how or election
Speaker 2: law plays out in effect, and who the presumed front
Speaker 2: runners of the race were.
Speaker 4: First, municipal elections are run on a non partisan basis.
Speaker 4: There are no party primaries to eat out weaker candidates
Speaker 4: to run. All you need to do is get the
Speaker 4: required number of signatures, pay the fee, and file on time.
Speaker 4: So this leads to a pretty wide field of candidates
Speaker 4: than you see in most elections. Second is that quirk
Speaker 4: in Georgia election law that everyone is probably familiar with
Speaker 4: by this point in time from the last few national
Speaker 4: election cycles. In order to win Georgia outright, you need
Speaker 4: fifty percent of the vote plus one. If no candidate
Speaker 4: hits that number, then the top two candidates go to
Speaker 4: a runoff election. The state law also applies to any
Speaker 4: municipal elections for cities with the population higher than one
Speaker 4: hundred thousand people, like Atlanta.
Speaker 3: Look Atlanta, which has six hundred thousand.
Speaker 4: So just around five hundred thousand, I think it's like
Speaker 4: four hundred and ninety thousand at this point. But the
Speaker 4: greater metro areas, like the greater Metro area is something
Speaker 4: like six or seven million.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So the two front runners of the race were not
Speaker 4: exactly popular figures. I would go so far as to
Speaker 4: say it like in many cases votes were cast against them,
Speaker 4: like kind of like with Trump, instead of in support of.
Speaker 3: Instead of voting for Biden, you're voting against Trump. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So former Mayor Cassim Reid was one of those candidates.
Speaker 4: He left office in twenty seventeen after a second term.
Speaker 4: And then it has this two consecutive term limit, which
Speaker 4: Reid had reached. However, you can run for a third
Speaker 4: term if it's not consecutive. Okay, So during Reid's second term,
Speaker 4: lawsuits and scandaled propagated heavily. Amongst the things that came
Speaker 4: out during both during and after Reed's administration was that
Speaker 4: Reid made nearly nine hundred thousand dollars in illegal bonus
Speaker 4: payments to staff, had a bribery scandal in his office
Speaker 4: that resulted in an FBI investigation, and ensured that airport
Speaker 4: contracts went to his friends and associates based a legalist,
Speaker 4: a legalist vator and to make matters worse for Reid,
Speaker 4: a month after he announced his candid seat, the AJAC
Speaker 4: release that it believed Reid was under investigation for allegations
Speaker 4: of wire fraud for quote using campaign funds to make
Speaker 4: purchases of jewelry, resort travel, lingerie, and furniture.
Speaker 2: I mean that would make sense considering everything else you
Speaker 2: just said. That's not really surprising.
Speaker 4: Then on the other side was Fleesha Moore, who accurately
Speaker 4: and not was seen by opponents as the face of
Speaker 4: COPSDY after Joyce Shepherd, who introduced the legislation authorizing the
Speaker 4: lease for COPSDY and lost her seat on council for
Speaker 4: that reason. While never forced to do so since city
Speaker 4: council presidents only vote in tiebreakers, More did say that
Speaker 4: she would vote in favor of Copsidity if it was needed. Then,
Speaker 4: a week before the election, Felicia Moore's campaign Instagram account
Speaker 4: posted a video with Lee Clevinger, a white Republican donor
Speaker 4: and supporter of Moore's campaign. Clevinger can be heard saying
Speaker 4: all of Atlanta mayor since nineteen seventy nine were quote
Speaker 4: not interested in anything except lining their own pockets. I
Speaker 4: should know. I feel like this could give me some
Speaker 4: uh since nineteen seventy four, a black person has been
Speaker 4: there every single time.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: That Yeah, that's that's what I was thinking. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: that sounds like he's just didn't go racist over so well.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: More removed the post and return the campaign contribution from
Speaker 4: Clevelander and said later, quote, it was an unfortunate statement
Speaker 4: by that constituent, and I should have corrected him or
Speaker 4: walked away.
Speaker 2: Unfortunate statement not just like fortunate if someone saying something
Speaker 2: incredibly racist. So this was the setting that led to
Speaker 2: election night that Tuesday. To everyone's surprise, Dickens eked out
Speaker 2: a second place victory above Read with just under six
Speaker 2: hundred votes for a total of twenty two thousand, one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty three votes for Dickens. More had a
Speaker 2: much better showing with thirty nine two hundred and two.
Speaker 4: But neither of them was over fifty, but neither of
Speaker 4: them broke the fifty percent, so we went to a runoff.
Speaker 4: So during the runoff, More really courted conservative Buckhead.
Speaker 2: And Buckheads like the northern more conservative like not suburb,
Speaker 2: but neighborhood of Atlanta, neighborhood.
Speaker 4: It's the one that wanted to turn it into its
Speaker 4: own city.
Speaker 2: Yes, which wanted to do to the kids succession, which
Speaker 2: is built on a whole bunch of legacies of red
Speaker 2: landing in segregation and blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: Oh we'll talk about that. Okay.
Speaker 4: So More also earned the endorsement of Reed, the.
Speaker 3: Guy who just said the racist thing.
Speaker 4: Guy who know, the former mayor who lost to Dickens
Speaker 4: for second place by about six hundred votes.
Speaker 2: Okay, So I'm trying to keep all these names straight
Speaker 2: here because there's a lot a lot of names coming
Speaker 2: into my head now.
Speaker 4: In a situation that led many progressives in Advantage to
Speaker 4: look at the guy who, well, he voted for copstate,
Speaker 4: he still supported closing the jail, was willing to cut
Speaker 4: seventy three million dollars from APD, and had a been
Speaker 4: a pretty consistent advocate for affordable housing on cancel on council.
Speaker 4: So it was between More and that guy. Yeah, so
Speaker 4: Progressives made a decision and went for Dickens in the runoff.
Speaker 4: Dickens won by a landside with sixty three percent of
Speaker 4: the votes ok so and fifty five votes. More actually
Speaker 4: lost thirteen thousand votes from her general election total. Interesting,
Speaker 4: Thus Mayor Andre Dickens becomes our next leader. Turnout for
Speaker 4: the runoff was in line with what we saw four
Speaker 4: years earlier when Keisha lance Bottom faced off against Garrison's
Speaker 4: candidate of choice, Mary Norwood.
Speaker 3: Get wait, don't put what do you mean.
Speaker 4: If she runs for Merrigan right now? I misunderstood everything
Speaker 4: that has happened.
Speaker 3: She's a scary woman. I'm not gonna so the Norway.
Speaker 4: The Bottoms run off only had four thousand more voters
Speaker 4: than we did in twenty twenty one's run off.
Speaker 2: So that was the twenty seventeen election. Twenty eighteen elections
Speaker 2: got okay, No, the Mayor Norwood, that was the twenty
Speaker 2: Bottoms one. I'm gonna act like I know Atlanta history
Speaker 2: at us correct you on some of this Atlanta history
Speaker 2: here as I feign ignorance to have you explained concepts
Speaker 2: for the audience, making me sound more ignorant than I am,
Speaker 2: but actually then explained to you and.
Speaker 4: I continue, Sorry, we should say that twenty seventeen runoff
Speaker 4: was actually much more evenly matched. Bottoms only one by
Speaker 4: eight hundred votes.
Speaker 2: So would that and that's scary. Yeah, that's scary because
Speaker 2: Mary Norwood cannot be the mayor.
Speaker 4: So Dickens. It's Dickens has said that he won with
Speaker 4: you know, consent to govern, and it's not really stretching
Speaker 4: it when he says that Atlanta has supported him in
Speaker 4: this particular election. Yeah, this particular opponent, we largely did.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 4: In the interim period, Dickens does the usual things. He
Speaker 4: appoints a transition seam. This included your usual cast of characters,
Speaker 4: but it is also worth noting that it included Dave Wilkinson,
Speaker 4: president and CEO of the ADVANTA Police Found Police.
Speaker 2: I've heard of them, the Atlanta Police Foundation. That's like
Speaker 2: a it's like a it's like a it's like a
Speaker 2: charity for police or something.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a nonprofit, you know, your standard nonprofit. Okay,
Speaker 4: they do cool thing tax deductible tax Yet you can
Speaker 4: donate to them tax deductibly just like they.
Speaker 2: Might advertise, just like the stream or does today.
Speaker 4: That's the second destiny of reference as many episodes. So
Speaker 4: as soon as Dickens is sworn in, he faces the
Speaker 4: Buckhead secession crisis. And you know, we explained a little
Speaker 4: bit earlier what Bucket is, but Atlanta is a very
Speaker 4: large metropolitan area, and much of the Fulton County itself
Speaker 4: was at one point part of unincorporated Atlanta, and then
Speaker 4: in two thousand and five, an unincorporated area just to
Speaker 4: the north of Buckhead called Sandy Springs was the first
Speaker 4: to become its own city. The initial breakaway cities that
Speaker 4: happened after that were predominantly white, and racism played a
Speaker 4: heavy role in their formation, But starting in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 4: newly formed black majority cities also started cropping up around
Speaker 4: the metro area, like the city of South Bolton and Stonecrest.
Speaker 3: So Buckhead wanted to.
Speaker 4: Do the same thing. They wanted to become their own city.
Speaker 4: And by no means was that like popular sentiment in Buckhead.
Speaker 4: But it's more complicated because the city hood drives were
Speaker 4: not like part of incorporated Atlanta the previous ones. Buckett
Speaker 4: is Incorporated Atlanta is Atlanta. It's part of the Atlanta
Speaker 4: Public School system. It's also an APD zone. It has
Speaker 4: its own parks, roadways, and water system that are all
Speaker 4: like City of Atlantic property.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: So to have the best chance of actually seceding, Buckhead
Speaker 4: needs a state congressional vote. Otherwise it would require a
Speaker 4: city wide vote, which it would buy with people. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 4: So in twenty twenty two, it found that Bucket secession
Speaker 4: bill started working its way through the legislature. The bill
Speaker 4: didn't make it very far this first time around. It
Speaker 4: dies on February eleventh, so just a couple of weeks
Speaker 4: into the session. But in order to kill it, Dickens
Speaker 4: reached out to Governor Kemp and other Republican leaders and
Speaker 4: developed a working relationship. Early on in his term as mayor,
Speaker 4: Dickens also kind of to quell this Buckhead secession played
Speaker 4: into the race of crime narrative that Bucket secessionists were
Speaker 4: claiming was the reason that they wanted to seceed. Dickens,
Speaker 4: in partnership with local law enforcement agencies and the Atlanta
Speaker 4: Police Foundation, created the Pete Offender Tracking Unit. They claimed
Speaker 4: most of the crime problem in Atlanta comes from repeat
Speaker 4: offenders and by sharing information about so called criminals between agencies,
Speaker 4: crime would drop. Of course, this is very problematic from
Speaker 4: an abolitionist perspective. When someone enters the criminal legal system,
Speaker 4: there is a criminal right. It haunts you. The task
Speaker 4: force only serves to reinforce that. And in response to
Speaker 4: the formation of the units, Southern Center for Human Rights
Speaker 4: said quote, If APD is planning to double down on
Speaker 4: the very strategies that they themselves admitted do not work
Speaker 4: in pursuit of a solution that keeps people behind bars,
Speaker 4: the effort is doomed to fail. You know else is
Speaker 4: doomed to fail.
Speaker 2: Our audience is actually buying these products that are advertising
Speaker 2: on our show for some reason, probably, but who knows.
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Speaker 2: The cooking boxes are really convenient if you live an
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Speaker 4: I actually use Hello Fresh Okay good, because I think
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Speaker 2: Ones that I she were advertising on our show. So
Speaker 2: thank you, thank you for that great, great work. You
Speaker 2: already got it all right. We are back.
Speaker 4: All right, So kicking back in with the buckhead session movement.
Speaker 4: In order to mollify Buckhead, there was also an opening
Speaker 4: of a police precinct in Zone two, in which Buckhead sits.
Speaker 4: This is the third precinct in Buckhead, which is made
Speaker 4: up of just twenty eight square miles.
Speaker 2: That's wild because like Portland only has like three or
Speaker 2: four precincts in total.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we have six.
Speaker 2: Jortland has like more people in like Portland proper than
Speaker 2: like Atlanta.
Speaker 4: Does I think our territory is more expansive, Yeah, than
Speaker 4: like first population wise, there's actually more people in Portland proper.
Speaker 3: Just pretty funny.
Speaker 4: I should say that the third precinct in Zone two
Speaker 4: was planned before Dickens took office, but he made sure
Speaker 4: to talk about it a lot earlier. Yeah I bet
Speaker 4: I bet so. And then, in what would fit perfectly
Speaker 4: as a scene in The Wire, Dickens spent both this
Speaker 4: year and last year talking about how crime and Buckhead
Speaker 4: dropped more in both years than any other zones.
Speaker 3: What's the Wire?
Speaker 4: But well there's a podcast about the Wire?
Speaker 3: Oh really a podcast? Yes, huh?
Speaker 4: I forget the name of What's the Wire. It's a
Speaker 4: it's a TV show about Oh police?
Speaker 2: Is is this one of like those like a millennial show.
Speaker 4: We're doing a bit.
Speaker 2: Is this like one of those millennial shows? It did
Speaker 2: come out in the early so this is this is
Speaker 2: like succession for old people.
Speaker 4: Got a secession for old people? Yes, I highly recommend
Speaker 4: watching it and check out the podcast that I can't
Speaker 4: remember the name of.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, plug someone else's podcast. Great, great job.
Speaker 4: As the Buckhead secession issue wound down, a Southeast Atlanta
Speaker 4: apartment complex started to draw increasing attention from the press
Speaker 4: due to rampant issues in the complex a lack of
Speaker 4: care by the owners. This so this massive apartment complex
Speaker 4: operator called Millennia. The company had a reputation across the
Speaker 4: country is terrible and it is deservedly so. At Forest Cove,
Speaker 4: the complex was unfit for human habitation.
Speaker 3: Oh really Uh?
Speaker 4: And we have to acknowledge that dickens here hadden out
Speaker 4: just to blame Millennia. But in February he told the
Speaker 4: approximately seven hundred residents that the city would be moving
Speaker 4: them to safer housing while the complex was either fixed
Speaker 4: or rebuilt. The rollout of this wasn't perfect. On April
Speaker 4: thirteenth of this year, Sean Keenan, a local reporter.
Speaker 2: Really of the friend of the show, New York Times
Speaker 2: repporter Sean Keenan makes another appearance.
Speaker 4: So Keenan released a new story eight of this year
Speaker 4: April thirteen, twenty twenty three, showing that the first that
Speaker 4: a quarter of Forest Cove residents were relocated to complexes
Speaker 4: identified as dangerous dwellings on the ajac's residential watchdoglyphs.
Speaker 3: That's pretty funny.
Speaker 2: So I have learned a little bit about Atlanta's like
Speaker 2: rental situation here, and it seems like it kind of
Speaker 2: sucks to be a renter in Georgia. It seems like
Speaker 2: you have almost no rights, no protection.
Speaker 4: I didn't have air conditioning for a little while, and
Speaker 4: it turns out that you are not guaranteed air conditioning
Speaker 4: in any real.
Speaker 2: Which is hard being like in Atlanta. Like I never
Speaker 2: I never had a c in Portland. But that's that's Portland.
Speaker 2: It's not We're not dealing with the Atlanta humidity in
Speaker 2: Atlanta heat.
Speaker 4: No, it's it's pretty miserable. Thankfully, my air conditioning did
Speaker 4: get fixed eventually, but yeah, there's no recourse for things
Speaker 4: like that. So until that report by Keenan, it it
Speaker 4: appeared that the city was doing diligent work taking care
Speaker 4: of displaced residents and ensuring that they retained access to
Speaker 4: care and services with as little disruption as possible, and
Speaker 4: by and large that that happened, but you know, for
Speaker 4: a quarter of residents, not so much. At this point,
Speaker 4: more questions are cropping up, so the story is likely
Speaker 4: going to continue to develop, but we don't really know
Speaker 4: where the point going to go because this is like
Speaker 4: current events.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So another force cove issue that will probably come
Speaker 4: up later in Diggins's term was that he made a
Speaker 4: promise to residence that they'll be able to return to
Speaker 4: the apartment complex eventually. But Millennia was denied hot assistance
Speaker 4: to fix the property, and it's unlikely that they'll do
Speaker 4: so on their own, so the fate of the complex
Speaker 4: is pretty up in the air. The city does own
Speaker 4: approximately eighty acres in the neighborhood, which could and should
Speaker 4: go to building low income housing, but it's prime real
Speaker 4: estate for further gentrification. So yeah, we'll see how that
Speaker 4: plays out.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 2: One of the first things like that I noticed when
Speaker 2: I was visiting Atlanta like last year was that like
Speaker 2: all of like most of the Section eight housing has
Speaker 2: been the converted into like luxury condos or like new
Speaker 2: like like a like a five story apartment complexes, and no,
Speaker 2: like the speed of the gentrification was was kind of
Speaker 2: surprising to me coming coming from Portland. Like there's still
Speaker 2: gentrification in Portland, absolutely, but did the expansiveness of it
Speaker 2: here and the speed of which it's accelerating was was
Speaker 2: surprising to me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we're not building like low income housing complexes.
Speaker 4: But what's happening here is that they're they're adding a
Speaker 4: certain percentage of new like if you're building a massive complex,
Speaker 4: a certain percentage of your off like your dwellings have
Speaker 4: to go at at a certain point of the average
Speaker 4: monthly income. Yeah, but that's not really addressing this like
Speaker 4: large scale issue that is going because you still.
Speaker 2: Have hundreds of them that it costs like three thousand
Speaker 2: dollars and you have like a dozen that are low income,
Speaker 2: and you just you do the barest amounts to script
Speaker 2: by while still filling up most of the available real
Speaker 2: estate with very expensive apartments.
Speaker 4: And I should plug here. There is a fantastic book
Speaker 4: called Red Hot City by GSU professor named Dan Immerglock.
Speaker 4: If you want to learn more about gentrification in Atlanta.
Speaker 4: It's great, Yeah, absolutely and set vital reading. So towards
Speaker 4: the end of Dickens's first one hundred days in office,
Speaker 4: APD Chief Rodney Bryant announced that he was going to retire.
Speaker 4: Bryant was not very well liked by city leadership. Felicia
Speaker 4: Moore had made a campaign promise to get rid of
Speaker 4: Bryant on her first day in office, but Dickens said
Speaker 4: he'd give him one hundred days to improve public safety
Speaker 4: and kind of see where things were at before firing him.
Speaker 2: And what happened after those one hundred days.
Speaker 4: Bryant stepped down and Dickens tapped then Deputy Chief Darren
Speaker 4: Sheerbaum as interim.
Speaker 3: Replace heard of this guy before.
Speaker 2: This is the guy who made that weird confession about
Speaker 2: having sex in the woods with all those police officers.
Speaker 2: I've heard that in a podcast recently. That's so crazy.
Speaker 4: Cherbom, who may or may not have said those things.
Speaker 4: His prior role was overseeing the cop city development, and
Speaker 4: he was also pretty well liked by APD officers, so
Speaker 4: Dicks officially hired him in October of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 4: But if you're a leftist or even just against cop City.
Speaker 4: This is actually like kind of a lost Cheerbomb is
Speaker 4: incredibly pr savvy, as you saw in that City Council meeting,
Speaker 4: and he does pretty well when he's talking to them.
Speaker 2: No, when I was first doing stuff on cop C,
Speaker 2: I remember when he was just like the spokesperson for
Speaker 2: he wasn't actually like the chief yet.
Speaker 3: And then he became the chief in.
Speaker 2: Like last fall, and they've gotten better at their propaganda
Speaker 2: since then, a lot better.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know I watched this like every week.
Speaker 4: He does a pretty good job.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: This brings us to budget season twenty twenty two. In April,
Speaker 4: Dickens tells the AGC that he wants to hire two
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty APD officers a year for three years,
Speaker 4: hoping that the total of seven hundred and fifty new
Speaker 4: hires will net a four hundred and fifty increase in
Speaker 4: officers for the department.
Speaker 2: Okay, so hiring a lot some of them might nutrition rate,
Speaker 2: other people might not stay on, but you're trying to
Speaker 2: like net to get another like four hundred or so officers.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 4: So, Dickens also approved four thousand dollars bonuses for APD
Speaker 4: paid using American Rescue Plan Act money.
Speaker 3: And great useful.
Speaker 4: Initially, in June, Dickens promised police a raise of three
Speaker 4: and a half percent, but in November it became apparent
Speaker 4: that the city would have a budget surplus, so Dickens
Speaker 4: and council raised that to nine percent, bringing APD to
Speaker 4: a total of a twenty seven percent raise over the
Speaker 4: course of three years.
Speaker 2: Funny how much money they're just getting pumped this past
Speaker 2: ten years.
Speaker 4: And I don't know what happens like three years ago,
Speaker 4: but it seems like something shouldn't.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 2: I mean, like you were talking about how like how
Speaker 2: Dickens was like previously working to get like like a
Speaker 2: seventy million reduction in police budget. You know, probably probably
Speaker 2: in some ways, probably just like for pr ras because
Speaker 2: during twenty that was the popular thing to do. And
Speaker 2: now he's just like funneling millions and millions dollars towards
Speaker 2: the police Foundation, towards individual officers, towards raises, bonuses, you know,
Speaker 2: standard mayor stuff.
Speaker 4: Oh and we're not done. In November, it was an
Speaker 4: early Christmas for APD. Dickens also debuted forty new SCAD
Speaker 4: and so SCAD is the Savannah College of Art, and
Speaker 4: design the Arts College.
Speaker 3: The big Art college in Georgia.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they designed these police Ford Explorer vehicles for
Speaker 4: an officer take home program.
Speaker 3: Via look like shit.
Speaker 4: Each vehicle cost sixty thousand dollars. So the total price
Speaker 4: tag of this was two point four million dollars to
Speaker 4: improve officer morale.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, let's let's get them, get them, you know,
Speaker 2: two million dollars with the cars, just to make them happy.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 4: Seventy additional takeo vehicles are in the pipeline once equipment
Speaker 4: becomes available to out cool. So yeah, this this program
Speaker 4: is just continuing to grow.
Speaker 2: Fuck whatever scad designer was paid to fucking design those
Speaker 2: shitty cars.
Speaker 4: So one of the things that was missing during the
Speaker 4: budget season back back in spring was the very thing
Speaker 4: that helped Dickens solidifie his image as a Progressive Council member,
Speaker 4: affordable housing. In his initial budget, Dickens put no increase
Speaker 4: in affordable housing for his alleged you had.
Speaker 2: A budget surplus, and you're like, no, let's give them
Speaker 2: a give all the money to the police who were
Speaker 2: already getting a ninety million dollar training facility.
Speaker 3: Let's give even more money.
Speaker 4: Sure, great, So Dan Immergluckt, the GSU professor I just
Speaker 4: mentioned he was. He's an affordable housing advocate and he
Speaker 4: was part of Dickens's transition team. And he told Capital
Speaker 4: B after the prospective budget was released, quote, for this
Speaker 4: to be his first budget to make a step backwards
Speaker 4: is extremely disappointing. And that's basically how all the progressives felt. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so Dickens did cave to housing advocate pressure and he
Speaker 4: added an additional seven million dollars in the affordable housing
Speaker 4: budget before the budget.
Speaker 3: Was passed in June. Cool cool, cool.
Speaker 4: Remember back in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one, everyone
Speaker 4: was an agreement that the jail was going to close.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the the A, they were going to convert it
Speaker 2: to that other thing.
Speaker 4: That it was going to be a center for Diversion
Speaker 4: in Equity. Yeah, it was going to be great, and
Speaker 4: by this point it actually had a name, the John
Speaker 4: Lewis Center for Diversion in Equity.
Speaker 3: Great.
Speaker 4: But in June of twenty twenty two, city Council voted
Speaker 4: down legislation authorizing the mayor to close the jail. Then
Speaker 4: plans came out in early August that instead of closing ACDC,
Speaker 4: Fulton County in Atlanta were in talks to rent seven
Speaker 4: hundred beds from the facility to Fulton County to address
Speaker 4: the overcrowding problem at Rice Street, Fulton County's main jail.
Speaker 2: Maybe they should just keep less people in jail.
Speaker 4: Activists warned that the lease would not alleviate these issues
Speaker 4: and that City Council needed to instead focus on decarceration.
Speaker 4: And then there was an acl new report that came
Speaker 4: out later in the year that found forty five percent
Speaker 4: of the overall jail population in Fulden County is unindicted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's holding people that actually have not been indicted.
Speaker 3: Ferdy crime. Great.
Speaker 4: Remember it was Dickens who introduced the legend to find
Speaker 4: a way to repurpose this jail, he said in a
Speaker 4: statement when the lease to Fulton County was coming up. Quote,
Speaker 4: as I've continually supported since my time on Atlanta City Council,
Speaker 4: I remain committed to fully repurposing the ACDC facility for
Speaker 4: non incarceration purposes. But we are also confronted by a
Speaker 4: real and immediate crisis of overcrowding at the Fulton County Jail.
Speaker 4: Many of these detainees are Atlanta residents. And our conscience
Speaker 4: calls us to act. This is a temporary lease agreement
Speaker 4: and will allow the City of Atlanta to play a
Speaker 4: role in alleviating this humanitarian crisis and to provide the
Speaker 4: necessary time for Fulton County to develop and implement a
Speaker 4: long term solution humanitarians, because we always know adding more
Speaker 4: prison beds really reduces the problem. Uh So, the temporary
Speaker 4: solution that we're talking about is a four year agreement,
Speaker 4: and Fulton County is paying the City of Atlanta fifty
Speaker 4: dollars per bed per night, So when the full seven
Speaker 4: hundred beds are taking Atlanta will be making twelve point
Speaker 4: seven million dollars a year.
Speaker 2: Remember when we had to release all those people from
Speaker 2: prison and jail in twenty twenty to overcrowding and then
Speaker 2: violent crime dropped. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 3: That is crazy.
Speaker 4: So the twelve point seven million dollars sounds like a
Speaker 4: lot of money, But before the lease went into effect,
Speaker 4: acdc's average population was under fifty individuals per night. The
Speaker 4: city's Department of Corrections budget is sixteen point one million
Speaker 4: dollars a year, so the city is still going to
Speaker 4: lose money running this jail. Even with Fulden County paying
Speaker 4: for their.
Speaker 3: Retainties for their share date answer. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Then on April fourteenth of this year, the news came
Speaker 4: out that Lashawan Thompson died in Rice Street Jail, having
Speaker 4: been neglected and ignored by Fulden County deputies. When they
Speaker 4: finally checked on Thompson, they found that he had been
Speaker 4: eaten alive by bugs as he lay dying. And this
Speaker 4: was in September of twenty twenty two, just after Atlanta
Speaker 4: approved this lease. The cell Thompson was in was so
Speaker 4: disgusting that a jail employee refused to enter without putting
Speaker 4: on a hazmat suit first.
Speaker 2: Oh, imagine what it was like to live in there.
Speaker 3: That's crazy.
Speaker 4: And this death isn't the result of overcrowding. Thompson was
Speaker 4: in jail on simple battery charges and being held on
Speaker 4: a twenty five hundred dollars bond. He was also unindicted.
Speaker 4: There was no reason for Thompson to be in jail
Speaker 4: at the time of his death. If he had the money,
Speaker 4: he probably would have been it live today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just blocking up poor people.
Speaker 4: And yeah, so this is the sort of thing that
Speaker 4: Dickenson Council have enabled with this new jail lease. Before
Speaker 4: we get into Dickenson copp City in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 4: we need to talk briefly about some more American Rescue
Speaker 4: Plan Act sheick Henry Dickinson Council pulled off this year.
Speaker 4: At the end of January, Atlanta announced that it was
Speaker 4: returning ten million dollars in ARPA funds earmarked for rental
Speaker 4: assistance that the city never used. What did just use
Speaker 4: informental assistance? So this naturally upset a lot of people.
Speaker 4: Public comment was quite feisty that day. ADVANTA is of
Speaker 4: course increasingly pricing out its legacy residents, as we just
Speaker 4: talked about, and ten million dollars would go a long
Speaker 4: way to helping combat that. And then to add insult
Speaker 4: to injury. A few weeks later, Council passed and Dickens
Speaker 4: signed legislation that gave five hundred thousand dollars in arp
Speaker 4: OF funds to the Atlanta Police Foundation to provide additional
Speaker 4: police and first responder housing. So really reinforcing the city's
Speaker 4: going to take care of police before everyone else.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh boy.
Speaker 4: So let's move on to how Dickens handled cop City
Speaker 4: since January eighteenth. I think is probably a good place
Speaker 4: to start. The killing of Tortigito by Georgia State Patrol
Speaker 4: officers the day that everything happened, Dickens wished the trooper
Speaker 4: a speedy recovery. I can find nowhere in which Dickens
Speaker 4: made any comment other than it's unfortunate that Tortigito was killed.
Speaker 4: Not surprising. He never accepts any level of responsibility for
Speaker 4: towards death, insisting instead that that responsibility lies with were
Speaker 4: just State Patrol or to Cab County. He refuses to
Speaker 4: acknowledge the fact that the city's insistence on trying to
Speaker 4: build cop City both ensured port and the officer's presence
Speaker 4: in the woods.
Speaker 2: And napd's involvement to the raid.
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, so this moment also kind of changed how
Speaker 4: Dickens approaches cop City. Before he was relatively quiet, but
Speaker 4: he begins this like full court media press after January eighteenth,
Speaker 4: and we don't know the exact details, but it does
Speaker 4: seem like to Cab County, Atlanta officials in APF came
Speaker 4: to an agreement in January to pass this land disturbance permit.
Speaker 4: In February, after a student protest at the Atlanta University
Speaker 4: Center and letters from AUC faculty that opposed construction of
Speaker 4: cop City and expressed solidarity with protesters. Dickens announced that
Speaker 4: he would hold a forum with the president of Morehouse College,
Speaker 4: David A. Thomas, who is a vocal cop City supporter.
Speaker 4: This was a big problem for Dickens as the colleges
Speaker 4: that make up the AEC and we didn't talk about
Speaker 4: which once those were earlier. It's Morehouse, Spellman, Clark University,
Speaker 4: Morehouse College of Medicine. All of them carry with them
Speaker 4: an incredible amount of historical and political power in the
Speaker 4: city of Atlanta, so keeping AUC support is pretty vital
Speaker 4: if you want to continue to run for elections. The
Speaker 4: attendance at the forum was limited to only AUC students
Speaker 4: and faculty, but a stream was duped and broadcast on
Speaker 4: Instagram Live. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find
Speaker 4: a complete copy, but there are definitely highlights that have
Speaker 4: made it out. Overall, Dickens was pretty patronizing and sarcastic
Speaker 4: to students. Several times students called the mayor out for
Speaker 4: his behavior, but he continued to show disdain the rest
Speaker 4: of the night. One student called him out for his
Speaker 4: lack of prior acknowledgment of towards death and Dickens's usual
Speaker 4: sidestep responsibility, again saying that it was unfortunate toward died,
Speaker 4: but insisting he was the wrong person to blame because
Speaker 4: it didn't happen in the city of Atlanta and the
Speaker 4: officer was not from APD. At one point, Dickens went
Speaker 4: on a TI raid after a student called him a
Speaker 4: self out this we do have audio for Hey, let me.
Speaker 3: Just check this, which I ain't never been a sell out.
Speaker 7: You can't, you can't. You got to check. You got
Speaker 7: the wrong resume that you're looking at.
Speaker 3: I know, I know.
Speaker 1: We want to yell and yet shout out things.
Speaker 7: Just be heard.
Speaker 5: You've been heard, You've been heard.
Speaker 3: I guess what you picked the wrong resume to pulling
Speaker 3: on a race car.
Speaker 4: Whatever Dickens was hoping to accomplish that night, he failed.
Speaker 4: Several memes and audio remixes of Dickens's performance went viral
Speaker 4: in the Atlanta Twitter sphere and continue to crop up
Speaker 4: this day, like the I am not a sellout one
Speaker 4: I don't know if you've seen.
Speaker 2: It, is that the I'm still ruined by the by
Speaker 2: the by the doctor Han Good good doctor memes. That
Speaker 2: just reminded me of the I am a surgeon memes.
Speaker 3: So great job, great job. Yeah, great work.
Speaker 4: So Dickens has of course continued to try it or
Speaker 4: to build or manufacture support for Copsody over the next
Speaker 4: two months. In March, she was visiting the neighborhoods around
Speaker 4: cop City to hear feedback from residents, and he of
Speaker 4: course started in the wealthier neighborhoods and he only went
Speaker 4: to the less affluent neighborhood, which, like cop City is
Speaker 4: actually in after a member of the Community Stakeholder Advisory
Speaker 4: Committee called him out for only favoring the wealthy communities.
Speaker 4: Local residents have told ACPC that Dickens skips over the
Speaker 4: houses with DTF signs outfront.
Speaker 3: That makes sense, Yeah, checks out.
Speaker 4: He's done several interviews now on cop City with both
Speaker 4: the AJAC and wab a local public radio station. The
Speaker 4: AGAC interview was particularly interesting because one of the interviewers
Speaker 4: asked Dickens what would happen if cop City ended in
Speaker 4: a cost overrun. Dickens told her that any large overruns
Speaker 4: would be paid for by philanthropic dollars from the foundation.
Speaker 4: He said this out he said this, but a member
Speaker 4: of his cabinet had already confirmed that two APF City
Speaker 4: was willing to pay thirty two million dollars at that point,
Speaker 4: and of course we've now learned that that number is
Speaker 4: sixty seven million dollars.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: Did you follow the City of Atlanta's Twitter account?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: I don't want to see that shit, but I know
Speaker 2: they have turned it into just a cop city a
Speaker 2: propaganda chancel.
Speaker 4: It's a NonStop propaganda channel, which is like really fun
Speaker 4: to watch because every cop city post is like bombarded
Speaker 4: with negative replies and quot tweets.
Speaker 3: I've seen these posts, I know. I know.
Speaker 2: I've talked about how they launched their own website trying
Speaker 2: to combat all of the top cop city websites. And yeah,
Speaker 2: they've really accelerated their propaganda the past few months. And yeah,
Speaker 2: just turned the actual City of Atlanto account into a
Speaker 2: cop city propaganda uh like platform, which is funny because
Speaker 2: they oft they also will often advocate and say like
Speaker 2: this isn't the City of Atlanta's project, this is the
Speaker 2: APS project, which they'll often like use that use that refrain,
Speaker 2: and yet we have the City of Atlanto account being
Speaker 2: turned into a into a megaphone to promote to this project.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the Atlanta Police Foundation doesn't actually give interviews to
Speaker 4: like news anymore. Yeah, they filtered and everything through the
Speaker 4: City of Atlanta, which.
Speaker 3: Normal charity organization.
Speaker 4: It's completely normal for them never to show up at
Speaker 4: City Council to talk about anything, and to hide from
Speaker 4: the public. It's fine. So meanwhile, Dickens is of course
Speaker 4: like dogged by opposition to cop City at every turn.
Speaker 4: On April thirteenth, three Georgia State University students, with the
Speaker 4: support of this keynote speaker, interrupted a global symposium Studies
Speaker 4: that Dickens was giving opening remarks. Dickens grows increasingly frustrated
Speaker 4: as the disruptors will not leave, and eventually Dickens and
Speaker 4: his retinue like just walk out. On April eleventh, Dickens
Speaker 4: had hired a new senior policy advisor named Karen Rodgers.
Speaker 4: Dickens brought Rogers over from the Atlanta Police Foundation, where
Speaker 4: she'd spent seven years working in community engagement, and he
Speaker 4: brought her on, of course, to advise about cop City.
Speaker 4: On April eighteenth, Decab County Medicical Examiner released the autopsy
Speaker 4: on towards death and that same day, just before the
Speaker 4: article came out that the autopsity was released, Dickins tell
Speaker 4: a press conference on the steps of city Hall. He
Speaker 4: was surrounded by a group of nearly one hundred all
Speaker 4: older black leaders, including former mayor Bill Campbell and Andrew Young.
Speaker 4: This appears to have been a hastily thrown together event
Speaker 4: and only a few media outlets were even aware that
Speaker 4: it was happening, Like, we didn't get an update that.
Speaker 3: It was going. I didn't know that was happening.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it just it kind of cropped up and seemed
Speaker 4: to take everyone by surprise. And of course it looks
Speaker 4: like the press conference was held to counteract the autopsy
Speaker 4: report coming out that day. Yeah, but that failed, and
Speaker 4: the autopsy report was the bigger story. Notably, the AJAC
Speaker 4: did not print the autopsy report on the first day,
Speaker 4: but it was pretty well covered elsewhere on the landscape,
Speaker 4: and the autopsy caused a second city councilor to speak
Speaker 4: out against cop city and a growing number of state
Speaker 4: representatives have started to speak out, you know, as that happened,
Speaker 4: and as the rest of the solidarity fund. But Dickens
Speaker 4: is of course unmoved and preparing for this fight to
Speaker 4: last a while. Then, of course, there was the city
Speaker 4: council vote on June fifth, and there had been some
Speaker 4: work done behind the scenes to try to get this
Speaker 4: set back to committee. Apparently Dickens like peeled off city.
Speaker 4: He called the maybe votes into his office early that
Speaker 4: morning and peeled off the votes to ensure that that
Speaker 4: copsity continued on. We should I wrote this, of course,
Speaker 4: I think months ago at this point. So, yeah, a
Speaker 4: couple quick highlights again the affordable housing. So with our
Speaker 4: affordable housing, it is supposed to get a certain percentage
Speaker 4: of our general operating budget, and it started out at
Speaker 4: one and a half percent, and then it was supposed
Speaker 4: to go up to two percent and two and a
Speaker 4: half percents where it's going to cap out. So this
Speaker 4: year was supposed to go to two percent. He kept
Speaker 4: it one and a half percent, but he did announce
Speaker 4: a public private partnership to offer one hundred million dollars
Speaker 4: in in affordable housing bonds. Really, so we we love
Speaker 4: our public private partnership Atlantaway things to get things done.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that seems like the way.
Speaker 2: That's I mean, that's what I'm excited about for for
Speaker 2: the the extra thirty million dollars bond to APF. That'll
Speaker 2: certainly get paid back in a reasonable time period.
Speaker 4: Any completely reasonable time period, and you know that'll get
Speaker 4: paid back, I'm sure. And we're not going to continue
Speaker 4: to pay anything. And APF is not going to make
Speaker 4: any money.
Speaker 3: Off No, this is none.
Speaker 2: Surely this project is not a massive taxpayer sinkhole.
Speaker 3: So that's it. That's the mayor.
Speaker 4: That's the mayor.
Speaker 3: That's where we are. And then when's the next mayoral election.
Speaker 4: So twenty twenty five, and of course Dickens has to
Speaker 4: move the needle. There was there were like some calls
Speaker 4: for a recall campaign around Chickens, especially amongst the movement.
Speaker 4: Like I personally don't think that it would have any
Speaker 4: chance of succeeding. There's kind of there's a perception that
Speaker 4: that he's doing okay. And you know, when you have
Speaker 4: somebody that was probed by the FBI for corruption just
Speaker 4: a few years ago, your standards of what the area
Speaker 4: kind of changes.
Speaker 2: People seem to be putting lots of their They dedicated
Speaker 2: some of their dedicated efforts in terms of like electoral
Speaker 2: sign up stuff as being put towards the referendum which
Speaker 2: got approved a few days ago. To continue, they need
Speaker 2: to colletch like what seventy five thousand signatures from people
Speaker 2: who were residents of Atlanta and registered to vote in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one, which seems like a pretty high bar.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of signatures.
Speaker 4: So it's a lot of signatures. And because the organizers
Speaker 4: say this municipal clerk was like playing games and withholding
Speaker 4: approving the signatures, so they don't have approving the referendum,
Speaker 4: and so they don't have the full like sixty days,
Speaker 4: like two weeks fifty No, it's fifty seven days. So
Speaker 4: I think it's like it's they have to have them
Speaker 4: by August fifteenth.
Speaker 2: Which is a lot of signatures, and August fifting is
Speaker 2: around when construction was supposed to art for cop city,
Speaker 2: So yeah, and then for other mayor roal candidates. I've
Speaker 2: heard rumor that friend of the show ontologically evil Mary
Speaker 2: Nor would may be interested in trying to run again.
Speaker 4: So this is like her her kind of move is
Speaker 4: she does she runs for mayor? All right, Well, first
Speaker 4: she does a term of city council and then she
Speaker 4: runs from mayor and then she doesn't get the mayorl spots,
Speaker 4: so she takes a you know, four years off, she
Speaker 4: comes back, runs for city council, runs from mayor, takes
Speaker 4: four years off. So we were now in her you know,
Speaker 4: mayor her city council term. And if she's going to
Speaker 4: do this for a third time, then she will run
Speaker 4: for mayor in twenty twenty five, which would suck. I mean,
Speaker 4: she came close last time.
Speaker 2: She did, and I think how depending on if, depending
Speaker 2: on how progress in the cop city construction goes.
Speaker 3: She has a way to frame this being like.
Speaker 2: Like I was the one who was actually in support
Speaker 2: of this popular proposal the whole time, and look we
Speaker 2: succeeded only because of me.
Speaker 4: Yes, she can do that, And there is so Atlanta's
Speaker 4: demographics are changing. We're no longer a majority block city.
Speaker 4: The population is down to like forty eight percent black people.
Speaker 4: So there Dickens is being called possibly the last black
Speaker 4: mayor of Atlanta, and you know that will be a
Speaker 4: shock to our systems. And Mary Norwood would be like
Speaker 4: just a way to quickly kill that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like I said, the only way to acurately
Speaker 2: describer is just ontologically evil like she is. She she
Speaker 2: is just that bad. She's like she's Yeah, it's not great,
Speaker 2: would not be fun. But she's not the mayor.
Speaker 8: It is.
Speaker 2: It is Mayor Dickens who is the shitty mayor of
Speaker 2: this episode, and based on how much power he has
Speaker 2: to change things and how much what he's decided to
Speaker 2: do with that power when instead of actually supporting all
Speaker 2: the affordable housing things, he's funneled millions of dollars to
Speaker 2: cop City, to the Atleanto Police Foundation, has refused any
Speaker 2: measure to revoke the land lease ordinance and even even
Speaker 2: even if not not to cancel the project, even just
Speaker 2: to move it somewhere else, He's refused every step of
Speaker 2: the way. And yeah, well we'll see how that does
Speaker 2: him in the next election cycle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm really interested to see, uh how he plays
Speaker 4: the referendum.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm I'm I'm interested to see if the referend
Speaker 2: them will even be a threat at all, because if
Speaker 2: it if it's, if it's, if it fails to get
Speaker 2: a significant abortion of signatures, then he may just ignore
Speaker 2: it because why would he bother to talk about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're definitely not going to devote any resources to
Speaker 4: it until they're sure that it is a threat. But once,
Speaker 4: once it you know, potentially becomes a threat, they will,
Speaker 4: They've got to start doing something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well we are we are like what two or
Speaker 2: three days into the week of Action at this point.
Speaker 2: I definitely I don't know what what things are like,
Speaker 2: but there's still is some days left. So yeah, if
Speaker 2: you if, if you're if you're in Atlanta, try to
Speaker 2: stay safe and stay as dangerous as you feel comfortable.
Speaker 4: Say hey to us when you see us.
Speaker 2: Sure, do you have any Do you have any things
Speaker 2: you would like to plug? Matt from the Atlanta Community
Speaker 2: Press Collective?
Speaker 4: Yes, so I am Matt and I work for the
Speaker 4: Atlantic Community Press Collective. If you want to check out
Speaker 4: our work, our website is Atlpresscollective dot com. We also
Speaker 4: do a lot on Twitter. Our handle is at Atlanta
Speaker 4: Underscore Press, and our Instagram, where we post a lot
Speaker 4: of our videos, is atl Press Collective.
Speaker 2: And then you can also donate a solidarity fund, not
Speaker 2: at the regular solidary fund website. Still I believe it's
Speaker 2: I believe it's still the National Bail Fund one right.
Speaker 4: I believe it is still the National Bail Fund until
Speaker 4: probably until that court case is settled.
Speaker 3: Got it all right?
Speaker 2: So yeah, make sure you go to the right site
Speaker 2: for the for the Act Blue National bil bail fund
Speaker 2: towards the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. Anyway, So that was the
Speaker 2: shitty mayor of today, Mayor Andre Dickens. I'll make the
Speaker 2: joke again. I think it's funny that the previous mayor
Speaker 2: was named Bottoms, the current mayor is named Dickens. It's Dickens,
Speaker 2: Dickens Bottoms anyway, no comment. That's the joke that I've
Speaker 2: made before. I'm going to keep making it until he's
Speaker 2: until he's no longer mayor. Unless someone else runs for
Speaker 2: we could do, nor would Dickens Bottom. No never, I'm
Speaker 2: not even gonna bother joking about that because that would
Speaker 2: be so, that'd be so.
Speaker 4: Don't put it in exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: That doesn't need anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, see you on the other side, Stay safe, stayed interesting.
Speaker 2: The Week of Action TATA.
Speaker 8: Hello everyone, Welcome to the podcast. It could happen here.
Speaker 8: It's me James today and I am joined for a
Speaker 8: rare example of Daniel Daniel being on the podcast.
Speaker 9: Yes, well, I'm James, thank you for having me. I'm
Speaker 9: thrilled to be here, uh to talk with you on
Speaker 9: the PODCAS cast that I edit every single day.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, normally you just hear me, but at this time
Speaker 8: you get they like the Dan. It's like the subaltant speaks,
Speaker 8: but it's Daniel. I couldn't fucking I couldn't really go
Speaker 8: anywhere with that, so I just I just left the
Speaker 8: two halves of the joke out there, either of them
Speaker 8: with a partner.
Speaker 3: Very sad.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So, Daniel, we're here today to talk about first
Speaker 8: day kits and the reason we're talking about first Ay
Speaker 8: kits is because it is Pride Month at the time
Speaker 8: of recording. That, of course, in the United States, means
Speaker 8: that people are worried about being murdered by homophobic psychopaths. Unfortunately,
Speaker 8: so mm hmm. That is uh, that is the world
Speaker 8: that we live in, and it shouldn't be. It's fucked up,
Speaker 8: and it hopefully won't be this way forever because you know,
Speaker 8: all these people are wrong and will die eventually and
Speaker 8: that will make the world better. But fingers crossed, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: we can.
Speaker 3: We can hope. I guess maybe they're raising a new
Speaker 3: generation of Turfs or whatever. I don't think hopefully not.
Speaker 3: Let's not.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So I just wanted to talk because I've seen
Speaker 8: a bunch of people online, like a lot of people
Speaker 8: who are in the like lgbt QI a community, or
Speaker 8: who are going to pride just being like, oh fuck
Speaker 8: like it. Genuinely, I can see why people are very
Speaker 8: afraid right because violence against queer people is at least
Speaker 8: seemingly increasing. I'm not going to give you training because
Speaker 8: this is a podcast and you can't learn first AID
Speaker 8: on a podcast, and you can't learn it on YouTube either. Really,
Speaker 8: I wanted to talk briefly about like supplies and then
Speaker 8: places to get training, because that is very important. I
Speaker 8: have bought my first ay it that I used for work.
Speaker 8: I have quite a few that I used for work.
Speaker 8: Actually I don't like to repack them. And I know
Speaker 8: that you have bought one that Jeffrey Bezos kindly sent you.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 9: At the height of the you know, the George Floyd protests,
Speaker 9: et cetera, I was out there in the streets and
Speaker 9: kind of after observing what was happening in Portland and
Speaker 9: after you know, listening into and editing it could happen
Speaker 9: to year episodes and you know what Gear and Robert
Speaker 9: were covering. It felt, if not necessary, but very prudent
Speaker 9: to invest in something like this, so that should there
Speaker 9: be a need to help people in the streets, I
Speaker 9: was there unable to do so, and whether or not
Speaker 9: this was a good first aid kit, I think we're
Speaker 9: going to find out today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the aim of the game.
Speaker 8: I should point out that, like my medical training is
Speaker 8: pretty basic, right, I'm not that kind of doctor, but
Speaker 8: I do have a wilderness first responder and a wilderness
Speaker 8: first aid and to start the bleed training, and I've
Speaker 8: done CPR training and I've done hostile environment first aid training,
Speaker 8: so a bunch of stuff which is focused around very
Speaker 8: very very basic first aid.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: In all of those cases, it's like make sure the
Speaker 8: person doesn't die immediately, and then get them to someone
Speaker 8: who is better trained than you so that they can
Speaker 8: help them more men, which is like, listen, if you
Speaker 8: are learning about medical stuff on the podcast hosted by
Speaker 8: a guy who has a PhD in mon European history,
Speaker 8: then that that is what you are doing too, right, Like, yes,
Speaker 8: and we're going to talk about that, because you can
Speaker 8: for sure fuck someone up if you if you go
Speaker 8: sort of outside of your scope of knowledge, and that
Speaker 8: it's I understand the desire to help, but we have
Speaker 8: to help in the way that it's most helpful.
Speaker 3: I guess, not do any harm. So yeah, let's go over.
Speaker 8: Let's let's go over I guess my first aid kit,
Speaker 8: and then we can we can open yours and see
Speaker 8: what's the same and what's different.
Speaker 3: Right, So this is one.
Speaker 8: I like it because it's small and it fits in
Speaker 8: the smaller my back, and if I really needed to,
Speaker 8: I could just like wear a kind of baggy shirt
Speaker 8: and it wouldn't be too obvious. I also have one
Speaker 8: that fits around my ankle for times when I really
Speaker 8: don't want people to know I have it, but that
Speaker 8: I also want to have it.
Speaker 3: And then you can wear some sick flared jeans or.
Speaker 8: Something and people just think you're a trendy kind of
Speaker 8: guy exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they'll know. So yeah, in mind, it sort of
Speaker 3: goes on.
Speaker 8: It's one of your back and then you can pull
Speaker 8: it away, right, has a big old red handle. You
Speaker 8: just put it like that and it comes away. Yeah,
Speaker 8: it's nice. That's one thing I will say right off
Speaker 8: the bat is like, I've seen a number of people
Speaker 8: get hurt.
Speaker 3: In a number of different situations.
Speaker 8: I've seen a number of people render first date, including myself,
Speaker 8: sometimes successfully, sometimes sadly not successfully. And if you're if
Speaker 8: you have a big bag of shit and then you
Speaker 8: open your bag of shit and you're just throwing stuff everywhere,
Speaker 8: Stuff's falling on the ground, it you're that's not helpful, right,
Speaker 8: like the things that will kill people that are preventable
Speaker 8: for the most part in and like trauma injuries. Right,
Speaker 8: Like the stuff that we might see if we're going
Speaker 8: to a pride, if we're attending a protest, and if
Speaker 8: we fucking work in a school in America, right is
Speaker 8: largely like like attention umothora, so a whole sucking chest
Speaker 8: wound and losing blood and losing blood is I believe
Speaker 8: that the sort of most common preventable cause of death
Speaker 8: in intrauma injuries.
Speaker 3: So most of us is going to focus around losing blood.
Speaker 8: And that's where tyber training called stop the bleed comes in, right,
Speaker 8: I believe it's stop the Bleed dot org. You can
Speaker 8: google free stop the Bleed classes near me. I've previously
Speaker 8: posted a link to where you can put in your postcode,
Speaker 8: zip code and find free stop the Bleed training near you.
Speaker 8: And again that will cost you no money at all
Speaker 8: cost you about half a day of your time. Oh great, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: it's a great thing actually, Like it's one of the
Speaker 8: few things that you know, the municipal governments of various
Speaker 8: things put on, well if there isn't one near you.
Speaker 8: I've heard the people hitting up fire departments and then
Speaker 8: getting them to put one on if they can demonstrate
Speaker 8: some interest because it is very basic. And most fire
Speaker 8: departments will have paramedics, right, which is a sort of
Speaker 8: step up from an empty So those folks can help
Speaker 8: teach those things very well. So what is in here
Speaker 8: for stopping the bleed? And I'm not going to teach
Speaker 8: you how to use it because that's what someone else.
Speaker 3: Does, someone else's job.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So before I open it up, this is a tornicue.
Speaker 8: Some people will pronounce it incorrectly. They will say that
Speaker 8: those people are with that hard t yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: the American way.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So it's what this guy is is is it? It's
Speaker 8: for like bleeding your limbs, arterial bleeding your limbs? Right,
Speaker 8: it just goes around since it down and I'm not
Speaker 8: telling you how to use it, and then you tighten
Speaker 8: it up, right. The things I want to emphasize about
Speaker 8: this are one the type of tornicae that is so
Speaker 8: this is called a combat application tornice. It's made by
Speaker 8: a company called North American Rescue. There are a few
Speaker 8: other ones that I would use. The other one I have,
Speaker 8: I think is the Softy Wide and I have some
Speaker 8: of the REVX med ratcheting tornices as well. They use
Speaker 8: like a boa. If people have used ski boots cycling shoes,
Speaker 8: they'll be familiar with a bone call. The one to
Speaker 8: buy is the one that you use when you do
Speaker 8: your training right, and it's going to be a sam
Speaker 8: as another one.
Speaker 3: There's another.
Speaker 8: These are all the tonques you want to buy if
Speaker 8: you're sort of if you're confused about which one you used.
Speaker 8: The ones that are approved by the t trouble C.
Speaker 8: It's a Committee on Tactical Casualty Care, Tactical casualt com.
Speaker 3: Something like that.
Speaker 8: Those guys have tested them extensively right to see which
Speaker 8: wants work, which wants don't. It is this is not
Speaker 8: somewhere to save money. That they they are about twenty
Speaker 8: three twenty five bucks. You find them on sale, it's not. Yeah,
Speaker 8: I mean, if if that's a big expense for you,
Speaker 8: then I understand uh, and it's it's okay not to
Speaker 8: have one if that's a big expense, or to save
Speaker 8: up and wait, like, that's okay, it's better than using
Speaker 8: an improvised tornic care. Right, there are not very many
Speaker 8: very good studies at least that I could find on
Speaker 8: improvised tornic k's. Someplaces still teaching improvises tornic K, like
Speaker 8: I've taken a Woman's First Responder where they taught it.
Speaker 8: I've also seen one not work, and I will tell
Speaker 8: you that's not an experience that I want to ever
Speaker 8: have again in my life, and I don't think it's
Speaker 8: one i'd like you all to share with me. So
Speaker 8: I would suggest if you're going to be using a
Speaker 8: tornic K, then then buying a cat is kind of
Speaker 8: the standard. I wouldn't buy it from Jeffrey Bezos because
Speaker 8: this Amazon dot com is a website that he owns. Believe, yeah,
Speaker 8: space cowboy Jeffrey. And so the reason why is that
Speaker 8: all of these different there are knockoffs, right, there are
Speaker 8: fakes of this. They go in different they go in
Speaker 8: the same bin from what I'm told, and then the
Speaker 8: person who's a picker just maybe grabs one. And sometimes
Speaker 8: you can end up with a fake. What can happen
Speaker 8: with a fake is the strap can break or the windless.
Speaker 8: So the windless is the guy that tightens it can break.
Speaker 8: Ah Okay, either of those things go to lead to
Speaker 8: the tornicue failing. Right, it's not going to apply enough pressure,
Speaker 8: and that's going to It could do a number of
Speaker 8: things right. It could just fail to start the bleeding,
Speaker 8: depending on if you've misidentified the bleeding. You could give
Speaker 8: someone a compartment syndrome or something. It's going to be
Speaker 8: very painful. It's going to be very painful anyway, and
Speaker 8: you'll learn that in your course which you're going to take.
Speaker 8: You're not gonna not going to just listen to me
Speaker 8: on the podcast.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 8: And so you do want a real one, and so
Speaker 8: the easiest way to obtain a real one is to
Speaker 8: buy one from a reliable source. Rescue Essentials, Chinook Medical
Speaker 8: and North American Rescuer or people who I've worked with.
Speaker 8: I've said at Rescue Essential sent me a bunch of
Speaker 8: shit before I went on a work trip. They it
Speaker 8: was lots of it was outdated or the open box
Speaker 8: or something. And I was able to donate that to
Speaker 8: fixes and journalists I was working with. I thought that
Speaker 8: was very cool of them. Cool they offer a stop
Speaker 8: the Bleed month discount. I think stop the Bleed month
Speaker 8: is May, so we might be out of that now.
Speaker 8: But those are real places where you can buy these
Speaker 8: tonic caes and know that you're not getting a fake one, right, So.
Speaker 3: You'll provide links to that in the description of the place.
Speaker 8: We will yeap, yeah, yeah, I'll make sure that those
Speaker 8: are there for you to click. So's there are different generations,
Speaker 8: like I think generation seven is what I have. Generation
Speaker 8: six is also fine. You probably won't find one sold
Speaker 8: before that. On the off chance you do, I would
Speaker 8: just stick to a generation seven or six. And it
Speaker 8: does have a little timestamps, so you want little sharpie
Speaker 8: as well to write the time on. That's more important.
Speaker 8: It's possible that, like you might put this on somebody.
Speaker 8: So you're at a Pride event and there is something
Speaker 8: terrible happening, like a mass shooter, and you might be
Speaker 8: there for a while. Let's say you're in Texas and
Speaker 8: all your cops are fucking cowards. Then unfortunately, if you
Speaker 8: were able to render aid someone and then you both
Speaker 8: of you were able to not get hurt any further.
Speaker 8: You could be there for a while. Then it would
Speaker 8: be relevant what time the tornic ga is applied. Normally,
Speaker 8: you know, in the US, we would hope that you
Speaker 8: would have medical attention pretty quickly because you know, that
Speaker 8: threat would have been stopped and then EMS would be
Speaker 8: able to provide help. But that that's where the time
Speaker 8: thing comes in, right, And so you want to have
Speaker 8: a tiny sharpie when you have a tornic in and
Speaker 8: you can get. North American Rescue actually sell little tiny,
Speaker 8: half sized sharpies and I shove them in the pouch
Speaker 8: with the torn ue and then there they are, and
Speaker 8: then you always have a sharpie. So we go inside
Speaker 8: there it is.
Speaker 3: Look at that. Okay, Hey, the little guy's a cute. Yeah,
Speaker 3: isn't it gorgeous? Yeah? We love a little guy here,
Speaker 3: credit card size sharpie.
Speaker 4: It's perfect.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, for those who are not danel exactly with
Speaker 8: a pinky sharpie.
Speaker 9: And I will do I will do the part of
Speaker 9: contextualizing for the for the non video audience.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Daniel.
Speaker 8: Yeah, of course, paint a picture with words if you will.
Speaker 8: So we're going through this now, if we if we
Speaker 8: focus on bleeding again, right, there's a couple of different
Speaker 8: dressings that you have.
Speaker 3: So again I'm not going to.
Speaker 8: Tell you what to use for wear, but you would
Speaker 8: use like the tornique on one part of your body.
Speaker 8: The other things you're going to use would be a
Speaker 8: pressure dressing. So you can get a ton of different
Speaker 8: pressure dressings. I like the Olays ones. Oh well a ees,
Speaker 8: but it doesn't hugely matter that those ones just have
Speaker 8: a little bit of gorez that you can pull out
Speaker 8: so you can pack a wound too.
Speaker 3: And that.
Speaker 8: Sometimes if you do so, if you get like a
Speaker 8: nice training, they might let you practice packing some wounds,
Speaker 8: so they might have like a little fake wound that
Speaker 8: you can pack and yeah, so that you'll learn a
Speaker 8: lot about like how to do that there. And so
Speaker 8: those allowed. Some of the other ones don't. But honestly,
Speaker 8: like sometimes they're called Israeli bandages. They will not like
Speaker 8: colonize Palestine if you you know, put them in your.
Speaker 3: First gate kit.
Speaker 8: But that that's what this guy is, right, And sometimes
Speaker 8: they have a lot of packaging on, so you want
Speaker 8: to take them down to kind of the last layer
Speaker 8: of packaging. None of this ship is sterile, right, None
Speaker 8: of this stuff is. Again it's not supposed to be
Speaker 8: in for a long time, right, So it's so it's
Speaker 8: okay to have that like either just bear or in
Speaker 8: its first layer of packaging.
Speaker 9: I want to get actualize one thing from a video perspective,
Speaker 9: just for everybody listening. As James is showing me his
Speaker 9: first aid kit, it looks like every item that he's
Speaker 9: talking about other than the tournique is individually wrapped and
Speaker 9: also strapped down. Yeah, it looks like I would say,
Speaker 9: about seven or eight individual items within there, and they
Speaker 9: all have their own pocket and they're all strapped down.
Speaker 9: And that's something that immediately looking at mine, I basically have,
Speaker 9: you know, small plastic baggies that I will hold up
Speaker 9: to James right now, small plastic baggies of just like
Speaker 9: a lot of loose shits. And it's just way too
Speaker 9: much stuff in here, I would say, of what I
Speaker 9: see in James's bag versus mine, I think I mean,
Speaker 9: first of all, there's stuff missing, Like there's no turnique
Speaker 9: in here. There's a lot of different gauze things, and
Speaker 9: there's but there's you know, in mind, I have like
Speaker 9: seven hundred different bandages, and like there's aspirin in here,
Speaker 9: and like some things that feel like they're more for
Speaker 9: like a camping trip than they are really like handling
Speaker 9: a first aid scenario in which you need to save
Speaker 9: someone's life. So one piece of advice that I'm getting
Speaker 9: from James as he shares this, is that you know,
Speaker 9: what's important to carry around is the stuff that is
Speaker 9: going to give you immediate access to the ability to
Speaker 9: save someone's life. So think about that as you are
Speaker 9: like packing your bag. What I have here that I
Speaker 9: bought online, that I'm still glad that I have is
Speaker 9: basically a collection of a bunch of different miscellaneous first
Speaker 9: aid stuff rather than a very stripped down specific list
Speaker 9: of items that I can use to save someone's life
Speaker 9: in an emergency scenario.
Speaker 8: Yes, excellent point, and you can see them all right
Speaker 8: when you open this guy. This guy is also like sigh,
Speaker 8: such that I can pull it off, pop it on
Speaker 8: the floor, open it up, have my workspace in front
Speaker 8: of me. If there's anything I'm not confident doing, if
Speaker 8: like when horrible things happen and people are bleeding you,
Speaker 8: you do not in that time gain skills right at
Speaker 8: that moment, speaking from like more experience than I would
Speaker 8: like to have. If people are in a really bad
Speaker 8: way in front of you. It's not a fun time,
Speaker 8: and you get scared and you might panic. That's okay,
Speaker 8: that happens to everyone. People aren't supposed to see their ship,
Speaker 8: and if it, certainly, if it's your first time seeing,
Speaker 8: it's not unreasonable at all to freak out and not
Speaker 8: know what to do. You can just hold any of
Speaker 8: this ship up, say hey I have a tornic uit.
Speaker 8: Hey I have a pressure dressing, and someone who who's
Speaker 8: at that time is able to help, can take that.
Speaker 8: You know what they're doing, they can help. So it's
Speaker 8: totally fine just to have this ship. And if you
Speaker 8: don't know how to use it, you know, don't go
Speaker 8: beyond your scope of knowledge. But just you have that
Speaker 8: ship and you can provide it someone else, that's fine.
Speaker 8: So yeah, everything's in little elastic bands. I've got this
Speaker 8: stuff which is called quick clot And we've talked a
Speaker 8: lot of the podcasts recently about indigenous medical technologies.
Speaker 7: This is an.
Speaker 8: Example of one, right, So it's using I think kalin.
Speaker 8: There's some that use kalin, some that use something that
Speaker 8: came from crabshells, but this is this is an indigenous
Speaker 8: medical technology that now is sort of it's been refined
Speaker 8: over time. This just contains a thing that stops it
Speaker 8: helps blood to clotch. Hemostatic agent. Right, so when you're
Speaker 8: packing a wound, you could use this first. This would
Speaker 8: help with blood clotting.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: It's also the type I have is detectable on X rays,
Speaker 8: which helps a lot. There are some older types which
Speaker 8: are powders. Those are probably best avoided. And you want
Speaker 8: the gauze that is impregnated with the hemostatic agent if
Speaker 8: you can. This stuff got really pricey recently, Like I
Speaker 8: think the best price I've seen for this is thirty
Speaker 8: five bucks. Oh wow, So yeah, this guy is going
Speaker 8: to cost you the most.
Speaker 3: Do you have an idea why that is?
Speaker 8: I think a lot of people probably bought it in
Speaker 8: twenty twenty. Might be part of it. Maybe it's some
Speaker 8: kind of supply chain thing. I don't know if you
Speaker 8: know where they get the ingredients from. But they just
Speaker 8: went up in price a lot link Like a lot
Speaker 8: of people were sort of reaching out about, hey, why
Speaker 8: is this shit so expensive?
Speaker 3: Sure, I don't know, but.
Speaker 8: It's not like one hundred percent necessary, but it is
Speaker 8: very helpful thing and it can make a difference in
Speaker 8: some cases. Right, So that's the hemostatic gauze. But else
Speaker 8: I've gotten here as a pair of trauma shares. That's
Speaker 8: just if you need to remove someone's clothing to access
Speaker 8: a wound, and that is kind of important. So for instance,
Speaker 8: I was doing a training once and I prefer to
Speaker 8: speak about those things. So like where a guy was
Speaker 8: presented to us with gunshot wound, and like, if you
Speaker 8: don't rip off his browsers like this, you know, if
Speaker 8: someone's been shot and you're there helping them again, like
Speaker 8: if you're not comfortable doing this, you haven't done the
Speaker 8: training and don't be just ripping off of the strangers clothes.
Speaker 8: That's weird in general. Yeah, yeah, there comes a yes. Yeah.
Speaker 8: So like and they had this cool kind of thing
Speaker 8: around his leg that bled like he had like two wounds,
Speaker 8: sort of pumping out blood. It's like a cool kind
Speaker 8: of bleeding simulator. So but yeah, bullets will do crazy
Speaker 8: ship and they'll go in one part of your leg
Speaker 8: and hit the bone abouts around and go out in
Speaker 8: fact the other. But they don't always travel in straight lines.
Speaker 8: They're not laser beams. So by exposing their wound, you
Speaker 8: can sometimes see the exit wound, and so you'll know
Speaker 8: that there are two wounds, right yeah, depending on how
Speaker 8: you're going to treat it. You know you're gonna pack it,
Speaker 8: you're gonna put a torn key on it. But that
Speaker 8: that will that's what these are for. You can also
Speaker 8: get things which are called like I think it's called
Speaker 8: a clothing knife. I actually keep one into the belt
Speaker 8: of my my plate carrier that I used to work,
Speaker 8: just so that it's like right here, and it's the
Speaker 8: same place I keep my diving knife, so then I
Speaker 8: know it's there. And what it does is these are
Speaker 8: a handy thing to have in your truck to.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, you've seen it.
Speaker 8: So it's a contained blade, right. I like this little
Speaker 8: chat because in addition to the contained blade, it has
Speaker 8: a little glass breaker.
Speaker 9: Yes, I say, we have one in the car, so
Speaker 9: it's like a scene. Some people might not as a
Speaker 9: sea belt cut yes, yeah, spell cutter, and usually on
Speaker 9: the other side, like you said, they have a glass breaker.
Speaker 9: So but that is a much more contained one and
Speaker 9: that looks nice. The one in my car is like
Speaker 9: the size of a small hammer because it's like meant
Speaker 9: to be like you know, give you the forest to
Speaker 9: hold it and snack of window, but also the kind
Speaker 9: of thing that is super useful. I think everybody should
Speaker 9: have one in their car.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can put on your keyring even right.
Speaker 8: This is the size of like a like a match
Speaker 8: box or it's like the size of the key fob.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you have a newer vehicle than
Speaker 3: I do, then I didn't mean to be car classes here.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, it's okay, Min's approaching classic status. But yeah,
Speaker 8: we'll we'll put a link on the on the website
Speaker 8: for this little chap as well. We're not like, we're
Speaker 8: not fucking getting affiliate revenue from that weirdness. Guys, We're
Speaker 8: just trying to.
Speaker 3: Help you out.
Speaker 8: Nice thing about this is like, it's quite hard to
Speaker 8: stab someone with trauma sheares because they've got this little
Speaker 8: up on the bottom. But it can be quite a
Speaker 8: lot of chopping and things. Right, this guy, you can whoop.
Speaker 8: So these probably also cheaper and you won't end up
Speaker 8: using them as scissors and getting them blunt. So that
Speaker 8: is that is my little getting people's clothes off. And
Speaker 8: then the last one. I have a couple of burned
Speaker 8: dressings in here. That's just because so many people got
Speaker 8: burned in twenty twenty pro from me though, Yeah, it
Speaker 8: would be. So if someone shoots something out, you don't
Speaker 8: pick that shit up, don't make it up, just don't.
Speaker 8: Like in my prepping, I got fire resistant gloves. I
Speaker 8: got like, I got gloves that were treated for like
Speaker 8: I don't reme it's like five hundred degrees or something
Speaker 8: like that in the event that I needed to throw
Speaker 8: back a gas canister. But I think I was. I mean,
Speaker 8: I was way too rambo about the whole thing because
Speaker 8: I still have not encountered a gas grenade once yet.
Speaker 8: So yeahs crossed, But I mean I don't know, I'm down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe I'm ready just get him. Yeah yeah, yeah, Dave,
Speaker 3: I love that for you. It's great.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So you can't instead of having the gloves right
Speaker 8: to just avoid picking it up. But people do get
Speaker 8: burned from that from from other stuff, right, So burn
Speaker 8: dressing not really necessary because it's unlikely if someone is
Speaker 8: burned to the extent that it's threatening to their life.
Speaker 8: You aren't helping them with your little box of stuff.
Speaker 8: So that's fine. And then these guys are vented chess seals.
Speaker 8: Ideally you do want vented chess seals. I was reading
Speaker 8: a study the other day. It's yes, the sort of
Speaker 8: greater survivability. And what you are doing with those is
Speaker 8: that this is for a sucking chess wounds. Not named
Speaker 8: that because it sucks, but it does. Yeah, but it is.
Speaker 8: This is for like, I guess, penetrating chest trauma. And
Speaker 8: what these these guys I bought in a pack of two.
Speaker 8: Hyphen are a good brand. I think Halo or another brand.
Speaker 8: There are some knockoffs on on Amazon dot Com. They
Speaker 8: wouldn't buy just like again, it's probably worth spending a
Speaker 8: little bit extra. These These are the ones that have
Speaker 8: gone through extensive testing that are issued to lots of
Speaker 8: militaries around the world. They're very flat, right, if you
Speaker 8: wanted to, you could distribute the ship about your person
Speaker 8: and it's just going to be harder to get it,
Speaker 8: and you're not going to remember which back pocket maybe
Speaker 8: you shut what in Sure, these are very flat and
Speaker 8: very easy. Their their giant stickers and you, again, when
Speaker 8: you do your training, will learn how to use them.
Speaker 8: But yeah, I would avoid like the Rhino. I think
Speaker 8: Rhino is one of the brands of Amazon and stuff.
Speaker 8: Just kind of like get a hyphen is kind of
Speaker 8: the standard. There's an older type as well, but these
Speaker 8: hyphens are more compact and they're preferred.
Speaker 9: And when you're searching hyphen, if you happen to researching,
Speaker 9: it's h y f I n. We're going to put
Speaker 9: it in the chat. But just you know, for a
Speaker 9: word that is phonetically very similar to another common word,
Speaker 9: hyphen is h y f i.
Speaker 8: N ah yes, p G Yeah, So well said Daniel,
Speaker 8: that is a. That is a that's a chess seal.
Speaker 3: Right, so.
Speaker 8: Here is the other type just for you're viewing this
Speaker 8: an Asherman chess seal, so that not preferred, So stick
Speaker 8: with the hyphen. These are kind of bigger and don't
Speaker 8: pack as well. And yeah, I would stick with the highphens.
Speaker 8: The other thing I have in here is a like
Speaker 8: a space blanket.
Speaker 3: Just interesting.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So when you are losing a lot of blood,
Speaker 8: you get very cold, and so you do want to
Speaker 8: keep that treasure, you do want to keep that casualty warm.
Speaker 8: This isn't going to really be enough on its own,
Speaker 8: quite honestly, like you need to probably actively heat someone,
Speaker 8: but it's better than nothing, and it's again.
Speaker 3: It's very small.
Speaker 8: Again, I've given tons of these out in various different
Speaker 8: situations that weren't like a casualty situation, so that a
Speaker 8: nice thing to have. You don't generally want to be
Speaker 8: packing ship just because it's a nice thing to have.
Speaker 8: And we'll get onto that. But this again is very small.
Speaker 8: There's almost always face for it, so I include that.
Speaker 8: I also have a little source of light, like a
Speaker 8: little torch flashlight for American listeners nice a s h.
Speaker 8: And that is there for being able to see things,
Speaker 8: which is very handy actually when you're trying to help
Speaker 8: someone who is bleeding. Another thing to include would be gloves.
Speaker 8: I have my gloves somewhere else on this belt, so
Speaker 8: they're not here, but medical gloves, right, And again you'll
Speaker 8: probably learn this in your course. But like a lot
Speaker 8: of people like to buy black ones, I don't know
Speaker 8: why cops wear black ones all the time, right, just
Speaker 8: makes it a little more difficult if you're doing a
Speaker 8: blood sweep, which is a thing you'll learn about in
Speaker 8: your class, so that it's actually quite hard to see,
Speaker 8: like blood on black, especially in perfect yeah, so blue
Speaker 8: tan something like that is kind of preferable.
Speaker 3: I do have those in the first age. I think good.
Speaker 4: Nice.
Speaker 8: Yeah, if you want to have those somewhere ready to go,
Speaker 8: I think they're on the front of this bag. You
Speaker 8: could slap those on. Just you know, you don't know
Speaker 8: where other people have been, what they've been up to you,
Speaker 8: and it doesn't matter what, you still want to help them.
Speaker 8: So you just want to just want to take care
Speaker 8: of yourself there. And so though they're honestly the main
Speaker 8: things I have in there, what I don't have in
Speaker 8: here is equally important. Right, I do not have tampons
Speaker 8: in here. The reason I do not have tampons in
Speaker 8: here as well, it's too far. I'm not a person
Speaker 8: who menitrates, and even if I was, I wouldn't have
Speaker 8: my first aid kit. And technically because they are not
Speaker 8: very good at but they're terrible at dealing with like
Speaker 8: massive bleeding, right, massive hemorrhage. That's not what they're for
Speaker 8: if people are familiar with what they are designed for.
Speaker 8: Like the volume of blood is not the same as
Speaker 8: the volume you will see from terial bleed. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: believe me again, Like I've had the misfortune to see
Speaker 8: people die from blood loss, and like that is a
Speaker 8: lot of blood more and it's coming out fast, and
Speaker 8: you ain't stopping it with a tampon. It just kind
Speaker 8: of stopping someone who is better equipped from helping. So
Speaker 8: if you want to carry tampons and you want to
Speaker 8: have them available in case someone needs them, that is great,
Speaker 8: that's very kind. If you put them in your car,
Speaker 8: put them in your in your bag that you go
Speaker 8: around with, please, but don't confuse them with a trauma
Speaker 8: dressing because they are different things. Don't plan to improvise
Speaker 8: anything what broadly right, Like, it's just when we have
Speaker 8: excellent tools available that designed for this job, just use them.
Speaker 8: And it's fine not to be able to get all
Speaker 8: this stuff at once, Right, you could spring for the
Speaker 8: chess seals first and then save with a bit of
Speaker 8: money get the tornic k. That's fine, But like, yes,
Speaker 8: can you can you improvise a chess seal with some
Speaker 8: duct tape and a credit card or a CRISP packet
Speaker 8: in theory? Sure, but like these are like twelve bucks,
Speaker 8: so let's just let's just let's just get them if
Speaker 8: we can and have people improvised tornic k successfully with cravats? Yes,
Speaker 8: have those failed and resulted in loss of life?
Speaker 10: You know?
Speaker 3: Yes? Like in some cases. Your belt isn't a torny
Speaker 3: k right, it doesn't have a windless it's not going
Speaker 3: to get tight enough. It might snap.
Speaker 8: Have people used successfully, Yes, Is there a twenty three
Speaker 8: dollar thing which works much more effectively?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 8: And it's a serious thing. It's fucking it's very real.
Speaker 8: Like again speaking from experience, like this shit will affect
Speaker 8: you deeply, and you want to know that you did
Speaker 8: the best you could. So and if you can't afford
Speaker 8: any of this stuff, that's totally fine, Like just take
Speaker 8: your time and acquire it.
Speaker 9: I think an important thing to add at this point
Speaker 9: is to you know, listeners of our show are I
Speaker 9: think overly familiar with the way that we have kind
Speaker 9: of introduce the idea of mutual aid, like the point
Speaker 9: of mutual aid, And what I mean by that is
Speaker 9: that you are not a one person revolutionary Like the
Speaker 9: whole idea is community effort. And so especially with something
Speaker 9: like this, this is like a kind of a two
Speaker 9: part point. Especially with something like this, consider that you
Speaker 9: are part of a community that can help people overall.
Speaker 9: Maybe it is not you the individual listening to this
Speaker 9: episode right now that is like I'm going to go
Speaker 9: invest in all of these things because I will be
Speaker 9: the first aid person. Maybe there's someone you know who's
Speaker 9: already interested in this, and this is information that you
Speaker 9: can pass on to them should they be wanting to
Speaker 9: invest in equipment like this. And another thing to think
Speaker 9: about in terms of why James is offering specific items
Speaker 9: is because think about a hobby that you like doing,
Speaker 9: Think about anything that you like doing a lot. You
Speaker 9: know you don't usually buy the cheapest version of the thing.
Speaker 9: And now this is not me, you know, necessarily advocating
Speaker 9: for overspending or buying expensive things. You just want to
Speaker 9: buy stuff that lasts and that works well and that
Speaker 9: does the job because you know overall that stuff will
Speaker 9: last longer than anything that is cheaper in the immediate moment.
Speaker 9: I think people can say the same thing about things
Speaker 9: like work boots, about tools, about anything that to you
Speaker 9: is worth investing your time in. So if this is
Speaker 9: something that you value, if being a first responder or
Speaker 9: being that person who's there, if taking a stop the
Speaker 9: bleed course is something that's important to you, consider that
Speaker 9: these things are more than just like you know, good
Speaker 9: things to have on hand. They're an investment in your
Speaker 9: future and your interests. So just something to consider that, like,
Speaker 9: while some of these things may I mean, nothing sounds
Speaker 9: outrageously expensive that you've said so far. I think the
Speaker 9: most expensive thing that you talked about was thirty five
Speaker 9: dollars in that range.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you can spend a lot on the pouch, but
Speaker 8: be sure you shouldn't. Sure like, don't buy some fancy
Speaker 8: hype beasts Instagram gung Guy pouch and right exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 8: I think, Yeah, the Selock scores is probably much expensive.
Speaker 8: Think I've spoken about on the point of durability, I
Speaker 8: do want to say I've seen people practicing with their
Speaker 8: torny keys, and I would suggest getting another one to
Speaker 8: practice with.
Speaker 3: Totally makes sense.
Speaker 8: So North America, Mescu breaks a blue one. It's exactly
Speaker 8: the same. It works just the same. If you need
Speaker 8: to use it, you can over time those things fatigue,
Speaker 8: and that they're not designed for multiple uses. Have they
Speaker 8: been used multiple times?
Speaker 3: Yes? Do people wash them and wash the blood of
Speaker 3: them and use them again? Yes? It is again like
Speaker 3: we shouldn't plan for a suboptimal setting and what's already
Speaker 3: going to be a pretty fucking suboptimal moment. And talking
Speaker 3: of suboptimal stuff, Daniel, we have to start, Yeah, to
Speaker 3: talk about Ronald Reagan. So that's my bad. I should
Speaker 3: have been the one being like Jason to take an
Speaker 3: AD break.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Here, I am a seasoned professional. We're back.
Speaker 8: We've returned from my AD break. So I wanted to
Speaker 8: talk about resources for training because I think those are
Speaker 8: very important, right, and that is where you're going to
Speaker 8: learn stuff. I am not telling you how to do this.
Speaker 8: I would suggest hitting up Stop the Bleed. I think
Speaker 8: it's stopped bleed dot org and Stop the Bid training
Speaker 8: in my area. There's a website that will link in
Speaker 8: the description. Are's part of that website where you can
Speaker 8: put in your zip code and find trainings. And then
Speaker 8: if I think about where I've got my training, it's
Speaker 8: through an organization called NOLS National Outdoor Leadership School. So
Speaker 8: once you get past Stop the Bleed, you've got a
Speaker 8: couple of Like most community colleges will have an EMTB
Speaker 8: course empt basic. That's quite a commitment of your time,
Speaker 8: but you can learn a lot of very important things.
Speaker 8: It can be a career for you if you want
Speaker 8: it to be. Certainly, it can be an adjunct to
Speaker 8: other careers you want to do. If you want to
Speaker 8: work in the outdoors. If you can do an EMT
Speaker 8: B and then do a wilderness EMT, that opens up
Speaker 8: a whole range of expeditions to you. So community college
Speaker 8: should be free. Most of those courses are free or
Speaker 8: very affordable, depending on where you are. Knowles courses are
Speaker 8: not free, nor are they very affordable. They are very expensive,
Speaker 8: but they are very good you look or ARII probably
Speaker 8: puts them on. Knowles does have scholarships for people who
Speaker 8: are more marginalized from the outdoors, or they did last
Speaker 8: time I spoke to them, so those might be worth
Speaker 8: checking out. And then there are apps which will give
Speaker 8: you resource since resources are not the same as training,
Speaker 8: right like training is knowing what to do, it's not.
Speaker 8: Sometimes it's knowing where to look. But in situations like this,
Speaker 8: like you don't want to be on your phone for
Speaker 8: more advanced stuff, for stuff where you know you're you're
Speaker 8: you're doing care in the field right if you're doing
Speaker 8: or you know, wilderness first responder. If you're trying to
Speaker 8: think times that I've done stuff with that. One time
Speaker 8: I was climbing up a mountain and the big old
Speaker 8: rock fell on me. I had to split my leg,
Speaker 8: and oh, my god, what bleeding like, yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 8: good times. Uh don't, yeah, don't don't watch out for
Speaker 8: rock Fall audience.
Speaker 9: And I just want to throw something out there. Every
Speaker 9: single time James tells us any story about his life,
Speaker 9: it is just this, this wonderfully vivid, like colorful story
Speaker 9: about something that has happened to him, or an experience
Speaker 9: that he's had, or a profession that he's had. That
Speaker 9: just adds to the tone of interesting facts about James.
Speaker 9: So if you I don't know, I highly recommend used
Speaker 9: in every single episode that James isn't because you have
Speaker 9: lived a fascinating life and that is merely a split
Speaker 9: second of it.
Speaker 3: That's wild.
Speaker 9: I'm glad you're okay, Yeah, I'm fine, But yeah, you know,
Speaker 9: clearly here we are with that, right, Like, especially in
Speaker 9: wilderness meander, then there's an emphasis on using what you
Speaker 9: already have, and because you can't bring everything into the wilderness, right,
Speaker 9: So that's where I'm saying.
Speaker 8: Knowledge doesn't wear anything. It doesn't take up any space
Speaker 8: in your pack. So you can use an air mattress
Speaker 8: pretty well to splint a leg injury. You can use
Speaker 8: one of those foam for air mattresses. A guy that
Speaker 8: you sleep on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So you can kind
Speaker 8: of fandangle those up around a leg. You can use
Speaker 8: a therm arrest or similar. Other products are available foam
Speaker 8: sleeping mattress. You can use a hiking pole, right, tent pole.
Speaker 8: Tentpoles are kind of nice because you can break them
Speaker 8: down into sections to get the right length, and then
Speaker 8: all you're using from your first aid kit is your
Speaker 8: it's your tape, right or I like ski straps. I
Speaker 8: attach everything in my life. It's important to me with
Speaker 8: ski straps. So I love a ski strap and I
Speaker 8: had some ski straps, and you can just splin that
Speaker 8: bad boy with a couple of ski traps, a couple
Speaker 8: of tent poles back of the net. You're not having
Speaker 8: a great day at that point. This is not the
Speaker 8: kind of medical care you'd hope for in a professional setting.
Speaker 8: But you know, if you've got that and you've got
Speaker 8: a crash, you you can get yourself to a higher
Speaker 8: degree of care. So when we're doing stuff like that,
Speaker 8: I believe NOLES has a Wilderness Medicine app. There's Deployed Medicine,
Speaker 8: which is a US military resource for field care, which
Speaker 8: can help to remind you of stuff that you've already
Speaker 8: trained on. It's not going to teach you to do
Speaker 8: stuff you shouldn't. Just read about it on there and
Speaker 8: use it. And there's a new one called goes Ges
Speaker 8: which literally launched like this week goes Health, which it's
Speaker 8: offline to It gives an offline data base of wilderness
Speaker 8: medicine and it helps you kind of with diagnostic queues
Speaker 8: of stuff. So when you do your wilderness first responder,
Speaker 8: at least when I did it, someone must have had
Speaker 8: an ectopic pregnancy and had a very bad outcome, because
Speaker 8: they'll they'll ask you with all these questions like what
Speaker 8: could this be? What could this be? And like they
Speaker 8: want you to be able to know what any topic
Speaker 8: pregnancy is so like. But there's like a sort of
Speaker 8: flow chart that you can follow right to help you
Speaker 8: be like what is this? Is it appendicitis? What's going
Speaker 8: on here?
Speaker 3: So when?
Speaker 8: Because you probably won't remember every certainly if you take
Speaker 8: a woof of course, and then two years later you
Speaker 8: know you have before you recertified, like something happens, a
Speaker 8: lot could happen in two years, you won't have remembered
Speaker 8: everything that you learned in your course right, So some
Speaker 8: of those apps are useful, but the most important thing
Speaker 8: this thing where you will learn to use all of
Speaker 8: the items in this I fact is stopped the bleed
Speaker 8: and it is free, and that is where everyone should start.
Speaker 8: They're not going to teach you how to use all
Speaker 8: the things. So if we bust open the bag that
Speaker 8: you got Daniel quickly, it's overstuffed. There's a lot of
Speaker 8: things in there. Yeah, wait, too many things.
Speaker 9: Mean literally, like as there is a there is a
Speaker 9: pouch of emergency drinking water. There is there is a
Speaker 9: which might call it a bright stick, like a little
Speaker 9: light stick. There is about one hundred different kinds of
Speaker 9: uh which MC call it. Like look at this literal
Speaker 9: just like pile of band aids, just lit like hundreds
Speaker 9: of band aids and alcohol wipes. And oh there's a whistle.
Speaker 9: A whistle is should you get lost in the wilderness.
Speaker 3: This is a very handy in urban or rural dishausters.
Speaker 3: But for first at not for this.
Speaker 9: I don't think any of this stuff is necessarily bad.
Speaker 9: It's just there's just way too much. There's gauze pads,
Speaker 9: there is this a b D pad, sterile extra absorbent pad, yep.
Speaker 9: That you know, I don't think is going to do
Speaker 9: what it needs to do. But there's a shit ton
Speaker 9: of gauze in here, and there are look at and
Speaker 9: you want to talk about things to cut open. You're
Speaker 9: talking about clothing scissors. Uh, these little guys I don't
Speaker 9: think are going to do that. No, they're for your
Speaker 9: tape and stuff exactly, trimming tape. There's also tweezers in here. Really,
Speaker 9: this feels like for people who are in the wilderness
Speaker 9: and they get a splinter.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, and that stuff super handy to having your
Speaker 8: truck or your car or you're like, motorcycle guys are
Speaker 8: already pretty good.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's not gonna immediately stop you from dying from
Speaker 8: loss of blood, which is what we're concerned with. That
Speaker 8: if you do ride a motorcycle, you really want to
Speaker 8: fucking have one. Like I ride a bicycle, and I
Speaker 8: have seen some motor vehicle accidents and I'm just gonna say,
Speaker 8: motorcycle folks want to have that. Someone else can grab
Speaker 8: it off your motobi. I can use it if you've
Speaker 8: hurt yourself, but sure, I've seen that happen before. So yeah,
Speaker 8: that stuff is all very handy. It's all very nice.
Speaker 8: It can make you feel better, right, Like there's I
Speaker 8: imagine there's a ton of viberprofen and paracetamol and benadryl
Speaker 8: uh all that stuff is great. That stuffs super handy, right.
Speaker 8: And another thing I would add is some of that
Speaker 8: stuff can be life saving if you have an allergy, right,
Speaker 8: and you need to take something for that, Yeah, put
Speaker 8: that in your first aid kit because that's particular to you.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 8: And that's if you need an EpiPen, then have your
Speaker 8: EpiPen of course, right, you know, I'm sure you do. Anyway,
Speaker 8: if you have diabetes, have your glucagarn and some sugar.
Speaker 8: All of that stuff is of course important. But in
Speaker 8: terms of like dealing with what we perceive to be
Speaker 8: an increased risk of like homophobic violence, which normally manifests
Speaker 8: itself as people getting shot in this country, then the
Speaker 8: little scissors and the ABD pad the band aids aren't
Speaker 8: what we need and they're just going to get in
Speaker 8: the way. So even if you have those, great keep
Speaker 8: them in the car. I gave tons of people band
Speaker 8: aids because they got blisters in twenty twenty, right, Because
Speaker 8: people are not familiar with walking that far. Their boots sucked.
Speaker 8: People decided to wear heavy boots because they're worried. All
Speaker 8: understandable things. It's a lot of band aids, a load
Speaker 8: of horse you plasters or you know, like second skin. Great,
Speaker 8: I'm happy to give you one of those things. I'll
Speaker 8: keep it in a different pocket though, right So, so
Speaker 8: I'm not you know, sorting past the blister plasters if
Speaker 8: someone's been shot. And that's a good tip regardless of
Speaker 8: what you're doing, what you're even if you're doing, you know,
Speaker 8: you're bringing more stuff and more people. It's great aspirin,
Speaker 8: I bet people need that sometimes, or iberprofione if their
Speaker 8: knees hurting from walking a lot, great, pound that shit.
Speaker 8: But like, don't that's not what we want. We don't
Speaker 8: want to be administering medicines really, certainly if we're not
Speaker 8: trying to do so after a trauma thing, because some
Speaker 8: of they pay medicines we might be taking might inhibit
Speaker 8: blood clotting, right, So we don't want to be doing
Speaker 8: that before that person goes on too a higher standard care.
Speaker 8: It's going to fucking suck for them. But like you're
Speaker 8: the best you can do is stop their person dying
Speaker 8: or help someone else who's qualified to do that by
Speaker 8: just saying, hey, I have this stuff and it's all
Speaker 8: pretty compact, you know, Like I said, it's it's you know,
Speaker 8: the size of a paperback, but decent sized paperback books
Speaker 8: and ththing like that, and having it may or may
Speaker 8: not be hopefully right. You just buy this thing and
Speaker 8: it sits around for a while, and eventually, if you've
Speaker 8: been having the tornquair in the sun for years and years,
Speaker 8: you've want to replace it. The UV can cause them
Speaker 8: to decay. You can just put them inside a pouch.
Speaker 8: I've made all kinds of pouches for them. You can
Speaker 8: buy an expensive one on the internet, or you can
Speaker 8: just use a piece so a piece of nylon, which
Speaker 8: is what I do, two rubber bands and put it
Speaker 8: inside your waistband of your thing. Many many such solutions exist.
Speaker 8: But yeah, I would encourage everyone. I think I've said
Speaker 8: it's about twenty eight times to get training and not
Speaker 8: just to just go and do this. If you can't
Speaker 8: access that training straight away and you want to get
Speaker 8: the stuff where you look for training, that's fine. Just
Speaker 8: don't be doing stuff you don't know how to do,
Speaker 8: because you know someone might confuse that for someone who
Speaker 8: is qualified and is helping. And then if you don't
Speaker 8: know what you're doing and you make a mistake, and
Speaker 8: that that could be worse someone. If someone comes in
Speaker 8: and they're doing triage right, they're saying, who do we
Speaker 8: need to treat now? Who do we need to treat later?
Speaker 8: Who can't we help then? And they see you doing that, Okay,
Speaker 8: that person's covered that. You want to be sure that
Speaker 8: you're covering what you're doing. So yeah, just make sure
Speaker 8: you get the training. We're not trying to scare you
Speaker 8: into not going to things. Please don't feel afraid. I
Speaker 8: know it's very easy to feel afraid. That's, of course
Speaker 8: the goal of you know, most of these people their
Speaker 8: ass is welded to their gaming chair and they will
Speaker 8: never actually come into the streets and hurt you. They
Speaker 8: just stay stuff on Twitter dot com and like, you're fine.
Speaker 8: But it's very reasonable to be prudent. And certainly this
Speaker 8: is stuff I have in my TK, I have it
Speaker 8: in my bag, I have it in most places I go,
Speaker 8: and you know, you get used to it. It's fine,
Speaker 8: and take it a course. And I'm on work trips
Speaker 8: and I try and leave lots of it with my
Speaker 8: colleagues who can't access it so easily in other countries.
Speaker 8: So yeah, I hope that's helpful for people's peace. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: it is it. It's it's look, I guess just to
Speaker 8: wrap up, like you are not. I don't watch television really,
Speaker 8: Hugh Laurie, what's Hugh Lurry's deal house?
Speaker 3: Oh house? Yeah?
Speaker 8: Or like some other super doctor, right, Like you can't
Speaker 8: heal everyone. Bad things happen, but there's just peace of
Speaker 8: mind and trying to do your best to help everyone.
Speaker 8: And that's relative accessible and not too expensive. I think
Speaker 8: there's an IPAC fund which gives youse away for free
Speaker 8: as well, so cool. That's where I'm looking in too.
Speaker 8: If that's if someone can find that, they can send
Speaker 8: it to me and I will post it. But yeah,
Speaker 8: it's a peace of mind and it's it's not too
Speaker 8: hard to get that training. So go out there and
Speaker 8: do that wonderful do it with someone you love, do it,
Speaker 8: do it for fun, do it with your friend, make
Speaker 8: a god a date.
Speaker 3: Yeah, find someone on yeah, yeah, do it. Let us
Speaker 3: know how that goes.
Speaker 9: Hey, what's your favorite color? So what are you doing
Speaker 9: this weekend? Wanted to a stop the bleed course. I
Speaker 9: think that's very.
Speaker 8: Sexy into that exactly. Yeah, please don't DM me with
Speaker 8: potential still please no, no, do not m James, don't
Speaker 8: do it. But yeah, hopefully that helps people. Wonderful well, James,
Speaker 8: thank you so much for this awesome information. It's been
Speaker 8: an absolute pleasure being on the show with you. And
Speaker 8: we'll post links in the chat or post sorry, post
Speaker 8: link the chat that we have exactly that that's that's
Speaker 8: my twitch ship coming through. I will post links in
Speaker 8: the description of the episode, and yeah, I look forward
Speaker 8: to doing this again with you. Yeah, Daniel, talking of
Speaker 8: your twitch ship, where can people find you?
Speaker 3: Twitch?
Speaker 9: Shit, They don't need to find me anywhere, but if
Speaker 9: you want to find me, you can TV slash Twitch
Speaker 9: dot tv slash DJ Underscore Daniel d A n L.
Speaker 9: And if you want to come ask me what Robert
Speaker 9: smells like. I will not ban you, but I will
Speaker 9: time you out for ten minutes, so you know, just
Speaker 9: you know, know that I'm happy to have whoever wants
Speaker 9: to come watch the watch the twitch stream, but I'm
Speaker 9: not going to answer any weird questions about my coworkers.
Speaker 3: As you should be. Thank you Daniel, thank you James
Speaker 3: or Government. It's it could happen here a podcast where
Speaker 3: by attempt to do a British accent. It's been overwritten
Speaker 3: by Robert's Boston accent because I can't get it out
Speaker 3: of my head. This is the podcast where retreat Britain
Speaker 3: with the level of respect that it deserves. You're getting
Speaker 3: You're getting this ship right now, because the entire rest
Speaker 3: of this episode is going to be unbelievably depressing.
Speaker 6: Oh wow, maah, that's such a good accent. I believe
Speaker 6: you're one of my authentic countrymen.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 6: So good to chat to another fellow brit.
Speaker 3: With me. With Me is Sophie from Mars, who does
Speaker 3: many things, including.
Speaker 6: Things impressions of Americans, doing impressions of British people, one
Speaker 6: of my favorite impressions to do.
Speaker 3: Oh god, you know this is being recorded, and this
Speaker 3: is being recorded at like a Geneva convention, crime time
Speaker 3: for podcasts. So it's it's going great, it's going great.
Speaker 3: I have I've consumed so much caffeine that I have
Speaker 3: seen the face of God. Yeah, but Sophie, welcome to
Speaker 3: the show. And yeah, I wish it was for something
Speaker 3: that was not this bullshit.
Speaker 6: But yeah, this is yeah pretty grim.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so okay, so what what what specifically is this bullshit? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 3: the government of the United Kingdom, despite his reputation is
Speaker 3: turf Isoland, has been kind of falling behind us in
Speaker 3: terms of like actual ability to use the state to
Speaker 3: discriminate and get trans people killed. And having seen this,
Speaker 3: reci Sunac was like, oh shit, hold on and has
Speaker 3: now compelled the British state to take a series of
Speaker 3: steps that we would include like doing mandatory outing of
Speaker 3: trans kids to their parents and schools.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Well, it's still it's still quite tough islandy, right,
Speaker 6: because it's like, yeah, this has always been the comparison
Speaker 6: between British transphobia and American transphobia. Your your guys are
Speaker 6: all like, you're going to Hell and I'm gonna make
Speaker 6: sure you personally get there with my shotgun, and our
Speaker 6: guys are like, bloody hell, that's not right. Did you
Speaker 6: have a license for that gender? You really shouldn't be
Speaker 6: walking around in public without proper registration for all of
Speaker 6: your genders. You're carrying their ma'am, and that's you know, like,
Speaker 6: so in that regard, we're still very much tough Island
Speaker 6: like that you've got you've got bills coming through that
Speaker 6: like invalidate other existing No, I mean I'm talking aboutself
Speaker 6: in suckles already, because even this legislation also invalidates existing
Speaker 6: legislation because bigots can't write laws that make any sense whatsoever.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I think, I mean, this is still using
Speaker 6: like my numbing bureaucracy to enforce horrible bigotry. So in that,
Speaker 6: in that sense, it's still very on brand for the
Speaker 6: British government.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so okay, do you do can we can we
Speaker 3: walk to a little bit of like what specifically it does,
Speaker 3: because this is one of the this is this is
Speaker 3: my one of the canones that I've been on is
Speaker 3: that most of like ninety nine percent of the people
Speaker 3: who cover this stuff are really really bad at actually
Speaker 3: like saying what a law says, because oh god, yeah sure,
Speaker 3: sure sure.
Speaker 6: So the first thing is about changing names, uniforms, and
Speaker 6: what pronouns are used for a student. They they're making
Speaker 6: it so that this can't be done with without parental consent.
Speaker 6: It should also be said that all of this is guidance,
Speaker 6: like that they're putting out guidance to schools and so
Speaker 6: when I said earlier, this is in conflict with existing legislation,
Speaker 6: Like we have the Equalities Act, which should actually protect
Speaker 6: against basically everything that they've said here.
Speaker 3: They don't care.
Speaker 6: You know, if the government puts out guidance, it's it's
Speaker 6: as ever with fascism, Like it's they're deplaying stochastic methods.
Speaker 6: They want to embolden people who would already be looking
Speaker 6: for any excuse to be shipped to trans kids, to
Speaker 6: be able to do it, even though it would actually
Speaker 6: break the law. So yeah, that's so that's my thing.
Speaker 3: So my understanding of this is it's it's it's closer
Speaker 3: to the kind of thing you get in the US,
Speaker 3: where like sometimes you have a state attorney general will
Speaker 3: just like issue an interpretation of a ruling. So it's
Speaker 3: it's like that is my my understanding of it.
Speaker 6: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, So it's guidance. All the guidance
Speaker 6: that they've gone out would actually break the Equalities Act.
Speaker 3: They don't care.
Speaker 6: So point one, no pronoun or uniform change without parental consent.
Speaker 6: Point two, no hiding any changes from parents. So if
Speaker 6: a kid is like, hey, you singular member of staff
Speaker 6: that I trust, the only adults that I know who
Speaker 6: I feel like could possibly keep me safe. My parents
Speaker 6: are violently queophobic, and I think that if I come
Speaker 6: out to them, I might be in danger. Please help me.
Speaker 6: The guidance is telling them no. You should definitely tell
Speaker 6: those horrible parents no matter how dangerous, how much of
Speaker 6: a danger the child is telling you that they're in.
Speaker 6: Head can say no to protect other kids. Now, this
Speaker 6: is a really interesting point that we'll have to come
Speaker 6: back to because head masters in the UK there's a
Speaker 6: whole class thing going on there that we should talk about.
Speaker 6: But yeah, so the head teacher of the school can
Speaker 6: say no to protect other kids. So explicitly, the justification
Speaker 6: is that kids being out. It's not it's not even
Speaker 6: the justification that a kid coming out as trans would
Speaker 6: be dangerous to them because they might get bullied. It's
Speaker 6: it's that it could be dangerous to other kids. So
Speaker 6: it's to protect them from I guess the social contagion
Speaker 6: of transit agenda Jesus Christ and any any kids uh
Speaker 6: gender questioning or just generally like any kid transit anyway
Speaker 6: basically is just being kicked out of competitive sports and schools.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is interesting because it's a kind of like
Speaker 3: smorgas Board of a bunch of the different Well, okay,
Speaker 3: the the preventing kids from coming out because it might
Speaker 3: cause other kids to come out thing is like a
Speaker 3: I think that's genuinely new. I've never seen that one before.
Speaker 3: But the rest of it, I think it's like like,
Speaker 3: you know, there, there's there's there's been you know, we've
Speaker 3: talked about this on the show, like there's been legislation
Speaker 3: in the US that has forced uh, that has forced
Speaker 3: schools to out kids. Yeah. Yeah, and you know obviously
Speaker 3: the the like sports bands are you know, it's sort
Speaker 3: of like a pretty kind of like ERG like ERG
Speaker 3: transphobic panic thing. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, all the biological advantage and all of this nonsense,
Speaker 6: which is like, you know, you could argue as one
Speaker 6: thing when you're talking about like a bodybuilder who has
Speaker 6: been who has been a bodybuilder for like twenty years
Speaker 6: and is now just starting to take estrogen and blah
Speaker 6: blah blah about biological advantage, But when you're talking about
Speaker 6: like two twelve year olds, Yeah, it's like, where's the
Speaker 6: biolog who I don't I don't know which one I'm
Speaker 6: betting on.
Speaker 3: You know, this is the thing, like I think I
Speaker 3: think there's a kind of like specific like like I
Speaker 3: think I think part of the reason it's worked in
Speaker 3: the US was like there's a very specific kind of
Speaker 3: sports brain that Americans have, where like like like there
Speaker 3: are like people people are really obsessed with high school
Speaker 3: sports and also college sports. Yeah, and I think I
Speaker 3: think that played a role in part of like how
Speaker 3: how this played out, because people were like, you know,
Speaker 3: people are people are like very very concerned about this,
Speaker 3: Like why why on earth they care about college football?
Speaker 3: Is right? Well, I mean not inn conta, but like
Speaker 3: like high school football. It's like this is like yeah,
Speaker 3: why sure, okay, whatever, We've built like a national cult
Speaker 3: around watching like seventeen year olds deshoy each other's brains.
Speaker 3: But gym really like you.
Speaker 6: Like what wild like and it's like the only the
Speaker 6: only sports we really we really care about a rugby
Speaker 6: and football or you know, our football, and like, I
Speaker 6: just it should be said, there's also a kind of creepy,
Speaker 6: uh cult of youth thing going on without football. It's
Speaker 6: like we don't we don't have the you know, grown
Speaker 6: men screaming and crying watching watching high schoolers and and
Speaker 6: university level athletes go against each other, but like there
Speaker 6: are you know, it's seen as you know, equivalent to
Speaker 6: the draft, as like opportunity for working class kids to
Speaker 6: get out of out of their situation. Is like maybe
Speaker 6: you'll be a football star, like opportunities to yeah, exactly,
Speaker 6: like opportunities to prove that you're the next Ronaldo or
Speaker 6: whatever all through our society. But yeah, like I don't know,
Speaker 6: it would be like a lot of a lot of
Speaker 6: English people suddenly very invested in lots of sports they
Speaker 6: never cared about before, when like football has been the
Speaker 6: only one they care about their entire lives, and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 6: what about the biological differences? And I'm like, my guy,
Speaker 6: the place that this would impact you is in is
Speaker 6: in professional football. And even supposing a trans woman were
Speaker 6: to get up into like the professional competitive level of
Speaker 6: women's football. You don't watch the women's football, but even
Speaker 6: if you did, like there are already constantly, like in
Speaker 6: the analysis of games, people are constantly like, you know,
Speaker 6: this player is really fast or whatever, so we know
Speaker 6: that the the opposing team is going to make a
Speaker 6: concerted effort to try and block them off. Specifically, I'm
Speaker 6: just waiting for when like a women's football team at
Speaker 6: the professional level, like brings a trans woman on as
Speaker 6: a deliberate, like deliberate distraction so that she can like
Speaker 6: look like she's going to try and get the ball,
Speaker 6: half of the opposing team try to block her off
Speaker 6: and then and then the rest of the team just
Speaker 6: go and score a goal.
Speaker 9: No, I, I.
Speaker 6: I want to take like take it back to say
Speaker 6: something I've been meaning to say, which is quite serious,
Speaker 6: Like you and I are both like trans, but not
Speaker 6: like we want out as as trans as kids. And
Speaker 6: I do think it's really important to acknowledge that when
Speaker 6: we're having conversations about trans kids, because in my exposure
Speaker 6: to trans kids and also like chatting with trans people
Speaker 6: I know who were out as kids, like there's just
Speaker 6: a repeated frustration over and over again of just like
Speaker 6: even the most well meaning adults who are trying to
Speaker 6: talk about this, like and I'm saying that that may
Speaker 6: will be us, are still like still talking for these ds,
Speaker 6: and so it's like it's an incredibly dispossessing and paralyzing position.
Speaker 6: And like, obviously children are like one of the groups
Speaker 6: in our society with absolutely the least agency and constantly
Speaker 6: talked over and had decisions made for them. And you
Speaker 6: can make arguments about how just that is, but like
Speaker 6: we all recognize that, like, there are plenty of cases
Speaker 6: where kids should be able to tell adults like what's
Speaker 6: going on with them, and adults ignore them. And then
Speaker 6: this is a really clear case of that. And so
Speaker 6: I have been talking to in preparation for coming on
Speaker 6: to do this interview. I've been talking to people I
Speaker 6: know who were kids who are out and also talking
Speaker 6: to people I know who work with with trans kids,
Speaker 6: just so that like just so that what I'm presenting
Speaker 6: is not just like my kind of my broad feelings
Speaker 6: about how it might be, you know, yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 6: I want to talk about that. The head teachers thing,
Speaker 6: head teachers can can say no to protect other kids
Speaker 6: is a really fascinating part of this.
Speaker 3: Sorry, can we can we back what actually is? So
Speaker 3: what actually is a head teacher because we don't have
Speaker 3: this in.
Speaker 6: That thing that is exactly what I'm trying to Yeah, yeah, okay, So,
Speaker 6: how well let me ask this, how does someone become
Speaker 6: a principle in your system?
Speaker 3: I actually that's a good question. I think that they
Speaker 3: get hired by the school basically, but it's I don't
Speaker 3: know if they're that that actually is a good question.
Speaker 3: I feel like I shouldn't.
Speaker 6: Can a teacher become a principle because here, like again
Speaker 6: in the in the framework of youth liberation, in the
Speaker 6: same way as we might say a cab, you know,
Speaker 6: you might point out that, like, you know, teachers people
Speaker 6: put in a systemic position to often like deny kids agency,
Speaker 6: but it's not quite as as like clear cut as
Speaker 6: a cab, right, Like, like teachers are fucking great, and
Speaker 6: like big up teachers unions, and like tons of teachers
Speaker 6: are both like massively underpaid and feeling the cost of
Speaker 6: living crisis really hard, and also pretty based people. Head teachers,
Speaker 6: on the other hand, a different school of fish entirely,
Speaker 6: Like they have a they have different unions, they have
Speaker 6: a different social life, they have a different class characteristic
Speaker 6: because like head teachers are paid so much more than teachers,
Speaker 6: and yeah, they're also like administrative. I don't know if
Speaker 6: like head teachers need to have even ever actually taught,
Speaker 6: but they're generally like really comfortable, very well paid, and
Speaker 6: they are there to to yeah, do a lot of
Speaker 6: administrative stuff and often like they're quite political, so specifically
Speaker 6: giving the power to say no to whether a kid
Speaker 6: comes out or not to the head teacher. Is like
Speaker 6: that feels very very deliberate on the other part of
Speaker 6: the Tory government, right, because like that's not it's not
Speaker 6: like your your your form tutor or you know, your
Speaker 6: whichever preferred teacher that you have lots of classes with
Speaker 6: your English teacher or whatever, like someone who's sees you
Speaker 6: maybe most days.
Speaker 3: It's this.
Speaker 6: It's this person who's like a figure ahead to the school,
Speaker 6: who has no personal relationship to you whatsoever, is being
Speaker 6: given this this uh yeah, this ability to just deny
Speaker 6: your transition, and that's utterly, utterly fucked And like I'm saying,
Speaker 6: it's a very conscious like class move, class based move
Speaker 6: on the in this guidance, I.
Speaker 3: Think, Yeah, I mean, it really seems like they had to,
Speaker 3: you know, it seems like a thing where the Tory
Speaker 3: government realized they couldn't rely just on regular teachers to
Speaker 3: act as gender bureaucrats. They had to they had to
Speaker 3: find someone who is like even like who has just
Speaker 3: no social attachment or social relations to like the actual
Speaker 3: kid who's trying to transition. Yeah, totally, you know, like
Speaker 3: it it is genuinely, Like I don't know, most like
Speaker 3: as as like as shit as teachers can be, like
Speaker 3: generally speaking, like your teacher does not want to torture
Speaker 3: their kids. That's like, that's not that's not that's that's
Speaker 3: usually not a thing that they want to do.
Speaker 6: And I and I and I don't want to leave
Speaker 6: it on said, Like I've been through the UK education system,
Speaker 6: I've encountered some teachers who definitely just want to torture
Speaker 6: their kids. Like but like again, most teachers are actually
Speaker 6: pretty good and like genuinely concerned with not only like
Speaker 6: what the safeguarding like rules say and what the protocols are,
Speaker 6: but like actually the moral duty of taking care of
Speaker 6: kids and making sure they're actually safe. Now that still
Speaker 6: can can can have problems. So like one person that
Speaker 6: I talked to, one of my friends, who was out
Speaker 6: when she was really quite young, she had like a
Speaker 6: a teaching assistant. So when kids are are like struggling
Speaker 6: in school and they need extra help with with with
Speaker 6: with their school work, sometimes like some lessons or topics
Speaker 6: are deemed as kind of like less necessary for them.
Speaker 6: Let's say maybe it's like their religious education lessons or whatever. Right,
Speaker 6: So they get to skip those ones, and then they
Speaker 6: go and do like I think you might call them
Speaker 6: remedial classes or whatever, like they're doing extra extra stuff
Speaker 6: to make sure that they supper classes they can get
Speaker 6: the basic Yeah, but it's within the school hours all
Speaker 6: I'm saying. So it's like they'll sort of say, you
Speaker 6: don't need to bother with this one. We'll go and
Speaker 6: do these classes instead to make sure that you can
Speaker 6: get like a passing grade in English. And so that's
Speaker 6: a person like a kid like that will have like
Speaker 6: the most developed a relationship too, because firstly, they are
Speaker 6: in every class that they sit through, and they also
Speaker 6: do special classes that is just one and one between
Speaker 6: the kid and that teaching assistant. So my friend said
Speaker 6: that she had like she'd come out to this teaching assistant,
Speaker 6: and the TA made it really clear that like she
Speaker 6: would have to try like sort of escalate this, like
Speaker 6: she would have to try to talk to more people
Speaker 6: about this situation and probably talk to her parents, And
Speaker 6: because of that, she sort of took it back, stopped
Speaker 6: talking about it, wouldn't go any further with it, and
Speaker 6: didn't come out to more people for a really long
Speaker 6: like for years after that point, and so you know,
Speaker 6: like you can already see that's an impact like that
Speaker 6: this will have more directly because that's like that situation
Speaker 6: is being described as the ideal outcome basically in some
Speaker 6: of this guidance. But I think also like it's important
Speaker 6: to acknowledge that we can imagine a best case scenario
Speaker 6: in my friend's story, like from however long ago, that
Speaker 6: maybe that Ta talks to other teachers who understand, and
Speaker 6: those teachers automatically think, like, are her parents going to
Speaker 6: be understanding? Can we approach this in a way that
Speaker 6: gives her space, Can we get her in touch with
Speaker 6: maybe like people who do youth work with queer kids,
Speaker 6: to like give her a venue to discuss this stuff
Speaker 6: without having to alert her parents. Now, so and we
Speaker 6: can imagine that best case scenario. I mean, like the
Speaker 6: impact immediately, like I said, was that she didn't come
Speaker 6: out for a long time. But but like that best
Speaker 6: case scenario is effectively eliminated if like the guidance is
Speaker 6: just like no, you have to tell the parents. The
Speaker 6: parents absolutely definitely must know. And I think that the
Speaker 6: thing as well about like no keeping like not keeping
Speaker 6: anything secret from parents. Let me just say what I
Speaker 6: say no hiding changes from parents. Is I think that,
Speaker 6: like that's a guidance that's pointing not just towards like
Speaker 6: the administrative part, like you're saying with what seems more
Speaker 6: in the jurisdiction of a gender bureaucrat, Like if a
Speaker 6: kid says, I'd like to change my name on the
Speaker 6: class register, but like if a teacher knows that the
Speaker 6: kids are using a different name and pronounce with their friends,
Speaker 6: right anyway, besides all of that, Like again, if we're
Speaker 6: imagining that best case scenario, like this thing about the
Speaker 6: head teacher can decide that their transition would be a
Speaker 6: danger to other kids, Like that's that's that's so above
Speaker 6: and beyond, like that's that's the that's the bit of
Speaker 6: this guidance that I find to be like probably the
Speaker 6: most the most utterly morally reprehensible is because because I
Speaker 6: think that a lot of trans kids are already familiar
Speaker 6: with how the pre existing safeguarding systems could cause them
Speaker 6: all these problems. But this is a new thing that's
Speaker 6: just like on top of all of that stuff. Even
Speaker 6: if you do have even if you do have support
Speaker 6: and like things are relatively okay for you, apparently, Yeah,
Speaker 6: the head teacher can just decide that you're not allowed
Speaker 6: to and that's that's utterly, utterly insane to me. Have
Speaker 6: another friend who was out when he was younger. He
Speaker 6: knew from a very young age he actually was lucky
Speaker 6: enough to have supportive parents and so like he was
Speaker 6: able to come out to people and come out to
Speaker 6: his parents. But even with supportive parents like he like that,
Speaker 6: there was still massive pushback from the school, which is like,
Speaker 6: you know, again, like it seems utterly ridiculous if you've
Speaker 6: got both the kids saying very clearly, I know for
Speaker 6: sure this sort of deal is, and like we have
Speaker 6: additional hindsight here that he's very happy with himself now
Speaker 6: and has been, you know, living his authentic life for
Speaker 6: you know how many years. But like, but you know,
Speaker 6: all this support around him at the time, and the
Speaker 6: and the school still says no, they're just yeah, the
Speaker 6: head teacher thing is actively pushing that even harder. And
Speaker 6: I just find that, yeah, just awful. Yeah, you know
Speaker 6: what else is awful? Living under capitalism and being bombarded
Speaker 6: with adverts for products and services. But the products and
Speaker 6: services themselves they're great, Isn't that right?
Speaker 7: Mayah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I am legally contractually required to not disparage
Speaker 3: the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 6: This brought this podcast brought to you by open Gate.
Speaker 3: Wow, we're back. Hopefully several more billionaires have been pins
Speaker 3: take to the bottom of the sea.
Speaker 6: Uh yeah, I'm so glad. So many, so many billionaires
Speaker 6: listened to it could happen here and took that juicy
Speaker 6: limited time offer to only pay two hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 6: for a ticket on the next submersible. Yeah. Like, following
Speaker 6: up from what I was just saying about my friend
Speaker 6: who was out when he was a kid and had
Speaker 6: supportive parents, he also highlighted to me how it impacted
Speaker 6: his medical transition at the time as well, because a
Speaker 6: lot of medical systems for a transition, and this is
Speaker 6: true in the UK, use some degree of like social
Speaker 6: transition as a requirement to prescribe any kind of medical transition.
Speaker 6: And so if you're a kid and you you know
Speaker 6: for sure this is your deal, and you want to
Speaker 6: avoid the traumas are going through the wrong puberty, which
Speaker 6: obviously is just like absolutely horrifying, then you need to
Speaker 6: be out and have the support of everyone around you, right,
Speaker 6: and that means like not only you need to be
Speaker 6: able to evidence like yeah, it's going well at school
Speaker 6: and not being bullied for being trans at all, which okay, yeah,
Speaker 6: like hopefully not. And I have supportive parents, my all
Speaker 6: my grandparents know as well and they're all on board
Speaker 6: or whatever. Like, but like if a school can just
Speaker 6: say no to a kid coming out, that's like that
Speaker 6: denies such a huge part of the social transition, which
Speaker 6: will then stop them from being able to medically transition.
Speaker 3: And like I'm you know, we.
Speaker 6: Maybe sis people need the spelling out, so I'll just
Speaker 6: say it, like if you can't. So if you can't
Speaker 6: medically transition, you're less likely to be well accepted in
Speaker 6: your social transition. So there's a really deliberate like catch
Speaker 6: twenty two of if you you know, of stopping someone's
Speaker 6: social transition and therefore stopping their medical transition and therefore right,
Speaker 6: it's just it's just trying to stop trans people existing altogether.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean I think it's sort of particularly
Speaker 3: grim in the UK system, where you like, it's way harder.
Speaker 3: Two well, okay, outside of the places where it's been
Speaker 3: made increasingly legal. In the US, it is way way
Speaker 3: harder to get, like to just to get Jennifer mccare
Speaker 3: in the UK, and it requires a lot of bullshit
Speaker 3: that like you don't have in the US, and it's
Speaker 3: it's much it's much much more like pathologized, which is
Speaker 3: kind of insane because it's it's pretty pathologized in the
Speaker 3: US too. But the UK is like like has has
Speaker 3: has cranked up the like gender bureaucracy level to like
Speaker 3: they they they they found that they found the one
Speaker 3: that goes to eleven and we're like, fuck this ship
Speaker 3: when this need this needs like two hundred more dials.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's all it's looking at out looking at our country,
Speaker 6: you might you might be led to the the the
Speaker 6: idea that we've been practicing uh, bureaucracy based fascism for
Speaker 6: hundreds of years already and gotten it down to the
Speaker 6: precise science. And well that's a that's a conclusion you
Speaker 6: could draw. Yeah. I was gonna say as well, Like
Speaker 6: we talked last time, I was on about like why
Speaker 6: is the UK like this in general? And I think
Speaker 6: that it's worth putting this into this puzzle piece, into
Speaker 6: a broader picture, right, Like we've just had a national
Speaker 6: story about a woman who is being prosecuted for having
Speaker 6: an abortion later than the allowed the allowed limits in
Speaker 6: British law, which is obviously the beginning of the right
Speaker 6: wing trying to push back on abortion. At the same time,
Speaker 6: Like a few weeks ago here Americans probably haven't heard
Speaker 6: about it, but there was a place in London called
Speaker 6: the Autonomous, a winter shelter. So this was some anarchists
Speaker 6: who some of whom I think we've interviewed on Red
Speaker 6: Planet before, who go kind of place to place and
Speaker 6: they squat on unoccupied buildings and they turned them into
Speaker 6: various things. But one thing they've repeatedly done is during
Speaker 6: winter periods turned them into homeless shelters that they run
Speaker 6: as autonomous shelters. And basically it got to the spring
Speaker 6: and they still hadn't moved out of this place because
Speaker 6: I mean, there were still homeless people that they wanted
Speaker 6: to help, and so the Metropolitan Police, London's finest sent down,
Speaker 6: you know, like dozens of pigs in riot gear to
Speaker 6: forcibly like evict them. And I just think that like
Speaker 6: it's really it's just really important to see the premise
Speaker 6: that like states are aware that they are policing the collapse, right,
Speaker 6: will be very familiar to your audience. But I think
Speaker 6: there's the specific context of Fortress Europe going on with
Speaker 6: Britain because like, even though Britain has brexited itself out,
Speaker 6: like we're still we still have a lot of the
Speaker 6: same concerns in right wing politics that drive the thinking
Speaker 6: of Fortress Europe, and so a lot of our like
Speaker 6: for instance, immigration stuff is increasingly draconian and fascy. And
Speaker 6: I just think that like putting these three pieces together,
Speaker 6: we can kind of see a bit of what's going on,
Speaker 6: like the government actively trying to clamp down on people's
Speaker 6: bodily autonomy, trying to stop any other kind of gender
Speaker 6: expression being in place, and also trying to like stop
Speaker 6: people from doing mutual aid and organizing that will lessen
Speaker 6: the impact of of the collapse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and well, and I think this is a it's
Speaker 3: a very deliberate you know, one of the things that
Speaker 3: I think is very common you know, like across the
Speaker 3: sort of like broad historical sweep of movements, right is okay,
Speaker 3: so well, okay, so the the the number one thing
Speaker 3: you do if when there's a massive social rument going on,
Speaker 3: you need to stop it that the first the like
Speaker 3: the sort of like most dramatic thing you do is
Speaker 3: you start a war. So for example, like you know,
Speaker 3: the the American movements of the sixties are immediately followed
Speaker 3: by the massive attenis ucation of Vietnam. I think, like
Speaker 3: the most blatant example that I could think of is
Speaker 3: in two thousand and six in Mexico, you have simultaneously
Speaker 3: this massive zapatista campaign. You have Omlo like basically declaring
Speaker 3: it well, there there's a contested election in Ombla like
Speaker 3: declares him self president even though like technically lost the election.
Speaker 3: And then simultaneously, like the city of Wahaka like does
Speaker 3: an uprising and take control of the city. Wow, and
Speaker 3: and like and like they they they hold the city
Speaker 3: for like one hundred days. And basically immediately after the
Speaker 3: like so the Mexican Army gets deployed and like takes
Speaker 3: back the city. And immediately after the like the the like,
Speaker 3: the the the the full on like entrance of the
Speaker 3: Mexican army into the war on drug starts. And this
Speaker 3: is like this is you know, this is a sort
Speaker 3: of very a very very common social pattern. Right of
Speaker 3: the way, the the way the way you defeat, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean just literally like straight up uprisings is by
Speaker 3: doing like one is, by doing a war. The second
Speaker 3: thing you can do is you start you you you
Speaker 3: you you pivot away from the social issues that are
Speaker 3: like that sort of your mass protesters, your uprisings are about,
Speaker 3: and you go back to domestic politics and you go
Speaker 3: back into social reproduction. You attack them there. So you know,
Speaker 3: I mean like it like China has a good example
Speaker 3: of this of like all all of this sort of
Speaker 3: like discontent that had been boiling around the country revolution
Speaker 3: and around you know, like like things around like things
Speaker 3: about gender roles, which was you know, like actually genuinely
Speaker 3: happening at that time. All of the sort of upheaval
Speaker 3: is capped off by the one child policy. Yes, or
Speaker 3: if you know, I mean we go back to the
Speaker 3: US for a second, right, we have twenty twenty, we
Speaker 3: have this massive uprising. Immediately after the uprising, we get
Speaker 3: all of the anti transhit intensifies, so like just unbelievably
Speaker 3: enormously right, yeah, and then this this is incredibly deliberate
Speaker 3: in a lot of ways. It's it's you know, it's
Speaker 3: it's it's it's very very concrete attempt to like reassert
Speaker 3: sort of patriarchal and cist gender control over people over
Speaker 3: sort of families, over over sort of society writ large.
Speaker 6: That was part of my point is that like is
Speaker 6: how we can see what the what the British state
Speaker 6: is up to, very very clearly, like they they are
Speaker 6: trying to create a more rigid control in their population.
Speaker 6: And you know this is why I mean like calling
Speaker 6: it turf Island, but like a lot of turfs will
Speaker 6: pretend that they you know, will fight for abortion rights
Speaker 6: or whatever. Actually there was a protest to do with
Speaker 6: the to do with that abortion case I mentioned the
Speaker 6: other day, and a bunch of a bunch of like
Speaker 6: anarchists and like trans people showed up, and there was
Speaker 6: also some people from Women's Place, who is a tough organization,
Speaker 6: and like then and so obviously like they were trying
Speaker 6: to like box them out and be like kiss off,
Speaker 6: you don't belong here. And then like a far right
Speaker 6: like preacher showed up with like anti abortion stuff and
Speaker 6: a megaphone and trying to like and so obviously like
Speaker 6: all of the all of the transactivists, the the authentic
Speaker 6: leftists like started it's like getting in that guy's way
Speaker 6: and ruining his day and making it so he couldn't
Speaker 6: do any of his stuff, and obviously the Turfs don't
Speaker 6: care at all. Like then yeah, they're not there to
Speaker 6: actually fight against anything. But you know, especially so when
Speaker 6: you when you look at that bigger picture, like I say,
Speaker 6: it's just like if you're looking at the bigger picture,
Speaker 6: you can tell there is no there there is no
Speaker 6: divide between like the bodily autonomy of sis women and
Speaker 6: for that matter, like transmask and non binary people with
Speaker 6: who are who are as signed female at birth, you know,
Speaker 6: and and trans rights. There's no conflict at all. It's
Speaker 6: it's the state is trying to crack down on bodily
Speaker 6: autonomy and on gender expression as part of a bigger
Speaker 6: project of you know, implementing more authoritarianism. And I don't know,
Speaker 6: I guess like that there's a feeling I keep on
Speaker 6: running up against recently, which is just like waiting for
Speaker 6: the waiting for disparate leftist causes to kind of realize
Speaker 6: and act like all of this stuff is is one side,
Speaker 6: you know, Like it's very clear, like because from the
Speaker 6: state's point of view, as you're saying, like starting a
Speaker 6: war tightening immigration policies, starting abortion, cracking down on quick people,
Speaker 6: Like all of these are, from the state's point of view,
Speaker 6: methods within methods in their toolbox to achieve one greater goal.
Speaker 6: And I think that like we need well, I mean
Speaker 6: to say we need class consciousness would be you know,
Speaker 6: just like it seems too obvious to say even but
Speaker 6: like we do, we need we need a consciousness of
Speaker 6: the fact that, like these issues affect everyone, even if
Speaker 6: it seems like it doesn't affect you in your everyday life.
Speaker 6: You know, if you were a cisht white man who's
Speaker 6: a self employed adult, utterly libertarian steel man, you don't
Speaker 6: depend on anyone like, it is still going to affect
Speaker 6: you because it is the state gaining more power over
Speaker 6: everybody by doing these things. One thing I want to
Speaker 6: say also about like the kids who I'd gotten some
Speaker 6: feedback from, was like there is a big mood among
Speaker 6: trans kids that like they'd been told that things were
Speaker 6: going to be getting better. So like when I said
Speaker 6: that that story with my friend who had the teaching assistant,
Speaker 6: she said that for her growing up, it was absolutely
Speaker 6: nightmarish and the bullying was really intense, and the support
Speaker 6: with the support from adults was non existent, and then
Speaker 6: there was a little window where like people started to
Speaker 6: become more aware of trans people and and from the
Speaker 6: liberal side and all of the like corporate pink washing
Speaker 6: and whatever, and it seemed like a broad like culture
Speaker 6: of acceptance is being brought in. And now it feels
Speaker 6: like that's being revoked. But like, you know, I mean
Speaker 6: how she put it was like she feels like it's
Speaker 6: just sort of back to normal because like that's what
Speaker 6: she already grew up with. But like I do, we
Speaker 6: have to think about it from the point of view
Speaker 6: of kids who are you know, trying to exist as
Speaker 6: trans kids right now, Like they have been told by
Speaker 6: by liberals that like things are getting better, we're aware
Speaker 6: of trans people. Now, we're going to fight for trans rites,
Speaker 6: and it's very clear that like they're not they're not
Speaker 6: getting better.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: I just want to say, like two, uh, trans kids
Speaker 6: who might like might hear this, might get any of
Speaker 6: this sentiment that like I completely I completely feel it myself,
Speaker 6: Like having come out at the tail end of liberals
Speaker 6: being like, yeah, we love trannies, sorry, Daniel, Like having
Speaker 6: come out right at the tail end of that now
Speaker 6: ship's getting unbelievably bleak, Like I also feel that, and
Speaker 6: I I guess it's the the the saying about like
Speaker 6: don't let this, let this radicalize you rather than lead
Speaker 6: you to despair, because I from where I'm looking around
Speaker 6: myself as an adult, you know, a politically active and
Speaker 6: engaged adult, like there there aren't any answers in the
Speaker 6: in the like left liberal ooh, we're so multicultural and
Speaker 6: accepting kind of space. It's that's that's entirely dependent on profit.
Speaker 6: And you know, Target is emptying all the pride stuff
Speaker 6: out of their stores. Now, Capital does not care for
Speaker 6: the queers, but we we can care for each other.
Speaker 6: I think it's really important to say that, like, you know,
Speaker 6: finding queer community is really important, but that's you know,
Speaker 6: and that's obviously true. But also like queer community being
Speaker 6: like class conscious and radical and organized are also really
Speaker 6: really important. And you know, I am seeing that, Like
Speaker 6: I do want to say, like in covering this like
Speaker 6: obviously really grim situation that's being enforced like that, we're
Speaker 6: not just sitting by and letting it happen. It's just
Speaker 6: that we are like as leftists, we're always this just
Speaker 6: like tiny radical fringe for the time being, and so
Speaker 6: like we're doing what we can. I don't want I
Speaker 6: just don't want trans kids to feel like there are
Speaker 6: absolutely no adults who who are in the Venn diagram
Speaker 6: of like understanding how fucked this is and actually having
Speaker 6: a proportional idea of the solutions that are necessary. Now
Speaker 6: we're not also, unfortunately, like none of us are currently
Speaker 6: in the third the third ven diagram circle of like
Speaker 6: having the power to stop it yet, but we're doing
Speaker 6: everything that we can for the time being, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, and I think there's only thing that's kind
Speaker 3: of it's important to think about with this too, is
Speaker 3: like like the reason this is happening it like is
Speaker 3: is because like there was actually a period of time
Speaker 3: when we were winning, right, And this is I think
Speaker 3: particularly true in the US, but I mean I think
Speaker 3: it's still also true in the UK, right, Like it
Speaker 3: like the the reason there had to be a backlash
Speaker 3: like this was because like things weren't you know, for
Speaker 3: a brief amount of time getting better. But like even
Speaker 3: with how bad it is now, even with how bad
Speaker 3: it's getting, it's it's always like, you know, like being
Speaker 3: a leftist, it is always hard to sort of make
Speaker 3: like these kind of like liberal teleological like the moral
Speaker 3: arc of the universe, like Ben's sour justice arguments. But
Speaker 3: we are going to beat them. Yeah, it will. It
Speaker 3: will take time, It will take an enormous amount of struggle,
Speaker 3: but we are going to and absolutely, you know, and
Speaker 3: like and I think something that is very very very important,
Speaker 3: like this is not hopeless, like it is not. It
Speaker 3: is simply not. We have already achieved in one things
Speaker 3: that like our forefathers fucking only dreamed of. Right, yeah,
Speaker 3: as well we are going out.
Speaker 6: Yeah no, I mean I I think I I completely agree,
Speaker 6: and I want to like double down on what I'm
Speaker 6: saying about the liberals that, like I the liberal promise
Speaker 6: that you've been given, of of acceptance within like their
Speaker 6: framework that like Hillary Clinton will stand up and say
Speaker 6: she loves trans writes. Yes, that one was a lie,
Speaker 6: that was fucked. That was bullshit, liberals lie. I hope
Speaker 6: that you have already figured this out because I believe
Speaker 6: kids are smart enough to figure this out, because liberals
Speaker 6: love to lie. But like, in terms of it getting better,
Speaker 6: like it will, even if the way that it gets
Speaker 6: better is that like is that like we break free
Speaker 6: like is only in breaking free of these systems. Like
Speaker 6: it's it's I I Am not going to make any
Speaker 6: promises that like the society that we live in as
Speaker 6: it is now is going to is going to come
Speaker 6: back around and like will have trans people treated the
Speaker 6: way that the gay people were treated in the year
Speaker 6: two thousand. It's it's you know that one maybe, but
Speaker 6: like I'm not holding my breath for it, but like
Speaker 6: it will get better one way or another. And it
Speaker 6: may well be the way that get it gets better
Speaker 6: is that we have like stronger and more radical communities
Speaker 6: of mutual aid and care, and those those are the
Speaker 6: spaces where it's like, you know, safe and and good
Speaker 6: for trans people and possible for us to strive and thrive.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think, you know, I think this is
Speaker 3: something that like, I mean, you know, if you look
Speaker 3: back at sort of how the history of like like
Speaker 3: if if you look if you look at just like
Speaker 3: the history of sort of like gay rights, right, like
Speaker 3: a big part of what that looked like that has
Speaker 3: been sort of you know, just like wiped from the
Speaker 3: sort of public memory, right, Like the stuff people remember
Speaker 3: is you know that the sort of like really flashy
Speaker 3: activist stuff, But a huge part of what that looked
Speaker 3: like was just you know, I have a couch, right
Speaker 3: you can you can sleep here, Like we will take
Speaker 3: care of you. We will like we will feed you,
Speaker 3: we will take care of you emotionally. And yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: as as bad as that shit was, they were, you know,
Speaker 3: as many people as we lost, Like, there are so
Speaker 3: so many people who are you know, like alive and
Speaker 3: thriving and you know, living authentic with themselves and are
Speaker 3: you know, like like genuinely like just like having like
Speaker 3: having a good time because that's because yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: That's my liver reality right now. I have so many
Speaker 6: friends in the quick community who are housing insecure or
Speaker 6: you know, who don't have jobs or whatever, and like
Speaker 6: we have each other. Like I think I got a this.
Speaker 6: This butcher I've been dating went to an event for
Speaker 6: like working class butchers the other day. She came back
Speaker 6: with some pins and she was like, do you want
Speaker 6: any of these? And I picked up this one that
Speaker 6: says we are dykes and all we have is each
Speaker 6: other because like that is like in the like dyke
Speaker 6: community that I'm in, Like that's so incredibly true, and
Speaker 6: we have each other's backs. And like, yeah, like it
Speaker 6: will continue to be true that we're taking care of
Speaker 6: each other. I guess it's like it's been already for
Speaker 6: me for years now. The thing to get angry about
Speaker 6: is how many people we will lose in the meantime,
Speaker 6: because like if I if you were if you were
Speaker 6: gay in nineteen seventy nine or whatever, right and you
Speaker 6: were about to go into the into the AIDS pandemic,
Speaker 6: like it just you may you may even then have
Speaker 6: had a sense, like I think a lot of people didn't,
Speaker 6: but like, you know, we we have hindsight to know
Speaker 6: that like things turned out quote unquote okay in the end,
Speaker 6: but like so many people were lost in the meantime.
Speaker 6: And for me, that's the thing I'm angry about is
Speaker 6: just like how tedious this liberal bullshit is of enacting
Speaker 6: this like staged farce of like, uh, scapegoating bigotry in
Speaker 6: order to like control the population, you know, in order
Speaker 6: to divide the working class with with this bigotry. And
Speaker 6: then like at some point we'll we'll will we will
Speaker 6: move past it and things will be more chill, and
Speaker 6: like trans people will not be the ones with the
Speaker 6: with the crosshairs on us either be either because we
Speaker 6: have abolished and smashed the crosshairs or simply because they've
Speaker 6: moved on. And I'm I'm just angry about how many
Speaker 6: people will be lost in the mean time.
Speaker 3: Yeahs, And I think I Gues said something we should
Speaker 3: circle back two in terms of sort of the immediate
Speaker 3: school regulations is like, you know, okay, so the people
Speaker 3: who are making these laws know this, but like a
Speaker 3: lot of the trans people who are killed are killed
Speaker 3: by their parents. That is a that is a very
Speaker 3: very common way for trans people to die. You come
Speaker 3: out to your parents and your parents kill you, and
Speaker 3: that is fucking bleak as ship. And you know, and
Speaker 3: again like like these these these these people know this,
Speaker 3: like there's there is a there's recently a recording of
Speaker 3: Rishi su Nak just like like just you know, okay.
Speaker 3: So the thing about sort of you know, this has
Speaker 3: been changing in the US now because we've gotten to
Speaker 3: a point where like right when people can just like
Speaker 3: say slurs and it's you know, public publicly acceptable.
Speaker 6: But for like for like a long time, you like
Speaker 6: say slaws and Daniel bleeps them. That's fucking crazy to me,
Speaker 6: you know, I'm look at the censorship I'm dealing with
Speaker 6: is what I'm saying. You know, I I say Tranny,
Speaker 6: I say Fagot, I say Dike, and Daniel's there just
Speaker 6: ruling with an eye and fist.
Speaker 3: What's that?
Speaker 6: What's up with that?
Speaker 3: It would be very funny if it just none, if
Speaker 3: this was censored at all, just like no. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: like like you know, there there there's a recording of
Speaker 3: like just like actually saying the ship like like I
Speaker 3: like actually just saying like the really sort of overt
Speaker 3: anti transship that he believes in private. Yeah, and like yeah,
Speaker 3: like that that that's like these people like want to
Speaker 3: hurt us? Like that is that is that there's something
Speaker 3: that's incredibly clear based on both their sort of what
Speaker 3: they say in private and what they do in public. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you know, fuck them. Yeah, Barry Hunk in the submarine, Uh,
Speaker 3: get it, get it, get in the fucking contraption.
Speaker 6: God's be its number submarine and and critical support to
Speaker 6: Comrade Occa. We will we will deal with with sinec.
Speaker 6: I'm speaking on behalf of the ocean. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 6: I don't I I don't know what to say about it,
Speaker 6: because again, like I was not out as trans as
Speaker 6: a kid. I don't want to give like empty assurances
Speaker 6: to people who are going through something that I did
Speaker 6: not go through, that we didn't did not go through.
Speaker 6: But I do want to say that like as for
Speaker 6: and it gets better, like we care for each other,
Speaker 6: and we like we we will continue to have each
Speaker 6: other's backs. I've been reading a lot of I've been
Speaker 6: reading Homo Sakea by Georgio Aganmbin for a little while
Speaker 6: now about the like the class of people like whichever
Speaker 6: in whatever society you're talking about, like class of people
Speaker 6: who are treated as the exception from the model of
Speaker 6: the state, like the people who know who are treated
Speaker 6: like it wouldn't matter if someone killed them. And you know,
Speaker 6: it's it's obviously hitting close to home, because that's that's
Speaker 6: the point of the book, right And I don't know,
Speaker 6: it's it's given me a lot of a lot of
Speaker 6: pause for thought over this kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: That like we have.
Speaker 3: We have each other.
Speaker 6: It does it does immediately give you a perspective that
Speaker 6: invalidates all of the all of the apparatus of the state,
Speaker 6: because it's all like, wow, that's the nice world you
Speaker 6: got over there. I'm just not part of it. I'm
Speaker 6: just not welcome in it. But it's a but the
Speaker 6: bit where I can say it's okay is we have
Speaker 6: our own world.
Speaker 3: And like, and it fucking rips by the way it does.
Speaker 6: It whips incredibly fucking hard. It might be like irresponsible
Speaker 6: to discuss in too much detail, but it does work. Actually,
Speaker 6: but like, yeah, like as much as like kind of
Speaker 6: explicitly intentionally like separatist arguments are frowned upon, and I
Speaker 6: think for good reason, like having each other's backs when
Speaker 6: when the rest of society doesn't, is is necessary and
Speaker 6: it is what we because it's necessary. It is what
Speaker 6: we're doing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and I will say too, like, you know, as
Speaker 3: as as much as there are a lot of SIS
Speaker 3: people who suck, there are a lot of SIS people
Speaker 3: who will have your back and who will fight for you.
Speaker 3: And yep, yeah and like and that and that, and
Speaker 3: I think I think part of like, I think I
Speaker 3: think part of the what what this stuff is about
Speaker 3: to write like is like part part part of the
Speaker 3: culture of fear and the culture of terror that all
Speaker 3: of this stuff is supposed to like is supposed to
Speaker 3: sort of bring it to being, is to make it
Speaker 3: harder for you know of like like there's a sort
Speaker 3: of obvious one of like, Okay, you want to you
Speaker 3: want to force trans people like back into the closet,
Speaker 3: you want to wipe away with the existence. But simultaneously,
Speaker 3: like it is also trying to isolate trans people from
Speaker 3: CIS people who will support them. Sure, and it's effective
Speaker 3: at that, right, but simultaneously like actually working together, we
Speaker 3: are unstoppable. And that's the reason they're doing all of
Speaker 3: this shit. Yes, yes, they have because they have to
Speaker 3: make sure it doesn't happen.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think as well, like it might be
Speaker 6: this is on one side of it might feel like
Speaker 6: the uniquely queer side of the divide and conquer experience,
Speaker 6: because like when we say there are so many more
Speaker 6: of us than there are of them, we're talking about
Speaker 6: the working class, or we're talking about human beings around
Speaker 6: the planet as opposed to the ruling class, or we're
Speaker 6: talking about like people of color as opposed to white
Speaker 6: people or whatever. But like the but for queer people,
Speaker 6: it's like we're very conscious that we're actually, yeah, factually
Speaker 6: a minority of the population. But like but yeah, me
Speaker 6: is right, Like there are there are sis people who care.
Speaker 6: There there are says people who authentically care and authentically
Speaker 6: like the very least want to offer support. And one
Speaker 6: thing that I'd say we're working on is like showing
Speaker 6: SIS people the avenues because the channels of support that
Speaker 6: they can go through because when yeah, because like yeah
Speaker 6: that that is the thing about the CIS ally is
Speaker 6: they they may they may, they may care with their
Speaker 6: entire bleeding heart, but they they they're not gonna come
Speaker 6: up with They're usually not going to come up with
Speaker 6: the way to help themselves. And they so they often
Speaker 6: need to be pointed like big neon flashing sign, here's
Speaker 6: how you help, Here's how you go to that.
Speaker 3: You got to you have to guide them, You have
Speaker 3: to guide the missile of the book proletariat interaction.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, yeah, to that effect in lieu of just
Speaker 6: telling your audience to uh, you know, form bonds of
Speaker 6: solidarity and mutual able with the quicker community in the UK,
Speaker 6: which like, guys, please you can check out the Good
Speaker 6: Law Project in the UK. They do a lot of
Speaker 6: really important legal work, have already been doing a lot
Speaker 6: of important like legal battles to try to turn back
Speaker 6: this tired of anti trans legislation and court rulings and
Speaker 6: so on, and they they accept donations to to like
Speaker 6: specifically to their fund that relates to trans cases. So
Speaker 6: like you can, if you're a SIS ally and listening
Speaker 6: to this and you have some spare cash, you can
Speaker 6: go look up the Good Law Project and donate to
Speaker 6: help the legal fight at least, because again, like this
Speaker 6: guidance is actually against the law as it stands. So
Speaker 6: I don't know that the Good Law Project has announced
Speaker 6: a fight to stop it yet, but I imagine that
Speaker 6: they will do something of some kind sometime soon. And yeah,
Speaker 6: I mean more support to them will only help.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And speaking of more support, where can people find you?
Speaker 6: Well, I'm Sophie from OZ. I have a video essay
Speaker 6: channel on YouTube. That's my main gig. I have just
Speaker 6: now nearly finished my project The World is Not Ending,
Speaker 6: which is about go figure the climate collapse and what
Speaker 6: is going to happen to us over the next hundred
Speaker 6: years as a planet surprise, not just total extinction, spoiler warning,
Speaker 6: working class revolt. And so it's a oh thanks bit.
Speaker 6: So it's a great time to join my Patreon because
Speaker 6: this project I've been working on for such a such
Speaker 6: a long time is nearly done. I also stream on
Speaker 6: Twitch at Sophie Underscore, FRM Underscore Mars. But speaking of Twitch,
Speaker 6: I think the thing that appeals to your audience the
Speaker 6: most besides that project will be my show Red Planet,
Speaker 6: which I do every Sunday a pm two eleven pm
Speaker 6: UK time on twitch dot tv slash Red Planet Live.
Speaker 6: It's a commy round table where we have four very
Speaker 6: based hosts, usually but not always, talking to some based
Speaker 6: guests who are organizers and activists doing cool stuff to
Speaker 6: make the world a better place. For example, this week
Speaker 6: and so I don't know when this episode's coming out,
Speaker 6: but this week, as we're recording it, we're going to
Speaker 6: have Michael laufer On who helps teaches people how to
Speaker 6: make myth of pristone and miss Aprostel, the at home
Speaker 6: abortion medications for people in places where it's illegal. So
Speaker 6: that's the kind of stuff you can expect on Red Planet.
Speaker 6: Check out Red Plant. It's it's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this will be out next like Wednesday
Speaker 3: or something cool.
Speaker 6: But then yeah, then that episode will be up on
Speaker 6: Spotify and yeah youtubel, I've yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this has been it can happen here. You can
Speaker 3: find us on Twitter and Instagram at happen here pod.
Speaker 3: I guess you can find me on Twitter while I'm
Speaker 3: still around at HR three, or just find the Ice
Speaker 3: Must be Destroyed person. Uh yeah, good, go go go go,
Speaker 3: go into the world and make life hell for transferbes
Speaker 3: and the British and American governments.
Speaker 6: Just support support working class, engage in mutual I blah, pipeline.
Speaker 3: Don't like it. There's the door could happen here. It's
Speaker 3: the show where we hate McDonald's. I'm your host, be
Speaker 3: a long professional McDonald's hater, and with me to talk
Speaker 3: about hating McDonald's is Mira, who's a freelance journalist, and
Speaker 3: you need an organizer. Mira, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so okay, So specifically, there are lots of the
Speaker 3: hating McDonald's is like an ancient anarchist tradition. I think
Speaker 3: I'm actually not sure how well it is known today,
Speaker 3: but I'm about eighty percent sure that the tradition of
Speaker 3: breaking Starbucks windows was actually originally like a it was
Speaker 3: actually originally a thing about breaking like it came from
Speaker 3: like a bunch of campaigns I think it definitely in France.
Speaker 3: I think also in Mexico that like anytime a Starbucks, Starbucks,
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ, anytiving McDonald's would open up, everyone would immediately
Speaker 3: start breaking the windows.
Speaker 5: That's the only proper way to handle on McDonald's.
Speaker 3: And yeah, professional, but the reason we're talking about McDonald's
Speaker 3: is that, Yeah, you tried to organize in McDonald's union,
Speaker 3: which is I guess the other thing you could do
Speaker 3: with the McDonald's other than lighting it on fire, which
Speaker 3: is maybe you could, Oh, I guess, I guess there
Speaker 3: are those people in France who took it over and
Speaker 3: turned it into like a food co op or something.
Speaker 3: But a third thing you can do with it, discovered
Speaker 3: a third A third thing to do with the McDonald's.
Speaker 3: Let's hit the towers. Yeah, but yeah, I wanted to
Speaker 3: talk about I guess what you know, Okay, I wanted
Speaker 3: to use Yeah, so you've written a very good piece
Speaker 3: about this in Strange Matters called by mcunion that is
Speaker 3: really good, and I wanted to talk about sort of
Speaker 3: the piece, the sort of nitty gritty aspect of like
Speaker 3: what it's like to organize a union, and also just
Speaker 3: about McDonald's because Jesus Christ, good.
Speaker 5: Lord, No, I have so much to talk about, so
Speaker 5: more than happy too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I guess, okay, I think I think we
Speaker 3: should start with just the sort of McDonald's miss of
Speaker 3: it all. I wanted to start with just talking a
Speaker 3: bit about what it's actually like to work on a
Speaker 3: McDonald's because I, well, okay, a, I feel like it's
Speaker 3: not actually universal experience anymore, for like people who have
Speaker 3: worked at a fast food restaurant, and b I think
Speaker 3: people who it's it's the thing you blought out of
Speaker 3: your collective memory very quickly because it sucked. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: so like, okay, so what what is it actually like
Speaker 3: when you you show up to your shift? So McDonald's
Speaker 3: was my first job, and it was a hell of
Speaker 3: an introduction. Yes, the moment you would come in, you
Speaker 3: would be most days bombarded with constant orders on the
Speaker 3: screen because they had these little screens both in the
Speaker 3: front and back drill areas that like showed all the
Speaker 3: orders they had, and like a good sixty seventy percent
Speaker 3: at the time I came in, people would just be
Speaker 3: swamped with orders. They'd be running around being like, oh,
Speaker 3: thank god, you hear we need someone to get on
Speaker 3: right now, and it's like you don't even get a
Speaker 3: moment to breathe. Like, as you're standing there waiting to
Speaker 3: clock in on their punching machine, you're just like, oh,
Speaker 3: dear God, I'm gonna have a fucking terrible time. And
Speaker 3: as you're running around, you know, cooking everything after you
Speaker 3: clock in, you're getting streamed at by your bosses right
Speaker 3: by you because they're like, oh, no, customer complained because
Speaker 3: there was too many pickles on their sandwich.
Speaker 5: And then you'll hear someone yelling from the drive through
Speaker 5: window on top of that, and then you might have
Speaker 5: people at the front counter. This is before proven, so
Speaker 5: McDonald's still had front counters when people would come in.
Speaker 5: I don't know if every McDonald's does, but everyone i've
Speaker 5: been too since has just closed down internally, and I
Speaker 5: envied that. But you would have people yelling from there,
Speaker 5: and if you were one of the unfortunate that souls
Speaker 5: who ended up working directly facing the customers and not
Speaker 5: just cooking, you would be the one getting screamed at
Speaker 5: by all parties involved. I later worked at a Windy's
Speaker 5: where I got a taste of that and I walked
Speaker 5: out three days into March.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Stuff sucks. Yeah, And I think that, you know,
Speaker 3: I think like one of the things I think like
Speaker 3: compounds this is, you know, okay, I will I will,
Speaker 3: I will, I will do a theory which is that
Speaker 3: I think people have a really weird understanding of what
Speaker 3: it means to have a job on a sort of
Speaker 3: theoretical level that dates back to a genuinely, very weird
Speaker 3: period in the twentieth century where people actually had like
Speaker 3: stable hours. Yeah, and that's just not how any of
Speaker 3: this works, right, Like you you know, you like, there
Speaker 3: is no actual stable amount of hours. You just get
Speaker 3: you get some number of hours like a week that
Speaker 3: you're assigned to. But then you know, but this the
Speaker 3: least to do a thing that we've oh god like,
Speaker 3: like literally every single field we've talked about unidizing has
Speaker 3: this problem, which is just understaffing, because why the fuck
Speaker 3: would you have enough people to do a job. Would
Speaker 3: you could have less than enough people to do a
Speaker 3: job and pave them less.
Speaker 5: That That was my experience a McDonald and fast food
Speaker 5: in general. You would get such inconsistent numbers of hours
Speaker 5: that you wouldn't know how much money you'd be making
Speaker 5: in the month, because for all you know, this month,
Speaker 5: you could be working you know, every regular day, every
Speaker 5: business day of the week. You could be working only weekends,
Speaker 5: or you could be like I was after the union
Speaker 5: got busted spoiler alert, uh, working three hours on Sundays
Speaker 5: in the mornings. And that's it if they really wanted to.
Speaker 5: And there's nothing that outside of a union you can
Speaker 5: do to prevent them from and outside of you know,
Speaker 5: niche legal areas where you can maybe push back, you
Speaker 5: can't really do much if they decide just not to
Speaker 5: staff you. And there is people working there who they
Speaker 5: had like full blown kids, families relying on them in
Speaker 5: that job. They weren't making much. Pennsylvania minimum wage was
Speaker 5: seven twenty five and you know they were paying us that, Yeah,
Speaker 5: and so from what little they could get, they would
Speaker 5: maybe get like at best a one hundred bucks a
Speaker 5: week with their hours, unless they were able to get
Speaker 5: into like a managerial position where it's the only one
Speaker 5: where you'd be kind of guaranteed ours in the sense
Speaker 5: that they desperately need you, so they throwing you on whatever.
Speaker 5: Beyond that, it's you also don't know the days you're
Speaker 5: going to work too.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: This thing I was gonna ask is like, what, like
Speaker 3: how how much time do you have between finding out
Speaker 3: you're going to be on a shift and then like
Speaker 3: being on the shift.
Speaker 5: You can have anywhere from several days notice to under
Speaker 5: twelve hours notice, and there is no way to predict
Speaker 5: what's going to happen the next week. Is it all
Speaker 5: depends on when you're going to get staffed. There were
Speaker 5: points I found out day out when I was going
Speaker 5: to be working.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ. Yeah yeah, and like this, I mean, this
Speaker 3: is the thing that like is becoming. This is the
Speaker 3: way that labor used to work in like the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: and then you know, it was just sort of like
Speaker 3: phased out because it turns out this is actually a
Speaker 3: stunningly inefficient way to actually like like run a business.
Speaker 3: But you know, we've reached the thing that happened at
Speaker 3: the end of history. Is it's not the history ended.
Speaker 3: It's that like capital needing to be efficient ended, and
Speaker 3: now they just like do this shit. And it's like, well, okay,
Speaker 3: so it doesn't matter if this is like a terribly
Speaker 3: a dificient way to run things. It's you just like
Speaker 3: it's it's it's it's a mechanism designed to just like
Speaker 3: absolutely destroyed like the sort of psyches and lives of
Speaker 3: the people who are doing the thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that is completely accurate. They do not give a
Speaker 5: rat's ass about anyone working there. For a second, Everyone
Speaker 5: working there is completely expendable, even if they're a manager.
Speaker 5: There's been points people have worked there for like three
Speaker 5: four months and got promoted to a manager. There's everyone
Speaker 5: is expendable, and they they make sure you know that too.
Speaker 5: And how they treat you. You're not treated with any dignity,
Speaker 5: with any respect. You're just completely thrown around at their
Speaker 5: whims and the whims of upper management, you know, the
Speaker 5: regional managers and the like. And it's it's awful because
Speaker 5: how they get away with that model is they know
Speaker 5: there's always going to be some people who are desperate
Speaker 5: to work at McDonald's, either because they're young and need
Speaker 5: to get a first job, or they're down on their
Speaker 5: luck and need to get something to pay the bills.
Speaker 5: I've even hitting hard times trying to reapply at McDonald's
Speaker 5: since working there because I needed to pay the bill.
Speaker 5: I was in that exact position again, and fairly recently,
Speaker 5: and so it's it's not a fun place to be,
Speaker 5: to put it mildly. Yeah, of course they didn't let
Speaker 5: me work there again because I believe I'm banned from
Speaker 5: ever working at a McDonald's again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it. That's another thing that I think is
Speaker 3: not that well understood, like loss of companies have basically
Speaker 3: not even like there are there are people that I
Speaker 3: know who are blacklisted, like from ship they did dream Occupy,
Speaker 3: like people like yeah, like like that there these these things.
Speaker 3: These things suck and if you like, you know, this
Speaker 3: is I guess one of the sort of issues of
Speaker 3: doing any kind of organizing is that like if you lose,
Speaker 3: like stuff can go like very badly for you, which sucks.
Speaker 3: But also simultaneously, if you don't organize things we go
Speaker 3: very badly for you. So it's you know, so it's
Speaker 3: a double Yeah, yeah, I guess the just one everything
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask, which I don't know if you
Speaker 3: know do you do you know if you're if you're uh,
Speaker 3: if you're McDonald's was a franchise if it was like
Speaker 3: actually owned by the company.
Speaker 5: So yes, it was a franchise. It wasn't done by
Speaker 5: like the official company in any major sense. I actually
Speaker 5: met the franchise owner during the course of the union,
Speaker 5: which was a fun time when we were in the
Speaker 5: process of getting busted.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, yeah, So do you want to explain what
Speaker 3: a franchise is? And I guess, like how that sort
Speaker 3: of model works.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So most McDonald's out there are franchises, which basically
Speaker 5: means McDonald's will kind of let independent people buy out
Speaker 5: their stores and own and manage them in a certain
Speaker 5: region for a portion of the profits. In the Scranton area,
Speaker 5: which was where I did the union, they were all
Speaker 5: owned by one single family who was ultra rich, in
Speaker 5: part because of the McDonald's and in part because of
Speaker 5: family inheritances, and these folk they would be the kind
Speaker 5: of be treated as like the head Honchow's the same
Speaker 5: way that CEOs get talked about at most companies. They
Speaker 5: weren't the CEOs, of course, but like as far as
Speaker 5: in terms of managing great distrant and area McDonald's went,
Speaker 5: they were the main ones in charge. Of course, McDonald's
Speaker 5: corporate always had the final say over everything, but they
Speaker 5: manage tens of thousands of restaurants across the world, so
Speaker 5: they don't really get involved in any of the nitty gritty,
Speaker 5: which is why they kind of let people own these franchises.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which I think is really interesting. It's like they've
Speaker 3: managed to somehow combine like the worst aspects of working
Speaker 3: for a major corporation with the worst aspects of working
Speaker 3: for like a small business tyrant. Which it's interesting to
Speaker 3: you because it's like, I don't know, because this is
Speaker 3: like one of the weird things about McDonald because like
Speaker 3: McDonald's McDonald's corporate doesn't make money from Hamburger's. They're basically
Speaker 3: a real estate company that like sells franchises to people,
Speaker 3: but but simultaneous. But that means that like they can
Speaker 3: do things, like they can force their franchises to do
Speaker 3: things that are like unprofitable because it doesn't matter to them,
Speaker 3: Like there's they're still getting paid, Like they're still getting
Speaker 3: paid their like licensing like franchising fees or whatever, like
Speaker 3: no matter what sort of like shit is happening there. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that's I don't know, it's it strikes me as
Speaker 3: like a really interesting. It strikes me as like the
Speaker 3: exact arrangement that's like the most likely to create a
Speaker 3: fascist just like because like like you know, you have
Speaker 3: a group of people like and I think I think
Speaker 3: it's a good agm with this. This is what like
Speaker 3: quote unquote economic anxiety is. Is you have like a
Speaker 3: you have like you have a sort of middle level
Speaker 3: of like this, you know, the middle level of person
Speaker 3: who is a capitalist but is also getting squeezed from
Speaker 3: the top down like by a by larger corporations and
Speaker 3: then also is facing bought about pressure from workers. And
Speaker 3: so their solution to this is just like ruthlessly, like
Speaker 3: you know, just just like ruthlessly do a fashion them
Speaker 3: against like everyone who's working for them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you scratch a liberal and the fascist leads. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's more true than McDonald's and fast food really than anywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 5: the mcfascists reign supreme.
Speaker 3: So speaking of mcfascists, the products and services these are too.
Speaker 3: These are two distinct sentences. They are not related. FCC please,
Speaker 3: actually no, fuck you. The SCC doesn't well no, no,
Speaker 3: the SCC. The SEC does not regulate us. I think
Speaker 3: we're actually regulated by the FTC. So fuck the SEC.
Speaker 3: That's why I could swear on this podcast because they
Speaker 3: don't recomplain us. And we're back Okay. So, having having
Speaker 3: returned to more mcfascism, Yeah, okay, So I guess we
Speaker 3: should start talking about how the union organizing started and
Speaker 3: how I guess the sort of immediate mistake that y'all
Speaker 3: made attempting to get this, to get this off the ground. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so it.
Speaker 5: Started with me. I was the first one there to
Speaker 5: bring up the concept of reunion because then I was
Speaker 5: like only seventeen. I was new to anarchism still, and
Speaker 5: so I was young, green, and eager to get shit done.
Speaker 5: I still am all the above.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but.
Speaker 5: I had a few contacts to local IWW people through
Speaker 5: just the very very faint activist networks that were up there,
Speaker 5: and by faint, I mean a total of like five people.
Speaker 5: So I got cut in contact with the IWW guy.
Speaker 5: I believe. I used the name Mark. Yes, I used
Speaker 5: the name Mark in the article to protect his anonymity,
Speaker 5: so I'll just keep consistency. And Mark was the one
Speaker 5: who convinced me to take more major steps. He was
Speaker 5: the one who I talked to and got consultation about it,
Speaker 5: and he was the one who gave all that initial guidance.
Speaker 5: And there was a few friends of mine I had
Speaker 5: there there also not really anarchists. Most of them were
Speaker 5: just like your soci Dems, but they were They were
Speaker 5: eager to get something done and help out, so you know,
Speaker 5: I can't complain there. And it was like a small
Speaker 5: core group of us who all wanted to get involved
Speaker 5: and get this album done, and we had never done
Speaker 5: anything like this before. Northeast Pennsylvania does have a strong
Speaker 5: history of unions there, but we were not part of
Speaker 5: that history initially, and so it ended up going south unfortunately.
Speaker 5: Pretty it went well at first, but I think some
Speaker 5: of the main issues we had in hindsight doing things,
Speaker 5: especially now having more experience union organizing under my belt,
Speaker 5: in hindsight, we rushed things way too much. We were
Speaker 5: trying to get everyone on board. We didn't do sufficient
Speaker 5: one on one conversations with people, we didn't do sufficient
Speaker 5: intel gather, and we didn't we relied too much on
Speaker 5: our technical tools and left too much incrimitating evidence that
Speaker 5: we trusted too many people with. We didn't really have
Speaker 5: a strong way of going about it that would have
Speaker 5: been better to what we were doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I guess this comes to one and I
Speaker 3: think of the main things that you're talking about here
Speaker 3: and I think is one of the main things about
Speaker 3: you know, union organizing that like like pretty much no
Speaker 3: matter who you talk to wright politically, the the things
Speaker 3: that are important to get a union to work are
Speaker 3: kind of similar, which is that, Yeah, like it's usually
Speaker 3: a very slow process. It's a process of building relationships,
Speaker 3: and it's a process of figuring out who in your work, well,
Speaker 3: who in your work pays people sort of trust and
Speaker 3: respect and like make friends with and figuring out how
Speaker 3: to sort of how to get them involved in how
Speaker 3: to get I don't know how how unions are not
Speaker 3: just sort of like abstract things like they're they're they're
Speaker 3: they're built of actual like social relationships that you have
Speaker 3: with another person and another and other gifts and in
Speaker 3: the relationships that they have with other people, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera. Yeah, Yeah, I wanted to ask about how, how, okay,
Speaker 3: when when when you were sort of starting to do
Speaker 3: this right, how, how were you sort of identifying the
Speaker 3: people you needed to talk to and what kinds of
Speaker 3: things were you doing to try to get them involved
Speaker 3: and try to like map out how the workplace functioned.
Speaker 5: So the first people identify were people that I thought
Speaker 5: I could trust, and the core group of people I
Speaker 5: had were folk that in regards to the union, I
Speaker 5: in hindsight, was a trust. We all agreed on the
Speaker 5: same issues, and we all had the kind of similar
Speaker 5: more gung ho attitude. I think me definitely the most
Speaker 5: out of everyone. We fell into a pitfall where I
Speaker 5: was kind of pushing the union by myself for a bit,
Speaker 5: which is definitely easy to fall into. Yeah, But we
Speaker 5: in terms of identifying the workplace leaders, the natural leaders
Speaker 5: found there, we mostly relied on conversations with Mark to
Speaker 5: do that. We talked with him about who worked there.
Speaker 5: We gave a brief list of everyone who worked there,
Speaker 5: and we kind of just pinpointed them the specific people
Speaker 5: we saw as leaders and left spent that And I mean,
Speaker 5: as far as basic charting goes, it wasn't terrible, but
Speaker 5: there is definitely a lot to be desired and it
Speaker 5: could have been far more fleshed out.
Speaker 3: What do you think that would have looked like? Or
Speaker 3: you know, what does that look like? In sort of
Speaker 3: like other campaigns that you've run that were like the
Speaker 3: first one you ever tried to do at.
Speaker 5: Seventeen, so charting as I would do it now It
Speaker 5: should be done from the start before even approaching the
Speaker 5: first person unless you extremely trust the person and like
Speaker 5: you are just bonded for life, you know you can't
Speaker 5: go without them unless you have like really deep trust
Speaker 5: with the person. Initially, you shouldn't approach anyone of them
Speaker 5: going into it. You should start off with if you
Speaker 5: can reaching out to an IWW REP. But if you
Speaker 5: can't make a detailed chart of who's in your workplace,
Speaker 5: what positions they're at, what team they're on, like in
Speaker 5: terms of if they're on one person's managed area or
Speaker 5: another person's managed area, you should should figure out who
Speaker 5: they're close to, who they listen to, relevant demographic information,
Speaker 5: because you want your unions to be intersectional, and you
Speaker 5: want to be able to figure out, above all else,
Speaker 5: whether or not you've had a away from work one
Speaker 5: on one with them, and whether or not you've had
Speaker 5: any talks with them prior about unions and where they
Speaker 5: might stand on unions. Do you want to document all that?
Speaker 5: And it doesn't have to be the most detail. You
Speaker 5: can just do a spreadsheet with it, but it can
Speaker 5: definitely be a lot to document. And it's it's no joke,
Speaker 5: it's not something that should be rushed. It's not fun.
Speaker 5: I you know, there's there's nothing really that's a blast
Speaker 5: about trying to sit there and be like, ah, yes,
Speaker 5: let me fill out paperwork about my workplace employees. But
Speaker 5: it will come back and save you so many times
Speaker 5: and give help you formulate strategies for going forward.
Speaker 8: And we.
Speaker 5: Rush things and talk did things like talking to people
Speaker 5: on the workplace floor and just said, hey, do you
Speaker 5: want to do a union? Yeah, and call that a
Speaker 5: day and said that was one on one and it wasn't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, should we explain what one on one like is
Speaker 3: supposed to be?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So one on one is. It doesn't necessarily have
Speaker 5: to be on one on one, but it should be
Speaker 5: between at least a union organizer and another person. It
Speaker 5: could potentially be another more seasoned organizer helping be a
Speaker 5: more noviced one along with during the one on one.
Speaker 5: That could be a thing, But ideally they are just
Speaker 5: one or two organizers talking to one workplace employee about
Speaker 5: initially anyway, just a non committal discussion on where what
Speaker 5: their issues are in the workplace, what grievances they might have,
Speaker 5: and what their current stances on workplace organizing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay, And another think I want to sort of
Speaker 3: get into is the role of like having having a
Speaker 3: way to talk to people outside of work and having
Speaker 3: just sort of a collaborative space where people talk about
Speaker 3: and I think this is something that like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: I think this this is you know, this is one
Speaker 3: of the big things. I think that that this is
Speaker 3: one of the big things that's changed in the past,
Speaker 3: you know, maybe like decade and a half or so.
Speaker 3: Is that how like the the the actual space in
Speaker 3: which people talk about a union like tends on to
Speaker 3: be a physical space anymore. It tends to be sort
Speaker 3: of either like a signal chat or like a Facebook chat,
Speaker 3: like a I guess what'sapp technically is owned by Facebook,
Speaker 3: but yeah, and so yeah, I want to talk a
Speaker 3: bit about that, and also I guess get into the
Speaker 3: sort of security problems that you can have with this,
Speaker 3: because yeah, yeah, there's so that's what we did.
Speaker 5: We had a group chat on Facebook Messenger to talk
Speaker 5: to everyone about the union and everything like that. And
Speaker 5: there's a lot of pros to having a centralized group chat.
Speaker 5: Don't get me wrong. It makes an easy way to
Speaker 5: communicate when you're trying to take actions to other people.
Speaker 5: It can be helpful to do any last minute coordination needed,
Speaker 5: It can be useful to make sure everyone's on the
Speaker 5: same page, but there's also major drawbacks to it. One,
Speaker 5: as you mentioned, there's big privacy concerns, and we ran
Speaker 5: into that during the campaign. If with anything organizing, you're
Speaker 5: only as secure as your weakest link, And if you
Speaker 5: have people you do not completely one hundred percent trust
Speaker 5: in your group chat, someone could leak everything, either wittingly
Speaker 5: or unwittingly. In our case it was wittingly, but you
Speaker 5: very well could have someone who isn't being careful and
Speaker 5: might show the group chat to someone else who they
Speaker 5: shouldn't accident And unless everyone's on the same page about
Speaker 5: best security practices, you're not going to get very far
Speaker 5: with having that. And for another, doing any form of
Speaker 5: organizing over texts and a major capacity is really hard. Yeah,
Speaker 5: there's so many issues with like making sure people are
Speaker 5: understanding their tone and undercommunicating properly and just meeting each
Speaker 5: other on the same level that you really can't do
Speaker 5: over text like you can do in person. If a
Speaker 5: text medium should, in my view, only be there to
Speaker 5: facilitate interactions that are later done at best in person,
Speaker 5: but if not, they can be done through like video calls.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like as much as zoom can be really annoying, like,
Speaker 3: it is way more productive than trying to do things
Speaker 3: two text. Like yeah, just like having just like just
Speaker 3: like having a weekly zoom meeting. You know, like like
Speaker 3: there there's there's a lot of like cases where you like,
Speaker 3: you know, you literally physically can't like be in the
Speaker 3: same place, and you know, and if if that's that's
Speaker 3: the thing you're dealing with, like, yeah, doing video calls
Speaker 3: and stuff like that makes it way way easier, for sure.
Speaker 5: It It is a way better medium to do anything
Speaker 5: union related with. And it's also much easier to bond
Speaker 5: with people over video chat too, And that's a huge
Speaker 5: part of the union is connecting with your other your
Speaker 5: pillow workers and meeting each other on that same level
Speaker 5: and bonded over your shared interests, over your share what
Speaker 5: you desire from union, what you desire from your workplace.
Speaker 5: You can't really do that easily anyway over text. I'm
Speaker 5: sure someone somewhere has done it, but it's not recommended
Speaker 5: for me anyway.
Speaker 3: Okay, Unfortunately, we need to do another thing that's not text,
Speaker 3: which is ads. You can tell were doing great on
Speaker 3: the ad pivots here, it's fine. I was I was
Speaker 3: watching what's his name, the guy the right way shipthead
Speaker 3: guy who like had a thing with Samantha Bee for
Speaker 3: a little bit. Glenn Beck. That's the one I was
Speaker 3: watching Glenn Beck, and I was like, oh no, this guy,
Speaker 3: this guy is This guy's ad pivot was just racism.
Speaker 5: So you know, we could do.
Speaker 3: It could happen. Here are our second slogan, better ad
Speaker 3: pivots than Glenn Beck, and we are back, hopefully. I
Speaker 3: don't know. Maybe we'll get extremely unlucky and everything will
Speaker 3: be broken and this will immediately cut to a third ad.
Speaker 3: But assuming that it doesn't, I wanted to talk a
Speaker 3: bit awesome so about sort of the kinds of things
Speaker 3: that are necessary to get people to believe that a
Speaker 3: union can work, because that's you know, like or organization
Speaker 3: isn't just sort of a purely like it isn't just
Speaker 3: sort of a purely mechanical thing. It's also about morale,
Speaker 3: you know, as like, as much as it's about social relationships,
Speaker 3: about sort of morale, about people believing in the thing.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to ask, yeah, I guess talk a
Speaker 3: little bit about what that process is sort of like
Speaker 3: and what can happen to it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that's something an issue we ran into and
Speaker 5: make a union fairly early on, was keeping people motivated
Speaker 5: for the union and getting people wanting to be involved,
Speaker 5: because one of the most common things you'll hear when
Speaker 5: trying to organize the union is people like, oh, I
Speaker 5: can't afford to lose this job. I have a family
Speaker 5: to feed, I have built to pay. You'll see people
Speaker 5: saying they don't want to risk their careers. If you're
Speaker 5: in a more professional environment, you'll see people just not
Speaker 5: wanting to take the risks that could jeopardize them. And
Speaker 5: it's important when you're kind of trying to address those
Speaker 5: concerns to meet them where they're at. You're not gonna
Speaker 5: you can't make those concerns go away because they're real.
Speaker 5: When you're organizing a union, there is a risk you
Speaker 5: could get fired and get punished for it. It happened
Speaker 5: to me. It comes with the territory. But if you
Speaker 5: do things safely and you do things right, it's a
Speaker 5: much safer option than not doing any And that's the
Speaker 5: main thing you kind of want to talk to people
Speaker 5: about is detailing their grievances and talking about how nothing's
Speaker 5: going to change without you. You can't butter up to
Speaker 5: your bosses and expect them to suddenly turn around on you.
Speaker 5: The most they'll do is play pretend for a little
Speaker 5: bit until things go right back to normal. And you
Speaker 5: kind of want to talk to people about also why
Speaker 5: it's more beneficial to them to just stick with the
Speaker 5: union because their strength is in numbers, and that's something
Speaker 5: that a lot of regular folk can kind of lose,
Speaker 5: is that they're not going to be an envelope. When
Speaker 5: someone's viewing getting involved, a lot of the time they're thinking, oh,
Speaker 5: if I get involved, I'm going to get fired. They're
Speaker 5: not thinking about the strengthen numbers. Sure, you just you
Speaker 5: yourself as the only one pushing for change in a workplace, Yeah,
Speaker 5: there's a decent chance you'll get fired. But if you
Speaker 5: have a whole crew of ten people all who are
Speaker 5: essential running the operations pushing for change, suddenly you're going
Speaker 5: to see things shifting a much different way. And so
Speaker 5: building that solidarity among people is important, and I think
Speaker 5: is the I want to say, the absolute best way,
Speaker 5: because there isn't an absolute best way to handle those concerns,
Speaker 5: but it's definitely a way that can be effective if
Speaker 5: done right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I guess, okay, I guess I guess we
Speaker 3: should go into how it sort of came apart. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because unfortunately, you know, and this I think is the
Speaker 3: thing that is depressing but true, which is that a
Speaker 3: lot of union like statistic well, actually I don't have
Speaker 3: the numbers. I'm not gonna I'm not going to actually
Speaker 3: say that, but a lot of union campaigns don't work.
Speaker 3: And you know, sometimes it's because like something bad happens,
Speaker 3: Sometimes because it's just you know, stuff happens out of
Speaker 3: your control. Sometimes it's I don't know, like a pande starts.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I was talked about what happened here and
Speaker 3: how to sort of avoid that because it sucks.
Speaker 5: So there's a lot of things that can be a
Speaker 5: downfall in the union. In the case of McDonald's, our
Speaker 5: main downfall, there was a lot of you know, little
Speaker 5: things we did wrong that didn't help at all that
Speaker 5: definitely just made matters worse in the end. But the
Speaker 5: straw that broke the camel's back was not being careful
Speaker 5: with who we trusted and Dan, as I referred to
Speaker 5: in the article, he was the one that caused the
Speaker 5: penultimate constructure of it. COVID contributed heavily, but I feel
Speaker 5: like if it weren't for Dan, the union could have
Speaker 5: had still a fighting chance in spite of COVID. Now,
Speaker 5: if it worked for COVID, I think the union also
Speaker 5: could have stuck around the mixture of external factors and
Speaker 5: internal did the downfall. But in terms of things we
Speaker 5: could have actively prevented, Dan was the main thing that
Speaker 5: we could have done. Approached way differently. We could have
Speaker 5: approached handling new people in a much better light. We
Speaker 5: should have had a centralized group being the ones with
Speaker 5: all the communications everything, and let people prove their trust
Speaker 5: to the union over time by doing taxes for it
Speaker 5: and just by building relationships with people and fostering stuff
Speaker 5: that's already there. Because Dan was two faced, we all
Speaker 5: thought he was our friend, which is why we thought
Speaker 5: we could trust him. But he was in it just
Speaker 5: to try and get some benefits for him, which is
Speaker 5: why he snitched. He thought maybe he would get, you know,
Speaker 5: some type of promotion or something he didn't, which side note,
Speaker 5: it doesn't help you to snitch on your union. If
Speaker 5: anyone out there is thinking of doing it, you're just
Speaker 5: going to screw yourself and everyone else over and nobody
Speaker 5: likes to snitch. Yeah, but we should have been a
Speaker 5: lot more cautious with how we approached people and shouldn't
Speaker 5: have just been doing things for the sake of doing them.
Speaker 5: Like we shouldn't have been approaching people inside the workplace.
Speaker 5: We shouldn't have been inviting everyone and everyone to all
Speaker 5: our confidential group chats. We should have been cautious of
Speaker 5: who we were around and what we were saying around people,
Speaker 5: and how we were going about it. That's the core
Speaker 5: of it. I mean, it's.
Speaker 3: Recklessness, yeah, And I mean I think, like you know,
Speaker 3: obviously it is not good if the exist, like if
Speaker 3: if the existence of your union a bunch of your
Speaker 3: stuff gets leaked, like this is not necessarily fatal, like
Speaker 3: I've I've been involved in campaigns where like that's happened
Speaker 3: and we want anyways, but it could definitely be. It's like,
Speaker 3: you know, especially like especially early on in the process,
Speaker 3: and especially like the more precarious stuff is uh it, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's not great. I can get yeah pretty bad pretty quickly.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 3: I guess the thing that I wanted to sort of
Speaker 3: ask about was like, Okay, so historically up until the
Speaker 3: last I mean I think was was was Burgerville the
Speaker 3: first like modern fast food union. I think it might
Speaker 3: have been. It was either or yeah, it was one
Speaker 3: of the two. Up up until like really the last
Speaker 3: like like I think, like post like twenty fifteen twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: fast food has been really really difficult to organize, and
Speaker 3: a lot of a lot of unions either just didn't
Speaker 3: try or did these kind of like weird PR stunt
Speaker 3: campaigns that were you know, like Fight fifteen attached things
Speaker 3: where it's like, wow, we're not actually really trying to
Speaker 3: get a union, we're trying to like get PR stuff
Speaker 3: for Fight fifteen. But this is I don't know, this
Speaker 3: is the thing I think it's interesting about the idew
Speaker 3: about the idea. This is the thing that's interesting about
Speaker 3: the industrial workers of the world specifically, is that they've
Speaker 3: actually like gone in and seriously attempted to do it,
Speaker 3: and they sort of finally broke through it a couple
Speaker 3: of places, and you know this this McDonald's campaign didn't work.
Speaker 3: But what was kind of interesting to me about it
Speaker 3: is like I don't know, like how kind of I
Speaker 3: don't know if normal is the right word of a
Speaker 3: campaign it was, but it's it looks a lot like
Speaker 3: I don't know, it looked like it looks a lot
Speaker 3: like campaigns that I've been involved in that were like
Speaker 3: not in the fast food industry. And now I guess
Speaker 3: I was wondering a bit about, like, to what extent
Speaker 3: were the sort of tactics shaped by like the very specific,
Speaker 3: weird conditions of fast food, and to what extent it
Speaker 3: was just sort of like the stuff you'd use in
Speaker 3: any workplace.
Speaker 5: So a lot of our base model was just stuff
Speaker 5: you'd use in any workplace. Because at the time we're
Speaker 5: doing this, I think the only fast food unions that
Speaker 5: were around were like Jimmy John's and Burbertville. I think
Speaker 5: those are the only two that had any publicity. This
Speaker 5: was before all the major Starbucks campaigns.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's all pretty recent.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And so we didn't have much of a playbook
Speaker 5: for how to approach things in a fast food environment. Specifically,
Speaker 5: a lot of what we were actually emulated the model
Speaker 5: on was factory environments and things like that, because there
Speaker 5: is somewhat of a similarity of having in both between
Speaker 5: fast food and factories. With factories and both fast food,
Speaker 5: you have a kind of assembly line model, you know,
Speaker 5: crank out or crank out work, crank out work, get
Speaker 5: things out at a rapid pace, and stick to your job.
Speaker 5: Maybe do it a little bit of clean up now
Speaker 5: and then, but you stick to what you're doing, and
Speaker 5: you're kind of isolated from other stations a bit. You
Speaker 5: have some overlap, but only in so far as your
Speaker 5: job will allow, but you might be able to talk
Speaker 5: to each other and you shared break areas. That kind
Speaker 5: of structure informed how we approached it. By us, what
Speaker 5: we tried to do was talk to people we didn't
Speaker 5: have external contacts with in areas that were away from cameras,
Speaker 5: in areas that were away from other people who might
Speaker 5: be able to hear. But there is better ways of
Speaker 5: doing it, and I think other campaigns benefited out. They're
Speaker 5: likely benefited from having more seasoned organizers at the core
Speaker 5: of it, because that's also at least for me and
Speaker 5: my experience with it. Something that didn't help us was
Speaker 5: having someone who with no real experience doing something at
Speaker 5: the forefront of that. I'm not to say that someone
Speaker 5: of no experience can't do amazing things. There's countless examples
Speaker 5: of unions that were ran by people with no experience
Speaker 5: at all who's just jumped right into it and did
Speaker 5: amazing jobs. But it's important to get a diversity of
Speaker 5: people with different walks of life at the core of it,
Speaker 5: people with different perspectives. So many different people involved at
Speaker 5: the core as a kind of central organizing committee can
Speaker 5: do you wonders with a union. Because we had just
Speaker 5: a few young left leaning people, a few young left
Speaker 5: leaning white people, most of which were male presenting. I
Speaker 5: wasn't out as trans there, so I was presenting as masculine.
Speaker 5: The other people I was with, they were all CIS men,
Speaker 5: with one exception, two exceptions. Sorry, my memory is a
Speaker 5: little on the fits. But we needed more people with
Speaker 5: different perspectives in there. We needed more, and there was
Speaker 5: plenty to be found in the workplace, but we just
Speaker 5: we neglected to include them in the core organizing the committee.
Speaker 5: And I think that's something that could really benefit unions
Speaker 5: and probably is a major strength of a lot of
Speaker 5: the successful ones is having a diverse main primary group
Speaker 5: of central organizers. I don't want to say central organizers,
Speaker 5: more like core organizers, because the solidarity union model isn't
Speaker 5: like hierarchical, but just a central group of people involved
Speaker 5: that seek to do the main leg work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, I mean this has been I
Speaker 3: think like one of the things that made the like
Speaker 3: the Starbucks campaign's work was like they well with with
Speaker 3: Starbucks can tape specifically, it was a lot of like
Speaker 3: find the queerest person in the workplace to start talking
Speaker 3: to them. But having the core group of people working
Speaker 3: on things being as diverse as possible is good both
Speaker 3: in like an immediate practical sense and it is sort
Speaker 3: of like long term to chiefe sense and the like
Speaker 3: faster that happens, the better. Yeah, Okay, do you do
Speaker 3: you have anything else that you from this that you
Speaker 3: think people should know about?
Speaker 5: I would say, if you can get external help from
Speaker 5: a union, if you've never done it before, and even
Speaker 5: if you having someone to balance ideas off of can wonders.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of fun with the IWW that are
Speaker 5: more than willing to offer helping hand to people trying
Speaker 5: to get started on a union campaign. All you got
Speaker 5: to do is reach out and ask, and I'm sure
Speaker 5: there will be someone in your local who's willing to help.
Speaker 5: But if even if there's not, you can probably get
Speaker 5: someone to help you more remotely too, And even just
Speaker 5: a little bit of guidance can go a long way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Union good, McDonald's bad. Be careful while you're organizing,
Speaker 3: and yeah, be strategic inspired about it. Well, okay, do
Speaker 3: you want people to find you first? And if so where? Yeah?
Speaker 5: I can be found over unfortunately for now, on Twitter,
Speaker 5: at my magazine, also on Mastodon, much more preferably, and
Speaker 5: those are the main places I'm at. If you want
Speaker 5: to reach me to, my email is found on my
Speaker 5: Twitter and masked it on my relating at gmail dot com.
Speaker 5: It's the best way to get hold of me.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well we'll put a link to the strange meta article
Speaker 3: in the in the description so you can read that
Speaker 3: to you because it's great. Yeah, Mirror, thank you so
Speaker 3: much for joining But I was gonna say us, but
Speaker 3: I guess thank you so much for joining me. Uh yeah,
Speaker 3: it was it was great talking to you. It was
Speaker 3: fuck McDonald's.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for having Yeah, it was really
Speaker 5: great being here. Been a huge fan of this podcast
Speaker 5: for a while, so I was like when when I
Speaker 5: first heard about potentially being on here. I was stoked
Speaker 5: and also yeah, fuck McDonald's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess, Yeah, this has been the podcast that
Speaker 3: you're listening to. You can find us that happen here
Speaker 3: pod on Twitter and Instagram. You can find us the
Speaker 3: rest of the stuff that people do at cools on media.
Speaker 3: I guess, I guess. I actually I have not plugged
Speaker 3: the do show that's been happening. There'll be a couple
Speaker 3: of episodes out by the time we do this. But
Speaker 3: Coolson has done a show with Jake Canahan called Sad
Speaker 3: Oligarchs that's about the Russian oligarchs who've been mysteriously dieinggue
Speaker 3: over the past, like as the start of the Ukraine. Yeah,
Speaker 3: probably only getting more relevant as whatever fucking bullshit is
Speaker 3: happening there right now plays out. I don't know, but
Speaker 3: by the time this goes up, you'll probably have a
Speaker 3: better idea of what happened or didn't happen. But yeah,
Speaker 3: go listen to that. Yeah, and go start a union
Speaker 3: in your workplace or alternately, light light light something on
Speaker 3: fire legally not the place something campfires, Explorers, we could
Speaker 3: make this. We have the technology.
Speaker 5: Union smores.
Speaker 1: Best kind, welcome back to it could happen here, a
Speaker 1: podcast about it. It being bad things happening here here
Speaker 1: being you know, wherever you are. We're talking specifically about
Speaker 1: wherever you are. I'm Robert Evans, one of the hosts
Speaker 1: of this podcast, and with me today is a guy
Speaker 1: I have a lot of admiration for probably my favorite
Speaker 1: YouTube documentarian, which I guess would be the fastest way
Speaker 1: to sum up who you are and what you do,
Speaker 1: Dan Olsen from the channel Folding Ideas.
Speaker 3: Dan, Hi, Hi, keep doing, I'm doing well. Thanks for
Speaker 3: thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, Dan, you and I have like a topic of
Speaker 1: shared interest to discuss. But the first thing I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about is your your name on the internet
Speaker 1: is a is foldable human?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't feel like I could fold you very well.
Speaker 10: No, Okay, So back in high school, I used to
Speaker 10: be like I was a really small guy, Like I
Speaker 10: was a really skinny guy.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 10: And you remember the you remember all the ads from
Speaker 10: the nineties for exercise equipment.
Speaker 3: I do remember some of that. Yeah.
Speaker 10: So the tagline that they always used for like the
Speaker 10: as scene on TV exercise equipment was that it folds
Speaker 10: for easy storage.
Speaker 3: Ah and being being dumb ass kids.
Speaker 10: You know, it's like one person in our friend group
Speaker 10: like has a car, but there's like seven of us,
Speaker 10: and so someone's got to ride in the trunk. And
Speaker 10: it's like, well, Dan gets to ride in the trunk,
Speaker 10: Like we're going to stick Dan in the trunk because
Speaker 10: he folds for easy storage.
Speaker 3: Because I was a small guy and so.
Speaker 10: It so I don't know why. When I would like
Speaker 10: busy Eric like trying to brand the channel, like, you know,
Speaker 10: a decade ago, I was like, I had this phrase
Speaker 10: that I was using with students that I was interacting with, was.
Speaker 3: Like, well, let's unfold that idea, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 10: Like that was kind of like on my mind. So
Speaker 10: I was like, ah, well, we'll like call the channel
Speaker 10: like unfolding ideas. Unfolding didn't really like just sound good.
Speaker 10: So it's like, oh, folding ideas, uh and then well
Speaker 10: esthetic parallel to that, you know, foldable human. I don't
Speaker 10: know it, it just it it came to me and
Speaker 10: it sounded good, and it was nowhere on the internet.
Speaker 10: There was like no overlaps. So I'm like, all right, interesting,
Speaker 10: We're good to go. SEO locked in.
Speaker 1: That's an example of a thing that I you know,
Speaker 1: we're talking, We're gonna be talking a lot about stuff
Speaker 1: that's unsettling about our modern era and how the Internet
Speaker 1: has sort of altered human dynamics. The things that I
Speaker 1: think is kind of neat about it is its ability
Speaker 1: to kind of preserve an amber aspects of you from
Speaker 1: the deep past. Like I have one of my emails,
Speaker 1: like my personal email is a Gmail that I got
Speaker 1: back when you had to get an invite to get
Speaker 1: a Gmail, right like right when Gmail first became a thing.
Speaker 1: And it's like, I'm not going to say it on
Speaker 1: here because then my email will get bombarded with shit.
Speaker 1: But like it's it's like a stupid joke that doesn't
Speaker 1: really make any sense. And every time I give it
Speaker 1: to some of their like why is that your email?
Speaker 1: Because I was like twelve, Like don't I don't even
Speaker 1: remember why I set this thing. It's just this like
Speaker 1: moment of something I thought was funny when I was
Speaker 1: pre pubescent, frozen in amber forever, because that's the Internet
Speaker 1: does that in little ways for each of us.
Speaker 10: I definitely abandoned my original something Awful account because some
Speaker 10: likes like you know what, maybe not that user name anymore?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so you are so Dan if people are
Speaker 1: not familiar with you, and I'm gonna guess a significant
Speaker 1: chunk of our listenership is kind of one of the
Speaker 1: biggest touchstones for you recently, was you put out a
Speaker 1: video about the NFT craze that a lot of people
Speaker 1: have credited with helping to kill it, me among them.
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful, wonderful video. Line go up was the
Speaker 1: actual title line. Yeah, line goes up, very good breakdown
Speaker 1: of how they work, why it was a con And
Speaker 1: you've been doing you know, I think kind of the
Speaker 1: first really the first time I became aware of you
Speaker 1: was you did a Flat Earth documentary, which is is
Speaker 1: very good.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: I did an article recently on like AI kids books
Speaker 1: that was partly inspired by an investigation you did into
Speaker 1: these kind of audible slash kindle grifters, the Mickelson Twins.
Speaker 1: So you do that kind of thing, right, like you Bay,
Speaker 1: You kind of run across things that are troubling or
Speaker 1: confusing to you, and then you investigate them to a
Speaker 1: pretty impressive extent and put together very clear, uh video investigations.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: That's that's I think, in a nutshell, probably pretty accurate.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's kind of where the where the channels ended up. Yeah,
Speaker 10: it's it's been a few different things over over the years,
Speaker 10: but that's kind of the phase that it's in right now.
Speaker 10: Is this kind of like I don't know, like yeah, documentarian.
Speaker 3: Place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, a lot of your stuff seems
Speaker 1: to focus on basically like the topic of kind of
Speaker 1: online grifter culture and and sort of its intersection with
Speaker 1: like different weird cultic milieuse like there's kind of a
Speaker 1: cross especially like with NFT's a real big crossover betwixt
Speaker 1: the two, right, Like, it's kind of I think a
Speaker 1: lot of crypto culture was kind of this intersection between
Speaker 1: old school cons and kind of internet cult dynamics. So
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk today about the problem of scam
Speaker 1: culture in the United States because I, by any sort
Speaker 1: of like objective reckoning, I've been looking into this. There
Speaker 1: are more scams and more fraud than right now in
Speaker 1: the United States than at any point previously, and basically
Speaker 1: from all sides, like phone scams are at the highest
Speaker 1: rate they've ever been. People are getting like, like I
Speaker 1: think the statistic I've got is that in March twenty one,
Speaker 1: I think is kind of when that peaked at like
Speaker 1: four point nine billion robocall scams, which is like like
Speaker 1: just kind of an outrageous increase over where it was
Speaker 1: a few years ago. The rate of fraud against elderly
Speaker 1: people seems to be in an all time high, at
Speaker 1: least in terms of dollar amount. One of kind of
Speaker 1: the unsettling quotes that I came across when I was
Speaker 1: looking into the degree to which old people are being scammed,
Speaker 1: and it's often through various email scams that are kind
Speaker 1: of based on getting trust or fright them that like
Speaker 1: someone else is trying to scam them and so they
Speaker 1: need to give in from it. Anyway, the thing that
Speaker 1: the quote that I came across was a regulator talking
Speaker 1: about this and being like, yeah, it's not it's no
Speaker 1: longer like smaller even medium dollar cons. People are stealing
Speaker 1: generational wealth, which was really interesting to me. And then
Speaker 1: there's kind of like phishing attacks are at pretty close
Speaker 1: to an all time high. I mean, there's a I'll
Speaker 1: send you there's a graph that I came across in
Speaker 1: a what was the source on this? In a comparateech
Speaker 1: article that I mean, it's just a straight line up
Speaker 1: from January twenty twenty nine to like the end of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. And so I'm I'm I'm kind of
Speaker 1: looking at all this, and there's a couple of different causes, right,
Speaker 1: Like some of the stuff the SEC did under ajit
Speaker 1: PI gets blamed for why it's gotten even worse with
Speaker 1: with phone scams, although that's not the whole story. AI
Speaker 1: powered tools have been a big part of like why
Speaker 1: f attacks have increased so much. But then like you've
Speaker 1: got like the degree to which the elderly are being conned,
Speaker 1: which is like this kind of at this intersection of
Speaker 1: a few different things. How much more online old people
Speaker 1: are today than they were, you know, ten to fifteen
Speaker 1: years ago.
Speaker 3: For population bubbles, yes, you know, multi valent dynamics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but kind of the commonality is that like scams
Speaker 1: are all around, like people, we're all kind of being
Speaker 1: assaulted by scams.
Speaker 10: I mean the time I just I just grabbed my
Speaker 10: phone and like of my last like fifteen text messages.
Speaker 3: Maybe uh it's like.
Speaker 10: Your pickup is available a couple like three with you know,
Speaker 10: four with actual friends, and then uh interact you just
Speaker 10: received an e Interact transfer high long time no talk.
Speaker 10: Just got your money, Okay, we'll send soon. Three hundred
Speaker 10: and eighty nine can now be routed to your institutions.
Speaker 10: Submit why the Canada Revenue Agency has sent you money?
Speaker 10: Your verification code for visa transfer is. And it's like
Speaker 10: it's like just constant, constant. I hadn't even because like,
Speaker 10: I'm not going to be shocked at all if I
Speaker 10: get a phishing text message during this conversation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like between my email and like my text messages
Speaker 1: or just phone calls, right, I get every day I
Speaker 1: get two or three calls from scam likely, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: my good friend scam Likely. Yeah, my old buddy, he's
Speaker 1: always got always got something cooking. But yeah, it's and
Speaker 1: I this kind of like I started focusing on this
Speaker 1: more a couple of months ago because you know, I
Speaker 1: had vaguely noticed. Boy, it's just like nothing but fucking
Speaker 1: scams coming into me through my phone these days. And
Speaker 1: then a couple of months ago, I got a phone
Speaker 1: call from my bank and it was one of those
Speaker 1: things like everyone else my cell phone lets me know
Speaker 1: when like a call is from scam likely or when
Speaker 1: it's from like you know, and it had the name
Speaker 1: of my bank on there. It was the right number,
Speaker 1: you know, So I pick it up and a human being.
Speaker 9: Is on the line and they're like, is this you know,
Speaker 9: Robert Evans And I'm like yeah, And then they're like,
Speaker 9: we've seen some like fraudulent activity on your account.
Speaker 1: Can we ask you a couple questions? And that is
Speaker 1: I've gotten that call before. Legitimately, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: a weird thing for your bank to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: let's talk about these us.
Speaker 10: Are you in the country right now? It's like no,
Speaker 10: I'm I'm in New York. It's like, okay, so we're
Speaker 10: seeing activity out in New York.
Speaker 5: That's you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, did you just buy something in Florida? No, I
Speaker 1: never go to Florida, but uh so yeah so And
Speaker 1: I didn't actually get to see where they were going
Speaker 1: with this. Nothing suspicious had happened. But like after they
Speaker 1: say that, I'm like okay, yeah, like what's what's the charge?
Speaker 1: And then my phone disconnects right like it's you know again,
Speaker 1: my where I live, you know, Oregon is the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere, so like sometimes connectivity is not great. So
Speaker 1: I call them back, you know, and I get on
Speaker 1: the phone with a person and they're like, yeah, what's
Speaker 1: what's in to be up? And I'm like, well, you
Speaker 1: guys called me saying that like that there was some
Speaker 1: possibly fraudulent activity that we needed to talk about. And
Speaker 1: the lady on the other end is like, no one
Speaker 1: here called you. Like I'm looking at your record. I
Speaker 1: can tell when someone's getting a call. We don't have
Speaker 1: any record of that. And I explained what happened, and
Speaker 1: she like goes back, talks to a supervisor and is like,
Speaker 1: so that was a scam. They've this is something we've
Speaker 1: seen more and more lately. They've they're able now to
Speaker 1: actually just spoof our banks and this is my bank
Speaker 1: is a significant sized institution. They're able to spoof our
Speaker 1: phone number now and so you can't tell through the
Speaker 1: caller ID, and like it was this whole thing where
Speaker 1: like obviously I know, don't give certain things over the phone,
Speaker 1: even if they're pretending to be your bank. We never
Speaker 1: got to that point where anything was actually compromised, but
Speaker 1: it was just like, well, shit, like what are you Like?
Speaker 1: That's this is now well beyond a thing where like
Speaker 1: you're getting called and someone's offering you, you know, to
Speaker 1: make a bunch of money. You know, holding a Nigerian
Speaker 1: princess wealth or something. If you sit in your account,
Speaker 1: this is your bank calls you and your phone tells
Speaker 1: you that it's your bank, and a human being who
Speaker 1: sounds just like the bank teller like it's it's gotten
Speaker 1: so and I think kind of the broad Obviously, each
Speaker 1: of these individual vectors by which scamming has increased is
Speaker 1: a worthy story and a separate story in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, but they also come together in this like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not it's not like weird at this
Speaker 1: point to note that everybody seems angrier, and everybody seems paranoid,
Speaker 1: and you hear more stories about like people opening fire
Speaker 1: on folks pulling into their driveway to turn around, and
Speaker 1: there's you know that story. Obviously there's guns and stuff
Speaker 1: that's also connected to that. But I wonder how much
Speaker 1: of the paranoia and anger is at least exacerbated by
Speaker 1: the fact that everyone is fighting off a million scammers
Speaker 1: at all times.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think that's a good observation, like that, just
Speaker 10: we're seeing this erosion of public trust in in reality.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And and some of that is like.
Speaker 10: Deliberate and political, uh, And a lot of it is
Speaker 10: just coming from like the fact that technology has enabled
Speaker 10: spam in in unprecedented new vectors and the fact that
Speaker 10: you can like that you can automate bombarding people with.
Speaker 3: Noise. Uh is is just kind of it's eaten away
Speaker 3: at all of us.
Speaker 10: Because it's like, how do I how do I trust anything?
Speaker 10: I mean so like and this is the thing is
Speaker 10: it's like, Okay, so I've been I've been keyed into
Speaker 10: this and thus paranoid for like a decade now. So
Speaker 10: if I get a message that's like, you know, like
Speaker 10: that from my bank, if it comes in text, then
Speaker 10: it's like I don't interact with the original thing that
Speaker 10: it came from. I then go like on the website.
Speaker 10: It's like all right, I like call my bank to
Speaker 10: to to inquire about it. Like never you know, it's
Speaker 10: like never communicate through the channel that you're first contacted in. Yeah,
Speaker 10: if you're if you're dealing with your bank, And it's
Speaker 10: like and it's like, but is that level of paranoia healthy?
Speaker 3: And it's like that takes that also takes effort.
Speaker 10: That means you have to have the foresight to be like,
Speaker 10: do not panic see the thing process it consciously go
Speaker 10: somewhere else, and like, you know, activate a different channel.
Speaker 10: You know, if they contact you through text, you know,
Speaker 10: go through like email or or like live chat. If
Speaker 10: they contact you through email, call them on the phone,
Speaker 10: not with the phone number that was at the bottom
Speaker 10: of the email, go to the website.
Speaker 3: And it's like, that's effort, that's effort.
Speaker 10: I don't even have that much energy in me sometime,
Speaker 10: and a lot of other people just like absolutely don't.
Speaker 10: And and that leads to like just exhaustion, vulnerability, you know,
Speaker 10: all of the things that feed into like paranoia, distrust,
Speaker 10: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's
Speaker 10: it's relentless. Like online advertising is basically useless at this point.
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, because like if you ran, if you ran
Speaker 10: a legitimate ad, you know, unless you have the money
Speaker 10: to run like a real proper you know, basically TV commercial. Yeah,
Speaker 10: like banner ads. I haven't I've seen like I don't
Speaker 10: know one legitimate banner ad for like a car company
Speaker 10: in the last year. Everything else is like a hearing
Speaker 10: aid scam or you know, liquefy your belly fat using
Speaker 10: the metaverse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it's this constant, like number one. It's
Speaker 1: led me to the situation where when I see an
Speaker 1: ad on social media in particular, but with any sort
Speaker 1: of like print in online ad, my assumption is it's
Speaker 1: probably a con right. Yeah, even if it's like oh wow,
Speaker 1: that's looks nice, well, that company is probably not gonna
Speaker 1: ship me that shirt right like, or it won't be
Speaker 1: right like, yeah, it'll.
Speaker 3: Be that photo is absolutely not from the company that
Speaker 3: is running this ad.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 10: You just you assume you distrust as a as a
Speaker 10: first measure. You see, you see a banner ad, you
Speaker 10: see the aesthetics of advertising, and the assumption is that
Speaker 10: it's like, ah, that's gonna you know, that's gonna get
Speaker 10: me to sign up for some subscription that's going to
Speaker 10: be buried in like recurring payments that yeah, I will
Speaker 10: never be able to cancel.
Speaker 9: And it's it's interesting because I, I mean, I'm not
Speaker 9: sure if this has been your experience, but like I
Speaker 9: can acknowledge I think I morally have to acknowledge like
Speaker 9: part of my success financially as a creator has been
Speaker 9: as a result of that.
Speaker 1: Because one of the things that we've seen in the
Speaker 1: the ad market is that text ads ads for print
Speaker 1: and shit do not work, do not function in any way,
Speaker 1: shape or form, and a lot of like random inner
Speaker 1: citt ads don't work well, but creator ads work well,
Speaker 1: and so there's money in it, right because people listen
Speaker 1: to like people have a degree of like, Okay, well
Speaker 1: this is like number one. It's just like the process
Speaker 1: of consuming a YouTube video or a podcast is different
Speaker 1: from an article. But like the ads work better because
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel the same as like the scrum of
Speaker 1: shit that like is getting pushed into every conversation you
Speaker 1: have on Twitter.
Speaker 10: A human that I can confirm existence has at least
Speaker 10: taken a look at this, like this is not at
Speaker 10: least like not a complete con or whatever, right, yeah,
Speaker 10: or if it is, then like then the host has
Speaker 10: also has also been kind of like by whatever, Like it.
Speaker 3: Ends up, yeah, we're in this together. Like it ends
Speaker 3: up being at least like a little.
Speaker 10: Bit sort of sort of distant distanced from that, you know,
Speaker 10: like the freakin' you know, by by a square foot
Speaker 10: of land in Scotland and become a lord and that
Speaker 10: whole thing is like a scam being run out of China. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 10: I mean one of the one of the kind of
Speaker 10: like weird ironies. For me is it's like, okay, so
Speaker 10: line goes up, came out, Well, the crypto ecosystem was
Speaker 10: in its like biggest ad blitz ever. You know, they
Speaker 10: had the Super Bowl ads coming up just like a
Speaker 10: month later actually like weeks like weeks afterwards, and so
Speaker 10: you know, like the vast majority of the like uh
Speaker 10: mideral ads that ran on that video were crypto dot Com,
Speaker 10: were ftx, were binance, and and the ad rates that
Speaker 10: they were paying, like the CPM that they were paying
Speaker 10: to run on crypto relevant videos was insane. Yeah, it
Speaker 10: was like it was like twenty eleven all over again.
Speaker 1: Twenty eleven was the only good time to be in
Speaker 1: digital content creation. There's like a lot that's unsettling about that.
Speaker 1: I think one of the things that is like most
Speaker 1: frustrated to me is the degree to which it's meant
Speaker 1: that we've we've gone backwards. Like there was this people
Speaker 1: who like study tech and kind of the way socialization
Speaker 1: around big tech works talk about this thing called the
Speaker 1: trow of disappointment, right, which is when you get a
Speaker 1: new technology, everybody we're in like the hype phase for
Speaker 1: like AI right now, right yeah, and then at a
Speaker 1: certain point it becomes clear which aspects of the hype
Speaker 1: were right, you know, the degree to which the technology
Speaker 1: is capable of doing things that kind of the evangelists
Speaker 1: were claiming, and to which extent the hype was wrong
Speaker 1: right in what areas is the tech always going to
Speaker 1: fall short? And that's called like the trow of disappointment
Speaker 1: when people start to reel and then you know things
Speaker 1: kind of are supposed to level after that's dot com
Speaker 1: is not in fact magic, Yeah, exactly exactly. You can't
Speaker 1: just keep shoveling money into this shit forever and in
Speaker 1: the hopes of exponential returns, or as a consumer, like
Speaker 1: at a point, I can remember the time when phones
Speaker 1: were exciting and I was, as especially as a journalist,
Speaker 1: like really interested every new year at like what new
Speaker 1: things they're capable of. And then after a couple of
Speaker 1: years it was like, well, every phone is like there's
Speaker 1: no difference. Now there's no excitement in getting a new phone.
Speaker 1: It's just like, well this my old phone is broken,
Speaker 1: so I need a new phone. But like I'm not
Speaker 1: like Wow, the new capabilities of this device, but I
Speaker 1: feel like there's another I don't even I don't really
Speaker 1: know what to call it, but there's also this kind
Speaker 1: of thing where we the Internet helps to create, or
Speaker 1: is the method through which is disseminated a new labor
Speaker 1: saving device, and then the scams reach such a density
Speaker 1: that the amount of labor you're able to save is minimal, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's I feel like there's like a that's
Speaker 1: at least one of the things that I've noticed, especially
Speaker 1: with like digital communication, with just communication in general. Right,
Speaker 1: my smartphone made it easier to stay in touch all
Speaker 1: the time, and now my smartphone it obviously I still
Speaker 1: carry the damn thing everywhere, but like my text messages
Speaker 1: are mostly scams, and my emails are mostly scams, and
Speaker 1: most of the calls that I get are scams.
Speaker 10: Like yeah, yeah, I've actually been finding myself drifting back
Speaker 10: towards email as a communication medium just because the spam
Speaker 10: filters are better, you know, mature and sophisticated and for
Speaker 10: the most part they work. Yeah, like they're yeah, it's
Speaker 10: like I can actually people can actually reach me by email.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 10: And you know, like there's there's a whole tech like
Speaker 10: really kind of the big thing is there's this whole
Speaker 10: technological element to it. And you know when you when
Speaker 10: you sort of pitched the idea of this conversation with
Speaker 10: the first two places, my brain went to where John
Speaker 10: Romulus Brinkley, the goat testicle doctor, yes, yes, yes, and
Speaker 10: pioneer of new media radio, and of course and Marshall mccluan, Yeah,
Speaker 10: you know, like those those were the those were the
Speaker 10: two things that my brain immediately was like, this is
Speaker 10: this is sort of like relevant to it, because like
Speaker 10: Brinkley was, he was a pioneer of radio.
Speaker 3: He he absolutely.
Speaker 10: Advanced sort of the format of like what radio could
Speaker 10: be and how you could use radio to not just
Speaker 10: extract money from people, but get them onto your side
Speaker 10: such that after they have given you their money, like
Speaker 10: they're they're not just they're not just your your victims,
Speaker 10: You're you're not just rolling into town and selling them
Speaker 10: some some snake oil and then like skid daddling as
Speaker 10: fast as possible, you have made them into your fans,
Speaker 10: into your followers. And you know the way that he
Speaker 10: did that by connecting his scam to like a sense
Speaker 10: of identity. You know that he wasn't just this fake doctor.
Speaker 10: He was also effectively a pastor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, people who had defend it after there was
Speaker 1: no longer any chance of them, like after it had
Speaker 1: been sort of proven that the thing that he was
Speaker 1: promising was not real, right like once there was no more.
Speaker 1: It's almost like you know that play The Music Man,
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, if you if you at home or not,
Speaker 1: Like I'm not a huge musical theater guy, that's a
Speaker 1: pretty famous play. But like the basic idea is this
Speaker 1: guy tells everyone come, this con man comes to town,
Speaker 1: tells everyone he's gonna make like a big band and
Speaker 1: raises money for it, and his plan is to like
Speaker 1: take the money and run. It's kind of what the
Speaker 1: Monoail Sketch and The Simpsons is based on to a
Speaker 1: significant extent. And if I'm remembering correctly, I shouldn't have
Speaker 1: brought this up, maybe because I'm actually not that knowledgeable
Speaker 1: about musical theater. But my recollection of the way it
Speaker 1: goes is that like he falls in lover some shit
Speaker 1: and feels bad, and you know, they wind up he
Speaker 1: winds up becoming not a con man, but like I
Speaker 1: think the modern version of that is he just he
Speaker 1: gets people to like adopt as a religion. The idea
Speaker 1: that these fucking trombones and uniforms and tubes and shit
Speaker 1: are on the way. He and like, you know, then
Speaker 1: they attack the local newspaper and string a journalist up
Speaker 1: in the center of town for telling them that there
Speaker 1: were ten years into this city, hasn't started a bay anyway, whatever, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so so.
Speaker 10: The other mccluan, you know, his famous postulate, the medium
Speaker 10: is the message, which remains a radical observation to this day,
Speaker 10: is just that it's this assertion that the medium itself
Speaker 10: is more important than any given message on it, or
Speaker 10: even the like the the combined weight of the individual messages. Now,
Speaker 10: I think in some regards mccluan kind of went like
Speaker 10: overboard with that because he said that it's like content
Speaker 10: doesn't matter at all, and it's like, ah, I think
Speaker 10: content matters. But the point still stands that like the
Speaker 10: medium itself, the like the invention of radio, the invention
Speaker 10: of television, the invention of the Internet, the invention of
Speaker 10: social media had a bigger, like has had a bigger
Speaker 10: impact than any given thing on it, because that's the
Speaker 10: thing that ultimately we warp our lives around, that we
Speaker 10: restructure our homes around, we restructure our physical environment around
Speaker 10: we restructure how we spend our days like that our
Speaker 10: time usage gets warped around the medium itself, and thus
Speaker 10: the medium becomes the portal for information to travel through.
Speaker 1: Absolutely and it also I mean, I think there's an
Speaker 1: extent to which that is true of kind of the
Speaker 1: way parasocial dynamics impact things like political belief. I think
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people, and I think there
Speaker 1: are a lot of things that people a lot of,
Speaker 1: especially when it comes to like radical politics, that people
Speaker 1: adopt because somebody who they had come to already like
Speaker 1: expresses those politics, right, and so something that maybe never
Speaker 1: would have gotten any purchase with them suddenly is able
Speaker 1: to get purchase with them because like a dude that
Speaker 1: they or a lady that they had a parasocial relationship
Speaker 1: express this kind of stuff. And it just it's not
Speaker 1: that it like hacks their brain. It's not that like
Speaker 1: people are you know, little robots. It's that, uh, this
Speaker 1: is kind of the way influence works. It's the same
Speaker 1: reason why like your you like, people often wind up
Speaker 1: believing similar things to their parents, or similar things to
Speaker 1: their friends group. You know, if your friends are all saying,
Speaker 1: like you know, on the positive end of things. If
Speaker 1: you're if you grow up like like I did. I
Speaker 1: don't know about your high school, but if.
Speaker 3: You are like I like that. I was just thinking
Speaker 3: the same thing.
Speaker 10: Like my vocabulary in high school was yeah, yeah, there
Speaker 10: is there's a slur that starts with F that was
Speaker 10: like every third word out of not just my mouth,
Speaker 10: but everyone I knew.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 1: The movie super Bad captures this to a significant degree
Speaker 1: of fidelity. To be honest, that's just the way shit was.
Speaker 1: And like the early aughts, and then you know, the
Speaker 1: people I hung around with, suddenly they were more people
Speaker 1: who were openly queer. And suddenly people weren't talking that way,
Speaker 1: and I stopped talking that way. It's just how people are.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just from like somebody that I admired being like, hey, yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't say that. I don't think that's cool. Oh
Speaker 3: that is kind of fucked up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then you know, and it's it's not an
Speaker 1: like yeah, I can I can go to my the
Speaker 1: subreddit for my show and see people being like yeah,
Speaker 1: I started getting interested in like anarchist politics and history
Speaker 1: and stuff because of something Robert said. And I don't
Speaker 1: think that's bad, because I think anarchist's history and politics
Speaker 1: are useful even if you're not an anarchist, right, it's
Speaker 1: valuable to understand that history. It's often undertold. But this
Speaker 1: is the same dynamic. This thing which has benefited me
Speaker 1: and to some extent benefited some of the ideas that
Speaker 1: I think are are should be more widely known. This
Speaker 1: is also why there's more nazis, right, like it's it's
Speaker 1: it's that's every where, which way and so so mccluan.
Speaker 10: You get these new mediums, you get the Internet, you
Speaker 10: get the subdivisions of the Internet, like you get social media,
Speaker 10: you get email, you get you know, instant messaging and whatnot.
Speaker 10: And because those technologies have this gravitational effect around them
Speaker 10: that alters the trajectory of how we structure our lives,
Speaker 10: they become because they are potent, because they are valuable
Speaker 10: communication vectors. They become prime targets for grift. And the
Speaker 10: thing is is that all of these technologies that have
Speaker 10: accelerated communication, you know, people have long been pointing out
Speaker 10: like the negative impacts of social media and just like
Speaker 10: the the effect on like self esteem, self perception of
Speaker 10: just being exposed to other people's curated idealized version of
Speaker 10: themselves so constantly. You know, it's like it's like that's
Speaker 10: already you know, impactful in potentially negative ways, and that's
Speaker 10: when you're dealing with like real people. And but then
Speaker 10: you add on to that that it's like, oh, you
Speaker 10: go on Instagram and like you can be following a
Speaker 10: bot and not even know it. You know, you're you're
Speaker 10: getting you know, and the algorithm is going to float
Speaker 10: this stuff. And so particularly if you're looking down these
Speaker 10: like these addictive infinite scroll feeds, you know, you don't
Speaker 10: have the filter of pre interaction to to gauge those things.
Speaker 10: So like so like I follow you on Twitter, and
Speaker 10: I know that if I see, like, oh, Robert Evans
Speaker 10: has retweeted this thing, that it's like okay, so like
Speaker 10: he's taken a look at it and and it's been
Speaker 10: through like the filter, the filter of his brain, and
Speaker 10: so I can probably just like, you know, take my
Speaker 10: trust in that thing up like one notch, right, But
Speaker 10: if I'm just like scrolling down the like the algorithmically
Speaker 10: he rated like this is what our computer has determined
Speaker 10: is similar to things that.
Speaker 3: You have already looked at. It's it's just it's so
Speaker 3: much more fraught.
Speaker 10: But there's it's really easy to be complacent and just
Speaker 10: be like, oh, I trust this thing, I trust this platform.
Speaker 10: And that's where we get into the trow of disappointment.
Speaker 10: Is ye this like I trust these algorithm. These algorithms
Speaker 10: do a really good job of like, oh, I watched
Speaker 10: Dan and so the YouTube algorithm introduced me to like
Speaker 10: a bunch.
Speaker 3: Of other really good creators.
Speaker 7: Cool.
Speaker 10: Uh oops, I watched one video on flat Earth and
Speaker 10: now my my recommends are full of like COVID denihialism
Speaker 10: and anti maskers and you know, the Trucker movement and
Speaker 10: and all of these other like wedges to just sort
Speaker 10: of slowly rot my brain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like it it's it's like kind of the
Speaker 1: way our parents told us, or Dare or whatever told
Speaker 1: us drugs worked, you know when we were little kids,
Speaker 1: where someone's like, oh, you want some pot. Here's some
Speaker 1: straight up heroin, right, Like you want some of it
Speaker 1: is too, like you want some crack cocaine? No, and
Speaker 1: I it is you know you were talking about, like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you see you follow someone and you see them share something,
Speaker 1: and if they're a trusted source for you, you know,
Speaker 1: it bumps it up a notch and even that, you know,
Speaker 1: that's the way it like it works for me as well.
Speaker 1: But there's a degree to which I find it like problematic,
Speaker 1: especially because like we all fuck around on the internet too.
Speaker 1: I had a thing go crazy viral recently where like
Speaker 1: someone someone posted an obviously photoshopped image of like a control,
Speaker 1: like a Logitech controller at the bottom of the of
Speaker 1: the sea and was like, look the controllers survive, and I, like,
Speaker 1: I shared it to make a joke, right, And the
Speaker 1: joke was that, like, well, the joke was that, like, well,
Speaker 1: the controller we're going to find out was one of
Speaker 1: the more functional things about that terrible sub and that
Speaker 1: was and I posted underneath it this obviously this is
Speaker 1: not a real image, guys. But like then I saw
Speaker 1: like I wound up finding it went. The post that
Speaker 1: I did of it went so viral that like it
Speaker 1: wound up like screen captain in some different Reddit communities
Speaker 1: for people to talk about. And they it was only
Speaker 1: the first post, not the one where I was like,
Speaker 1: obviously this is fake, and like it was a joke,
Speaker 1: you know, it was it was a it was a
Speaker 1: it was a ship post.
Speaker 3: We were Banton online.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah. But also I'm like, I wonder how
Speaker 1: many people now think that literally there's a Logitech controller
Speaker 1: that they found at the bottom of the sea because
Speaker 1: of that? What is what are the ethics now of
Speaker 1: like making a making a jib a jape as like
Speaker 1: somebody who's got like a following, like where does that
Speaker 1: come into? And like I don't know, and I don't
Speaker 1: I'm certainly not like clear on it because I seem
Speaker 1: to be incapable of not shit posting. I spent too
Speaker 1: much time on something awful as well. But it's so
Speaker 1: it's so hard.
Speaker 3: To give up. I miss it. I miss the days
Speaker 3: when I could just make like tasteless jokes on on
Speaker 3: on Twitter and you know, a couple hundred people would
Speaker 3: see them and go like that's funny. Uh.
Speaker 10: And now it's like, ah, if if I'm a little
Speaker 10: too ironic, someone's gonna be like, oh crap, are are
Speaker 10: you like that happened?
Speaker 3: It's like, no, no, that did not happen. Not happened.
Speaker 3: This is this is fake. I am. I am telling
Speaker 3: you lies. For it was a bit, but it was
Speaker 3: a bit.
Speaker 1: I was doing a bit, but no, and that's like
Speaker 1: you know Something Awful, which is kind of the the
Speaker 1: the digit It's like the oh crap, now I've forgotten
Speaker 1: a very basic science team, you know, the big, the
Speaker 1: big puddle of boiling goop. That life came out of
Speaker 1: the primori. It's the primordial, primordial of digital culture. That's
Speaker 1: what Something Awful was.
Speaker 9: It was a forum website that gave birth in various ways,
Speaker 9: some direct and some indirect, to four Chan, to Reddit,
Speaker 9: to Twitter culture, you know, to all of these different
Speaker 9: to anonymous, to all of these different like things have
Speaker 9: a you can trace a lineage back to Something Awful.
Speaker 9: And the motto of that website, as written by the
Speaker 9: terrible person who founded it, was the Internet makes you stupid.
Speaker 3: And I.
Speaker 1: At the time what that kind of meant was. And
Speaker 1: if you're younger, or if you just weren't very online
Speaker 1: in the late nineties early two thousands, you may not
Speaker 1: remember this long period, but there was a fairly long
Speaker 1: period where the default assumption in regular society was whatever
Speaker 1: happens online doesn't matter, right, like, it can't matter.
Speaker 10: It's probably fraudulent, it's almost certainly like made up. You
Speaker 10: can't you can't trust anything online and real.
Speaker 1: People are not on the internet, right, Like it's kids,
Speaker 1: it's nerds, but like, you know, guys who run banks
Speaker 1: aren't online. You know, Like the idea that the richest
Speaker 1: man in the world would spend all of his time
Speaker 1: shit posting was absurd, Like, so.
Speaker 3: He really should be busier than he had surfably, is he?
Speaker 1: Certainly it seems like it, although I guess so, shit,
Speaker 1: I I if I'm being fair, But yeah, it's there's this, uh,
Speaker 1: this degree to which digital culture is still very much
Speaker 1: a huge chunk of it. Like we all want it
Speaker 1: to not matter. We all want a place where we
Speaker 1: can just shit post and bullshit because shit posting and
Speaker 1: bullshitting comes out of like the very same impulses that
Speaker 1: like determine a lot of how we interact with like
Speaker 1: our friends, right, you know, we all need some times
Speaker 1: where you can just sit down, have a couple of
Speaker 1: beers or whatever, and like say shit with your with
Speaker 1: your buds, you know, and it's not it's not being recorded,
Speaker 1: it's not going up any everywhere forever. You can just
Speaker 1: kind of like talk. This is the it's a it's
Speaker 1: a field almost. Social experimentation is a huge part of
Speaker 1: maturity of growing up becoming a person. Uh, and I
Speaker 1: think we all get kind of there. There's a degree
Speaker 1: of like the accessibility of the Internet that makes that
Speaker 1: impossible to entirely get over, even though it is demonstrably untrue.
Speaker 1: What happens on the Internet matters quite a lot, and
Speaker 1: you can have a real significant you can influence your
Speaker 1: own life in very negative ways by saying the wrong
Speaker 1: thing on the Internet at the wrong time.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I mean lots of people have observed just this fact
Speaker 10: that it's like on Reddit, you can you're not on Reddit,
Speaker 10: I mean on Reddit too, but you know, on Twitter,
Speaker 10: like once, you know, once a month, Twitter elects some
Speaker 10: ten follower anime profile pick with who with with a
Speaker 10: single tasteless joke and makes it the full crim of reality.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's like that's a and the thing, I
Speaker 3: don't think.
Speaker 10: This is actually that far off topic, just because like
Speaker 10: it's this warping of reality, this warping of like what
Speaker 10: is real, what is trustworthy, what are the like impacts
Speaker 10: of things, And the fact that like you know, ten
Speaker 10: follower account can become can become international news, Yeah, has
Speaker 10: to sit alongside the endless bombardment of dick pills and
Speaker 10: global leaders, Like I had this joke that I was
Speaker 10: trying to formulate over the weekend of like World War
Speaker 10: two with Twitter, where it's like, you know, just a
Speaker 10: joke hinging on the idea that some like follower bought
Speaker 10: would observe this like, ah, it's like, you know, two
Speaker 10: posts in a row, Like it's like the USSR has
Speaker 10: rolled into Berlin, Stalin has unfriended the president. I hope
Speaker 10: this doesn't mean anything, you know that it's like that
Speaker 10: you have, like you have international politics happening in the
Speaker 10: same space as fake international politics, as the same space
Speaker 10: as just like this endless bombardment of you know, of
Speaker 10: curated reality, fictionalized reality, unreality and spam, and no one
Speaker 10: knows what's real anymore, no one knows what to trust,
Speaker 10: and the instinct and a lot of people is to
Speaker 10: just give up trying to parse the difference. And that
Speaker 10: makes us like increasingly vulnerable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think a big part of what's what's
Speaker 1: kind of at the core of the problem here is
Speaker 1: is what you've said here makes us vulnerable. The degree
Speaker 1: to which this can be weaponized is really significant. Like
Speaker 1: the you know, one of the things that we saw
Speaker 1: that I think is kind of low key a significant
Speaker 1: moment in sort of info conflict. Shit is this last
Speaker 1: this weekend? Last weekend from you know what we're talking now,
Speaker 1: there was a mutiny by the Wagner mercenary forces in
Speaker 1: Ukraine and Southern Russia against the Russian government, or at
Speaker 1: least that's what it appears to have been now, right,
Speaker 1: this is Russia. A lot of this is really weird.
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to say we don't we certainly
Speaker 1: don't know entirely like what happened there, like what's going
Speaker 1: on there? But a couple of things happened very quickly.
Speaker 1: For one, folks on the right, and there were also
Speaker 1: a lot of kind of like shit had left people
Speaker 1: who adopted this too, decided that liberals were cheering on
Speaker 1: the head of Wagner Evgeny Pregoshin because like they believed
Speaker 1: he was a reformer and that like they'd all thought
Speaker 1: this guy, who was like objectively a piece of shit
Speaker 1: and a fascist is like they're cheering him on because
Speaker 1: they hate Putin so much and they've convinced themselves that he's,
Speaker 1: you know, going to fix Russia. And he's like, no, no,
Speaker 1: I didn't see that, Like look I love calling people
Speaker 1: out when they have shitty takes, specifically on this specific war,
Speaker 1: because I've been covering it since twenty fourteen. But like,
Speaker 1: I didn't see that, and none of the people talking
Speaker 1: about how liberals were doing this provided any evidence of it.
Speaker 1: And it happens all the time, right Sometimes people will
Speaker 1: like take a post that has like thirty likes and
Speaker 1: be like, this is what the left is saying. But
Speaker 1: like with this, there was even less. Like I didn't
Speaker 1: see a single post where someone was like, Pregosion's gonna
Speaker 1: like fix you know, corruption in Russia or whatever. No
Speaker 1: one was saying that they just invented that this was
Speaker 1: going on. And it part of it is that, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the way Twitter works now made it a
Speaker 1: lot easier for dis info to spread from this thing.
Speaker 1: Like there was very famously a guy who is an
Speaker 1: absolutely a con artist just started sharing a bunch of
Speaker 1: videos from there with like bad commentary that was inaccurate,
Speaker 1: and Elon Musk was like, this is the guy I've.
Speaker 9: Come to trust about. You can say Elon Musk, Yeah,
Speaker 9: we can say Elon Musk. I don't know, it's a problem, Dan, So.
Speaker 10: You beat me to Elon Musk because I was going
Speaker 10: to say this like the con artist was, but then
Speaker 10: it turns out that he was just retweeting that guy.
Speaker 10: It's like he got of course he got involved anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it's the I don't think this the
Speaker 1: solution was not because we lived, you know, our parents
Speaker 1: and grandparents lived to the day where most people would
Speaker 1: be like, well, you know, folks who are in politics
Speaker 1: maybe need to care about this. I might want to
Speaker 1: get the broad strokes of it, but like random people,
Speaker 1: you know, shouldn't be influencing what's going on with these
Speaker 1: international relations. And that's how you get shited, like the
Speaker 1: Dulles brothers carrying out coups all over the world on
Speaker 1: behalf of the US government, where most Americans are.
Speaker 9: Like, what did we do in Guatemala? I didn't know
Speaker 9: we had guys in Guatemala and that wasn't great. But
Speaker 9: also this new thing where if you are a personality,
Speaker 9: if you are in media, then you are obliged to
Speaker 9: be a part of every big thing that happens everywhere,
Speaker 9: even if you are demonstrably incompetent at that and everyone
Speaker 9: is demonstrably incompetent at that.
Speaker 3: Past a certain point you know. Yeah, and that's been
Speaker 3: Oh boy has that. That's been a lot to deal with.
Speaker 1: And it going back to the original thing that started
Speaker 1: this conversation. That's part of how so many of these
Speaker 1: cons perpetuate is that, like, people are only competent, including
Speaker 1: famous people, including people with followings in limited areas, and
Speaker 1: once you get out of your area of competence, it's
Speaker 1: easy to get fooled. And if there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who trust you because of the things you were
Speaker 1: right about, then they can very easily get fooled when
Speaker 1: you get fooled.
Speaker 10: One of the big hazards there is that, and this
Speaker 10: is a long standing observation, is that huckster's con artists
Speaker 10: are going to be more willing than anyone else to
Speaker 10: pretend to.
Speaker 3: Be up to date on it.
Speaker 10: They have no compunction about being It's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 10: I know, I'm an expert on submarines and Ukraine and
Speaker 10: Russia and Belarus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 6: So they're.
Speaker 10: The reason it's a con man is because it's a
Speaker 10: confidence man. Because they get your confidence because they act
Speaker 10: confidently and give you reason to give you reason to
Speaker 10: trust them, and they have no moral compunction about lying
Speaker 10: to you. Uh, and and they are always going to
Speaker 10: be fast with the take, faster with the confidence statement,
Speaker 10: faster with the solution, faster with the with with a
Speaker 10: call to action to buy their book or dick pills.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it's the And often I think part
Speaker 1: one of the things that's made this all so much
Speaker 1: harder to catch and so much more durable is that
Speaker 1: it's it used to be as obvious. You used to
Speaker 1: be able to see like, Okay, well, this guy's a
Speaker 1: con man. But like, I'm not a person who can
Speaker 1: be conned by someone selling diet pills. That's not my vulnerability,
Speaker 1: so I immediately recognize this guy as a con man.
Speaker 1: Or I am not a person who can be conned
Speaker 1: by Christianity stuff because I'm not a Christian, So I'm
Speaker 1: I'm not vulnerable to this con man. And now so
Speaker 1: much the cons are downstream of the following and of
Speaker 1: the fame, and so a lot of people are getting
Speaker 1: taken in by conman. And maybe you know the fact
Speaker 1: that person's putting in a link for their there's supplements,
Speaker 1: you know, on every viral post. You don't buy their supplements,
Speaker 1: but they'll come up with something else for you once
Speaker 1: they get you in, once you're in the funnel, or
Speaker 1: even if they never convince you to buy anything, if
Speaker 1: you're sharing their content, that's bringing more people into the funnel,
Speaker 1: you know, and that really wasn't the case. That wasn't
Speaker 1: the case with you know, you go back ten years
Speaker 1: talking about like Young Living right, or some other like
Speaker 1: multi level marketing company where they're selling you know, essential
Speaker 1: oils with fraudulent health claims. They weren't getting random people
Speaker 1: to spread their business without paying for shit.
Speaker 3: And now you can do that.
Speaker 1: If you're a con man and you've already got followers
Speaker 1: because you bought a bunch and you're you're on the Ukraine, shit,
Speaker 1: you just grab whatever videos and say whatever about them,
Speaker 1: you know, frame them in whatever way is likely to
Speaker 1: get people to share them the most. Then suddenly you
Speaker 1: gain two thousand, three hundred thousand followers in the space
Speaker 1: of a night or two, and your ability to scam
Speaker 1: people and get money out of them has increased several times.
Speaker 1: You know, the con is downstream of the of the platform, right,
Speaker 1: so you know that's you get this guy, maybe he's
Speaker 1: shilling thing X or thing. Why he's got a couple
Speaker 1: you know, whatever different con he has, But regular people
Speaker 1: can be in the in the business of spreading his platform,
Speaker 1: of increasing his profitability, even if they're not vulnerable to
Speaker 1: the con. Maybe they're not the kind of person who's
Speaker 1: ever going to buy weight loss pills or supplements or
Speaker 1: whatever kind of thing. But if this guy starts, you know,
Speaker 1: sharing all of these videos on the fighting in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: you know, at a moment when it happens to be
Speaker 1: the opportune moment to do that, and they go crazy viral, well,
Speaker 1: then that guy is able to triple his following and
Speaker 1: you know, and have people who are not interested in
Speaker 1: his con spread his shit, which gets him followers, which
Speaker 1: brings more traffic to whatever the money generating part of
Speaker 1: the con is.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's it's all a sales funnel or just anxiety.
Speaker 10: We have built our society into just like a giant
Speaker 10: nested series of sales funnels. Yeah, I don't know, Dan,
Speaker 10: that's bound to be a solid foundation. I don't see
Speaker 10: if you go wrong. That seems like that will go
Speaker 10: well for us. How do we get any ideas on
Speaker 10: how to fix it? Or should we just should we
Speaker 10: just state a problem and then run away? I mean
Speaker 10: the easy thing to do would be to restore trust
Speaker 10: in our public institutions.
Speaker 3: You know, if we could.
Speaker 10: Have sort of like I don't even want to say,
Speaker 10: like a unifying cause, but just a sense of common
Speaker 10: of like shared commonalty and and trust in like our
Speaker 10: local our local society, you know, strong like not necessarily
Speaker 10: strong families, but like strong family units constructed or natural
Speaker 10: or however you want to like define our constructors, but
Speaker 10: like local with like good infrastructure around us so that
Speaker 10: our physical spaces are you know, appealing and comfortable to
Speaker 10: live in and and provide us a sense of like
Speaker 10: enrichment and fulfill you know, the easy stuff. Yeah, just
Speaker 10: just fix infrastructure, fix society, fix media, and uh and
Speaker 10: then I think we're good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's that's good. So if we fix everything,
Speaker 1: then we won't have any more problems. That's great. We're
Speaker 1: on the same page now. I mean it is really
Speaker 1: like and this is there's it's also there's also this
Speaker 1: kind of like problematic element of when you're like, well,
Speaker 1: we want to like a problem is that there's zero
Speaker 1: trust in institutions objectively a problem because it means that
Speaker 1: when say the CDC is like, hey, guys, there's this,
Speaker 1: there's a plague, we should probably do this, and this
Speaker 1: and this. It immediately becomes a culture war thing, and
Speaker 1: so you can't actually you can't actually confront serious problems
Speaker 1: the way that you need to be able to confront them.
Speaker 1: It's just not possible anymore. Likewise, Like, but the other
Speaker 1: issue is that, like, well, for a significant chunks of
Speaker 1: the population, there's never been any good reason to trust,
Speaker 1: you know, the institutions because you know, they're marginalized groups
Speaker 1: and whatever. You know, when the institution trust was higher,
Speaker 1: like the government was fucking them in this way and
Speaker 1: that way, and yeah, you know that's also so I wonder,
Speaker 1: like I think there's a significant extent to which we
Speaker 1: need new concepts of like what an institution is and
Speaker 1: should be, Like we need It's it's such a ground
Speaker 1: floor problem because like I don't know, we're never getting
Speaker 1: back to a point where Americans trust the CDC. Like
Speaker 1: that's just not going to happen, you know, Like whatever
Speaker 1: the way forward is on us having less the overcoming
Speaker 1: the anti vax anti science shit around medicine, it's not
Speaker 1: getting everyone to love the CDC. You know, that's just
Speaker 1: not ever going to happen again.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: And part of the complexity here is that it's it's
Speaker 10: really easy to sort of say that, you know, it's like, Okay, well,
Speaker 10: the solution is like strong central institutions, and it's like
Speaker 10: that's not that's not correct at all either, because like
Speaker 10: I mean, the my go to example for that would
Speaker 10: be that it's like look at look at the LDS,
Speaker 10: look at Mormons. They have a very very strong central
Speaker 10: institution that provides this like social anchoring point for a
Speaker 10: lot of their lives, and yet Mormon communities are incredibly
Speaker 10: vulnerable to affinity fraud and MLM's you know, like Utah
Speaker 10: Salt Lake is like the locus of MLM culture, and
Speaker 10: so like it's not the sort of like strong man like, ah,
Speaker 10: this is why we need strong like you know, strong.
Speaker 3: Leaders is is not.
Speaker 10: Isn't the answer in its own way, even if it's
Speaker 10: a very tempting sort of like answer to gravitate towards.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's I don't know. I don't actually know.
Speaker 1: Part of the problem is that like there are little solutions, right,
Speaker 1: there are little things that you can do, stuff like
Speaker 1: advocating for you know, a more functional idea of like
Speaker 1: more a more functional legal definition of like what an
Speaker 1: auto dialer is and what counts as like illegally sort
Speaker 1: of like flooding phone lines with with with cons and
Speaker 1: stuff or restricting you know, the ability of people like
Speaker 1: bill collectors and stuff to utilize you know, the phone
Speaker 1: system in some of the ways that they do, like
Speaker 1: the and that can make stuff better. Just like you know,
Speaker 1: at a certain point, we will develop tools that mitigate
Speaker 1: some of the harm AI is doing in the con space.
Speaker 1: Some of its ability to automate and push shit to
Speaker 1: people at scale will get reduced at a certain point.
Speaker 1: That will happen, right, because it happens with everything. You know,
Speaker 1: AI is not unique.
Speaker 6: This is the It's it's a.
Speaker 1: You've heard the you've heard the red Queen hypothesis, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a way of like for it's kind
Speaker 1: of like a way of looking at evolutionary theory. There's
Speaker 1: this this point in Alice in Wonderland where you know,
Speaker 1: the Red Queen kind of like traps Alice in this
Speaker 1: situation where like she's got to keep running as fast
Speaker 1: as she can. But it's like a situation like a
Speaker 1: conveyor belt sort of situations. No matter how hard she runs,
Speaker 1: she never gets ahead, right, And that's kind of the
Speaker 1: way that like the evolutionary arms race works, right, Like
Speaker 1: you know, one one animal develops a defense against a
Speaker 1: predator and the predator develops a way around it, and
Speaker 1: like the the the like, that's kind of the best
Speaker 1: case scenario for how we adapt to cons I think actually,
Speaker 1: like technology just moves too fast now for us to
Speaker 1: to be able to keep up, right, Like we're not
Speaker 1: We're not just standing in place. We're consistently following behind
Speaker 1: and I don't know, I don't know what we do here, uh, I.
Speaker 10: Mean yeah, so like there will there will be technol
Speaker 10: technological solutions to specific manifestations. I mean a big one
Speaker 10: like in there, like to not to not ban is
Speaker 10: that you know the uh uh at a, the legal system,
Speaker 10: the governments, Like governments need to do something about the
Speaker 10: robocalling and the text messages because they're rendering a vital
Speaker 10: piece of like synek infrastructure unusable. Yeah, people don't trust
Speaker 10: their phones anymore, and that's that's bad because it means
Speaker 10: they stop using it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 10: It's like there's yeah, there's very real like consequences and
Speaker 10: we need to be able to trust that we're talking
Speaker 10: to people who aren't just trying to get our money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, Well, Dan, you got anything you want to
Speaker 1: plug at the end of this. Here your YouTube channel,
Speaker 1: Folding Ideas everyone should check out if you have not already.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the YouTube channel that's going to be the big one.
Speaker 3: I'm still on.
Speaker 10: I'm on socials at Foldable Human, though I'm trying to
Speaker 10: wean myself off of them because they're broken and being
Speaker 10: broken on purpose and they're bad for my soul. So
Speaker 10: I still I'm addicted, So I still keep coming back,
Speaker 10: but I'm a lot less active than I used to be.
Speaker 1: Oh sorry, I didn't hear you. I was too busy
Speaker 1: getting anxious because of a thing on Twitter.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Dan, thank you so much for coming on today.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate your thoughts on all of this. I'm
Speaker 1: looking forward to your next video, your next investigation, whatever
Speaker 1: that happens to be. Folks should check out. If you haven't,
Speaker 1: Line goes up your documentary on NFTs. You should check
Speaker 1: out entrepreneurs is I think what you called your Mickelson
Speaker 1: Twins documentary. Yeah, check out everything Dan has done. Thank you, Dan,
Speaker 1: And that is the episode you can all go home
Speaker 1: now and deal with the fact that your bank information
Speaker 1: just got stolen by somebody in Macedonia. Hey, we'll be
Speaker 1: back Monday with more episodes every week from now until
Speaker 1: the heat death of the Universe.
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