Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 2: can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome, We could happen. Wow, Okay, we're just both doing
Speaker 3: the intro all right. I wanted to be the intro.
Speaker 4: I was saying that wokness has won the Super Bowl.
Speaker 3: Ah, because okay, okay, hold on, this is my this
Speaker 3: is this is my moment. I've got the soapbox, this
Speaker 3: is it could happen here. Everyone has the Taylor Swift conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Wrong.
Speaker 3: Taylor Swift is completely uninvolved in the NFL's conspiracy to
Speaker 3: make sure Patrick Mahomes wins every fucking game. All of
Speaker 3: these fucking all these fucking bogged chuds or fucking Johnny
Speaker 3: come Late doesn't care about football fans. Real fans know
Speaker 3: if you look at every fourth quarter of every fucking
Speaker 3: Chiefs game before Taylor should have got involved. It looks
Speaker 3: exactly the same. All right, this has been it can
Speaker 3: happen here. We may or may not cut that.
Speaker 4: I can't believe that the liberal Taylor Swift, Joe Biden's
Speaker 4: puppet Taylor Swift and Travis Peiser Kelsey stole the Super
Speaker 4: Bowl from the good Christian people of San Francisco, the
Speaker 4: only bashtate of conservatism left in this country.
Speaker 3: It is so incredibly funny, Like, okay, so it's so
Speaker 3: curtly funny to me, A that they're not mad at
Speaker 3: Patrick Mahomes and b that somehow okay, the Chiefs, Like,
Speaker 3: imagine you're a Chiefs fan, right, you have been for
Speaker 3: like thirty years racist, you have been doing a cult
Speaker 3: and I quote the Tomahawk chop, like you are the
Speaker 3: most racist person in your entire small town. And then
Speaker 3: all of these fucking dipshits online, all these fucking right
Speaker 3: dipshits immediately and like all of you guys are like
Speaker 3: fucking pussy woke libs. And it's just like, like, imagine
Speaker 3: being that racist for that long only to be immediately
Speaker 3: tossed aside.
Speaker 4: It is kind of baffling that in like the country's
Speaker 4: national divorce overwokeness. Somehow the Liberals get to keep football
Speaker 4: like this is that's so bizarre that that now football
Speaker 4: is seen as like a liberal cuck thing to enjoy
Speaker 4: among the largest swaths of of Republicans, at least at
Speaker 4: least online Republicans.
Speaker 3: It's really funny, fascinating. This is how we're going to
Speaker 3: beat them in the fucking civil war because we're going
Speaker 3: to take the college campuses, which means that we're going
Speaker 3: to have the only watchable footballs. These bastards are going
Speaker 3: to be reduced to watching fucking high school games. Like speaking,
Speaker 3: speaking of watching football. Yeah, so the thing this episode
Speaker 3: is actually about is if you watch the Super Bowl
Speaker 3: or like, God help you, you've tried to use YouTube
Speaker 3: without an ad blocker, a thing I do not recommend
Speaker 3: at all. You have seen ads for Temu with it's
Speaker 3: TMU or Temu Temu. Okay, yeah, it has the absolute
Speaker 3: the absolutely oh good god, yeah, this this app This
Speaker 3: one This one's bad, folks, This one's I I went
Speaker 3: insane and have been spiraling for like two weeks now
Speaker 3: writing this, so you know. So it has the absolutely
Speaker 3: dog shit tagline shop like a billionaire.
Speaker 4: Wait, that's its tagline. Yeah, oh that's weird.
Speaker 3: It's funny. The everything is they only have one ad, righty,
Speaker 3: it's not just super Bowl like it's It's been on
Speaker 3: YouTube for like ages. But yeah, so this begs the
Speaker 3: obvious question, what on earth is this thing? And the
Speaker 3: answer is that Temu is the American version of a
Speaker 3: Chinese shopping app called pindu. You will hear people pronouncing
Speaker 3: it pin duo duo. That's because they're hacks and frauds.
Speaker 3: So but I'm just gonna call it so. The company,
Speaker 3: the parent company for both Temu and Pindua Doua, changed
Speaker 3: their name to PDD, so I'm just gonna call it
Speaker 3: that two. So yeah, PDD is China's worst tech giant.
Speaker 3: They have worked multiple of their employees to death. They
Speaker 3: probably also use slave labor. Those are unrelated stories. So today,
Speaker 3: welcome to the abyss. This is the story of Tamu.
Speaker 3: I have stared into it, and now you motherfuckers are
Speaker 3: coming with me and staring into it some more.
Speaker 4: Well, it's more like we're listening into it because it
Speaker 4: doesn't really have.
Speaker 3: A visual No, no, you're staring into it. Okay, you
Speaker 3: you will get visuals. I will say to this bullshit,
Speaker 3: I will I will start hallucinating in my office. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Timuo is the American version of PDD. PDD it
Speaker 3: roughly translates two together more savings together, so it's like
Speaker 3: a co op. Actually, it probably sells stuff from co ops. Okay, huh.
Speaker 3: So PDD is the second largest shopping app in China
Speaker 3: behind Ali Baba. Alibaba is China's like version of Amazon. Basically,
Speaker 3: they're the second largest app. Ali Baba reportedly has eight
Speaker 3: hundred and sixty sixty three million users per year. That's
Speaker 3: a lot of users. Yeah, that's that's multiple us is.
Speaker 3: PDD has been claiming that they have seven hundred and
Speaker 3: forty million monthly users. It's unclear if that's exactly true,
Speaker 3: but it's probably around there, which again, that is twice
Speaker 3: the entire population of the US. So this is a
Speaker 3: fucking unbelievably massive company. And to understand what this what
Speaker 3: this company is, and how it became probably the worst
Speaker 3: of the Chinese tech giants, we have to go back
Speaker 3: to the very beginning. And the very beginning is this
Speaker 3: guy named Colin Huang. Huang is a weird guy. I
Speaker 3: don't know he's he's he's the Chinese version of the
Speaker 3: American tech bro. So he's you know, he's he's a
Speaker 3: recognizable like asshole who started a giant company, but he's
Speaker 3: not exactly the same. So he So he graduates from
Speaker 3: like college in China, and in the early two thousands
Speaker 3: he goes to the University of Wisconsin to get a
Speaker 3: master's degree in computer science, which it like it should
Speaker 3: be illegal for anyone to get degrees in computer science.
Speaker 3: Terrible stuff, zero out of time. I should know how
Speaker 3: to use computers.
Speaker 4: I can't believe you'd be believe in the status legal
Speaker 4: system to prevent people from learning.
Speaker 3: Fin social sanctions. We're going to make it morally illegal.
Speaker 3: You're going to get chased out by people with the
Speaker 3: rocks on the street if you try to type something
Speaker 3: they get to a computer. So okay. So he's at
Speaker 3: the University of Wisconsin, and while he's there, he basically
Speaker 3: like posts his way into becoming the pro basically the
Speaker 3: protegee of Chinese tech billionaire Duan Youngping. This is an
Speaker 3: interesting relationship. Duan is like a very very influential Chinese
Speaker 3: tech tech billionaire. He gets every single article calls him
Speaker 3: the Warren Buffett of China. I I don't fucking know,
Speaker 3: but like you know, for like for examples, like how
Speaker 3: big this guy is like Vivo and like the one
Speaker 3: plus company the mixed phones, those are both like spin
Speaker 3: offs of like things that he built. But yeah, so
Speaker 3: you know, so this is this is an interesting relationship
Speaker 3: for Huang because and it's also interesting because like the
Speaker 3: narrative around Huang and PDDs that they're like these like
Speaker 3: hungry upstarts, like clunging their way up from nothing, and
Speaker 3: they can like go after Ali Baba and the Chinese
Speaker 3: like tech market wars because they're like they're ferocious, they
Speaker 3: have like nothing to lose, and like they're rich and
Speaker 3: fat Ali Baba and like nah, like this guy has
Speaker 3: had the backing of like a bunch of really powerful
Speaker 3: Chinese tech guys, like from the absolute beginning. Another part
Speaker 3: of like the Huang lore is that Dwan like took
Speaker 3: him to this really famous dinner where Warren Buffett was
Speaker 3: offering if if you donated like six hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: thousand dollars a charity, he would like eat dinner with
Speaker 3: you and like talk with you about like finance stuff.
Speaker 3: And so Dwan like buys this thing to go to
Speaker 3: dinner with Warren Buffett and brings Huang with him, and
Speaker 3: he Huang, Who's Who's Huang's the founder of PD again,
Speaker 3: so he gives him credit for like this, this like
Speaker 3: financial wisdom that he got here. Here's just from an
Speaker 3: interview with side Jim. This is a Chinese outlet. What
Speaker 3: Buffett said is actually very simple and can be understood
Speaker 3: by my mother. Perhaps what this meal meant most to
Speaker 3: me was that I realized the power of simplicity and
Speaker 3: common sense. Human thoughts are easily polluted. When you make
Speaker 3: a judgment on something, you need to understand the backgrounds
Speaker 3: and facts. After understanding it, what you need is wisdom,
Speaker 3: but whether you have the courage to use reason when
Speaker 3: facing facts use common sense to judge. Common sense is
Speaker 3: obvious and easy to understand. But our various biases and
Speaker 3: personal interests form due to growth and learning blind us.
Speaker 3: So this is like entrepreneurial bullshit. But you know this
Speaker 3: is apparently this is like a big formative like thing.
Speaker 3: Like ah, he like got the wisdom of word Buffett,
Speaker 3: and he listened to it. It's just like what there's
Speaker 3: the thing I think is more interesting is that he
Speaker 3: talks about what in the same interview what Dwan taught him.
Speaker 3: Dwan also taught me a common sense thing in business.
Speaker 3: Price fluctuates around value. The price will definitely fluctuate, but
Speaker 3: as long as your value increases, the final price will
Speaker 3: be close to the value. This common sense allows you
Speaker 3: to focus on increasing the intrinsic value of the company
Speaker 3: and not be overly concerned about price fluctuations in the
Speaker 3: capital market. And this, to me is fascinating because the
Speaker 3: first half of that is like orthodox Marxist price theory,
Speaker 3: like in like in Marxist price theory, right, the whole
Speaker 3: thing about it is that price is determined by value.
Speaker 3: The value of a commodity is determined by like the
Speaker 3: number the amount of labor hour is socially necessary to
Speaker 3: produce it, and eventually, like price, sort of like fluctuation,
Speaker 3: the price can change. It's not price isn't like identical
Speaker 3: to like socially necessarily like labor time, but it like
Speaker 3: fluctuates abround it. And so that's like the first part
Speaker 3: of it, which is the Marxist thing, except this is
Speaker 3: like China, like modern like twenty twenties China. So Marxist
Speaker 3: value theory has been degraded to like, make your company
Speaker 3: valuable and don't worry about stock prices and market fluctuations.
Speaker 3: It'll work out in the end.
Speaker 4: So true, so true, based based.
Speaker 3: I mean, the funny thing is this is actually better,
Speaker 3: like you get the advice than like most of the
Speaker 3: shit that like American CEOs use. But it's also, oh god,
Speaker 3: what has happened to my poor value theory, my beloved,
Speaker 3: my beloved theory of how capitalism works has been turned
Speaker 3: into this weird tech bullshit, a tragedy. So meanwhile, back
Speaker 3: in two thousand and four, Dwan convinces Hwang to turn
Speaker 3: down a bunch of these jobs. So he's he's like
Speaker 3: a computer science graduate, right, and he's being headhunted by
Speaker 3: like a bunch of the sort of like mainstream tech
Speaker 3: companies at the times, like Oracle, Microsoft, and they're giving
Speaker 3: they want to give him like an enormous amount of money,
Speaker 3: but his mentors like, no, no, no, don't take this
Speaker 3: tech job, take the Silicon Valley tech job. Join Google.
Speaker 3: And so he joins Google. And this is this is
Speaker 3: another like very famous things like ah, he wanted to
Speaker 3: join the like up and coming hungry tech startup. But
Speaker 3: here's the thing, so Google. He joins Google in two
Speaker 3: thousand and four, which is kind of early, but Google
Speaker 3: also goes public that year, so you know, this is
Speaker 3: up working really well for him because he gets a
Speaker 3: bunch of stock options that those stock options are worth
Speaker 3: millions of dollars. That's a lot of Also, some of
Speaker 3: the startup capital for like the later companies he founds
Speaker 3: comes from that. And Huang really quickly like works his
Speaker 3: way up the ranks. But he so he gets put
Speaker 3: in charge of like launching Google in China, and this
Speaker 3: is a fiasco, does not work at all. Huang blames
Speaker 3: like too much oversight from people at the senior leadership
Speaker 3: at Google, which I can get, but I mean it
Speaker 3: just doesn't work at all. Like he starts as at
Speaker 3: two thousand and six. By twenty ten, Google has pulled
Speaker 3: out of China entirely, like they're not they're not trying
Speaker 3: to push the fucking search edge because nobody uses it.
Speaker 3: So okayv having having like unbelievably bombed out of his
Speaker 3: first tech job, he he he does the like entrepreneur thing.
Speaker 3: He's he starts like a couple of these like shopping
Speaker 3: like online shopping companies they do like fine, and he
Speaker 3: sells them, but they don't like do incredible and so okay.
Speaker 3: So this is the part that a lot of the
Speaker 3: accounts of him leave out, like the sort of like
Speaker 3: fawning accounts leave out. Is the next thing that he does,
Speaker 3: which is he sets up this like really shit game
Speaker 3: studio and they make like a bunch of like absolutely
Speaker 3: unbelievably weird and horny mobile games. So they make like
Speaker 3: Mafia City, Joy Spade, Texas, Hold'm Poker. They had this
Speaker 3: game called Girl ex Battle that is like you assemble
Speaker 3: a harem of girlfriends and then have them fight other people.
Speaker 3: Instead of like absolutely have you played any of these
Speaker 3: Oh no, absolutely not. I refuse. I think I've actually
Speaker 3: seen Mafia City ads before, but it's like, like it's
Speaker 3: the absolute most dogshit like bargain basement. I guess they're
Speaker 3: kind of pre gotcha games.
Speaker 4: I was just wondering how far your dedication to research
Speaker 4: went here, but.
Speaker 3: Not far enough. Look, here's the thing, my dedication of
Speaker 3: research went exactly far enough that I refuse to install
Speaker 3: any of these apps for reasons that we'll get into
Speaker 3: next episode. I was like, absolutely not. In fact, this.
Speaker 3: Doing this research actually caused me to uninstall chaw Bus,
Speaker 3: which is like a Chinese food delivery app, because I
Speaker 3: realized that it was constantly running in the background to
Speaker 3: like to drive up. It's like user engagement metrics.
Speaker 4: That is completely fair, although if you were even more dedicated,
Speaker 4: you could have bought a burner phone to download all
Speaker 4: these apps onto and tested on that.
Speaker 3: So that's true, but I no, I refuse to let
Speaker 3: that shit connect to my internet. Like, under no circumstances.
Speaker 4: You can go to a Starbucks, you can go to
Speaker 4: a see I've just thrown out options here.
Speaker 3: I probably could have done this, but no, absolutely not. Actually, well,
Speaker 3: it's actually really hard to download the Chinese version of
Speaker 3: this for reasons that we'll get into the next episode.
Speaker 3: All right, all right, but okay, So, like he's running
Speaker 3: this shitty game company and he has a genuinely brilliant
Speaker 3: and terrible insight, which is that she sees how addictive
Speaker 3: like mobile gaming and how addictive like micro transactions are,
Speaker 3: and he goes, oh shit, what if I put this
Speaker 3: in a sh popping gap except that because that's the
Speaker 3: reasonable way to explain it. But like, the thing he
Speaker 3: actually did was like why are okay? His thought his
Speaker 3: actual thought process was why are we not selling game
Speaker 3: games are all like advertised in men, right, Like these
Speaker 3: the apps that he's making are like weird, horny stuff
Speaker 3: for guys. Why are we not making games of women?
Speaker 3: Which is reasonable, But then his follow up was, uh,
Speaker 3: effectively women be shopping, and he was like, so trying,
Speaker 3: and we'll make a shopping thing. It's just like we'll
Speaker 3: make we'll make we'll make an app to make shopping
Speaker 3: into a game, and so and one of the things
Speaker 3: he's he's also been doing one of the like the
Speaker 3: kind of like search engine optimization scams, where like he
Speaker 3: just keeps making different shopping like shopping websites and hoping
Speaker 3: that one of them will like climb in the search rankings.
Speaker 3: But eventually he hits on a like a combination of
Speaker 3: using the like dog shit like addictive mobile gamification stuff
Speaker 3: from his mobile games in a like in an online
Speaker 3: shopping app, and he hits on that as the idea
Speaker 3: for a new shopping app. And this is what turns
Speaker 3: into PDD. Now do you know what didn't turn into
Speaker 3: PDD and is in fact better?
Speaker 4: Hopefully these ads that are not for Temo we better
Speaker 4: not get a fucking temo ade.
Speaker 3: Hopefully, I it's actually possible. It's oh god, well, careful
Speaker 3: what you wish for, and we're back. So PDD doesn't
Speaker 3: start in the way that normal tech app things do,
Speaker 3: which is to say that PDD starts as an online
Speaker 3: fruit vendor. Now, okay, if you know anything like.
Speaker 4: A like a farmer's market online like what what?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Okay, So if you know anything about how like
Speaker 3: Amazon worked, right, So Amazon goes from books to a
Speaker 3: bunch of stuff to food. PDD does this backwards. They
Speaker 3: start in food. Now, this is very weird. And the
Speaker 3: reason this works, and the reason that PDD starts as
Speaker 3: a marketplace for rural farmers to self roofs and vegetables
Speaker 3: like directly to consumers is because unfortunately of the structure
Speaker 3: of the Chinese agricultural market, which we have to talk
Speaker 3: about a little bit. So something I talked about. God,
Speaker 3: I don't know how many years ago this was now,
Speaker 3: but like a while back I did an episode about
Speaker 3: this company that poisons like three hundred thousand babies by
Speaker 3: making poisoned milk in China. And one of the things
Speaker 3: though that was a Bassard's episode one of the things
Speaker 3: I talked about in that episode was how the Chinese
Speaker 3: agricultural market is incredibly fragmented. We don't have time to
Speaker 3: do a full history of rural decollectivization here, but the
Speaker 3: upshot of it is that it results in a lot
Speaker 3: of farmers working really small plots of land who are
Speaker 3: forced to sell their goods to a series of middlemen
Speaker 3: who make the actual profits. And because these farmers have
Speaker 3: like a tiny amount of land and grow stuff on
Speaker 3: or they have like two cows, right, they don't have
Speaker 3: the financial leverage to negotiate with like the middleman, the
Speaker 3: middle bank can just set prices on them. And and
Speaker 3: the product of this is you have a really really
Speaker 3: fragmented market where there's just like all of these like
Speaker 3: unbelievably large numbers of these really small sellers, and part
Speaker 3: of and you know, and this and this, this locks
Speaker 3: all of these people into the middlemen. The middle man
Speaker 3: can set the prices. The middlemen set the prices incredibly low,
Speaker 3: and they're locked in because they don't have another distribution
Speaker 3: method because the only thing they can do is sell
Speaker 3: to these like agricultural midleman companies. The companies like above them,
Speaker 3: like your grocery companies are like actual milk company who
Speaker 3: packages the milk. They love this stuff because it means
Speaker 3: that they don't have to like pay the farmers. They
Speaker 3: can just buy like the goods directly. They don't have
Speaker 3: to deal with like employment stuff, and they don't have
Speaker 3: to deal with quality control too because they can pass
Speaker 3: that on to the middlemen. Now, something else we talked
Speaker 3: about in our anti work Lying Flat episodes like three
Speaker 3: years ago, is that China has these like far like
Speaker 3: rural influencers. That was it was like a huge wave
Speaker 3: of these people that sort of like image you might
Speaker 3: actually have seen you've seen the videos of just like
Speaker 3: someone in rural China like cutting wood or something. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: totally totally. Yeah. So those those things, we were like, Okay,
Speaker 3: the US catches up the stuff on the Chinese internet
Speaker 3: like usually several years after like happened there, and that
Speaker 3: makes sense. Yeah. And the next thing in line after
Speaker 3: the original sort of ural influencer waves was these like
Speaker 3: was this wave of like farmer influencers and these people
Speaker 3: they're using like a different Chinese like it's like another
Speaker 3: it's like another tich Dot clone basically, and they're doing
Speaker 3: the thing that they're doing is okay. So you you know,
Speaker 3: you have your regular influencer who's trying to sell you
Speaker 3: like the image of rural life, right, and then you
Speaker 3: have the farmer influencers who are trying to sell you
Speaker 3: the image of rural life and also their potatoes. And
Speaker 3: this is this is like the marketing strategy. This is
Speaker 3: this is how you can skip the middlemen and like
Speaker 3: actually sell your fruit is by becoming an influencer. Which
Speaker 3: it's so cursed. It's so cursed. I hate it so much.
Speaker 4: That is kind of dystopian. It's just the constant, the
Speaker 4: constant performance.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But the problem is that the alternative to it
Speaker 3: is even worse because PDD realizes this and that they're
Speaker 3: looking at these markets and they're like, hold on, these
Speaker 3: farmers are already selling their goods for like next to nothing.
Speaker 3: If we come in, pay them a bit better, use
Speaker 3: our text or like our tech money to our text
Speaker 3: startup money. They have an enormous amount of tex startup money.
Speaker 3: If we use that text startup money to give them rebates,
Speaker 3: we can do things that like you know, we can
Speaker 3: not charge them commission, right, And if we can do this,
Speaker 3: we can turn around and sell these fruits for like
Speaker 3: zero dollars. Zero dollars is slight exaggeration, but when I like,
Speaker 3: they're selling these fruits for an are unbelievably cheap, Like
Speaker 3: we are talking ten mangos for a dollar and thirty
Speaker 3: nine cents, which is like a steal, outrageous, right, And
Speaker 3: you know this is this is incredibly successful. What they're
Speaker 3: doing basically is a giant version of the Amazon gambit. Right,
Speaker 3: they're eating shit and taking losses to sell all of
Speaker 3: this stuff, although they're losing less money than you'd think,
Speaker 3: Like the actual price of these goods is already so low,
Speaker 3: and we're gonna come back to that too, because that's
Speaker 3: an aspect of what's so messed up about this whole thing.
Speaker 3: But you know, so they eat shit that takes some losses,
Speaker 3: but they really really quickly build market share. So this
Speaker 3: is a very very short smart strategy because it's not
Speaker 3: just in the sort of real market. China has a
Speaker 3: shit ton of like small and medium sized producers that
Speaker 3: make a whole bunch of things, or like guy with
Speaker 3: one factory person doing like craft production stuff. And PD's
Speaker 3: plan is to pull together all of these sellers like this,
Speaker 3: this whole all all of these people from different markets
Speaker 3: into just one giant, like one giant like market that
Speaker 3: they control now importantly, unlike Amazon, and this is like
Speaker 3: ali Baba too, because Ali Baba works on a fairly
Speaker 3: similar model to well, okay, in a lot of ways,
Speaker 3: is a similar model to Amazon. It's not identical. But
Speaker 3: unlike those two companies, PDD doesn't run their own logistics network.
Speaker 3: It's all it's all third party. Like the shipping and
Speaker 3: all that shit is done by is done through third
Speaker 3: party logistics stuff. So like their shipping companies, they don't
Speaker 3: own warehouses like that stuff, you know, what they're what
Speaker 3: they do instead is they use the shipping companies and
Speaker 3: warehouses that were developed in like the earlier parts of
Speaker 3: the Chinese tech boom, and they're able to just use
Speaker 3: that infrastructure to you know, to to ship all their
Speaker 3: stuff around. And this means that the company is extremely
Speaker 3: lean in the sense that like they don't have a
Speaker 3: lot of physical assets like they know, and this means
Speaker 3: they don't have to deal with labor costs or like
Speaker 3: the logistics problems of actually having to like you know,
Speaker 3: of actually having employees packing boxes and making things they're
Speaker 3: just an app. It's it's it's well, they're they're like
Speaker 3: the original model of Uber in some sense, right where
Speaker 3: like you don't like Uber doesn't fucking own or wasn't
Speaker 3: supposed to be owning cars. I mean, I guess Uber's
Speaker 3: a bad example because they were trying to do the
Speaker 3: automated car thing, but that was a fiasco. But you know,
Speaker 3: the thing that PDD makes is just an app, but
Speaker 3: it's it's an incredibly addictive app, like it's it's it's
Speaker 3: a shopping gotcha game, which is like maybe the worst
Speaker 3: sentence in the history of the human language.
Speaker 4: And this was like this was around the time, like
Speaker 4: I want to say, like tennish years ago, give or
Speaker 4: take a few years, where like micro transactions were becoming massive,
Speaker 4: like all, like it took over gaming, It took over
Speaker 4: so many parts of just being online, It took over apps,
Speaker 4: like it just it just infected everything, and we luckily
Speaker 4: kind of pushed back on some some of that. We're
Speaker 4: still not all of it, but like there was definitely
Speaker 4: some some degree of like, oh well, we are simply
Speaker 4: not going to be buying all of these games if
Speaker 4: it's just full of like micro transaction bullshit, and then
Speaker 4: Fortnite took over and we're back and well again.
Speaker 3: But whatever. Actually, it's it's pretty funny. China kind of recently,
Speaker 3: the Chinese government like did a crackdown on like loop
Speaker 3: boxes and stuff because they were some of some of
Speaker 3: the some of the regulations they put in place a nuts,
Speaker 3: but some of it was like you can't sell loop
Speaker 3: you can't sell gambling the children. Yeah, and this caused
Speaker 3: like it's funny because they're kind of walking it back
Speaker 3: now because it hurt their gaming market so much. They're like, well, shit, okay,
Speaker 3: we have to we need those kids. Yeah, like that's
Speaker 3: the only way to make money. Yeah, but you know,
Speaker 3: but but PDDs like brilliant. They're sort of like the
Speaker 3: the the absolutely evil shit that they realized is like
Speaker 3: we can just we can just do this for shopping.
Speaker 3: And so like the moment you log in, right, there's
Speaker 3: like these flash deals and there's these group deals and
Speaker 3: this is the thing that the group deals are the
Speaker 3: thing that that PDD is based around. So the way
Speaker 3: it works is you get these group deals and so
Speaker 3: you get a link and you send it to people,
Speaker 3: and the more people click on the link to buy
Speaker 3: the thing, the cheaper it becomes. So, and then you
Speaker 3: send the links over we Chat, which is the curve
Speaker 3: of like catch all Chinese messenger or like social media
Speaker 3: app that everyone uses to like talk to their boomer parents.
Speaker 3: And so the thing that your boomer parents are doing
Speaker 3: is they're sending these shopping links to each other. And
Speaker 3: you know, and the the more like the more people
Speaker 3: click on these links, the cheaper the good becomes. So
Speaker 3: what was the more people are buying it, the more
Speaker 3: people you rope into buying stuff from this app, the
Speaker 3: cheaper it is, and the more deals you get, you
Speaker 3: get things like they'll just like give you like quote
Speaker 3: unquote free money if you spend enough money in like
Speaker 3: basically like in the same way that like micro transaction
Speaker 3: works right where it's like, you know, in a game,
Speaker 3: it's like if you play the x number of games,
Speaker 3: will give you like in game currency, whereas this is
Speaker 3: just like will literally give you money, you'll like send
Speaker 3: things to you. God, that sounds like hell, it's awful.
Speaker 3: It's so bad, and very importantly right, it's this giant
Speaker 3: loop that it not only gets people to spend money,
Speaker 3: but it gets people to bring their friends in because
Speaker 3: you have to bring your friends in to get the
Speaker 3: group deals, so everything gets cheap and cheaper, and the
Speaker 3: tactics they use are absolutely wild. They get in trouble
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty one for this promotion called Bargain for
Speaker 3: Free Goods, where you'd get a link and the claim
Speaker 3: was that if enough people clicked it, you would get
Speaker 3: the good for free. And so this guy tried to
Speaker 3: do it, but he couldn't. He can only get it
Speaker 3: two point nine percent of the cost. So we sued
Speaker 3: them for false advertising and the claim got thrown out,
Speaker 3: but the company had to pay him like money, so
Speaker 3: like this is the kind of shit that they're doing.
Speaker 3: WeChat actually like blocked their links for a while because,
Speaker 3: you know, cause like some enormous portion of messages suddenly
Speaker 3: we're just like these people sending these spam links to
Speaker 3: like every single person they know, trying to get them
Speaker 3: to buy like a fucking toothbrush so that your toothbrushes
Speaker 3: can be cheaper. Right. But eventually we Chat kind of like,
Speaker 3: you know, we Chat gives up and they start like
Speaker 3: allying more with PDD. I mean, there's a whole there's
Speaker 3: a whole complicated story. I'm not gonna get to hear
Speaker 3: about like the like China's really really ferocious like tech
Speaker 3: company wars because like in the US, you know, like
Speaker 3: our tech monopolies are relatively stable, right, Like they've sort
Speaker 3: of portioned up the Internet into or and like distribution
Speaker 3: and stuff into just like basically like local monopolies, right,
Speaker 3: Like like Google is like the only search engine company.
Speaker 3: There's there's basically no competition there, right, Like there's some
Speaker 3: competition in terms of social media, but even then it's
Speaker 3: like and it's not like the Chinese version words like
Speaker 3: unbelievably ferocious competition and sometimes they cooperate, but yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's really fierce. And PDDs. You know the thing
Speaker 3: that they do, right is they pair this app stuff
Speaker 3: with direct to consumer sales, and PDT is really the
Speaker 3: pioneers of this. She In and okay, so I I
Speaker 3: she In is that fucking fast fashioned clothing company. I
Speaker 3: learned today that it is actually pronounced she In because
Speaker 3: the name of the thing is she In, like sa
Speaker 3: she she and then she's like she's in. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: hate it so much. I'm so sad. I I mean
Speaker 3: I feel slightly better because like I kept trying to
Speaker 3: read it in Chinese. It's like this doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 3: Like it's just bafflely it doesn't and it's like, oh no,
Speaker 3: it's because it's in English. Yeah, But BDD is the
Speaker 3: precursor of Shean's like strategy, right, like they're they're the
Speaker 3: originators of this, except they're you know, they're what they're
Speaker 3: doing basically, it's it's a fact. It's kind of like
Speaker 3: drop shipping, but you know, the sales are being pushed
Speaker 3: by these these sort of gamified app stuff, and this
Speaker 3: means they have this like real time supply management system
Speaker 3: that tells producers like like they can like they go
Speaker 3: down and like tell their sellers like what to produce
Speaker 3: more of based on like app sales. So you know,
Speaker 3: like the way it works is you start off with
Speaker 3: a small it's like a small number of things, and
Speaker 3: then you get ads to push that those like fucking
Speaker 3: toothbrushes or whatever. And then as like sales wramp up,
Speaker 3: you ramp up productions. You can ship people more toothbrushes.
Speaker 3: Now do you know who else will ship you toothbrushes
Speaker 3: that will probably be better quality than the PDD tooth pressure?
Speaker 4: No, we can we can guarantee all of our sponsors
Speaker 4: have only the top quality toothbrushes. That is, that is
Speaker 4: what we call the cool Zone guarantee. Go do toothbrush
Speaker 4: dot com and put in the keyword MIA for a
Speaker 4: ten percent off on your TOLF of the lines.
Speaker 3: Please don't do this, So all right, D and D
Speaker 3: just it takes rural China by storm. Sure it sounds convenient,
Speaker 3: like yeah for some panil and it's really really cheap,
Speaker 3: is the thing, right, And the thing about rural China
Speaker 3: is you're dealing with a level of poverty that like
Speaker 3: is like almost like it's not unimaginable in the US,
Speaker 3: but it's like unbelievable, Like it's something that like like
Speaker 3: we don't really have it in the same way because okay,
Speaker 3: so like an example of the kind of stuff we're
Speaker 3: dealing with, right, Like, so, China's GDP per capita in
Speaker 3: like the sixties was lower than hades. Right, this is
Speaker 3: an unbelievably poor country. And there are there are places
Speaker 3: in real China that are still like basically not quite
Speaker 3: that poor, but are like unbelievably poor in ways that like,
Speaker 3: you know, we're talking about people who are like people
Speaker 3: who are doing kind of well in these regions, are
Speaker 3: making seven hundred dollars a month. Like that's like on
Speaker 3: a good month, right, they're making seven hundred dollars a month,
Speaker 3: which is that's eight four hundred dollars a year. And
Speaker 3: that's that's that's if you have twelve good months, right,
Speaker 3: if you have normal months, it's more like six thousand
Speaker 3: dollars a year. And so you know, and when when
Speaker 3: when you're in a place where people are using stuff
Speaker 3: like this, and again that's someone who like has a
Speaker 3: job full time is making like six thousand dollars a year,
Speaker 3: and so people use PDD to shop because it's incredibly
Speaker 3: cheap and it's also addictive. And when I say cheap,
Speaker 3: like we're talking like two dollars for a pair of
Speaker 3: jeenes cheap, right, And like that's that's also like cheap
Speaker 3: and you on too. It's like unbelievably low prices.
Speaker 4: I mean this, this kind of this kind of reminds
Speaker 4: me a little bit of that recent Tucker Carlson. Russia
Speaker 4: is great actually media stunt. Oh yeah, look, all of
Speaker 4: these groceries only cost one hundred dollars in American currency,
Speaker 4: and it's like Yeah, because they're getting paid like two
Speaker 4: hundred dollars like a week, like they're not they're not
Speaker 4: taking home very much money, so all of the costs
Speaker 4: like slide very differently, Like you can't just compare this
Speaker 4: one to one.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Also, the thing I will say about PDD is
Speaker 3: that their prices are unbelievably low by Chinese standards, like
Speaker 3: this is this is also why they look so low
Speaker 3: by American standards too, is that these are these are
Speaker 3: low by Chinese standards, and because they're so low by
Speaker 3: Chinese standards, like people, people buy stuff from it. The
Speaker 3: cost of this is that the stuff they're selling is
Speaker 3: really cheap. I mean, the other cost is the unbelievable
Speaker 3: exploitation of the Chinese working class. But you know, we'll
Speaker 3: get to that. We'll get to that next episode. The
Speaker 3: main cost of the stuff being cheap is that the
Speaker 3: stuff they buy like sucks ass like literally literally this
Speaker 3: only the CEO talks about is that their gambit is that, Okay,
Speaker 3: we'll ship you ten mangos for for like a dollar
Speaker 3: thirty nine. Two of them will be rotten, but that
Speaker 3: means you still get eight mangos. That we're still unbelievable,
Speaker 3: Like that's the thing, and like, you know, the stuff
Speaker 3: that they get like sucks. Here's from the Chinese media
Speaker 3: outlet sixth Tone, which has done a lot of good
Speaker 3: coverage of PDD. They they used to be better. They're
Speaker 3: like the kind of like left like stay media outlet.
Speaker 3: They used to be better, and then their staff got
Speaker 3: run out because they they went they walked too close
Speaker 3: to the line. So but here's here, here's what here's
Speaker 3: they've done a lot of they because the most of
Speaker 3: the PDD coverage came from before their people got run out.
Speaker 3: So quote. Following the I p O, a number of
Speaker 3: purchase Series A purchases allegedly bought from PDD we're shared online,
Speaker 3: including a hair dryer that broke out in flames after
Speaker 3: it was switched on, a power bake. Hey, that also
Speaker 3: happens in America. Don't worry.
Speaker 4: I know you're like, I know you're like, oh, I'm
Speaker 4: missing out on all these great deals, all these great products.
Speaker 3: Not true. This could also happen in the States.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 3: There's another one where they had a power bank and
Speaker 3: someone ordered it and they came and it was just
Speaker 3: four triple A batteries and a container.
Speaker 4: That's funny. That's good, that's a good bit. That's yeah,
Speaker 4: that's pretty good.
Speaker 3: You know, there's stuff like like one of one like
Speaker 3: sixth time was interviewing people in real areas you bost off.
Speaker 3: They were like, yeah, I brought it. I bought a
Speaker 3: fishing rod for like two bucks and it was broken.
Speaker 3: I bought a pair of shoes and it literally fell
Speaker 3: apart after three days. Sot me.
Speaker 4: I have complicated feelings on this because I think there
Speaker 4: is a place for gambling in purchases. If if, for example,
Speaker 4: on Amazon, if every fourth product you bought there was
Speaker 4: a completely like defective, like purposely like lower quality version,
Speaker 4: I think that would be a good for the world.
Speaker 4: We would have probably we would have less people using Amazon,
Speaker 4: and you would kind of get slightly punished. So I
Speaker 4: think this actually could be a good thing if used correctly,
Speaker 4: where we where we purposely sabotage every like fourth person
Speaker 4: who buys anything online.
Speaker 3: But the problem is that people fucking love gambling like that.
Speaker 3: That's that's just gonna make people do more because now
Speaker 3: there's more of a downside if we're trying to get
Speaker 3: your fucking deal. So I mean, and this is the thing, right,
Speaker 3: Like you're rolling the dice every time every time you
Speaker 3: take a you.
Speaker 4: Order like an election generator online and they send you
Speaker 4: a double a. Oh my god, it'd be so funny funny.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, now, hey, you too can now shop
Speaker 3: on Temu. You too could experience getting shipped just fucking bullshit.
Speaker 4: You order some nice Hawaiian coffee and they send you
Speaker 4: some like camameo. Oh god, devastating.
Speaker 3: So this this whole thing of you buy stuff that
Speaker 3: sucks or doesn't work. And the fact that PDD starts
Speaker 3: in rural China means that, like initially there's this like
Speaker 3: real class element about how who uses PDD. It's seen
Speaker 3: as like the site for poor and gullible people who
Speaker 3: don't care about quality. Yeah, it's like it's the place
Speaker 3: where lower class people shop. Yeah sure, yeah, And well
Speaker 3: that stops being true kind of because everyone starts using it.
Speaker 3: But Comma, the other problem they have is that it
Speaker 3: is absolutely rife with kind of fit products. Right after
Speaker 3: they go public in twenty eighteen, there's like a Chinese
Speaker 3: state investigation into the sale of their kind of fit product,
Speaker 3: and pdd's response is like, Wow, we're just a marketplace,
Speaker 3: anyone can sell on it. How are we supposed to
Speaker 3: control who makes counterfeit stuff? But this is this is
Speaker 3: actually like it gets to a kind of like cultural
Speaker 3: thing where you know, what is one of the things
Speaker 3: that happens in world trying. This happens in a lot
Speaker 3: of places where like almost everyone is wearing like clothes
Speaker 3: that are like knockoff brand stuff because it's just the
Speaker 3: cheapest clothes and like that's that's the kind of clothes
Speaker 3: that's being made that you can afford if you're you know,
Speaker 3: like you're you're you're you're trying to sort of make
Speaker 3: it like in World China, so you get like, you know,
Speaker 3: you have like entire villages where you walk in and
Speaker 3: everyone's wearing like like niaky and like a dietis or
Speaker 3: something like it's like nice. This stuff gets really wild,
Speaker 3: really fast. So here's from that that Sedging interview with
Speaker 3: Colin Huang again. So here's here's a catching it. It's
Speaker 3: a Chinese media outlet, so they're their interviewer. One of
Speaker 3: the best selling products on PDD is a bottle of
Speaker 3: Affidas priced at twenty seven point eighty on that is
Speaker 3: like three almost four dollars with a total of four
Speaker 3: point seven million orders sold. Do you think this medicine
Speaker 3: might be real? Here's the CEO. First, of all, medicines
Speaker 3: are healthcare products sold on pdd's platform must have national
Speaker 3: certification marks. Secondly, the gross profit margin of healthcare products
Speaker 3: is already extremely high, just like facial mass. Do you
Speaker 3: think the two hundred yond facial max is useful? So again, again,
Speaker 3: what is happening here is that like they have sold
Speaker 3: like one point four point seven million orders of of
Speaker 3: like a fake aphrodisiac. And when the CEO is asked
Speaker 3: about his response, it's like, well, but who could really
Speaker 3: say if any health products work?
Speaker 4: Like, wow, that is a pretty funny bit. I mean,
Speaker 4: it sucks that people, the poor people are losing money, but.
Speaker 3: Well, to be fair, be fair, pretty fine if you
Speaker 3: are trying to like buy an afrodisiac, I don't really care. Sure,
Speaker 3: sure yeah, but like you know, so part of it,
Speaker 3: like they're selling like fake hack medicines. This is like
Speaker 3: the Chinese version of the American like grift, like right
Speaker 3: wing grift like supplement market.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, it's the brain pills to help your
Speaker 4: libido or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but this also gets a lot darker. One of
Speaker 3: the there's one of the stories that kind of like
Speaker 3: made the rounds of Chinese social media that six Tone
Speaker 3: reports on is that people found PDD like advertising like
Speaker 3: sleep medicine as date rape drugs. Ah yeah, fucking bleak.
Speaker 3: There's like fuck and that's the thing. There's like no
Speaker 3: fucking content moderation on this, right, so people just do
Speaker 3: that shit and it really sucks. But on their hand,
Speaker 3: none of the constant bad press like stop pdd's rise, right,
Speaker 3: and now it is time to leave Colin Huang soil.
Speaker 3: Until about phil twenty twenty, pdd's rise was synonymous with
Speaker 3: its CEO, Colin Huang, But in mid twenty twenty, Huang
Speaker 3: resigned as the CEO and kind of like exited public
Speaker 3: life effectively, like not entirely. We kind of like he
Speaker 3: like took he like he resigned a CEO, and then
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one he resigns as like a chairman of
Speaker 3: the board and he's like, you know, he's doing this
Speaker 3: like philanthropic stuff instead, and he's you know, he's doing
Speaker 3: his like post CEO life thing, right, And we've never
Speaker 3: gotten a good answer as to why he stepped down,
Speaker 3: but I have a theory, and I think my theory's
Speaker 3: pretty good. And also it goes into have I, Garrison,
Speaker 3: have I explained to you the thing about I don't
Speaker 3: remember if I've done it? On this show talked about
Speaker 3: the Chinese paid a loan app thing, M I don't think.
Speaker 3: So okay, So all right, we are now going to
Speaker 3: do We're gonna close this episode out on one of
Speaker 3: the most absolutely insane moments of Chinese internet history. So okay.
Speaker 3: One of the things that happens in the Chinese tech
Speaker 3: market in the late twenty tens and early twenty twenties
Speaker 3: is this mass proliferation of app based payda loans. This
Speaker 3: is one of the worst things I have ever seen.
Speaker 3: What effectively happens is that around like twenty fourteen twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: a bunch of Chinese tech companies, especially like delivery companies
Speaker 3: like sort of like China's version of grub, Public, Door,
Speaker 3: Dash and Ali Baba, They're like Amazon equivalent, gets in
Speaker 3: it too, and these people realize that they can start
Speaker 3: their own payment platforms. So basically like all these companies
Speaker 3: are making their own version of PayPal. But then they
Speaker 3: realize that they can use these platforms to give out
Speaker 3: Payda loans so that you can in one app take
Speaker 3: out a payday loan to order delivery, or you can
Speaker 3: in one app take out a payday loan to buyshit
Speaker 3: from Amazon. With the payday loan, ten Cent gets in
Speaker 3: on it, so you can buy Mitro transactions with your
Speaker 3: payday loans. This, as you might expect, Spiral's out of
Speaker 3: control immediate lee on the interest race on these loans
Speaker 3: are enormous, and this means that they make an unbelievable
Speaker 3: amount of money. And so apps just start like shoveling
Speaker 3: these loans in people's faces the momently long onto apps.
Speaker 3: But the thing is like this doesn't stop with just
Speaker 3: like the big shopping apps right by twenty nineteen. It's
Speaker 3: not just you know, like when I say this is
Speaker 3: going to apps right like you're fucking Like imagine if
Speaker 3: Twitter was trying to offer you bad A loans, like
Speaker 3: that's the main point of Oh that that might happen,
Speaker 3: but that might actually maybe based on the plans for
Speaker 3: the Twitter to become the banking app. Yeah, well that's
Speaker 3: actually the funny thing. So so Elon Musk really really
Speaker 3: likes China and part of the reason for this is
Speaker 3: that you know, a bunch of Tesla factories are in
Speaker 3: shing John part of the reason for this, like he's
Speaker 3: trying to like recreate the like weed chat environments, but
Speaker 3: everyone doesn't, right, Like people don't actually like it. But
Speaker 3: the thing is, the other thing that he really loves
Speaker 3: is the number of hours that you can get people
Speaker 3: to work in China that you can't really in the US.
Speaker 3: So we'll get to that fucking next episode. But you know, okay,
Speaker 3: so like like your your fucking Twitter is trying to
Speaker 3: sell you paid a apps, But then it gets the
Speaker 3: point where your fucking flashlight app is trying to sell
Speaker 3: you trying to get you to take out payday loans,
Speaker 3: like your like photo app, like every fucking app on
Speaker 3: your phone is trying to sell you pay loans. That
Speaker 3: sounds incredibly annoying. This is and this is one of
Speaker 3: these things right that like, okay, like as bad as
Speaker 3: like American apps are, right, like as bad as like
Speaker 3: the version of capitalism that we have in the American
Speaker 3: app ecosystem, Like the wildest shit is always going on
Speaker 3: in the Chinese tech market, which is like even more
Speaker 3: insane than the American tech market, and this is the thing,
Speaker 3: like we don't actually have this here, and I've been
Speaker 3: trying to figure out why it never happened here. I
Speaker 3: think it has to do it partially with banking regulation
Speaker 3: and partially with like the fact that like the actual
Speaker 3: American payd a loan companies don't want other companies to
Speaker 3: like cut in on their business. Yes, so I think
Speaker 3: that's what's happening. But like in China, it's literally like
Speaker 3: and this is happening in like like like twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, that this stuff is happening,
Speaker 3: so you know, and it's in all and this this
Speaker 3: gets I mean, it turns into just a fucking nightmare
Speaker 3: because you know, obviously, like this turns into this giant
Speaker 3: wave of people who got it in over their heads
Speaker 3: and can't pay their loans back because they took out
Speaker 3: a payday loan with thirty percent interest. And also, and
Speaker 3: this is one of the fun things, companies just straight
Speaker 3: up lie about their interest rates. Like there's a lot
Speaker 3: of examples of companies saying we have a nine percent
Speaker 3: interest rate, and then you know, in the contract it
Speaker 3: says nine percent interest rate. And then when they try
Speaker 3: to get you to pay it back. It's like thirty percent, right,
Speaker 3: Like this is like you know, and so sometimes they're
Speaker 3: they're even they're you know, you're getting up to like
Speaker 3: one hundred tw hundred percent interest like these like organized
Speaker 3: crime levels of interest. And you know, like Alli like
Speaker 3: the tech giants are all into it. Ali Baba isn't
Speaker 3: quite as big into it as like some of the
Speaker 3: other companies, but like they're doing it, like they absolutely
Speaker 3: are doing the payd a loan shit. And I mentioned
Speaker 3: Alibaba here because in late twenty twenty, Jack Ma who's
Speaker 3: the founder of Alli Baba, just like disappears. He's just
Speaker 3: gone for like several months, no nobody knows where he is,
Speaker 3: and then he reappears in like twenty twenty one, but
Speaker 3: he's not doing tech ceo stuff anymore. He's doing like
Speaker 3: weird public education tours in like rural China. And this
Speaker 3: causes like a huge, a huge like kind of thing
Speaker 3: in the American press because what they're reading it as,
Speaker 3: and they're kind of right, is that there's this in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, there's this enormous raft of financial regulations
Speaker 3: on tech companies, and this gus interpreted is like a
Speaker 3: crackdown on chech companies. Like the CCP is trying to
Speaker 3: bring the tech giants in line, like they disappear jack
Speaker 3: Ma and you know, one of the and this is
Speaker 3: something something that a story that gets lost in this
Speaker 3: in the American press is that like one of the
Speaker 3: big things they're trying to do is stop is stop
Speaker 3: all of these fucking companies. I'm turning their apps to
Speaker 3: the pede alone factories. And you know, like I'm I'm
Speaker 3: not like a CCP fan, Like it is well known,
Speaker 3: Like it's like my dislike of the CCP is so
Speaker 3: large that like a non insignificant number of people in
Speaker 3: the US think I work for the CIA, right, But
Speaker 3: like this is like those fucking tech companies they were
Speaker 3: like they were like like on the edge of completely
Speaker 3: annihilating the Chinese economy. They were very they got very
Speaker 3: very close to just like reducing like enormous swaths of
Speaker 3: the entire Chinese population and to like peer at based
Speaker 3: debt pionage. It was a fucking disaster. And this is
Speaker 3: part this is a big part of why this like
Speaker 3: tech crackdown came in because the CCP was like, holy shit,
Speaker 3: if you guys do this like you're actually going to
Speaker 3: like like you're you're gonna You're gonna fucking nuke the
Speaker 3: Chinese economy, like we cannot allow every single fucking app
Speaker 3: to be a paid a loan like service and things.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's still not great now, but it things
Speaker 3: have gotten a lot less bad in the in the
Speaker 3: payday loan like thing since then. But you know, again
Speaker 3: like it it it had to get bad enough that
Speaker 3: your flashlight, we're trying to get your take out of
Speaker 3: payday loan for the CCP to actually like go after
Speaker 3: their like tech giant darlings. And I think what happened
Speaker 3: is that I think what happened is that Colin Huang
Speaker 3: like saw which way the wind was blowing, and she
Speaker 3: was like, Okay, there's gonna be a giant crackdown now
Speaker 3: now two wits credit. This is the only time I
Speaker 3: will give PDD credit for anything. PDD actually didn't do
Speaker 3: the payday loan shit. I think because Colin Huang was
Speaker 3: just slight was like smart enough to be like, this
Speaker 3: is a fucking terrible idea, Like if we try to
Speaker 3: get our like rural customer base hooked on pay day loans,
Speaker 3: all these people are gonna just be completely broke in
Speaker 3: like nine months. So PDD doesn't do it, but she
Speaker 3: takes this moment like he picks twenty like July twenty
Speaker 3: twenty eight, which is like a couple months before Jack
Speaker 3: Modest spears, and he just fucking nopes and he's like
Speaker 3: I'm out and yeah, like things, you know, and he
Speaker 3: picked a good time, and this meant that, like, you know,
Speaker 3: he never really faced any consequences for you know, he
Speaker 3: wasn't really caught up in the crackdown. He got out fine,
Speaker 3: and you know, he picked he picked the right time
Speaker 3: to do it, and pdd's future in America was still
Speaker 3: ahead of it. But when the Chinese media began to
Speaker 3: uncover the dark side of PDD in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 3: Colin Kwang was nowhere to be found. And that is
Speaker 3: what we're covering tomorrow. We haven't even gotten to the bad.
Speaker 4: Stuff yet, haven't even got to Temu proper.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well the thing about Temu, and we will get
Speaker 3: to Timo next episode. But Temu's like a twenty twenty
Speaker 3: two thing, right, so it's really reacent. It's only been
Speaker 3: around for like two years, which means that if we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about this, ninety percent of it is
Speaker 3: going to be PDD because PDD is like ninety years old.
Speaker 3: But yeah, tune in tomorrow for a bunch of absolutely
Speaker 3: harrowing ship. Yeah, this is this is this is it
Speaker 3: could happen here.
Speaker 4: We loved so exciting. I love learning about new harrowing ship.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Jacob app and here a podcast featuring a
Speaker 3: sound activated strobe light that you can't see because this
Speaker 3: is not a visual podcast.
Speaker 4: Unless you have like setasthesia and you could like start
Speaker 4: hearing seeing the strobe through our voices, in which case
Speaker 4: is good for you.
Speaker 3: Wish that was me? Yeah, So that that's Garrison. I'm
Speaker 3: the We're back again. We're back again for a descented
Speaker 3: to hell. Yeah. So, so last episode we talked about
Speaker 3: Colin Huang and the rise of PDD, which is China's
Speaker 3: second largest shopping app and the Chinese version of the app, Temu.
Speaker 3: So we're now in the post Colin Wong era, an
Speaker 3: era I think actually might be worse than the original era,
Speaker 3: which is kind of stunning. But you know, here we are,
Speaker 3: here we are, and this era actually starts really well
Speaker 3: for PDD. This is like twenty twenty twenty twenty one,
Speaker 3: China's lockdowns are actually incredible for PDD because, as we
Speaker 3: talked about last episode, pdd's strategy is group shopping, right,
Speaker 3: It's about getting a bunch of people to buy things
Speaker 3: together to make it cheaper, this thus pulling in more
Speaker 3: in our customers. Now China had real lockdowns, and in
Speaker 3: a real lockdown, this is increasingly how people got food.
Speaker 3: You know, the strictness of the lockdowns very across, like
Speaker 3: depending on what province you're in, right, But so like
Speaker 3: my family was an inner Mongolia and an inner mongolia
Speaker 3: in like the first lockdowns, you could send you could
Speaker 3: only send one member of your family outside per week
Speaker 3: to like, you know, to go get groceries. Otherwise everyone
Speaker 3: else fed all times has to stay indoors. And this
Speaker 3: meant that people started pulling together to like all buy
Speaker 3: groceries and then sending one person out to like go
Speaker 3: pick up the delivery. And this this ingrained PDDs like
Speaker 3: fundamental strategy of like buying into the into the consiousness
Speaker 3: of the Chinese public because they've just been doing it
Speaker 3: for like a year, right, And as twenty twenty, for
Speaker 3: a word on PDD like skyrockets. This this is this.
Speaker 3: The period from like twenty twenty to like twenty twenty
Speaker 3: four has been the period where pdd's grown them most.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was already pretty big before then, but
Speaker 3: now you know, it's it's now like the main competitor
Speaker 3: of Alibaba. It was like the previously unassailable like online
Speaker 3: shopping giant. The company grew so much that it forced
Speaker 3: the other like shopping companies to get into the fruit
Speaker 3: market because it was like clobbering them there so badly.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it was wild. But then a bunch of
Speaker 3: absolutely terrible stories broke about PDD in both the Chinese
Speaker 3: and American press. So we're gonna start with the stuff
Speaker 3: that's I guess less bad, and then it's gonna get worse.
Speaker 3: So question number one is the PDD at malware. All right,
Speaker 3: we're just really jumping right in here. Oh, this is
Speaker 3: this is the mild shit, this is the Are we
Speaker 3: allout to say this legally? Yeah? It's well, here's the thing.
Speaker 3: So Google play removed the app from its play store.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so all right, so so okay, we need
Speaker 3: to be very specific about what we're talking. It's too
Speaker 3: bad for Google that it's probably too bad for you. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so very specifically, this is we're the thing we're talking
Speaker 3: about right now is not Temu. We're talking specifically about
Speaker 3: the Chinese version of the app, PDD, And this was
Speaker 3: released on the Google Play Store in like the mid
Speaker 3: twenty the mid early like like I think it's like twenty.
Speaker 5: Twenty one or something.
Speaker 3: And okay, so this again, and to be clear again,
Speaker 3: this is not this is specifically the Android version of PDD.
Speaker 3: And this is interesting too because so most people in
Speaker 3: China like don't use Android for you or sorry, they don't.
Speaker 3: They don't. They don't use Google Play right, like they
Speaker 3: don't that that's not like the App store where they
Speaker 3: get their apps from. So when PDD released, like their
Speaker 3: app on the app store, this is this is them
Speaker 3: specifically going to the Western market.
Speaker 4: And did they have infrastructure set up in the States
Speaker 4: to support this type of like drop shipping or like
Speaker 4: how do they.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll get into it.
Speaker 4: It was like kind of later a little bit like
Speaker 4: gig economy stuff in China, But how how are they
Speaker 4: going to.
Speaker 3: Move that FedEx? Okay, yeah, right, well we'll get into
Speaker 3: that more later. We're talking about Timmo. This first one
Speaker 3: didn't like it didn't have that many users because it
Speaker 3: was just like the Chinese app. But like here, okay,
Speaker 3: so okay, there's something we also we need to get
Speaker 3: out of the way first, which is that there's like
Speaker 3: a massive panic in the US about Chinese apps being
Speaker 3: like Chinese government trojan horses, like especially TikTok. So unfortunately,
Speaker 3: before we start this we have to sort out kind
Speaker 3: of or like you have to make a judgment about
Speaker 3: what level of apps surveillance is, like the level of
Speaker 3: apps are veilance you get in the US because all
Speaker 3: of your apps are spying on you, and then what
Speaker 3: is like above and beyond the like quote unquote normal
Speaker 3: level of spying and like TikTok is TikTok is unbelievably invasive, right,
Speaker 3: Like it is true, it's a privacy nightmare, but like
Speaker 3: so are most apps, Like TikTok's worse than normal. But
Speaker 3: it's not that TikTok is like the Chinese communists. So
Speaker 3: this is something we're gonna get into. And this is
Speaker 3: this is true with pdu too. The US actually gets
Speaker 3: like the stripped down, cucked not as bad version of
Speaker 3: Chinese apps like TikTok does not have a bunch of
Speaker 3: the like integration stuff that that Doyen, the Chinese like
Speaker 3: version of it has. We're like Douyen has this thing
Speaker 3: where like I guess Google's kind of doing it now,
Speaker 3: but like you can directly, like like an influencer can
Speaker 3: hold up a p and you could tap the product
Speaker 3: and go buy it. Google is trying to do that now. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but China had that, like like Dueyan said that for
Speaker 3: like ages, right, It's like so like the versions of
Speaker 3: the apps that we get here are actually less bad
Speaker 3: than the Chinese ones, which makes the whole panic so
Speaker 3: funny to me. It's like no, no, no, like they're sending
Speaker 3: you like a better version of the app.
Speaker 4: Like, well, that's because when Uncle Sam calls in our version,
Speaker 4: we have to take out all of the maoist influences. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I don't know whatever whatever, All.
Speaker 3: Right, all right, so you know, look like so we
Speaker 3: have to we have to sort out of the difference
Speaker 3: between stuff that's just like the weird moral panic and
Speaker 3: what what's actually malware. So CNN did an investigation of
Speaker 3: this app. So originally there was a Chinese company that
Speaker 3: a Chinese security company was looked at this app and
Speaker 3: was like, they're using a bunch of Android exploits, Like
Speaker 3: they're like they're using like they're they're they're effectively hacking
Speaker 3: your phone, right, They're they're they're they're deploying a bunch
Speaker 3: of x of things that are like broken in in
Speaker 3: like in Android and allowing you like this like lesson
Speaker 3: do stuff and I supposed to be able to do.
Speaker 3: And so CNN brought in a bunch of different security
Speaker 3: like analysts and like they brought in security companies like
Speaker 3: look at it, and here's what they found.
Speaker 4: Well, I don't know if you'd trust this c it EN.
Speaker 4: They're literally called the Communist News Network.
Speaker 3: Quote. The app was able to continue running in the
Speaker 3: background and prevent itself from being uninstalled, which allowed it
Speaker 3: to boost its monthly active rate right hyper on it.
Speaker 3: I don't know how pronounce this guy's name. I'm so
Speaker 3: sorry this guy. This guy's this guy's name has an
Speaker 3: umlot over the oh. I'm an expert at pronouncing foreign names.
Speaker 5: Give it to me.
Speaker 3: It's h y pp umlot o n e n good luck.
Speaker 3: You know what.
Speaker 4: I'm just gonna take a I'm gonna.
Speaker 3: Put in I'm so sorry to this guy, who I
Speaker 3: think is fine. This guy's security analyst said it also
Speaker 3: had the ability to spy on competitors by tracking activity
Speaker 3: on other shopping apps and getting in information from them.
Speaker 3: He added, Totin, which is like another guy, found PDD
Speaker 3: to have exploited about fifty Android system vulnerabilities. Most of
Speaker 3: these exploits were tailor made for customized parts known as
Speaker 3: original Equipment Manufacturer code, which tends to be audited less
Speaker 3: than ASoP, which is like another kind of code and
Speaker 3: therefore prone to more vulnerabilities. He said PDD had also
Speaker 3: exploited a number of AOSP vulnerabilities, including one that was
Speaker 3: flagged by Totioniin to Google in February twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: Google fixed this bug in March. He said, I've never
Speaker 3: seen anything like it. It's like super expansive. Serg Totionin,
Speaker 3: android security expert, He's like guy said that, sorry, I've
Speaker 3: never seen and Android Tracin said, I've never seen anything
Speaker 3: like this. It's like super expansive. According to Tosian, the
Speaker 3: exploits allowed PDD to access users location, contacts, calendars, notification,
Speaker 3: and photo albums without their consents. They were also able
Speaker 3: to change systems, setting an access users social media accounts
Speaker 3: and chats. He said, Now that is pretty bad. I
Speaker 3: will I will mention that like a lot of your
Speaker 3: normal apps can also do shit like that. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: that's stuff that you can get out of, like Google,
Speaker 3: but some of it's not good. The other thing that
Speaker 3: they were doing is they're doing these things called privileged
Speaker 3: escalation attacks, where they're trying to get like a higher
Speaker 3: level of privilege on the system so they can run
Speaker 3: code and not supposed to be able to. So you
Speaker 3: know how like sometimes when you're running something at a computer,
Speaker 3: you have to run it as admin so the thing
Speaker 3: actually works.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like Discord, Yeah, I actually Discord. I've been trying
Speaker 4: to stream Alan Wake two to my friends and oh
Speaker 4: my god, it has been such a nightmare. I'm gonna
Speaker 4: personally write the CEO of Discord a letter.
Speaker 3: And yeah. But like so like so there they're like
Speaker 3: the way the system security works is there's certain levels
Speaker 3: of users that are allowed to do certain things and
Speaker 3: certain people who aren't, and this is supposed to stop
Speaker 3: people from running malicious code. And so they're doing these
Speaker 3: privileged escalation attacks where they're trying to be able to
Speaker 3: like do stuff that only admins can do, And so
Speaker 3: I showed this to it. So I was trying to
Speaker 3: get a gauge on how much of this is real
Speaker 3: and how much of this is insane, And so I
Speaker 3: showed I showed it to my friend who's a software engineer,
Speaker 3: and he was like, what the fuck? So this is
Speaker 3: this is very tetfically the privileged escalation attacks on the end,
Speaker 3: the attack on the like the original equipment manufacturer code,
Speaker 3: like the OEM stuff that's just not normal, Like that
Speaker 3: is that is actual malware that is like not that
Speaker 3: is not normal app bullshit that like, this thing is
Speaker 3: trying to hack your phone. So in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: the like Google pulled the app from the store because
Speaker 3: everyone was like, what the fuck. Wait, this is just
Speaker 3: literally malware. I'm gonna I'm gonna so so what were
Speaker 3: they trying to do? Here's CNN again. It was in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty, according to a current PDD employee, that the
Speaker 3: company set up a team of about one hundred engineers
Speaker 3: and product managers to dig for vulnerabilities and Android phones,
Speaker 3: develop ways to exploit them and turn that into profit.
Speaker 3: According to the source who who quested anonymity for feear
Speaker 3: of for fear of reprisals, the company only targeted users
Speaker 3: in rural areas and smaller towns initially, while of winning
Speaker 3: users in megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai. The goal
Speaker 3: was to reduce the risk of being exposed, they said.
Speaker 3: By collecting expansive data on user activities, the company was
Speaker 3: able to create a comprehensive portrait of the users' habits, interests,
Speaker 3: and preferences. According to the source, this also allowed it
Speaker 3: to improve its machine learning model to offer more personalized
Speaker 3: push notifications and ads, attracting users to open the app
Speaker 3: and place orders. They said, So this all makes perfect
Speaker 3: sense with like how we know that PDD operates right, Like,
Speaker 3: you know, they're trying to build detailed profiles or rural
Speaker 3: customers they can serve the more efficient ads, and they're
Speaker 3: doing it by apparently just straight up running an in
Speaker 3: house hacking team. I got pretty large one. Oh so
Speaker 3: they supposedly that team got like acted and they don't
Speaker 3: do it anymore, but who knows. So, Okay, this is
Speaker 3: not even close to the most batshit thing that PDD
Speaker 3: gets up to. Okay, we're gonna escalate up the how
Speaker 3: weird this stuff is. So. One of the things that
Speaker 3: that PDD has a six tone och reporting is that
Speaker 3: they have these really strict non compete clauses that prevent
Speaker 3: people from like so if you if you take a
Speaker 3: job here and you get fired or eat, like you leave,
Speaker 3: you can't take another job at a tech company for
Speaker 3: like two years. This is like fucking like any tech company,
Speaker 3: like fucking like, I don't know, they're they're really expensive.
Speaker 3: It's like like fucking like setting up your grandma's website
Speaker 3: like might get you in trouble. It's like it's it's
Speaker 3: a real disaster. We have these in the US too,
Speaker 3: and they absolutely suck. So I think there was a
Speaker 3: ruling about them, an FTC ruling to ban them recently.
Speaker 3: Maybe oh no, they're proposed, it hasn't gone through yet
Speaker 3: trying to get rid of them. But yeah, there's they're
Speaker 3: in the US two. But these ones are really strict
Speaker 3: and apparently they're like PDD is really aggressive about it
Speaker 3: to the point where like people people will take other
Speaker 3: jobs under fake identities and like pdd's hr will like
Speaker 3: track them down. Oh wow, yeah, like they're they're like
Speaker 3: headhunting these people well, like like inverse headhunt, like they're
Speaker 3: they're like they're literally just hunting down people trying who
Speaker 3: are trying to get like jobs, right, And this apparently
Speaker 3: led people to adopt secret identities to like hide, right,
Speaker 3: And so this kid is something I I did not
Speaker 3: believe the first time I read it, which is that
Speaker 3: apparently and I originally read this in NIK, which is
Speaker 3: usually reliable, but I read this and I was like,
Speaker 3: no way. Uh. The thing that they said was that
Speaker 3: employees at work, like who work for PDD apparently use
Speaker 3: pseudonyms and like never tell each like almost never tell
Speaker 3: each other they're actual names. That's I mean, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: And apparently also they're banned from like like the information level.
Speaker 3: Information control was so strict that like you can't you're
Speaker 3: not allowed to know what like the structure of another
Speaker 3: work group is. And like I read this, I was
Speaker 3: like I don't believe this, right, And then I started
Speaker 3: running into like other outlets like Financial Times, was like yeah, no, no,
Speaker 3: apparently they they talked to they they talked to people
Speaker 3: who work for the company. They're like, yeah, everyone uses pseudonyms.
Speaker 3: I didn't fucking know anyone's real name or like there
Speaker 3: was like one person who's real name that I know wild.
Speaker 3: I don't know why they do. I've never seen I've
Speaker 3: literally never seen this before with any company. It's it's
Speaker 3: fucking nuts. I got nothing. Yeah, I do you know who?
Speaker 3: No one had this company knows my real name. So
Speaker 3: that's true. I do actually operate by a pseudonym. Yeah that.
Speaker 4: Is not like a sizable portion of the cool Zone
Speaker 4: Media team, but.
Speaker 3: All of us are fake names. Robert Evans, that's not
Speaker 3: Robert Evans, real Robert Evans. It was the producer of
Speaker 3: that movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 4: Anyway, do you know who also has trustworthy names that
Speaker 4: you can trust these products?
Speaker 6: Woo?
Speaker 4: So true? Jeff, Wow, that was a really funny joke. Bill, Oh,
Speaker 4: we're back.
Speaker 3: Sorry.
Speaker 4: I was just talking to the two fake fake name
Speaker 4: people who are listening in on our call right now.
Speaker 3: Me I continue. So this is where we get to
Speaker 3: the truly bleak stuff. So all right, in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 3: one of pdd's employees in shing Juhn just worked worked
Speaker 3: a shift, came home, and the distrait up fucking died
Speaker 3: in her bed from overwork. This this was a you know,
Speaker 3: this very quickly turns into a giant media thing because
Speaker 3: this woman like she's in she's in really good health,
Speaker 3: and she just fucking is worked so hard that she
Speaker 3: lays down he her bed dies. Then a worker who
Speaker 3: posted a video of an ambulance outside of pdd's headquarters
Speaker 3: with the caption another brave warrior of PDD has fallen,
Speaker 3: which great caption, terrible situation, great caption. He gets fired
Speaker 3: for it, and then very quickly like after that, so
Speaker 3: they have like a the company has like a Q
Speaker 3: and a thing like if effectively, what happens is someone
Speaker 3: responds to like one of their social media accounts with
Speaker 3: and asks them what do you think of the PDD
Speaker 3: worker who died after working overtime? Should PDD bear responsibility?
Speaker 3: Their corporate account responded and I quote, look at those
Speaker 3: in the underclass, who isn't exchanging life for money. I
Speaker 3: never thought that this is a problem of capital, but
Speaker 3: as a problem of this society. We live in an
Speaker 3: era where we spend our whole lives working hard. You
Speaker 3: can choose a comfortable life if you accept the consequences
Speaker 3: of comfortable living. People control how much effort they make.
Speaker 3: Everyone does.
Speaker 4: I can't believe this people who genuinely like advocate that
Speaker 4: China is a like communist country, so strange, that's insane.
Speaker 4: They're only talking like God.
Speaker 3: This is this is like this and this is like
Speaker 3: and this is like this is one of the things
Speaker 3: that like I just like I don't know, like I
Speaker 3: just can't fucking get over this ship because like I
Speaker 3: have a bunch of fucking family in China, And do
Speaker 3: you know do they fucking quote Karl Marx, No, they
Speaker 3: quote Steve Jobs because they're all these like fucking insane
Speaker 3: entrepreneur bullshit, like like fucking literally like grind set like
Speaker 3: until you straps. Yeah, it's insane. It's like, no, it's
Speaker 3: not your fault that you work too hard. This is
Speaker 3: actually labor's fault and not capital like this. This fucking
Speaker 3: blew up in the Chinese media when people got like
Speaker 3: people got really fucking pissed, and PDD at first was like, no,
Speaker 3: this is a fake post. We never did it, and
Speaker 3: the people were like, no, no, it's not. This is
Speaker 3: we found the post. Right, they take they take it down.
Speaker 3: People like had saved screenshots, and eventually the company was
Speaker 3: forced to admit that it was actually their account, but
Speaker 3: then they said that it was a social media contractor
Speaker 3: who put it on the corporate account. Quote by mistake.
Speaker 4: Oh sure, yeah, that's like that. That's like me when
Speaker 4: I search my twin peaks not Safe for work fan
Speaker 4: art on the coolest media account. It was a mistake, guys,
Speaker 4: didn't didn't didn't mean to post it there. I don't
Speaker 4: know how that happened, it got it got past the VODs.
Speaker 3: I don't know how. Yeah, and you know, people, people
Speaker 3: understandably are not happy. Like and then eleven days later,
Speaker 3: a PDD employee jumps off a fucking building again, also
Speaker 3: because they've been worked so hard. And this this is
Speaker 3: where we need to talk about pdd's labor conditions, because
Speaker 3: they are fucking appalling. Here's sixth Tone. A former PDD
Speaker 3: employee who left the company a year ago told sixth
Speaker 3: Tone under conditions of anonymity, that excessive work hours are
Speaker 3: common practice around eight months after he joined PDD in
Speaker 3: early twenty nineteen. He said employees were told they need
Speaker 3: to work at least three hundred hours per month, amounting
Speaker 3: to nearly twelve hours per day, six days a week.
Speaker 3: We're gonna get more into that that's a schedule called
Speaker 3: nine nine six, where you work from nine am to
Speaker 3: nine pm, six days a week. This is incredibly common
Speaker 3: and try This is actually a good schedule. In a
Speaker 3: lot of Chinese work environments, it can get way worse
Speaker 3: than that. Here's another quote from that six Tone article.
Speaker 3: The company cares a lot about our work hours. It
Speaker 3: has become company culture. Even if staff is finished working,
Speaker 3: if they'll just stay in the office. I was one
Speaker 3: of the lucky ones. I only had to work from
Speaker 3: eleven am to ten pm, and my manager was nice
Speaker 3: to me. This person added that employees arriving after eleven
Speaker 3: am would have their daily wages docked by three hours.
Speaker 3: It's fucking insane. It's nightmarish. That same worker talked about
Speaker 3: how she would like this is a thing that's like
Speaker 3: you see this a lot of different accounts, is that
Speaker 3: people would just literally break down ryeing at their desks
Speaker 3: because they had so they were so overworked. Are these
Speaker 3: like office jobs? These are workers workers? These are fucking
Speaker 3: tech workers, Like right, these are the fucking bougie tech jobs.
Speaker 4: They're not like the Chinese because they're getting overworked in
Speaker 4: like a factory or like an Amazon warehouse.
Speaker 3: Tech workers and this this is the thing about this, right,
Speaker 3: is that like we we only we don't like there
Speaker 3: hasn't been okay, So the Chinese media, this actually like
Speaker 3: becomes a huge thing in the Chinese media, is that
Speaker 3: these people are dying. There was another there's also around
Speaker 3: the same time, a delivery driver lit himself on fire
Speaker 3: like as a protest for like the amount of shit
Speaker 3: that he had to deal with. And this was a big,
Speaker 3: like a huge thing in the Chinese media. But almost
Speaker 3: all of the reporting and the coverage and stuff like
Speaker 3: that was about the tech workers. But like, fucking so
Speaker 3: many people work schedules that are worse than nine ninety six, right,
Speaker 3: Like that is a that is a that is a
Speaker 3: tech workers schedule. Right, there are a lot of places
Speaker 3: where people were fucking way worse shit. The sort of
Speaker 3: countervailing force to it is people who, like you know,
Speaker 3: we talked about this kind of in the Lying Flat episodes.
Speaker 3: It's people working for like one day and then eating
Speaker 3: just like plain rice with some like whatever fucking the
Speaker 3: cheapest thing they can finally they can fucking get out
Speaker 3: of it and not working for two more days and
Speaker 3: working another day. But like it's it's so bad, like
Speaker 3: the little labor conditions are just appalling, And you know,
Speaker 3: like a bunch of stories sort of started coming out
Speaker 3: about how bad PDDs like conditions are. There was one
Speaker 3: on we chat that broke that I saw via six
Speaker 3: tone about the toilet situation in pdd's largest office building.
Speaker 3: So this building has one thousand people per floor, It
Speaker 3: has eight total bathrooms per floor. One thousand people. They
Speaker 3: don't even have one bathroom for every hundred people.
Speaker 4: How does this even function? I mean, like I suppose
Speaker 4: it just does that people are like pea.
Speaker 3: No like people people people fucking like you don't eat
Speaker 3: in the morning, or you try to hold out to
Speaker 3: lunch when you can run to a different building and
Speaker 3: try to use the bathrooms there. But like you know,
Speaker 3: if you try to hold it all day, or you
Speaker 3: just yeah, where you fucking do that? You go, you go.
Speaker 3: You you use your lunch time instead of eating to
Speaker 3: fucking go somewhere else. You starve yourself. There are like
Speaker 3: there's a bunch of reports of guys just like shitting
Speaker 3: in urinals because there's literally wasn't time for them to
Speaker 3: fucking actually like use a stall, so they're just like
Speaker 3: they're they're just like they're they're pooping in urinals. Maybe
Speaker 3: the worst picture I've ever seen in my entire life
Speaker 3: is this is gonna be the episode are PDD started
Speaker 3: installing timers over the toilets to show how long how
Speaker 3: long people had been there. So there's just like a
Speaker 3: like a a fucking clock over you that starts when
Speaker 3: you when you fucking close the door to try to
Speaker 3: get people to go to the bathroom faster. It is
Speaker 3: just appalling the conditions. And again, these are the conditions
Speaker 3: of like the office workers. It's apocalyptically bad. So I
Speaker 3: realized when I was researching this story that I actually
Speaker 3: ran into PDD earlier because I so like before I
Speaker 3: did this story, I hadn't looked into TEMU at all,
Speaker 3: and I realized that I had. I had ran into
Speaker 3: PDD earlier when I was tracking the story about uh
Speaker 3: tech workers banding together to like basically like on GitHub,
Speaker 3: these these office workers, like tech workers like made a
Speaker 3: giant spreadshet where everyone would document their hours and like
Speaker 3: their pay scales and stuff. And it was like, you know,
Speaker 3: it was this sort of like you know, it was
Speaker 3: it was a thing to like demand better labor conditions. Actually,
Speaker 3: i'mretty I'm pretty sure they were actually demanding like the
Speaker 3: workplace democracy too. It was pretty wild. But the thing
Speaker 3: that you get out of that is that PDD has
Speaker 3: the worst the worst hours of any tech company. They are.
Speaker 3: PDD is so bad that other Chinese tech companies got
Speaker 3: worse in order to compete with them. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 4: That is the whole hard thing about setting the bar
Speaker 4: so low is that it allows other people to lower.
Speaker 3: Their own bars. Yeah. Yeah, and it makes just every
Speaker 3: everybody worse. Yeah. And again, like I I can't emphasize
Speaker 3: enough the extent to which these are the office workers, right, Like,
Speaker 3: these are the people who are making the best money
Speaker 3: out of this, who are treated better than like the
Speaker 3: fucking factory workers and the fucking like people in the
Speaker 3: rural areas like fucking doing farming.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: But again we don't we don't know a huge amount
Speaker 3: about what those workers' lives are like because they're not
Speaker 3: urban tech workers. And urban tech workers can get their
Speaker 3: stories into the press, but like you know, migrant migrant
Speaker 3: factory workers, rural workers, there's you know, there's just not
Speaker 3: the kind of attention that you can get out of
Speaker 3: a big story about like an urban office building, and
Speaker 3: you know, I mean, these labor conditions are so bad
Speaker 3: that people are just straight up fucking dying. And the
Speaker 3: Chinese government eventually gets involved, like they're they're, they're, they're
Speaker 3: version of the Streame. Court eventually rules that like working
Speaker 3: people twelve hours a day, six days a week is illegal,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't really matter, like a lot of those
Speaker 3: people still have those same schedules. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 3: and like this this is not a this is not
Speaker 3: a problem that can be solved just by like court rulings. Right,
Speaker 3: So yeah, it's it's really fucking bad. We're gonna we're
Speaker 3: gonna take an ad break. I don't I don't have
Speaker 3: a good transition out of that ship. And we're back.
Speaker 3: So all of this brings us to Temu And it's
Speaker 3: slogan shop like a millionaire.
Speaker 4: So, oh god, this the slogan, it's so it like
Speaker 4: it evokes like a like a nauseous reaction in me.
Speaker 4: It's so it epitomizes everything that is wrong about our
Speaker 4: current way of living and the way we idealize the
Speaker 4: rich and put them on this like pedestal for how
Speaker 4: you should live your life. But also knowing that you
Speaker 4: will never actually be there. Yeah, this is this is
Speaker 4: this is as close as you're going to.
Speaker 3: Get, and it's it's it's also a thing where like
Speaker 3: it's it's a completely unreal lit like it's if that's
Speaker 3: this isn't how fucking billionaires shop like billionaires do? It's
Speaker 3: shop like you think those people fucking shop Like, no, no,
Speaker 3: they don't. They have they have.
Speaker 4: Over over like saving three dollars on on like a mango.
Speaker 3: You're like no, yeah, like what the fuck are you
Speaker 3: talking about? Yeah? So yeah, like I I hate it.
Speaker 3: I hate it so fucking much, you know. So, as
Speaker 3: we said, like this is the time of is the
Speaker 3: American version of PDD. If you're in the US, you've
Speaker 3: probably seen tim owas. Apparently they're not that many of
Speaker 3: them in like other countries, Like I have British friends
Speaker 3: who are just like, what the fuck are you talking
Speaker 3: about me?
Speaker 4: And I've never heard of TIMMU. Before the Super Bowl,
Speaker 4: for whatever it's worth.
Speaker 3: The big play where they were advertising was YouTube. But
Speaker 3: if you're watching YouTube without an app blocker, don't I
Speaker 3: can I don't know if I can legally recommend you
Speaker 3: Probably probably that's on your phone. I can get it.
Speaker 3: It's an app. I don't do it. I don't know
Speaker 3: if it may be legal, it may not be. I
Speaker 3: can't say I will never advocate breaking the law.
Speaker 4: No, definitely, buy YouTube. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's definitely the
Speaker 4: way to go.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. But you know, so like they okay, like most
Speaker 3: famously yeah, as you're saying, like, so they spent twenty
Speaker 3: seven million dollars buying three Super Bowl ads. It's all
Speaker 3: the same ad and it sucked. But you know, okay,
Speaker 3: this is only a fraction of their fucking budget.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: Here's from the Wall Street Journal quote. Ten MoU's marketing
Speaker 3: budget reached one point seven billion dollars in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: and that figure will grow to nearly three billion in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four. JP Morgan's analyst estimate. Last year, ten
Speaker 3: MoU's marketing spending contributed to an average loss of seven
Speaker 3: dollars per quarter, according to Goldman Sax estimates. They are
Speaker 3: buying so many ads they are literally driving other companies
Speaker 3: out of the ad market. LIKETCCO has been talking about
Speaker 3: how they can't afford to run ads because ads are
Speaker 3: getting too expensive. Because they're buying so many fucking ads.
Speaker 3: Here's Reuter's quote. US companies dependent on commercial spending or
Speaker 3: spending on commercials, not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, commercial spending. They are buying commercials, yes, yeah, like Facebook,
Speaker 4: they say Meta. I refuse to fucking call that company Beta,
Speaker 4: like fuck that shit. Their Facebook are being saved by
Speaker 4: Chinese retailers like Temu and she In. They represent ten
Speaker 4: per those two companies, just Temu and g In represent
Speaker 4: ten percent of Meta's revenue last year. The Facebook owners said.
Speaker 3: So Temu is hemorrhaging money right now in order to
Speaker 3: do this right, JP Morgan thinks they're losing three billion
Speaker 3: a year. But they also project and to be fair,
Speaker 3: these projections, these projections are wrong so many of the time,
Speaker 3: of so much of the time. But the projecting the
Speaker 3: tenet will be making three point five billion a year
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty seven. And all of this raises the
Speaker 3: question why, and to answer that, we need to get
Speaker 3: into Chinese development economics. So the Chinese economy has a problem,
Speaker 3: and this is a problem that the CCP is known
Speaker 3: about for a long time. It's the problem of turning
Speaker 3: a sort of like a low on the value chain
Speaker 3: like manufacturing economy into a consumption driven economy. Now, the
Speaker 3: problem with transitioning into a consumption driven economy is that
Speaker 3: people don't have enough money to boost consumer demand. The
Speaker 3: Marxist way of saying this is that under capitalism, both
Speaker 3: output and consumption are double determined by your wage. Right,
Speaker 3: Your wage determines both firm output and also how much
Speaker 3: you can consume. Right, in non Marxist terms, Oh no,
Speaker 3: no one has enough money to buy things. They did
Speaker 3: you consumer economy by brother in Christ, You set the wages. Okay,
Speaker 3: where are the fuck? Yes? Where the fuck are these
Speaker 3: people supposed to be getting money from to buy your
Speaker 3: shit if you won't give them more money? Like wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 3: so you know you can't do this by just making
Speaker 3: them like work more hours. You know, you can work
Speaker 3: people for like twelve fifteen, like twenty hours a day,
Speaker 3: but there's only twenty four hours a day. Like, there's
Speaker 3: an actual definite there's an actual definite limit to the
Speaker 3: amount of exploitation you can do via increasing labor hours.
Speaker 3: This is this has always been capitalism's problem, right, Like
Speaker 3: the sort of rapacity of capitalism has hit the secular
Speaker 3: limit of time itself. So the solution to this is
Speaker 3: to expand into new markets where consumers have more money,
Speaker 3: which is to say the US. So PDD initially targeted
Speaker 3: like poor rural Chinese workers, right, and this is kind
Speaker 3: of the same group that Temu was targeting in the now.
Speaker 3: In the US, their initial base is people who like
Speaker 3: buy from dollar stores, but they've been spreading rapidly. Temu
Speaker 3: has outpaced she In to become the second largest shopping
Speaker 3: app in the US. But the important thing really, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: there's not gonna be on Amazon. Yeah, they're like they're
Speaker 3: destroying Shiin, Like wow, yeah, I did not know they
Speaker 3: were that popular. Yeah, I mean, like estimates are like, well,
Speaker 3: I've seen simens to say they have one hundred million years.
Speaker 3: I don't buy that. I've seen that the estimates that
Speaker 3: I think I'm more reliable of like fifty four million
Speaker 3: years in the US. Although well, the thing is we
Speaker 3: don't we don't have post super Bowl numbers between fifty
Speaker 3: and well, I think I think it's like fifty. I
Speaker 3: wouldn't I wouldn't accept one hundred million ones. I think
Speaker 3: that's bullshit. We don't have good post super Bowl data yet.
Speaker 3: Kind of the issue. But yeah, they're they're they're clobbering people.
Speaker 3: But the important thing about specifically the American market for
Speaker 3: Temu is that like the kind the equivalent person who
Speaker 3: shops at a dollar store in the US still has
Speaker 3: unfathomably more money than that same person in China, because
Speaker 3: partially this is because the strength of the American dollar.
Speaker 3: Partially this is because American wages are just like unfathomably
Speaker 3: higher than Chinese wages, and that that's that's that's true
Speaker 3: even if you like, even when you account for like
Speaker 3: the relative strength dollar to the yawn. So you know,
Speaker 3: the other kind of important thing about Timmy strategy is
Speaker 3: that they've been using this kind of like loophole that
Speaker 3: will set up a US customs law to allow people
Speaker 3: to like bring presents home from countries. So like if
Speaker 3: you go to another country and you bring a present home,
Speaker 3: it's worth less than two hundred dollars, you go through
Speaker 3: like an expedited customs thing, and you don't have to
Speaker 3: pay tariffs on it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So Timu and like a whole bunch of these
Speaker 8: companies just ship every single one of their packages in
Speaker 8: quantities where it's like seven hundred and ninety nine dollars,
Speaker 8: not eight hundred.
Speaker 3: Dollars ye yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's really funny. It's
Speaker 3: set off this like a massive intra capitalist war because
Speaker 3: like a bunch of like like American right wingers, like
Speaker 3: American manufacturers, like the Republican Party are like, we need
Speaker 3: to close this gap, but then all of the fucking
Speaker 3: shipping companies are like, no, this is a vital part
Speaker 3: of the American consumer economy. And there's this like giant
Speaker 3: war going on like both in Congress, like like in
Speaker 3: the press over whether they should where they should close
Speaker 3: as loophole now, you know. On the other hand, like
Speaker 3: there are real challenges to Temu being the first like
Speaker 3: company to break into the like Chinese companies like really
Speaker 3: truly break into the American market like she and has
Speaker 3: done well, but they haven't like they have they have
Speaker 3: They're not like a rival for it to Amazon, right,
Speaker 3: Like they're not big enough to like knock off one
Speaker 3: of the sort of like American tech giants. And Temu's
Speaker 3: problem is that. Okay, so if you compare Temu to
Speaker 3: to PDD, right, the Chinese version, PDD is supposed to
Speaker 3: be about spreading through word of mouth, right, It's it
Speaker 3: spreads by like someone in your you know, you as
Speaker 3: as if someone buying something from PDD taps your entire
Speaker 3: friend group and your family to get them to buy
Speaker 3: something for cheaper.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: But the problem is that.
Speaker 4: Like fucking night, I forgot how this whole structure is.
Speaker 3: It's so bad. But the thing is, like Americans don't
Speaker 3: really do that, like they're been attempts to do like
Speaker 3: group on things they never worked. And Americans also don't
Speaker 3: group shop right because we're I don't know more weird
Speaker 3: b wok.
Speaker 4: There's just a fucking this is not a thing but
Speaker 4: full full of a lot more like individualistic impulse science.
Speaker 4: That is that is kind of a large part of
Speaker 4: what the American shopping classes is built off of.
Speaker 3: And and this isn't This is an issue for Temu
Speaker 3: because like they don't have the word of mouth thing
Speaker 3: that drove them in China, so they're relying on just
Speaker 3: top down like like massive ad buys and stuff, and
Speaker 3: there's kind of a limit. And it's something that that
Speaker 3: Temu understands, right, Like this is you know the whole
Speaker 3: there's a whole thing in the Chinese tech industry about
Speaker 3: the power of being able to leverage people's like private networks, right,
Speaker 3: Timu understands, but they don't have a way to break
Speaker 3: into the American market because it just doesn't work like
Speaker 3: the Chinese market. So instead they're like buying three Super
Speaker 3: Bowl ads right now. There's another issue, which is that
Speaker 3: the goods that they sell suck ass and they break instantly.
Speaker 3: You know, that's an issue, but I don't know it's
Speaker 3: the US. Lots of things suck and break instantly, but
Speaker 3: like it is only that's been driving sort of negative
Speaker 3: sentiment from people who've used it, is they're like they
Speaker 3: buy something and it's just like sucks, and they're you know,
Speaker 3: they're unhappy about it. The thing I think is maybe
Speaker 3: the biggest problem is that their delivery times are really
Speaker 3: long by American standards because they're they're shipping overseas. Temu
Speaker 3: had to build an actual logistics infrastructure where PDD like didn't,
Speaker 3: right because PDD is just using like Chinese versions of
Speaker 3: FedEx or whatever, right, And Temu's kind of doing that
Speaker 3: but in you know, in order to make it convenient
Speaker 3: for Chinese sellers. The way that they the way that
Speaker 3: they've sort of like set this up is they have
Speaker 3: a warehouse in Guandong, and every seller like ships it
Speaker 3: to this warehouse and then Temu deals with getting it
Speaker 3: shipped overseas. The problem is that this is really slow, right,
Speaker 3: It takes like two weeks for things to show up.
Speaker 3: And that's not out that's slow by like normal standards,
Speaker 3: but this is the US American standards. That is like
Speaker 3: a tortoise nightmarishly slow. Because we have gotten used to
Speaker 3: a level i'd say gratification, but like, yeah, like this
Speaker 3: is a level of power that was previously reserved for
Speaker 3: like Chinese emperors, and we fucking use it every day
Speaker 3: to order fucking nail clippers from Amazon, right, or in.
Speaker 4: My case, so a whole bunch of materials to build
Speaker 4: a black lodge, which I will then return as soon
Speaker 4: as my party is over.
Speaker 3: Incredible, you know, And this is this is a This
Speaker 3: is also something that's kind of new for Temu because
Speaker 3: PDD was built on being able to doing sales or
Speaker 3: fast enough they could sell fruit to people. Right, do
Speaker 3: you know how hard it is to sell fucking fresh
Speaker 3: fruit to people? That's like it legitimately really difficult. Well yeah,
Speaker 3: you can't.
Speaker 4: You can't ship. You can't have a two week ship
Speaker 4: for ca.
Speaker 3: But why it is I mean, it doesn't do a
Speaker 3: bunch of you have you have to have an actual
Speaker 3: logistics infrastructure set up for it, right. You can't just
Speaker 3: ship it in like an Amazon bomb.
Speaker 4: They have to be they have to be like specifically
Speaker 4: ripening along the Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and and and and tims also up to
Speaker 3: do that, right. And this is and this is an
Speaker 3: issue with all of their stuff because you know, they're
Speaker 3: they're trying to do direct to consumer sales. But the
Speaker 3: thing is in China it's really fast, and here it's slow.
Speaker 3: And the upside for Tamu is that their stuff is
Speaker 3: really cheap, right, It's unbelievably cheap. And you know, obviously
Speaker 3: they're they're losing money on the sales, and most of
Speaker 3: the money they're losing on the sales is from their
Speaker 3: ad spending, not from the actual sales. And this is
Speaker 3: this is where you get into again the really bleak
Speaker 3: part about this where Okay, so why are these why
Speaker 3: are these prices so low? And part of its tech
Speaker 3: money subsidy, but a lot of it is just labor,
Speaker 3: just pure, pure unrivaled labor exploitation. You know, when with
Speaker 3: with the Chinese workers movement, like as like a a
Speaker 3: sort of like collective mass movement just completely broken by
Speaker 3: Tienamen and then again dream like the crackdowns through the
Speaker 3: twenty tens that wiped out whatever sort of like classical
Speaker 3: workers movement style thing was may have popped up from
Speaker 3: the strikes in twenty eleven, Like there's there's no there's
Speaker 3: no mass countervailing force in Chinese politics to try to
Speaker 3: raise wages, like independent union organizing is illegal. You will
Speaker 3: get arrested. The actual unions that exist, like they all
Speaker 3: trying of union federation doesn't do shit. We don't really
Speaker 3: have that kind of like fake union thing here. It's
Speaker 3: like it's like a different but you know, like they're
Speaker 3: they're I don't know this is this is this is
Speaker 3: maybe not the time for me to try to explain
Speaker 3: China's union system. Like the unions are fucking bullshit. They
Speaker 3: don't do anything. Like if you go to them and
Speaker 3: be like my wages are too low, they'll try to
Speaker 3: get you to like negotiate with the company directly, right
Speaker 3: like like as an individual, and like it's they're nonsense.
Speaker 3: They're completely useless, and you know the results of this
Speaker 3: and the results of just like the incredible poverty of
Speaker 3: the Chinese working class and the fact that you know
Speaker 3: a lot of Chinese migrant workers, who are people who
Speaker 3: actually making these goods. So a lot of some of
Speaker 3: its world workers, some of its migrant workers. But a
Speaker 3: lot of these people's wages are lower than they otherwise
Speaker 3: would be because they're drawing revenue off of like they're off
Speaker 3: of of of like the plots of land that their
Speaker 3: family has, like back in the countryside, when they like
Speaker 3: when they they like migrate to another city to find
Speaker 3: a job. Yeah, so like all of these factors are
Speaker 3: just institutionally like smashing the price of like like like
Speaker 3: smashing like wages, and there's no there's no fucking there's
Speaker 3: not there's nothing really there to resist them and and
Speaker 3: act like you know, it's not like the Chinese working
Speaker 3: class like completely takes it lying down right, but it's
Speaker 3: like the resistant strategies are trying to work as little
Speaker 3: as possible. But that doesn't that's you know, and that's
Speaker 3: something that can be very effective in the sense of
Speaker 3: like you're working a lot less, but it's not something
Speaker 3: that drives up like wages. And so when when you're
Speaker 3: looking at Temu and you're seeing a pair of Janes
Speaker 3: for two dollars. Like what you are seeing is the
Speaker 3: raw exploitation of the Chinese working class. And this is
Speaker 3: also true of like the rest of the fucking shit
Speaker 3: you buy from China, right, Like almost all of the
Speaker 3: price of like a shirt that you're buying, I mean,
Speaker 3: Chinese textile manufacturing is kind of like not what it
Speaker 3: used to be, right but like you know, but like
Speaker 3: you're you're buying like fucking some bullshit from China. Like
Speaker 3: if you're buying from like another drop shipping company, right,
Speaker 3: like the thing you're actually paying for, you're paying the
Speaker 3: drop shipping company. You're not fucking paying the workers. They're
Speaker 3: not they're fucking not making shit all like all of
Speaker 3: the stuff that's like, I mean, it's not like one
Speaker 3: hundred percent, like a huge portion of of the fact
Speaker 3: that the price is higher on non Temu sites is
Speaker 3: just like it's just markups. Because this is this is
Speaker 3: just what the Chinese economy is. It's just sort of
Speaker 3: like it's you know, it's it's it's it's unbelievable exploitation.
Speaker 3: And this brings us to the thing we're gonna today
Speaker 3: on which is does Temo use slave labor.
Speaker 8: Oh oh okay, And the answer is probably, but it's
Speaker 8: hard to tell.
Speaker 3: So this has been a big thing because Tim is
Speaker 3: one of the companies that the State Department brought up
Speaker 3: when they were doing their investigations into like like Sheian
Speaker 3: was the other one into like are these companies using
Speaker 3: Shing John's slave labor and you know this is labor
Speaker 3: from people put in in the fucking camps. I think
Speaker 3: the answer is probably because I mean, so the thing
Speaker 3: is the State Department doesn't have any actual evidence, right,
Speaker 3: like they're all and they're they're doing this incredibly what
Speaker 3: we'll get into this in a second, Like, you know,
Speaker 3: obviously they're doing this because this is like this is
Speaker 3: an intra like capitalist feud thing, right. The State Department's
Speaker 3: talking about this because they're pissed at China. Yeah, this
Speaker 3: is like a nastic project for the United States. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but Comma, it's also probably true because these like and
Speaker 3: and this this is like the thing specifically with with
Speaker 3: PDD that we've been talking about is that they don't
Speaker 3: intimus Like they don't vet the sellers of stuff, right,
Speaker 3: Like we talked about last episode that like people were
Speaker 3: selling sleeping pills as date rate drugs, right, they don't
Speaker 3: fucking vet it at all. So yeah, probably, like quite possibly. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the stuff, the stuff that they're selling from Shing Jun,
Speaker 3: and they have a pretty large presence there, like was
Speaker 3: using sort of like prison slave labor from the camps there. However, Comma,
Speaker 3: we can't talk about prison slave labor without talking about
Speaker 3: the fact that fucking every goddamn US firm also uses
Speaker 3: prison slave labor. Everyone from fucking McDonald's to Starbucks, to
Speaker 3: Walgreens to JC Penny, like fucking every every company, every
Speaker 3: American company you can fucking think of, uses slave labor
Speaker 3: or their slave labor in their in their supply chain.
Speaker 3: And they're using slave labor because in the US, under
Speaker 3: the thirteenth Amendment, slavery is legal as long as the
Speaker 3: person as long as the person being enslaved is incarcerated.
Speaker 3: So you know, like it doesn't fucking matter, like this
Speaker 3: is this is this is the problem. It doesn't matter
Speaker 3: whether you buy from the US or China. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: you're you're getting fucking slave labor. So if you if
Speaker 3: you want to not do that, your your your only option.
Speaker 3: If if you do not want to, if you do
Speaker 3: not want everything you consume, like the food that you eat.
Speaker 3: If you don't want, like everything that you use in
Speaker 3: your daily life to be the product of unfathomable human exploitation,
Speaker 3: your only option is to destroy the monstrous economic system
Speaker 3: that reduces humans to commodities and tear up the fucking
Speaker 3: roots of every single one of these companies from San
Speaker 3: Francisco to Shanghai and burn it to the ground. That's
Speaker 3: that that those are your options, like, it's not your
Speaker 3: individual consumer choice, not gonna make it any better that
Speaker 3: That's what I got.
Speaker 4: I okay, all right, well god, like was it the
Speaker 4: Super Bowl great this year?
Speaker 3: Yeah? What a game? What a game?
Speaker 4: Almost almost double overtime.
Speaker 3: That was crazy. I I don't know. That was the
Speaker 3: worst Chiefs team of all time and they nobody could
Speaker 3: fucking beat them. We're so dubed. We're going to get
Speaker 3: Patrick Mahobe is gonna win like a fucking twelve peet.
Speaker 3: It's so over for every other sports team. Better things
Speaker 3: aren't possible unless you make them possible.
Speaker 9: Hello and welcome to it could happen here. Today's episode
Speaker 9: is one that I wanted to tackle for a while,
Speaker 9: and there are many different avenues to go about it.
Speaker 9: I think today's a little bit more focused, and I
Speaker 9: want to talk about food, Palestinian food, to be exact,
Speaker 9: and the way that it can be used as resistance
Speaker 9: as part of a culture that is being eradicated. Essentially,
Speaker 9: the appropriate of Palestinian surface culture by Israel has been
Speaker 9: happening ever since Israel's inception. Surface culture encompasses tangible and
Speaker 9: observable elements that contribute to the distinctive identity of a
Speaker 9: cultural group or region. Music, food, dress, and other aspects
Speaker 9: often define a nation's surface culture. Authentic culture evolves organically
Speaker 9: over generations, at least it's supposed to, but Israel has
Speaker 9: a sort of top down approach to culture that lacks
Speaker 9: genuine identifying characteristics. Throughout its history, Israel has either fabricated, annexed,
Speaker 9: or reconstructed both surface and deep cultural elements through what
Speaker 9: writer Jamal Khanj describes as quote falsehoods, myths, and fables.
Speaker 9: Unlike the conventional, slow and organic development of culture, Israeli
Speaker 9: surface culture came prepackaged by appropriating those very elements from
Speaker 9: the Age Old to Palestinian culture. A prominent aspect of
Speaker 9: any society's culture is its local cuisine. In nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 9: Israel ethnically cleansed Palestine of all non Jewish Palestinians, took
Speaker 9: over their land and brazenly claimed Palestinian culinary treasures like hummus, falafe, Babylonus, deabule, salad, coscos,
Speaker 9: frikic i, bimjadda, da peda, bread, and many more. They
Speaker 9: claimed them all as Israeli. All it took was to
Speaker 9: identify a Palestinian dish and then add the noun Israeli
Speaker 9: before its name. Going through the complete list of pleasiarized
Speaker 9: Palestinian cuisine would take me way, way too long, especially
Speaker 9: because I feel like Western familiarity with Palestinian cuisine remains
Speaker 9: somewhat limited. But I do want to explain one example
Speaker 9: that clearly shows just how foreign appropriated Palestinian food is
Speaker 9: to Israel.
Speaker 3: Homos.
Speaker 9: The Arabic word humos does not exist in these spoken
Speaker 9: Israeli language Hebrew. Pronouncing the word correctly is actually a
Speaker 9: bit challenging for most Hebrew speakers because there is no
Speaker 9: hard ha in the Hebrew alphabet, and in general, when
Speaker 9: Hebrew speakers attempt to enunciate homos or any Arabic word
Speaker 9: with the hard ha. They mispronounce it as j in
Speaker 9: this case homos not homos, and you might have heard
Speaker 9: this a lot recently. When it comes to Ramas. The
Speaker 9: full name of the dish homos becomes even more challenging
Speaker 9: when adding its second part to heini. The h in
Speaker 9: tahini is also a hard ha, So own Israeli would
Speaker 9: distort the Palestinian dish homos bitahini to horomos bitachini. This
Speaker 9: is an insult to the Arabic language, culinary etiquette, and
Speaker 9: to Arab shifts in the levant kitchen around the world.
Speaker 9: To paraphrase Palestinian American comedian Moamer, homos does not exist
Speaker 9: in your lexicon. You can't pronounce it, how can it
Speaker 9: be your national food. Even more amusing is when an
Speaker 9: Israeli writer posited that humost and eggplant babyanuche were quote
Speaker 9: Israeli foods, because that's how the Spanish Inquisition identified secret
Speaker 9: Jews from the food they ate. A similar hypothesis to
Speaker 9: this is the argument that foods like homos, fada, felfric, etc.
Speaker 9: Were brought by Jews who came from the Arab world.
Speaker 9: Of course, the diverse citizenry of the Arab world or
Speaker 9: the Muslim slash Arab Spain. It must have had hommost
Speaker 9: and eggplant in their cultural diet. Jewish citizens cooked and
Speaker 9: ate the food because they lived in the culture that
Speaker 9: produced the food, not because they created the food for
Speaker 9: that culture. Arab Jews also exist, but that would still
Speaker 9: make all of this food Arabic.
Speaker 8: Food.
Speaker 9: Writer Jamad Kanj writes, since Israelis contend that Jews have
Speaker 9: the right to claim foods brought with them as Israeli food,
Speaker 9: why don't they claim Russian dishes as Israeli food?
Speaker 3: Better?
Speaker 9: Yet, why don't Is from New York claim American steak
Speaker 9: as an Israeli food too? I know it's kind of
Speaker 9: said in jest, but he does raise a serious question.
Speaker 9: Why does Israel appropriate Palestinian and Arab food but not
Speaker 9: food brought in from Russia, Europe, Poland or America. It
Speaker 9: is simply because Palestinian food provides the Israeli top down
Speaker 9: culture with a distinctive surface cultural identity. It also features
Speaker 9: atypical exotic culinary dishes to Western kitchens, and this makes
Speaker 9: it a lot easier to hoodwink the West regarding the
Speaker 9: origin of their made up surface culture. The gall of
Speaker 9: claiming Palestinian culinary treasures is not only historically inaccurate, but
Speaker 9: also offensive and disrespectful. It is quite common for countries
Speaker 9: to adopt elements of other cultures, including their cuisine. For example,
Speaker 9: American cuisine celebrates a rich tapestry of international dishes like Asian, Italian,
Speaker 9: and Mexican food. However, the foods remained appreciated for their origin,
Speaker 9: with no real urgency to appropriate them as America's national food.
Speaker 9: Kanj suggests that unlike Israel, it could be that the
Speaker 9: United States does not have the same obsessive need to
Speaker 9: fake a culture to justify its existence. In contrast, the
Speaker 9: Zionist movement envisioned Israel's survival as being predicated on erasing
Speaker 9: the history of the rich heritage of Palestine's culture.
Speaker 3: And its people.
Speaker 9: And all of this is extremely relevant to what is
Speaker 9: happening right now as Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians.
Speaker 9: Because genocide and ethnic cleansing isn't just about lives lost.
Speaker 9: It's not just about physical death, but the death of
Speaker 9: the very idea of a people. Erasing even the memory
Speaker 9: of a people and their culture, cuisine, and heritage along
Speaker 9: with it, it's pretending Palestinians and their culture were never
Speaker 9: there to begin with. And this has been a narrative
Speaker 9: that Zionists have said since Israel's inception, the land without
Speaker 9: people for a people without land. But this appropriation of
Speaker 9: food in both the physical and cultural ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Speaker 9: This didn't start on October seventh. The slow ethnic cleansing
Speaker 9: of Palestine has been going on for over seventy six years,
Speaker 9: and the stealing and claiming of Palestinian food as Israeli
Speaker 9: is intrinsically a part of that. It brings me to
Speaker 9: the topic of today's episode. Today, my guests are Reem
Speaker 9: Asial and Jabriel Units. Reim is a multiple award winning
Speaker 9: Palestinian Syrian speaker and chef based in Oakland, California, working
Speaker 9: at the intersection of food, community and social justice. Jabrie
Speaker 9: is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist who has worked with
Speaker 9: Reim on multiple projects, including a show that we touch
Speaker 9: on in this episode. With Food as a Tool, we
Speaker 9: talk about utilizing Arab hospitality to build a strong, resilient
Speaker 9: community as well as celebrate Palestinian joy. Here it is Hello, everybody,
Speaker 9: this is Sharen. Welcome to It could happen here today,
Speaker 9: we're talking to two people I love and respect very
Speaker 9: much about a topic that I think is really underreported on,
Speaker 9: and that's food erasure and how it's part of ethnic cleansing.
Speaker 9: And I think it's a really important topic to talk
Speaker 9: about right now, especially with the genocide happening in Palestine.
Speaker 9: So let's just jump right in without further ado. Welcome
Speaker 9: my guests, Read and Jabidil.
Speaker 1: Hello, Hello, Hello, Hey.
Speaker 9: Just so our audience can get to know you guys
Speaker 9: a little bit better, how about you all introduce yourselves
Speaker 9: and like what you do?
Speaker 5: And yeah, yeah, ream you want to go first?
Speaker 1: Sure. My name is Reem. I am a Bay Area
Speaker 1: based Palestinian Syria and chef. I own a restaurant called Reems, California,
Speaker 1: and our mission really is to build community across cultures
Speaker 1: and experiences through the warmth of Arab bred and hospitality.
Speaker 5: Beautiful. Wow, that was so succinct.
Speaker 7: My name is thank you for sesay, so.
Speaker 1: I've done it a few times, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: My name is jobrel Unis. I'm a filmmaker based in
Speaker 7: Pasadena and I am also a Palestinian artist in general.
Speaker 9: Yeah, no relation. Both of our last names are Unis,
Speaker 9: but that is how we met. A white person said,
Speaker 9: you guys have the same last name, you should meet,
Speaker 9: and we met. No, we're friends, But I really like
Speaker 9: the partnership that you guys have in the collaboration that
Speaker 9: you guys, from my perspective, have established. Can you guys
Speaker 9: talk about what you've been working on recently together?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Yeah, So we've been working on for the past since
Speaker 7: like twenty twenty one or late twenty We've been working
Speaker 7: on a documentary series that is named after Reem's cookbook,
Speaker 7: which is you should pick it up. It's one of
Speaker 7: my favorite cookbooks that I own. It's called Arabia and
Speaker 7: it is a documentary series exploring the food ways and
Speaker 7: diaspora of Arab people across South past Asia North Africa.
Speaker 7: And I think the general log line and dream can
Speaker 7: dive into a bit more of the general log line
Speaker 7: is you can tell this like through telling the story
Speaker 7: of the food, you can tell the story of our
Speaker 7: people in diaspora. And it underscores a lot of I
Speaker 7: think we'll talk about today, which is sort of food identity,
Speaker 7: identity through food and resilience and through food. But also
Speaker 7: I think one thing that's always been really important to
Speaker 7: both of us is how much we see the show
Speaker 7: as like a celebration of our culture. I feel like
Speaker 7: there are so many trauma stories from not only Palestinians
Speaker 7: but Arabs in general, and I think something that was
Speaker 7: really important us as I guess let's talk about all
Speaker 7: of it. We're an extremely I think you know, we're
Speaker 7: extremely politicized as a people, but also very passionate. But
Speaker 7: also let's celebrate all the things we love about ourselves
Speaker 7: and love about our culture and the tastes and smells
Speaker 7: and sounds and sights. So how would you I feel
Speaker 7: like that's sort of the setup, but how would you
Speaker 7: describe it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. And our hope is
Speaker 1: that the being able to break down the barriers or
Speaker 1: have a lens into our world for the public is
Speaker 1: kind of a gateway to understand the context and the
Speaker 1: politics behind why things are the way they are and
Speaker 1: to really fight the dehumanization that Arabs have experienced, particularly
Speaker 1: in the West. And so, you know, while this is
Speaker 1: a show about food, it's also it's very much a
Speaker 1: show about people and how interconnected we are. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we're really excited to be able to break down some
Speaker 1: of those barriers of understanding in a way that could
Speaker 1: actually lead to people, you know, fighting anti Arab sentiment
Speaker 1: in this country, fighting Islamophobia, all of these things when
Speaker 1: they have that kind of lens or that view into
Speaker 1: our world.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I mean it's been pretty interesting. I can
Speaker 7: I keep vamping a little bit. It's been pretty interesting.
Speaker 7: I mean, I think the sort of like thought that
Speaker 7: started the show really was why it's so easy? And
Speaker 7: I think we'll talk about this later too in depth,
Speaker 7: but like, why is it so easy to find so
Speaker 7: many different cultures food? You know, like you have I'm
Speaker 7: going to use Asian food as an example because I
Speaker 7: live in the San Gabriel Valley, so it's like all
Speaker 7: around me. But you have Korean food and Japanese food,
Speaker 7: and so many different types of Chinese food that are
Speaker 7: all specifically called what they are and where they're from. Right,
Speaker 7: They're all like identified correctly, and that can extend to
Speaker 7: the Latin X world and their food, it can extend
Speaker 7: to European food. It's all very you know, like people
Speaker 7: call it what it is, and then you sort of
Speaker 7: get to you get to you know, Southwest Asia and
Speaker 7: North Africa and suddenly the food stops being called you
Speaker 7: know what it is, and starts being called Mediterranean or
Speaker 7: starts being called Middle Eastern. And I think that the
Speaker 7: idea was, like I had gone to Anaheim, where there's
Speaker 7: a neighborhood called Little Arabia here, and there was a
Speaker 7: Palestinian restaurant.
Speaker 5: I was like so excited about it. It was called
Speaker 5: the Olive Tree.
Speaker 7: It's closed now, but I was like so so excited,
Speaker 7: and I got I always get so so excited when
Speaker 7: I find a Palestinian restaurant or a yeam any restaurant, and.
Speaker 5: You know, I mean many of them.
Speaker 7: But I think the reason I get so excited is
Speaker 7: because it's so hard to find those places, and I
Speaker 7: think there's a reason why. And so, you know, three
Speaker 7: and a half years later, the show has sort of
Speaker 7: grown from that initial thought and interest and become very
Speaker 7: very different, and it's effort to humanize Arabs, which is
Speaker 7: something I think is you know, it's unfortunate that we
Speaker 7: still have to do that, but I think we kind
Speaker 7: of do, especially right now. But yeah, we've been pitching
Speaker 7: for like, you know, we worked on it together for
Speaker 7: a while and then have just been pitching and going
Speaker 7: through pitches and talking at different companies and getting a
Speaker 7: lot of great feedback and getting some really weird feedback
Speaker 7: for the past like few years.
Speaker 9: And we can talk about that more if you want,
Speaker 9: but well, oh, I'd like to talk about some of
Speaker 9: the more interesting feedback, I guess, But I would also
Speaker 9: want to ask you, ream, how how did you get
Speaker 9: involved in food? Like where did that passion start?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've I would say food has always been in
Speaker 1: the backdrop, for better or for worse of my life experiences,
Speaker 1: particularly when everything falls apart from me. I grew up
Speaker 1: kind of as a whatever. The term I've heard is
Speaker 1: like the third culture kid, right where the Arab identity
Speaker 1: was really strong in our household and that was particularly
Speaker 1: through food, but then also and a stranger in a
Speaker 1: strange land outside of the home, where it was predominantly
Speaker 1: your typical Americana suburban culture. And so I was kind
Speaker 1: of like, even though food was there, the intertwining with
Speaker 1: identity made me like run away from it a lot
Speaker 1: because it reminds you of your otherness and also just
Speaker 1: the nuances of seeing my mom being a working mom
Speaker 1: and struggling in the kitchen. So I was like I'm
Speaker 1: I'm going to be a feminist and I'm never going
Speaker 1: to touch that was like, and then every time, like
Speaker 1: you know, and then I did like what the immigrant
Speaker 1: child does, like overachiever, like go to college, try to
Speaker 1: be the president, and then realize that's not.
Speaker 9: What I want to do.
Speaker 1: When I spent many years in the nonprofit world, I
Speaker 1: was doing organizer work, and while that work was really
Speaker 1: rewarding to some extent, it was really draining and not
Speaker 1: fulfilling in a deeper spiritual level. And so every time
Speaker 1: I would burn out, the food, and particularly the food
Speaker 1: of my culture would come back in some shape or form.
Speaker 1: So I just had this kind of moment in twenty
Speaker 1: ten where I was in another bout of burnout and
Speaker 1: depression and really questioning everything. And it was a trip
Speaker 1: that I took to the Arab world with my father
Speaker 1: and seeing particularly bred in these straight corner bakeries be
Speaker 1: the anchor for this community that I had, you know,
Speaker 1: as a kid of diaspora, like really longing to feel
Speaker 1: connected to and it was through the food that I
Speaker 1: felt connected once again. So my mom did something right.
Speaker 1: Look of her the credit for that, But I was like,
Speaker 1: I need to explore this more. I need to understand
Speaker 1: what is this? And so then food became a source
Speaker 1: of healing for me to like come back to my
Speaker 1: identity and come back to my culture. But then also
Speaker 1: just the power of food as a community builder that
Speaker 1: like transcends all cultures, Like I really loved that as
Speaker 1: a community organizer who had been working with other communities
Speaker 1: who struggled just like my own, right, So that's kind
Speaker 1: of how I got into food by way of my
Speaker 1: love for wanting to belong and my love for connection
Speaker 1: of community, and then slowly became obsessed with food itself.
Speaker 1: I mean, who doesn't love food? But it is a
Speaker 1: place of both trauma and healing for me, So it
Speaker 1: became kind of a way to transcend that.
Speaker 9: No, I think it's a great thing to bring up
Speaker 9: how it's a trauma and very healing as well. I
Speaker 9: to kind of talk about like the feedback. I know
Speaker 9: you've had a restaurant in the Bay Area for a while.
Speaker 9: Was it similar when you tried to make the show
Speaker 9: come together, Like did you have similar barriers and feedback,
Speaker 9: Like were you like familiar with some of the things
Speaker 9: that people were saying or was it completely like a
Speaker 9: new game.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the context that I started my restaurant, and I
Speaker 1: want to say it was probably much different than even
Speaker 1: what it is now today, although certainly there is backlash.
Speaker 1: But I would say I was one of the first
Speaker 1: few chefs who were saying, nope, I want my food
Speaker 1: to be called Arab. And I really wanted to counter
Speaker 1: these kind of watered down labels of Middle Eastern or
Speaker 1: Mediterranean or you know, levantine. To me, those were all
Speaker 1: colonial terms and it was like a bad word to
Speaker 1: say Arab, and I wanted to reclaim that identity. I
Speaker 1: was like, if I'm going to come out, I want
Speaker 1: to come out as my whole self and not this person,
Speaker 1: this scared person that was stifled all my life. And
Speaker 1: I understand why the immigrants before me came, you know,
Speaker 1: did it that way because they needed to make a living.
Speaker 1: And you know, there was a lot of anti Arab sentiment,
Speaker 1: especially in the wake of nine to eleven, that that
Speaker 1: kind of climate here. And so I had this like
Speaker 1: lovely idea that I'm like this generation where I can
Speaker 1: like break it down and make it cool. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to mainstream it, you know, And I got
Speaker 1: pushback actually from my own family, because they had those fears.
Speaker 1: They were like just you know, start like don't even
Speaker 1: start with like a zacta avduu. Shit, nobody's gonna now
Speaker 1: it's like the hot thing. But so that was a
Speaker 1: context in which I was opening my business and nobody
Speaker 1: had done it really before, so I could kind of
Speaker 1: create my own rules and people like what is this?
Speaker 1: And I still got like a lot of like, oh
Speaker 1: is this you know Mediterranean? You know people, it took
Speaker 1: a while to train people to say Arab and then
Speaker 1: put the layer of Palestinian identity, you know, my Palestinian
Speaker 1: identity at the time that I was opening my restaurant
Speaker 1: was really important. It was you know, I had started
Speaker 1: my pop ups on the in the wake of Israel's
Speaker 1: second to worst. Now we're seeing the worst of it
Speaker 1: incursion on Raz in twenty fourteen, in which they killed
Speaker 1: you know, over three thousand Palestinians in one winter, and
Speaker 1: we were devastated by that. We were devastated about the
Speaker 1: state of organizing with Palestinians. And I really wanted to
Speaker 1: as I opened my restaurant, not be scared to talk
Speaker 1: about my whole self, and so I h so everything
Speaker 1: about Reims. Even though we're not like pushing our politics
Speaker 1: in your face. Very act of being Palestinian was seen
Speaker 1: as political, just existing, and we had a mural of
Speaker 1: a Palestinian activist who was based in Chicago names Desmoda,
Speaker 1: who is deported by the government, as it made an
Speaker 1: example of to say, if you're Palestinian and you're outspoken
Speaker 1: about Palestine, this is what will happen to you. And
Speaker 1: I put her on the wall to remind my community
Speaker 1: and to remind myself that we don't need to be scared.
Speaker 1: And I got a lot of backlash for that, but
Speaker 1: I think even in that time, despite the backlash, the
Speaker 1: amount of community support, amount of opportunity for people to learn,
Speaker 1: was that much greater, and so I ended up getting
Speaker 1: a lot more positive attention for my vikery overall as
Speaker 1: a result of that.
Speaker 7: Do you have just a few?
Speaker 1: It makes me happy every time I wake up with
Speaker 1: a nomination, I'm like, I wonder what the Zionists be thinking.
Speaker 1: It gives me a little bit of like hope that
Speaker 1: like our success is kind of like what is threatening,
Speaker 1: you know, because we are truth We are in the
Speaker 1: business of truth telling, and we do it in a
Speaker 1: way that's very human, you know, based in our humanity
Speaker 1: and our dignity, and that our restaurant was really I
Speaker 1: think powerful in that way that a simple art piece
Speaker 1: or the simple act of making food and calling it
Speaker 1: Palestinian was that threatening to the powers.
Speaker 7: That be, you know, Like that's such an interesting backdrop
Speaker 7: also to talk about the feedback we got from the show,
Speaker 7: because like, I think Reem's experience was so was so
Speaker 7: visceral in that way, and I mean when she described
Speaker 7: as well, and I think you can look it up
Speaker 7: and there have been articles on BIS and stuff about
Speaker 7: it where people can read about her experience and everything
Speaker 7: that happened. And you know, I think maybe we undersold
Speaker 7: you your intro a little bit raam, like you're a badass,
Speaker 7: and you know, the James Beard noms and a lot
Speaker 7: of great and awesome press.
Speaker 5: But I think what's.
Speaker 7: Interesting about the show is with realms, with realms at
Speaker 7: the restaurant. You know, it's very specifically Palestinian and Arab food,
Speaker 7: and the show, while yeah, it's being made by us
Speaker 7: who are Palestinian people, it's not only about Palestine. And
Speaker 7: that's been something we've sort of had to overcome. Like
Speaker 7: the show is about Arabs, and it's about our foods
Speaker 7: and food ways, and as much as the food, you know,
Speaker 7: the show. As much as the show focuses on Palestine,
Speaker 7: it also focuses on Egypt and Yemen and where you know,
Speaker 7: I mean the Yemeni coffee tradition is like where Arab
Speaker 7: coffee kind of came from and started from. And it
Speaker 7: also focused on Lebanon and Morocco and Algeria. It's been
Speaker 7: an interesting yeah, go ahead, ream, Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was just to that point, like it's it's not
Speaker 1: about I mean, first of all, these these these states
Speaker 1: are border right or they're colonized states in some shape
Speaker 1: or form, and the idea is to fight the tropes
Speaker 1: of the Arab as one thing, right, Like it's showing
Speaker 1: the breadth and depth of our culture that like we're
Speaker 1: not Hamat, it's not a monolith, we're not homogeneous. And
Speaker 1: even the ethos of Realms kind of is very similar
Speaker 1: to that idea that yes, we are Palestinian, but we're
Speaker 1: also Syrian, we're also Oakland, we're also California. Like those
Speaker 1: things don't need to compete with one another. I hate
Speaker 1: you know, like you know, my identity kind of coming
Speaker 1: on the scene. Yes I'm Arab and yes I'm Palestinian,
Speaker 1: but those are political identities. The reason we call our
Speaker 1: food Palestinian is to draw attention to the ethnic cleansing
Speaker 1: and a rasure of our people. That's why we call
Speaker 1: it Palestinian. But it's not. There's there are certain foods
Speaker 1: that are not inherent. I mean, they're enjoyed all over
Speaker 1: the Arab world and they look different, but you can't
Speaker 1: like the claiming of ownership of food is. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I think this show is really trying to fight against
Speaker 1: that trope of the it's called ada Bia, which is
Speaker 1: kind of like a tongue in cheek, like what do
Speaker 1: you think of with the Arab woman? And it's like,
Speaker 1: let me take all of those stereotypes and like turn
Speaker 1: them on their head. It's the same thing with like
Speaker 1: all of our food ways in our culture. There is
Speaker 1: no singular way of what an Arab is. We all
Speaker 1: have kind of our unique stories and histories, so when
Speaker 1: we choose to call things what they are, there's a
Speaker 1: context in a history for that, and that's what we're
Speaker 1: trying to share.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 9: I think, I mean, I really relate to the idea
Speaker 9: of really wanting to be represented with food, Like when
Speaker 9: I find a Syrian restaurant, I freak out. Like there's
Speaker 9: one alcohol in southern California where it's like my family
Speaker 9: and I go there every weekend when I'm down and
Speaker 9: when I'm visiting my parents. It's just like a place
Speaker 9: where we feel like the closest we can get to
Speaker 9: home again. And I think it's a really important like
Speaker 9: reminder that I don't know food is food can be
Speaker 9: really powerful. And before I keep rambling, I'm gonna take
Speaker 9: our break and we'll be right back, and we are
Speaker 9: back reim you mentioned something earlier that I think is
Speaker 9: worth touching back on the idea of like existing being
Speaker 9: already like a political act. I think that is like
Speaker 9: it's a burden for a lot of people of color
Speaker 9: and a lot of marginalized communities. And I think hand
Speaker 9: in hand with that is the fact that like our
Speaker 9: food is also like a political act, like making sure
Speaker 9: it's couscus not is really cuscus, or whatever it is
Speaker 9: that we're trying to fight against. How do you see food?
Speaker 9: And especially now, I think people underestimate how many levels
Speaker 9: there are of ethnic cleansing because erasing food and appropriating
Speaker 9: food is a huge part of that, right, So can
Speaker 9: I get your take on that, both of your takes.
Speaker 1: You mean, like beyond appropriating, Yeah, I mean I think
Speaker 1: food is a tool of it is weaponized historically against people,
Speaker 1: I mean most doubtably obviously with seventy five years of
Speaker 1: occupation of Palestine. One of the many ways besides the dispossession, killing, expulsion,
Speaker 1: is to sever us from our food waste. And when
Speaker 1: you sever someone from their land that creates the food ways,
Speaker 1: you sever them from their culture, from their existence. Then
Speaker 1: there's just the most the more immediate way as we're
Speaker 1: seeing this genocide unfolds, where you can starve a population
Speaker 1: in that and so food then becomes kind of of
Speaker 1: this powerful tool to break a people, and why we
Speaker 1: see people like food become a form of resistance for people.
Speaker 1: But even here in our communities, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: not unfortunately unique to the Palestinians. You've seen the pillaging
Speaker 1: of indigenous folks here in this country the same things,
Speaker 1: kind of cutting them off from their food ways, their
Speaker 1: means of subsistence, of supporting one another, of you know,
Speaker 1: being connected to their culture. And now you're seeing in
Speaker 1: communities through economic policy, like food deserts and people not
Speaker 1: being able to access their food or have sovereignty over
Speaker 1: their food production. So it is absolutely a tool and
Speaker 1: something that we talk about at REAMS a lot that,
Speaker 1: like the fight for Palestine is the fight for food
Speaker 1: sovereignty everywhere and vice versa.
Speaker 9: Right, Well, I'm glad you brought up the idea of
Speaker 9: or just the fact that like Israel and the Zionist
Speaker 9: regime has like taken Palestinians from their land. And I've
Speaker 9: talked about this before on this podcast, but like the
Speaker 9: olive tree is a very significant part of Palestinian culture,
Speaker 9: and like olive harvesting is a huge part of Palestinian life.
Speaker 9: And so when you burn down thousands of olive trees,
Speaker 9: or when you kick people out of like the art
Speaker 9: agriculturally rich parts of the land, you're denying them so
Speaker 9: much more than just olives. It's like very deep. And
Speaker 9: I think when people that are not as informed about
Speaker 9: Palestine question like why is there a watermelon? Like what's
Speaker 9: this and what's the olive about? And I think that
Speaker 9: goes to show how powerful food can be. And just
Speaker 9: for those who don't know, the watermelon became an active
Speaker 9: or a symbol of resistance because the Palestinian flag was
Speaker 9: not allowed to be raised for a while, and it
Speaker 9: has the same colors as Palestini flag, and so that's
Speaker 9: just like a really beautiful way that food has become
Speaker 9: this like powerful symbol. And so I just I just
Speaker 9: trying to, I don't know, emphasize that a little bit,
Speaker 9: I guess, Jabil, what's your take.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean I think that I think just I'll
Speaker 7: speak like a little bit more domestically. I feel like
Speaker 7: Reem is so eloquent and talking about historic parts of it,
Speaker 7: but I mean even here, like domestically in Los Angeles
Speaker 7: or California, I think one of the things and it
Speaker 7: kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 7: One of the things that's one of the things that's
Speaker 7: difficult is there are so few identifying parts of or
Speaker 7: just restaurants in general, like correctly identifying restaurants Syria in
Speaker 7: or Lebanese or Palestinian or what have you, and they
Speaker 7: hide under these names which when I'm not going to
Speaker 7: name like specific restaurants here, but like which when other
Speaker 7: restaurants open and maybe they're owned by an Italian person
Speaker 7: or just other people that aren't Arab, and suddenly they're
Speaker 7: taking the food and misappropriating it and calling it. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I mean Israeli kuscus or like an Israeli salad or
Speaker 7: Israeli falaffl or Hey, here's all this food and it's
Speaker 7: shuarma and it's kebabs and it's manyish and we're an
Speaker 7: Israeli restaurant. Like these are things that are really difficult
Speaker 7: because I think, you know, those things tend to be
Speaker 7: unfortunately just like more approachable, saying Mediterranean tends to be
Speaker 7: more approachable, and what you get ultimately is a population
Speaker 7: of I would say a larger population of non Arab
Speaker 7: people that don't really understand what they're eating and they're
Speaker 7: not educated on where it comes from. And just the
Speaker 7: amount of people you know, anecdotally that I personally have
Speaker 7: met who like don't know that this food is Arab
Speaker 7: food or don't know like what where the food comes from,
Speaker 7: which is so interesting to me because it's not an
Speaker 7: experience that I think many other cultures or ethnicities have.
Speaker 7: And so yeah, I mean I kind of always joke
Speaker 7: that I feel like a really close example is if
Speaker 7: you know, somebody started like an American person started making
Speaker 7: sushi and they're like, this is American food and it's
Speaker 7: just not at the same time. And so I think
Speaker 7: that the need to assimilate for generations before reems and
Speaker 7: I I have an empathy for the want of safety
Speaker 7: that they were doing and the want to make a
Speaker 7: living and the reasons they did it. I think we
Speaker 7: kind of alluded to that earlier. But where it's left
Speaker 7: us now is a population of Arabs and diaspora that
Speaker 7: I think are harmed for it. You know, like we
Speaker 7: don't have we don't show up on the census, and
Speaker 7: it's all sort of one part. It's all they're all
Speaker 7: different parts of the one problem. And I think that
Speaker 7: when you take the food and you don't give it
Speaker 7: its correct name, and you don't or you give it
Speaker 7: the incorrect name, it hurts all of us in ways
Speaker 7: that like we can't even imagine, whether it's at work
Speaker 7: or in diversity and belonging initiatives not including Swannamina people,
Speaker 7: or whether it's just in food ways and not being
Speaker 7: included or not being included in the census, which leads
Speaker 7: to us not having as much community support around our
Speaker 7: people are not knowing medical statistics like I think they're
Speaker 7: all they're symptoms of a bigger issue, and I think
Speaker 7: one of the ways you combat that issue is through
Speaker 7: knowledge and shared learning and shared experience.
Speaker 5: And I think food and.
Speaker 7: Food ways are one of the main ways that people
Speaker 7: experience and learn about other cultures. And I think if
Speaker 7: people look at that in their own lives, you can
Speaker 7: apply it to any culture of food that you really
Speaker 7: love and maybe it's not your own, and you've learned
Speaker 7: something about those people through that, you know. I think
Speaker 7: the main dishes of any culture, it says a lot
Speaker 7: about where that culture has been, where they come from,
Speaker 7: what their history is. And I think people being able
Speaker 7: to experience those things and go to a Mexican restaurant
Speaker 7: and learn about, you know, a certain dish and where
Speaker 7: it comes from or why it's there or why it's
Speaker 7: named something is an experience that allows them to learn
Speaker 7: about a culture. And we just don't necessarily have that here.
Speaker 7: And then when you add on, you know, misnomers or
Speaker 7: incorrect labels, it becomes even more damaging and also just
Speaker 7: hurtful and very annoying, Like it's so annoying, and I like,
Speaker 7: I don't want to go. I'm sorry, Like there are
Speaker 7: restaurants in LA that I like just don't want to
Speaker 7: go to. And maybe the chefs are really nice and
Speaker 7: they might be allies in some ways, or maybe they're not,
Speaker 7: but like I would rather give please, Like I would
Speaker 7: rather give my money to like an Arab person making
Speaker 7: our own food rather than going to experience it.
Speaker 5: In a different way, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Like I don't.
Speaker 7: I don't know, so I think that's kind of like
Speaker 7: how I generally feel. And the less professional answer is
Speaker 7: I just find it like really annoying. And I'm like,
Speaker 7: come on, y'all, there's so many listen, like, we're not
Speaker 7: LA's not New York. We have like not as many
Speaker 7: Arab places to go. They're sort of few. You have
Speaker 7: to seek them out a little bit more here. But
Speaker 7: I'm like, come on, y'all, we're out here. Yeah, go
Speaker 7: find go find us, like, go find give your money
Speaker 7: to like this Syrian immigrant who moved here and started
Speaker 7: this place that everybody loves.
Speaker 5: And you know, I, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 7: There are a lot of big restaurants, are very popular
Speaker 7: restaurants here, and I'm just like, not a dog. I
Speaker 7: don't want to pay I don't want to pay thirty
Speaker 7: five dollars for to believe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, I mean, I think it's twofold kind
Speaker 1: of like who has access to resources versus who doesn't? Right,
Speaker 1: who gets highlighted? You know, there's that piece and what's
Speaker 1: palatable to the American public and what's not right? Like
Speaker 1: I always say, like, for for instance, I think like realms,
Speaker 1: we kind of we do things a little bit different. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we honor tradition, we honor the soul of air cuisine,
Speaker 1: but we play around with it. And one could argue,
Speaker 1: are we is this like americanizing the food? And we're like, no,
Speaker 1: it's just through the lens of a yes for Palestinian
Speaker 1: Syrian by way of California. But we I think when
Speaker 1: we first came on the scene, I mean, there is
Speaker 1: something to be said about the privilege that I have
Speaker 1: as English speaking, as this generation that can like what
Speaker 1: do you call it, translate the foods to a mainstream
Speaker 1: public in a way that's like really compelling, like a
Speaker 1: mediator almost, But that comes from a little bit of
Speaker 1: like that people don't they want the food, you know,
Speaker 1: and so like I am this palatable character in some ways,
Speaker 1: and that's a contradiction that I'm constantly like, I don't
Speaker 1: want to be, but it's like, what do you call
Speaker 1: that the trojan horse? Right? But then once you come
Speaker 1: into Reams, it's still it's very warm. I mean, there's nothing.
Speaker 1: We're not tricking anyone, right, But we're also truly ourselves
Speaker 1: and that's not for everybody. So we don't want to
Speaker 1: be a gentrifying space where like, if you're going to
Speaker 1: come in here, you have to deal with the community
Speaker 1: that we're in just as much as the food that
Speaker 1: you are obsessed with now, right because either wrote about
Speaker 1: it or whatever. So we really and that's not for everybody, right, like,
Speaker 1: and that just speaks to a like a bigger problem
Speaker 1: of like if you like the people as much as
Speaker 1: you like their food, Like our food is not just
Speaker 1: for sale. You can't just take some of it and
Speaker 1: leave the rest of it. And I think that's why
Speaker 1: the American public is so comfortable with our foods being
Speaker 1: represented by people other than us. We're not we're not
Speaker 1: We're never the tellers of our own stories because again,
Speaker 1: this dehumanization of Palestinians, and it's particularly interesting now and
Speaker 1: I would say, like Reims has always been transparent. But
Speaker 1: I've heard from counterparts in who are now you know,
Speaker 1: like there are other restaurants now coming out. I think
Speaker 1: there was even just an article that was released today
Speaker 1: on Eater about the Palestinian category on Google, and you know,
Speaker 1: people are now calling their restaurants, are maybe leading up
Speaker 1: to this last four months calling their restaurants Palestinian. And
Speaker 1: that was palatable enough. It's like cool, like it's this
Speaker 1: culture that's really beautiful. But then when it came down
Speaker 1: to it, when we're experiencing a genocide, it made people
Speaker 1: feel uncomfortable. So it's like they want to like it
Speaker 1: doesn't stop at food, you know, And I think our food,
Speaker 1: at least for me, and I would say for a
Speaker 1: lot of people who get into like expressing their food
Speaker 1: ways here in the US, Like you can't just take
Speaker 1: some of us our food and then dismiss the rest
Speaker 1: of us or dehumanize the rest of us. And so
Speaker 1: I think that is the contradiction that we're always dealing with,
Speaker 1: is like how can we offer this beautiful culture but
Speaker 1: not tokenize it so it becomes depoliticized because it is political.
Speaker 1: And if you're engaging with Palestinian cuisine and consuming it.
Speaker 1: You can't just you can't do it without either you know,
Speaker 1: being an active participant one way or the other, right,
Speaker 1: and what is happening to Palestinians. And so we kind
Speaker 1: of pushed the envelope on that, and you know, for
Speaker 1: us at Reams, that has yielded a real, ever expanding
Speaker 1: community of folks who have really maybe a few years ago,
Speaker 1: knew nothing about Palestine. We got to do it in
Speaker 1: a way that was right. And so we were you know,
Speaker 1: we met people where they're at. We bring them along.
Speaker 1: It's not like we're like, you know, beating anything over
Speaker 1: people's heads, but we're like, this is what it means
Speaker 1: to be truly authentically ourselves. This is our story, this
Speaker 1: is the history, this is the painful atrocities, And like,
Speaker 1: if you're going to eat our food, you have to
Speaker 1: engage with that in some way. Like it can't just
Speaker 1: be comfortable and like it's cool to eat Palestinian food.
Speaker 1: I don't want to see our food as a trend, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So while it's while it's cool to see a lot
Speaker 1: of Palestinian restaurants now gaining popularity, and hopefully, you know,
Speaker 1: REMS has paid some path for that we got to
Speaker 1: make sure that we're doing it in a way that's
Speaker 1: intentional and responsible so we don't get tokenized.
Speaker 7: I think one just like piggyback. One thought, one thought
Speaker 7: that you brought up Bream that I thought was really
Speaker 7: interesting was like being able to tell our own stories,
Speaker 7: and often we're not.
Speaker 4: We're not.
Speaker 7: And I think that relates to like a lot of
Speaker 7: what we've talked about today. But I mean even like
Speaker 7: sharing our own experiences, Like you know, I don't think
Speaker 7: it's necessarily a choice to be where you you know,
Speaker 7: to be who you are. It is what you are,
Speaker 7: and I think ultimately there's this real pressure for Arabs
Speaker 7: and in Palestinians as well, to sort of let other
Speaker 7: people tell our story for us, Let other people make
Speaker 7: the food, let other people photograph the traumas and the
Speaker 7: joy is like if you go to any like art
Speaker 7: bookstore and try to find like an Arab photographer photographing
Speaker 7: of their own people, whether it's the wars or the
Speaker 7: joy or art, like, you'll find maybe one, you know,
Speaker 7: And I've been to that and said, hey, do you
Speaker 7: have any I'm looking for like this, and I want
Speaker 7: it from an Arab person, And like the only one
Speaker 7: really is sharing a shot. Who's I'm Persian, But I
Speaker 7: don't know. I think it's I think it's just really
Speaker 7: interesting how I think there's like a real fear about
Speaker 7: talking about for a lot of us, about talking about
Speaker 7: our own experiences publicly. And I think a lot of that,
Speaker 7: A lot of that comes from just like being sort
Speaker 7: of conditioned in this country to minimize ourselves and minimize
Speaker 7: our identity.
Speaker 1: And I think essentially, well, there are real retributions for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we get jailed, we get deported, we get fired from
Speaker 1: our jobs. We don't get book deals, we don't get
Speaker 1: show deals. Yeah, as we're experiencing. So it's like that's real.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I mean a lot of the a lot
Speaker 7: of the stuff we've a lot of the feedback we've
Speaker 7: gotten on the show. I mean early on, a couple
Speaker 7: of years ago, we started getting feedback that I mean
Speaker 7: there were like two or three when we first started pitching,
Speaker 7: and I won't call out names, but they were like
Speaker 7: major companies, and one of them was we already have
Speaker 7: like our minority food show. Like that was one of
Speaker 7: the literal pieces of feedback. And another one was and
Speaker 7: again like I just I know We've talked about Palestine
Speaker 7: a lot, but again, like the show is not necessarily
Speaker 7: centered around Palestinians. It's just us telling our own stories.
Speaker 7: And one of the pieces of feedback we got was
Speaker 7: they were worried that Reim and I like that our
Speaker 7: identities were too inherently political. And it's like, okay, but
Speaker 7: there's like nothing we can do about how you perceive us.
Speaker 7: What we can control is saying, hey, we want to
Speaker 7: make an Arab joy show, and we want to like
Speaker 7: show off the things we love about our called Sure,
Speaker 7: and we want to talk about how great the food tastes,
Speaker 7: and talk about stories like immigrant success stories of people
Speaker 7: coming to this country. And yeah, we'll talk about the trauma,
Speaker 7: and sure, we'll talk about the politics because that's what
Speaker 7: we're passionate about. But like to get that feedback even
Speaker 7: a couple of years ago, when you know, it seemed
Speaker 7: like everybody was sort of every culture or people were
Speaker 7: getting their turn to sort of shine, was I was like, really,
Speaker 7: are we still Are we still here right now?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 7: And yeah, I mean it's gotten it's gotten weirder as
Speaker 7: time goes on, and you know, I don't know, no
Speaker 7: show exists like this in the way that probably no
Speaker 7: restaurant existed like Raim's did when she opened it. And
Speaker 7: I think it's going to take like someone who just
Speaker 7: really believes and is a champion for.
Speaker 5: Arab people.
Speaker 7: For us to make something that just shows how much
Speaker 7: we love our own peace people, and how excited we
Speaker 7: are to be Arab and how excited we are to
Speaker 7: be Palestinians, and how fucking awesome our food is and
Speaker 7: how great our culture is and how fun and exciting
Speaker 7: it is, and all these things that people love and eat.
Speaker 7: We just want to show them like where it comes
Speaker 7: from and who we are, and in addition to that,
Speaker 7: show that we're all regionally very different, like we call
Speaker 7: in this country. Every type of Arab food is called Mediterranean,
Speaker 7: whether it's Moroccan or Lebanese or Egyptian, and they're all
Speaker 7: so different, they're all wildly different. Yeah, And I think that, Yeah,
Speaker 7: like the fact that we haven't been able to tell
Speaker 7: this story is wild you know, like the fact that
Speaker 7: no one has and we've come really close. We've gotten
Speaker 7: into deals before, we've gotten into shopping agreements more recently,
Speaker 7: and sort of you know, the outcome felt punitive. After
Speaker 7: October seventh. And yeah, I think that ultimately the fact
Speaker 7: that like we we and it doesn't I you know, truly,
Speaker 7: I hope it's main rym but like the fact that
Speaker 7: no one has been able to tell this story for
Speaker 7: a group of people that is so huge in the
Speaker 7: Arab community, in the Muslim community, like that no one
Speaker 7: has been able to serve this demographic of people with
Speaker 7: a food show is wild and there's so many of
Speaker 7: us who would be so excited. I would be so excited,
Speaker 7: Like I would be bummed that it wasn't me, but
Speaker 7: I would be thrilled that.
Speaker 5: It happened for the community.
Speaker 7: And I don't know if not now when you know,
Speaker 7: like the time for the time for equity injustice as always.
Speaker 7: And I think that's generally how I sort of feel
Speaker 7: about the the show and just being able to like
Speaker 7: I just want to tell the story for my community
Speaker 7: so badly, And yeah, I mean, I don't know, I
Speaker 7: feel like I went on a bit of a tangent.
Speaker 7: That's kind of where I feel I am right now.
Speaker 1: Well, in a time of in a time of genocide
Speaker 1: where literally are people and this is not just past that,
Speaker 1: it's not you know, there's a regional are the dehumanization
Speaker 1: of Arabs is costing us lives. Yeah, so it feels
Speaker 1: that much more important.
Speaker 7: To do this work now.
Speaker 3: Ye.
Speaker 9: People are so used to seeing us seeing Arabs like traumatized,
Speaker 9: are used to seeing us in pain. They're used to
Speaker 9: seeing our countries destroyed and seeing our buildings turn into rubble.
Speaker 9: I think so much of our culture is so beautiful,
Speaker 9: and so much of it is about food and art
Speaker 9: and joy. I think it's really Yeah, I would be
Speaker 9: so excited for that show too, because I if I
Speaker 9: was a little kid watching that, I would have felt
Speaker 9: so much better about myself. And to your point a
Speaker 9: couple minutes ago, Realm, you were talking about how you're
Speaker 9: not exactly a mediator, but growing up, there's almost this
Speaker 9: like shame about having like you're not Arab enough, you're
Speaker 9: not American enough. You have a foot in both worlds.
Speaker 9: But it's really a strength, you know, in your experience
Speaker 9: and in our experience, Like we can use that foot
Speaker 9: in both worlds to our advantage and try to show
Speaker 9: the American community how beautiful our community is. And I
Speaker 9: don't know, I think it's yeah, I love you guys.
Speaker 1: That's what it comes down to it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but I really do appreciate you both doing this work,
Speaker 9: and yeah, reminding us that it's Arab culture isn't something
Speaker 9: to be feared. I don't know that the humanization has
Speaker 9: gotten to a point that it's just really terrifying. And
Speaker 9: so I think the fact that even existing is like
Speaker 9: political or scary, and yeah, you to your point, everything
Speaker 9: is so much more digestible for people an Arab or
Speaker 9: than Muslim or whatever. Like in La we have a
Speaker 9: huge Armenian community and they're really embraced, and I would
Speaker 9: love that to happen for us too.
Speaker 1: The backlash of being Arab feels very real and visceral
Speaker 1: right now, feels like we are in a time of
Speaker 1: the years after nine eleven again, and especially with this
Speaker 1: upcoming election in twenty twenty four, it's a really, I
Speaker 1: think a scary time of censorship for Arabs in general
Speaker 1: and Muslim communities. Regardless of who the candidate who wins
Speaker 1: our political campaign, it's quite clear that the policies towards us,
Speaker 1: you know, the foreign policy, but also domestically, how that
Speaker 1: has translated into hate crimes against Arabs simply for being
Speaker 1: Arab is a really scary thing. And so yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just a new thing that we're going to have to
Speaker 1: navigate in this in this new era.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think on that note, like community is so
Speaker 9: important and I'm really grateful to continue to foster the
Speaker 9: community around me as well. And I think with food,
Speaker 9: with Palestinian culture in general, it relies so much on
Speaker 9: us remembering and continuing to talk about it and not
Speaker 9: letting anyone forget about it. And so I think food
Speaker 9: is the same way. It's just reminding everyone this is
Speaker 9: where it comes from, this is how important it is,
Speaker 9: this is what it means to the culture. You can't
Speaker 9: enjoy some of our culture and not all of it,
Speaker 9: I guess, And I feel like that happens all the time.
Speaker 9: I really appreciate you guys both being on the show
Speaker 9: and talking a little bit about your stories, and yeah,
Speaker 9: I can't wait to see the show happen day because
Speaker 9: it will happen awesome.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the work that I'm doing,
Speaker 1: especially as it relates to food and hospitality. I was
Speaker 1: one of the founders of an effort called Hospitality for Humanity,
Speaker 1: and you can find us on at Hospitality the.
Speaker 3: Number four pal P a L.
Speaker 1: You know, we continue to do things at REMS and
Speaker 1: you can see us on the socials at REEMS, California,
Speaker 1: and then you can obviously follow my whereabouts at rem
Speaker 1: dot A seal.
Speaker 5: A s Sil.
Speaker 9: I could put all your links in the description as well,
Speaker 9: but you're real. Do you want to be found on
Speaker 9: the internet?
Speaker 3: And if so, where.
Speaker 7: I don't know how much I want to be found
Speaker 7: on the internet.
Speaker 5: I will plug that. I think everyone should call.
Speaker 7: Their senators and demand a ceasefire immediately, and also consider
Speaker 7: donating to one of many nonprofits, but the one that
Speaker 7: I have is Gaza Emergency Appeal, and uh, just ask
Speaker 7: for a ceasefire as much as possible. But also if somebody.
Speaker 1: Demanded, they'll find me.
Speaker 7: Demand demanded. Don't ask, sir, please can I have? Can
Speaker 7: I have a?
Speaker 1: Please?
Speaker 9: But no, please, everyone that's listening, keep talking about Palestine,
Speaker 9: keep sharing info from Palestinians themselves, and yeah three Palestine.
Speaker 6: Yes, Hello, and welcome back to It could happen here.
Speaker 6: I am once again your guest host, Molly Conger, and
Speaker 6: today I'm going to tell you about something that is
Speaker 6: happening here. Being my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. You might
Speaker 6: have seen the news recently that Patriot Front leader Thomas
Speaker 6: Ryan Russou was arrested in Texas on an out of
Speaker 6: state felony warrant. On February twenty third, authorities in McLennan County, Texas,
Speaker 6: arrested Rousseau and poked him into the county jail. The
Speaker 6: jail roster lists the offense as burn object to intimidate
Speaker 6: OH slash s that OS means out of state, and
Speaker 6: it lists Virginia as the state issuing the warrant. And
Speaker 6: Rousseau's arrest certainly made a splash when the news hit
Speaker 6: Nazi telegram channels lit up with posts about his arrest.
Speaker 6: Gab feeds were flooded with hastily made graphics decrying this
Speaker 6: political persecution. This sudden spike and interest in a little
Speaker 6: used Virginia Code section might make you think Rousseau was
Speaker 6: the first person to be taken into custody on this charge,
Speaker 6: that perhaps he was targeted for arrest in some kind
Speaker 6: of grand political plan to take him out of the game.
Speaker 6: But he is in fact the eleventh person to be
Speaker 6: arrested in just the last year for participating in the
Speaker 6: Tiki Torch march at the University of Virginia on August eleventh,
Speaker 6: twenty seventeen. These cases have been working their way through
Speaker 6: the system here for long enough that some of Rousseau's
Speaker 6: code defendants have not only already been found guilty, they've
Speaker 6: served their time and gotten back out. But with this
Speaker 6: sudden surge and interest in this case, I want to
Speaker 6: give you all a little background on the other ten.
Speaker 6: If you'll indulge me for a moment, though, I'd like
Speaker 6: to read you something I wrote nearly a year ago,
Speaker 6: just as the first cases were being unsealed. There is
Speaker 6: no statute of limitations on felonies in Virginia. With that
Speaker 6: in mind, here's section eighteen point two Dash four twenty
Speaker 6: three point oh one Dash B of the Code of Virginia.
Speaker 6: Burning object on property of another or a highway or
Speaker 6: other public place with intent to intimidate. Any person who,
Speaker 6: with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons,
Speaker 6: burns an object on a highway or other public place
Speaker 6: in a manner having a direct tendency to place another
Speaker 6: their person in reasonable fear or apprehension of death or
Speaker 6: bodily injury, is guilty of a Class six felony On
Speaker 6: August eleventh, twenty seventeen, hundreds of torch bearing marchers traversed
Speaker 6: the grounds of the University of Virginia. They'd come to
Speaker 6: Charllettsville from across the country, taking Friday morning flights or
Speaker 6: taking turns at the wheel for cross country drives, and
Speaker 6: rented vans with guys they met on message boards. Arriving
Speaker 6: early before the big event. The following morning, they gathered
Speaker 6: at Nameless Field, a grassy acre near the Via tennis
Speaker 6: courts with a deceptive name, and distributed tiki torches. Men
Speaker 6: with walkie talkies clipped to their belts, some with wired earpieces,
Speaker 6: barked orders. Elliot Kleine, an ambitious young white nationalist organizer
Speaker 6: calling himself Eli Moseley after the twentieth century British fascist
Speaker 6: Oswald Moseley, shouted at the crowd as they formed into
Speaker 6: a line. Or picking big guys no females. Klein and
Speaker 6: his security team would be selecting the biggest marshers to
Speaker 6: lay down their torches and keep the perimeter as the
Speaker 6: march moved moved through the university grounds, they might need
Speaker 6: their hands free. The march wound its way through grounds
Speaker 6: up the lawn, then up the steps of the University
Speaker 6: of Virginia's iconic rotunda. On the other side of the rotunda,
Speaker 6: gathered near the statue of Thomas Jefferson, a small group
Speaker 6: of anti racist protesters waited. In her testimony during a
Speaker 6: later civil trial, one of the women who was terrorized
Speaker 6: that night said of the sound of the approaching crowd,
Speaker 6: when we heard the roaring, we just linked arms and
Speaker 6: held hands and started to sing.
Speaker 4: She said.
Speaker 6: At first it sounded like thunder, like the earth was growling.
Speaker 6: As they grew closer, but before she could see the
Speaker 6: light of the torches, she began to make out the
Speaker 6: chance hundreds of voices raised in Unison, shouting blood and soil.
Speaker 6: Testifying about that night four years later, she said she
Speaker 6: could still hear it sometimes in her nightmares, and by
Speaker 6: the time the small group of mostly students realized the
Speaker 6: magnitude and ferocity of the approaching it was too late.
Speaker 6: They were surrounded, fully encircled at the base of the
Speaker 6: statue by hundreds of torch wielding white supremacists for a
Speaker 6: few minutes, minutes that those trapped at the base of
Speaker 6: the statue said they believed might be their last, as
Speaker 6: they were doused in lighter fluid, maced and punched. There
Speaker 6: was a melee. The police made no move to intervene,
Speaker 6: as streams of pepper spray were let loose and cries
Speaker 6: of medic were audible above the roar of you will
Speaker 6: not replace us. When the trapped counter protesters were finally
Speaker 6: able to flee, stumbling blindly with burning eyes and covering
Speaker 6: their heads in a hail storm of fists and torches,
Speaker 6: the marchers declared victory. Richard Spencer, an organizer of that
Speaker 6: weekend's rally, climbed the base of the statue and delivered
Speaker 6: a victory speech to the still roaring crowd, now shouting hail, victory,
Speaker 6: hail's Spencer, as Spencer told them, we occupy this ground,
Speaker 6: we one, that is why don't they cry?
Speaker 1: There? All right? All right, all right?
Speaker 8: Were these freaks?
Speaker 4: We on?
Speaker 6: These freaks we are he's.
Speaker 3: Brown, We on these one. What in the hell are
Speaker 3: we doing out here? What in the hell are we doing?
Speaker 3: Risking our lives? Were risking our lives for our people,
Speaker 3: for our ancestors, for our future. That's how we're doing.
Speaker 3: What do you think it? Anti fock can defeat our
Speaker 3: wrong do you think it anti focking to feed our group.
Speaker 3: They have to because they have to go to fix line.
Speaker 6: The marchers dispersed to their various hotels, campgrounds, and Arabian bees.
Speaker 6: Spencer later said cheekly that he booked his under the
Speaker 6: pseudonym literally Hitler. They had to rest up for the
Speaker 6: real battle in the morning, and while they slept, a
Speaker 6: young man from Ohio was driving through the night, perhaps
Speaker 6: already knowing that his gray Dodge Challenger would be impounded
Speaker 6: as a murder weapon. Before he slept again, he checked
Speaker 6: Twitter and retweeted a post David Duke had tweeted images
Speaker 6: of the Torch March celebrating the Altright's success that evening
Speaker 6: with the caption our people on the march, will you
Speaker 6: be at Unite the Right tomorrow? As he left Ohio
Speaker 6: that evening, the young man and the Dodge Challenger got
Speaker 6: a text from his mother, a text we've all probably
Speaker 6: gotten from our mothers. She said, be careful, and James
Speaker 6: Alexfield's junior, in one of the last texts he sent
Speaker 6: before a lifetime behind bars, replied to his mother with
Speaker 6: a photograph of Hitler and the words we are not
Speaker 6: the ones who need to be careful. Years later, the
Speaker 6: word charles Ville has become synonymous with those two fused images,
Speaker 6: Fields's mangled challenger and an iconic photo of the crowd
Speaker 6: torches and hands the rotunda at their backs. Fields was
Speaker 6: convicted both in state and federal court of Heather Hire's
Speaker 6: murder and multiple counts of aggravated malicious wounding. Daniel Bordon,
Speaker 6: Alex Ramos, Jacob Goodwin, and Tyler Watkins went away for
Speaker 6: a brutal gang beating of a young black man. Richard Preston,
Speaker 6: an imperial wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, did some
Speaker 6: time for discharging his firearm in the general direction of
Speaker 6: another young black man while shouting die and word. But
Speaker 6: all in all, for all the violence of both days,
Speaker 6: there was a curious reluctance to bring charges for anything
Speaker 6: that didn't rise to the level of attempted murder, and
Speaker 6: some things that did. There are thousands of photographs videos
Speaker 6: from every conceivable angle taken by victims, bystanders, professional photojournalists,
Speaker 6: and even the marchers themselves. Their faces are uncovered, their
Speaker 6: motives are clear, and the law is fairly straightforward. But
Speaker 6: the University of Virginia lies within the jurisdiction of Albemarle County.
Speaker 6: In twenty seventeen, Apomwalle County Commonweal's attorney, Robert Tracy, chose
Speaker 6: not to bring any burning objects cases under Section eighteen
Speaker 6: point two Dash four twenty three. He didn't think he
Speaker 6: could make a case against the tiki torch mob, or
Speaker 6: maybe he didn't want to. The Commonweal's attorney for the
Speaker 6: City of Charlesville at the time, Dave Chapman, wrote in
Speaker 6: a memo in October of that year that he did
Speaker 6: believe the cases could be made, but they weren't his
Speaker 6: to prosecute. But in Virginia, prosecutors come and go, and
Speaker 6: a felony lives forever. In a October twenty nineteen debate
Speaker 6: between then sitting Prosecutor Robert Tracy and his challenger, Jim Hinchley,
Speaker 6: Tracy again scoffed at the idea of indicting these cases,
Speaker 6: even saying that Hindley's belief that it was possible was
Speaker 6: a sign he was inexperienced and wrong for the job.
Speaker 6: A month later, Hine won the election, and now it
Speaker 6: seems he's trying to make good on his campaign promise
Speaker 6: of proving Robert Tracy wrong. In February twenty twenty three,
Speaker 6: the Albumole County Commonwealth' Attorney's office quietly sought and got
Speaker 6: indictments under the Burning Object Statute. A grand jury agreed
Speaker 6: with Hingeley there was probable cause to believe that objects
Speaker 6: had been burned with the intent to intimidate. Fugitive warrants
Speaker 6: were issued, arrests were made by local police and far
Speaker 6: ranging jurisdictions, And now, nearly six years after that hot
Speaker 6: night in August, the extraditions are starting. I want to
Speaker 6: share with you the stories of the men who carried
Speaker 6: torches that night. Some of them are now facing felony
Speaker 6: charges of Almorole County. Others may come to share that fate.
Speaker 6: After the crowd dispersed that night, and after the deadly
Speaker 6: rally the next morning, those men went home. Some started businesses,
Speaker 6: some died, Some trafficked drugs, beat their wives, choked their girlfriends,
Speaker 6: went to grad school, went to prison, started families, ran
Speaker 6: for office, left the movement, tried to lead the movement,
Speaker 6: or just tried to disappear. There are as many stories
Speaker 6: as there were flames in the night. When their voices
Speaker 6: joined as one shouting Jews will not replace us, then
Speaker 6: going their separate ways back to the communities they came from.
Speaker 6: And now some of them are on their way back,
Speaker 6: this time against their will. So I wrote that about
Speaker 6: ten months ago, last April, just as the first cases
Speaker 6: were unsealed. Obviously a lot's happened since then. But before
Speaker 6: I get into a recap of those first ten cases,
Speaker 6: let's hear a brief word about some products and services.
Speaker 6: So if Thomas Rousseau is number eleven on this list
Speaker 6: of tiki torch defendants, they were the first ten. The
Speaker 6: grand jury that convened in February of last year handed
Speaker 6: down the first five indictments. Will Zachary Smith, William Billy Williams,
Speaker 6: Tyler Dykes, Dallas, Medina, and William Fears. Will Smith of Nacona,
Speaker 6: Texas was the first in custody. He was actually already
Speaker 6: in custody here in Charlottesville when the first charges were filed.
Speaker 6: He had been indicted on a separate felony charge back
Speaker 6: in twenty eighteen for pepper spraying the counter protesters that night,
Speaker 6: but remained a fugitive until his arrest in January twenty
Speaker 6: twenty three. So when the prosecutor brought the torch charges
Speaker 6: to the grand jury in February. It was probably an
Speaker 6: easy first choice. Will Smith pled guilty to the torch
Speaker 6: charge in May in a sealed plea deal that dropped
Speaker 6: the much more serious pepper spray felony, and was allowed
Speaker 6: to return home without being sentenced. Billy Williams traveled here
Speaker 6: with will Smith back in twenty seventeen. The pair were
Speaker 6: acting as bodyguards for Robert Hasmadore Ray, the Daily Stormer bloger,
Speaker 6: who is actually also still a wanted fugitive on a
Speaker 6: felony charge of pepper spraying those counter protesters that night.
Speaker 6: When Billy Williams was extradited from Texas in April of
Speaker 6: last year, he was denied bond after some apparent dishonesty
Speaker 6: regarding his relationship with Robert Ray. Through his attorney, he
Speaker 6: denied having had any contact with Ray while he was
Speaker 6: a fugitive. He in fact claimed they barely knew each other,
Speaker 6: having met only a couple of times. I can tell
Speaker 6: you that that's not true. But after claiming that they'd
Speaker 6: had no contact in the intervening years, the prosecutor revealed
Speaker 6: in the bond hearing that law enforcement partners had shared
Speaker 6: information with his office that they believe that not only
Speaker 6: had they been contact, but that Ray had been living
Speaker 6: with Williams living on his property while he was in
Speaker 6: hiding as a fugitive. Williams two pled guilty to the
Speaker 6: burning object charge in July, receiving an active sentence of
Speaker 6: six months but with times and good behavior. He was
Speaker 6: home barely two weeks after entering his plea, but not
Speaker 6: before he missed the birth of his seventh child with
Speaker 6: his common law wife. Tyler Diykes was arrested on Saint
Speaker 6: Patrick's Day. He'd been out with other members of the
Speaker 6: white supremacist group the Southern Son's Active Club, trying to
Speaker 6: hang a racist banner from a highway overpass in Savannah, Georgia,
Speaker 6: when he was unfortunately bitten by a dog. I do
Speaker 6: not have information on what came of the dog. I
Speaker 6: hope he's okay, concerned about infection though. Tyler Diykes went
Speaker 6: to the emergency room to have the wound looked at.
Speaker 6: In Georgia, as in most states, emergency rooms contact the
Speaker 6: police to report dog bite injuries. An officer was dispatched
Speaker 6: to the hospital to take a report from Dikes about
Speaker 6: the dog bite incident, which is a fairly routine situation.
Speaker 6: But somewhere during their interaction in the hospital, the officer
Speaker 6: ran Dyke's name to the system and it came back
Speaker 6: with a warrant. A panicked Dikes sent his hate group
Speaker 6: group chat a quick text arrested by Virginia nuke my account.
Speaker 6: In video of the melee the base of the statue
Speaker 6: on August eleven, twenty seventeen, Dykes can be seen throwing
Speaker 6: punches even after everyone else had stopped, and then celebrating
Speaker 6: the victory by marching around in a weird, tight little
Speaker 6: circle with his right arm extended in a Nazi salute.
Speaker 6: Diykes pled guilty to the torch charge in May and
Speaker 6: received the same six month act of sentence Williams had
Speaker 6: gotten with time served and good behavior. He was released
Speaker 6: in July. I wonder if he expected to see his
Speaker 6: elderly parents waiting for him in the parking lot outside
Speaker 6: the album ArHL Charltsville Regional Jail that day, but he
Speaker 6: never made it that far. U S Marshals took him
Speaker 6: into federal custody before he ever walked outside. He's currently
Speaker 6: out on bond awaiting trial on ten counts for his
Speaker 6: participation in the January sixth insurrection. Dallas Medina of Ohio
Speaker 6: turned himself in in April and was allowed to return
Speaker 6: home on bond. He had been an active member of
Speaker 6: an extremely online group of mass shooting enthusiasts calling themselves
Speaker 6: the Bowl Patrol, so named after the bull cut hairstyles
Speaker 6: sported by their idol Dylan Roof. After a feud with
Speaker 6: Chris the Crying Nazi Catwell ended with Catwell in federal prison.
Speaker 6: The group more or less fell apart in twenty twenty.
Speaker 6: Mendina hasn't appeared in court since his bond hearing in April,
Speaker 6: and he doesn't yet have a trial date. William Fiers
Speaker 6: was booked into the album L Charlesville Regional Jail in
Speaker 6: June after being transferred from the Texas prison where he
Speaker 6: was serving a sentence for domestic violence. Just two months
Speaker 6: after Unite the Right, William Fears beat and choked his girlfriend.
Speaker 6: A few days later, he traveled to Florida with his brother,
Speaker 6: Colton Fears and their friend Tyler Tenbrink to see Richard
Speaker 6: Spencer's speech at the University of Florida. He knew when
Speaker 6: he left town for Gainesville that week that his girlfriend
Speaker 6: had reported the assault. Having already been to prison for
Speaker 6: abducting and stabbing a different ex girlfriend years earlier, he
Speaker 6: knew another conviction would put him away for a while,
Speaker 6: and he wanted one last shot at starting the race
Speaker 6: war before they got him. In video from the Torch March,
Speaker 6: William Fears can be seen swinging his torch at a
Speaker 6: counter protester, screaming Die Commie. Fears remains in custody but
Speaker 6: does not yet have a trial date. William's brother, Colton Fears,
Speaker 6: joined him at the Albumarl Charlesville Regional Jail in September.
Speaker 6: I suspect the jail probably kept them separated, but it
Speaker 6: still would have been the closest the brothers had been
Speaker 6: in years. When the brothers were in Gainesville in October
Speaker 6: of twenty seventeen, their friend Tyler Tenbrink shot at a
Speaker 6: group of anti fascist counter protesters after Richard Spencer's speech. Thankfully,
Speaker 6: no one was injured, but Tenbrink was convicted of attempted
Speaker 6: first degree homicide. Colton Fears was driving the car when
Speaker 6: the men left the scene of the shooting and spent
Speaker 6: five years in a Florida prison for accessory after the
Speaker 6: fact to attempted first degree homicide. Colton was released in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty two and returned home to Texas, where he
Speaker 6: was then arrested in August twenty twenty three on the
Speaker 6: burning object charge. After pleading guilty in October, he was
Speaker 6: allowed to return home prior to sentencing Ryan Roy of
Speaker 6: Vermont and himself in in May. If you've been reading
Speaker 6: the voluminous leagues that seem to be constantly springing forth
Speaker 6: from Patriot Front's online comms, you may know him better
Speaker 6: as Rex. It looks like he's stayed quite busy in
Speaker 6: the years since Unite the Right as a member of
Speaker 6: Patriot Front. He is currently home on bond and does
Speaker 6: not yet have a trial date. Jamie Troutman of West
Speaker 6: Virginia turned himself in in October under the pseudonym Altright VA.
Speaker 6: Troutman was an active organizer and planner of the Unite
Speaker 6: the Right rally. He was present at many of the
Speaker 6: precursor events that took place here in Charlesville during the
Speaker 6: Summer of Hate, including the two other torch marches smaller
Speaker 6: torchlit rallies that were held in downtown Charlottesville in May
Speaker 6: and October of that year. Like Dyke's photos show, Troutman
Speaker 6: was present at the Capitol on January sixth, though in
Speaker 6: Troutman's case no charges have been filed. He too is
Speaker 6: home on bond with no trial date set. And before
Speaker 6: we get to the last two of those first ten cases,
Speaker 6: let's hear from someone who has also not been charged
Speaker 6: in connection with the mill reactionary attempt to overthrow the
Speaker 6: US government these products and services. The final two of
Speaker 6: these first ten torch cases are the messy ones. So
Speaker 6: we've got these four guilty please, and we've got four
Speaker 6: cases that are sort of moving along slowly down the
Speaker 6: usual path. And then we've got two cases where the
Speaker 6: defendants have had some success bogging the cases down with motions.
Speaker 6: Jacob Dix of Ohio was arrested in July. Dix is
Speaker 6: seen in photos and video on the eleventh and twelfth
Speaker 6: with two other Ohio men, his roommate Ryan Martin, who
Speaker 6: recently passed away, and Daniel Borden, one of the men
Speaker 6: convicted of beating a man nearly to death during the
Speaker 6: rally on August twelfth. I'm sure we'll learn more about
Speaker 6: Dix as his case progresses, but I have found him
Speaker 6: in photos with the Traditionalist Worker Party at the Nazi
Speaker 6: rally in Pikeville earlier that same summer. In his torch case,
Speaker 6: he has been granted both a substitute judge and a
Speaker 6: special prosecutor based on a sort of nebulous, though very
Speaker 6: loudly argued conspiracy theory involving the wife of a judge
Speaker 6: who is not even presiding over his case, and a
Speaker 6: prosecutor who has a history of expressing anti racist political
Speaker 6: views in his personal life. Dix is out on bond.
Speaker 6: With the recent rule in granting him a special prosecutor,
Speaker 6: we may be seeing a trial date get set in
Speaker 6: the near future. And finally, Augustus Sole Invictus. Until Rousseau
Speaker 6: was arrested last week, the biggest name in this batch
Speaker 6: was Augustus Invictus. Even before his name was on the
Speaker 6: fliers as a headline speaker at Unite the Right, Invictus
Speaker 6: was no stranger to the headlines. In twenty sixteen, he
Speaker 6: ran for US Senate in Florida as a libertarian. His
Speaker 6: campaign was marred by such controversies as his own past
Speaker 6: statements on eugenics, A twenty thirteen ritual sacrifice of a goat,
Speaker 6: his legal representation of w supremacist militia leader Marcus Faiella,
Speaker 6: and numerous police reports from both his wife and his
Speaker 6: teenage girlfriend alleging domestic violence. In the years since, Invictis
Speaker 6: never did become a US senator despite a second attempt,
Speaker 6: and never did get convicted of domestic violence despite many,
Speaker 6: many more police reports. He's also no longer a pagan.
Speaker 6: Asked recently about the goat blood drinking ritual he performed
Speaker 6: in twenty thirteen, he quipped that he drinks human blood now,
Speaker 6: just a little transubstantiation joke about his recent conversion to
Speaker 6: traditional Catholicism. Invictus was arrested on the burning object charge
Speaker 6: in Florida in June twenty twenty three and held for
Speaker 6: a month before being extradited to Virginia and released on bond.
Speaker 6: Like Dix, he has been granted a substitute judge. He too,
Speaker 6: was seeking a special prosecutor, but no ruling was made
Speaker 6: at his last hearing. Currently, his case is docketed for
Speaker 6: trial next month, but I'm willing to bet that gets postponed.
Speaker 6: So that's more or less where we are now. Rousseau
Speaker 6: is the eleventh man to be charged in these cases.
Speaker 6: We've got four guilty please on the record, leaving him
Speaker 6: as one of seven open cases. We can expect to
Speaker 6: see Rousseau extradited from Texas to Virginia in the near future.
Speaker 6: I would say maybe a week or two, although some
Speaker 6: of them have been held for up to a month
Speaker 6: before a deputy can get down there and bring them back.
Speaker 6: Something I was really surprised to learn in all of
Speaker 6: this is in most extraditions for state cases like this,
Speaker 6: like these are not federal cases. These are local cases.
Speaker 6: When someone gets extradited long distance, a deputy just flies
Speaker 6: down there and then they fly back together on a
Speaker 6: commercial airline. It's not like a con air situation. They're
Speaker 6: just on an airplane together. So it really depends on
Speaker 6: when a deputy can sort of get down there and
Speaker 6: get them. So he'll be extradited sometime in the next
Speaker 6: few weeks, and then once he's booked into the album
Speaker 6: RL Charltsville Regional Jail, he'll get an appearance in court.
Speaker 6: It's anybody's guest right now who he'll hire to represent him.
Speaker 6: Former Proud Boy and current Patriot Front lawyer Jason Lee
Speaker 6: van Dyke was thoughtful enough to reply to one of
Speaker 6: my tweets about Rousseau's arrest to say that he will
Speaker 6: not be taking this case, as much as he would
Speaker 6: have loved to try this case, which he said that
Speaker 6: he would do a very good job doing and he
Speaker 6: could definitely do it, and unfortunately he just can't. He
Speaker 6: cited the difficulty in finding local council to assist. He's
Speaker 6: not admitted to the bar in Virginia, so who would
Speaker 6: need someone who is to sort of sponsor him in
Speaker 6: and be responsible for him in the case. So he said,
Speaker 6: you know, he can't find local council, and also it
Speaker 6: would just be two time consuming and too expensive to
Speaker 6: try a case in Virginia as he's located in Texas,
Speaker 6: so it won't be Jason Lee van Dyke, I've been
Speaker 6: writing about these cases in my newsletter, The Devil's Advocates.
Speaker 6: It's on Ghost, which is like substack, but it's not substack,
Speaker 6: it's Ghost, and I'm looking forward to writing some updates
Speaker 6: very soon. The finding out for this particular fucking around
Speaker 6: has been a long time coming, and I can't help
Speaker 6: but wonder if these cases had been brought sooner, Patriot
Speaker 6: Front might not even exist. You know, I suspect once
Speaker 6: Rousseau has gotten a lawyer, he will ask for a
Speaker 6: bond hearing. That's probably what's next. It's impossible to know
Speaker 6: how much information other law enforcement agencies are interested in
Speaker 6: sharing with the local prosecutor, but that kind of information
Speaker 6: sharing did play a critical role in some of the
Speaker 6: other cases. In bond hearings for Billy Williams and Tyler Dikes,
Speaker 6: information about the defendant's associations and activities collected by other
Speaker 6: local police agencies and federal authorities was what kept them
Speaker 6: in custody. In Dikes's case, several police and sheriff's departments
Speaker 6: in South Carolina and Georgia shared information that he was
Speaker 6: a suspect in some like swastika vandalism cases, some flying cases.
Speaker 6: It's not clear if the FEDS shared information ahead of
Speaker 6: time about the January sixth case, but it is clear
Speaker 6: that the prosecutor's office was talking to other law enforcement
Speaker 6: agencies who'd been keeping tabs on these guys. And I
Speaker 6: think you would be a fool to think the FEDS
Speaker 6: don't have some information about Rousseau that might raise a
Speaker 6: Judge's eyebrow. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Speaker 5: Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.
Speaker 5: I'm Andrew Sage and I run the eature channel Andrewism.
Speaker 5: But this is not Andrewism. This is it could happen
Speaker 5: here today. I'm with Garrison yet again, and we are
Speaker 5: tackling really the genesis of this podcast, everyone's favorite subject, collapse.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, yeah, you know, just.
Speaker 5: A light topic for your morning or eating commute. I mean,
Speaker 5: if it's twenty twenty four and you don't know what
Speaker 5: collapse is, allow me to illuminate.
Speaker 4: Also, why are you listening to this podcast? It is
Speaker 4: ostensibly about collapse.
Speaker 5: Indeed, in essence, collapse is the significant loss of an
Speaker 5: established level of complexity towards a much simpler state. It
Speaker 5: can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and
Speaker 5: be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human
Speaker 5: extinction or a singular global event. Although the longer the
Speaker 5: duration the mod resembles a decline instead of a collapse.
Speaker 5: So collapse is really a lot of things happen all
Speaker 5: of once. People typically decide, you know you're talking about
Speaker 5: the climate, talking about resources and the decline of resources,
Speaker 5: talking about last extinction, talking about societal unrest and break
Speaker 5: down and the inequality, and truly pick your poison, brother,
Speaker 5: We're talking about you know, the f and increasing global
Speaker 5: energy demands to graddingly slow transition to renewables, the destabilization
Speaker 5: of our food and water systems. There's no one cause,
Speaker 5: but several compounding pressures, as Pablo Serophene and Raphael Stevens
Speaker 5: aptly summarize. To maintain itself and avoid financial disorder and
Speaker 5: social unrest, our industrial capital civilization is forced to accelerate,
Speaker 5: to become more complex and to consume ever more energy
Speaker 5: its Doasleine expansion has been nurtured by the exceptional availability
Speaker 5: though this will not last long of fossil fuels that
Speaker 5: are very energy efficient, coupled with her growth economy and
Speaker 5: highly unstable levels of debt. But the growth of our
Speaker 5: industrial civilization today, constrained by geophysical economic limits, has reached
Speaker 5: a phase of decreasing returns. Technology, which has long sail
Speaker 5: to push these limits back, is less and less able
Speaker 5: to ensure this acceleration, and locks in this unsustainable trajectory
Speaker 5: by preventing the development of new alternatives sounds familiar.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 5: At the same time, the sciences of complexity are discovering
Speaker 5: that beyond certain thresholds, complex systems, including economies and ecosystems,
Speaker 5: suddenly switched to new and unpredictable states of equilibrium and
Speaker 5: may even collapse. We are more and more aware that
Speaker 5: we have crossed certain boundaries that guarantee the stability of
Speaker 5: our living conditions as a society and as a species.
Speaker 5: The global climate system and many of the planet's ecosystems
Speaker 5: and major biochemical cycles have left the zone of stability
Speaker 5: that we were familiar with herald in a time of sudden,
Speaker 5: large scale disruptions which internally stabilized industrial societies, the rest
Speaker 5: of humankind and even other species.
Speaker 3: Yes, I agree.
Speaker 5: In terms of the hows of collapse, you know, it
Speaker 5: might be slow, or it might be quick, It might
Speaker 5: be happening now already, or maybe just really kicking off
Speaker 5: seriously in their future today, we'll really be talking about
Speaker 5: the sort of different ways of conceptualizing collapse, different frame
Speaker 5: devices we can use, and addressing the variety of responses
Speaker 5: that people have to collapse. In a future episode, I
Speaker 5: want to take a look at I suppose a more.
Speaker 5: This could be like the pessimistic episode in a sense,
Speaker 5: and the next one will be a bit more you know,
Speaker 5: how not to spiral into despair?
Speaker 4: So yeah, how to have a good understanding of the
Speaker 4: reality of our crumbling systems, but not just be a
Speaker 4: doomer who stays inside and scrolls all the time.
Speaker 3: It is just depressed.
Speaker 5: Well, but thankfully you have more options than just being
Speaker 5: a duma. And we're going to get into all of
Speaker 5: those responses very soon. There are quite a few interesting.
Speaker 3: Ones, alrighty.
Speaker 5: First of all, we need to talk about some different
Speaker 5: ways of conceptualizing collapse. For example, we have Dmitry Orlovs
Speaker 5: five stages, just like a rule coaster of chaos, which
Speaker 5: each stage more intense than the last. First, we have
Speaker 5: stage one financial collapse. Everyone losing faith in business as usual,
Speaker 5: financial institutions going belly up, savings vanish, financial freefall, say
Speaker 5: goodbye to your savings, account, loans, pensions. Basically what went
Speaker 5: down in Argentina back in two thousand and one. Sounds familiar, Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 5: Next we have commercial collapse. Now it's not just about money,
Speaker 5: it's about losing faith in the market. Shall provide commodities
Speaker 5: end up being hoarded, shopping centers are closing for business,
Speaker 5: and we might even bring back barter, and then boom,
Speaker 5: we have the next stage, political collapse. Trust in the
Speaker 5: government will take care of you crumbles. Governments try to
Speaker 5: maintain oiler with curfews and martial law, but local corruption
Speaker 5: takes over services, the roads un maintained, the rubbish piling up.
Speaker 5: All of actually makes a really bold claim here, and
Speaker 5: that is that the US might be on this on
Speaker 5: the track of these like stages. Like I know, I know,
Speaker 5: that sounds like a really like a radical claim to
Speaker 5: make I.
Speaker 4: Feel like everyone listening to this has a decent understanding that, like,
Speaker 4: these things aren't just switches that are either on or off.
Speaker 4: This is like a sliding scale, and the US is
Speaker 4: a decent ways on this scale already. I mean, that's
Speaker 4: what That's what the first five episodes of the second
Speaker 4: season of this show was really all about, specifically in
Speaker 4: terms of the climate and how it's not like everything
Speaker 4: all falls apart at once. It's that these systems that
Speaker 4: we've grown to rely on will slowly crumble away until
Speaker 4: they've become basically nothing, or they just become like corporate puppets,
Speaker 4: or they've just become like like they're not they're not
Speaker 4: actually real anymore in any kind of impactful way. And
Speaker 4: I mean we saw a little bit of this during COVID,
Speaker 4: how many systems that we relied on just weren't really
Speaker 4: around anymore or were not actually reliable. And you see
Speaker 4: this whenever, like whenever there's a massive amount of wildfires
Speaker 4: that takes over a whole region and it displaces hundreds
Speaker 4: of thousands of people. Usually the response to that is
Speaker 4: not the government's going to come in and save everybody.
Speaker 4: It's a whole bunch of really poor anarchists set up
Speaker 4: a series of tents to give people food and to
Speaker 4: get people organized, to find places to sleep, and like
Speaker 4: that's the actual response to these crumbling institutions. It's not
Speaker 4: just like you know, fallout New Vegas. We're living in
Speaker 4: the apocalypse immediately. It's a lot more fuzzy.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, in in a sense, I kind of get
Speaker 5: people who wish it was a bit more straightforward and
Speaker 5: so sure, you know, because if it's like if it
Speaker 5: was like a major event, right like if it was
Speaker 5: an innovasion that just happened, I think it's a lot
Speaker 5: easier for people to conceptionize something like that and respond
Speaker 5: to it. And I just mobilize all your efforts and
Speaker 5: all your focus is on solved in this issue, because
Speaker 5: it's right in front of your face when you're talking
Speaker 5: about like geological time scales and multiple decades of you know,
Speaker 5: slowly breakdown, and you know, I have all these election cycles,
Speaker 5: and you have all these tipping points to scientists are
Speaker 5: telling you about, and then you know, someday eventually it's
Speaker 5: raining during the dry season and dry during the rainy season,
Speaker 5: and there's no snow in January.
Speaker 3: And.
Speaker 5: All that jazz onward the social collapse. This is where,
Speaker 5: according to all of faith in your people will take
Speaker 5: care of you, disintegrate, civil wars brew, thepopulation becomes a thing,
Speaker 5: clans take over like a post apocalyptic drama unfolding. And
Speaker 5: then the grand finale is cultural collapse, which is a
Speaker 5: loss of faith in the goodness of humanity. And as
Speaker 5: a result of that loss of faith, kindness, generosity, empathy
Speaker 5: all falls out the window. I completely disagree, I think
Speaker 5: with all ours solution here. I think that these types
Speaker 5: of crisis kind often bring out the best in people.
Speaker 5: Of course, we also do see the worst in people,
Speaker 5: but I don't think it'll ever reach a point where
Speaker 5: the bad of people's behavior so vastly outweighs the good
Speaker 5: to the point where people just completely lose faith in
Speaker 5: our capacity for mutual aid and that kind of thing.
Speaker 5: There is, of course, a bonus stage that all are throsen,
Speaker 5: which is ecological collapse, where reboot in society in an
Speaker 5: exhausted environment. It's like good luck with that. You know,
Speaker 5: it's very difficult to do. It becomes a sort of
Speaker 5: a well that we end up trapped in. So that's
Speaker 5: one way of understanding collapse. And there's also C. S.
Speaker 5: Halling's four phase model of ecological change, and according to him,
Speaker 5: all systems go through cycles of four phases. A phase
Speaker 5: of growth where the system accumulates matter and energy, a
Speaker 5: phase of conservation where the system becomes more and more interconnected,
Speaker 5: rigid and therefore vulnerable. A phase of collapse or loosening,
Speaker 5: and then a phase of rapid reorganization lead into another
Speaker 5: phase of growth in often very different conditions. This is
Speaker 5: more of a I suppose optimistic I mean I read
Speaker 5: it as kind of optimistic because it recognizes that, you know,
Speaker 5: some like things break down, and that's it. Like even
Speaker 5: in death, there's like a life, and there's like a rebooth,
Speaker 5: and then there's of course the conditions that rebooth will
Speaker 5: be different, but it's not like things completely come to
Speaker 5: an end. It suggest that the conditions that growth and
Speaker 5: healing might be kick started with would be very different
Speaker 5: from the ones that with the conditions that were there originally.
Speaker 5: Another author's views on the subject, a guy named John
Speaker 5: Michael Greer, once said that quote. The difference between my
Speaker 5: view and that of many others in the collapse field,
Speaker 5: it's a lot of them assume that the first wave
Speaker 5: of crisis will be followed by total collapse, and I
Speaker 5: argue that it'll be followed by muddying through and partial recovery,
Speaker 5: then by renewed crisis and so on. Thus, I don't
Speaker 5: think it's actually that useful to have a single metric
Speaker 5: for what counters collapse, because collapse is a process, not
Speaker 5: an event. The collapse of industrial civilization has been underway
Speaker 5: for quite some time now and will still be a
Speaker 5: going concern for longer than any of us will be alive.
Speaker 5: And then there's David Krowitz's sort of choose your own
Speaker 5: adventure style collapse where we have sort of three options
Speaker 5: that we could go down. There's one of linear decline,
Speaker 5: there's one of oscillating decline, and there's one of systemic collapse.
Speaker 5: For the step, we have linear decline, which is optimistic
Speaker 5: in a sense. It's assuming everything will respond proportionally to
Speaker 5: its causes. So, for instance, if oil consumption goes down,
Speaker 5: GDP follows suit. It's a very gradual and controlled decline,
Speaker 5: which gives us time to transition to renewable energy and
Speaker 5: to change our ways. It's kind of a dream scenario
Speaker 5: for some deep growth enthusiasts, So some of those who
Speaker 5: champion a transition to a greener future, we kind of
Speaker 5: want it to be a slow collapse, not a rapid collapse,
Speaker 5: because it gives us time to respond and adjust accordingly.
Speaker 5: Of course, the other side of that, the catch is
Speaker 5: that when it is that slow, it also sort of
Speaker 5: gives an excuse for inaction, excuse for delay and putting
Speaker 5: off and procrastinating on the changes that are necessary. A
Speaker 5: more realistic scenario, according to Korwss, oscillating decline, where you
Speaker 5: have economic activity bounce in between peaks of recovery and
Speaker 5: recession but with an overall downward trend. It's almost like
Speaker 5: an oil priced roller coaster where the higher prices lead
Speaker 5: to recession, then a dipping prices sparks bit of growth.
Speaker 5: Both each cycle the system loses a bit more of
Speaker 5: its mojo for lack of a better word. The debts
Speaker 5: the pile up, the investment possibilities dwindle, and it's kind
Speaker 5: of like the catabolic collapse idea that John Michael Career
Speaker 5: came up with. It's not too fast and so innocence,
Speaker 5: it still gives society some room to adapt. And the
Speaker 5: last model that Coreres has is the systemic collapse model,
Speaker 5: which sees our civilization has a super complex system with
Speaker 5: all these intertwined feedback loops, and so by crossing these
Speaker 5: invisible change over points and dealing with small disruptions can
Speaker 5: end up leading to unpredictable changes. It's like a roller
Speaker 5: coaster without a clear track, nonlinear, cumulative, and potentially brutal.
Speaker 5: You know, it's like no kind of safety approval was
Speaker 5: passed on this roller coaster whatsoever, a death trap and
Speaker 5: there's no telling where the cart will wear. Of course,
Speaker 5: really the how of collapse depends on who you ask
Speaker 5: but with all these models, they do seem to be
Speaker 5: a couple of clear points, best articulated again by Savine
Speaker 5: and Stevens. One, the physical growth of our societies will
Speaker 5: come to a halt in the near future. Two we
Speaker 5: have irreversibly damaged the entire system, at least on the
Speaker 5: geological scale of human beings. Three we are moving towards
Speaker 5: a very unstable, nonlinear future with major disruptions will be
Speaker 5: the norm. And four we're now potentially subject to global
Speaker 5: systemic collapses. Prospects look bleak to me. They look extra
Speaker 5: bleak when you consider that some people are still stuck
Speaker 5: on the is climate change real? Ha ha ha global
Speaker 5: warming and yet it's cold ha ha ha level of discourse.
Speaker 5: But for those who are made away of the issues,
Speaker 5: I've noticed people adopt a range of responses. I think
Speaker 5: one of the first responses that I see to collapse
Speaker 5: is slumber.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: They catch like a whiff of what's going on and
Speaker 5: decide to just turn over and go back to sleep,
Speaker 5: To purposefully embrace ignorance, disregard new information, and shun any
Speaker 5: under standing of what's going on. Perhaps you know their
Speaker 5: God and their fragile sanity, which is understandable, but people
Speaker 5: sleep in or we need to face these issues is
Speaker 5: a disaster waiting to happen. These issues are not going anywhere,
Speaker 5: and we really need people to have the courage and
Speaker 5: the boldness to face them instead of turning over and
Speaker 5: going back to sleep. Similarly to that response, we have
Speaker 5: the denial response, where people face with this reality, reject
Speaker 5: it consciously and construct their own or they stage for
Speaker 5: information that comforts them rather than exposes them to the truth.
Speaker 5: They construct a media bubble that shields them or a
Speaker 5: social circle that could protect them and reaffirm their core beliefs.
Speaker 5: Everyone is capable of denying reality, but it's become quite
Speaker 5: prevalent in the age of technology, where we can easily
Speaker 5: shut out any truths that make us uncomfortable. And then
Speaker 5: this apathy, you know, like slumber and denial. People respond
Speaker 5: with apathy to protect themselves in some way. After all,
Speaker 5: if nothing really matters, there's no need to try, no
Speaker 5: need to think, no need to bother Jesus, just disconnect
Speaker 5: as humans. I think we have a really tough time
Speaker 5: responding to non immediate threats. It's been said, as I
Speaker 5: said earlier, that no climate change isn't happening too quick,
Speaker 5: it's happening too slowly. It's not obvious enough. And because
Speaker 5: it's not obviously enough, it's very easy for this next
Speaker 5: response to be made manifest and it's preoccupation. Of course,
Speaker 5: this is more of a fault of the system. But
Speaker 5: people these days are all busy, you know, everyone can
Speaker 5: afford to invest and explore and understand the world's problems,
Speaker 5: even if the threat is so existential that their office
Speaker 5: busy work or retail servitude would ultimately amount to nothing.
Speaker 5: But I'm not talking about those people when I talk
Speaker 5: about preoccupation. I'm talking about the people who respond to
Speaker 5: the issues of the world by purposefully distracting themselves with
Speaker 5: busy work, constructing a convenient excuse to not challenge the
Speaker 5: structures that they are under, like running away for the
Speaker 5: predicaments of collapse. But the prodiccommends of collapse hatches up
Speaker 5: to all of us sooner or later. And on the
Speaker 5: flip side of the people who busy themselves with busy
Speaker 5: work are the people who dive into mind less consumerism,
Speaker 5: which is coupled with apathy to some extent. If nothing
Speaker 5: matters and everything's falling apart, you might as well just indulge, consume,
Speaker 5: distract yourself with games, music, party and drugs and drinking.
Speaker 5: It's like slumber, except you're aware of the reality and
Speaker 5: just plug in your ears to just dance. But at
Speaker 5: least for those that plug their ears, they don't face
Speaker 5: what I've called overwhelment. Some people respond by trying to
Speaker 5: wrap their minds around the depth and complexity of collapse
Speaker 5: to the point of obsession and just kind of end
Speaker 5: up losing their mind together there. I don't think there
Speaker 5: is any human mind that can completely consume and comprehend
Speaker 5: every minued problem we face. I think that's why we
Speaker 5: are social species, because we can we can kind of
Speaker 5: distribute that understanding of all the various problems so that
Speaker 5: no one person has to handle all of it. We
Speaker 5: really are going to need to come together to understand collapse,
Speaker 5: because as individuals, to deal with somethings to a complex, abstract,
Speaker 5: far flung and frightening, it's it's frankly, subjecting yourself to
Speaker 5: that is almost a form of self torture or self flagellation.
Speaker 5: And what we need is the oppositeity, people building each
Speaker 5: other up and healing our communities and coming together so
Speaker 5: we could solve this crisis. Of course, there is such
Speaker 5: a thing as being too caught up in that sort
Speaker 5: of hope, and a trap that a lot of people
Speaker 5: fall naturally into, because in a sense we are biologically
Speaker 5: predisposed towards optimism. We tend to hold on to hope
Speaker 5: in some future outcome they'll just work out, you know.
Speaker 5: And it's sort of a blind hope because it can't
Speaker 5: adjust to the ever shifting reality. It strips us of
Speaker 5: our ability to see clearly and to take realistic and
Speaker 5: necessary action. We give up our agency and leave things
Speaker 5: in the hands of the leaders and the experts. We
Speaker 5: stay passive. We waste time, precious time we spend on
Speaker 5: real harm reduction, just going with the flow. We prevent
Speaker 5: the necessary conversations with the blind hope when we fixate
Speaker 5: so much on whether we can fix it or how
Speaker 5: we can fix it, without considering what we need to do.
Speaker 5: If we can't fix it, you know what happens? Then
Speaker 5: blind hope manifests in a few different forms. But I
Speaker 5: think whatever formant comes into it ultimately and ultimately and
Speaker 5: inevitably leads to disappointment, waiting forever for future that won't come,
Speaker 5: that exists solely in one's mind, irrespective of reality. It's
Speaker 5: quite frankly a form of denial. It takes a bit
Speaker 5: of a journey to move towards a greater level of
Speaker 5: emotional maturity to handle the tough conversations and let go
Speaker 5: of the false hopes, like the idea that will somehow
Speaker 5: reverse all the damage our planet has been dealt with
Speaker 5: scot free. But once we have done that, and once
Speaker 5: we have strengthened or resolve and strengthen our ability to
Speaker 5: process and to engage with the reality of what's happening,
Speaker 5: we can take action with knowledge that no, our leader
Speaker 5: is not going to do anything substantially enough, and no,
Speaker 5: this moves far beyond reform. It really is a hard
Speaker 5: pill to swallow, but if you can take it, you'll
Speaker 5: be better off to resist. We really don't need blind
Speaker 5: hope and resistance. I think hope is important. I'm distinguishing
Speaker 5: it from hope. Blind hope, however, is a distraction and
Speaker 5: sort of connected to the blind hope conversation. Are the
Speaker 5: people who respond to this crisis with the obsession with
Speaker 5: individual change, people who believe with a few tweaks here
Speaker 5: and there that we can continue or perpetual growth, we
Speaker 5: just have to switch to veganism or recycle or cockpool
Speaker 5: every once in a while, and that that individual level
Speaker 5: action on a large enough scale would resolve the crisis.
Speaker 5: They place a lot of stock and blame in individuals entirely,
Speaker 5: and they don't engage with the wires structures of society.
Speaker 5: A lot of liberals, of course, fall into this camp.
Speaker 5: And speaking of liberals, we see a very pernicious trend
Speaker 5: of progress worship as another response to collapse. The author
Speaker 5: Dennis Meadows actually points out a curious trend over the
Speaker 5: past four decades. There's a constant shift in justifying why
Speaker 5: we shouldn't change our behavior. Back in the seventies, critics
Speaker 5: were saying, no limits. You know, anyone who thinks they're limits,
Speaker 5: they just don't get it. In the eighties they're saying, oh,
Speaker 5: actually there are limits, but they are very far away.
Speaker 5: We have nothing to worry about, nothing to lose sleep over.
Speaker 5: And then in today nineties, the limits are no longer
Speaker 5: at are no longer is distant. And then the supporters
Speaker 5: of growth they chiming with, oh, well, you know the
Speaker 5: limits are close, but no worries. You know, the markets
Speaker 5: and technology will swoop in and fix everything. And then
Speaker 5: you reach into two thousands and it becomes clear that
Speaker 5: the tech and the markets might not cut it, and
Speaker 5: then a narrative spins again. Regardless of whether not the
Speaker 5: markets or tech and cut it, we still need to
Speaker 5: push for growth because that's the goal and ticket to
Speaker 5: the resources we need to tackle lot of problems. It's
Speaker 5: basically a game of justification hopscotch. It's almost a cult
Speaker 5: of progress that any and all growth is good. That
Speaker 5: don't matter the consequences of on our finite earth, we
Speaker 5: can just expand and expand eternally. A lot of the
Speaker 5: responses I get to my discussions of the growth or
Speaker 5: post growth or whatever, it's like, yeah, but you can't
Speaker 5: do that because then the GP wouldn't grow and wouldn't
Speaker 5: elevate people's unders of living. And you know, it's not
Speaker 5: fair that global.
Speaker 4: Wait Andrew, are you a Malthusian?
Speaker 5: Nothing of the sort. Nothing of the sort. But I
Speaker 5: think that we should not be fallen into this shrap
Speaker 5: of being like, oh, well, you know, it's not fair
Speaker 5: that these rich countries they get to reach that level
Speaker 5: of development and then we have to, like and then
Speaker 5: what we're going to step in and stop other countries
Speaker 5: from doing so When it's not that I mean, I'm
Speaker 5: speaking from a not rich country. What I'm saying is
Speaker 5: that the what I say to this equal is that
Speaker 5: the path of development these rich countries took it's not sustainable.
Speaker 5: It is literally dooming us all. Yes, the entire population
Speaker 5: cannot strive for the level of consumption that Americans strive for.
Speaker 5: Do I think the development days take place, absolutely, but
Speaker 5: not on the trajectory, not following in the footsteps of
Speaker 5: these rich countries, this global North, and it's like I
Speaker 5: see of decimating the world, you know, places like India,
Speaker 5: place like the Caribbean, places in Africa. You know, we
Speaker 5: do need to, you know, improve housing, and improve access
Speaker 5: to water, and improve access to education, all these different things.
Speaker 5: But chasing after this sort of careless economic growth narrative
Speaker 5: and path is just going to accelerate all of our destruction.
Speaker 5: I agree with the need for reparations from global North
Speaker 5: to global South that will allow us to reach the
Speaker 5: level of we could reach the quality of life that
Speaker 5: I think every human should have access to. But I
Speaker 5: don't think that that is the same thing as saying that, oh, well,
Speaker 5: you know, every country should have their own equivalent of
Speaker 5: Britain and the US's Industrial Revolution, And who cares that
Speaker 5: that ship has sealed, that window of opportunity has passed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think going back to like your series
Speaker 4: of episodes on cults, when you're talking about the cult
Speaker 4: of progress, I think that is that gets thrown on
Speaker 4: as like a very trendy term, but I think it
Speaker 4: has a lot of truth in it for this specific reason.
Speaker 4: In order to maintain the type of progress that is
Speaker 4: necessary to sustain this at this current point, what seems
Speaker 4: to be a very unsustainable method of interacting with the planet.
Speaker 4: You have to rely on growth as this thing that
Speaker 4: you can't actually like predict its It's you can't actually
Speaker 4: predict a real endpoint for it.
Speaker 3: You have to only assume and only hope that it
Speaker 3: will get there.
Speaker 4: It's this that's why there's this real sense of accelerationism
Speaker 4: throughout these whole industries, because people know that if we
Speaker 4: continue just doing this way, the planet will not be functional,
Speaker 4: at least for us in like one hundred years, probably
Speaker 4: you know in much less time as well. But the
Speaker 4: reason why they're all continuing is that they have the
Speaker 4: people have it have this idea in their heads that
Speaker 4: if we just if we just keep accelerating, if we
Speaker 4: keep going, we have to go faster and faster and faster,
Speaker 4: because we'll find something along the way that will magically
Speaker 4: fix the problem. Well, if the only way to fix
Speaker 4: the problem is to continue accelerating, and we'll find this
Speaker 4: thing that doesn't currently exist, but we'll find like this
Speaker 4: like supernatural device or discovery that allows us to kind
Speaker 4: of fix the little problem we've made for ourselves. And
Speaker 4: it is a very like religious belief that if if
Speaker 4: we just keep going, we'll like get some like deep this,
Speaker 4: some like some like deep special insight.
Speaker 5: We've reached the point where people are lesterally looking to
Speaker 5: have uns like almost in a super natural sense, Yeah,
Speaker 5: to find a situation like oh, well, we'll just be
Speaker 5: able to keep on going because asteroid mining, We'll just
Speaker 5: go one settlement other planets and I'll continue our expansion
Speaker 5: endlessly and we could just keep on going.
Speaker 4: And you also see this with people like developing AI.
Speaker 4: They're like, if we if we get into AI smart enough,
Speaker 4: it'll be able to tell us how to fix our problem.
Speaker 4: And it is a deeply spiritual drive. It is a
Speaker 4: very cultish drive, like we have to keep going, even
Speaker 4: though we are currently dooming ourselves by continuing. We have
Speaker 4: to continue because that's the only way that we'll get
Speaker 4: this out of this problem. It's like we can, we can,
Speaker 4: we can only dig deeper, like we've gone so far
Speaker 4: into the.
Speaker 3: Center of the earth.
Speaker 4: It's faster, Yeah, it's faster to dig out the other
Speaker 4: way than actually try to turn around and fill the
Speaker 4: hole again. It is a very cultish spiritual drive to
Speaker 4: like continue this, to continue and like explicitly like accelerate
Speaker 4: development because we've realized we've done something that's uh from
Speaker 4: our current point of view, almost irreparable. But there's this,
Speaker 4: there is this belief that if we owe that the
Speaker 4: only way to fix it is is if we keep going,
Speaker 4: then will somehow stumble across the magical the magical thing
Speaker 4: that will fix our problem.
Speaker 5: I want to talk specifically about the sort of I mean,
Speaker 5: I know there are other people in the world who
Speaker 5: wards how there's response, in the global South, who will
Speaker 5: olds how there's response. But I see a lot of
Speaker 5: Americans responding to my like decreath advocacy or whatever saying, well,
Speaker 5: what about the global cellth you know, I mean, nevermind,
Speaker 5: I live in the global South, what about the global cell?
Speaker 5: And what really gets me about it is just how
Speaker 5: it's almost like a way of comfort in themselves.
Speaker 4: Sure it's it's it's using the struggles of marginalize people
Speaker 4: to not interrogate your own role in the continuing destruction
Speaker 4: and like systemic oppression that produces this great economic and
Speaker 4: u and like a difference in quality of life.
Speaker 5: Because it's like you have to then you'll have to
Speaker 5: confront the fact that maybe your lifestyle and the privilege,
Speaker 5: some of the lifestyle and privileges you enjoyed really should
Speaker 5: not be enjoyed by anyone ever, Like maybe that level
Speaker 5: of the thing was never sustainable in the first place,
Speaker 5: and we could have done with less. And I know
Speaker 5: it's really I really hate having this kind of conversation
Speaker 5: on the internet because I think it's very difficult to
Speaker 5: get into the left of nuances necessary because then I
Speaker 5: know people will say, oh, well, I'm from a week
Speaker 5: in class background from this and that I've also faced
Speaker 5: livel deprivation. I get all that, but then there are
Speaker 5: other things where I'm like, you know, can we live
Speaker 5: in a world where everyone has access to Amazon one
Speaker 5: day ship in two day shipping, you know. Can we
Speaker 5: live in a world where everyone owns a car, even
Speaker 5: if it's an electric car. I think there are certain
Speaker 5: standards of I guess lifestyle or milestones of lifestyle that
Speaker 5: we've come to accept that I think in retrospect, we
Speaker 5: will look back and say, Wow, that was an aberration
Speaker 5: of human history that we were even maintaining that sort
Speaker 5: of infrastructure, even maintaining that level of consumption. You know,
Speaker 5: I'm sure a couple of generations online people will look
Speaker 5: back and be like, wow, do you tell me nearly
Speaker 5: every household had a car and that everybody was just
Speaker 5: on the roads driving all the time, and we built
Speaker 5: our cities or infrastructure around vehicles when we knew very
Speaker 5: early on, when the oil companies knew very early on
Speaker 5: that eventually we would run out, we just didn't care.
Speaker 5: I'm kind of all over the place with this, but
Speaker 5: you're gonna say something, well.
Speaker 4: I was also gonna mention like in these in these
Speaker 4: sorts of discussions, it also can be often overlooked that
Speaker 4: just because you live in the United States or in
Speaker 4: any other kind of big place, that doesn't mean like
Speaker 4: it's that's not The United States isn't one place. There
Speaker 4: is a difference between living and like a five thousand
Speaker 4: dollars apartment in a downtown like city center, versus living
Speaker 4: on the outskirts of town in like a house that's
Speaker 4: falling apart right or living on the street, or or
Speaker 4: living in the middle of Utah versus living on the
Speaker 4: coast like there's or living in like a montane like there's.
Speaker 4: There is such a large difference even for people in
Speaker 4: the States, for like many many like not everyone is
Speaker 4: able to live in this like very are arguably very
Speaker 4: very unsustainable, very like hyper hyper modernity. Way there is
Speaker 4: there is, there's millions of people that of course, like no,
Speaker 4: I'm not saying that against your point. I'm saying, like
Speaker 4: this is this is also part of the problem. Like
Speaker 4: we have we have tricked ourselves into thinking that if
Speaker 4: you if you live in the United States, that must
Speaker 4: mean you are like you are one of the elite few.
Speaker 4: But there's millions of people who are living in like
Speaker 4: the like some of the most some of the harshest
Speaker 4: conditions in the world, even in the richest country in
Speaker 4: the world, like it is is anti.
Speaker 5: Growth is not coming to take from one's meager lifestyle
Speaker 5: if one lives in those circumstances, you know, deep growth
Speaker 5: is really coming after those on the other end of
Speaker 5: that spectrum of life style.
Speaker 4: No, if if any, it would be, and it would
Speaker 4: be a greater equalizer between people living in countries.
Speaker 5: Of your standard of living.
Speaker 4: Yes, as as as well as looking at you know,
Speaker 4: quote unquote like the global South or quote unquote like
Speaker 4: third world countries, like there is there's this idea of
Speaker 4: like I think we've had someone on this show to
Speaker 4: talk about this before, Joey, like the fourth World, like
Speaker 4: you're you were living in third world conditions but.
Speaker 3: In a first world country.
Speaker 4: And how all of these, all of these types of
Speaker 4: these all of these types of systemic inequality and differences
Speaker 4: and uh like a cost of living, living conditions, they
Speaker 4: all they all come by in together in really Gaussian
Speaker 4: fuzzy ways, even if you live in the United States, Canada, England,
Speaker 4: like Germany, wherever, and and and it produces this extremely
Speaker 4: extremely bizarre.
Speaker 3: Mishmash of of.
Speaker 5: Circumstances.
Speaker 4: Of circumstances. Yeah, you can you can walk by someone
Speaker 4: who's driving like a five hundred thousand dollars car. Meanwhile
Speaker 4: you are literally being forced to live on the street
Speaker 4: like that is that is so that is such a
Speaker 4: bizarre dichotomy.
Speaker 5: The few times I've been to the US seeing that dichotomy,
Speaker 5: like in real something else. I mean, of course there's
Speaker 5: an incoming equality, and there's vastest parties in wealth and
Speaker 5: turned out as well. You know, there are people who
Speaker 5: you know live on the streets and their people who
Speaker 5: you know go to yacht parties every weekend. What I
Speaker 5: want people to recognize is the way that these elites
Speaker 5: get you to advocate against your own interests is through
Speaker 5: that sort of and connect you to their culture progress
Speaker 5: and get you invested in their culture progress. Hook you
Speaker 5: in is through that sort of temporarily embarrassed to millionaire mantra.
Speaker 5: They hook you in by saying, yeah, they're coming for
Speaker 5: our stuff. Eventually you get to my level too, and
Speaker 5: then you wouldn't want people to take your stuff away either,
Speaker 5: you know, like my tech development is gonna right, We're
Speaker 5: going to bring all of us up, you know, and
Speaker 5: you shouldn't let these people stop you. Rather than no, well,
Speaker 5: obviously these rush guys are going to get brought down
Speaker 5: a peg, but by bringing them down a peg, everybody
Speaker 5: will have a better quality of life. But instead of
Speaker 5: recognizing that, they deceive people with this techno opim, they
Speaker 5: bring people into this trap of capitalist realism that either
Speaker 5: you live in the deprivation of the worst of the
Speaker 5: worst of people's livelihoods and the capitalism, or you live
Speaker 5: in the excess of the best of the best of
Speaker 5: people's lives and the capitalism. And there's nothing beyond those
Speaker 5: two options. And so obviously the de growth people want
Speaker 5: you to be living in the former option, and you
Speaker 5: should oppose them because of that. Another response I see
Speaker 5: is that there are a lot of people who are
Speaker 5: just completely like have complete faith in our leaders, who
Speaker 5: believe that, you know, once we get just the right
Speaker 5: people in office, things will work out. The truth is,
Speaker 5: of course, the system corrupts even the best of intentions.
Speaker 5: Politicians are a class and to themselves, and their actions
Speaker 5: reflect ultimately their own interests and the interests of their backers.
Speaker 5: Nation states, governments, rulers. Is their job, it's in their
Speaker 5: job description to maintain structures that ultimately harm humanity, and
Speaker 5: there's only so much they can do to affect the
Speaker 5: status cho placing our salvation in their hands. It's an
Speaker 5: exercise in futility, invest in your future and the confines
Speaker 5: the electoralism is a waste of time, but it also
Speaker 5: demonstrates whoy effectively mass media and schooling has broken down
Speaker 5: and limited our imagination. I like to call that status realism,
Speaker 5: the idea that there's no alternative to this hierarchy of
Speaker 5: rulers and rule, that people just need to submit to
Speaker 5: the wills and whims of others rather than organizing for
Speaker 5: themselves in their communities. There's, of course, the response of
Speaker 5: apocalypse worship rather classic response around those who end up
Speaker 5: obsessing over collapse and honestly that the worshippers of the
Speaker 5: apocalypse are also houl to a form of blind hope.
Speaker 5: You know, the accelerationists, doomsday preppers, cultists, extreme survivalists, zombie
Speaker 5: video game enthusiasts, believers in the end times. They all
Speaker 5: seem to have a whole so they seem to have
Speaker 5: a real excitement for collapse, or they fixate really heavily
Speaker 5: on the ideal version of the end of the world,
Speaker 5: like they can't wait for the world to end. They
Speaker 5: embrace the sort of we're all on our own mantra,
Speaker 5: barricade themselves, bunker down, stockpile weapons and essentials. They get
Speaker 5: en up for a violent future because they anticipate that
Speaker 5: others will react to the situation similarly to how they
Speaker 5: intend to react. So they're taken like a page from
Speaker 5: ad Max and like, yeah, I'm going to be immortant Joe,
Speaker 5: so I don't end up a thrall of immortant Joe.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, if it's not obvious, the people who respond
Speaker 5: in this way freak me out, you know, those who
Speaker 5: look at what's going on and instead of resisting or
Speaker 5: trying to change the circumstances, they just accept it as
Speaker 5: things going according to schedule of prophecy, or they try
Speaker 5: to make it worse. I don't know if you've seen
Speaker 5: Leave the World.
Speaker 3: Behind, Oh my god, yes, horrible.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm sure you remember that one character and that
Speaker 5: prepper and his whole response to the crisis before him
Speaker 5: completing that a selfishness.
Speaker 4: Which is a betrayal to his character inspiration in the
Speaker 4: movie Tremors, which showed the correct way to be a prepper,
Speaker 4: which is to actually help the people in your community.
Speaker 5: I actually haven't seen that movie. That it's my list.
Speaker 4: It's what it is a it is an old movie
Speaker 4: about a worm that takes over a small town. It's
Speaker 4: pretty silly, but it does.
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
Speaker 5: No, it sounds like something Stephen King would write.
Speaker 4: It's it's not really a horror. It's more of like
Speaker 4: a comedy thriller.
Speaker 5: Like it's a comedy.
Speaker 4: Okay, it's not a comedy, but it is a nately
Speaker 4: funny situation. Also because it's like filmed in the eighties
Speaker 4: or nineties, like it it just the way it's age
Speaker 4: just makes it more funny.
Speaker 3: But it is also a good movie.
Speaker 4: And and uh yeah after after this, I mean it's
Speaker 4: it's kind of like what if like an earthquake or
Speaker 4: a tornado hits this small town, except this is more
Speaker 4: like adversarial. It's like this like worm is like like
Speaker 4: like causing like the towns buildings like cave in because
Speaker 4: it's like digging underground. And we see we see this fantastic,
Speaker 4: fantastic prepper character is able to help everybody out because
Speaker 4: he is he is prepared for such a scenario.
Speaker 5: How kind of film? Yes, unlike unlike that through schebag
Speaker 5: and and leave the world behind. Yes, we'll talk about
Speaker 5: that movie after. Yeah. I mean, the last response I
Speaker 5: really wanted to cover was despair, pessimism, seeing the worst,
Speaker 5: expecting the worst, living and utter defeat, weighing down actual
Speaker 5: efforts with pessimism jumping into my comment section to be
Speaker 5: more in our fate. I mean, according to those in despair,
Speaker 5: there's nothing that we can do to affect our future,
Speaker 5: and in my eyes, those on this dumor pillar just
Speaker 5: as misguided as those who are hyped up with blind opium.
Speaker 5: I think it's okay to admit that we don't know
Speaker 5: what's going to happen. You know, I don't claim to
Speaker 5: your profit. I don't think anybody should. The IPCC reports,
Speaker 5: for example, are a consensus of scientists and their understanding
Speaker 5: of the situation. Some scientists are going to be more
Speaker 5: conservative in their report in their reporting, others are a
Speaker 5: bit more catastrophes. But either way, I really don't think
Speaker 5: we need to get into the weeds of just how
Speaker 5: bad it is or exactly how it's going to happen,
Speaker 5: but matters that things need to change some way, somehow.
Speaker 5: I think it's important to try and understand as much
Speaker 5: as the situation as you could not to the point
Speaker 5: of obsession. To take note of how we respond to
Speaker 5: the issue, To look at the various responses I covered
Speaker 5: and see if you fit into any of those camps,
Speaker 5: and to recognize that the worst case scenario is far
Speaker 5: from inevitable. My advice is ready to prepare for the
Speaker 5: worst in whatever way you can, and put hope and
Speaker 5: build for the best. Build community, build connections, build your skills,
Speaker 5: build your strengths, and push in any way that you
Speaker 5: can in whatever's fare you find yourself for meaningful change.
Speaker 5: Because say it with me now, it could happen here.
Speaker 3: It certainly could.
Speaker 5: That's it for me. I'm on YouTube andwism, I'm on
Speaker 5: patureon dot com, slash saint tu. That's it. We'll power
Speaker 5: to all the people. Peace.
Speaker 3: Hey.
Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 2: now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 4: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 9: You can find sources for It could happen here. Updated
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