Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. What are we recording?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah?
Speaker 1: What the episode started?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: I was, I was, I was going to say something,
Speaker 1: something to do with Texas. But to be honest, you know, why,
Speaker 1: why why do we do this? Why do we let ourselves,
Speaker 1: you know, get famous for for for saying a particular
Speaker 1: bit and then just keep repeating it over and over again.
Speaker 1: Are we so creatively bankrupt that there's there's nothing else
Speaker 1: we can do but repeat our greatest hits in order
Speaker 1: to recapture some of the some of the the excitement
Speaker 1: that we felt as younger men. Anyway, my co hosts
Speaker 1: on this episode, James Stout and me A Wong, welcome,
Speaker 1: there could happen here.
Speaker 4: Hi, Robert, I'm glad you're doing so well.
Speaker 1: We're all doing great, James. You've just been having a
Speaker 1: searing emotional experience at the border. Yeah, and everyone else
Speaker 1: is busy living in the United States, which is its
Speaker 1: own seering emotional experience.
Speaker 5: Man.
Speaker 1: Today, today we're going to be talking about the both
Speaker 1: the most and least American state, Texas. Huzzah, Yeah, love you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Who here has spent a lot of time in Texas. Garrison,
Speaker 1: You lived in the Dallas area, right.
Speaker 6: A lot that I've made my visits to Texas over
Speaker 6: the years with you, even in the murder house.
Speaker 1: You and I have quaffed many a shiner bock together,
Speaker 1: James Many. Okay, I guess we'll move into the fucking episode.
Speaker 1: So there was a there was an email sent out
Speaker 1: by Texasdemocrats dot org recently with the title Texas moves
Speaker 1: from solid red to battleground. Sure, you know, like clockwork.
Speaker 1: A lot of Democrats got very excited, and I made
Speaker 1: a couple of people made posts being like, hey, this
Speaker 1: is the same thing that happens every single election. They
Speaker 1: are never right. Texas is never a battleground and it
Speaker 1: always costs an insane amount of money. It is a
Speaker 1: con by DC political consultants to get your money and
Speaker 1: pump it into something that will fill up their coffers
Speaker 1: and not achieve anything of value for the state of
Speaker 1: Texas or for the Democrats nationwide. And this makes people
Speaker 1: very angry for two reasons. One, they tend to interpret
Speaker 1: it as saying abandon Texas and the people there, which
Speaker 1: is not the statement I was making or anyone else
Speaker 1: was making. And number two, everyone and it kind of
Speaker 1: obsessively starts pointing out like, look, look at how over
Speaker 1: the last thirty years, you know, the things have narrowed
Speaker 1: in Texas, and the proportion of like Democratic votes is
Speaker 1: you know raised, This is a this is winnable. We
Speaker 1: can do it. We can do it. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: today about why the anyone who talks to you about
Speaker 1: flipping Texas as a political goal that you should give
Speaker 1: money to is conning you, and not only conning you,
Speaker 1: but making it actually more difficult for Democrats to win,
Speaker 1: both in Texas and nationwide. That's that's that's the premise
Speaker 1: of the episode.
Speaker 7: Everybody, Here's here's how Bernie can still win. Though at
Speaker 7: the very end, we will give you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, We're gonna let you know he's got a shot. Look,
Speaker 1: look if he if he is capable of putting another
Speaker 1: three rounds of six point five into a dinner plate
Speaker 1: sized target at one hundred and fifty yards. Now that
Speaker 1: that was anyway, he'd have to shoot a lot of
Speaker 1: people to make.
Speaker 3: He's got a deploy bought a joy into an.
Speaker 4: Absolutely not.
Speaker 1: Person. So I want to talk about this because I
Speaker 1: find it, like I think people tend to interpret this.
Speaker 1: I've certainly gotten accused of like, oh, you're just kind
Speaker 1: of being like a nihilist. Uh, this is you're being
Speaker 1: you know, just an anti electoralist. You're not being practical.
Speaker 1: There was a there was one particular guy who's like
Speaker 1: a local Democratic candidate who responded seven times to my
Speaker 1: tweet being like with variations, and his obsession was like,
Speaker 1: if we win Texas, it's impossible for the GOP to
Speaker 1: win national elections, which is true. If theoretically the Democrats
Speaker 1: flipped Texas, the GOP would have no chance at winning
Speaker 1: a federal election ever.
Speaker 3: Again, Yeah, and so simultaneous to this, right, if the
Speaker 3: Republican there are more Republicans in California than there are
Speaker 3: any other state in the Union, and if the Republicans
Speaker 3: won California, they would they would win every election forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, happen, not going to happen. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those things. I am not saying
Speaker 1: Texas will never be a blue state. You know, that
Speaker 1: is something that is possible, even likely, given enough time.
Speaker 1: What I am saying, the argument that I'm making here,
Speaker 1: and I'll provide you with evidence, is that number one,
Speaker 1: focusing on these elections from the top down. And when
Speaker 1: you're saying we want to flip Texas, that's a top
Speaker 1: down approach, right. You are not focusing on we want
Speaker 1: to fill up and win a bunch of different local elections.
Speaker 1: We want to flip, you know, the state houses. We
Speaker 1: want to flip a bunch of mayoralties and stuff. You
Speaker 1: are saying what matters is how Texas votes in the
Speaker 1: national election. And if you were to get if you
Speaker 1: were to kind of eke out a bear like in Georgia,
Speaker 1: right where you get a narrow victory in the federal election,
Speaker 1: that would be great for the Democratic Party. One of
Speaker 1: my issues with it is that kind of focusing obsessively
Speaker 1: on flipping Texas isn't focusing on the stuff that actually
Speaker 1: will help Texans, like Texans currently being targeted by the
Speaker 1: state government, because flipping the state in a federal election,
Speaker 1: but not taking the governor's seat, not taking the lieutenant
Speaker 1: governor's seat, not like actually taking the state House, doesn't
Speaker 1: improve life for people in Texas. I think the kind
Speaker 1: of the degree to which the federal government, Biden's administration,
Speaker 1: has been unable to push back very effectively against kind
Speaker 1: of a lot of the shit that DeSantis has been
Speaker 1: doing in Florida. You know, they have started to make
Speaker 1: some attempts, is evidence of this, and kind of more
Speaker 1: to the point, even if you don't agree with that, fundamentally,
Speaker 1: these strategies that the Democratic Party has embraced in Texas
Speaker 1: do not work. The Texas Democratic Party is incompetent. They
Speaker 1: are bad at their job. They are worse. People bring
Speaker 1: up Georgia a lot when I talk about flipping Texas,
Speaker 1: and folks are like, well, we flipped Georgia, And it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: because the state elected officials and candidates in George number one,
Speaker 1: the state party did a much better job of kind
Speaker 1: of harvesting is a weird way to phrase it, but
Speaker 1: of incubating talent to run for election in a number
Speaker 1: of local offices. Then the Texas Democratic Party has ever done,
Speaker 1: and that was a big part of what allowed them
Speaker 1: to be competitive and eventually to flip the state. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of like kind of dollar sign information on
Speaker 1: how bad the state party in Texas is at this shit,
Speaker 1: and I guess I should go ahead and provide some
Speaker 1: of that now. So in the twenty twenty two election,
Speaker 1: the midterms famously an unusually good showing for the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party nationwide for a midterm election everywhere but Texas. O'Rourke
Speaker 1: ran against Greg Abbott. He lost by eleven percent. This
Speaker 1: is kind of to contrast the election that got everyone
Speaker 1: excited when he was running against Cruse. I think they
Speaker 1: were like three percent apart. And again, the only reason
Speaker 1: there was this kind of mistaken belief and excitement among
Speaker 1: dims that O'Rourke, because he was so close to Cruz,
Speaker 1: had a real shot of winning Texas. No, he got
Speaker 1: kind of close to beating Cruz because Ted, even Republicans
Speaker 1: hate Ted Cruz. No one has ever liked that man.
Speaker 1: His own wife can barely stand to be in a
Speaker 1: room with him. His political allies would turn the other
Speaker 1: cheek if fucking somebody anyway, we shouldn't talk about political
Speaker 1: assassinations on this podcast. It wouldn't anger anybody though, right.
Speaker 1: Lindsay Graham has said that, like Lindsay Graham's like, what
Speaker 1: maybe the only good joke a Republican elected officials ever
Speaker 1: told is that if you were to shoot Ted Cruz
Speaker 1: on the floor of Congress and the trial was held
Speaker 1: in Congress, like nobody would vote to convict the murderer. Anyway.
Speaker 1: So Beto lost quite badly to Greg Abbott, and beyond that,
Speaker 1: basically every statewide candidate that the Democrats ran lost in
Speaker 1: that election. It was a bad election for the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party and people who pay attention to Texas politics and actually, like,
Speaker 1: aren't just trying to like grift your donation money? Know this.
Speaker 1: Joe Montfort, a Democratic consultant in North Texas, said, quote,
Speaker 1: it's been one election after another where we ramp everybody
Speaker 1: up and set these expectations that we're going to finish
Speaker 1: in first and then we finish in second. I don't
Speaker 1: see any indication that we can win at state wide
Speaker 1: levels or won't continue to bleed house seats to the
Speaker 1: other party.
Speaker 4: I love to need to finish in second.
Speaker 8: There is if there's like a podium on election libertarians. Yeah,
Speaker 8: the text Democratic Party to take the l to like Gildstein.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were some kind of site. There were some
Speaker 1: wins by Democrats in Texas. They managed to hold on
Speaker 1: to two out of three seats congressional seats in the
Speaker 1: battleground regions in South Texas, but they still lost one.
Speaker 1: They did they you would still lose one and you know,
Speaker 1: the GOP had to spend a lot of money to
Speaker 1: do that. But like one of the one of the
Speaker 1: points is that so they they held onto two of
Speaker 1: those seats, and they won a contestant seat in the
Speaker 1: suburbs of Dallas, and you know, like but basically in
Speaker 1: all of these areas, these were like super narrow winds,
Speaker 1: like these the big successes, and they were narrow wins
Speaker 1: in areas that Joe Biden had carried by double digits
Speaker 1: two years ago. And Joe Biden is a historically like
Speaker 1: that is part of some of the some of it
Speaker 1: will show you how bad the Texas Democratic Party is.
Speaker 1: Joe Biden is not a popular president. And the fact
Speaker 1: that he carried a lot of these areas by more
Speaker 1: than the candidates who narrowly won in twenty twenty two
Speaker 1: could is not a great sign for the way things
Speaker 1: are trending.
Speaker 6: Yeah, It's probably also worth pointing out that like those
Speaker 6: Southern Texas seats, like in the Rio Grande Valley, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 6: those people are normally Democrats, Yeah, but you have guys
Speaker 6: like hen is it Quella Quala Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah's
Speaker 6: opposed to abortion rights yeah yeah, and extremely hawkish on
Speaker 6: the border, and like, yeah, what do we gain by
Speaker 6: having like yeah, blue team good? Like not really if
Speaker 6: this person is going to take away your bodily autonomy
Speaker 6: and brutalize people for coming to this country for one day.
Speaker 4: About a life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's like a lot of the some of
Speaker 1: these wins are kind of like marginal at best, given
Speaker 1: the compromises or just given the kind of Democrats who
Speaker 1: can win it. It's like a Joe Manchin kind of situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And more to the point, like it's not not only
Speaker 1: is this like evidence kind of that the Democrats' strategy
Speaker 1: isn't isn't working. It's not simply that they tried something
Speaker 1: and it failed. They tried something and it was so
Speaker 1: expensive that it stopped them from trying things in other
Speaker 1: areas where the money could have gone better. For example
Speaker 1: of how fucking wasteful, particularly the bed O Wort campaign was, right,
Speaker 1: he loses by eleven points to Greg Abbot. He raised
Speaker 1: seventy seven million dollars to lose by that much. A
Speaker 1: few years earlier, Lupe Valdez ran against Greg Abbot. She
Speaker 1: spent raised like two million dollars and lost by thirteen points.
Speaker 1: So seventy five million dollars may have bought Beto two percent.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, like if you assume that national trends
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with that gap closing, buy a
Speaker 1: tiny amount, like what.
Speaker 3: With seventy five million dollars, I could take control of
Speaker 3: a moderate at least is Texas city?
Speaker 6: Like yeah that is like, yeah, I could buy had
Speaker 6: my chunk of Texas specific like you could purchase a
Speaker 6: large chunk of fort Worth with that much money. No, yeah,
Speaker 6: that's how I'll go here at cools the own media.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, to own fort Worth. Finally my dream completed.
Speaker 1: I'll be able to be I'm gonna buy those horse
Speaker 1: statues at Los Kalitas, finally be happy.
Speaker 6: Let's get blucifer as well. It's probably a good time
Speaker 6: to pivot to ads that help us pay for a
Speaker 6: piece of fool.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, you know, who isn't a waste of money
Speaker 1: these fucking ads. So overall we just talked about you know,
Speaker 1: Beto raised seventy seven million. The gubernatorial race cost in
Speaker 1: total something like one hundred and forty million dollars, which
Speaker 1: is a huge amount of money for something that fails
Speaker 1: that badly and doesn't there's no evidence that Beto's campaign
Speaker 1: like he was. He's obviously good at fundraising, right, And
Speaker 1: there was kind of this belief among a lot of dims,
Speaker 1: an errant belief that this meant that he would be
Speaker 1: good for down ballot races. Right, He's going to bring
Speaker 1: the entire because of how much attention he gets, He's
Speaker 1: going to raise the entire Democratic Party up. The poor
Speaker 1: showing of the Democratic Party in Texas in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two suggests that that's not the case. And the money,
Speaker 1: like there are there are fights that could have been
Speaker 1: won and probably weren't because the money wasn't being invested
Speaker 1: in those fights. It was going to battle. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to quote from an article by the Texas Tribune here.
Speaker 1: This year the party ran Rochelle Garza, a civil rights
Speaker 1: lawyer with little political experience against Attorney General Ken Paxton,
Speaker 1: who was widely seen as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent.
Speaker 1: But Garza struggled to raise money or gain traction in
Speaker 1: auric shadow and lost by ten percentage points against Paxton,
Speaker 1: who's been indicted on felony security fraud charges and is
Speaker 1: being investigated by the FBI for abuse of office accusations.
Speaker 1: And it's what, Maybe she couldn't have won no matter
Speaker 1: what you did. But one of the rules of politics
Speaker 1: in this country is that the money you spend at
Speaker 1: a big race, like a gubernatorial race, like a like
Speaker 1: a like a Senate or a congressional campaign at the
Speaker 1: federal level, like a presidential campaign, goes less far per
Speaker 1: dollar than the money you spend in smaller local elections. Right,
Speaker 1: ten million bucks going into that election might have done something,
Speaker 1: you know, as opposed to seventy five million going into
Speaker 1: Bedo O'Rourke and accomplishing very little. This has been not
Speaker 1: just a problem in Texas in previous elections, throughout the
Speaker 1: Trump area and a little before in particular, this was
Speaker 1: a problem the DIMS had kind of from the middle
Speaker 1: of the Obama years until the last couple of like,
Speaker 1: really the last midterm at twenty eighteen is when it
Speaker 1: started to turn around nationally, and the dims have I've
Speaker 1: learned a lot in other regions about like not spending
Speaker 1: stupid amounts of money on hopeless contests, but not like comprehensively.
Speaker 1: So for example, in twenty twenty two, the second most
Speaker 1: expensive house race was the fourteenth congressional district of Georgia,
Speaker 1: where Marcus Flowers raised sixteen million dollars and lost by
Speaker 1: thirty two points, not a great return on the investment.
Speaker 1: And it was like the reason why he raised so
Speaker 1: much money is because he was running against Marjorie Taylor Green,
Speaker 1: and nationally, dims outside of Georgia wanted to put in
Speaker 1: money because they hate her. And it's a trend that
Speaker 1: relies a lot on social media on kind of the
Speaker 1: way in which like hardcore dims, the dims that do
Speaker 1: a lot of the small dollar donations think about politics
Speaker 1: where it's like Marjorie Taylor Green bad donate money to opponent, Well,
Speaker 1: her opponent had no chance of winning in that district,
Speaker 1: Like no amount of money would have flipped that, and
Speaker 1: you just wasted sixteen million dollars that could have helped
Speaker 1: somewhere else. Maybe that's an insane thing, and it's not
Speaker 1: as bad as it used if you want to look
Speaker 1: at like the like the kind of the dumbest it
Speaker 1: ever was. In twenty twenty, so Lindsay Graham's seat was
Speaker 1: up in South Carolina and Jamie Harrison ran against Lindsay
Speaker 1: Grant and dims again because Lindsay Graham evil, you know,
Speaker 1: raised one hundred and thirty million dollars and he lost
Speaker 1: fight ten points. Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell, who
Speaker 1: is another like you can always get a shitload of
Speaker 1: money to fight Mitch McConnell ninety four million dollars lost
Speaker 1: by twenty points, either of the like one hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty million, ninety four million, that's two state legislators you
Speaker 1: could have flipped, or at least made progress on flipping, right,
Speaker 1: Like that amount of money could potentially do that or
Speaker 1: at least help set up, you know, get a couple
Speaker 1: of people elected who have a chance at kind of
Speaker 1: broadening a base of support and becoming you know, leaders
Speaker 1: in states that are currently like dominated by red legislators.
Speaker 1: Like there's a chance at least here and that.
Speaker 3: Like specifically the state legislature. Thing is this has been
Speaker 3: a problem with the Democrats for fucking ages, which is
Speaker 3: that they just like it is only genuinely in the
Speaker 3: last two years the Democrats are started giving a ship
Speaker 3: about state legislatures, like and this is this is one
Speaker 3: of the things from the Obama era, Like one of
Speaker 3: the reasons everything sucks so much is that the Democrats
Speaker 3: managed to lose like, oh god, I forget it was
Speaker 3: like they I think I think the total they lost
Speaker 3: like a thousand seats. It was like yeah, and and
Speaker 3: and you know, on the we were seeing the product
Speaker 3: of this, right like this like like Wisconsin was sort
Speaker 3: of just a hell hole for the last decade. Uh
Speaker 3: and you know, I mean like and these are like
Speaker 3: Minnesota to like the like, there are lots of these
Speaker 3: states that like that thought, not Minnesota, wor am I
Speaker 3: talking about Michigan?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Michigan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like there's a lot of these states, and you know,
Speaker 3: like and both of these places were winnable, right like
Speaker 3: like they're like the Democrats are winning there now, right,
Speaker 3: but they just like fucking left, like you know, they
Speaker 3: they they fucking left Lint to get poisoned by lead
Speaker 3: because they just not like the only the only things
Speaker 3: that the problem is there's there's no money for consultants
Speaker 3: in in sort of like downbout like state, and like
Speaker 3: local races just just jack shit, right, And the Democrat
Speaker 3: the Democrat party like is not run by sort of
Speaker 3: like it's it's not a party in like an actual
Speaker 3: real sense. It is a it is a collection of consultants.
Speaker 3: And those consultants only care about senates, about Senate races.
Speaker 3: Sometimes they care about house races, and they care specifically
Speaker 3: they spend all of their fucking money and presidential races.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's like again, and the Republicans don't
Speaker 3: do that because they have a bunch of like people
Speaker 3: they you know, because they have a bunch of like
Speaker 3: part of their base, right is these like small and
Speaker 3: mid scale capitalists in you know, in cities, in rural
Speaker 3: areas who have like immediate concerns about like you know,
Speaker 3: there's like there there are specific workers who they want
Speaker 3: like lives to be worse. And so because of that,
Speaker 3: the Republican machine is like seize the entire fucking country.
Speaker 3: And the Democrats have been sitting around like spending like
Speaker 3: a trillion dollars on Wendy Davis losing by twenty points.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it's like you get these you get
Speaker 1: these like cases where you know, you're looking at thirty
Speaker 1: million being spent, you know, failing to unseat Marjorie Taylor
Speaker 1: Green or somebody thirty three million something like that. But
Speaker 1: what you don't like at the same time as like
Speaker 1: that's happening, is all of these massive amounts of money
Speaker 1: are being devoted to these like to the races that
Speaker 1: get attention because there's famous names involved. You have, like
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty I think it was you have or no,
Speaker 1: it is twenty twenty two. You have the election between
Speaker 1: Ted Budd, a Republican against the Democrat Sherry Beasley in
Speaker 1: North Carolina where the Democratic Party decided not to prioritize
Speaker 1: this election because it wasn't winnable, and then Bud won
Speaker 1: up wound up winning by just four points. That's a
Speaker 1: seat you could flip with money. That's that's not that's
Speaker 1: not an unreasonable thing, as opposed to again, the races
Speaker 1: where it went to and people are losing by like
Speaker 1: thirty something fucking percent. And if you want to know
Speaker 1: who a serious candidate is who is not just trying
Speaker 1: to do the sexy thing or not just trying to
Speaker 1: like again flip the state so that we can win
Speaker 1: the federal election, but actually wants to help their state.
Speaker 1: And this is again there's very nice things about Beto O'Rourke.
Speaker 1: I was in Texas during the ice storm. He did
Speaker 1: good work during the ice storm, like actual community defense
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that I do have some respect for.
Speaker 1: He is not and has never been a serious politician.
Speaker 1: And I will tell you why he went from winning
Speaker 1: an election to losing a state election against Ted Cruz,
Speaker 1: to losing a presidential race to losing the governor seat.
Speaker 1: That is so fucking scattershot. That is not building a
Speaker 1: base of power, That is not building from the ground up,
Speaker 1: and like encouraging the growth of other personalities. You're just
Speaker 1: darting from whatever the sexiest and most like pr driven
Speaker 1: race is. That's not serious. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: what Number one one, the Democratic Party, the ship that like,
Speaker 1: as we've said, they're getting better. The National Party got
Speaker 1: a lot better at this particularly in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: It was less stupid than the previous couple of elections
Speaker 1: had been.
Speaker 3: Really difficult, to be more dumb than that, but you
Speaker 3: know it is British British labor et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Y labor actually is the big one. Oh my fuck.
Speaker 1: I want to talk what has what has worked, and
Speaker 1: what I think could work again. And to do that,
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about a guy named Howard Dean,
Speaker 1: who here knows who Howard Dean was. Garrison simply, yeah,
Speaker 1: a little bit.
Speaker 5: Have you?
Speaker 1: Have you all heard the video of him screaming that
Speaker 1: got like his career is before? Okay, well, James, would
Speaker 1: you load that up for us so we could play
Speaker 1: that in a second to the Deanswward, Jamie, pull it up.
Speaker 1: Howard Howard Dean ran for president and was He was
Speaker 1: the first national political candidate to use the internet effectively
Speaker 1: to raise money in the in the history of US politics.
Speaker 1: He's kind of pre Obama, worked out a lot of
Speaker 1: the strategies that Obama's people wound up using to very
Speaker 1: successfully raise money for him. He was really good at it.
Speaker 1: He was a reasonably intelligent candidate, and then he gave
Speaker 1: the speech that we're about to play for you, and
Speaker 1: it completely created his ended him as a as a candidate.
Speaker 3: You know, I always say, the thing about Dean. Dean
Speaker 3: is stunningly unlucky that he ran in the time that
Speaker 3: he did, because the clip you're about to hear is
Speaker 3: one thousand times less weird than anything DeSantis has ever done.
Speaker 3: Like he he ran in it. I mean there was
Speaker 3: there was dan Quail, right, but like he ran in
Speaker 3: an era where like the seriousness and like non weirdness
Speaker 3: of politicians was so much higher.
Speaker 4: I mean it's in the chat, so you can this
Speaker 4: is a good shit.
Speaker 1: Straight to that beautiful scream.
Speaker 9: We're going to South Carolina in Oklahoma and Arizona and
Speaker 9: North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and
Speaker 9: Texas and New York. We're going to South Dakota and
Speaker 9: Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington,
Speaker 9: d C.
Speaker 2: To take back the White House.
Speaker 1: That's it. That ended his career as a candidate. And
Speaker 1: it's a little silly, but that doesn't that doesn't that
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a twelve second news cycle today. But after
Speaker 1: kind of failing out as a presidential candidate, he became
Speaker 1: chairman of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and he
Speaker 1: was a pretty good one. His kind of primary strategic
Speaker 1: vision was what he called the fifty state strategy, which is,
Speaker 1: don't focus just on swing states, never write a state
Speaker 1: off at unwinnable. Instead, spread the money that the DNC
Speaker 1: has around two campaign throughout the country everywhere, particularly to
Speaker 1: fund local dncs so that they can start building a
Speaker 1: stable of candidates that can attract voters and eventually win
Speaker 1: local elections. It's not like an easy, it's not a
Speaker 1: sexy strategy because a lot of it is focused on
Speaker 1: like the slow kind of grueling fight to build up
Speaker 1: a base of support and unfriendly terrain. But it worked
Speaker 1: like really well. Actually in twenty or so states, those
Speaker 1: that had voted solidly Republican in private previous recent presidential races,
Speaker 1: Democratic candidates like won elections that had previously like in
Speaker 1: the like gone against them like it had. Like there
Speaker 1: were about like twenty states where it the kind of
Speaker 1: slide to red was arrested and pushed back to blue.
Speaker 1: These are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska,
Speaker 1: North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah,
Speaker 1: West Virginia, and Wyoming. When you do the yeah, there
Speaker 1: we go. So basically, Dean's strategy led to a net
Speaker 1: gain of thirty nine state House seats and a two
Speaker 1: percent increase of all seats in the states analyzed. They
Speaker 1: lost two, you know, state Senate seats net, but it
Speaker 1: worked great in the House and like gained an attorney generalship,
Speaker 1: gained three House seats, gained a Senate seat, and in
Speaker 1: fifteen of the twenty seats the Democratic nominees on increase
Speaker 1: in vote share between two thousand and four and two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, which was the years that so again,
Speaker 1: not super sexy. These aren't like we flipped Texas suddenly,
Speaker 1: but it's like, oh, we started to see real gains
Speaker 1: and like a lot of pretty red states.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: It didn't work everywhere. It was not particularly successful in
Speaker 1: a large chunk of the South, like it did not
Speaker 1: arrest the slide into the red everywhere. But in a
Speaker 1: lot of the Midwest, particularly the states that were like
Speaker 1: the Hillary Clinton so called firewall that went for Trump
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty, it was extremely effective. And of course
Speaker 1: it got mixed immediately after Obama won election. And this
Speaker 1: is a big part of why in twenty ten the
Speaker 1: DIMS lost disastrously. But like the basic idea of we
Speaker 1: should be putting money into local democratic parties in order
Speaker 1: to like number one, have like a big part of
Speaker 1: winning any conflict, whether it's a war or a political election,
Speaker 1: is having the resources available reserves to take advantage of
Speaker 1: opportunities that present themselves in the moment. So you have
Speaker 1: a solidly read state house seat or judge ship or
Speaker 1: something like that, or governorship or mayor mayoralty, and a
Speaker 1: candidate has a health scare or has a scandal, you know,
Speaker 1: they get caught fucking a thirteen year old or something,
Speaker 1: and suddenly this seat that was solidly read is in play.
Speaker 1: And if you have no one who can get votes,
Speaker 1: who can get voters excited, who can run for that, well,
Speaker 1: then your probably not gonna win it. It's just going
Speaker 1: to like go to whoever the RNC you know, picks
Speaker 1: to pick up the seat next. But if you've got
Speaker 1: someone waiting in the wings, they have a chance at
Speaker 1: winning it. And a good example of this is what
Speaker 1: just happened in Jacksonville, Florida. Right you have DeSantis make
Speaker 1: go like lunge to the fucking most fascist end of
Speaker 1: the right and pass this abortion bill that's something like
Speaker 1: seventy five percent of the state doesn't like. And the
Speaker 1: Dims had a decent candidate there that was able to
Speaker 1: run against the Republican mayor of Jacksonville and win. And
Speaker 1: in that election, the dim spent two million and the
Speaker 1: Republicans spent nine million. You were not talking about the
Speaker 1: kind of resources expended that you're seeing in some of
Speaker 1: these dumb races we're talking about. So anyway, like this
Speaker 1: is most of what I wanted to get into is
Speaker 1: just like you can win and you can improve things
Speaker 1: in Texas and you can build a base from which
Speaker 1: to actually change things electorally in that state. But you
Speaker 1: can't do it by just like focusing on whoever is
Speaker 1: at the top. Like it has to be smarter. It's
Speaker 1: not just about shoveling money into a pit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like I think there's there's a couple of
Speaker 3: things I want to add. One was that like, oh god, okay,
Speaker 3: like so Tim Kane, Yeah, tim Kaine got put in
Speaker 3: after they ran out Dean and Jesus like Tim Kane
Speaker 3: might be is a is like a once in a
Speaker 3: generation terrible politician, like one of the worst, you know,
Speaker 3: but like like you would see ship like.
Speaker 1: He is the Winston Churchill of making me bored.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, like he like like you would see I mean,
Speaker 3: and this still happens, right, but like there are there
Speaker 3: are seats that are winnable that the Dems like just
Speaker 3: literally won't even bother finding people to run for because
Speaker 3: they're just fucking too lazy and they don't give a shit.
Speaker 3: And you know this this happens if this happens in
Speaker 3: a fucking lot of races, and you know, and part
Speaker 3: part of the other thing that that happens in this
Speaker 3: sort of period that like you know, is the reason
Speaker 3: why the top down is okay. So this is like
Speaker 3: if if we're gonna actually do this sort of like
Speaker 3: complicated electoralism, like this is why Bernie Sanders lost two
Speaker 3: elections in a row. Is that you can't actually like
Speaker 3: like actual sort of like substantive political change like doesn't
Speaker 3: happen from the top down. It's it's like it happens
Speaker 3: on bottom up organizing. And you know, the the democratic
Speaker 3: waves in like the last two years, we're basically like
Speaker 3: them eating actual social movements. It's you know, like they
Speaker 3: it's it's them basically, like they're there. There's a sort
Speaker 3: of rejuvenated anti abortion movement that they just sort of consume. Right,
Speaker 3: They've been doing a very very good job of sort
Speaker 3: of like eating like whatever sort of queer rights like
Speaker 3: movements exist alive, and they had kind of stopped doing
Speaker 3: that for a while because they chose to just like
Speaker 3: destroy Occupy Whether rather than like try to co opt it.
Speaker 3: And you know, I mean there were reasons for that, right,
Speaker 3: but like part of part of the thing like if
Speaker 3: if you if if you're a Democrat and you want
Speaker 3: to actually like win Texas, you need to have like
Speaker 3: actual you to have actual sort of social movements that
Speaker 3: you know, the Democrats can eventually take over and destroy.
Speaker 3: But in the time between they destroy them, destroying them
Speaker 3: and them, and you know, like like in the brief
Speaker 3: time while they both exist and are controled by Democratic Party,
Speaker 3: that's how you actually sort of like build the kinds
Speaker 3: of the build the kinds of coalitions to build the
Speaker 3: kinds of organization that win these races. And the Democratic
Speaker 3: Party has just no interest in doing that like almost
Speaker 3: anywhere basically outside of Minnesota, where I don't know.
Speaker 4: Those.
Speaker 3: The Minnesota Dems are fucking built different. I don't, I don't,
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 10: I don't.
Speaker 3: I don't have another explanation for that, but like, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's I don't know, it's it's.
Speaker 1: It's like one of the things that you have the
Speaker 1: opportunity to do at the local level is and this
Speaker 1: is you know, this is a big factor in like,
Speaker 1: uh politics in Georgia. You've got people who are motivated
Speaker 1: because of a specific political issue that Dems are strong on,
Speaker 1: like abortion, and you can you can get people registered,
Speaker 1: you can get people out organizing, you can get people
Speaker 1: donating money, and more most important that you can get
Speaker 1: people votevoting and voting in numbers that they haven't before
Speaker 1: and make if you're able to kind of harness that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. But being able to harness that again,
Speaker 1: part of it is this is not sexy. This is
Speaker 1: not something we can say this is going to flip
Speaker 1: a state in twenty twenty four. But putting in the
Speaker 1: money and the resources to have people who are being
Speaker 1: supported to go out and make attempts and to build
Speaker 1: like a reputation and a base of support and networks
Speaker 1: in the state, Like that's the non sexy thing that
Speaker 1: the number one the Republicans are really good at. If
Speaker 1: you're asking yourself, looking at all these horrible anti trans bills,
Speaker 1: anti gay bills, anti abortion bills, how do they do
Speaker 1: this well? Because church is organized at the local level
Speaker 1: to build up the kind of support and the kind
Speaker 1: of human infrastructure that allowed them to take advantage of
Speaker 1: the kind of broader social trends that drove some of
Speaker 1: those states more deeply read and that kind of like
Speaker 1: made may did it possible for them to do things
Speaker 1: that ten years before people had said, like there's no
Speaker 1: way to make this happen. That can work on the
Speaker 1: left side of things, but you have to have the
Speaker 1: groundwork in They started.
Speaker 7: With like school boards, Yeah, they started. They started with
Speaker 7: going for school boards, going after books. Then you get
Speaker 7: up basic people riled up that you can go after
Speaker 7: healthcare for minors and you can go after health care
Speaker 7: for adults. It was a very easy path and it
Speaker 7: started by like going to the most accessible places to
Speaker 7: have public comment on issues, which was complaining about books
Speaker 7: inside of school.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And another thing I'd say about the church thing is
Speaker 3: like the thing that you used to do that for
Speaker 3: the Democrats was unions, but then they destroyed them all.
Speaker 3: And but you know, but like you can actually you
Speaker 3: can actually see what this looks like like in the
Speaker 3: places where something like this. This is why the state
Speaker 3: level Midwest Dems are so much further to the left
Speaker 3: than the Dems everywhere else, because like the people in Minnesota,
Speaker 3: the people in Wisconsin are likely the only reason they're
Speaker 3: even so remotely in power is because and you know,
Speaker 3: you're seeing this, like it's at like in Chicago too,
Speaker 3: with Brandon Johnson. Is that like those those people are
Speaker 3: like functionally dependent on like that they're on their teachers
Speaker 3: unions to exist as like a political coalision. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: so you know, like like union organizing is a is
Speaker 3: a like we're just like fucking just giving money to
Speaker 3: a strike fund is even even if the thing that
Speaker 3: you want to do is win elections, that is a
Speaker 3: more effective way of winning of winning elections than fucking
Speaker 3: giving money to Beto Auroric like a seventh time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and again when we the thing I want to
Speaker 1: get across here is the right thing to do is
Speaker 1: not say and no one is suggesting this here, fuck Texas,
Speaker 1: it can never be fixed. The right thing is saying
Speaker 1: if you're focused on one famous guy running in Texas
Speaker 1: or this like top level thing of flipping Texas, you
Speaker 1: don't actually care all that much about the problems being
Speaker 1: faced by people in Texas because that's not really going
Speaker 1: to fix them. Right, Beto's not going to win. And
Speaker 1: even if Texas flips for an election action, that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean the state legislature flips. It doesn't mean the governor flips.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that things get better for people doing
Speaker 1: these kind of bottom up approaches. Number one will eventually
Speaker 1: flip the fucking state. Right, there is a demographic trend happening.
Speaker 1: Part of how you flip the state, By the way,
Speaker 1: if you're actually responsible, is like proving that you can
Speaker 1: make people's lives better. If you want to flip the state,
Speaker 1: that's maybe more ethical than just being like, what if
Speaker 1: we dump one hundred and seventy million dollars to try
Speaker 1: to make this guy who goes viral on YouTube or
Speaker 1: Twitter sometimes look better? Right, maybe one of those is
Speaker 1: more ethical than the other. Anyway, I don't want to
Speaker 1: rant about electoralism anymore, but as a transplant in Texan,
Speaker 1: I get frustrated by this. So I felt like we
Speaker 1: had to say something.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I also get frustrated by Better claiming to be punk,
Speaker 6: which is the least punk thing in the fucking whether
Speaker 6: that's a no repisode.
Speaker 1: No, we have one. We have one elected who's gotten
Speaker 1: anywhere close to being punk, and it was Bernie Sanders
Speaker 1: when he when he got into that cold book depository
Speaker 1: that November morning with the man liquor carcano rifle. Extremely
Speaker 1: punk anyway, cutting the feed here.
Speaker 11: Ah, oh yeah, it could happen here a podcast where
Speaker 11: I just made my colleagues I can see them through
Speaker 11: the zoom, deeply uncomfortable by opening this podcast with with.
Speaker 1: With a sound that you shouldn't make in the workplace.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. Joining me today is Mia Wong and
Speaker 1: Garrison Davis me. I take it from here.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, So it's been a you know, this is okay,
Speaker 3: So this, I guess is now like last week's Twitter thing.
Speaker 3: But okay, so also not this is this is? This
Speaker 3: is not a Twitter thing? No, well it kind of is.
Speaker 1: It kind of is, but like let's not let's not
Speaker 1: friend this as a Twitter thing?
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, okay, so what this is? We we are okay,
Speaker 3: we have been experiencing in the last you know, like
Speaker 3: half decade actually belonging from that cause like this seven
Speaker 3: eight years now, like the the sort of incredible rise
Speaker 3: in casual American anti semitism and the level of anti
Speaker 3: semitism that you could just do in in sort of
Speaker 3: public discourse and it's quote unquote fine. And one of
Speaker 3: the sort of biggest indicators of this is the like
Speaker 3: the the extent to which it's now socially acceptable to
Speaker 3: just do the most like absolutely like unhinged like antisemitic
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories about George Soros. And specifically the thing that
Speaker 3: specifically was like, okay, need to do this episode was
Speaker 3: last week Elon Musk like compared George Soros to Magneto
Speaker 3: and then said, quote you assume they are good intentions.
Speaker 3: They are not. He wants to erode the fabric, the
Speaker 3: very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity. And this is
Speaker 3: just like the mainstreamline of the Republican Party now like
Speaker 3: they just all do this. You can just sort of,
Speaker 3: I mean, and this is honestly like as bad, like
Speaker 3: you know, this is like the stuff that Elon Musk
Speaker 3: is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's not even anywhere near
Speaker 3: as bad as it goes, Like it's pretty common to
Speaker 3: just sho these people like talking about the Satan sorrows
Speaker 3: agenda and shit. Now like it's it has gotten unbelievably,
Speaker 3: unfathomably out of control. And so today I wanted to
Speaker 3: take a look at, okay, who George Soros actually is,
Speaker 3: like the real human being and not the sort of
Speaker 3: like caricature projection that has been created of him on
Speaker 3: the right. And I wanted to also sort of look
Speaker 3: at why the right hates him so much. And you know,
Speaker 3: Soros is kind an interesting figure because he falls like
Speaker 3: right in the middle of like our two shows about people,
Speaker 3: because he's not he's not really like a cool person.
Speaker 3: He does cool stuff, but though he does stuff that's
Speaker 3: cool sometimes, but he's not also like a bastard properly.
Speaker 1: So though he's done some bastardy stuff too, he has.
Speaker 3: We are going to talk about that.
Speaker 1: He said, he's a Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3: Most of what this episode is about, he's.
Speaker 1: I would say he's like twenty percent more complicated than
Speaker 1: the average billionaire on a on.
Speaker 3: A morel yeah, I think I think like twenty or
Speaker 3: thirty percent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there's somewhere in that neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, and I think there's three George Soros's.
Speaker 3: Two of them are real and one of them is fake.
Speaker 3: There is you know. So George Soros is a billionaire philanthropist, right,
Speaker 3: and you know, so that means that he has a
Speaker 3: sort of billionaire side and a philanthropist's side, and they
Speaker 3: are very often working across purposes. Sometimes they're not working.
Speaker 3: Sometimes there he aligns them together, sometimes he doesn't. And
Speaker 3: so the way I've sort of structured this is like
Speaker 3: the first episode we're gonna be talking about the sort
Speaker 3: of billionaire side and how he did that, and the
Speaker 3: second episode is going to be more about the philanthropist's
Speaker 3: side and how both of these basically have been kind
Speaker 3: of accidentally structured in such a way that the right
Speaker 3: was like, oh my god, this is the perfect guy
Speaker 3: to do atise medic conspiracy theories about. And then there's
Speaker 3: also the third George Soros is like the one who's
Speaker 3: just literally the devil who the Republicans have made up
Speaker 3: and yeah, so George Soros was born to a Jewish
Speaker 3: family in Hungary in nineteen thirty, which is not a
Speaker 3: good time to be born into a Jewish family in Hungary.
Speaker 1: No, really, there's not a good time to be born
Speaker 1: to a Jewish and family in Hungary until like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get I'm gonna say, sometime in the fifties.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I will say that it gets way
Speaker 3: like it. It is way worse when he is born
Speaker 3: than it was in like even like the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 3: which is like not a great time, but it's gotten
Speaker 3: significantly worse. He is fourteen when the Nazis invade Hungary
Speaker 3: nineteen forty four, and this is the point at which
Speaker 3: we get to our first Soros conspiracy, which is that
Speaker 3: there's this, there's this.
Speaker 1: It's a little more complicated than that. It's not really
Speaker 1: the Nazis. Well, it's a little more complex than yea,
Speaker 1: when the extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community begins, really
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty four, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And so there's a thing that happens. I don't know.
Speaker 3: He and his dad have a kind of complicated like
Speaker 3: set of things they survive, and there's a part of
Speaker 3: the story that gets picked up by the right that
Speaker 3: gets If you've ever heard Alex Jones talk about Sorows,
Speaker 3: like the second or third thing he will say is
Speaker 3: that like Soros Nazi collaborator, was like a willing collaborator
Speaker 3: with the.
Speaker 1: Nazis, which is not true.
Speaker 3: And also like he's fourteen, like you know, but like
Speaker 3: I don't really call even like fourteen year olds and
Speaker 3: the Hitler youth willing collaborators because they're children. Yeah, you
Speaker 3: have to have a lion at some point, even with
Speaker 3: Nazis where if their kids, they're not really morally responsible
Speaker 3: either way. Yeah, and like you know, so the specific
Speaker 3: thing that he does is there's these notices that are
Speaker 3: sent up by the government that's like telling Jewish people
Speaker 3: to like go like to a place and if you
Speaker 3: go to the place, you're gonna get routed up and killed.
Speaker 3: And basically, so the thing that actually happened is that
Speaker 3: so George Ros's dad is told to do this and
Speaker 3: he gives it to George Rosen is like go tell
Speaker 3: these people that they've been called for this and that
Speaker 3: if they go, they're like they're gonna get taken away.
Speaker 3: And this has been transformed by you know this that is,
Speaker 3: this is a nightmarish thing these people are spiving. This
Speaker 3: has been transformed by a bunch of the worst people
Speaker 3: ever lived into Nazi collaboration, which is also you know,
Speaker 3: the part of the story that never gets told, even
Speaker 3: even when people sort of like do the like dive
Speaker 3: into like oh this is fake. Is that the thing
Speaker 3: that like Soros's family spends the rest of the war
Speaker 3: doing is basically getting like counterfeit papers to Jewish families
Speaker 3: that like says that they're Christian, and you know they
Speaker 3: like they they legitimately save a bunch of families from
Speaker 3: dying in the Holocaust, and yeh.
Speaker 1: Know, the shit that Jones pulls on them is like
Speaker 1: part of this because of like the job this guy
Speaker 1: who's like saving young George Soros has involves like basically
Speaker 1: like itemizing stuff left behind by Jewish families forced out
Speaker 1: of their homes. He's like they were profiting off of
Speaker 1: the holl No, they were like doing whatever job kept
Speaker 1: them under the radar while they attempted to help. Like
Speaker 1: it was the Holocaust. It was messy. Yeah, but like
Speaker 1: it's almost like saying like Oscar Schindler took advantage of
Speaker 1: slave labors. Well, no, it's actually what Schindler was doing.
Speaker 1: It was not that, Yeah, like he was you the
Speaker 1: trappings of this slave labor system in order to rescue people.
Speaker 1: It's quite different from just enslaving people.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think the thing that's really disturbing about this though,
Speaker 3: right is like, Okay, like this is like Alex Jones
Speaker 3: is Alex Jones, Right, He's just gonna say the worst
Speaker 3: shit you've ever heard. But like this is like a
Speaker 3: thing that mainstream right wingers just say now, yeah, and
Speaker 3: it's just unbelievably horrible and it sucks and it's just
Speaker 3: like not true. But fortunately for George Soros, his family
Speaker 3: makes it through the Holocaust, well his immediate family does,
Speaker 3: and they like get out and they end up in
Speaker 3: the US. And this is where, Okay, this is something
Speaker 3: that I think is very important to the story that
Speaker 3: isn't told very much. So Soros is like a finance whiz, right,
Speaker 3: he is very, very very good at finance. And we're
Speaker 3: gonna be talking a bit about like how like the
Speaker 3: things that he figured out to let him do this,
Speaker 3: because it's interesting. But he's also not from the sort
Speaker 3: of like American or the British financial elite, Like if
Speaker 3: I don't there's like a certain kind of person, right
Speaker 3: who like goes into finance and you know, it's like
Speaker 3: like like wasp frat Brose or like in bred British aristocrats, right,
Speaker 3: and door Soros is like a hung is a Hungarian immigrant, right.
Speaker 3: He is not sort of from these people. He is
Speaker 3: like and and you know this is this is gonna
Speaker 3: be a really big deal when he like goes up
Speaker 3: against the British financial elite later on. But you know,
Speaker 3: he he he threw sort of like he's able to
Speaker 3: turn like a job doing door to door salesman into
Speaker 3: like a way into a firm, and he's able to
Speaker 3: sort of work his way up to a point where
Speaker 3: like he has suddenly like has his own hedge fund
Speaker 3: and he is really really good at this. He's he's
Speaker 3: one of the sort of early people who does hedge funds.
Speaker 3: There's a great book called The Influence of Soros, Politics, Power,
Speaker 3: and the Struggle for an Open Society by Emily Tempkin,
Speaker 3: who did a lot of really great work like interviewed Soros,
Speaker 3: interviewed an enormous number of the people who were around him.
Speaker 3: And I want to read a passage of this about
Speaker 3: like how he figured out how to sort of beat
Speaker 3: the market. He's talking about this guy named Carl Popper,
Speaker 3: who's like a philosopher of science who also wrote this
Speaker 3: book called The Open Society that we'll talk about next episode.
Speaker 1: More.
Speaker 3: Popper's philosophy made me more sensitive to the role of
Speaker 3: misconceptions in financial markets, Soros said decades later. People believe
Speaker 3: that markets don't lie and shouldn't be and should be trusted.
Speaker 3: But that isn't true. Sorrow's knew markets react to humans,
Speaker 3: and humans are fallible. Instead of looking at the money
Speaker 3: being made, or as Sebastian Mallaby put it, in more
Speaker 3: Money than God, his book on the history of hedge funds,
Speaker 3: the Psychology that drove investors appetites, Soros looked at how
Speaker 3: one impacted the other, predicting that each would drive the
Speaker 3: other forward until the trust were so completely overvalued that
Speaker 3: a crash was inevitable. And this is really like if
Speaker 3: you even today, right, you know, if you're able to
Speaker 3: understand that, you know, like the way a lot of
Speaker 3: hedgephoon people tend to think about the market is as
Speaker 3: like the market, you know, especially in this period, is
Speaker 3: this is this sort of dogmatic, neo lible thing of
Speaker 3: like the market is like a perfect codvance of price signals,
Speaker 3: and so I was just like no, it's made out
Speaker 3: of people. And those people like get greedy. They have
Speaker 3: emotional stuff they like they get into these like fomo
Speaker 3: like fear of missing out stuff. You know, they like
Speaker 3: intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees the assets like expensive,
Speaker 3: so everyone like you know, rushes to buy it, and
Speaker 3: like this is something like like even now right, this
Speaker 3: is this is like a very smart way to understand finance.
Speaker 3: She's figured this out in like the seventies. And if you,
Speaker 3: if you, if you're able to do this kind of
Speaker 3: stuff and like use this to understand how the market
Speaker 3: works in the seventies, you are going to look like
Speaker 3: a god among men. And he starts a hedgephone in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy three, but by nineteen eighty one he has
Speaker 3: a fun that is worth three hundred and eighty one
Speaker 3: million dollars in like nineteen eighty one money. I don't
Speaker 3: know what that is in modern money, but I assume
Speaker 3: it's a lot. I'm a hack of a fraud. I
Speaker 3: should have actually figured this out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's like a billion dollars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like he personally is like has like for
Speaker 3: himself like one hundred million dollars right, and he you know,
Speaker 3: at this point, he starts to become sort of very
Speaker 3: famous in finance circles because you know, I mean he's
Speaker 3: just like absolutely destroying the market. Now, okay, this is
Speaker 3: where things get. You know, up until this point, he's
Speaker 3: kind of like he's been doing a lot of sort
Speaker 3: of finance stuff that's kind of shady, but it's mostly
Speaker 3: just been him like ripping off other finance people, which
Speaker 3: I'm entirely okay with, like that's just very funny. But
Speaker 3: he starts to get into currency speculation, and in nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty five he has one of his big breaks, which
Speaker 3: is he predicts the plaza cords. Now, okay, the Plaza
Speaker 3: cord is something we've talked about on the show before,
Speaker 3: but I need to talk about it a bit more
Speaker 3: because unfortunately it's we have to talk about the Asian
Speaker 3: financial collaps this episode. And this is a like one
Speaker 3: of the key moments of the Asian financial collabs, even
Speaker 3: though it was like a decade earlier. So in nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty five, Ronald Reagan is trying to like revive the
Speaker 3: US as a domestic manufacturing industry because it's like dying,
Speaker 3: and you know the reason part of the like a
Speaker 3: big part of the reason is dying is that they're
Speaker 3: getting absolutely destroyed by sort of German and like West
Speaker 3: German and Japanese manufacturers. And part of what's happening here
Speaker 3: is that particularly Japan's currencies are worth way currency is
Speaker 3: worth way less than the dollar. This is called having
Speaker 3: a weak currency, and having a weak currency is really
Speaker 3: good for if you have like an export based manufacturing economy.
Speaker 3: And so Reagan basically like walks into a meeting with
Speaker 3: like the Germans, Japanese government, the British, like few other
Speaker 3: people and just basically just like not quite in so
Speaker 3: many words, but basically just says like you are all
Speaker 3: American military protectorates, and because you're all American military protecs,
Speaker 3: like I can I can force you to increase the
Speaker 3: value of your currency like or else capital O, capital e.
Speaker 3: And they do. They comply, and this is this, this
Speaker 3: becomes this is a thing called the Plaza Cords. And
Speaker 3: this this, you know, weakens the value of the dollar
Speaker 3: versus a bunch of other currencies. And this like literally
Speaker 3: single handedly like restores the profitability of American manufacturing like
Speaker 3: through the nineties, which is really wild, but the the
Speaker 3: other the important thing for this story is that I
Speaker 3: I don't know how he did this, but like George
Speaker 3: Soros predicts that this is gonna happen, and she makes
Speaker 3: an unbelievable amount of money basically like no, no, like
Speaker 3: basically do in currency speculation because he knows what, like
Speaker 3: currencies are going to increase in value, which you know,
Speaker 3: he knows that, like uh, for example, he knows that,
Speaker 3: like the Japanese yen is going to increase in value.
Speaker 3: So he makes an enormous amount of money doing this stuff,
Speaker 3: and he gets very famous for like he'll like make
Speaker 3: it much of money, and then it'll lose it again
Speaker 3: and and then he'll make it again. And this all
Speaker 3: culminates in okay, so they're they're okay. He starts taking
Speaker 3: a truly enormous bets, like against national currencies, and there's
Speaker 3: one of these that's just funny, and there's one of
Speaker 3: these that's really bad. So we're gonna do the funny
Speaker 3: one first, which is so in nineteen ninety two Soros
Speaker 3: And this is the other part that they ever got
Speaker 3: talked about. It's like it's not just Soros doing this stuff.
Speaker 3: He has like allies because like as big as Soros
Speaker 3: for NBA is right, he can't him and his ally
Speaker 3: is gonna take a fifteen billion dollars short position on
Speaker 3: the pound. And even he doesn't have like nobody like
Speaker 3: this is like fifteen billion of nineteen nineties money, right,
Speaker 3: Like you need a bunch of firms working together in
Speaker 3: order to do this. But he basically takes this massive
Speaker 3: bet the pound is gonna go down, and because of
Speaker 3: the way that these these bets work, like the actual
Speaker 3: value of the pounds like collapses and the British Central
Speaker 3: Bank like like doesn't have enough thing. The reason we're
Speaker 3: able to do is they figure out that the Birtis
Speaker 3: Central Bank doesn't have enough money to stop them, like
Speaker 3: they don't have enough money to like maintain like they
Speaker 3: don't have enough reserves to like maintain the value of
Speaker 3: the pound. And so he gets like completely blamed for this,
Speaker 3: even though again there's like other people involved in this, right,
Speaker 3: Like the front page of the Daily Mail is literally
Speaker 3: his face in the title I made a billion crashing
Speaker 3: the pound baste, which is I okay, so like an
Speaker 3: anti British level, this is very funny. It's no, there's
Speaker 3: a bunch of arguments about like what does this mean
Speaker 3: for like the world economy and for national sovereignty. Soros
Speaker 3: thinks that like currency speculation is necessary evil and he he.
Speaker 1: Has this sort of seem to think that when you're
Speaker 1: making that much money, yeah right.
Speaker 12: You know it's now okay, this this like specific thing
Speaker 12: which is like a a a bank a banker comes
Speaker 12: in and is able to manipulate the value of a currency.
Speaker 3: This is like this is like absolutely like this is
Speaker 3: the fodder for like the absolute most paranoid fantasies of
Speaker 3: the anti Semitic right. Like it's this sort of like
Speaker 3: rootless cosmopolitan banker like attacks the good and righteous like
Speaker 3: noble people of Britain thing, And this is how it
Speaker 3: gets framed in the press, who are like the press
Speaker 3: is I mean it's the British press, right, Like the
Speaker 3: British are not known for, you know, not being anti Semitic,
Speaker 3: and so they just like go wild with this. But
Speaker 3: you know, like this particular thing he's doing against the British.
Speaker 3: Part of what's happening here, right is there's this sort
Speaker 3: of there's this kind of like national populist equation thing
Speaker 3: going on here where there's this assumption that like the
Speaker 3: Bank of Britain, like the bank, like the British Central
Speaker 3: Bank is like an entity that is identifiable with like
Speaker 3: an ordinary person in Britain, and like no, like the
Speaker 3: the Retis Central Brank is run by just unbelievably and
Speaker 3: bred aristocrats, right.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think they're pretty believably in bread.
Speaker 3: That's fair.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're just talking about like like zero point five
Speaker 1: six of a Habsburg unit. You know, I have the
Speaker 1: Habsburg is the international unit for measuring how inbred someone is.
Speaker 1: If you're if you're unaware.
Speaker 3: I yeah, yeah, that seems that seems like a reasonable
Speaker 3: amount of inbread for these specific people. But you know,
Speaker 3: like but this is what I was talking about, Like
Speaker 3: at the very beginning, I was talking about sort of
Speaker 3: like sorrow's not being from this sort of like normal
Speaker 3: class of finance people. And the thing is, like the
Speaker 3: normal class of finance people are fucking terrible at their jobs, right,
Speaker 3: like these amber British aristocrats and like the fucking American
Speaker 3: like cocaine frat boys, like like just like doing lines
Speaker 3: of cocane off each other's as cracks. Like these people
Speaker 3: all suck at their jobs. And George Soros is like
Speaker 3: smart and is good at his job, and so she
Speaker 3: just like absolutely goes through these people like a fucking
Speaker 3: flaming chainsaw, and she just like, you know, and the
Speaker 3: maneuvers that he's doing here, she just like absolutely humiliates
Speaker 3: all of the people at the at the at the
Speaker 3: British Central Bank. He's humiliating, like and not just those
Speaker 3: guys too, it's humiliating the Tories, it's humiliating like all
Speaker 3: of the people who are seriously important in the real economy,
Speaker 3: in the sort of real British economy. And he can
Speaker 3: do this right because like his opponents are you know,
Speaker 3: people who are like they're they're they're promoting they're like
Speaker 3: they're they're they're okay, they take in like their people
Speaker 3: from college, right, and they're promoting the base off how
Speaker 3: good they are at golf. And so when she just
Speaker 3: sort of like cut like walks in and just makes
Speaker 3: it like makes like billions of dollars just like destroying
Speaker 3: these people, he makes just a permanent enemy of a
Speaker 3: very very powerful like faction of the British ruling class,
Speaker 3: and the British ruling class, like I don't know, they
Speaker 3: they It is hard to fight people who will beat
Speaker 3: the British ruling class and an anti semitism off. And
Speaker 3: this is this is one of the things that sort
Speaker 3: of you know, if you're looking at like why Sorrow
Speaker 3: specifically is the guy who all of these sort of
Speaker 3: right wing conspiracies wind up being about, Like part of
Speaker 3: it is because he pisses off these specific people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these guys who's like dads were all friends with
Speaker 1: the King of England, who was like a close personal
Speaker 1: buddy with Hitler. Like there it's a bunch of like
Speaker 1: it's a bunch of guys who are already pretty bigoted
Speaker 1: and then they get beaten at their own stupid financial game.
Speaker 1: And so like the fact that it's a Jewish dude
Speaker 1: who does it means that they're going to be even
Speaker 1: more racist than they already were. And the fact that
Speaker 1: there's plenty of international anti semitism and that George Soros
Speaker 1: after this starts funding liberal and you know, vaguely progressive causes,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, it's not this is not a it's not
Speaker 1: surprising that this is the way things went.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, and again, like I can't under
Speaker 3: emphasize the extent to which this is also very specifically
Speaker 3: the reaction to the British media class. Who I mean,
Speaker 3: we know now that those people are psychos, Like we
Speaker 3: have seen them see a transperson at a boat race
Speaker 3: and like like ten years ago and like like draw
Speaker 3: a giant things circling them in a boat and making
Speaker 3: it a front page news story. Those people in the nineties.
Speaker 7: Were like, sure, they are biological biologically better at navigation,
Speaker 7: that is that has actually been been proven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but then they're like justice, they're they're they're just
Speaker 3: a sort of feral and like terrifying lead bigoted then
Speaker 3: as they are now. And this means that like like
Speaker 3: just if you're a regular British person and you are
Speaker 3: like walking down the street and there's a newspaper sand
Speaker 3: you are seeing like like they truly unbelievably terrifying anti
Speaker 3: Semitic shit, like just literally everywhere. And this this will
Speaker 3: have no consequence, which is whatsoever? Yeah, it's all good,
Speaker 3: nothing bad ever happens. And speaking of no consequences, do
Speaker 3: you know what we can promise about about training services?
Speaker 3: Twenty three minutes.
Speaker 1: In you know, look, you're welcome, Daniel.
Speaker 3: Okay, we're back. We have to talk about Okay, so
Speaker 3: the doing it to the British economy was mostly just
Speaker 3: really funny because the British economy is going to be fine.
Speaker 3: And it's the funny part about shed H doing it
Speaker 3: of the British economy is that this actually unfortunately helps
Speaker 3: the British economy because it forces the British to like
Speaker 3: abandon some truly spectacularly not very good financial policy they
Speaker 3: were doing. But then he does it to Thailand and
Speaker 3: that is a lot less justifiable. So it in this
Speaker 3: is five years later, is nineteen ninety seven. Sous brings
Speaker 3: in some economists, Arminio Fraga, like Roddy Joe's David Kowitz,
Speaker 3: he brings He's bringing in people who are sort of
Speaker 3: experts in like developing market economics, and that's never no
Speaker 3: one has ever brought in a developing market economist for
Speaker 3: like a good reason. And what they what they realize
Speaker 3: is that they start doing analysis of Southeast Asia, like
Speaker 3: the Southeast Asian markets, and they realize very quickly that
Speaker 3: Thailand is fucked. They they figure out that Thailand has
Speaker 3: Thailand has his currency pegged to the dollar and this,
Speaker 3: but you know, they don't have the reserves support this,
Speaker 3: and the tie like actual Tai currency isn't strong enough
Speaker 3: to maintain like stay being pegged to the dollars. It's
Speaker 3: not a strong enough currency, and so they do a
Speaker 3: two billion dollars short of of like Thailand's currency. And
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm gonna read from the Influence of Sorrows
Speaker 3: again about like the process of this. It was a
Speaker 3: debate we had. Jones told me we'd gone to work
Speaker 3: in Asia, and here you are taking large scale short
Speaker 3: positions in countries with institutional fragility. Going for the juggular
Speaker 3: in the United Kingdom was one thing doing the same,
Speaker 3: and Thailand was another. The Bank of England would surely recover.
Speaker 3: Thailand was a developing economy and it was unclear what
Speaker 3: impact outside investors could have. Soros has justified speculation with
Speaker 3: the idea that it could serve as a kind of
Speaker 3: warning to governments. Look, Thai government, the bot needs to devalue.
Speaker 3: Change your policy now before a currency collapses, devastating for
Speaker 3: your people. The trouble is the Thai government didn't do this. Instead,
Speaker 3: it spent months using Bank of Thailand reserves to buy
Speaker 3: tai bot. When it finally ran out in early summer
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety seven, the value of the bot plunged thirty
Speaker 3: two percent against the dollars, and millions of people lost
Speaker 3: Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund seven hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look, yes,
Speaker 1: I made a lot of money selling Heroin to those
Speaker 1: middle schoolers, but really, when you think about it, it
Speaker 1: was a warning to those schools that it was too
Speaker 1: easy for me to bribe the janitor to sell Heroin
Speaker 1: to kids.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 1: You know, I was actually performing a public service.
Speaker 3: So true, Robert, it is just like that, you know,
Speaker 3: to be fair, you know, I'm not going to every money.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to finish that thought.
Speaker 1: That's probably for the best. Yeah, we need we need
Speaker 1: one person to remain uncanceled here to keep the lights on.
Speaker 3: Oh god, doesn't have to be me.
Speaker 1: Oh no, yeah, no, legally it does.
Speaker 3: It's really bad. Yeah, no more joking, but yeah, we can't.
Speaker 3: We can't suffer any other jokes.
Speaker 1: Yes, somebody's got to upload this episode.
Speaker 3: All right here here, here, here's the next joke. Soros
Speaker 3: actually doesn't make money off of the speculation. If off
Speaker 3: of a speculating in Southeast Asia because he loses basically
Speaker 3: the same amount of money taking like a long position
Speaker 3: in Indonesia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I took
Speaker 1: a long position on doing cocaine in my bathroom with
Speaker 1: the money that I made selling drugs to all those kids.
Speaker 1: You know, we're a lot alike him and me, we're
Speaker 1: a lot of like, well.
Speaker 3: Okay, to be fair, to be fair, and this is okay,
Speaker 3: this is the thing I I The reason I wanted
Speaker 3: to talk about this specifically is that, like, okay, like
Speaker 3: to this day, if you look under sort of if
Speaker 3: you if you every once in a while, someone someone,
Speaker 3: there'll be a tweet that's like, like, what did George
Speaker 3: Sorrows do? And immediately there will be a bunch of
Speaker 3: people talking about how he like deliberately destroyed all of
Speaker 3: the economies in Southeast Asia. Yeah, and that's not really
Speaker 3: what happened.
Speaker 1: And that would be for one thing, too much to
Speaker 1: put on one guy fucking around with a cup.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And I wanted to actually kind of walk
Speaker 3: through this a little bit in depth, just because Okay,
Speaker 3: there's a really really easy way to think about the
Speaker 3: economy that is bad. It leads you into anti Semitic traps,
Speaker 3: which is like, hey, here is like one banker who
Speaker 3: wanted to make money, and because he wanted to make money,
Speaker 3: he like destroyed all these economies. And like, on the
Speaker 3: one hand, yeah, like like sorrow is vetting against like
Speaker 3: the tai currency is bad, right, like this is this
Speaker 3: is not a thing you should have been doing. On
Speaker 3: the other hand, you know, Okay, so that's like the
Speaker 3: sort of level one thing. But the thing about you know,
Speaker 3: this is the sort of this is the sort of
Speaker 3: like great Man anti anti Semitism theory of collapse. And
Speaker 3: this is the theory that a lot of the sort
Speaker 3: of regional leaders take, you know, because and this and
Speaker 3: this is sort of a crucial thing, right, this position
Speaker 3: very conveniently allows them to just like not think about
Speaker 3: capitalism in general or like their role in this in
Speaker 3: this crisis, which is not insignificance. And so in order
Speaker 3: to figure out what what actually happened here, we need
Speaker 3: to look at so so Sorow sort of like tip
Speaker 3: like tip some don dominos, right, but the dominoes were
Speaker 3: already there and they were going like regardless even if
Speaker 3: Soros had never existed, right, like they were going to
Speaker 3: fall and they were going to fall because ironically of
Speaker 3: the Plaza coords. So you know when we talked about
Speaker 3: the plaza courts earlier. The US forces Japan to increase
Speaker 3: the value of its currency relative for the dollar. Okay,
Speaker 3: so this is great for the American economy. This nukes
Speaker 3: the Japanese economy, I mean the Japanese economy, you know.
Speaker 3: And we'll talk about this in a bit too. It
Speaker 3: was already kind of doing bad when the US does
Speaker 3: this and its manufactured economy just like implodes it. It
Speaker 3: gots the Japanese economy. It has. The Japanese economy has
Speaker 3: never recovered from this. It probably will never recover really
Speaker 3: into what it was. And you know, the effect this
Speaker 3: has is that now the governments of Japan has to
Speaker 3: figure out how to grow their economy without having any
Speaker 3: like way to make money that grows your economy. But
Speaker 3: and now they have a stronger currency. And so their
Speaker 3: solution is, okay, what what did they all all the
Speaker 3: central bank people look around each other and they go,
Speaker 3: what is a strong currency good for housing speculation? And
Speaker 3: so they they start like they start they start slashing
Speaker 3: interest race and they start basically building an entire economy,
Speaker 3: uh based on the assumption that housing prices will always
Speaker 3: go up, and so you should just take out loans
Speaker 3: so you could buy houses because the value of the
Speaker 3: housing will because housing prices will always go up, so
Speaker 3: you can you can have all of these assets based
Speaker 3: on mortgages. This is this may may or may not
Speaker 3: be sounding familiar to everyone who lid you thousand.
Speaker 4: And eight.
Speaker 3: And so you know, in in like in like nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty two, the entire Japanese economy implodes sort of again
Speaker 3: because they they literally built the two thousand and eight machine.
Speaker 3: And so this this forces the US to do something
Speaker 3: called the reverse Plaza cords where they take the original
Speaker 3: Plaza records and they reverse it and they increase the
Speaker 3: value of the American dollar. American manufactory dies like it's
Speaker 3: never recovered, it's never coming back. And this for a
Speaker 3: this kind of the stabilizes the Japanese economy a little bit,
Speaker 3: but it means that the US now no longer has
Speaker 3: a functional economy. And so we do our solution to
Speaker 3: this is we need two thousand and eight, right, we
Speaker 3: build an entire economy also on the Japanese model of
Speaker 3: currency speculat of you know, of like housing price speculation,
Speaker 3: craculation of like or like the rising prices of like stocks. Right,
Speaker 3: we we build an economy completely made a bullshit. But
Speaker 3: you know, okay, but what does this have to do
Speaker 3: with the Asian market collaps? Okay? The problem is that
Speaker 3: like all of the countries in East Asia and like
Speaker 3: Southeast Asia also do this. They also do the thing
Speaker 3: where they're like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna
Speaker 3: ba We're okay, so our manufacturing economies are declining, right,
Speaker 3: so we're gonna we're gonna base our entire economy on
Speaker 3: housing prices going up. And you know that's and it's
Speaker 3: not George Soros. That's the thing that actually destroys like
Speaker 3: the sort of that that's something that like that like
Speaker 3: actually destroy all of these economies. And you know, and
Speaker 3: I wanted to sort of run through this, and you know,
Speaker 3: this is like a lot of like sort of econ shit, right,
Speaker 3: But the reason I wanted to run through this is
Speaker 3: that I think I think he gets at the sort
Speaker 3: of truly the truly horrifying thing about how our economy
Speaker 3: works that is really difficult to face, and is I
Speaker 3: think it's at least a part of why people really
Speaker 3: really want there to just be one guy who is
Speaker 3: running anything everything, whether that's the CIA, whether that's Soros,
Speaker 3: whether that's like the New World Order. Yeah, right, because
Speaker 3: if there's if there's like a guy who's doing this, right,
Speaker 3: you can stop him. But the great horror of this
Speaker 3: world is that there is no deep state, right, there
Speaker 3: is no Satanis cabal, There's no one pulling the strings
Speaker 3: at all. The only thing that is there is just
Speaker 3: sort of the cold, lifeless and inexorable death logic of capital.
Speaker 3: And that logic is moving all of us, right all
Speaker 3: you know, the people who are doing that can conspiracies
Speaker 3: insofar as they exist, are being moved by this. All
Speaker 3: of the rulers are being moved by capital. All of us,
Speaker 3: the subjects, are being moved by capital. But that like sucks, right,
Speaker 3: Like the fact that all of these economies are destroyed
Speaker 3: not by like the individual actions of people, but by
Speaker 3: the fact that, like returns are less good in Thailand
Speaker 3: than they are in China. And this is just sort
Speaker 3: of the inectable logic of the entire economic system we have.
Speaker 3: This is, you know, this is absolutely terrifying and faced
Speaker 3: with this sort of reality, right, like people who want
Speaker 3: to protect capitalism because you know, they have a bunch
Speaker 3: of assets in it, right, retreat into this sort of
Speaker 3: like they you know, they they they use Soros as
Speaker 3: a smoke screen for like why everything is suddenly going wrong.
Speaker 3: But sort of simultaneous to this, right, this is also
Speaker 3: a real problem for George Soros because he's like, you know,
Speaker 3: when he's not sort of in his role as like
Speaker 3: capital he's like not a piece of shit. He's like
Speaker 3: a person who wants the world to be better. And this,
Speaker 3: you know, this causes a sort of there was a
Speaker 3: contradiction in his ideology, right, which is that he wants
Speaker 3: the world to be a better place, and simultaneously he's
Speaker 3: also a capitalist, and these two things are sort of
Speaker 3: warring with each other. Even as early as even as
Speaker 3: early sort of the nineties, he's giving speeches about how
Speaker 3: like his open society that he wants. It's a sort
Speaker 3: of like this liberal democratic society of like laws and
Speaker 3: norms and human rights. The greatest danger twitter ceased to
Speaker 3: be communism, it's now capitalism. But he can't do anything
Speaker 3: about it because he is also a capitalist. And next
Speaker 3: episode we are going to watch Soros like through his
Speaker 3: philanthropic endeavors, attempt to solve the problems that his economic
Speaker 3: system has caused, and fail catastrophically and become the sort
Speaker 3: of boogeyman and the the anti Sivdic spector of every
Speaker 3: conspiracy theory the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so check out that next time. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you're hanging out around Clark Middle School and you
Speaker 1: have forty dollars, I can hook you up with some
Speaker 1: some of that sweet black tar, so you know, give
Speaker 1: me a ring. My phone numbers posted in the show
Speaker 1: notes of every episode.
Speaker 3: It's it could happen here the podcast where I attempt
Speaker 3: to wrangle jokes that are enough okay that we keep podcasting. Yeah,
Speaker 3: with me here to wrangle Robert Evans and also Karrison Davis. Welcome,
Speaker 3: Welcome by Eck.
Speaker 1: My two uses in this series are to make corrections
Speaker 1: on Hungarian history of the Holocaust and talk about selling
Speaker 1: Heroin to children. So proud to be here.
Speaker 3: I'm very excited. You're gonna hear me complain. You're gonna
Speaker 3: get to listen to me very briefly complain about Plato,
Speaker 3: a thing I did not think I was gonna do
Speaker 3: when I started.
Speaker 1: This like the like the philosophy guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, all right, okay, so all right,
Speaker 3: why why are we eventually going to talk about Plato?
Speaker 3: So George Soros is probably best known for a foundation
Speaker 3: that he eventually funds called Open Society that was visually
Speaker 3: the Soros Foundation. Then he was like, why am I
Speaker 3: naming this after myself? And it changed to Open Society.
Speaker 3: I'm going to read, so the Open Society is a
Speaker 3: very sort.
Speaker 1: Of again, I gotta say, exactly twenty percent more self
Speaker 1: awareness than you get from the average billionaire. Like Bill
Speaker 1: Gates is like, well call it the Gatespell Foundation. Sourus
Speaker 1: is like, well call it the Soros you know wait,
Speaker 1: wait you know, no, you know what?
Speaker 3: Well, And to be fair, like Soros has Sorros has
Speaker 3: a real ideology and it it can't work, but if
Speaker 3: it did, the world wouldn't be that bad, Unlike unlike
Speaker 3: what would happen if you let Bill Gates run rampant
Speaker 3: over the earth, which is the world we live in
Speaker 3: right now. So I'm going to read a little bit
Speaker 3: from the influence Soros again about like what the Open
Speaker 3: Society is. I have lived through Nazi persecution and Soviet occupations.
Speaker 3: Soros later said, Popper's book is Carl Popper Open Society
Speaker 3: and His Enemies struck me with the force of revelation.
Speaker 3: It showed that fascism and communism have a lot in common,
Speaker 3: that they both stand in opposition to a different principle
Speaker 3: of social organization, the principle of open society. So okay,
Speaker 3: I I read this, and I was like, okay, so
Speaker 3: let's go, let's go. Let's go read Carl Poppers's book,
Speaker 3: which is called The Open Society Enemies. And so I assumed, right,
Speaker 3: that's interesting me.
Speaker 1: I was also doing poppers last night.
Speaker 3: You had to suppear your experience with your poppers. I'm
Speaker 3: assuming I had a bad fucking time. I read this
Speaker 3: like last week.
Speaker 1: She got mears from a gas station too, Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, instead I got it from the internet for free,
Speaker 3: which questionable results. So okay, so I read this book, right,
Speaker 3: So this is Karl Popper is like normally a philosopher. Well,
Speaker 3: he's like a scientist, right, He's most famous for philosophy
Speaker 3: of science stuff. But he also wrote this book, and
Speaker 3: this is his critique of totalitarianism. So okay, I'm expecting, right,
Speaker 3: it's going to be half of it's gonna be about
Speaker 3: the Nazis and half of it's going to be about
Speaker 3: the communist right. No, the first half of this book
Speaker 3: is about Plato and the second half of this book
Speaker 3: is about Borks. But he spends like two hundred ages
Speaker 3: yelling at Plato. And to be fair, everything he says
Speaker 3: about Plato and about why Plato is totalitarian is completely true.
Speaker 3: But like his conclusion about what totalitarianism is is that
Speaker 3: totalitarianism is descendant. It's like the product of this thing
Speaker 3: he calls historicism, which is when like you have one
Speaker 3: thing that's the agent of history. And so he sees
Speaker 3: like like I don't know, like a great man or
Speaker 3: like the guy like whatever hegel's geist, or like one
Speaker 3: great nation or like a great class as like those
Speaker 3: are all examples of historicism. And if you think about
Speaker 3: history like this, you will this is how totalitarianism is born.
Speaker 3: And I am incredibly skeptical of that, of the view
Speaker 3: of the way you look think about history being the
Speaker 3: origin of totalitarianism. I I don't know. It's it's a
Speaker 3: very very weird book. In a lot of ways. Poper
Speaker 3: is trying to do this thing that like a lot
Speaker 3: of kind of liberal philosophers of that period is doing,
Speaker 3: which is that she's trying to reconcile sort of like
Speaker 3: individual freedom but then also sort of economic calitarianism. And
Speaker 3: you know, okay, so if you were actually serious about
Speaker 3: doing both of these things right, like the two things
Speaker 3: you care about on earth are protecting individual freedom and
Speaker 3: achieving economic calitarianism, you have two options. You either become
Speaker 3: an anarchist and you sacrifice neither of your values, or
Speaker 3: you become a neoliberal and you sacrifice both. And Popper
Speaker 3: unfortunately takes a second route.
Speaker 1: And I feel like a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: the conflict between kind of like reconciling you know, the
Speaker 1: Great Man theory of history with some of these other
Speaker 1: like it comes out of an unwillingness to look at
Speaker 1: systems of power, because the extent to which like individual
Speaker 1: weirdos and their obsessions influence history is largely due to
Speaker 1: or is largely like related to the degree of power
Speaker 1: that like different systems allow to be invested into like
Speaker 1: individual weirdos. Like it's it's less a matter of like
Speaker 1: you've got these sort of you know, in that kind
Speaker 1: of fascist idea, you've got these sort of individuals who
Speaker 1: embody the spirit of a people. And more, if your
Speaker 1: system allows huge amounts of power to be invested in
Speaker 1: individual people with their weird hang ups, than those weird
Speaker 1: hang ups of this one guy may wind up defining history.
Speaker 1: I don't know, this is this this is an unrelated ram.
Speaker 3: Well, no, I think it is related because this this
Speaker 3: is sort of the core flaw of this ideology, which
Speaker 3: is that these people conclude okay, so like they don't
Speaker 3: okay the thing that they have to do, like pop
Speaker 3: rass to do right, because he like acknowledges that a
Speaker 3: lot of the Marxist critique is really powerful and that
Speaker 3: like it is in fact not very good that you
Speaker 3: have an entire class of people to like survive off
Speaker 3: of extracting like labor from another class of people. But
Speaker 3: you know, if you accept that, right, you can't actually
Speaker 3: like defend capitalism on the merits of it being an
Speaker 3: economic system. You have to like do this like circle
Speaker 3: run around dance of like defending ideas. And this all
Speaker 3: gets like gets to this point where the problem that
Speaker 3: you're talking about happens, which is that like, well, okay,
Speaker 3: capitalism is also a system where one really weird guy,
Speaker 3: and he's like, terrible ideas can have an enormous impact
Speaker 3: on how society operates. Like this is this is this
Speaker 3: is this is the thing we're all suffering from from
Speaker 3: like Elon Musk, right, or like what what's that guy's name,
Speaker 3: like Robert Moses, right, Like yeah, like the you know,
Speaker 3: like capitalism is absolutely a system that generates just one
Speaker 3: guy who can just fuck everyone's.
Speaker 1: And that's a perfect example of it, because like the
Speaker 1: fact that Moses has these weird personal hang ups around
Speaker 1: public transportation and this love of being driven around influences
Speaker 1: how tens of millions of people live to this day,
Speaker 1: and influences like the global climate crisis. And so it's
Speaker 1: not like this great man didn't like grab the lathe
Speaker 1: of heaven. It was more like, no, our we we
Speaker 1: are society kind of like the system we set up
Speaker 1: allowed an enormous amount of power for this specific thing.
Speaker 1: How our cities are set up to be invested in
Speaker 1: an unelected weirdo because he was the only one interested
Speaker 1: enough to focus on it, and that led to this
Speaker 1: very bad situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like I think I think Popper's think of that.
Speaker 3: I was like, well, okay, you do you do you
Speaker 3: deal with this by like just having elections for everyone,
Speaker 3: And it's like, well, okay, like so sometimes you have election.
Speaker 3: We never vote for crazy assholes, thank god. Sometimes sometimes
Speaker 3: sometimes you get Donald Trump, right, like, you know, the
Speaker 3: these these are these are these are things that are
Speaker 3: going to haunt both Popper. Popper doesn't live long enough
Speaker 3: to see like the absolute worst this can possibly go.
Speaker 3: But George Soros unfortunately has lived to see exactly how
Speaker 3: value this this con possibly go.
Speaker 1: But let's call him, let's let's call him by his
Speaker 1: nickname from from now on. Uh uh g Sizzle? Is
Speaker 1: that good that we're not doing that. We're not doing that.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you, Garrison. This is this is this
Speaker 1: is why you're This is why you're here. You have
Speaker 1: power of attorney over what nicknames we call the subjects
Speaker 1: of the episodes.
Speaker 3: I will I will keep it and reserve this power.
Speaker 1: See, this is we're We've built a system to try
Speaker 1: and uh and stop you know, individuals with with weird
Speaker 1: hang ups from from influencing history so much. It's that simple, folks,
Speaker 1: you know, devolve powers. Yeah, works great for un precedency.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, we're you have to talk about Ugoslavia this episode.
Speaker 3: So it doesn't always work. But all right, so back
Speaker 3: back back in, back in sort of the heady days
Speaker 3: of of the seventies and eighties George, where like, okay,
Speaker 3: he has a dual thing where he at once has
Speaker 3: his kind of crisis a conscience thing where he's like,
Speaker 3: I want to actually do something with my life that's
Speaker 3: not just you know how, I want to have an
Speaker 3: impact on the world that is positive and not like
Speaker 3: I made so much money that like gods look at
Speaker 3: it and vomit and so and so. Okay, So his
Speaker 3: solicial is he sets up a tax dodge. And he's
Speaker 3: actually very explicit about those interviews that his first foundation
Speaker 3: to do charity work was set up as a tax dodge.
Speaker 3: But but this is where Soros is very interesting, right
Speaker 3: because he has, you know, for for like a billionaire, right,
Speaker 3: he has some positions that are started only very good.
Speaker 3: So he is anti apartheid and that is like not
Speaker 3: a thing you can guarantee from people in that era,
Speaker 3: like oh boy. He also and this is only I
Speaker 3: guess gets him in trouble like to this day, is
Speaker 3: he is pro Palestine. And this is part of why
Speaker 3: like Netanyahu absolutely hates him. He's he's not like like okay,
Speaker 3: he's he's.
Speaker 1: Not like a radical pro Palaestine by the standards of
Speaker 1: net and Yahoo a radical.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah. It was like his you know, his
Speaker 3: sort of like like his sort of like liberal humanism,
Speaker 3: like hey, we should not like shoot children with guns.
Speaker 1: Thing is Broadley anti shooting children throwing rocks?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like like that that that makes you a
Speaker 3: like like like enemy number one of the Israeli Still
Speaker 3: well yeah, no, I okay put them like.
Speaker 1: The enemy number one is those kids, but yeah.
Speaker 3: Or four. They haven't rapped him yet. So oh god,
Speaker 3: speaking of things that the Israeli government didn't do. So
Speaker 3: he gets his start.
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to do an ad.
Speaker 3: I don't worry. I have a better one. It's kind
Speaker 3: of good. So in that today, his first experience, like
Speaker 3: doing charity work is he decides that he's going to
Speaker 3: go up against like apartheid in South Africa, and yeah,
Speaker 3: this is good. So he he what he starts doing.
Speaker 3: He starts giving scholarships to black students to go to
Speaker 3: the University of Cape Town, and then he learns a
Speaker 3: very very important lesson about neoliberalism that he's about he's
Speaker 3: going to like promptly forget after this, which is that, okay,
Speaker 3: So what actually happened what he thinks is going to happen, right,
Speaker 3: is what he's trying to do, is he's trying to make,
Speaker 3: you know, he's trying to make sure there's more money
Speaker 3: for black kids to go to go to university. What
Speaker 3: actually happens is that the state uses his money to
Speaker 3: pay for the existing scholarships and stops paying for any
Speaker 3: more scholarships. And so there's two things going on here, right,
Speaker 3: One is the obvious. This is the this is the
Speaker 3: apartheid racism, right like they don't want more like they
Speaker 3: don't want more non white kids going to school. But
Speaker 3: then two also this is also sort of a classic
Speaker 3: nearliberal failure, which is like if you were, if you were,
Speaker 3: when you replace the state with like billionaire philanthropists, the
Speaker 3: state simply instead of like you know, having more of
Speaker 3: the of like the resources of the services provided, the
Speaker 3: state just stops doing it and spends more money on cops.
Speaker 3: And so he sours very quickly realizes that like he
Speaker 3: figures this out, it is like I fuck this, Like no,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to help you, like I'm not going
Speaker 3: to help the apartek government do racism. And so this
Speaker 3: makes him kind of weary of this stuff because he
Speaker 3: has sort of he has sort of seen how you
Speaker 3: see what happens when you when you very explicitly try
Speaker 3: to work within a system that is unbelievably fucked up,
Speaker 3: which is that the apartheid government uses your money to
Speaker 3: as a way to like funnel more of their own
Speaker 3: money into their own pockets. And do you know who
Speaker 3: else use the system of apartheid to funnel more money
Speaker 3: into their own pockets?
Speaker 7: Oh okay, I see, I now see what you were doing.
Speaker 7: I think the last I think the previous attempt to
Speaker 7: not break was actually better.
Speaker 3: I was kind of like, you know, you.
Speaker 1: Know, I mean criticism correct that our podcasts are entirely
Speaker 1: sponsored via a time machine. We used to go back
Speaker 1: to apartheid South Africa. Uh get their advertising dollars. So
Speaker 1: please keep the krue grands flowing and purchase these products
Speaker 1: and services. I learned that krue grands was the South
Speaker 1: African currency from the movie Lethal Weapon two. We're back
Speaker 1: and I'm sitting uncomfortable in the knowledge that I am
Speaker 1: the only person on this zoom call who has watched
Speaker 1: lethal Weapon? Two? Have either of you seen any of
Speaker 1: the Lethal's weapon? No, unbelievable. You're missing maybe the best
Speaker 1: Mel Gibson performance outside of that time he got pulled
Speaker 1: over in Malibu and gave a racist rant to those
Speaker 1: California State Highway Patrol officers.
Speaker 3: H okaygre thinking of people who are about to give
Speaker 3: racist rants. Okay. So the other thing about Soros, and
Speaker 3: the thing that is sort of blisteringly ironic about how
Speaker 3: the sort of course of Andy Soro's attacks go, is
Speaker 3: that Soros is like a vehement, like pretty hardline anti
Speaker 3: communist and this is what he spends most of his time,
Speaker 3: like in the eighties doing, is is you know, like
Speaker 3: give giving money to anti communist groups and communist countries.
Speaker 3: So he funds Solidarity in Poland, which is this like
Speaker 3: I very mixed record.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll get the like he's funding anti communist causes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he's funny, but you know he's he's funny.
Speaker 3: He's trying to fund like a very specific kind of
Speaker 3: like liberal anti communist cause, right, and you know this
Speaker 3: this goes badly for him in a number of ways.
Speaker 3: One is that the moment, like the moment the Berlin wallfalls,
Speaker 3: everyone just like suddenly forgets about all of the anti
Speaker 3: communism that he did because you know, and this is
Speaker 3: something about this, we have a kind of anti communist
Speaker 3: that he is, right, Like, there's a lot of anti
Speaker 3: communists who are, like you were, just like desk squad guys,
Speaker 3: right like, this is your like your guy trained by
Speaker 3: Shan Kai Shek who's like shooting peasants in like El Salvador. Right,
Speaker 3: there's also like another kind of anti communists in this
Speaker 3: era who are sort of liberal anti communists who like
Speaker 3: are anti communists but like also anti Pinochet. For example,
Speaker 3: like Soros give somebody to the people, you know, when
Speaker 3: when Pinochet has this big referendum of his like should
Speaker 3: I stay in power? He gives money to the people
Speaker 3: who are like no, and those are people who, ah,
Speaker 3: their intentions are better than the just like absolutely horrifying
Speaker 3: right wingers. But you know, it doesn't it doesn't go
Speaker 3: great for him. So Soros his initial plan, right is
Speaker 3: he's gonna, you know, okay, when he's trying to like
Speaker 3: start funding ant communist groups, He's gonna use his things
Speaker 3: like he was gonna go into Hungary and he was
Speaker 3: gonna like give Hungarian students scholarships, and the Hungarian students
Speaker 3: were like, don't do this, Like if you if you
Speaker 3: just show up and give us money, the state is
Speaker 3: immediately going to be able to go like, hey, you
Speaker 3: were like outside funded opposition people doing like regime change stuff,
Speaker 3: and it's going to like immediately discredit us. And so
Speaker 3: this is the point where he sets up the SOUS Foundation,
Speaker 3: which becomes opens There's a whole thing with this. This
Speaker 3: stuff changes names like many times the Open Society Foundation stuff. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: and you know, and so you know what we were like,
Speaker 3: we just talk about what they actually do because in
Speaker 3: sort of like.
Speaker 1: That, I can tell you one thing that they do
Speaker 1: because I used to work with when I was teaching
Speaker 1: classes at Belling cat my my partner, my partner, John Carlo,
Speaker 1: he would go and teach because he's he was born
Speaker 1: and for at least a period of time raised in Venezuela.
Speaker 1: He would teach classes in Latin America to local journalists
Speaker 1: who wanted to know open source investigative techniques and who
Speaker 1: didn't have the kind of money to pay what it
Speaker 1: usually costs to do a belling cat thing, and that
Speaker 1: program whereby a bunch of journalists in Latin America, particularly Columbia,
Speaker 1: got training, was funded by the Open Society Foundation. And
Speaker 1: so a couple of years ago when there was that
Speaker 1: massive swellowing of like the police murdering people and protest
Speaker 1: crowds and stuff in Colombia, the journalists who were like
Speaker 1: doing open source investigation to track down which police officers
Speaker 1: were you know, killing folks and how this was going
Speaker 1: were a lot of the folks that John Carlo had trained.
Speaker 1: Like that's the kind of stuff that one of the
Speaker 1: kind of things that the Open Society Foundation does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they also do a lot of They do a
Speaker 3: lot of like giving student scholarships. The other thing they're
Speaker 3: really big on that doesn't get talked about much is
Speaker 3: that there were huge on like cultural events basically like
Speaker 3: paying people money to like put on plays and like
Speaker 3: theater stuff and music and like writing poems and books,
Speaker 3: which is like I don't know, like I actually think
Speaker 3: that's cool, Like like we as a society used to
Speaker 3: do this, Like we used to like pay people, like
Speaker 3: the government used to pay people to like write things
Speaker 3: and like create art. And then we decided that that
Speaker 3: was bad, and I've never done it again.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I'm anti creating art for the record, That's
Speaker 1: why I'm really happy about all this.
Speaker 3: Ai bait bait ye bait post do not engage. So
Speaker 3: unfortunately for the Soros Foundation, one of the people they
Speaker 3: give these these scholarships to is victor Or Broun, which
Speaker 3: is I.
Speaker 1: Victory the Hungarian Yeah, press, yes, we.
Speaker 3: Shall, we shall return to that. This is I think
Speaker 3: maybe the single greatest example of like creating young grave
Speaker 3: Digger I've ever seen in my entire life. I I
Speaker 3: I don't know, like one of the things that that
Speaker 3: comes up about this and this is this is one
Speaker 3: of the things that another one of the guys who
Speaker 3: sorows BACKX, who like betrays him later on, says that
Speaker 3: Soros is bad at politics, like you just he's like
Speaker 3: not very good at it, Like he's not you know
Speaker 3: people like the sort of like thing about him is
Speaker 3: that he's this sort of like criminal mastermind who can
Speaker 3: like like bankow revolutions and stuff, and he just like
Speaker 3: gets out maneuvered by people constantly in ways that are
Speaker 3: like kind of depressing. Yeah, but you Okay, So he's
Speaker 3: spending in the eighties like doing all this, you know,
Speaker 3: like doing this sort of cultural work. And you know
Speaker 3: in Hungary, right, there's a sort of interesting thing that
Speaker 3: happens where like he's wealthy enough that like even the
Speaker 3: Communist Party is sort of like has to work with
Speaker 3: him because he has money and they sort of don't.
Speaker 3: But you know, the other thing that that's I think
Speaker 3: important to understand is that he's not like there's a
Speaker 3: bunch of foundations who do like exactly the same stuff, right,
Speaker 3: like maybe slightly worse. Like you know, there's like the
Speaker 3: Ford Foundation, There's like the Rockefellers, right, or the Rockefeller Foundation,
Speaker 3: like they all they all like at any place where
Speaker 3: open society is like doing stuff, there's like a worse
Speaker 3: version of it at the Ford Foundation, and like the
Speaker 3: Rockefellers are doing. But you know, somehow, stunningly only one
Speaker 3: of these groups is singled out for being yelled at
Speaker 3: all the time. And I will I will leave as
Speaker 3: an exercise to the reader why specifically picked Soros and
Speaker 3: not Ford? Huh huh?
Speaker 7: I wonder, I wonder what big mystery. I wonder what
Speaker 7: differences and uh and cultural views might be.
Speaker 3: It might be Yeah, so okay, the other real problem
Speaker 3: that he runs into, which is a cultural problem, is that, okay,
Speaker 3: this is the problem that all the liberal anti communists
Speaker 3: run into, which is that, Okay, so the walls come down, right,
Speaker 3: and the communist governments fall, and it turns out that, uh,
Speaker 3: the anti communists and and Europe are almost all right
Speaker 3: wingers and their base are all like right wing nationalists fanatics.
Speaker 3: Here's another Stories quote about this. I thought I would
Speaker 3: blaze the trail, I would lead and others would follow.
Speaker 3: But now that I look, I find that there was
Speaker 3: practically nobody behind me. I asked myself what went wrong?
Speaker 3: And part of what went wrong is like what Soros
Speaker 3: is doing in these places. So for example, you know,
Speaker 3: he's involved in funding solidarity, he's involved in some solidarities
Speaker 3: negotiations with the government. And then the other thing that
Speaker 3: he does is he's one of the people who helps
Speaker 3: like do structural adjustment in Poland. And this goes really
Speaker 3: badly because so what we were talking about, we just
Speaker 3: talk a little bit about what solidarity is because he
Speaker 3: helps destroy it by accident. Solidarity is this giant sort
Speaker 3: of like social democratic e union that forms in you know,
Speaker 3: in like the early eighties in Poland, that's like the
Speaker 3: first sort of independent union in one of these communist countries.
Speaker 3: And they eventually are able to sort of like knock
Speaker 3: off the government. But they come into power, and you know,
Speaker 3: so they do on sort of Soros's advice and on
Speaker 3: the advice of a lot of the sort of financial people.
Speaker 3: They're getting, right, all of the people are telling them
Speaker 3: to do privatization. So they do it, right, They privatize
Speaker 3: all of these giant state owned like facilities, they privatize
Speaker 3: their docks like stuff like that. And this, it turns out,
Speaker 3: it just causes massive de industrialization. It destroys Solidarity's base
Speaker 3: because there's there's suddenly no longer all of these union
Speaker 3: jobs at all these state owned factories. And so you know,
Speaker 3: they lose an ex election and the solidarity like vanishes
Speaker 3: forever into the midst of time. There's like six of
Speaker 3: those guys left. Yeah, and this and this is a
Speaker 3: real sort of source problem. This that like keeps running
Speaker 3: over and over again, right is you know, he spent
Speaker 3: all this time being an anti communists, but then the
Speaker 3: actual anti communists who have bases and who aren't just
Speaker 3: like destroying their own bases by like doing privatization, which
Speaker 3: is something he stuff he's also pushing, right are these
Speaker 3: right wringers? And this is this is just sort of
Speaker 3: a fiasco, and you know, it's so like he he does,
Speaker 3: like he tries to do like a very similar thing
Speaker 3: to what he'd been doing in in Eastern Europe and China,
Speaker 3: and this goes like even worse because he winds up
Speaker 3: like backing, he winds up backing one of the CCP
Speaker 3: factions who gets purged after Tienemann, and so you know,
Speaker 3: surus like as the sort of nineties go on, right,
Speaker 3: like he's sort of slowly starting to realize that, like
Speaker 3: the stuff that he's doing is not working very well.
Speaker 3: And one of the sort of I don't know if
Speaker 3: consequence is the right word, but okay, one of soros
Speaker 3: are sort of like principles that makes them different from
Speaker 3: a lot of other of these billionaires rights. He doesn't
Speaker 3: do humanitarian aid. His thing is that like he wants
Speaker 3: to produce a society that doesn't need humanitarian aid, which
Speaker 3: is sort of noble.
Speaker 13: But like.
Speaker 3: Then then Yugoslavia falls apart, and he winds up doing
Speaker 3: a bunch of stuff in Yugoslavia, Like he winds up
Speaker 3: building like a water purification plant Sarajevo. While aside resiege
Speaker 3: and the other thing that I didn't know he was
Speaker 3: like really involved with is like he's basically the reason
Speaker 3: why the UN war crimes tribunal that like tries Moloshovic
Speaker 3: and stuff like happens, Like he funds it. It wasn't
Speaker 3: really like a UN thing he was. He was like, Hey,
Speaker 3: we're gonna have this tribunal. And then the German government
Speaker 3: like arrested one of the war criminals just sort of
Speaker 3: randomly at like an airport or something. And he's able
Speaker 3: to convince sort of like Clinton and a bunch of
Speaker 3: other people to like actually turn and the UN to
Speaker 3: like turn this into a real court. And this pisses
Speaker 3: off a lot of people and like bye by a
Speaker 3: lot of people. I mean, like very specifically pisses Belosovik
Speaker 3: cough because I somewhat obvious reasons that he tried to
Speaker 3: try him for war crimes. Okay, so I think, gar
Speaker 3: you're too young for this. Robert, do you remember Rock
Speaker 3: the Vote? God?
Speaker 1: Oh yes, I remember Rock the Vote.
Speaker 3: Okay. So one of the things Soros does is he
Speaker 3: does like a he brings like a rock to vote.
Speaker 3: He's like one of the people who brings the rock
Speaker 3: devote to like Slovakia great, and you know, and this
Speaker 3: is the first.
Speaker 1: Time that this is how we introduce people to democracy
Speaker 1: by showing how cringe it can be perfect well.
Speaker 3: And the government is immediately immediately this is sort of
Speaker 3: the first time that like a government is seriously like, well,
Speaker 3: I mean, okay, this is the first time that you've
Speaker 3: had like a protest movement that starts and the head
Speaker 3: of the country goes like, it's George Soros. He's the
Speaker 3: one doing this, even though like the Ford Foundation again
Speaker 3: and the Rockefellers and just like a bunch of random
Speaker 3: people in Slovakia are also doing this. But this is,
Speaker 3: this is this is sort of going to become like
Speaker 3: a pattern in in in these things, because you know,
Speaker 3: he he's sort of like like I think she's kind
Speaker 3: of like poking a lot of sort of very powerful,
Speaker 3: like increasingly powerful sort of regional right wing leaders because
Speaker 3: he looks at the societies and are like, actually, it
Speaker 3: sucks to have like just dog shit right wingers who
Speaker 3: are like racist and hate everyone running a country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds like it would be bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is this is the thing about words, right,
Speaker 3: Like he every once in a while, right, he sees
Speaker 3: something really bad going on and goes, I'm gonna throw
Speaker 3: a bunch of money at it try to fix it.
Speaker 3: And so one of the things that he does this
Speaker 3: for is the war on drugs, like in the in
Speaker 3: sort of the eighties and nineties, Like Saras looks at
Speaker 3: this and it is like this fucking sucks, Like this
Speaker 3: is really bad. And so he starts working in Baltimore,
Speaker 3: where the government is trying to do like something's like
Speaker 3: pretty like something like even now is to consider sort
Speaker 3: of like pretty radical I like harm reduction stuff. So
Speaker 3: I mean they like it. Like Baltimore in the nineties
Speaker 3: has needle exchanges. Uh, he's doing like narcan trainings for people.
Speaker 3: He's you know, he's doing things like funny instead of
Speaker 3: like like giving money to like he's doing he's has
Speaker 3: these programs to like get people out of like prison faster,
Speaker 3: and he's doing like after school programs for kids and
Speaker 3: this stuff like this is like genuinely good. Like there's
Speaker 3: no like I don't know it sucks that like it's
Speaker 3: it's billionaire money that's like doing it. But like I
Speaker 3: don't know, like probably there's a lot of people who
Speaker 3: are alive because I didn't get HIV from needles that
Speaker 3: they were able to do exchanges for. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sure, that's all. That's all good stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And but you know the interesting thing about Storts, right,
Speaker 3: he's he's like not like you know, he's doing stuff
Speaker 3: that's like pretty lefty, right, but he's like not a
Speaker 3: partisan guy until he sees George Bush and he sees
Speaker 3: he's he like the day after nine to eleven, he's like,
Speaker 3: holy shit, this guy is a maniac. And like it's
Speaker 3: just instantly has like the switch flips of like this man,
Speaker 3: this man is an enemy to open society, which is true.
Speaker 3: And he's like he's he like, guess this braid of
Speaker 3: like I need to bring this man down. So he
Speaker 3: starts getting really for the first time, he starts getting
Speaker 3: really really involved in the two thousand and four election.
Speaker 3: He's doing like like these like micro targeting ad stuff.
Speaker 3: He's like throwing money around everywhere, and you know, I
Speaker 3: mean he explicitly like the like the way he looks
Speaker 3: at it, like if he's very explicit about this is
Speaker 3: like he wants to level the like the playing field
Speaker 3: between the Republicans, who are funded by just a trillion
Speaker 3: routing billionaires and the Democrats, who are funded by not
Speaker 3: that many billionaires. The problem with this is that he
Speaker 3: has like a very weird view of what's wrong with Bush.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna read from the People up the Stars again
Speaker 3: in imposing its view of freedom on both the American
Speaker 3: people in a foreign country. Quote the supremacist ideology of
Speaker 3: the Bush administration, and it is in contradiction with the
Speaker 3: principles of open society because it claims possession of an
Speaker 3: ultimate truth, which I don't know, I don't actually think
Speaker 3: like claiming possession of an ultimate truth is like specifically
Speaker 3: the thing that like is the reason why the Bush
Speaker 3: administration is bad. But simultaneously, I don't know, Like I
Speaker 3: it's hard for me to be like too mad about
Speaker 3: a billionaire seeing George Bush and just like going, oh
Speaker 3: my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah it didn't it didn't work, but it yeah, good
Speaker 1: that he gave it, gave it the old college try.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Well.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, this this has a backlash effect, which the Republicans
Speaker 3: see him start doing this and they're like, oh shit,
Speaker 3: this is incredible campaign material for us, and we start
Speaker 3: seeing like the sort of the less openly anti Semitic
Speaker 3: like precursors. So like all the stuff we see today,
Speaker 3: like Bill O'Reilly goes after him.
Speaker 1: Oh god, Robert, do you remember denn Dennis Hastard. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Look if my favorite pedophiles who were long standing speakers
Speaker 1: of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastard is easily in
Speaker 1: the top three.
Speaker 3: She i, this is the thing that's been like collectively
Speaker 3: wiped from like America's conscience. Is that like the Republican
Speaker 3: speaker of the House for like twenty years was like
Speaker 3: one of one of one of history's most prolific pedophiles.
Speaker 1: He sure was.
Speaker 3: And she she also turns out one of the people
Speaker 3: who mainstream the anti Soros stuff. She starts citing a
Speaker 3: fucking Lyndon LaRouche quote unquote report claiming that Soros got
Speaker 3: his money from drugs. So Lyndon LaRouche is this like
Speaker 3: fascist weirdo who cut his teeth and running this like
Speaker 3: anti communist cult that would like physically fight leftist groups
Speaker 3: on campuses and would like give information on like student
Speaker 3: leftist groups and like other leftistcroops or the government like
Speaker 3: they are they are so feded up that like if
Speaker 3: you start reading about de LaRouche sites, like they were
Speaker 3: narking to federal orgs like you've never heard of before,
Speaker 3: it's stunningly, stunningly bizarre like conspiracy cult thing. And Dennis
Speaker 3: Hastert was just straight up like reading their antisemitic conspiracy
Speaker 3: theories like on TV. But you know, and I think
Speaker 3: I think it's something that that one of the things
Speaker 3: I wanted to emphasize like in this episode, right is
Speaker 3: like the anti Soro stuff isn't really like I don't
Speaker 3: know what you call it, like or sort of organic
Speaker 3: anti Semitism, Like it's not something that like comes from
Speaker 3: the Republican base, right, This is something that this is
Speaker 3: a deliberate choice by Republican political strategists who are very
Speaker 3: deliberately like this this is this is a Jewish billionaire
Speaker 3: who's helping the who's helping a Democratic party, Like we
Speaker 3: can use this to do to try to do like
Speaker 3: culture warship to win this election. And you know, like
Speaker 3: we know we can see the results of this, and
Speaker 3: this isn't even you know, we're gonna get this in
Speaker 3: a little bit, but like this this isn't even the
Speaker 3: only time this is gonna happen where like the specific
Speaker 3: like sorrows, like anti Semitism stuff for dreaming agust is
Speaker 3: like it's cooked up by like like very specifically cooked
Speaker 3: up as a targeted thing by political strategists. I love it.
Speaker 1: Which it's it's good.
Speaker 3: Anyways, we should we should do ads.
Speaker 1: Yeah, speaking of anti Semitism, you know, just just speaking
Speaker 1: about it. That's what we're doing here. Anyway, here's the mads. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back, got another email from the A d L.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna deal with this. Y'all continue talking about George Soros.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, So all right, Well the other thing Soros
Speaker 3: keeps doing, like you know, so in going after Bush, right,
Speaker 3: he has now made himself like he's not enemy number
Speaker 3: one yet, but he's going he's made himself like a
Speaker 3: pretty high profile enemy of the Republican like.
Speaker 1: Through the shoe.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, so that guy actually sucks.
Speaker 1: Ida Yeah yeah, we're not praising him.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He starts this sort of like arc of pissing
Speaker 3: off a bunch of really really powerful and important people
Speaker 3: who are anti Semitic great wingers. So remember how I
Speaker 3: a while back, I said I was talking about there
Speaker 3: was a guy who double crossed Soros, who was like,
Speaker 3: this guy's bad at politics. So that guy was like
Speaker 3: a h that that that that guy. That guy was
Speaker 3: a Georgian protest leader who Soros like helped like his
Speaker 3: protest movements overthrow a sort of like kind of pretty
Speaker 3: shitty like pro Russian government in Georgia. But like that guy,
Speaker 3: that guy has like a wild arc that you could
Speaker 3: do his own fucking movie series on. He's now a victor,
Speaker 3: a close ally of Victoria Bond. So it's going great,
Speaker 3: But how do you actually pronounce his name? For some reason,
Speaker 3: it always just like pings off my brain.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean Victoria Garren. I hear, are the
Speaker 1: real brain trust to ask about pronunciation? You've brought together,
Speaker 1: you know, just the goat.
Speaker 7: Latest gnunciator just said to me a list of like
Speaker 7: European cities. That's a free episode idea.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm just gonna say the word Binghamton like forty
Speaker 1: seven times. It's gonna be great.
Speaker 3: Okay, So sorrows back to this GE's called the Rose Revolution,
Speaker 3: and you know this turns out badly for Soros in
Speaker 3: every possible way, which is that like one his guy
Speaker 3: like sucks and turns on him. And then two he
Speaker 3: really like this like really pisses off Latimer putin a
Speaker 3: man who is going to hold this grudge like like
Speaker 3: on his deathbed, he will be holding this grudge. Now, okay.
Speaker 3: So one of the things that that sort of like happens.
Speaker 3: So he's backing these sort of like protest movements in
Speaker 3: Eastern Europe. I refuse the sort of two thousands. And
Speaker 3: you know, as the two thousands go on and turn
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight, thing the world economy goes to shit.
Speaker 3: A bunch of right wingers started taking power. And one
Speaker 3: of victor Or Bond's like political consultants, who's this guy
Speaker 3: who he met through net and Yahoo? Like specifically like
Speaker 3: this is this is another consultant guy very specifically cooks
Speaker 3: up the idea for how you know, he's trying to
Speaker 3: fend off like a right like a sort of another
Speaker 3: sort of right wing challenge. He's trying to fend off
Speaker 3: like the rest of our political establishment. And or Bond's
Speaker 3: consultant like very specifically is like what if we go
Speaker 3: after Soros again? And you know, and so he does,
Speaker 3: and this is this is another one of those things
Speaker 3: like this is literally the anti Semitism is fucking cooked
Speaker 3: up in a pr lab in order for these people
Speaker 3: to win elections. And I don't know that that that
Speaker 3: just sort of just sort of like cynical cold bloodedness
Speaker 3: of it, like of these people, like this politic cool
Speaker 3: consultant by the way, like is also Jewish, right like,
Speaker 3: and he just doesn't give a shit. He's like a
Speaker 3: fuck it. Like well, you know, like I'm like one
Speaker 3: of Netanyahu's guys. NETANYAHUO fucking hates this guy too, Like
Speaker 3: why don't we just use him as a punching bag,
Speaker 3: And so they do, and you know, this is this
Speaker 3: is part of a big part of the reason like
Speaker 3: why Soros turns into this sort of enemy Number one
Speaker 3: is that in twenty fifteen, they start blaming him for
Speaker 3: the influx of refugees from Syria and this spreads like
Speaker 3: fucking wildfire. Suddenly, like every single right wing leader on
Speaker 3: earth is like, oh shit, I can blame all of
Speaker 3: my refugee stuff on this guy, and they start doing it.
Speaker 3: And you know, so suddenly, like like air Dowan is
Speaker 3: blaming him for like the Gtzy part protests and he
Speaker 3: does at thirteen, like Trump gets on this and you know,
Speaker 3: this stuff sort of like it's it spreads really quickly,
Speaker 3: and once it's sort of out of the bottle, right
Speaker 3: like you know, like people like like there are the
Speaker 3: people who sort of first start this right are doing
Speaker 3: this sort of like you know, like incredibly cold, cynical
Speaker 3: political calculus. But once once that, once this like incredibly
Speaker 3: high level that he sent and he sententism gets out
Speaker 3: of the open, it starts turning into just like Soros
Speaker 3: a Satan ship and you know, and and part part
Speaker 3: of what happens here is is that like this is
Speaker 3: this is one of the things, like the sort of
Speaker 3: campaigns against Soros is one of the things that he's
Speaker 3: responsible for, like our current like migrant policy, like why
Speaker 3: it's so bad, Like why like half our episodes next
Speaker 3: week and are going to be about like just horrible
Speaker 3: shit happening at the border, which is that like Soros
Speaker 3: in the in the like the late the nineties and
Speaker 3: two thousands found out that like Clinton was funding his
Speaker 3: welfare reform by cutting legal immigrants off from food stamps
Speaker 3: and like SSI benefits, and he's like, wait, this is fucking.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's just like like he caught one point five million
Speaker 3: people off of his off of fucking benefits for just
Speaker 3: no reason, like on believably demonic act. And Soro finds
Speaker 3: out about this is like wait, what the fuck, what
Speaker 3: do you mean he's doing this? So he like puts
Speaker 3: a coalition together that like funds a bunch of immigrant
Speaker 3: advocacy groups, and he's able to overturn this. But there's
Speaker 3: a sort of right the right wing reaction to this,
Speaker 3: right like is partially also part of the right wing
Speaker 3: reaction to Soorros two thousand and four. There's this very
Speaker 3: very effective and like unbelievably brutal sort of right wing
Speaker 3: backlash about immigration politics. That is, you know, it's one
Speaker 3: of the things that drives the Obama administration.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: The Obama administration is like worse than the Bush administration
Speaker 3: on like deportation shit. It's you know, just utter horror,
Speaker 3: and all of that stuff continues, and all of these
Speaker 3: right wing people figure out that if you can just
Speaker 3: pin like like Trump starts with Trump pins the migrant
Speaker 3: caravent on Soros, and they figure out, like, this is
Speaker 3: the this is like the specific combination, right, It's like
Speaker 3: the the the anti semitism of like the Jewish banker
Speaker 3: bringing immigrants into your country is just like the sort
Speaker 3: of one way shop driving your entire country into like
Speaker 3: a like fascist right wing frenzy. And it works. And now,
Speaker 3: you know, like the cycle that we're in now is
Speaker 3: like anytime something happens, like the right blames info like this.
Speaker 3: So the the the current right wing panic is that
Speaker 3: Trot Soros was funding some like pretty moderate like reform
Speaker 3: DA people because he's a criminal justice reform guy. And
Speaker 3: the Republicans are now all talking about how this is
Speaker 3: like a scheme by Soros to like cause crime and
Speaker 3: like destroy the entire country. And unfortunately, like this is
Speaker 3: just like this is this is just this is just
Speaker 3: reality now all of these like really bleakly cynical political
Speaker 3: leaders and they're like polsters and pr consultants, where like
Speaker 3: we could use anti semitism to win elections and they
Speaker 3: did and now we live in hell.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But on the upside, you know, uh, the you know,
Speaker 1: have you guys had the new uh the new Mountain
Speaker 1: Dew zero major melon. It's not tasty, but uh it's
Speaker 1: in grocery stores. So if you're looking for a diet
Speaker 1: mountain dew flavor, you know, that makes it all kind
Speaker 1: of worthwhile.
Speaker 3: I no longer even delivering flavor.
Speaker 1: That's that's what I had for you. It was that
Speaker 1: or another heroine.
Speaker 7: Why why would they need to deliver flavor when instead
Speaker 7: they can just continue to mainstream anti semitism to get
Speaker 7: right wing politicians elected so they can make say.
Speaker 1: But you know what I've been I've been studying this
Speaker 1: can for a while now, and none of the anthropomorphized
Speaker 1: watermelons look like they could be racial caricatures. So that's
Speaker 1: a win.
Speaker 7: You know, Look, if that is, if that is actually
Speaker 7: that actually is a racism wind to.
Speaker 1: If Mountain Dew had made a melon version in nineteen thirty,
Speaker 1: it would have been pretty bad. Like we would be
Speaker 1: sharing pictures of those cans on Twitter today and going,
Speaker 1: oh my god. They would have to make a statement.
Speaker 1: They'd have to donate some money to like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: fun to probably scholarships or something. It'd be a real
Speaker 1: problem for Mountain Dew, is what I'm saying. But today,
Speaker 1: nothing problematic about the melons on their can.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm sure there's nothing problematic about the soda industry.
Speaker 1: Aspertaine, the health chemical.
Speaker 3: Well, is that is that all we had?
Speaker 5: Yah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's yeah, this is this is endicular app here.
Speaker 7: Well, it's now we finally know why George Soros is
Speaker 7: as bad as Magneto, and why comparing George Soros to
Speaker 7: Magneto as the one of the richest men in the
Speaker 7: world who owns probably the most influential communication app is
Speaker 7: probably not a good thing, you know.
Speaker 3: Okay, one more thing I want to get out, like
Speaker 3: for one second that I forgot I realized I forgot
Speaker 3: to say earlier, is that like Soros is not like
Speaker 3: in the scale of billionaire, Soros is not very rich,
Speaker 3: Like he's like the three hundred and seventieth richest billionaire.
Speaker 3: Like he's not even in the top one hundred. Right,
Speaker 3: Elon Musk he has like six billion dollars. Elon Musk
Speaker 3: has like one hundred and eighty four billion dollars or something.
Speaker 3: So like, you know what the the relative levels of
Speaker 3: influence that these people have.
Speaker 7: No, I was talking about Elon Musk, Yeah, right, the
Speaker 7: one of the chest most influential people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just I just I need
Speaker 3: everyone to understand exactly how much more fucking riches. It's
Speaker 3: it's it's like fucking it's like when fucking Henry Ford
Speaker 3: was like doing anti Semitic conspiracy series. It's like you
Speaker 3: literally like like you personally literally control like more wealth
Speaker 3: than like all the people you're ranting about combined. Like
Speaker 3: shut the fuck up. Oh my god, h anti semitism, folks,
Speaker 3: it sucks. And also rich people do it even though
Speaker 3: they're they are the actual like the actuals. Yeah, in
Speaker 3: so far as anything even remotely like what they're what
Speaker 3: they're hypothesizing, could even potentially exist, it's fucking these people.
Speaker 3: So yeah, they're bad. Uh yeah, it's it could happen here.
Speaker 3: Uh look, I didn't I didn't think of an intro
Speaker 3: for this one. I really should have. I apologize to
Speaker 3: the readers. I was reading about Chinese aloze instead.
Speaker 10: Uh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a podcast that's I don't know. It's
Speaker 3: about things. I'm here unlike all those other podcasts about things,
Speaker 3: and ours is actually about things. And today it's about
Speaker 3: hot dogs, and in order to talk about hot dogs,
Speaker 3: were joined by Jamie Loftus, whose new book Raw Dog,
Speaker 3: The Naked Truth about hot Dogs boldly asked the question
Speaker 3: what if a book was good? Welcome to the show, JB.
Speaker 5: Hello, Hello, So it's so good to be here to
Speaker 5: talk about things. This is like the thingiest thing available,
Speaker 5: I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I I read this book in Okay, I
Speaker 3: don't know how you're actually supposed to divide up, Like
Speaker 3: if you stand up to go to the bathroom in
Speaker 3: the middle of a sitting, is that still one sitting?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So I read this book in one sitting and it
Speaker 3: was great.
Speaker 5: One sitting with a bathroom break.
Speaker 3: I think there was two technically, but yeah, it was
Speaker 3: a good time. Yeah. And so okay, so this is
Speaker 3: this is a book that's about hot dogs and also
Speaker 3: about it's a tale of human human and animal misery
Speaker 3: and suffering. And so as I was reading book, my
Speaker 3: playlist pops up Daniel Connan The Painted Birds song The
Speaker 3: Butchers Share, and so I'm like reading about this and
Speaker 3: the song starts going, Let's take a walk around the
Speaker 3: Old Bizarre, where every little thing has traveled far, every
Speaker 3: pair of pants and grain of rice contains a horror
Speaker 3: story and its price.
Speaker 5: Wow. Really really theming right at you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was like wow, Wow, Okay, I guess reality
Speaker 3: is just sort of telling me what the what what
Speaker 3: the plot is right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 7: I mean that In another another case, I think it's
Speaker 7: really important that we're talking about this right now.
Speaker 3: Is that I.
Speaker 7: Believe your book was officially published on May twenty third, Yeah,
Speaker 7: which is which is the twenty third day in the
Speaker 7: fifth month, which is obviously of the year twenty twenty three,
Speaker 7: which is very important in the in the Discordian glendar,
Speaker 7: and your books about hot dogs, which is a specifically
Speaker 7: it is the one sacred food in the religion of Discordianism.
Speaker 7: So we for these.
Speaker 3: Reasons, it's really it's really important we talked with this
Speaker 3: because you us be a very powerful wizard to have
Speaker 3: to have figured this out.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, I had to reserve this date years in advance.
Speaker 5: I saw it coming and uh, you know, and and
Speaker 5: then by the time people caught on it was too late.
Speaker 5: I had already I had already wizarded my way into
Speaker 5: the most potent release date. And now I mean, it's
Speaker 5: we all may be fucked because I didn't.
Speaker 3: Someone's gonnassassinate JFK again.
Speaker 5: It's gonna be great, and this time his head is
Speaker 5: going to explode like there's twice as much blood in
Speaker 5: it as the original. It's gonna be really shocked.
Speaker 15: The original.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 15: It's like as the original series or movies.
Speaker 3: It's gonna be a second there's gonna be a second
Speaker 3: grassy knoll stack on top of the book depository. It's
Speaker 3: gonna be amazing.
Speaker 5: Has reboot Culture gone too far? You know? It's good,
Speaker 5: it's a good question.
Speaker 3: I was gonna I was trying to do a reboot
Speaker 3: culture plug cycle back here thing, and I can't do it.
Speaker 3: I'm a hack and a fraud. But I wanted to. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So I wanted to talk to you a bit about
Speaker 3: one of the things you mentioned in the book is
Speaker 3: that you were trying to get into like like try
Speaker 3: trying to be able to get tours of these of
Speaker 3: these meat like packing plants, and just they just like
Speaker 3: didn't let you. So I wanted to ask a bit
Speaker 3: about like that process, because that seemed like it was
Speaker 3: incredibly chaotic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was really frustrating and humiliating kind of every
Speaker 5: step of the way. Where I mean, as we were traveling,
Speaker 5: I had, you know, the map of places that I
Speaker 5: wanted to go, and then I also had a map
Speaker 5: of like meat packing plants that we could possibly go
Speaker 5: to on the way, And so I reached out a
Speaker 5: little bit in advance and either got I mean got
Speaker 5: a ton of just no answers, and I would try
Speaker 5: to call, but generally the excuse I was given was was, well,
Speaker 5: we don't let people tour anymore since COVID, because there
Speaker 5: were a few places. I know that the Vienna Beef
Speaker 5: factory in Chicago used to do tours of very specific
Speaker 5: areas of the factory, kind of the least gnarly parts,
Speaker 5: which is saying nothing, but you know, there were places
Speaker 5: that you used to let civilians tour, and now it's
Speaker 5: just unless things have changed in the last you know,
Speaker 5: year or so, no one can. And on top of that,
Speaker 5: in certain states, and this is also shifting. But the
Speaker 5: AGGAG laws I think make it way less possible and
Speaker 5: appealing for any meat packing plant to allow other people in,
Speaker 5: which is true. I mean the AGAG law rabbit hole
Speaker 5: is so sinister of just like, instead of any meaningful
Speaker 5: improvement in meat packing plants, they're inventing new laws to
Speaker 5: combat technology, which is just like terrifying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that was all was that? Was that
Speaker 3: technically pregreen.
Speaker 5: Scare That's a good question, Honestly, I think I think
Speaker 5: it was.
Speaker 3: I think that was mostly like a mid like a
Speaker 3: mid nineties thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but they've definitely kicked up. I mean, I think
Speaker 5: awareness of them in general has kicked up in the
Speaker 5: last couple of years because like in uh, sort of
Speaker 5: in step with how horrible conditions were for workers during
Speaker 5: lockdown after the executive order, I think there was like
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, a heightened interest in wanting to
Speaker 5: investigate it, and they were just blocked at every single turn.
Speaker 5: And there are some I know that some have been
Speaker 5: overturned or in the in the process of being overturned,
Speaker 5: but I don't know. It seems pretty bleak to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like you do know, I think i'd help
Speaker 3: with that, right, Like we found out like one like
Speaker 3: a look was like a month ago, like pretty recently.
Speaker 3: Also that there were a bunch of companies, of these
Speaker 3: meatpacking companies that were just like using child labor. The
Speaker 3: children were getting horribly named.
Speaker 5: Yep. That yeah, that was in didn't make the book,
Speaker 5: but I could have taken an educated guess, you know,
Speaker 5: like truly it is like often so comically bad it
Speaker 5: feels wrong, but it's just like so over the top horrible,
Speaker 5: and it sounds like describing current meatpacking conditions in the us.
Speaker 5: Sounds like you're describing meatpacking conditions one hundred years ago,
Speaker 5: and they were actually slightly better one hundred years ago.
Speaker 5: So it is it is very bleak in the unions
Speaker 5: that still exist, but they are somewhat weakened and making
Speaker 5: it possible for laws like this to sneak through at
Speaker 5: active child labor. And uh, there's I know. I put
Speaker 5: this in the book because it's something I think about
Speaker 5: all the time. Where you know, down the line, it
Speaker 5: was reported that not only was working to meet packing
Speaker 5: plant one of the least safe jobs in the country
Speaker 5: during lockdown, but but on top of that, a year later,
Speaker 5: it was revealed that the top brass at Tyson and
Speaker 5: Smithfield were directly colluding with the government and essentially drafted
Speaker 5: the drafted the executive order that was given in April
Speaker 5: twenty twenty to keep the meatpacking plants open. There were
Speaker 5: you know, foreman and sort of middle managers at these
Speaker 5: companies that would take bets on how many of their
Speaker 5: employees would get sick. It was just like it was
Speaker 5: cartoon evil.
Speaker 3: It was yeh, I'm like constantly haunted by the taking
Speaker 3: bets thing like that's you think about that, like once
Speaker 3: a week and of like, I think I think your
Speaker 3: line was I think your line was like a continued
Speaker 3: thing of how okay with you are?
Speaker 10: You?
Speaker 3: Are you with bringing the guillotine back? And I was like,
Speaker 3: you know, like this.
Speaker 5: And it's the worst when it's like middle managers. I'm like,
Speaker 5: what is what is your endgame here? Like it's I mean,
Speaker 5: I know what the endgame is, but it's so bleak
Speaker 5: to you know, be making you know, just getting by
Speaker 5: and still betting against your like like vulnerable people that
Speaker 5: work for you, who you see every day. It's just like,
Speaker 5: I mean whatever, not surprising, but yeah, I was like, Wow,
Speaker 5: there's no there's no justice in hot dog Land. There
Speaker 5: really is.
Speaker 15: I'm so curious about how curated what they what information
Speaker 15: is allowed to be shared, Like I'm curious if I
Speaker 15: don't know if they know how bad it is even
Speaker 15: or if they're just like conditioned not to not to
Speaker 15: think about it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, from what I can tell, there are. And I
Speaker 5: write about one at length in the book because it's
Speaker 5: one of my favorite YouTube clips of all time. This
Speaker 5: like Canadian TV show that's like a I think it's
Speaker 5: just called how It's Made, But.
Speaker 3: It's like this is a very popular Canadian television show.
Speaker 3: It's I watched this as a kid, really, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I love I mean, I love shows like that,
Speaker 5: and I love specifically when they show you how something
Speaker 5: gross is made because they're really trying to like keep
Speaker 5: the mood light in a way that is like so
Speaker 5: funny with hot Dogs where it's like just these big
Speaker 5: machines farting out goo and then there's like this bassline
Speaker 5: playing that's like boom boom, boom boom. The next step
Speaker 5: in the hot dog's journey is going to the shit
Speaker 5: that and you're like, what, it's so good, but it's
Speaker 5: really I mean, those those clips are ridiculously curated and
Speaker 5: to the point where it's like I can't even really
Speaker 5: tell you what's missing, but I you know, you could
Speaker 5: tell weird pr when you see it, and yeah, like
Speaker 5: they're sort of showing the easiest I don't know, it
Speaker 5: reminds me. I don't know why. I'm like in I'm
Speaker 5: like Farah Nose pilled today, but like it reminds me
Speaker 5: of the anecdote about Elizabeth Holmes where she was like
Speaker 5: taking Joe Biden around Pharah Nose and then there were
Speaker 5: like people in each room, setting up the next room
Speaker 5: to look like it was a functioning business, as like
Speaker 5: they were taking him through the through the rooms and
Speaker 5: successfully deceived him. That's very much what hot dog production
Speaker 5: clips feel like to me, which is wild because they're
Speaker 5: still disgusting, like you cannot make it look good. But yeah,
Speaker 5: I don't know. I mean, going back through years of reports,
Speaker 5: it's it's really difficult, understandably so to speak with people
Speaker 5: who work at meat packing plants as well, because there's
Speaker 5: like not a lot of that they stand to gain
Speaker 5: from talking to reporters. But there was a good Washington
Speaker 5: Post report about it in the early two thousands that
Speaker 5: detailed not just labor abuses within the workforce, but how
Speaker 5: you know when you're not paying your employees enough and
Speaker 5: not keeping the equipment updated, and are you know, factory
Speaker 5: farming focused on just production production production. The animals are
Speaker 5: far worse off too, and there were some pretty horrifying
Speaker 5: descriptions of what would happen to animals when people didn't
Speaker 5: have the workforce or the or the tools to be
Speaker 5: able to, you know, slaughter an animal in not the
Speaker 5: most horrible way possible.
Speaker 3: I like thought I had to, like i'd like watch
Speaker 3: stuff before on factory farming and like, I don't I
Speaker 3: might have a real fun time sleeping tonight thinking about
Speaker 3: the fucking like I don't know. I mean, the LA
Speaker 3: should probably content wording this because this is like the
Speaker 3: animal stuff and this is genuinely horrible, Like this thing
Speaker 3: I was like, I was like, I'm talking about like
Speaker 3: they're like stunning an animal to kill it, but the animal
Speaker 3: comes back and they're like literally chopping the animal apart
Speaker 3: while it's alive. The animals like blinking out that're like
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5: It's like it's hot. And then and on the workers end,
Speaker 5: it's like and don't stop or you're fired, and like
Speaker 5: and you have no protection. It's just like it's a
Speaker 5: it's a nightmare in a lot of places. And there
Speaker 5: it came around in an interesting way with at the
Speaker 5: Nathan Totalk eating contest last year because they use I
Speaker 5: don't know if they used Smithfield plants for all of
Speaker 5: their food, but they did certainly some of them. And
Speaker 5: there was a protester who came on stage while Joey
Speaker 5: Chestnutt was gobbling seventy five guzsies or something like that,
Speaker 5: and like the protester was like wearing a Darth Vader
Speaker 5: mask and he had this sign that said like take
Speaker 5: down the Smithfield death Star. And it was a good,
Speaker 5: like a pretty solid protest. It made it on TV.
Speaker 5: But then Joey Chestnut tackled him to the ground and
Speaker 5: then just stood up and kept eating hot dogs. It
Speaker 5: was like, I mean, the protester was so in the right,
Speaker 5: but also watching Joey really just take someone just in
Speaker 5: the middle of eating. He was like forty hot dogs
Speaker 5: deep tackled this guy to the ground and on like
Speaker 5: the low res feed I was watching, it looked like
Speaker 5: he killed him, and I was like, what did Joey
Speaker 5: just do on ESPN? Did he just kill a man?
Speaker 5: He didn't, but he injured someone and he also had
Speaker 5: a broken leg at the time. Joey not the protester,
Speaker 5: so it was just like then he went back to
Speaker 5: very very bizarre and then he yeah, and then he
Speaker 5: finished the contest and he was like, well, I would
Speaker 5: have beat my own record, but unfortunately I had a
Speaker 5: pause for five seconds to kill someone. But anyways, Yeah,
Speaker 5: the especially Smithfield, I think is uniquely bad. That Smithfield Entyson.
Speaker 5: It's just like her, like horrendous with labor practices.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think that was like I had
Speaker 3: a thing I was gonna say and then it simply
Speaker 3: evaporated from my mind. Uh you know what fucking ed
Speaker 3: breaker to cover up my failures.
Speaker 7: I keep having this like false memory. I feel like
Speaker 7: it's like it's like Mendela effect thing where when everyone says,
Speaker 7: whenever someone says Joey Chestnut, I keep I keep thinking
Speaker 7: it's a character.
Speaker 3: I think you should leave, But whenever I look at it,
Speaker 3: very single time, I mean, it does sound.
Speaker 5: Like that, and I think you should leave. Has such
Speaker 5: god tear hot dog jokes that Joey should be on
Speaker 5: that show, but unfortunately he lacks charisma and so he's
Speaker 5: He's definitely complicit in a number of things. Very hard
Speaker 5: to know what Joey's politics are, which I know is intentional,
Speaker 5: but I'm like, what's going on with him? He's from
Speaker 5: San Diego, but now he lives in Indiana. I just
Speaker 5: don't feel like it bodes well, but I can't say
Speaker 5: for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you know that was another part of this
Speaker 3: that I was like, I was reading this and especially
Speaker 3: like given the ship that's been happening the last few
Speaker 3: weeks reading about to Kyu Kobyashi, the former champion competitive
Speaker 3: eating guy coming to the US and then like having
Speaker 3: the very combination American experience of like coming to the
Speaker 3: US and then slowly realizing, holy shit, this place sucks ass,
Speaker 3: Like there's just a bunch of racist here and they
Speaker 3: hate us, and my boss is going to like run
Speaker 3: a racist pr campaign against me for money.
Speaker 5: Like like mask off like every day all the time,
Speaker 5: And here's the guy I'm going to be replacing you with,
Speaker 5: and you will be only abused until this guy can
Speaker 5: beat you and then goodbye forever. And that's what happened.
Speaker 5: It's so I mean, I don't know. I think it's
Speaker 5: fascinating in a very sick way because it's like he
Speaker 5: is just hot dog Vince McMahon, like absolutely who this
Speaker 5: guy is and clearly idolized as Vince McMahon, the guy
Speaker 5: George Shay like his wife wrote for the WWE and
Speaker 5: soap operas, and so he he's just like very well
Speaker 5: versed in a very racist, anti woman high drama. Like
Speaker 5: it's just like what he it's his favorite and I
Speaker 5: hate him and he's so uniquely in control of that world.
Speaker 5: It feels very Vince mcmonish, where you're like, surely someone
Speaker 5: else could do this job, but it's just not not allowed.
Speaker 7: If he's the Vince McMahon of the hot dog world,
Speaker 7: are what are you now in the hot talk world?
Speaker 7: Good question, the study of hot talks.
Speaker 5: I'm one of the people who Vince McMahon covers up
Speaker 5: the murder of I think probably that's eventually me. I'll
Speaker 5: be involved in a very small, suspicious incident in this
Speaker 5: man's life. I don't know. I mean, yeah, Unfortunately, I
Speaker 5: feel like that's the best shot I have. Uh. It
Speaker 5: was interesting though, when I released an excerpt of my
Speaker 5: book that was about Joey Chessman and there they did
Speaker 5: not run this by me, but they just named the
Speaker 5: excerpt I'm in Love with Joey Chestnut, and I was like, Okay,
Speaker 5: I guess I do say that, but I wouldn't lead
Speaker 5: with it anyways. Uh, the Major League Eating PR team
Speaker 5: reached out to me, and I thought it was going
Speaker 5: to be I was just going to get like reamed,
Speaker 5: but they it was just a light fact correct. It
Speaker 5: was very weird, a little menacing, But I guess that
Speaker 5: they're fine with me calling them evil. They're like, hey,
Speaker 5: when you said we were evil, your number was a
Speaker 5: little bit off, just so you know. And thanks.
Speaker 3: I guess Russ is good for us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, knowledge is power, and I changed my mind. I
Speaker 5: think they're great now due to this small fact.
Speaker 3: Correction ringing ringing endorsements where we're attempting to confirm live
Speaker 3: there is not, in fact a gun behind Jamie's head
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 5: Look, I can't say. I can't say I think the
Speaker 5: two things. Yeah, with the book being out now, it
Speaker 5: feels nice in most ways, and then two ways where
Speaker 5: I'm like stressed out about it, where I'm like, I'm
Speaker 5: afraid that George sha is going to come for me,
Speaker 5: and I'm also afraid the entire city of Chicago is
Speaker 5: going to come.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, I want to talk about this because okay,
Speaker 3: all right, So I'm gonna have to go into witness
Speaker 3: protection after this. But I agree with you that the
Speaker 3: Chagosolt hot Dog is not that good. Yeah, like I
Speaker 3: think on hot Dog is really good. But yeah, there's
Speaker 3: like it doesn't it just it's it gets to soggy
Speaker 3: pretty quickly. It like the flavors don't necessarily go together.
Speaker 3: Like it's only okay, it's it's it's.
Speaker 5: Wet and there's too much going on, and it's just like, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's a catastrophe. I I well, okay, I'm was promising
Speaker 5: myself I would dial back on Iago hotdogs lander, but
Speaker 5: it's like not, it's not it's not very good. And
Speaker 5: I think the main thing, it wouldn't bother me as
Speaker 5: much if they I'm like those people in Chicago who
Speaker 5: But if the Chicago hot dog loving community was just like, hey,
Speaker 5: we have this gross hot dog and we love it,
Speaker 5: that's fine, unbridled enthusiasm for something gross, love it. But
Speaker 5: then they top that up by being like, and if
Speaker 5: you like Ketchup, you should walk into traffic and get
Speaker 5: hit by a car. Like so aggressively hate Ketchup in
Speaker 5: a way that I don't know. I love something disgusting,
Speaker 5: but hating something innocuous is such a weird thing to do.
Speaker 5: It's very bizarre.
Speaker 3: I also got like just absolute whiplash reading this because
Speaker 3: one of these places you go to is the incomprehend
Speaker 3: simply named Fatso's Last Stand, and I was literally there
Speaker 3: last week by accident, because I know, yeah, so I
Speaker 3: was like an absolute fool. I was trying to travel
Speaker 3: at seven am on two hours of sleep because I
Speaker 3: was writing an episode and I took a bus the
Speaker 3: wrong way and I ended up there and I was like,
Speaker 3: what the fuck have I just walked into? Opened this
Speaker 3: book and I was like, Oh my god, what is
Speaker 3: happening to me?
Speaker 5: Empty Fatso's Last Stand sounds like a very scary, wominal space.
Speaker 3: It was so a cursive like I was like getting
Speaker 3: off the bus and the bus driver was like, are
Speaker 3: you sure you want to get off here? And I
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, well like a like a I don't
Speaker 3: know episode, it was a thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then you find out that Fatso's Last Stand
Speaker 5: burned down twenty years ago. Did you get anything?
Speaker 3: They weren't open?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 5: Pretty good?
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 5: It was pretty good there. And then I've since gone
Speaker 5: back to Chicago because I didn't have time to go
Speaker 5: everywhere I wanted to, And I since on back and
Speaker 5: I do genuinely like the Chicago style hot dog at
Speaker 5: Red Hot Ranch. I'm a big Red Hot Ranch head.
Speaker 5: I've converted, but a lot of it is, Yeah, it's
Speaker 5: just bizarre, and the hating the ketchup thing is confusing.
Speaker 5: And then I went to Pittsburgh recently and their Ketchup City, USA,
Speaker 5: and so I was having some interesting conversation and yeah,
Speaker 5: this is what my life is like now I did everything.
Speaker 3: Okay. So there's there's two more various like hot dog
Speaker 3: questions you need to ask. One is do you have
Speaker 3: portillo takes?
Speaker 5: Ooh not really? I like I like Portillo's and I've
Speaker 5: been in Illinois and I've been in California too. It's
Speaker 5: a classic. It's good it didn't it didn't make it
Speaker 5: into the book because there was like so many hot
Speaker 5: dogs that didn't make it into the book because they're like,
Speaker 5: all right, that's just you saying, like there were so
Speaker 5: many paragraphs in the road, like and then I had
Speaker 5: this one and I liked it. And then I had
Speaker 5: this one and I liked it. So my editor was like,
Speaker 5: all right, we can, we can cut it.
Speaker 4: Yeah we can.
Speaker 5: I had to cut whole chapters. It's so wild how
Speaker 5: long this book could have been where I not reigned
Speaker 5: in but there was well this is Chicago relevant too.
Speaker 5: I took a two day course called hot Dog University
Speaker 5: through Vienna Beef from this Guy's a thing.
Speaker 4: I'm going to beat that for me.
Speaker 5: Sorry, oh yeah, I'm a graduate of hot Dog University.
Speaker 5: It's a course where you it was on zoom. Unfortunately
Speaker 5: it used to be in person. This is Guy Mark, PhD,
Speaker 5: Professor hot Dogs, and you take the course and he
Speaker 5: teaches you how to open your own hot dog stand
Speaker 5: and over the course of two days. And it was
Speaker 5: actually I learned a lot.
Speaker 15: How many people were on the zoom.
Speaker 5: There are three people. It was me and two guys
Speaker 5: from Chicago. And I was trying to like be I
Speaker 5: didn't want to say why I was there, so I
Speaker 5: was trying to like, oh, my name's Jamie, and I'm
Speaker 5: interested in opening a California hot dog stand. And Mark
Speaker 5: was really interested in an idea. And it was a
Speaker 5: couple months of me kind of like dodging some emails
Speaker 5: of like I'm not going to do it. I never
Speaker 5: told them, but I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 3: Okay, So all right, I need to I got. I'm
Speaker 3: now conflicted because I have a great hot dog stand pivot.
Speaker 3: But also I want to ask you the second hot
Speaker 3: dog question, which is have you had Japa Dogs?
Speaker 5: No, I haven't had Japa dogs yet. I wanted to
Speaker 5: go because I know that there's like a bunch of
Speaker 5: there's some Vancouver.
Speaker 3: Is that right, Like I know, yeah, yeah, Canadian Canada codd.
Speaker 3: My my friend in Vancouver keeps insisting I eat it,
Speaker 3: and I refuse.
Speaker 5: I wanted to go to Vancouver and try it because
Speaker 5: like Northwestern hot dogs, there's like there's a lot going
Speaker 5: on there in a good way, Like Portland, Seattle, big
Speaker 5: fan of their hot dogs. Yeah, I didn't get to
Speaker 5: jack a dog. There are a few places. There was
Speaker 5: a place in Maine I really wanted to go to,
Speaker 5: but it was so on the side of the highway
Speaker 5: and open two hours a day that it was like
Speaker 5: it would be so logistically hard to be there. But
Speaker 5: working on it. Yeah, I want to go to jap
Speaker 5: a dog someday. I went to U. I got hot
Speaker 5: dog poutine in Montreal recently, which I guess is common
Speaker 5: a common poutine make.
Speaker 3: It was great.
Speaker 7: So now that you've dedicated I'm guessing multiple years of
Speaker 7: your life.
Speaker 5: Two years Yeah, ye, not getting those back.
Speaker 7: So I guess it's studying both hot dogs and like
Speaker 7: the cultural conditions that are created around them.
Speaker 3: Do you feel like a better person.
Speaker 16: Ooh?
Speaker 3: Or have you learned something extremely useful about American culture
Speaker 3: that will improve your life going forward.
Speaker 5: Thank you for two alternatives to the question. I said
Speaker 5: that knowing more about hot dogs didn't make me a
Speaker 5: better person. I think, I hope, And I also I
Speaker 5: think that like I don't know, it's like it feels
Speaker 5: better to or I don't know, like I enjoy my stuff.
Speaker 5: That it's like you can get to a really dark
Speaker 5: and serious place, but they seem so innocuous. It's like whatever,
Speaker 5: and getting Hansel and Gretel to come into your candy
Speaker 5: house and then being like, actually, it's sucking a murder city.
Speaker 5: Everyone's fucked in here. Like you're gonna have fun for
Speaker 5: a little while, the food is delicious, but then you're
Speaker 5: gonna die. Like I just I like, I like subjects
Speaker 5: like that and getting to I don't know, I've met
Speaker 5: genuinely when we had the book release show the other night.
Speaker 5: I've met so many nice people through the hot dog community,
Speaker 5: my my dog community. It's true. I had this guy
Speaker 5: I met in a parking lot in Culver City. He
Speaker 5: was a Wiener mobile driver at the time, and he
Speaker 5: like his yance. We talked on stage and he was
Speaker 5: reflecting on his Wienermobile heyday and he told me this,
Speaker 5: Oh I'm excited because at the time he was still
Speaker 5: working for Oscar Meyer and I was like, do people
Speaker 5: have sex in here? And he was like, I don't know, probably,
Speaker 5: but now he doesn't work for Oscar Myers. I was like,
Speaker 5: do people have sex in there? You have no loyalty
Speaker 5: at this point, and he was like, okay, well I
Speaker 5: never did. But there is like, there's like six seats
Speaker 5: in the waitermobile, and I guess on the back left
Speaker 5: it's called the meat seat. And that's where the fuck
Speaker 5: the meat seats. I know. It was really it was
Speaker 5: really shocking, and he's so sweet that it was really
Speaker 5: scary to hear it coming out of his mouth. So
Speaker 5: there is the meat seat. Anyways, I've made a lot
Speaker 5: of nice I've met a lot of nice people through
Speaker 5: hot dogs, and I've learned stuff I did not know.
Speaker 3: So fun.
Speaker 7: Well, you, you too can become a better person by
Speaker 7: purchasing the book Rock Talk wherever books are sold. One
Speaker 7: actual serious question, have they ever watched the movie Food Fight?
Speaker 10: No?
Speaker 5: Wait? When? When?
Speaker 16: Is it?
Speaker 7: From the twenty twelve computer animated movie starring starring supermarket
Speaker 7: food mascots that they and they unite to fight the
Speaker 7: generic brand food products in their grocery store. And there's
Speaker 7: a lot of really weird na see imagery, really uncomfortable
Speaker 7: like over sexualization and some of the most some of
Speaker 7: the most garish animation you've ever seen. It's a pretty
Speaker 7: wild movie.
Speaker 5: It was.
Speaker 3: It was a development for like it was like almost
Speaker 3: like a decade and a half.
Speaker 5: Evil Longoria, Hillary Duff, Oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Christer Lloyd plays Plays plays one of the villas.
Speaker 5: It is.
Speaker 3: It is one of the worst like acid trips of
Speaker 3: a movie, just just because of like it is just
Speaker 3: really bad.
Speaker 15: That is, I have zero records predominantly features hot dogs,
Speaker 15: so I can.
Speaker 5: I mean, hot dogs are certainly prominent on this post there.
Speaker 5: I'm just like shocked at them billing the starkest tuna
Speaker 5: above the twinkie. It doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 7: Also, there is there is there is a dog character
Speaker 7: who's just like Indiana Jones, but a dog that is
Speaker 7: also but also in a romantic relationship with a human woman.
Speaker 5: I don't want to know where the Nazi stuff comes in,
Speaker 5: but I am this is so wild because it's like
Speaker 5: I thought that sausage party was the worst thing to
Speaker 5: happen to this very scary genre, and it like, this
Speaker 5: is like.
Speaker 3: The dark side of Sausage Party.
Speaker 5: No, oh my hot. Oh, and there's a maybe there's
Speaker 5: a sequel Food Fight. It's about time.
Speaker 3: I've not heard of this.
Speaker 5: Oh oh, maybe this is fake. No, maybe this is fake.
Speaker 5: I hope it's fake.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 5: This is so ugly Holy no, it is.
Speaker 7: It is one of the worst movies ever ever made.
Speaker 7: It's it's it's it's garish, it's upsetting, it is weirdly fascistic,
Speaker 7: and it's also like primarily based around like brand promotion. Also,
Speaker 7: a lot of these big food companies like signed these
Speaker 7: contracts in the late nineties, and of course the film
Speaker 7: didn't come out until twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. There's a whole bunch of really weird,
Speaker 3: like Food Fight merchandise that was made with all of
Speaker 3: these brand mascots and it's all extremely questionable.
Speaker 5: That does explain the cast, yeah, because it was like,
Speaker 5: it's a late nineties cast to have Wayne Brady playing Daredevil,
Speaker 5: band Christopher Lloyd playing mister Clipboard, Chris Catan is in it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: this movie has been in the me for a long time.
Speaker 1: Wow, holy ship.
Speaker 3: Anyway, I was just wondering since it is.
Speaker 7: It is supermarket food hot dog adjacent, and it does
Speaker 7: does often draw draw draw parallels to Sausage Party, which
Speaker 7: is also obviously one of the most famous hot dog films.
Speaker 4: One of the most famous films.
Speaker 1: I have.
Speaker 5: I've been wearing them at the shows I have. They
Speaker 5: did make Halloween costumes for Sausage Party, and they have
Speaker 5: the bun that looks so visceral like the like it
Speaker 5: has like vagina mouse, and then they gave the bun
Speaker 5: huge boobs and a huge butt. Anyways, she's voiced by
Speaker 5: Kristin Wig and I have the costume and I've been
Speaker 5: wearing it.
Speaker 3: You have the actual costume, Yeah, I have.
Speaker 5: It's it's tonight.
Speaker 3: Oh god, you're.
Speaker 15: Wearing it for your book stuff?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I love a costume change, especially when it is also
Speaker 5: a jump scare.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah wow. Yeah, Well that's incredibly upsetting. That's about
Speaker 3: all the time we have today, though, Jamie. Where can
Speaker 3: people find the hot Dog book?
Speaker 10: Oh?
Speaker 5: You can find it all over the place, but I
Speaker 5: would recommend getting it from bookshop dot org if you're
Speaker 5: ordering online. It's a really cool website that will automatically
Speaker 5: purchase from your nearest independent bookstore and send it to you.
Speaker 5: So yeah, it's a pro labor book, so don't buy
Speaker 5: it from somewhere shitty, use your head, but yeah, get it.
Speaker 5: And there's also I also the audience book if you
Speaker 5: like many people have been telling me for the past
Speaker 5: couple of days, or like a book kind of a
Speaker 5: long podcast in a way, and it's like, sure, it
Speaker 5: feels great. It feels great to hear.
Speaker 3: And where can people find you on the internet and
Speaker 3: the stuff that you also do that's not the hot
Speaker 3: time book.
Speaker 5: Uh, bravely still on on Twitter at Jamie loftus help
Speaker 5: and Instagram at Jamie christ Superstar. And then you can
Speaker 5: listen to me on the Bechdel Cast every week on
Speaker 5: this very network.
Speaker 3: Well, I sure hope you cover food Fight in an
Speaker 3: upcoming episode.
Speaker 5: We just covered Sausage Party, and I think we both
Speaker 5: have PTSD, So.
Speaker 3: You have like a de talks period first.
Speaker 5: And then come back with food Fight and by the
Speaker 5: end be like, you know, Sausage Party.
Speaker 3: This is the one you do when the paperback comes out.
Speaker 5: Honestly nice, not the worst idea. I I do want
Speaker 5: to watch this movie now, but I like looking at
Speaker 5: the poster, I'm like, I don't know if I can
Speaker 5: watch it alone, but I will watch it.
Speaker 3: We can, we can surely plan something.
Speaker 5: Let's do it all right.
Speaker 7: Thank you, Thank you for coming on and talking about
Speaker 7: hot dogs and labor and all of all of your
Speaker 7: hard work. You can find us on cool Zone Media,
Speaker 7: on most of the Instagrams and twitters and other places.
Speaker 3: And happen here pod keep on dog dog doggin yep.
Speaker 7: Okay, as they say, as they say, yes, hello, welcome
Speaker 7: to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Recently, I
Speaker 7: just wrapped up a whole five episodes about the previous
Speaker 7: week of action to stop cop City in Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 7: In a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to shorten the running time
Speaker 7: of those episodes, I had to cut out many of
Speaker 7: the funny bits, jokes, gaffs, goofs, bloopers, and related tomfoolery.
Speaker 7: But as demonstrated by the police's massive mobilization to shut
Speaker 7: down a canceled comedy event in the woods on March seventh,
Speaker 7: the Wallani Forest and surrounding area of Atlanta are often
Speaker 7: home to manifestations of absurdist humor. There's been a lot
Speaker 7: of not great news recently, well there's kind of always
Speaker 7: a lot of not great news now that we live
Speaker 7: in an ever expanding hyperreality oversaturated with information. But I digress.
Speaker 7: I think it's just as important to not overlook the comedic,
Speaker 7: lighthearted side of things as it is to keep up
Speaker 7: with all of the doom and gloom that we usually.
Speaker 3: Platform on our show. So, without further ado, I present
Speaker 3: to you jokes from the Atlantist side.
Speaker 7: Note, I am now invoking Jester's privilege legally, everything we
Speaker 7: say in this episode is a joke as a as
Speaker 7: a little heads up. Okay, this episode will probably make
Speaker 7: more sense if you listened to the four part Week
Speaker 7: of Action series or the retrospective episode. But also I
Speaker 7: will do my best to pop in via this narration
Speaker 7: to help fill in any gaps so that listeners will
Speaker 7: not be completely lost if you've not listened to those
Speaker 7: other episodes. Anyway, we shall start by tuning back into
Speaker 7: my conversation with Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective
Speaker 7: as we discuss the March fifth police raid of the
Speaker 7: South River Music Festival. Welcome to it could happen here cast.
Speaker 7: I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 2: In World of Warcraft, you can shield bash.
Speaker 5: So.
Speaker 3: There's been this effort from police and media to frame
Speaker 3: these arrests as like these were arrests that happened at
Speaker 3: a crime scene, like these these arrests were people who
Speaker 3: were torching equipment, who were involved in all these actions,
Speaker 3: who were doing domestic terrorism. But all the rest that
Speaker 3: happened were at a music festival, Like they were in
Speaker 3: a completely different section of the forest.
Speaker 2: At a music festival, at the parking lot, even away
Speaker 2: from the music festival. And you know, police surveillance may
Speaker 2: be good, and they may have been able to pick
Speaker 2: out an individual or two, but for the most part,
Speaker 2: like you had something like two hundred people partake in
Speaker 2: this direct action and then disappear into the woods, there's
Speaker 2: really no way too And of course most of them
Speaker 2: were wearing block of some form.
Speaker 3: There's really no way much of that block, which has
Speaker 3: now been burnt and it's no longer existing in the
Speaker 3: physical material realm, so there's no way to like really
Speaker 3: tell who was there, and other than allegedly having mud
Speaker 3: on your clothes.
Speaker 7: Don't want to talk about what the war and were
Speaker 7: in the oddity of how the warrants were formatted.
Speaker 2: Once you started to listen to them, you noticed this
Speaker 2: very repetitive nature of them. And so about halfway through
Speaker 2: we get to a lawyer who straight up calls out
Speaker 2: the fact that these warrants seem like they were just
Speaker 2: copy pasted.
Speaker 3: Like every single person all the way downline. And one
Speaker 3: of the such claims the mud mud.
Speaker 2: So I don't know, I don't know how many festivals
Speaker 2: you've attended in your life, but I've been to a few,
Speaker 2: and they are never clean affairs.
Speaker 7: So it rained like one day before the night before
Speaker 7: the festival started, there was a tornado warning in Atlanta.
Speaker 7: I forgot about that, and there was rain, which makes
Speaker 7: I don't know if the prosecutors know this, but when
Speaker 7: rain mixes with dirt, it creates something called that we
Speaker 7: that we refer to as mud. My dock martins are
Speaker 7: still caked in mud. Future me cutting back in here
Speaker 7: for a sec. So for the record, I have since
Speaker 7: cleaned my dock Martins, but the mud was still on
Speaker 7: there for well over a month until I was forced
Speaker 7: to wash my shoes after I stepped in much much
Speaker 7: more mud while in the Tillamook Forest as I was
Speaker 7: failing to shoot Akeeltech, which yeah, that was that was
Speaker 7: probably my bad. These charges don't make any sense. There's
Speaker 7: no evidence these people committed any actual crimes, so they're
Speaker 7: just being charged with terrorism. This like nebulous concept. The
Speaker 7: judge said that the legal basis of these claims will
Speaker 7: have to be decided on another day. Similarly, they said
Speaker 7: that in regards to like actual evidence that these people
Speaker 7: charged did any crimes, she said that she had none
Speaker 7: of this, none of the She said that she had
Speaker 7: none of this evidence in front of her, and that
Speaker 7: evidence is for another day.
Speaker 3: So it's absolutely I think bonkers is an appropriate word.
Speaker 3: One of those one of those kangaroo court moments.
Speaker 2: It really my faith in the legal system was really
Speaker 2: solidified this day. There was also the threat of arrest
Speaker 2: for the New York Times reporter that happened forgot to
Speaker 2: mention that, So yeah, I'll leave that commentary by itself.
Speaker 7: They should have they should have charged Sean Keenan with
Speaker 7: domestic terrorism. Sorry for making fun of noted trans ally
Speaker 7: the New York Times. I promise it won't happen again.
Speaker 7: Wait wait, no, that's that's a lie. That there's at
Speaker 7: least two more New York Times jokes.
Speaker 3: In this script.
Speaker 7: Fuck, I guess let's talk about Monday, Monday, Monday, So, uh, don't.
Speaker 10: It is the editor?
Speaker 2: No, Daniel, Daniel, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3: He's not going to hear any of this ship. I'm
Speaker 3: because the way these work as I transcribe them and
Speaker 3: then I copy and paste sections, so they only move
Speaker 3: the section over.
Speaker 2: So when I when I say, ask Garrison about okay.
Speaker 3: So it turns out that was a lie. Daniel did
Speaker 3: need to hear that. So sorry, danel full full transparency.
Speaker 3: Most of those bleeps were me making horrible, horrible slurping
Speaker 3: noises into the microphone, as Daniel can probably attest. So
Speaker 3: really all of you should be thanking Daniel for suffering
Speaker 3: through those to bleep them out. Daniel died for your sins,
Speaker 3: I mean content truly, truly, braver than the troops.
Speaker 7: Insert joke. Anyway, back to me from the past. So
Speaker 7: let's talk about let's talk about Monday. I want to
Speaker 7: talk about the clergy event that happened in from a
Speaker 7: city hall, so city council meeting. You work for the
Speaker 7: Atlantic Community Press Collective. You've you've covered a lot of
Speaker 7: city council meetings in Atlanta before. This was my first
Speaker 7: time covering an Atlanta City Council meeting. Due to your
Speaker 7: know wisdom in this in this field, I would like
Speaker 7: for you to to discuss what happened at the city
Speaker 7: Council meeting and in relation to your to your to
Speaker 7: your years of experience in covering these these uh these meetings.
Speaker 2: So I city council meets every other week on Mondays.
Speaker 2: I cover several other committees, but uh, you know, the
Speaker 2: big one is always the city Council meeting. And over
Speaker 2: over the course of time, there there's like a cast
Speaker 2: of characters that that you just begin to understand are
Speaker 2: going to appear either every week or or from time
Speaker 2: to time. And you you had the pleasure of actually
Speaker 2: getting to see a few of these and I was like,
Speaker 2: there were we were there were a few of us
Speaker 2: media folks there, and I was actually really happy that
Speaker 2: like people got to experience this with me because I
Speaker 2: usually have to do it by myself. So you got
Speaker 2: to meet three of the characters. You got to meet
Speaker 2: Brother Hakim, you got to meet Rachel, and you got
Speaker 2: to be your favorite chef doctor.
Speaker 7: So this is just somebody who everyone refers to as
Speaker 7: chef Doctor. He is dressed up as what you can
Speaker 7: only describe as a chef doctor some wondering half of
Speaker 7: a chef's outfit, half of a doctor's outfit. He had
Speaker 7: a Freemason pin on his shirt, because of course he did.
Speaker 7: And I just like watched him for a while, because
Speaker 7: like initially in the city council meeting, they were just
Speaker 7: like handing out awards to, like the proclamation, the proclamations
Speaker 7: and awards to like various people, including like former city
Speaker 7: council members, like whatever. And then eventually public comments started,
Speaker 7: and I guess, let's let's talk about chef doctor so well, no,
Speaker 7: so for the entirety of the city council meeting. During
Speaker 7: the proclamations, in the back, in the back of the
Speaker 7: back of city Council, there was this large red like
Speaker 7: like heart just sitting sitting in the back.
Speaker 2: But it looked like Bob the Tomato from the it looked.
Speaker 3: That was exactly what I thought.
Speaker 7: I like, this heart, Like, why is there this Bob
Speaker 7: the Tomato ass heart mascot just sitting in the back
Speaker 7: of city council. No one was inside the costume. It
Speaker 7: was just like the heart sitting there next to like
Speaker 7: another massive heart made up of like flowers.
Speaker 3: I saw.
Speaker 7: I was kind of confused for why that was there.
Speaker 7: There was like a pediatric surgeon that got like one
Speaker 7: of the awards, and like, oh, maybe the heart's there
Speaker 7: because of like because of like heart surgery or something.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: No, No, that would make sense. And you have to
Speaker 2: you have to get out of that mindset for public
Speaker 2: comment for the most part.
Speaker 3: So then chef doctor gets ten minutes of public comment.
Speaker 2: So we should explain that mechanism. Everyone who signs up
Speaker 2: for public comment gets two minutes. You can award your
Speaker 2: time or give over your time to somebody else. So
Speaker 2: there were four other people who gave their time over
Speaker 2: to chef doctor to give him ten minutes, and he
Speaker 2: used all ten minutes.
Speaker 7: And so what was chef doctor trying to get out
Speaker 7: of the city? Why was he giving public.
Speaker 2: Heart So a shout out to chef doctor. Okay, like
Speaker 2: his Chef doctor wants to create a soul food museum
Speaker 2: in the West side of Atlanta, and and he's she's
Speaker 2: shown up a few times to kind of ask city
Speaker 2: council for money, and as far as I know, that
Speaker 2: has gone nowhere. But that was what he is ostensibly
Speaker 2: there for today. However, beyond just the heart, the dancing,
Speaker 2: we haven't got there yet. However, beyond just the big
Speaker 2: red heart, and like the paper mache flower heart, he
Speaker 2: brought a.
Speaker 7: Floutist, a floutest. So a floutist is someone who plays
Speaker 7: the flute. If you are like an uncultured person, who's
Speaker 7: who's who's listening to this? And he walked up to
Speaker 7: the microphone and then for five minutes he got a
Speaker 7: floutist to play a flute cover of amazing Grace.
Speaker 2: Yes, but but he had back muse from a laptop
Speaker 2: that just kind of appeared up nowhere, and so he
Speaker 2: played into the microphone.
Speaker 7: They played this funeral song as as this now heart
Speaker 7: that's been brought to life, it starts dancing.
Speaker 3: Starts dancing. So this person wearing like heart pajama pants
Speaker 3: changed into this hard question at some point. I didn't
Speaker 3: see them change into this. I don't know how this happened.
Speaker 3: I must have missed it.
Speaker 2: With City Council Magic.
Speaker 13: Next will be.
Speaker 2: Chef doctor Kenneth Wilhoyt.
Speaker 13: You'll have ten minutes due to yield in time.
Speaker 2: Chef, let's go ahead and get started.
Speaker 3: My name is.
Speaker 14: A chef doctor Kenneth Wilhoyd. I'm the president of the
Speaker 14: Soul Food Museum and the Soul Food University.
Speaker 17: We are celebrating a twentieth anniversary and we are asking
Speaker 17: for the City Council and an honorable mayor to get
Speaker 17: behind us and support us with donating a museum space,
Speaker 17: building and land with parking in the city of Atlanta.
Speaker 14: For our tourists that come here to have a place
Speaker 14: to come and experience our hospitality agriculture Service of Atlanta.
Speaker 14: I'm gonna sell quick prayer because I'm spirit lid. I
Speaker 14: do things by spirit. I'm at that age you know
Speaker 14: it's not about me, it's about the spirit. Now we'll
Speaker 14: have a song that was selected by the spirit of
Speaker 14: the ancestors, not by me, but by the spirit of
Speaker 14: the ancestors. I asked God to say, Hey, God, what
Speaker 14: songs should we introduce today? This is the one that was.
Speaker 3: But this, this guy in the heart costume walks up
Speaker 3: and he starts like kind of dancing to this float
Speaker 3: music for five minutes. Talk about the dancing.
Speaker 2: I don't think it was so much dancing as a
Speaker 2: swaying with a little bit of hand motion along with
Speaker 2: the swang.
Speaker 10: But like I.
Speaker 2: I wasn't expecting it.
Speaker 3: I thought some would like dosed me with hallucinogens.
Speaker 2: I did, actually I had. There were some streps of LSD.
Speaker 2: I put them in your water bottle when you went looking.
Speaker 3: This explained so much about what happened on Monday.
Speaker 2: No, it would make much more sense if that's what happened. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: Atlanta is a cartoon town and that's not what happened.
Speaker 2: This was real life.
Speaker 7: So this, this this float cover of Amazing Grace played
Speaker 7: for five minutes with along with the dancing Heart, and
Speaker 7: then we finally got to public comment for the reason
Speaker 7: for the reason for the reason for why we were there.
Speaker 7: Not only were we blessed with that stunning rendition of
Speaker 7: amazing Grace, the floutist himself was was briefly able to
Speaker 7: address the city Council before President Dave Shipman rudely, very
Speaker 7: very rudely called time amazing.
Speaker 3: It's such a sort that made the world.
Speaker 5: So that's.
Speaker 7: Okay, and we are back. And just as a note,
Speaker 7: I forgot to put this in the script, so I'm
Speaker 7: going to say it now. It turns out that that
Speaker 7: heart costume that was quote unquote dancing to the music
Speaker 7: that's actually rentable. You can rent that in Atlanta. So
Speaker 7: I I have some really good ideas for the next
Speaker 7: for the next week of action, since we could rent
Speaker 7: more more bouncy castles and also that hard costume. I
Speaker 7: think there's a lot of potential, extremely funny things that
Speaker 7: that could happen. Anyway, back to my conversation with Matt
Speaker 7: from the Atlantic Community Press Collective.
Speaker 2: There are a couple like things to note about how
Speaker 2: city council public comment works. City council doesn't tend to
Speaker 2: pay attention to them Oessensibly the only one who pays
Speaker 2: attention is City Council President Doug Shipman, because it is
Speaker 2: his job to call time and to call up the
Speaker 2: next person. But you know, city councilors will like step
Speaker 2: in and out of the room, get something to eat
Speaker 2: during the seventeen hours of public comment for cop city,
Speaker 2: like one of them held a press conference like it is.
Speaker 3: It is weird. How they're like legally allowed to not
Speaker 3: pay attention like that is that is bizarre.
Speaker 2: You would you would you would think that if you
Speaker 2: allegedly work for the people, like.
Speaker 3: You would you have to actually listen to them.
Speaker 2: So amongst the city Council. There are two in particular,
Speaker 2: I'm glad you got to see there. There's Mary Norwood,
Speaker 2: who represents Buckhead, and then there's Dustin Hillis, who is
Speaker 2: the the committee chair for the Public Safety Legal Administration Committee.
Speaker 2: So he's basically in charge of police here.
Speaker 1: Throwing molotov cocktails at officers and damaging millions of dollars of.
Speaker 3: Equipment, and he gives off that vibe and neither one
Speaker 3: of them will pay attention.
Speaker 7: They were, they were on their phone from almost the
Speaker 7: entire time I was there. The the the Buckhead woman
Speaker 7: gave off ontologically evil vibe. Like I I did not
Speaker 7: know like who she was when I went to the
Speaker 7: City Council, but once I saw her, I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 7: this person is like obviously evil, right, And I asked
Speaker 7: people about it afterwards, like oh, yes, that is a
Speaker 7: person that represents Bucket. I'm like, okay, yes, of course,
Speaker 7: of course, Bucket of course.
Speaker 2: Being the like primarily white neighborhood in North Atlanta, that
Speaker 2: part of it wan to secede from the city, and
Speaker 2: that's a whole, Yes, that is a whole another issue.
Speaker 2: But to kind of give context of what Buckhead is redlining.
Speaker 10: That's not a question, that's just a observation.
Speaker 2: And so sitting directly next to her is Dustin Hillis,
Speaker 2: who is known for not paying attention.
Speaker 3: Ever, except except they did both pay attention after public
Speaker 3: comment when police gave their testimony on what happened to
Speaker 3: the night previous, and then these two people were very engaged.
Speaker 3: We will hear more from Mary Norwood ontologically evil in
Speaker 3: a in a bit, but first I have to saw
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ fucking fuck Jesus. My cats are just running
Speaker 3: a muck all right.
Speaker 7: We will hear more from Mary Norwood ontologically evil in
Speaker 7: a bit, but first I have to I have to
Speaker 7: some of Councilman Antonio Lewis's response after Police Chief Darren
Speaker 7: Cherbaum gave his little presentation at City Council. Because I
Speaker 7: don't think I've ever heard January sixth, the Atlanta Way,
Speaker 7: and six Flags all get mentioned in the same sentence
Speaker 7: before they.
Speaker 16: Looked like January sixth. I ain't never seen police run
Speaker 16: from a group of people, and so the only thing
Speaker 16: I could think about when I saw that video. I
Speaker 16: saw it on atl scoop, the videos all out there.
Speaker 16: I've been seeing it all over and when I saw
Speaker 16: the police officers run, I mean I was a little nervous.
Speaker 16: When I saw the heat map, I saw one hundred
Speaker 16: people I saw, I saw it. I mean like that
Speaker 16: ain't the Atlanta wait, I mean, I ain't never seen.
Speaker 16: I'm just thinking about the At the same time, at
Speaker 16: six Flags, we had some young men that were fighting,
Speaker 16: some of our teenagers fighting at six Flags.
Speaker 3: They didn't run up on the police.
Speaker 16: They didn't run up on the police with molotail malor
Speaker 16: tail cocktails throwing to burn up stuff. What I will say,
Speaker 16: I thank you so much for last night for working.
Speaker 16: I want to really commend officers because y'all were under
Speaker 16: some immense pressure. And to not see a gun fire
Speaker 16: back because when I see the firecrackers, I'm from Cleveland Avenue.
Speaker 16: If they throw firecrackers at me, I don't know those firecrackers.
Speaker 16: I've never seen that. So I appreciate APD for doing that.
Speaker 7: Truly, truly a stunning admission, just just perfect. So I
Speaker 7: had to listen to Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum's testimony
Speaker 7: a few times for the five episodes that were released
Speaker 7: earlier this month, so I didn't really feel like fully
Speaker 7: listening through again to find any funny bits to put
Speaker 7: in this episode. So I just kind of like skimmed
Speaker 7: through while multitasking, and weirdly enough, I noticed that the
Speaker 7: chief said some pretty shocking things that I somehow just
Speaker 7: must have missed in my previous viewings. So I will
Speaker 7: play those for you now, and I will warn you
Speaker 7: it is. It is pretty disturbing. Like all the subjects
Speaker 7: we put on air, their statements do not reflect our
Speaker 7: opinions or the official position held by whatever current company
Speaker 7: owns this podcast. So yeah, like I said, well warning,
Speaker 7: these are shocking, but I will let the chief speak
Speaker 7: for himself.
Speaker 18: Take aggressive action against these officers, move to the front gate,
Speaker 18: more accelerant, inflict vitally harm upon them, launch illegal and
Speaker 18: criminal attacks to attack members of law enforcement, bring harm
Speaker 18: to our officers. These attacks are going to continue.
Speaker 7: Pretty pretty shocking stuff coming from a police chief to Jesus,
Speaker 7: But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Because
Speaker 7: to my surprise, after public COVID was over and all
Speaker 7: the news cameras left after I left, and you know,
Speaker 7: everyone left the building, it turns out Darren Sheerbaum gave
Speaker 7: a second testimony at the very end of the City
Speaker 7: Council meeting that I just completely missed until now, so
Speaker 7: I will warn you it is kind of leud in nature.
Speaker 7: So if you want to skip past lewd police conduct,
Speaker 7: just fast forward like a minute or two. But anyway,
Speaker 7: without further ado, here is the secret recently unearthed second
Speaker 7: testimony presented by Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum.
Speaker 18: Presidentship and members of the Council would like to brief
Speaker 18: you on events that transpired yesterday. I'm going to let
Speaker 18: the video play here. Why I walk through each of
Speaker 18: the situations. What you see here is of our partners
Speaker 18: at the Decab County Police Department, the Sheriff of Fulton County,
Speaker 18: as well as the Georgia State Patrol. We're seeing changing
Speaker 18: out of the clothes that they were wearing. They're going
Speaker 18: to position themselves when it appears to be an attempt
Speaker 18: to keep pursuing the officers. This is the officers see these.
Speaker 18: We had a rapid response from our partners as well
Speaker 18: as to change their clothing. Different groups were performing acts
Speaker 18: within the manner of their training and their discipline at
Speaker 18: this time. Our officers repositioning themselves inside of our partners.
Speaker 18: These officers had been stationary to ensure that they are
Speaker 18: being restrained. The officers are on city property and are
Speaker 18: positioning themselves and repositioned themselves to be prepared to go
Speaker 18: back in. Our officers are showing great restraint. They remained
Speaker 18: in a position. It's what you see here is a
Speaker 18: lieutenant that is discharging. We're very fortunate that that was
Speaker 18: the outcome, and I want to commend every man and
Speaker 18: woman on duty yesterday as they stood in the gap
Speaker 18: to do their job, those officers entered our partners, and
Speaker 18: what you see here, ladies and gentlemen, is as some
Speaker 18: of the individuals that had just previously had entered into
Speaker 18: those officers, they start changing back into the clothes that
Speaker 18: they were just wearing moments before. Just last night, officers
Speaker 18: of this department, as well as the Cab County to
Speaker 18: the Georgia State Patrol and the Sheriff's Department moved in.
Speaker 18: And I want to think of the men and women
Speaker 18: again of the Atlanta Police Department, the Georgia State Patrol,
Speaker 18: the Sheriff's Department, as well as the the Cap County
Speaker 18: Police Department for the professionalism that they demonstrated through the
Speaker 18: night and to the early hours of this morning while
Speaker 18: many of us were asleep, they continue to work through
Speaker 18: the night.
Speaker 16: I've never seen that, so I appreciate APD for doing that.
Speaker 10: I would have loved for every one of those very
Speaker 10: hysterical people that we've been sitting listening to for two
Speaker 10: or three hours to have seen an actual video of
Speaker 10: what really did happen. And there may be great reasons
Speaker 10: if the administration chose to do it this way, but
Speaker 10: our media is gone and all the people that needed
Speaker 10: to see this are gone.
Speaker 5: I'm glad that nobody was hurt and none of our
Speaker 5: employees were hurt yesterday.
Speaker 7: Oh boy, whoa uh well that was That was certainly
Speaker 7: something I did not did not want to know that
Speaker 7: much about what the the APD and their partners get
Speaker 7: up to after hours. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled comedic,
Speaker 7: James I know A. Sheerbaum was addressed with some questions
Speaker 7: by Unicorn Riot when he was trying to exit, which
Speaker 7: he then denied. He hea have a very frustrated face
Speaker 7: and then denied answering and promptly left the building.
Speaker 2: Well in the company of the New York Times journalist
Speaker 2: Oh with With with.
Speaker 7: A friend of the show Sean Keenan. So that was
Speaker 7: that was a That was most of Monday. Yeah, that
Speaker 7: is everything that happened on Monday.
Speaker 2: So what Monday evening I went home to start working
Speaker 2: on article. What did you do, Guaryson?
Speaker 7: I went to the Perham in the Woods. I got
Speaker 7: to share my memory of the veggie tails esther story
Speaker 7: starring the tickle monsters. I got to bond with a
Speaker 7: few expangelicals about that, so that was fine. Then there
Speaker 7: was an experimental noise show in the forest.
Speaker 2: And then you had a tragic neck injury on Monday night.
Speaker 3: So Tuesday, the.
Speaker 2: Group that we followed left out of the church and
Speaker 2: went to Norfolk Southern, which is one of the funders
Speaker 2: of APF and UH Friend of the Environment in Ohio.
Speaker 2: When they finished reading the letter, like all they asked
Speaker 2: was that the letter go to the CEO. Yep, And
Speaker 2: they denied that and all they had to do was
Speaker 2: accept it and and move on.
Speaker 3: But they while people were inside the security called ns Police.
Speaker 3: And if you're wondering, you're like, you know, NS Police.
Speaker 3: That isn't the city in Atlanta, what could that be?
Speaker 3: That is the Norfolk Southern Police, who are legally allowed
Speaker 3: to arrest people.
Speaker 2: And we we thankfully we avoided going to Norfolk Southern
Speaker 2: Police Jail, going to Norfolk Southern Court, which certainly would
Speaker 2: have been a very legitimate court, so.
Speaker 7: It would have been almost as legitimate as the real
Speaker 7: court that that the bail hearings happened at. That same day,
Speaker 7: after successfully evading Norfolk Southern Jail, Matt and I headed
Speaker 7: downtown for a march that was accompanied by a cadre
Speaker 7: of over one hundred officers. Pinning this crowd onto the sidewalk.
Speaker 3: Got a blocking the sidewalk like a Doorida State University
Speaker 3: canine unit. This blocking off the entire sidewalk next to
Speaker 3: a Fulton County Sheriff's vehicle. I like the cops are
Speaker 3: just also commanding the corporate media on where they can
Speaker 3: stand and the whatever like boomer journalist is with whatever
Speaker 3: like mainstream news. Helle and was very peeed off at
Speaker 3: this cop for telling you to get on the sidewalk.
Speaker 3: The next day, a smaller crowd met up at the
Speaker 3: same spot and broke off into little subgroups to walk
Speaker 3: around downtown Atlanta and hand out defend the forest leaflets.
Speaker 3: So all the little subgroups kind of meet up on
Speaker 3: on Andrew Jung and Peach Tree, right next to the
Speaker 3: Hooters and the hard Rock Cafe.
Speaker 7: To classic examples of atlanted food. There was an Atlanta
Speaker 7: swat vehicle parked outside of the Hooters. Fucking the fucking
Speaker 7: outside a fucking hard rock cast.
Speaker 3: So I can't keep picking up this copyrighted music.
Speaker 2: But there's a big.
Speaker 3: Atlanta Police swat vehicle parts on the block by the
Speaker 3: Atlanta Police Foundation head quarters. All right, there's actually a
Speaker 3: pretty decent number of people gathered here for the flywering
Speaker 3: event today. They're at the Peachtree and Young International Boulevard intersection,
Speaker 3: right across from the Hooters and the Hard Rock Cafe.
Speaker 3: There's a swat vehicle parks right behind us. There is about,
Speaker 3: I don't know, twenty to thirty officers stationed a little
Speaker 3: bit to our north. You know, normal police responds to
Speaker 3: people handing out flyers, just fifty officers and a swat team.
Speaker 3: Lieutenant Neil Welch approaches the crowd and gives them a
Speaker 3: dispersal order. They cross the street walk like a block
Speaker 3: north past some of the cops that are guarding the
Speaker 3: Wells Fargo building. At this point, people chatted the cops
Speaker 3: to quit your jobs. Quit your job, and one of
Speaker 3: the cops guarding the wells Fargo, says, that's actually good idea.
Speaker 5: You can always quit your job.
Speaker 15: That's actually sounded.
Speaker 3: Already tried.
Speaker 2: And he's like, I tried to and they wouldn't let me.
Speaker 2: But like, I don't like laughing, but that one got me.
Speaker 2: That one got me.
Speaker 7: The cop responded like, not in like a glib tone
Speaker 7: like he was, it was actually actually like yeah, that's
Speaker 7: actually yeah, that's actually a good idea.
Speaker 3: Extremely funny moment.
Speaker 2: While this is happening, Uh, there's another group who comes
Speaker 2: in to the side of Petree Center Mall and enters
Speaker 2: the mall to find Mayor Andre Dickens.
Speaker 3: Andre Dickens is like the head of some kind of
Speaker 3: like board or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah. There there are a couple of boards in Atlanta
Speaker 2: that stipulate the mayor is like the head of the board,
Speaker 2: and this is one of them. And it meets in
Speaker 2: Peatree Center Mall as one does. So the mayor is
Speaker 2: having a meeting in the mall office spaces, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of above the mall, and so so three Indigenous
Speaker 2: An activists along with Kamal Franklin arrive and they find
Speaker 2: the mayor. They enter the board meeting and they begin
Speaker 2: to read this letter from the Muscogie Nation aloud. Mayor Dickens,
Speaker 2: in true mayor fashion, bolts away from this, running through
Speaker 2: an exit door which is then like blocked by a
Speaker 2: guard which I think that has its own like set
Speaker 2: of legal issues, essentially just ignoring them over his shoulder.
Speaker 2: He calls out, I've got a copy of the letter
Speaker 2: and hides just completely trying to escape what is not
Speaker 2: a good look for him.
Speaker 7: This this is what we call a ted Wheeler moments.
Speaker 7: So as this happens, I think like like Apex Swat
Speaker 7: is deployed.
Speaker 2: They so Apex and Swat had had been elsewhere and
Speaker 2: they were called back to their vehicles like right before this,
Speaker 2: and then the activist exit and almost like in this
Speaker 2: very comical moment, after they get out in a way,
Speaker 2: squads of these special units start rushing into the building,
Speaker 2: of course, finding no one.
Speaker 7: Charlie Chapman asked, shit, truly, okay, even a more future
Speaker 7: version of Garrison here. Apparently I've been told by Daniel
Speaker 7: that his name is Charlie Chaplin. I don't know he's
Speaker 7: a pedophile. So whatever, Charlie not Daniel, oh boy, And
Speaker 7: I do want to say I did try multiple times
Speaker 7: to take Matt to the Hard Rock Cafe or the Hooters,
Speaker 7: either one, and he refused my offer multiple times, very
Speaker 7: very rudely. So at some point when I'm back in Atlanta,
Speaker 7: I will have to gather a troop of fanboys and
Speaker 7: head over to the Hooters anyway. Next was the Community
Speaker 7: Movement Builder's rally on the evening of Thursday, March ninth,
Speaker 7: which had fewer jokes that night, but there are a
Speaker 7: few embarrassing recording bloopers at the expense of my own ego,
Speaker 7: So I will play those for your amusement. You absolute
Speaker 7: seck Fox.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we'll start.
Speaker 3: It is a kind of raining.
Speaker 7: We'll see how many people show up and how how
Speaker 7: large the police response will be. In comparison, what could
Speaker 7: happen here?
Speaker 2: Well, it could happen here. A podcast by Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: We are at the site of the Martin Luther King Memorial.
Speaker 3: Did you see the two Sandy Springs police buses?
Speaker 2: I did see that, Sandy. I lived in Sandy Springs
Speaker 2: for a year and that brought back some memories. But
Speaker 2: yes to Sandy Springs police buses, Sandy Springs, of course,
Speaker 2: being mostly outside of the perimeter. A good A good
Speaker 2: drive from here. That's good, that was good. All right, hoggers,
Speaker 2: absolutely hoggers.
Speaker 3: The police police has has been stating, well, I'll never mind,
Speaker 3: I cut that. What am I saying? Big puddle on
Speaker 3: the street, demonstrating the city's commitments to infrastructure. That was
Speaker 3: that was a joke because the drawing was plumped. I
Speaker 3: accidentally turned off my my my recording by tripping on
Speaker 3: some stairs. They're so they're so close together, we're just
Speaker 3: they're just sandwiched in. Got a New York Times reporter
Speaker 3: standing in the middle of the street, of course, the
Speaker 3: only person allowed to stand in the streets the one,
Speaker 3: the one New York Times reporter. I would estimate almost
Speaker 3: about a kilometer, But I'm Canadian, so that's not very
Speaker 3: helpful to you, to you us listeners.
Speaker 2: The real outside agitators is Sandy Springs. Please. Yeah. The
Speaker 2: police were ready to mass rest the entire time. I
Speaker 2: don't know if you mentioned this. So in between the
Speaker 2: police line in front of the APF building and the
Speaker 2: protesters was essentially like a mixture of Copwatch and National
Speaker 2: Lawyers Guild and a CLU, because of course you had
Speaker 2: to have like both both legal observer factions just to
Speaker 2: make sure everybody's watching each other.
Speaker 7: Get you can watch energy, Get a westrested, who can
Speaker 7: watch acil you get arrested.
Speaker 2: It's turtles all the way down, legal observers.
Speaker 3: All the way down. Oh and we are back. That's
Speaker 3: that's great, all right.
Speaker 7: One of the stops on the tour of the Blondie
Speaker 7: Forest that Joe Perry was doing throughout the week was
Speaker 7: the area of the land swap between the former owner
Speaker 7: of Black Hall Studios, Ryan Millsap, and the Cabot County's
Speaker 7: Entrenchment Creek Park. So on one side there's this beautiful
Speaker 7: forested park that Ryan Millsap wants to trade for. Then
Speaker 7: on the other side is this massive amount of dirt
Speaker 7: that he currently owns, which is right next to Bouldercrest Road.
Speaker 13: That's a huge, huge dirt field that you see. And
Speaker 13: what happened is while that swap was being orchestrated, Blackhall
Speaker 13: was bringing thousands and thousands and thousands of dump truck
Speaker 13: loads of dirt and just filling it up, filling it up,
Speaker 13: filling it up, and somebody else is gonna have.
Speaker 2: To do the math.
Speaker 13: But I don't know if you say, like fifteen acres
Speaker 13: of dirt that is twenty feet plus high, how much
Speaker 13: dirt that is.
Speaker 2: It's a lot.
Speaker 13: It's not natural. It's not something that's helping this flood
Speaker 13: prone area. All that's gonna run into here, no matter
Speaker 13: how many silk fences you put up. So that's what
Speaker 13: they're calling Michelle Obama Park. That's exactly exactly right. If
Speaker 13: somebody needs to talk to Michelle and say, Nahu, you
Speaker 13: need to take your name off of that. And I
Speaker 13: don't know who who got away with that, but that's
Speaker 13: not it.
Speaker 2: You're seeing the most picturesque side of that piece of land.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you get gets the top worse.
Speaker 1: It's just it's just it's garbage.
Speaker 13: Well the thing, and it is literally garbage because a
Speaker 13: lot of this stuff, this dirt cave. You know, Ryan
Speaker 13: millsp has he is. He's not a movie mogul, He's
Speaker 13: he's a land baron. He's he's in real estate and
Speaker 13: he's made billions of dollars in real estate, and so
Speaker 13: that dirt comes from other properties. He's he's digging up
Speaker 13: a place on you know, a boulevard to put some
Speaker 13: apartments in. He's pulling dirt out of there. That's what's
Speaker 13: coming in here. That's dirt coming from all these other
Speaker 13: construction sites.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is not top soil.
Speaker 13: You can, and I believe me, I'm not saying I'm
Speaker 13: not making that up. I've been over there and I've
Speaker 13: walked and I've seen what's in there. I've seen water
Speaker 13: heaters in there. I've seen gutters in there, I've seen pipes,
Speaker 13: I've seen all kinds of crap.
Speaker 3: It's trash.
Speaker 13: It's a big trash mountain. That's what they want to
Speaker 13: have be Michelle Obama Park and hanging a hath So. Yeah,
Speaker 13: that's I just wanted you to kind of lay your
Speaker 13: eyes on what the county thought was a good idea,
Speaker 13: in what Black Hall thought. Of course, you know, Ryan
Speaker 13: Miller is a great idea for Ryan millsatt because the
Speaker 13: land that he acquired is worth way more millions more.
Speaker 13: It's now worth millions more than than when he made
Speaker 13: the swap. So he has made a lot of money
Speaker 13: on this swap, and that's why he's angry that he
Speaker 13: can't get his hands on it. Yet nobody knows what
Speaker 13: he's gonna do with it, because the original agreement between
Speaker 13: him and the county was that he was gonna build
Speaker 13: movie studios on that land. Well he can't now because
Speaker 13: he sold his rights to the movie studios to a
Speaker 13: company that's now called Shadow Box. They're the ones that
Speaker 13: owns his previous studios, so he can't have a rival
Speaker 13: company right across the street from them. So he hasn't
Speaker 13: said and nobody knows exactly what he's gonna do with
Speaker 13: the property if he wins this court case, and it's
Speaker 13: those forty acres, who knows. It's a mystery. So that's
Speaker 13: that's where that stands right now. Hopefully we win the lawsuit.
Speaker 13: If we do, he will be he will have to
Speaker 13: put the bill for repaving the path and redoing the
Speaker 13: parking lot and putting a new gazebo in. That's what
Speaker 13: the judge decreed. That's why they said we don't need
Speaker 13: a restraining order. All that is replaceable. So except for
Speaker 13: the trees that he tore down, you know those are
Speaker 13: going to take another seventy five years, but who's counting.
Speaker 7: The fate of Michelle Obama Park is still up in
Speaker 7: the air as of time of recording. So yeah, I'm
Speaker 7: excited to visit that if the landswap gets passed, almost done,
Speaker 7: we're gonna we're gonna briefly, briefly tap back into my
Speaker 7: conversation with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective and
Speaker 7: then unfortunately, our jokes must come to an end.
Speaker 2: I think one thing that's been lost in all of
Speaker 2: this too is all of the lighthearted events that have
Speaker 2: continued to gone through the week. And you know, we
Speaker 2: have this this, this youth rally or there's the youth
Speaker 2: rally that's happening on Saturday. Of course recording this beforehand,
Speaker 2: and like the joy of the movement that was represented
Speaker 2: in the Bouncy Castle rip which was first pointed at
Speaker 2: a rifle was pointing at and.
Speaker 3: We haven't talked about the gun, talk about the guns
Speaker 3: in the bouncy castle.
Speaker 2: So so one thing I think that that.
Speaker 3: We didn't mention.
Speaker 2: How can you forget about the guns and the bouncy castle.
Speaker 2: So when when the police came running up onto the
Speaker 2: tarmac at RCA Field where the bouncy Castle was, of
Speaker 2: course they had to point a rifle at the bouncy Castle.
Speaker 2: And if that doesn't show that police are not here
Speaker 2: to have fun and have joy. I don't know what
Speaker 2: what is I I don't know if anyone was in
Speaker 2: it at the time. I don't think so. I think
Speaker 2: they were literally just pointing a gun at an empty
Speaker 2: bouncy castle which they have they destroyed, and and I
Speaker 2: think we have to take a moment to mourn that.
Speaker 3: Did they destroyed or like deflate it? I think they destroyed.
Speaker 3: It wasn't like a rental or something.
Speaker 2: Yes, So rip bouncy house, you will be missed and
Speaker 2: all the joy that you represented. Uh, my girlfriend's texting
Speaker 2: me cringe.
Speaker 3: Let me let me check my my note my notes.
Speaker 2: In case Garrison doesn't cut this. Ask about Garrison's neck?
Speaker 1: What hmm?
Speaker 3: What what did you say?
Speaker 2: Ask about what Garrison did?
Speaker 3: Friday fire, burn Tower Saturday, Gresham Park Sunday, Monday noon Tuesday.
Speaker 3: All right, all right, okay, I'm gonna just gonna look
Speaker 3: through my other notes app because I keep my notes
Speaker 3: in three different notes apps because I'm normal.
Speaker 2: So one thing that's been notable, especially in how the
Speaker 2: police talk about the forest, is they've begun using like
Speaker 2: these these militarized terms, like the denial of operating area
Speaker 2: that we saw when Ryan millsap was important to Cap County.
Speaker 2: He said, the GBI told him to clear the area
Speaker 2: to deny operating space. And you know the use of terrorism,
Speaker 2: like there's there's some eerie parallels between the language that
Speaker 2: was used to describe insurgencies in countries that America is
Speaker 2: invading or the United States is invading, and a lot
Speaker 2: of that language, like the military equipment that was used
Speaker 2: there is has come home and it is now being
Speaker 2: used against Americans engaged in like these liberation struggles.
Speaker 3: I wonder where we've talked about that before.
Speaker 7: I don't know it happen where speaking of it is
Speaker 7: still happening. The last week, approximately five hundred people came
Speaker 7: out to City Hall as the city Council is now
Speaker 7: in the process of voting to approve public funds for
Speaker 7: the Cop City project. Nearly three hundred people signed up
Speaker 7: for public comment, with one hundreds more waiting in line.
Speaker 7: A public comment lasted seven hours, and during so not
Speaker 7: a single person voiced support of using taxpayer money to
Speaker 7: fund the police training facility. The Atlanta Community Press Collective
Speaker 7: have recently reported that the proposed city funds toward the
Speaker 7: Cop City project have ballooned to a minimum of fifty
Speaker 7: one million dollars, with the thirty million dollar package awaiting
Speaker 7: final vote in City Council, plus another at least twenty
Speaker 7: million dollar chunk to be given to the Atlanta Police
Speaker 7: Foundation via a quote unquote loan, which indicates that the
Speaker 7: Atlanta Police Foundation's private fundraising has not gone as well
Speaker 7: as they initially had hoped. For more on that, I'd
Speaker 7: recommend checking out The Press Collective's recent article from May
Speaker 7: twenty fourth, and you can also donate to them to
Speaker 7: support their continued reporting of the happenings in Atlanta.
Speaker 2: You can find us on Twitter at Atlanta Underscore Press.
Speaker 2: Our website is Atlpress Collective dot com, and you can
Speaker 2: find our Instagram at atl Press Collective. We have partnered
Speaker 2: with Open Collective. We are fiscally sponsored now by the
Speaker 2: Open Collective Foundation in a way to transparently fundraise in
Speaker 2: order to sustain our reporting. Everything up until actually the
Speaker 2: Week of Action, everything that we have done up until
Speaker 2: the Week of Action was all unpaid, and it is
Speaker 2: our desire to continue to grow with the movement, and
Speaker 2: so we were excited to find a partner in the
Speaker 2: Open Collective Foundation that can continue that sort of horizontal
Speaker 2: open in organizing that that we have done internally.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, I think I think.
Speaker 1: I think we're good.
Speaker 3: I think we have it.
Speaker 2: Good job team.
Speaker 3: Oh shit, I wasn't required.
Speaker 1: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 5: It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 5: Thanks for listening.