Speaker 1: Cool media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
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Speaker 3: Welcome to it could happen here a show, But thanks.
Speaker 3: Falling apart, I'm Garrison Davis today, I'm joined by James Stout.
Speaker 4: Hello, Hi, Gay, I'm excited to see what's falling UPOT today.
Speaker 3: Well, that's our elections, which have, as we all know,
Speaker 3: have been raged for as long as I can remember,
Speaker 3: which is kind of true considering when I was born
Speaker 3: circa the year two thousand oh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the famous, the great and democratic collection of to
Speaker 4: have in the United States.
Speaker 3: The flawless election of two Yeah. But no, we are
Speaker 3: going to be talking about Trump's continuing claims that the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty election was rigged and his investigation of election
Speaker 3: fraud in not just the twenty twenty election but also
Speaker 3: the twenty twenty four election, which if you recall, was
Speaker 3: not rigged against Trump, considering Trump won that election including
Speaker 3: the popular vote.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he won every way you could slice that up.
Speaker 5: A sweeping victory.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was a fatle for the Democrats.
Speaker 3: But a lot of the investigations into election fraud actually
Speaker 3: do revolve around the twenty twenty four voter roles, which
Speaker 3: we will discuss in a bit, But first let's go
Speaker 3: back a few weeks on Executive Disorder. I reported that
Speaker 3: Cash Brittel went on too Fox News a few weeks
Speaker 3: ago and announced that the FBI would soon be making
Speaker 3: arrests related to Trump's claims that the twenty twenty election
Speaker 3: was stolen, with Patel saying, as a conspiracy end quote,
Speaker 3: they tried to thwart our elections and rig the entire system.
Speaker 5: We got all the evidence, we've.
Speaker 6: Got all the effortens I can announce on your show
Speaker 6: that we've got all the information we need. We're working
Speaker 6: with our prosecutors, the Department of Justice and the Attorney
Speaker 6: General Todd Blanche and we are going to be making
Speaker 6: arrest and it's coming, and I promise you it's coming soon.
Speaker 3: Patel also claimed on Fox News, quote, we have the
Speaker 3: information to back President Trump's claims. About a week and
Speaker 3: a half later, the DOJ announced quote multiple aliens charged
Speaker 3: with illegally voting in federal elections.
Speaker 5: It's multiple, James, multiple.
Speaker 4: Well, okay, yes, we're looking at three.
Speaker 5: No, no more than three, more than three.
Speaker 7: Four.
Speaker 4: It was fun, fun for me, Okay, just for people
Speaker 4: who aren't familiar with the skired of the United States,
Speaker 4: it's that's not a statistically significant number. When it comes
Speaker 4: to electoral outcomes, generally, they are decided by several multiples
Speaker 4: of four.
Speaker 3: Usually, Yeah, Patel commented, quote Securing our elections from criminal
Speaker 3: actors here at home and around the world is one
Speaker 3: of the top priorities for this FBI. Non citizens voting
Speaker 3: is a federal crime, period, and while other administrations may
Speaker 3: have looked the other way in the past, those days
Speaker 3: are over. We will continue to work around the clock
Speaker 3: with our interagency partners to ensure those who engage in
Speaker 3: such conduct will not get away with it. So these
Speaker 3: arrests took place in New Jersey, and these quote unquote
Speaker 3: multiple aliens were four permanent residents who registered to vote
Speaker 3: and cast ballots in at least one federal election before
Speaker 3: applying for naturalization via the N four hundred.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, the N four hundred form has a section where
Speaker 3: it asks if the applicant has ever registered to vote
Speaker 3: or has voted in a federal, state, or local election.
Speaker 3: Three of the peace people charged in New Jersey checked
Speaker 3: no in the box asking if they had voted. The
Speaker 3: other left the box blank, but when later questioned by
Speaker 3: an Immigration Services officer at the us CIS interview, this
Speaker 3: applicant answered no that they did not or have not voted.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, interestingly, only two out of the four are actually
Speaker 3: charged with quote, voting by an alien in a federal election, okay,
Speaker 3: three are charged with false statements in relation to naturalization, yeah,
Speaker 3: and two are charged with procurement of citizenship or naturalization unlawfully.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, because I'm guessing the goal here would be
Speaker 4: to denaturalize them, right for.
Speaker 3: The people that were naturalized that that looks like that
Speaker 3: will that will be part of what they do going forward.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I know I've reported on this in NED before,
Speaker 4: but like large parts of USCIS have denaturalization targets right
Speaker 4: in the same way that we've seen deportation targets for
Speaker 4: ICE and CBPS. So like that will be the reason
Speaker 4: that though the specific charges. Right, that is the easiest
Speaker 4: way to denaturalize someone. I was going to say the
Speaker 4: only way, but I think there are technically other ways.
Speaker 4: But like the bulk of times you're going to see
Speaker 4: someone denaturalized, it's because they concealed previously, it had been
Speaker 4: that they had concealed like some loyalty to like like
Speaker 4: a terrorist group, right, or perhaps there are bars for
Speaker 4: like communists and Nazis, like like with capital letters. I'm
Speaker 4: not talking about the political affiliation. I'm talking about like
Speaker 4: being a member of a party with a party card there,
Speaker 4: and I'm not talking about it the view necessarily.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a whole other like tangent, there's there's back
Speaker 3: and forth rules. If you can really denaturalize someone for
Speaker 3: being a member of a communist party, still depends what
Speaker 3: they mean by communist party.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's kind of like a vague term.
Speaker 3: But the false statements in relation to naturalization, as in
Speaker 3: allegedly lying on the form by checking a box that
Speaker 3: conflicts with what the federal government is alleging, is a
Speaker 3: much more clear route to denaturalization. One of the people
Speaker 3: charged is a green card holder from Liberia who immigrated
Speaker 3: as a refugee in nineteen ninety eight, named David Newilli.
Speaker 3: He's currently seventy three years old. He allegedly registered to
Speaker 3: vote in New Jersey in two thousand and three and
Speaker 3: attested he was a US citizen. The complaint claims Nuelly
Speaker 3: voted by mail in the twenty twenty general election and
Speaker 3: submitted a provisional ballot in person on November fifth, twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four, for that general election next May. It's May
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five. Nuelly submitted a N four hundred claiming
Speaker 3: he had never voted in the US, but admitted to
Speaker 3: voting twice in the naturalization interview. Okay, he is charged
Speaker 3: with voting by an alien in a federal election and
Speaker 3: false statements. Yeah, those are the charges he's facing.
Speaker 4: That's interesting because he seems to clarified in the interview,
Speaker 4: right correct. I don't quite know how that works, but like.
Speaker 3: He did admit in the interview that he that he
Speaker 3: did vote, but they're still charging him with false statements
Speaker 3: based on the N four hundred.
Speaker 4: And it will be interesting to follow because it could
Speaker 4: be pretty hard to stick the landing on that given
Speaker 4: that he I mean, I guess technically what you put
Speaker 4: on the form is there's no take backs, I guess,
Speaker 4: But him using the interviewor to clarify it certainly seems
Speaker 4: like he's trying to do what's in the spirit of
Speaker 4: the things asking him to do. Yeah, there will be
Speaker 4: an interesting one to follow.
Speaker 3: This was also interesting because it shows the investigative capacity
Speaker 3: of the FBI. This guy admitted to that, Like, he
Speaker 3: admitted to this in the USCIS interview.
Speaker 5: The FBI did not like crack the case.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, like there, yeah, yeah, definitely, Yeah, he told
Speaker 4: he told the cops that he did it.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: When was his USCIS interview.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure when the interview was. He submitted the
Speaker 3: N four hundred in May twenty twenty five, okay, so
Speaker 3: Trump two, it would have been in late twenty twenty five. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this was at least with an last year.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. Some of those N four
Speaker 4: hundred is thing forever now totally. It's kind of interesting.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I'm just wondering to what extent previously, I
Speaker 4: don't actually know, to an extent previously USCAS would like
Speaker 4: refer people for prosecution.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that is that is a good question.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, now here here is August
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five. Okay, was when he was interviewed, according
Speaker 3: to the criminal complaint, relatively first turnaround.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wonder if that's just a part of the
Speaker 4: country he's in or whether that was because like they
Speaker 4: wanted to get in the office, right. And then I
Speaker 4: had to clarify or detain him because he had voted.
Speaker 3: And then in October, USCIS denied the application due to
Speaker 3: a lawful acts of voting in the twenty twenty and
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four elections and the false statement on the
Speaker 3: end of four hundred. Yeah, we will take an ad
Speaker 3: break here and then talk about the three other cases
Speaker 3: after these messages.
Speaker 4: All right, we are back.
Speaker 3: Iden Koresh, forty three years old, is a Green Card
Speaker 3: holder who immigrated from Israel on a B two visa
Speaker 3: in twenty fifteen. In twenty twenty one, Koresh allegedly registered
Speaker 3: to vote in New Jersey, asserting he was a US citizen,
Speaker 3: and voted in person in the twenty twenty two midterm election.
Speaker 3: Koresh later submitted an N four hundred and twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five based on his charges, I believe his citizenship was
Speaker 3: granted because he's charged with voting by an alien in
Speaker 3: a federal election and procurement of citizenship or naturalization unlawfully.
Speaker 3: A lot of these criminal complaints are quite short, around
Speaker 3: seven pages, okay. Jasynthic Zoom is a seventy.
Speaker 4: Year old Green card holder who.
Speaker 3: Has lived in the US since two thousand after immigrating
Speaker 3: from Jamaica. She allegedly registered to vote in twenty eighteen
Speaker 3: and voted by mail in the twenty twenty general election.
Speaker 3: She submitted an N four hundred and twenty twenty one
Speaker 3: and was granted citizenship based on what the DOJ is
Speaker 3: calling false statements. She's charged with two counts of false
Speaker 3: statements in relation to naturalization.
Speaker 4: Two counts would be I guess, registering to vote and voting.
Speaker 3: She's oddly one of the ones who's not actually charged
Speaker 3: with voting in a federal election. She's just charged with
Speaker 3: two false statements. This is I think one in the
Speaker 3: interview and the other on the end.
Speaker 4: Four hundred Oh okay, yeah, that can make sense to Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's interesting they didn't charge Maybe, like I guess they're
Speaker 4: like eyes on the prize, trying to denaturalize someone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, but like a big part of the
Speaker 3: FBI's messaging in this is, you know, we found people
Speaker 3: who illegally voted, but half of the people here aren't
Speaker 3: actually charged with that, and I don't quite know why.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's theoretically possible to charge could be added later,
Speaker 3: but at least in the original criminal complaints issued when
Speaker 3: DJ made the announcement, Egzoom is not actually charged with voting,
Speaker 3: even though even though the criminal complaint says that she did,
Speaker 3: but it's not one.
Speaker 4: Of the charges. Yeah, the normal pattern with federal charges
Speaker 4: is to have a lot of charges, and like most
Speaker 4: of these federal cases will end in plea bargains, right
Speaker 4: because the exposure is so high. So yeah, it's interesting
Speaker 4: that that's not there when normally the patents to put
Speaker 4: as much as you can in front of the person
Speaker 4: so that you end up with a plea vargain.
Speaker 3: This last guy is also not charged with illegally voting
Speaker 3: in a federal election. Being a done Vig is a
Speaker 3: thirty three year old Green card holder who immigrated from
Speaker 3: India in twenty twelve. He's alleged to a registered to
Speaker 3: vote in twenty sixteen and subsequently voted in person for
Speaker 3: the twenty sixteen general election, and then by mail in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty. Vig later submitted an end four hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three, but he only faces one charge, procurement
Speaker 3: of citizenship or naturalization unlawfully.
Speaker 4: So again, a lot of these charges.
Speaker 3: Even even though the criminal complaints allege a lot of
Speaker 3: the same stuff, the actual charges vary greatly, and it's
Speaker 3: it is unclear why exactly that is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think different. They're all in New Jersey, all
Speaker 4: New Jersey, say same years, say it tourney, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's it's interesting. It'll be interesting to follow those cases
Speaker 4: as well. Like I know, like I said that they
Speaker 4: have some sort of denaturalization targets, so whether they're just
Speaker 4: focusing their energies on that. It could be a case.
Speaker 4: So it could be something to do with the specifics
Speaker 4: of that crime that I just don't know about. Voting
Speaker 4: will not as citizen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there could be some prosecutorial reason that they aren't
Speaker 3: pursuing it in certain cases but are in others.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And they're all alleged to voting in federal elections, right,
Speaker 4: that's yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: In at least one federal election, either presidential, general, election
Speaker 3: or midterm general election.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And New Jersey does not have like local election voting
Speaker 3: for non citizens.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: A few days before Patel announced the arrests on Fox News,
Speaker 3: the Department of Justice sent a letter to the chief
Speaker 3: election official for Wayne County, Michigan, demanding Wayne County hand
Speaker 3: over all ballots from the twenty twenty four election. The
Speaker 3: letter said that DOJ and its Civil Rights Division is
Speaker 3: authorized to investigate and prosecute individuals who may have registered
Speaker 3: to vote or voted in violation of US law. The
Speaker 3: letter included three instances of recorded allegations and convictions in
Speaker 3: Wayne County in quote unquote recent years related to voting fraud.
Speaker 3: This pushed by the DOJ to get their hands on
Speaker 3: ballots or voter rolls is part of a much larger pattern.
Speaker 3: In January, during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, one of
Speaker 3: the demands from now former Attorney General Pambondi during negotiations
Speaker 3: with Governor Tim Walls was for the DOJ to be
Speaker 3: granted access to the state of Minnesota's voter roles quote
Speaker 3: to confirm that Minnesota's voter registration practices comply with federal
Speaker 3: law unquote. Trump's DOJ has actually sued over thirty states
Speaker 3: for not complying with requests to gain access to their
Speaker 3: voter rules. Cases against Arizona, Massachusetts, Rhode Island have been dismissed,
Speaker 3: as have cases in California, Michigan, and Oregon, but the
Speaker 3: DOJ is appealing those rulings. At least fifteen states have
Speaker 3: complied or said they will comply with requests by handing
Speaker 3: over voter registration lists, including driver's license and social security numbers.
Speaker 3: These are largely red states Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma,
Speaker 3: South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming. In a
Speaker 3: March hearing in the case against Rhode Island to gain
Speaker 3: access to their voter rules, Eric Neff, the acting chief
Speaker 3: of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of
Speaker 3: the DOJ, said that after receiving the voter rules quote,
Speaker 3: our intention is to run this against DHS's SAVE database unquote.
Speaker 3: That's the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement database here eause.
Speaker 3: If don want to briefly explain what this database is
Speaker 3: and how it's used.
Speaker 4: In very basic terms, it is a database, so you
Speaker 4: have like everified. Right, will be an example of a
Speaker 4: DHS database that employers can use to check if somebody
Speaker 4: is able to accept employment legally in the United States.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: Save is there for government agencies, not individuals, and they
Speaker 4: should be able to determine whether or not somebody is
Speaker 4: eligible for certain benefits.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: There are things called public charge rules. If people want
Speaker 4: a more in depth explanation of public charge rules, you
Speaker 4: can scroll all the way back to November twenty twenty
Speaker 4: four when I made a podcast about these things. We
Speaker 4: looked at a number of tools that the Trump administration
Speaker 4: might use to try and deportantly naturalize people in a
Speaker 4: podcast episode back then. The problem with these databases is
Speaker 4: they're not very good. The most obvious and amusing examples
Speaker 4: of Verify not being very good when state agencies hire
Speaker 4: cops who DHS claims are not legally able to work
Speaker 4: in the United States and then the state agencies point
Speaker 4: out that they used Everify, which is DHS's own tool
Speaker 4: for verifying, and then everyone gets quiet and wonders like,
Speaker 4: who screwed up here?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 4: Because they have done their obligation right, large employers have
Speaker 4: to use everify the same is true, I imagine for
Speaker 4: SAVE right in that it is not a database which
Speaker 4: is perfect, and so running one against the other. Also
Speaker 4: that the phrase running here is doing a lot of work, right,
Speaker 4: Like are they going to look for name matches? Are
Speaker 4: they going to look for Social Security number or driver's
Speaker 4: licensed matches? Certain non citizens will have what's called an
Speaker 4: iti N on SSN. There are a lot of ways
Speaker 4: which this could go horribly wrong. There's a reason that
Speaker 4: these two databases are not normally combined. Not to mention
Speaker 4: the fact that this provides a really large disincentive for
Speaker 4: people a signing up for benefits, right, which we've already
Speaker 4: seen just the rhetoric from the Trump administration in the
Speaker 4: campaign provided a disincentive for people accessing benefits, but also
Speaker 4: for people registering to vote, right Like, Yeah, people who
Speaker 4: are of diaspora communities, whether or not they are citizens,
Speaker 4: will be concerned about this. And that is not a
Speaker 4: that it's not an unconscious side effect. I'm sure, right,
Speaker 4: that is something that they are extremely aware of as
Speaker 4: they go forward doing this.
Speaker 3: The Court raised concerns about SAVE and said that there
Speaker 3: has been reporting of people being falsely identified as non
Speaker 3: citizens in SAVES database. But Eric Neff responded that according
Speaker 3: to the DHS, the accuracy rate of the SAVE database
Speaker 3: is one hundred percent.
Speaker 4: So I'm sure that's fine. That's just no database of
Speaker 4: the skills it.
Speaker 3: No, that's just mathematically impossible, Like it's yeah, ninety nine
Speaker 3: percent and one percent are like vastly, vastly different.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it's worth noting that, like in Trump's one
Speaker 4: of his early executive orders, like like Spring of twenty five,
Speaker 4: the one about preserving the integrity of American elections, part
Speaker 4: of what he asks them to do there was to
Speaker 4: overhaul SAVE and make it like a a single source
Speaker 4: citizenship verification yeah database, which it is not, and it
Speaker 4: is still not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's there's there that is that push from
Speaker 3: the executive order a few months ago to create like
Speaker 3: state citizenship lists.
Speaker 9: M h.
Speaker 4: Yeah. They've tried to go a number of ways about this, right.
Speaker 4: They also the fall of last year, the integrated SAVE
Speaker 4: with the with the passport database. I think most people
Speaker 4: will be aware that there are millions of American citizens
Speaker 4: who don't have passports for instance, right. Yeah, they've added
Speaker 4: some other stuff, right, but the idea here is to
Speaker 4: create like and it should worry everyone, right, Like, this
Speaker 4: is a citizenship database that they will then attempt to
Speaker 4: combine with their biometric databases. I'm sure, and we've seen
Speaker 4: this with like the the name of the android app
Speaker 4: is eluding me. Now there's an android app that ICE
Speaker 4: officers have which is supposed to verify someone's status based
Speaker 4: on a facial recognition scan. We know it doesn't work
Speaker 4: because there was one, for example, one lady who was
Speaker 4: scanned twice. Each result returned it different. Yeah, neither of
Speaker 4: which was her. This stuff is extremely dangerous for anyone, right,
Speaker 4: Like you'd be a citizen or a non cenizen. The
Speaker 4: idea that they're going to check you against like the
Speaker 4: list of legit Americans should really worry people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and unable to pass the Save Act in Congress.
Speaker 3: Not to be confused for the same database, though they
Speaker 3: are slightly related. Yeah, but unable to pass that in Congress.
Speaker 3: The Trump signed executive order last March attempting to force
Speaker 3: the Postal Service to not deliver mail in ballots if
Speaker 3: the voter on the ballot does not appear on this
Speaker 3: newly created list of pre approved voters using this state
Speaker 3: citizenship list. Yeah, we'll see if that actually goes through,
Speaker 3: but that it's another example of them, you know, trying
Speaker 3: to trying to use state citizenship lists to just crack
Speaker 3: down on the number of people that are able to vote.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we can all imagine that this will have different
Speaker 4: impacts across different demographics, right, and that is very much
Speaker 4: not accidental.
Speaker 3: And the last thing for the voter roles in Fulton County, Georgia,
Speaker 3: and Maricopa County, Arizona, the federal government has simply seized
Speaker 3: voting records. In Arizona, the FBI successfully subpoena twenty twenty
Speaker 3: election records from Maracopa County, and in Georgia, the FBI
Speaker 3: rated election warehouse in January after dubiously obtaining a search warrant.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Then on May sixth, a federal judge ruled that the
Speaker 3: federal government can keep the twenty twenty election materials that
Speaker 3: were seized in that raid, even if quote, the seizure
Speaker 3: in this case was certainly not perfect.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Maricopa County's an interesting one, right, Like, but I think
Speaker 4: it's part of a grand jury investigation. Yes, yeah, I
Speaker 4: can remember at the time, and there's a twenty twenty election,
Speaker 4: like Maricopa County's results being somehow contentious, the State Center
Speaker 4: did their own investigation into that, like several entities have.
Speaker 3: Right, the details of that investigation is in part what
Speaker 3: was the target of the grand jury subpoena.
Speaker 4: Okay, not so much Maracopa County, but a number of
Speaker 4: Arizona counties were really important in the results of the
Speaker 4: twenty twenty election. Right, there was a massive effort for turnout.
Speaker 4: I personally know people in indigenous communities who literally traveled
Speaker 4: for the entire day to vote. The indigenous turnout, especially
Speaker 4: Indigenous women in Arizona, really did make a big difference
Speaker 4: in the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 3: And Americopa County is the like by population, the biggest county.
Speaker 4: Americopa County is fast. A number of other like Arizona counties,
Speaker 4: like outside Americopa, were also really pivotal in twenty twenty elections.
Speaker 4: It's not surprising to see those ones being tied, Like
Speaker 4: it wasn't surprising to me the time to see them
Speaker 4: being targeted. You know, Yeah, americop is where Phoenix is
Speaker 4: just for people to put it on the map, famous
Speaker 4: for having really great law enforcement over the years, Joe
Speaker 4: Opio was America do you share if.
Speaker 5: You Oh, yes, ah, last from the past.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, not so often. Isn't he like doing some
Speaker 4: running for office or something? I thought he.
Speaker 3: Was was he was for a bit. I have not
Speaker 3: thought of Joe Opio for a few years though.
Speaker 4: What a life to lead. Yeah, it's been a while.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: Joe Opio born innineteen thirty two.
Speaker 2: That's that's wild.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he can't be even for the United States even cheritocracy.
Speaker 7: A little, Yeah, but no.
Speaker 3: Trump does continue to truth claims about Fulton County on
Speaker 3: his On his account of a few nights ago, he
Speaker 3: put out a video of the election board. The video
Speaker 3: was edited to appear as if it was implying that
Speaker 3: there was voter fraud or that the elections were conducted improperly,
Speaker 3: and when that was not what the video is actually
Speaker 3: actually showing. But he has his truth a lot after
Speaker 3: the raid. That to watch out for the results of
Speaker 3: the of the Fulton County election raid and now federal
Speaker 3: judges letting the fence keep the materials that they seized,
Speaker 3: even if it was in the judge's own words, certainly
Speaker 3: not perfect.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think Fulton County plays a load bearing role in
Speaker 4: the in maga understanding of the twenty twenty election, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Trump, So that is where he got the
Speaker 3: mugshot taken right like this is like he is, Oh,
Speaker 3: I've forgotten about that personal vendetta against Fulton County.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense. Up Pier by
Speaker 4: the way, did run for mayor of Fountain Hills in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four. Oh my god, yeah, just eight years
Speaker 4: before it's underdth birthday. What a country. Oh, it's incredible
Speaker 4: he did. He received whopping one five and twenty seven
Speaker 4: votes in the primary election. It's a thousand people who
Speaker 4: thought the best hope we have is someone who is
Speaker 4: approaching Sheriff Joe at nearly a century of age.
Speaker 5: Remarkable well with age, cubs wisdom.
Speaker 4: Yeah, up to a point.
Speaker 5: That doesn't for us today at a good half of
Speaker 5: the year.
Speaker 3: We will keep a lookout for any more any more
Speaker 3: arrests by Patel, who claims to have all the evidence
Speaker 3: he needs, even though he only arrests so far is
Speaker 3: just a fill people from New Jersey and then I
Speaker 3: think one other person from Pennsylvania. Yeah, it was arrested
Speaker 3: like in March. Again because the actual number of voter
Speaker 3: fraun this country. Is it's minimal, according to according to
Speaker 3: all investigations we've seen so far, very low.
Speaker 4: It's statistically insignificant.
Speaker 3: Yes, very low, to the point where it's statistically insignificant.
Speaker 3: I think if you're going to be conserned of an
Speaker 3: election rigging looking at the way that partisan jerrymandering has
Speaker 3: been completely completely allowed to go through and gerrymandering over
Speaker 3: districts that were protected by the voting right, Zach.
Speaker 4: Look at what that is. Polling places are. Look at
Speaker 4: the like the electoral college exists to be in between
Speaker 4: the popular vote and the result of the of the election. Right,
Speaker 4: there are there are many things which distort the will
Speaker 4: of the people. Non citizens voting is not statistically significant
Speaker 4: in that, like, it's just not. But this will have
Speaker 4: a real electoral outcome, or is I guess because it
Speaker 4: will dissuade people from voting. It will dissuade people who
Speaker 4: have become US citizens from voting. It will dissuade people
Speaker 4: who were born as US citizens.
Speaker 3: And they could be pursuing charges against election officials in
Speaker 3: some of these states, and like that is part of
Speaker 3: trying to seize these these ballots and voter roles is
Speaker 3: not just to charge the possibly for people who may
Speaker 3: have illegally voted, but then trying to put some of
Speaker 3: the blame on election officials themselves. And yeah, and that
Speaker 3: is modi of intimidation is certainly part of the goal here.
Speaker 3: And that's written explicitly in some of these executive orders
Speaker 3: threatening charges against US officials for allowing certain mail in
Speaker 3: votes to be to be counted. Yeah, when the Trump
Speaker 3: administration claims that they should not be.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The nascence of this whole thing is Trump's calls
Speaker 4: to electoral officials in Georgia, right, like the Fulton County,
Speaker 4: the whole Yeah, fine, by find those votes. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: where it all began.
Speaker 3: So yeah, we'll keep up on this as it develops
Speaker 3: leading into the midterm election.
Speaker 4: But bye bye for now. Yeah, but early vote often, voter,
Speaker 4: early vote often. Hello and welcome, Dick. Could happen here
Speaker 4: a very special episode today because I am lucky enough
Speaker 4: to be joined by Molly Kong.
Speaker 9: Hi.
Speaker 10: Molly, Hi, James, thanks for having me. I'm excited to
Speaker 10: hear about today's topic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, today's topic is buffalo. If if it's just came
Speaker 4: up on your phone without you clicking it, So I guess, look, buffalo.
Speaker 4: When people imagine the great planes before European colonization, I
Speaker 4: think buffalo are the fauna that they particularly imagine being present.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 10: It's such a romantic image, right, and they're gone now,
Speaker 10: but they were one so many. Like every time we
Speaker 10: drive through southwest Virginia. I'm in central Virginia, So when
Speaker 10: we drive through southwestern Virginia, my husband always brings up
Speaker 10: this account that he read of someone witnessing the buffalo
Speaker 10: stampeding through the Cumberland Gap.
Speaker 4: Like we're oh wow, yeah, right.
Speaker 10: Down on the tip of southwestern Virginia and just looking
Speaker 10: at that place and imagining buffalo there, like you have
Speaker 10: to romanticize it.
Speaker 5: That's incredible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's sick. One of the coolest like American experiences
Speaker 4: I've ever had, Maybe seven or eight years ago, now,
Speaker 4: I was bike packing in the Colorado Wyoming border up there,
Speaker 4: and I was with some friends. We've been like maybe
Speaker 4: we're like three or four days in, you know, like
Speaker 4: where you kind of hit the sweet spot at that
Speaker 4: point when you like have it showered for that long
Speaker 4: and you're just kind of disconnected from the world, that's
Speaker 4: when it starts to get Molly's making a face fun.
Speaker 5: You can't see just four days of human stink, it
Speaker 5: really starts to get good.
Speaker 4: That's when it gets good because you're just like, that's
Speaker 4: how long it takes to disconnect, right, somethoking at your
Speaker 4: phone and like worrying about not smelling the.
Speaker 5: Stuff, becoming a beast of the outdoors.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you just returned to your feral self. I'd like
Speaker 4: to return to my feral self as often as possible.
Speaker 4: But we're like riding. I get where we're going at Walden.
Speaker 4: Maybe we're coming off this big plateau dropping into this
Speaker 4: big kind of like where it gets kind of more plane,
Speaker 4: e big big kind of meadow plane. And we're coming
Speaker 4: down there and it's a few of us and these
Speaker 4: buffalo just come like from the side of us, and
Speaker 4: they're running alongside us, right, and we're riding and we're cooking,
Speaker 4: going twenty twenty five miles an hour or something like that,
Speaker 4: and these buffalo are just cruising next to us because
Speaker 4: they're just trying to get like trying to check out,
Speaker 4: like what are these weirdos doing? And they're just like,
Speaker 4: why the fuck would you put all your stuff on
Speaker 4: a bicycle? And go ride around like this and then
Speaker 4: we're like, oh, it's a fucking buffalo, and like for
Speaker 4: like maybe a mile, they just kind of wanted to
Speaker 4: keep this thing that they just wanted to keep tabs
Speaker 4: on us as we're going down this dirt road and
Speaker 4: then like they were getting really close, right, so they're
Speaker 4: like kicking up all this dust, and you got to
Speaker 4: feel like you are like almost one of the buffalo.
Speaker 4: You know, you're in the herd traversing the planes.
Speaker 5: I think you're supposed to keep your distance from them, right, Yeah,
Speaker 5: they were.
Speaker 4: We didn't have many choice at that point. Yeah, when
Speaker 4: they're like, do not approach. Yeah, they were approaching us.
Speaker 4: We didn't stop. I was like pretty pretty keen on
Speaker 4: not stopping. And Molly is right.
Speaker 5: They look so pettable, but they're really not.
Speaker 4: They're really Yeah, despite their fluffy appearance. It's it's advised.
Speaker 4: Like any time in the Yellowstone pretty much, especially in
Speaker 4: these summer months, you will find a video tourist approaching
Speaker 4: a buffalo and regretting that scision pretty big. I've been
Speaker 4: going by a bowl before and I would like to
Speaker 4: keep it to one. Going for me.
Speaker 5: One is all most people get.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it is. I was pretty let me tell you,
Speaker 4: I thought that one was all I was going to get.
Speaker 4: I was I was ready to make my peace of
Speaker 4: the world. Luckily I got a second chance.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: People kind of focus on a buffalo, right, They ignore
Speaker 4: many of the other species that we lost during dis
Speaker 4: intent period of ecological destruction, right, And I can see why. Really,
Speaker 4: you can find images of piles of dead buffalo skulls.
Speaker 4: There's that really haunting image of the idea of killing
Speaker 4: animals only for their capes or their tongues. Often this
Speaker 4: period of genocidal violence is referred to as a buffalo genocide,
Speaker 4: and I think that encapsulates, right, not just the destruction
Speaker 4: of the buffalo population, but also of the indigenous cultures
Speaker 4: that relied on that buffalo population and of the ecology
Speaker 4: they went with. Obviously, when I say destruction, I'm not
Speaker 4: saying they've gone very much till here till present, but
Speaker 4: the attempt by the government and capitalism to remove those
Speaker 4: people from that land. But yeah, it is a shame
Speaker 4: that these other animals don't get a fat shake. Have
Speaker 4: you ever seen a blackfooted ferret?
Speaker 10: When you said there was going to be something about ferrets,
Speaker 10: I was thinking about it, and I realized all domesticated
Speaker 10: animals were wild animals, and it never occurred to me
Speaker 10: that a ferret could live outside.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a ferret thrives in the outdoors. I really wanted
Speaker 4: to have ferrets when I was younger, Like I enjoyed
Speaker 4: the presence of ferrets. I enjoyed working with ferrets.
Speaker 5: Oh, he's kind of cute in a way.
Speaker 4: He's gross. The ferrets are very sweet. Yeah, we had
Speaker 4: we had friend with ferrets growing up, so we would
Speaker 4: use them to They use them to catch rabbits in
Speaker 4: the UK, right. Oh. Yeah. The reason that these guys
Speaker 4: struggle to get back on the landscape is because they
Speaker 4: need massive prairie dog towns to feed of.
Speaker 5: Oh do they live in like societies? Do they live
Speaker 5: like a prairie dog's? So the ferrets live in like
Speaker 5: ferret villages.
Speaker 4: The ferrets predate the prairie dogs.
Speaker 5: But do they live in like a village.
Speaker 4: I don't know if they live in like I don't
Speaker 4: know what their social structure is. In Colorado, there's a
Speaker 4: National Blackfooted Ferret Center where you can go and see them.
Speaker 4: I've cycled past it, but I regret not going in
Speaker 4: maybe I'll make a special trip reach out if you're
Speaker 4: with the ferret people.
Speaker 5: Sorry, I said, he looks gross.
Speaker 4: Yeah, please don't counsel us, because the prairie dog towns
Speaker 4: can collapse, right, really, their populations can collapse pretty easily.
Speaker 4: They get like infecta's disease is so they need like
Speaker 4: a massive number of prairie dog towns in order to
Speaker 4: have a sustainable genetically these ferret population.
Speaker 5: Oh, I get it, I get it.
Speaker 4: And because we don't have those right, because they are
Speaker 4: not generally amenable to agriculture, and then the ecosystem is
Speaker 4: very different from it what it's naturally worse. That means
Speaker 4: I don't know if there are any there are when
Speaker 4: they're not extinct genetically but ecologically, in terms of their
Speaker 4: participation in the ecosystem, I don't think there are any.
Speaker 4: Very fair I think there are some in the Charles
Speaker 4: Russell Wildlife Refuge, but very few blackfooted ferrets, which is
Speaker 4: a shame because of their cool little guys.
Speaker 10: I mean, I guess, given what we did to the
Speaker 10: landscape of so much of the country, I'm sure there
Speaker 10: are other animals that just like their niche is gone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that is exactly what I want to talk
Speaker 4: about today, right, Like, specifically I want to talk about
Speaker 4: buffalo because of the canceling of some public land grazingly
Speaker 4: since of buffalo, before we do that, Molley, we should
Speaker 4: talk about the terminology, right, Buffalo bison discussion.
Speaker 5: Right, because they're not buffalo, their bison bison bison.
Speaker 4: And as we are, what five minutes into this, someone
Speaker 4: has already logged onto Reddit. They have opened.
Speaker 5: Already made the threat already exists, that's already that address.
Speaker 5: It's too late.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we should have moved this to the to the
Speaker 4: front of the episode again, and that if that is
Speaker 4: you redditing, please stop. I am aware that scientifically we
Speaker 4: should call them bison. I don't care. English speaking people
Speaker 4: have been calling these animals buffalo since English speaking people
Speaker 4: came to this continent. They did so because the animals
Speaker 4: reminded them of Cape Buffalo. I actually have had a
Speaker 4: frame gored by a cape buffalo as well. We're going
Speaker 4: through most of my goring experience.
Speaker 5: You got to leave these big cow type creatures alone.
Speaker 4: He was ambushed that my my going was entirely my fault,
Speaker 4: like you shouldn't be unkind to animals, and I deserved it,
Speaker 4: and it was a good learning experience for me. It wasn't.
Speaker 4: I think it's just a bad overall experience. Being Gore
Speaker 4: wouldn't recommend it.
Speaker 5: I'm avoiding it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you've got this far, you're probably good. I think
Speaker 4: men in their twenties are probably like peaple does.
Speaker 10: I think once you hit thirty, your odds decreased dramatically.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're out the wind, unless you're working with cattle.
Speaker 4: Like my dad got pretty close a couple times when
Speaker 4: I was a kid. I remember jumping over a fence once,
Speaker 4: but I think that was more of a professional hazard
Speaker 4: than like a lifestyle choice. So here's the deal, Right,
Speaker 4: there are many species in the USA which have names
Speaker 4: similar to species on other continents that they are not
Speaker 4: the same European blackbirds and American blackbirds.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 4: Robins would be another example. There is a different sheep's headfish.
Speaker 4: Almost everywhere I have gone underwater, everyone has a sheep's head.
Speaker 4: The coolest sheep's head for people wondering is California sheep's
Speaker 4: head because it undergoes a sex change, making it a
Speaker 4: pretty cool fish. Also, it gets really cool after it transitions.
Speaker 4: It gets like these black and red stripes. It's one
Speaker 4: of my favorite fish. If you want to be censurious
Speaker 4: about buffalo names, I would suggest picking one of the
Speaker 4: many Indigenous words that have been used to refer to
Speaker 4: his animal for far, far longer than buffalo or bison. Also,
Speaker 4: buffalo is one of the cooler words in English language.
Speaker 5: Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 7: Yes.
Speaker 4: It is the longest single word sentence because it's a
Speaker 4: down and a verb and a proper down right.
Speaker 10: Right like so it's it's buffalo, the city, buffalo, the
Speaker 10: animal buffalo, the verb meaning like what like to bully
Speaker 10: or something to like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know if you've been around them, but
Speaker 4: they do do this. They sort of bother the bush.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I'm making of course at motion with my
Speaker 4: neck and shoulders. Not one apart from Molly can see.
Speaker 11: Uh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're they're they're just kind of aggressive in a
Speaker 4: sort of pokey and yeah, like it's a good verb.
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 4: Hang around what you watch a buffalo, you'll get it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's buffalo, the proper down buffalo, the nown buffalo, the
Speaker 4: verb buffalo, the proper down buffalo, the verb no. Buffalo
Speaker 4: the noun.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna have to diagram this one.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like bison from upstate New York are bullying other
Speaker 5: bison from upstate New York.
Speaker 4: Yes, that is the a breakdown of the Buffalo sentence
Speaker 4: fun trivia for everybody. Yeah, that's yeah, they will do
Speaker 4: that the end of the year. Will quiz you why
Speaker 4: are we talking about Buffalo today?
Speaker 5: I can't remember.
Speaker 7: I can.
Speaker 4: Let me tell you. It's because the Bureau of Land
Speaker 4: Management has canceled grazing rights in seven allotments public land
Speaker 4: in Phillips County, Montana privately owned bison. And there's been
Speaker 4: a bunch of reporting on this, like when this stuff happens,
Speaker 4: when stuff the Trump administration does with public land, the outdoors,
Speaker 4: they're they're like Democrat blue wave, fake news, panic accounts,
Speaker 4: really really go kind of wild with it. They did
Speaker 4: with this one, right. I think people running whatever, like
Speaker 4: you know, Occupy Democrats and Suit Nation for Change Yeah whatever,
Speaker 4: yeah by Democrats.
Speaker 5: I forgot about pantsuit Nation. Wow, that's a real throwback.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I never forget about the Panasuit Nation. They live
Speaker 4: forever in my mind. What I think, like the people
Speaker 4: of that tendency have not realized is that these are
Speaker 4: not per se wild buffalo. It's not like these buffalo
Speaker 4: have individually, like oh, as a population survived the genocide,
Speaker 4: been holding out in this land of Phillips County for
Speaker 4: more than a century. Right. That doesn't mean that we
Speaker 4: should be like callous about this. We shouldn't, But I
Speaker 4: just want to explain a little more. I guess there
Speaker 4: are still thousands of buffalo across the West on federal
Speaker 4: and private land. Some of them have been raising on
Speaker 4: public land with permits for more than four decades. Having
Speaker 4: them on the landscape is a good thing, right. We
Speaker 4: need the genetic diversity, even if they're privately owned.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 5: So it's not just like I don't know knowing very
Speaker 5: little about this.
Speaker 10: I think a lot of the discourse around these, like
Speaker 10: permits for grazing on public land, it's like, well, why
Speaker 10: should these farmers get to use our public land for
Speaker 10: their property for their cattle? And I don't know enough
Speaker 10: about that to care about that at all. But in
Speaker 10: terms of what buffalo due to the grassland, like just
Speaker 10: walking around on it and eating it is part of
Speaker 10: the maintenance of that grassland. Yes, yeah, like the eradication
Speaker 10: of the buffalo in the Midwest caused ecological havoc because
Speaker 10: we need them walking around and shitting on it.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Specifically what we need is them coming in, eating everything,
Speaker 4: trampling around, shitting everywhere, and then leaving, right, because that
Speaker 4: is what like so many indigenous cultures had these like
Speaker 4: these like traditions that the buffalo go away in and
Speaker 4: we do a tradition and they come back. Right. This
Speaker 4: happens for a lot of migratory animals. It's not just buffalo, right,
Speaker 4: because it gave shape to time in people's lives. That's
Speaker 4: how they impacted the landscape, right. They didn't stay in
Speaker 4: one place. They moved through spaces. So like, if we
Speaker 4: want to restore this short grass prairie ecosystem, which is
Speaker 4: as it turns out, why people are putting buffalo on
Speaker 4: this particular land, then we need a lot of space
Speaker 4: to do it, and we need buffalo to be able
Speaker 4: to move around. Right. So people who own these particular
Speaker 4: buffalo are an NGO called American Prairie. You head of
Speaker 4: American Prairie used to be American Prairie Reserve, No American
Speaker 4: Prairie Foundation.
Speaker 5: Okay, great, are they the villains or are the heroes neither.
Speaker 4: I mean the Trump administration is the villains. Doug Bergham specifically,
Speaker 4: I guess is always God.
Speaker 5: I forgot about Doug Burgher.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Fortunately Doug is now Interior Secretary, thanks to ARII
Speaker 4: for signing a letter endorsing him. Also, fuck you. American
Speaker 4: prairie is interesting. I guess, like, it's not what I
Speaker 4: would want, but I don't think it's evil.
Speaker 5: Sounds like most NGOs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it sounds like most of the world as it exists.
Speaker 4: Not Yeah, then how I would do it. American prairie
Speaker 4: is a is a big engine. They've been trying for
Speaker 4: about a quarter of a century to buy up private
Speaker 4: land adjacent to public land around the Charles M. Russell
Speaker 4: National Wildlife Refuge and the Upper Missouri River breaks national money.
Speaker 4: So the goal is to create like by by like
Speaker 4: bridging these two pieces of public land, to create a
Speaker 4: massive reserve where like one of the things with with
Speaker 4: bison specifically right, they need a lot of space and
Speaker 4: very few bison can cross like political boundaries.
Speaker 5: They don't have passports.
Speaker 4: They don't. Yeah, this is one of their issues. They're undocumented,
Speaker 4: you could say, But think about the Yellowstone people get
Speaker 4: really mad about the Yellowstone bison leaving the park. This
Speaker 4: is a big deal. This has been a big deal
Speaker 4: for it.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, people like what like they're.
Speaker 5: Disney cast members, Like they're not allowed to leave in costo.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, they have to return.
Speaker 5: Take that off.
Speaker 4: Yeah, take the body off and just wear their head.
Speaker 5: They can't be walking in the parking lot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can't see Mickey Mouse at Vonds like that
Speaker 4: would really ruin the magic. Yeah, people get mad at them, right,
Speaker 4: for a number of reasons.
Speaker 5: The bubble don't know about the park that.
Speaker 4: This is a thing, right and buffalo As it turns out,
Speaker 4: they love to disrespect a fence, which I respect. I
Speaker 4: like that about them.
Speaker 5: If I had shoulders like that, I would disrespect a fence.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they so like Cattle fencing is generally not sufficient
Speaker 4: for buffalo fencing. But buffalo fencing can be built people.
Speaker 4: It does exist when people are building it, it's better
Speaker 4: if they are conscious of other worldlife. Right, they can
Speaker 4: another of the megafauna in the megafauna that has existed
Speaker 4: here for for millenia, but it's now much much much
Speaker 4: lower numbers are like prong corn antelope.
Speaker 5: We have those here yes, I guess I don't really,
Speaker 5: I've never really been out west, so you are Mulley's
Speaker 5: out there.
Speaker 4: If you would like us to make a podcast where
Speaker 4: I take Molly camping, yeah, we just look at animals.
Speaker 4: That would be my ideal job, a podcast where I
Speaker 4: just talk to someone about an animal every week, Like
Speaker 4: we go camping, we see an animal, we talk about it.
Speaker 5: I didn't know ferret's lived outside. Like, think of all
Speaker 5: you could show me?
Speaker 4: Yeah, be amazing. Yeah, God, we could have so much
Speaker 4: fun if we start with the ferrets. Yeah, but prong
Speaker 4: horn are amazing. You've not seen a prong horn.
Speaker 5: They lived in Africa. And what am I thinking of?
Speaker 5: Like an ibex?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean ibex does live in Africa. I think
Speaker 4: some of them live on Okay, we're gonna.
Speaker 5: Oh man, everyone's finding out. I don't know.
Speaker 4: Anything podcast diversion.
Speaker 5: I'm googling prong horn antelope. Yeah, you see them, and
Speaker 5: these they are just out there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they just like they they live on the landscape.
Speaker 4: They actually were massively numerous, like before the various extinction events.
Speaker 5: So it's like a like a reindeer that lives in Colorado.
Speaker 4: A reindeer reindeer are only reindeer in North America when
Speaker 4: they're in captivity Cariboo when they when they are wild
Speaker 4: picture of Cariboo.
Speaker 5: We don't really have a lot of like wild animals
Speaker 5: out here.
Speaker 4: Really see that this is yeah, because the East coast
Speaker 4: is much more urbanized.
Speaker 10: Like like like every now and again, a baby bear
Speaker 10: will wander into town and it's like big nicks.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, I like it when a bear there's another
Speaker 4: animal I have massive respect for. I love how they
Speaker 4: don't give a shit. I respect any animal that eats
Speaker 4: from the trash.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The prong horns are actually massive, Like I think antello
Speaker 4: cap pridie is the genus. And then there are different species.
Speaker 4: There were tons like we had we at one point
Speaker 4: had tiny like weien a dog sized antelope. Oh like
Speaker 4: a like a dick dick Yeah, yeah, like a dig
Speaker 4: dig But.
Speaker 5: That's a cool guy but fast.
Speaker 4: Oh So, one of the things about prong horns is
Speaker 4: they can jump. Like I've seen them jump.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it looks like a jumping guy.
Speaker 4: Well, they don't like to jump. A fence is a thing.
Speaker 10: Oh so then now you have like a problem. The
Speaker 10: buffalo are stuck, but so is the antelope.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because that speed was always their like defense mechanism
Speaker 4: right there, they're super that. I think cheetahs are the
Speaker 4: only land animal that's faster and.
Speaker 5: They don't live in the same environment.
Speaker 4: No, yeah, I knew that different continents. Yeah, yeah, there
Speaker 4: is not a North American cheetah. I mean, at this point,
Speaker 4: you could think that might have been.
Speaker 5: A can tell me there is.
Speaker 4: I think there might have been at one point, like
Speaker 4: a like a prehistoric shooter a time. They headlick ground
Speaker 4: slow some things. But yeah, when you're building the buffalo fencing,
Speaker 4: you have to allow the prong horns to go under
Speaker 4: if you're trying to build an ecological fence.
Speaker 10: Oh, I guess because they could like bend over in
Speaker 10: a way the buffalo can't exactly.
Speaker 4: There's just more bubble.
Speaker 5: It's too big.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a lot of chunk to a buffalo and
Speaker 4: the way it couldn't get under there. Right. So the
Speaker 4: other reason people don't like buffalo is because of brucellosis.
Speaker 4: You know brucellosis.
Speaker 5: Is is it a buffalo disease?
Speaker 4: Well, it's a disease that buffalo can have. Maybe you
Speaker 4: know from the Warren Zevon song don't. Okay, it's just funny.
Speaker 4: I'm talking to Molly about really American shit to neither
Speaker 4: there's a British person.
Speaker 5: I don't know any of what you're saying.
Speaker 4: Okay. Warren Zevon a very good famous musician, guy Sally Dead.
Speaker 5: But he has a song about buffalo disease.
Speaker 4: He has a song which in part it talks about brucellosis.
Speaker 4: It says, the cattle will have brucellosis. What a great
Speaker 4: journey we're going on.
Speaker 10: That's the service I provide, is the podcast idiot, because
Speaker 10: I know nothing.
Speaker 4: You have a very deep, very deep well of knowledge.
Speaker 4: It just doesn't extend to Warren's Evon.
Speaker 10: No listener left behind, Like there's no one sitting here
Speaker 10: listening wishing that something had been explained more because I'm
Speaker 10: making you explain what Antelope are.
Speaker 5: Yea and what a Warren Yvonn is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we could go off on at Tangent Higgs.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 4: This song is about the fact that Sweet Home Alabama
Speaker 4: is a deeply, deeply hateful song, but it does. That
Speaker 4: does get mentioned quite a lot. But yeah, the brucellosis.
Speaker 10: But I feel like once you're touching a buffalo you
Speaker 10: have worse problems than whatever.
Speaker 2: This is.
Speaker 5: Oh, well not great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it depends, it depends who you are, right, Like, Uh,
Speaker 4: what brucellosis does is generally it infects heifer's so like
Speaker 4: young lady cows, it will cause them to abort their
Speaker 4: first calf.
Speaker 12: Sound.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's sad. Also, because of the word it's controlled,
Speaker 4: your herd can get killed out. If you have brucellosis, it.
Speaker 5: Would be contagious to people's like cattle.
Speaker 4: Yes, and that would be very bad.
Speaker 10: So okay, when you see people don't like buffalo because
Speaker 10: they're worried about brusilosis, they're not worried that they will
Speaker 10: get brucellosis, they're worried that it will affect their cattle.
Speaker 4: Yes, I do believe people can get brucellosis. I'm not
Speaker 4: as familiar with that.
Speaker 5: Apparently I'm looking here.
Speaker 10: Apparently if you do get it, there's a twenty percent
Speaker 10: chance that your testicles are going to swell up real bad.
Speaker 4: So oh wow, I didn't know that.
Speaker 5: Ok I guess the why they don't want it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that would also be bad, right like big
Speaker 4: bull Brucellosis painful like that.
Speaker 5: Okay, so we're talking about the cattle industry. I'm on board.
Speaker 5: I'm on board.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's the cattle that they're concerned about. They can
Speaker 4: take or leave the testicular swelling like they're tough.
Speaker 5: Why are they touching the buffalo in the first place,
Speaker 5: they're not?
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, they're not.
Speaker 8: Okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's a buffalo coming out and causing the
Speaker 4: cattle to get brucellosis. Right, here's the deal. Elk also
Speaker 4: get brucelos.
Speaker 5: I know about elk, We have those, okay.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 4: Okay, So an elk also travels widely, right, and elk
Speaker 4: it's not generally an animal that is kept behind high fences.
Speaker 4: Sometimes that there probably are high fence like game farms
Speaker 4: where people paid to go and hunt.
Speaker 5: Elk, as we have some in Virginia.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's kind of gross in my opinion. I
Speaker 4: don't like that. But elk also carry brucellosis. Right, So
Speaker 4: if we're concerned about brucellosis, we also need to be
Speaker 4: concerned about elk. But it really doesn't get brought up
Speaker 4: in the elk discussion. It gets brought up in the
Speaker 4: in the buffalo discussion. So these are the reasons that
Speaker 4: some of the reasons that people don't like buffalo.
Speaker 10: Right, right, because they carry they carry a cow disease,
Speaker 10: and they don't like to stay inside the park.
Speaker 4: Got it, Yeah, yeah, they don't like to stay inside
Speaker 4: the park. We've talked for a long time, Molly, talking
Speaker 4: of things that might cause your testicles to swell. Here
Speaker 4: is some products and services or maybe it'll help. Yeah,
Speaker 4: maybe maybe you'll have bought your first calf. Who knows.
Speaker 4: It's roll the dice. All right, we are back. So
Speaker 4: let's talk about the area where this is happening. Right,
Speaker 4: This is happening in kind of northern central Montana around Livingstone.
Speaker 4: Lots of the land in this area has actually dropped
Speaker 4: below the population density that Turner considered to be evidence
Speaker 4: of the closure of the frontier when he was developing
Speaker 4: that thesis. Right, I'm not a big fan of the
Speaker 4: concept of the frontier. If that's another podcast it I'll
Speaker 4: make one day, But I don't like it.
Speaker 5: But there's like no people there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's yeah, there are. There are very few people there,
Speaker 4: in part because cattle farming is hard, in part because
Speaker 4: it's harder in a globalized economy, in part because of
Speaker 4: climate change. There's this theory of the Buffalo Commons written
Speaker 4: by two people called Popper, and they considered like this
Speaker 4: specific area to be a tragedy of the commons, where
Speaker 4: this beautiful plains ecosystem has been destroyed, and they put
Speaker 4: forward the idea that the presence of buffalo and the
Speaker 4: landscape could return it to a sort of short grass
Speaker 4: prairie commons. This isn't a direct link to the American
Speaker 4: Prairie Reserve, but this is kind of what they're trying
Speaker 4: to do. They're not putting buffalo on the landscape because
Speaker 4: they are a buffalo organization.
Speaker 5: Right, so they're trying to restore the grassland.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's the idea, because we don't have a prairie
Speaker 4: national park. Right when colonization was moving west, as a
Speaker 4: Department of Homeland Security likes to highlight with its use
Speaker 4: of that image, liberty was floating across the planes there. Sorry,
Speaker 4: let's just put the image in my head. Remember when
Speaker 4: the Trump administration is getting very aggressive towards Somali people.
Speaker 4: I guess it still is. Yeah, yeah, did you see
Speaker 4: the Ai version of that where it's a Somali woman
Speaker 4: like crossing the plaines? No, okay, it was pretty funny.
Speaker 4: It was one of there you're.
Speaker 5: Doing an opposed like like like the Mermaid on the
Speaker 5: front of a ship.
Speaker 4: Yeah exactly, Yeah, Like yeah, it was like this is
Speaker 4: a Somali promised land. Like they were like, I guess,
Speaker 4: parodying American rhetoric towards indigenous people and being.
Speaker 10: Like, like, Somali people can't do manifest destiny.
Speaker 5: I thought we loved that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it was very funny. It was. It was
Speaker 4: kind of amusing to see that American rhetoric reflected back.
Speaker 4: Somali people have incredible posting abilities that HS was not
Speaker 4: ready for. So what the what the APR is trying
Speaker 4: to do is yet use the buffalo here as like
Speaker 4: a landscape engineer, right, like an animal that will help
Speaker 4: return this area to I guess natural state is a
Speaker 4: problematic term, you know.
Speaker 5: But like to it's pre industrial state.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: When we think about like why isn't there a plane
Speaker 4: national park, we have to consider the role the capitalism place, right.
Speaker 5: Because no one would go visit that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well I think they would. The plans would beautiful
Speaker 4: in their in their way, right, But I guess, like.
Speaker 10: You know, just thinking like is the role of the
Speaker 10: national park to preserve this landscape, this ecosystem, or is
Speaker 10: it to create a place where people could go and
Speaker 10: buy things?
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 5: Increasingly it's the latter.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think there is a bias towards preserving Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's there's like a scenic vista bias. This is an
Speaker 4: area where people could ranch cattle, and so like that
Speaker 4: happened instead, you know, and then we got to a
Speaker 4: point where like no one was going to give up
Speaker 4: their private land to make a massive park.
Speaker 5: Well they didn't want to in any of the other
Speaker 5: times either, So.
Speaker 2: The government needs to make you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the government could force you back in
Speaker 4: the day.
Speaker 10: I mean, I just can't imagine a new national park
Speaker 10: ever coming into existence. We just don't have that kind
Speaker 10: of political will anymore.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we might get like the Donald Trump's
Speaker 4: birthplace National Park or like something similar, you know, like.
Speaker 5: We would never get Yellowstone again, Yeah, we wouldn't.
Speaker 4: And like part of that is because they violently remove
Speaker 4: the indigenous people from those places in order to I don't.
Speaker 10: Want to romanticize that. Like I live near Shenandoa Valley
Speaker 10: National Park where people were forced out in a pretty
Speaker 10: brutal way, that's a big part of the history here.
Speaker 10: So I don't want to romanticize the creation of the
Speaker 10: national park. I just mean, like, the government is not
Speaker 10: going to spend a lot of money on something that's
Speaker 10: just for everyone to enjoy.
Speaker 4: Ever again, yeah, yeah, and they're not going to say, like,
Speaker 4: to an extent, we are removing this piece of land
Speaker 4: from the rapacious capitalism that has destroyed the rest of
Speaker 4: our natural spaces.
Speaker 5: So if somebody's going to eat this grass, it's going
Speaker 5: to be hamburgers.
Speaker 4: We wanted to turn into the cheapest meat possible. Also,
Speaker 4: like I should point out that like land back and
Speaker 4: national parks are very very very different things. I like
Speaker 4: to kind of illustrate this with the idea that during
Speaker 4: the Nez Perce War, as a Nez person like fighting
Speaker 4: their way towards the Canadian border, they are having gunfights
Speaker 4: in Yellowstone National Park as tourists are coming to Yellowstone
Speaker 4: to like check out the mountains and nursey the geysers
Speaker 4: and stuff.
Speaker 5: You know, that's that's America.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just perfectly America, right, Like, we'll look at it. Look,
Speaker 4: we're preserving this for you as we violently remove the
Speaker 4: indigenous people and.
Speaker 10: Just like coming to spend your tourism dollars, never mind
Speaker 10: that there's a war going on there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just being like just kind of letting that go past.
Speaker 5: Whatever the time period equivalent of a visor and a
Speaker 5: fanny pack was that was cooking.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah for sure, probably probably a cigar. And I
Speaker 4: know this trousers to stop past your knee. So you'll
Speaker 4: hear people saying a lot of shit about the API
Speaker 4: of the America Prayer Reserve, right, And so I did
Speaker 4: what I should do as a responsible journalist, and I
Speaker 4: pulled their nine nineties.
Speaker 10: That's my favorite thing to do. Yeah, where's the money going? Yeah,
Speaker 10: well where's the money coming from?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Where the money coming from. You'll hear a lot
Speaker 4: of like anti API stuff, someone from the cattle in this.
Speaker 4: If you go through that part of Montana, you'll see
Speaker 4: signs that say like save the cowboys, stop the American
Speaker 4: Prairie Reserve.
Speaker 10: I think we have a different understanding of what a
Speaker 10: cowboy is me and the sign maker.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, Well, it is inherently time, I guess, to cattle, right,
Speaker 4: and the idea being that these bison are displacing cattle.
Speaker 4: It's not a direct contract with cattle. In fact, the
Speaker 4: APR has ten times more cattle on its land than
Speaker 4: it does buys it. Like most ranches, the APR has
Speaker 4: deeded or private land that they graze on leasing right
Speaker 4: to adjacent public land. What the APR is spending its
Speaker 4: money on, among other things, among like some staffing costs,
Speaker 4: of its costs, paying consultants, paying fundraisers, pay consultants. Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: they're dropping some coin on consultants. Is they buy up ranches.
Speaker 4: The way land ownership works in this area is kind
Speaker 4: of like a checkerboard, and you've got public land and
Speaker 4: private land.
Speaker 10: So they're trying to make pathways for the bison by
Speaker 10: buying contiguous plots.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're not all contiguous, but their goal is to
Speaker 4: have a large contiguous area in which.
Speaker 5: Right, and you just have to buy them when they
Speaker 5: come up exactly.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think the argument is that they're they're pushing up
Speaker 4: land prices, right, But in reality, this area is depopulating rapidly.
Speaker 4: It might push up land prices a little bit, but
Speaker 4: it's not like there's massive bidding wars going on here
Speaker 4: for each of these ranches.
Speaker 10: Right, because are there new people seeking new cow ranching
Speaker 10: opportunities who are trying to move in who are being
Speaker 10: prevented from doing that.
Speaker 4: Will be people trying to like either I guess, if
Speaker 4: expand their ranch, or if a family is subdividing its ranch,
Speaker 4: or if you didn't inherit your family ranch, I guess,
Speaker 4: and want to buy some land. Generally, how it works
Speaker 4: here is you buy a certain part of land. It'll
Speaker 4: be like sixty forty seventy thirty something like that. So
Speaker 4: you'll buy land, and that would give you the privilege
Speaker 4: to have like first DIBs on grazing on the public
Speaker 4: land that is adjacent to your land. So most of
Speaker 4: these ranches are checkerboarded, right, It's not like a bigtiguous plot.
Speaker 4: So not being able to graize a bison on the
Speaker 4: public land kind of fucks that up in these plots
Speaker 4: for the American prairie people, right, And like I should
Speaker 4: say that, like I have some sympathy for people ranching
Speaker 4: in this area, like my family of farmers, Like it's
Speaker 4: going to be really fucking hard right now when fuel
Speaker 4: prices are insanely high to be trying to farm on
Speaker 4: these especially the way that like American people farm have
Speaker 4: massive expanses, right, you have to be in a vehicle
Speaker 4: a lot. When I was reading about the brucellosis stuff,
Speaker 4: and it made me think of foot and mouth disease,
Speaker 4: which happened in the UK when I was a child.
Speaker 4: I remember how traumatic that was for people having their
Speaker 4: whole herds killed. Several people who were like within our
Speaker 4: extended family social circle killed themselves and they're horrible when
Speaker 4: they lost all their cattle. Yeah, like it's really fucked up,
Speaker 4: Like at least in that part of the world, like
Speaker 4: you might have. It might have been your great grandfather
Speaker 4: who started bringing these cattle, right, Like, it's an intergenerational
Speaker 4: project that nick joins lining through your family. So I
Speaker 4: do understand these people like deeply tied to this land.
Speaker 4: Also not in the same way as Indigenous people. I
Speaker 4: can see that people like you know, don't want it
Speaker 4: to change. I understand that, and like consolidation and agriculture
Speaker 4: climate change, the way our foody consistem works, that is
Speaker 4: an issue we should address if we want to take
Speaker 4: care of the land. What the government is doing, it's
Speaker 4: not how we address that. Sometimes you'll see people saying
Speaker 4: that the APR is entirely a tax avoidance system for
Speaker 4: the Mars family, like the chocolate people. Yeah, yeah, big chocolate.
Speaker 4: You familiar the Mars family a rich as fuck.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I didn't know they were involved in the in
Speaker 5: the bison industry.
Speaker 4: Well, they have donated. I couldn't find an exact figure, right,
Speaker 4: Like with the change of nonprofit like the reporting laws,
Speaker 4: it's a lot harder now than it used to be.
Speaker 5: So they don't own or operate it. They've just made
Speaker 5: large donations.
Speaker 4: They've made Lars donations. It's a unit called Mars Vista
Speaker 4: within the APR, which has some private housing on it.
Speaker 4: But like I think people are fundamentally misunderstanding how they're
Speaker 4: super wealthy, Like these people are worth more than one
Speaker 4: hundred billion dollars. I would highly encourage anyone who thinks
Speaker 4: that an NGO which is going through like in the
Speaker 4: tens of millions a year, maybe by twenty fifteen. So
Speaker 4: in the first fourteen years of this project's existence, say
Speaker 4: donated twenty million. That's not touching the edges.
Speaker 10: I'm sure they have a complicated tax shelter system set
Speaker 10: up for themselves that doesn't involve bison. It involves bank
Speaker 10: accounts and countries. You haven't heard of.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly, Like the Panama Paper's had zero bison in
Speaker 4: it for a reason, right, Like you're just being very
Speaker 4: it's very sweet if you think that. Like the way
Speaker 4: that they are avoiding paying federal taxes is buying land
Speaker 4: to put buffalo on.
Speaker 10: Like all these families have their own whole foundations that
Speaker 10: are just about moving money around in opaque ways. Yeah,
Speaker 10: if you're trying to avoid paying taxes, you don't donate
Speaker 10: to a real charity that's actually doing something complicated with
Speaker 10: physical animals and land. You have a foundation that does
Speaker 10: grants for something obscure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like it's just not it's just just not it.
Speaker 4: Like it's just it's not it. That's not how taxes work.
Speaker 4: That's not how ridge people work. So we've talked about
Speaker 4: Brucelosi is going to move past brucellosis, and I had
Speaker 4: a diversion on chronic wasting disease and elk feeding, but
Speaker 4: maybe we'll make that a whole other podcast. So we
Speaker 4: also talked about this this checkerboarding of public land. Right,
Speaker 4: lots of these ranching operations that they're buying rely heavily
Speaker 4: on public land grazing. So in twenty twenty two. They
Speaker 4: applied in twenty nineteen. The BLM allowed them to graze
Speaker 4: bison on seven plots in Phillips County. Right, So that's
Speaker 4: saying that you can put your bison on this public
Speaker 4: land which is adjacent to the private land which you own.
Speaker 5: And that's standard practice. Everybody's doing that.
Speaker 4: It depends on the particular plot, right, So they had
Speaker 4: to apply to the Bureau of Land Management.
Speaker 5: It's like pretty common for people to be grazing to
Speaker 5: get these permits to graze on the public land.
Speaker 4: There have been bison on public land for forty years.
Speaker 4: There remain bison on public land across the West, to
Speaker 4: include some tribes grazed bison on public land as well
Speaker 4: as on tribal land.
Speaker 5: But like the cattle farmers are doing this as well.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, the cattle farmers are alder Yeah yeah, but that's.
Speaker 10: Like some I'm saying, like, if you buy this plot
Speaker 10: of land, it's like kind of common that you would
Speaker 10: also be grazing on the public land adjacent to it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's entirely understood, like or not even adjacent to,
Speaker 4: but sometimes like interspersed with Yeah, Like so if you
Speaker 4: look at like a sometimes you'll see like a de
Speaker 4: died and a least acreage when you're looking at like
Speaker 4: a land, like if you were if you were interested
Speaker 4: in buying a ranch Molley.
Speaker 10: So like when they so, when they bought this land,
Speaker 10: it would be reasonable for them to assume that they
Speaker 10: would be able to use the parcels adjacent and interspersed
Speaker 10: within it.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, okay, yes, and they would have known that
Speaker 4: that would have required in some cases asking the BLM, right,
Speaker 4: which is what they did. And in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: the BLM said, go ahead, put your by some in
Speaker 4: this on these particular seven plots, right, So they were
Speaker 4: amended to include bison. They've got environmental impact study done,
Speaker 4: you know, they did all the things.
Speaker 5: Is doing an environmental impact study of the presence of
Speaker 5: a native of animal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, on its native range.
Speaker 5: What would happen if a buffalo lived here?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 5: We asked ten government scientists.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we spent thousands of dollars finding out what happens
Speaker 4: if buffalo lives in buffalo home. Turned out didn't do
Speaker 4: massive ecological damage, So BLM said, let the buffalo back.
Speaker 4: What is interesting about this rule change is the justification
Speaker 4: the BLM is using and that is the thing that
Speaker 4: people should be worried about. In my opinion, that should
Speaker 4: be the headline. The headline should be, So the BLM
Speaker 4: is trying to regulate these leases that have their roots
Speaker 4: in the nineteen thirty four Taylor Grazing Act.
Speaker 5: I'm not unknowingly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, the Tailor Grazing Act a big deal when
Speaker 4: it comes to public land in the West in farming. Right,
Speaker 4: it is trying to regulate these leases to quote unquote
Speaker 4: productive purposes. It doesn't say productive purposes anywhere I can
Speaker 4: find in the Tailor grazing net. It does use the
Speaker 4: term I guess domestic livestock.
Speaker 5: I think could be a livestock.
Speaker 4: Well, they are a livestock.
Speaker 5: I've eaten them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they These bison are vaccinated, they are fenced, they
Speaker 4: are tagged, they'll be handled. I'm guessing the way the
Speaker 4: API does it is like a kind of non invasive handling,
Speaker 4: like trying to keep them not acclimated to human contact
Speaker 4: per se.
Speaker 5: But like it's hard to ask a livestock a bison
Speaker 5: to human content.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can get like beefalow, right, which is like
Speaker 4: a like a hybridized bison.
Speaker 5: They sell bison that my whole foods. That's livestock.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The APR is not raising them to kill them to
Speaker 4: sell them for meat.
Speaker 10: But they could if they wanted to, Like, because I
Speaker 10: don't think the government is ever going to go to
Speaker 10: a cattle rancher and say you have to kill X
Speaker 10: number of these or they're no longer livestock.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well that is the question, right, Like, what if we
Speaker 4: choose if you gave me a million dollars today, I
Speaker 4: would immediately cease making podcasts. I would buy a large
Speaker 4: plot land, and I would have an ungodly number of
Speaker 4: rare and endangered domestic livestock species. Right, I'd have jacob sheep.
Speaker 4: I'd have polyseric sheep with four horns, you know, like
Speaker 4: satan looking sheep. I'd be all about.
Speaker 10: It, and they would remain leag livestock even if you
Speaker 10: had no intention of eating them.
Speaker 4: Well, that is the question, right. The productive purposes definition
Speaker 4: could be extremely broad. What if you're doing practice like
Speaker 4: restorative ranching.
Speaker 10: Right, what if the Bureau of Land Management was concerned
Speaker 10: with the land being properly managed.
Speaker 4: Well, at a point, I guess the BLM was right
Speaker 4: because there was a rule. This is actually kind of funny.
Speaker 4: It was called the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, and
Speaker 4: the BLM rescinded that last week. So previously that was
Speaker 4: one of the considerations for managing land, for managing public land,
Speaker 4: And I guess like we should just briefly say that
Speaker 4: there is no such thing as government land, right, It's
Speaker 4: all native land. And the land which is currently managed
Speaker 4: by the government is paid for by me and Molly
Speaker 4: and everyone else. Doug Berghen doesn't own it. It is
Speaker 4: there for future generations, right, Like.
Speaker 5: It's like, what is what are they going to do
Speaker 5: with it?
Speaker 10: If they kicked the buffalo off of it.
Speaker 4: Will be my guest card the Cattalony leases.
Speaker 5: So they're just going to lease it to someone else.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But like, I guess some portions of public land
Speaker 4: in that part of Montana are entirely land locked by
Speaker 4: private land. Like one of the things that APR did
Speaker 4: that made people like it there is that the APR
Speaker 4: bought a ranch and then opened up a gated road
Speaker 4: which allowed people to access fifty thousand acres of public
Speaker 4: land that had previously been completely islanded. Right's so, like, right,
Speaker 4: what their plan is to do? They have to sell
Speaker 4: these ranches now, so.
Speaker 10: The government just is saying you can't use this public
Speaker 10: the land anymore in such a way that might negate
Speaker 10: your ability to use your privately owned land because we
Speaker 10: don't think bison our livestock.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because bison awoke. More broadly, like this conservation of
Speaker 4: landscape health rull with sinshon is worrying, very amusingly, the
Speaker 4: BLM has forgotten to take down the website that explains
Speaker 4: the value of the rule, so at the time of recording,
Speaker 4: the BLM's website still say quote, the rule recognizes conservation
Speaker 4: as an essential component of public lands management on equal
Speaker 4: footing with other multiple uses of these habitats. Americans rely
Speaker 4: on public lands to live a food, energy, cleaner and
Speaker 4: water wildlife habitat and places to recreate. The BLM knows
Speaker 4: the importance of balancing our use of natural resources with
Speaker 4: protecting public lands and waters for future generations. The rule
Speaker 4: will safeguard these lands and waters to protect our way
Speaker 4: of life. Still a bit cringe, But they've now rescinded
Speaker 4: that rule, So I guess our way of life is
Speaker 4: now under threat.
Speaker 1: Because I just.
Speaker 5: Don't understand how this is justifiable at all. But I
Speaker 5: guess that's not really the point for.
Speaker 4: A lot of people, right, Like, it sort of flies
Speaker 4: under the radar because it's not, you know, like a
Speaker 4: big Washington thing. I can see how like in our
Speaker 4: major population centers, it can be easily to be like
Speaker 4: the Defudd cares where the cows and buffalo go.
Speaker 10: But I think, even aside from from an ecological argument,
Speaker 10: which I think is very important, right that the restoration
Speaker 10: of these grasslands, this is the government saying no, we're
Speaker 10: going to take this public resource away from someone who
Speaker 10: is rightfully using it and paying to use it, and
Speaker 10: we're going to sell that right instead to a capitalist
Speaker 10: concern over a bullshit fake reason.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not that the APR is not. I suppose it's
Speaker 4: not really a capitalist concern. It's like a nonprofit.
Speaker 5: But there has to be some sort of big cattle
Speaker 5: lobbying at play here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there are elements of the cattle industry
Speaker 4: which have been opposed to bison, especially due to that
Speaker 4: departure of bison from the park is really something that
Speaker 4: for years has been like a point of tension in Yellowstone.
Speaker 4: It's worth who is for this and who is against it?
Speaker 4: I guess it is cattle ranches who are opposed to
Speaker 4: the grazing of bison out here.
Speaker 5: And who specifically is getting those seven specific plots.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I think the reason they recinded those is
Speaker 4: because they were the seven most recently approved. Okay, because
Speaker 4: there are other plots. I think there are tribes in California,
Speaker 4: for instance, who have applied for buffalo grazing on public land.
Speaker 4: And I should point out that like a tribal cultural herd,
Speaker 4: a food sovereignty herd is a very different thing to
Speaker 4: the APR. I hope that APR did know that. I
Speaker 4: know that tribal and trits.
Speaker 10: Would, but I guess as far as the government is concerned,
Speaker 10: it's the same that danswers just know.
Speaker 4: I don't know yet. We don't know yet, right, We
Speaker 4: don't know if those tribal leases have been approved. What
Speaker 4: we do know is that, like this production standard is
Speaker 4: a thory of threat to them. The Coalition of Large
Speaker 4: Tribes actually wrote a letter opposing this decision. A quote
Speaker 4: from it here. It is offensive and unacceptable that the
Speaker 4: federal government would still seek to keep buffalo off of
Speaker 4: these lands. Chairmen of the shann River Sioux Tribe, Ryman
Speaker 4: Lebau wrote, adding that BLM lands are all former buffalo lands.
Speaker 4: He calls the decision a painful reprise the genocide the
Speaker 4: federal government attempted could commit against us and our relative
Speaker 4: to buffalo. They also call it affirmative action for cattle,
Speaker 4: which is kind of funny. Wow. True, yeah, but yeah
Speaker 4: it's true, And it's like saying during cowdyr, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: this is one our one angula is fine and the
Speaker 4: other one is in. I want people to be concerned
Speaker 4: about this because it could be deeply damaging to the
Speaker 4: attempts of tribes to recover their buffalo population. It could
Speaker 4: be deeply damaging to our public lands. I guess I
Speaker 4: want to talk briefly about the buffalo genocide because they
Speaker 4: think it's something that people have like a grasp of,
Speaker 4: but not like a maybe in depth understanding. What I
Speaker 4: want to briefly say is that the government played a
Speaker 4: massive role in wiping out of most of a buffalo.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 4: We ended up with fewer than a thousand head at
Speaker 4: Buffalo like there were times when a tree falling down,
Speaker 4: a lightning strike, a bad flood could have significantly altered
Speaker 4: the future of the species. Because there were so few.
Speaker 4: Capitalism also played a role, though. The idea that the
Speaker 4: buffalo hunters were like just following orders from the government
Speaker 4: relies in part on books written by former buffalo hunters
Speaker 4: trying to absolve themselves. I would suggest that we also
Speaker 4: look at the incentive provided to kill the animals and
Speaker 4: to not make use of their remains after people did that, right,
Speaker 4: because like as much as the government did, the capitalism
Speaker 4: that the government was ringing with it killed the majority
Speaker 4: of the wild buffalo in this country. And that is
Speaker 4: what's happening again, right we look at public lands management today.
Speaker 4: The glass yearro was of chuck O Kanyon. Chakokanyon was
Speaker 4: the site of the biggest building in what is now
Speaker 4: the United States until the eighteen eighties. Oh chuck O
Speaker 4: and civilization built these massive great houses there. Really really beautiful,
Speaker 4: amazing place, one of the less visited units in the
Speaker 4: National Park System. Gorgeous, amazing. I saw some out there too.
Speaker 5: This is all news to me.
Speaker 4: You got to go to Chaka Kanyon.
Speaker 5: We have to find something we can record that gets
Speaker 5: me down to the Southwest.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I bet there are some biggots, you know there are
Speaker 4: because they use they appropriate the Zooni sacred Sun symbol
Speaker 4: in some of their Nazi shit because have we not
Speaker 4: fucking done enough? Well, apparently not right, because there is
Speaker 4: there is a campaign to have drilling to like dealist
Speaker 4: areas of Chaco Canyon. I also spent time last year
Speaker 4: in Which in Homeland, with which in people there. What's
Speaker 4: happening is a Trump administration is trying to grant drilling
Speaker 4: permits in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the which and people,
Speaker 4: I should say, preferred to use the term Arctic refuge,
Speaker 4: So I'm going to try and use that going forward.
Speaker 4: They don't like anoir just that. So what that will do,
Speaker 4: right is on the on the plane there drilling is
Speaker 4: the place where the caribou migrate. The porcupine caribou herd
Speaker 4: makes the longest land mammal migration in the world.
Speaker 5: So we're just speed running the devastation of every cool,
Speaker 5: big animal we have.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like, we're going to do drilling in the place
Speaker 4: where the caribou carve, right, and if they don't go
Speaker 4: there to carve, then it's over. Yeah, And there are
Speaker 4: so few of these animals left, right, they can cross
Speaker 4: political boundaries, that can travel their great dis stance is
Speaker 4: unimpeded by capitalism. Largely that's because the which in territory
Speaker 4: is not a reservation. It's like they own it. So
Speaker 4: they can go off public land onto Gwichinland and without
Speaker 4: the caribou, like the Gwitchin culture cannot be the same
Speaker 4: as it is, right the caribou is sacred to them
Speaker 4: like that culture in the distance of the Cariboo, I guess,
Speaker 4: are tied together, and like the same could be said
Speaker 4: for bison, right Like that it's part of the reason
Speaker 4: that we don't have bison on the planes anymore because
Speaker 4: indigenous people on the bison went hand in hand in
Speaker 4: the genocide of the indigenous peoples. There was also a
Speaker 4: genocide of the buffalo, I guess, and those two things
Speaker 4: weren't separate or distinct. And I think, like there's this
Speaker 4: idea in the American liberal psyche that like a bison
Speaker 4: being on the land constitutes a return and like that's
Speaker 4: not it, right, Like privately owned bison being on the
Speaker 4: APR is not land back.
Speaker 10: I mean, it would restore the grassland to some degree,
Speaker 10: but that's not that doesn't have the same cultural impact
Speaker 10: as returning the land to its natural stewards.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, and allowing indigenous people to like manage the
Speaker 4: land for future generations in the way that they did
Speaker 4: for millennia before this massive extinction event, the European colonization.
Speaker 10: I hope nobody thinks they privately owned buffalo flock is
Speaker 10: the same as land back.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I hope not. I really hope not. Like did
Speaker 4: you see like when the folk Pet tribes were like
Speaker 4: killing some of their buffalo to feed people during the
Speaker 4: last shutdown.
Speaker 5: I do remember that. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's kind of a strange reaction being like, oh,
Speaker 4: how sad that they have to to kill their buffalo, Like.
Speaker 5: But that's what the buffalo for.
Speaker 4: Yes, so it's why they the buffalo are there of
Speaker 4: culture can exist and it's.
Speaker 5: Not like a sacred cow situation. Yeah, yeah, it's sacred
Speaker 5: to them, but not in that way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like it's sacred to them and it is sustaining
Speaker 4: to them, right, And like that's my understanding at least,
Speaker 4: and having spent a little bit of time with people
Speaker 4: who have that relationship to other animals like that, when
Speaker 4: I think about like which inference in their caribou, like
Speaker 4: they will fight as hard as they can to preserve
Speaker 4: their cariboo herd, but that's not like a different thing
Speaker 4: from them. They also hunt the caribou and eat it.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Part of the natural relationship with them is sometimes eating them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like they did in that way, the culture
Speaker 4: is sustained by the ongoing presence of the animal right.
Speaker 10: I guess, I guess we just I don't know the
Speaker 10: Western mind. We can only hunt something to extinction, we
Speaker 10: can't contemplate.
Speaker 4: Yeah, wanting to coexist with it.
Speaker 10: A symbiotic coexistence where we eat them sometimes, but we
Speaker 10: don't want them all to be dead.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, We're not just going to be like, okay,
Speaker 4: this that was from while it lasted on to the
Speaker 4: next one. Yeah, I just do the next species now. So,
Speaker 4: like people should be worried about this. This is not
Speaker 4: the end of bison on public lands. It's not the
Speaker 4: end of bison on tribal lands. But this productivity standard
Speaker 4: should really concern people. BLM is the biggest public lands
Speaker 4: management agency. Sometimes it gets jokingly called the Bureau of
Speaker 4: Livestock and Mining, which is pretty much the way it's going, right, right, So.
Speaker 5: Is there a legal definition being used here, like something
Speaker 5: from a statute or something from a contract, like, what
Speaker 5: is this? What is productive use?
Speaker 4: That's a productive use is a standard that they have
Speaker 4: derived from the term domestic livestock in the Tailor Grazing Act.
Speaker 10: And then how is domestic livestock legally defined any domesticated animal?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well they are claiming that it is domestic livestock
Speaker 4: if it is productive.
Speaker 10: But this is circular, right, So productive use means livestock
Speaker 10: and livestock have to be productive.
Speaker 5: But what is productive? It's live stock? Livestock is productively Like, well.
Speaker 4: There has to be like a cash exchange, I guess
Speaker 4: like they're saying that it has to be raised for sale.
Speaker 10: But then like, how exactly are we measuring? That doesn't
Speaker 10: have to be profitable?
Speaker 4: Does it have to be extracting the maximum output out
Speaker 4: of that given area of land?
Speaker 5: Do you have to be exporting something?
Speaker 9: Like?
Speaker 10: Do you have to have a government can like what
Speaker 10: is the threshold here for what's productive?
Speaker 4: Yeah, APR has given by some meat to food banks before,
Speaker 4: so apparently that doesn't meet the standard.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 10: So without without a hard and fast, like clear written standard,
Speaker 10: this is the government just deciding who does or doesn't
Speaker 10: get to do business with them?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and who who does and doesn't have access. There
Speaker 4: are issues, big issues with grais and cattle on public land, ecological, social,
Speaker 4: climate change, animal welfare. There are issues, many of them.
Speaker 4: But the idea that if you wanted to, let's say,
Speaker 4: if you wanted to raise fewer cattle and do what
Speaker 4: they call regenerative ranching to something more sustainable, you couldn't
Speaker 4: because it's not as productive. It's bonkers right on public land.
Speaker 10: Like right, so now you lose, you lose your government
Speaker 10: contract because you tried you try something, try something new,
Speaker 10: try something sustainable.
Speaker 4: You tried to be too nice to the land that
Speaker 4: supposedly belongs to everyone.
Speaker 10: So in order in order to use this land that
Speaker 10: is supposed to be for you know, public preservation, you
Speaker 10: have to be as exploitative and destructive as possible.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a great, thank you, Doug Burgham.
Speaker 4: Yeah cool. Are we going to extend this to Like
Speaker 4: I'm not as familiar with mining, but you can stake
Speaker 4: a claim on public land, right, lots of most mining claims.
Speaker 4: I imagine a state on public land and you can
Speaker 4: you can exploit that claim. Is it now going to
Speaker 4: be the case that like you have to exploit that
Speaker 4: claim and like if we don't have this standard of
Speaker 4: maintaining the land, and that it said it's gone now
Speaker 4: and that the only standard is it has to be
Speaker 4: as productive as possible.
Speaker 10: Then how is that land management? This is the Bureau
Speaker 10: of Land Exploitation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the BLM is just and I know the BLM
Speaker 4: has done this for many cents. This isn't then this
Speaker 4: isn't new for the BLM.
Speaker 5: But having officially rescinded their rule on conserving the land.
Speaker 4: Yeah, then this could be really bad. Right, Like the
Speaker 4: massive chunks of the West are managed by the BLM,
Speaker 4: and like the idea that they're only going to allow
Speaker 4: it the most productive uses or force the most productive uses.
Speaker 4: Like this is one of the many ways that Trump
Speaker 4: administration is attacking public lands that people should talk.
Speaker 10: About more and again without adequately defining it. I just
Speaker 10: feel like this is another vector for is handing out
Speaker 10: government resources to donors allies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like without any change in statute. Right, this
Speaker 4: is the law that Bergham is reinterpreting. Here, You've got
Speaker 4: the nineteen thirty four Tailor Grazing Act and then like
Speaker 4: there's a nineteen seventy six law that that and the
Speaker 4: statutory language is that the BLM should manage the land
Speaker 4: for multiple use and sustained yield. That is broad, but
Speaker 4: like we are not going to get this Congress to
Speaker 4: pass a better one.
Speaker 10: No, And if anybody does try to take this to court,
Speaker 10: the Supreme Court will just say, no, you have to
Speaker 10: strip mine the field.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, like your only choice.
Speaker 5: You have to frack, even whether or not you have
Speaker 5: to set up tracking.
Speaker 4: You're dure like obliged to do feed lands even though
Speaker 4: you can't. Like, it's just like a really concerning area
Speaker 4: that I think has been approached kind of almost tokenistically
Speaker 4: in some of the press. Like this is bad for everyone,
Speaker 4: right if the government is saying you can only ranch
Speaker 4: this way on a big pland, like that's also bad
Speaker 4: for ranches all over the west, right, I don't think
Speaker 4: that like the way that we restore our land to
Speaker 4: its custodians and to like its natural state. It's big
Speaker 4: private parks like APR is like a private national park, right,
Speaker 4: Like you can walk through lots of it, you can
Speaker 4: hunt on it like public land. Some places you can
Speaker 4: camp on it. They have dispersed camping. That's nice. I
Speaker 4: don't believe in the benevolence of the rich, because like,
Speaker 4: look how we fucking got here, right.
Speaker 10: But that that half measure was the best thing we
Speaker 10: had at this moment, and now it's illegal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, now it's And like I'm glad that these rich
Speaker 4: people are putting buffalo on the landscape because we need
Speaker 4: more of them. Like, if we're ever going to have
Speaker 4: truly wild herds, we need that genetic diversity. Right, They've
Speaker 4: been through horrible genetic bottlenecks in getting up to this
Speaker 4: half a million number.
Speaker 10: Right, It's not like we can just try again later,
Speaker 10: let it, let the number drop back down. We'll try
Speaker 10: again in a hundred years, Like at some point we've
Speaker 10: missed the boat.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and as the climate continues to change, we have
Speaker 4: to think about how land management, food procurement plays a
Speaker 4: role in our future. And like this is the opposite
Speaker 4: of doing that. And I think people ought to be
Speaker 4: concerned about that. There's not much you could do about it,
Speaker 4: Like it's these people who weren't elected ruling on things
Speaker 4: that are not saturtary. But it is something that I
Speaker 4: think people ought to add to that many concerns with
Speaker 4: the Trump administration.
Speaker 7: I guess he more worried.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know. I don't want you to be
Speaker 4: more worried. I want you to go outside, like see
Speaker 4: a buffalo. It will be nice.
Speaker 10: That would at least know that I don't know the
Speaker 10: future existence of the world as we know it is
Speaker 10: being intact from all sides, even from directions I wasn't
Speaker 10: aware of. Yeah, there are attack vectors that I just
Speaker 10: had not considered.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is a new and exciting way that they're
Speaker 4: making tit worse. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed a
Speaker 4: little diversion about buffalo. Next week, I want to talk
Speaker 4: about bears. I want to tear the bears.
Speaker 10: I'm excited to learn about because I've seen a bear
Speaker 10: and I know they live in the United States unlike
Speaker 10: they do.
Speaker 5: I guess I was thinking of like spring Bok. Maybe
Speaker 5: they kind of they look like that in it.
Speaker 4: M I don't know what.
Speaker 10: I've been to a zoo and big of antelope type
Speaker 10: animals there, so I just I don't know.
Speaker 5: Everything at the zoo must be from far away.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 4: The prong horn is like it's a there's a there's
Speaker 4: a cool zoo. I'm not a big zoo guy.
Speaker 5: You've got to make sure it's one of one of
Speaker 5: those ones that a credited zoo.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's one in Palm Springs where you can see
Speaker 4: I've seen big hon I've been fortunate enough to see
Speaker 4: big horn sheep in their natural habitat. But for most people,
Speaker 4: your best chance, again they look at the big horn
Speaker 4: sheep is to get to that one in Palm Springs.
Speaker 4: When you see a prong horn just pronging, you know,
Speaker 4: like do they like yeah, they bounce al they got
Speaker 4: those giant tendons right that they buffalo can go thirty
Speaker 4: five miles an hour and they're faster than a buffalo.
Speaker 10: So like, I don't want to see a buffalo go
Speaker 10: thirty five miles an hour. I don't want to see that.
Speaker 4: They can be it. Yeah, it's like seeing a mini
Speaker 4: van like doing muscle cars. Shit, you know, like they
Speaker 4: can jump, they could. They have this incredible buffalo can
Speaker 4: like jump over stuff. They're they're actually very nimble despite
Speaker 4: looking you know, like a like a cinder block.
Speaker 5: They're so cute that I want to touch one so bad,
Speaker 5: but I don't.
Speaker 4: Want to get vice against it. Yeah, bricellosis is going
Speaker 4: to be a long term issue. It's yeah, it's the trampoline.
Speaker 4: There'll be a short term issue for you. So yeah,
Speaker 4: don't touch buffalo, don't touch them. Send send Molly pictures
Speaker 4: of your prong horning counters.
Speaker 10: Yeah, if you have seen a wild animal in the
Speaker 10: United States, let me see it.
Speaker 5: I don't know we had those.
Speaker 4: Yeah, can in Molly's replies with your raccoons in your trash.
Speaker 5: Raccoons I know about I've seen it, right, Yeah, yeah
Speaker 5: it was.
Speaker 10: I was in South Korea many years ago at a
Speaker 10: theme park that had a zoo in it. I don't know,
Speaker 10: it's a while ago. Perfect in the zoo area, there
Speaker 10: was this huge display. Everyone was crowded around this very
Speaker 10: cool zoo animal was raccoons.
Speaker 4: Oh really, they don't have them. Yeah, they play such
Speaker 4: a cultural role in the American cultural hegemonies.
Speaker 10: I don't want to see a raccoon, but I guess yeah,
Speaker 10: if you can't see one, that's an intriguing get.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, I remember, I like, my initial engagement with
Speaker 4: raccoons was through the movie Pokahontists, which is a whole
Speaker 4: other ship. So when I first saw a raccoon, I
Speaker 4: wanted to visit it, right, because you know, they have biscuits.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you thought it was gonna be like a chatty yeah.
Speaker 7: Like a little friend.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was very aggressive, be unnecessarily aggressive a little friend. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I was approaching in a spirit of kindness. I think,
Speaker 4: like generally, I also have been victimized by a skunk
Speaker 4: for several years now, so I think maybe I just
Speaker 4: that's not a friend. No, it's fine.
Speaker 10: Those ladies on TikTok that have pet ones will tell
Speaker 10: you that is not a friend.
Speaker 4: Apparently they're very nice if they like, can be encouraged
Speaker 4: not to. I don't know, I don't think it. Don't please,
Speaker 4: don't capture a skunk, can bring it home with you,
Speaker 4: like it's skunk wants to live on its own. But yeah,
Speaker 4: this one skunk will find me every time I'm going
Speaker 4: through that, like I'll be coming out at night.
Speaker 5: He's thinking about you.
Speaker 4: On my head. It's like a fucking Exocet missile. I
Speaker 4: see him coming from like two hundred yards away.
Speaker 5: It's the fucking guy again.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's pissed at me. I'm pissed at him. He
Speaker 4: turns around, he squares up.
Speaker 5: Did you get got No?
Speaker 4: No, he'll show his ass to me and then I'll
Speaker 4: I'll just kind of give him a wide berth and think, oh,
Speaker 4: that was unusual, seeing it's gounn to be that, And
Speaker 4: then two weeks later, there he is again.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's waiting for you. He does not want you
Speaker 5: to come back.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, he doesn't. He's also trying to like exercise
Speaker 4: control over the public land and aggressive.
Speaker 5: He's doing land management and you're not part of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, he's returning it to its natural state by
Speaker 4: keeping European people off the land, which I guess is
Speaker 4: honestly valid, respectable.
Speaker 5: He's heard horror stories from his great grandparents.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can respect that night and now I think
Speaker 4: of it in that way. But yeah, I've got some
Speaker 4: good pictures of the back end of him. Well after
Speaker 4: he kept doing it, I thought, I'm as well photograph
Speaker 4: and document this tendency. So yeah, I have them. I'm
Speaker 4: going to use them for some kind of greetings card
Speaker 4: or something they haven't yet.
Speaker 5: Perfect with the family Christmas card, I think.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I just keep people on their toes. We've rambled enough, okay, Yeah,
Speaker 4: please send us your wildlife pictures. We would love to
Speaker 4: see them.
Speaker 5: And next week bears bears.
Speaker 4: Yeah, money before we go. Do you want to plug
Speaker 4: your podcast about people who probably don't engage with animals
Speaker 4: very much?
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, you can listen to my show A weird
Speaker 10: Little Guys. I don't think there's been an animal in
Speaker 10: the show in a while. Well, I guess eventually I
Speaker 10: will get around to those guys that occupied that BLM land.
Speaker 4: But yeah, yeah, that's it.
Speaker 5: But it's that kind of shell.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I bet they love wolves. I bet I bet
Speaker 4: they like think a lot about wolves even though they
Speaker 4: don't see them.
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a guy who had
Speaker 10: his user name on a Nazi forum was the device
Speaker 10: a wolf, which is incorrect German for the white wolf.
Speaker 4: Perfectly, they do love wolves, Yeah, yeah, could I guess.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much, Molly.
Speaker 5: Thank you, James.
Speaker 7: Welcome to take it out here a podcast where I
Speaker 7: try to explain economics to you and Molly. I'm your host,
Speaker 7: Fia Lung, And thank you Molly for agreeing to do this,
Speaker 7: especially on extremely short notice. So I appreciate it.
Speaker 5: I am so excited to struggle to learn.
Speaker 7: So, okay, there's good news and bad news. The good
Speaker 7: news is that the central thing that this episode is about,
Speaker 7: nominally is a concept called monopsony, and it's actually really easy.
Speaker 8: No.
Speaker 10: See you said that. You said that in the work
Speaker 10: chat earlier. You said monopsy and I was like, oh man,
Speaker 10: she's so tired. That's not even a word.
Speaker 7: Well, okay, this actually gets into the thing because this
Speaker 7: is a word that was made up specifically for this concept. Unfortunately,
Speaker 7: I do also have to do the bad news, which
Speaker 7: is that to actually understand the history of this, we
Speaker 7: do have to explain stuff that's legitimately very complicated. So
Speaker 7: I'm locked in. Yay, but okay, okay, monopsony. The hook
Speaker 7: of this, this is part of the reason why you
Speaker 7: get paid like shit is because of monopsony. So I
Speaker 7: first was interested in writing about this specifically for this
Speaker 7: show because weirdly NPR's Planet Money Like discovered the concept
Speaker 7: of monopsony and did it a couple of pretty interesting
Speaker 7: pieces on the history of the concept. And the place
Speaker 7: that they go with it is they start talking about
Speaker 7: one of my favorite economists, Joan Robinson, who is really
Speaker 7: good and we're gonna spend most of this episode talking
Speaker 7: about her. But one of the stories that they tell
Speaker 7: this is a very famous story in the circles of
Speaker 7: economists that I'm around, I guess is about her sitting
Speaker 7: down with like a British class system inventing the term monopsony.
Speaker 7: So okay, what is what is.
Speaker 5: Monopson it's one something mono.
Speaker 7: You know what a monopoly is. So monopoly is when
Speaker 7: one seller, right, So okay, it's like, yeah, you have
Speaker 7: I don't know, you have like Google, which is a
Speaker 7: monopoly on like search engines. Right, And you know, monopoly
Speaker 7: doesn't necessarily and what we'll be getting into this more
Speaker 7: in a second, it doesn't necessarily have to mean that
Speaker 7: there's literally only one right. But you know, like the US,
Speaker 7: like every market you are dealing with in the United
Speaker 7: States is some kind of monopoly where you know, sometimes
Speaker 7: there's like a big three, or sometimes there's like two,
Speaker 7: or sometimes there's maybe five.
Speaker 10: Or sometimes it's quite literal, like we only have one
Speaker 10: power company in Virginia.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, you know, And sometimes monopolies are deliberately set
Speaker 7: up by the state, right where sometimes you know, the
Speaker 7: state a state would just be like, yeah, fuck it,
Speaker 7: there's only one power company here.
Speaker 5: Oh no, it's a private company. It's a private company.
Speaker 7: Yeah right, yeah, But sometimes private companies will be hand
Speaker 7: at monopolies like this, right, Utility companies are a thing
Speaker 7: where it does kind of make sense because having two
Speaker 7: companies setting up rival electrical grids is like a nightmare.
Speaker 5: But well, that's why the state should do it.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Well it's like it's like, yeah, this is the
Speaker 7: issue though, right, And this is why monopoly in theory
Speaker 7: is like a thing that economists are not supposed to like,
Speaker 7: because monopoly screws up the sort of like perfect competition
Speaker 7: between all of these one million different companies that's supposed
Speaker 7: to like make your life good because they're all forced
Speaker 7: to sell everything at like the lowest possible price because
Speaker 7: they have to outcompete everyone else. And it's like all
Speaker 7: of this stuff. But then if you have one monopoly,
Speaker 7: they can charge you whatever the fuck price they want
Speaker 7: because there's only one of them, and the alternatives are
Speaker 7: to eat shit.
Speaker 10: Or like like Amazon choking out. It was one hundred diapers, right.
Speaker 10: It was a diaper company that offered like affordable order diapers,
Speaker 10: and the yeah undercut them really hard concentrated period of time,
Speaker 10: so they went out of business and they jacked with
Speaker 10: the prices on dipers.
Speaker 7: Yep, yep. This is basically just what the modern tech
Speaker 7: economy is is that some company will come in with
Speaker 7: like one hundred billion dollars worth of tech money. Ex
Speaker 7: there were a bunch of ride share wars in India
Speaker 7: over this, where like all these ride share companies were
Speaker 7: basically giving people for like really really low cost rides.
Speaker 7: I mean, they're obviously still screwing the drivers, but like
Speaker 7: oh yeah, naturally, yeah, yeah, and so they were just
Speaker 7: trying to like edge of when I was out of
Speaker 7: the market so that they could take control of it
Speaker 7: and raise the prices and stuff eventually.
Speaker 10: Because it's like, you know, the capitalism enthusiast likes to
Speaker 10: imagine that the economy is like you know, Darwinian evolution,
Speaker 10: survival of the fittest, right, we evolve and compete and
Speaker 10: the best man wins. But actually it's more like intentionally
Speaker 10: introducing mongooses to the islands of Hawaii.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's yeah, this is an evolution. You just introduce
Speaker 5: a giant weasel that aid all the bird eggs.
Speaker 7: Yeah, right. And it's like, you know, if you look
Speaker 7: at how capitalism spreads historically, it's it's not even like
Speaker 7: capitalism doesn't outproduce other like economic systems usually what it
Speaker 7: does is, like, you know, there's this line in the
Speaker 7: Communist Manifesto that I think Marx was extremely wrong about.
Speaker 7: We're just talking about like like trade is the cannon
Speaker 7: that will bring down Chinese walls. And he's talking about
Speaker 7: like free trade will like destroyed China's trade bearers. It's like, well, no,
Speaker 7: like China's trade barriers were brought down by the Opium Wars,
Speaker 7: like the British Navy like sailed in and like besieged
Speaker 7: the capital. Like you know, but when people talk about monopolies,
Speaker 7: they're talking about selling goods right right. And what Chillan
Speaker 7: Robinson realizes very quickly is that hold on, this is
Speaker 7: also true for employers, right if you are trying to
Speaker 7: find a fucking job right under sort of like the
Speaker 7: models of perfect competition that like neoclassical economics, the economics
Speaker 7: that like you learned in school, they just normally assume that, oh, yeah,
Speaker 7: you can just switch jobs really easily, so obviously companies
Speaker 7: have to pay you.
Speaker 10: Right, But in most towns there's one major employer who
Speaker 10: kind of sets the bar.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like here it's UVA.
Speaker 7: Yeah, like it's Walgreens or like Walmart, and like if
Speaker 7: you ever had to find a job, Like you understand
Speaker 7: how this works.
Speaker 5: I actually haven't, but I understand in the theory.
Speaker 7: To the listener, you've you've had to find a job.
Speaker 7: Here's you're speaking to.
Speaker 5: You're speaking to the only person who's never applied for
Speaker 5: the job.
Speaker 7: We literally never applied for a job.
Speaker 5: It's a complicated situation. Yeah, I've never Like, oh wow,
Speaker 5: good for you.
Speaker 7: I love this for you. This rules for everyone else. Yeah,
Speaker 7: Like it's really obvious that you know there exists conditions
Speaker 7: where you have monopolies but for like hiring people. So
Speaker 7: Joan Robinson like at this meeting with this classes coins
Speaker 7: the term monopsony to be like, okay, there's one seller.
Speaker 10: Okay, I'm usually against a neologism, but I understand the
Speaker 10: need for this word.
Speaker 5: I'm on board. Yeah, I'm on board with Joanne.
Speaker 7: It's a good word. She she's really cool. Yeah. I
Speaker 7: I spread mentioned the caveat here, which is she does
Speaker 7: do the like classic nineteen fifties communist thing of like
Speaker 7: going to China and then getting led around on like
Speaker 7: state sponsored tours and then coming back and assuming you
Speaker 7: understand what's happening in communist China and that didn't go great,
Speaker 7: but you know, a lot the rest of her work
Speaker 7: is really good. And this is kind of where Planning
Speaker 7: Money does a really interesting history skip, where in their
Speaker 7: version of the story they go oh yeah, and then
Speaker 7: everyone just kind of ignored it until recently it got
Speaker 7: picked back up by these economists who were like, wow,
Speaker 7: we did peer reviewed research and we found out that, like,
Speaker 7: it turns out that yeah, actually there isn't perfect competition
Speaker 7: in the labor market and that yeah, labor markets are
Speaker 7: controlled by these monopolies.
Speaker 10: And I guess you have to do studies to prove things.
Speaker 10: You can't just vibe it out.
Speaker 5: But I would say just the general vibe like I
Speaker 5: could have told you that, I told you that, Mollie.
Speaker 7: Okay, I have such bad news for you, which is
Speaker 7: we are going to meet the person in this story
Speaker 7: whose idea it was to be like, hey, we should
Speaker 7: like figure out how the economy works using data.
Speaker 5: That was a new concept for them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, was invented by a guy. We're good to
Speaker 7: get to the story of the invention.
Speaker 5: Of and it was in like nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 7: This is a sign I got. It was like the
Speaker 7: thirties nineteen thirties when we invented this.
Speaker 5: It was in two thousand and four they brought math
Speaker 5: into it.
Speaker 7: Oh god. One of my absolute favorite stories of all
Speaker 7: time is, like, you know, in like the nineties, there
Speaker 7: was like the craze over chaos theory, which I think
Speaker 7: the only artifact of that is like the chaos theory
Speaker 7: guy in Jurassic Park, one of my classes, Wings and
Speaker 7: all these things happened. Like a chaos theory is it's
Speaker 7: a it's a like a genuinely very interesting math concept.
Speaker 7: But the thing about chaos theory is that it only
Speaker 7: applies to things that are third order equations, a.
Speaker 5: Thing I definitely know what that is.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we could go off in a tangent on this,
Speaker 7: but I'm just I'm just gonna tell the Econ show. Yes,
Speaker 7: so everyone economics to me was like, oh my god,
Speaker 7: there's this hot topic. But the problem is it doesn't
Speaker 7: apply to the economic stuff people were doing in the
Speaker 7: nineties because they don't use third order equations. They only
Speaker 7: use second order ones because they're dumbasses. This is like
Speaker 7: one of the trends of the show is that the
Speaker 7: people who do mainstream economics are extremely dumb.
Speaker 10: And I've always had that feeling, but because I don't
Speaker 10: understand the economy, it's hard for me to be sure.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well it's it's because it's ideologically motivated, right, you
Speaker 7: know the reason that you study economics in high school?
Speaker 5: Who studies economics in high school?
Speaker 7: I didn't know there are like economics classes in high school, right,
Speaker 7: like that? Right? Sorry when I say studies, like yeah,
Speaker 7: like you had to take an econo great school. Yeah,
Speaker 7: the reason there are economics classes in high schools is
Speaker 7: not to teach people economics. It's specific it was specifically
Speaker 7: designed as an anti communist thing to like teach kids
Speaker 7: how capitalism really works through like again a model where
Speaker 7: they don't teach you that monopolies exist, and you know, obviously,
Speaker 7: like some of this has been incorporated into more modern stuff,
Speaker 7: like the cause of a monopsony like kind of has
Speaker 7: entered into the lexicon of like the economics you get
Speaker 7: taught as like a little tiny baby child, which is
Speaker 7: not actually economics. It's literally propaganda. That's what it was
Speaker 7: designed to be.
Speaker 10: I mean, how fun to get to pretend to be
Speaker 10: a scientist when you don't do real math and really
Speaker 10: you're just a propagandist.
Speaker 7: Oh, it's so fun. It's so fun. One of the
Speaker 7: other things like if if you're ever like in university
Speaker 7: settings and you want to just like listen to someone
Speaker 7: complain about shit for a while, go talk to the
Speaker 7: math people about the ship people get Nobel prizes for
Speaker 7: in economics, where it's like this is like shit that
Speaker 7: like a child who studies mathematics could do. The math
Speaker 7: doesn't even have a Nobel prize, right if you want
Speaker 7: to get like a Fields Medal, there's not.
Speaker 5: Nope, that's so sad for the math guys.
Speaker 7: Matho doesn't have one.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, and the other thing is econsoable price is fake too.
Speaker 7: This is this is another thing that's important. It's not
Speaker 7: one of the prizes that was set down by by Nobel,
Speaker 7: which like the Nobel prices. They created their own.
Speaker 5: And the dynamite guy knew what he was doing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but it's like literally like the Central Bank of
Speaker 7: Sweden made their own and called it a Nobel and
Speaker 7: it's not a real one. It's a fake one.
Speaker 5: Wait, so you're saying that if we are confident enough.
Speaker 7: In our assertion, oh, yeah, we could just make a Nobel.
Speaker 5: We could tell people that we are Nobel Laureates in podcasting.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean as a huge thing. You also have
Speaker 7: to have an extraordinarily large amount of money to do
Speaker 7: to do propaganda for this, because the reason this works
Speaker 7: is that the Nobel Prize in economics is also a
Speaker 7: propaganda effort, right, And one of the ways you can
Speaker 7: tell us a propaganda effort is that they didn't give
Speaker 7: what a Joanne Robinson, who was one of the most
Speaker 7: influential economists who has ever lived.
Speaker 5: Justice for Joanne genuinely like it's it's outrageous.
Speaker 7: It's just like one of the few things even to
Speaker 7: the people who hate her are like, yeah, no, she
Speaker 7: should have gotten one because she's one of the people
Speaker 7: who invents the idea that competition isn't perfect, Like she
Speaker 7: invents imperfect competition where there's like monopolies and shit, this
Speaker 7: is all like there's something that's like foundational to like
Speaker 7: everyone's to some extent understanding of economics, but most of
Speaker 7: our ideas are completely ignored and saying like monopsony is
Speaker 7: like a thing that you put in textbooks. But then
Speaker 7: when you're trying to like you know, you're you're an
Speaker 7: economist that like not even like the fucking Heritage Institute
Speaker 7: or Heritage Foundation or whatever you're at, like a just
Speaker 7: like a random economics think tank, right, Like you don't
Speaker 7: take Knopsony into account when you're like, hey, we can't
Speaker 7: raise the minimum wage because if you raise the minimum wage,
Speaker 7: then everyone's going to get fired. And it turns out
Speaker 7: to like, well, no, that's not true. And the reason
Speaker 7: that's not true is because if you assume that neoclassical
Speaker 7: economics is real, is that companies aren't hiring people at
Speaker 7: like the lowest possible wage that like that they could
Speaker 7: do without someone going to somewhere else. They're hiring them
Speaker 7: even lower than that because they can suppress the wages
Speaker 7: because where the fuck else are you going to work? Right, right?
Speaker 10: But also like people like human behavior is not subject
Speaker 10: to the rules of mathematics in that straightforward kind of way.
Speaker 7: No, it's very dumb and like because this goes back
Speaker 7: to something that's important to all of this, which is
Speaker 7: that like economics as a field is not it's not
Speaker 7: a science. It doesn't come from science, it comes from
Speaker 7: moral philosophy.
Speaker 5: The economy guys they're always saying stuff.
Speaker 10: They're just like confidently asserting something and showing me a
Speaker 10: graph that's just like, does not reflect my lived reality
Speaker 10: at all.
Speaker 5: But they're very confident about the graph.
Speaker 7: No. Well, and that's the thing because because because it's
Speaker 7: originally philosophy.
Speaker 5: It's like, no, the economy is going great. It's like not,
Speaker 5: we're right, not from not in my house.
Speaker 7: No, it's like it's fucking bullshit. That's a reflection of
Speaker 7: the fact that economics as a discipline works backwards from
Speaker 7: the way that a science works, which is economics starts
Speaker 7: out with assumptions about how humans work, right. It starts
Speaker 7: out with the assumption that, like everyone's like a rationally
Speaker 7: calculating actor who's like seeking to maximize their own utility.
Speaker 5: And I've never met that person. Yeah, it's philosophy. I
Speaker 5: actually no, I.
Speaker 10: Love maximizing utility. Don't get me started on maximizing my
Speaker 10: economic utility.
Speaker 7: It's literally utilitarianism, right. It's not something that's derived from
Speaker 7: from empirical data. It's it starts with an assumption about
Speaker 7: how things work and then projects that assumption onto the world.
Speaker 10: I don't want to be melodramatic, but I'm having a
Speaker 10: breakthrough here in my understanding of what economics is I
Speaker 10: thought they were just being dumb before suddenly I see
Speaker 10: it completely differently.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's ideologically motivated reasons they have. They have a
Speaker 7: philosophy they've attempting to mathematically define, like project their philosophy
Speaker 7: onto the world, and it doesn't work very well because
Speaker 7: it's philosophy. It's not right.
Speaker 10: They're trying to prove a conclusion rather than map reality.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they're going backwards. Yeah, and this is something that
Speaker 7: we're going to get into in a second. But first
Speaker 7: we're going to get into are the products and services
Speaker 7: that support this podcast? Wow?
Speaker 5: Speaking of the economy.
Speaker 1: Woo, we are back.
Speaker 7: So one of the things that's actually interesting about the
Speaker 7: story of Joan Robinson is that there's a reason why
Speaker 7: almost no one, I mean, I don't know that people
Speaker 7: people listening to this podcast have a higher likelihood of
Speaker 7: knowing who Joan Robinson is than like almost any other
Speaker 7: group of people on Earth. But like, there's a reason
Speaker 7: why she's not extremely well known by normal people.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna be so honest with emia.
Speaker 10: The only economists I know are the ones that Jabier
Speaker 10: and Malay named his clone dogs after.
Speaker 7: That makes sense. Well, like people think you've heard of you,
Speaker 7: like you've heard of like Adam Smith.
Speaker 5: Right, that's true. That's not one of the clone dogs.
Speaker 7: John Robinson is an economist who is important enough that
Speaker 7: like you should know who she is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but he would not have named one of the
Speaker 5: clone dogs after her. I think they're I think they're
Speaker 5: all boys. No, absolutely not. He probably like he would
Speaker 5: chainsaw her.
Speaker 7: It's bad. But the reason that you don't know who
Speaker 7: she is, and the reason that Monopsony kind of like
Speaker 7: sat in the closet of mansion economics until people started
Speaker 7: digging it out recently, is because John Robinson is part
Speaker 7: of a tradition of heterodox economics, which is it's you know,
Speaker 7: the economics that's not the mainstream ones, and all of
Speaker 7: those people who got systematically purged from every academic institution
Speaker 7: over the span of about thirty years by the neoclassical
Speaker 7: economists because.
Speaker 5: The government doesn't want you to know their ideas.
Speaker 7: I mean, like well, like like genuinely what happened was
Speaker 7: it was like it was it was a bunch of
Speaker 7: these people like hired by capitalists in order to do
Speaker 7: propaganda for them, and they went through and systematically took
Speaker 7: over and purged all of the country's economics departments.
Speaker 10: If what she's saying is the entire framework of your
Speaker 10: worldview just like functionally doesn't work.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, that's that's not a good vibe for them.
Speaker 7: So let's talk about the kind of tradition that John
Speaker 7: Robinson operates in, because this is actually a story that
Speaker 7: really really tangentially the planet money people kind of allude
Speaker 7: to and then ever talk about again even though it's fascinating.
Speaker 7: So John Robinson is I guess you could call her
Speaker 7: one of the sort of first people in what you
Speaker 7: would call the post Kinesian tradition.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, I'm always saying that, do you know who Canes
Speaker 5: is an economist? Was his name Maynard?
Speaker 7: Yeah, John Maynard Kanes. Okay, he's like, like if you
Speaker 7: remember one thing about Canes, like if you need to
Speaker 7: just be like you have a flash card, you need
Speaker 7: to be like someone says Canes, he's the I guess,
Speaker 7: like the Cetagal terms like countercyclical spending. But he's he's
Speaker 7: the guy who's like, what economy bad, government should spend
Speaker 7: money in order to make economy not bad. Again, that's
Speaker 7: like the most basic part of Kanesianism.
Speaker 5: And that's all I need.
Speaker 7: Yeah, But like the thing about Caynes is that like
Speaker 7: he wants like a nicer version of capitalism, but he
Speaker 7: is like a capitalist, and so there's a sort of
Speaker 7: miliu around him that John Robinson is kind of part of.
Speaker 7: But there's a lot of elements of it. And people
Speaker 7: who Canes like take stuff from who are extremely obscure
Speaker 7: now because you know, Canes did a version of it
Speaker 7: that like took the radicalism out. I promised earlier you
Speaker 7: were going to get to the guy who like invented
Speaker 7: the concept of actually doing scientific studies for macroeconomics. That
Speaker 7: reason that makes me.
Speaker 5: So mad that the answer to that question isn't the
Speaker 5: first guy who put math in who decided that we
Speaker 5: should do math and economics. Oh, the first guy that
Speaker 5: did it, the first economists, right, the guy even been
Speaker 5: in economics.
Speaker 7: Right, economists do a bunch of math. It's just not math, that's.
Speaker 5: But like we should study the currently existing reality.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the world first.
Speaker 10: Right, it's just like trying to force reality into this
Speaker 10: chart that I made.
Speaker 5: That's awesome.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And so the guy who was like, hey, what
Speaker 7: if we observed reality? His name is Michael good for him?
Speaker 5: Great dub Michael.
Speaker 8: He rocks.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he has a long and convoluted history of stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say I don't endorse
Speaker 5: everything he did. I don't know anything about him.
Speaker 7: Honestly, he kind of rocks. He's so he COLLECKI, like
Speaker 7: foundationally is a Marxist, right, It's not sure that he's
Speaker 7: from this school, but he's the guy from which one
Speaker 7: of the major schools of Marxist economics is born, which
Speaker 7: is called the Monopoly capital school, who are kind of
Speaker 7: the Marxist version of the people who were like, oh
Speaker 7: my god, hold on, monopoly has gotten so out of hand.
Speaker 7: We have to change how our economics work. Robinson kind
Speaker 7: of discovers Kaleki a little bit later in her career.
Speaker 7: It's sort of like a forties thing, right, She's originally
Speaker 7: writing about emperor competition and like monopsony in.
Speaker 4: Like the thirties.
Speaker 7: But Colleki's one of the people who is responsible for
Speaker 7: a bunch of these ideas around, like him and Robinson
Speaker 7: are responsible for a bunch of the ideas around. Like okay, yeah, actually,
Speaker 7: it turns out that everything we've been talking about is
Speaker 7: like the world is composed of monopolies and monoposes and
Speaker 7: everything exists at best in the state of hypercompetition. And
Speaker 7: this this becomes kind of its own school, and like
Speaker 7: you know, it branches out in a bunch of different
Speaker 7: ways through the work of some other people who who
Speaker 7: start to look at like how is price set? And
Speaker 7: this is something that we've talked about on this show before.
Speaker 7: So so like, okay, if you've ever seen the graph
Speaker 7: that like all of the econ people use where it's
Speaker 7: like prices, supply and demand, right.
Speaker 5: What is it?
Speaker 7: Well, okay, so at a certain point and we've talked
Speaker 7: about this on the show before, our friends as Strange Matters,
Speaker 7: the magazine Strange Matters, I have written about this a lot.
Speaker 7: If you like, ask a person it's funny. I actually
Speaker 7: did this by accident with a fringe who runs like
Speaker 7: a very very small business. Well it's not that small,
Speaker 7: but like run runs runs like a very very small business.
Speaker 7: And I asked her, like she was talking about, like, okay,
Speaker 7: how do we figure out how to like price something?
Speaker 7: And I talked to her about it and she goes, yeah,
Speaker 7: it's cost plus markup right. And the thing about price right,
Speaker 7: is price is not set by a graph, like prices
Speaker 7: are set by a person in an office who figures
Speaker 7: out what the price is going to be, right, and
Speaker 7: the way that they do that is cost plus markup.
Speaker 7: It's like, how expensive was the item for us to obtain,
Speaker 7: and then what's the like additional price that we need
Speaker 7: to sell it for in order to both make profit
Speaker 7: and pay everyone. And this is really obvious to like
Speaker 7: anyone who's done a job, but like, well, yeah, no, shit,
Speaker 7: of course it's costless markup. In economics, this is considered
Speaker 7: an extremely radical idea.
Speaker 5: I guess you know.
Speaker 10: In this, in this supply and demand model, it's just
Speaker 10: like whatever people are willing to pay, you just keep
Speaker 10: in create seeing the price until demand drops off and
Speaker 10: then you back off a little.
Speaker 7: Yeah. In economics, that's called like companies being like price takers.
Speaker 7: The theory and like normal economics quote unquote is that
Speaker 7: companies they don't set prices. They take the price from
Speaker 7: like what people are willing to pay, and that's objectively
Speaker 7: not true.
Speaker 5: They're just constantly standing there tweaking the dial.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's like no, no, no, no, no, no, like just
Speaker 7: just on an objective level, what's happening is is you
Speaker 7: know this, this is what's called like administrative prices, right,
Speaker 7: and this is this is like the basic like one
Speaker 7: of the basic revelations of like post Kanes in economics
Speaker 7: is that price is set by a person who sets
Speaker 7: it by cost plus markup.
Speaker 5: And there's the precog who floats at a pool of
Speaker 5: goo and just into it's the prices.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they like see the data. It's like no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 7: it's literally just a person they set the price. It's
Speaker 7: cost plus markup. There's some like psychology stuff there about
Speaker 7: like what kinds of prices will break a consumer's loyalty
Speaker 7: to like a store, right, because if you like raise
Speaker 7: the price at a store too much, people will stop
Speaker 7: shopping at the store. But like that's like the way
Speaker 7: this stuff actually works. And this is one of the
Speaker 7: big post Knesy and innovations is like, Hi, we're trying
Speaker 7: to figure out how price works. So we went and
Speaker 7: we asked a bunch of people how it works. A
Speaker 7: remarkable choice, yeah, right, ah God, But this is an
Speaker 7: issue for neoclassical economics because the whole like supply and
Speaker 7: demand setting price is like the basis of their whole thing,
Speaker 7: and it's the basis of all of their politics. Now,
Speaker 7: at this point, we need to talk about the thing
Speaker 7: that's legitimately complicated. Before we get into that, We're going
Speaker 7: to talk with something that's not complicated, which is how
Speaker 7: to use these products and services.
Speaker 5: Wow, we're actually doing the economy right now.
Speaker 7: We are.
Speaker 1: We are back.
Speaker 7: Okay, so we're gonna stop doing the economy. And the
Speaker 7: reason we're going to stop doing the economy is that,
Speaker 7: you know, when I talked about there being an ideological
Speaker 7: purge right people, a Strange Matters wrote about this economist
Speaker 7: named Frederick Lee who was an IWW member and who
Speaker 7: was one of the sort of I don't know, like
Speaker 7: the guy trying to pull the five thousand different strands
Speaker 7: of heterodox economics together. And he writes a really really detailed,
Speaker 7: in depth analysis of at each individual school, how did
Speaker 7: the neoclassical people come in and purge everyone and then
Speaker 7: maintain control of it. And one of the ways you
Speaker 7: can tell that this isn't about who is correct, it
Speaker 7: is about who has power is something called the Cambridge
Speaker 7: Capital controversy, which I'm going to assume Mali you have
Speaker 7: you haven't heard of this.
Speaker 10: No, I was just really sort of marveling and turning
Speaker 10: that phrase over in my mind.
Speaker 5: It's not about who is correct, it's about who has power. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna store that one away. That's a good turn
Speaker 5: of phrase.
Speaker 7: It's a good way of understanding this, and it's a
Speaker 7: good way of understanding the central thing of like, hey,
Speaker 7: why did everyone kind of ignore monopsony for eighty years?
Speaker 7: And it turns out that the answer is that being
Speaker 7: right doesn't do anything in economics.
Speaker 5: That's heartbreaking.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's bleak. And some of these people people who
Speaker 7: have institutional power. So one of the things that Joan
Speaker 7: Robinson is most famous for doing is her and her
Speaker 7: collaborator Piero Saraffa, who's another whole story, who's an extremely
Speaker 7: wild guy. Saraffa is the other person who a bunch
Speaker 7: of this, like heterodox economics is based off of. There's
Speaker 7: a large extent to which heterodox economics means that, like,
Speaker 7: you think Saraffa was right instead of the Chicago School people,
Speaker 7: and like the neoclassical people or Marx or you're sort
Speaker 7: of like fusing the two of them. And he and
Speaker 7: Joe and Robinson are writing out of Cambridge, the one
Speaker 7: in England. But then there's also a whole bunch of
Speaker 7: neoclassical economists are at Cambridge, the one in Massachusetts.
Speaker 5: They really can't be doing that. Yeah, well, we got
Speaker 5: to rename at least one of them.
Speaker 7: And they fight it out. That's why it's called the
Speaker 7: Cambridge capital controversy. They know more. Yeah, so, okay, the
Speaker 7: thing that they're fighting about is extremely convoluted. At some point, Mollie,
Speaker 7: I'm gonna drag you on here and we're gonna do
Speaker 7: the actual full version of it. But the short version
Speaker 7: of it is really funny. And the short version of
Speaker 7: it is that this is a fight about Okay, so
Speaker 7: you have like two different kinds of what are called
Speaker 7: capital goods. So you have like, I don't know, I
Speaker 7: think the capital's power one. It's like tools that make
Speaker 7: ice cream and tools that make airplane And the question
Speaker 7: is how do you figure out how much those tools
Speaker 7: are worth together?
Speaker 5: Well, are you selling ice cream on the airplanes?
Speaker 7: You know they where you're selling them? Doesn't taste really,
Speaker 7: I just think.
Speaker 5: Is there synergy at play here?
Speaker 12: Mia?
Speaker 5: Like, well, I'm actually.
Speaker 7: One of the legitimately the idea that you could use
Speaker 7: the same equipment to do multiple things, is like a
Speaker 7: really serious problem for an enormous number of economic schools.
Speaker 7: Like it's like real bad. It's like kind of it's
Speaker 7: kind of even bad for like the mathematics behind like
Speaker 7: classical Marxist political economy. It's it's it's really bad for
Speaker 7: like the classical people. It's not great.
Speaker 5: So my new airline where everyone gets a free ice
Speaker 5: cream is really throwing a wrench into this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, as long as as long as the same
Speaker 7: machines can either be making ice cream or you can
Speaker 7: be making airplane and you can't tell which one.
Speaker 5: What are they teaching at economy school? What if even happening?
Speaker 5: So we were arguing about ice cream machines, Well.
Speaker 7: So so what what they're what they're arguing about, right,
Speaker 7: is if you are doing like normal neoclassical economics, can
Speaker 7: you point at like factories and go how much is
Speaker 7: this worth? And this is a real problem because it
Speaker 7: turns out that the way the neoclassical economists do this
Speaker 7: is circular. So, okay, you're trying to figure out how
Speaker 7: much money a factory is worth. I'm going to quote
Speaker 7: here from the book Capital Is Power which has a
Speaker 7: very good explanation of what's happening here. The money value
Speaker 7: of any capital good, that is, the amount investors are
Speaker 7: willing to pay for it, is the present value of
Speaker 7: its expected future profits, computed by discounting this profit by
Speaker 7: the prevailing rate of interest. So value equals expected profit
Speaker 7: divided by rate of interest. So basically what they're saying
Speaker 7: here is that, like, okay, you're trying to figure out
Speaker 7: how much money is the factory worth. The amount of
Speaker 7: money the factory is worth depends on how much money
Speaker 7: you make from using the factory to make a plane
Speaker 7: or make ice cream. That's like basically what that's saying,
Speaker 7: and then there's a discounting rate because you're making that
Speaker 7: money in the future.
Speaker 10: The problem with all of these principles is it's a
Speaker 10: perfect blend of stuff that's like completely fucking obvious, like
Speaker 10: statements of observed reality. Yeah, and then also stuff that
Speaker 10: somebody just made up based on a feeling that they had,
Speaker 10: and you can never.
Speaker 5: Tell which one you're doing, you know what I mean?
Speaker 10: Like, yeah, like what the factory is worth is based
Speaker 10: on how much money it can make, obviously.
Speaker 7: But here's the problem. This is one of those you know,
Speaker 7: you know, the Calendart Hawes meme where it's like you
Speaker 7: can divide everything into two categories. This one surprisingly seems
Speaker 7: like it observed. Reality is actually bullshit because because the
Speaker 7: problem is all right, so, okay, so in order to
Speaker 7: find out the value of the factory, you need to
Speaker 7: know what the profits are going to be.
Speaker 10: Well, I thought the value of things. I thought the
Speaker 10: price of things was set by supply and demands. The
Speaker 10: value of the factories whatever, someone's willing to pay for it.
Speaker 7: Right, But here's the issue though, Like that's like sort
Speaker 7: of true.
Speaker 5: No, I'm just making a jug that like prices and
Speaker 5: values appear to be disconnected.
Speaker 7: Legitimately, that is drilling into the problem with what's happening here,
Speaker 7: which is that, okay, but how do you know how
Speaker 7: much money the factory is it going to be worth?
Speaker 10: So we're saying like the factory has an inherent value
Speaker 10: versus the factory has a price.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so our price.
Speaker 5: Is not reflect an inherent value.
Speaker 7: So this is also kind of the core of this issue, right,
Speaker 7: which is like.
Speaker 5: That money isn't even real.
Speaker 7: Well yeah, but it's like, okay, if if you want
Speaker 7: to compare how much two different types of machinery are worth.
Speaker 7: You need to compare them in terms of money. Because
Speaker 7: they're making two different things. You have to be able
Speaker 7: to compare them. But the problem is the moment you
Speaker 7: start doing that, you then have to go, Okay, how
Speaker 7: much is it worth? And how much is it worth?
Speaker 7: In theory is like it's it's like marginal utility. Right,
Speaker 7: So in order to know how much the machine is worth,
Speaker 7: you have to know how much money it can make.
Speaker 7: But in order to know how much money it can make,
Speaker 7: you need to know how much the machine is worth.
Speaker 7: The issue here, right, is that you're trying to find
Speaker 7: one price for how much the factory is worth. But
Speaker 7: you can't find that one price without knowing how much
Speaker 7: profit you're getting from using the factory to make the thing.
Speaker 7: But you could have multiple different levels of profit from
Speaker 7: that same factory. The problem is, how do you determine.
Speaker 7: You know, you could make ten dollars in the factory,
Speaker 7: where the factory could also make twenty dollars. How do
Speaker 7: you figure out which one of those it is? Because
Speaker 7: that's what determines the value the factory is how much
Speaker 7: money it makes. So okay, you turn around to the
Speaker 7: neoclassical theory of how you figure out what the profit is.
Speaker 7: But that theorem requires you to know the marginal utility
Speaker 7: of the factory. So it requires you to know how
Speaker 7: much profit you're going to get from using the tool. Right,
Speaker 7: you have to know how much the tool is worth
Speaker 7: in order to figure out how much a profit is.
Speaker 7: But then you have to figure out in order to
Speaker 7: figure out.
Speaker 10: So this is why they just make stuff up, because
Speaker 10: otherwise they get trapped in the infinite loose.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's worse than that, because the value of the
Speaker 7: factory depends on how much money you're going to make
Speaker 7: from the ice cream. But how much money you make
Speaker 7: from the ice cream depends on how expensive it is
Speaker 7: to have the ice cream machine. Right, So they're both
Speaker 7: set by each other. Right, If you only have one
Speaker 7: of them, you can't calculate the other one. They're both
Speaker 7: like X and Y, and in order to figure out
Speaker 7: what one of them is worth, you already have to
Speaker 7: know the other one.
Speaker 5: Right, you need a constant at some point.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and legitimately, and this is a shit show because
Speaker 7: it means that you actually can't figure out how much
Speaker 7: the capital goods are worth in order to move on
Speaker 7: to stage two of the process, where you figure out
Speaker 7: the profit because you already need to have the answer
Speaker 7: to the question you are asking, and so like this
Speaker 7: is an issue bad enough that the IMF publishes these
Speaker 7: or I think it's maybe it's the World Bank publishes
Speaker 7: these like giant tables of like the value of capital
Speaker 7: stocks right in a country. Well, they'll go through there.
Speaker 7: They're trying to produce economic data about like a country,
Speaker 7: and they're like, okay, like how much are the factories worth?
Speaker 7: And the people who are trained to produce these books,
Speaker 7: there's multiple different values that these factories could have depending
Speaker 7: on how much money they make, and they're literally just
Speaker 7: chose to choose one of them, like at random. They're like,
Speaker 7: fuck it, pick one.
Speaker 10: This is not making me more confident about the economy.
Speaker 7: No, Well, but this is a shit show because because
Speaker 7: this is what this fight is about. It's about like
Speaker 7: the whole Cambige capital controversy is is like Joan Robinson
Speaker 7: going hold on. In order in order to like figure
Speaker 7: out your equation for how price works, you need to
Speaker 7: know something that you can only figure out by knowing
Speaker 7: the price already.
Speaker 5: Well, that's why you just feel the price in your heart.
Speaker 7: Well, yeah, but this causes, this causes like a decade
Speaker 7: of like fighting about this all of the like famous
Speaker 7: neoclassical economists. Actually, ho, can you list a Javier's dogs?
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, so Milton from Milton Friedman, Murray from Murray
Speaker 5: ro barred, and two dogs, one Robert, one Lucas for
Speaker 5: Robert Lucas Junior.
Speaker 7: Wow. He actually, I think he actually dodged all of them.
Speaker 7: I think I think he meant by bye by not
Speaker 7: naming someone. Paul Samuel said, I think he actually dodged it.
Speaker 10: He considers these dogs to be Conan's offspring, so these
Speaker 10: are all clones of his dog Conan. He considers the
Speaker 10: dogs to be Conn's offspring and thus his own grandson's
Speaker 10: because he believes the dog is his son.
Speaker 7: He's fucking Christ anyway.
Speaker 10: Yeah, but that's the only reason I know any of
Speaker 10: those people are.
Speaker 7: Oh my god, wait, hold on, hold on, I'm sure
Speaker 7: I'm not looking at at which Robert is this named
Speaker 7: after Robert.
Speaker 10: Lucas Junior from the University of Chicago.
Speaker 7: Oh, he dodged it. It was it was mostly the
Speaker 7: other Robert Robert Slowell sloow. God damn. I think I
Speaker 7: think he actually dodged having any of his dogs be
Speaker 7: named after the people who got their asses kicked in this.
Speaker 7: I think he managed to do it. So Paul Samuelson
Speaker 7: is like after Milton Freedmen and maybe Hyek. He's like
Speaker 7: probably the third most influential neoclassical economists, and he's like
Speaker 7: one of the people at the American Cambridge who are
Speaker 7: like arguing with like neoclassical people and they lose. They
Speaker 7: just straight up lose this fight because they're wrong. And
Speaker 7: the consequence of them being wrong is every single thing
Speaker 7: they've ever written is wrong. Because if you can't calculate
Speaker 7: how much a factory is worth, literally nothing you've ever
Speaker 7: written functions that's so funny. They can't do it.
Speaker 5: Didn't of them kill themselves like.
Speaker 7: You would think, But they were just like, oh well,
Speaker 7: we'll just guess.
Speaker 10: Because I like a lot of people were like at
Speaker 10: the end of their careers. Right, you're like sixty seventy
Speaker 10: years old, you're like professor emeritus of macroeconomics at Cambridge
Speaker 10: or we're never the fuck and do you find out
Speaker 10: that everything you've ever written was no longer Like we
Speaker 10: all agree that everything you ever said was wrong.
Speaker 7: How do you do Here's the thing. They just kept
Speaker 7: writing as if they didn't lose. Okay, this is why
Speaker 7: I was saying, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 5: Who can say who wins or loses, because it's all fame.
Speaker 7: Yeah and so and so likely. Literally what they did
Speaker 7: is is that this stuff, this fight never like broke
Speaker 7: out of like academic economist circles, and so no one
Speaker 7: today has any idea any of this shit happened.
Speaker 5: Good. No, because it doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, I mean, idiot, it does in the sense
Speaker 7: that life, to me, you can demonstrably prove that, like
Speaker 7: these people can't tell you how much a factory is worth.
Speaker 5: I've read the Wall Street Journal. I know there's no
Speaker 5: such thing as an economist.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Part of what's happening here is like the reason
Speaker 7: we all intuitively do that is because these people win.
Speaker 10: Right, So this entire like academic field just kind of
Speaker 10: shrugged and said, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 5: What we're saying doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there were like a couple of people who tried
Speaker 7: to like actually work with it, and everyone eventually just
Speaker 7: stopped paying attention. Legitimately, the answer for like modern economics
Speaker 7: is just to pretend that it never happened and then
Speaker 7: go like, oh, well, these people never produced anything of
Speaker 7: note academically, and it's like, well, on the one hand,
Speaker 7: that's like not true because the stuff that they did
Speaker 7: right is really good. But also their descendants, yeah, didn't
Speaker 7: get academic positions because you purge them all. And this
Speaker 7: is this is one of these things where like part
Speaker 7: of the reason that the new classical people took over
Speaker 7: in the first place was because they thought that they
Speaker 7: were right about this argument of like what caused the
Speaker 7: seventies economic collapse, which had like supposedly disproved Kanesianism. But
Speaker 7: then in this time period they got just obliterated, like
Speaker 7: they have taken an L the size of which, genuinely,
Speaker 7: I don't know if anyone in an academic field has
Speaker 7: ever taken a bigger L than these people did in
Speaker 7: this fight. They got just like beaten into pulp and
Speaker 7: it just didn't matter, like Nailmi.
Speaker 5: Wolf finding out live on air that her entire book
Speaker 5: was based on misunderstanding of a term.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's it's like that shit like except this, this
Speaker 7: is like every economist.
Speaker 5: Except in this In this case, they went on to
Speaker 5: continue to produce work based.
Speaker 4: On that premise.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you know, but this is the part of the
Speaker 7: story that like isn't in the accounts, you know, when
Speaker 7: Planet Money has to explain, like why the work of
Speaker 7: Joan Robinson, like isn't something that mainstream ECCONMYS pay attention to.
Speaker 10: Oh full circle, okay, yeah, that's where we were going.
Speaker 5: Yes, it's it's because.
Speaker 7: Like John Robinson had the temerity to ab a woman
Speaker 7: b B a leftist and seeing not be one of
Speaker 7: these like neoclassical freaks and and d she beat them.
Speaker 7: Like John Robinson is one of the major people in
Speaker 7: this fight.
Speaker 10: I should I should have had more faith that we
Speaker 10: were coming back around. I thought we were I thought
Speaker 10: we were lost. I was confused. No, I get it now.
Speaker 10: So when they were writing about like it's so crazy
Speaker 10: that nobody uses this term anymore, the underlying truth there
Speaker 10: is that they are.
Speaker 5: This is why lossing over this.
Speaker 10: The fact that the reason this term isn't better known
Speaker 10: is because they entire field of economics is based on
Speaker 10: suppressing challenging truths.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and there's one other aspect too, which is the
Speaker 7: economics is an example of how this works on like
Speaker 7: a small scale, right, But this this happens on a
Speaker 7: macro scale with just about everything that you consume, which
Speaker 7: is there are two models for sort of suppressing how
Speaker 7: information spreads and how like you know how social moup
Speaker 7: has developed, where one you just suppress them or to
Speaker 7: you co opt them and you do what's called recuperation.
Speaker 7: And you know it is interesting, Like the concept monopsony
Speaker 7: will appear sometimes like like in like textbooks, but they'll
Speaker 7: just be like, oh, yeah, this is anotherything that can exist,
Speaker 7: and like monopolies can also exist. Let's go back to
Speaker 7: spending all of our time dealing with like a bunch
Speaker 7: of stuff that's incredibly fake. And they will strategically like
Speaker 7: misuse the concept of monopsony in order to deal with it,
Speaker 7: like as a critique the recouper rate, like the word,
Speaker 7: but then they won't use any of the political conclusions
Speaker 7: of it.
Speaker 5: That's clever of them.
Speaker 10: That's clever of them, so that you don't go looking
Speaker 10: for more about the term because you have it and
Speaker 10: it's defanged and you don't need to worry about it.
Speaker 14: Yeah, And the thing is that the political consequences of
Speaker 14: it is this is the thing I talked about at
Speaker 14: the beginning, which is like, yeah, I menopstmally as a
Speaker 14: concept is why you get paid one of the reasons
Speaker 14: you get paid, like.
Speaker 7: Shit, And Joan Robinson's inclusion is like, yeah, capitalism is
Speaker 7: an inherently exploited economic system.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the logical conclusion there, right, Yeah, but that's
Speaker 5: not allowed.
Speaker 7: No, And so you know, like Robinson's legacy is that
Speaker 7: part of her work is co opted and recuperated in
Speaker 7: a way where they teach the tiniest part of it
Speaker 7: that can't be used challenge a system, and the part
Speaker 7: of it where she deals a kind of intellectual death
Speaker 7: blow to an entire field of economics that in like
Speaker 7: the history of academia. I don't know if any one
Speaker 7: has ever been so decisive.
Speaker 5: We defeated intellectually, and yet they just sort of brushed
Speaker 5: it off and moved on. Yeah, which I feel like
Speaker 5: that is so damning, right that you're just I mean,
Speaker 5: you've just admitted that everything you've ever said is based
Speaker 5: on nothing. If you can just disregard this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, God, I can't find the exact quote, but Samielson
Speaker 7: has this line about how like they need to just
Speaker 7: treat it as an article of faith. That this can
Speaker 7: be done, and they just kept going and it.
Speaker 5: Is just so you can't tell me this is a
Speaker 5: science if you're like, well, it's just based on you
Speaker 5: just have to have faith.
Speaker 1: You just have to believe.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean the economy has always put on tinker
Speaker 10: Bell rules, right, Like you have to believe or it
Speaker 10: won't work.
Speaker 5: You have to clap for her.
Speaker 7: Yeah, in order for the entire system that these people
Speaker 7: are paid to propagate, because this entire school of economics
Speaker 7: is created by a bunch of right wing billionaires to
Speaker 7: get them together in order to push against like both
Speaker 7: communism and like the Kynesian idea they should pay taxes.
Speaker 7: This is something also, I guess I kind of want
Speaker 7: to conclude about this. It's like there are a lot
Speaker 7: of times where you see, like like a newspaper columnists
Speaker 7: and they're saying the most unhinged thing you've ever seen,
Speaker 7: or like you know, I'm gonna take I take a
Speaker 7: very incendiary example, and you look at like Ezra Kleine,
Speaker 7: and Ezra Kleine is like being like, oh, you have
Speaker 7: to like take the ideas of like some random fucking
Speaker 7: nazi seriously, and no, I don't, No, you don't. But
Speaker 7: the but the reason he's saying this, it does it's
Speaker 7: not even about what he believes.
Speaker 5: Oh, these people believe nothing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this is what they're being paid to say because
Speaker 7: Klein's job is to is to act as a way
Speaker 7: to sell like fascist tech oligarchy to liberals. Like and
Speaker 7: this is the same thing with like you get these
Speaker 7: newspaper columnists who'll like say, like the most unhinged shit
Speaker 7: you've ever seen. And yeah, they're saying that because it's
Speaker 7: their job to produce this, right, Like, they're not acting
Speaker 7: as individual people. They're acting as it cutouts and projections
Speaker 7: of like the people who they've been hired.
Speaker 5: By, and those people have a monopsony on opinion. Yeah,
Speaker 5: well every opinion, every opinion writer is saying the dumbest
Speaker 5: shit you've ever heard because of monopsis.
Speaker 7: Well yeah, I mean, but like literally it's because they
Speaker 7: can they can choose who the fuck to hire, right,
Speaker 7: Like that's the actual reason. And you know, and like
Speaker 7: journalism is one of these things where it's like you see,
Speaker 7: newspapers have an incredible amount of power because there's like
Speaker 7: seven fucking newspapers left and if you want to do journalism,
Speaker 7: like you're fucked. You either like fall in line and
Speaker 7: accept them paying you like absolute dogshit, or you go unemployed,
Speaker 7: or you're like one of the very few people who
Speaker 7: was able to like make a living doing this independently,
Speaker 7: but like.
Speaker 5: Or you're us we found a way, yeah, or like
Speaker 5: a rich and successful podcaster picks you out and goes, hey,
Speaker 5: we're gonna pay you to do this, right, Like No,
Speaker 5: But I think I think about that all the time,
Speaker 5: that it really this is such a unicorn job because
Speaker 5: almost every job in media you do, you have to
Speaker 5: you have to suck it up and eat the ship,
Speaker 5: and you have to say the dumbest thing anyone's ever heard,
Speaker 5: because that's how you keep your job, and that's not
Speaker 5: our reality. And I'm so grateful for that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think I think that's a good place to end.
Speaker 7: I guess I don't know. We're going to end on
Speaker 7: a hopeful note, which is we got well, okay, We're
Speaker 7: gonna end on the cynical note, which is, like the
Speaker 7: only way to have an even sort of good job
Speaker 7: in this economy where employment is controlled by employers is
Speaker 7: to get incredibly mined luck, like be the most lucky
Speaker 7: person in the entire world.
Speaker 15: Yeah, so, I don't know if if you want to
Speaker 15: live in a world where you don't have to win
Speaker 15: the lottery in order to have like a pretty well
Speaker 15: paid in order to I am so close to hitting
Speaker 15: the median salary of assists white dude in the US.
Speaker 7: I'm so close. I can see, I can taste it.
Speaker 7: If you want that.
Speaker 5: I love my union podcasting jobs.
Speaker 7: Got you gotta win the lottery or you got to
Speaker 7: build a world where that's not how any of the
Speaker 7: shit works, which is what Jolan Robinson would have wanted.
Speaker 12: Sorry, Joanne.
Speaker 3: Nostalgia is a relatively new feeling for me. I'm in
Speaker 3: my mid twenties, and for the first time, I'm seeing
Speaker 3: stuff from when I was a kid come back in style.
Speaker 3: We are fully in the throes of two thousands of nostalgia.
Speaker 3: I'm talking emo, Indie Slea's denim y two K standard
Speaker 3: definition digital video and one of my favorites, the bubbly
Speaker 3: frutiger aero design style that partially inspired Apple's new liquid glass.
Speaker 3: But now that our cultural nostalgia cycle has cut up
Speaker 3: to when I was a kid, I'm starting to realize
Speaker 3: what kinds of things I'm nostalgic about. One of the
Speaker 3: biggest is two thousand and eight's Lego Batman the video game.
Speaker 3: This game is great, no dialogue, Danny Elfman, music, simple,
Speaker 3: classic designs. This game is what introduced me to the
Speaker 3: gothic art deco world of Gotham City and the dark
Speaker 3: carnival of Batman characters growing up around the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Speaker 3: This game was my window into the big city with
Speaker 3: its cathedrals and skyscrapers, and likely planted the desire to
Speaker 3: one day move to New York City. After a twelve
Speaker 3: year hiatus, the fourth game in the Lego Batman series
Speaker 3: comes out today, Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Night,
Speaker 3: a new installment that blends stories from across the Batman films,
Speaker 3: shows and comics, featuring classic Lego puzzle gameplay with the
Speaker 3: movement and combat of the rock Steady Arkham games. I
Speaker 3: actually got to play a demo version of this new
Speaker 3: Lego Batman game last October when I attended New York
Speaker 3: Comic Con, the largest pop culture convention on the East
Speaker 3: Coast and the most attended in North America. New York
Speaker 3: Comic Con is a four day fan fest for Everything Superheroes, comics,
Speaker 3: sci fi, and fantasy, held once a year at the
Speaker 3: Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. This is it could happen here.
Speaker 3: I'm Garrison Davis. Part of my intention in attending New
Speaker 3: York Comic Con was to gauge how the big media
Speaker 3: companies and pop culture in general was reacting to the
Speaker 3: movement against wokeness, which was a large force throughout twenty
Speaker 3: twenty five. One of the first panels attended was the
Speaker 3: tenth anniversary panel for the TV show Mister Robot, with
Speaker 3: creator Sam Smil and stars Raymon Malick and Christian Slater.
Speaker 3: Most of the panel was spent reminiscing on the show's production,
Speaker 3: which was probably what most fans want out of a panel,
Speaker 3: but Mister Robot is a relatively political show. To his credit,
Speaker 3: Ismael discussed the show's origins as an anti capitalist and
Speaker 3: anti corporate hacker story inspired by the two thousand and
Speaker 3: eight recession and the Arab Spring.
Speaker 16: I took away from that is that there was the
Speaker 16: world felt in crisis. How naive was I back then
Speaker 16: that that that was what crisis was like? But uh,
Speaker 16: and and that these young people in not just Egypt,
Speaker 16: but in the entire Middle East was using technology to
Speaker 16: organize and start a revolution, and that really inspired a
Speaker 16: lot of what of what the story of mister Robot
Speaker 16: and and specifically the character of Elliott.
Speaker 3: Smel went on to call the show's imagined dystopia a
Speaker 3: quote unquote Pleasantville compared to our current political situation.
Speaker 16: Honestly, I feel like the show we did was not
Speaker 16: nearly as fucked up as what it would be like today.
Speaker 16: I mean, it's like Pleasantville now.
Speaker 7: I mean.
Speaker 3: At a panel for the Tina Romero queer zombie movie
Speaker 3: Queens of the Dead, transactor Jack Haven referenced then recent
Speaker 3: and somewhat misleading reporting that the FBI was declaring trans
Speaker 3: people as terrorists. In another panel, a trans comic artist
Speaker 3: also mentioned that trans people were being designated as violent extremists.
Speaker 3: This artist also discussed queer censorship in comics. She had
Speaker 3: drawn a cover for the DC Comics series of a
Speaker 3: character called Red Hood, but this cover was never released
Speaker 3: because the comic series was canceled by DC after the writer. Also,
Speaker 3: a trans woman made two posts joking about the death
Speaker 3: of Charlie Kirk. Meanwhile, one of the Siskuy artists for
Speaker 3: the hit series Absolute Batman. Drew art of Absolute Batman
Speaker 3: snapping the neck of an ice agent literally at New
Speaker 3: York Comic Con, and this artist continues to draw covers
Speaker 3: for the series. Speaking of Batman, I also attended an
Speaker 3: industry panel on Batman animation hosted by directors, character designers,
Speaker 3: and showrunners James Tucker, creator of Batman, The Brave and
Speaker 3: the Bold, and a producer for the show Batman Keeped.
Speaker 3: Crusader mentioned having to ignore the anti woke backlash some
Speaker 3: recent shows received for depicting certain characters as black or
Speaker 3: gender swapped. Nerd culture has been dealing with this stuff
Speaker 3: for a while. Gamer gait was a contributing factor to
Speaker 3: the rise of the all Right, and since then pop
Speaker 3: culture fandom has been one of the main battlegrounds in
Speaker 3: which the culture war is waged. At New York Comic Con,
Speaker 3: While hints of the domestic political climate did slip through
Speaker 3: in brief moments during panels, the prevailing mode of the
Speaker 3: convention was falling back on comic fantasy as an escape inwards,
Speaker 3: but not really an escape out. It's like your parents
Speaker 3: are fighting and rather than leaving the house or trying
Speaker 3: to intervene. You crawl into your closet and hide with
Speaker 3: your stuffed animals, video games, and comic books, soothing yourself
Speaker 3: with the comfortable familiar. While walking around the convention floor,
Speaker 3: I felt like I was a ghost trapped. In twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: this particular form of nerdy superhero fandom culture was stuck
Speaker 3: in stasis, living in the undead husk of the MCU.
Speaker 3: The main thing differentiating New York Comic Con from a
Speaker 3: pure pre pandemic Avengers Endgame era time capsule was how
Speaker 3: much it felt like an anime convention. I attended my
Speaker 3: fair share of comic cons in the twenty teens, but
Speaker 3: the volume of anime stuff at New York Comic Con
Speaker 3: really surprised me. New York Comic Con itself has had
Speaker 3: a troubled history with anime. Shortly after New York Comic
Speaker 3: Con was created in twenty and six, the same company
Speaker 3: behind the convention also started an anime con called New
Speaker 3: York Anime Festival. But as the New York Comic Con
Speaker 3: rose in popularity, it started to eat away at New
Speaker 3: York Anime Festival. The two conventions merged in twenty ten,
Speaker 3: but that meant that superheroes and anime had to compete
Speaker 3: for time and space at the convention, and around twenty ten,
Speaker 3: superheroes were winning that battle. To quote Anime News Network,
Speaker 3: the New York Anime Festival was quote slowly and quite
Speaker 3: literally shoved into the basement at the job At Center
Speaker 3: over the years by New York Comic Con management until
Speaker 3: it ceased to exist altogether unquote. Come in twenty twelve,
Speaker 3: the New York Anime Festival component was phased out altogether.
Speaker 3: At the time, anime and manga were not doing so
Speaker 3: well in the United States, having just suffered a market
Speaker 3: crash due to a combination of factors related to the
Speaker 3: Great Recession, the pivot from DVD to digital, the bankruptcy
Speaker 3: of the Borders bookstore, the shutdown of the US distributor
Speaker 3: Bandai Entertainment, and manga publisher Tokyo Pop, followed by the
Speaker 3: twenty eleven Tokohu earthquake, which disrupted manga and anime production.
Speaker 3: So it wasn't at all surprising that Western media and
Speaker 3: the then ascended superhero genre dominated the New York Comic
Speaker 3: Con show floor. But now, oh, how the tables have turned.
Speaker 3: Come twenty twenty five, the exhibition boots for major Western
Speaker 3: pop culture companies were outnumbered and dwarfed in size by
Speaker 3: Japanese animation, manga and video game booths. This humiliation wasn't
Speaker 3: isolated to the show floor. Even before entering the exhibition space,
Speaker 3: huge banners hung in front of the main entrance for
Speaker 3: anime like My Hero, Academia, Digimon Gundam and the new
Speaker 3: manga Love Bullet banner ads for Crunchy Rolls New Manga
Speaker 3: Reading Platform covered the glass walls at the Javits Convention Center.
Speaker 3: The only banner that rivaled the anime ones in size
Speaker 3: was for the Anne Rice Gay Vampire Show on AMC.
Speaker 3: Once you got to the show floor, the company with
Speaker 3: the biggest single presence was Japanese entertainment company Bandai Namco.
Speaker 3: This was by a large margin. The Bandai Namco presence
Speaker 3: was significantly bigger than the Marvel and DC booths combined.
Speaker 3: Most but not all, of the Japanese and South Korean
Speaker 3: companies were concentrated in the middle of the exhibition floor,
Speaker 3: next to the main entrance. On the north side. Toy
Speaker 3: Animation of Dragon Ball and One Piece Fame had their
Speaker 3: booth right at the show floor entrance. And it was
Speaker 3: bigger than the Nickelodeon, Avatar and Paramount Star Trek booths combined.
Speaker 3: The Adult Swim and HBO Max booths were even smaller combined,
Speaker 3: They took up significantly less floor space and were less
Speaker 3: busy than the exhibition booth for the Japanese and a
Speaker 3: company behind Chainsawman, Jujitsu, Kaizen and the Attack on Titan
Speaker 3: Finale Studio Mappa, who had a booth at New York
Speaker 3: Comic Con for the very first time. Anime and manga
Speaker 3: distributor Crunchy Role had a larger presence on the show
Speaker 3: floor than the combined presence of publishing giants Scholastic and
Speaker 3: Penguin Random House. The Crunchy Role booth was also bigger
Speaker 3: than the one for DC Comics. Manga publisher Viz Media
Speaker 3: has maintained a large presence on the show floor for
Speaker 3: the past decade. Viz Media is the largest physical publisher
Speaker 3: of graphic novels in the United States with twenty five
Speaker 3: percent of the market share, and is owned by the
Speaker 3: same company that publishes shown in Jump, which is the
Speaker 3: largest physical comic publisher in the world. The biggest global
Speaker 3: publisher of comics in general is the South Korean digital
Speaker 3: comic platform Webtune, who also had a comparatively large exhibition booth,
Speaker 3: as did Japanese video game companies Nami and Capcom. The
Speaker 3: video game Ninja Gaidan four had a booth to itself,
Speaker 3: and collectible card game company Boushi Road had a booth
Speaker 3: rivaling that of card game Titan Wizards of the Coast.
Speaker 3: Even the sort of third party merch slot that you
Speaker 3: find at these types of conventions was selling more and
Speaker 3: more anime stuff than I'd seen in previous years. Looking
Speaker 3: back at the New York Comic Con twenty eighteen show
Speaker 3: floor map, Bandai Mco. Had a much smaller booth, about
Speaker 3: the same size as Dark Horse Comics. This was less
Speaker 3: than one quarter of the size of Bandai's show floor
Speaker 3: presence in twenty twenty five. Besides Bandai, the other animeor
Speaker 3: manga related booths in twenty eighteen were for Dragon Ball,
Speaker 3: Square Enix, and Viz Media. Looking back at the other
Speaker 3: large booths from twenty eighteen feels like a snapshot from
Speaker 3: a bygone age. Comedy Central, Rooster Teeth, Shira, Funko Pop,
Speaker 3: and the TV channel. Of these, only Funko still had
Speaker 3: a booth in twenty twenty five, and a much smaller
Speaker 3: one at that as the company has suffered a massive
Speaker 3: drop in sales and what was once a pop culture
Speaker 3: giant is now in severe financial stress.
Speaker 5: It could happen here, well, return after.
Speaker 4: These messages we now returned.
Speaker 7: It could happen here.
Speaker 5: Outside the comic con environment. I have seen anecdotal evidence
Speaker 5: of animes growing popularity. Besides random Instagram reels or TikTok videos,
Speaker 5: the most common thing I see people watching while riding
Speaker 5: the subway is anime. When I was in Berlin last
Speaker 5: October covering a convention, on my way back to the Airbnb,
Speaker 5: I came across a group of about fifty people cause
Speaker 5: playing chainsaw Man because that night the chainsaw Man movie
Speaker 5: released in German theaters. Most of the costumes worn at
Speaker 5: a weekend Halloween party at the mood Ring nightclub in Brooklyn,
Speaker 5: We're from anime. Also fun fact, Mayor old candidate zarmm
Speaker 5: Donnie made an appearance at this party ahead of the
Speaker 5: upcoming election. US Olympic figure skater and gold medalist and
Speaker 5: Listen Lou talked about anime during interviews at the Olympics
Speaker 5: and was seen carrying around a chainsaw Man plushy your
Speaker 5: top five anime.
Speaker 11: Okay, I'm not going to rank these like in their
Speaker 11: exact places, but Jujitsu guys and Chainsawman for sure.
Speaker 1: A new chapter dropped today, Actually Today's big day.
Speaker 4: Big day reader, Yes, okay, attack on Titan.
Speaker 7: Was airon Justified.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Madoka Magica and I think it's like could be
Speaker 4: forgetting some but m soa.
Speaker 1: Graduation.
Speaker 3: But does this perceived rise in popularity actually reflect in
Speaker 3: sales well. In September, the Demon Slayer movie Infinity Castle
Speaker 3: won the US box office with a seventy million dollar
Speaker 3: opening weekend, eventually earning almost eight hundred million dollars worldwide,
Speaker 3: becoming the seventh highest grossing film of twenty twenty five
Speaker 3: and the highest grossing international film in the United States,
Speaker 3: surpassing the twenty five year record held by Crouching Tiger
Speaker 3: and Dragon. In October, the chainsaw Man movie opened number
Speaker 3: one at the US box office, beating the Bruce Springsteen
Speaker 3: biopic starring Jeremy Allen White, which no one really saw.
Speaker 3: The chainsaw Man movie grossed almost two hundred million dollars worldwide.
Speaker 3: For the past eight years, Netflix has been heavily investing
Speaker 3: in anime. Last summer, Netflix claimed that anime is watched
Speaker 3: by half its global users. In twenty twenty five, Netflix
Speaker 3: users watched almost nine billion hours of anime, a ten
Speaker 3: and a half percent increase from twenty twenty four. In fact,
Speaker 3: the rate of viewership growth for anime on Netflix is
Speaker 3: ten times that of all other content on the platform.
Speaker 3: In January of twenty twenty six, Netflix announced a new
Speaker 3: deal with anime studio Mapa to exclusively stream a slate
Speaker 3: of original Mapa shows. Polygon and Vox Media pulled over
Speaker 3: four thousand people in twenty twenty four, and forty two
Speaker 3: percent of gen Z participants in the US said that
Speaker 3: they watched anime every week. But It's not just anime.
Speaker 3: Manga exploded in international popularity over the pandemic and continues
Speaker 3: to out sell American comics domestically. Manga sales have quadrupled
Speaker 3: in the US since twenty twenty, reaching a yearly market
Speaker 3: value of about one point three billion dollars by twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three. Of the forty four point seven million graphic
Speaker 3: novels sold by American bookstore chains and online sellers, twenty
Speaker 3: one point eight million were manga. That's almost fifty percent
Speaker 3: of sales. Coming in second place was comics for kids,
Speaker 3: which made up about thirty eight percent of sales approximately
Speaker 3: seventeen million copies. In twenty twenty three is the year
Speaker 3: we have the most complete data on. Seven out of
Speaker 3: the ten top selling comic book authors were Japanese, and
Speaker 3: this is in the United States. Of the seven hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty top selling comic books in the US, almost
Speaker 3: four hundred were manga. Here's a clip of a PBS
Speaker 3: news piece from twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: Over the last few years, Japanese animation and comic books
Speaker 4: have seen an explosion of popularity in the United States.
Speaker 11: We couldn't fill the stores fast enough.
Speaker 17: Barnes and Noble Senior director of Books, Shannondovido.
Speaker 11: The readers in the space are so voracious. It's a
Speaker 11: good thing that the series are so long and so
Speaker 11: beautifully drawn, because not only do they look for ten
Speaker 11: other series to read once they finish one, they go
Speaker 11: back and reread.
Speaker 17: Manga sales in the US quadrupled from twenty nineteen to
Speaker 17: twenty twenty two, with a peak of twenty eight point
Speaker 17: four million copies sold. It is now the fourth largest
Speaker 17: fiction category overall in the United States, behind romance, thrillers,
Speaker 17: and fantasy.
Speaker 11: It's one of our top ten subjects any day. During
Speaker 11: the pandemic, it was in our top five pretty consistently.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, shelf space for superhero graphic novels has been reduced
Speaker 3: at Barnes and Noble the past few years, sometimes to
Speaker 3: a single shelf, to make way for an expanding collection
Speaker 3: of manga. Manga sales are also rising in the superhero
Speaker 3: Holy of Holy's direct market comic bookstores, where manga was
Speaker 3: up thirty three percent in twenty twenty five. The main
Speaker 3: driver of sales for US comic publisher Dark Horse Comics
Speaker 3: is through licensing manga like Berserk. So what might be
Speaker 3: causing this? As pop culture has become one of the
Speaker 3: main battlegrounds of the cultural war, maybe anime and manga
Speaker 3: serve as a safe refuge from the divisive, all consuming
Speaker 3: politics of the United States. A few months ago, we
Speaker 3: got behind the scenes news about the end Or Press Tour.
Speaker 3: Creator Tony Gilroy admitted in an interview with The Hollywood
Speaker 3: Reporter that Disney requested Gilroy and the cast refrain from
Speaker 3: using the words fascism and genocide in early promotion of
Speaker 3: the show to avoid political outrage. When James Gunn described
Speaker 3: Superman as a quote unquote immigrant, right wing news pundits
Speaker 3: manufactured a backlash with a Fox News graphic reading super
Speaker 3: woke and Jesse Waters saying you know what it says
Speaker 3: on his cape MS thirteen. Former Superman actor Dean Kane
Speaker 3: also complained about Superman becoming too woke a month before
Speaker 3: he joined ICE as a part of a publicity stunt.
Speaker 3: American culture war issues do effect the way our entertainment
Speaker 3: industry operates, from what projects get greenlit to casting and
Speaker 3: even corporate mergers. The Trump aligned Ellison family bought Paramount
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty five and now seek to acquire Warner Brothers.
Speaker 3: All that considered, it would seem that anime and manga
Speaker 3: may not get nearly as cut up in our American
Speaker 3: culture war debate and be relatively safe from both woke
Speaker 3: and anti woke influence. Though this idea demonstrates the limits
Speaker 3: of woke as an understanding of politics, because, of course,
Speaker 3: Japanese media is in fact very political. Take Gundam, Godzilla,
Speaker 3: attack on Titan, films like Love and Pop Jin Rao
Speaker 3: or Kyoshi Kurosawa's new movie Cloud. A lot of Japanese
Speaker 3: media russ with their extremely punitive judicial system and the
Speaker 3: country's relationship with nationalism and the military, not to mention
Speaker 3: the growing popularity of media that plays with gender and
Speaker 3: sexuality like Yaowe and Boys Love, or the common presence
Speaker 3: of gender non conforming characters in works like Jiu Jitsu,
Speaker 3: Kaizen and chainsaw Man. And yet there aren't as many
Speaker 3: anger YouTube videos to crying Woke chainsaw Man for having
Speaker 3: a beautiful, non binary twink. America is just largely insulated
Speaker 3: from Japanese political issues. Last February, Japan's Conservative Party swept
Speaker 3: a parliamentary snap election, getting over two thirds control of
Speaker 3: the lower house, the largest majority since World War Two.
Speaker 3: But both chuds and woke alike can enjoy anime because
Speaker 3: it feels outside American politics, and it is true that
Speaker 3: Japanese creators aren't trying to navigate around a potentially hostile
Speaker 3: American audience, which means they can do certain things that
Speaker 3: American com companies might find too risky. The vitriolic reactions
Speaker 3: to the Last Jedi definitely affected Disney's plans for Star Wars,
Speaker 3: which soon prioritized the comparatively safe and sanitized Mandalorian TV show,
Speaker 3: which has a movie version coming out this week. Most
Speaker 3: of the non and Or Star Wars shows are primarily
Speaker 3: trying to capitalize on nostalgia, whether for the original trilogy,
Speaker 3: the prequels, or even the Clone Wars TV show from
Speaker 3: the two thousands. And Or was championed and protected by
Speaker 3: Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, but now she's transitioning out of
Speaker 3: that role. In an exit interview with Deadline, Kathy Kennedy
Speaker 3: alluded that going forward, Lucasfilm may not pursue risky projects
Speaker 3: that break the mold. Quote you have to be bold,
Speaker 3: and you have to be willing to take risks with
Speaker 3: people and ideas. Otherwise you are just doing the same thing.
Speaker 4: Right now.
Speaker 3: We're in an era where companies are so risk averse,
Speaker 3: and I get it. I hear all the comfort stations
Speaker 3: they've got Wall Street to please, and I get it.
Speaker 3: But I also believe that that's what contributes to things disappearing. Ultimately, quote,
Speaker 3: this reliance on nostalgia and this extreme risk aversion has
Speaker 3: landed us in a pop cultural recession, and Japan is
Speaker 3: ready willing and able to fill the gap. This is
Speaker 3: not simply a matter of thing Japan, but rather this
Speaker 3: points to real differences in the production and distribution process.
Speaker 3: A lot of manga is read in Japan. As popular
Speaker 3: as it's getting here, we are nowhere close to how
Speaker 3: much manga is read in Japan. Despite their smaller population,
Speaker 3: Japan still is the primary producer and consumer of manga,
Speaker 3: with a market value of almost four point five billion
Speaker 3: dollars a year. Manga that sells really well often gets
Speaker 3: adapted into an anime, and when that anime airs in
Speaker 3: the US, the show then helps drive sale of the
Speaker 3: original manga. The top selling manga in the US usually
Speaker 3: follow whatever is the most successful currently airing anime adaptation.
Speaker 3: In recent years, that's been Chainsaw Man, Spy Family, Demon Slayer, Berserk,
Speaker 3: and ju Jitsu Kaizen. This model doesn't really exist.
Speaker 5: In the US.
Speaker 3: We don't have regularly airing twenty two episode seasons of
Speaker 3: comic book shows anymore, especially any of that appeal to
Speaker 3: a wide age range. The closest comparison is what Amazon
Speaker 3: Prime has done with mini series like The Boys and Invincible.
Speaker 3: But even the juggernaut that was the MCU did not
Speaker 3: meaningfully boost sales of the original Marvel comics. It could
Speaker 3: happen here will return after these messages we now return
Speaker 3: to it could happen here. In an interview last January, Generally,
Speaker 3: chief creative officer and president of DC Comics, talked about
Speaker 3: why manga is beating Western comics. Quote, the stories told
Speaker 3: in Japanese manga and anime are incredibly powerful. I often
Speaker 3: find myself wondering what is missing in Western comics and
Speaker 3: why aren't they able to achieve the same flavor. I
Speaker 3: think manga has an advantage over American comics, which are
Speaker 3: mostly about superheroes, and that's where the majority of sales
Speaker 3: and readers are concentrated. In Japan, it's closer to literature
Speaker 3: and anyone can read it. And it's not just hero stories.
Speaker 3: There's a much wider range of genres, like stories about
Speaker 3: cooking and soccer. You can draw stories from that. So
Speaker 3: I'm very happy that manga has been so successful because
Speaker 3: it gives me a goal to aim for. The manga
Speaker 3: market is bigger than our industry, so the question becomes,
Speaker 3: what can we learn from this? Jimily is right, but
Speaker 3: this is only getting at one part of the equation.
Speaker 3: It's not just that manga has a wide range of genres,
Speaker 3: but also a constantly growing collection of original characters and
Speaker 3: new series within familiar genres like Shonan or Boy's action comics.
Speaker 3: Japan is actually generating new culture, not just recycling the
Speaker 3: same four ips over and over again. Something like Chainsaw
Speaker 3: Man has its fair share of Japanese and American inspirations,
Speaker 3: but importantly, it's not a simple spinoff of one of
Speaker 3: those franchises, but an evolution of the genre. Most manga
Speaker 3: series have a defined beginning and end, usually written by
Speaker 3: a single author, as opposed to the perpetual continuity of
Speaker 3: most Western comics, where opening up an issue feels like
Speaker 3: jumping into the middle of a story that's been going
Speaker 3: on for years, passed on from one author to another.
Speaker 3: This certainly has its own appeal, but it can be
Speaker 3: challenging for new readers. When people first get into manga
Speaker 3: or anime and finish a serieses, there's then this massive
Speaker 3: backlog of different series, all with unique characters. A collected
Speaker 3: manga volume is also much cheaper than a DC or
Speaker 3: Marvel trade paperback, about ten dollars compared to twenty dollars
Speaker 3: part of DC comics strategy of trying to learn from
Speaker 3: manga has included the creation of a new line of
Speaker 3: paperbacks called DC Compact Comics. Regular Western comics are significantly
Speaker 3: taller and wider than manga, printed on glossy full color
Speaker 3: paper about seven by eleven inches, whereas manga has cheaper paper,
Speaker 3: usually in black and white, in a more compact package,
Speaker 3: usually five by seven and a half inches. DC Compact
Speaker 3: Comics offers quote unquote, new reader friendly stories in a
Speaker 3: manga sized package at a cheaper price point, but this
Speaker 3: is only copying the form factor of manga. In twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three, three of the top five selling DC Comics
Speaker 3: titles were old classics from the late eighties, Watchman, Sandman,
Speaker 3: and Batman Year One. These are the type of comics
Speaker 3: that DC combackt Comics is reprinting. It's all of these
Speaker 3: old comics retrofitted into manga size for ten bucks, and
Speaker 3: this is helping DC with sales, but it's still a
Speaker 3: self cannibalizing process. These things can't run forever on a
Speaker 3: nostalgia alone, and if they keep trying to, they're going
Speaker 3: to lose to whoever can make new stuff on mass
Speaker 3: which right now is Japan and South Korea, with China
Speaker 3: ride around the corner. Even when DC is promoting new stories,
Speaker 3: they're still relying on the same handful of characters, and
Speaker 3: this has forced them to do a series of confusing
Speaker 3: continuity resets to attract new readers, though this often has
Speaker 3: the backfire effect of alienating existing readers and making the
Speaker 3: whole ordeal seem too complicated to bother investing time and
Speaker 3: money into. Japan does have their own version of IP recycling,
Speaker 3: like Pokemon, Dragon Ball, and Gundam, but in a long
Speaker 3: running series like Gundam, new installments are often completely separate
Speaker 3: from one another, remixing key concepts in a new canon
Speaker 3: or premis Gundam. Wing introduced Gundam to most Americans when
Speaker 3: it aired on Tunami, and that show is entirely distinct
Speaker 3: from the original Gundam series from nineteen seventy nine. This
Speaker 3: continuity separation is continued with new installments like Iron Blooded
Speaker 3: Orphans and Witch from Mercury. Something similar is attempted in
Speaker 3: the Marvel Ultimate Universe or DC's Else Worlds, or more comparably,
Speaker 3: in something like the critically acclaimed Absolute Batman or Absolute
Speaker 3: Martian Manhunter series, but historically these concepts get roped into
Speaker 3: multi verse slop and crossover events that feed into the
Speaker 3: same nostalgia loops and franchise self cannibalization. The risk of
Speaker 3: version among US media companies not only restricts what type
Speaker 3: of stories can be told, but also who is telling them.
Speaker 3: Even the new darling of DC Comics Absolute Batman, the
Speaker 3: groundbreaking series that's redefining the character, is written by a
Speaker 3: guy who has been writing Batman since Obama's first term.
Speaker 3: At the New York Comic Con Batman Animation panel, I
Speaker 3: recognized animators and directors that I've known of since I
Speaker 3: was a little kid, because I watched the bonus features
Speaker 3: on all of my Batman DVDs. The big announcement at
Speaker 3: that panel was that they were adapting Batman Nightfall, a
Speaker 3: comic book run from the nineties, into a multi part
Speaker 3: animated film series. I also attended panels for Gundam and
Speaker 3: The Chainsaw Man Movie, and the Japanese directors on the
Speaker 3: panels were considerably younger. The Chainsawman Movie director is in
Speaker 3: his thirties. Likewise, Gundam, Iron Blooded Orphan was written and
Speaker 3: directed by people in their thirties, and we used to
Speaker 3: let young people make cool superhero stuff. Batman, the animated
Speaker 3: series was made by kids in the nineties. The problem
Speaker 3: is those kids now in their mid sixties are still
Speaker 3: the only people allowed to make Batman stuff. The manga
Speaker 3: industry has pipelines for young writers and artists to submit
Speaker 3: their work and get published because publishers are always looking
Speaker 3: for new stories, and the huge popularity of digital comics
Speaker 3: in Japan and South Korea also provides easier opportunities for
Speaker 3: young creators to get their comics in front of a
Speaker 3: lot of eyes. Keeping this balance of new stories and
Speaker 3: old ip is working out pretty well for Japanese capital
Speaker 3: on a global scale. They are much better at producing cheap,
Speaker 3: widely available branded merchandise. Pokemon and Hello Kitty are the
Speaker 3: top two highest grossing media franchises in the entire world.
Speaker 3: Most of that is merchandising revenue. Out of the top
Speaker 3: ten highest grossing media franchises, five are j Japanese. The
Speaker 3: others are Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, Disney Princesses,
Speaker 3: and the MCU. American audiences suddenly deciding that Goku rules
Speaker 3: and Batman drools doesn't cause this state of affairs. Rather,
Speaker 3: the opposite production and economic conditions determine which characters or
Speaker 3: franchises are seen as cool and culturally relevant. As the
Speaker 3: anime and manga industry has seen rapid growth the past
Speaker 3: few years, there's been discussions within the industry about whether
Speaker 3: anime should continue to cater to a Japanese audience or
Speaker 3: try to appeal to the growing international market. In December,
Speaker 3: the Japanese Prime Minister met with entertainment industry figures to
Speaker 3: discuss how Japan's media market could expand overseas to enhance
Speaker 3: their diplomatic power. Neon Genesis Evangelian creator Hideyakiano has argued
Speaker 3: that anime should not adapt to a growing overseas audience,
Speaker 3: but that the audience should adapt to uniquely Japanese aspects
Speaker 3: of anime. The government of Japan has recently announced that
Speaker 3: they are boosting state investment in the creation of Japanese
Speaker 3: media like manga, anime, and music, and strengthening its global
Speaker 3: distribution networks. While speaking on a government panel of experts,
Speaker 3: Hideakiano pointed to labor shortages negatively affecting production studios, but
Speaker 3: some of the new government efforts may actually do more
Speaker 3: harm than good for the international market, like AI driven
Speaker 3: translation tools and assistance in combating online manga piracy. Capital
Speaker 3: goes through periods of growth and recession, while retracting capital
Speaker 3: pushes living labor out and increasingly relies on dead labor,
Speaker 3: like DC compact comics, reprinting the past over and over again.
Speaker 3: This is the part of the cycle that Western companies
Speaker 3: have been stuck in the past few years. But the
Speaker 3: rise of anime itself grew out of the Great Recession.
Speaker 3: It was the collapse of the DVD market and the
Speaker 3: rise of internet piracy that laid the groundwork for early
Speaker 3: streaming platforms like Crunchy Role, which would play a significant
Speaker 3: part in pushing anime and manga into the mainstream come
Speaker 3: the twenty twenties. According to the Japan Times, overseas sales
Speaker 3: of Japanese content reached thirty seven point six billion dollars
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty three, surpassing Japan's semiconductor exports. And if
Speaker 3: you look at the revenue for Pokemon and Hello Kitty
Speaker 3: compared to Star Wars, The MCU and Batman, it makes
Speaker 3: sense that Japan wants to keep growing their international market.
Speaker 3: But this commodity warfare is not a matter of East
Speaker 3: versus West, but a battle between old and new capital.
Speaker 3: Old capital in Europe and America had early global dominance.
Speaker 3: Europe fell off, but then came Japan, and now South
Speaker 3: Korea is growing and is gearing up to steal Japan's
Speaker 3: lunch money. Last September, Disney announced a new partnership with
Speaker 3: the South Korean com company Webtune to create a new
Speaker 3: digital comic platform using the Marvel and Star Wars catalog.
Speaker 3: But Marvel and DC aren't gonna overcome the dominance of
Speaker 3: Japanese media by just reprinting old comics as web tunes
Speaker 3: or manga sized packages. That doesn't fix the core issue,
Speaker 3: which is caused by Western companies not investing in new labor.
Speaker 3: They are increasingly relying on the dead labor of their
Speaker 3: ubiquitous iconography. Even my beloved Lego Batman is an instance
Speaker 3: of this. The game is primarily pulling from plots of
Speaker 3: old Batman movies, with combat ripped from the Arkham games.
Speaker 3: In the marketing for the game, the different Batman skins
Speaker 3: literally have a nostalgia meter moves like DC Compact Comics
Speaker 3: is an attempt to manage the crisis while still not
Speaker 3: taking risks and investing in living labor. They don't want
Speaker 3: to invest because superhero comics aren't growing, which just further
Speaker 3: compounds the problem. Meanwhile, anime and manga are rapidly growing
Speaker 3: in the United States, which is why Japanese companies are
Speaker 3: buying almost half the show floor at New York Comic Con,
Speaker 3: whereas ten years ago they were in a tiny corner
Speaker 3: of the basement.
Speaker 4: I am wearing my women want Me, Fish Fear Me hat.
Speaker 3: This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 3: years cast covering what's happening in the White House, the
Speaker 3: crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm name
Speaker 3: joined by Proper Devans, Mi Hawong, James Stout and James's hat.
Speaker 2: And James's hat.
Speaker 4: What do they say, Garrison?
Speaker 2: Oh they hurt?
Speaker 5: I think I think the audience heard.
Speaker 4: Gotta leave that one in.
Speaker 2: Women fear him, Fish want him, something along those lines.
Speaker 4: Yeah, fish want me. It's a whole thing with fish.
Speaker 2: Fish fear women, women want fish, something like that. I
Speaker 2: don't know. Del Toro made a movie about this, Yes
Speaker 2: he did, Yes he did, Garrison, what happened did nothing
Speaker 2: happen this week. I guess we can all go home.
Speaker 2: It seems like a like like an uneventful news week, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: nothing happened with the I R S or anything. Shootings overseas?
Speaker 2: All good, Cuba fine, nothing happening in Bolivia, nothing happening
Speaker 2: with Roe Castro.
Speaker 5: Well that doesn't for it's not happening here.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 5: We'll see you next week.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's not happening here. A podcast brought to you
Speaker 2: by Marijuana.
Speaker 4: And Sleeping Pills. Should we start with some little things
Speaker 4: and then move on to some big things. Not that
Speaker 4: that little things are unimportant, but we're covering them in
Speaker 4: less detail now and maybe more detail later. Yeah. Former
Speaker 4: Interior Secretary now Representative Ran zin Key is once again
Speaker 4: attempting to delist brown bears from the David Species Act.
Speaker 2: He hates those brown he fucking hat. They're trying to
Speaker 2: do the same thing with grizzlies too. They're a little
Speaker 2: further behind, but there's a push going right now. Like
Speaker 2: grizzly numbers have recovered a lot. They're starting to do
Speaker 2: bad stuff. We gotta start outing them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if the grownd bears and britty bears are the same, species.
Speaker 4: They're just brown bears would be the term I would
Speaker 4: use to describe all of the Usus horribilis, I guess
Speaker 4: in North America. Yeah, like Kodiak brown bear and grizly bear.
Speaker 4: But yes, you're right. The justification that Zinki has given
Speaker 4: is that populations are getting higher, and he specifically cited
Speaker 4: a tragedy in which I hiker lost their life in
Speaker 4: Glacier National Park and another attack on two tourists in Yellowstone. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the Endangered Species Act has nothing to do with how
Speaker 4: dangerous an animal is, not as population size really play
Speaker 4: a role in these It's not that these bears attack
Speaker 4: these people because they were hungry, because the other bears
Speaker 4: that outcompeted them for food. Now, one person walked up
Speaker 4: on a sow with cubs, so that group yep, came
Speaker 4: across the sourer's cub and the other one. I think
Speaker 4: the bear was probably foraging for berries and a person
Speaker 4: surprised it in some thick timber. A lot of people
Speaker 4: thought that they would dealist grizzlies, but they didn't straight
Speaker 4: away in January and they so if I haven't, I'd
Speaker 4: write a whole two thousand words of this. When he's left.
Speaker 4: If you want to learn more about bears, a lot
Speaker 4: of a lot of bear content. We will also bring
Speaker 4: you a bear episode in the coming weeks in which
Speaker 4: I talked to Molly about bears, because it seems like
Speaker 4: you like me talking to Molly about animals. Talking of animals.
Speaker 4: Trump administration has reapproved an exciting way to kill them,
Speaker 4: the M four cyanide trap. It's been reapproved.
Speaker 2: Thank god, single issue syanide vote. That's been my one
Speaker 2: issue for your gearson. You know this I'm all about,
Speaker 2: And it's not just this. I'm just in general support
Speaker 2: of them. Anything that increases regular Americans daily access to cyanide.
Speaker 2: You know That's why I'm also against clean air regulations continue.
Speaker 4: James, I will. I've bumped into a few of these,
Speaker 4: like maybe you have two. It's not a code to
Speaker 4: get a coat, to get it's a different thing. But
Speaker 4: what this is is it's like a spring loaded, trapped
Speaker 4: a little thing poking out the ground, normally covering cloth
Speaker 4: and baited. It's triggered when some I think, bites and
Speaker 4: pulls it. So it's designed to then squirt the cyanide
Speaker 4: up into the mouth of It's normally canines, right, it's
Speaker 4: not much else. Yeah, bites and pulls them. These things
Speaker 4: have killed dozens of pets and livestock.
Speaker 2: It's a pretty fucked up kind of trap. Like it's
Speaker 2: really bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's pretty bad. The old ones that used to
Speaker 4: use like a thirty eight special blank that would really
Speaker 4: fire the cyanide up. That was a massive fucking issue. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that was a coyote geta see.
Speaker 2: I just want to put those in my normal thirty
Speaker 2: eight and just concealed carrious cyanide. Everyone dies, get really close,
Speaker 2: get really close. They attack you from like upwind, you know,
Speaker 2: and then then it's just you. Yeah, once you open
Speaker 2: your mouth and get really close to me, you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I guess like people will maybe be familiar with these
Speaker 4: from an incident where the fourteen year old boy was
Speaker 4: injured and his dog was killed. This was back in
Speaker 4: the twenty teens. In that case, M forty four was
Speaker 4: not on the family's property, but it was less than
Speaker 4: one hundred yards from their house. Wow. And they've discontinued
Speaker 4: using them in Idaho after that. But the BLM as
Speaker 4: a whole discontinued their use only in like late twenty three,
Speaker 4: early twenty four. Trump administration hates every living creature, so
Speaker 4: it's not really surprising that these are back. Obviously, the
Speaker 4: issue here is livestock, right, Like they're protecting livestock yep
Speaker 4: from Canid's. Yeah, there are better ways of doing that.
Speaker 4: We shouldn't be fucking putting cyanide in a public lands.
Speaker 4: It's not It's sorry, this one gets me kind of annoyed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just the general belief that anything that might interfere
Speaker 2: with a livestock animal justifies, Like widespread genocide of crucial
Speaker 2: species is really bad. Yeah, and also dominant in a
Speaker 2: lot of the American West.
Speaker 4: Yes, and like cooties are some of the smartest creatures
Speaker 4: we have, right, They've resisted all attempts to control their population.
Speaker 4: They continue to thrive. Believe in all fifty states, I
Speaker 4: think there are maybe not forty nine. I don't think
Speaker 4: there are any in Hawaii, but yeah, incredible animals. Coke to
Speaker 4: America by Dan Flores's a good book about them. In
Speaker 4: the Channel Islands Channel Lines National Park, a fire has
Speaker 4: already hit over fourteen thousand acres. It is on Santa Rita.
Speaker 4: It's threatening a grove of very rare tory pines. Tory Pines.
Speaker 4: Really we have some here in San Diego and some
Speaker 4: up there. The initial reporting suggested that the mariner himself
Speaker 4: had fired distress flares and those flares had ignited the fire.
Speaker 4: What the coast guard is now saying is he was
Speaker 4: on like a fifty two foot boat by himself. Boat
Speaker 4: people mad about me saying boat not whatever, and no,
Speaker 4: I don't care. The boat had run aground and it
Speaker 4: was rocking, and I'm guessing that rocking either short in
Speaker 4: something or cut of fuel line that caused a vessel
Speaker 4: itself to ignite, and then the vessel igniting caused fire
Speaker 4: on the island, and he then fired flares standing within
Speaker 4: a previously burned area, so the fire had burned pasted in.
Speaker 4: He fired flares. Quite why he wasn't able to signal
Speaker 4: with his radio or if he was able to signal
Speaker 4: with his radio and then the radio got burned or
Speaker 4: other means of communication right like a personal locator beacon EPERB.
Speaker 4: I don't know. All I know is what's been reported
Speaker 4: so far, but noneless. This is really tragic for one
Speaker 4: of the very few areas in California which has been
Speaker 4: less ravaged by capital. Move along to Immigration. I have
Speaker 4: seen evidence that USCIS income is plummeting, and this is
Speaker 4: because they're processing fewer applications right then, they're moving much
Speaker 4: much much more slowly with actually processing the applications to
Speaker 4: give people the right to have visas or to permanent
Speaker 4: residency cismship. The agency is normally funded by fees, and
Speaker 4: it seems that it will soon not be funded by
Speaker 4: fees anymore. So despite all these DOGE cuts and efficiency cuts,
Speaker 4: the agency is going to end up costing taxpayers more money,
Speaker 4: which is great. Today, United States marines boarded the motor
Speaker 4: tanker Celestial, which they quote suspected was on route for
Speaker 4: Iran flights from Uganda. The Democratic Republic of Congo and
Speaker 4: South Sudan are facing new arrival restrictions due to the
Speaker 4: outbreak of a BOLO in the region. With USAID funding slash,
Speaker 4: like the US would have normally led a response to
Speaker 4: something like this or at least helped fund it now won't.
Speaker 4: This means that the outbreak will be bigger and more
Speaker 4: people die. Scott Persent has said that the United States
Speaker 4: will temporarily allow quote the most vulnerable nations to access
Speaker 4: Russian oil selectively and temporarily lifting sanctions. Also, Ukraine has
Speaker 4: begun using unguided rockets on first person view drones, and
Speaker 4: this is a pretty serious development for remote control warfare.
Speaker 4: They're using them to suppress Russian air events, but they
Speaker 4: released videos of that for the first time this week. Finally,
Speaker 4: for me, it appears at a large batch of new
Speaker 4: immigration judges will be starting work immigrant judges. It's worth
Speaker 4: noting I'm not judges in the sense that we understand
Speaker 4: the for other judges in the legal system. They're more
Speaker 4: like bureaucrats like Robert. Yes, Robert's more real of a judge.
Speaker 4: That's certainly not reverend judges. Their ranks have been purged
Speaker 4: by the Trump administration rate since thirty, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 4: I know lots of them have retired, or quit or
Speaker 4: been fired. I can imagine that this new cohort might
Speaker 4: be more favorable to the Trump administration's immigration goals.
Speaker 7: So there's been in the past few days in massive
Speaker 7: intensification of month long protests in Bolivia that has escalated
Speaker 7: into a general strike. It's also turned into one of
Speaker 7: the traditional Bolivian protest tactics, which is a series of
Speaker 7: roadblocks blocking access to the capital. These are largely the
Speaker 7: result of two kind of different, kind of related fights.
Speaker 7: The first one was an attempt at agricultural reform that
Speaker 7: would have done a whole bunch of sort I guess
Speaker 7: you'd call it like nineteen ninety four style Mexican constitution,
Speaker 7: like neoliberalization, like collectively held addious land. And then now
Speaker 7: the protests have been gaining steam over dire economic situation
Speaker 7: and the liberal reforms passed by their writing president after
Speaker 7: the MAAS effectively imploded during twenty twenty four and twenty
Speaker 7: twenty five, leading to the first writing president in Bolivia
Speaker 7: since the early two thousands, and also the re emergence
Speaker 7: of Carlos Mesa, a guy I literally never thought I
Speaker 7: would hear about again, but apparently is back somehow after
Speaker 7: getting ousted by like basically effectively the exact same style
Speaker 7: of mass roadblock protests in two thousand and five. He's
Speaker 7: now also back for some reason. But yeah, these protests
Speaker 7: are probably going to continue to escalate. We've reached the
Speaker 7: miners throwing dynamite phase of Oblivian protest, which tends to
Speaker 7: precede government's collapsing. We will see how this story progresses for.
Speaker 3: Our first main story, we'll discuss the shooting at an
Speaker 3: Islamic center in San Diego.
Speaker 4: James doing us to us off. Yeah, So the shooting
Speaker 4: happened on Monday, the eighteenth of May. Three people were killed.
Speaker 4: We'll go over a little bit about them in a second.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 4: It happened at the Islamic Center of San Diego, which
Speaker 4: is the largest MASK in San Diego County. People might
Speaker 4: be familiar with the Islamic Center of San Diego because
Speaker 4: of other stories about surveillance on the MASK over the years.
Speaker 4: In this case, the two shooters were Kane Clark seventeen
Speaker 4: and Caleb Bavaskar's eighteen. Shortly after the shooting took place,
Speaker 4: police searched Kane Clark's house. It took them a long
Speaker 4: time to get a warrant. Normally they can use an
Speaker 4: e warrant for these things to get one very quickly,
Speaker 4: but some reason took several hours. Officers were actually at
Speaker 4: Clark's house when the shooting began. This was because his
Speaker 4: mother had called police to report her son was missing
Speaker 4: in her car in camouflage and had stolen her weapons.
Speaker 4: She called them two hours before the shooting began. Despite
Speaker 4: that they were able to make it to the Islamic
Speaker 4: center of San Diego, kill three people, then move further
Speaker 4: down the street and fire at a landscaper who seems
Speaker 4: to have been largely uninjured or not injured in a
Speaker 4: serious way. Then they proceeded further down the street before
Speaker 4: ending their lives. I think one of them shot the
Speaker 4: other and then shot themselves. I think it's worth noting
Speaker 4: that Sandiac has driven itself into debt, spending massive amounts
Speaker 4: of money, specifically on cops and specifically on surveillance, and
Speaker 4: neither of them did anything to prevent this. The San
Speaker 4: Diego Police Department received a call two hours before the shooting,
Speaker 4: to quote Police Chief Scott Wall quote, she believed herself
Speaker 4: was suicidal, and she began to share information that several
Speaker 4: of her weapons were missing, her vehicle was missing in
Speaker 4: addition to her son. Will said. She also said her
Speaker 4: son was with a companion. They were dressed in camera
Speaker 4: that it's not consistent with what we would typically see
Speaker 4: from someone who was suicidal. They tried to use their
Speaker 4: automated license plate readers referred to a Flock cameras Flock
Speaker 4: actually doesn't provide the hardware, and San Diego. Their only
Speaker 4: lead was a single hit in Fashion Valley, which is
Speaker 4: several miles away from where the shooting took place, also
Speaker 4: further from Clark's house than the sight of the shooting was.
Speaker 4: But Vasquez comes from Tchula Vista, which is much further south.
Speaker 4: There is no way that I can see to get
Speaker 4: from Fashion Valley too ICSD without passing automated license preate readers.
Speaker 4: You can't take surface streets and avoid them. I've ridden
Speaker 4: most of that route. This was the way I used
Speaker 4: to commute on my bicycle when I was teaching. In
Speaker 4: the end, that didn't make a difference. They weren't able
Speaker 4: to get there and prevent the shooting. Not a single
Speaker 4: office discharge their firearm. Last month of San Diego officer
Speaker 4: did discharge his firearm, and a lady with a ballpoint
Speaker 4: pen missing several times in a busy street. Let's talk
Speaker 4: about the three people who were killed here. Yeah, I
Speaker 4: think they're more important than.
Speaker 2: These Well, yeah, because they undeniably they've any of those
Speaker 2: kids from getting killed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in a way that like is genuinely laudable and heroic.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, Amina Abdullah was a security guard of the mosque.
Speaker 4: I saw a reported he had eight children. He seems
Speaker 4: to have significantly delayed the shooter by exchanging fire with
Speaker 4: both of the shooters.
Speaker 2: And initiating the mask's lockdown protocol.
Speaker 4: Yes, so he used his radio to initiate the lockdown protocol.
Speaker 4: The shooters live stream the shooting and I've reviewed some
Speaker 4: elements of that and you can see they basically get
Speaker 4: into the entrance of the mosque and then get hold
Speaker 4: up there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they moved past him and he engaged them.
Speaker 4: Correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they were attempting to get past him to
Speaker 2: the kids, and he engaged them, drew them back, and yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean all of this would have been so much
Speaker 2: worse if he hadn't done what he did, which cost
Speaker 2: him his life.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly, Like, yeah, he engaged him. He continued to
Speaker 4: draw their fire lick until obviously he passed away. Other
Speaker 4: two victims Mansur Caziha known as Abu Aziz, who worked
Speaker 4: at a mosque for decad since they broke around. He
Speaker 4: was managing the store like the little gift shop snack shop,
Speaker 4: and Nadir al Wad. His wife teaches at the school
Speaker 4: and he lives right next door. He actually was at
Speaker 4: home when the shooting began and he ran toward the
Speaker 4: mosque when he heard the shooting, and it seems that
Speaker 4: both of them were in the parking lot, directing people
Speaker 4: away from the mosque and again drawing the attention of
Speaker 4: the shooter right so that unfortunately resulted in them both
Speaker 4: losing their lives. The shooters, as I said, then fled
Speaker 4: in a white BMW, shot at a landscaper, and then
Speaker 4: took their own lives. It appears that they met online.
Speaker 4: Basquez lives in Chula Vista, like a good distance away
Speaker 4: from where the shooting took place. There was a press
Speaker 4: conference shortly afterwards where the mayor was heckled. Gloria is
Speaker 4: a pretty unpopular mayor for a number of reasons, making
Speaker 4: San Diego very unlovable for poor people. He's consistently attacked
Speaker 4: and house population, I guess notably in this case because
Speaker 4: of the presence of a pro Palestinian artist. He boycotted
Speaker 4: our Pride march. But what it's worth Gloria himself is gay.
Speaker 4: City has had a really bad record of hate crimes,
Speaker 4: and I think in San Diego, because of this long
Speaker 4: history of hate crime and bigotry and anti blackness and
Speaker 4: anti Semitism and Islamophobia and the deep roots they have here.
Speaker 4: People assumed that these two young people would have come
Speaker 4: from East County, which is I think sometimes it's this
Speaker 4: myth right that like all bigotree exists kind of east
Speaker 4: of the fifteen and it's fine after that. That is
Speaker 4: very much not the case, and these two people do
Speaker 4: not come from that scene. They do not come from
Speaker 4: that world. There are groups that are white supremacist in
Speaker 4: East County, without a doubt many of them, and individuals
Speaker 4: who I mean Metzica was not living that far away, right,
Speaker 4: This is not that. Claremont, where Clark lived, is one
Speaker 4: of the most diverse neighborhoods. I have taught in high
Speaker 4: schools in Claremont. I taught in the community college there.
Speaker 4: Tons of my students over the years have been people
Speaker 4: who attended this moth school or they have children who
Speaker 4: go to the school in the preschool there. So yeah,
Speaker 4: this is like very close to home for me. I
Speaker 4: guess we should discuss a little of the shooter's kind
Speaker 4: of accelerationist worldview.
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, yeah, the imagery and associated manifesto that
Speaker 3: leaked down line after the shooting.
Speaker 2: I mean just The shortest thing we can say before
Speaker 2: getting into it is that this is a christ Church
Speaker 2: inspired attack. Yes, motivated by anti like anti Islamic Islamophobia,
Speaker 2: right obviously, but also these shooters were very motivated by
Speaker 2: anti Semitic beliefs, by in cell beliefs, and by general
Speaker 2: fandom of mass shootings, you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The first inclination we had that this was LinkedIn Natz
Speaker 3: accelerationism was some pictures are released of the shooter's vehicle
Speaker 3: where a gas can had an SS sticker on it. Eventually,
Speaker 3: pictures came out of their weapons which had slogans like
Speaker 3: race war and hate speech written literally the words like
Speaker 3: hate speech just go on the weapon, Yeah, as well
Speaker 3: as wearing Nazi imagery on tactical clothing.
Speaker 2: Garrison will have more to say and we'll look at
Speaker 2: more about these shooters, but first, here's some ads and
Speaker 2: we're back, all right.
Speaker 3: To start off, I pretty much agree with extremism researcher
Speaker 3: Jared Holt, who's one of the best in the business
Speaker 3: that quote, these kids could not have been any clearer
Speaker 3: that they cooked their skulls on Neo Nazi accelerationists slop yep,
Speaker 3: their manifestos are as sloppy as they are extremist, but
Speaker 3: they do make clear they sought to be copycats.
Speaker 4: Unquote.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's an entirely, entirely correct yep analysis of what happened.
Speaker 2: It's one of the laziest manifestos in some ways. It's
Speaker 2: very patterned off of the christ Church shooter's manifesto, which
Speaker 2: was you know, say what you will about it, a
Speaker 2: fairly original work. Like there's one of the more notable
Speaker 2: segments of this is a chunk where they're talking about
Speaker 2: their beliefs. They talk about the Freemasons, and whichever one
Speaker 2: of them was writing that portion is like I don't
Speaker 2: actually know anything about them, but I know that they're bad. Basically,
Speaker 2: like they haven't had time to get into this part
Speaker 2: of the ideology, which is like it's very it's very sloppy,
Speaker 2: it's very online. It's very much a product of terrorgram
Speaker 2: you know, like in yes, like the sloppiness is part
Speaker 2: of the humor I kind of expect for these guys.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: At large parts of it were just like parentheses unfinished yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and I think that's part of a bit,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the manifesto was titled Sons of Terrant, named
Speaker 3: after the christ Church shooter. Yeah, about half of it
Speaker 3: was written by each of the shooters, and it states
Speaker 3: that the Terrant was their biggest inspiration. The manifesto shows
Speaker 3: a deep referential knowledge of Nazi colorationism, but in a
Speaker 3: very like regurgitated sense, right almost is if you asked
Speaker 3: chat GPT to make a new Nazi colorationist manifesto. I'm
Speaker 3: not saying they actually did that, but that's the sort
Speaker 3: of like vibe that it has.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's very generic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's slopped.
Speaker 3: There's really nothing like new it all in there. It's
Speaker 3: mostly just referential.
Speaker 2: And it has that chat GPT vibe in part because
Speaker 2: they're just copying these other manifestos that were written by
Speaker 2: guys who were somewhat more original eve than them, and
Speaker 2: they came by it, I think primarily not even from
Speaker 2: initially scanning the original documents, but from seeing chopped up
Speaker 2: up pieces of them in these conversations that they're having
Speaker 2: in these like groups that they're in, and so it
Speaker 2: just kind of inculcates this slop mindset. They're like, this
Speaker 2: is kind of it's not just the manifesto that slop
Speaker 2: the way these people were radicalized. Probably was also slap Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's this big element of like gen z irony
Speaker 3: throughout stuff like this, and you can see that on
Speaker 3: the shooter's TikTok and their Steam page, which has a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of anime Nazi Edits little TikTok dances with
Speaker 3: accelerationist imagery and like anime art. The way that these
Speaker 3: two shooters identified with Nazi excelerationism and mass killers is
Speaker 3: very close to the way a lot of people just
Speaker 3: identify with pop culture fandom. The columbine aspect is also
Speaker 3: pretty crucial here, and one of the shooters rites about
Speaker 3: that in the manifesto. On their Steam they had a
Speaker 3: anime columbine edit. Yeah, trying to understand a shooting like
Speaker 3: this as just primarily ideologically driven has its limits, right,
Speaker 3: That's certainly an aspect of it.
Speaker 5: That's very clear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, ideological imagery is front and center, but there's also
Speaker 3: this copycat aspect and like the Saint lineage of these
Speaker 3: shooters trying to make themselves infamous bysocting themselves with these
Speaker 3: other mass killers, and the in group signaling is what
Speaker 3: the fashion of ideology is resting on.
Speaker 2: Yes, the in group signaling is key because when you
Speaker 2: just say they're trying to like copy their copycasts, they're
Speaker 2: trying to copy these other killers, then that makes people
Speaker 2: think of someone who is kind of purely narcissistically so
Speaker 2: focused on the outside on how people see them as
Speaker 2: a result of their act. But at least equally important
Speaker 2: is this group of folks that they socialize with in
Speaker 2: these telegram chats and other communities that they think are
Speaker 2: cool and that they like, and they are trying That's
Speaker 2: why the manifesto is the way it is. That's why
Speaker 2: the christ Church Manifesto was the way it was. They're
Speaker 2: trying to signal to their differing communities of people online.
Speaker 3: It's like part of a fan It's is like the
Speaker 3: way that we think of pop culture. That's what this
Speaker 3: is for a small number of young people online.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's like it go. It's not just even
Speaker 2: Nazi stuff. Like I've seen a lot of people making
Speaker 2: a big deal about the fact that one of the
Speaker 2: shooters had a profile image of a character Ashley Graves from.
Speaker 4: The Incest video game.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a video game called The Coffin of Andy and Leiley,
Speaker 2: which is like a really fucked up incest video game
Speaker 2: and she's like she's like specifically like a really bad
Speaker 2: evil person. And it's like the comments I've seen are
Speaker 2: basically like, yeah, I'm not surprised that he would idolize
Speaker 2: someone who would do this, would like idolize a character
Speaker 2: like that. It's a bit yeah, it's like that. That's yeah,
Speaker 2: these are these are all things that are like popular
Speaker 2: in these weird little chunks of the right. Like it's
Speaker 2: it's it's an encompassing thing. It's not just these people
Speaker 2: are Nazis or these people want to be famous. And
Speaker 2: if you're just looking at the at that, then you're
Speaker 2: going to be confused by this like very sloppy seeming
Speaker 2: manifesto unless you understand it's there to make their friends laugh, you.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, I mean like and and as ideological as
Speaker 3: this is, it's just as mimetic. Yeah, even if the
Speaker 3: overt Nazi stuff is very strong in this case, and
Speaker 3: as much as people will focus on the Nazi stuff
Speaker 3: and a lot of the reporting, we can't over look
Speaker 3: this sort of like fandom and like column buine aspect.
Speaker 3: You know, crucially, there's two shooters here that's very very
Speaker 3: column bin esque and that's something they acknowledge in the manifesto.
Speaker 3: They did live stream the shooting in a discord call,
Speaker 3: so there were people aware that this shooting was happening
Speaker 3: since before the shooting started, people to hop on to
Speaker 3: this call.
Speaker 4: Shoes, It's said in their manifesto the I'm going to
Speaker 4: wait until they had a good number of people on
Speaker 4: the call before starting so they could ensure someone recorded it,
Speaker 4: which indeed someone did.
Speaker 3: Just as a side note here, I've seen a lot
Speaker 3: of people talk about this as like a as like
Speaker 3: quote unquote seven six' four, shooting all, right seven six
Speaker 3: four refers to a specific group of or a specific
Speaker 3: online community that does child likes. Exploitation they try to
Speaker 3: extract and blackmail children into providing child sexual best material
Speaker 3: and sometimes convincing children to also do acts of. Violence
Speaker 3: there is not an explicit seven six four connection THAT
Speaker 3: i am aware of at this. Point sometimes these communities
Speaker 3: do overlapped interseex SO i wouldn't be surprised if there
Speaker 3: is something seven six foot related that comes out about
Speaker 3: one of these shooters. Eventually, sure but THIS i think
Speaker 3: that framing that that understanding is slightly. MISTAKEN i think
Speaker 3: people jump to that very. Often there was obviously the
Speaker 3: sort of like group element of this. Shooting they're streaming
Speaker 3: it in a discord, call BUT i THINK sem six
Speaker 3: floor does actually refer to a specific. Group it's not
Speaker 3: just you, know neo natzic acceleraationist shooters in. General i've
Speaker 3: seen some people question why a mosque was chosen as
Speaker 3: the target if a lot of the manifesto is, antisemitic
Speaker 3: that's kind of like the crux of their. Ideology they
Speaker 3: did The Islamic center likely because they wanted to specifically Copy, Terrant.
Speaker 3: Right that's even down to the clothes that they're. Wearing
Speaker 3: the military fatigues that they're wearing are very similar to
Speaker 3: What terran wore in the, manifestos even around the same
Speaker 3: length of As terrence. Manifesto, Yeah AND i think a
Speaker 3: vital part of this and when you when you're looking
Speaker 3: at this sort of which seems like things that are
Speaker 3: incongruent between what they're writing and what they're, doing it's
Speaker 3: that this is sort of the most advanced stage of
Speaker 3: the production of politics to, aesthetics and it's reached a
Speaker 3: point where like the aesthetic itself is like the medically. Alive,
Speaker 3: yes in a way that's you, know in a way
Speaker 3: that operates independently of like what the people who made
Speaker 3: the ideology were trying to. Do and now the aesthetic
Speaker 3: itself is getting people to just do the, things and
Speaker 3: so they're doing it for the, esthetic which is what
Speaker 3: the politics has been turned. Into and you, know even
Speaker 3: like the selection of video games they have on This steam,
Speaker 3: profile he's designed with this in. Mind the incest, game one,
Speaker 3: example parts Of iron four is also included on The
Speaker 3: steam Pro.
Speaker 2: God of course it fucking.
Speaker 4: Is but here's the.
Speaker 7: Thing here's the.
Speaker 3: Thing the shooter unlocked no. Achievements they weren't even.
Speaker 2: Playing it's about being cool to your.
Speaker 4: Buds they weren't even playing the.
Speaker 3: Game but he but he wanted to include the game
Speaker 3: on the profile because it references or has been a
Speaker 3: part of other Neo nazi accelerationists in the.
Speaker 7: Past.
Speaker 3: Yeah, similarly a lot of like The enemy visual novels
Speaker 3: included on the profile seem to be.
Speaker 2: Unplayed, yeah it doesn't happen. Enough this gets looked at
Speaker 2: because of how horrifying the actions are as something separate
Speaker 2: fundamentally from like all the other shit that like dumb,
Speaker 2: shit young people do to be cool and it really
Speaker 2: shouldn't entirely.
Speaker 3: Or just being, suicidal, right or just being extremely mentally
Speaker 3: like unwell and like, underregulated socially.
Speaker 2: DISINTEGRATED i think the desperation to fit in anywhere is
Speaker 2: tied with that sort of thing, too, Right like the
Speaker 2: fact that you would lie about the stuff you're interested
Speaker 2: with in order to put on this image that is
Speaker 2: more fitting for what you think this community wants to
Speaker 2: see from. You you.
Speaker 3: Know part of the tragedy here is that these, people
Speaker 3: as kids found community in these acceleration of spaces that
Speaker 3: became the primary way they socialize in a very similar
Speaker 3: vein as a lot of people socialized online About Star
Speaker 3: wars or whatever anime is popular on, TikTok or like
Speaker 3: those other fandom spaces that are not designed around going
Speaker 3: into a place of worship or a school and killing
Speaker 3: tons of.
Speaker 4: People, YEAH i GUESS i should just Sayreal, briefly THE
Speaker 4: fbi removed thirty firearms From Cane clark's family. Home it
Speaker 4: seems still the firearms they. Use for whatever it's, worth
Speaker 4: it just make a huge, DIFFERENCE i, guess other than
Speaker 4: to say that like these were all complying With california.
Speaker 4: Law california has very strict gun. Laws it's very hard
Speaker 4: in this country to stop people getting the means to
Speaker 4: kill lots of.
Speaker 2: PEOPLE i mean that, said it's entirely possible that that
Speaker 2: is why there weren't more people. Killed you, know we
Speaker 2: really it's impossible to say that the gun that they
Speaker 2: were using isn't wildly different from an ar in this
Speaker 2: kind of. Situation but you, know there's limitations on the
Speaker 2: amount of m and a mag or whatever then may
Speaker 2: have had some. IMPACT i don't really HAVE i don't
Speaker 2: have enough granular detail about all of, that and it's
Speaker 2: also kind of impossible to, say but, yeah these were
Speaker 2: All kali legal.
Speaker 4: Guns, yeah you see the kid IF i would not
Speaker 4: suggest watching the, VIDEO i don't think anyone needs to
Speaker 4: watch the.
Speaker 3: Video it's not good for. You this is no reason
Speaker 3: to watch it or read the. Manifesto there's nothing in.
Speaker 4: There, yeah none of this will make your, grief you,
Speaker 4: know more more? Real ya is your solidarity more? Completely
Speaker 4: you don't need to. Do you see the kid fuck
Speaker 4: up the window for a while in a, video which is.
Speaker 4: GOOD i wish someone had fucking shot him when he
Speaker 4: was doing. That one of the last THINGS i want to.
Speaker 3: Add there has been an attempt by some popular right
Speaker 3: wing figures to try to turn this into another trans.
Speaker 2: Shooting, yeah Specifically Elon.
Speaker 5: Musk, Yes Elon musk has boosted.
Speaker 3: Claims, yeah completely unfounded, false just actually outright.
Speaker 2: False absolute lies admitted by the.
Speaker 3: Opage he's just lying false iss that either one or
Speaker 3: both of the shooters were a. Transgender this seems to
Speaker 3: be primarily using a picture of one of them that
Speaker 3: has long hair as the sort of quote unquote evidence
Speaker 3: they are not.
Speaker 4: Trans neither of them are.
Speaker 3: Trans they write about HATING lgbtq people in the.
Speaker 2: Manifesto they're not. Trans it's not a trends. Shooting, no
Speaker 2: they hating trans people in. Particular.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah but you know they're just like these people
Speaker 7: Like Elon musk and all threight when people doing this
Speaker 7: like they're just overtly doing The Julius striker Like Dear,
Speaker 7: stormer Like jewish crime, shit like that's just all this this.
Speaker 7: Point it's, yeah.
Speaker 2: They don't think it's true anymore than like we. Do
Speaker 2: they just know that you've got in this period of
Speaker 2: time right after something like this, happens if you flood
Speaker 2: the zone with shit like, that some number of people
Speaker 2: will never get. Corrected that's all this. Is, yeah reality
Speaker 2: is very malleable in those first few. Hours.
Speaker 4: Yeah, YEAH i think some of them will also think it's. Funny.
Speaker 4: YEAH i think in the same way it signals that
Speaker 4: you're calls to your friends and in the same way
Speaker 4: that these people did, that like it's. Disgusting, wow it's
Speaker 4: all the same.
Speaker 7: Thing, yeah we're doing the meme.
Speaker 2: Genocide it's arguably genocide has always been a.
Speaker 9: Meme.
Speaker 4: Yeah the whole thing has been really hard on The
Speaker 4: San diego community where we have a big fire At
Speaker 4: EASTER i ll aposto as well getting under. Control we
Speaker 4: will share a fundraiser for the families of the three
Speaker 4: people who unfortunately lost their. Lives it's already upper half
Speaker 4: a million, dollars which is nice to. See but, YEAH
Speaker 4: i know that that mask specifically has spent so much
Speaker 4: time on. SECURITY i know they've applied for, grants LIKE i,
Speaker 4: know they've they've done everything they. Can they have, cameras
Speaker 4: they had armed. Security They it's really sad that this
Speaker 4: community felt that this might happen and it. Happened you
Speaker 4: know that they felt that they weren't, safe And i've
Speaker 4: filed some public records requests that will take weeks months
Speaker 4: to come. Back but if there is more reporting on
Speaker 4: this to be, done we will do, it especially like
Speaker 4: this is WHERE i, live this is my, community So
Speaker 4: i'm going to try my best to find out as
Speaker 4: much AS i. Can but, yeah it's a tragedy right.
Speaker 3: Now before we go on and ad, BREAK i have
Speaker 3: one more story. Here On, tuesday there was a primary
Speaker 3: election In. Kentucky Incumbent Libertarian Republican Thomas massey lost the
Speaker 3: election by ten points to A pak And trump backed,
Speaker 3: Challenger Ed. Gallrain massey broke With trump over the release
Speaker 3: of The epstein, files though Unlike margree taymc, green he
Speaker 3: did not step down but continued to serve In, congress
Speaker 3: opposing The One Big Beautiful, bill The war On iran
Speaker 3: and aid To. Israel trump's Selected, gallarin a Former navy,
Speaker 3: seal to run Against, massey and this election became the
Speaker 3: most expensive primary In house race. History Great apak and
Speaker 3: other Pro israel lobbying groups spent over nine million dollars
Speaker 3: to unseen Massive, jesus and overall ad spending in this
Speaker 3: primary reached over thirty three million Dollars.
Speaker 7: Jesus's wide receiver one.
Speaker 3: Money, yeah it's, wild it's this is this is crazy
Speaker 3: for A kentucky house.
Speaker 5: Scene that's. Good that's gonna go to A republican either.
Speaker 2: Way it's it's just A trump's ego.
Speaker 3: Thing it's like A Trump israel. Thing, yeah it's it's
Speaker 3: it's pretty.
Speaker 2: Wild, yeah, Yeah israel, too. Obviously, yeah of course.
Speaker 3: The pros are a. Lot you funded a, significant significant
Speaker 3: part of the ad.
Speaker 4: Spending it's.
Speaker 3: Crazy another interesting, factor packs on both sides of this
Speaker 3: race USED ai deep fake ads depicting the opposing. CANDIDATE
Speaker 3: i want to briefly show some of, these not the whole,
Speaker 3: ones just just very short clips, together like the sense
Speaker 3: of of what of what the deal is?
Speaker 7: Here incredible impending sense of.
Speaker 4: Dread, YEAH i love.
Speaker 13: It These trump, traders they can't stand our president and
Speaker 13: can't help but let it. Show like O eddy gal
Speaker 13: Rynd Oo geddy left The Republican party After trump won
Speaker 13: THE gop nomination in twenty. Sixteen take a look for
Speaker 13: yourself and when Did wogedy change his registration back to
Speaker 13: THE Gop After Joe biden was sworn, In trump was
Speaker 13: in the foxhole and okty Gal rynd tucked his tail
Speaker 13: and Ran kentucky fourth the back is responsible for the
Speaker 13: content of this.
Speaker 2: Ad oh my, god it's.
Speaker 4: Done Donald trump.
Speaker 3: Side this is the craziest part of the ad where
Speaker 3: a deep Fake Donald trump is in the trenches with a.
Speaker 7: Rifle it just looks like a. Photoshop it looks it
Speaker 7: looks like a Shitty moan photo.
Speaker 4: Shot, yeah Like World.
Speaker 2: War one or. Two it could kind of be.
Speaker 4: EITHER i think of GIVING D, day, right like you
Speaker 4: got the tank, barriers like he's got The grande the tank.
Speaker 2: Barriers but that looks that is that a?
Speaker 4: Garage, yeah because he fighted it twice without running the.
Speaker 7: BANK i don't think they know who we're.
Speaker 4: Going to this and they have.
Speaker 2: Already his camo doesn't look anyway what?
Speaker 4: Happened?
Speaker 3: True so Woke Eddie gueran right, away As trump was
Speaker 3: in the, trenches.
Speaker 4: The foxhole, garrison the. Foxhole my apologies under.
Speaker 3: Fire this is the Pro massy, ad, Right so the
Speaker 3: promasciads are trying to frame The, trump The trump backed
Speaker 3: candidate as woke Woke Eddie.
Speaker 2: Gallay, YEAH i love, IT i love.
Speaker 4: It who Abandoned?
Speaker 5: Trump, meanwhile the Anti massy ads looked like.
Speaker 9: This Thomas mercy caught in a thropple In washington.
Speaker 4: With the squad on the what, no what is happening?
Speaker 9: Mess he voted just the squad against Finishing trump's. Wall
Speaker 9: he voted with them against hiring new border.
Speaker 1: Agents, jesus this is as.
Speaker 9: Adultery it's a complete and total betrayal Of President trump
Speaker 9: And kentucky. Conservatives On may, nineteen Fire Thomas Massy Mega
Speaker 9: kentucky is responsible for the content of this.
Speaker 2: ADVERTISING i guess the upside of this is the term
Speaker 2: thrupples really gonna. Mainstream. Huh they trust people in just
Speaker 2: like small Town kentucky didn't know what this Was Thomas.
Speaker 3: Massey is it a quote unquote throufle with the squad
Speaker 3: showing him holding hands the squad is more than showing
Speaker 3: him holding hands WITH aoc and other deep faked interactions
Speaker 3: BETWEEN aoc and Elan.
Speaker 2: Omar yeah, great cool.
Speaker 4: Stuff yeah. Wow the cable news generation really going to
Speaker 4: be having that minds melted by that.
Speaker 3: Shit, lastly an ongoing story we followed ON edi the
Speaker 3: past few months is Whether trump will endorse in The
Speaker 3: Republican senate runoff In. Texas early reports indicated That trump
Speaker 3: would back Incumbent Senator John cornyn over mega hardliner And
Speaker 3: texas Ag Ken, paxton But trump seemed irritated that his
Speaker 3: intentions were, leaked and following, That paxton started to make
Speaker 3: moves in a bid to win the president's. Favor In,
Speaker 3: March paxton promised to drop out of the race if
Speaker 3: The Republican senate tailed the filibuster to pass the voter
Speaker 3: restriction bill dubbed The Save America. Act at the, time
Speaker 3: the bill Was trump's top, priority and this gambit By
Speaker 3: paxton seemed to, work as later that month he was
Speaker 3: seen meeting With trump at Mar A, lago and then
Speaker 3: this Past, Tuesday trump Endorsed paxton Via truth On truth social.
Speaker 3: Quote he is a winner in all. Caps ken is
Speaker 3: a strong supporter of terminating the filibuster in all caps
Speaker 3: and very, importantly The Save America. Act John cornyn is
Speaker 3: a good man AND i worked well with, him but
Speaker 3: he was not supportive of me when times were tough.
Speaker 3: Unquote this endorsement seemed to Catch Senate republicans off, guard
Speaker 3: some of whom now worry the seat may be in.
Speaker 3: Jeopardy Republican Majority Leader John thune is still Backing Senator.
Speaker 4: Cornyn what's going on that?
Speaker 8: Break, yeah.
Speaker 4: That was a lovely. Song or we're about to hate a.
Speaker 4: Song let's say song, stated we're about to hear the.
Speaker 4: Song i'm about to hate a. Song, WELL i am
Speaker 4: excited about.
Speaker 2: That that must mean it's time to learn about. Tariffs
Speaker 2: rocky Jazz, bob rocky jazz.
Speaker 5: Bo sorry, lack.
Speaker 1: Rocky jazz bo rocky Jazz.
Speaker 7: Bob by, god there's tariff news. Again so let's run
Speaker 7: through a few pieces of tariff. News we have now technically,
Speaker 7: speaking started the terriff refund of. Process people are starting
Speaker 7: to get their money. Back this is going to be
Speaker 7: a catastrophe that unfolds over the course of, genuinely who
Speaker 7: knows how. Long my guess IS i don't think this
Speaker 7: is done by next. Year we've also seen a series
Speaker 7: of negotiations from The trump administration with a whole bunch
Speaker 7: of different. Countries THE us had a summit With china
Speaker 7: Where trump is ution in ping met and appear to
Speaker 7: be trying to wind down the trade. War there is
Speaker 7: an attempt to reduce tariffs on goods that aren't under
Speaker 7: the sort Of section three oh one national security. Tariffs
Speaker 7: there's also been some attempt by The chinese government to
Speaker 7: get THE us to back off of using the national
Speaker 7: security powers for more. Tariffs the deals on this one
Speaker 7: are still kind of. Inconclusive we're going to see more
Speaker 7: as this. Unfolds there's a very good quote THAT i
Speaker 7: think is interesting FROM Us Trade. Rep Jamison guer where in,
Speaker 7: writers well this is reported in, writers was On Fox
Speaker 7: Business news where he, said, quote it's not really a
Speaker 7: situation where we go and Get china to change the
Speaker 7: way they, govern the way they manage their. Economy career
Speaker 7: Told Fox businesses last week this was about three weeks.
Speaker 7: Ago now that's all baked into their. System BUT i
Speaker 7: think there is a world where we find out where
Speaker 7: we can optimize trade Between china and THE us to
Speaker 7: achieve more. Balance so this is effectively a pure back
Speaker 7: off of everything they've been saying about like all of
Speaker 7: the all of The chinese economy inherently having rigged trade
Speaker 7: because of government, subsidies et, cetera et.
Speaker 4: Cetera on, it it.
Speaker 7: Seems like they're kind of trying to wind this, DOWN
Speaker 7: i think largely because they have with this war In,
Speaker 7: iran they have dropped a second nuke on the, economy
Speaker 7: and they want to make sure that the two bombs
Speaker 7: they've dropped on the on their own feet aren't going
Speaker 7: off at the same. Time so in that vein we've
Speaker 7: also seen THE eu has finally gotten together to approve.
Speaker 7: Ish it's a little, complicated a provisional deal with the
Speaker 7: administration that the are also still a little murky. On
Speaker 7: but the short version seems to be THE us imposes
Speaker 7: of fifteen percent tariff On european, goods while once again Per,
Speaker 7: reuters THE eu would quote remove import duties ON us
Speaker 7: industrial goods and grant preferential access TO us farm and sea.
Speaker 7: Produce we still don't know exactly what that's going to look,
Speaker 7: like but those are the preliminary details after these negotiations
Speaker 7: were thrown into chaos When trump was trying to Invade. Greenland,
Speaker 7: yeah we'll know more about what these deals look like
Speaker 7: in the weeks to. Come, now the other piece of
Speaker 7: news we should talk about here is that On, friday
Speaker 7: on The friday that you're presumably listening to this On,
Speaker 7: Heaven walsh is going to be sworn in as the
Speaker 7: new chairman of The Federal. Reserve this has come as
Speaker 7: part of a deal where in order to getsh out of,
Speaker 7: committee The Justice department dropped their investigation into Former Federal
Speaker 7: Reserve Chairman Jerome. Powell it is worth, noting, though That
Speaker 7: Jerome Powell Rum powell has obviously stepped down as the
Speaker 7: chairman of The Federal. Reserve, coward that's, ALL i got.
Speaker 7: Nothing my brain is too cooked On Federal reserve to
Speaker 7: be able to react. Properly but Coma Jerome powell is
Speaker 7: not stepping down from The board Of, governors which he's still.
Speaker 7: ON i think he's still also on The Open Market,
Speaker 7: Committee So worsh has his work cut out for. Him
Speaker 7: we should. Mention so who Is Kevin. Walsh we've talked
Speaker 7: about this a little bit. Before he, IS i would,
Speaker 7: say more stable and more hinged than the previous Candidate
Speaker 7: trump has been talking. About he has experience in The Federal. Reserve,
Speaker 7: however he's also very very close to a lot of
Speaker 7: the tech, right particularly feel and end. Reason that is
Speaker 7: absolutely a cause for alarm that these sort of tech
Speaker 7: fascists have gotten their guy as the head of The Federal. Reserve,
Speaker 7: however he has effectively inherited a, Grenade so how are
Speaker 7: things going to be going for him when he when
Speaker 7: he takes office in about two. Days as we're recording
Speaker 7: for this not. Great the yield on the thirty year
Speaker 7: teen notte is that five point four, percent which is
Speaker 7: the highest it's been since two thousand and. Seven for
Speaker 7: people unaware of what high teennote yield, means it means
Speaker 7: things bad for THE us, economy and investors are spooked
Speaker 7: and kind of. Panicking this seems to mostly be investors
Speaker 7: finally starting to price in weight hold on this war
Speaker 7: In iran is not simply going to, end so he
Speaker 7: is inheriting a situation that is going to be a
Speaker 7: mess because these high interest rates means that there's going
Speaker 7: to have to be sort of fed interest rate hikes
Speaker 7: in order to curve. Inflation, However trump wants exactly the
Speaker 7: opposite of, that So larsh is immediately caught between a
Speaker 7: rock and a hard. Place the rest of The Federal
Speaker 7: Reserve board does not want to slash int rates right,
Speaker 7: now And Jerome, powell who hates, him is still on
Speaker 7: the board and is still attempting to manage a kind
Speaker 7: of rear flank resistance To trump's control over THE. Fed
Speaker 7: so who, knows there's going to be some pretty dramatic
Speaker 7: clashes my guess fairly soon between some combination Of trump
Speaker 7: wash and the rest of The Federal Reserve. Board and
Speaker 7: we will keep you. Informed nice speaking of money and,
Speaker 7: taxes Giving trump allies control of massive pools of, money.
Speaker 2: And that and that of our tax, money thank.
Speaker 3: You On, Monday President trump dropped his ten billion dollar
Speaker 3: lawsuit against THE irs after he negotiated With trump administration
Speaker 3: man to create a one point eight billion dollar fund
Speaker 3: to compensate victims of political quote unquote.
Speaker 5: Weaponization.
Speaker 3: Yeah the Lawsuit trump levied Against trump's government alleged the
Speaker 3: i R s failed to prevent a contractor from leaking
Speaker 3: his tax returns in twenty, nineteen When trump was also.
Speaker 3: President part of the. Settlement this is, wild, RIGHT i
Speaker 3: have to think this is this is. Wild you know the,
Speaker 3: headline it's Very.
Speaker 2: Trump trump wins lawsuits Against trump. Government, yeah Against trump's.
Speaker 5: Cires, yeah you, know technically didn't win the. Lawsuit it was.
Speaker 3: Settled and part of the settlement is this one point
Speaker 3: eight billion dollar Fund.
Speaker 2: Garrison one point seven. Seven, yes, technically come, ON yeh
Speaker 2: was rounding up that's, right, baby this.
Speaker 4: World, yeah in this, Case, garrison he's unacceptable to round
Speaker 4: up because they had something they were going for, there
Speaker 4: they were, cooking they.
Speaker 3: Found this fund is for people who believe they are
Speaker 3: victims of political oppianization by THE doj acting A.
Speaker 4: G tuddland.
Speaker 3: Quote it is this department's intention to make right the
Speaker 3: wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens.
Speaker 7: Again.
Speaker 3: Quote blanche himself will appoint a five member committee to
Speaker 3: evaluate weaponization claims submitted by the. Public so this is
Speaker 3: basically a scheme to Usurp congress's power of the purse
Speaker 3: by literally weaponizing the judicial.
Speaker 5: Process but this story actually gets. Crazier oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah another part Of trump's settlement Against trump is that
Speaker 3: THE doj has pledged That trump and his two eldest
Speaker 3: sons are to be forever exempt from tax audits by
Speaker 3: the irma quote The United states releases waives acquits and
Speaker 3: forever discharges each of the plaintiffs from and is hereby
Speaker 3: forever barred and precluded from prosecuting or pursuing any and
Speaker 3: all claims.
Speaker 4: Unquote Incredible.
Speaker 3: NOW A dj spookesperson later Told The Financial times that
Speaker 3: this exemption only applies to existing. Audits but that's not
Speaker 3: really what the document, says and that's not What trump
Speaker 3: administration is saying outside of this one statement from A dj.
Speaker 5: Spokesperson so who Knows Julius.
Speaker 7: Caesar didn't do this? Shit like what are we doing?
Speaker 2: Here, yeah, yeah it's it's. Again the standard for a
Speaker 2: long time previously was that like The president AND vp
Speaker 2: were audited like, yearly because it's just like what you,
Speaker 2: do like in a, democracy just because you it should
Speaker 2: be built into the system that you don't trust that
Speaker 2: the president isn't. Corrupt that's a bad. Idea it's speaking of.
Speaker 3: Corruption the whole idea of settling a lawsuit yourself.
Speaker 4: Yourself it's, yeah using everyone's.
Speaker 2: MONEY i, WOULD i would sue myself a. Lot i'm
Speaker 2: gonna be, Honest, Garrison i'm gonna be. HONEST i don't
Speaker 2: like what THE i didn't know he could do.
Speaker 8: THAT i just.
Speaker 7: This has somehow managed to turn me into why they
Speaker 7: Made Jimmy carter give up this peanut farm? Loob like, yes, no.
Speaker 4: That was literally WHAT i was looking Like Bill, clinton
Speaker 4: not the most exactly, anaogous but Like Bill clinton used
Speaker 4: to cross the street to use a different phone to
Speaker 4: avoid transgressing the hatch At, yeah and now we're here.
Speaker 7: Observed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah i'm not A Bill clinton, fan but, yeah come.
Speaker 2: On but just just thinking about the difference in severity
Speaker 2: between How Monica, gate which is what it was literally
Speaker 2: called often at the, time was treated and how the
Speaker 2: president creating a one point seven seven six billion dollar
Speaker 2: slush fund for people who tried to do an insurrection
Speaker 2: is being treated like it's it's.
Speaker 3: Insane, yeah, Right and that's that's the other thing we should. Mentioned,
Speaker 3: right this is going to be mostly used by people
Speaker 3: who were prosecuted for their involvement in The january sixth.
Speaker 3: Insurrection these funds are not going to be granted to
Speaker 3: like left wing activists who are being prosecuted By trump's
Speaker 3: doj for a political targeted like.
Speaker 2: Come there might be some lawsuits around, THAT i, mean we'll.
Speaker 2: See Senator Ron wyden Of oregon has said That democrats
Speaker 2: are going to fight every element of the self dealing.
Speaker 2: Measure not only is this another heinously corrept act by
Speaker 2: the most corrupt administration in, history it's clearly a violation
Speaker 2: of the law that prohibits interference by executive branch officials
Speaker 2: AND irs. Audits so we'll see if any of that is.
Speaker 2: Successful good. Luck i'm not against, tryan but it's not
Speaker 2: my odds on.
Speaker 9: Bet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah not to demean the. Effort i'm just trying
Speaker 2: to be reasonable.
Speaker 4: Here, yeah we can.
Speaker 3: Dream back in twenty, nineteen WHEN i was in film,
Speaker 3: SCHOOL i was interviewing a federal.
Speaker 2: Judge wow humblebrag high for.
Speaker 3: Some like documentary, project and she talked about the rices
Speaker 3: in twenty, nineteen So trump. One she talked about how
Speaker 3: she thinks that it's really going to be the judicial
Speaker 3: system that saves us from. Authoritarianism, this this is this
Speaker 3: is our this is the last line of defense we
Speaker 3: have against a.
Speaker 7: Dictator judge things their job, good like like to be.
Speaker 2: FAIR i knew a lot of journalists who are like the,
Speaker 2: press free press that back.
Speaker 7: In, Reality like The Supreme court just like repealed The
Speaker 7: Voting Rights, Act and.
Speaker 3: That's What i'm that's What i'm getting. To On, friday
Speaker 3: THE Us Supreme court Rejected democrats' emergency appeal in The
Speaker 3: virginia redistricting, case leaving the decision by The States Room
Speaker 3: court to block the new voter Approved house map in.
Speaker 3: Place THE Us Supreme court offered no explanation in their
Speaker 3: brief one sentence unsigned memo.
Speaker 7: That that that might be the shortest shadow dock, yet
Speaker 7: which is insulting because they were already like one. Paragraph.
Speaker 3: Yeah The Virginia's Room court ruled the new map violated
Speaker 3: the state constitution via procedural error during the referendum. PROCESS
Speaker 3: I i often think about the CONVERSATION i had with
Speaker 3: this with this federal judge in twenty. Nineteen as all
Speaker 3: this stuff's been, Happening i'm, LIKE i would really love
Speaker 3: to talk with her. AGAIN i should maybe try to
Speaker 3: track her down and the like ask because, yeah oh, boy.
Speaker 4: Yeah how do you conceive of yourself, now like your
Speaker 4: role in this?
Speaker 7: Yep how do you function ideologically as a person whose
Speaker 7: job it is to do the? Law when The Supreme
Speaker 7: court has said That article, one section four of The,
Speaker 7: constitution when it says That congress can pass laws or regulate,
Speaker 7: elections does not actually apply To congress passing a law
Speaker 7: to regulate. Elections like what do you do after that
Speaker 7: in order in order to make it so that black
Speaker 7: people don't get a? Vote?
Speaker 4: Again, like where do you put your idea on the
Speaker 4: tea now it's all.
Speaker 7: Fake. Yeah, God i'm extremely angry about.
Speaker 3: THIS i mean, yeah around that time was when the
Speaker 3: partisan jerrymandering was like explicitly allowed by The Supreme. COURT
Speaker 3: i mean you, can, yeah we can track a lot
Speaker 3: of a lot of the stuff to that ruling as. Well,
Speaker 3: right and this WAS i think that that was a
Speaker 3: round twenty, nineteen between twenty eighteen twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: One shall we move on to the war which is
Speaker 4: not a war In? IRAN i believe we. Shall, Okay,
Speaker 4: WELL i will start at the start of this. Week just,
Speaker 4: GONE i guess where the president has said a deadline
Speaker 4: for strikes about which we found out through a series
Speaker 4: OF ai generated, images and then back down from it
Speaker 4: at the urging avalids in the region as talks. Continue,
Speaker 4: Meanwhile iran has not stopped using drones and missiles to
Speaker 4: Attack kurdish group's Largely Iranian kurdish groups in Southern kurdistan
Speaker 4: indigenously produced. Missiles, yes we're going to talk about indigenous production.
Speaker 2: Later, yes, okay, Okay art AND i see what you're.
Speaker 4: Doing trump On monday said he would hold off the
Speaker 4: quote unquote scheduled. Attacks, Meanwhile iran has opened AN x
Speaker 4: account using x dot, com the everything website for The
Speaker 4: Persian Gulf Straight, authority a direct contravention of my desire
Speaker 4: to not make this Segment twitter.
Speaker 5: Review this is the worst episode we've done in a.
Speaker 5: While it.
Speaker 2: Is it's like this is, yeah you, know you.
Speaker 4: Know twenty eight days later when it opens and all
Speaker 4: this bad shit is just like clicking. Through, yeah that's
Speaker 4: every week, now.
Speaker 3: Every news sentence one of us, SAYS i just my
Speaker 3: headache grows a, little a little, bit a little bit bit.
Speaker 7: Like longing for the halcyon. Days we thought that twenty
Speaker 7: twenty was the worst year.
Speaker 2: Ever people are nostalgia for twenty. Twenty now folks are
Speaker 2: getting hopeful about the hauntavirus out.
Speaker 7: There oh please Please.
Speaker 4: God so, yes it RUNS x account for THE, pgs
Speaker 4: A Persian Golf straight. Authority it's claiming that it has
Speaker 4: established a controlled maritime zone in the straight hashtag strait
Speaker 4: Of horn moos hashtag horn moves undercourse. Straight if you
Speaker 4: want to get in on that, conversation.
Speaker 2: Why would you hashtag it that this isn't A you are.
Speaker 4: The Islamic republic Of iran and what are you? Doing
Speaker 4: it's creating a hashtag Because donald trumpet has bombed you
Speaker 4: for three months without declaring. War yet, like what a,
Speaker 4: World what a time to be. Alive, MEANWHILE cbs see
Speaker 4: again every fucking. Sentence, man only the, only the, best Oh.
Speaker 4: Man every TIME i see a full, STOP i want
Speaker 4: to just go and walk into the. Ocean IF i,
Speaker 4: DID i might eventually float to the straight upform, moves
Speaker 4: WHERE cbs is reporting that THE us has identified ten naval.
Speaker 4: MINDS i spoke to my mind guy that this is
Speaker 4: the LIFE.
Speaker 2: I, lead is mine guide.
Speaker 4: Mine, Guy it's going to be my New you.
Speaker 2: Could d m the old iatola On. Twitter it's possible
Speaker 2: you can get the new. One there's no way to.
Speaker 2: Know although the old one never got back to me
Speaker 2: about whether or not he liked, anime so that remains
Speaker 2: an unanswered.
Speaker 4: Question he would post About american. Sports it's very. Funny
Speaker 4: these are The maham three and seven, minds so it's seven.
Speaker 4: Minds here are the particularly advanced. Ones they apparently can
Speaker 4: absorb some, sonar making them very hard to, detect and
Speaker 4: they can go off when you're searching for. Them neither
Speaker 4: of these are contact, mines, Right The muhamma, three's for,
Speaker 4: example they're midwater, floating whereas sevens are going to be
Speaker 4: on the. Bottom they can go off using a number
Speaker 4: of different, sensors like The muhama threes could go off
Speaker 4: using magnetic or acoustic sensors when the ship is, nearby
Speaker 4: so you don't even have to directly bump, them which is.
Speaker 4: Great if they have found, ten one assumes that there
Speaker 4: are actually tons more than. That we are now waiting
Speaker 4: until something bumps into.
Speaker 7: One.
Speaker 4: Great for a long, time there was Like schrodinger's minds
Speaker 4: right that we now the minds are, there that the
Speaker 4: mines are.
Speaker 7: Real so it's.
Speaker 2: Cat the cat is out of the. Box, No, No,
Speaker 2: JAMES i. AM i seem to recall several weeks, Ago
Speaker 2: Donald trump Said iran's offensive capability has been completely. Degraded that's.
Speaker 4: Correct, yeah no, navy no. Boats so they must have
Speaker 4: got the very quickly in the initial hours after the strikes,
Speaker 4: BEGAN i, guess and it just took this long to.
Speaker 2: Find, well sometimes sea turtles lay particularly explosive, eggs But
Speaker 2: Donald trump can't be expected to have anticipated that.
Speaker 7: Well and we've already denied the suicide dolphin, program so
Speaker 7: we couldn't stop the sea.
Speaker 4: Turtles, yeah well these are not suicide, dolphins, right what
Speaker 4: if these dolphins intended to live another?
Speaker 2: Day homicide dog?
Speaker 4: Exactly, yeah, yeah that big band, name or like the
Speaker 4: dolphin from Sea. Quest reach out to me if homicide
Speaker 4: dolphins is the name of your, band.
Speaker 2: Reach out to me if you Like. SeaQuest.
Speaker 4: Yeah like a lot of any military, technology these are entirely, copied,
Speaker 4: RIGHT i think as A, Norwegian swedish minds And french.
Speaker 4: Minds but That's iran does this a, lot, Right it
Speaker 4: sort of plagiarizes other people's military.
Speaker 2: Technology, yeah like a smart person.
Speaker 8: Does.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah it's like THE us, did like everyone else
Speaker 2: if they see someone else make a good. Weapon that's
Speaker 2: how war.
Speaker 4: Works, yeah and The iranians do it in a more
Speaker 4: direct way than. MOST i will, say they didn't even.
Speaker 4: Pretend but why if the world has cut you off
Speaker 4: with sanctus, anyway what did you go to?
Speaker 1: Lose you?
Speaker 2: Going this isn't like Fucking android copying ship from iPhone's
Speaker 2: code or. Whatever this is just how war.
Speaker 4: Works, yeah what are they going to?
Speaker 1: Do bomb?
Speaker 8: Them?
Speaker 2: Yeah we Never we didn't sue THE ussr for plagiarism
Speaker 2: when they got a new, like that's not how this.
Speaker 4: Worse, Yeah i'm sure some Like french guys are mad about. It,
Speaker 4: yeah they going to. Change let's talk about reporting FROM
Speaker 4: nyt today That israel intended to install Mood off And
Speaker 4: Dinner jad as the new leader Of iran and the
Speaker 4: way that they intended to do, this of, course AND
Speaker 4: i think this is particularly telling of THE Idf they
Speaker 4: bombed his.
Speaker 2: House, yeah that's, all that's the only thing they know
Speaker 2: how to, Do.
Speaker 4: James, yeah it's when you only have a ham the
Speaker 4: world is a.
Speaker 2: Nail WHEN i read that and made me. Think this
Speaker 2: great comedian now, Dead Bill hicks had a bit during
Speaker 2: The Gulf, war The First Gulf war where he was
Speaker 2: like talking about the amazing guided missiles THE us has
Speaker 2: that we could like fire down, chimneys and he was,
Speaker 2: like couldn't we theoretically use that technology to shoot food
Speaker 2: into the mouths of hungry?
Speaker 4: PEOPLE i THOUGHT i read that. Story unfortunately they Injured
Speaker 4: almadida jadh, Again, yeah because it's It's, rael, right and, like,
Speaker 4: yeah nothing they love to do more than the killer
Speaker 4: range or A muslim person and so, yeah spectactically they
Speaker 4: attempted to Install Apmadida jad a guy who wanted to
Speaker 4: Wipe israel off the map in the power In, iran.
Speaker 2: This guy was the. Devil if you, remember if you
Speaker 2: were if you watched the news when he was first
Speaker 2: president Of, iran this guy was the. Devil so a
Speaker 2: massive pusher.
Speaker 4: Of the nuclear. Program, yeah like, yeah, Fascinating.
Speaker 7: Probably the world's most famous. Hardliner maybe he's just maybe
Speaker 7: he's the only guy they knew, about.
Speaker 4: Like, Right like do they have some incredible compliment they.
Speaker 5: WELL i mean this is part of israel strategy.
Speaker 3: Though they want aggression to increase so they have justification
Speaker 3: to take over the region and like crack down like even,
Speaker 3: Harder like this is that was part of their strategy
Speaker 3: With hamas for.
Speaker 4: Years yeah, sure but they already have. Justification they're already
Speaker 4: killing a bunch of people In, iran like.
Speaker 3: They can try to rope in even more, countries broken more.
Speaker 3: People like this is like a scaling.
Speaker 4: Issue they are the accelerationists of the of the internationals
Speaker 4: really Genuine.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No we also found out That Israel loki Invaded, iraq
Speaker 4: setting up two bases in The iraqi desert and shooting
Speaker 4: At iraqi troops and civilians who came near.
Speaker 3: Them coy, Guys Israel loki Invaded.
Speaker 4: Iraq, yeah, yeah that's. Me, YEAH i am here to
Speaker 4: maintain a youth audience by using the language that they. Understand,
Speaker 4: yeah that's. Good let's talk about The. Senate On, tuesday
Speaker 4: The senate advanced to resolution quote who directed The removal
Speaker 4: of The United States Armed forces from hostilities with or
Speaker 4: against The Islamic Republica iran that have not been authorized By.
Speaker 4: Congress this is more of a rebuke than anything with
Speaker 4: a reasonable chance of actually stopping the, war but it's still.
Speaker 4: Significant significant Because Bill cassidy crossed party lines after losing
Speaker 4: his primary, election in Which trump campaigned against. Him only
Speaker 4: after losing, though yeah, right, yeah after this guy had
Speaker 4: destroyed your whole, life you suddenly grow a. Backbone that makes.
Speaker 4: Sense he was joined By Susan conins Of, Main Lisa
Speaker 4: markowski Of, alaska And Ran paul Of. Kentucky, while of,
Speaker 4: course do you guys want to guess which festering tird
Speaker 4: Of democrat senator across the other Way.
Speaker 7: Fedterman, yes, yeah of.
Speaker 2: Course when you said, FESTERING i thought of, Man, okay.
Speaker 4: Okay well we can, YEAH i mean, yeah, yeah, yeah
Speaker 4: calling him Fester man in the. Chat good. Stuff John
Speaker 4: cornyn Of, Texas Tommy tubaville Of, alabama And Tom tillis
Speaker 4: Of North carolina didn't, vote which allowed the vote to.
Speaker 4: Pass in, practice even if the resolution passed The, HOUSE
Speaker 4: i guess The president could veto it if you wanted.
Speaker 4: To it's, interesting, though they've been gradually peeling Off. Republicans
Speaker 4: Right makowski switched last Week cassidy this. WEEK i don't
Speaker 4: think the non voting was much about, this as they
Speaker 4: just didn't vote at all that. Day But, cassidy we
Speaker 4: can see. Why Right colin To makowski are the once
Speaker 4: and they talk about like swinging a Lot rampaul is
Speaker 4: plowing his own lonely furrow as he always. Has but
Speaker 4: it's interesting that they've gradually peeled these people away from
Speaker 4: The Republican. Party, meanwhile In, nigeria The United states has
Speaker 4: carried out a series of strikes Against islamic state. Targets
Speaker 4: they Killed abubaka Al, manuki someone who went by several other.
Speaker 4: Names you'll see a lot of other names In. Impressors
Speaker 4: he definitely was solidifying a power within The West africa.
Speaker 4: Provinces islamic state and definitely becoming, relevant especially you, know
Speaker 4: post a territorial caliphate In iraq And.
Speaker 3: Syria, yeah this is the stuff that the most of
Speaker 3: that Counter Terrorism trategy document was writing.
Speaker 4: About, yeah and they have been pursuing This internegeria for some.
Speaker 4: TIME i wrote Last christmas about them winding up for
Speaker 4: grown strikes right into the station troops. There trump's statement
Speaker 4: was always somewhat. Incomprehensible trump said he had been hiding In.
Speaker 4: Africa that man had obviously lived In africa his entire,
Speaker 4: life never. Left trump called him second in command. Globally
Speaker 4: that thing not outside the realm of, possibility but it's
Speaker 4: also not lear. Right there's not like a direct like
Speaker 4: pyramid chart that we can go. To it was a
Speaker 4: JOINT Us nigerian. Operation we saw overhead. Videos looks to
Speaker 4: me like it's from a. Drone it seems like there
Speaker 4: was a helicopteric, component potentially a ground component as. Well THE,
Speaker 4: us of course has had special and conventional forces In
Speaker 4: africa for, decades but this is still a remarkable strike for.
Speaker 4: Them it will be maybe the first to. Many it
Speaker 4: seems like they were doing several almost every day this.
Speaker 4: Week judging by The Saint Colm Media where's page WHICH
Speaker 4: i will link in the, sources, well go ahead and
Speaker 4: email Us gone, Yep Cool zone tips at protone dot.
Speaker 2: Me sure we reported the.
Speaker 7: News arguably put a turns girl on your.
Speaker 4: Couch Rip Stephen?
Speaker 2: Colbert is he? Dead we reported the. News, Hey we'll
Speaker 2: be Back monday with more episodes every week from now
Speaker 2: until the heat death of The.
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