Speaker 1: Cool media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Bucket we Ball, all right, yeah, Bucket we Ball, Welcome
Speaker 3: to it could happen here. We have a pretty sizable
Speaker 3: panel today. I'm Garrison Davis. I have been forced to
Speaker 3: watch many hours of daily Wire plus exclusive programming at gunpoint.
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: My co hosts mostly Robert Evans, uh huh.
Speaker 4: We are joined by Mia Wong. I was not involved
Speaker 4: in the kidnapping and what this is on the record.
Speaker 4: We have a sports consultant, James Stout.
Speaker 1: Hello, Hi, I'm here to talk about sports.
Speaker 3: That's right. And we have our resident, a subject matter
Speaker 3: ex for in basketball, Sophie Ray Lichterman.
Speaker 5: I'm so afraid, so so.
Speaker 3: How how many of you have seen it, at least
Speaker 3: the trailer for Lady Ballers? Because I'm assuming I'm the
Speaker 3: only one that's actually watched this movie.
Speaker 2: I tried to watch through the trailer of Lady Ballers,
Speaker 2: and then I had a realization that my time on
Speaker 2: this earth is finite and precious, and so instead I
Speaker 2: went and looked at a cloud.
Speaker 3: Okay, anyone else I saw part of the trailer. Do
Speaker 3: we want to watch a one minute trailer?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Absolutely, yep.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: I haven't taken on in aus troll this week. Let's
Speaker 1: watch a one minute trailer.
Speaker 6: Gear.
Speaker 2: Okay, time to get black pilled. Let's do it.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna subject the panel here to the Ladyballer's trailer,
Speaker 3: which then you'll hear their reaction, do you afterwards?
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ. So this was mostly an excuse for them
Speaker 2: to like slow mo video of hitting women, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that was the primary reason for doing this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I didn't need to see that whole thing that
Speaker 5: was really upsetting.
Speaker 1: The reason why I wanted to actually show you is
Speaker 1: because I'll never get that minute back.
Speaker 3: As what I's it's not even like it's not even
Speaker 3: like offensive or triggering, it's just it's just poorly made.
Speaker 3: It's it's it's just not very good. And before we continue.
Speaker 3: I want to actually talk about why we're talking about this,
Speaker 3: because you know, whenever I say to my friends, Hey,
Speaker 3: do you want to come over and watch Lady Ballers,
Speaker 3: Everyone's like, why would you do that?
Speaker 1: And the reason, Garrison I.
Speaker 3: Saw this twice. The reason is is because I think
Speaker 3: it is actually important to know what your enemy is
Speaker 3: up to. It's important to see what they think. Good
Speaker 3: media is it's important to see how they are they
Speaker 3: are trying to shape the world around them, and I
Speaker 3: think fiction gets a lot closer to the actual outlook
Speaker 3: these people have than sometimes their nonfiction stuff like That's
Speaker 3: why Robert has done deep dives on on Ben Shapiro's
Speaker 3: books on Behind the Bastards for years. Whenever these guys
Speaker 3: get the opportunity to make their own complete world, whenever
Speaker 3: they get to play as God and create a thing
Speaker 3: that reflects their soul, it's a lot more insightful than
Speaker 3: like a two hour podcast of them ranting. So that's
Speaker 3: why I decided to actually put a lot of work
Speaker 3: into digging into this movie. So I have the structure
Speaker 3: of this episode split up into three parts.
Speaker 5: Can you stop sharing your screen? It's very distracting image.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeahs fascinating to see what Garrison gets recommended.
Speaker 5: There is a screenshot of like all the like grab
Speaker 5: photos from a bunch of Daily Wire plus.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, I do have some slides to show the class.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you do. Can you remove that one thing?
Speaker 2: You know, Sophie, Sophie, Just just to bring this up,
Speaker 2: we have Garrison's address. We could swap them and put
Speaker 2: it into this.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna answer it. I'm not gonna answer that
Speaker 1: on a podcast. Yeah, yeah, silence.
Speaker 3: I have this episode structured into three parts. The first one,
Speaker 3: we're gonna go into just a very basic overview of
Speaker 3: the plot so we have an understanding of what this
Speaker 3: movie actually contains. Then we're gonna go into the production
Speaker 3: of this movie because the actual behind the scenes a
Speaker 3: development of this film is also incredibly insightful. And then
Speaker 3: finally we're gonna go into jokes and ideology because these
Speaker 3: two things go hand in hand. Both of them reveal
Speaker 3: more about how the other operates. So first off, I
Speaker 3: have I have the title card for Lady Ballers here
Speaker 3: in the movie. It's not very good. And this movie
Speaker 3: was written, directed, produced, and is starring the Daily Wire
Speaker 3: CEO Jeremy Boring, So this is like, this is a wait,
Speaker 3: this is guy. Yes, that is the CEO.
Speaker 1: Film to have himself in What is sad Man? We
Speaker 1: start in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: He is he is incredibly boring, Sophie an excellent observation.
Speaker 5: And tries to make himself look like Jordan Peterson as
Speaker 5: much as he possibly can, and it's quite disturbing.
Speaker 3: Well, Jordan Peterson is now his employee.
Speaker 2: So, my god.
Speaker 3: We start in two thousand and eight. Jeremy Boring has
Speaker 3: a horrendous Tony Stark go tee which I'm currently showing
Speaker 3: the class on my side.
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, that's that's a self harm level of
Speaker 2: facial hair.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you assume, man on, that's what's happening here.
Speaker 2: Ah, Jeremy, No, you have to not do that.
Speaker 5: Not good?
Speaker 1: Why does it stop? Why is her little break?
Speaker 3: I thought, that's not good, Like I said, a horrible
Speaker 3: Tony Stark level go tee. He is the coach of
Speaker 3: a high school basketball team who's about to lose the
Speaker 3: Tennessee State championships. The coach gives an impassioned speech in
Speaker 3: the locker room that ends with the team chanting the
Speaker 3: coach's motto quote, winners are just losers who win.
Speaker 1: Unquote.
Speaker 3: You hear this line throughout the movie constantly. Winners are
Speaker 3: just losers who win. This is a core part of
Speaker 3: how this movie operates. Now, the team's able to pull
Speaker 3: it together in the second half and coach Jeremy Bording
Speaker 3: leads the team to victory, becoming three time state championships.
Speaker 3: We then flash fifteen years later. Coach Jeremy is failing
Speaker 3: to keep the attention of the new generation who are
Speaker 3: too busy on their phones to learn basketball, and is
Speaker 3: fired from his high school coaching job. To make matters worse,
Speaker 3: he's recently divorced and his wife's new boyfriend is a
Speaker 3: liberal who's brainwashing his daughter played by Matt Walsh, who
Speaker 3: I have a screencap here as well.
Speaker 1: Okay, what the actual fuck do we know? The budget
Speaker 1: for this movie, by the way.
Speaker 3: Not exactly, but it is not cheap based on how
Speaker 3: much they paid for casting.
Speaker 1: This cost multiple.
Speaker 3: Hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wouldn't be
Speaker 3: surprised if they put a few million into this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So it's very funny that the part of the
Speaker 1: integral part of the play is one being angry about
Speaker 1: Big Divorced and not at all telling that.
Speaker 3: Is a huge part of this movie is Big Divorce energy,
Speaker 3: which actually will play into the ideology of the film
Speaker 3: as well. So we have Matt wallsheer in a wig
Speaker 3: with man bun. He's wearing like a like a like
Speaker 3: like a burgundy button up dress, sitting on a manicured
Speaker 3: lawn with like rainbows, flags and stuff. Anyway, so this
Speaker 3: is this is who Jeremy was cucked to. Now Jeremy
Speaker 3: gets a new job at a restaurant that happens to
Speaker 3: be drag themed. No, there are no actual drag queens,
Speaker 3: just men in ugly wigs and poor fitting clothing. Here
Speaker 3: he meets the former star point guard of his basketball
Speaker 3: team from fifteen years ago. The coach enters his former
Speaker 3: player into a local track and field contest to win
Speaker 3: five thousand dollars, but the men's events are full. Luckily,
Speaker 3: the former basketball player is still wearing his wig from
Speaker 3: the drag restaurant, and.
Speaker 1: The why queen's doing continue this. You cannot question the.
Speaker 6: Screen right, great, okay, good to know, thank you.
Speaker 3: But the woman at the sign up table is luckily
Speaker 3: covered in trans pride pins and mistakes the former basketball
Speaker 3: player for a trans woman and adds him to the
Speaker 3: woman's division. With a little convincing and some fake boobs,
Speaker 3: the coach gets the player to agree to compete in
Speaker 3: the women's division. The guy easily wins every event in
Speaker 3: the track and field match, as the women competitors just
Speaker 3: scowl at him. This attracts the attention of a local
Speaker 3: female reporter, the journalist character, who is weirdly horny for
Speaker 3: Jeremy Boring, like uncomfortably horny for Jeremy Boring something. It's like, Oh, Jeremy, Jeremy,
Speaker 3: you wrote, directed, and started this. You you created this
Speaker 3: whole scenario. Yeah, very very interesting.
Speaker 1: What else would the the made woman character do then
Speaker 1: be horny for Jeremy? Hoh the fuck?
Speaker 3: The journalist is seeze through the coaches scheme, but proposes
Speaker 3: that they team up to create a national news story
Speaker 3: by having trans women or people pretend to be trans
Speaker 3: women compete in the US Open for the Global Games
Speaker 3: by exploiting their new diversity and inclusion clause.
Speaker 1: Very funny that they think this is how this is
Speaker 1: a real thing. This isn't a real thing. This is
Speaker 1: they don't understand how journalism happens.
Speaker 7: You don't.
Speaker 8: You don't create the story like it is, very funny movie.
Speaker 8: He despises journalists. Well, that is how they do. Yeah,
Speaker 8: very it's very correct. They've revealed that they kind of
Speaker 8: didn't take journalism one o one.
Speaker 3: No, the whole point of the Daily Wire is literally
Speaker 3: creating new stories themselves.
Speaker 1: Yes, anyone what I've seen the next picture.
Speaker 3: But to play basketball once again, they first have to
Speaker 3: put the old team back together. First, they recruit two
Speaker 3: brothers who own a used car dealership, and then they
Speaker 3: travel to Michigan to find another teammate who is living
Speaker 3: ted K style in the woods after being traumatized by
Speaker 3: an enemy team mascot as a teenager. None of us
Speaker 3: is explained.
Speaker 1: They just wanted to do that trope. They just want
Speaker 1: they just want okay, yeap.
Speaker 3: Needing one more team member, they recruit the desperately lonely
Speaker 3: gay coded towel Boy, who now owns a mansion after
Speaker 3: selling his tech company. After learning about the coach's plan
Speaker 3: to play in the women's league, the team is initially upset,
Speaker 3: but after another impassioned speech about winning from the coach,
Speaker 3: the players agree to join the Lady Ballers. The coach's
Speaker 3: daughter stops by to explain to gender identity concepts to
Speaker 3: them that she learned in school, like how women can
Speaker 3: have beards just like her art teacher in kindergarten. The
Speaker 3: Lady Ballers easily win their first basketball game and skyrocket
Speaker 3: into fame as the first all trans women's basketball team.
Speaker 3: After their first taste of victory, they start competing in
Speaker 3: all women's sports, obviously dominating every single one.
Speaker 5: Because these like burnout old dudes are going to be
Speaker 5: better than every female at the encounter.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, that's the it's the it's the joke about
Speaker 6: like I take the stage against Serena Williams, confident that
Speaker 6: being a man will allow me to beat her her
Speaker 6: past sales through my body and I die instantly.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, now, this, this whole winning all of the
Speaker 3: sports section is conveyed through the classic cinematic technique of
Speaker 3: the montage, which is just as bad as you can imagine.
Speaker 4: I have a clip from the montage here. It was
Speaker 4: you really ashamed given that the montage was invented famously
Speaker 4: by Soviet cinematographers.
Speaker 3: Is now this was this was definitely a reference to
Speaker 3: this definitely definitely reference to Soviet era film. Absolutely voter.
Speaker 5: You're showing me fake Joe Biden sniffing this person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like he's stiffing little Jonathan van Ness.
Speaker 3: So this is this is this is the gay coated
Speaker 3: towel boy. Oh who was invited to the Houses International
Speaker 3: Women's by God, and.
Speaker 5: We have jock and rubbing his shoulders.
Speaker 3: It's called the Washington rag magazine. Democracy dies in print,
Speaker 3: very very.
Speaker 6: Clear, really scything with insightful.
Speaker 1: That's such a bomber garrison.
Speaker 3: After the Lady Baller's way of success, the coach's ex
Speaker 3: wife confronts him about what he's doing and calls the
Speaker 3: Ladyballers not real girls, to the shock of her new
Speaker 3: woke boyfriend. Sorry, this is this is actually a really
Speaker 3: important scene.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: The coach's daughter expresses to him that she wants to
Speaker 3: be a boy because she wants to be a winner
Speaker 3: and because quote boys are better at everything unquote, which
Speaker 3: the coach denies, but he does admit that are better
Speaker 3: at all sports as well as quote driving, parking, most
Speaker 3: of the stemfields, rock and roll, and opening pickle jars unquote.
Speaker 3: This is not played as a joke. This is played
Speaker 3: completely straight. The coach then explains to his daughter that
Speaker 3: girls can be better at all sorts of things like quote,
Speaker 3: being nurturing, sensitive, empathetic, being better at doing lots of
Speaker 3: things at once, and caring for a lot of people
Speaker 3: at once, being better at communicating and building community. And
Speaker 3: they civilize men. It's the only reason we have a civilization.
Speaker 3: No women, no world unquote, which is a deeply revealing
Speaker 3: a line from Jeremy Boring.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's how these yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: He then God, He.
Speaker 5: Then explains, So that's so boring, it's such a lame take.
Speaker 3: He then explains to his daughter that the main thing
Speaker 3: that women can do that men can't is give birth,
Speaker 3: and that's the special gift from God. The coach goes
Speaker 3: home after his talk with his The journalist is waiting
Speaker 3: for him there. He's expressing concern about men competing in
Speaker 3: women's sports, but she rants about how divorce is evil
Speaker 3: and threatens to cancel him if he doesn't cooperate.
Speaker 5: Garrison, Garrison, sorry, why is only one person in this
Speaker 5: screen cap wearing a wig?
Speaker 3: That's a great question, Sophie, that never gets never gets explained.
Speaker 1: Are you gonna show us some montage. I'm very excited
Speaker 1: to see you.
Speaker 3: I'm not showing No, I'm not showing you my pirate
Speaker 3: my pirated copy of Lady Follers listeners.
Speaker 5: There's like a screen cap from the movie and it's
Speaker 5: the entire basketball team and all all the men are
Speaker 5: not wearing wigs except one guy.
Speaker 3: This is actually a different basketball team, which I will
Speaker 3: I will.
Speaker 1: Get you one person wearing a wig. Let Let let
Speaker 1: me get to it.
Speaker 3: The people get to it. This is this is very
Speaker 3: carefully structured plot, Sophie. You gotta understand that the genius
Speaker 3: of Jeremy Boring is scripting requires time to digest. So
Speaker 3: the Lady Ballers arrive at their final qualifying game, but
Speaker 3: instead of finding a women's basketball team to play against,
Speaker 3: the opposing team, the Cowgirls, is now suddenly all made
Speaker 3: up of extremely large black men accompanied by this female journalist.
Speaker 3: The Lady Ballers get absolutely smoked during the first half,
Speaker 3: but during halftime, the coach has a change of heart.
Speaker 3: He tells the team to man up and forfeit all
Speaker 3: of their previous qualifying wins because they don't want their
Speaker 3: legacy to be a racing women from women's sports.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: So this is the opposing team made up of I
Speaker 3: think it's just it's it's some college basketball team in Nashville,
Speaker 3: and oh yeah, only one of them is wearing a wig.
Speaker 3: It's it's all, it's it's playedoff as a joke. It
Speaker 3: is all kind of racist. The female journalist tries to
Speaker 3: assassinate Jeremy Boring with a sniper rifle, but missings because
Speaker 3: the coach happens to lean down to pick up a penny.
Speaker 1: What yeah, abnormal Italian normal thing.
Speaker 4: I mean this, this, this makes this this. This is
Speaker 4: the second piece of media release in the last few
Speaker 4: months where the lesson is always take a second shot.
Speaker 4: This is also the plot of Barvel's Echo The journalist stay,
Speaker 4: the journals got.
Speaker 3: Close, Then suddenly the first player to join the lady
Speaker 3: Ballers comes out to the coach that they actually feel
Speaker 3: like a woman, but the coach convinces them that they
Speaker 3: are delusional and then assaults them in the genitals and
Speaker 3: walks away.
Speaker 1: What the why? Sorry the next why are they like this?
Speaker 5: Every screencap just gets worse and worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a child. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, Before the second half of the game starts, the
Speaker 3: coach replaces the Ladyballers with his daughter and her friends.
Speaker 3: The other team then helps the little because because they
Speaker 3: don't want their legacy to be replacing women in women's sports,
Speaker 3: so instead they instead, the coach uses his daughter and
Speaker 3: her friends to be like, look, women play girls playing sports.
Speaker 3: It doesn't make very much sense. But the other team
Speaker 3: helps the little girls play the game, but they ultimately
Speaker 3: crushed the little girls four hundred and eighteen to six,
Speaker 3: and this has played off as like a funny a
Speaker 3: funny bit. We cut to nine months later, the brothers
Speaker 3: used cardi. Theirship is now also a kid's sports center
Speaker 3: where the coach is now teaching, and he has changed
Speaker 3: his motto to quote winners are just losers who do
Speaker 3: what's right. Unquote what true? What this this this is
Speaker 3: the real ending of the movie.
Speaker 9: But but that doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make
Speaker 9: any sense for the context of the movie. No, that's now,
Speaker 9: this is we're not moving past that.
Speaker 2: What the fuck?
Speaker 1: That's that's nothing. I love have angreed this fucking tagline,
Speaker 1: and they didn't take any time to make even even
Speaker 1: coh like.
Speaker 3: Winners are just losers who do what's right because because
Speaker 3: the Ladyballers are the real winners because they admitted to
Speaker 3: losing its sports to do any right, which is to
Speaker 3: not lie about being women. That I think that's what
Speaker 3: they're trying to say, but it doesn't make very much sense.
Speaker 3: It's all very convoluted.
Speaker 5: Yes, I mean, my my high school basketball coach told
Speaker 5: me to cry on the inside like a winner after
Speaker 5: my shoulder popped out of its socket.
Speaker 6: But that's just good advice, Sophie. That's what I tell
Speaker 6: everybody on Garrison started getting traumatized by the Daily Wire.
Speaker 2: That's what I told you.
Speaker 1: My high school rugby coach just relocated my shoulder for
Speaker 1: me and told me to get on with it. So
Speaker 1: I'm glad that we both have shoulder trauma. This screen
Speaker 1: cap is just wow. Sorry, Garrett, please continue.
Speaker 3: So after this what's played off as like a heartwarming ending,
Speaker 3: we cut away to a car parked from across the
Speaker 3: street looking at the kids playing basketball. Ominous music starts playing.
Speaker 3: It's Matt Walsh's character holding a long lens camera taking
Speaker 3: pictures of the scene. He takes his man bun Wig off,
Speaker 3: and Matt Walsh says quote another sweet Daddy Walsh ad
Speaker 3: venture comes to a satisfying conclusion, the camera zoom's back
Speaker 3: to reveal Candice Owens sitting in the passenger seat. She remarks,
Speaker 3: I don't understand how you did anything to help make
Speaker 3: the situation any better, to which Walsh replies, don't you,
Speaker 3: and then starts doing the most forced, unconvincing maniacal laughter
Speaker 3: I've ever heard. The camera pans down to the car's
Speaker 3: headlights and we cut to credits, and the most sonic
Speaker 3: the hedgehog ass butt rock plays as the film closes.
Speaker 3: So this is played as a reveal that Matt Walsh's
Speaker 3: character was actually secretly Matt Walsh who was manipulating this
Speaker 3: whole situation to show people that trans women in sports
Speaker 3: is bad. That's what they're trying to play off as
Speaker 3: the twist, ending that this was all a quote unquote
Speaker 3: Daddy Walsh adventure.
Speaker 1: We do have a post credit.
Speaker 4: Actually said he actually yes, literally said another sweet Daddy Walsh.
Speaker 2: Was the phrase Daddy Walsh used at any point previously
Speaker 2: in the movie.
Speaker 3: No, because okay, previously Walsh was playing a liberal boyfriend.
Speaker 3: But we now reveal that was all that, that was
Speaker 3: all part of his scheme. This was all part of
Speaker 3: Matt Walsh's scheme.
Speaker 1: Actually, Garrison, I'm I'm gonna need you to cut the
Speaker 1: audio for another Sweet Daddy Walsh ad venture because I
Speaker 1: think that will be something we can use a lot.
Speaker 1: That's that's closer, will I will?
Speaker 3: I will ad that.
Speaker 7: Here another Sweet Daddy Walsh Adventure comes to a satisfying conclusion.
Speaker 3: What are you talking about? I don't understand how anything
Speaker 3: you did helped to make this situation better, don't you?
Speaker 3: But we do have a post credit scene. In the
Speaker 3: post credit scene, we see the basketball player that came
Speaker 3: out as Trands to the coach in the climax of
Speaker 3: the film, in conversion therapy, talking about their childhood to
Speaker 3: none other than doctor Jordan B. Peterson.
Speaker 5: Fuck shake, Garrison, great, So why why are you doing
Speaker 5: this to us?
Speaker 2: I'll say this.
Speaker 6: It sounds like a movie, does it?
Speaker 1: Does it?
Speaker 10: Really?
Speaker 1: Not a very good one?
Speaker 2: Yeah, not a good one. But do you.
Speaker 3: Know what is really good for all of us? Ad
Speaker 3: break taking? I think taking a quick ad break to
Speaker 3: digest and think about what we've all just experienced.
Speaker 5: I kind of stream into the void. But yeah, all right,
Speaker 5: we are back. Wasn't that a fun?
Speaker 3: A fun recap of the Daily Wires hit new movie
Speaker 3: Lady Ballers, streaming exclusively on The Daily Wire Plus. So
Speaker 3: let's go into the actual production of this thing, because
Speaker 3: this is also deeply revealing. So The Daily has a
Speaker 3: sports podcast called Crane and Company, hosted by two brothers
Speaker 3: who claimed to be former athletes. A few years back,
Speaker 3: Ben Shapiro approached them with the idea of making a
Speaker 3: documentary about them trying to join some women's sports leagues.
Speaker 3: This idea, however, was quickly abandoned due to the obvious
Speaker 3: fact that women's sports leagues don't allow men, and the
Speaker 3: Daily Wire hosts apparently did not want to go through
Speaker 3: the process of transitioning and the years of hormone are
Speaker 3: was necessary to qualify for women's sports for a documentary
Speaker 3: that would exclusively stream on The Daily Wire Plus.
Speaker 6: Man, I would have respected it if that had If
Speaker 6: that had been what they did, though, that would have
Speaker 6: been a different, different thing.
Speaker 3: I will actually insert this clip here just because it's
Speaker 3: really useful to hear them say this, because they just
Speaker 3: admit the quiet part out loud here.
Speaker 11: So you approached me and you said we should make
Speaker 11: a fictional film about this topic, now'd be fair. I
Speaker 11: think I'd actually suggested as the Grain Boys that they
Speaker 11: do this as a doc.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 11: I originally went to them and I said, you guys
Speaker 11: should like go try out for a bunch of ladies' leagues,
Speaker 11: And that became not possible because, as it turns out,
Speaker 11: most ladies leagues don't allow in actual men men, and
Speaker 11: they weren't willing to go at the full distance in
Speaker 11: terms of what it would require in order to you know,
Speaker 11: the actual hormone treatments and everything to play in some
Speaker 11: of the ladies' leagues.
Speaker 1: But in any case, it turned into this. So there
Speaker 1: we go.
Speaker 3: A very clear admission from Ben Shapiro that this entire
Speaker 3: premis is fake, that this I premis could never work,
Speaker 3: And so after disproving their own premise, what's left to do?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 3: The CEO of The Daily Wire and failed Hollywood producer
Speaker 3: Jeremy Boring wanted to take this idea from Ben and
Speaker 3: just do it as a fictional movie, because fiction's arguably
Speaker 3: more powerful than reality. So for his directorial debut, Jeremy
Speaker 3: wanted to make something reminiscent of early two thousands comedies,
Speaker 3: and he was frequently rough frinst Dodgeball as aspiration for
Speaker 3: this movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not surprised.
Speaker 1: Which is it to be fair? Is it insults to Dodgeball?
Speaker 6: No, that's a that's an actual movie.
Speaker 1: Contains some genuinely funny scenes, characters.
Speaker 2: I think script like Vince Vaughan actually is a conservative,
Speaker 2: but he's also an actor.
Speaker 3: I think Boring is definitely stuck in the early two
Speaker 3: thousands as culture because that is when he tried to
Speaker 3: break into Hollywood. So that's kind of what his idea
Speaker 3: of what movies are is. Very much is trapped in
Speaker 3: the early early two thousands. He has he has a
Speaker 3: quote from that interview with Ben Shapiro, quote, There's not
Speaker 3: been a true comedy made since Barack Obama became president.
Speaker 3: Obama destroyed three things comedy, rock and roll, and America.
Speaker 3: Other than that he was an average president.
Speaker 4: Fucking hell own strikes on every fucking rock band.
Speaker 1: That's it. Yeah, that's why he took a predictor drawing
Speaker 1: to Linen skin. It's house.
Speaker 2: Only if only.
Speaker 3: Jeremy Boring also remarked, quote, it became impossible to tell
Speaker 3: a joke in the Obama administration because Obama made a
Speaker 3: pact with culture shapers that they should change the fundamental
Speaker 3: understanding of themselves unquote, and he's talking about how comedy
Speaker 3: became a way to progress social change instead of a
Speaker 3: way to point out the absurdity in the world. So
Speaker 3: Jeremy decided to move forward with the production of Lady
Speaker 3: Ballers in mid March of twenty twenty three, which, if
Speaker 3: you are good at math, you realize is less than
Speaker 3: a year than when it came out. The script for
Speaker 3: Lady Ballers was written in just two weeks.
Speaker 1: Sounds right, yep, well that I absolutely believe. Did they
Speaker 1: use GBT? It is? It is?
Speaker 3: It is possible. The entire production had to be very rushed,
Speaker 3: since Jeremy needed to be in Hungary in the beginning
Speaker 3: of July to shoot the Daily Wires New Fantasy mini series.
Speaker 3: But Jeremy says the biggest production hurdle wasn't budgetary or
Speaker 3: the very tight pre production and shooting schedule. It was
Speaker 3: the casting process. Every single actor they approached for every
Speaker 3: single role. Is that is a direct quote? Said no.
Speaker 3: Even the conservative actors who have said that they've want
Speaker 3: to work with the Daily Wire have already worked with
Speaker 3: the Daily Wire. Even canceled actors declined after hearing the
Speaker 3: pitch for Lady Ballers Man, which isn't surprising because the
Speaker 3: movie is not very good, So instead of hiring actual actors,
Speaker 3: they just decided to use Daily Wire employees love this obviously.
Speaker 3: Writer director and Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boring stars as
Speaker 3: coach rob I'm refusing to call him that. I'm just
Speaker 3: gonna call him coach Jeremy because that's who he is.
Speaker 3: The three hosts of the sports podcast The Crane and
Speaker 3: Company are three of the Lady Wallers. Matt Walsh plays
Speaker 3: the hippie husband of Robinson.
Speaker 5: They claim to have been like athletes, like high school
Speaker 5: or college athletes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a different thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can imagine Ben Shapiro was used as a
Speaker 2: football but as close as they.
Speaker 1: Get, Bench Peary was the one on top of the
Speaker 1: cheerleading tower. He's a little guy. He didn't been good
Speaker 1: at it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have we have Matt Walsh playing the hippie,
Speaker 3: woke husband. Daily Wire hosts Michael Knowles and Brett Cooper,
Speaker 3: both of whom are failed actors, play newscasters. Then we
Speaker 3: have Daily Wire hosts Ben Shapiro, cand of Sowans, Andrew
Speaker 3: Clavin and Jordan Peterson all have Cameo Roles, so I
Speaker 3: was able to excitedly point out all eleven Daily Wire
Speaker 3: employees to my friend as they forced them to watch
Speaker 3: this with me.
Speaker 1: Still, so the.
Speaker 2: Roder we have mental health care through the company, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we might need to get a fifty one to fifty
Speaker 2: on Garrison just for a couple of couple of couple
Speaker 2: of three day cycles.
Speaker 6: Oh, they cleared this out of their heads.
Speaker 5: I was actually disassociating and thinking about how one day
Speaker 5: I hope to cast all of us in a basketball movie.
Speaker 2: A movie you mean, a movie about the actual time
Speaker 2: that I outshot Lebron James. Sure, yeah, that makes that
Speaker 2: makes sense.
Speaker 1: So I've seen Robert send a pool ball about head
Speaker 1: height across a crowded once. I am sure it would
Speaker 1: be very similar.
Speaker 2: That was just a brief demonstration of my power. James.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now you redunked that pool balls. I mean Christmas
Speaker 1: to see.
Speaker 5: I thought the worst basketball movie I saw was the
Speaker 5: one on Disney Channel where they had two twins that
Speaker 5: were basketball players but they weren't actually twins, and it
Speaker 5: looked nothing alike and it was just really really poor
Speaker 5: production and bad.
Speaker 1: But this is it.
Speaker 3: I thought there was basketball movie I've seen was Space
Speaker 3: Jam two.
Speaker 1: But this this now, no, no, no, you loved that movie.
Speaker 1: You talked about that movie for so long.
Speaker 3: It's not a good movie.
Speaker 1: So it is really bad.
Speaker 3: So Lady Ballers was shot in less than a month
Speaker 3: under the fake name Coach Miracle Now. According to reporting
Speaker 3: from the National Scene, background actors and crew were misled
Speaker 3: about the production before signing on to the movie, just
Speaker 3: being told it was a basketball comedy. The name The
Speaker 3: Daily Wire was hidden in the contracts and extras had
Speaker 3: to sign NDAs it appears, the production company went by
Speaker 3: the name Bonfire Legend, which is also the production company
Speaker 3: going forward with The Daily Wires Fantasy mini series and
Speaker 3: a few other upcoming projects. So be on the watch
Speaker 3: for anything called Bonfire Legend if you're signing up to
Speaker 3: be a background extra for a movie in Nashville. Well,
Speaker 3: I was able to locate the online casting sheet for
Speaker 3: the movie and it has this description quote casting extras kids,
Speaker 3: skilled sports.
Speaker 1: Sports is in parentheses.
Speaker 3: By the way it is, it doesn't make sense as
Speaker 3: as a sentence. But casting extras kids, skilled sports and
Speaker 3: background for a misfit Team inspired basketball comedy Misfit Team.
Speaker 2: Yeah sure, yeah, that's skilled.
Speaker 1: God. I found there. I found they like the recruiting
Speaker 1: thing for the Coach Miracle project. Oh god, there's some
Speaker 1: terrible shit in here. I guess they seemed to want
Speaker 1: to start. It was supposed to be about t ball initially.
Speaker 1: Well there is there is.
Speaker 3: There is a scene where when I see when the
Speaker 3: athletes start entering all of the women's divisions, they they
Speaker 3: do enter a t boll contest as well. That is
Speaker 3: that is that is during the montage.
Speaker 2: I guess they just couldn't give up that great idea.
Speaker 3: Despite the on disclosure agreement, local background actors in Nashville
Speaker 3: did come out and warn people about the production once
Speaker 3: they figured out the Daily Wires involvement and the movie's
Speaker 3: anti trans messaging. One extra, a trans man who unwittingly
Speaker 3: signed onto the movie, said that Daily Wire fans from
Speaker 3: around the country traveled to Nashville to be in the
Speaker 3: film once they learned it was shooting in Tennessee, and
Speaker 3: according to background actors, certain props and costuming were hid
Speaker 3: on set to downplay the transphobia while shooting. After some
Speaker 3: extras voiced concerns and objections to props and signs which
Speaker 3: read stuff like baller Pride and various other kind of
Speaker 3: like trans related jokes. To quote the Nashville scene quote.
Speaker 3: During a break from filming, several actors voiced their objections
Speaker 3: and were quote unquote screaming about the Daily Wires involvement
Speaker 3: with the film before being escorted out of the building unquote.
Speaker 3: Protests were held outside of filming locations for the duration
Speaker 3: of the shoot. These protests also served to inform unaware
Speaker 3: cast and crew about the movie's messaging. Filming was initially
Speaker 3: supposed to take place at Belmont University, but that got
Speaker 3: canceled as the Daily Wires deception regarding the production of
Speaker 3: the film was made public. So good on everyone who
Speaker 3: was coming out against this after they realized what was happening.
Speaker 3: Good on everyone for protesting disrupting these sorts of things.
Speaker 3: I think is a vital importance at the very least,
Speaker 3: so that you can inform anyone who is signed on
Speaker 3: to this that of like what this actually is, because
Speaker 3: you know, if you're a transperson who signed up to
Speaker 3: be a backward extra and you find yourself on a
Speaker 3: Daily Wire set, that is a very dangerous place to be.
Speaker 3: So that is extremely important. Ted Cruz, who was an
Speaker 3: aspiring actor according to According to jervy Borg in his youth,
Speaker 3: was asked to do a cameo.
Speaker 2: Oh God, oh that scans so much Jesus Christ. Every
Speaker 2: one of these fucking guys.
Speaker 6: All of them were all aspiring movie like American in Hollywood.
Speaker 2: But they can't because they don't have any talent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, aspiring is generous. Failed would be a failed failed.
Speaker 4: We need like a public works jobs program for these
Speaker 4: people or something to stop them from doing this stuff,
Speaker 4: like have them I don't know.
Speaker 2: We need to integrate. We need to integrate Hollywood casting
Speaker 2: agents with a system of suicide booths, and we need
Speaker 2: to put a sign outside those suicide booths that says
Speaker 2: Marvel Movie Backlot Casting or something like that. And when
Speaker 2: these people fail out, we just send them into the
Speaker 2: booth and tell them they got a great role. They're
Speaker 2: going to be the new Spider Man or whatever.
Speaker 1: Describing Canadian Hollywood, you.
Speaker 3: Are describing Canadian Hollywood. After after Ted Cruz has shot
Speaker 3: his cameo, he beat Jeremy Boring in a one on
Speaker 3: one basketball game. So that's a fun fact for you, Sophie.
Speaker 1: It would be a comedy.
Speaker 3: Fact for me because you love basketball, Yeah, but nobody
Speaker 3: needs That's.
Speaker 2: That's a real case of the stoppable force meeting the
Speaker 2: movable object.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's Did they have the like low hoops? Do
Speaker 1: you think you know? The ones for children who can't
Speaker 1: jump up to dunk on an adult size hoop yet? Is?
Speaker 3: There's a really good line from Jeremy in an interview
Speaker 3: that went discussing the production of this film. After shooting
Speaker 3: a wrestling scene with a professional stunt woman, Jeremy said
Speaker 3: that he was driving in his car on his way
Speaker 3: home and he thought to himself, quote, we're genuinely being
Speaker 3: terrible to women in the making of this movie, unquote,
Speaker 3: which is the most true thing he's ever said.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bro, but he tried to he tried.
Speaker 3: To justify it by saying, this is actually happening in
Speaker 3: the actual world, referring to men injuring children and little
Speaker 3: girls in sports games. Which isn't true. That that just
Speaker 3: isn't true. Grown men are not entering little league and
Speaker 3: assaulting little girls. That's just not happening.
Speaker 5: Jeremy of the Ted Cruz basketball game, because Ted Cruz
Speaker 5: pass I have the ugliest jump shot that has ever existed.
Speaker 3: I don't think he can jump, Yeah, exactly, he has.
Speaker 3: He has a one foot vertical at least I think,
Speaker 3: but he.
Speaker 5: Definitely shoots like two hands like Jolty.
Speaker 3: It's it's it's weird how much Jeremy in interviews has
Speaker 3: to like reassure himself that, like this quote, this movie
Speaker 3: is absurd, but it's only as absurd as the real
Speaker 3: world unquote, despite already admitting that the entire conceit of
Speaker 3: this movie, that that men can fake being trans to
Speaker 3: just win all of women's sports, is just divorced from reality.
Speaker 1: It's not true.
Speaker 3: Like you this, this doesn't happen. And now I will
Speaker 3: do one one final quote from Jeremy that made me
Speaker 3: really upset before we take a take another ad break,
Speaker 3: where he's talking about the thematic similarities in this film.
Speaker 3: Quote Tonally, the film is a lot like Dodgeball, but
Speaker 3: thematically it's much less like Dodgeball. It's much more like
Speaker 3: the Death of Stolid unquote, which is so absolutely good movie,
Speaker 3: the Death of Stall and slaps the fact that Jermy
Speaker 3: Boring is comparing his dog shit basketball movie to the
Speaker 3: Death of Stalin's darring Steve Buscemi insulting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you don't get to. You don't get. You don't
Speaker 2: get to compare yourself to Armando Yanucci. If you've never
Speaker 2: written a thing which you didn't This was not This
Speaker 2: is not writing.
Speaker 1: Holy upsetting.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think the closest thing I can compare
Speaker 5: it to is the Disney Channel original movie Double Team
Speaker 5: to where the twins were not actually twins and the
Speaker 5: plot was bad.
Speaker 1: Go ahead and don't google that Double Teamed.
Speaker 3: Let's have a capitalistic palette cleanser with these lovely products
Speaker 3: and services that support my daily wire Plus addiction.
Speaker 1: All right, we are back.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, Sophie's showing me the picture from the
Speaker 3: Disney Channel movie. It does not look good. No, I
Speaker 3: will say it does look slightly better than lay, which
Speaker 3: isn't insane carrying the bar which is lying on the ground.
Speaker 1: Lifetime's better.
Speaker 3: Let's get into some of the jokes and the and
Speaker 3: the ideological underpinnings of this film. And I also just
Speaker 3: have a few others random fun facts I have here
Speaker 3: saved the the the the font choice for the opening
Speaker 3: credits of this movie, which is not very good if
Speaker 3: you if you look at the font for the Daily
Speaker 3: Wired Plus presents a Jeremies movie which is another title
Speaker 3: card is just a Jereimese movie, which isn't how you
Speaker 3: do title.
Speaker 1: Cards for films. But whatever sentence.
Speaker 3: No, we have just one minute into the film there
Speaker 3: is your mom incest joke between two brothers.
Speaker 1: Every time you say something, it just fucking comes out
Speaker 1: of out of no way.
Speaker 3: There's actually a lot of incest oaks in this movie.
Speaker 3: Why immediately we have like overexposed cinematography, the white circlip thing.
Speaker 3: It doesn't look good. We have this joke in the
Speaker 3: first few minutes with this gay coated uh TWL boy
Speaker 3: who's sniffing the sweaty towels from the other teammates during
Speaker 3: the during the opening credits montage, they put this horrible
Speaker 3: film grain filter on this basketball footage. I have I
Speaker 3: have a I have an example here. Just it doesn't
Speaker 3: look good. It doesn't look good. That guy breakdancing, No,
Speaker 3: that's that's that's him doing a foul I think.
Speaker 2: It's him doing a fucking Tim Robinson face.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he does kind of have a Tim Robinson ad face.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: And we also during the opening credits, we have the
Speaker 3: great line introducing Jeremy Boring.
Speaker 1: Very fun.
Speaker 3: We have a we have a kids and their damn
Speaker 3: phones joke.
Speaker 2: With with sure, oh, I'm certain.
Speaker 3: With phone notifications being used as a punchline during a
Speaker 3: failed like impassioned speech. We have what was what was
Speaker 3: first a funny joke, We have a stealing catalytic converter joke,
Speaker 3: which is immediately ruined.
Speaker 5: Ah ah, come on, it's offensive to Robert.
Speaker 1: I will not stand for this.
Speaker 2: My culture is not a costume.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The catalytic Converter jokes immediately ruined by turning racist by
Speaker 3: having the one black kid in the class drop his
Speaker 3: cordless reciprocating saw. The movie then acknowledges the racism by
Speaker 3: having the coach receive a phone call from his boss
Speaker 3: telling him that it's racist to tell teenage boys not
Speaker 3: to steal, which the coach justifies by saying the Bible
Speaker 3: says not to steal. In response, his boss fires him
Speaker 3: because you can't teach the Bible in school.
Speaker 1: So that God, I wish it were. That is how.
Speaker 3: That is how coach Jeremy loses his job. When picking
Speaker 3: up his daughter from school, the teacher standing outside is
Speaker 3: inaudible because she's he was wearing like six COVID masks.
Speaker 3: One of which says, quote, we say gay, and then
Speaker 3: the teacher goes into a coughing fit because Jeremy does
Speaker 3: not have a catalytic converter, and Jeremy just tells her
Speaker 3: to smile and wear makeup. Jeremy asks his daughter what
Speaker 3: they learned at school today, and she says that they
Speaker 3: had a moment of silence for the workers exploited by
Speaker 3: the capitalistic system when learning about the Cold War. His
Speaker 3: eight year old daughter also informs him in class that
Speaker 3: a girl showed her her penis in the bathroom. Jeremy's
Speaker 3: upset at this, but his daughter accuses him of being
Speaker 3: transphobic and says, okay, boomer, very very funny stuff. Jeremy
Speaker 3: suggests that he might move his daughter to a private school,
Speaker 3: to which his daughter replies, quote private schools reinforce white
Speaker 3: patriarchal privilege.
Speaker 4: Unquote based base child, base child rile children hate you, yo, divorces.
Speaker 1: Just such a powerful day wild.
Speaker 3: Lot of the movies jokes are just Jereby Boring's fake
Speaker 3: daughter saying like accurate, like academic level things, and that's
Speaker 3: just the joke, is that she's like right, Jereby has
Speaker 3: been coucked by a liberal hippie played by Matt Walsh,
Speaker 3: as we've said, who refers to the coach as my
Speaker 3: lover's former lover, which is which they play as an
Speaker 3: ongoing joke, and liberal Matt Walsh talks about how he
Speaker 3: likes eating bugs and vaccines to stay healthy. This is
Speaker 3: this is coded as a joke that vaccines keep you healthy.
Speaker 1: Whal she's not a great actor.
Speaker 5: Eating bugs and vaccine to keep healthy? Yeah, I did
Speaker 5: get that right, all right? Yeah, Now, while she's not
Speaker 5: a good actor, he is. He is a black hole
Speaker 5: of charisma. He can he can really only do deadpan delivery.
Speaker 5: So watching him try to play like a sincere hippie
Speaker 5: leftist is just like uncanny. But Jeremy plays the most
Speaker 5: divorced man ever, which she pulls off fine.
Speaker 1: So is she acting in that role? I gotta give
Speaker 1: him credit?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 5: What you know?
Speaker 3: They say in front of Matt Walsh's house, we have
Speaker 3: these like fake we have these fake yard signs which
Speaker 3: I'm just gonna read quote in this house, we believe
Speaker 3: crickets are delicious. Silence is violence. Speech is also violence.
Speaker 3: No one is illegal, but Europeans coming to America was bad.
Speaker 3: Guns don't kill people. White people kill people. Also, trans
Speaker 3: rights are human rights feelings. Don't care about your facts.
Speaker 3: Pride Month is every month. Social credit scores matter in
Speaker 3: inclusive inclusion. The earth is literally going to burst into
Speaker 3: flame any day.
Speaker 1: I like that he just kept rights or human rights
Speaker 1: in there. Can't think of riff on it. It's just
Speaker 1: like human rights.
Speaker 5: No one is illegal, but Europeans coming to America is bad.
Speaker 1: So true, so true. Yes, this isn't more base yard
Speaker 1: side than the ones that like live people actually have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could have just outside of my house. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: wasn't very funny.
Speaker 2: They are if the fact that like twelve people in
Speaker 2: this country eat cricket protein like it's it's such a
Speaker 2: they're a baby thing to be scared of, like you
Speaker 2: all eat lobster.
Speaker 6: Go on.
Speaker 5: I'm saying, you know, yard sides could be improved, is
Speaker 5: what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: They couldn't even get like a cab on that, Like
Speaker 1: it seems like there's some really easy things.
Speaker 3: They don't really have anything related to police in this
Speaker 3: movie at all.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's what I'm getting mad about.
Speaker 3: Jays at the Coach's new job at the drag themed
Speaker 3: restaurant Jeremy Boring has to like put on drag and
Speaker 3: then reflects on sexual harassment by saying, quote, I didn't
Speaker 3: know men could be so handsy. He then sexually assaults
Speaker 3: a female barkeep immediately after finishing that sentence, which I
Speaker 3: guess is like played as a joke, but he like
Speaker 3: he likes he like slaps of a female barkeep on
Speaker 3: the butt after reflecting on sexual harassment. When reflecting on
Speaker 3: his life since two thousand and eight, the coach says, quote,
Speaker 3: I've stayed the same and the world has changed. One day,
Speaker 3: it's all about winning. The next day, they want you
Speaker 3: to lead from behind. Don't be so mean to kids,
Speaker 3: don't push them so hard, don't make fun of losers.
Speaker 3: How are you supposed to win that way? Unquote? It's
Speaker 3: just an interesting look at Jeremy Boring saying like he
Speaker 3: is trapped in two thousand and eight and the world
Speaker 3: has moved on, but he is still there, which I
Speaker 3: think is totally true. Him, Ben Shapiro, all of them
Speaker 3: are trapped in two thousand and eight and the world
Speaker 3: has moved on, and they are unwilling to learn and
Speaker 3: grow and change. His people and this is just just
Speaker 3: a really interesting admission of that fact.
Speaker 4: I think it's an interesting thing here too, with like
Speaker 4: the way that this, this, this kind of like this
Speaker 4: this has to do with also the like the why
Speaker 4: they're so obsessed with college campuses, but the way that
Speaker 4: they're like they're stuck in high school sports. Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: it was just like this powerfully American thing, like no
Speaker 4: one else in the fucking world cares about high school sports.
Speaker 2: Like no one, I mean, real people don't care about
Speaker 2: any sports.
Speaker 3: Wrong, the core of my existence, it is it is
Speaker 3: like a reactionary nostalgia like like it is it is.
Speaker 3: It is a very like like a hontological reactionary conservative drive.
Speaker 5: I also want to point out that that laugh that
Speaker 5: Robert just did, the little evil laugh he just said,
Speaker 5: is what they were trying to go for at the
Speaker 5: end of that movie.
Speaker 2: And I know, I know, look, look what they have
Speaker 2: to do to mimic a fraction of my power.
Speaker 3: Spending millions of dollars the whole dog Shit Cast Dogship
Speaker 3: Basketball movie.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: So, like many of the Daily Wire Zone staff, the
Speaker 3: the the cacharacter of the former high school basketball player
Speaker 3: was also an aspiring actor, but wasn't able to succeed
Speaker 3: because quote, it turns out white males of non exotic
Speaker 3: sexualities is the only ethnic group not being cast by
Speaker 3: Hollywood these days.
Speaker 1: Unquote.
Speaker 6: Yeah, man, I haven't seen a white guy in a
Speaker 6: movie in forever. Nope, just go to La No white dudes.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 6: Like one of the wokest movies of last year, the
Speaker 6: D and D movie still had a white guy as
Speaker 6: the main character, Like it's they're all over the place.
Speaker 5: Not to mention a white guy sports movie, very uncommon, like, yeah,
Speaker 5: come on.
Speaker 3: I just love the turn of phrase non exotic sexualities
Speaker 3: and then referring to that as an ethnic group.
Speaker 1: Yes, that.
Speaker 2: Makes the sexuality exotic.
Speaker 3: We then have a joke quote I heard Disney was
Speaker 3: going to make the new Snow White a neurodiversion black
Speaker 3: lesbian unquote, which is just Jeremy being mad about the
Speaker 3: new Snow White movie because he's trying to make his
Speaker 3: own snow.
Speaker 1: Oh god, yeah, that is it about cocaine. Uh oh
Speaker 1: probably mm hmm. I can see that. Divorced dad on
Speaker 1: cocaine'll be it'll be great.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I hate my kids and I love cocaine. That's
Speaker 1: the entire script.
Speaker 3: When referencing white men, Jeremy says, quote, it wasn't that
Speaker 3: long ago when we were champions, winners.
Speaker 1: Unquote.
Speaker 2: I mean you never were, Jeremy.
Speaker 1: Just learn how to cry on the inside like a
Speaker 1: winner like the rest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jeremy, Yeah, there's plenty of white men who are
Speaker 2: champions at various things, just not you, because you're a
Speaker 2: fundamentally disappointing person.
Speaker 3: When the coach is fighting with a woman at the
Speaker 3: track and field sign up table, the woman threatens him
Speaker 3: with a taser and says I will tase a white man.
Speaker 3: When the former basketball player runs up to check on
Speaker 3: the coach after he's tased, the woman says, holy crap,
Speaker 3: I taste an ally, after which, after getting his player
Speaker 3: listed in the woman's division, Jeremy says quote, I was
Speaker 3: happy we could get this worked out without without having
Speaker 3: to get social media involved, to which the woman at
Speaker 3: this signup table, to which the woman at the signe
Speaker 3: up table says, quote, please, I have a family and
Speaker 3: a queer dog. It's very funny, very funny stuff.
Speaker 1: Fuck all right, well really upsetting me? Please?
Speaker 3: We then continue this is we have, we have, we have,
Speaker 3: Jeremy saying lines like do you know how much faster
Speaker 3: a man past his prime is than a female athlete
Speaker 3: and not.
Speaker 1: Not faster, not like I'm sorry, I have been sorry.
Speaker 3: We also have high school boys could run faster than
Speaker 3: world record of female sprinters on no, they can't stop. Like.
Speaker 1: Also for just say you hate women, just say you
Speaker 1: hate women.
Speaker 3: This is yeah, Sophie, you were actually you were actually
Speaker 3: stumbling across the actual ideological core of this movie, which
Speaker 3: is just hating women.
Speaker 2: Yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Hating women, hating trans women, just being hateful. Yeah, yeah
Speaker 1: at sport and wishing you didn't suck at everything you
Speaker 1: try and do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they put they put a horrible digital video filter overall.
Speaker 2: By the way, the fastest female marathon runner tickets, Essepha
Speaker 2: from Ethiopia, did it in two hours and eleven minutes,
Speaker 2: in fifty three seconds.
Speaker 5: I will.
Speaker 6: Give you to throw some random high schoolers at that
Speaker 6: record and see if they can beat it. I do.
Speaker 5: I do hope that somewhere on the internet there is
Speaker 5: data of Ted Cruz is athletic.
Speaker 1: Uh, go ahead, I.
Speaker 2: Want to see Matt Walsh try to do a two
Speaker 2: hour and eleven minute marathon because his heart will explode.
Speaker 5: But also I want to know Ted Cruz's times from
Speaker 5: high school.
Speaker 1: That's got to be s yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: What kind of fucking track runner were you?
Speaker 1: Yeah yep, yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: And they're they're right that, like the fastest males are faster,
Speaker 2: but the fastest male marathon is faster by like eight minutes,
Speaker 2: nine minutes.
Speaker 3: Well, like testosterone is a massive performance enhancing druck.
Speaker 6: Yes, but it's not like the way they're saying. We're like, well,
Speaker 6: any man could beat the best women. No, very few
Speaker 6: people can do a two hour and eleven minute marathon.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like, even when I spent most of my twenties
Speaker 1: being paid to exercise, I trained all the time with
Speaker 1: ladies who were also like paid to exercise right when
Speaker 1: we were. When I was racing bikes, I trained with
Speaker 1: women who are pro racers all the time. Women who
Speaker 1: are very good at sports are just very fucking good
Speaker 1: at sports. Like, even men who are professional athletes are
Speaker 1: gonna be on their level.
Speaker 2: Most professional athletes can't do a two hour and eleven
Speaker 2: minute marathon. Only like people who are really fucking good
Speaker 2: at marathon.
Speaker 5: Make sure you could lap this guy that is high
Speaker 5: school Ted Cruz, Yeah, magnificent.
Speaker 1: So we have.
Speaker 3: We have this reoccurring Joe with these two newscasters played
Speaker 3: by two of the daily wirehouses. Throughout all of the
Speaker 3: news footage, there's a horrible like fake like digital video
Speaker 3: filter just overlaid on the footage. It looks really ugly,
Speaker 3: and the newscasters keep saying brave and beautiful trans women,
Speaker 3: as if they're being forced at gunpoint to acknowledge that
Speaker 3: trans women exist. There is a few bud light jokes
Speaker 3: in there. We have a joke about Jeremy stealing most
Speaker 3: of the winnings from the track and field contest. When
Speaker 3: the journalists character is called out for transphobia by the
Speaker 3: coach when she accuses the athlete of faking being a woman,
Speaker 3: she responds by saying, quote, save it. I'm a journalist.
Speaker 3: I literally cannot be shamed, and then and then says
Speaker 3: that you can only be a woman if you get
Speaker 3: menstrual cramps, which is really funny because this is actually
Speaker 3: one thing that happens. If you go on HRT for
Speaker 3: long enough, you actually do start getting menstrual cramps. So
Speaker 3: the actual line she has about only real women have
Speaker 3: menstrual cramps is one of the things that HRT actually
Speaker 3: does does give you, which is just kind of funny.
Speaker 1: I love the idea as well, Like before you enter
Speaker 1: the women's basketball game, you have to provide evidence of
Speaker 1: your menstrual cramps. In order to be able to compete,
Speaker 1: you have to provide empirical proof of cramp. Cramp inspector
Speaker 1: has arrived.
Speaker 3: The journalist also says quat men are stronger, faster, meaner.
Speaker 3: Soon all of the best women will be men, cheating
Speaker 3: low life men.
Speaker 1: But after after the.
Speaker 3: First meeting between the journalists and the coach where they
Speaker 3: agree to work together, the journalist invites the coach home
Speaker 3: and Jeremy gets them doombed. This is this is This
Speaker 3: is a reoccurring bit in the movie that Jeremy gets
Speaker 3: femdammed by this journalist. I'll believe that I have I
Speaker 3: have a screenshot here Jeremy tied up in bed.
Speaker 1: This yeah Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: When trying to get their old team back together, they
Speaker 3: learned that the one black guy from their old team
Speaker 3: was found dead with a hole in his head due
Speaker 3: to a laser from space. I think this is a
Speaker 3: Jewish space laser joke. It's not explained why. Yeah, wow,
Speaker 3: what is.
Speaker 7: What?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I can't say it's a joke there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have this information you do here? I can't. I can't.
Speaker 1: Do you think I feel like they had to take
Speaker 1: the anti Savaitines and Bucks need that a black man died?
Speaker 2: Is that literally the whole joke?
Speaker 3: And he was probably he probably got killed from a
Speaker 3: from from a laser in space, And why that is
Speaker 3: all the joke is?
Speaker 6: That's okay?
Speaker 5: Also, just looking at this screencap on this photo, why
Speaker 5: is it decorated with like urban outfitters like lighting because
Speaker 5: she's a journalist.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Seffie, you don't have an outfit's room in
Speaker 1: your house. You didn't get one from the from the
Speaker 1: journalists in Union, No I was. I was not provided
Speaker 1: a Neon love light. Oh yeah, I got one of them.
Speaker 1: He's on. On my return from Syria, I get another one.
Speaker 3: The movie is full of stock footage and a lot
Speaker 3: of royalty free music, and there was there was literally
Speaker 3: a Jeremy's Razors commercial shoved in the middle of the movie,
Speaker 3: alongside a whole which of the other Daily Wire product placement.
Speaker 3: If you didn't know, Jeremy Boarding started his own razor
Speaker 3: company after Harry's Razors dropped their ads on the on
Speaker 3: the Daily Wire, so he started his own razor company.
Speaker 3: He also started his own chocolate company, both of which
Speaker 3: have product placement in the film. But Jeremy's Razors has
Speaker 3: a whole like ad just edited into the middle of
Speaker 3: this movie. I think this is like a Wayne's World reference,
Speaker 3: but it's hard to say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there is that. I think you're right there.
Speaker 3: There is a rape whistle joke, just a joke saying
Speaker 3: that rape whistles exist, and that's the joke. And then
Speaker 3: when the coach's daughter explains gender theory to the lady ballers,
Speaker 3: we get a fantastic series of shots depicting a gender
Speaker 3: conspiracy board red string connecting terms on a whiteboard such
Speaker 3: as demi boy, demi girl, paraboy, which I I actually like, paraboy.
Speaker 1: That one's pood when you're a boy with a parachute,
Speaker 1: L TB T Q I A plus A, B, C,
Speaker 1: D E, F G, etcetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: We have the word panda as a term. I don't
Speaker 3: know what that means.
Speaker 2: F ten heard of that one, f T M mt f.
Speaker 3: A fab amab other non binary pan sexual saxo sexual,
Speaker 3: I don't know what that is.
Speaker 2: They have one who just fox Anglo saxons.
Speaker 1: Because of saxophone, maybe a saxophone.
Speaker 4: I finally found a type of homophobia that I approve of.
Speaker 4: They have saxo sexuals. Stop at the center of the
Speaker 4: gender conspiracy board. They just have frogs, which is I
Speaker 4: guess in Alex Jones joke. But here is the picture
Speaker 4: of the gender conspiracy board.
Speaker 3: Lots of the lots of the red string on this
Speaker 3: board just connected nothing, It's just red string.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a bad conspiracy board. I've made a lot
Speaker 2: in my life and that one's not very good.
Speaker 1: Sod.
Speaker 6: Also, it's really lame to do it to make like
Speaker 6: a whiteboard, your your board, like get cut out pictures
Speaker 6: and bits of like text and stuff from from printouts
Speaker 6: and nail it to the wall, you know, like actually
Speaker 6: go the.
Speaker 1: Extra mile, basic ass whiteboard.
Speaker 6: That looks like something someone makes for a movie, not
Speaker 6: something a crazy person makes in the throes of paranoia.
Speaker 3: Like come on, so I'm just going to speed run
Speaker 3: the rest of these.
Speaker 1: Come on, hit me.
Speaker 4: We are we're getting we are getting a little log.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: When one player asks what is a woman, another response
Speaker 3: by saying just shave your legs, tell each other how
Speaker 3: brave you are for things that require absolutely no physical courage,
Speaker 3: and don't be afraid to cry at work.
Speaker 1: Unquote, yeah, all things I do as man actually about
Speaker 1: you are as I've established, crying the into like a winner.
Speaker 3: There is a part of a part of their ongoing
Speaker 3: newscaster segment they get increasingly more racist costumes after being
Speaker 3: forced to go on two weeks of sensitivity training. Michael
Speaker 3: Knowles's character learns that they are quote a raging scoliosexual
Speaker 3: and also one and two thousand and forty eight percent Dakota.
Speaker 3: So he says, I know what it's like to overcome diversity,
Speaker 3: and then the other newscaster says that her old name
Speaker 3: is her slave name. She is a white woman. These
Speaker 3: costumes only get more racist the more filmed on Jesus
Speaker 3: goes on. As the lady ballers enter onto the court
Speaker 3: for the first time, all of the seats are empty
Speaker 3: because quote it's ladies basketball boys. Nobody watches during their
Speaker 3: first game.
Speaker 1: That's the thing, right, I just say, all these people
Speaker 1: who are suddenly so fucking concerned about women's sports manifestly
Speaker 1: do not give a fuck about women's sports. Right, correct.
Speaker 1: You weren't there when the prize money was shit. When
Speaker 1: people are being secretly assaulted by their coaches, you don't
Speaker 1: give a fuck. It's just a vehicle for transphobia and
Speaker 1: just a behaicle teansphobia and how much they hate women.
Speaker 3: During their first game, the lady ballers keep whispering in
Speaker 3: the ears of the players from the other team that
Speaker 3: they're lesbians, some of whom are revolted, some of whom
Speaker 3: are turned on by this. Referee Ben Shapiro, in a
Speaker 3: cameo role, Oh good, says keep it clean, keep it
Speaker 3: tucked to the players as they start their first game.
Speaker 3: The game is full of constant fouls as the male
Speaker 3: players just flagrantly assault the other team. The stands start
Speaker 3: to fill up the longer the game goes on, and
Speaker 3: someone in the audience says, this is great. It's just
Speaker 3: like watching men's basketball. This is just a reoccurring bit.
Speaker 3: Is that, like all of the footage of basketball with
Speaker 3: like men versus women, it's just the men like assaulting
Speaker 3: women during playing and just like doing like fowls. They're
Speaker 3: not actually playing basketball, they're just like punching women and
Speaker 3: stealing the ball and like that's that's how they play.
Speaker 3: One of the ladyballers feel a little guilty after winning
Speaker 3: their first game after seeing a woman on the other
Speaker 3: team cry, and then in the locker room he says
Speaker 3: to the boys, quote, aren't we just using our innate
Speaker 3: strength and speed to wail on a bunch of girls
Speaker 3: in a competition where we wouldn't stand a chance against
Speaker 3: other men? But then he gets a notification that he
Speaker 3: got a brand sponsorship and then changes his mind. The
Speaker 3: other lady ballers gets invited to Nike commercials and to
Speaker 3: speak at the White House on women's rights. The journalist
Speaker 3: calls this the virtue economy. After their first win, the
Speaker 3: journalist is about to fuck Jeremy Boring in the locker room,
Speaker 3: but stops and says, the last thing I need is
Speaker 3: another abortion this year, and says, do you know what
Speaker 3: it's like to be a female field reporter in the
Speaker 3: twenty ninth biggest media market? Which I don't understand how
Speaker 3: that relates to the abortion. It's not very funny. Here's
Speaker 3: a screenshot from the wrestling bit where you see, yeah,
Speaker 3: totally a totally real weight class distinction between a guy
Speaker 3: who's like over two hundred pounds and a woman who's
Speaker 3: like one hundred and forty pounds. Totally how sports works.
Speaker 1: Oh sor the guy doesn't look very familiar with the
Speaker 1: ways and means of wrestling.
Speaker 3: No, the two brothers enter a woman's shower together and
Speaker 3: say one small step for dudes, one giant leap for lesbians.
Speaker 3: The joke is that men are gonna sexually assault women,
Speaker 3: I guess, which again is only more revealing about how
Speaker 3: these guys think about women. During the victory montage, almost
Speaker 3: all of the basketball gameplay is just the men assaulting women.
Speaker 3: We have lots of fowls and slow motions, shots of
Speaker 3: like men's dicks and crotches colliding with the female players faces.
Speaker 3: That's that's most. That's most of the footage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, most of the footage that I'm sure boring
Speaker 2: watched over and over again. In slow mom.
Speaker 3: We have a lot of dead naming jokes. We have
Speaker 3: one transage joke about how the towel boy can now
Speaker 3: relive childhood as a girl and compete in girls Little
Speaker 3: League baseball, in which he gives the eight year old
Speaker 3: picture a concussion. There's a joke about how girls have
Speaker 3: sex with each other at sleepovers, which leads to an
Speaker 3: incest orgy. That's that's just a reoccurring side plot, is
Speaker 3: this incest orgy joke?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Jeremy.
Speaker 3: Boring says to his ex wife when his ex wife
Speaker 3: is complaining to him about all of his deception, he says,
Speaker 3: my former lover the turf. And that's that's played as
Speaker 3: a joke. Here's more of these increasingly racist costumes.
Speaker 1: My god from vocals and for sake and fucking stop,
Speaker 1: oh my god, pretty man.
Speaker 8: Fuck So yeah, wow, Garrison look so embarrassed for these people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they don't look like they're having fun.
Speaker 1: They just.
Speaker 3: Uh anyway, I have I have a few more of
Speaker 3: the incest jokes written down, but I don't think I
Speaker 3: need to read them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The journalist character constant.
Speaker 3: All of the journalists throughout the film, including these two
Speaker 3: newscasters and the main journalist character, constantly make fun of
Speaker 3: and insult people who have kids. This is like the
Speaker 3: Daily Wire making some point about how like journalists hate families.
Speaker 3: I think it's.
Speaker 1: Kind of un because they pay us like shiit so
Speaker 1: like we're all too poor to have children.
Speaker 3: So that's that's all the jokes. Now I'm gonna get
Speaker 3: to like my actual end thesis on des No, but
Speaker 3: I think I.
Speaker 5: Think you do have a good theory there that like
Speaker 5: this is this might be set up to start like
Speaker 5: a Matt wash some kind of like cinema.
Speaker 3: Because we have the final shot of Matt Walsh actually
Speaker 3: orchestrating the whole thing. Anyway, So the actual ideology of
Speaker 3: this film is that men are better at almost anything
Speaker 3: that requires skill, but women are maybe better at like emotions,
Speaker 3: and they can make babies, and that's the one benefit
Speaker 3: to being a woman. This belief was paraphrased in the
Speaker 3: movie itself by the journalists character saying, quote, boys and
Speaker 3: girls are different, but at least girls can have babies.
Speaker 3: In probably what's the most like extremely telling scene in
Speaker 3: which many of the Daily Wire staff have referred to
Speaker 3: as the heart of the movie, where the coach tells
Speaker 3: his daughter, it's true that boys are better at all
Speaker 3: sports as well as driving, parking, stem fields, rock and roll,
Speaker 3: and opening pickle jars. Girls have one special gift that
Speaker 3: boys can ever have, making babies. So to this type
Speaker 3: of conservative women are just emotional baby making factories who
Speaker 3: also serve to quote unquote civilized men it's the only
Speaker 3: reason we have civilization, no women, no world. This is
Speaker 3: how they view women. They view women as a civilizing
Speaker 3: force thrust upon men and as a factory for reproduction.
Speaker 3: That is the only utility that the Daily Wire sees
Speaker 3: for being a woman. Now, this scene with Jeremy Boring
Speaker 3: and his fake daughter is immediately followed up by another
Speaker 3: very preachy scene in a way that really breaks from
Speaker 3: the movie's pacing. The coach is talking to the journalists
Speaker 3: character about his divorce and how he's worried that's really
Speaker 3: starting to affect his daughter. The journalist then goes on
Speaker 3: a very out of character rant about how, of course
Speaker 3: the divorce is affecting his daughter. Quote, seventy percent of
Speaker 3: people in prison come from broken families. Your daughter is
Speaker 3: now twice as likely to do drugs twice, is likely
Speaker 3: to drop out of school four times, is likely to
Speaker 3: have trouble fitting in three times, is likely to end
Speaker 3: up in therapy twice, is likely to commit suicide fifty
Speaker 3: percent more likely to have health problems. Do people even
Speaker 3: freaking do a Google search before deciding to blow up
Speaker 3: the planet your kids live on? Unquote? So this is
Speaker 3: the Daily Wire taking a break from the movie to
Speaker 3: express their belief that divorce is the root cause of
Speaker 3: sidal decay. This is the other, I think core part
Speaker 3: of the movie's ideology, how the fact that women are
Speaker 3: divorcing men is causing most of this of the societal
Speaker 3: problems that we're seeing in America. And then the which
Speaker 3: is probably the most frustrating scene where we have the
Speaker 3: we have the first kind of ladyballer. Player comes out
Speaker 3: to the coach as maybe feeling like they're actually trans
Speaker 3: The coach then instructs them to ignore anyone in their
Speaker 3: life who might be loving and accepting, like their family,
Speaker 3: and instead just listen to Jeremy Boring, saying, quote, you're confused.
Speaker 3: I get that. We're all confused sometimes. If you need help, buddy,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna help you get it.
Speaker 3: But you need to believe me when I tell you this.
Speaker 3: You're not a woman. You're just a lost man in
Speaker 3: a lost world with shitty parents and a shitty coach
Speaker 3: who've all gone along with this lie. Instead of hurting
Speaker 3: your feelings and telling you the truth, The player then
Speaker 3: asks them how can the coach be so sure that
Speaker 3: they're not a woman, to which Jeremy Boring then punches
Speaker 3: the player in the genitals and walks away. He has
Speaker 3: no a for that, right. Jerrby Boring has no answer
Speaker 3: to someone who actually says no, I'm trans The only
Speaker 3: answer to him is to assault them. This is this
Speaker 3: points at the Daily Wire is the actual ideological core.
Speaker 3: They want you to ignore everyone in your life who
Speaker 3: loves you and accepts you and instead just listen to them.
Speaker 3: To briefly paraphrase a review from Rollo Tony, this organization
Speaker 3: is built around the phrase facts don't care about your feelings.
Speaker 3: But they're telling the audience the exact opposite, to actually
Speaker 3: just ignore everyone in your life who actually loves you,
Speaker 3: ignore the facts of your actual sense of being, and
Speaker 3: instead listen to The Daily Wire and pay a one
Speaker 3: hundred dollars subscription service to the Daily Wire. Plus that's
Speaker 3: the actual point of the movie, and I this film
Speaker 3: doesn't even qualify as like a parody movie because a
Speaker 3: parody comes from a place of appreciation that rehiffies the
Speaker 3: actual original source material. This movie is too self invested
Speaker 3: in the Daily Wire's own micro cosmatic world to actually
Speaker 3: even succeed in any in any sense of parody, and
Speaker 3: the moral of the film is that a healthy man
Speaker 3: would never want to be a woman because women are
Speaker 3: so much genetically worse than men. But because women are worse,
Speaker 3: we should let them have their own fun, We should
Speaker 3: let them have their own sports, because they have no
Speaker 3: chance of ever competing with men in anything. This movie
Speaker 3: can't fathom why someone who was born a man would
Speaker 3: want to transition into a woman for any other reason
Speaker 3: than fame and success, because women are so much just
Speaker 3: like inferior. At the heart of this film lies a
Speaker 3: deep hatred of women and a misogynistic core to its transphobia.
Speaker 3: Misogyny operates as the film's own justification for its transphobia,
Speaker 3: as the film spends most as The film spends most
Speaker 3: of its time making fun of women and women's sports,
Speaker 3: as it does the idea of trans people. There are
Speaker 3: no actual trans characters in the movie. The film doesn't
Speaker 3: even deal with trans issues. Besides, just like drag and
Speaker 3: the word non binary being a joke, there isn't actual
Speaker 3: any jokes. It's all about how women suck. That's the
Speaker 3: actual point of the movie, and for all of that,
Speaker 3: the actual attempts at humor just don't work because most
Speaker 3: of the humor is just saying classically offensive things and
Speaker 3: acting like that itself is a punchline, which doesn't work
Speaker 3: as comedy because the people saying those lines also genuinely
Speaker 3: believe the offensive things they're saying. It only works as
Speaker 3: a joke if the conservative audience can imagine a liberal
Speaker 3: audience getting triggered while watching, which isn't actually humor. And
Speaker 3: the only other type of humor we have in the
Speaker 3: film is anti intellectualism characters like Jeremy Boring's daughter saying
Speaker 3: random like gender theory terms, and that being plays a
Speaker 3: joke with no punchline, none of it actually works. I
Speaker 3: mostly feel bad for all of the child actors who
Speaker 3: got duped into this and all of the extras. That's
Speaker 3: the actual end result of this film is that The
Speaker 3: Daily Wire trick to a whole bunch of people in Nashville,
Speaker 3: including like very innocent kids, into participating in this just
Speaker 3: very low quality piece of propaganda that just deeply hates women.
Speaker 3: And that is my actual thesis on how this movie operates,
Speaker 3: and the core of the Daily Wire's own transphobia being
Speaker 3: this misogynistic center and worldview that men are superior to women.
Speaker 4: I mean, I will say I think they've done a
Speaker 4: good job in they've they've created a companion piece to
Speaker 4: Whipping Girl, where if you need to explain to someone
Speaker 4: what trans misogyny is, you just show them this movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, all right, Well, yep, I think we've said enough
Speaker 6: about it.
Speaker 3: Was that was a fun hour and fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have to talk about that again.
Speaker 5: Thanks for ruining my day, Garson.
Speaker 6: All right, everybody, enjoy the Daily Wire. I guess buckety ball.
Speaker 1: Hello, everyone, welcome, TA could happen here? Focusting. I'm enthusiastically
Speaker 1: introducing for the third time because I've just sounded so
Speaker 1: half fast the first two times that I've made myself
Speaker 1: do it again. I'm joined by my friend and your friend,
Speaker 1: Sharene Lannie Unis Hi, Serene Hi.
Speaker 10: That was lovely to witness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wasn't it great that I really put on my
Speaker 1: podcasting boots and you know, went back to the podcasting
Speaker 1: pace to do another day in the podcast minds and
Speaker 1: it's beautiful.
Speaker 10: Beautiful, Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah,
Speaker 10: that's that's all I have to say.
Speaker 1: As you can tell too, content creators who are excited
Speaker 1: to create content. I'm glad we're not on Twitch. We
Speaker 1: would we would be uh, we'd be in the poorhouse.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's like eight hour streams can't do it
Speaker 1: all right, So we're not here to talk about how
Speaker 1: how have we been in the podcast minds for too long?
Speaker 1: Today we are here to talk about clothing in the cold.
Speaker 1: Why are we talking about this? Because right now it's
Speaker 1: it's record cold all across the US. It's very, very cold.
Speaker 1: Because I meant to spending a lot of time outside,
Speaker 1: both helping drop water for migrants crossing the border, helping
Speaker 1: out in cucumber, and a lot of days just like
Speaker 1: doing my recreation stuff in the mountains. So I'd like
Speaker 1: to do And I think that, like I guess education,
Speaker 1: I guess a lot of people have been aggressively marketed
Speaker 1: at about what to wear when they're outdoors, be that
Speaker 1: people who are working or people who are recreating. And
Speaker 1: I think it's good to have a little bit of
Speaker 1: clarity around it, especially as we're entering like this might
Speaker 1: be the worst winter of our lives, it might also
Speaker 1: be the best winter of the rest of our lives. Right.
Speaker 1: Climate change is making more and more people exposed to
Speaker 1: more and more extreme weather all over the world. So
Speaker 1: I want to talk a little bit about the stuff
Speaker 1: I've learned in thirty something years of playing outside about
Speaker 1: how to stay warm in the cold. So that's what
Speaker 1: I'm going to do. I've got this broken down, Like
Speaker 1: I think, the really important thing to think about when
Speaker 1: you are picking your outfit it is obviously or your
Speaker 1: colors match. It's very important, But more than that, it's
Speaker 1: like thinking about thinking about outfit as a system rather
Speaker 1: than as a series of individual things. And they think
Speaker 1: this is where like the way outdoor companies market is
Speaker 1: really bad. They'll be like, oh, yeah, this jacket is
Speaker 1: bad ass, and it's warm, and it's waterproof and it's
Speaker 1: wind proof and it's also breathable, and like that's you
Speaker 1: probably would be much better off with three cheaper jackets
Speaker 1: in one very very expensive jacket. Interesting specifically, I guess
Speaker 1: I've seen a lot of people come a cropper when
Speaker 1: their very single jacket gets wet, right, and then you're
Speaker 1: either got one layer or you commit to wearing a
Speaker 1: wet jacket. So we're going to talk about the different
Speaker 1: parts of your clothing system, what you should look for
Speaker 1: and why you should pick certain things. I'll try and
Speaker 1: recommend things that are cheap as well, because I know
Speaker 1: that money is hard to come by and the world
Speaker 1: seems to be constantly trying to extract money from us.
Speaker 1: So this is based on do you know who Mark
Speaker 1: Twite is? Sreen?
Speaker 10: No, I don't know who Mark Twite is. But I'm
Speaker 10: looking at the same document you are, and I read
Speaker 10: his name maybe six times, and every time it was
Speaker 10: Mark Twain, and I was so confused.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's Mark legendary mountaineer. Mark Twain is equally
Speaker 1: good for you know, if you're going on a boat
Speaker 1: down the Mississippi River or climbing a mountain exactly.
Speaker 10: But no, I don't know who mister twit is.
Speaker 1: Mister twice. It's a famous mountaineer. He's good at climbing mountains.
Speaker 10: Oh that's cool. That's cool to be famous for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know. Yeah, a boy can dream, like maybe
Speaker 1: maybe in another life I'll not have to podcast, not
Speaker 1: just be able to raise fluffy animals and climb climbing
Speaker 1: a mountain sheep. Yeah, that is the dream, you know.
Speaker 1: Every year, every time I don't want to sit down
Speaker 1: and write my book and think about the amount of
Speaker 1: livestock I could possibly purchase it, but lots of lots
Speaker 1: of books. Dream Yeah, well one day talking me sheep,
Speaker 1: Actually let's talk about basse layers because one of the
Speaker 1: things they could be made out of, showing is wool
Speaker 1: from sheep.
Speaker 10: Nice, that was good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, I am a professional podcast guy. So
Speaker 1: you basically there's the thing unx your skin right, and
Speaker 1: a lot of people I think this is where like
Speaker 1: people say, have you heard the phrase cotton kills? No? No, yeah,
Speaker 1: you've not heard that.
Speaker 10: Okay, I have not heard that. I mean I'm glad
Speaker 10: you're making an episode about this, cause like most of
Speaker 10: the things I've learned about keeping warm have just been
Speaker 10: like things i've heard, you know what I mean. I've
Speaker 10: never like researched what actually will help me or what
Speaker 10: will help other people, because I think like even like
Speaker 10: when you provide when you are going to provide or
Speaker 10: like cheaper options, that's a good thing to like donate
Speaker 10: to people too, now you know what will actually help
Speaker 10: them versus like something else.
Speaker 1: But yeah, totally, like I know, like for a lot
Speaker 1: of un housed people, for instance, like you'll get donated
Speaker 1: a lot of crappy cotton t shirts. But those are terrible, right,
Speaker 1: the little gaps in the cotton, they get wet and
Speaker 1: they stay wet, and it is much worse to be
Speaker 1: cold and wet than it is just to be cold. Right,
Speaker 1: And these the whole system of clothing designed by Mark Twhite,
Speaker 1: Mark Twain's brother Mark White. The idea is not to
Speaker 1: keep you dry. The idea is to let you dry
Speaker 1: off quickly. Right, So you can get wet, you can sweat,
Speaker 1: but it's much more preferential to be able to dry
Speaker 1: off quickly. And that's all cotton doesn't do. And so
Speaker 1: that's why cotton is considered to be like your worst
Speaker 1: choice here. So if your base layer, you want to
Speaker 1: go with the two options, I guess well, it's it's
Speaker 1: like many things. It's a continuum, not a binary. And
Speaker 1: so you've got wool on one end and you've got
Speaker 1: synthetic on the other end. Wool is really nice because
Speaker 1: it doesn't smell right, like if you have like athletic clothing.
Speaker 1: Synthetic can get really stinky if you wear it for
Speaker 1: a few days, it only gets stink here. Wool tends
Speaker 1: to be much better for that. It also doesn't catch fire.
Speaker 1: And melt to you, which if that's important in your
Speaker 1: line of work, then then that's wool is naturally fire retardant.
Speaker 1: Really where it's like, yeah, yeah, does everyone know this?
Speaker 1: Clearly no, charene, but.
Speaker 10: Sheep are sheep fire proof?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think obviously high enough temperature would
Speaker 1: still be fatal for them. But yeah yeah, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: when we don't respect the.
Speaker 10: Sheep enough, very powerful ability.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. There's not even a sheep pokemon that could
Speaker 1: like Pokemon.
Speaker 10: As you said that, I was like, what a good defense?
Speaker 1: Well yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone send me a picture of
Speaker 1: a sheep Pokemon that you've designed, and I will describe
Speaker 1: it on the podcast. It's unfortunately not a visual medium,
Speaker 1: but I'd still like to see your sheeps, right, so
Speaker 1: will it's flame retarding. It's very useful in certain lines
Speaker 1: of work. It's not so important for other people. But
Speaker 1: I will say that, like even sitting around the campfire,
Speaker 1: it is actually really shitty if your clothes melt to you.
Speaker 1: I've had gloves melt on my hands and it was unpleasant. Wow,
Speaker 1: that was only like a little bit. But again, I
Speaker 1: can I can assure you that people sitting around campfires
Speaker 1: do have their clothing catch on fire. This is not
Speaker 1: like a thing. It's why all your tents have to
Speaker 1: be treated with a flame retardant treatment. That's that stuff
Speaker 1: that makes when your tent. You know, if you put
Speaker 1: a tent away where it's wet and hot, you leave
Speaker 1: it at the back of your truck, it gets really
Speaker 1: sticky when you when you get out. That's a frame
Speaker 1: retardant treatment on your tent. Oh, thenly lot about fire today.
Speaker 1: So the problem with will though, is that you have
Speaker 1: to treat it with care, like you don't want to
Speaker 1: be tuble drying wool, right, and it can kind of
Speaker 1: get misshapen. There are like hybrids, the thing called new yarn,
Speaker 1: which I like a lot, which is like a wall
Speaker 1: synthetic hybrid. I have lots of clus stuff made of that,
Speaker 1: and then there are full synthetic things like a little
Speaker 1: base layer. Here. Again this being mainly a podcast only
Speaker 1: sharene can see this.
Speaker 10: Describing a piece of clothing.
Speaker 1: It looks like cloth, all right, We're going to be
Speaker 1: fucked for the next hour or so.
Speaker 10: But what am I looking at it? It's like it
Speaker 10: look kind of like textured or something.
Speaker 1: So it's like this, yes, yes, it's ribbed. Leave we've
Speaker 1: just moved right past that. It's it's ribbed, and that's
Speaker 1: to allow like the little bits that touch your skin
Speaker 1: keep you warm. But then the channels allow for it
Speaker 1: to breathe right from monastor to move away and walk
Speaker 1: away from your body.
Speaker 10: So that's that's the synthetic hybrid or.
Speaker 1: This is synthetic. It's spandex and polyester. It's got this
Speaker 1: like it's very thin, you can see through it, but
Speaker 1: it's also very warm, by a company called Beyond Clothing.
Speaker 1: I would caution people again, it's having too thick if
Speaker 1: you're planning on actually hiking or being active or like,
Speaker 1: you know, let's say you work in construction, you work
Speaker 1: in agriculture. Maybe you just have a job you have
Speaker 1: to go to remote places. You're a doctor who has
Speaker 1: to treat people at remote places, or you win turbine engineer,
Speaker 1: or you work on the railway lines or something. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're going to be active, having too thick of
Speaker 1: a base layer could be really annoying because if it
Speaker 1: heats up, that's kind of your last option. And if
Speaker 1: it's really thick and you've tried to rely on that
Speaker 1: for most of your warmth. Then you're going to overheat.
Speaker 1: And then when you overheat, you're going to sweat a lot.
Speaker 1: Or when you sweat a lot, that sweat is saying
Speaker 1: going to soak your layer, right, and then when it
Speaker 1: gets cold, you're going to be wet and cold, and
Speaker 1: that is bad. So consider if your base layer like
Speaker 1: a lightweight or a midlight thing, and try and get
Speaker 1: your warmth from something else. It's whatever suggest. I really
Speaker 1: like the new yarm ones. Like I said, there's one
Speaker 1: made by Black Diamond called a Rhythm T shirt, which
Speaker 1: I really like. I've loaded those. They are often on sale.
Speaker 1: You can get them really cheap. If you're looking for
Speaker 1: something really cheap, I would say to just avoid cotton,
Speaker 1: so you can look for things which are polyester or nylon,
Speaker 1: and those are going to be a lot better than
Speaker 1: just your cotton T shirt. They are going to smell,
Speaker 1: they're going to get pretty stinky, but you can often
Speaker 1: find them for around the same price. Right, and if
Speaker 1: it's very cold, you may want basically your legs as well.
Speaker 1: Good ones for those are hard to get cheap. I
Speaker 1: like ones that zip all the way off, like like
Speaker 1: like a you know, like like Chipendale style. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you want zips all the way down the side, Oh, zippers,
Speaker 1: so they're up pull on? No, yeah, because then you
Speaker 1: have to take your boots off.
Speaker 10: Right, So if you're oh, well you think of everything.
Speaker 1: Drop your trousers, put those on. Because taking your boots
Speaker 1: off in the snow and then hopping around.
Speaker 10: No, I mean it sounds very impractical. So that's cool
Speaker 10: they thought of that. That's very smart.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's a nice Uh, it's a nice Yeah.
Speaker 1: Technology has to give us many things. There's a company
Speaker 1: called Couu who's chiefly hunting company, but they make a
Speaker 1: really nice like side zip leg based layer, which I
Speaker 1: think I would recommend for a lot of people if
Speaker 1: it's really cold where you are with I guess trousers
Speaker 1: generally they're a lot less complicated than upper layers, but
Speaker 1: the things you want in the cold really are again
Speaker 1: something that's not going to like cause you to sweat
Speaker 1: a lot, So I wouldn't suggest everyone like going around
Speaker 1: in waterproof sure others. I really like ones that have vents,
Speaker 1: like mechanical vents so you can open up so you
Speaker 1: can cool off these guys, right, Like the pockets are
Speaker 1: mesh so if you open the pocket, not only can
Speaker 1: you get your accessories out that you can also like
Speaker 1: vent off the heat that way and so that way
Speaker 1: you don't soak them out with sweat. Right, there's a
Speaker 1: company called Beyond who makes every possible weight and size
Speaker 1: of trouser. I really like their stuff. I use this
Speaker 1: stuff a lot. You can get knee pad pockets as well,
Speaker 1: which are super useful, not only if you're like like
Speaker 1: you see them in military gear a lot, but if
Speaker 1: you're working, saying, construction or carpentry or something like that,
Speaker 1: you have to kneel a lot. It's really nice table
Speaker 1: on kneepad. So those get a recommendation for that. For
Speaker 1: a cheap one. The pro to make a parent called
Speaker 1: the stretch zion, which I think is really nice. Climb
Speaker 1: in them all the time. They can often be found
Speaker 1: really cheap. Your next thing is your active insulation. So
Speaker 1: that's you need to warm yourself when you're active. Right,
Speaker 1: So there's two types of insulation. The system is active
Speaker 1: and static. One is for when you're moving and the
Speaker 1: other is for where you're stationary. And your active insulation
Speaker 1: is people used to call this a mid layer, but
Speaker 1: that was back when people wore like wool jumpers, and
Speaker 1: you kind of had to keep it covered from the
Speaker 1: world or it will get wet and stretched out and
Speaker 1: very very heavy. But sometimes this will actually be outer layer,
Speaker 1: so I don't think mid layers is a great term.
Speaker 1: That's what they used to call it. People used to
Speaker 1: use fleeces a lot. Are fine, but again they can
Speaker 1: get very very heavy if they get wet. Some of
Speaker 1: them don't breathe very well, and they can sort of
Speaker 1: very quickly become too hot of your exercising, and they're
Speaker 1: not very wind proof. They don't block the wind at all.
Speaker 1: So much better choice is something called a grid fleece,
Speaker 1: so like the base layer is talking to you about,
Speaker 1: it has like a little grid pattern that allows for
Speaker 1: moisture and air to move away from your body, so
Speaker 1: like you're less likely to overheat. There's a really cool
Speaker 1: fabric called Polotech Alpha, which you should look for rather
Speaker 1: than like looking for a specific item. If you look
Speaker 1: for Polartech alpha or Polotech Alpha direct, then you can
Speaker 1: scat around for stuff that's some sale and find something
Speaker 1: that's really nice. It kind of looks a bit fleecy,
Speaker 1: but it's also a grid pattern. It's really warm and
Speaker 1: it's very small. I have a few things that are
Speaker 1: like made of that. I have one from a moot
Speaker 1: called the Alpha sixty. So there are different weights, right,
Speaker 1: sixty ninety one twenty sixty is the least. I think
Speaker 1: ninety it's grams for square meter, But ninety grams for
Speaker 1: square meter is pretty much a good mid zone for
Speaker 1: almost everyone. So that's what to look for in those
Speaker 1: if you're looking for a cheap midless or a cheap
Speaker 1: way to stay warm while you're moving around. The US
Speaker 1: military has this thing called a waffle top because inside
Speaker 1: of it looks like a waffle right, I guess Grid was.
Speaker 1: You know they like to give things baby names in
Speaker 1: the US Army. O Luk, Suren's got one? Yeah like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love a waffle top. I'm always pulled all the time,
Speaker 1: so I just I'm also a cold person. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: do love a waffletop.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But yeah, those waffle ups, you can get them super
Speaker 1: cheap everywhere online. I would caution people against getting it
Speaker 1: can be easy to find, like a thing where it's
Speaker 1: got like a waffle back air and a soft shell
Speaker 1: front and it's like your windshell, your rain shell. But
Speaker 1: those are really warm, and they're really big and bulky,
Speaker 1: and it's quite hard to wear them if you're actually
Speaker 1: moving with any sort of intention. So that's where you
Speaker 1: want to keep your things separate, so you can choose
Speaker 1: choose what, like exactly how warm you are, rather than
Speaker 1: being forced to be like a certain level of warm.
Speaker 1: Talking of forcing people to do things, cherene, Wow, it's
Speaker 1: time for us to force them to listen to some adverts.
Speaker 12: Let's do it.
Speaker 1: We're back, so Charene's voice, and we are talking now
Speaker 1: about the other part of keeping yourself warm, which is
Speaker 1: static insulation. This is the big warm jacket. Everyone likes
Speaker 1: your happy jacket, the one that makes the cold go away. Right.
Speaker 1: The deal here is that like a big puffy jacket
Speaker 1: is pretty crappy to wear. Again, if you're moving with
Speaker 1: any intention, right, like, unless it's seriously like arctic cold,
Speaker 1: then it's hard to hike or climb in a big
Speaker 1: puffy jacket. So what this guy is for is for
Speaker 1: when you stop moving. So if you're hiking, that would
Speaker 1: mean when you stop to regroup, or you stop to
Speaker 1: have a snack or to put your camp together or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's good to have like a really big jacket that
Speaker 1: is warm that you can toss on immediately. Putting clothes
Speaker 1: on once you are cold is generally not the deal.
Speaker 1: The deal that is putting them on so you don't
Speaker 1: get cold, because all you're doing with all these layers, right,
Speaker 1: is trapping air against your body that is warm. That's
Speaker 1: what the little the grid parts in the grid fleece do,
Speaker 1: and that's what all the little feathers in the down
Speaker 1: jacket do, right. They're just trapping pockets of air that
Speaker 1: you heat up. So if you wait till you're really cold,
Speaker 1: it's going to take you a lot longer to get
Speaker 1: to get warm. The thing to do is once when
Speaker 1: you're moving you're nice and warm, you stop, you're going
Speaker 1: to get cold. So if you toss on that jacket
Speaker 1: then you can stay cold. I say warm down jackets
Speaker 1: are really complicated. If there are a couple of issues
Speaker 1: with like cheap down jackets that make them probably best avoided.
Speaker 1: One is that if you're not using ethically sourced down,
Speaker 1: that the industry can be pretty abusive. Right that down
Speaker 1: is comprised of feathers that come from ducks and geese.
Speaker 1: It's not very nice to ducks and geese to kill
Speaker 1: them and steal their feathers. And if you're going to
Speaker 1: do it at all, if that's something that you choose
Speaker 1: to do, you should at least try and find ethically
Speaker 1: sourced down. In my opinion. The other thing is that down,
Speaker 1: natural down, when it gets wet, it clumps up and
Speaker 1: it doesn't work anymore. It doesn't insulate you, right, no,
Speaker 1: like nicer downs modern more like modern downs are treated
Speaker 1: with water repellent coating, so they don't tend to do
Speaker 1: that as much. But the other thing was down is
Speaker 1: like like a lot of numbers get thrown at you
Speaker 1: when you're looking at a down jacket, Like if you
Speaker 1: if you look at the money internet as all kinds
Speaker 1: of information, some of that stuff is bullshit. The things
Speaker 1: that are important are the fill power and the fill weight.
Speaker 1: The feel power is it tells you how many cubic
Speaker 1: inches of loft one ounce of that down will fill.
Speaker 1: So a higher number is better, right, a higher number
Speaker 1: is more puffy. And then your feel weight tells you
Speaker 1: how much of that down is used in a jacket.
Speaker 1: So a higher fill power jacket with a lower let's say,
Speaker 1: a four hundred four power jacket with sixty grams of
Speaker 1: feel weight would be as warm as an eight hundred
Speaker 1: fold power jacket with thirty grams of feel weight. So
Speaker 1: once you get your phil power and your feel weight,
Speaker 1: then you get a pretty good idea of how warm
Speaker 1: a jacket is going to be. So the other alternative
Speaker 1: to natural down is synthetic down.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 1: Where that stands out is like it can get wet
Speaker 1: and you can generally like baby it a bit less,
Speaker 1: but some pack down as well, and it is tend
Speaker 1: to be heavier and you don't get feel power, but
Speaker 1: you do get feel weight. So if you're the jacket
Speaker 1: I use is synthetic because like I like to shovel
Speaker 1: in my bag and sometimes it's wet or like sometimes
Speaker 1: it gets a bit wet, right, I just I don't
Speaker 1: like to have to like try and baby it so much.
Speaker 1: I also, for ethical reasons, prefer that. There's a company
Speaker 1: called Prima Loft p r I m A. They make
Speaker 1: synthetic insulation sort of very good and they say make
Speaker 1: some from post consume recycled plastics and they have something
Speaker 1: that to buy degradeable as well, So I really like cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's cool, right, Like I saw something a while ago
Speaker 1: and how ducks and geese are treated forel like down
Speaker 1: and it may be very I was like.
Speaker 10: I didn't really want to ask because I don't really
Speaker 10: need to know more than I already do because I
Speaker 10: don't buy that stuff anyway. But do they are there
Speaker 10: birds that die exclusively for their feathers or at least
Speaker 10: do they die for meat and their feathers?
Speaker 1: I think they die exclusively. I'm sure they are eaten,
Speaker 1: but they are raised like the commercial product is the
Speaker 1: feathers basically because they kill them much younger. Yeah, it's shitty.
Speaker 1: There are like ethically sourced downs, which I think if
Speaker 1: you know, if you're a consumer of animal products, For
Speaker 1: the most part, I avoid than most of my wall
Speaker 1: stuff I got before I vegan. But I think if
Speaker 1: you're picking between wall and down, I think the down
Speaker 1: industry is it's hard to be mean to sheep in
Speaker 1: a way that people are mean to a poultry, because
Speaker 1: sheep just on't having it. They'll die.
Speaker 10: Also, you're not like shearing wool is different than plucking feathers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well yeah then killing an animal to Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a distinct thing going on there. So yeah, I prefer
Speaker 1: not to have I have a few down jackets that
Speaker 1: you know, but I keep them baby and look after,
Speaker 1: but for the most part I use the Generally, these
Speaker 1: are called ballet parkers, the sort of static insulation layer
Speaker 1: because when you're balaying, when you're climbing, right, you don't
Speaker 1: put them off for climbing, but then when when you're
Speaker 1: on ballet, you're stationary, so you put them on. And
Speaker 1: it's nice to have a hood on these two, right,
Speaker 1: because you don't want to be like, oh, I've got
Speaker 1: to get my beanie out, get my jacket on. You
Speaker 1: want to just be able to put your one big
Speaker 1: warm jacket on and then you're warm.
Speaker 10: So is it true that you can lose like heat
Speaker 10: from your head and you're or like I've always heard
Speaker 10: that like if you wear a beanie you can stay
Speaker 10: warm better. Is that not true?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you can lose heat from your head
Speaker 1: and so it's a part of your body.
Speaker 10: I mean, okay, I know technically that makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 10: but yeah, it's like you lose mom thing to say
Speaker 10: to their kids where it's just like cover your head,
Speaker 10: don't go out when your hair as.
Speaker 1: We Yeah, you can lose heat from any sort of
Speaker 1: exposed surface. Area right and insulated part of your body.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes people overestimate their role played by your head.
Speaker 1: Like you know, people say you lose ninety percent of
Speaker 1: your heat from your head. This isn't true, right, This
Speaker 1: is why we don't climb mounta into like fur hats
Speaker 1: and speedos. Like you, you do want to cover your
Speaker 1: head when it's cold, and it can make a big difference,
Speaker 1: especially like your ears. You know, where the circulation is
Speaker 1: close to the skin, they can get cold your nose right,
Speaker 1: you can get frost nip your nose and in your ears.
Speaker 1: So like you do want to cover those things having
Speaker 1: like a kafa or snowed is that what it's called.
Speaker 10: I don't know. Okay, but that's enough.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, a buff is a trade name a buff
Speaker 1: globle thunder.
Speaker 10: Yeah is a great suggestion. Good job?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah. I have a kafa that I've worn up and
Speaker 1: down many mountains. It's really nice because if you tuck
Speaker 1: it into the neck of your jacket kind of blocks
Speaker 1: or the wind gaps, and then it's already warm because
Speaker 1: it's it's been inside there. So when you go from
Speaker 1: jacket to sleeping bag, you just wrap that guy around
Speaker 1: your shoulders and then it's you're warm. Multi purpose I love.
Speaker 1: And also if you have a kafia, you can use
Speaker 1: it to prefilter water, right because you want to get
Speaker 1: rid of the turbidity. So like if you're if you're
Speaker 1: filtering from buddy water, you can put your kafa over
Speaker 1: the lid of your bottom and then rub a b
Speaker 1: down scoop. Yeah, yeah, many used to make a sling
Speaker 1: out of it. I won't use it to hold gauze
Speaker 1: on a leg wound that I had. Well, people lived
Speaker 1: a wife, yeah, many of my krofias lived a life.
Speaker 1: Just I'm just here for the ride. So that's your
Speaker 1: your down jack if you do want like a down
Speaker 1: animal down duck down jacket, the catalone ones are really
Speaker 1: good for the money. The Cathline is a French sports
Speaker 1: It's like French ARII or European ari It's huge in Europe,
Speaker 1: not so big in America. But there's stuffs excellent value. Also,
Speaker 1: if you want to get really dorky about down jackets
Speaker 1: and warm jackets. The ultra light subreddit a place where
Speaker 1: definitely go sometimes more times than I should, is you
Speaker 1: can find like someone has made a spread cheet ranking
Speaker 1: like the fill, power, fill weight, and price of different
Speaker 1: down jackets. So if you want to get into it,
Speaker 1: you can get really into it there. You can spend
Speaker 1: a lot of your life on that subreddit if you
Speaker 1: want to. So the next layer, and it kind of
Speaker 1: plays into the the two insulation things. It's your wind layer.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the way we experience cold as
Speaker 1: humans is through wind, right, because the way that's why
Speaker 1: we have the concept of wind chill, right, or the
Speaker 1: air rushing past you, cause you a lot more than
Speaker 1: that same temperature without the air rushing past you. And
Speaker 1: this is often how we experience cold and the outdoors
Speaker 1: especially right. So having something like active insulation is great,
Speaker 1: but often, like that alpha fabric for instances you can
Speaker 1: see through it. It can be very warm, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't do anything to block the wind. And that's sort
Speaker 1: of by design, right, because it's allowing vapor to move out,
Speaker 1: which is what you want. But you do sometimes espectly
Speaker 1: in windy conditions, need a layer to block the wind.
Speaker 1: That's your wind layer. It also helps a lot in
Speaker 1: not trashing your expensive insulation layers, like a very nice
Speaker 1: down jacket will sometimes have a very low The Denny
Speaker 1: account is like the thickness of the fabric. So a
Speaker 1: nice down jacket will still can often have a low
Speaker 1: Denny account. It's not really designed to be like it's
Speaker 1: not like recently, I've been out in cucumber building shelters
Speaker 1: for people, right, so I'm constantly carrying lumber and you know,
Speaker 1: using tools and cutting stuff. And if you wear your fancy,
Speaker 1: expensive super light down jacket, you're going to shred it
Speaker 1: and then you're going to end up with little patches
Speaker 1: of duct tape all over it. And now you're expensive
Speaker 1: down jacket. It's not as warm as it used to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sad time for you. So you can avoid this by
Speaker 1: either just not wearing it for that or covering it
Speaker 1: with a wind layer, which also helps because even those
Speaker 1: down jackets often like the wind can get right through them,
Speaker 1: So a wind layer is a really nice option for
Speaker 1: a number of those reasons. Also, you can often just
Speaker 1: worry above your base layer and even down to pretty
Speaker 1: cold when you're moving trail running like people trail run
Speaker 1: I'm sure they'll have already know this, but if you're hiking,
Speaker 1: your trail running, if you're climbing, a wind layer can
Speaker 1: really like increase the range of temperatures which you can
Speaker 1: work in without getting too cold. And like a very
Speaker 1: small mind is like the size of maybe a tennis
Speaker 1: ball when I pack it down, but it makes you
Speaker 1: a lot warmer. You don't want one that blocks all
Speaker 1: of the wind because then you won't be able to
Speaker 1: it won't be breathable, right, You want something that's a
Speaker 1: little bit breathable. The one I have, I looked up
Speaker 1: the one I like. It's called a mouth in hardware
Speaker 1: core air shell, but core as spelled with a K.
Speaker 1: How you know it's yeah, you got to you got
Speaker 1: to get it in, got to get it in there
Speaker 1: somewhere and then wear it is but like you know,
Speaker 1: like like wearing clothes and so double puns on their spellings.
Speaker 1: It's made of the stuff called pertext quantum are, which
Speaker 1: is really cool. It feels like silky but it's a
Speaker 1: synthetic fabric and it's really nice, and it's very small.
Speaker 1: It's very light and like you could put it in
Speaker 1: and you had, like if you're wearing like cargo trousers,
Speaker 1: you know, you can put it in the side pocket
Speaker 1: or cargo short if you're that kind of person. So
Speaker 1: those if you're looking for a cheaper thing to block
Speaker 1: the wind, Like you can find pretty cheap wind cheaters
Speaker 1: right out there. You don't want something that's very plastic
Speaker 1: y and then kind of clammy you're going to sweat
Speaker 1: up in. You can get surplus British wind proof smocks
Speaker 1: that are really nice. I use those all the time
Speaker 1: when I'm working outside because uploads of pockets. They're nylon
Speaker 1: cotton blends, so they're not all cotton, and they they're
Speaker 1: very like robust. You know, they're not going to wear,
Speaker 1: wear down or like get destroyed if you're carrying lumber
Speaker 1: or rock climbing, right, if you're interclimbing, like a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff, will you need something with a thicker
Speaker 1: face fabric otherwise you're going to destroy it when you're climbing,
Speaker 1: especially if you're climbing somewhere like Joshua Tree, where like
Speaker 1: the rock is like sandpaper and it eats your clothing.
Speaker 1: The final layer is your waterproof, right, It's a final one,
Speaker 1: because like you want to avoid wearing your waterproof really,
Speaker 1: like I think far too many people where like they
Speaker 1: rely on waterproof coats when it's not raining enough to
Speaker 1: need one. The problem with waterproofs is if rain can't
Speaker 1: come in, moisture can't really come out. Even fabrics like
Speaker 1: gortex per text and that they say that they're breathable,
Speaker 1: but I think anybody who's tried to exercise hard in
Speaker 1: a gortex jacket will tell you that they're not. Like,
Speaker 1: if you're hiking with a group and you'll put on
Speaker 1: your gorate, then you need to move slower because you're
Speaker 1: going to overheat, and then you're going to get wet
Speaker 1: from the inside because you're sweating. Just not what you want.
Speaker 1: So waterproof is important because when it's really wet and
Speaker 1: you're outside, you don't want to get soaked, right, But
Speaker 1: it's also not something you should be wearing most of
Speaker 1: the time. What you want to look for in a
Speaker 1: waterproof Again, there are like statistics numbers. One of them
Speaker 1: is the it's the pressure resistance of the fabric, like
Speaker 1: it's expressed in the as the height of a water
Speaker 1: column in millimeters until it can push through the water
Speaker 1: resistance of the fabric. Does that make sense?
Speaker 10: No, not at all, Thank you.
Speaker 1: For bet honesty. That's good. If you imagine like that,
Speaker 1: like I have a tube, right, it's a linear tube
Speaker 1: like a cylinder, and then I put it on my
Speaker 1: waterproof fabric, right, I put my waterproof fabric at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the tube, and then I put one milimeters
Speaker 1: of water. It doesn't do anything. Two mil three meals
Speaker 1: for adding until until it pushes through the fabric.
Speaker 10: So that's that's called like a pressure.
Speaker 1: What do you go, Yeah, that's a pressure. It's sometimes
Speaker 1: expressed in pounds per square inch as well.
Speaker 10: Okay, cool.
Speaker 1: It's useful if you're like skiing or snowboarding, like safety
Speaker 1: of your skiing or snowboarding badly and you're going to
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time like sat in your ass then,
Speaker 1: or you know, otherwise working in snow, like kneeling in snow.
Speaker 1: That's very handy. There's also a statistic which is probably
Speaker 1: more useful. It's the millimeters of rain in twenty four
Speaker 1: hours before it like wets out and becomes permeable. So
Speaker 1: if you live somewhere really wet, like Belgium or the UK,
Speaker 1: Belgium just sticks out in my head as a place
Speaker 1: where it rained all the time, but maybe that's just
Speaker 1: my bitterness. You're looking for like something in the twenty
Speaker 1: thousand range. That's a jacket that you can pretty much
Speaker 1: wear all day in the wet and be fine. Gortex
Speaker 1: Pro Fabric. I know it's twenty eight thousand, so that's
Speaker 1: kind of your gold standard, but anything over twenty coupan
Speaker 1: it's fine. And the breatheability is the last one moisture
Speaker 1: vapor transfer rate, and again anything over twenty thousand is good.
Speaker 1: The other thing to look for in a waterproof is
Speaker 1: taped seams and you know the bits where it stitched together.
Speaker 1: If there isn't tape behind those seams, then water can
Speaker 1: get in through that stitching. And like I've seen people
Speaker 1: get very expensive jackets which in explicably don't have tape seams.
Speaker 1: I think it's like maybe a fashion jacket or something,
Speaker 1: but I have like wet like down every seam, like
Speaker 1: they take off their jacket.
Speaker 10: You with a group of like people just that are
Speaker 10: wearing these kinds of clothing and just like you judging
Speaker 10: them quietly.
Speaker 1: That's me every day, Serene, every day when you see me,
Speaker 1: I'm judging people for their outdoor clothing. It just it
Speaker 1: just happens inside my head. It's my inside voice. I'm
Speaker 1: happy that people are outside, and I just want them
Speaker 1: to have a comfortable, enjoyable experience.
Speaker 10: That's a good like thing to focus on if you
Speaker 10: want to make sure it's like not a fashion jacket
Speaker 10: versus like utilitary and whatever. You know, like is it
Speaker 10: going to actually be helpful or are you just gonna
Speaker 10: look cool?
Speaker 1: Or is it going to do both? Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: do both, Like you should feel good in what you're wearing,
Speaker 1: and wear things that make you feel happy about yourself
Speaker 1: and your body. And however you want to appear is fine.
Speaker 1: Like I don't give a fuck, just want you to
Speaker 1: be comfortable and safe.
Speaker 10: But he will judge you.
Speaker 1: That won't judge you. I would judge you if you're
Speaker 1: doing something that might put you in danger or someone
Speaker 1: more accually, like you can put yourself in danger in it,
Speaker 1: and I don't care. Like, if you want a free solo,
Speaker 1: fucking have it, but don't put other people in danger
Speaker 1: without their consent. I guess which you're doing if you
Speaker 1: go outside, because someone has to come get you if
Speaker 1: you get in trouble out there, and that's not a
Speaker 1: risk free endeavor. Right, returning from my judgmental character to
Speaker 1: waterproof jackets, you know, tue, you know what else? I
Speaker 1: am judging how my voice sounds. I'm remaining a loof
Speaker 1: from judgment. I would never but but I am judging
Speaker 1: your products and services and support this show, and I'm
Speaker 1: judging them poorly because gold is not a good way
Speaker 1: to spend your money.
Speaker 10: But we still love our jobs.
Speaker 1: We do love our jobs, Yeah, we do. I do
Speaker 1: enjoy my job. I like my job. I just I
Speaker 1: want you to have nice jackets and not Rounald Reagan
Speaker 1: commemorative coins. So here's some adverts. We're back, and yeah,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk a little bit more about waterprop jackets.
Speaker 1: I think it's important. The other thing you want to
Speaker 1: look for, right, So your your tape seems are good.
Speaker 1: And then I like to have mechanical venting, which.
Speaker 10: Is yeah you mentioned that earlier. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: So this is these vents that I can open where
Speaker 1: as opposed to venting through the fabric, I want to
Speaker 1: vent through a zip that I can open up. Right, So,
Speaker 1: like I'm wearing a puffy jacket right now, that's a
Speaker 1: mechanical vent, right. Why am I saying that jacket? Charene
Speaker 1: can see me, No one else can. It's like the
Speaker 1: sixth sense. I'm a dead person and Scharen is the
Speaker 1: only person who can see me that.
Speaker 10: Is, can I just get that straight? So just unzipping
Speaker 10: your jacket counts as mechanical venting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so like if you have a nice waterproof jacket,
Speaker 1: it will have pit zips.
Speaker 10: Okay, got it? Just what a fancy weight just to
Speaker 10: say unzipping some.
Speaker 1: Well yeah yeah, okay, well because you but you want
Speaker 1: like this, This is not right If I unzip and
Speaker 1: it's a pocket inside, that's not mechanical venting because zipped.
Speaker 10: A chest pocket. For those listening, everyone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, welcome to the podcast. But I do stuff, and
Speaker 1: Charene tells you what I do. Yes, pockets are not
Speaker 1: mechanical vents. Right, but you went away. So you've got
Speaker 1: pit zips. Some of them will have chest zips ways
Speaker 1: to force that hot air out and allow breathe ability
Speaker 1: to happen. Right, So I like that in raine jackets.
Speaker 1: And then I also like a hood right because it's
Speaker 1: having a wet head isn't fun. So this is this one.
Speaker 1: I liked taber hood and the billet Parker. I like
Speaker 1: to havebhood sometimes the wind jacket. I like taberhood. If
Speaker 1: you're doing climbing and you're doing I never really wear
Speaker 1: a hood when I'm cycling, but other helmet actively if
Speaker 1: you're caving or canyoneering, might be a good idea to
Speaker 1: check the hood situation with the helmet that you wear
Speaker 1: for that activity. So like for climbing, you know, you
Speaker 1: lots of people will say they have a helmet compatible hood,
Speaker 1: but I don't know what helmet those people are wearing
Speaker 1: because they don't fit over like even a pretty low
Speaker 1: profile climbing helmet. So if you know, if you can
Speaker 1: go to your loco outdoor shop, take take a helmet,
Speaker 1: you know, don't don't be afraid of trying it on
Speaker 1: with the helmet on. And you want these all really
Speaker 1: to be cut to allow you to move right. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of modern outdoor gear. It looks really nice
Speaker 1: like when you're going about town, but it's cut kind
Speaker 1: of too tight in the well, it looks very trendy.
Speaker 1: It can inhibit your movement right, and so you want
Speaker 1: to be aware of that. You may have to size up.
Speaker 1: And it's not because you've got bigger, it's because close
Speaker 1: I've got smaller.
Speaker 10: Also, if you're layering, that would make sense anyway.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, definitely, And you want to have your water
Speaker 1: proof cut. So it can go over your stuff, right,
Speaker 1: because if it rains, you just want to chuck that
Speaker 1: thing on. And likewise, you want to have that big
Speaker 1: ballet Parker cut so that it can fit over your
Speaker 1: other layers, right, because again you want to be able
Speaker 1: to chuck it on as soon as you stop. And
Speaker 1: your windproof jacket too, so you can use it to
Speaker 1: protect your more expensive you can even I know people
Speaker 1: who do the windproof jacket over the gortex just to
Speaker 1: protect it. Right. I have two gortexes that like. I
Speaker 1: have one that's very small and very thin, and that
Speaker 1: I like, as an emergency, give it if I don't
Speaker 1: expect it to rain or expect for it. But I'm
Speaker 1: going on a week long trip. I'm not gonna, you know,
Speaker 1: want to be completely fucked if it rains. So I
Speaker 1: bring a little one. It's called the Mountain Hardware Minimizer,
Speaker 1: and kind of the name gives away, but it's just
Speaker 1: very small. It's made of gortex pac light, which is
Speaker 1: like the lower tier of acceptable gortex. It's fine, you know,
Speaker 1: Like I go outside a lot and I use it
Speaker 1: and it's fine. It doesn't breathe quite as well, but
Speaker 1: you can again overcome that rete with some with them
Speaker 1: zips that don't zip, and then if it's going to
Speaker 1: be red all day, I have a jacket that's a
Speaker 1: bit heavier, thicker, packs bigger, But the one I have
Speaker 1: is from a hunting company called four Low lo h.
Speaker 1: It's really nice. Often for some reason, hunting stuff in
Speaker 1: recent years has got a lot better, and outdoor stuff
Speaker 1: kind of has used to Hunting stuff used to be shitty,
Speaker 1: but it's it's kind of overtaken it for some reason.
Speaker 1: And sometimes it's also nice to have stuff that isn't
Speaker 1: bright orange and it isn't like a theory of why
Speaker 1: that is because people have a metrics shit ton of
Speaker 1: money and wealthy people have got into backcountry hunting because
Speaker 1: they want to have a big dead thing. But these
Speaker 1: are not people who maybe some people, some people are
Speaker 1: sending it really fucking hard doing hunting and doing like
Speaker 1: ten twelve day hunts, and they're hardcore outdoors people as well,
Speaker 1: and they're very wealthy people. They like to be uncomfortable
Speaker 1: and they will spend a lot of money on expensive jackets.
Speaker 1: That's my theory. Yeah, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Speaker 1: Those are the two things that you really want with
Speaker 1: any waterproof, you do need to take care of them.
Speaker 1: I think with gor Tex everyone should be aware of
Speaker 1: it has what are called forever plastics in it, and
Speaker 1: they are really not good for the environment. And not
Speaker 1: only are they not good for the environment when it's made.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just Gortex, right, Gortex is a brand.
Speaker 1: They make fabrics, and I'm not just saying it's with
Speaker 1: all those those kinds of multi layer lament at waterproofs.
Speaker 1: And it's not just when they're made, it's also when
Speaker 1: water sluffs off them, right, Like so when it rains
Speaker 1: on you and then that the rain you know, the
Speaker 1: rain drop goes into the three and the stream goes
Speaker 1: into the river, and the river goes into the ocean,
Speaker 1: that little forever plastics are still there, and that's not good.
Speaker 1: I would imagine, as with many things, it's more not
Speaker 1: good than we know right now. So some brands like
Speaker 1: fol Ravn won't use Gortex and this stuff for that reason.
Speaker 1: They don't have any forever plastics. Instead they use waxes.
Speaker 1: I think people are kind of maybe have forgotten or
Speaker 1: like you don't see as much of it as you
Speaker 1: used to. But wax jackets are really good. If it's
Speaker 1: going to rain all day. If you're not so concerned
Speaker 1: about weight, you can get like a waxed cotton jacket
Speaker 1: or waxed canvas jacket like car Heart makes up right
Speaker 1: or fils and have a nice Filson jacket that they
Speaker 1: were a lot and it's way less fragile, but it
Speaker 1: is much heavier, but it's also better for the planet.
Speaker 1: So that's something. If you do have a gortex jacket,
Speaker 1: like it's not something that I feel good like having
Speaker 1: five gortext jackets, you know, and like buying new ones
Speaker 1: every year, like you should try and take care of them.
Speaker 1: And there's a product called nick Wax which is really good.
Speaker 1: You should use nick Wax stuff when you're wa washing
Speaker 1: any of your outdoor if you're washing down, you should
Speaker 1: use nick Wax down wash or you're really fuck up
Speaker 1: your expensive down and jacket. So I think that's a
Speaker 1: good thing. And then yeah, wax, Like consider how often
Speaker 1: you're really out in an absolute downpour and if that's
Speaker 1: not very often, like maybe you're okay with a wind
Speaker 1: layer or like just waxing the shoulders of your like
Speaker 1: have a cotton jacket behind me that I just wax
Speaker 1: the shoulders off, but like it's like a smock with
Speaker 1: lots of pockets and I just put wax. I bought
Speaker 1: some Greenland wax, which is which is a fear ratheran thing,
Speaker 1: and wax the shoulders so the shoulders are impermeable to water.
Speaker 10: Does it look different like the Does it look like shiny?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it looks a little bit shiny, but like it's
Speaker 1: not bad. And if you do it like better than me,
Speaker 1: then then it won't look as shiny. But can you
Speaker 1: can I can see that. No, it's not bad, it's
Speaker 1: not it's kind of fun that maybe other people do
Speaker 1: other things for fun, but I kind of like it.
Speaker 1: You get a hair dryer and you grab the wax
Speaker 1: on and then you melt it in with the haair dryer.
Speaker 1: That's what I do on Saturday nights. Insight into my life.
Speaker 1: So the last thing that I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: was extremities. Right, I have rainos where like oh really
Speaker 1: yeah really rainos?
Speaker 10: Adone else that has it? Noah, like yellow right now?
Speaker 10: I mean not yellow if I press them get yellow,
Speaker 10: but like it's well, my feet and hands are always
Speaker 10: cold all the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, same, And it's miserable. I hate having
Speaker 1: cold hands.
Speaker 10: Literally, look at this. Wait, I just bought these recently.
Speaker 10: These are electric hand warbers. Oh wow, trouble and I
Speaker 10: keep them now. I just walk around with these all
Speaker 10: the time.
Speaker 6: It's great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is nice to have warm hands. And if
Speaker 1: you too, if you're a fellow hands cold, there there
Speaker 1: are some things you can do. I think sometimes people
Speaker 1: wear really thick gloves that stop the hands moving and
Speaker 1: that doesn't really increase circulation, or they'll have cold wrists
Speaker 1: and then it's kind of there's like a temperature. You
Speaker 1: know that blood's getting cold or it's in your hands.
Speaker 1: So I found like having a base layer or a midle,
Speaker 1: a active insulation layer with thumb loops really helps. Then
Speaker 1: thumb loops make sure that the sleeve goes all the
Speaker 1: way into the glove. And I would encourage you, rather
Speaker 1: than wearing one big ass pair of gloves, to have
Speaker 1: like a glove. I know this sounds really dorky, but
Speaker 1: like a glove system. So like a thin lacy glove
Speaker 1: and then a shell glove which is either waterproof or
Speaker 1: wind proof, and then if you want to, you can
Speaker 1: then stack that with a mitten on top of that right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love emittletons are so cute. Yeah, get your person
Speaker 1: who sews in your life to say your parentmittans. Have
Speaker 1: them join with a little strings so you can run
Speaker 1: that through the sleeves of your jacket. You don't lose them.
Speaker 1: I used to have those. Yeah, me too.
Speaker 10: I feel like or maybe I just imagined having one.
Speaker 5: I can't.
Speaker 10: You can't figure out what our memories and what are
Speaker 10: memories anymore? But I love those kinds of mittens.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe I'll make gum that you'm shreen w James.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I can't believe you have How did you say
Speaker 10: in British boys mittens? No reightouns rain rainers?
Speaker 1: How you say it reno? They're French. I'm guessing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think mine. Maybe I don't know, Maybe it's just
Speaker 1: from being naturally cold, but holding onto the handlebars of
Speaker 1: a bicycle racing over cobbles has really fucked the circulation
Speaker 1: and sensation in my hands. Yeah, the same thing that
Speaker 1: happens if you work a jackhammer, wows get cold.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's good, not good, not good for the human and
Speaker 1: body to do any think that much outdoor research make
Speaker 1: a good glove system, but they only make it for
Speaker 1: the military and they won't sell it to you, which
Speaker 1: is lame. Yeah, there's a lot of like so one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that some of this surplus clothing comes
Speaker 1: up is because it's designed as a system, which is good. Right,
Speaker 1: it's one piece designed to work with another piece, and like,
Speaker 1: for instance, Patagonia makes a protective combat uniform for the army.
Speaker 1: As much as they would like to not talk about it,
Speaker 1: it's still true and I've written about it before, but
Speaker 1: they make a really good system and it's great, and
Speaker 1: stuff's got like they actually have like this little graphic
Speaker 1: that's like if it's this cold, where this, If it's
Speaker 1: this cold and wet, where this, If it's this cold
Speaker 1: and windy, where this. And it's very handy for people,
Speaker 1: especially people who may not have grown up or had
Speaker 1: that kind of experience or just had the chance to
Speaker 1: try different products because they're very expensive. Right, it's very
Speaker 1: handy to be like, okay, this is and this, and
Speaker 1: then you only need these five or six pieces that way,
Speaker 1: as opposed to having dozens of jackets and dozens of
Speaker 1: different things for different weathers. So like it it works
Speaker 1: very well, and it frustrates me that they don't do
Speaker 1: the same thing when selling to people who are not
Speaker 1: in the military. So the other things I wanted to
Speaker 1: do with extremity is real quick socks sucks. It goes
Speaker 1: the same way as gloves that you don't want to
Speaker 1: a sock system. Yeah, I'm glad that you're picking up
Speaker 1: when I'm picking down at suren.
Speaker 10: I have a sock system, but it's not you're it's
Speaker 10: not anything about this tell me about Yeah, well, my
Speaker 10: feet are always called this is not a sock, but
Speaker 10: I do wear this in my house.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, Charene is showing me. Uh, it looks like
Speaker 1: it's kind of a moon boot but made of fluff.
Speaker 1: It looks like a Yeti's foot.
Speaker 10: It's very more. I don't wear shoes in my house,
Speaker 10: so I either always have those slippers on or socks.
Speaker 10: But my sock system is these socks can never mingle.
Speaker 10: I have outside socks, I have house socks, and I
Speaker 10: have bed socks, and those socks remain in their sections.
Speaker 10: An outdoor sock cannot come in my bed.
Speaker 1: Does that make sense? It does, And I'm fascinated to learn.
Speaker 1: When we start recording, I'm going to inquire more about
Speaker 1: Charine sock collection.
Speaker 10: Yeah, very interesting to me anyway. Yeah, that's eroticism. But
Speaker 10: I think so the same thing with gloves, you're saying
Speaker 10: like they should be layered.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean with socks, I think the big thing
Speaker 1: is to like not always be trying to I think
Speaker 1: people want to wear like a big thick wall sock
Speaker 1: because it's cold, and then if you're kind of crammed
Speaker 1: that into your same boot, you're going to restrict circulation.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna be able to move your feet, right.
Speaker 1: So what I would do instead is I either have
Speaker 1: a couple of pair of thin socks or use a
Speaker 1: warmer fabric, so like Olpaka wool is very warm for
Speaker 1: its weight. The other nice thing about woll socks is
Speaker 1: again the insulate when they're wet, right, So your feet
Speaker 1: are gonna sweat you're moving, and so you want something
Speaker 1: that's not going to get your feet cold, right, especially
Speaker 1: if you a person who already gets cold feet. So
Speaker 1: Marina wool is good, our Packer wool is very good.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you don't want to restrict with like one
Speaker 1: big fluffy sock. You can get insulated boots if it's
Speaker 1: really cold, I right down until below freezing. I don't
Speaker 1: like insulated boots because again I don't like my feet
Speaker 1: to get sweaty.
Speaker 10: And well, you wear your feet for that kind of weather.
Speaker 1: They get really cold, just gor text boots and I
Speaker 1: wear the same boots for almost everything unless it's like
Speaker 1: jungly if you're going to get wet, like Goratex's boots
Speaker 1: suck right because they take forever to dry. So like,
Speaker 1: if you're in the jungle and the water is going
Speaker 1: to come over your boots, then you shouldn't wear gortex
Speaker 1: boots if you're not I have some. You like to
Speaker 1: know exactly what boots I have? Sure?
Speaker 10: I mean we're not sponsored though maybe no?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get some of this ship for
Speaker 1: free when I was working in the outdoor industry, but
Speaker 1: no one's paying us to say this. I have Solomon
Speaker 1: quest for D.
Speaker 10: I think I have Wait, I have those? No, which
Speaker 10: ones do I have? I did like a bunch of
Speaker 10: research a couple of years ago when I got my
Speaker 10: new hiking boots. I feel like I have the Solomons
Speaker 10: or those were the ones I no, no, no, I do
Speaker 10: have the Solomons because I returned the other one that
Speaker 10: everyone likes the witches. What's it called hokahs.
Speaker 1: The whole focus. Oh yeah, No, Hogas make lovely running shoes.
Speaker 1: I'm not. I don't have a preference for I.
Speaker 10: Think there were. I mean I just didn't understand the hype.
Speaker 10: So I remember switching over to or returning those and
Speaker 10: getting the Solomons. Wow, look at us.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Team Solomon over here, they're vegan too.
Speaker 10: Oh I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's if you have leather boots, you can snow
Speaker 1: seal them around this time of the year, but then
Speaker 1: there'll be a bit less breathe, a bit more waterproof.
Speaker 1: But yeah, consider not overcramming like thick socks into boots
Speaker 1: of the same size. If you if you're going to
Speaker 1: get a specific pair of winter get the assize bigger
Speaker 1: and then you could wear a thicker sock. I would
Speaker 1: probably do that before I went to an insulated boot.
Speaker 1: Until it was really cold, like arctic stuff, you don't
Speaker 1: need an insulated boot. Vask makes some nice insulated boots
Speaker 1: that I have used. And then hats is the last one.
Speaker 1: Hats again, like it depends a little bit on the temperature,
Speaker 1: but I have a couple of wool beanies that I
Speaker 1: got years and years and years ago, and they're very
Speaker 1: good and they're very warm. And the only thing is
Speaker 1: when they get wet, they kind of stretch out a bit,
Speaker 1: so they don't love getting wet. You might want to
Speaker 1: put a hood over yourself. Otherwise, a flea speanie is
Speaker 1: really good. People are sleeping on the flea speanie, but
Speaker 1: like a micro flee stretchy beanie, it's very nice. I
Speaker 1: tend to take them when I travel because I'm a
Speaker 1: cold person and planes are cold. So if I have
Speaker 1: that and my little Kafa in my bag, then I
Speaker 1: can kind of wrap myself up on the plane and
Speaker 1: I probably look a bit weird to everyone else, but
Speaker 1: I don't care because I am warm and planes are cold.
Speaker 1: I think that it's the end of my ted talk
Speaker 1: on warm clothing.
Speaker 10: We talk for an hour about cold serene.
Speaker 1: I didn't think we'd keep it under an hour. Wait really, yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I've been draining my whole life for this shit. Like
Speaker 1: I love. I used to like my whole job used
Speaker 1: to be to tell people what to wear and take
Speaker 1: with them when they go outside. Wait really, yeah? Outdoor
Speaker 1: industry journalists who are years how I started my little
Speaker 1: when I was little baby journals the expert here, little
Speaker 1: baby journalist, I wrote, I don't think I'm an expert,
Speaker 1: but I will say, well, I'll tell you what. There's
Speaker 1: my other little soap box. You will read a lot
Speaker 1: of reviews, and sometimes, like the reviews for Boots, did
Speaker 1: they did Sharen in a good direction? Not everyone who's
Speaker 1: writing those reviews is going outside very much, is what
Speaker 1: I will say, or sending it very hard. Some of
Speaker 1: them are, doubtedly are, but a lot of them are
Speaker 1: trying to get you to click a link which will
Speaker 1: return a certain percentage to the website that you're clicking
Speaker 1: the from, so four or five percent back right, And
Speaker 1: you may, for instance, some of the brands I've mentioned
Speaker 1: here don't have that. It's called affiliate marketing. And if
Speaker 1: brands don't have affiliate marketing, you generally can't put it
Speaker 1: in articles for a lots of magazines about the outdoors.
Speaker 1: This is something that I fucking loathe, and you can't
Speaker 1: be honest and say this is my favorite thing. Everything's
Speaker 1: designed to be seoed and to get you to click
Speaker 1: something and to return some affiliate revenue to the website.
Speaker 1: So it would take a lot of those reviews with
Speaker 1: a pinch of salt. Also, just small brands struggle to
Speaker 1: get into a lot of into a lot of magazines
Speaker 1: because they don't have the marketing money to send piles
Speaker 1: and piles of free stuff. So yeah, be cautious about
Speaker 1: what you read. And if you look around, you know,
Speaker 1: if you're looking at this shit like like, I absolutely
Speaker 1: have jackets that got several hundred dollars that I got
Speaker 1: for free or I made some employer pay for because
Speaker 1: I was going somewhererifically in hospitable. Is a human life
Speaker 1: like Alaska or Alaska's actually lovely. I'd like to live there.
Speaker 1: That's the dream. Right one day I'll podcast my way
Speaker 1: to a million dollars and raise sheep in Alaska.
Speaker 10: I was looking for tickets to Alaska yesterday. Actually, yah,
Speaker 10: I want.
Speaker 1: To show we're talking about Alaska.
Speaker 10: Yeah yeah, we talk about lights.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, go get after it. But I
Speaker 1: don't really support moving to Alaska and colonizing people's land
Speaker 1: because I shouldn't do that. Don't don't do extra colonizing.
Speaker 1: I'm already doing enough. Feel bad about it. But so yeah,
Speaker 1: I would suggest people take those reviews with a pinch
Speaker 1: of salt. There are websites like gear Trade where you
Speaker 1: can find new stuff. eBay offer up a lot of
Speaker 1: people buy outdoor stuff, go camping, wants, get cold, get wet,
Speaker 1: get sad, slap it on the internet and sell it
Speaker 1: for pennies versus what it's worth, so you don't have
Speaker 1: to buy any of this stuff new. Most of these
Speaker 1: companies also have bomber warranties, and I'm just going to
Speaker 1: leave that there as to the combination of second hand
Speaker 1: purchasing a warranties, but you can probably join the dots.
Speaker 10: Well, yeah, thanks for having me for this. I learned
Speaker 10: a lot.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining me, Sheriene and sharing with me your
Speaker 1: sock system.
Speaker 10: I mean, yeah, that was really intimate. No, I think
Speaker 10: this stuff is like underrated how important it is. I
Speaker 10: feel like, I mean, like, unless you're always outdoors and
Speaker 10: you're like you're an outdoorsy person, I think you wouldn't
Speaker 10: know exactly the best way to keep warm. And it's
Speaker 10: good to know, like what will actually help someone if
Speaker 10: you want to, I don't know, donate stuff to them.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we have been plagued with donations of really
Speaker 1: shitty blankets. For instance, it's no one's fault. I genuinely
Speaker 1: understand that people care and like it. I'm so proud
Speaker 1: that people want to help, and it makes me so
Speaker 1: happy to see people taking the money that I know
Speaker 1: none of us have enough of and buying stuff. But like,
Speaker 1: for instance, a thick wall blanket is going to do
Speaker 1: so much more than two or three very thin micro
Speaker 1: lease blankets. You know, if you, if you're looking towards
Speaker 1: your local unhoused community, right again, like think about things
Speaker 1: that are durable and that we'll still insulate when they're
Speaker 1: wet and well if you, if you do well, then
Speaker 1: then that's a great choice for a lot of those things.
Speaker 1: And but perhaps we can have one of my own
Speaker 1: house friends on to talk about like effective donations. The
Speaker 1: best way to help people who are unhoused is to
Speaker 1: give them money and that they can buy the things
Speaker 1: that they need because they know about the things that
Speaker 1: point and so yeah, that, yeah, that's my last thing
Speaker 1: for today. Give people who need things money so they
Speaker 1: can buy them. All right, bye everyone, Bye.
Speaker 4: Elections. No, we're not talking about those elections. This is
Speaker 4: it could happen here. We're talking about a bunch of
Speaker 4: other elections and how fucking terribly they went. I'm hosts
Speaker 4: me along with these James stout.
Speaker 1: Hi, Mayah, I'm stoked. I do love a good election.
Speaker 1: It's great to vote for people.
Speaker 4: We are kind of talking about elections today, but the
Speaker 4: thing that we're actually talking about is what has happened
Speaker 4: to the left since twenty eleven.
Speaker 1: And anyone who was around eleven.
Speaker 4: Twenty thirteen, and like any time after that, one of
Speaker 4: the arguments you got constantly was Okay, so twenty eleven,
Speaker 4: you have occupy, you have to movement to the squares.
Speaker 4: You have these mass millions of people like assembling in
Speaker 4: squares and trying to do direct democratic stuff and you know,
Speaker 4: figuring it out and making it work and not working,
Speaker 4: and you know all the complicated and messy things that
Speaker 4: happen when you have real political movement. And that entire time,
Speaker 4: there was an entire chorus of dipshits whose only line was, well,
Speaker 4: if you want to get serious about taking power, you
Speaker 4: have to get into electoral politics. And these people got
Speaker 4: their wish. And now we are, like almost a decade
Speaker 4: and a half out. I think I think we are
Speaker 4: finally in a position to objectively analyze how well this
Speaker 4: shit went and oh boy, so join us as we
Speaker 4: wander from disaster to apocal disaster and go over the
Speaker 4: wreckage of all of these very, very once promising and
Speaker 4: inspiring social movements to joy.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited. I'm so excited to hear yet another
Speaker 1: attempt at making the world better than in fact failed.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, okay, there's actually two places we could start here,
Speaker 4: So I'm gonna let you pick. Do you want to
Speaker 4: start with Sars or do you want to start with Podemos.
Speaker 1: Let's start with Podemos.
Speaker 3: I do.
Speaker 1: I do enjoy a good Spain. It's been reading about
Speaker 1: the another round of exhumations today, so I do love
Speaker 1: a country that has banked into its constitution amnesty for
Speaker 1: people who did fucking mass and Expain has more mass
Speaker 1: graves in anywhere apart from is it rwand or Cambodia. Cambodia.
Speaker 1: Cambodia is if you only beat Spae from Spain for
Speaker 1: mass graves.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: A country which I cannot say enough has not finished
Speaker 1: as civil war and remains a post dictatorship and will
Speaker 1: until it recovers. Allows people whose fucking parents and grandparents
Speaker 1: were murdered in the street to recover their remains and
Speaker 1: grief for them. Sorry, I thank you for me to
Speaker 1: my ted. No, no, this is good.
Speaker 4: Well and I mean, and part of the context of
Speaker 4: this whole thing is that this is one of the
Speaker 4: underlying things that causes the enormous uprisings in Spain twenty eleven.
Speaker 4: They have one of the biggest I mean actually literally
Speaker 4: One of the reasons occupy happens is that there are
Speaker 4: specific people who are in like actually, we fucked up
Speaker 4: with to Vicky Asiwell on the show about this, like
Speaker 4: she was in Catalonia when this stuff started. There's there's
Speaker 4: like a million like there are individual squares where there
Speaker 4: are like a million people.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I was in Catalonia when this stuff started.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like and that's one of the things that
Speaker 4: that brings Occupied to the US is people who were
Speaker 4: there for that being in the US and like being
Speaker 4: in Siconti Park when occupy started, and so you know,
Speaker 4: they have they have one of the largest and most powerful,
Speaker 4: like anti sterity movements, like anywhere in the world, is
Speaker 4: very well organized. But one of the things that happens
Speaker 4: in this is very quickly there's an attempt to hijack
Speaker 4: this because people see the number of people who are
Speaker 4: in the streets. They see they see this as an
Speaker 4: opportunity to you know, take electoral power, right, this is
Speaker 4: the whole lines like we're serious about taking power, blah
Speaker 4: blah blah blah blah. And Podamos in particular, is influenced
Speaker 4: by like some of the people on earth who I
Speaker 4: hate the most.
Speaker 1: They're they're they're.
Speaker 4: Influenced by like like they deliberately call themselves post Marxists,
Speaker 4: like left populist philosophers. They're their model is Perhnism. It
Speaker 4: is a shit show. It is a catastrophe. Like every
Speaker 4: single party who's ever tried their strategy of taking power
Speaker 4: has failed, Like left populism as an elect as specifically,
Speaker 4: like this kind of left populace at a strategy has
Speaker 4: a worse record for taking power in Europe. Then left
Speaker 4: wing military coups like it's that.
Speaker 1: Bad to be fair, left wing mandatary case rarely succeed
Speaker 1: at the ballot box.
Speaker 4: They means, they're they're they're a more effective way of
Speaker 4: getting into power than this this fucking left electoralism shit.
Speaker 4: So for people who don't really remember, Potamos was like
Speaker 4: the like them and Sergi were like the thing in
Speaker 4: like like post sort of like post occupier like and
Speaker 4: in that moment of like, these are the like the
Speaker 4: big like left like electoral successes. These are the things
Speaker 4: they're gonna gonna take power, Podamos specifically. So the the
Speaker 4: thing Podamos calls itself like their whole strategy is to
Speaker 4: build build what they call the electoral war machine. Their
Speaker 4: entire strategy is just to win elections.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 4: That's the whole thing. They're gonna pull together a bunch
Speaker 4: of leftist groups, They're going to win elections. Did they
Speaker 4: ever win a single election? No? Zero, The entire type
Speaker 4: it has bid says I of Pootabos.
Speaker 1: It has been what like thirteen years.
Speaker 4: They have lost every single election in a row.
Speaker 1: They were in the they were in the Sanchez coalition
Speaker 1: government with the Faciliyah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well so this is this is the other interesting
Speaker 4: thing is that put the thing that Potamos is like
Speaker 4: thing right originally was well they had this whole sort
Speaker 4: of one of the things that was very popular in
Speaker 4: their early twenty tens was this whole like oh, we'll
Speaker 4: have a political party, but it'll like take like it'll
Speaker 4: it'll take its policy from these direct democratic assemblies. Those
Speaker 4: assemblies have ever material that was all lie. Yet anytime
Speaker 4: someone tells you that their political party is going to
Speaker 4: take its direction from like assemblies in the street, they're
Speaker 4: lying to you. They're trying to get you out of
Speaker 4: the street. Don't believe them. So that that was all nonsense.
Speaker 4: But the other big thing about about Potamos was that
Speaker 4: they were supposed to be like the big like third
Speaker 4: force in Spanish politics, right, they were going to be
Speaker 4: like the new force that was going to come in.
Speaker 4: They were going to wipe away all the cru politicians
Speaker 4: and they specifically their big thing was that they refused
Speaker 4: to enter coalition governments. Now for long fast forward to
Speaker 4: losing like six straight elections, and now what is Potamos
Speaker 4: podemos is the permanent minority government coalition partner with the
Speaker 4: Spanish Socialist Party. And before you get excited about the
Speaker 4: Spanish Socialist Party, like they suck, like they are shit.
Speaker 1: I will always stand anyone who digs up Franco's rotting
Speaker 1: corpse and flies it across the country. That's those ritten.
Speaker 4: But they're also like that's mostly like they they're they're
Speaker 4: they're they're also I mean, they they've they've kind of
Speaker 4: been forced to go a bit to the left, like
Speaker 4: by Podemos and like by the sort of transformations that happen.
Speaker 4: But they're also just like a bunch of dealerble ships.
Speaker 4: Like they're like, literally, this is one of the parties
Speaker 4: that Podemos was formed to run out of power, and
Speaker 4: now they're just you know, they're just a permanent like
Speaker 4: minority coalition governments. Pablo and Gleasios, who is Potamos's like
Speaker 4: great political strategist. He was like he was like their guy.
Speaker 4: He was the guy he wore cool leather jackets and
Speaker 4: ship like. He was the guy who was like in every.
Speaker 1: Day what you say a politician and left the jacket.
Speaker 1: You fucking run, yeah, you run a mile peak. Dad's
Speaker 1: trying to look cool energy.
Speaker 4: He he has retired from politics. It just abject failure
Speaker 4: because nothing ever fucking worked. One of the one of
Speaker 4: one of the big things that, you know, one of
Speaker 4: the big recent things that Pidamos did was help the
Speaker 4: Socialist Party crush the massive wave of metalworkers strikes that
Speaker 4: swept Spain in twenty eleven.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: One, so great stuff happening there like they're you know,
Speaker 4: they're not literally fascists, and that's that's their selling point.
Speaker 12: Uh.
Speaker 4: They fucking lose every election and they yeah, ran, ran,
Speaker 4: ran the social movements into the ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a They literally had a thing, didn't they, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're their men. Their initial manifesto was like to convert
Speaker 1: indignation into political change, and like the movement that began
Speaker 1: the occupation of the squares in Spain was called the
Speaker 1: indignats or indignaos in Catalando Spanish. Like the whole thing
Speaker 1: was like two channel this energy into a process which
Speaker 1: is literally designed to stop shit changing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, guess what, it didn't fucking change.
Speaker 4: They lost every election. They've never wanted an election. They're
Speaker 4: never going to wait an election.
Speaker 1: Yeah, remain in the street to my Spanish friends and
Speaker 1: Kathlan friends and Basque friends and Galician friends and other
Speaker 1: friends in Iberia.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So all right, moving on to so, you know, we
Speaker 4: talked about how Spain had one of the biggest like
Speaker 4: movement into the squares type things. Greece I think technically
Speaker 4: gets the honor of having the first post two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight uprising, which was actually not an economic thing.
Speaker 4: It was the cops like murdered a fucking kid and
Speaker 4: people just lit shit on fire like it was. It
Speaker 4: was fucking wild.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 4: There's a quote about like those first protests that I
Speaker 4: always I was thinking about in like the height of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty, when I was watching that guy in the
Speaker 4: elbow mask with a molotov like, which is you know
Speaker 4: that those first protests it was people. It wasn't It
Speaker 4: wasn't a people were trying. People wen't try to build
Speaker 4: a political movement. They just wanted destruction.
Speaker 1: Because yeah, yeah, they were angry and they wanted to
Speaker 1: ben shit down.
Speaker 4: Abject abject fury at the cops just murdering this child,
Speaker 4: and partially also they murdered this kid like in in Xarchia,
Speaker 4: which is like Greece's anarchists like neighborhood. So yeah, terrible
Speaker 4: idea by the police.
Speaker 1: Terrible thing.
Speaker 4: Greece has repeated massive protests. One of the reasons they're
Speaker 4: having these protests is that Greece is forced to accept
Speaker 4: these like crippling austerity measures by the Troika, which is
Speaker 4: this group that was running the bailouts in Europe, composed
Speaker 4: of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and
Speaker 4: the European Commission, which is basically the executive branch of
Speaker 4: the European Union with reps from all of the EU countries.
Speaker 4: And the product of this is that the only faction
Speaker 4: that ever actually mattered in the Troika was just Germany. Effectively,
Speaker 4: what was happening with Germany was imposing like a bunch
Speaker 4: of economic sanctions on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is when like the European Union became like
Speaker 1: what Germany says we do, especially from guide to this stuff.
Speaker 4: In the context of these massive protests, Greece elects Soresa,
Speaker 4: which is supposedly this left wing party that is going
Speaker 4: to you know, the specifically the mandate they were handed
Speaker 4: was stop the austerity and literally they are in negotiationd
Speaker 4: with the Troika. They have a plan in hand to
Speaker 4: tell the Troika to fuck off and for Greece to
Speaker 4: leave the European Union in to seat up capital controls
Speaker 4: to start, like, you know, this is a process that
Speaker 4: would have like the only way this could have function
Speaker 4: is they start, you know, they start literally like seizing
Speaker 4: property from like a bunch of fucking yacht owners. And
Speaker 4: instead of doing that literally at the last second with
Speaker 4: the plan in hand at the negotiating table, soresa folds.
Speaker 4: Instead they cut a deal with the Troika, they impose
Speaker 4: literally the exact same austerity measures they are put in
Speaker 4: power to stop. And then you know, now, now having
Speaker 4: done this, they're now facing their own giant anti sterity protests.
Speaker 4: And the thing that Theresa does is ally with the
Speaker 4: riot police. You, by the way, the things one of
Speaker 4: the ways that Resa got people to support them was
Speaker 4: specifically by running on basically completely rebuilding the Greek police force,
Speaker 4: because Greece's police force, oh yeah, fuck me, just straight.
Speaker 1: Up a bunch of Nazis.
Speaker 4: And when I say that, I literally they vote. I
Speaker 4: think it's ninety seven percent of their members voted for
Speaker 4: the Golden Dawn, which is like the Greek neo Nazi Party. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and like so many of these people vote for the
Speaker 4: Golden Down that they can be considered like a significant
Speaker 4: part of the total of the Golden Don's base.
Speaker 1: Yeah, perhaps more importantly of its like street fighting element
Speaker 1: that yeah, that kills anti fascists, right.
Speaker 4: Those guys, like the Golden Down eventually comes apart because
Speaker 4: they ordered the assassination of an anti fascist rapper from
Speaker 4: parliament and then had the guy killed. Yeah, yeah, just
Speaker 4: fucking batch it. And those are the people who the
Speaker 4: Greek police are supporting. But Sarge Sarsa needs them because
Speaker 4: they need the police to smash the anti serity movements
Speaker 4: to stop people from like knocking off their governments and
Speaker 4: stopping the austerity. And they do it. It works eventually,
Speaker 4: after years and years and years and years of just
Speaker 4: smashing these like smashing these protests with police, they're able
Speaker 4: to you know, they're they're they're able to stamp out
Speaker 4: the sort of the giant social movements. And the consequence
Speaker 4: of this is that they turn over Greece to just
Speaker 4: like a bunch of murderously far right, anti immigrant shitheads.
Speaker 4: Who are the people who currently run Greece. They're unbelievable,
Speaker 4: like just unbelievably right wing. These guys are so right
Speaker 4: wing they were trying to find ways to claim credit
Speaker 4: for getting it, like getting those like several hundred people
Speaker 4: on that migrant ship earlier this year killed. Like, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's that's who currently runs Greece, and that's who's the
Speaker 4: reason like turned power over to because they literally did nothing,
Speaker 4: it destroyed their own base.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's probably worth like stopping to note here that
Speaker 1: like fearmongering around migrants has been the thing that has
Speaker 1: moved like straight up fascists into power in much of
Speaker 1: southern Europe, right like Italy and Greece, and like even
Speaker 1: if you're not a person who lives at the border,
Speaker 1: like this ship is absolutely like the playbook that the
Speaker 1: fire right is using all over the world, absolutely using
Speaker 1: here right now. And we have an election. You're here,
Speaker 1: and like you owe it to the world to correct
Speaker 1: that bullshit differformation whenever you can. Now that we're talking
Speaker 1: about Greece, can we just briefly mention the Archer of Syntagma,
Speaker 1: the biggest chad ever to walk the earth? Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: I can't do it. I got you an episode without
Speaker 1: this guy. If you are not familiar with Yannis mikkeladis
Speaker 1: this absolutely legend dude who took a bow and arrow
Speaker 1: to the protests, given a thirteen year sentence and then
Speaker 1: escape from prison I think was recaptured and then it
Speaker 1: went on hunger straight for a while. Just just this
Speaker 1: series of experts that they're truly legendary, incredible.
Speaker 4: They replace this with fucking h just being another party
Speaker 4: that imposed Austeria.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, no, no one's replaced that guy. He's still
Speaker 1: h he's still but as.
Speaker 4: As as they replaced the political movement that produced this guy, yeah,
Speaker 4: with like just just genuinely the greatest glowdown in human history.
Speaker 4: Just terrible stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's very sad. It could have been a
Speaker 1: wonderful thing. There are still like Greece has still a
Speaker 1: very strong and and and uh like a respectable anarchist movement.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to get over there to they squat large
Speaker 1: areas of housing for migrants to like allow microslip in it.
Speaker 1: And it's extremely based and I'm trying to get spend
Speaker 1: some time forgot to mention this.
Speaker 4: So they also do this in Spain, and so I've
Speaker 4: talked about this on the show before, but I actually
Speaker 4: mentioned it here since we're doing this. Uh So, one
Speaker 4: of podemos is like regional allies as Barcelona and Camu.
Speaker 4: First thing that Barcelona and Camu did upon taking power
Speaker 4: was a victim immigrant squat because they knew it wouldn't
Speaker 4: have enough defenses to stop the police and victim.
Speaker 1: So fuck these people.
Speaker 4: Those people used to be anarchists, they're traders.
Speaker 1: Fuck them yeah, and this happens constantly, right, like the
Speaker 1: Senate entered into government in nineteen thirty six with the
Speaker 1: Spanish Socialist Party and getting and got completely owned by
Speaker 1: Moscow and extremely predictable fashion, and all their friends got
Speaker 1: in some cases literally flayed alive. Perhaps consider not doing
Speaker 1: that next time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So, speaking of being played alive, do you know
Speaker 4: do you know who else will flay you alive? You
Speaker 4: don't buy buy their stuff?
Speaker 1: Is it their products and services? I support this podcast again,
Speaker 1: isn't it? They're fucking they're all over that shit. We
Speaker 1: can't say that, can we just bleep?
Speaker 7: It?
Speaker 1: Mean?
Speaker 12: All right?
Speaker 2: We're back?
Speaker 4: So all right, we need to talk about two other
Speaker 4: places where this kind of stuff happened. We're leaving Europe.
Speaker 4: We're gonna go We're going to go to briefly, we're
Speaker 4: going to go to the Anglophone world now, a deeply
Speaker 4: cursed place. In the US, all of these same people
Speaker 4: gained power. Their giant political project, and their only real
Speaker 4: political project, was attempting to elect Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders
Speaker 4: lost two consecutive elections, first to Hillary Clinton, the most
Speaker 4: unpopular Democratic presidential candidate in modern history, and then lost
Speaker 4: a second election to Joe Biden de Manso. See now
Speaker 4: he forgot what president he served as VP under. And
Speaker 4: I'm only mentioning this because these are these are the
Speaker 4: people who spend all of their time talking about how
Speaker 4: serious they are about taking power, and they got their
Speaker 4: rass kicked by again Hillary Clinton, the most unpopular candidate
Speaker 4: in the entire history, like the bordered history of the
Speaker 4: Democratic Party, and Joe fucking bited a man like I
Speaker 4: just okay, And instead the one guy they did run
Speaker 4: and managed to actually like get into power was one
Speaker 4: John Fetterman.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, Look he's had some banging tweets, but
Speaker 1: he's been a complete fucking turd in his time in office.
Speaker 4: I'm pissed about this because from the very beginning, I
Speaker 4: was like, this guy sucks ass. He's a Zionist, anti immigrants'
Speaker 4: he fucking sees.
Speaker 1: Anti trousers, he opposes said anything below the knee, And
Speaker 1: no one fucking believed me this. His campaign was run
Speaker 1: by a bunch of fucking DSA people, and instead they
Speaker 1: elected John fucking Fetterman, who hates everyone who fucking worked
Speaker 1: with him, is just screaming like the same fascist, anti
Speaker 1: immigrant borders. He's also in the pocket of big egg.
Speaker 1: He's made he's introduced a bill to not allow people
Speaker 1: to go vegan ex substitutes egg.
Speaker 4: But he's not even in like the pocket of like
Speaker 4: good big egg. Like he's not in the pocket of
Speaker 4: like big people who haven't realized that they're trans yet.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 4: No, he's in the pocket of bad big egg.
Speaker 1: I think that's an act of solidarity. Like as a
Speaker 1: as a man with a giant ball dome, he somewhat
Speaker 1: resembles an egg, so he feels like communion with other eggs.
Speaker 1: I think that's what he says. Yeah, so okay, that
Speaker 1: that's the US.
Speaker 4: At some point, we're gonna do another episode about that
Speaker 4: all of the just fucking absolute dipshits that they elected
Speaker 4: in the elected in LA who've been doing like just
Speaker 4: sweeping homeless camps. So fuck them. But that's that's not today.
Speaker 4: We're we're in segonna move to Corbin. So all right,
Speaker 4: So the British last in the beginning of I know
Speaker 4: it's this is like impossible to imagine now, but in
Speaker 4: the beginning of the twenty tens that Britain had a
Speaker 4: vibrant and expanding left they had a bunch of straight movements,
Speaker 4: They had the student protests, they had a bunch of riots,
Speaker 4: and all of that energy and all of those fucking people,
Speaker 4: you know, got got sucked up by Corbinism, and Corbin
Speaker 4: lost an election to Boris fucking Johnson, a man who
Speaker 4: was ousted by his own party and replaced by Liz
Speaker 4: shorter term than a cabbage trust, like you know, and
Speaker 4: all of these people, all these people I've I've had
Speaker 4: to talk to these people for fucking years and years
Speaker 4: and years, right, and their whole thing was like, well, okay, like,
Speaker 4: but the media read the election against us, and the
Speaker 4: Labor Party was trying to stablish just like yeah, no shit,
Speaker 4: what the what the fuck did you expect was going
Speaker 4: to happen? Did you seriously think if you even like
Speaker 4: just remotely wanted to challenge capital at all? Did you
Speaker 4: seriously expect that the poorgeoisie were gonna play by the rules?
Speaker 1: What the fuck did you think was gonna happen?
Speaker 4: Did you think they were just gonna fucking sit there
Speaker 4: and let you take power because your ideas were somewhat popular, Like, no,
Speaker 4: of course they fucking were. Of course they were going
Speaker 4: to say what taut you and the whole fucking thing
Speaker 4: about the media. It's like, well, yeah, of course, you know, like, yeah,
Speaker 4: obviously the media in Britain is run by the fucking Burdox.
Speaker 4: Their press isn't unbelievably insanely right wing. Sure, however, coma,
Speaker 4: you guys are the ones who decided to pick an
Speaker 4: arena where your candidate and your entire political project can
Speaker 4: be sunk by negative press attention. You picked that arena
Speaker 4: to fight, and then on top of that, you ran
Speaker 4: a completely conventional political campaign. Right, Literally, all you did
Speaker 4: was fucking campus, You ran a completely conventional political campaign,
Speaker 4: and that everyone's fucking Pikachu facing that they had like
Speaker 4: one of the worst labor losses in modern history, right,
Speaker 4: Like okay, what what the fuck did you think was
Speaker 4: going to happen?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 7: Then?
Speaker 4: This this is again, this is one of the reasons
Speaker 4: why electoralism doesn't work, because if you're in a field
Speaker 4: that is entirely about the popularity of one person, and
Speaker 4: there's an entire apparatus that is able, that is better
Speaker 4: able than you to directly communicate to the entire population
Speaker 4: to tell them that that one person is fucking bad.
Speaker 4: Of course, you're gonna fucking lose, Like what did you
Speaker 4: think was gonna happen? And now you know the Labor
Speaker 4: Party is run by Cure Starmer, who is like the
Speaker 4: most right wing labor candidate since like Tony Blair.
Speaker 1: He prosecuted the people who were in the streets in
Speaker 1: twenty ten. Right, Like that that is where we've got
Speaker 1: to now. It's like we have a choice between like
Speaker 1: Ricci like send gunboats into the channel to smink sink
Speaker 1: the small ship Sunak and the guy who wants to
Speaker 1: look you up for taking a bottle of water from
Speaker 1: boots in twenty ten.
Speaker 4: Like it's yeah, it's not a choice. And that's and
Speaker 4: like the corporate left has been basically completely liquidated. The
Speaker 4: only thing that's left if you are these media organizations
Speaker 4: who are all attacking right as fast as they can
Speaker 4: possibly fucking move because that's where the fucking money is
Speaker 4: and because you know Starmar actually used to be a
Speaker 4: trotsky Ie and all of these people. No, but the
Speaker 4: way you actually if if you were on the left
Speaker 4: and you want to take electoral power in Britain, the
Speaker 4: way you do it has become a conservative and it
Speaker 4: will work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, look look at Tony Blair, right,
Speaker 1: he was extremely successful in like criminalizing being a teenager
Speaker 1: and these insanely right wing policies. Again, people aren't familiar
Speaker 1: with anti social behavior orders in Britain. They should, they
Speaker 1: should look them up. And oh my god, machines that
Speaker 1: make noise to keep young people out of public space,
Speaker 1: like to fully yeah, like the shit he was doing
Speaker 1: was insane. And but if youople continue to well, look
Speaker 1: Britain's electoral system. If you think America's electoral system as fucked,
Speaker 1: check out first past the Post, like fully insane. One
Speaker 1: of the areas I lived when I was a kid, Like,
Speaker 1: you just didn't have an option. There was some like
Speaker 1: someone named Giles or a similar kind of like Giles
Speaker 1: vibing name, or a token Lib DEM candidate, and like,
Speaker 1: you know, Marmaduke was your only choice really, like like,
Speaker 1: which is why I did not engage in the practice
Speaker 1: of voting in the United Kingdom. But yeah, it is
Speaker 1: a funck system.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And again it's like, well, yeah, you chose a
Speaker 4: rigged system to participate in in the first place. And
Speaker 4: then it's like, well you lost, well yeah, it was like, yes,
Speaker 4: you can complain that it was rigged against you. But
Speaker 4: you should have known that going in, if you were
Speaker 4: genuinely serious about taking power, you had to know that,
Speaker 4: and you fucking didn't, And now your entire country has
Speaker 4: been absolutely destroyed. So that's the UK, and we're going down.
Speaker 4: And so from there we're going to pivot to Latin America,
Speaker 4: where there is a very very long history. In fact,
Speaker 4: a lot of the Latin America parties we'll be talking
Speaker 4: about mostly aren't even parties that took over from the
Speaker 4: momentum of twenty eleven like uprisings. They're from like the
Speaker 4: two thousand and one movements, people who hijacked like two
Speaker 4: generations back of social movements by this point.
Speaker 1: And I think that the post twenty eleven stuff was
Speaker 1: inspired by the pink wave stuff in Latin America, right,
Speaker 1: like it goes around in the circle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So so now we're going to check in on
Speaker 4: how the pink tide's doing. The answer is absolutely dog shit.
Speaker 4: So we're gonna go to Ecuador first. So, okay, Ecuador
Speaker 4: is right now a complete fucking disaster. It shouldn't be
Speaker 4: like this though. In theory, Correa is like the is
Speaker 4: the guy and he's like the leftist guy in Ecuador.
Speaker 4: He's like he is their guy who came out of
Speaker 4: the pink tide, and in theory, his party should win
Speaker 4: like basically every Ecuadorian election from now to the end
Speaker 4: of time. They should, in theory have the easiest job
Speaker 4: of like every every any electoralers we're talking about, in
Speaker 4: this party, they have had. They had a decade in
Speaker 4: power to just completely destroy all of their political oppositions
Speaker 4: and you know, to completely rebuild the economy and political
Speaker 4: landshape in a way that would have made the right
Speaker 4: taking power impossible. Instead, his party is completely unelectable and
Speaker 4: have an out of power for eight fucking years. After
Speaker 4: Lennon Moreno, who is the guy that they literally the
Speaker 4: hand picked guy that they picked to run their own
Speaker 4: party purge them all, tried to have Correa arrested and
Speaker 4: spent the entire rest of his career being a right winger. Now,
Speaker 4: even after even after they got purged for their own
Speaker 4: party by the guy that they handpicked to put into
Speaker 4: power decks after they would turned out to be a
Speaker 4: right winger, even after that happened, they still should have
Speaker 4: been able to win like every fucking election. However, KMA
Speaker 4: Korea instead of like doing normal leftist stuff, spent like
Speaker 4: his entire career sending riot police to beat the shit
Speaker 4: out of the digitus eychological protesters who didn't want them
Speaker 4: drinking water to be poisoned by minds, which means there
Speaker 4: were a huge number of like indigenous leftists who should
Speaker 4: be part of like the left wing base, who Wilma,
Speaker 4: under any circumstances vote for Korea even if he was
Speaker 4: running against literally the devil, because he fucking beat the
Speaker 4: shit out of them, like fuck you like and you know,
Speaker 4: and this one I should briefly explain, like, Okay, this
Speaker 4: is this is obviously a very very simplified this is yes,
Speaker 4: a political I mean, I'm gonna do a political compass
Speaker 4: thing that's very simplified, but I think gets across one
Speaker 4: of the major kind of like breaks in a lot
Speaker 4: of Latin American countries that have real lefts and also
Speaker 4: whose economies are largely based on resource extraction, which is
Speaker 4: that Okay, so you know, you have you have your
Speaker 4: kind of political compass like you would in the US,
Speaker 4: you have a let you have a left right axis,
Speaker 4: but in a lot of these countries, the updown access
Speaker 4: isn't like statist anti status. The updown access is on
Speaker 4: the one hand you have like developmental extractivists and on
Speaker 4: the other hand you have ecological anti extractivists.
Speaker 1: So what this means in.
Speaker 4: Practice is there's this giant divide over whether or not
Speaker 4: you should do drilling on indigenous land. So for example,
Speaker 4: you have the current right wing Ecuadorian government which is
Speaker 4: extractivist in right wing, and this means they think you
Speaker 4: should drill on indigenous land and you should take all
Speaker 4: of the money you get from that and give it
Speaker 4: the rich people. There is you know, Korea's government was
Speaker 4: extractivist and left wing, which means that you know, you
Speaker 4: you do, you do all the mining on indigenous land,
Speaker 4: then you take the money and you give it to
Speaker 4: a welfare state. And then opposed to him was a
Speaker 4: bunch of anti extractivists, indigenous ecological groups who want redistribution,
Speaker 4: but they don't want like they don't want people poisoning
Speaker 4: their water with minds, so they oppost Korea because they
Speaker 4: don't want their shit mind And then there's also Krea
Speaker 4: is also opposed by these like liberal environmental NGOs who
Speaker 4: like don't want the Amazon destroyed, but also like poor
Speaker 4: people can go fuck themselves. And this this has made
Speaker 4: the way the consolation of these things have worked out
Speaker 4: means that like that what should be like a pretty
Speaker 4: normal left right political alignment thing has gone completely nuts.
Speaker 4: There's a bunch of like there's a bunch of sort
Speaker 4: of like econological indigenous groups who have gone hard, who
Speaker 4: have like swung right because the right wingers are the
Speaker 4: only people who will support them against Korea. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 4: actual like indigenous electoral opposition in his various forms is
Speaker 4: a complete fucking disaster. Patrick Cutik, which is like the
Speaker 4: this is the like the big sort of like indigenous
Speaker 4: electoral alliance. They keep running this guy named yaku Perez,
Speaker 4: who is like he's like the only person in the
Speaker 4: entirety of Ecuador who's more unelectable than Korea. Is like
Speaker 4: nobody fucking even even the additions opposition to Korea like
Speaker 4: doesn't like him. So and and then you know, eventually
Speaker 4: Jakuperez like left the party, but it doesn't really matter
Speaker 4: because they still just lose every single election. The the
Speaker 4: left just there's completely dysfunctional, and you know there's there's
Speaker 4: other like things going on here. Too, which is that like,
Speaker 4: for example, Korea is like has an unbelievably hardline anti
Speaker 4: abortion stance, Like he he threatened to resign if his
Speaker 4: party tried to pass legislation that would allow abortion in
Speaker 4: the case of rape. Like that's how anti abortioned this
Speaker 4: guy is. Fucking that's bad. This is like like, okay, yes,
Speaker 4: this is this is this is a very very Catholic country, right.
Speaker 1: Even by that standards, that's fucking nuts, Like yeah, Jesus Christ, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's rough. You know.
Speaker 4: So the product of this is that a a country
Speaker 4: that has a like a decently centered left electoral like
Speaker 4: electorate in theory.
Speaker 1: Has produced three straight conservative governments.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 4: These governments have absolutely annihilated the Ecuadorian economy and the
Speaker 4: welfare state and left it prey to like to organize crime.
Speaker 4: Who you know, unlike the just completely dysfunctional electorian state
Speaker 4: can at least provide like a semi stable income. But
Speaker 4: the downside of this is that they're organized crime, so
Speaker 4: you know, not things going very badly. You've probably seen
Speaker 4: some of the like absolutely wild videos of stuff of
Speaker 4: like people storming like like armed groups just like storming
Speaker 4: like TV stations. They assassinate. They'vessassinated actually several presidential candidates.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, that was it's been there on a wild one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's really bad. On Christmas Eve, if I was
Speaker 1: talking to a family from Ecuador who's gone to the
Speaker 1: US to get some medical treatment for the son who
Speaker 1: very manifestly needed help, and they were telling me like
Speaker 1: just of their life experiences and like it was bad.
Speaker 1: It was like I've been to some places where violence
Speaker 1: it happens, and like the stuff that they were telling
Speaker 1: me was shocking.
Speaker 4: It's gotten really, really bad since basically between twenty fifteen
Speaker 4: and twenty seventeen, and it's just progressively gotten worse. As
Speaker 4: He's right, when governments have stayed in power, and you know,
Speaker 4: right now, right now, there hasn't been an alternative to
Speaker 4: them because the electoralists toured again. The people who are
Speaker 4: supposed to be serious about taking power are just a
Speaker 4: complete fucking disaster and can't do anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Career can't literally can't go back to Ecuador now, right,
Speaker 1: I think he might be. I think he can go back.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 4: There was a while where there was a war and
Speaker 4: out for his arrest. I think he's back now, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: but the ray.
Speaker 1: Of lighte for ecuadors.
Speaker 4: The Ecuador still has a lot of very like of
Speaker 4: very militant street movement who have been winning, have actually
Speaker 4: been like winning concessions from governments when they go when
Speaker 4: they go into the streets. So that's good inter law.
Speaker 4: One day the electorals get the fuck out of their
Speaker 4: way and they win. But hasn't happened yet. Things are
Speaker 4: really bleak. On that note. Do you know what's not really.
Speaker 1: Bleak the possibility of buying gold coins. Yeah, to insulate
Speaker 1: ourselves against inflation. Yep. You'd be stoked if you had
Speaker 1: a ton of gold, neck kudo, wouldn't you? Currency has
Speaker 1: gone to ship sitting on your pile of gold like
Speaker 1: Scrooge McDuck, you'd be you'd be living the dream.
Speaker 4: All right, And we're back. So all right, we're gonna
Speaker 4: take a couple of other take a few other places
Speaker 4: that the electoral left has won in uh Chavismo is
Speaker 4: dead as door nail. Maduro's slashing pensions, alarizing the economies,
Speaker 4: cutting a bunch of deals with American oil companies, and
Speaker 4: has arrested leadership the Venezuelan Commnist Party again.
Speaker 1: Keeps doing this.
Speaker 4: So, you know, things things going great, like obviously not
Speaker 4: helped by the blockade, which is very bad, but like,
Speaker 4: you know, not great Marina, which we're not going to
Speaker 4: talk an enormous At some point we're gonna like actually
Speaker 4: do a thing like actually go talk to the Zapatistas.
Speaker 4: But things are not good there right now. So the
Speaker 4: left in theory kind of has taken power in Mexico. Unfortunately,
Speaker 4: the moment they took power, they immediately tacked right, handed
Speaker 4: control of vast swaths of the country over to the military,
Speaker 4: built a train through a bunch of indigenous land and
Speaker 4: then gave that to the military.
Speaker 1: Yeah, switched to a bunch of military come ons around
Speaker 1: because they like claimed that the old guys were corrupt.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And then you know, and one of the other
Speaker 4: things that is really bleak about it was that, like
Speaker 4: the whole premise of Omlo like coming into power was
Speaker 4: like he ran in the campaign hugs not bullets, right,
Speaker 4: His whole thing was he was supposed to be ending
Speaker 4: the war on drugs.
Speaker 1: Did he end the war on drugs? Absolutely? Not of
Speaker 1: power to the military. People still getting fucking slaughtered. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I definitely saw a bunch of dudes
Speaker 1: in ski mask with a fifty cow chilling just the
Speaker 1: other side of the border, yeah, by the government two
Speaker 1: days ago.
Speaker 4: And and and instead of doing that, he's also been
Speaker 4: like continuing to like escalating the war against his appatistas
Speaker 4: who have been getting just like people getting fucking murdered
Speaker 4: by a bunch of these government backed para militaries. It's
Speaker 4: really fucking bleak out.
Speaker 1: There right now.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that that that's been, that's been.
Speaker 4: The legacy of Omlo finally winning a Mexican election is
Speaker 4: the most bright winging possible. Omlo governments, like I will
Speaker 4: say they're better on trans stuff than everyone, like the
Speaker 4: other parties who were all completely nuts, but that's about
Speaker 4: the only bright spot.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, like they were in bilfteral negotiations with
Speaker 1: the US, and like when the US clicked its fingers
Speaker 1: and said shut down these gaps in the border, they
Speaker 1: sent a bunch of National guards. So I'll just to
Speaker 1: sit right at the gap in the border war.
Speaker 4: They've been They been doing a bunch of just like
Speaker 4: horrific anti border shit. Imil was also just like pretty
Speaker 4: friendly with Trump, which.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a populist thing there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that fucking sucks. And so we're going to
Speaker 4: close on the maas Oh boy. So there's been a
Speaker 4: bunch of stuff happening in Bolivia that I don't I
Speaker 4: don't think most Americans have heard much about. So the
Speaker 4: Maasment movement for socialism, there's some other shit, but yeah,
Speaker 4: they are well okay, So for most of the time
Speaker 4: they've existed, it's been even more Alse's party. However, Comma
Speaker 4: it was always kind of a weird coalition because the
Speaker 4: MAS is this coalition between like the social movements, and
Speaker 4: in this context, like people say social movements, this includes
Speaker 4: like you know, like giant like movement groups, but also
Speaker 4: like unions and stuff. So it was a coalition of
Speaker 4: these unions and these like developmentalist capitalists who are well
Speaker 4: together by evil morallies and some of his allies, and
Speaker 4: you know, the sort of common ground of forging a
Speaker 4: like quote unquote indigenous Florid national state that's based on
Speaker 4: like based on forging a welfare state, based on like
Speaker 4: mining and extractive stuff and like oil drilling and stuff,
Speaker 4: and also based on the emersions of this new sort
Speaker 4: of indigenous middle class. Right now, it has split in
Speaker 4: two between an Evil Morales faction and who was the
Speaker 4: foreign president, was president for a very very long time,
Speaker 4: and Luis Octre, who was the who is the current
Speaker 4: president Oblivia, but has been kicked out of the MS
Speaker 4: by EVO and his faction.
Speaker 1: So this is a disaster.
Speaker 4: They both of them, both Okra and Evil Morales, have
Speaker 4: these they have a lot of personal alliances within the
Speaker 4: social movements, and this means it's been a very very
Speaker 4: messy split.
Speaker 1: And you know, this is not okay.
Speaker 4: If you look at these two people, you would expect
Speaker 4: it to be an ideological split because acres from like
Speaker 4: the developmentalist right of the party. Like he was he
Speaker 4: was a banker, he's been in charge of the Bolivian
Speaker 4: Central Bank for a long time. He was like finance minister,
Speaker 4: so he's from like the center right, like developmentalist faction
Speaker 4: of the party. Evo technically speaking, has been the representative
Speaker 4: of like the the sort of like the social movement
Speaker 4: faction of the party. He has a lot of allies
Speaker 4: in a lot of coca growers union stuff like that.
Speaker 4: But it hasn't broken like that because this isn't an
Speaker 4: ideological fight. This is just these two guys, both want
Speaker 4: to be presidents and so they've they've literally torn the
Speaker 4: entire Bolivian left in two over over this fucking bullshit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, never before happened on the left. Two dudes wanting
Speaker 1: to be in charge.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is this has been really really messy,
Speaker 4: and it's not breaking down the way. It's not breaking
Speaker 4: cleanly politically down because there's a lot of like people
Speaker 4: from the anti extractivist left of the party who are
Speaker 4: pissed off of the way that EVO has like personally
Speaker 4: tried to seize control of what are supposed to be
Speaker 4: independent social movements. And I know people hear that and
Speaker 4: are like, wait, what's what's the problem with like social
Speaker 4: movements being integrated with the state, because like we don't.
Speaker 4: The US doesn't have social movements, like not not in
Speaker 4: the way that like that Latin America has them. Like
Speaker 4: DLM is the closest thing that we have to that.
Speaker 4: But imagine if like BLM was like an actual leftist group,
Speaker 4: like the actual like organization Black Lives Matter, Yeah, like
Speaker 4: capitalism Yeah, yeah, it was like it was like it
Speaker 4: was like a leftist group that would like lead protests
Speaker 4: and strikes and ship like we do. We don't have that.
Speaker 4: That's like not a thing here, and so mostly when
Speaker 4: when people hear about the stuff, they're like, wait, what
Speaker 4: what does that mean? Like why why are we com
Speaker 4: planning that like these that social movements are being like
Speaker 4: folded into the state or like folded into this bureaucratic apparatus.
Speaker 4: So I'm gonna run through an example of what that
Speaker 4: looks like in practice. So we're gonna we're gonna talk
Speaker 4: about the could briefly talk about the Confederation of Indigenous
Speaker 4: Peoples of Bolivia.
Speaker 1: So yeah, based, yeah, so we follow flag.
Speaker 4: I didn't have anything in there on it. It is
Speaker 4: very funny, given given what we're about to talk about.
Speaker 4: It is very funny that all of the pro am
Speaker 4: as people in in in the US had that as
Speaker 4: their flag, as like they had that flag as their
Speaker 4: profile picture when this coup was going on.
Speaker 1: It's one of the cool oft flags out there. It rips,
Speaker 1: it does rip.
Speaker 4: So so back in twenty eleven, this is like, this
Speaker 4: is like eight years before the coup, the Confederation of
Speaker 4: Indigenous People of Bolivia opposed building this road through projected
Speaker 4: indigenous territory that the government was trying to force through.
Speaker 4: So they opposed it. Their opposition didn't do anything. They
Speaker 4: you know, they joined in this enormous protest movement against
Speaker 4: this road construction, even when his supporters had the confederation's
Speaker 4: offices stormed by riot police and tried to replace his
Speaker 4: leadership with loyalists. This failed initially, and the you know,
Speaker 4: so the the Confederation of Indigenous People's Oblivia had been
Speaker 4: part of the like of the mas's like formal alliance,
Speaker 4: right and after that they were like fuck you man,
Speaker 4: we're out.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: They left, and then the confederation split between the groups
Speaker 4: who were pro EVO and everyone else. So another faction
Speaker 4: of the confederation split from the regular confederation and went
Speaker 4: back and joined and calling themselves the same thing, and
Speaker 4: went back and joined the MS again. So like this
Speaker 4: is a shit show, right, and a lot of it
Speaker 4: is like you know, it's it's it's comes down to
Speaker 4: these sort of like loyalty testings, like are you willing
Speaker 4: to back every single thing that EVO wants to do
Speaker 4: And if you're not, like they're going to their faction.
Speaker 4: And this is the thing that like this happens in
Speaker 4: the fucking DSA all the time, right, Like everyone in
Speaker 4: the DSA is constantly trying to purge every other faction
Speaker 4: to install their loyalists, like in charge of whatever fucking
Speaker 4: working group. Right, but you know this is happening in
Speaker 4: a place where the left actually has power, which means
Speaker 4: that instead of like you know a series of weird
Speaker 4: elections and like purging people from positions, you're storming their
Speaker 4: offices of riot police. Yeah, this is why a lot
Speaker 4: of sort of groups so you would expect to be
Speaker 4: backing evil Art and are backing Okra instead. But really, truly,
Speaker 4: this is just two guys having a Dick Waven contest.
Speaker 4: By this is what happens when you do electoralism. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but you know it's also worth mentioning the reason we're
Speaker 4: in this situation in the first place is that Evo
Speaker 4: refused to, just like in twenty nineteen, refuse to just
Speaker 4: let someone else in his party run, Like if literally
Speaker 4: anyone else had run, the MAAS would have just trivially
Speaker 4: easily won the election. There wouldn't have been a coup,
Speaker 4: it wouldn't have even been the potential to do one.
Speaker 4: But he refused because he wants to personally be in power,
Speaker 4: and this is what allows the twenty nineteen coup to happen.
Speaker 4: And the second, the second reason that we're here now
Speaker 4: is that in twenty twenty one, and I.
Speaker 1: Don't think I don't think most American left is like
Speaker 1: know about this. I think people know about the coup.
Speaker 4: I don't think people know about the stuff that happened
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty one, which is that there was this
Speaker 4: massive series of there was this massive series of like
Speaker 4: barricades that went up to bring down the coup government.
Speaker 4: So this is the thing that happens periodically in Bolivia.
Speaker 4: This is like, this is how the social movements took
Speaker 4: power in the first place, is that they you know, Bolivia,
Speaker 4: because of the way the terrain works, very very mountainous country,
Speaker 4: very narrow roads, not many roads into a place.
Speaker 1: You could just block all of the roads.
Speaker 4: That go into the capitol, and you can you can
Speaker 4: shut down the entire country's economy by just doing these roadblocks.
Speaker 4: They very nearly this is actually like again the origin
Speaker 4: of the NIS is that they very nearly like completely
Speaker 4: destroyed the belief in government with this in two thousand
Speaker 4: and six, and then Evo pulled his people off the
Speaker 4: barricades and was like, no, we're gonna do an election.
Speaker 4: He easily wins the election because he's you know, he's
Speaker 4: doing the things we've been talking about this whole episode,
Speaker 4: which is harnessing the power of the social movements in
Speaker 4: order to get elected. And it works, like he becomes president.
Speaker 4: But you know, in twenty twenty one, it happens again,
Speaker 4: and the these groups are getting very close. They've they've
Speaker 4: they've done enough damage that they forced the coup government
Speaker 4: to like actually have elections, which they didn't want to have.
Speaker 4: But they're on the verge of like actually knocking the
Speaker 4: government out of power. And Evo once again pulls all
Speaker 4: of his people off the barricades because he doesn't want
Speaker 4: the barricades to like disrupt his chance of winning the election.
Speaker 4: And so instead of like bringing down this government and
Speaker 4: like ushering in like sweeping like left ering reforms whatever
Speaker 4: on like the back of a revolutionary seizure of power,
Speaker 4: we have the Maas split between two dipshits. And yeah,
Speaker 4: these are these are very very serious about taking power.
Speaker 4: You can tell this because they've split the party over
Speaker 4: personal bullshit.
Speaker 1: Yeah every time, right, Like leaderism is the curse of
Speaker 1: the left, and it, yeah, it stops us doing things
Speaker 1: because it's always just dude chest some being each other.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and and and this is the second part about it,
Speaker 4: is that this is a product of leaving the streets.
Speaker 4: And we're gonna close on Chile. We did a very
Speaker 4: optimistic episode in the protests in Chile a couple of
Speaker 4: years ago because it looked like they were actually winning.
Speaker 4: That's not true anymore, after the whole Okay, so Chile
Speaker 4: and twenty nineteen has these massive, massive treat protests. They
Speaker 4: successfully forced the government to call a constitutional convention to
Speaker 4: like replace their Pinochet constitution. But that got everyone off
Speaker 4: the streets. And because it got anyone off the streets,
Speaker 4: both successive attempts to have a constitution have failed. It's
Speaker 4: deeply unclear what the fox had happened with the constitution. It's
Speaker 4: possible they're gonna end up with a constitution that is
Speaker 4: even more right wing than the current one because they've
Speaker 4: blown literally their moment of opportunity by pulling anyone out
Speaker 4: of the streets. And now the rights resurgence, it's a
Speaker 4: complete fiasco. Yeah, the repression of invidious people has continued
Speaker 4: unabated under the new quote unquote left wing government. So yeah,
Speaker 4: it's it's a complete fiasco. And that that is today's lesson,
Speaker 4: which is venue when when when people tell you that
Speaker 4: they are the ones who are serious about taking your
Speaker 4: wielding power and they want you to go vote for them.
Speaker 4: We have they have failed everywhere for a decade. Do
Speaker 4: not let them do this to you again. Don't leave
Speaker 4: the streets. Yeah, Instead, don't leave the streets. Don't give
Speaker 4: someone else fucking power, take it for yourself. That's that's, that's,
Speaker 4: that's all I've got.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good place to end, I think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't uh, don't infantilize yourself by electing some Instagram brick
Speaker 1: to make decisions for you.
Speaker 12: Welcome, Sie could happened here. I'm Andrew sach to the
Speaker 12: true channel Andraism and one of the last times I
Speaker 12: was on here I was discussed in political Colds, generally
Speaker 12: drawn from the work of Dennis Tourist and Tim Willforth
Speaker 12: in their book On the Edge Political Colts, and after
Speaker 12: we learned about the roller coaster emotional ride the individual's
Speaker 12: experience during cult recruitment, where their feelings and ideas are
Speaker 12: manipulated and they are drawn into an exclusive and isolating group,
Speaker 12: we explore the common techniques used by political cults, including
Speaker 12: creating rigid belief systems, immunity to falsification, authoritarianism, arbitrary leadership,
Speaker 12: deification of leaders, intense activism, and the use of loaded language.
Speaker 12: We also heed to the contradictory positions often held by
Speaker 12: members of political cults, so as advocating for liberty while
Speaker 12: supporting totalitarianism, believe in equality alongside late leaders, accumulating privileges,
Speaker 12: promoting sexual morality while exploiting members, and demanding free speech
Speaker 12: rights while suppressing dissent within the group. And we also
Speaker 12: examined Robert Lifton's eight conditions that indicate the presence of
Speaker 12: ideological totalism within cults, which include miliu control, mystical manipulation,
Speaker 12: the demand for purity, the cult of confession, the sacred science, loading,
Speaker 12: the language, doctrine of a person, and it is by
Speaker 12: civil existence. If you want the details on all of that,
Speaker 12: you can check out the first episode in Political Cult series,
Speaker 12: or you could pick up the book on political cults yourself.
Speaker 12: As I said on the Edge Political Cults Left and
Speaker 12: Right by Dennis Turish and Tim Wolforth, I also had
Speaker 12: an episode where I spoke about the Trotskyist turned right
Speaker 12: wing cult of Lyndon Laroche, which was primarily based in
Speaker 12: USA but today joined by Garrison. I want to take
Speaker 12: a look at the deadly cult that arose from the
Speaker 12: Japanese student movement, the United Red Army.
Speaker 1: Very exciting stuff.
Speaker 12: If my research for this episode, I looked at dead
Speaker 12: Bodies and Living Guns by Yoshikuni Karashi, the Japanese Women's
Speaker 12: Liberation Movement, the United Red Army by set Sushiya Matsu,
Speaker 12: and Hijackers, Bombers and bank Robbers by Patricia G. Steinhoff.
Speaker 12: So let's get into it, and to do so, we're
Speaker 12: going to need some historical context, not necessarily as in
Speaker 12: depth as digging into the evolution of postwater pas, which
Speaker 12: is such a deep and complex period in history that
Speaker 12: it really deserves and has given special attention by historians
Speaker 12: that I have not the knowledge to buster. We do, however,
Speaker 12: need to take a look more specifically at what the
Speaker 12: conditions were like in the country in the late sixties
Speaker 12: and early seventies. After the war, Japan was transitioned into
Speaker 12: something of a liberal democracy with all of that entails.
Speaker 12: The US rolled in and occupied Japan and forced all
Speaker 12: these changes and reforms and so by the late sixties
Speaker 12: and seventies, you have post war children who were now
Speaker 12: adults and had gone through and witnessed these systems full
Speaker 12: his hand. They saw the limits of democracy and capitalism.
Speaker 12: Japanese society was firmly under the thumb of the US
Speaker 12: as well, which created its own grievances amongst population. The
Speaker 12: Japanese government had become a key supporter of US imperialism
Speaker 12: in the Cold War era. Both the Korean War and
Speaker 12: the Vietnam War were facilitated through the US's military bases
Speaker 12: in Japan, and the Japanese left did not like that
Speaker 12: at all. Naturally, in response, the state would crush them,
Speaker 12: as states are apt to do. When the Japanese were
Speaker 12: taken to the streets and solidarity, the state increased their surveillance, repression,
Speaker 12: and incarceration. Some on the Japanese left would come to
Speaker 12: see Japan as a police state with US back in,
Speaker 12: but that wasn't the left's only issue with Japanese society.
Speaker 12: Japan's economic success post war thanks to the US, had
Speaker 12: brought the establishment of a mass consumer society that gave
Speaker 12: the population, even in rural areas and among poor factory workers,
Speaker 12: greater access to information and consumer goods, and that ended
Speaker 12: up posing an issue for the left in Japan because
Speaker 12: many of the organizations were struggling to adjust to the
Speaker 12: shift in times. To quote Yoshikui Igarashi directly, the new
Speaker 12: left critique of post war society had long been too
Speaker 12: rigid to address the rapidly changing social conditions of Japan.
Speaker 12: Each person was complicit with the plaical and economic mechanisms
Speaker 12: that produced social injustice insofar as he or she took
Speaker 12: advantage of them. It was simply impossible to undo the
Speaker 12: effects of the system when many in society cherished their
Speaker 12: newly found agency as consumers. So the left in Japan
Speaker 12: was fixated on this very romanticized image of the ruggeted
Speaker 12: workers and not really engaging with what the workers themselves
Speaker 12: thought about and wanted to see transformed in their circumstances, Like, yeah,
Speaker 12: it's understandable that workers, despite being exploited, would also cling
Speaker 12: to some of the comforts they've gained even under those
Speaker 12: poor circumstances, And these left organizations weren't adequately engaging with that.
Speaker 12: They were engagement the fact that yeah, this poor factory
Speaker 12: workers poor and suffering, but they also appreciate the fact
Speaker 12: that they have access to all these new technologies and
Speaker 12: all this new entertainment media and all that stuff. They
Speaker 12: were still stuck in this very late nineteenth to early
Speaker 12: twentieth century of understanding. Yeah, so they were kind of
Speaker 12: ideologically stuck and disconnected. They had this one vision of
Speaker 12: the struggle and it wasn't really being updated with the
Speaker 12: changing times. So it's no surprise really what we're resulved
Speaker 12: from this late sixties status co. First, I think we
Speaker 12: should stop I understanding the various associations of Seki Gun,
Speaker 12: which is the Red Army. There were three major related
Speaker 12: groups under the label of Psekagoon that shared a very
Speaker 12: particular vision, to quote Britisher Gi stein Off. One, we
Speaker 12: have the original group led by Shiamita Kaya, which began
Speaker 12: as the Pseki gunha of a major student organization in
Speaker 12: nineteen sixty eight and dropped the K designation, becoming Psecic
Speaker 12: Gun sometime after it became independent in mid nineteen sixty nine. Nice. Two,
Speaker 12: you had a remnant of the original Psychicgoon, which in
Speaker 12: nineteen seventy one joined with another group to become Rengo
Speaker 12: Psaki Gun United Red Army and remember that because of
Speaker 12: the focus of today, and they became under the leadership
Speaker 12: of the Seka Gun head Mori Sunyo. And then three lastly,
Speaker 12: he had a group that developed in Lebanon beginning in
Speaker 12: nineteen seventy one under the leadership of Okidaira Takeshi and
Speaker 12: Psaki Gun member Chigaenaubu Fusako and formally broke with Rango Psycakun.
Speaker 12: And this group formally broke with Rango Zseka Gun the
Speaker 12: United Red Army in nineteen seventy two, they were called
Speaker 12: the Japanese Red Army. So you have the Red Army
Speaker 12: faction Psychic Gun her which dropped the high designation and
Speaker 12: became Psychic Gun, and you had a remnant from the
Speaker 12: original Psychic Gun which joined with another group to become
Speaker 12: Rango Psychagun the United Red Army. And then you had
Speaker 12: a group that broke away from the United Red Army
Speaker 12: and became the Japanese Red Army. Very classic Marxist Leninist
Speaker 12: party splating practices. So in the early days Psaki Guna
Speaker 12: the parent Revolutionary all of the later two groups beckoned
Speaker 12: Japan's brightest students, the children of many elites. And when
Speaker 12: I say elites, I mean these youths would have been
Speaker 12: regular degular academics, doctors, bureaucrats, and corporate careerists if not
Speaker 12: for them joining this organization, having passed their entrance exams,
Speaker 12: immersed in the anti mainstream culture of the universities at
Speaker 12: the time, they seize that freedom to create organizations against
Speaker 12: mainstream Japanese society. The Red Army Sekukuna had split from
Speaker 12: its parent group, a national student organization called the Communist League,
Speaker 12: informally bunned over a quote unresolvable policy dispute, and the
Speaker 12: bund itself had come out of the first major factionals
Speaker 12: split in nineteen fifty eight in the postwar Japanese national
Speaker 12: student organization known as Sengakuin, which was formed by folks
Speaker 12: who had been expelled from or left the Japanese Communist Party. So,
Speaker 12: just to bring out the speed, there you have the
Speaker 12: Japanese Communist Party, and then some people who were expelled
Speaker 12: from that party created their own organization known as Anger Couldn't,
Speaker 12: and then that zenger Kurdin organization split.
Speaker 3: Do you know what else could benefit from a split?
Speaker 3: Right now? It's this episode with this ad break.
Speaker 1: And we're back.
Speaker 12: One of the splits that came out to that was
Speaker 12: the Communist League, which we came known as the Bund,
Speaker 12: and the Bund had a split within it that boothed
Speaker 12: the Red Army, and the Red Army had its own splits.
Speaker 1: Yes, as.
Speaker 3: As all these groups love to do.
Speaker 12: Yes, let's of split it. And according to sign Off,
Speaker 12: Bund actually had a really remarkable history of internal factional splits.
Speaker 12: In fact, even for its own cohort is quite exceptional.
Speaker 12: That generated over fifty separate groups, in addition to Psychic,
Speaker 12: which had become Psychic Goon dropping the ha as I said,
Speaker 12: after it became independent from BOND in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 12: Again nice. And then after the split, Pecigo immediately copied
Speaker 12: the already outdated communist party setup that BUND had initially
Speaker 12: inherited from its own parent organization. I mean everything from
Speaker 12: the Central Committee to the Politbrew, to the Secretariat to
Speaker 12: the former representation from regional and local units, though a
Speaker 12: lot of these structures mainly existed on paper according to
Speaker 12: former members. So what was psechigoing doing well? The members
Speaker 12: were already experienced in orchestrating mass activities typical of the
Speaker 12: era's student movement. They excel in producing and disseminating political publications,
Speaker 12: organizing meetings, and coordinating street demonstrations, but eventually they realized
Speaker 12: this stuff just isn't working. They need something bolder. The
Speaker 12: group aimed for innovative action rather than organizational innovation, adopted
Speaker 12: the Red Army moncle and aligned themselves as soldiers within
Speaker 12: a loosely structured central committee. And despite being a legal
Speaker 12: entity in post war Japan, Sekigoon quickly found itself at
Speaker 12: art of the state due to its provocative intentions and actions.
Speaker 12: The group openly declared its intention to ecagie in legal
Speaker 12: activities no can upset whatsoever, triggering intense police surveillance and
Speaker 12: a confrontational relationship from the outset. Their journey transitions swiftly
Speaker 12: from public legal events to clandestine and unlawful activities such
Speaker 12: as weapon making, hijackings, bombings, weapon theft, and bank robberies,
Speaker 12: and with that unfamiliar territory came many mistakes and much realing.
Speaker 3: In so they went from having meetings and making the
Speaker 3: zines to doing other stuff. Is what I is, what
Speaker 3: I take it for translated to a modern politically active audience.
Speaker 12: They went from doing like peaceful protests, you know, peaceful marches,
Speaker 12: sit ins, that sort of thing, to like vankrobberies, embomments. Yeah,
Speaker 12: and on top of that, they really had the they
Speaker 12: had the inflated sense of self to grandiously label their
Speaker 12: attempted uprisings as the Tokyo War, the Osaker War. Sure, sure,
Speaker 12: Kyoto War. I mean the actions in a sense it
Speaker 12: is some urban guerrilla warfare that they might have been
Speaker 12: engaging in with some of these actions very glad to sign,
Speaker 12: very direct and violence and stuff, and there was a
Speaker 12: state response.
Speaker 3: A lot of a lot of like more of these
Speaker 3: like extremely violent militant insurrectory type can kind of get
Speaker 3: that inflated sense of what they're doing. And even though
Speaker 3: I don't think ted Kay is an insurructionist, but still
Speaker 3: it's it kind of it's like, did he think that
Speaker 3: blowing someone's fingers off every five years was going to
Speaker 3: trigger the collapse of industrial civilization? And you're like, maybe,
Speaker 3: maybe not, but that doesn't seem like a really great plan. Yeah,
Speaker 3: if you're just taking someone's fingers off, yet you think
Speaker 3: you're like the only one who's standing in the way
Speaker 3: between industrial society and the future of a desolate earth.
Speaker 3: But I don't know it. It is a complicated things
Speaker 3: some dives. Yeah, yeah, it's always hard to gauge the
Speaker 3: successfulness of your own actions.
Speaker 12: Indeed, indeed, but I mean in this case, I think
Speaker 12: we can't gauge the success because well, first of all,
Speaker 12: the actions of all eventually led to police raids, harassed
Speaker 12: in indictments. Sure, and also we could measure success based
Speaker 12: on the achievement of particular goals, and all of their
Speaker 12: attempted uprisings were made with the aim of global revolution
Speaker 12: based on Trotsky's ideas. Okay, yeah, So they were trying
Speaker 12: to build an army that would not only lead in
Speaker 12: revolution in Japan but also eid in revolutionary activities worldwide.
Speaker 12: So some of their members even sought support and training
Speaker 12: from groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Speaker 12: Palestine huh Yeah. And eventually they tried to organize guerrilla
Speaker 12: training with intent to attack the Prime Minister's residents, but
Speaker 12: a police raid foiled their plans and arrested fifty three
Speaker 12: of their members, which led to the core of the
Speaker 12: organization psychagun to go underground. And then while they were underground,
Speaker 12: their style of organization had to evolve. Initially they resembled
Speaker 12: the sort of cumbersome bureaucracy of a communist party, but
Speaker 12: eventually they reinvented themselves to become similar rather to the
Speaker 12: Japanese managerial styles of the time period. In short, because
Speaker 12: I'm really trying to get to the juicy bits of
Speaker 12: what was happening, the communication who so they faced Due
Speaker 12: to that underground police surveillance led to a sophisticated telephone
Speaker 12: network managed by Lea's wives and girlfriends. Organizational decision making
Speaker 12: went from ecalitian debates to hierarchical orders, and after any
Speaker 12: activities they engage in evaluations so like quarterly reports and
Speaker 12: like a corporate office, to refine their approach for next time.
Speaker 12: So given all that history and context, what happens next
Speaker 12: relation be all too surprising. In December nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 12: the few remaining not arrested or dead members of Psakagun's
Speaker 12: underground Army joined forces with another group in a similar
Speaker 12: situation called Kakome Saha or Revolutionary Left, to form the
Speaker 12: United Red Army aka Rengo Sekigun, which established themselves in
Speaker 12: a remote cabin in the Japanese Alps in the dead
Speaker 12: of winter in Guma Prefecture and tried to work out
Speaker 12: the ideological and organizational differences that came from uniting the
Speaker 12: two organizations. The new group was led by the Red
Speaker 12: Mani faction leader Sunyo Muri and second in commanded by
Speaker 12: Heroku Nagata, the leader of the Revolutionary Left. And quick,
Speaker 12: quick digression, it's actually a big deal. Nagata was a woman,
Speaker 12: and that was sort of a win in a sense.
Speaker 12: I mean a win, not in a broader sense, probably
Speaker 12: not a win considering what happens next, but a win
Speaker 12: in the sense that at the time there was a
Speaker 12: big issue with the Japanese New Left and its patriarchal nature,
Speaker 12: where women typically only had any kind of say or
Speaker 12: authority in relation to their male partners. So it was
Speaker 12: kind of nice to see Nagata get elevated to a
Speaker 12: position where she didn't have to be connected to a
Speaker 12: male figure in the movement in order to have any
Speaker 12: kind of say or any kind of political sway, of course,
Speaker 12: what she did with that say, what she did with
Speaker 12: that close way, was not all too hot, but yeah,
Speaker 12: I digress. Under the direction of Mari and Gelbasnagata, about
Speaker 12: twenty five United Red Army members underwent revolutionary training to
Speaker 12: prepare for armed struggle against the state. At this point, though,
Speaker 12: you have to wonder what exactly they were hoping to achieve.
Speaker 12: They weren't even connected any legism workers struggles in the country.
Speaker 12: They weren't organizing their communities. They has created these revolutionary
Speaker 12: cells where they would hold film to their rigid political
Speaker 12: aims and refuse to engage in reality. To quote Yoshikuni
Speaker 12: Igarashi directly, from the earliest days of the New Left,
Speaker 12: confrontations with the police were endowed with performative value. By
Speaker 12: taking the beatens of police batons on their heads and
Speaker 12: being sprayed with tea gas, Raleigh participants presented themselves both
Speaker 12: as victims of the state repressive power and as agents
Speaker 12: of resistance against it. However, by the early nineteen seventy
Speaker 12: it became obvious that their performances were not enough to
Speaker 12: break through the statuscope. It was also apparent that popular
Speaker 12: support for the movements had aoracious limit and was starting
Speaker 12: to wane. As new Left organizations began to see the
Speaker 12: futility of trying to build widespread support. The acts of
Speaker 12: violence lost their performative aspect. Rather than presenting themselves as
Speaker 12: both victims and agents of resistance as they had done before,
Speaker 12: many organizations, including the Red Army and the Revolutionary Left,
Speaker 12: began to escalate their violence. The activists engaged in this
Speaker 12: increasingly brutal struggle became a sort of self appointed revolutionary elite,
Speaker 12: a group that demanded of its members a stepped up
Speaker 12: bodily commitment in the form of an ever intensifying regimen
Speaker 12: of physical training and corporeal deprivation, and a willingness to
Speaker 12: die for the cause. The United Red Armies revolutionary struggles
Speaker 12: at the mountain Bases demonstrated the process through which violence
Speaker 12: came to dominate the lives of its members. At another
Speaker 12: point in the general article, he says that while the
Speaker 12: partomatic shift caused by Japan's high growth economy demanded a
Speaker 12: new theory and practice of political engagement, United Red Army
Speaker 12: members merely wish to undo the effects of economic development,
Speaker 12: literally seeking to establish a critical purchase outside of the
Speaker 12: existence system. Aspiring to transform themselves into a revolutionary elite,
Speaker 12: they physically distanced themselves in mountain bases while vole rising
Speaker 12: violence as a means to achieve alternative political conditions. Their
Speaker 12: two stage strategy of exiting and then striking back of
Speaker 12: the system, however, proved completely inadequate. At one point, early on,
Speaker 12: two members in this mountain cabin in the Japanese Alps
Speaker 12: decided that they wanted to piece out of the United
Speaker 12: Red Army probably go back to live in a normal life.
Speaker 12: So in retaliation, Nagata organized their assassination with the help
Speaker 12: of United Red Army members. Yeah, like, how dare you leave?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I mean, this whole Red Art saga is a really
Speaker 3: great example of how an extremely militant leftist force really
Speaker 3: really does mirror so many, so many cult dynamics. And
Speaker 3: like I I the stakes are high.
Speaker 1: I get it.
Speaker 3: Like you have a lot of like intense shared experiences
Speaker 3: with people, it can produce a whole bunch of emotional,
Speaker 3: volatile reactions. I'm sure what they all went through. I
Speaker 3: can I can barely even begin to understand with with
Speaker 3: my like with my background and more like a like
Speaker 3: anarchist instructionary action. But yeah, you know, it's the whole
Speaker 3: Hitman squad for whenever members like age out in their
Speaker 3: late twenties. This is certainly an interesting move.
Speaker 12: Indeed, and if I wasn't bad enough, it gets worse.
Speaker 12: So clearly, the fact that people want to leave means
Speaker 12: that the character of their members are not good enough.
Speaker 12: So the United Red Army wanted to improve the character
Speaker 12: of its members, so under Maury and Nagata's directives, they
Speaker 12: underwent a purge through a process of collective and individual
Speaker 12: self criticism. It's always self criticism of these people, so
Speaker 12: before long, self criticism became this sort of high stakes
Speaker 12: test of each member's revolutionary commitment, call into question everything
Speaker 12: from their engagement and romantic relationships to their appreciation of
Speaker 12: material possessions. Any such attachments were seen as evidence that
Speaker 12: these members were not committed enough to the cause. In fact,
Speaker 12: they were the worst thing you could possibly be, a
Speaker 12: counter revolutionary and then things got worse. So just to clarify,
Speaker 12: and this is according to Patricia G. Steinoff, who studied
Speaker 12: the organizational structure of these groups. When the United Red
Speaker 12: Army came together, they engaged in standard consensus decision making procedures,
Speaker 12: which is how they came into agreement that the members
Speaker 12: needed to be tough, fund into revolutionaries capable of fighting
Speaker 12: the police. But despite engagement and consensus from time to time.
Speaker 12: The organization was very strictly vertical. The central committee had
Speaker 12: a separate room from everyone else in the cabin and
Speaker 12: the internet conditions made it easier to stand out if
Speaker 12: you weren't cooperating with directives. To quote one section of
Speaker 12: the article, When the top leaders introduced violence in order
Speaker 12: to speed up the transformation of the weakest members, no
Speaker 12: one was able to confront leadership to stop it. Those
Speaker 12: who disagreed tended to use traditional Japanese methods of indirection,
Speaker 12: expressed in opposition by silence and withdrawal. And given the
Speaker 12: purpose of the group's activity and the expectation of full
Speaker 12: participation that is built into the ground rules of consensus
Speaker 12: decision making, silence and withdrawal were interpreted as unrevolutionary weakness
Speaker 12: and participating in violence against others were soon defined as
Speaker 12: evidence of one's own sincere commitment to become a better revolutionary.
Speaker 12: Those who failed to participate energetically in the violence against
Speaker 12: others became the next victims of the purge.
Speaker 1: Yeah that all makes perfect sense to me. Actually, yeah, I.
Speaker 12: When they deemed somebody to be a counter revolutionary, the
Speaker 12: others would be ordered to punish them through beatens, torture,
Speaker 12: and exposure to the elements without food or shelter. As
Speaker 12: you can imagine, people died. So when the first victims died,
Speaker 12: the leaders said that they had died of defeatism because
Speaker 12: they couldn't overcome their own weakness. Six weeks later, in
Speaker 12: February nineteen seventy two, twelve of the twenty five members
Speaker 12: were dead. One sign off points out that ironically, in
Speaker 12: between bouts of the purge, the United Red Army members
Speaker 12: were able to break into work groups and carry out
Speaker 12: tasks like building a new cabin, planning the next attack,
Speaker 12: and burying the bodies of the dead. Comrades watching that
Speaker 12: you like jump in between these pooge sessions and like
Speaker 12: building a cabin with your buds.
Speaker 3: Honestly, I don't doubt it. Like I this this all
Speaker 3: does make a sort of weird sense to me. Like
Speaker 3: I've seen I've seen radical groups kind of fall apart
Speaker 3: in not ways that lead to like mass purging, as
Speaker 3: in like murder, but I've seen groups fall apart in
Speaker 3: similar ways to this. You'll you'll have like a smaller
Speaker 3: insular click who tries to remain really active and like
Speaker 3: keep going and doing stuff while also spending all their
Speaker 3: extra time towards continually purifying their member base. Because once
Speaker 3: you once you start that like purification and process like,
Speaker 3: you can't stop. You have to keep the spotlight on
Speaker 3: someone else, so then it's not on you, Like you
Speaker 3: have to be proactive in constantly purifying the member group,
Speaker 3: or else someone's gonna set their target on you like
Speaker 3: it has. I can, I can totally see how this
Speaker 3: would have this would have gone down, and I think
Speaker 3: smaller versions of this still remain to be a massive
Speaker 3: problem among radical organization structures, even structures that claim to
Speaker 3: be horizontal, they still have like an insular a clique
Speaker 3: of like the people who are like the cool group,
Speaker 3: who's going to replicate a lot of these same things,
Speaker 3: And how even though it's not technically vertical in practice,
Speaker 3: they still are able to do a lot of these
Speaker 3: same like top down and overwriting decision making processes.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's it's And this is really what sort of
Speaker 12: motivated me to start to talk about political cults a
Speaker 12: bit more. I mean, not on reading the book, looking
Speaker 12: at this case and reading the book, because I really
Speaker 12: I want people to recognize that it's not like this
Speaker 12: strange out to this wild thing that could nevolative place
Speaker 12: in your postal life. Like it's very easy for any
Speaker 12: political organization to become a cult, and there's no ideology
Speaker 12: that's immune to that. And so through these case studies
Speaker 12: and through the breakdown to the various components and elements
Speaker 12: of cult cults and cult behavior, cult tactics, all people
Speaker 12: to be able to recognize the signs. Because what I
Speaker 12: really hate the most, and this is why I focused
Speaker 12: mostly on left wing cults not as much right wing cults,
Speaker 12: is to see people who have so much potential to
Speaker 12: contribute meaningfully to like revolutionary change, and then they just
Speaker 12: get all their energies redirected into self criticism sessions and
Speaker 12: purification rituals and revolutionary lop in.
Speaker 3: Let's take an ad break here and we'll be right
Speaker 3: back to continue talking about the body count of the
Speaker 3: Red Army.
Speaker 1: Okay, we are.
Speaker 12: Back, So twelve bodies dead and buried.
Speaker 3: But on the upside, they have a new cabin so true,
Speaker 3: come on, you know, it's it's a small price to pay.
Speaker 12: So eventually the leaders Maury and the Gata left, which
Speaker 12: gave each of the United Red Army members a chance
Speaker 12: to escape before they too succumbed to the fate of death.
Speaker 12: So I find really interesting is that all of them
Speaker 12: wanted to leave, but they didn't find it in themselves
Speaker 12: to leave until after the leadership left.
Speaker 3: They were all too scared of each other.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and so they want They took that opportunity to
Speaker 12: escape before they two died, and of course the police
Speaker 12: were hot on all of their tails. Mary and the
Speaker 12: Guta got arrested, and eventually there were only five members
Speaker 12: left and they were armed to the teeth. They ended
Speaker 12: up hiding in a mountain lodge and managed to capture
Speaker 12: a hostage, which was the wife of the owner of
Speaker 12: the mountain lodge, and Setsu Shigematsu described very succinctly what
Speaker 12: came next. Quote. Between nineteenth and twenty eighth of February,
Speaker 12: these five remaining members of the United Red Army held
Speaker 12: off over fifteen hundred riot police at the lodge, which
Speaker 12: was called Asama Sansu, and this armed standoff and hostage
Speaker 12: taken incident became an unprecedented television spectacle. Television news coverage
Speaker 12: of the incident began in nineteenth February, with hundreds of
Speaker 12: media staff on site to work the story. On the
Speaker 12: twenty eighth of February, continuous live televised news coverage lasted
Speaker 12: for ten hours and forty minutes. This constituted an unprecedented
Speaker 12: broadcasting event in Japan. This constituted an unprecedented broadcasting event
Speaker 12: in Japan's media history that has never been surpassed in
Speaker 12: terms of its duration and ratings. At the climax the
Speaker 12: police operation in twenty February, with eighty nine point seven
Speaker 12: percent view of ratings according to the National Broadcasting Corporation,
Speaker 12: almost the entire country was watching the same thing on TV.
Speaker 12: The United Red Army's form of smaller scale insurgency against
Speaker 12: the state was thus rendered hyper visible, and this drew
Speaker 12: unprecedented attention to this due left sect. So after the
Speaker 12: remaining members were captured, between the interrogations, media interviews and autobiographies,
Speaker 12: the whole of Japan and the world got to hear
Speaker 12: what really went on. Immediately after the hostage situation, Despite
Speaker 12: their rather fringe style, the United Red Army actually had
Speaker 12: some public sympathy until the truth of how bad things
Speaker 12: were came to light. They even made a movie about it.
Speaker 12: The news of the purge practically devastated not only the
Speaker 12: broader Secagoon organization, but also transformed the course of the
Speaker 12: radical left in Japan and beyond. Remember, they did have
Speaker 12: a branch in Lebanon, which thankfully did not make the
Speaker 12: same pursiing mistakes. Still, though many in Japan lost hope
Speaker 12: in revolution as a result of the publicity of those actions.
Speaker 12: Political activism had already been on a decline in the
Speaker 12: late sixties and early seventies, but the shock of the
Speaker 12: Purge was like a nail in the coffin. A lot
Speaker 12: of people literally distanced themselves from their own leftist movements
Speaker 12: because of how staggering that news was. The Purge literally
Speaker 12: purged leftism as a major force in Japanese society. And
Speaker 12: it's only recently, with writers like Gohaisato that Marxism has
Speaker 12: started to gain some attention again.
Speaker 3: And this is like around what this is like the
Speaker 3: are we like the sixties seventies?
Speaker 12: Yeah? Yeah, all this took place in the The Purge
Speaker 12: took place between December nineteen seventy one and February nineteen
Speaker 12: seventy two.
Speaker 3: Really really the last dying breath of the militant truskyeser.
Speaker 12: Yes, indeed, indeed, if we look at the techniques used
Speaker 12: by political cults, rigid belief systems check you know, immunity
Speaker 12: to falsification, check, authoritarianism, check, arbitrary leadership, check deification of leaders.
Speaker 12: Most likely out I didn't seeing the evidence of that specifically,
Speaker 12: I wouldn't be surprised. Intense activism, check, use of loaded language.
Speaker 12: I'm sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet.
Speaker 12: You see basically all of those tactics employed in this organization,
Speaker 12: and you just see the result of it. And I
Speaker 12: think it's stories ideas that need to be known so
Speaker 12: that such mistakes can be of in the future. So, yeah,
Speaker 12: that's the story of the Unit's Red Army. This has
Speaker 12: been it could happen here.
Speaker 3: It certainly could happen. No, I think it is a
Speaker 3: It is a really good example. Now it doesn't map
Speaker 3: on one to one because I don't think many many
Speaker 3: people are are doing exactly what the Red Army did
Speaker 3: in terms of their their style of militant struggle. But
Speaker 3: there's there's there's smaller scale versions, and there's still the
Speaker 3: kind of insular group dynamics, whether that's like just an
Speaker 3: affinity group, whether that's like a larger collective. I think
Speaker 3: there's a lot of a lot of lessons to learn
Speaker 3: from the Red Army, and it'd be wrong just to
Speaker 3: dismiss this whole example as being a little bit too
Speaker 3: far fetched or just like two different because it is.
Speaker 3: It is a really tragic story, and I feel like
Speaker 3: people could learn learn more from this than what they
Speaker 3: initially think.
Speaker 12: Indeed, I agree, So don't go out there and start
Speaker 12: to unite your Red Army folks, try and avoid that.
Speaker 3: If you want to build a CAVIN, you can do
Speaker 3: it without burying twelve of your friends anyway, Thank you,
Speaker 3: Thank you for that.
Speaker 12: And true the problem?
Speaker 3: Where can the fine listeners find you on the internet?
Speaker 12: YouTube dot com, slash andrewism and nowhere else own I
Speaker 12: guess also Patreon dot com slash saying true. But other
Speaker 12: than that, I can't be found on the internet. I
Speaker 12: don't exist.
Speaker 3: Good for you, Good for you, just like the Red
Speaker 3: Army who doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, Welcome back to It Could
Speaker 2: Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and coping
Speaker 2: with dystopia. And one of the first signs of our
Speaker 2: dystopia coming to be was the establishment of the TSA
Speaker 2: and the Department of Homeland Security more broadly. Obviously DHS
Speaker 2: much more problematic than just the TSA. We did a
Speaker 2: couple of episodes on them with Behind the Bastards back
Speaker 2: in the day. But you know, the TSA came to
Speaker 2: be right after nine to eleven, and both its establishment,
Speaker 2: you know, the seeming necessity of it, and the kind
Speaker 2: of impositions into personal privacy that it made commonplace. We're
Speaker 2: both harbingers of the very fucked up era we find
Speaker 2: ourselves in now. And the TSA is an interesting law
Speaker 2: enforcement agency to me from the perspective of a normal person.
Speaker 2: I think they're kind of the least objectionable of our
Speaker 2: federal law enforcement agencies, right They at least, I should say,
Speaker 2: of all of the cops that we have in this country,
Speaker 2: they're the ones you're least likely to have a serious
Speaker 2: problem with, right Like, they're not real cops in the
Speaker 2: way that most cops are. They don't like ticket or
Speaker 2: arrest you generally, unless you're one of the startling number
Speaker 2: of Americans who gets caught with a loaded handgun trying
Speaker 2: to go through airport security. Mostly, and I've flown way
Speaker 2: more often than I want to remember, mostly My experience
Speaker 2: with TSA agents is they check your ID, you know,
Speaker 2: they stare at an X ray machine where your shit
Speaker 2: goes through it. Sometimes they alert and swab some stuff.
Speaker 2: But you know, for me, it's usually not that big
Speaker 2: a deal. For most people, I know, it's not that
Speaker 2: big a deal. Obviously, you know, the degree to which
Speaker 2: it's a problem is going to vary widely depending on
Speaker 2: whether or not you're a white dude. But that said,
Speaker 2: still less potential for things going horribly violently wrong and
Speaker 2: with a lot of police interactions. So I'll give them that.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting to me that kind of given this fact,
Speaker 2: the TSA is so hated, not by I think most Americans.
Speaker 2: I think we're all kind of frustrated by them. We know,
Speaker 2: you know, they're not great at their jobs. They get
Speaker 2: caught in tests, letting shit through all the time. It's
Speaker 2: kind of a pain in the butt. But there's a
Speaker 2: chunk of Americans who fucking hate the TSA, and they
Speaker 2: hate it because of how invasive it is. And it's
Speaker 2: a little weird if you're a regular person, because going
Speaker 2: through airport security is still less invasive than like applying
Speaker 2: for an apartment, which a lot of people do more
Speaker 2: regularly than they fly, or taking a trip to the DMV,
Speaker 2: which again a lot of people do more regularly than
Speaker 2: they fly. But people, you know, with money, upper middle
Speaker 2: class and rich people, that's where you really get most
Speaker 2: of the hate from the TSA. Now, obviously there's some
Speaker 2: from principled libertarians, and I tend to think they have
Speaker 2: a point there, but there's a lot of people who
Speaker 2: really hate the TSA specifically because it's kind of the
Speaker 2: only law enforcement friction they deal with on a day
Speaker 2: to day basis. You know, they live in a neighborhood
Speaker 2: where they're not getting pulled over. You know, the cops
Speaker 2: their job is not to fuck with with the people
Speaker 2: who have money. So the only time they're going to
Speaker 2: get padded down and deal with that thing that is
Speaker 2: a pretty common experience for Americans and a lot of
Speaker 2: cities is when they go through the airport when they fly,
Speaker 2: and they also fly often because they have more money.
Speaker 2: So I find myself in this interesting position when reporting
Speaker 2: on the TSA, of there's real abuses there, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of real threats there. The fact that they do
Speaker 2: get so much up in our business and that we've normalized,
Speaker 2: it is an issue, and at the same time, like
Speaker 2: I always know when I do something like this, the
Speaker 2: people who get angriest about whatever I write about the
Speaker 2: TSA are going to be the worst pieces of shit
Speaker 2: in the country. So it's a fun balancing act.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Obviously, as I'm trying not to gloss over, there are
Speaker 2: some really good reasons to be pissed at the TSA,
Speaker 2: like this twenty fifteen story from Denver of several agents
Speaker 2: who were caught running a groping scam. Basically, one female
Speaker 2: crew member would point out the men that she found attractive,
Speaker 2: and a colleague would signal that person out for a
Speaker 2: pat down, and they basically say, like, oh, it's alerting
Speaker 2: something around your growing or inner thighs, so that like
Speaker 2: she could bottle them. Essentially, Now these people got fired.
Speaker 2: The TSA went after them when they got caught, but
Speaker 2: who knows how many people they groped in the interim period.
Speaker 2: Video in twenty twenty three caught TSA agents at Miami
Speaker 2: International Airport stealing from passenger bags in the security lines.
Speaker 2: There's like footage of it. Obviously, the people who do
Speaker 2: this are going to be very, very stupid, because, like
Speaker 2: you know is a TSA agent. There's cameras all over
Speaker 2: the place. You're in the fucking TSA, and the video
Speaker 2: is just this guy like reaching his hand into a
Speaker 2: bag pulling out cash. It's not hard to find headlines
Speaker 2: that are similar, though, going back about as long as
Speaker 2: the TSA has existed, what interests me more are the
Speaker 2: massive violations of privacy and the potential involvement the TSA
Speaker 2: and their normalization of those invasions of privacy has in
Speaker 2: the expansion of the surveillance state. So this year at
Speaker 2: CEES twenty twenty four, when we found out the TSA
Speaker 2: had a booth and they were there to talk about
Speaker 2: their new facial recognition scanners, Garrison and I had to
Speaker 2: go check it out, and the interview that we conducted
Speaker 2: is going to kind of be the heart of this episode,
Speaker 2: but I wanted to get over a little bit more
Speaker 2: of a preamble first. So the TSA started testing facial
Speaker 2: recognition scanners on a voluntary basis at sixteen domestic airports,
Speaker 2: and I think twenty twenty two they expanded it to
Speaker 2: twenty five airports or so last year twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: they are in twenty seven now, according to what we
Speaker 2: were told by a representative, and the goal is for
Speaker 2: this technology to go nationwide. Obviously, not everyone is thrilled
Speaker 2: with that idea. And I'm going to quote from a
Speaker 2: June twenty twenty three article on CBS News. Five US
Speaker 2: senators sent a letter demanding the TSA halt the program.
Speaker 2: You don't have to compromise people's biometric security in order
Speaker 2: to provide physical security at airports, said Senator ed Marky Pokowski,
Speaker 2: who is the TSA representative, says he agrees with senators
Speaker 2: and that he wants to protect privacy for every passenger.
Speaker 2: I want to deploy technology that's accurate and doesn't disadvantage anybody.
Speaker 2: Privacy advocates worry about the lack of regulations around facial
Speaker 2: recognition and its tendency to be less accurate with people
Speaker 2: of color. Most images are deleted after use, but some
Speaker 2: information is encrypted and retained for up to twenty four
Speaker 2: months as part of the ongoing review of how the
Speaker 2: technology performs. What's left out of that article is that
Speaker 2: the TSA is also allowed to maintain biometric data taken
Speaker 2: from non citizens, people entering the country from foreign countries, migrants,
Speaker 2: and the like, and they're able to keep that and
Speaker 2: share it. It's kind of unclear the extent of that,
Speaker 2: but they're not bound by the same rules with those
Speaker 2: people that they are for citizens. And there are other
Speaker 2: issues as well, as we'll get into. So Garrison and
Speaker 2: I were with excited to have a chance to chat
Speaker 2: with a TSA representative. This guy was less excited to
Speaker 2: see us, and we will get into that story, but
Speaker 2: before we do, it's time foreign ad break and we're back.
Speaker 2: So Garrison and I show up at the CES booth
Speaker 2: and it's kind of a small one. You might imagine
Speaker 2: it's about the size of like three normal office cubicles.
Speaker 2: Maybe there's a couple of tables. There's like a little
Speaker 2: podium thing in the front that's got their logo on it.
Speaker 2: They have some stickers, including one that's like it's like,
Speaker 2: peanut butter is a liquid and it's a cartoon of
Speaker 2: peanut butter, which I was informed when I commented on
Speaker 2: it by one of the TSA people that yes, peanut
Speaker 2: butter is a liquid, which is one of those things
Speaker 2: that it's both absurd and also like, well, actually, I
Speaker 2: don't know how else you'd categorize peanut butter if you're
Speaker 2: the TSA, so I guess it's something.
Speaker 6: I can't have much of an issue with cream. But
Speaker 6: is a cream different from a liquid?
Speaker 2: I don't know. That's for the philosophers to decide. So
Speaker 2: Garrison and I come up to this booth and there's
Speaker 2: a guy standing behind the pode. I mean, the way
Speaker 2: stuff works at CEES is you have generally a mix
Speaker 2: of actual officers from the company. Sometimes it'll be like
Speaker 2: a CEO or an executive in the case of a
Speaker 2: smaller company. Other times it'll be regular employees or like
Speaker 2: engineers and stuff who can answer technical questions, and then
Speaker 2: a bunch of Most of the people that you talk
Speaker 2: to are like PR reps. I don't know who the
Speaker 2: guy was that was at the booth when we first
Speaker 2: showed up, because as soon as we said we wanted
Speaker 2: to talk about their facial recognition cameras, he saw we
Speaker 2: were media and he instantly did the PR equivalent of
Speaker 2: throwing his buddy on a grenade. He like backed off,
Speaker 2: He was like, let me get something for you. He
Speaker 2: pulled his coworker over and then he fucking vanished. And
Speaker 2: I'm going to play you a little bit of audio
Speaker 2: of that, we're interested in what you have here in
Speaker 2: terms of facial recognition.
Speaker 1: It's the cat too right over there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, what are you saying, because I know
Speaker 6: right now, like if you've got pre check or oh gosh,
Speaker 6: what's the other one? The independent company that we I'm
Speaker 6: on a live interview now, I thought, so, I mean
Speaker 6: we came up to ask to talk to a TSA.
Speaker 7: Okay, sure, yeah, sure, hang on just a second.
Speaker 2: So the guy we found ourselves in front of was
Speaker 2: our Carter Langston, who is actually the Press secretary of
Speaker 2: the TSA, and by god, I don't know if I've
Speaker 2: ever seen a man less happy to see me. Eventually
Speaker 2: we started talking, and I have to give Carter credit
Speaker 2: for professionalism. His eyes said I despise you both on principle,
Speaker 2: and I am enraged to be doing this, but his
Speaker 2: voice remained calm, even and his responses were to be
Speaker 2: quite honest, pretty polished.
Speaker 6: I'm kind of interested in sort of how you see
Speaker 6: this altering the way we do air travel over the
Speaker 6: next five ten years, right, because obviously right now people
Speaker 6: are using facial recognition if they have pre check or
Speaker 6: they have I'm spacing the name, but you know, the
Speaker 6: independent company that does get you to pass the line
Speaker 6: and stuff like they do, like facial recognition when you
Speaker 6: are in the airport. Is this something that you is
Speaker 6: coming more broadly to like everybody going through security in the.
Speaker 1: Future, eventually, eventually.
Speaker 7: So right now it's at twenty seven participating airports, and
Speaker 7: it's not at every single we call them travel.
Speaker 2: Document checker podiums.
Speaker 1: It's not at every.
Speaker 7: Single checker travel Document checkerdum TDC, for sure, but it
Speaker 7: is growing and becoming We're deploying more and more as
Speaker 7: as funding becomes available for we're using facial recognition to
Speaker 7: identify passengers. It's a it's a significant improvement over the
Speaker 7: previous way we were identifying passengers just with the human
Speaker 7: interaction looking at an ID credential and looking at it
Speaker 7: based on what that individual knows about the fifty states
Speaker 7: and territories.
Speaker 1: And how they could what their credentials look like.
Speaker 7: The technology actually takes that over and does a much
Speaker 7: better job of validating the authenticity of that idea. And
Speaker 7: then the facial recognition component with a picture still image
Speaker 7: taking a picture of the passenger standing in front of
Speaker 7: the travel document check or podium and then matching that
Speaker 7: picture of that person standing there live against the credential
Speaker 7: photo and making a match that way, so we know
Speaker 7: that the credential is valid, it's true, it's accurate. We
Speaker 7: know that the person standing there is also the person
Speaker 7: on the credential. We can verify the boarding status and
Speaker 7: the screening status of that individual and can provide them with.
Speaker 1: Where they should go.
Speaker 7: Next for their screening because the officer is able to
Speaker 7: discern based on all of the information provided at the
Speaker 7: back end of the monitor that they reviewed. They can
Speaker 7: see all of those items have been checked, there's a
Speaker 7: boarding status, and there's a screening status, and then just
Speaker 7: tells the passenger where to go to follow up for screening.
Speaker 6: So I'm interested in how how someone becomes basically enrolled
Speaker 6: in this right, because my assumption is at this point,
Speaker 6: just the picture you get when you're getting your driver's
Speaker 6: license or your state ID for the DMV is not
Speaker 6: sufficient for a facial recognition system, right, simply having the
Speaker 6: picture in the government space. You need to have somebody
Speaker 6: to like get their face scanned, their irises scanned or
Speaker 6: something like that.
Speaker 2: In order to have them in the system, right, not in.
Speaker 6: The system at all.
Speaker 7: So with the way we're rolling these out at airports
Speaker 7: and check brains is once a passenger has been identified
Speaker 7: and that and goes into screening, all of the information.
Speaker 1: That was captured is gone.
Speaker 7: We don't store any of the pictures participation right now,
Speaker 7: it's completely volative.
Speaker 3: UH.
Speaker 7: Their signage right there at the checker podium UH to
Speaker 7: indicate that passengers can opt out, they don't have to
Speaker 7: participate and all that. All it happens at that point
Speaker 7: is the same officer will UH will turn basically over
Speaker 7: to the alternative process, review the ID, review the boarding
Speaker 7: pass and allow the passenger.
Speaker 1: To continue too easy.
Speaker 7: So if you don't lose their place in line, and
Speaker 7: they don't, they're not delayed in any way from getting
Speaker 7: screen But.
Speaker 2: I'm in terms of like the people who choose to
Speaker 2: use it.
Speaker 6: Right, So if you if you're in this system, is
Speaker 6: it literally just comparing your face to the face on
Speaker 6: the I D. You're not like en roll separately the
Speaker 6: way you are if you are in like pree checkers.
Speaker 1: No, okay, no it's not.
Speaker 7: There's not a database associated BABS and so no, that's
Speaker 7: that's not our use.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 7: Some of the airlines have partnered with US. They saw
Speaker 7: a benefit in it, and they're using similar technology for
Speaker 7: backdrop for their Frequent Flyer Miles program participants. So that
Speaker 7: is there's a database associated with that obvious, and so
Speaker 7: those passengers are company have an entirely different experience. Yeah,
Speaker 7: but the way that we're using it at the checkpoint
Speaker 7: is as I just said, for identity verification.
Speaker 2: Got you caught that right? How he says participation is
Speaker 2: voluntary right now? Well, I hadn't come across this information
Speaker 2: at the time, but afterwards I read a fascinating Washington
Speaker 2: Post article from last summer about Portland Senator Jeff Murkley.
Speaker 2: Jeff Merkley says that when he was trying to make
Speaker 2: a flight at Reagan International Airport, he was told that
Speaker 2: if he didn't verify his ID via face scanner, he
Speaker 2: would face a significant delay. Quote from the article. There
Speaker 2: was no delay, the spokeswoman said. The senator showed his
Speaker 2: photo ID to the TSA agent in cleared security.
Speaker 6: So basically he was lied to.
Speaker 2: Somebody lied and said you're going to if you don't
Speaker 2: want to like be delayed and maybe miss your flight,
Speaker 2: you have to submit to a face scan which is
Speaker 2: one of the things that privacy advocates were worried about
Speaker 2: from the beginning. But you know what, privacy advocates aren't
Speaker 2: worried about the products and services that support this podcast,
Speaker 2: and we're back. So I think when it gets right
Speaker 2: down to it, the silliest part of all of this
Speaker 2: to me is that the TSA isn't even claiming they
Speaker 2: need to run faces through like some futuristic database of terrorists,
Speaker 2: right like they want to scan our faces so they
Speaker 2: know if this like bad guy they're tracking is in
Speaker 2: the airport in Disgui, it's using a fake passport or
Speaker 2: something that's not actually what it does. Facial recognition the
Speaker 2: TSA is using right now, at least, just takes the
Speaker 2: place of the TSA guy. You hand your ID before
Speaker 2: you go put your shit in bins, right like, you know,
Speaker 2: you go up and before you can go take your
Speaker 2: stuff out of your bags and put it in those bins.
Speaker 2: You hand a guy your license times your license and
Speaker 2: boarding pass. He looks at it in your face. If
Speaker 2: you wear at a mask, he tells you to take
Speaker 2: it down for a second and then he lets you
Speaker 2: go in. Right, That's what the facial recognition scanners are
Speaker 2: actually doing here. That Washington Post article also cites an
Speaker 2: anti facial recognition activist, Tauana Petty, who says that she
Speaker 2: was told by a TSA agent at the same airport, Reagan,
Speaker 2: that undergoing facial recognition scanning was not optional. So people
Speaker 2: are already being told this is a requirement. And obviously,
Speaker 2: as a spoiler for where this goes, the bigger, deeper
Speaker 2: question is like how long is that going to be
Speaker 2: the case?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: So you know that's kind of the big concern, right,
Speaker 2: is that they're saying it's optional now, it obviously won't
Speaker 2: be forever, and some people are just going to be
Speaker 2: told they don't have a choice, Like that's kind of bullying,
Speaker 2: strong arming people, threatening that they'll miss their flight if
Speaker 2: they don't submit to it, which makes me extra suspicious
Speaker 2: about their data retention, right, And that is the question
Speaker 2: we asked as the interview went on, where is the TSAs,
Speaker 2: But where is the TSA's byometric data or really where
Speaker 2: is passenger biometric data actually going to go once the
Speaker 2: TSA has it?
Speaker 3: In terms of the information storage is is there? I
Speaker 3: know I've been seeing more of these like signs the
Speaker 3: more that I travel. It's I do a decent bit
Speaker 3: of traveling for these for these sorts of systems. And
Speaker 3: I'm curious with how this works for non US citizens
Speaker 3: if because I know there's there's certain at least in
Speaker 3: some of the technology that's being used by customers of
Speaker 3: border patrol, they do store images captured of non US
Speaker 3: citizens for a certain time period.
Speaker 1: They do take pictures of.
Speaker 3: US citizens when entering the country at.
Speaker 1: Lots of lots of airports.
Speaker 3: Are there are these two systems interacting at all? Or
Speaker 3: is the TSA system and not customers about customs and
Speaker 3: voter patrol system more separated?
Speaker 7: Well, first of all, I can't speak for customs and
Speaker 7: border protection, but I can tell you that where you
Speaker 7: we have two very different use cases. So in their
Speaker 7: use cases very much oriented in the customs arena, and
Speaker 7: then ours is as I just mentioned, at the checkpoint
Speaker 7: and solely for the identity verification. And if an international
Speaker 7: passenger comes in with a credential that identifies them, then
Speaker 7: the unit would obviously accept that credential. It's a photo,
Speaker 7: it's a photo credential. So again all that the system
Speaker 7: would do is validate that that person on that credential
Speaker 7: is also the same person that's standing right there in
Speaker 7: front of the travel document checker.
Speaker 2: Okay, most of you are probably aware of this, but
Speaker 2: the TSA actually does not have a good record of
Speaker 2: protecting private data. Now this is not old man Robert
Speaker 2: being a libertarian, it's just documented history. The TSA initially
Speaker 2: claimed their full body scanners, which took what are essentially
Speaker 2: naked pictures, never stored photos and couldn't transmit them. But
Speaker 2: in twenty ten this was revealed to be a lie
Speaker 2: when we gained access to documents that included technical specifications
Speaker 2: and vendor contracts which indicated the TSA required vendors of
Speaker 2: these scanners to provide equipment that can store and send
Speaker 2: images of screen passengers. Now this was supposed to only
Speaker 2: be in testing mode, but if it can store and
Speaker 2: send images of screened passengers, it can store and send
Speaker 2: images of screened passengers. In twenty twelve, a former TSA
Speaker 2: agent accused his coworkers of saving nude body images of
Speaker 2: passengers from the body scanner and making fun of them
Speaker 2: in back rooms. He said that safeguards were put in
Speaker 2: place to ensure the agents manning the scanners never saw
Speaker 2: the people they were scanning outside of the scanner, but
Speaker 2: that these policies were frequently violated. Basically, every privacy policy
Speaker 2: they had was frequently violated by agents so that they
Speaker 2: could make fun of people's dicks, Right, that's the story.
Speaker 2: The TSA retired its old scanners the next year, replacing
Speaker 2: them with a device that showed less detail, particularly provided
Speaker 2: agents with less clear looks at people's dongs. In twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, a TSA agent in Minneapolis was accused by
Speaker 2: airport police of taking dozens of photos of young women
Speaker 2: going through flight screening. The TSA's record here, both in
Speaker 2: terms of the agency itself and in terms of its employees,
Speaker 2: is certainly not worse than numerous police departments right or
Speaker 2: the FBI. This is something to keep in mind. As
Speaker 2: frustrating as all this stuff is, literally every local and
Speaker 2: city law enforcement agency has worse cases, and by gods,
Speaker 2: so do the FEDS could make a case that, as
Speaker 2: frustrating as a lot of this is, the TSA is
Speaker 2: less of a threat to privacy than most other federal
Speaker 2: law enforcement agencies. But that's beside the point. For one thing,
Speaker 2: normalizing facial recognition technology in the airports is a step
Speaker 2: towards normalizing it everywhere, the data that is gathered will
Speaker 2: not always be deleted, and more to the point, there's
Speaker 2: no way to know that the system isn't going to
Speaker 2: expand in directions that we all find deeply uncomfortable as
Speaker 2: it goes on. That's why you kind of have to
Speaker 2: nip this stuff in the bud, especially since they're not
Speaker 2: really promising extra security here. When you look at the
Speaker 2: scandals of the TSA, a lot of it has to
Speaker 2: do with the fact that they'll be getting tested by
Speaker 2: some other law enforcement agency to see if they can
Speaker 2: like sneak shit through, right, and the TSAO led a
Speaker 2: bunch of guns or a fake bomb or whatever through
Speaker 2: because people aren't paying attention. Facial scanners aren't going to
Speaker 2: catch that, and it's kind of unclear to me what
Speaker 2: they are going to catch. My other bigger issue is
Speaker 2: that even though they say they're going to throw away
Speaker 2: biometric data, they're not going to keep it more than
Speaker 2: twenty four hours outside of special situations, which they do
Speaker 2: kind of leave themselves an end there. The fact that
Speaker 2: they say they're deleting this stuff doesn't mean they are
Speaker 2: going to delete that stuff. And I brought up this
Speaker 2: troubling history of like lack of respect for privacy, violations
Speaker 2: of privacy by TSA agents in the past within the
Speaker 2: context of this new system. And I want to play
Speaker 2: Carter's answer for you. I am curious.
Speaker 6: You know, there were a couple of last mic or
Speaker 6: six years, a couple of cases stories that grew up
Speaker 6: of pictures, images of passengers who were on the body
Speaker 6: scanners being shared, right like that said they were before,
Speaker 6: a couple of scandals about that, and that influenced your
Speaker 6: attitudes on the data attention policy that should exist for
Speaker 6: the facial recognitions.
Speaker 7: So let me first tell you that we follow the
Speaker 7: National Institute of National Institute of Standards and Technology their
Speaker 7: guidelines and standards to a t. Not only that we
Speaker 7: publish online our privacy impact assessments, so there are we're
Speaker 7: very transparent in our use of this technology, how we're
Speaker 7: using it, what we're using it for. And again it's
Speaker 7: completely voluntary, nothing.
Speaker 2: Is stored and similar and it's simply.
Speaker 1: Which is really the.
Speaker 7: Lynch transportation security. Yeah, I mean we've got to know
Speaker 7: that was who we're I guess going live into the
Speaker 7: secure area of an airport is in fact it's a
Speaker 7: person that.
Speaker 2: They say that so yeah, that's more or less how
Speaker 2: the conversation ended. Carter was very happy to see us go,
Speaker 2: and I don't think Garrison or I were particularly surprised
Speaker 2: by anything we heard, but I did find it interesting
Speaker 2: that he kind of confirmed the goal is eventually for
Speaker 2: this to not just be everywhere, but be something that
Speaker 2: you can't opt out of. And I do partly wonder
Speaker 2: how much of that is them looking for a way
Speaker 2: to get more data on people, maybe even to share
Speaker 2: to other law enforcement agencies, and how much of that
Speaker 2: is kind of the same reason a lot of you know,
Speaker 2: AI style technology and kind of facial recognition does sort
Speaker 2: of fall under that umbrella. If you're going to have
Speaker 2: a general intelligence, one thing it has to be able
Speaker 2: to do is recognize people's faces. So it is a
Speaker 2: piece of that and I think that, just like a
Speaker 2: lot of other applications of that kind of technology are
Speaker 2: inevitably used to cut workforces. That's kind of probably the
Speaker 2: chief thing the TSA is looking to use it to do. Right,
Speaker 2: if you can replace the guy who has to look
Speaker 2: at your ID, or at least most of them, with
Speaker 2: facial recognition scanners that do the same thing, then you
Speaker 2: can save on your budget right now. The downside of that,
Speaker 2: maybe to us. The upside is it could be faster.
Speaker 2: The downside, of course, is there's a really good chance
Speaker 2: it won't be. The robot will be even more racist
Speaker 2: than Asa age it might be. You know, it's one
Speaker 2: less chance to deal with a human with whom you
Speaker 2: might be able to talk something through. Anyway, Well, I'll
Speaker 2: see where this goes, but for today, this has been
Speaker 2: It Could Happen here, and I have been Robert Evans. Hey,
Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 2: now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.