Speaker 1: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Take it away. Robert Evans, gosh,
Speaker 1: it could happen here. I did it brilliant. Thank you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love I love that really, thank you. You're Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: We also have Christopher Long, Garrison Davis, and we have
Speaker 1: Andrew here with us. We'll be leading this episode. Hi Andrew, Hello,
Speaker 1: Hello everyone. Hell is the with in Portland? It is cold.
Speaker 1: Everywhere else in the continentally United States, it is a
Speaker 1: boiling hell storm. Actually today today, today it's only eighty four.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we we have three days where it's merely
Speaker 1: in the eighties and then it goes back to being
Speaker 1: like again. It's very very excited your temperature measurements. But angeles,
Speaker 1: it's lovely today. We're lovely for the next couple of
Speaker 1: days and then we'll be burning sixty six. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be perfect here forever. Climate change is over in Northern Oregon.
Speaker 1: I have declared it, Well have you declared it? It
Speaker 1: must be true exactly. So today, once I have a
Speaker 1: bit of a discussion, an open discussion about my favorite
Speaker 1: kind of discourse, and that is dead discourse. I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about discussion code that people have been having
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago about restaurants, a restaurant discourse,
Speaker 1: this whole idea that people heard about five minutes ago
Speaker 1: and got super rare lap over and sparked to a
Speaker 1: bunch of like drama, because that's what social media and centervizes.
Speaker 1: But I figured, you know, we could have a nice
Speaker 1: roundtable discussionaire about code and code restaurant abolition, and show
Speaker 1: our thoughts on the ideas presented in the zine that
Speaker 1: inspired it for those those who read it, Abolish Restaurants
Speaker 1: by prola in Food. But first of all, I wanted
Speaker 1: to share it about my experience in the food industry.
Speaker 1: It was quite brief, and by brief, I mean like
Speaker 1: four days I started working at this this winery slash
Speaker 1: cafe that was UM owned and run by this trust
Speaker 1: fund baby, and it was very clear that she had
Speaker 1: failed up for most of her life. Um. It was
Speaker 1: very disorganized and very stressful experience. I quit like a
Speaker 1: few days after I got it because instead of you know,
Speaker 1: making coffees and preparing wines and stuff, I got a
Speaker 1: job pushing paper in an office, which is only marginally better.
Speaker 1: And I mean everyone want to speak over like food
Speaker 1: to his people or anything, because like my experience is
Speaker 1: very limited, but in my own limited experience, it sucked.
Speaker 1: I mean my blood too into water trying to keep
Speaker 1: up with everything. It was one of those kind of
Speaker 1: under the table jobs, so you don't have a contract
Speaker 1: or a specific job description. It's just like you're doing everything.
Speaker 1: So you're sorting and taking off recycling, and you're organized
Speaker 1: and stock, you're making coffee, busing tables and cashion products.
Speaker 1: You're handling accounting for some reason, like lady, I just
Speaker 1: got here, but I'm already doing accounting, um, and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. I didn't have an official break either,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't allowed to sit at all. Um. I
Speaker 1: mean my boss said that I could stop for lunch
Speaker 1: what I needed to, But because of this, these constant responsibility.
Speaker 1: Shue was piling onto me. We never got a chance
Speaker 1: to take a breath. The one time I did take
Speaker 1: a lunch break, she rushed me out to lunch break
Speaker 1: because I was taken too long and she was busy
Speaker 1: taking care of her other real estate. I only consistent
Speaker 1: customers with her friends. And yet somehow, you know, she
Speaker 1: kept the doors opening, the lights on because you know,
Speaker 1: trust fund baby. But yeah, to reiterate, it was a
Speaker 1: very sucky experience I had. Any Yeah, I worked at
Speaker 1: a restaurant for starting when I was in high school,
Speaker 1: I was fifteen and a half for three or four
Speaker 1: years part of college, the baby learn a lot about
Speaker 1: how awful people are. But it was like you did
Speaker 1: learn how to work in a team and things like that.
Speaker 1: Helpful goals there, But management was terrible. Ah, not exactly
Speaker 1: easy work, not exactly fun work. Um. Yeah, it was like,
Speaker 1: I honestly feel like a lot of people should have
Speaker 1: to do some type of job like that so that
Speaker 1: they learn, you know, how how to treat people who
Speaker 1: work in that in that kind of position. Um, because
Speaker 1: mostly my memories of it is terrible, horrible customers who
Speaker 1: just treated people like scum. Yeah, but I needed the job,
Speaker 1: so yeah, yeah, my only experience in food service was
Speaker 1: working at a sonic not for a crazy long time,
Speaker 1: but it was terrible, um, and it left me with
Speaker 1: an abiding like respect for people who have to do that.
Speaker 1: And I you know, we can talk, we'll talk more
Speaker 1: about the restaurant thing, but I certainly don't think fast
Speaker 1: food restaurant or a thing that exists in my ideal future,
Speaker 1: because I don't know how you could possibly operate those
Speaker 1: without a tremendous amount of human suffering and wasted potential,
Speaker 1: because they're just they're bad things. Now that said, any
Speaker 1: utopian society will have a way to acquire Popeyes, but
Speaker 1: perhaps not at like midnight in every city of the
Speaker 1: country whenever you wanted. My utopian society is a wool
Speaker 1: in which KFC has been abolished and everything else to
Speaker 1: like exist. Yes, yes, well again this is it could
Speaker 1: happen here sponsored by I'm perfectly okay with imperialism, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: and what kind of like can I ask, like, what
Speaker 1: kind of restaurant I know? Robert said his was fast food,
Speaker 1: Mine was very like casual food. What what kind of
Speaker 1: restaurant did you work at? Right? It wasn't. It was
Speaker 1: like a winery slash caffee and it also served food.
Speaker 1: It was like a touch to a hotel. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and the whole the hotel part of it probably made
Speaker 1: it appearance. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, Yeah, kurs, scare either
Speaker 1: of you rather work in the food fruit food service
Speaker 1: industry at all? Yeah. I worked at a bakery for
Speaker 1: like a year and a half, mostly back of the house. Um.
Speaker 1: But I mean I would you know, would end up
Speaker 1: washing washing dishes and taking out recycling and all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. But most of my work was designing
Speaker 1: recipes because I was more on like the food science angle.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, I mean it's I have a
Speaker 1: complicated uh feelings on like cafes specifically. I mean I
Speaker 1: I love anarchist cafes and like the idea of anarchist cafe.
Speaker 1: I would love to love to like have one at
Speaker 1: some point. It's like operated by the workers quote quote
Speaker 1: owned by the workers, um, with a shooting range out back.
Speaker 1: But obviously the guns and buns. We call it guns
Speaker 1: and buns. You can the croissan and you can shoot
Speaker 1: fard by cafe by all me inside your right. Guns
Speaker 1: and buns is a breakfast cafe, gun range, strip club
Speaker 1: and apparently as long as as long as you fund it,
Speaker 1: you can have whatever you want. But the people will
Speaker 1: funded Garrison. Obviously, the food service industry has just make
Speaker 1: it a cooperative that makes everything. Sorry, please continue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the food service industry has a lot of problems.
Speaker 1: But if if I were if I were able to
Speaker 1: go into a bakery like maybe like two or three
Speaker 1: times a week to just bake food for people and
Speaker 1: that helps me live the rest of the week, I
Speaker 1: would totally do that, right, So, like it depends on
Speaker 1: a lot of factors, but it's like there's ideas around,
Speaker 1: like an anarchist cafe, work around cafe that would be
Speaker 1: like totally chilled to work to like be there a
Speaker 1: few days of the week making food because I enjoy
Speaker 1: making food, I enjoy baking, and I like food science. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, when you would start we start tying
Speaker 1: that into labor and exploited the labor practices and the
Speaker 1: notion of like having to serve other people, then it
Speaker 1: gets a little bit more tricky. Um, and you know,
Speaker 1: less less less good, less cash money in a sign,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, you know it was was was kind of
Speaker 1: funny about it. Um I would say it is like
Speaker 1: kind of lost guada. Let me just think for a second. Well, so,
Speaker 1: I mean one of the things that I have noticed
Speaker 1: over the years, because I've had a lot of friends
Speaker 1: work as bartenders, as waiters and waitresses, there are there's
Speaker 1: a chunk of people who really like the work. They
Speaker 1: usually don't like their employer, they often have issues with
Speaker 1: like their manager or whatever, but like they like their
Speaker 1: co workers and they enjoy the the act of like
Speaker 1: doing restaurants stuff. Um I and I know that. Like,
Speaker 1: so one of the things that I did recreationally for years,
Speaker 1: as I was going to I would go to these
Speaker 1: regional burning Man events and one of the rules there's
Speaker 1: like everyone pays the same thing to get in. There's
Speaker 1: no like get there's no like talent, so there's nobody
Speaker 1: who's like paid to be there as an act, and
Speaker 1: there's no like exchange of currency lab But there are restaurants.
Speaker 1: There are people who like bake food and and and
Speaker 1: give out and like make and give out coffee. There's
Speaker 1: there's multiple bars and a number of the people I
Speaker 1: knew who were like the most who would spend the
Speaker 1: most of their time which is again totally their own.
Speaker 1: At these events volunteering as bartenders were people who worked
Speaker 1: as bartenders, and we're like, look, I like serving drinks.
Speaker 1: I hate a lot of what goes along with being
Speaker 1: in a bar, but I enjoy making and serving drinks.
Speaker 1: There was this one really cool dude out in the
Speaker 1: middle of he was out because it's a spread out
Speaker 1: over acres of woodlands. There's just this guy I found
Speaker 1: one night alone in the woods at like a podium sized,
Speaker 1: little booth lit up bar he'd made, and he was like, look,
Speaker 1: I am a very good bartender. What I do not
Speaker 1: like is making the same things every night for drunk
Speaker 1: people who don't know anything about a good mixed drink.
Speaker 1: So you and I are gonna have like a five
Speaker 1: minute conversation and then I'm gonna tell you what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna make you. Yeah. Yeah, it was really cool like that.
Speaker 1: More stuff like that, more like restaurant pop ups that
Speaker 1: are like those types of things are are just are
Speaker 1: divorced from like this notion of like, you know, being
Speaker 1: served by a lower class member of society. Instead it's
Speaker 1: people like sharing actual interests that they have and they're
Speaker 1: not obligated to be there or else they get you know,
Speaker 1: or else they're not able to pay their rent. Right,
Speaker 1: there's lots of things like a utopian society or be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would totally be down with doing some some kind
Speaker 1: of you know, some kind of thing related to giving
Speaker 1: food to other people are preparing food or you know,
Speaker 1: drink like mixed strengths. Uh. I like making coffee a
Speaker 1: lot like espressove and the ship. Um it's like I
Speaker 1: can totally see that, but right now, you know, it's
Speaker 1: just a totally different field. Um, by and large for
Speaker 1: most people in you know, the food service industry, and
Speaker 1: it sucks work. By and large, it really sucks to
Speaker 1: work in the foods service industry. Yeah, the food service
Speaker 1: industry is one of the most explicitve industries in the country.
Speaker 1: That said, the idea of gathering in public to consume
Speaker 1: food and beverages is fundamental to human beings and we're
Speaker 1: never not going to have that as society's so there
Speaker 1: has to be ways in which to have versions of that.
Speaker 1: And again, probably not the every ten minutes you get
Speaker 1: the same three fast food restaurants that are open all night.
Speaker 1: That probably that definitely does not exist in an ideal society,
Speaker 1: but in any any better society, human beings will gather
Speaker 1: to eat and drink around each other because it's something
Speaker 1: we've done in every civilization that has ever existed. So,
Speaker 1: Andrew do you do? Do you want to talk a
Speaker 1: bit more about the actual zine, because I feel like
Speaker 1: a lot of people's course around the zine is not
Speaker 1: about the zine itself. It's about what the title of
Speaker 1: the zene is, because people should read the actual zene.
Speaker 1: If you read it makes very reasonable arguments. Um. The
Speaker 1: titles just intentionally provocative. Um. Yeah. And what I've realized
Speaker 1: about intentionally provocative slogans is that the people who who
Speaker 1: want to get it, you know, they tend to be
Speaker 1: drawn into those kinds of things. And then there's some
Speaker 1: people who see something provocative and it kind of shuts
Speaker 1: them down. Yes, some people see it, see something so
Speaker 1: provocative and see it's like I want to learn more.
Speaker 1: And other people see it and they have that kind
Speaker 1: of a gut reaction to It's like it's like the
Speaker 1: backfire affect type thing. Yeah. So I mean to get
Speaker 1: into the kind of the history of it and just
Speaker 1: the idea of restaurants as as the Zene Explorers. According
Speaker 1: to the discourse, a restaurant is just a place to eat.
Speaker 1: If you sit down in the middle of a desert
Speaker 1: with a table and a chair and you eat something
Speaker 1: that's apparently a restaurant, that's not a restaurant. That it's
Speaker 1: not a restaurant. But okay, the definition of a restaurant
Speaker 1: is a place where people pay to sit and eat
Speaker 1: meals that are cooked and served on the premises. Commerce
Speaker 1: is a part of the definition of a restaurant. Why
Speaker 1: do we universalize and naturalize things that are neither That
Speaker 1: is my question. It's like what people do with the state,
Speaker 1: or with capitalism, with police or agender. I mean, just
Speaker 1: like those things. The restaurant is an invention, but it's
Speaker 1: been crystallized and induced into our mind as something that
Speaker 1: is you know, that is natural, it is universal. You
Speaker 1: know when when Kronk brought his buddy Brock a piece
Speaker 1: of chicken, that was a restaurant. You know, it's like,
Speaker 1: we take we take these things that come from very
Speaker 1: specific modern capitalist context and we stretch them out over
Speaker 1: the entire human experience. If you look into the history restaurants,
Speaker 1: the first restaurants began to appear in Paris in the
Speaker 1: seventeen sixties, un as leaders in the eighteen fifties. Majority
Speaker 1: the restaurants that will be located in Paris, and I mean,
Speaker 1: for those who know a little bit about his three,
Speaker 1: Paris is kind of an interesting place where a lot
Speaker 1: of things happen, especially during that rough time period, a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff going on there exactly, I mean elsewhere
Speaker 1: on the world, communal meals were quite common. People cooked
Speaker 1: community and the eight community, and they were new restaurants,
Speaker 1: specifically before the invention of restaurants, and in Paris around
Speaker 1: Europe at least where people had servants who cooked for them.
Speaker 1: Travelers had ins where their meal was included with the
Speaker 1: price of the room and they ate for the innkeeper
Speaker 1: and his family, and peasants they ate their meals at home,
Speaker 1: and of course they were also caterers free events and
Speaker 1: special occasions. And there were taverns and wineries and coffees
Speaker 1: and bakeries for certain foods and drinks. Of course, later
Speaker 1: on all of those things, the taverns, the wineries, the
Speaker 1: cake the caffes, and the bakeries. After restaurants came about,
Speaker 1: those other institutions to shape and bend into this sort
Speaker 1: of the mold of the restaurants was established. Restaurant based
Speaker 1: on the name of it. Um comes from this this
Speaker 1: idea that they were meant to restore health to sick people.
Speaker 1: Restaurant restaurant, all right, and they used to sue these
Speaker 1: small meat stews. So by by that, by that metric,
Speaker 1: Taco Bell cannot be a restaurant. I I would argue
Speaker 1: that it is the only restaurant. It's, well, it's going
Speaker 1: to restore bowel movement if you have any kind of
Speaker 1: blockage that that that it will restore that. But besides that,
Speaker 1: I cannot, I can do not think it's going to
Speaker 1: restore Yeah, Taco Bell, It's probably something like a laxatant.
Speaker 1: I don't know. But yeah, So why France, Why Paris?
Speaker 1: Why restaurants? It kind of occurred after the food craft
Speaker 1: kills were abolished by the Revolution. It was like this
Speaker 1: attempt to kind of democratize the food industry. You know,
Speaker 1: Liberty got a home all that jazz, so restaurants and
Speaker 1: it began spree enough because all these former cooks of
Speaker 1: the now be headed king and aristocrats, they wanted to
Speaker 1: work somewhere. Sure, so you know, in a restaurant, if
Speaker 1: you get a meal at any time the businesses open,
Speaker 1: anyone with money could get a meal. The customers would
Speaker 1: come and they would eat an individual tables, eat individual
Speaker 1: plates and bowls of food. They get to choose from
Speaker 1: another option, a number of options, and they grew in
Speaker 1: size and complexity as they went on. They got a
Speaker 1: fixed menu and eventually all day. We invented the bacon eator. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the end fact. The Bacon was the first book
Speaker 1: I had when I went to the US. I would apologize,
Speaker 1: but this country has done so much worse than that
Speaker 1: of fun facts about Andrew. Yeah, you know, it's a
Speaker 1: thing to tune in and you get a litt new
Speaker 1: fact that you could. I don't know adds my Wikia
Speaker 1: page or something, but yeah, yeah, it was. It was.
Speaker 1: It was mid. Honestly, my brother makes better bogas. But
Speaker 1: that's besides the plane. Yeah, nearly every burger that you
Speaker 1: can get at a fast food restaurant is is mid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: t g I Friday's had some good Friday. That is
Speaker 1: the place when you're in a town you've never been before,
Speaker 1: that's where you want to just show up and get
Speaker 1: absolutely ship house drunk until two am with like a
Speaker 1: bunch of strangers at the t g I Friday's Bar,
Speaker 1: which is the boulevard of broken dreams, Like it's only
Speaker 1: people who can't hack it in a regular bar and
Speaker 1: weirdos traveling through town. I love a t g I
Speaker 1: A Friday's Bark. I was not aware of that sertiod type.
Speaker 1: I mean there's aid t g I here in Trinidad
Speaker 1: and me last time I knew they had like some
Speaker 1: kind of karaoke thing going on. Yeah, it's probably the vibe.
Speaker 1: I haven't been too many times anyway, I think this
Speaker 1: is enough product place month for for one episode, like
Speaker 1: out a lot of different here's ads. Sure, why not?
Speaker 1: So the growth of the restaurant came the growth of
Speaker 1: the market. With the growth of the restaurant came the
Speaker 1: growth of the market. Needs that will you know fulfilled
Speaker 1: either through a direct relationship with domination like between a
Speaker 1: lord or a king and his silvants, or a private
Speaker 1: relationship like within the family. They were all being fulfilled
Speaker 1: on the open market. It was once a direct oppressive relationship,
Speaker 1: now became the relationship between buyer and seller now came in.
Speaker 1: Didn't direct oppressive exactly, a diffused oppressive relationship foremost because
Speaker 1: no one person, I would say it could really carry
Speaker 1: the blame. A similar expansion the market took place over
Speaker 1: a century later with the rise of fast food because
Speaker 1: as the nineteen fifties housewife was on her way out,
Speaker 1: you know, being undermined, and as you women started to
Speaker 1: move into the open labor market, many of the tasks
Speaker 1: that were done by women traditionally were being transferred onto
Speaker 1: the market. Not to say that women still don't do
Speaker 1: the majority of care work in modern society, but as
Speaker 1: women started moving into the office into the workplace, things
Speaker 1: started to shift with regard to eating and eating patterns.
Speaker 1: An important point to notice that, of course, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole woman moving into the workplace thing is kind
Speaker 1: of a white woman phenomenon, because you know, people of color,
Speaker 1: women of color were inward places before then in large numbers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and there's there's a thing I think it's important
Speaker 1: to note here too, which is like part part of
Speaker 1: what's happening here, is that like some of the care
Speaker 1: labor that white women were doing gets transferred on to
Speaker 1: non white women. And this this is this has been
Speaker 1: one of the things that, Like, I think we talked
Speaker 1: about this a long time ago in an interview I
Speaker 1: did with it with a nurse. But like, like, for example,
Speaker 1: you see this with healthcare a lot where like a
Speaker 1: lot of like union workers get these goods, you know,
Speaker 1: they get really good healthcare plans from the unions, but
Speaker 1: those healthcare plans are basically subsidized by not paying women
Speaker 1: of color like ship. And there's this whole sort of
Speaker 1: like trend around this is sort of like like you can,
Speaker 1: you know, if if you're witching, if you're rich enough,
Speaker 1: you can escape housework. But you escape housework by essentially
Speaker 1: thrusting it on somewhere, on someone else who's like further
Speaker 1: down the social ladder venue. Yeah, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a form of that um that phenomenon. People have been
Speaker 1: talking about the the idea of choice feminism, as in
Speaker 1: any choice that woman to sneak that a woman makes
Speaker 1: part of the feminist sort of movement. So I saw
Speaker 1: some discourse happened recently. People are talking about, um, how
Speaker 1: oh one should have a right if she's a housewife,
Speaker 1: that she should still be able to you know, pursue
Speaker 1: her interests, which is of course agreed and the solution
Speaker 1: being proposed, so that was that the man, the breadwinner,
Speaker 1: would pay for a domestic servants to come and work
Speaker 1: for the woman so that she can pursue her other responsibilities,
Speaker 1: her other interests and desires. And so it's just kind
Speaker 1: of this perfect what a close to license exactly because
Speaker 1: then this woman is working away from her family, and
Speaker 1: then you know, it's just like this is a the
Speaker 1: messed up system. But yes, so as fast food restaurants
Speaker 1: began to grow rapidly, people began being paid weed is
Speaker 1: for what used to be hostwork. And of course, as
Speaker 1: we know, capitalism could not exist without the billions of
Speaker 1: dollars of unpaid labor that women perform on a yearly basis.
Speaker 1: Modern restaurants emerged in the nineteenth century under specific conditions.
Speaker 1: They had to be businessmen with capital to invest in restaurants.
Speaker 1: They had to be customers who are expected to satisfy
Speaker 1: their need for food in the open market by buying it.
Speaker 1: And they had to be workers with no way to
Speaker 1: live but by working for someone else. As these conditions developed,
Speaker 1: as capitalism developed, sorted restaurants and so at the root
Speaker 1: of this whole abolished restaurants discourse needs to be an
Speaker 1: understanding of where restaurants came from their historical development. You
Speaker 1: cannot take them in isolation and project them, like I said,
Speaker 1: across all of humanity, because it's only through understanding, through
Speaker 1: its specific circumstances that we can transform it as we
Speaker 1: transform society as a whole. As we were saying, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of things that are hell about restaurants.
Speaker 1: The way that work comes in like waves and rushes,
Speaker 1: a lot of slow time in between. We either really
Speaker 1: stressed out, the really bored. Remember working they had the
Speaker 1: winery and like for mostly day, I just have to
Speaker 1: be like shifting around bottles on the shelves. I couldn't
Speaker 1: sit down and chill or be on my phone or anything.
Speaker 1: I just had to busy myself until a customer came.
Speaker 1: I guess it was never came because it was a
Speaker 1: failed business propped up only by her parents money. But
Speaker 1: did you ever get told the phrase if you can lean,
Speaker 1: you can clean, not in not in those exactly words, Yes,
Speaker 1: in those exact words, God, and every fucking manager who
Speaker 1: says it to you think that like it's their cool
Speaker 1: line was anyway? Yep? Yeah, So you have to just
Speaker 1: you have this this constant thing of trying to look
Speaker 1: busy while having got nothing to do, while you're trying
Speaker 1: not to fall behind because they have tendings to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone's always working harder and faster, and of course the
Speaker 1: boss wants to squeeze as much workout in the same
Speaker 1: number of people out as possible, you know, like you
Speaker 1: pushing people to these ridiculous extremes, which is why it's
Speaker 1: a kind of stereotype now of like restaurant workers all
Speaker 1: being on drugs. You know, there's also this whole in
Speaker 1: humanity to like employees being paid in tips. Now, as
Speaker 1: far as I know nowhere is that as severe as
Speaker 1: it is in the US um. But of course around
Speaker 1: the world there are tipping cultures of varying degrees. And
Speaker 1: so when you have that sort of work where you
Speaker 1: sure you're living your subsistence is so directly tied to
Speaker 1: like tips, Not only do you have this sort of
Speaker 1: divide being created between the workers between like, for example,
Speaker 1: the waiters who make the tips and the cooks who
Speaker 1: don't make any tips, And it's just the sort of
Speaker 1: had to compete against each other because the way it's
Speaker 1: trying to get as much done as possible so they
Speaker 1: can make their tips quickly so they could have their
Speaker 1: you know, quick service. Where as the cooks they have
Speaker 1: no interesting motivation to push themselves harder and just becomes stressful.
Speaker 1: I never got tips from baking in the back of
Speaker 1: the house unless some of the people in front of
Speaker 1: the house would like share the tips at the end
Speaker 1: of the day by their own like. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: know folks who worked in places where all tips were
Speaker 1: shared with the way the kitchen staff, and it seemed
Speaker 1: to be a fifty fifty breakdown of this is really
Speaker 1: good and everyone gets paid fairly, and this is actually
Speaker 1: some scam by man management to deny people a bunch
Speaker 1: of tips by like pulling them and a certain factory
Speaker 1: that gets done so like It's like any formulation of
Speaker 1: this inherently winds up being pretty abusive. Yeah, and dividing
Speaker 1: you know another interesting and I mean, as you guys
Speaker 1: mentioned stressful components about you know, this line of workers.
Speaker 1: Of course, the customers, which customer service for in general,
Speaker 1: tend to you know, whether you're working at a bar
Speaker 1: or you're working at a you know, a restaurant, even
Speaker 1: working in like sales and some sort of like retail.
Speaker 1: Still their whole subread is dedicated to how terrible customers
Speaker 1: are two workers, and so that that's sort of dynamic
Speaker 1: of service. It it really changes people. I mean, customers
Speaker 1: can just as easily be working class as the people
Speaker 1: working in the restaurant. It there's still that dynamic that's
Speaker 1: created when you are the one being seated and soothed
Speaker 1: on the other police and on their feet soothing you.
Speaker 1: Some of the worst customers in America at least are
Speaker 1: working class and poorer folks who it's like their chance
Speaker 1: to be above somebody like when they go out to
Speaker 1: a restaurant, so they can be extra shitty. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: is a thing that happens. Surprisingly that even like restaurant
Speaker 1: weekers who treat restaurant workers batly when they go to
Speaker 1: a restaurant. Yeah, yeah, yes, it's like someone gets the
Speaker 1: opportunity to be to exert the power and they're like
Speaker 1: do it in the short, short, short, short amount of time.
Speaker 1: But although I will say I'm sure those are also
Speaker 1: the restaurant workers who treat people badly at the restaurant
Speaker 1: they work at, including like some of the some of
Speaker 1: the things that have ever been said to beered by
Speaker 1: customers at the restaurant job. I had, yeah, not surprising,
Speaker 1: and I was like no, I was like I was
Speaker 1: like in high school, I was a kid and these
Speaker 1: are like grown ups being horreendous. So like I think,
Speaker 1: I think it's like I don't know, like when people
Speaker 1: talk about this, like when people talk about restaurants, like
Speaker 1: in the discourses, it's it's in a way that's like
Speaker 1: it's incredibly abstract and doesn't like it don't it doesn't
Speaker 1: think about the fact that like the relationship between the
Speaker 1: customer and the people who have to interact with the customers, host, etcetera,
Speaker 1: like that that is a social relation. It's a social
Speaker 1: relation that like that, like like the the power dynamic
Speaker 1: inherent to it abscribes sort of different kind It describes
Speaker 1: different kinds of behavior to the people who are like
Speaker 1: who are like on either side of it, like it
Speaker 1: it controls like what you have to do as a server,
Speaker 1: like what the performances you have to give to like
Speaker 1: the smile you have to put on, which is actually
Speaker 1: like that's the original thing of what emotional he is, right,
Speaker 1: is like the labor you have to do to make
Speaker 1: the person who you're serving, like I think that you're
Speaker 1: like happy and enjoying it, like having a good time.
Speaker 1: But then you know on the customer's en too, it's
Speaker 1: like you get this sort of you know, I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is your one chance to to be on top
Speaker 1: of a sort of power relation and like that like
Speaker 1: that like that specific thing is so fucking evil. It's
Speaker 1: like that there there, there's there's a story I think
Speaker 1: about a lot from Run and Schwang. Originally was it
Speaker 1: was about um like one one of the last emperors
Speaker 1: of the Tang dynasty, like his his concubine like loved
Speaker 1: legia and like, okay, I get it as lesia that
Speaker 1: gets really good, but like leeches grown leaches only grown
Speaker 1: in this in the south of China. You can't really
Speaker 1: grow in the north. It doesn't like it's too cold,
Speaker 1: too arid. And so in order to get her leash,
Speaker 1: like every morning, they would send like the fastest writers
Speaker 1: like in China would like be sent by horse like
Speaker 1: to southern China and then back so that you get
Speaker 1: the lechia there in time like for for it still
Speaker 1: to be like ripe and like edible, and you know
Speaker 1: that that's the kind of that's the kind of power
Speaker 1: that you to only literally the Emperor of China had
Speaker 1: this ability, right, like the like the Emperor of fucking
Speaker 1: China could get this commodity and like force everyone in
Speaker 1: a change to go do something for them. And now
Speaker 1: like everyone has that Like literally everyone has that power.
Speaker 1: Like every time you use Amazon, you have that power.
Speaker 1: Every time you go to a rusturant, you have the
Speaker 1: power to do this, and it it turns people into
Speaker 1: monsters because like that's you know, the Chinese emperors are
Speaker 1: like these are some of the worst people who've ever lived. Now,
Speaker 1: like everyone everyone like just like like the fundamental basis
Speaker 1: of the society is there was a place where you
Speaker 1: can go and you can become the emperor of fucking China.
Speaker 1: The problem with the idea of instant gratification being reliant
Speaker 1: on the exploitation of other people. Yeah, and and like that, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that doesn't seem right Garrison, Oh yeah, don't worry now,
Speaker 1: watch me as I order next day delivery on a
Speaker 1: dollar drone just to just to funk around in my backyard.
Speaker 1: Like yes, it's it's everything is fine in America. I
Speaker 1: I do. I am like of the opinion that the
Speaker 1: grocery store is like the primary artistic achievement of capitalism
Speaker 1: as a system. Um. They are objectively marvels, um. And
Speaker 1: they're they're built on a river of blood deeper and
Speaker 1: wider than is. It's like it's a hyper object, right,
Speaker 1: It's like impossible to comprehend the full scale of cruelty
Speaker 1: that goes into being able to like, well, it is November.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go get a fresh bag of grapes that
Speaker 1: have been genetically modified to taste like cotton candy, picked
Speaker 1: by people making sense an hour in Yes, in the
Speaker 1: country that's on the other side of the world. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: whose relatives are shot for attempting to scramble over the border. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That the grapes passed through easily. Yes. And I think
Speaker 1: like like that that points to another Like I think
Speaker 1: part of the dynamic safely with restaurants that happens, which
Speaker 1: is that like, okay, like cooking takes time, right, and
Speaker 1: the less and less time that you have, the more
Speaker 1: like the more reliant you become, um on like on
Speaker 1: these services. And so you see this with like you know,
Speaker 1: like China has like a like a particularly horrible like
Speaker 1: delivery culture, like you can like you can have someone
Speaker 1: deliver food to you, like to the train, like like
Speaker 1: a sub Like a train will stop at a stop
Speaker 1: and you can have someone run a bag of food
Speaker 1: to you and then like leave and you just like
Speaker 1: you go to the next stop and you get off.
Speaker 1: And that happens because everyone's working nine nine six, and
Speaker 1: it's like, Okay, you're working. You're working nine am the
Speaker 1: nine pm, six six days a week, and you know
Speaker 1: you don't you literally do not have time to cook
Speaker 1: because you're working. You're working twelve hours a day. And
Speaker 1: like an example of this is like restaurant wrap. People
Speaker 1: who work restaurants, like line cooks and chefs hardly ever
Speaker 1: cook for themselves. They always get food from other restaurants
Speaker 1: because they're cooking eight to ten hours a day. They're
Speaker 1: not going to go home then cook for themselves. They
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, it's this system almost it makes it
Speaker 1: makes the things that prop it up come necessary to
Speaker 1: keep the whole thing going. It's all like balancings super
Speaker 1: like precariously on its own weight. It's it's equivalent to
Speaker 1: like if you're in a criminal syndicate, making somebody you're
Speaker 1: working with tangentially shoot a man in the back of
Speaker 1: the head so that you both have blood on your hands.
Speaker 1: Like everyone is everyone just by by virtue of existing
Speaker 1: under it. Like if you're working sixty hours a week
Speaker 1: is a fucking nurse during COVID or as a fucking
Speaker 1: line cook dealing with this surge of delivery ship and
Speaker 1: then on your way home, you just want to pick
Speaker 1: up some like sushi from a fucking grocery store that
Speaker 1: requires ingredients from all around the world and is made
Speaker 1: by people who are not getting enough money to make
Speaker 1: it and is horrible for the environments and the fisheries
Speaker 1: and all that kind of ship um, And but like
Speaker 1: what are you supposed to do? Like you you just
Speaker 1: you just finished like a ten hour shift, Like do
Speaker 1: you not deserve like one one nice thing at the
Speaker 1: end of the like Like Like so it's if you people
Speaker 1: can't like either you becomeing like a complete aesthetic right
Speaker 1: and and reject and go kind of ted k and
Speaker 1: live in a shack in Montana and reject all of
Speaker 1: these these kind of modern conveniences, or you accept that,
Speaker 1: like you're going to spend some time waiting into the
Speaker 1: river of blood because otherwise the things you have to
Speaker 1: do to stay alive in this society are completely emotionally unsustainable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was this was the original, like before it kind
Speaker 1: of became this cop out for like just doing whatever
Speaker 1: you want. Like this was the original. There's no ethnical
Speaker 1: consumption under capitalism is about this was about like this
Speaker 1: specific problem that everything in the society, Like even even
Speaker 1: if you're living in the woods and Montana, it's like yeah,
Speaker 1: like where where where did where? Like where where did
Speaker 1: your cabin come from? Like where did your nails come from?
Speaker 1: Who made the hammers? Like everyone's like completely dependent for
Speaker 1: everything on the exploitation of other people. And it it is.
Speaker 1: It is a mean. The one thing that gives me
Speaker 1: a little to hope is when Andrew was explaining how
Speaker 1: like restaurants came arise because of people who used to
Speaker 1: work for Kings and ship who then started working at
Speaker 1: restaurants because they still want to make food. It's like
Speaker 1: that evolution. Taking it to the next step is people
Speaker 1: who work at restaurants now no longer having to work
Speaker 1: under capitalist exploitation and realizing, hey, I know how to cook, well,
Speaker 1: I'll just set up like ways to feed the community
Speaker 1: outside of this system of commerce. Right, that is the
Speaker 1: next evolution if you start with people cooking for the
Speaker 1: king people, then cooking in places where you pay to
Speaker 1: eat in this exploitative system, and then people cooking for
Speaker 1: people so that there's food around into like a community setting. Right,
Speaker 1: if you if you follow that trajectory, that's actually kind
Speaker 1: of hopeful. It's almost like we've come full circle. I
Speaker 1: mean in some ways. Yeah, Like right, it's if if
Speaker 1: you just go back to like beings, Yeah, like communicating.
Speaker 1: If there's places around different communities, different towns, different like
Speaker 1: urban centers that have have the capacity to feed people
Speaker 1: who are not able to cook, cook, cook for themselves
Speaker 1: that night or that day, that's something that if if
Speaker 1: it's there is ways of setting that up which I
Speaker 1: can see being so much better than how restaurants work.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe maybe people wash their own dishes afterwards,
Speaker 1: maybe people do something to help with like prep or something. Right,
Speaker 1: like there's there's there's ways to make this that gives
Speaker 1: you the parts of restaurants that are actually really convenient,
Speaker 1: um without the exploitation, and so that that type of
Speaker 1: like community cooking is something I mean, you know that's
Speaker 1: even similar to like how like a good dinner party
Speaker 1: operates um just that kind of extended out across you know,
Speaker 1: more of like a pop up setting and say, hey, yeah,
Speaker 1: this this month, we're using all of these ingredients that
Speaker 1: are grown in our general local area. Right, We're not
Speaker 1: getting shipped. We're not getting like strawberries in December shipped
Speaker 1: from halfway around the world. Will make stuff that is available,
Speaker 1: um as it you know, as it's grown, or we
Speaker 1: can pick, we can store food, right and yeah, and
Speaker 1: maybe we we've we've turned the old defunct Walmart into
Speaker 1: a grows shelter. So once or twice during the winter
Speaker 1: there are some strawberries and everybody comes together and shares
Speaker 1: this marvel that the community came like worked as a
Speaker 1: team to ensure would be available. But you can't just
Speaker 1: go and buy four pounds of strawberries that are produced
Speaker 1: with their like twice the weight of the strawberries and
Speaker 1: pesticide in order to keep them alive in fields that
Speaker 1: were never meant to grow straw Like maybe that's not
Speaker 1: available all year round. Like yeah, just give back to
Speaker 1: the point being raised to vote um about like the
Speaker 1: wethical consumption of the capitalism, because that's a really important
Speaker 1: point the whole poopas of that seeing has been lastidized.
Speaker 1: But it really is crucial to have a duance and
Speaker 1: the signing of it. What frustrates me is that it's
Speaker 1: been taken and it's been tuned into this justification and
Speaker 1: that it's okay that I buy from Sheen. It's okay
Speaker 1: that I buy a three thousand the whole from Sheen
Speaker 1: because no ethical consumption on the couple is on. Was
Speaker 1: like with where somebody goes on, they engage in something
Speaker 1: that is not is Andrew, you're talking around my two
Speaker 1: and a half pound a day veal habit and I
Speaker 1: don't appreciate. Yeah, that sounds like a problem. That's like
Speaker 1: something Joe Roken dot sets like, I eat two and
Speaker 1: to a half pads of veal every day and that
Speaker 1: keeps my brain running smoothly. The cavemen, so I mean exactly,
Speaker 1: it did work for Georgie Peterson, he's doing great. Christ
Speaker 1: at the mirror notion of Antifa, I would do an
Speaker 1: impression middle of hood my throat, so that's I would see.
Speaker 1: I would say that as we were saying, you know
Speaker 1: that there really is is potential we see even under
Speaker 1: these conditions that people find ways to survive, you know,
Speaker 1: they create like these informal work groups that are not
Speaker 1: only able to come together and push back against management,
Speaker 1: were able to work together to create trust within each other.
Speaker 1: You know, you have like for example, waiters who would
Speaker 1: try to hand in the kitchen on a slow day,
Speaker 1: or a cleaner or who might pick up a thing
Speaker 1: or two a dishwasher. We're trying to move up to
Speaker 1: become like a align cook. All these different workers, they
Speaker 1: they do things certainly to try to undermine the unnatural
Speaker 1: divisions and hierarchies and between the skill and unskilled um
Speaker 1: in the restaurants. Certain of course it doesn't always work
Speaker 1: because there are you know settings were in the manager
Speaker 1: successfully created divisions. You know, whether it be the manager
Speaker 1: creating a division between um teen different nationalities of immigrants,
Speaker 1: so you know, playing upon someone's queer phobia against like
Speaker 1: queer staff, or someone's biases against I don't know, I
Speaker 1: can't think of a third example. But there are ways
Speaker 1: a managers try to like sew these divisions between workers,
Speaker 1: and they always at workers try to push back. They're
Speaker 1: alsoways ad managers trying to do the opposite to create
Speaker 1: a community within the restaurant and includes themselves, so instead
Speaker 1: of fostering isolation and prejudice, they create a community that
Speaker 1: especially in small restaurants, that involves them that talk about
Speaker 1: that's you know, the boss might share with them how
Speaker 1: difficult it is working and organizing for the business of
Speaker 1: the restaurant. And or they might create like a special
Speaker 1: kind of restaurant focused on their identity. So they might
Speaker 1: create a restaurant for for queer youth with all the
Speaker 1: staff a queer, you know, you have a restaurant for
Speaker 1: you know, a black owned restaurant world workers and black
Speaker 1: and try to create community based on this identity. But
Speaker 1: it kind of erases the unavoidable class interests between workers
Speaker 1: and management. Its smooths over that dimension. So it becomes
Speaker 1: more difficult to organize and to speak up for your
Speaker 1: rights because you're you're aware that the managers are human
Speaker 1: and they too are struggling, Which kind of brings me
Speaker 1: to the idea of restaurants with no managers and the
Speaker 1: idea of cooperative The assume cooperative restaurants is that they
Speaker 1: basically have to collectively take on the rule of managers
Speaker 1: managing themselves, creating those pressures and pushing those pressures upon themselves.
Speaker 1: They enforced the work on each other, and they have
Speaker 1: to work longer in some cases and work harder in
Speaker 1: some cases. Because the structure of a restaurant is designed
Speaker 1: to make money, and if it is not making money,
Speaker 1: then everybody loses their jobs. So, due to this pressure,
Speaker 1: bosses in a position where they have to pushed workers
Speaker 1: to get as much out of the workers as possible.
Speaker 1: You raise the boss on the occasion from the equation,
Speaker 1: but you keep the rest of the concept of a restaurant,
Speaker 1: and line between work and boss becomes blue to the
Speaker 1: extent where it's almost like image of a person with
Speaker 1: a boot on their hand pulling a boot on their head.
Speaker 1: Where this oppression there was one external becomes internalized because
Speaker 1: that is how a restaurant survives through pressure, through exploitation.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like with how self employed people are
Speaker 1: on the capitalism. Yes, you're working for yourself and you
Speaker 1: have some freedom that regard, but you're still restricted by
Speaker 1: the broader system. You haven't escaped it, You've just had
Speaker 1: to navigate it. And I have to make quarterly payments
Speaker 1: to the I R S. Yeah, I mean what I say,
Speaker 1: I think work for ourselves in some capacity a certain
Speaker 1: level of freedom, and it um you still have those pressures,
Speaker 1: and it's just you have to inflict them on yourself.
Speaker 1: You know. You don't have like a break that has
Speaker 1: been mandated, and so at least in my case, I
Speaker 1: don't take breaks because that's just how I am. You know.
Speaker 1: You work longer hours, you push yourself harder and harder,
Speaker 1: you work on days when you should be resting, and
Speaker 1: it's just it illustrates the fact that liberation is not
Speaker 1: to be found under this system, and it's something totally
Speaker 1: new with a totally different metric of success, a totally
Speaker 1: different metric of sustenance, totally different bare minimum and totally
Speaker 1: different motivation needs to be foundation upon which society is built,
Speaker 1: because there's profiting a worken. Yeah, And I think there's
Speaker 1: a like I think the reason this debate happens like this,
Speaker 1: this whole discourse happened in the first place, is just
Speaker 1: that like like just like a lot of it really
Speaker 1: was just a complete inability to imagine like literally any
Speaker 1: other way of like even just like like any other
Speaker 1: way of getting food that has not involved you going
Speaker 1: to a place and telling someone to make it for
Speaker 1: you and like that. I don't know, Like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like the fact that there have already been sort of
Speaker 1: seismic shifts in the way that like food production happens, right,
Speaker 1: I think is evidence of like, no, we don't have
Speaker 1: to do it like that, like we just we just
Speaker 1: do not It wasn't like this for most of human history.
Speaker 1: We could do something better than whatever they were doing
Speaker 1: before it. Yeah, a lot of people might you know,
Speaker 1: wish for like in this. So it's a shift over
Speaker 1: into the abolition section of it, the restaurant abolition. A
Speaker 1: lot of people look to, for example, a union as
Speaker 1: a path by which a short too, you know, we
Speaker 1: make certain gains and belong to where we can take
Speaker 1: over and radically transforming. The difficulty comes in how unions
Speaker 1: have traditionally operated in the restaurants fair they tend to
Speaker 1: be significantly less successful. I mean, restaurants usually have very
Speaker 1: high turnover people in the last couple of months um.
Speaker 1: They often employed like a lot of young people who
Speaker 1: are just looking for part time or temporary employment. Well,
Speaker 1: people do work, they are constantly looking to move on
Speaker 1: to better things, and so it makes it difficult to
Speaker 1: create a stable union with a stable membership that can
Speaker 1: buckle down and really negotiate and push for the interests
Speaker 1: of the people working. Because people working and constantly changing.
Speaker 1: I think one of the like one of the really
Speaker 1: great things has led you is that like like especially
Speaker 1: when fast food took over, like the major unions that
Speaker 1: even do exist, which is like that we don't like
Speaker 1: we're just not gonna bother even trying to organize these
Speaker 1: people because they just assumed it was impossible, and so
Speaker 1: like there are there are very very few fast food unions.
Speaker 1: I mean, like I think one of the only like
Speaker 1: even sort of functional ones is the ww like organized Burgerville.
Speaker 1: But that's that's been like it like the like the
Speaker 1: big unions when they've done campaigns for fast food workers,
Speaker 1: it's like it will was clean like five or fifteen,
Speaker 1: but it's like they're not actually trying to like form
Speaker 1: unions of the freshmand workers, Like they don't they're not
Speaker 1: even trying. They're just trying to They're they're using them
Speaker 1: for sort of like a lot being an advocacy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and difficulty also commins when un it's established itself, you know,
Speaker 1: because a union structurally it's not always by all the Lucas.
Speaker 1: You know, there's still sort of a hierarchy bureaucracy that
Speaker 1: may establish itself and try to maintain itself, even if
Speaker 1: it starts off benignly. No, just for all of the
Speaker 1: radical history that unions do have, quite a few unions
Speaker 1: in the particularly the United States, have also been conservative
Speaker 1: bastions and bastions of different attitudes about like stuff like
Speaker 1: white supremacy. You know, there's there's a lot of the
Speaker 1: union movement is as much Blair Mountain as it is
Speaker 1: trying to stop black people from being able to work
Speaker 1: on trains. You know, like all of those things are
Speaker 1: part of the history. Yeah, I mean, I'll speak briefly
Speaker 1: on like the union situation in the Caribbean, particularly in
Speaker 1: turned out the trade union movement was intrinsically inextricably tied
Speaker 1: with the anti colonial movements in the movement for independence.
Speaker 1: Yours to became that the unions became tied up with
Speaker 1: the political parties that are rules after independence and well
Speaker 1: during the process of independence. But I know, happening with
Speaker 1: the UNI and so was that they end up being
Speaker 1: tied to deeply with the political parties. So that ended
Speaker 1: up being that the established unions. You know, the higher
Speaker 1: ups in those established unions, they have these relationships of
Speaker 1: favors and obligations with the politicians. A lot of politicians
Speaker 1: come out of these union movements and end up establishing
Speaker 1: their own political careers. And because it's also tied up
Speaker 1: when you workers get into these industries that do have union,
Speaker 1: that have been unionized, there's a very clear separation between
Speaker 1: the union and the workers because while the union is
Speaker 1: able to you know, push for the workers rights, and
Speaker 1: you know, they're still separate from the workers. The unions
Speaker 1: still exists as a new negotiator between the workers and
Speaker 1: the management. And so you have the workers which to
Speaker 1: go beyond just negotiating. The union exists almost as a
Speaker 1: release five for any sort of class antagonists. So any
Speaker 1: kind of pressure, any kind of real pressure against the
Speaker 1: start at school. I mean, it's not just unique to
Speaker 1: to turn that outlet to the Caribean I means it's
Speaker 1: globally cross history. You've seen union struggles kind of go
Speaker 1: over the same sort of dynamic. You know, new generations
Speaker 1: of workers, they build up the movements, they build up
Speaker 1: the unions, and the unions begin to change and perhaps
Speaker 1: new union leaders spring up to replace the old union leaders,
Speaker 1: one put on the same position and the same pressure
Speaker 1: as the reacting the same way as the bureaucracy and
Speaker 1: being rejuvenated. Unions are reformed and they end up going
Speaker 1: back to the same abay as that they had been before.
Speaker 1: And in some cases, the fight to reform the union
Speaker 1: takes the place of the fight against the boss because
Speaker 1: of all the bureaucracy and system of obligations and just
Speaker 1: deeply rooted ideas about the place of the union. Because well,
Speaker 1: unionizing is a difficult process. Union leaders to tend to
Speaker 1: enjoy certain benefits from their position, and as we are
Speaker 1: aware of, you know, certain hierarchies self justifying those are
Speaker 1: the top tend to want to perpetuated. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like and so this idea that this is kind of
Speaker 1: an unsettled thought of mind, but it's kind of like
Speaker 1: the idea of you know, using the state to establish
Speaker 1: workers power and then abolishing it afterwards, you know, using
Speaker 1: the union to get some shift workers po But then
Speaker 1: it's expecting this union of a certain structure that exists
Speaker 1: towards negotiating, ends to somehow pushing these sort of more
Speaker 1: radical directions. There's a saying that that um, but the
Speaker 1: zine um the rights of the zine says, it's like
Speaker 1: restaurant unions needed to be restaurants and we don't. I
Speaker 1: think that sort of applies more broadly because when we
Speaker 1: get into the whole idea of like work apbulation, it's
Speaker 1: just concept of workers are people outside of work, but
Speaker 1: a workers union exists within the confines of work as
Speaker 1: we understand it. So I think that's where the difficulty lies.
Speaker 1: The zine goes on to say later on that every
Speaker 1: time we attack the system, but we don't destroy it,
Speaker 1: it changes and in turn changes us, and the train
Speaker 1: of the next fight gains are tuned against us, and
Speaker 1: we are stuck back in the same situation at work.
Speaker 1: The boss to try to keep us looking for individual
Speaker 1: solutions or solutions within an individual workplace or an individual trade.
Speaker 1: But the only way that we can free ourselves is
Speaker 1: to broaden and deepen our fight. We involve worcause from
Speaker 1: other workplaces, other industries, and other regions. We attack more
Speaker 1: and more fundamental things. The desire to destroy restaurants becomes
Speaker 1: a desire to destroy the conditions that create restaurants. We
Speaker 1: aren't just fighting for representation in or control over the
Speaker 1: production process or fighters and against the act of chopping
Speaker 1: vegetables and washing dishes, or poor and bear or even
Speaker 1: serving foods other people. Is with the way all of
Speaker 1: these acts are brought together in a restaurant, separated from
Speaker 1: other acts, become part of the economy. And I used
Speaker 1: to expand capital. The starting and ending point to this
Speaker 1: process is a society of capitalists and people forced to
Speaker 1: work for them. We want an enter this. We want
Speaker 1: to destroy the production process or something outside and against us.
Speaker 1: We're fighting for a world of productive activity, fulfills. The
Speaker 1: need is an expression of our lives, not forced on
Speaker 1: us in exchange for a wage. A world were produce
Speaker 1: for each other directly, and I don't know where to
Speaker 1: sell to each other. The struggle of restaurant workers is
Speaker 1: ultimately for a world without restaurants or workers. And I
Speaker 1: mean so, I think people are still going to call
Speaker 1: small degensives restaurants restaurants anyway, probably, But I hope this
Speaker 1: discussion as cause equals kind of deepen approach to this.
Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen here. I am Robert d
Speaker 1: uh and this is a podcast about things falling apart
Speaker 1: and sometimes how to put them all together. And you know,
Speaker 1: today we're actually going to be talking more about the ladder,
Speaker 1: which I know is revolutionary for us. We're usually just
Speaker 1: kind of like getting way more into the doom er stuff.
Speaker 1: But I think there's been more than enough of that,
Speaker 1: particularly in the wake of several horrific Supreme Court rulings
Speaker 1: that I don't really need feel the need to go
Speaker 1: into detail on, but one of the things that has
Speaker 1: happened in the wake of these rulings this this like
Speaker 1: kind of liberal reaction to the fact that to the
Speaker 1: fact and they're right to be angry about the fact
Speaker 1: that they're being essentially governed by a small minority of
Speaker 1: people who are very densely geographically located in the South,
Speaker 1: that is where like the bulk of the support for
Speaker 1: the the hard rights policies comes from. Um and it's
Speaker 1: led to this like fuck Texas, Fuck Florida, Fuck uh,
Speaker 1: these these quote unquote like red states, these regressive states,
Speaker 1: which is this deeply problematic for a number of reasons,
Speaker 1: including the fact that you know, if you just want
Speaker 1: to look at it in terms of party politics, there
Speaker 1: were more people who voted for a Democrat in Texas
Speaker 1: in the election than live in either the state of
Speaker 1: Oregon or Washington. UM. These are densely populated places with
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount of people who are people of color,
Speaker 1: who are trans who are you know, in some way
Speaker 1: threatened by this weird Cristo fascist bullshit that is increasingly
Speaker 1: clamping down on the country. And so today I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk with some folks who will live in and
Speaker 1: around the Dallas, Texas what we call the DFW areat
Speaker 1: Dallas Fort Worth, UM, and who have lately been organizing
Speaker 1: to kind of both confront this, uh, this rising Cristo
Speaker 1: fascist like the street aggression portion of it, and to
Speaker 1: provide support in defense um for people who are are
Speaker 1: being victimized by it. So I'd like to welcome some
Speaker 1: representatives of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club to
Speaker 1: the show. Hey, y'all, boy, Yeah, do you want to
Speaker 1: kind of introduce yourselves to to start? However you'd like
Speaker 1: to be known on the show? I'm Satan, I'm bubble
Speaker 1: Satan and bubble um And how long have y'all been
Speaker 1: like doing Because there's there's two specific things that kind
Speaker 1: of I don't know, I became aware of y'all, and
Speaker 1: and we had some brief interactions, right, It's a brief
Speaker 1: interaction that some of your folks during the the snow
Speaker 1: thing that that destroyed everything, um. And so I've been
Speaker 1: kind of watching y'all socials ever since. And there were
Speaker 1: a couple of things recently that struck me as very
Speaker 1: uh worth discussion actions that you y'all were a part of.
Speaker 1: One of them was there's a neighborhood in Dallas called
Speaker 1: Oak Lawn that is kind of colloquially known as the gighborhood.
Speaker 1: It is like the um the gay neighborhood in Dallas obviously,
Speaker 1: and so it's a place that you know, even before
Speaker 1: kind of things got a little easier after twenty um,
Speaker 1: it was kind of a safe place and a little
Speaker 1: bit like of a of a of a fortress for
Speaker 1: like people who are not you know, straight and this
Speaker 1: gender which is and kind of are you know, for
Speaker 1: for an idea of how aspects of the df W
Speaker 1: area can be. The town I grew up in, Plano,
Speaker 1: had a condoms to go move in, and within like
Speaker 1: two nights of setting up shop and Plano, somebody fired
Speaker 1: a nine millimeter handgun through the window like it's not
Speaker 1: a it's a place where it could be difficult. UM.
Speaker 1: And so obviously repression and kind of violence and fears
Speaker 1: of vigilante violence um from folks who are queer has
Speaker 1: is understandably amped up in the wake of everything that's
Speaker 1: been happening. And y'all carried out an action where a
Speaker 1: sizeable group of leftists marched armed through the gaghborhood. Um.
Speaker 1: The one of the there were a couple of different
Speaker 1: chants that that I was hearing. One of them was,
Speaker 1: um about bashing back something like that. You want to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about like that action and what
Speaker 1: actually went down. Um. Sure. So at the beginning of
Speaker 1: Pride Month, we had a large group of fascists come
Speaker 1: to the gighborhood. Um, you know, they were shouting groomer,
Speaker 1: they were telling us the fist of Christ is coming
Speaker 1: down on you soon and um, you know, making really
Speaker 1: out their threats. So we discussed, um, you know, what
Speaker 1: we could do to be proactive to make sure that
Speaker 1: doesn't happen again. Um. And we ended up getting together
Speaker 1: some groups who were interested in an armed demonstration, which
Speaker 1: even here in Texas is not something you see too often. UM.
Speaker 1: And we decided to march through the gabhborhood. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: I would say a majority of the people that we
Speaker 1: know are LGBT and h it's our neighborhood. So you know,
Speaker 1: we put on this demonstration there and it was, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of incredible. We got some looks, but we also
Speaker 1: got a lot of support. Um, we had a lot
Speaker 1: of great chance. Um. You know, bottoms tops we all
Speaker 1: hate cops. There we go. Yeah, yeah, that was the
Speaker 1: that was the one that was in the video. Um.
Speaker 1: And so what was the I'm interested in kind of
Speaker 1: because I think this is the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: is potentially very useful. We we have seen. One of
Speaker 1: the things that I have personally observed and that has
Speaker 1: been observed by a number of folks, is that when
Speaker 1: these kind of right wing mobs who primarily want people
Speaker 1: who cannot defend themselves, who don't have the numbers to
Speaker 1: defend themselves, they want to like beat the ship out
Speaker 1: of people in a gang, right Like, that's that's the
Speaker 1: proud boy thing, that's the Patriot prayer thing. That's all
Speaker 1: these weird little groups. Primarily what they want to do.
Speaker 1: They don't want a fair fight. And when they are
Speaker 1: confronted with organized people on the left who are armed,
Speaker 1: that tends to scare the ship out of them. And
Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, during that day where you had
Speaker 1: those Christian fascists kind of coming after um that Queer
Speaker 1: family event, like one of the one of the live
Speaker 1: streams that one of the right wingers had, people were
Speaker 1: some of them were like commenting on the fact that
Speaker 1: there were people leftist open carrying and like how unsettling
Speaker 1: they found that. Um So I'm interested in kind of
Speaker 1: how the idea too, we're going to do this, have
Speaker 1: this kind of a march, you know, through this neighborhood,
Speaker 1: we're going to make sort of a show beforce. How
Speaker 1: that idea kind of came together? And then what logistically
Speaker 1: did y'all like feel the need to set up, Like
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess it wasn't as simple as like hey,
Speaker 1: everybody with a gun, like come come meet here and
Speaker 1: we're gonna have us a walk. Um So I'm interested
Speaker 1: in kind of what the logistics are because I think
Speaker 1: this is the kind of thing that people other people
Speaker 1: are going to want, like find useful to do, like
Speaker 1: statements of we are here, we have the tools to
Speaker 1: defend ourselves and we're not going to just passively let
Speaker 1: you run through our neighborhoods fucking with us. I think logistically,
Speaker 1: one of the big things was just making sure that,
Speaker 1: you know, everyone who was carrying was carrying properly, and
Speaker 1: then also to protect our own selves, making sure that
Speaker 1: whoever was carrying was also protecting our identity by wearing
Speaker 1: essentially full black walk UM, which that in itself sends
Speaker 1: a message. You know, a bunch of queer people marching
Speaker 1: through the streets of Dallas and full black block with
Speaker 1: guns UM sends a message like we're not going to
Speaker 1: take your ship. We're done. You know, you're not gonna
Speaker 1: mess with our bodily autonomy. UM. That march happened, We
Speaker 1: had planned it to be on that day originally, and
Speaker 1: that happened to be the day that Robie Wade was
Speaker 1: overturned UM, and it essentially just evolved that morning to
Speaker 1: a more intersectional body bodily autonomy march. But really logistically
Speaker 1: it was mostly about protecting ourselves and making sure that
Speaker 1: people who weren't carrying the firearms were also so protected
Speaker 1: from our firearms. Yeah, I want to dive into that
Speaker 1: a little bit, because that's so an important aspect of
Speaker 1: it is the ensuring saying. I have seen a lot
Speaker 1: of marches, and I will be honest, I've seen a
Speaker 1: lot of people being armed on on both sides politically,
Speaker 1: who have done things with guns that I would consider reckless.
Speaker 1: Probably the top moment in my mind is during a
Speaker 1: big march in Portland somebody leaned over and a glock
Speaker 1: fell out of the front pouch of their hoodie that
Speaker 1: they were just head loose in there. Um yeah, UM,
Speaker 1: So obviously it is not as it should not be
Speaker 1: as simple as like, you know, load up on guns
Speaker 1: and bring your friends, so to speak. How do you
Speaker 1: attempt to ensure like how like how do you actually
Speaker 1: go about handling the safety aspect? Is it? Like? Are
Speaker 1: you appointing essentially kind of like range officers. Before the march,
Speaker 1: we were keeping an eye on ship, like what does
Speaker 1: that actually look like? Um? I want to I want
Speaker 1: to give two examples for the march we did in
Speaker 1: the gighborhood. Um, it was different in that it wasn't
Speaker 1: publicly announced wearing um it was going to be, so
Speaker 1: it was kind of a by invitation only demonstration, so
Speaker 1: we knew pretty much everybody that was coming, except for
Speaker 1: people in the neighborhood who kind of joined ad hawc UM.
Speaker 1: So that's one way that we've done things. When we
Speaker 1: do more of like uh protest security for other actions. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, there are different people who will feel motivated
Speaker 1: to bring UM arms and usually they know what they're
Speaker 1: doing pretty well. In a couple of instances where someone
Speaker 1: is being unsafe, UM, you know, one of us will
Speaker 1: just go over there and talk to them, you know,
Speaker 1: like hey, you you you really need a sling uh
Speaker 1: for this, or you know, don't don't be uh pointing
Speaker 1: it in any way at a building. UM. Just little
Speaker 1: tips like that too, you know, resolve the behavior. So
Speaker 1: when it actually comes to like uh because because one
Speaker 1: of the things like whenever you have sort of a
Speaker 1: gathering like this is is de escalation and even within
Speaker 1: people within the march potentially like dispute resolution and that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. What was the how how did you
Speaker 1: kind of organize for that? Like what was the planning
Speaker 1: on that? And like, um, I think that's a really
Speaker 1: important question. One of the first things that we decided
Speaker 1: pretty early on is that we are not there to
Speaker 1: police any protesters. So you know if someone is is
Speaker 1: doing something illegal. Uh, And no, at no point where
Speaker 1: we you know, tell them to stop or try to
Speaker 1: make them stop. We may move away from the area
Speaker 1: or something like that, but we're not there too police
Speaker 1: our people at all. When it comes to like counters
Speaker 1: coming up in antagonizing, the main thing we do is
Speaker 1: try to put ourselves between them and any people they're targeting. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, we have cameras, we have less than lethal,
Speaker 1: we have different tools to try to de escalate that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so when it comes to like, uh, I guess
Speaker 1: training on that end, did you kind did you have
Speaker 1: any sort of like um um infrastructure, human infrastructure whatnot
Speaker 1: set up prior to this to like make sure people
Speaker 1: who were like doing de escalation were folks that you knew,
Speaker 1: you know, had some level of understanding of it, or
Speaker 1: folks that you could trust. Like how was the actual
Speaker 1: how do you actually because I mean, it strikes me
Speaker 1: that there is a great deal of like trust that's
Speaker 1: necessary to put together something like this, To be able
Speaker 1: to meet up with folks and and like march armed
Speaker 1: together requires probably a little bit more in in the
Speaker 1: way of of of trust than you know, just showing
Speaker 1: up at a protest. UM, that's kind of more conventional. Um.
Speaker 1: Was there sort of some in any kind of like
Speaker 1: I don't know, system or or like yeah, training or
Speaker 1: whatnot that y'all had for specifically like how to behave
Speaker 1: how to de escalate all that kind of stuff. Or
Speaker 1: was it just like folks that kind of you knew
Speaker 1: from from prior events were good at that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, as far as our group goes, UM, I
Speaker 1: can speak to myself personally and say that I trust
Speaker 1: one of our people with my life. UM. And I
Speaker 1: think because of that, and because we were really the
Speaker 1: ones putting it on, like we knew that if something
Speaker 1: were to go down, one of us would get in
Speaker 1: the middle of it, and we all trust each other.
Speaker 1: I think that in any sort of organizing environment, trusting
Speaker 1: trusting the people that you're working with is one of
Speaker 1: the most vital things that you can do because they're
Speaker 1: going to be the ones beside you when a proud
Speaker 1: boy rolls up and you want the person decide you
Speaker 1: to be someone that you can trust. UM, And we
Speaker 1: do that. We do have you know, we we do practice,
Speaker 1: and we do train together, and UM, we also have
Speaker 1: fun together and having that certain level of trust means
Speaker 1: the world when you're putting yourself out there in that way.
Speaker 1: And how long of the folks that are kind of
Speaker 1: like you're, we're most affiliated with like making this happen.
Speaker 1: How long have you all been sort of organizing and
Speaker 1: and doing stuff together. I would say most of us met,
Speaker 1: since all of us met in organizing different facilities during
Speaker 1: after the FOD protests and then just to boom in
Speaker 1: mutual aid that happened in DFW after that, Whether it
Speaker 1: was through Homeless Outreach or um, you know, bell bonds
Speaker 1: or however we met each other, it was mostly through
Speaker 1: that mutual aid community and getting out in the our
Speaker 1: communities and organizing ourselves and trying to find like minded
Speaker 1: people who wanted to see the same change happened. Now. UM,
Speaker 1: I think one of the uh, one of the things
Speaker 1: that's been on my mind a lot lately, and that
Speaker 1: that y'all particularly bring up, is the challenges of organizing
Speaker 1: in parts of the country where not just you know,
Speaker 1: the police who are always pretty regressive, but the entire
Speaker 1: legal structure is set up to as Florida has increasing,
Speaker 1: thevential number states have done like punished protests. Penalized activism
Speaker 1: make things more dangerous for for for people who are
Speaker 1: like going out there in public in addition to doing
Speaker 1: things to try and criminalize you know, people who are
Speaker 1: are are not uh straight, you know, white Christians. UM.
Speaker 1: So when you look at like kind of the challenges
Speaker 1: of organizing in a place where it's more dangerous, and
Speaker 1: obviously it's it's not particularly safe to be organizing against
Speaker 1: you know, the l A p D. But the court
Speaker 1: system in California is broadly speaking less stacked against you. UM.
Speaker 1: So if you had advice to give to people who
Speaker 1: had don't have this group of friends and people they've
Speaker 1: been organizing with for a couple of years already, but
Speaker 1: they want to have that, they want to build that
Speaker 1: in their community, where would you suggest they start? UM.
Speaker 1: I always tell people that it starts by showing up
Speaker 1: um to all kinds of events, you know, supporting a
Speaker 1: broad range of groups. And you know, you're at the protests,
Speaker 1: if you are at the feedings, the distributions, UM, You're
Speaker 1: gonna meet people and you're gonna build trust um, mutual
Speaker 1: trust there UM So that you know, when you want
Speaker 1: to start a project, you want to start a group,
Speaker 1: you'll have those people that know you. Um, it is
Speaker 1: very dangerous. Uh. I think it's always important to tell
Speaker 1: people to watch your op set. You know, don't be
Speaker 1: re sharing all kinds of activist stuff with your personal
Speaker 1: profile that has your name and your birthday and all
Speaker 1: of that. But yeah, it really goes to meeting people
Speaker 1: in person, I think. Yeah, And um, I mean that's
Speaker 1: such a difficult part of it because I think for
Speaker 1: a lot of people, particularly who maybe are living in
Speaker 1: rural areas, who are living, um, kind of outside of
Speaker 1: places that have well formed protest communities, social media and
Speaker 1: the internet is is a lifeline for them and often
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases like how they came to
Speaker 1: a lot of the political beliefs in a desire to
Speaker 1: do something. Um, but you're like, you can't. You have
Speaker 1: to actually get like face to face on the ground
Speaker 1: with people to actually build the kind of relationships that
Speaker 1: can lead to the sort of activism that y'all are doing.
Speaker 1: And that's that is a tough needle for a lot
Speaker 1: of people to threat I think, and you know, in
Speaker 1: those more rural communities, if there's not already those systems
Speaker 1: in place, you know, set up a monthly mail distribution
Speaker 1: with the local homeless shelter, the local homeless camp. And
Speaker 1: if you you know, can get a few friends, more
Speaker 1: people will show up and you can build that community yourself,
Speaker 1: even where it's not existing already. UM. It's more about
Speaker 1: just finding those like minded individuals that are already existing
Speaker 1: in your community and getting to know your neighbors. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to trust your neighbors. I think that's a great as
Speaker 1: far as the plan of action goes as good as
Speaker 1: you can get for at least starting down that road. UM.
Speaker 1: Before we kind of move on from this specific action,
Speaker 1: I did want to talk a little bit about the
Speaker 1: conversations you had both with like people who lived in
Speaker 1: Oaklawn and also with um, you know, passers by. I'm wondering, like, UM,
Speaker 1: did you have any that particularly surprised you or that
Speaker 1: particularly stick out to you right now? I personally was
Speaker 1: a little bit more surprised with the amount of support
Speaker 1: that we received, um, just because while Oaklawn is the
Speaker 1: gighborhood is generally more blue liberal, yes, park Town very
Speaker 1: anti gun typically yea, very yea. And to see you know,
Speaker 1: people sitting on the patios of the bars carrying for
Speaker 1: us while we were walking by. Especially as someone who
Speaker 1: has been you know, grown up in that area, it
Speaker 1: meant a lot. You know. It really shows almost like
Speaker 1: the cultural shift that we're going as far as left
Speaker 1: this politics go. If people are going to be supportive
Speaker 1: of us. Yeah, that's really interesting to hear. And now
Speaker 1: I were there, did you have any kind of interactions
Speaker 1: with out of I don't know people who were who
Speaker 1: were more conservative or more on the on the center
Speaker 1: right side of things. I think we had a couple
Speaker 1: of people who were kind of filming and frowning. It's
Speaker 1: always hard to tell, yeah, in that case, but no
Speaker 1: one really said anything to us. That's interesting. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: now that was that what that kind of brings me
Speaker 1: to the next topic, which is how how how did
Speaker 1: Dallas how to DPD handle this? Un hardly out of
Speaker 1: our cars and multiple police cars surrounding us while we
Speaker 1: were just unloading um. They were constantly trying to guess
Speaker 1: where we were going with the mark um by cutting
Speaker 1: off streets and trying to like escort us and like
Speaker 1: you know, blocking traffic and things like that. But but
Speaker 1: we were there less than five minutes before I would
Speaker 1: say at least four police cars were surrounding us, asking
Speaker 1: us questions. They were pulling out their guns like we
Speaker 1: were a threat. Geez. Um, Well, I mean yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that doesn't surprise me. Um. Did you have any kind
Speaker 1: of like direct is did they send like the p
Speaker 1: I O s up to try and you know, talk
Speaker 1: with organizers or whatever? Um? So they did right at
Speaker 1: the beginning, and I think that interaction went really well,
Speaker 1: um because they approached us as we were getting ready,
Speaker 1: and they said, you know, what group is this, Who's
Speaker 1: in charge, who's who's leading? What are your plans? And
Speaker 1: you know, every single person who was there was disciplined
Speaker 1: enough to either say nothing or say no plans. There's
Speaker 1: no group, there's no leaders. And you know after that,
Speaker 1: they kept their distance. They did not really interfere more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that is one of those things um,
Speaker 1: that police know. I've always found it useful too when
Speaker 1: you are having when you have to have an interaction
Speaker 1: with a police officer and um, sometimes it is unavoidable,
Speaker 1: like you need to kind of focus on like what
Speaker 1: are the things that they need to hear for this
Speaker 1: interaction to like end, um and end you know, not
Speaker 1: in them getting violent. Um. And I think it sounds like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you you you'll handled it perfectly like that that was
Speaker 1: the right way for everyone to react, like you were.
Speaker 1: It is Texas, Like it's not like it is at
Speaker 1: all illegal to walk around with guns. Um, so yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's that sounds that sounds again. I'm impressed
Speaker 1: by kind of both the boldness of the action but
Speaker 1: also the discipline that that was required to actually that
Speaker 1: was required like from the ground up right, not not
Speaker 1: because like the there was some sort of like vanguard
Speaker 1: leadership exerting force downward in order to actually make this
Speaker 1: work safely and in a way that that left hopefully
Speaker 1: and it seems like this is the case people who
Speaker 1: live in the area feeling broadly speaking pretty good about it.
Speaker 1: I would say that, you know, since the march, in particular,
Speaker 1: just in DFW in its entirety, the support that we
Speaker 1: have received has been almost overwhelming. Um. You know, people
Speaker 1: now recognize the people in black Walk as being safe
Speaker 1: and they're going to help us. If I need something,
Speaker 1: I can go to them. And that's the whole purpose
Speaker 1: of community defenses. Having Michael would be to have everyone
Speaker 1: be that person. Uh. Now, the other thing I would wonder,
Speaker 1: because it's I you know, I've spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time at black block protests, but generally in Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 1: where a hot day is like eighty degrees, UM, y'all
Speaker 1: are in fucking DFW UM. Those those summers are no joke.
Speaker 1: And wearing the gear that y'all are wearing is is
Speaker 1: UM a potentially dangerous thing? Right? Like? Was there was there?
Speaker 1: Was it kind of individual or left up to infinity
Speaker 1: groups to like figure out hydration and stuff, or did
Speaker 1: you have people who are kind of watching folks and
Speaker 1: reminding them and like trying to ensure that like that
Speaker 1: part of it was handled. Because that does strike me
Speaker 1: as a specific risk in this case. Most of us
Speaker 1: do have UM at least minor street medic training UM,
Speaker 1: as well as our own hydration kits, and we all
Speaker 1: carry extra electrolytes and things like that for people who
Speaker 1: may not be part of our group who may also
Speaker 1: need assistance. UM. That's a big part of it here
Speaker 1: in Texas is that's that's the main risk with protesting
Speaker 1: in the summer is dehydration, heat exhaustion, he stroke. You know,
Speaker 1: we do recommend that the people who are in black
Speaker 1: blog where moisture within loose layers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Marino
Speaker 1: is your friend if you can get it, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But you know, we all of us are you know,
Speaker 1: at least trained enough to recognize those symptoms. We make
Speaker 1: scenes that we can pass out to people, UM about
Speaker 1: how to protest safely in the summer, in the heat specifically.
Speaker 1: That's great, much more dangerous. Now. One of the things
Speaker 1: I've been seeing recently, and this is I'm guessing from
Speaker 1: a more recent march, was that the photo going around
Speaker 1: that's kind of kind of viral on right wing social
Speaker 1: media of UM. It's a black and white photo. There's
Speaker 1: uh an individual UM with a plate carrier and an
Speaker 1: a r UM and another individual with UM like a
Speaker 1: chest rig and what I think is a baretta um
Speaker 1: carbine um and uh, both of them are at a
Speaker 1: reproductive rights march UM. And there's a mix of really
Speaker 1: interesting reactions from the right like on this UM and
Speaker 1: I'm interested in kind of yeah your thoughts there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's it's been really weird. UM. We try to
Speaker 1: track whatever is being posted about us UM. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: can give us intel on people who might want to
Speaker 1: target us UM. But we've been noticing, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like a solid third of right wing comments are kind
Speaker 1: of broadly supportive. I think it really throws them for
Speaker 1: a loop. Um, you know, we we've even seen people saying, actually,
Speaker 1: bodily autonomy is a lot like gun rights and things
Speaker 1: like that, and it's been really weird. I think, um,
Speaker 1: being armed might kind of humanize us for some of
Speaker 1: those people in a way. It's been a weird thing.
Speaker 1: I have thought a couple of times that, I mean
Speaker 1: a number of times. I talked about this on the
Speaker 1: first season of It could Happen here. I think that
Speaker 1: there is some potential to bridge some divides there with
Speaker 1: kind of the existence of of a of an increasingly
Speaker 1: prominent left wing gun culture. You know. One of the
Speaker 1: comments I saw was somebody like going through the gear
Speaker 1: display and be like, actually, no, they're they're reasonably well
Speaker 1: set up, and like everything seems like this is this
Speaker 1: is exactly how you'd you know, want to have it done,
Speaker 1: and just people being like actually appreciative. And I guess
Speaker 1: maybe there's a degree to which, like if you're if
Speaker 1: you're in that community from a right wing side but
Speaker 1: not like a straight up fascist side, maybe there's a
Speaker 1: potential for like more commonality and like you said, the
Speaker 1: idea that like, oh maybe some of them will actually
Speaker 1: broaden their support for reproductive rights, um, you know, or
Speaker 1: at least consider it. You know, I don't know that
Speaker 1: that doesn't strike me as like a negative move and
Speaker 1: it it um, particularly in a place like Texas, you
Speaker 1: have to try to at least um have some sort
Speaker 1: of common ground with people who are are more on
Speaker 1: the right wing side of things, because they're so damn
Speaker 1: many of them. Yeah, so I think, um, it's one
Speaker 1: of those cases where when ideological where when ideology gets
Speaker 1: atomized to just like guns good, you know, that is
Speaker 1: like a core belief for some people. Um, that can
Speaker 1: draw them to being supportive of pro choice marches in
Speaker 1: a in a weird way. It's it's kind of a
Speaker 1: pretty specific kind of brain worms. But seeing it a lot, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't like call it necessarily a positive like it's
Speaker 1: a it's an aspect of things that are negative, but
Speaker 1: it's something that also can be like useful and and
Speaker 1: potentially positive. Like even though if you get into what's
Speaker 1: leading someone to like, oh, I really I re examined
Speaker 1: my beliefs on reproductive rights because I saw some people
Speaker 1: marching with guns. That's not like a sign of of
Speaker 1: a series of thought process that I think is like
Speaker 1: wildly positive. But at least somebody maybe came around on
Speaker 1: something better than going the other way. You know, we've
Speaker 1: been talking about the effects of getting all this right
Speaker 1: wing attention and uh, you know, in a way, that's
Speaker 1: what we want. We want to advertise that we have
Speaker 1: strong community defense, and on the flip side, you get
Speaker 1: all these supportive comments and hopefully those people don't want
Speaker 1: to kill me anymore. So it's it's just positive. We think, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're I mean, one of the ways in which these
Speaker 1: kind of protests can increase security for a community, Like
Speaker 1: one way is that maybe there are people who will
Speaker 1: get scared off because they don't want to risk getting shot.
Speaker 1: And the other is that maybe some people will re
Speaker 1: examine their opinions on that community because it's now more
Speaker 1: familiar to them because there probably way too into guns.
Speaker 1: But yeah, absolutely, so let's talk about um. There there
Speaker 1: was a specific action um that kind of the thing
Speaker 1: that was going around on Twitter was these proud boys
Speaker 1: trying to get into it, believe it was a library,
Speaker 1: and like a line of parents squaring off with them
Speaker 1: to like stop them. Um. Can we talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about that. Yeah, that was in McKinney. Um. It
Speaker 1: was the day after through V. Wade got overturned, And
Speaker 1: we honestly didn't know what to expect when we got
Speaker 1: there because of McKinny. We were like, are we going
Speaker 1: to be very much so outnumbered in this? And when
Speaker 1: we arrived there was already about thirty to forty people
Speaker 1: who were either parents or friends of the library there
Speaker 1: in support and maybe only the teen or twenty people
Speaker 1: in opposition. Um. So it was, you know, a pretty
Speaker 1: good welcoming, supportive environment. Um. And about thirty minutes after
Speaker 1: we got there is when the Proud Boys arrived, and
Speaker 1: we just really only had to tell two people, hey,
Speaker 1: they're Proud Boys. And before I before we couldn't even
Speaker 1: get over there to like block them off ourselves. There
Speaker 1: were like eight to ten soccer moms in their flip flops,
Speaker 1: Nike shorts and handmade signs standing in front of them
Speaker 1: and blocking them from coming any closer. Um. And of
Speaker 1: course they did get closer as people were leaving the
Speaker 1: library and the event was ending and things like that.
Speaker 1: But it was one of those things where it just
Speaker 1: organically happened, and it was it was beautiful, like in
Speaker 1: in a place like McKinney of all places, like I
Speaker 1: gw up in North Texas, like place I would expect
Speaker 1: to find, like a soccer mom in Nike shorts asked like,
Speaker 1: thanking me for bringing my gun to the library. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's wonderful to hear. I mean, and I people
Speaker 1: who are not in the d F w U area
Speaker 1: won't understand this, but like, yeah, I spent a significant
Speaker 1: chunk of my early life in McKinney, and I would
Speaker 1: not have expected that reaction there. Um, yeah, that's really
Speaker 1: really good to hear. And it also is you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm. I obviously have been supportive of a number
Speaker 1: of tactics to confront fascism, including people showing up in
Speaker 1: block and stuff and and protesting or or or confronting
Speaker 1: them physically. But I don't think there's any more durable
Speaker 1: kind of community self defense than than that, than than
Speaker 1: a than a group of people who are just kind
Speaker 1: of live in an area and around and curious, realizing
Speaker 1: there's a threat and immediately acting against it. Like that's
Speaker 1: such a that's such a powerful thing. Yeah, saying no,
Speaker 1: not in my neighborhood. And you know, again, like we
Speaker 1: didn't expect to have that reaction, which made it that
Speaker 1: much better when we saw it. And you know, having
Speaker 1: those people for the first time in their life maybe
Speaker 1: even can face to face correctly with fascists probably has
Speaker 1: a lasting impact on them as well. Like I hope
Speaker 1: that they keep going to more events like that and
Speaker 1: keep going and protecting their community from these people. Now,
Speaker 1: let me ask you, when you have these kind of
Speaker 1: interactions with folks, and when you had these specific interactions
Speaker 1: with those specific folks, is there kind of is there
Speaker 1: sort of an information spreading thing afterwards? Is they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: here's who we are, and like where you can find
Speaker 1: out more about us? Um, like kind of attempts to
Speaker 1: like let people know who you are and what you're
Speaker 1: doing and how they can you know, follow you and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Like is that a is that is that a part
Speaker 1: of the activism or was it more just like we're
Speaker 1: showing up to kind of provide a barrier for these
Speaker 1: people and like that's not this is not the time
Speaker 1: or place for that. It's a little bit of both. Um.
Speaker 1: A lot of these actions we are invited to. We
Speaker 1: have kind of made it a point to be known
Speaker 1: as we are here to help UM. So a lot
Speaker 1: of times we will get invited or people will send
Speaker 1: us an event and we will We do usually try
Speaker 1: to get in touch with you ever's organizing the event
Speaker 1: to make sure that they are comfortable with us, either
Speaker 1: open carrying or what they prefers to can still carry
Speaker 1: and things like that, UM, because it is still necessary
Speaker 1: to be polite UM. But then also when we do,
Speaker 1: we always meet people at these actions who are wanting
Speaker 1: to get more involved than just that one time, and
Speaker 1: we do have ways for them to get involved in
Speaker 1: their community and learn from us. Obviously, Dallas is um
Speaker 1: It's nickname for a long time has been the City
Speaker 1: of Hate UM, and it is a place that is
Speaker 1: I mean the city itself is fairly blue, but there
Speaker 1: is I mean, even within the Dallas area proper a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of people who are like extremely conservative. Obviously,
Speaker 1: I mean we I don't want to be harping on
Speaker 1: this too much, but is there a degree to which
Speaker 1: you are concerned about like attempts at at infiltration and
Speaker 1: whatnot or attempts to yeah, like kind of like you know,
Speaker 1: to do sort of the the fascist equivalent of what
Speaker 1: a lot of anti fascists do with right wing groups.
Speaker 1: There is a lot of concern about that. UM. We
Speaker 1: just you know, we do the best we can. We
Speaker 1: think we've done a pretty good job already, clearly very
Speaker 1: careful with um, you know, who were who were in
Speaker 1: contact with, who were working with UM. We've had to
Speaker 1: you know, stop working with abusers a few times. That
Speaker 1: is a tough one. We don't expand nearly as much
Speaker 1: as we could given all the people who want to
Speaker 1: be part of this particular group. We believe more in
Speaker 1: you know, many strong groups and uh try to help
Speaker 1: people do that. Um. But yeah, it's a tough struggle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's a that's an interesting because I think
Speaker 1: maybe a better question for me to ask is is
Speaker 1: not like, how do you avoid that? But how do
Speaker 1: you avoid like? Because because the if you look back
Speaker 1: at the actual history of co Intel pro right and
Speaker 1: the ship that like Hoover and his his goons were
Speaker 1: saying to each other, like, the goal was not to
Speaker 1: infiltrate every left wing movement. The goal was to make
Speaker 1: people be so afraid of infiltration that they weren't able
Speaker 1: to effectively organize, and so that that is I guess
Speaker 1: kind of the real trick is this. Obviously there's a
Speaker 1: degree to which you want to be on your guard.
Speaker 1: You need to be careful. It's it's it's important to
Speaker 1: be not just ethical, but but like responsible in your
Speaker 1: op set. But you also can't let like fear of
Speaker 1: that sort of thing happening just because you're you know,
Speaker 1: kind of surrounded in a place like North Texas. You
Speaker 1: can't let that fear stop you from from trying, right.
Speaker 1: I think a big part of that is it goes
Speaker 1: back to the trust thing. You know, we don't really
Speaker 1: let people into the close folds until they've come to
Speaker 1: a few actions with us and they've you know, proven
Speaker 1: that they're not you know, spilling the beans all over
Speaker 1: Twitter and yeah that you know, um, we know who
Speaker 1: they are and know what they're about, and then we
Speaker 1: involved them a little bit more. Um. It's all about
Speaker 1: building that trust with the people you're working with. It
Speaker 1: just goes right back to that is you know, trust
Speaker 1: is built over time, um, And the longer we all
Speaker 1: know each other, the more we trust each other, and
Speaker 1: then you know, we are able to have those conversations
Speaker 1: about welcoming more people in and um, you know, setting
Speaker 1: up the processes for that now has just on a
Speaker 1: logistical standpoint, that kind of notoriety i'll have have gained
Speaker 1: because of some of these actions. Has it sort of
Speaker 1: led to like difficulty in terms of we were dealing
Speaker 1: with like so many much interest, so many people reaching
Speaker 1: out to us, like how do you how do you
Speaker 1: actually like organize kind of that, like how you how
Speaker 1: you respond to people when ship goes viral? You know,
Speaker 1: I I know how overwhelming that can be. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: been pretty new to us. Um. We've been more used
Speaker 1: to being kind of your local crew that does things
Speaker 1: no one ever talks about. And uh, having a larger
Speaker 1: profile now is a challenge because we do know, you know,
Speaker 1: attracting a lot more attention you know, put some constraints
Speaker 1: on us. Um, but I think that goes back to
Speaker 1: why it's important to have a lot of different groups
Speaker 1: doing a lot of different stuff. Um. You know, you
Speaker 1: can't just have one uh group, uh doing all the
Speaker 1: organizing that needs to be done in an area. It's
Speaker 1: just a bad idea. You know, if a group gets
Speaker 1: taken out for a variety of reasons you don't want
Speaker 1: everything to fall apart. Yeah, so I guess kind of
Speaker 1: as we come to probably close to the end of
Speaker 1: this where there were there are things that I didn't
Speaker 1: get into that you wanted to talk to about what
Speaker 1: y'all are doing and kind of what you want other
Speaker 1: people know, particularly folks who I don't know we're in
Speaker 1: in Louisville or and you know, fucking Idabelle, Oklahoma, and
Speaker 1: UM kind of want to feel want to build UM
Speaker 1: or at least help to help to protect their community
Speaker 1: in a place that UM, there's additional challenges in doing so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've seen that recurring events no matter what it is,
Speaker 1: you know, book club distribution, if there's a place that
Speaker 1: people can find you regularly, that's a great way to
Speaker 1: have the kind of people you want to meet, you know,
Speaker 1: just just walk up and talk to you, UM for
Speaker 1: me what you know, watching your ops set and also
Speaker 1: compartmentalizing your information, like if I don't need to know something,
Speaker 1: I don't want to know it, UM, And that's a
Speaker 1: good way to stay safe while also you know, being
Speaker 1: able to organize and take action because like you said earlier,
Speaker 1: the most important thing is the will to do something.
Speaker 1: If you're just you know, the safest thing you can
Speaker 1: do is stay in your basement, but then no one
Speaker 1: will do anything. Yeah, exactly right. Um, was there anything
Speaker 1: else either of you all wanted to get into. I
Speaker 1: guess I also want to plug passing on training. So
Speaker 1: whatever skills you have, we've taught, um medical stuff, how
Speaker 1: to do an oil change, um, how to fire gun stuff,
Speaker 1: martial arts you know, unarmed fighting is also important. Um,
Speaker 1: share knowledge with each other, you know, make each other
Speaker 1: more powerful in that way. Yeah, that is a I
Speaker 1: think a great line to end on. Um, thank you
Speaker 1: everybody else and um yeah, um you can check out. Actually,
Speaker 1: you guys want to plug your your your socials, you
Speaker 1: could follow me at bubble break on Twitter and um
Speaker 1: it's kind of out now, but you can follow Anarco
Speaker 1: air softest we have trained on there excellent, and then
Speaker 1: of course, uh Domeport John Brown Gun Club on pretty
Speaker 1: much all platforms currently. Yeah. I never got into TikTok
Speaker 1: either one of these days. All right, everybody, that's the episode.
Speaker 1: What uh inspiring networks of violent accelerationism my nihilistic loss
Speaker 1: of faith in the possibility of human progress, And I
Speaker 1: don't I don't. I don't know. That's probably not a
Speaker 1: good way to Yeah, I'd be like that sometimes, Garrison,
Speaker 1: what are we What are we talking about today? This
Speaker 1: is it could happen here podcast, Bad Things, World falling apart.
Speaker 1: There's just been a big shooting in Boston. You probably
Speaker 1: about Chicago, not Boston. Boston, not Boston, not this. I
Speaker 1: was thinking about the Boston bombing. Oh, there we go.
Speaker 1: It's also not really in Chicago. We should know. It's
Speaker 1: like thirty right, Yeah, yeah, it's like it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a it's a northern suburb. Yeah, it's like it's
Speaker 1: and yeah, because I've heard a bunch of people say
Speaker 1: it's like a super rich neighborhood, and then I've heard
Speaker 1: other Chicago folks say that, like, no, it's like an
Speaker 1: upper middle class neighborhood that used to be richer. And anyway, whatever,
Speaker 1: it's not like Chicago that and yeah, we'll be talking
Speaker 1: about it because it's It is an incident that fits
Speaker 1: within a pattern of behavior that very few people understand
Speaker 1: nor really prepared to think about. And it's part of
Speaker 1: why is because if you actually understand what's going on
Speaker 1: with this shooting, there is no political utility in what happened.
Speaker 1: Um And I mean that the number of ways there
Speaker 1: is no if you are someone who is supportive of
Speaker 1: more stringent gun control, there is not political utility in
Speaker 1: the shooting for a number of reasons, including the fact
Speaker 1: that Illinois has strict gun laws, and while a lot
Speaker 1: of Illinois gun crime has to do with weapons that
Speaker 1: coming from other states, he bought his legally in the
Speaker 1: state of Illinois. Um. And even though like this guy
Speaker 1: was on police radar, he had made threats before they
Speaker 1: had confiscated all of his knives, and he's still allowed
Speaker 1: to buy guns, even though Illinois has a red flag
Speaker 1: law that very easily if you can confiscate demands knives
Speaker 1: they could have confiscated, has stopped him from buying guns
Speaker 1: or whatever. Plenty of laws on the books to have
Speaker 1: stopped this. And it's useless in a left right political
Speaker 1: sense of the word, because there are this guy does
Speaker 1: not graph onto any of that I have. I think
Speaker 1: it is there's a value and kind of putting out
Speaker 1: some of the Trump imagery he's put on only because
Speaker 1: the right has immediately left on calling him a transgender
Speaker 1: anti for shooter. And I guess in terms of a
Speaker 1: social media thing, sharing him draped in a Trump flag
Speaker 1: is the quickest way to like rebut that, but that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean he's not it's it's not not for actually
Speaker 1: understanding what's going on. Yeah, there's very this is it's
Speaker 1: it's in a pattern of shootings that are becoming more
Speaker 1: common the past few years. We saw it at the
Speaker 1: UH there's a school shooting last like October or November
Speaker 1: that the shooter had a very similar profile. Um, and
Speaker 1: it's a it's a part of this growing online trend
Speaker 1: using imagery related to mental illness too encourage and justify
Speaker 1: mass acts of violence in some rebellion from how our
Speaker 1: regular society is structured and how people usually think of reality.
Speaker 1: So it's it's something that we generally people who spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time researching this, myself included trying to
Speaker 1: be very careful about how we talk about this, right
Speaker 1: because we we don't want the wrong things boosted. But
Speaker 1: also everyone just being in the dark isn't great either, Right,
Speaker 1: That's that's frustrating. Right, if people are curious, they want
Speaker 1: us start to look stuff up, and it's better that
Speaker 1: they have someone who knows what they're talking about explaining
Speaker 1: to them then then just have them being the wild
Speaker 1: West of the Internet on site image boards or forms
Speaker 1: learning about these nonsense propaganda styles. There's there's a few
Speaker 1: things that are unique about this guy. I mean, he
Speaker 1: was not only making the propaganda, but he also did
Speaker 1: he also did a violet act that is actually more
Speaker 1: unique than usual. Usually the people who are involved in
Speaker 1: making this type of propaganda that he was making, he
Speaker 1: made YouTube videos, music, he he was he was very
Speaker 1: prolific in what he was putting out content wise into
Speaker 1: the Internet. And usually the people who put stuff out
Speaker 1: in this style of propaganda and this style of like
Speaker 1: of a very very like meme driven violent mental illness
Speaker 1: fetishization subcultures, they don't generally the people who make the
Speaker 1: stuff don't go and do the stuff. This is what
Speaker 1: instance where this this did happen. So that's actually unique
Speaker 1: for a few reasons. Yeah, I mean, I think one
Speaker 1: of the things that's interesting about that is that and
Speaker 1: this is something that has not been discussed nearly as
Speaker 1: much as I think it ought to have. In the
Speaker 1: wake of the shooting, this guy basically released an a
Speaker 1: r G at the same time as he carried out
Speaker 1: his shooting, Like we're basically we're going to get to that.
Speaker 1: I mean because in some ways this is a really
Speaker 1: good explanation, not explanation. This is really an example of
Speaker 1: the post manifesto, like post manifesto terrorism UM, where there's
Speaker 1: not there's not a written manifesto. It's someone's entire all
Speaker 1: line presence and their entire online documentation is is that
Speaker 1: that serves as their manifesto. The whole image of them online,
Speaker 1: everything they've put out, it represents the thing that they
Speaker 1: want spread. It's people these types of people are are
Speaker 1: less likely to write, you know, like a ten page
Speaker 1: thing about how about why they hate X minority. Instead,
Speaker 1: they're gonna leave piles and piles of clues and puzzle pieces,
Speaker 1: music videos and content that lead people into what they
Speaker 1: want to project as their mental state to be. UM.
Speaker 1: So it's like everything is and everything is part of
Speaker 1: what they want to put out. Yeah, and I think both.
Speaker 1: You can see the act itself, the shooting itself as
Speaker 1: an attempt to spread the art that he was making
Speaker 1: and to spread this like profile that he had built.
Speaker 1: There's a reason why that logo that he had for himself,
Speaker 1: UM was all over everything there's a reason why unique logo,
Speaker 1: very unique. Ago. He put out some of the videos,
Speaker 1: one from ten months ago showed the location he's believed
Speaker 1: to have started shooting from. It looks like, um, so
Speaker 1: he was planning this for a while, and he I
Speaker 1: think this was this was meant both as almost as
Speaker 1: like an advertising campaign for this guy's EP, if you
Speaker 1: want to look at it that way, but in a
Speaker 1: broader sense, like like like it's it's it's it's more
Speaker 1: circular than that. Right. He wasn't just trying to spread
Speaker 1: his stuff, but he was trying to spread his stuff
Speaker 1: in this this imagery and branding that he had created
Speaker 1: for himself and in order to put other people in
Speaker 1: that same mind state. It was. It was also very
Speaker 1: personal to him. Um, he's I've spent the past few
Speaker 1: hours watching watching hours of the stuff that he's put out. Um,
Speaker 1: and I mean he's there's there's videos that he's animated
Speaker 1: of him doing a suicide by cop. Um, there's there's
Speaker 1: music videos he's made about doing a school shooting. Um.
Speaker 1: These are these are d as and Pot has been
Speaker 1: grappling with for a long time and he finally did
Speaker 1: the thing. I'm I'm unsure currently if he always knew
Speaker 1: that he was going to do this or if he
Speaker 1: was actually trying to fight it now that's that's honestly
Speaker 1: not even worth debating because it's not useful to what's
Speaker 1: going on because he did it, because because he didn't.
Speaker 1: But we've had you can see the types of stuff
Speaker 1: he's been putting out, Like yes, the string that he
Speaker 1: did the shooting on, he has a long, along zooming
Speaker 1: clip of that same street in videos that was posted
Speaker 1: like over a year ago. Um, he's been he's been
Speaker 1: thinking in this way for a long time. This isn't
Speaker 1: like a fast radicalization. This is someone who has been
Speaker 1: heavily steeped in very very small niche online some cultures
Speaker 1: for a long time. Like the guy is twenty two
Speaker 1: years old, he's he's had his Twitter account since two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven. He's been online so much. Um, it's deeply
Speaker 1: online person, deeply alienated, uh, socially isolated, uh, deeply like disassociative.
Speaker 1: And this is this is by the way, can assistant
Speaker 1: with what his friends have said, consistent with what people
Speaker 1: who knew him and worked with him and put music
Speaker 1: and albums together with him have have repeatedly. A number
Speaker 1: of them at this point come out and said variations
Speaker 1: of like, yeah, man, he he got like really weird,
Speaker 1: like it was it not not like and not in
Speaker 1: the way that like, oh he got super into que
Speaker 1: or like he became a Nazi, but like he got
Speaker 1: weird in a way I didn't understand and I stopped
Speaker 1: associating with he got he got detached from parts of
Speaker 1: of like modern reality in ways that are really hard
Speaker 1: for people to understand. Um, and I think it's it
Speaker 1: is important to emphasize just that the deeply online nature
Speaker 1: of this he he had. He made a whole music
Speaker 1: video titled I Rely on the Internet, um that you
Speaker 1: can't find anywhere, so that don't even try to love
Speaker 1: of God. You don't need to. You don't need to.
Speaker 1: But like, but it opens, but it opens by him
Speaker 1: saying I get mad when other people are more popular
Speaker 1: than me on the internet. And the mass shooting is
Speaker 1: in line with this, With this style of thinking, right,
Speaker 1: he's he is he is trying to reify himself into
Speaker 1: a into a memetic image to spread around the same
Speaker 1: way many mass shooters try to do this same thing
Speaker 1: that he is doing this extremely intentionally Um, he wants
Speaker 1: to be the thing that represents a very specific idea,
Speaker 1: and I'm it's again we are always trying to be
Speaker 1: carey careful, but like how much we get into this
Speaker 1: because you don't want to boost the wrong thing. But
Speaker 1: it's no one of the important to talk about because
Speaker 1: it's costing a lot of people in their lives, and
Speaker 1: no one really knows how to deal with this problem
Speaker 1: right now. One of the beautiful things about our current
Speaker 1: age is that if you are someone like if you
Speaker 1: are someone who researches terrorism, extremism, violence, particularly in the
Speaker 1: American context, although certainly not exclusively christ Church and the
Speaker 1: whole Germany, I don't need to go into it. But
Speaker 1: if you are someone who focuses on this stuff, um,
Speaker 1: you will repeatedly have the experience of encountering a new
Speaker 1: subculture online or a new trend, a new like species
Speaker 1: of meme and find yourself wondering, like when the shooting
Speaker 1: is going to be? Um. I made a significant chunk
Speaker 1: of my career because I was paying attention to one
Speaker 1: particular group of folks online when they did their shooting.
Speaker 1: And I am not primarily I've not been in the
Speaker 1: you know, We've talked a little bit about schizo wave,
Speaker 1: which is kind of broadly speaking, the thing that this
Speaker 1: guy most embodied. Um that is that is the propaganda
Speaker 1: style which has a bad name. Yes it's obviously we're
Speaker 1: not endorsing its name. This is the style that people
Speaker 1: who are involved in this only community use. It's about
Speaker 1: fetishizing parts, or fetishizing media driven aspects of mental illness
Speaker 1: to encourage violence. It's about obviously mental illness, yes, the
Speaker 1: aesthetics and mental illness. Right, People who are who actually
Speaker 1: you know, deal with mental illnesses are much less likely
Speaker 1: to commit violent acts. They're actually more likely to be
Speaker 1: the recipient of of of violent acts not documented. So
Speaker 1: like this is this is like I think it portant
Speaker 1: to actually get people to like understand because this is
Speaker 1: one of the things that if you look at like
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson for example, like how Alex Jones bind to
Speaker 1: all these shooters, the thing they pivoted, one of the
Speaker 1: things they pivoted to is, oh, it's because all these
Speaker 1: people are on antidepressants. And it's like, no, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk about So there was there was this tweet,
Speaker 1: but I mean, I hate talking about Marjorie Taylor Greens.
Speaker 1: I think it's useless to talk about her, and it
Speaker 1: only gives her inflates the thing that she represents. But
Speaker 1: but but uh, she had this tweet about a picture
Speaker 1: of of him that that that that he that he posted,
Speaker 1: and she's asking is he in jail or a rehab
Speaker 1: center or a psychiatric center in this photo that's on
Speaker 1: his bedroom? What drugs are psychiatric drugs or both? Does
Speaker 1: he use? And the image here is of an image
Speaker 1: very clearly photoshopped of this person sitting in like of it,
Speaker 1: sitting in like a mental institution, holding a Bible. And
Speaker 1: it's part of this thing that is like a fetishizing
Speaker 1: the aesthetics of mental illness. Right, It's like, look at me,
Speaker 1: I'm I am so detached from reality, I be I
Speaker 1: belong inside a mental institution and the aesthetics of Christian fascism,
Speaker 1: which is also a weird part of it. There's a
Speaker 1: photo one of the like images he posted in four chan.
Speaker 1: I think it was fortunately I may be mistaken about
Speaker 1: the exact location, but it was like it was a
Speaker 1: Catholic saint with like the sacred heart like in her hands,
Speaker 1: with the head replaced by like some anime girl. I've i've,
Speaker 1: I have not seen that yet. But yeah, this image
Speaker 1: that he made of of inside this this mental hospital,
Speaker 1: that that is, that is part of the joke to him, right,
Speaker 1: the joke, Like I don't think he would actually assume
Speaker 1: that someone would think this is an unphotoshopped image. I
Speaker 1: think he would he hilarious obvious, like like Margine Taylor
Speaker 1: Grey is just like just like unable to determine the
Speaker 1: most basic photoshop that you can see the edge marks
Speaker 1: very clearly. So but but this, but like this is
Speaker 1: part of the joke, right, And everything getting into what
Speaker 1: he actually believes about reality and stuff isn't important because
Speaker 1: everything about this is has to do with like post
Speaker 1: to ironic violence and post ironic like comedy, post ironic
Speaker 1: like ideas of reality. It's the difference between this what
Speaker 1: is sincere and what is real and what is ironic
Speaker 1: and what is fake don't matter. They as long as
Speaker 1: they're happening, that's what's happening. So it's all as real
Speaker 1: as anything else. So getting into specific ideas about what
Speaker 1: he personally believes doesn't actually matter because one we don't
Speaker 1: know if that's genuine at all. He's he's putting everything
Speaker 1: out intentionally. And two it doesn't matter on the actual
Speaker 1: material circumstances. What are producing effects inside our world right now,
Speaker 1: like these types of like acts of violence, but it's
Speaker 1: it's everything is put out, should be but it'll seem
Speaker 1: like contradictory, it'll seem confusing. Right. He opened a video
Speaker 1: of his that he was like doing a live stream
Speaker 1: like like I think, like over like a year ago,
Speaker 1: and he he calls everyone who's watching his live stream
Speaker 1: like he calls them communists. He's like, hey, communists, um.
Speaker 1: And it's not because they're actually communists, not because he
Speaker 1: likes communism. It's not because he's necessarily fascist either. It's
Speaker 1: that all these things are so blurred and you use
Speaker 1: them interchangeably to produce this sense of meaninglessness and the
Speaker 1: reaction to this meaningless world that he's constructed for himself
Speaker 1: and these types of online subcultures try to construct. The
Speaker 1: only sensible reaction to this meaningless world is for them
Speaker 1: to do these types of acts of violence. That is,
Speaker 1: that is the point. So the actual details what they're
Speaker 1: saying aren't important, because it's all about constructing this world
Speaker 1: that is utterly meaningless and self contradictory and confusing and
Speaker 1: nothing makes sense and the only way to respond to
Speaker 1: that is to get out of it. And that's part
Speaker 1: of what they're they're trying to do. And there are
Speaker 1: I mean, and again part of the frustrating things that
Speaker 1: there are all of these things that people try to
Speaker 1: kind of simply affix to this our pieces of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: American gun culture, the fetishization of violence as the way
Speaker 1: to achieve positive ends in our culture is a part
Speaker 1: of this. It's why, it's part of why the natural
Speaker 1: response to everything is meaningless and confusing is going a
Speaker 1: galling spray exactly. Um. And likewise, the fact that politics
Speaker 1: is where it is where you have like this one
Speaker 1: party that's the Republican Party that is almost entirely dedicated
Speaker 1: to like owning the Libs and just purely attacking people
Speaker 1: rather than trying to do anything because their policies have
Speaker 1: been unmitigated disasters for the country, and the other side
Speaker 1: just kind of blindly tells people to vote like that
Speaker 1: hopelessness that like that, that kind of nihilistic aggression on
Speaker 1: the right all feeds into this. And you could say
Speaker 1: that like a great deal of right wing media, particularly
Speaker 1: right wing ault media, is kind of firms a heavy
Speaker 1: component of like the milieu that this guy was radicalized in.
Speaker 1: But it's more like that kind of stuff provided a
Speaker 1: language for him than it is that that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff was specifically like his motivating things. The same thing
Speaker 1: with Trumpism, right, Like he he engaged with Trumpism only
Speaker 1: in a way that it helps kind of destabilize things.
Speaker 1: And is this like orbit of chaos, right, That's that's
Speaker 1: why it that that that's why it's into it. Right,
Speaker 1: He was deeply into stuff run conspiracy theories, paranormal deep nihilism, um,
Speaker 1: getting cut off from consensus reality, getting awakened to some
Speaker 1: like greater truth. Everything that he's actually into is all
Speaker 1: just to serve to serve those types of means. Politics
Speaker 1: aren't the core part of that, but it's a reaction
Speaker 1: to politics. And then he's going to use it as
Speaker 1: just as just another tool. It's because yeah, many of
Speaker 1: them are racist. Maybe they can share racist memes, but
Speaker 1: that's not actually the the the center point of of
Speaker 1: what's going on um. And you know, in some ways
Speaker 1: to be easier if it would be, because that gives
Speaker 1: you something actually easy to target otherwise right now, you know,
Speaker 1: when you're trying to address this whole propaganda style that
Speaker 1: is encouraging these things to happen, it's a harder thing
Speaker 1: to climb down on because it's it's an like an
Speaker 1: endless game of whack a mole trying to find out,
Speaker 1: you know, who's the big people pushing content like this
Speaker 1: right now and like these weird niche communities, how can
Speaker 1: we get them taken down? And they just always pop
Speaker 1: back up, right It's always it's it's this end this game.
Speaker 1: So it's hard to target, and that leaves you with
Speaker 1: the feeling of like hopelessness on how this situation will
Speaker 1: be solved, which is like also part of the point
Speaker 1: of why these attacks happen is to is to get
Speaker 1: that reaction. Um, but it sucks, like it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's always bad to just have the like the only
Speaker 1: thing you think about is like, oh wow, I don't
Speaker 1: see a way to solve this. It's just terrible. But
Speaker 1: that's part of the intention here, and man, it's it's
Speaker 1: not good because you know, you this this isn't the
Speaker 1: first shooting that has happened from this skits awave aesthetic.
Speaker 1: There there. There has been other ones, but these things
Speaker 1: are norms are gonna start hearing more and more about this,
Speaker 1: and that sucks. Um, It's gonna become more of a
Speaker 1: of a thing that people are going to be aware of.
Speaker 1: Right as soon as as soon as MPR starts talking
Speaker 1: about it, you're like, Okay, this is this is fully
Speaker 1: this is this is fully escaped the box. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's one of those things when um, because I was
Speaker 1: just I was saying earlier, like what it's like when
Speaker 1: you finally when you find yourself staring at it something
Speaker 1: that is going to blow up in a violent way
Speaker 1: and just not knowing when you are one of a
Speaker 1: number of folks who I've known who are kind of
Speaker 1: particularly dealing with this space. And it's been like two
Speaker 1: years that folks have been saying like there is there
Speaker 1: will have it like and the thing that is most
Speaker 1: almost as frightening as like anything else is that. And
Speaker 1: then fucking Brett Bear is going to be talking about
Speaker 1: Schizo wave on the news like we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to deal with like Joe Rogan trying
Speaker 1: to parse this ship out while stoned um, while stoned
Speaker 1: and well, talking about the Cally Yuka and we're talking
Speaker 1: about the fucking calli Uga, which does lead us into
Speaker 1: the board Apiacht Club Gas. So are we gonna are
Speaker 1: we gonna set? So we'renna talk about one thing dealing
Speaker 1: with skits. We were finished talking about one thing dealing
Speaker 1: with skits away and then when I enter into other
Speaker 1: thing that the only accurate way I can describe describe
Speaker 1: this is that my my dives into this, into this
Speaker 1: theory are the equivalent of what it feels like to
Speaker 1: have a psychotic episode. And that's not that's not disparaging
Speaker 1: at all. It's about the actual thing is your brain
Speaker 1: does when that happens. How you take one meaningless piece
Speaker 1: of information and project meaning onto it to make it
Speaker 1: super important. Um, and how that kind of cascades down.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, So the board the board a fiacht club
Speaker 1: a k A. Now, I guess the board ape Nazi
Speaker 1: Club because people online have decided that they're really good
Speaker 1: at researching Nazis. I guess somebody hopp into the fucking
Speaker 1: subreddit and tell us that we we needed to be
Speaker 1: all right, we needed to be dealing with this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I was like, like, randomly, I like visited some
Speaker 1: of my friends in Chicago who are like normies and
Speaker 1: like they were telling me about this video. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it is. It is again. It has fully escaped the
Speaker 1: box now and that's part of the problem. So there
Speaker 1: is this YouTuber who made a video in partnership with
Speaker 1: a quote unquote internet artist um about how the Board
Speaker 1: Apiacht Club friends of the pod are secretly this Nazi
Speaker 1: op to troll everyone into spreading esoteric Nazism. That's that's
Speaker 1: the claim. Now, first I'm gonna say that the guy
Speaker 1: who made this video was in partnership with this internet
Speaker 1: artist who at the same time launched a rival ape
Speaker 1: based n f T project, and this video served as
Speaker 1: an ad for his rival ape n f T project.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, his Ape n f T project
Speaker 1: was taking the art that the Board Apiacht Club used
Speaker 1: for their apes, making no changes to it, and just
Speaker 1: selling it to people on a different platform, which is
Speaker 1: like intellectual property theft right, right, Like, I never want
Speaker 1: to be the guy saying the board apes are leading
Speaker 1: on the right. I can't believe, like we are not
Speaker 1: defending Board Ape Yacht Club and I want them to
Speaker 1: be hit with a brick. But we're talking about this
Speaker 1: because people are appropriating the term, appropriating the almost like
Speaker 1: the aesthetics of anti fascist research that he started selling
Speaker 1: their own products. They are appropriating the aesthetics of anti
Speaker 1: of scholarship focused on extremism, um, in order to sell
Speaker 1: n f T s. That's what's happening with this. The
Speaker 1: board Ape Yacht Club or Nazis video so agains. So
Speaker 1: all the inporation comes from this from this guy who's
Speaker 1: a rival arrival n f T internet art. What's his name,
Speaker 1: hig writer Rips? I think, yeah, writer Rips. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: he's being sued now by the Board Apes or whatever,
Speaker 1: and like, good god, I and I mean everything, I
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna if you watch the video that we're
Speaker 1: referring to, I'm not disparaging you in case you thought
Speaker 1: it was convincing, because I mean that was part of
Speaker 1: the editing, because he was trying to make it seem convincing.
Speaker 1: But every every single thing is like cherry pick and
Speaker 1: squished together to resemble meaning. But once you actually open
Speaker 1: it up, you're like, oh, this is actually nothing. Um.
Speaker 1: The whole thirty minute section on the cipher is about
Speaker 1: them doing cipher's badly to get a result out of
Speaker 1: the clues that they were given. They're looking for specific
Speaker 1: results to match whatever they want to see um. And
Speaker 1: everything else is the connections are so tangential um and
Speaker 1: it's it's like synchronicity gone bad. Right. It's people who
Speaker 1: take these things and protect meaning onto them, when in
Speaker 1: reality that's just how everything in the world works, and
Speaker 1: it's not actually meaningful or important. It's just because you're
Speaker 1: focusing on it, so you're gonna see it everywhere. It
Speaker 1: is the same thing we were talking about in our
Speaker 1: food factories, conspiracy videos, a podcast sorry, and and it's
Speaker 1: basically one of the things that has made this, I
Speaker 1: think spread so viral e is that there's a germ
Speaker 1: of not truth. But there's there's a single convincing point
Speaker 1: that it all starts from. And the single convincing point
Speaker 1: is that the board Apiat club logo was from that
Speaker 1: other Nazi logo. Absolutely, yeah, very is very much patterned
Speaker 1: off of like the the old s s Death's Head
Speaker 1: because you shouldn't, yeah, because the number of things going
Speaker 1: on there, because the Nazis were really good at graphic design,
Speaker 1: and because also that's not originally a Nazi thing. It
Speaker 1: has its origins and a Prussian military unit, and there's
Speaker 1: a reason why the death's head went so far. And
Speaker 1: it is generally like, for example, when you see a
Speaker 1: death's head on in the Ukrainian soldier in like Ukraine,
Speaker 1: that dude's probably got some pretty Nazi fucking beliefs. It's
Speaker 1: not a it's it's not a again, So the fact
Speaker 1: that you see something that looks like it may have
Speaker 1: an inspiration in that um but like is a worthwhile
Speaker 1: point to start looking at stuff. Absolutely, But once you
Speaker 1: go at it with a conclusion in mind, then find
Speaker 1: things just to back up your own conclusion. That's not
Speaker 1: how you do good research because man, like one of
Speaker 1: the founders is Jewish, not saying Jewish people can't be
Speaker 1: fascist or whatever, but like half the people who started
Speaker 1: it are ethnic minorities. They're really bad writers, and they
Speaker 1: put together this thing that's complete nonsense, and people are
Speaker 1: now assuming it's this, yeah, make a conspiracy, and it's not.
Speaker 1: It's just because it's so And I think part of
Speaker 1: why people are so so. I think part of why
Speaker 1: a chunk of the people who hate it want there
Speaker 1: to be a conspiracy is because this thing has made
Speaker 1: so much money, and it is utterly banal and an idiotic,
Speaker 1: and it is utterly been all in idiotic and part
Speaker 1: of the thing A lot of this comes out of
Speaker 1: and a lot of the strength that kind of this individual,
Speaker 1: this thing has, this this video has comes out of
Speaker 1: the fact that years ago a number of folks, some
Speaker 1: of whom our present company here, started warning people about
Speaker 1: the ways in which fascists would hide things like fourteen
Speaker 1: and eight and all of dog whistles, hidden imagory, all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff here is and and so people
Speaker 1: started to get primed to the fact that that happens,
Speaker 1: that the Nazis hide ship, and that that that you
Speaker 1: should be on the lookout for it. But one of
Speaker 1: the things that has been forgotten, I think, in kind
Speaker 1: of the rush to do that for ship like this,
Speaker 1: is that it's not just the fact that there hiding
Speaker 1: like and in the in the specific case of people
Speaker 1: are putting fourteens and eighty eights and ship. When I
Speaker 1: was discussing that was nearly always in the context of
Speaker 1: like members of Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys and
Speaker 1: affiliated groups who were beating people in the streets. Right,
Speaker 1: So you're not you don't just have the imagery you
Speaker 1: have someone going out and doing things that like they
Speaker 1: are claiming I have nothing to do with fashions, but
Speaker 1: like no, you can see like you haven't and there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you have an ape that's numbered one eight, which
Speaker 1: is a video, it's because there's like ten thous these
Speaker 1: apes and they're all numbered in numerical order. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like the fact that in a group of a set
Speaker 1: of ten thousand apes, one of them is a number
Speaker 1: of four eight is not Nazi dog whistling even anymore
Speaker 1: than it would be Satanic dog whistling that there's gonna
Speaker 1: be a six six six in there. You know. It's
Speaker 1: just like there's one that's six nine six nine, just
Speaker 1: like there's one that's two three four seven. Whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's like that thing people used to do were
Speaker 1: like I don't know if people still do this, but
Speaker 1: like they were when I was like kid. People would
Speaker 1: like you get someone who'd like pull out a grid
Speaker 1: of a city and they start drawing pentagrams on it. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, yeah, there's a bunch of random
Speaker 1: lines if you can. But the other thing that's that's
Speaker 1: a really problem. That's a big problem about this. It's
Speaker 1: not only it's passing off bad extremism research to sell
Speaker 1: their own n f T product, which is bad and
Speaker 1: of itself. It's also saying the stuff that doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be said out loudly to a huge audience, all
Speaker 1: while using the fast wave image style, and that sucks
Speaker 1: because it's talking about things like traditionalism. It's talking about
Speaker 1: types of esoteric Nazism that usually we don't want to
Speaker 1: put a giant megaphone on because when people get really
Speaker 1: into this, you get stuff like the shooting that happened
Speaker 1: a few days ago. That's that's Those are the same
Speaker 1: Internet communities that this stuff is really fostered in, So
Speaker 1: we don't like to amplify it because the more people
Speaker 1: who are in these communities, the more their brains slowly
Speaker 1: get chipped away at by these people making this making
Speaker 1: these types of like hypnotic propaganda. So when we have
Speaker 1: a tuber that has a video with millions of views
Speaker 1: talking about the Caluga, talking about Julius A. Vola talking
Speaker 1: about a whole bunch of stuff around like extremely niche
Speaker 1: occult Nazism, that's not great, especially when they're using the
Speaker 1: fastave style. Of video editing to make it seem really
Speaker 1: cool and scary, and when they're doing it ultimately to
Speaker 1: make money in an n f T scheme, right, It's
Speaker 1: it's it's more than just this is not just somebody
Speaker 1: did research that was like bad um. This is somebody
Speaker 1: crafted a viral thing using the aesthetics of research um
Speaker 1: and dropping some really dangerous shit into the consciousness in
Speaker 1: an irresponsible way to sell the same ape drawings they
Speaker 1: were attacking. Extremely frustrating because even the whole cipher section
Speaker 1: of the video I'll still reel against because it's about
Speaker 1: people using a bad jillion cipher methodologies to get specific
Speaker 1: results out of it that they want, and all the
Speaker 1: results they get out of it also are like not
Speaker 1: problematic and kind of explainable, Like all of them refer
Speaker 1: to something about monkeys anyways, even if they are true,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's it doesn't necessarily need to be referencing
Speaker 1: this obscure thing in traditionalism. It's like, oh no, that's
Speaker 1: because it's the name of a fucking monkey. And I
Speaker 1: don't again, I don't. I don't have any actual opinion
Speaker 1: on whether the Bourne Apiat Club has someone working for
Speaker 1: it that is hiding in secret references because honestly, I
Speaker 1: don't care, because all because what it's viewed publicly as
Speaker 1: is a stupid n f T thing. I mean, it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not viewed publicly with people who use it as
Speaker 1: a Secretnacy conspiracy because if it is, what's the impact,
Speaker 1: What's what's the impact that it's had? Like, how how
Speaker 1: would it matter if it's a secret Nazi conspiracy theory?
Speaker 1: What's it? What's it doing? It's it's selling bad pictures
Speaker 1: of monkeys. When when we talk about the first wave
Speaker 1: of this and like they need to explain, you know,
Speaker 1: the symbols that people were hiding in these like right
Speaker 1: wing street movements of a bunch of whom wound up
Speaker 1: feeding into Jam six, It's easy to say, well, what
Speaker 1: the harm was? They were going out, they were beating people,
Speaker 1: they were planning terrorists a tax, right like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's doing terrorists to I have I again, I fucking
Speaker 1: hate these Board eight motherfucker's. I think this is the
Speaker 1: stupidest fucking I don't know trend I've seen in my
Speaker 1: entire goddamn life. I cannot point to anything even vaguely Nazi.
Speaker 1: They have supported or done like and among other things.
Speaker 1: If you want to know if something is a dangerous
Speaker 1: conspiracy or a stupid grift, one question you should ask
Speaker 1: yourself and this isn't always relevant, but one question you
Speaker 1: should ask yourself is is Jimmy Fallon involved? Because if
Speaker 1: Jimmy Fallon is involved, it's probably just a dumb grift.
Speaker 1: Because I mean, the whole, the whole, the watching this
Speaker 1: guy break down how you get secret messages out of
Speaker 1: these ciphers is it's it's the same. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing as like to and on ship. It's people wanting
Speaker 1: to get an answer out of numbers and things and
Speaker 1: then pushing that answer as truth even if it's like
Speaker 1: not not based in any form of reality. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's so it's it's really frustrating to watch people basically
Speaker 1: start using Q and ON style research tactics to justify
Speaker 1: their hatred of an n f T project, which is like, no,
Speaker 1: you can just dislike it from being an n f
Speaker 1: T thing. You don't need to rapid in a in
Speaker 1: this package that is just really bad extremism research. Part
Speaker 1: of one of the things that scares me about this
Speaker 1: attack and about like what's going to happen kind of
Speaker 1: in the media after it is that. Um, I think
Speaker 1: kind of inevitably these aesthetics are just going to get
Speaker 1: co opted on a wider and wider basis. That's what's
Speaker 1: happening on TikTok right now, is that these these types
Speaker 1: of fast, waven, schizweve aesthetics are just becoming a core
Speaker 1: part of the zoomer online aesthetic. And that sucks. The
Speaker 1: The other point I wanted to mention about the Highland
Speaker 1: Park thing is like this, this guy that did this
Speaker 1: is such a perfect profile of this type of de
Speaker 1: attached like gen Z like almost I like like post
Speaker 1: politics terrorism, um that Like he is such a perfect
Speaker 1: example of someone who has been online since he was
Speaker 1: a very very little kid trying to make content online. Right,
Speaker 1: everyone in gen Z needs to be performing all of
Speaker 1: the time, right, Your whole life is a performance for
Speaker 1: the internet. Um. He was doing that same thing. He's
Speaker 1: been making them, making music and videos and ships since
Speaker 1: he was he was like younger than me. Like he's
Speaker 1: been doing this for a long long time. Um. And
Speaker 1: the types of like you know, like nested communities that
Speaker 1: you get like that you like fall into. It's such
Speaker 1: it's such like a clear example of the very types
Speaker 1: of things that you know, me and others have been
Speaker 1: talking about and warning about for a while. Um. And
Speaker 1: it's the whole like muddled nous of reality that we
Speaker 1: even get with this like board a Nazi clip video. Right,
Speaker 1: They're all part of this same problem with the Internet,
Speaker 1: Like our brains weren't designed for this much information coming
Speaker 1: at us at the same time, we cannot sort it
Speaker 1: all out. Um. And it's not ideal. Um, I was,
Speaker 1: it's not It's not great. I would rather it not
Speaker 1: be like this. I don't know how to like comment
Speaker 1: people with a solution to this, because this is an
Speaker 1: unsolved problem. It's like, come up with a solution for
Speaker 1: the fucking um the fact that emissions like are not
Speaker 1: going to be reduced, you know, because the world, because
Speaker 1: the world does suck. But the very be very cognizant
Speaker 1: of video propaganda styles and anyone that uses flashing like
Speaker 1: classic or catholic um like imagery. Be very very careful,
Speaker 1: be very careful of people who fetishize these tetics of
Speaker 1: mental illness. Be very careful about about people that that
Speaker 1: you wrap these aesthetics of of mental mental illness and
Speaker 1: like a very violent package because like that that's what
Speaker 1: we get with with with the shooter. He was like
Speaker 1: doing doing videos about about, you know, these types of
Speaker 1: mental illness that end with him just like a picture
Speaker 1: of like a drawing of him holding a gun. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, way before he bought a gun, he was
Speaker 1: making art about about this. UM. I think the one
Speaker 1: that's stuck out to me most was him repeatedly referring
Speaker 1: to himself as a sleepwalker, UM, which which I don't know,
Speaker 1: like obviously that is very much in line with the
Speaker 1: Skitzawave aesthetic stuff that like you have been talking about.
Speaker 1: It also kind of makes me think, I mean it.
Speaker 1: It brought me to thinking about Barbara Tuckman, who is
Speaker 1: a historian who wrote a book called The Guns of
Speaker 1: August that's a history of World War One. UM that
Speaker 1: that describes kind of the machinery that got set up
Speaker 1: and marched everybody into that situation exploding like sleep sleepwalkers, right. Um,
Speaker 1: Like this system has been set up and the people
Speaker 1: are kind of so unwilling to see where it's leading that, Uh,
Speaker 1: everything is just kind of marching with a with a
Speaker 1: sense of an inevitability towards a worse and a worse
Speaker 1: end point. And that's that's what scares me most about this.
Speaker 1: I've I've listened to many of his horrible songs and
Speaker 1: there's nerric and there's lyrics very similar to that idea.
Speaker 1: UM about that kind of inevitable, like faked driven nature
Speaker 1: of our current situation and how reality has become so
Speaker 1: muddled with the internet. Um, and like we there's been
Speaker 1: uh an intentional, top down effort to destroy any nature
Speaker 1: of consensus reality and make everything up for debate of
Speaker 1: there's there is, there is Facts no longer are a thing,
Speaker 1: like they just don't exist. And this is the world
Speaker 1: that results from that happening. When there's people in power
Speaker 1: who put are pushing for this, like you know, like
Speaker 1: Steve Bannon is among you know, one of many people
Speaker 1: who are pushing for this type of world. Um, this
Speaker 1: is the result that we get, and this is the
Speaker 1: that they kind of want us to get. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's yeah, I mean because if everything is true and
Speaker 1: that's fine fun mentally, like what they're going for is
Speaker 1: this idea that like everything is true and nothing is everything? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if every like and if you hit that state,
Speaker 1: you can do anything right, like to to steal a quote.
Speaker 1: Who was that? Was that fucking Crowley? Um? The but
Speaker 1: but like that's very much nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that goes all the way back to the assassins. Yes, sure, sure, sure,
Speaker 1: um but no, but it is like that is that
Speaker 1: is the thing, right if you mean even the even
Speaker 1: the shooter guy had numerous Discordian references in in his ship. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all about the same stuff. It's all it's all
Speaker 1: dealing with these same problems. And you're right, obviously, if
Speaker 1: if you know, if you deal with dissociation as I
Speaker 1: sometimes do, if you you know like parts about the
Speaker 1: Discordian aesthetics and like like the kind of ideas they
Speaker 1: play with, that does not make you an inherently dangerous person.
Speaker 1: That's that's not the problem here, um the right, Like
Speaker 1: you get like, I'm you know in some ways, but
Speaker 1: I I think about a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: these same topics because I look at all of this
Speaker 1: I'm I look at all of this research all the time.
Speaker 1: So it is my brains in a similar is isn't
Speaker 1: a isn't a similar place? That's that's that doesn't make
Speaker 1: you a bad person. That doesn't make you dangerous. Um,
Speaker 1: but I think it's important to be cognizant of the
Speaker 1: type of propaganda that people are pushing, the types of propaganda,
Speaker 1: trends and styles that are producing material effects in the world,
Speaker 1: like these types of shootings. Yeah, and so I don't
Speaker 1: know what else to say, honestly, because it's bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a problem. I would say, if anyone ever
Speaker 1: tells you about something they saw on the internet, hit
Speaker 1: them and runaway screaming. That's a good that's a good
Speaker 1: way to move forward. Um, and please don't don't start
Speaker 1: the other things like you know, we're gonna, we're gonna
Speaker 1: the right is going to have two possible reactions to
Speaker 1: stuff like this, Right, They're gonna one do a satanic panic.
Speaker 1: They be like, oh, look at these people doing a
Speaker 1: cult shit. Um, let's do another. Let's do another satanic panic,
Speaker 1: which would suck. There, there's there's there's there's that option
Speaker 1: obviously that would tie you into like transphobia, that would
Speaker 1: tie into a whole bunch of whole much of bullshit. Um.
Speaker 1: The other option is that people start, you know, using
Speaker 1: mentally ill people as a scapegoat that start of saying
Speaker 1: we should lock up people who deal with mental illness
Speaker 1: is also not that would suck, wouldn't solve the problem either,
Speaker 1: wouldn't do it. Yeah, Like that's the thing I've I've
Speaker 1: actually been seeing this in the last really like probably
Speaker 1: three months, is there's been a bunch of people who
Speaker 1: have been calling for like bringing like bringing sort of
Speaker 1: old school asylums back. That's that's exactly what the people,
Speaker 1: the people who make this propaganda, that's exactly what they want.
Speaker 1: That's that they want you to have that reaction that
Speaker 1: would make things so much worse. If you put people
Speaker 1: like this in an asylum for ten days then they
Speaker 1: get out there, they are so much more likely to
Speaker 1: to do these types of things. Not because they're actually
Speaker 1: like not because like not nothing to do with their
Speaker 1: actual whatever like mental things they have going on. It's
Speaker 1: because of the set. The aesthetic styling is right. They
Speaker 1: want to be a character in a story. If they
Speaker 1: feel like their life is going in a direction that
Speaker 1: they are a character in a story, they're getting put
Speaker 1: in these situations that they've memed about. Right, this guy's pictures,
Speaker 1: he's photostrapher of himself inside mental institutions, right, It's it's
Speaker 1: a character in a story. If you do that, you're
Speaker 1: playing right into their hands. It is that is not
Speaker 1: what that that should not be the focused of what
Speaker 1: we are doing. Um and like carsonal problems are not
Speaker 1: the solution to these types of things, especially for people
Speaker 1: who are who are like just making music online, Like
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do? Fucking arrest people for the
Speaker 1: like for the music they make like, that is not
Speaker 1: the solution. Don't let people turn this into targeting people
Speaker 1: who have actual like mental like mental things that they
Speaker 1: deal with. Don't make them the scapegoat of this. Um
Speaker 1: and be very careful if anyone tries to do any
Speaker 1: kind of satanic panic nonsense about secret occultists who are
Speaker 1: trying to alter your kids reality or whatever, or very
Speaker 1: careful because anyone who uses that type of framing for
Speaker 1: this problem is not genuine. They do not actually care.
Speaker 1: They are pushing something that they want. Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the reasons why the idea
Speaker 1: that these people are kind of seeing themselves as part
Speaker 1: of a narrative is important is because it represents a
Speaker 1: discontinuity with the way mass shootings have worked for most
Speaker 1: of the time that people listening to this has been
Speaker 1: alive in the United States prior to a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago. Really twenty nineteen was the big break year
Speaker 1: for this. The vast majority of mass shooters were also
Speaker 1: committing suicide. That was part of the goal. That was
Speaker 1: what happened. UM. And if you are an individual with
Speaker 1: a gun who has just committed a series of murders,
Speaker 1: it is very easy to make sure you die in
Speaker 1: that attack. It's extremely easy. Um. That is why so
Speaker 1: many of them did it. That has that has stopped
Speaker 1: being given in the way that it used to be.
Speaker 1: The change I think was christ Church was the main
Speaker 1: inflection point for this. But a lot of these guys
Speaker 1: go down alive. The Buffalo shooter taken alive, the last
Speaker 1: the last skitz Awave shooter from a few months ago,
Speaker 1: I was taken in alive. UM. Just intriguing because if
Speaker 1: I was to watch all this video propaganda beforehand, I
Speaker 1: would have assumed that this guy wanted to die within
Speaker 1: the act. A lot of the stuff was written about
Speaker 1: him doing this to kind of end his life and
Speaker 1: escape into whatever is next. That that's the kind of
Speaker 1: feeling I get a lot of his writing, and yet
Speaker 1: he didn't of the imagery he was putting out, particularly
Speaker 1: the ship with him in in the asylum, as kind
Speaker 1: of evidence of where like part of it was part
Speaker 1: of why I suspected like he had he intended to
Speaker 1: get taken alive. That is, that is that is very possible.
Speaker 1: I mean like because in some ways, yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to speculate, not necessarily the most useful. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna I'm not gonna speculate further. But there's a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of possible things to to think about there,
Speaker 1: which I will do so because I have all the stuff.
Speaker 1: Don't know what else, Please, it's you don't don't look
Speaker 1: at this stuff because it's like forbidden, right, don't don't
Speaker 1: don't seek it out because it's like, oh, it's forbidden
Speaker 1: knowledge that they don't want you to see. It's dangerous.
Speaker 1: Oh that's that's not the point. The point is it's bad.
Speaker 1: And now it's also hard to find. So like, just like,
Speaker 1: don't not watching like it's not it's not even it's
Speaker 1: not worth watching. It's not like stuff like like in
Speaker 1: the immediate wake of it, and like, my what happened
Speaker 1: to me? Was I got a fucking headache. You get
Speaker 1: a headache, you feel bad. It's it waste. It wastes
Speaker 1: your time. Like if you if you want to get this,
Speaker 1: like the experience of this without having to like do
Speaker 1: this ship like fucking eat a bunch of like eat
Speaker 1: a ship ton of candy, watch watching Watch, watch Pink
Speaker 1: Floyd's The Wall Jesus Christ, except except if you're eating
Speaker 1: a bunch of candier watching the Wall like it's actually
Speaker 1: before every good, whereas this is just like it's it's
Speaker 1: only the bad parts of that. But I only look
Speaker 1: at this because it's my fucking job and it sucks.
Speaker 1: H Yeah, all right, well, um you know I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say we're probably done here. Um, so I
Speaker 1: don't know until next time. Again, if anyone tries to
Speaker 1: tell you about something that happened on the internet, strike
Speaker 1: them and flee. Remember run hide, fight from people trying
Speaker 1: to tell you about things happening on social media. These
Speaker 1: are this is this is the good strategy going forward.
Speaker 1: All right, podcast it could happen here. It's a podcast
Speaker 1: about the terrible things that are happening going around the
Speaker 1: world and the wonderful people who are trying to fix them.
Speaker 1: What it is today is a podcast with Harek Lubani
Speaker 1: of Glia. And what really inspired me about the story
Speaker 1: and maybe want to share it with you, is that
Speaker 1: it came out of a really dark place. Terek was
Speaker 1: on the ground in Gaza treating gunshot wound victims, and
Speaker 1: a lot of gunshot wound victims, Like I remember reading
Speaker 1: his field testing of the device and just being appalled
Speaker 1: by the number of people who have been shot, a
Speaker 1: lots of them children, and some of the reporting he
Speaker 1: was doing right like, oh, I had this this torniquet
Speaker 1: and we were reusing them and they don't work very
Speaker 1: well on the pediatric application because kids shouldn't be shot, right.
Speaker 1: But instead of getting down, he was able to make
Speaker 1: a solution. And I think that's really important. And I
Speaker 1: really like that even through like this dark and terrible
Speaker 1: stuff that we've all had to experience and he experienced
Speaker 1: in Gaza, he was able to see a positive solution
Speaker 1: away to look after people, to move forward in this case,
Speaker 1: to prevent death and preserve life. And I think it's
Speaker 1: easy to focus on the dark stuff, that's enough of
Speaker 1: it happening, but I think it's important to focus on
Speaker 1: the great people who are doing great things to protect
Speaker 1: and care for other people as well. So that's a
Speaker 1: little bit of what we got today and I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy it. So I'm here with Tarak Lubani. He's
Speaker 1: from Glia. Their company came across when I was writing
Speaker 1: about three D printed tournic case. Would you like to
Speaker 1: introduce yourself to us a little bit about GLEA and
Speaker 1: what you do there. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: My name is terrickle Banny. As you had mentioned, I'm
Speaker 1: an emergency physician. I work in Canada in a city
Speaker 1: in Canada called London, and I also work in the
Speaker 1: Gaza strip as an emergency physician as well. Glia was
Speaker 1: really an answer to a problem, the problem being that
Speaker 1: when I see patients in Gaza they don't get the
Speaker 1: same quality of service that I can give to my nations.
Speaker 1: Of course, that's multi factorial, but a big part of
Speaker 1: that has to do with the way in which we
Speaker 1: as uh that the medical profession have medical devices we
Speaker 1: don't release that we don't give access to other people
Speaker 1: to use. And so Glia's purpose was to take the
Speaker 1: most medical devices that doctors use and to make sure
Speaker 1: that they were accessible and available to doctors all over
Speaker 1: the world. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's very cool. And you
Speaker 1: make a number of devices, right, Like I know that
Speaker 1: I first called to you about the torn Q, but
Speaker 1: you make also a stethoscope. Is that right? The stethoscope
Speaker 1: is the calling card of medicine. And so it was
Speaker 1: the first project that we started working on to test
Speaker 1: out the theory. I mean, we started with the theory
Speaker 1: that hey, we can probably make a device that's just
Speaker 1: as good as a three D device, but the costs
Speaker 1: let's say three dollars or even thirty dollars. And that
Speaker 1: was the stuf scope. We tested it, we published the results,
Speaker 1: We proved it was as as good as the Gold
Speaker 1: Standards the Litman Cardiology three at the time, and often
Speaker 1: using it both in our own practices, also making it
Speaker 1: available other people to make for theirs. Okay, yeah, And
Speaker 1: so that's what's really interesting about your company as opposed
Speaker 1: to other companies, right, you're not necessarily like manufacturing and distributing.
Speaker 1: You are providing the designs that allow other people to
Speaker 1: make them, right, And so can you talk about some
Speaker 1: of their like, uh, I know that you use three
Speaker 1: D printing, and I want to talk about that. But also,
Speaker 1: like I remember seeing that the tubing and the setoscope
Speaker 1: comes from the a Coca Cola machine, right, for some
Speaker 1: of those considerations, Yeah, absolutely, the purposes to make these
Speaker 1: devices available to other people for the lowest as possible,
Speaker 1: but also like actually be available. It's no good if
Speaker 1: you can make it for twenty cents, but parts that
Speaker 1: required are nowhere. So that's why we much with a
Speaker 1: basket of items that are more or less earsily available,
Speaker 1: and we made the stuffoscopes out of that. For example,
Speaker 1: you can probably get the very specific kind of earpieces
Speaker 1: that most stuffoscopes have, but they are naturally going to
Speaker 1: be less available and less abundant than if you were
Speaker 1: to use regular earbuds the contact phones. There are way
Speaker 1: more headphones out there than there are stuffoscopes. Therefore, those
Speaker 1: parts are more available, even if, of course there they
Speaker 1: are less expensive. But even if they were slightly more expensive,
Speaker 1: it would be worth it. What we really take away
Speaker 1: is the monopoly and the profit motive. And so by
Speaker 1: doing that, or rather let's say the exorbitant profit that
Speaker 1: medical device companies are making, and by doing that, we're
Speaker 1: really able to to realize the promise of patents. All
Speaker 1: of the devices that we make were patented at one point.
Speaker 1: The promise of patents is that when the patent is over,
Speaker 1: you'll get a chief device. But that promise is not realized.
Speaker 1: The stutoscope is a three hundred year old device basically,
Speaker 1: and the fact that it is not available at the
Speaker 1: highest quality except for three kind of nuts. So that's
Speaker 1: why we started there, and of course moved on to
Speaker 1: more and more complicated devices, much more complicated even than
Speaker 1: the turniket. By now, okay, yeah, can you I remember
Speaker 1: reading because you you you kept a blog. I remember
Speaker 1: on medium where you talked about testing the tourniquate when
Speaker 1: when you were in Gaza and it just a like,
Speaker 1: you know, if you read medical literature then did this
Speaker 1: was just the shocking I remember being absolutely shocked by
Speaker 1: the number of casualties you were in counting and countering,
Speaker 1: and then also like you were saying, like the the
Speaker 1: lack of available tools. So perhaps you could explain like
Speaker 1: a little bit of what you saw there and then
Speaker 1: how these tournicates have been able to help you address
Speaker 1: that like massive disparity and access to care. The tourniquet
Speaker 1: project really started in Gaza because we noticed that after
Speaker 1: one of the wars, the war in two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: that we had a particularly high casualty rate, of course,
Speaker 1: but of that there were many deaths that we would
Speaker 1: classify as preventable death's where we felt that had tourniquets
Speaker 1: been available, those patients likely wouldn't have died. Um When
Speaker 1: we started working on it, of course, we knew at
Speaker 1: some point there'd be another war. It is it is
Speaker 1: very common in Gaza for there to be attacked by
Speaker 1: the Israelis. We didn't anticipate for it to happen so fast,
Speaker 1: and for it to happen in a way where the
Speaker 1: tourniquet was so necessary. That, of course, was what what's
Speaker 1: called the Great March of Return, where Palestinians protested on
Speaker 1: mass and one of the Israeli responses was to shoot
Speaker 1: live fire at the protesters, often targeting About eight percent
Speaker 1: of the hits were targeting the arms and the likes,
Speaker 1: which is where turnickets are the most effective. So the
Speaker 1: high number really is going to the way in which
Speaker 1: the Israeli has decided to deal with this protests, and
Speaker 1: the fact that it was a protest rather than a
Speaker 1: specific war, and that meant also that we could predict
Speaker 1: with the relative degree of accuracy where the injuries would be,
Speaker 1: which meant that it was even more important to have
Speaker 1: the right equipment of the right training. It was part
Speaker 1: of an overall strategy. So of course it's not like
Speaker 1: turnickets were the thing that saved lives. Turnickets were part
Speaker 1: of a campaign to train paramedics and to train doctors
Speaker 1: and how to stop bleeding in these kinds of injuries,
Speaker 1: and they were one of the most important tools in
Speaker 1: that campaign, but only part of that campaign. Yeah, of course,
Speaker 1: of course you need ed tools and obviously the education,
Speaker 1: and you can't just slap it on and in the
Speaker 1: person's fine, right, Obviously there's a lot of care afterwards
Speaker 1: which is important too. And can you maybe talk us
Speaker 1: through and you talked about like the promise of patents, right,
Speaker 1: and I think this is important in in exactly what
Speaker 1: we're talking about in torniicates because it's a little different
Speaker 1: to like medic medicines, right, It's a little different with
Speaker 1: medical devices. And so there are existing TORNI kits on
Speaker 1: the market, right, and I think that sort of market
Speaker 1: leading one is it's the cat. Can you explain like
Speaker 1: why and those not getting to people who need them
Speaker 1: desperately in these areas. The problem with the turnickets that
Speaker 1: are available right now kind of falls into a few
Speaker 1: different categories. North American Rescue. The makers of CAT have
Speaker 1: two key patents on the Cat, and as far as
Speaker 1: we can tell, just based on the posture of the company,
Speaker 1: if anybody else were to make exact Cat replicas, they
Speaker 1: will be suited. The people who are willing to then
Speaker 1: make exact Cat replicas tend to be people who are
Speaker 1: unaccountable and largely have not much to lease, and so
Speaker 1: that's why we saw a gla initially um for example,
Speaker 1: with the Ukraine campaign of tourniquets that that were relatively
Speaker 1: low quality, and so you can't just make the device.
Speaker 1: You also have to know that the device will work,
Speaker 1: because you don't want to discover that when you put
Speaker 1: it on armor like and then it fails. Gaza is
Speaker 1: an acid test of all of these things, because not
Speaker 1: only our devices generally not available or expensive, it's kind
Speaker 1: of at the bottom of any purchase list, for example,
Speaker 1: but also in Gaza there's a complete international blockade Israeli led,
Speaker 1: of course, but there are other countries that are that
Speaker 1: are contributory, and that blockade means that equipment can't get
Speaker 1: in so long as the Israelis deem it to be
Speaker 1: of military value. Um. This is where things like dual
Speaker 1: use devices and so on come into play. The tourniquet
Speaker 1: is a medical device. It is it can only be
Speaker 1: a medical device. There is no second use, and so
Speaker 1: it should be exempt. However, even if the Palestinians could
Speaker 1: afford fifty U S dollars per unit, which should be
Speaker 1: the cost to get one in, the Israelis won't let
Speaker 1: them in. So de facto, even though they shouldn't be banned,
Speaker 1: they are de facto banned, and that means that not
Speaker 1: only can we depend on cheap Chinese retailers. Let's say,
Speaker 1: to give us replica turniquets, we actually have to manufacture
Speaker 1: them ourselves. When we open sourced our designs, it was
Speaker 1: with an eye to two things. One making it available
Speaker 1: so that the replica makers can make higher quality replicas.
Speaker 1: They're already making replicas. We may as well give them
Speaker 1: a legal replica rather than a patent break busting replica.
Speaker 1: Not that I think there's anything wrong with that in
Speaker 1: these cases where there's emergencies, but just the same Glia's
Speaker 1: tourniquet doesn't break any patents. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: in addition to think them the ability to make high
Speaker 1: quality turnikets, we can also make high quality turnkets locally
Speaker 1: and domestically. Because of course, national liberation, as it were
Speaker 1: in the medical device space can't come if you can't
Speaker 1: make your own devices. We discovered that during COVID. The
Speaker 1: Palestines have known that for decades now, and we're kind
Speaker 1: of rediscovering it in Ukraine where there just aren't enough
Speaker 1: turniates and so they are forced to improvise or except
Speaker 1: tourniquets that they don't want to accept, right, Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: I think I think COVID was this great example that
Speaker 1: we can't continue to rely on the sort of winds
Speaker 1: of global capital to provide things that we need to survive.
Speaker 1: I think you're manufacturing is fascinating because you're using essentially
Speaker 1: commonly available materials in the three D printer, Is that right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's correct. I mean, we're not against using other things,
Speaker 1: they just have to be very simple. For example, are
Speaker 1: electronics use PCBs. You can't three D print electronic circuits
Speaker 1: just yeah, so we use PCBs. But when we design
Speaker 1: our PCBs. There are a couple of ways to design it.
Speaker 1: You can design an eight layer board that can only
Speaker 1: be manufactured in one or two places in the world,
Speaker 1: or you can design a board that's three times the
Speaker 1: size but can be manufactured anywhere in the world. And
Speaker 1: when you're talking about credit card sized devices, if it's
Speaker 1: notebook size instead of credit card size, it doesn't really
Speaker 1: matter that much. For example, the example I'm thinking of
Speaker 1: here as an electric cardiogram, where we took a device
Speaker 1: that had failed UM in the sort of market that
Speaker 1: they the makers open source and they had intended it
Speaker 1: to be a fitness device, and then it didn't work.
Speaker 1: Their company went bankrupt and so they open sourced it.
Speaker 1: So we looked at their schematics all of the problems
Speaker 1: that they had already solved. We said, okay, the problem
Speaker 1: we're going to solve is to make it so that
Speaker 1: this can be manufactured in a high school electronics lab.
Speaker 1: And we were able to achieve that it was bigger.
Speaker 1: It was twice as big, but who cares. The old
Speaker 1: one was half the size of a credit card. You know,
Speaker 1: who cares? You make get a little bit bigger. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, UM you make it much more accessible,
Speaker 1: twice as big, twenty times more accessible. And if some
Speaker 1: of your staff like your tourniquets, it's really um. There's
Speaker 1: not much or any really of a performance trade off
Speaker 1: from what you've seen, right. Indeed, they might be better
Speaker 1: for some pediatric applications if I remember correctly that that's right.
Speaker 1: So when you think of the way in which corporate
Speaker 1: devices are made, they are made to the specifications of
Speaker 1: particular buyers, and the buyers are the people who have
Speaker 1: the money. Who's the buyer for tourniquets? When you think
Speaker 1: about who needs tourniquets consistently, who do you who has
Speaker 1: money to give you turnickets? Who should you market too?
Speaker 1: There's only one sane answer, and that is First world militaries,
Speaker 1: especially occupation militaries or militaries that are engaged in UH
Speaker 1: ground level warfare, who are expected to take small arms
Speaker 1: or i e. D s. And so there are not
Speaker 1: many children who you have to sell to in that
Speaker 1: particular market. There aren't many small women, or even women
Speaker 1: at all they have to sell to in that market.
Speaker 1: So I don't think that North American rescues engineers would
Speaker 1: have any trouble making sure that their TURNI gets worked
Speaker 1: amazingly well for children, But why why would they spend
Speaker 1: one to million dollars doing that work and research when
Speaker 1: that's not their audience and that's not their buyer. For us,
Speaker 1: the normal person, the civilian is the in quotation marks buire.
Speaker 1: They're not the ones buying, but they're the ones who
Speaker 1: are the main consumer, and so they're the ones who
Speaker 1: we target. In Gaza, specifically, of the population is under
Speaker 1: the age of fourteen. You'd have to be crazy to
Speaker 1: go out there and put a tourniquet out that only
Speaker 1: works on big, burly men. So that's that's why we
Speaker 1: were we were driven to do that. And as for
Speaker 1: the performance trade offs, yeah, you're right. The the what
Speaker 1: we learned about spec sheets on lots of these devices
Speaker 1: is that they're made up. There isn't really a great
Speaker 1: way to know how well elternic it works. Unfortunately, there
Speaker 1: isn't a really great way to know how well stetoscope works.
Speaker 1: And so some of the first work we did was
Speaker 1: actually designing some tests so that we can say, okay, well,
Speaker 1: here's how you prove that the stutoscope works as well
Speaker 1: as that stutoscope, or here's how you prove that you
Speaker 1: know this works as well as that, and those testing
Speaker 1: protocols we made them open source and easily available too.
Speaker 1: For example, if you want to test the stethoscope, you
Speaker 1: can do that with a pair of headphones, a microphone,
Speaker 1: and the Hello Kitty balloon. That's how we did it originally.
Speaker 1: Could we have spent ten dollars making that test right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we could have, but that wouldn't have helped us in
Speaker 1: terms of helping other people make stuftoscopes wherever they are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's very cool. And then by open sourcing that test,
Speaker 1: you allow for other people who have ideas or sort
Speaker 1: of models for their own improvements or different designs, that
Speaker 1: they can then use that test right and continue to
Speaker 1: improve and share their improvements with others. I do not
Speaker 1: want to work on stethoscopes anymore. I want to people
Speaker 1: to take it up. And it doesn't mean that I won't,
Speaker 1: of course I will. But my favorite thing is when
Speaker 1: somebody sends a message and says, hey, I like what
Speaker 1: you've done. Here's how I think it could be better.
Speaker 1: I love those messages. I love them, and you know what,
Speaker 1: nine out of ton of those ideas don't work out.
Speaker 1: They don't pan out. But like our stethoscope since two
Speaker 1: thousands seventeen, all of the improvements have been from other
Speaker 1: people because we haven't had the time and money to
Speaker 1: work on it. But we have been open minded, have
Speaker 1: incorporated lots of design changes that other people in the
Speaker 1: community have suggested. That's a good thing. It's good for everybody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think it does an excellent job at getting it.
Speaker 1: They like the fundamental conceit of a Dragon device development model, right,
Speaker 1: which is uh, which isn't true. Actually, that there's massive
Speaker 1: R and D costs and those R and D costs
Speaker 1: have to be recouped by charging a massive amount for
Speaker 1: a period of time and making access to that medicinal
Speaker 1: device a privilege, not right, and then eventually the cost
Speaker 1: will come down. They often don't, and then everyone will
Speaker 1: have activities thing And it's like, it's been my experience
Speaker 1: that it doesn't work that way. But what you've shown
Speaker 1: is an alternative right that people want to help and
Speaker 1: that that they don't that there's not a need for
Speaker 1: this like price gouging to facilitate the improvement in this technology.
Speaker 1: Is that fair? We're not taking a purely altruistic model here.
Speaker 1: People are generally improving the stethoscope for their own uses,
Speaker 1: so there is a self interested aspect, if you want
Speaker 1: to present it that way. What we realized is that
Speaker 1: actually the most useful way to develop a device is
Speaker 1: to make it as good as possible and release it
Speaker 1: and then have other people who want to improve it
Speaker 1: have a capacity to share back to you. So as
Speaker 1: much as I I believe in altruism and I do
Speaker 1: think every time that I've seen people collaborate, I've seen
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount of it, this more resembles the open
Speaker 1: source software model, where which is actually the world I
Speaker 1: came from. I came from the free software model, where yes,
Speaker 1: you do things just for the fun of it, but
Speaker 1: also very large corporations are involved. For example, some of
Speaker 1: the stuffoscope's improvements happened because the lab needed to use
Speaker 1: it for some experiments on animals, and so they made
Speaker 1: modifications and they fed them back. Amazing, that's fantastic, And
Speaker 1: but that that was totally self interested. That they knew
Speaker 1: that it would cost them significantly less to build on
Speaker 1: our work and it would cost them nothing to share
Speaker 1: back their their contributions. So it's you know, we're not
Speaker 1: going out there trying to to prove that everybody is
Speaker 1: good at heart, even though I do actually think that's
Speaker 1: fundamentally true. What what we're doing is showing through this
Speaker 1: model the devices can advance with relatively little upfront costs
Speaker 1: and with the contribution of many, many members. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a view phrase it really well. I think that
Speaker 1: people have this self interest which also serves out of
Speaker 1: people's interests, and and it's like, yeah, I've seen it
Speaker 1: in all kinds of open source communities, like we've reported
Speaker 1: before on three D printed guns, which is obviously it's
Speaker 1: kind of a different end of the spectrum. But it's
Speaker 1: fascinating to see this global exchange. And I'm sure you
Speaker 1: have people. You've mentioned that there are people in Myanma
Speaker 1: who are who are printing your tornic case. Right. We
Speaker 1: were amazed when people from Myanmar had reached out and
Speaker 1: said that we've senior tourniquet and we want to implement that.
Speaker 1: We have situation that's very similar to Gaza. We thought
Speaker 1: that's exactly what we want. What they did was two things. One,
Speaker 1: they took our instructions and they used them, but then
Speaker 1: they also fed back to us how those instructions were incomplete,
Speaker 1: how they could be better, and some design changes that
Speaker 1: made their lives better again amazing by them using it,
Speaker 1: by them taking, they also gave. And that's the sort
Speaker 1: of relationship, the kind of solidarity that we've seen. Whatever
Speaker 1: other people have used our devices, we've noticed that they take,
Speaker 1: and it's it's not a problem if people in and
Speaker 1: me and mar had just taken and not given anything back,
Speaker 1: that's fine too, because it doesn't take anything away from
Speaker 1: us to share. This is this is a kind of
Speaker 1: sharing where the more you share, the more there's potential
Speaker 1: for benefit, but there's never a loss. You never lose
Speaker 1: by sharing in that sense. We're not also trying to
Speaker 1: present it as though we need people to share for
Speaker 1: us to feel that this model works. We don't. But
Speaker 1: we're already may king it anyway. We're already using it anyway.
Speaker 1: We're sharing, and some people help out by contributing black
Speaker 1: and some people don't. It's it seems to me to
Speaker 1: be the most effective way to develop devices for low
Speaker 1: costs and make sure that they get out to where
Speaker 1: they need to be. Yeah, because they can century and
Speaker 1: people who need them can find them. As you found
Speaker 1: out right like people across the world, do you have
Speaker 1: a sense of where else they're being used? The turnickets
Speaker 1: right now are being used in Gaza, in Ukraine and
Speaker 1: in me and mar if they're being used in other places.
Speaker 1: Were not really aware of it, but people aren't compelled
Speaker 1: to make us aware of it. Um and and all
Speaker 1: three of those locations have moved forward the project tremendously.
Speaker 1: For example, for Ukraine, Uh, the Ukrainian support people weren't
Speaker 1: really able to contribute so much their own ability to
Speaker 1: construct and make, but they were able to contribute really
Speaker 1: important research, financial and testing capabilit lidaes and so of
Speaker 1: course a project like this costs money. They're like, hey, look,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't have farms print farms, but we
Speaker 1: do have some cash that we want to put into it.
Speaker 1: And we were able to use that money very very effectively,
Speaker 1: more effectively than if they would have bought the pieces
Speaker 1: to then create the capacity for them to go and
Speaker 1: make their own turn accounts. Okay, so yeah, let's talk
Speaker 1: about that. That's fascinating and uh, and we could maybe
Speaker 1: contrasted to a sort of another model, right like if
Speaker 1: UM because you you understand you're able to go to
Speaker 1: Ukraine and help them set up as opposed to Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would have taken months, I imagine to do that
Speaker 1: with I don't know how they make the cats, but
Speaker 1: they like they molded or something. But with with a
Speaker 1: non sort of with a non open source, non printed model,
Speaker 1: like to set up a tournicate factory in Ukraine or
Speaker 1: Poland would take months. Right, yes, absolutely, but you're not
Speaker 1: going to. There's two reasons why Northern I can rescue.
Speaker 1: I'll just call them now from here on out, won't
Speaker 1: do that. One of them is that that conflict at
Speaker 1: some point will end. It's very expensive to set up
Speaker 1: production lines. And the other thing is the more tourniquets
Speaker 1: you put into the market, the cheaper tourniquets get, you know,
Speaker 1: supply and demand. Like we learned that one pretty well
Speaker 1: from capitalism. And so they have an inherent disincentive, whether
Speaker 1: they recognize it or not, whether it's conscious or not.
Speaker 1: North American Rescue and all these companies have an inherent
Speaker 1: disincentive in flooding the market with tourniquets, whereas we do not.
Speaker 1: For us, it's the opposite. The more people we lose,
Speaker 1: pretty much, GLIA loses about ten to twenty dollars per
Speaker 1: tourniquet that we manufacture, we have no incentive to keep
Speaker 1: doing it, and we want other people to do it
Speaker 1: because we want as many tourniquets to be provided as possible.
Speaker 1: What we do then is we heavily subsidize the tourniquets
Speaker 1: using our own internal funds and and fundraising. That that
Speaker 1: we do with the goal of getting them out there
Speaker 1: so that deaths can be prevented. And so we want
Speaker 1: other people producing. When I go there, every tourniquet somebody
Speaker 1: else makes instead of me is less headache for me,
Speaker 1: is less pain for me, and is less financial loss
Speaker 1: for me and for glee. Of course, so our incentives
Speaker 1: are different. They want a shortage, consciously you're not, and
Speaker 1: we want an abundance. We want everybody to turnique in
Speaker 1: their pocket. Now, that's that's our goal. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about your experiences in Ukraine? Give with
Speaker 1: that pretty recently? Right, Ukraine is a very very complicated
Speaker 1: subject when it comes to tourniquets, because the tourniquet wasn't
Speaker 1: this h I'm gonna mind my words very carefully. I'm
Speaker 1: not Ukrainian, I'm not a Ukrainian doctor, and my experience,
Speaker 1: there is very limited. I am in solidarity with the
Speaker 1: medical community in Ukraine, and part of being in solidarity
Speaker 1: with a medical community is recognizing that even when there
Speaker 1: are weaknesses, it is not my place to insert myself
Speaker 1: into their processes. And so the way that the Ukrainians
Speaker 1: have approached tourniquets is at the outset to ban all
Speaker 1: three D printed tourniquets and two basically make it so
Speaker 1: that only what they considered to be high quality tournike its,
Speaker 1: mainly the CAT and another another one or two models
Speaker 1: were available in there. This unfortunately created a tremendous shortage,
Speaker 1: and the other thing that functionally happened was a disconnect
Speaker 1: between the policy makers within the medical community and the
Speaker 1: people on the ground. The people on the ground, of course,
Speaker 1: are doing whatever they can to provide care wherever they can,
Speaker 1: and the policymakers are a little bit more disconnected from
Speaker 1: that and so have different considerations. The shortage then creates
Speaker 1: this um difficulty. You know, there are of course three
Speaker 1: D printed turnikeates aren't accepted officially in Ukraine, but there
Speaker 1: are an abundance of three D printed tourniquets in Ukraine
Speaker 1: because the people on the ground are accepting them um,
Speaker 1: and what we see is a kind of grassroots experimentation
Speaker 1: with how it is that we can prevent deaths. The
Speaker 1: other difficulty is that tourniquets are a tool, and in
Speaker 1: bad hands, this tool isn't going to work, even if
Speaker 1: it's a great tool. And so one of the things
Speaker 1: that I realized, and I think everybody at this point,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying anything that's new or unknown to the community,
Speaker 1: we all realize that without appropriate training and how to
Speaker 1: use a tourniquet, they're not going to work. Um. And
Speaker 1: so even high quality tourniquets out there in the field
Speaker 1: are failing because they're being used improperly. It's causing unnecessary deaths.
Speaker 1: So I don't know how deep you want to get
Speaker 1: into that experience in Ukraine, but I think what we
Speaker 1: can say is that it's important to be in solidarity
Speaker 1: with that community, and as such, we're providing them all
Speaker 1: of the experience that we have and all of the
Speaker 1: capability that we have to produce tourniquets that the Ukrainians themselves,
Speaker 1: both officially and on the UH in the front lines,
Speaker 1: are able to use and and feel are actually safe
Speaker 1: for their patients. Yeah. Yeah, that's a difficult situation. I think.
Speaker 1: Obviously a lot of what's happening in Ukraine has been
Speaker 1: necessarily like like rushed, and it's somewhat graps chaotic is
Speaker 1: in it's their own word, but it took a while
Speaker 1: for people to fully sort of understand that the necessities
Speaker 1: of the scale and the scale of the conflict, or
Speaker 1: perhaps understand this is still the wrong word, but yet
Speaker 1: to come up with the most of the way to
Speaker 1: do the least harm. I guess that's such a great
Speaker 1: way of to frame it. And I think even from
Speaker 1: your experience as you see that very often in these
Speaker 1: situations that's the name of the game. It's not even
Speaker 1: doing what you know is best, but rather figuring out
Speaker 1: what the least horst scenario was. Yeah, yeah, so often,
Speaker 1: I think, and it's very easier I think, to to
Speaker 1: like backseat drive these things right from from our positions
Speaker 1: of safety and sort of plenty, you know, to say, oh,
Speaker 1: what should them, they should do that, which I think
Speaker 1: you did very well to explain that the first and
Speaker 1: most important thing is to be instolid arity with the
Speaker 1: people there and to hopefully allow their experience to guide
Speaker 1: us in how we can best help them to to
Speaker 1: prevent death, prevent harm, and so can you talk about
Speaker 1: what you were able to do there, what sort of
Speaker 1: interventions could you make to hopefully help prevent more dying.
Speaker 1: The main thing that that we did in terms of
Speaker 1: so I I kind of was there in with two
Speaker 1: hats on. One of them was the tourniquet manufacturing hat
Speaker 1: and the other one was as an emergency doctor. Because remember,
Speaker 1: fundamentally what brought me to medical devices in the first
Speaker 1: place was that I was an emergency doctor having problems
Speaker 1: actually uh caring for my patients. As a tourniquet manufacturer
Speaker 1: basically was about engaging with other people who are making
Speaker 1: and using tourniquets to understand some of the roadblocks and problems.
Speaker 1: One of the biggest ones is that there isn't a
Speaker 1: great way to test units of tournikets. So traditionally tourniquets
Speaker 1: are tested by design. Uh Nar says, here's our design
Speaker 1: and here's how we tested it, and then we accept
Speaker 1: that this particular company will make this particular device to
Speaker 1: this particular standard. But in the Ukraine, especially with the
Speaker 1: presence of replicas and three D to tourniquets, there became
Speaker 1: a new problem how do you test each unit rather
Speaker 1: than a specific line, and working on that, I don't
Speaker 1: know how into the leads you want me to get,
Speaker 1: but working on that is still a problem that is unsolved,
Speaker 1: but has been one of the biggest issues that we've
Speaker 1: been dealing with on the emergency medicine side. Of course,
Speaker 1: when I provide direct care to patients, I was in
Speaker 1: a hospital on one of the communities, on the front line,
Speaker 1: on one of the fronts, and so providing direct care
Speaker 1: became important. And working with the doctors, many of whom
Speaker 1: didn't really experience that much have that much experience with
Speaker 1: trauma patients, so working with them to share our experiences
Speaker 1: from GAZA in low resource trauma medicine, and also to
Speaker 1: gain from them their experiences because of course their scenarios
Speaker 1: and situations are different. It's more artillery based rather than
Speaker 1: small arms fire or um sort of bombing based, so
Speaker 1: they're they're different scenarios. I had a ought to learn
Speaker 1: from them. I did, and um I tried to contribute
Speaker 1: some of our experiences as well. The training I think
Speaker 1: is probably the number one problem right now, but that's
Speaker 1: my personal opinion. Is one doctor who was there for
Speaker 1: a limited period of time so that that individual unit
Speaker 1: tests that you're you're working towards is um because I
Speaker 1: know in theory, at least a CAT is a single
Speaker 1: use device, right and so in theory, if you if
Speaker 1: you just slapped it on something that could measure pressure,
Speaker 1: and Titan did that, devices and being used and shouldn't
Speaker 1: be used again to provide care. Is that the bottom
Speaker 1: that you're running up against or is it sort of
Speaker 1: making a way to test things it's replicable and cheap
Speaker 1: and accessible. Reusability was the number one problem that we
Speaker 1: tried to tackle in Gaza because we couldn't print turniquets
Speaker 1: as fast as they're being used, and so we use
Speaker 1: them up to ten times. And when I was in
Speaker 1: the hospital, I walked by this I V poll with
Speaker 1: a bunch of tourniquets hanging from it. To night instantly
Speaker 1: recognized what I was looking at. That was a tourniquet
Speaker 1: rewashed station in which tourniquets that came off of patients
Speaker 1: who are being rewashed, dried, and then sent back out
Speaker 1: into the field. Whatever you think the standards are for
Speaker 1: a tourniquet. When there's this level of of shortage, that's
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. That's what happened in Gaza, and
Speaker 1: that's what happened in the Ukraine. That's what I saw
Speaker 1: in my own eyes. Of course, we don't need to
Speaker 1: stretch that far anymore to recognize this. What were people
Speaker 1: doing with the ninety five masks two years ago in
Speaker 1: my hospital. We were holding them, storing them, washing them,
Speaker 1: reusing them. So this is something that we see whenever
Speaker 1: there's a shortage, and it makes the unit testing that
Speaker 1: much more important because if you could take an already
Speaker 1: used tourniquet and assure that it will succeed the next
Speaker 1: time it's being used, that is so valuable, so valuable,
Speaker 1: and it cuts down every tourniquet you can reuse as
Speaker 1: a tourniquet. You don't have to import, you don't have
Speaker 1: to buy, you don't have to package, you don't have
Speaker 1: to ship over all of these lines. Yeah, yeah, of course,
Speaker 1: And I think it's probably we should probably address like
Speaker 1: the the ways in which they can fail because I think, uh, look,
Speaker 1: just people in the United to date, if in an
Speaker 1: extremely like resource rich setting, right, we'll probably have knownly
Speaker 1: are unknowingly acquired trying to get on Amazon or somewhere
Speaker 1: else eBay that that might not be a real one,
Speaker 1: and so I want it's real, but we might not
Speaker 1: be a reliable one. Can you explain like like how
Speaker 1: they fail and what the consequences of that failure are.
Speaker 1: There are two kinds of failures when we talk about
Speaker 1: turnick outs. One of them is what we would call
Speaker 1: a technical failure, and the other one is a clinical failure.
Speaker 1: A technical failure is the easiest one for most people
Speaker 1: to spot. The tourniquet literally breaks in your hand. And
Speaker 1: that said, you hear a crack, you see something crack,
Speaker 1: you see a break, things fall apart the end, and
Speaker 1: so one of the things that we we want is
Speaker 1: to minimize these by over engineering. So, for example, the
Speaker 1: first GLIA tourniquet was engineered to spec you're supposed to
Speaker 1: be able to turn it three times, and so we
Speaker 1: made it so you can turn it three times. And
Speaker 1: then what I realized is that even I, who is
Speaker 1: like super well trained, I would be in the field
Speaker 1: running while my eyes were full of tear gas while
Speaker 1: people are shooting, and I didn't I'd forget did I
Speaker 1: turn it two times? Three times? So we over we
Speaker 1: started over engineering the tourniquets at a certain point. Of course,
Speaker 1: every turnikid is going to break. You turn it enough times,
Speaker 1: every turniquet is going to break. But that's not necessarily
Speaker 1: going to be the case if you have even a
Speaker 1: moderate amount of training. I'm going to turn it for
Speaker 1: five times, but I'm not going to turn it twenty times.
Speaker 1: So the technical failures are one kind of failure. The
Speaker 1: other one is clinical failure. Now here's something that I
Speaker 1: wonder if you knew about tourniquets from the gold Standard
Speaker 1: Company fail They fail on application, and that number goes
Speaker 1: up to if you were to check sixty seconds after application.
Speaker 1: So what does this tell us? What this tells us
Speaker 1: is a clinical failure is actually the important marker here,
Speaker 1: because we know turniquets break, and we know turniquets fail
Speaker 1: in general, especially turnickets that have been in some g
Speaker 1: i's pocket in Afghanistan for six months, those ones that
Speaker 1: their failure rate can go even higher. And so what
Speaker 1: we train people to do is to recognize clinical success.
Speaker 1: Put on a tourniquet, did the blood stop? No? Put
Speaker 1: on a second turniquet, did the blood stop No? Try
Speaker 1: a third one if you have them, obviously, And so
Speaker 1: the routine training involves applying a second turniket, and one
Speaker 1: of the like happiest moments for me. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is obviously better sweet, but it was when I saw
Speaker 1: a patient who was brought in by a medic who
Speaker 1: I had I had been in the training four and
Speaker 1: he had applied to turnickets to a guy who certainly
Speaker 1: would have died had he had he not had the
Speaker 1: turniquet applied to him. You know, I was exaguinating so much,
Speaker 1: injury so severe that he needed a couple of turnickets
Speaker 1: to really get it under control. So it's it's where
Speaker 1: we have to recognize that there is no magic tool.
Speaker 1: This is part of an overall program. There's no three
Speaker 1: D printer that's going to train people just gonna make
Speaker 1: you stuff and then you have to do the rest
Speaker 1: of it, right, Yeah, Yeah, So I think if we, uh,
Speaker 1: we should look maybe at the fact that like I
Speaker 1: live in the United States and you're in Canada, and
Speaker 1: I think there were like three mass shooting is yesterday, right,
Speaker 1: that they that the threat of violence is certainly at
Speaker 1: a high for recent times in h for why a
Speaker 1: more diverse range of people. Right, There's always been violence
Speaker 1: in this country. There's always been violence against certain groups
Speaker 1: of people disproportion in this country, but people are probably
Speaker 1: more concerned with treating down to your wounds, and they
Speaker 1: would have been ten years ago. So if someone was
Speaker 1: looking to make one of your devices, how can they
Speaker 1: do that? And they ensure or do their best to
Speaker 1: ensure that they are doing so in a way which
Speaker 1: gives them the best chance of success. At the moment,
Speaker 1: I would say to the individual maker, don't do it,
Speaker 1: not for a life threatening situation. If then, do individual
Speaker 1: makers want to make turnikuts, then they're going to have
Speaker 1: to be proficient at three big things. One of them
Speaker 1: is plastics three D printing, ensuring that the quality of
Speaker 1: the plastic is good. The other one is sewing, that
Speaker 1: is to say, assembling sod stuff. And the third one
Speaker 1: is is quality assurance, because even done perfectly, a certain
Speaker 1: number of tourniquets aren't going to make it. And that
Speaker 1: quality assurance is both at the moment of manufacture and
Speaker 1: then over time, because of course all devices deteriorate over time,
Speaker 1: but tourniquets have such an important role that you have
Speaker 1: to check them periodically to make sure everything is okay.
Speaker 1: So I would say to the individual maker, don't or
Speaker 1: if you do do it as an exercise rather than
Speaker 1: as an actual tool. If somebody is in an emergency situation,
Speaker 1: there's nothing they can do except to do it then
Speaker 1: be in touch with us. So, for example, there are
Speaker 1: makers in in countries that have been in touch and
Speaker 1: have said, okay, look, I have to do this because
Speaker 1: the situation here is bad. We support them as best
Speaker 1: as we can. We try to send people out to them,
Speaker 1: or we try to have them ship units to us.
Speaker 1: We try to get them up and going. Glia is
Speaker 1: not a medical device manufacturer. GLIA is a access to
Speaker 1: medicines and access to medical devices company, and part of
Speaker 1: that is making sure that people who are making medical
Speaker 1: devices are doing them to the highest possible quality. So
Speaker 1: if you are forced to make them be in touch
Speaker 1: with us, we will help in any way that we can. However,
Speaker 1: there's another category of people, and that is manufacturers who
Speaker 1: already know how to make medical devices. To those people,
Speaker 1: we say, take our stuff, please use it. Please. It
Speaker 1: is there for the taking, and it is high quality,
Speaker 1: it works really well, and if it's missing something, tell
Speaker 1: us we'll make it better for you and for us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great. I think that's really excellent. Advice. Uh, perhaps
Speaker 1: a good note for us to finish on where can
Speaker 1: people find you they want to get in touch, if
Speaker 1: they if they want to look at some of the
Speaker 1: devices like making a stethoscope, I imagine could be like
Speaker 1: a fun project and put a lot less potential risk there.
Speaker 1: So where can they find that stuff? Absolutely, the stethoscope
Speaker 1: is such a fun project. It's fun because any everybody
Speaker 1: has a heart in general, and um, you can listen
Speaker 1: to your family and friends and loved ones. And it's
Speaker 1: one of my favorite things when I'm in practice and
Speaker 1: I listen for sometimes patient will be there with their
Speaker 1: son or daughter or child, and I'll tell the kid,
Speaker 1: you want to listen to mommy's heart, your daddy's heart.
Speaker 1: It's one of the best things. So the stethoscope is
Speaker 1: a great fun, low risk project. Please go ahead and
Speaker 1: do it. Make it. You can find our stuff anywhere
Speaker 1: you can find principle stuff. It's on thinking versuss, on printiples,
Speaker 1: it's basically everywhere or through our geth hub or on
Speaker 1: the Glia site. So that's clia dot org. And if
Speaker 1: people want to participe paid, they're very welcome to. We
Speaker 1: always want need and love, help and of course, it's
Speaker 1: a community. You can never have too many friends, so
Speaker 1: we're always looking for more friends and love to see
Speaker 1: more people. We have a matter most obviously, it's not
Speaker 1: just our devices that are open source. We try to
Speaker 1: make our tire stack open source so people can join
Speaker 1: and chat with us and you know, hang out with
Speaker 1: people who are doing really, really cool and super impressive stuff.
Speaker 1: At this point, I love to recognize the fact that
Speaker 1: I'm one of the least productive, least impressive people at
Speaker 1: clear Really the work that's happening is amazing, and it's
Speaker 1: led by lots of smart, dedicated, visionary people. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: great to hear that. It's really cool that you can
Speaker 1: we can work with people as well, So hopefully people
Speaker 1: do get in touch. I'm sure there'll be someone who's
Speaker 1: interested in what you're doing but has something to contribute
Speaker 1: in some fashion. Yeah, thank you so much for giving
Speaker 1: us some of your evening. Is there anything else you'd
Speaker 1: like to say before we finish up. I think the
Speaker 1: most important thing to say is that there's this mystique
Speaker 1: that people develop. You alluded to it earlier. There's a
Speaker 1: mystique people develop around medical devices. Medical devices are solutions
Speaker 1: to problems and they were made by people like me
Speaker 1: who don't know what the hell they're doing sometimes, and
Speaker 1: so let's not you know, aggrandize or like separate ourselves
Speaker 1: from the people who are doing this work. Yes we
Speaker 1: have to be cautious, Yes we have to be vigorous,
Speaker 1: but at the same time we can all contribute to
Speaker 1: be a part of us. Very cool. And can people
Speaker 1: find you personally anyway? Do you have social media that
Speaker 1: that people could follow. Yeah, if people look at my
Speaker 1: name Terrik Labanny, I'm on all the all the socials,
Speaker 1: as is Glia as well, so you can contact me
Speaker 1: or Glia and participate in anything that you want. And
Speaker 1: like I said, we we always welcome friends. Great, wonderful,
Speaker 1: Thanks so much man, Thank you so much. That was
Speaker 1: such a pleasure. Hey, exackday with more episode this every
Speaker 1: week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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