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. What's meta my verse? This
Speaker 1: is it could happen here a podcast entirely dedicated to
Speaker 1: the metaverse um, which is the promise of the human future.
Speaker 1: Um on with me as always is my co host,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg. I don't I don't know how talks. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure how. I don't know who the voice you
Speaker 1: were doing, I guess he sounds like nothing like no
Speaker 1: one but the absence of a soul when it's dial up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what's going on inside his head in any moment
Speaker 1: when he's not actively making the Internet worse. It's just
Speaker 1: a dial tone in there. Awesome, Garrison, what are we
Speaker 1: talking about today? Well, yeah, we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: the metaverse and how how it's different from what people
Speaker 1: talk about it as and yeah, it's it's gonna be, it's,
Speaker 1: it's gonna it's gonna touch on a variety of things,
Speaker 1: split up into two parts. Um, but first I would
Speaker 1: like to paint you a picture with words, a word picture.
Speaker 1: So you're a wickture. Yeah, You're walking walking through your
Speaker 1: favorite grocery store. There's you know, cards passing by, horrible,
Speaker 1: horrible music playing. It's the lighting is white and and
Speaker 1: like overexposed and under exposed at the same time. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's hard, it's hard to see. And this, uh,
Speaker 1: this like a person who looks like an employee keeps
Speaker 1: keeps popping up and trying to take you to different
Speaker 1: sections of the store. You're trying to just ignore her.
Speaker 1: It's very annoying. All you need to get is the
Speaker 1: stuff you have on a little list, and it's it's awful. Um.
Speaker 1: Eventually you get so fed up with this whole experience
Speaker 1: that you take out, You go to where the wine
Speaker 1: bottles are, You take them out and you arrange them
Speaker 1: into a giant penis on the floor, because that's the
Speaker 1: only thing you can do because you're not actually in
Speaker 1: a store. You're in your living room, and you have
Speaker 1: a horrible headset on, and you're trying to do shopping
Speaker 1: in a virtual in a virtual grocery store. Um. And
Speaker 1: that's that's the actual kind of scope of what we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about today is virtual marketplaces and how
Speaker 1: they interact with seemingly real marketplaces. Yeah, I'm sure this
Speaker 1: is inspired by there were a couple of videos that
Speaker 1: dropped recently, one of them from I think Walmart. We're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking, We're gonna be We're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about it. So yeah, So a couple a couple of
Speaker 1: days after New Year of It, you went viral across
Speaker 1: the social media's ranking, up over like eleven million views
Speaker 1: on Twitter um, and it was titled how Walmart envisions
Speaker 1: shopping in the mold in in the metaverse. Now, So
Speaker 1: what followed was like two minutes of an embarrassing like
Speaker 1: VR jank, including like throwing around virtual gallons of milk
Speaker 1: from your cart into a virtual fridge many many dunks
Speaker 1: are made. Fun was had, But what few people probably
Speaker 1: realized is that like this, actually this this wasn't a
Speaker 1: Walmart metaverse test store. This was actually a five year
Speaker 1: old tech demo from before non Neil Stevenson fans even
Speaker 1: knew what the term metaverse meant. So a few years back,
Speaker 1: a tech company called a Mutual Mobile partnered with Walmart
Speaker 1: for a project set to quote reimagined retails virtual Reality. Now,
Speaker 1: that sounds very fancy and important, but considering this was
Speaker 1: five years ago and you're not hearing about it until now,
Speaker 1: shows how impactful this thing actually was. The first stated
Speaker 1: goal of the tech demo, according to the Mutual Mobile website,
Speaker 1: was to impressed influencers at south By Southwest teen. So
Speaker 1: you know, just like the so called metaverse is now,
Speaker 1: this is largely a promotional project um and a way
Speaker 1: to attract investors. This was this was never actually a
Speaker 1: serious thing. It's I'm gonna say it right now. South
Speaker 1: By Southwest was always one of the stupidest things in
Speaker 1: the world. Um. And when it comes back, it will
Speaker 1: be still because it's stupid. It's a stupid place for
Speaker 1: the most insufferable people in the world to come and
Speaker 1: talk about technology. Some people also listen to music, that's fine,
Speaker 1: so yeah. For For the For the experience itself, they
Speaker 1: used an original Oculus rift and programmed roughly like four
Speaker 1: minute linear um expedition into a barren, hellish digital Walmart
Speaker 1: where you pick up and throw it did it did
Speaker 1: sound exactly. My favorite thing about this video is they
Speaker 1: were clearly using the audio of some sort of like
Speaker 1: shooter game, because it was often like things would it
Speaker 1: would sound like you were in like fucking doom going
Speaker 1: through a portal. Extremely it was bad, like hell, you'll
Speaker 1: you'll pick up and throw fake wine bottles into your
Speaker 1: blue digital cart, and the whole thing ends with a
Speaker 1: fake drone delivering an eight hundred dollar TV that you
Speaker 1: fake purchased. It's it's not great. What Mutual Mobile and
Speaker 1: Walmart were trying to do. They have a constatement on
Speaker 1: their website back from it was they said that Walmart
Speaker 1: envisioned unvailing a fully virtual shopping experience that puts shoppers
Speaker 1: inside the store without ever leaving their homes. To attract
Speaker 1: customers and to spell the misconception that they're not as
Speaker 1: advanced as their more digital counterparts, brick and mortar establishments
Speaker 1: are not only accelerating investments in areas like web and mobile,
Speaker 1: they're also exploring the very edge of emerging technology. Walmart
Speaker 1: of virtual reality is a case some point potential shoppers
Speaker 1: can virtually pick up products, read labels, talk to virtual associates,
Speaker 1: and fill their shopping carts. But the goal wasn't just
Speaker 1: to create something interactive. Walmart needed something that showed the
Speaker 1: potential of VR in retail while putting them ahead of
Speaker 1: the competition. So I mean this was like this was
Speaker 1: this was kind of ahead in some ways, but also
Speaker 1: ahead in the ways that it's kind of showing how
Speaker 1: not useful. This example is so obviously like this five
Speaker 1: year old video resurface now due to Zuckerberg and Epic Games,
Speaker 1: you know, forcing an AstroTurf metaverse into the cultural zeitgeist,
Speaker 1: coupled with their you know, conflation of anything VR to
Speaker 1: the legendary metaverse, right, because VR does not equal metaverse,
Speaker 1: nor is it nor is it necessarily vice versa. But
Speaker 1: now these terms are getting used so interchangeably that someone
Speaker 1: can stumble across this video will be like, oh, look
Speaker 1: at this metaverse store, when like, it's it's not it's
Speaker 1: just a it's just a VR text. The metaverse in
Speaker 1: order to be like the thing that people have been
Speaker 1: imagining through cyberpunk since like the nineties, it needs to
Speaker 1: be persistent and interact directly with the real world in
Speaker 1: a number of ways, like it it's it's it's well,
Speaker 1: we'll get into we'll get into kind of what metaverse
Speaker 1: could be in the future in terms of like the
Speaker 1: it could happen here idea, and then not just a metaverse,
Speaker 1: but a series of metaverse is what they could be,
Speaker 1: and how that kind of con negates the original idea
Speaker 1: of it in the first place. But um, when asked
Speaker 1: by Vice News about the resurgence of their Walmart project,
Speaker 1: Mutual Mobile replied, the vision of a virtual shopping experience
Speaker 1: we helped Walmart realize back in tween stands validated in
Speaker 1: the metaverse era of today. This whole experience has only
Speaker 1: encouraged us to keep experimenting, innovating, and leading the charge
Speaker 1: with cutting edge tech. So I mean, considering most of
Speaker 1: the virality of this was people joking about it, I yeah, sure, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: Mutual good good luck with that. So a few days
Speaker 1: after the Walmart video went viral, rumors of another big
Speaker 1: box store going metaverse started to circulate again, accompanied by
Speaker 1: a video of a possible like three D metaverse storefront.
Speaker 1: Reports emerged, starting in India claiming that H and M
Speaker 1: had announced that it would offer its customers a three
Speaker 1: dimensional shopping experience in its a virtual store inside the
Speaker 1: metaverse via something called now. I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: keik City or seek City. Um, I'm not really comfortable
Speaker 1: saying either of those things because they sound weird, but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go with Sik City. That's something.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit better. I know, I know it's sound,
Speaker 1: but it sounds like it's a slur. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say Seek, but it's it's see k um. So this
Speaker 1: This account on on Twitter called us seek VR shared
Speaker 1: the following from its official Twitter account, Shopping in the
Speaker 1: Metaverse with seek coin. Concept VR store, presented to H
Speaker 1: and M by Seek creates mainstream use cases for sek
Speaker 1: coin and scaling virtual reality beyond games. So I'll get
Speaker 1: into what seek is in a bit. But the report
Speaker 1: said that customers would be able to walk through the
Speaker 1: store choose the apparel they wanted to purchase in the
Speaker 1: Sikh City universe. Um. Although the clothes could only be
Speaker 1: a warn in the digital environment, payment would be made
Speaker 1: with seek coin and customers could have the opportunity to
Speaker 1: order the same apparel from H and m's physical stores later.
Speaker 1: But that's you're buying two separate things. One of us
Speaker 1: the digital skin, one of its an actual, you know,
Speaker 1: real thing. Um so what a seek Zeek was launched
Speaker 1: in eighteen. It's a metaverse coin pop project built on
Speaker 1: the Ethereum blockchain and their their their goal is to
Speaker 1: connect artists, athletes, and other digital content creators directly with
Speaker 1: their fans and virtual worlds. Seeks n f T marketplaces
Speaker 1: is designed to enable real ownership of the in which
Speaker 1: I would actually want. That is, if it's me having
Speaker 1: a very sexual zoom chat with Pitt. You know what,
Speaker 1: we don't need to garrison, please continue, okay and quoting
Speaker 1: from sisubside. Seek currently offers a range of immersive VR
Speaker 1: experiences within Seek City, including theater, concert arenas, sports complex,
Speaker 1: hang out lounge and more and all the things you
Speaker 1: can do in your real home, but weird and on
Speaker 1: the internet. This is horrible, and I see a potential
Speaker 1: appeal for people who are like out in the sticks
Speaker 1: or in parts of the world where they're not they
Speaker 1: feel not like they're very politically or whatever disconnected, which
Speaker 1: is the same thing the Internet already does. I'll talk
Speaker 1: about it being in VR will make it better. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I've lived in the middle of nowhere and
Speaker 1: relied on the Internet to be social, and I don't
Speaker 1: think I would have wanted to change the Internet in
Speaker 1: for this because it sounds yeah anyway, I'll talk about
Speaker 1: use cases in a sec. But yeah, So end users
Speaker 1: will be able to use seek token to make purchases,
Speaker 1: vote for content control programming a much more after token launch,
Speaker 1: seek VR, in partnership with Universal Music, can realize live
Speaker 1: performances of world famous artists such as Bong Jovi, Lady Gaga,
Speaker 1: You Too, Sting, and many more can take place on
Speaker 1: this platform. So seek is like it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: the startup, but it's been around for a while. It's
Speaker 1: trying to do like you know, virtual venues inside the metaverse.
Speaker 1: They they do have contracts with Universal so it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a mix of trying it's it's a mix of
Speaker 1: this coin, so it's a mix of this like cryptocurrency,
Speaker 1: also trying to use this cryptocurrency in this world. They're
Speaker 1: trying to build up um there. Their their their roadmap
Speaker 1: to metaverse right now. First thing is like payment integration,
Speaker 1: so using sea coin, they want sea Coin to be
Speaker 1: the coin for everything in the metaverse. They want all
Speaker 1: of the metaverse be based off this thing that they
Speaker 1: invented called sea coin because it will make them money. Um.
Speaker 1: Next thing they want to do is create a creator
Speaker 1: enabled ecosystem, so kind of copy the content creator thing
Speaker 1: we have right now, poured that into the metaverse. But
Speaker 1: again have everything. You know, you can invest in your
Speaker 1: creators so you can vote on what they do using
Speaker 1: sea coins and all of we talk about like the
Speaker 1: personal ownership in the previous episode. But then a lot
Speaker 1: of it, you know, they have like an n FT marketplace,
Speaker 1: Avatar marketplaces, etcetera, etcetera. But a lot of this stuff
Speaker 1: is built around like concerts, you know, venues, you know,
Speaker 1: a lounge, movie theaters where you can do stuff in VR.
Speaker 1: That is like that is the main the main thing
Speaker 1: that Seek is trying to do. They do have this
Speaker 1: one one quote somewhere, oh yeah, the future milestone. So
Speaker 1: after they achieve this Seek metaverse where everything is ran
Speaker 1: through Seek, all of like you know what, whether you're
Speaker 1: on Oculus, whether you're on Vibe, all of it gets
Speaker 1: run through Seeks. It's one one multiverse, sorry, one metaverse.
Speaker 1: Their their future milestones are quote a VR Space Academy.
Speaker 1: They do not do not say what that means, um
Speaker 1: KIEK Studios again kind of unclear. I'm guessing like original content.
Speaker 1: And then the last one is a blockchain metaverse alliance.
Speaker 1: Those are their those are their three big future milestones
Speaker 1: after they get there there. What was that last one?
Speaker 1: Blockchain metaverse alliance? I mean, this was like in the
Speaker 1: Facebook thing to write the idea that we're going to
Speaker 1: integrate n f t S. But it was also clearly
Speaker 1: just like they tossed that in there on the Facebook one,
Speaker 1: there was no evidence they thought seriously about n f
Speaker 1: t S or blockchain. It was just had gotten big
Speaker 1: while they were preparing the things, so they tossed them
Speaker 1: in there. Um, I I get the idea, right, Like
Speaker 1: the thing that they keep pitching with this is that
Speaker 1: you'll be able to have an item in one game
Speaker 1: that is yours. The company doesn't own it, you can
Speaker 1: take it to other games, which anyone who makes games
Speaker 1: will tell you was fucking nonsense. It's something like that
Speaker 1: might be vaguely possible in a metaverse where everything was
Speaker 1: forced to use the same engine. Um and all everyone
Speaker 1: was also forced to abide by a bunch of strict
Speaker 1: rules by Facebook. Um. That Also, that's probably violating antitrust laws. Um.
Speaker 1: And also it seems like a ridicul ulously Sysiphisian task
Speaker 1: with no real benefit. I don't think anyone's going to
Speaker 1: do it, but I'm guessing that's what they're referring to
Speaker 1: when they want to jam the blockchain up in the
Speaker 1: fucking metaverse? Like what else could it be? The blockchain
Speaker 1: Metaverse Alliance, all of the blockchains the metaverse is gonna
Speaker 1: aligned into. Yeah, like they don't want to put all
Speaker 1: of the metaverse stuff. You want to wear this shirt
Speaker 1: in the metaverse. So, just like the real world, the freedom,
Speaker 1: the freedom of the internet catch you feel. It's the
Speaker 1: ever expanding possibilities. I do love because they keep talking
Speaker 1: about within the context of metaverse games like you'll get
Speaker 1: to unlock a character that's just yours and nobody else
Speaker 1: can play it, and they'll have special abilities that means
Speaker 1: he wins all the time. It's like, why would people
Speaker 1: play that game? I think it was Business Insiders someone's
Speaker 1: article talking about how neat it would be for games
Speaker 1: to work this way, and like, think of all the
Speaker 1: money you'd make people wanting to watch your character wins.
Speaker 1: People don't want to just like watch a guy who's
Speaker 1: structurally unable to lose because he he bought the right
Speaker 1: character in a racing game win every race. That's not
Speaker 1: No one's going to pay to watch that. Do you
Speaker 1: understand what people watch races for? Like now anyway, well,
Speaker 1: let's hear from our good friends at our products and
Speaker 1: services before we come back and talk more about seek coins.
Speaker 1: I guess I don't know. All right, we are back,
Speaker 1: So yeah, zee coins virtual reality spaces run on smart
Speaker 1: contracts through the through the Bayans smart chain and there
Speaker 1: there there run the run through the Ethereum blockchain. UM.
Speaker 1: So the the there's about seven and seven forty four
Speaker 1: millions seek coins and supply. The maximum supply capacity is
Speaker 1: capped at one billion coins. Uh Sea coins peaked at
Speaker 1: one one dollar and sixteen cents a year ago after
Speaker 1: launching and around four cents um. They're currently being traded
Speaker 1: for around sixty cents. So that's that's what actual sequens doing.
Speaker 1: Like like like people do use this's not many people
Speaker 1: like they they do have these contracts with with with
Speaker 1: Universal Music UM. But before this h and m thing,
Speaker 1: I I never heard of Seek coins. Um. So, two
Speaker 1: days after the rumors began circulating that H and M was,
Speaker 1: you know, partnering with Seek, H and M said Nope,
Speaker 1: we did not, we are we are not doing this,
Speaker 1: but they did not close the door in future possibilities.
Speaker 1: They said, uh, we we we like to we'd like
Speaker 1: to confirm that H and M is not is not
Speaker 1: opening a store in the metaverse at this time. We're
Speaker 1: also not collaborating with Seek. So the official Twitter account
Speaker 1: for Seek subsequently clarified later on that the store that
Speaker 1: they were doing was just a concept that was presented
Speaker 1: to H and M and not a not a launching
Speaker 1: virtual store yet. Um. But they do they do say
Speaker 1: that they're in discussions with H and M to make
Speaker 1: this a reality, but it's not a reality as of now.
Speaker 1: So this this kind of begs the question like, what
Speaker 1: about a three D digital space is superior to a
Speaker 1: two D digital space for simple tasks like shopping online.
Speaker 1: So once you start, you know, unfolding questions like this
Speaker 1: about the Internet metaverse a r VR, you there are
Speaker 1: more the conternal sides to this than you would have
Speaker 1: initially estimated. Um. But first off, before we kind of
Speaker 1: have this discussion, we should split this into two categories.
Speaker 1: One for shopping for like real physical items that you
Speaker 1: plan on like receiving in person, and then digital items
Speaker 1: that don't physically exist and are just just on your
Speaker 1: computer and monitor. So obviously, like there's no clear advantage
Speaker 1: in most cases to traversing an isolated virtual environment in
Speaker 1: order to order food as opposed to just scrolling through
Speaker 1: a web page. Um, but once you expand out of
Speaker 1: the confines of VRS sensory deprivation three three D technology
Speaker 1: in a r SO augmented reality does actually have some
Speaker 1: useful prospects, including some that are already in use. Um.
Speaker 1: Amazon and Ikea, for example, will have options on their
Speaker 1: perspective websites and apps that can like project furniture options
Speaker 1: into your living space, so you can that's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that has some future. I think. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it is currently this is being done on your phone screen,
Speaker 1: but in a R glasses application of this actually serve
Speaker 1: its purpose quite well because something something that people would want. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the phone screen version is pretty mediocre and these are
Speaker 1: and that's kind of the thing the place where at
Speaker 1: I we make fun of this stuff a lot because
Speaker 1: most of its nonsense. There are there are really there's
Speaker 1: a lot of potential in some of these ideas, but
Speaker 1: there's their potential for like and the same level that
Speaker 1: the air fryer has potential where it's like a thing
Speaker 1: a bunch of people will buy, but it's not. None
Speaker 1: of this yet is stuff that's going to completely change.
Speaker 1: Like you might get a few million people to to
Speaker 1: get these glasses and or this app made these classes
Speaker 1: for a couple of reasons, but who would use this
Speaker 1: this app to like help plan out how they're setting
Speaker 1: up their houses. You might get a few million people
Speaker 1: who do that. It's not going to be like an
Speaker 1: iPod or an iPhone or or like Facebook that no
Speaker 1: one's had figured that out yet. There's there's some neat
Speaker 1: products that are going to be valuable, but we're still
Speaker 1: on the stage where nobody's under nobody's figured out fundamentally
Speaker 1: what people want from this, as opposed through like tiny
Speaker 1: specific needs in the same way that like there was
Speaker 1: a number of futurists who quite add accurately figured out
Speaker 1: with a smartphone, like, oh, people want a thing that
Speaker 1: will give them access to all of the knowledge and
Speaker 1: ideas in the world and also let them yell at
Speaker 1: anybody anytime they want. Like, that's something that is going
Speaker 1: to be incredibly successful, and it has and it's changed
Speaker 1: the entire world. Zuckerberg was like, people want to be
Speaker 1: able to be racist faster, and by god, we wanted
Speaker 1: it and and that was huge. Um, I don't like
Speaker 1: these are It's a good idea, like, yeah, let people
Speaker 1: scope out how their room is gonna look when they're
Speaker 1: shopping or whatever through a r But we haven't yet
Speaker 1: hit that this is going to change the world, because
Speaker 1: being slightly better at using Ikea will not change the world. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think as an avid air fry air hater, I
Speaker 1: do think comparing metaverse to the air fryer is actually
Speaker 1: which I love to say to Garrison. I know Garrison
Speaker 1: hates it when I use the air fryer. Fer mhm
Speaker 1: anti air frier action is my new tattoo. They screech
Speaker 1: like the person at the end of Invasion of the Body.
Speaker 1: But my goodness, do they cook my food faster? Fried
Speaker 1: it with the air Wow? Almost like it's impossible anyway. Um.
Speaker 1: Mutual Mobiles Digital Marketing shot Agis talked with Vice after
Speaker 1: the Walrut video went viral, and he explained that like
Speaker 1: the demo was made to show the potential of virtual
Speaker 1: reality and shopping experiences that they can have for you know,
Speaker 1: different people, UM, including its ability to connect like elderly
Speaker 1: people or people with disabilities to a shopping experience from
Speaker 1: the comfort of their own home, something that he thinks
Speaker 1: might even be you know, attractive to people who have
Speaker 1: been through several rounds of COVID quarantine. And I can
Speaker 1: kind of understand this last argument. You know, during early quarantine,
Speaker 1: I definitely used my VR headset more often than I
Speaker 1: had before. UM and with our alienated capitalist world, I
Speaker 1: can see the use of walking around a digital store
Speaker 1: if you're stuck at home, um, due to something like
Speaker 1: a plague, or if you know, if you have a
Speaker 1: physical or mental reason that makes you know, going to
Speaker 1: a story difficult. Because but like it's yes, this this
Speaker 1: can help that. But also this is always very religed
Speaker 1: on how these types of stores are set up and
Speaker 1: how these stories like affect your brain. It's like a
Speaker 1: big part of going to the grossery store and what
Speaker 1: it's designed to do. Let's make it so that we're
Speaker 1: not just following a shopping list. There's like a structured
Speaker 1: joy of discovery. Everything about the design to the store
Speaker 1: is to get you to buy things you didn't think
Speaker 1: you needed before you walked in, and we're trained from
Speaker 1: birth to like to find this process pleasurable. So in
Speaker 1: that way, walking around a VR like wal Mart or
Speaker 1: H and M might actually make some people happy despite
Speaker 1: that being sad and dystopian if you stop and think
Speaker 1: about it, right, like, because that's that's actually like it's
Speaker 1: a it's a very capitalist thing, but it does make
Speaker 1: us happy because that's that's what we've been trained to
Speaker 1: do since we're babies. So that there's there is that
Speaker 1: side of it for in terms of like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: can see if I really don't want to leave the house,
Speaker 1: but I want to get the experience of walking through
Speaker 1: a place, maybe I will walk through a Target to
Speaker 1: get groceries. I don't know as some people maybe it
Speaker 1: might do that, but otherwise, you know, it's much It
Speaker 1: is much simpler and easier to just scroll through a
Speaker 1: two dy thing on a web page and and and
Speaker 1: and do the things you need. That's the thing, Like
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, I mean absolutely because I I when
Speaker 1: I was making fun of one of these videos, somebody
Speaker 1: like called it out as being ablest and was like
Speaker 1: fixing all the use as this as for a disabled person,
Speaker 1: if they can use this, they can use Amazon. And like,
Speaker 1: as a person who sometimes I don't shop for groceries
Speaker 1: at Amazon, but I've shop for groceries online. It's fine.
Speaker 1: The it's it's everything it needs to be. You can
Speaker 1: get your groceries online, and the metaverse is just going
Speaker 1: to make it like weird and off putting and unnecessarily complicated,
Speaker 1: because at the moment, I can get groceries with my
Speaker 1: phone while I'm like jogging um or as I'm like
Speaker 1: sitting in traffic, or like while I'm on a zoom
Speaker 1: call listening to Garrison talk about the metaverse as opposed
Speaker 1: to putting on a headset and like doing the same
Speaker 1: thing basically as driving there, but more expensively. Anyway, are
Speaker 1: you for shopping right now? I am ordering sevent cans
Speaker 1: of ZeVA and forty pounds of raw beef, the normal
Speaker 1: week's worth of food for me, And that's literally like
Speaker 1: two days for him. See but Robert, you could be
Speaker 1: doing this while wearing a bucket on your head and
Speaker 1: walking around a fake store. I could wear a bucket
Speaker 1: on my head to the real store. They can't stop me.
Speaker 1: I usually wear a bathrobe. This is the first half.
Speaker 1: For it's like, you know, buying actual physical items you
Speaker 1: plan to receive in stores, you know, furniture. It's actually
Speaker 1: kind of makes sense. Uh food, It's a little bit iffy.
Speaker 1: The only kind of consideration there is if people want
Speaker 1: the mental effect of walking around a store, if they
Speaker 1: find that pleasurable, then it's a thing. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's way more efficient to just scroll through your phone.
Speaker 1: Um As for the other side, buying virtual items, whether
Speaker 1: they be you know, n f t s, video game
Speaker 1: skins or super special exclusive VR hangout rooms, I don't
Speaker 1: give a funk how this works. If you want to
Speaker 1: walk around a VR vault about your VR art and
Speaker 1: your VR clothes, knock yourself out. I buy Sonic the
Speaker 1: Hedgehog games. We all have our weird things we do
Speaker 1: that don't make any sense. Yeah, if that's if these
Speaker 1: procery stores are just gonna be like the seven weirdest
Speaker 1: people in the country Masturbannings. They buy wine and milk.
Speaker 1: That's the thing, Robert I was when I was when
Speaker 1: I was doing the digital picture. In the beginning, I
Speaker 1: had two scenarios, one where you align the bottles into
Speaker 1: a deck. The other one I was going to say,
Speaker 1: you take off your pants and start masturbating, and I
Speaker 1: decided not to do that one. So I'm happy that
Speaker 1: because because yeah, that is the actual use case for this,
Speaker 1: is that someone people are gonna be walking around these
Speaker 1: fake walmarts just all cherking off. That's what's gonna happen there.
Speaker 1: They're gonna have this animation of a real, real female
Speaker 1: employee of theirs who like pops up when you do
Speaker 1: something you're not supposed to do and explain something to you.
Speaker 1: And it's going to be impossible to remove initially, and
Speaker 1: people are going to turn it into a whole weird,
Speaker 1: horny thing, and like they will appear in all these circumstances,
Speaker 1: it's gonna go it's going to be the only thing
Speaker 1: that goes viral, Like it's gonna be the only thing
Speaker 1: people remember five years later about the first of these
Speaker 1: This is I'm I'm gonna start go back to this
Speaker 1: towards the end of part two, but this is the
Speaker 1: actual way to handle the metaverse, because we're gonna this
Speaker 1: this thing is going to be forced on us one
Speaker 1: way or another. We're gonna have a form of it,
Speaker 1: and honestly, the best thing we can do with it
Speaker 1: is either ignore it, ignore it, or maybe more attractively,
Speaker 1: is to funk with it. Like that's gonna be the
Speaker 1: thing that's gonna be the thing to do. There was
Speaker 1: an article a few days ago that headline is Final
Speaker 1: Fantasy porn interrupts Italian Senate zoom event. Someone someone joined
Speaker 1: in and started playing poured from Final Fantasy seven, Like
Speaker 1: this is to do. This is the way that we
Speaker 1: need to do it. If there's gonna be dumbass like
Speaker 1: meetings on the Zuckerberg metaverse, people need to go in
Speaker 1: and make it weirdly horny. Yeah, Garrison, I could not
Speaker 1: agree more that that's the what you need to do,
Speaker 1: citizens of the Internet is look up something awful habo
Speaker 1: h A B b O hotel. That's the kind of
Speaker 1: ship that we need to be doing in fucking um
Speaker 1: in in the there was basically a children's video game,
Speaker 1: was an early kids MMO and a bunch of weird
Speaker 1: adults and something Awful decided to create an unsettling cult
Speaker 1: of people who all looked identical and marched around doing
Speaker 1: all of these weird, unsettling things in a children's game.
Speaker 1: It was very fun um like or or like in
Speaker 1: a in second life when it was the new big
Speaker 1: sexy thing there was. This was very self important tech writer,
Speaker 1: investor type person who was doing a Q and A
Speaker 1: and people just like animated thousands of floating penises going on.
Speaker 1: This is this is gonna be the thing. This is
Speaker 1: what you we're gonna have to do because in order
Speaker 1: because if it's gonna be this horrible corporate hell, the
Speaker 1: only way to do it. The only way to deal
Speaker 1: with that is to make it unusable for everybody so
Speaker 1: that so that it doesn't get used. And the way
Speaker 1: to do that is by putting dicks everywhere. Dicks andwhere
Speaker 1: ever decides to do a multiverse presentation, or if one
Speaker 1: party or another has had decides to a multiverse debate,
Speaker 1: it is everyone's moral responsibility, civic duty. This goes beyond
Speaker 1: civic This is as a citizen of the human race.
Speaker 1: You know, as a member of this species, you have
Speaker 1: to try to find a way to suck it up
Speaker 1: for them. Something could be more important. So yeah, so,
Speaker 1: if if you're buying digital items, do you never plan everything,
Speaker 1: even person I don't care how you do it. Knock
Speaker 1: yourself out. We all have our weird things. I I
Speaker 1: bisonic DLCs, people do World of Warcraft. If you want
Speaker 1: to get of art piece, you can only hang in
Speaker 1: your digital room. That sounds miserable, but have fun. I
Speaker 1: I used the internet to order very off putting Danish
Speaker 1: cheese product. Oh yeah, that did happen. That was off putting.
Speaker 1: It was weird. It was like you tried to trick
Speaker 1: yourself into liking it when you were eating it. Though
Speaker 1: I we I don't remember not liking it because I
Speaker 1: hate a good amount. But I've had the second cube
Speaker 1: sitting around and I've had no desired open desired. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: so I did not like it. I just I don't
Speaker 1: know that I ever want to eat it again. Quality
Speaker 1: audio content. So here's the thing. I have not actually
Speaker 1: been talking about the metaverse. Nothing I've mentioned thus far
Speaker 1: actually is the metaverse and doesn't have really anything to
Speaker 1: do with the metaverse besides the technology of a VR
Speaker 1: and a R. You know. It turns out companies like Facebook, Epic, Microsoft,
Speaker 1: Invalve the way they talk about the metaverse is kind
Speaker 1: of all a big lie, like the not metaverse, it's
Speaker 1: a it's an astros turf top down marketing scheme to
Speaker 1: turn more of you into data and to create and
Speaker 1: to create vinyl marketing, like that's instant. Instead of an
Speaker 1: interconnected solution to the alienated bubbles of Web two, it's
Speaker 1: just a social media network that encompasses all of your
Speaker 1: vision and encourages even more digital alienation and less in
Speaker 1: person socialization. Kids, you know the worst stuff about the internet.
Speaker 1: What if it was the only thing about the Internet.
Speaker 1: What if it was encompanying everything you see instead of
Speaker 1: just a computer screen. So all of the gaming CEOs
Speaker 1: who were talking about the promise of n f T
Speaker 1: s and like, I think it was the one of
Speaker 1: the guys who runs read and I think it might
Speaker 1: have been Alexis so haney in or whatever their name
Speaker 1: is who said that, like in five years of games
Speaker 1: will be n f T base because people don't like
Speaker 1: wasting their time and not getting compensated for it, Like,
Speaker 1: do you know what it games is? That's not what people.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna I'm gonna talk more about metaverse as
Speaker 1: big tech or just bigger tech in part two. But
Speaker 1: this this this. This will be wrapping up part one
Speaker 1: of the digital storefronts, and then we'll get into some
Speaker 1: more kind of applications of this and how we're actually
Speaker 1: seeing it in the second half. So, Robert, do you
Speaker 1: wanna Do you want to go buy a virtual uh
Speaker 1: block of Danish cheese? Um? No, I did. When I
Speaker 1: was hanging out on top of the mountain the other day,
Speaker 1: I ran into a guy flying some drones, which I
Speaker 1: normally don't like. But this guy had a VR control
Speaker 1: rig for his very nice drones that those are dope.
Speaker 1: I might, I might get into that ship, uh, But no,
Speaker 1: I have no desire to shop. I like going to
Speaker 1: the grocery store. Um as I do as much of
Speaker 1: my shopping that way as possible because it's soothing and
Speaker 1: uh nice and I think very human to go be
Speaker 1: around other people to get food. But yeah, that's the thing,
Speaker 1: you know, and things like the pandemic where that it
Speaker 1: comes harder. I think that is where the use cases
Speaker 1: for the digital stores actually come in. Like theoretically, but
Speaker 1: you've never you've never seen them that feelings which it
Speaker 1: all just looks deeply off putting. It all. It's the
Speaker 1: problem is that it's it's stuck. It's stuck in the
Speaker 1: uncanny valley. So it's not pleasurable to be in those
Speaker 1: digital spaces because you're even though it's being marketed as
Speaker 1: a solution to alienation, it's just more alienating because it's
Speaker 1: because it's it's like very clearly exposing the alienation that
Speaker 1: we try to avoid. Um, So it falls right in
Speaker 1: the middle of the uncanny valley and it's not pleasant.
Speaker 1: But we we we we We will talk more about
Speaker 1: that in part two. Um, if you want to follow
Speaker 1: the show on the social media's that is Cools on
Speaker 1: media and Happen here pod. It can keep up with
Speaker 1: my tweets when I I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 1: what I do on Twitter anymore. But that's hungry about
Speaker 1: tie And you can harass Robert Evans at I read Okay,
Speaker 1: that's the show. Do it? Do it? Are all kill him?
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg, Welcome to the podcast where we talk about
Speaker 1: the metaverse. I enjoy barbecue sauce And that was Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1: That was pretty good. That that is that is SNL worthy.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Garrison, because it's because it's so bad. All right, Um, now,
Speaker 1: that was that was my own big goal. This is
Speaker 1: this is part two of the Metaverse that never was
Speaker 1: UM here at it could happen here and we're actually
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about like that. It couldn't wait until
Speaker 1: we launched portions of the show and pretend we never
Speaker 1: said all this ship. It's going to be the best garrison.
Speaker 1: You know, Robert, Remember remember when I was talking about
Speaker 1: um seek City and all of the virtual venues. I
Speaker 1: just just I just got a message from our beloved
Speaker 1: parent company, I Heart Media. We planned to extend UM
Speaker 1: shows into the Metaverse, which was which was announced a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago. But thought that the Metaverse was a
Speaker 1: pretty good idea. I think we will talk about how
Speaker 1: the Metaverse could be cool later in this episode, but
Speaker 1: then we'll explain why it won't be. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: heard Media did announce so web three in the Metaverse
Speaker 1: and the newest consumer platforms for I Heart Media. So sorry,
Speaker 1: I I was just working. It's it's working in a
Speaker 1: matrix for reference there, So yes, I see what. Thank you?
Speaker 1: Um Anyway, So I'm guessing for non Neil Stevenson fans,
Speaker 1: many of you probably had not heard of the Metaverse
Speaker 1: before last year. Um VR sure you've heard of VR
Speaker 1: a R maybe, UM, but probably just as like niche
Speaker 1: gaming technology, you know, not not this massive, not not
Speaker 1: like a massive successor to the Internet. UM. Primarily three companies, Facebook,
Speaker 1: Epic Games, and Valve uh, the later two being mostly
Speaker 1: gaming and software companies. UM. Kind of all decided the
Speaker 1: best way to push their niche VR and software technology
Speaker 1: into the zeitgeist was with this flashy new marketing, and
Speaker 1: it kind of worked. Metavers is now and many more
Speaker 1: people's like personal lexicon, but it's not really the metaverse,
Speaker 1: you know, like the Walmart thing. It's a way to
Speaker 1: attract investors and drum up free press, but it's still
Speaker 1: the same old VR and a R applications of the technology.
Speaker 1: None of these companies are trying to make metaverse a
Speaker 1: thing that we actually want or you know, working towards
Speaker 1: an interconnected, immersive, three D open source successor to the Internet.
Speaker 1: All of the different websites and services we use united
Speaker 1: under one digital roof, like a super platform that you know,
Speaker 1: is made up of all of these sub platforms. You
Speaker 1: have social media, online gaming, and all of like the
Speaker 1: you know, ease of life apps, all accessible through the
Speaker 1: same digital space under the same digital economy that that
Speaker 1: thing isn't happening. People like that. That's not what people
Speaker 1: with money are actually pushing towards, even though they're still
Speaker 1: using the metaverse term. Yum. There was a great piece
Speaker 1: in Wired that came out last month as a part
Speaker 1: of their Matrix VR issue. UM. It was called the
Speaker 1: metaverse is simply big tech but bigger. It was by
Speaker 1: Cecilia di'antazio. It was so it's it's a wonderful piece,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say a quote
Speaker 1: from it right here. Um. By the mid two thousands,
Speaker 1: it became clear that money wasn't in building individual websites
Speaker 1: that we could access on the open web. It was
Speaker 1: making information sorders, channels, aggregators, and publishers, open enough to
Speaker 1: scale with user generated content, but closed enough to reap
Speaker 1: enormous profits. This was the evolution from Web one to
Speaker 1: Web two. For nearly thirty years, the gravity of the
Speaker 1: consolidation has pulled the cyberspace together. Under the US this
Speaker 1: of fewer and fewer corporate titans, the freaky little planets
Speaker 1: get drawn together, collide and make bigger planets, clide again
Speaker 1: and make stars or even black holes. Facebook eats, Instagram,
Speaker 1: and WhatsApp. Amazon swallows two dozen e commerce sites, and
Speaker 1: you're left with these few supermassive players controlling and appropriating
Speaker 1: the celestial motion of billions of users. This is how
Speaker 1: big tech got big end quote. So yeah, like now
Speaker 1: we have all of our isolated toolboxes, and they really
Speaker 1: fight against any inter platform integration. You have you know,
Speaker 1: Microsoft Office and they're they're like off their office suite.
Speaker 1: You have like Google Workspace. You have Apple's own like
Speaker 1: air Drop, Apple Pages and Final Cut Pro, plus the
Speaker 1: the nightmare that is Adobe's subscription tools. Like Google wants
Speaker 1: you to spend all day checking your Gmail, traveling with
Speaker 1: Google Maps, watching videos on YouTube, and browsing on Chrome. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: your friend texts you via I Message, uses Apple Maps,
Speaker 1: and calls his mom on face time. This is the
Speaker 1: single person in the world uses Microsoft Edge. That is true,
Speaker 1: But like this, this form of the Internet is the
Speaker 1: one that the metaverse is growing out of. Metaverse is
Speaker 1: just a way for tech companies to add VR and
Speaker 1: a R and the accompanying extra surveillance and data collection
Speaker 1: to this poor foot to like their own portfolio of
Speaker 1: proprietary products in order that's happened. They need to convince
Speaker 1: us that we need headsets for the next evolution of
Speaker 1: the Internet. So it's not surprising that Facebook and Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: were the first ones to crack this thing right open.
Speaker 1: It's they own not only four of the top six
Speaker 1: social media platforms, but also Oculus, which is the most
Speaker 1: popular manufacturer of VR hardware. VR has been relegated to
Speaker 1: niche gaming technology for like, basically two decades, and Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: decided the best way to sell more of its headsets
Speaker 1: and software was to give the tech a fresh new
Speaker 1: paint job and call it Metaverse and like. It's sort
Speaker 1: of working that there were approximately nine point four million
Speaker 1: shipment severe headsets in two one three point six million
Speaker 1: of which we're done during the holiday season after Facebook's
Speaker 1: big Metaverse event. It's suspected that the Quest two, which
Speaker 1: is made by Oculus, a Facebook um, makes up for
Speaker 1: more than three quarters of all those headsets sold. So
Speaker 1: the Democrat demographics data isn't explicitly available, but probably a
Speaker 1: lot of kids received these things as holiday gifts um
Speaker 1: Oculus Meta. Facebook does not release its VERR headset sales figures,
Speaker 1: but the Oculus app that that you need to have
Speaker 1: to make the headset work. Shot to the top spot
Speaker 1: in Apple's App Store on Christmas Day. That was the
Speaker 1: first time it's ever been in the number one app
Speaker 1: on the App Store, so indicating a spike, and headsets
Speaker 1: received as holiday gifts. So they're selling a lot of headsets,
Speaker 1: like Oculus is is selling a lot of their things,
Speaker 1: Like you know, I I got one a few years ago,
Speaker 1: but you know, now there's there's there's more and more
Speaker 1: of them circulating. Um. But you know this, it's still
Speaker 1: all relegated to VR because I'm not actually metaverse. Arguably
Speaker 1: the closest thing we have to the actual metaverse is
Speaker 1: stuff like Roadblocks and Minecraft. Now that is still not
Speaker 1: that's not immersive three D. It's you're still looking at
Speaker 1: it through a two D screen, but it is software
Speaker 1: that gives users development tools to create their own projects
Speaker 1: within this shared three D space. What separates these things
Speaker 1: and basically all attempts from making the metaverse from being
Speaker 1: the ideal metaverse, is still the proprietary aspect. Everything is
Speaker 1: isolated islands. You can't take your Roadblocks game into Minecraft, right,
Speaker 1: it still is isolated to their specific things. But you know, Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: robox Is CEO described the company as the shepherds of
Speaker 1: the metaverse in early and he is kind of right, like,
Speaker 1: that's not that's not totally inaccurate. Um, I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: again from the Wired piece by Cecilia di'antasio. Um, if
Speaker 1: big text unchecked growth continues, there will be multiple versus,
Speaker 1: if there are any at all, each will be interoperable
Speaker 1: under one tech giants giant umbrella. The same way Apple
Speaker 1: is both a walled garden and a convenient, habitable terrarium
Speaker 1: for its dedicated consumers. Users love the seamlessness of Apple's
Speaker 1: proprietary off porting system, the ambiguity of my message, and
Speaker 1: Apple presumably loves the thirty commission it can charge on
Speaker 1: developers who sell apps in their app store. So Epic
Speaker 1: Games is the other big metaverse proponent right now, you
Speaker 1: know they were. They were actually making announcements about metaverse
Speaker 1: a few months before Facebook did um and the c
Speaker 1: a l Epic Games. Tim sween Ley has been outspoken
Speaker 1: against the metaverse ran by a big tech giant like Apple.
Speaker 1: But that's not that's not really genuine because his version
Speaker 1: of the metaverse Entails of Cyberspace made accessible through Fortnite
Speaker 1: and Unreal Engine, two things owned by Epic Games. So like,
Speaker 1: it's not like he's not actually sincere about creating an
Speaker 1: open source thing. He just wants to be the one
Speaker 1: to control it. He's just upset that he thinks someone
Speaker 1: else might. Um. He tried to sue Apple last year
Speaker 1: and and failed. UM, and the College Fornia judge told
Speaker 1: him that Epic Games seeks a systematic change which would
Speaker 1: result in a tremendous monetary gain and wealth. The lawsuit
Speaker 1: is a mechanism to challenge the policies and practices of
Speaker 1: Apple and Google, which are an impediment to Mr Sweeney's
Speaker 1: vision of the oncoming metaverse. So it's not actually about
Speaker 1: like him being against big tech giants and being against
Speaker 1: a big tech giant Wren metaverse. It's just that he
Speaker 1: doesn't like that he won't be able to make as
Speaker 1: much money with it if multiple tech companies work together
Speaker 1: to make it. Like that's that's that's really what he's
Speaker 1: concerned about. He would rather be in control of this thing, um,
Speaker 1: because like, yeah, it would be really interesting to see
Speaker 1: if multiple tech giants work together to create an actual
Speaker 1: successor to the Internet, like an actual like you know
Speaker 1: how the internet is just when you open up your
Speaker 1: computer or and you have access to the net. It's
Speaker 1: not it's it's not like running a specific program you
Speaker 1: get to go in all the things. It would be
Speaker 1: interesting if people actually work towards creating that, but no,
Speaker 1: it's all about creating very isolated operating systems with a
Speaker 1: very isolated tool like tool chest. Like you can't access
Speaker 1: Steam games via the Oculus store. These things don't These
Speaker 1: things don't work. Now you can Oculus. You can use
Speaker 1: the Oculus on Steam games, but not vice versa. They're
Speaker 1: making things the way they're making things because they're not
Speaker 1: trying to design a new Internet because for one thing,
Speaker 1: the Internet wasn't designed. It was like the result of
Speaker 1: a bunch of people who were doing things that interested them,
Speaker 1: all kind of intersecting and building upon each other. And second,
Speaker 1: like the they're they're not they're making individual profit tunnels.
Speaker 1: They're not actually trying to create um. They're not trying
Speaker 1: to like actually trying to think about what people might
Speaker 1: want next, or what people might might want beyond the Internet.
Speaker 1: They're thinking, how what can we sell that we're not
Speaker 1: currently selling, and that's never going to be the thing
Speaker 1: that figures out Yeah about Yeah. On on that point,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do one final quote from the Wired piece. Um,
Speaker 1: if if these companies dominating cyberspace did decide to collaborate simultaneously,
Speaker 1: piecing together opposite sides of the quilt to create a
Speaker 1: digital tech style, that would be very polite. But is
Speaker 1: there a world in which Microsoft, Facebook, Epic Games, Apple,
Speaker 1: uh Navidia, etcetera combine all of their valuable products captain
Speaker 1: planet style into an architect of the metaverse under open
Speaker 1: source standards? Nobody in particular roops billions from That's sort
Speaker 1: of a tall task to overhaul your code and collaborate
Speaker 1: with your competitors. Why would three or four tech giants
Speaker 1: partner to make a metaverse when they already spent decades
Speaker 1: and billions constructing one of their own. So yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's never gonna happen the way the way society
Speaker 1: is made, the way internetworks, that's not ever going to
Speaker 1: be a thing. Speaking of companies and things that you
Speaker 1: can buy online and advertising, here's some ads and we're
Speaker 1: back and we're gonna talk about possibly the most successful
Speaker 1: version of air of of VR technology we're gona talk
Speaker 1: about the actual use cases that are generating actual profit.
Speaker 1: So there is a there was a tweet a few
Speaker 1: days ago that I'm just gonna read the tweet and
Speaker 1: then then we'll talk about the implications. Um. This one
Speaker 1: very very viral. UM. I caught this very early on, though,
Speaker 1: and I started writing about it, and then a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of articles dropped on the topic. A farmer in
Speaker 1: Turkey has fitted his cows with virtual reality goggles to
Speaker 1: make them think they're outside in summer pastures. The farmer
Speaker 1: found out that these pleasant scenes make the cows happier
Speaker 1: and produce more milk. Futures metaverse, So we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about the cow matricks. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about the Yeah it is to go back in time
Speaker 1: and tell people, hey, you know that hit movie The
Speaker 1: Matrix in the future, We're going to do that, but
Speaker 1: for more milk to get So the thing that went
Speaker 1: viral about it that kind of broke the story for
Speaker 1: a lot of people was this farmer in Turkey with
Speaker 1: the pictures of the cows with VR goggles on them.
Speaker 1: Pretty pretty pretty fucked up. Um. But the idea and
Speaker 1: the actual technology used came from came from Russia. UM
Speaker 1: farmers worked together with developers, veterinarians and consultants at the
Speaker 1: oh boy, here here's a Russian town name, or I
Speaker 1: guess a farm name Kragskernof, I don't know. Yeah, thats right,
Speaker 1: it's us that I think we can we can were we?
Speaker 1: I think you nailed it. It's it's it's this farm
Speaker 1: near Moscow. UM and they teamed up so all least
Speaker 1: you know, farmers, developers and vets and consultants teamed up
Speaker 1: to make this cow matrix project UM and there was
Speaker 1: an official statement from the Moscow Ministry of Food and
Speaker 1: Agriculture reads the global trend towards universal computerization. The significant
Speaker 1: significantly simplifies work processes in many areas that and allows
Speaker 1: you to achieve unprecedented results. Russian milk producers keep up
Speaker 1: with world standards and are even ready to offer the
Speaker 1: market new and unexpected solutions. On a farm in the
Speaker 1: Moscow region, a prototype of virtual reality glasses were tested
Speaker 1: to improve the conditions for keeping cows. Employees of one
Speaker 1: of the largest farms in the Moscow region, together with
Speaker 1: i T specialists, decided to conduct an experiment studying the
Speaker 1: influence of virtual reality and developed a layout of VR glasses.
Speaker 1: So the herd donned these VR systems adapted for the
Speaker 1: heads of cows. Um so. And they also had to
Speaker 1: they had to to to make the imagery work. They
Speaker 1: need to tweak the color palette in the software to
Speaker 1: make it suitable for the cow's vision, because cows can't
Speaker 1: see rudder green, so there's just two shades of yellow
Speaker 1: and blue. So in order to replicate what grass like
Speaker 1: to them, they have to you know, change the stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and then they programmed a unique summer field
Speaker 1: simulation program and subjected it onto these cows. Uh. The ministry,
Speaker 1: the Russian Ministry of Our Culture concluded that the cow
Speaker 1: matrix does work. UM. In a statement from a few
Speaker 1: a few years ago, officials said environmental conditions have significant
Speaker 1: have a significant impact on cow health and as a consequence,
Speaker 1: the equality and quantity of milk produced. So, you know,
Speaker 1: like this is the thing I I talked with, um,
Speaker 1: someone I know about this, and they're like, well, if
Speaker 1: it makes the cow like actually happier and healthier than like,
Speaker 1: what's the problem. And like the problem is is that
Speaker 1: like you're gas lighting and entire creature's reality. Like you're like,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're like not consentually cassolighting their reality, and
Speaker 1: I that is I don't like that. I don't eat
Speaker 1: everything without their consent. So I it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where it's like, but we're also not gaslighting their
Speaker 1: reality and this like we're not depriving their senses of
Speaker 1: what the world is. No, this seems like an escalation
Speaker 1: in our war on the cow. Yeah, so you know
Speaker 1: this other farmer in Turkey heard about this and decided
Speaker 1: to try it out on his cows. Um and yeah,
Speaker 1: the fund up Cow Matrix or the cow Tricks does
Speaker 1: seem to do its job extracting more milk from the
Speaker 1: cow to increase profitability. Quote from quote from the farmer said, Uh,
Speaker 1: we get an average twenty two liters of milk per
Speaker 1: day from the cows in our farm. The milk average
Speaker 1: of the two cows that wore the VR glasses went
Speaker 1: up to twenty seven liters. So yeah, when when when
Speaker 1: the story first broke there was the most popular article
Speaker 1: was from a site called Futurism, which made made me
Speaker 1: made me very depressive about about futurism of depressed about futurism. Garrison. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it made me mad enough that I'm going to read
Speaker 1: some of its to you. Thank god, I haven't been
Speaker 1: angry in seconds. That cows produce more milk when VR
Speaker 1: makes them think they're in beautiful green pastures proves that
Speaker 1: keeping them in agriculture environments isn't healthy, nor does it
Speaker 1: make them happy. Putting them in a cow matrix does
Speaker 1: sound a little grim, yes, but you can't argue with
Speaker 1: the results. Oh my god, I can't. I say, you
Speaker 1: actually care if all this has shown is that, like potentially,
Speaker 1: if you put cows in this thing during the winter,
Speaker 1: when it's not sunny and bright outside, then they are happier.
Speaker 1: This is not shown that, for example, taking all cows
Speaker 1: out of pastures and sticking them in matrix boxes would
Speaker 1: make them Yeah, because the thing is they're not they're
Speaker 1: on pastures. They're in little jail cells with VR goggles
Speaker 1: on their head. So like it's that that was that
Speaker 1: was the use case, And like the quote from the farmers,
Speaker 1: like they're watching green pasture and it gives them an
Speaker 1: emotional boost. They are less stressed. Um and the farmers
Speaker 1: that he plans to be plans to buy ten more.
Speaker 1: It's like you can spend thousands of dollars on specialized
Speaker 1: caw via headsets um or you can you know, like
Speaker 1: use that money to buy more land for the cows
Speaker 1: to spread out. And if we're at that point in
Speaker 1: society that in order to make in order to in
Speaker 1: order to make enough cow milk, we need to gaslight
Speaker 1: cows by overruling their senses with a clunky of your
Speaker 1: headset on their little fuzzy faces. Maybe we should start
Speaker 1: having milk. Maybe we should like maybe that's it, Like
Speaker 1: if we require this to have milk in our cereal,
Speaker 1: then nope, no more, not not gonna. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: do that. I refuse. That's not like it's already And
Speaker 1: if you practice, if you don't buy milk like like
Speaker 1: locally from a farm, you know, so if we're doing this,
Speaker 1: that just like immediately checks me out of every like no,
Speaker 1: I'm just fully fully not. Yeah, I think that's kind
Speaker 1: of evil. I think that's kind of evil. Like the
Speaker 1: whole industry way by which we produce meat at scale
Speaker 1: is pretty evil. But that's an escalation. It's it's the
Speaker 1: specific thing of like of of of overruling the reality
Speaker 1: and senses um of another living creature like that is
Speaker 1: for some reason, for some reason, that just puts them
Speaker 1: into a way in order for you to get like meat,
Speaker 1: And that's just like turning them into food, but like
Speaker 1: making their living really shitty and then making trying to
Speaker 1: trick them to thinking they're not. Yeah, it's even worse
Speaker 1: than just having them live in shitty conditions, I think
Speaker 1: from an as standpoint, and maybe it's more pleasant for
Speaker 1: the animal, but from like our standpoint, it's worse to me. Yep.
Speaker 1: So speaking of uh, I don't know, don't Is there
Speaker 1: some segway that we can work this in? You know
Speaker 1: what does essentially force you to live in an alternate
Speaker 1: reality that allows you to be more productive for the
Speaker 1: people who make money based on your existence buying these
Speaker 1: products and services that supporting this podcast. I was just
Speaker 1: gonna say podcasts in general do that. But yes, cool,
Speaker 1: All right, we are back and my last my last
Speaker 1: big section here is titled we Are the Cows. So
Speaker 1: this is that's gonna that's gonna give you a sense
Speaker 1: of how of how we're going to talk about what
Speaker 1: so what what? What the cow tricks really demonstrates though,
Speaker 1: is that the end goal of all this is to
Speaker 1: make us the cow right you know, we we and
Speaker 1: we already are to some degree with like the Internet
Speaker 1: and smart and smartphones. But this is more, this is
Speaker 1: an escalation, right Like the people, the ghoules, that Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley and you know, the whole tech world want. They
Speaker 1: want a world where we are forced to down hardware
Speaker 1: rigs that block out our body's senses and replace the
Speaker 1: input with digital coded counterfeit. That's that's the Internet that
Speaker 1: tries to convince you that you're inside of it and
Speaker 1: it is inside of you. That that's that's that's that
Speaker 1: is what they want. Really, Like, even if we get
Speaker 1: the metaverse that I would prefer, you know, like the
Speaker 1: mythical open source interconnect did successor to the Internet, with
Speaker 1: all these different websites, tools and games that I like
Speaker 1: all together and intuitively accessible through a share digital space.
Speaker 1: Even if we get that, like, which we won't, and
Speaker 1: if there's safeguards to protect digital privacy that are built in,
Speaker 1: which there wouldn't be, that doesn't actually make the real
Speaker 1: world much better. Like in my opinion, air technology specifically
Speaker 1: could be really cool. Um, but but redesigning the world
Speaker 1: to require headsets, goggles or air glasses would suck like now,
Speaker 1: would not only for people who can't get a technology
Speaker 1: right if if we redesign the world to be like
Speaker 1: the only way to interact with systems is through this
Speaker 1: digital lens, that's gonna suck. We we now, we already
Speaker 1: had that do some degree with smartphones and the internet,
Speaker 1: but this is another escalation of it. And again, like
Speaker 1: like the cow, it's just gonna be a way to
Speaker 1: paint over our late capitalist climate disaster of a world.
Speaker 1: Um metaverse is a tech capitalist solution to our current
Speaker 1: and pressing political and ontological problems. And I have used
Speaker 1: the bathroom really that well, I'll talk for a little while.
Speaker 1: I think a big part of what Garrison is saying
Speaker 1: is that instead of relying on these tech industry ghoules
Speaker 1: to build the future for you, which is a future
Speaker 1: in which they sell you away to hide from the
Speaker 1: hell that they have made of the world and others
Speaker 1: like them have made of the world, instead of doing that,
Speaker 1: you've just spend the rest of your life listening to podcasts,
Speaker 1: put put blinders on over your eyes, cover up all
Speaker 1: of your senses, but your ears and just exist forever
Speaker 1: in a concoon made entirely of my voice and occasionally
Speaker 1: Garrison and Chris's and Sophie's voice, but mainly my voice.
Speaker 1: And they're saying, not listen to just any podcast but
Speaker 1: podcasts that you benefit from. I don't think people should
Speaker 1: listen to any podcasts that I don't do. That doesn't
Speaker 1: seem right. So where's my angle on that? Huh? I
Speaker 1: don't know. Um, I don't know how long we should
Speaker 1: vamp while Garrison just leaves in the middle. I really
Speaker 1: need to, I really need to to see. Well, it's okay.
Speaker 1: I just told everybody that we're the metaverse now, Garrison Archia.
Speaker 1: I drank so much coffee this morning. It was a problem, okay.
Speaker 1: In similar to all this, you know, remember the John
Speaker 1: Carmike interview from Yes That's such a Bomber the Doom
Speaker 1: co creator and former CTO of Ovoculus. Yes these bodies
Speaker 1: are a curse John, Yeah, on the Journogon show. He
Speaker 1: openly said, the problems of yours to make the world
Speaker 1: you wanted, It is not possible on earth to give
Speaker 1: everyone what they would want. Not everyone can have Richard
Speaker 1: Branson private islands people react negatively to any talking of economics,
Speaker 1: but it's a resource allocation. You have to make decisions
Speaker 1: about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot
Speaker 1: more value to a lot more people. In the virtual sense,
Speaker 1: we can have virtual devices that can get cheap enough
Speaker 1: that lots and lots of people will be able to
Speaker 1: have these. Not everyone can have a mention, Not everyone
Speaker 1: can have a home theater. These are things we can simulate,
Speaker 1: though to some degree, in virtual reality, and the simulation
Speaker 1: is not as good as the as the real thing.
Speaker 1: If you're rich, you probably have your own home theater,
Speaker 1: imagine in private island. Good for you. You're probably not
Speaker 1: the people who's going to benefit the most from this thing.
Speaker 1: Most of the people in the world lived in cramped
Speaker 1: quarters and are not and they wouldn't that and that's
Speaker 1: not what they would choose to be and if they
Speaker 1: had a limited resources. There's this piece of art that
Speaker 1: goes around the internet. It's the this dystopian kid in
Speaker 1: a corner drooling with goggles on, with like rainbow pictures.
Speaker 1: But it's a terrible looking place, and people say, this
Speaker 1: is the world you're trying to build. People plugged into
Speaker 1: virtual reality and ignoring the world around them, and Carmacs
Speaker 1: responses and encouraging. He says, but is his life really
Speaker 1: better off if he takes the goggles off and he's
Speaker 1: in the horrible place? So I I think Carmack really
Speaker 1: has convinced himself that virtual reality is a path to
Speaker 1: making the world a better place. In the interview, he
Speaker 1: compares VR to the invention of like air conditioning. He says, like,
Speaker 1: I live in Dallas, it's a hundred degrees here. We
Speaker 1: change the world around us in all that we do.
Speaker 1: We live in air conditioning. People don't generally go, oh,
Speaker 1: you're not experience seeing the world around you because of
Speaker 1: air conditioning. This is what human beings do. We bend
Speaker 1: the world to our will, and this is how things
Speaker 1: get better by building, by building technology and distributing them
Speaker 1: to people so that they have something better than what
Speaker 1: we would they would have if they didn't exist. Now,
Speaker 1: if you dig into what he's saying, here's actually a
Speaker 1: few interesting things. Because for one, yeah, air conditioning is
Speaker 1: actually kind of bad, like the way we're using it
Speaker 1: and what it represents. It is a band aid solution
Speaker 1: to our continual problem of heating up the earth and
Speaker 1: it's making the problem worse every single day. Yeah, and honestly,
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah, it's like it's like a band aid
Speaker 1: that also makes the problem worse because a C contributes
Speaker 1: to a lot of energy human shit. But you know,
Speaker 1: air conditioning is also an actual material change, right like
Speaker 1: it can it can actually help people not die due
Speaker 1: to heat. The metaverse and VR has talked about does
Speaker 1: not improve a middle to lower class person's material conditions,
Speaker 1: and to say so demonstrates how disconnected these tech bros
Speaker 1: are from a regular person's reality. The metaphors and VR
Speaker 1: and like virtual worlds are going to be built based
Speaker 1: on the perception of reality held by those who create them.
Speaker 1: That's why we're getting shitty digital private movie theaters, fake
Speaker 1: mansions and metaverse concerts and h and M n f
Speaker 1: T stores. They're giving us a simulated version of the
Speaker 1: world that they actually get to live in for real.
Speaker 1: But we can refuse this. We we don't need to
Speaker 1: take them up on this offer. If we're gonna be
Speaker 1: stuck with with multiple proprietary branded meta verses that are
Speaker 1: made by rich tech bros to mirror a world that
Speaker 1: the that the rich tech bro gets to live in
Speaker 1: the best thing we can do is funk with it.
Speaker 1: We can saboage it from the inside. We need to
Speaker 1: spam floating dicks at a metaverse concert. This is the
Speaker 1: actual thing that needs to happen, because look, we all
Speaker 1: know terrorism is fun, right, everybody loves terrorism, but there's
Speaker 1: horrible consequences for doing it in the real world. In
Speaker 1: the metaverse, there's no laws against terrorism. Yet you can
Speaker 1: terrorize however you want in the metaverse and it's just
Speaker 1: trolling and that's fine, So do a much of it
Speaker 1: as possible until they make it illegal. The except that
Speaker 1: would go really well with this type of thing is
Speaker 1: the poet terrorism concept of this applies like perfectly to
Speaker 1: this idea of how we need to funk with these
Speaker 1: digital spaces that are trying to be created, because yeah,
Speaker 1: like they're like they're pretty bad. During one Bitcoin consumed
Speaker 1: all of the electrical energy um by equivalent to a
Speaker 1: country like Argentina um. The bitcoin network handled like nineties
Speaker 1: seven million transactions, so this is roughly zero point zero
Speaker 1: one two percent of the worldwide volume of non cash transactions.
Speaker 1: But bitcoin was responsible for zero point five four of
Speaker 1: global electricity consumption on total, which is astronomical, like that's
Speaker 1: all like, that's it's either it's ridiculates on average, that's like, uh,
Speaker 1: like thirteen hundred kill about hours poor per bitcoin transaction,
Speaker 1: which is so much energy. The power consumed by a
Speaker 1: single bit quin transaction on average could power an average
Speaker 1: US household for one and a half months. It's it
Speaker 1: is ridiculous how much and how much it's getting used.
Speaker 1: And they're trying to build, you know, like the sek
Speaker 1: City thing. They're trying to build this metaverse off of crypto,
Speaker 1: which they're like, I'm sad because like crypto could be
Speaker 1: really similar to the metaverse. Crypto could be really rad
Speaker 1: Like crypto could be an actually super red thing, but
Speaker 1: the way it's being used right now is really environmentally damaging.
Speaker 1: UM and this this linking of Web three, you know,
Speaker 1: the mythical Web three and the metaverse to crypto is
Speaker 1: showing like yeah, it's it's is kind of like the
Speaker 1: band aid solution, where it's not it's it's it's not
Speaker 1: it's not actually fixing the problem, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: making the problem worse because they're so set on linking
Speaker 1: it to crypto right now that it's it sucks like it.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's it's gonna happen. It's gonna suck. What
Speaker 1: you can do is you can spam Final Fantasy seven porn,
Speaker 1: you can spam Sonic, the Hedgehog feet picks. This is
Speaker 1: this is the only tool we have. But save for
Speaker 1: actual terrorism, which we're not gonna talk about on this podcast,
Speaker 1: you can, but we can't talk about poetic terrorism. That
Speaker 1: is something that you can do. You can funk with
Speaker 1: these systems from the inside and make them unusable. And
Speaker 1: that's that's really the only thing. And that's what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do in my spare time because it's fine. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: do do poetic terrorism in the metaverse. Um, go funk
Speaker 1: it up for them. Um. And maybe in the process,
Speaker 1: here's my dream garrison that perhaps in the process of
Speaker 1: sucking it up for them, we build something that we
Speaker 1: actually like. That's the thing, right, Yeah, that is similar
Speaker 1: to how the Internet kind of got originally created. Of course,
Speaker 1: now it's turned into this hellscape, but that'll probably that
Speaker 1: will probably happen any ten years or more for the
Speaker 1: meta but we can get a little bit of fun
Speaker 1: out of it, and we can have some fun with it,
Speaker 1: like we did on the internet for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: It all got real bad. So that is that is
Speaker 1: the metaverse that doesn't exist. Um and yeah, So fight
Speaker 1: against the matrix as best as you can do your best,
Speaker 1: hold them out, Go to city for the cows the world.
Speaker 1: Make a cow's y on. It's up to us. This
Speaker 1: is depressing, all right. That's the episode. Welcome to It
Speaker 1: could happen here, A show about things falling apart and
Speaker 1: how to maybe put them back together a little bit
Speaker 1: better than they were before. I am Robert Evans, and
Speaker 1: with me this week is I guess I'm very excited
Speaker 1: about Chris Begley, author of The Next Apocalypse, The Art
Speaker 1: and Science of Survival. Chris, Welcome to the show. Thank
Speaker 1: you now, Chris. Before we get into the meat of
Speaker 1: our discussion, I have to talk about what you do
Speaker 1: for a living, because for years and years it was
Speaker 1: my job to go around the world. I talked to
Speaker 1: people and pretty much every continent about their different interesting jobs.
Speaker 1: So I've I've talked interviewed everybody from like Bravo workers
Speaker 1: in Nevada to Iraqi counter terrorism special forces in Iraq.
Speaker 1: And you have probably the coolest job title if anybody
Speaker 1: I've met, you're an underwater archaeologist, that's right. How did you? Um?
Speaker 1: How did you? I mean was that was it just
Speaker 1: kind of like were you kind of laser focused on
Speaker 1: that goal or was it more you were interested in
Speaker 1: archaeology and you loved diving, and so the two just
Speaker 1: kind of made sense together. Yeah. Well, I started out
Speaker 1: as ah what now called a terrestrial archaeologist, you know,
Speaker 1: working on the land as most people do, and worked
Speaker 1: for years in Central America. Honduras was my focus, as
Speaker 1: you saw in the book, but other other places uh,
Speaker 1: nearby as well, And really it was about I would say,
Speaker 1: I don't know twill often fourteen years ago I wanted
Speaker 1: to just branch out a little bit from that. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that that all archaeologists have seen
Speaker 1: is that, you know, there are certain things that really
Speaker 1: just aren't as explored as other things, and one was
Speaker 1: all of the archaeological resources underwater. I mean, we hear
Speaker 1: about underwater archaeology or maritime archaeology in the Mediterranean, right,
Speaker 1: you know, Roman shipwrecks and all that, but there are
Speaker 1: big chunks of the world where we've done very little
Speaker 1: to see what's out there. You know. And one other
Speaker 1: interesting thing about that is there are many different things
Speaker 1: you could look at underwater, but often we look at shipwrecks,
Speaker 1: and shipwrecks are different from regular archaeological sites because, you know,
Speaker 1: shipwreck is a moment in time that all happened in
Speaker 1: in one instance, and so when we're looking at that
Speaker 1: kind of archaeological site, we see this snapshot that we
Speaker 1: don't see when we look at a it was occupied
Speaker 1: over hundreds of years, so you know. So, yeah, so
Speaker 1: that wasn't my focus, but it became, uh, sort of
Speaker 1: somewhere I wanted to go as I learn more about
Speaker 1: And one of the things I find really interesting that
Speaker 1: the basic thrust of your book is that the way
Speaker 1: in which we think about civilizations falling or collapsing or
Speaker 1: how however you you know, the ways in which folks
Speaker 1: tend to discuss that when we're talking about the Maya
Speaker 1: or the romans Um is very different from what archaeologists
Speaker 1: who tend to study these cultures, how they tend to
Speaker 1: perceive of of what you might more accurately call a
Speaker 1: decline or or you know, a decentralization or whatever. I
Speaker 1: think there's a number of terms that we could use.
Speaker 1: But these ideas that like you have these civilizations and
Speaker 1: then they suddenly fall apart um, are not really based
Speaker 1: in rigorous historical analysis usually. Um, there's some cases as
Speaker 1: as you go into the book. UM, and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: I'm interested in that because you're kind of coming at
Speaker 1: from a very rigorous historical standpoint in this book. Um,
Speaker 1: a lot of the stuff that we talked about on
Speaker 1: on this show in a more contemporary sense. And I'm
Speaker 1: kind of wondering how the idea to write this sort
Speaker 1: of came together because you you started it before the
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen pandemic. Obviously that had an impact on the book.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's all over there. Yeah yeah. Um, well,
Speaker 1: I've I was. One of the things that I do
Speaker 1: is teach the wilderness survival courses and um, and I
Speaker 1: don't do that as frequently as some people that that
Speaker 1: sort of dedicate themselves to that do, but but but
Speaker 1: I do it fairly frequently. And UM. It became obvious
Speaker 1: to me over time that people were taking these courses
Speaker 1: not just to learn how to deal with being lost
Speaker 1: out in the wilderness, which is sort of was my vision.
Speaker 1: What do you do if you unexpectedly have to spend
Speaker 1: an eye out in the woods, or or two or three. Um,
Speaker 1: they were really thinking about what am I do when
Speaker 1: things fall apart? How do I take care of myself?
Speaker 1: How do I take care of my family using these
Speaker 1: skills that you could use in a situation where things
Speaker 1: had fallen apart? And that sort of oriented me towards
Speaker 1: the fact that, you know, people were worrying about the future.
Speaker 1: I mean I could see it. I could see it
Speaker 1: in my students at university. I could see it, you know,
Speaker 1: in the people's faces at the supermarket. You know, there
Speaker 1: was something going on there that was um uh, there
Speaker 1: was concerning people, and a lot of it had to
Speaker 1: do with climate change, and that I think was was
Speaker 1: the focus initially for me writing this um because what
Speaker 1: I saw was, you know, sort of the prepper community
Speaker 1: and survivalist community looking at things that really seemed to
Speaker 1: be short term and didn't at all focus on what
Speaker 1: we really saw historically. So I think that my um,
Speaker 1: my initial motive to motivation to write this was really
Speaker 1: just seeing this concern that was that was growing among
Speaker 1: people about what the future is going to look like.
Speaker 1: And then of course COVID hit and that that that
Speaker 1: really brought all this to the to the forefront. And
Speaker 1: are there any specific ways in your mind that you
Speaker 1: you can you kind of think on how COVID altered
Speaker 1: what you were what you were writing, or how you
Speaker 1: conceived of what you were writing. Like once you you know,
Speaker 1: you you have this kind of vision that's inspired by
Speaker 1: the things that you're seeing and hearing, particularly in these
Speaker 1: wilderness survival courses. And then as you get started, we
Speaker 1: have this horrible, horrible plague hit and a number of
Speaker 1: of of things start to happen very quickly. How does
Speaker 1: that kind of alter the trajectory of what you're writing? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess the you know, the there were some just
Speaker 1: sort of practical logistical things obviously, right, uh, Some things
Speaker 1: that I intended to do or ways that I had
Speaker 1: hoped to interact with folks in the course of interviewing
Speaker 1: people for the book or writing it, you know, wasn't
Speaker 1: going to be possible. But in terms of thinking about
Speaker 1: how things happened, the big thing for me was, um,
Speaker 1: how it became politicized so quickly. You know, that was
Speaker 1: you know in the um you know, you know, well,
Speaker 1: now you see all of the memes you know, um
Speaker 1: talking about the zombie movies where half the population doesn't
Speaker 1: believe their zombies or something. You know, that was never
Speaker 1: really on the radar, at least not on my radar before.
Speaker 1: And so now um, um, you know it is because clearly,
Speaker 1: not only do these things happen and then you have
Speaker 1: a group of people that are dealing with it, you
Speaker 1: have obviously the dynamics within the group, which which of
Speaker 1: course we knew, but to see it play out in
Speaker 1: this way and this sort of dramatic way that really
Speaker 1: altered the course of history. I mean, the pandemic could
Speaker 1: have turned out uh, you know, differently, but it didn't.
Speaker 1: And part of the reason that didn't was because of
Speaker 1: the way folks reacted to it. And I'm wondering because
Speaker 1: a part a chunk of your career, in a big
Speaker 1: chunk of this book is kind of looking at in
Speaker 1: places like Honduras where these these civilizations entered decline, and
Speaker 1: in some cases it was very sharp, like within a
Speaker 1: fairly short period of time, nine of the population leaves
Speaker 1: or you know, uh is deceased. Um. And you you
Speaker 1: see like the crumbling of a lot of these governmental
Speaker 1: institutions and whatnot that had had organized life for a while.
Speaker 1: You see the pretty significant migrations. Um. Is there any
Speaker 1: ways in which kind of the last two years as
Speaker 1: an archaeologist has changed or informed how you were thinking about, um,
Speaker 1: these places that you've been you've been studying, in these
Speaker 1: moments in history that you've been studying for so long. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in some ways, it brings some of it into a
Speaker 1: little sharper focus. For instance, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that that archaeologists had long talked about was that
Speaker 1: during these declines or these collapses, that it's uneven. It's
Speaker 1: not equal for everybody. It's not equal over space and time,
Speaker 1: and certainly depending on your position in society. UM, there's
Speaker 1: different ways in which it it plays out for you, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's something that we see. We see
Speaker 1: it from um, you know, access to vaccines to UM well,
Speaker 1: I mean even things like you know, if we think
Speaker 1: about folks that are unvaccinated. Now there's a you know,
Speaker 1: a chunk of those people that are doing it for
Speaker 1: a sort of political reasons or other ideological reason, but
Speaker 1: there's also a big, uh, a big group of those
Speaker 1: folks that are doing it because history shows that they
Speaker 1: should be wary of anything that uh society tries to
Speaker 1: do to them. And so, you know, you have these
Speaker 1: these things playing out for different ways for um, you know,
Speaker 1: people from different regions of the country or political orientations,
Speaker 1: or race or ethnicity or um, you know, a whole
Speaker 1: variety of things. And so seeing how uneven it was
Speaker 1: the pandemic, UH makes me think that you know, it
Speaker 1: certainly was that way then. UH. The other thing that
Speaker 1: we see when we look archaeologically is that it's these
Speaker 1: big structures or systems that collapse. That really is the
Speaker 1: collapse and the things that cause it initially, whether it's
Speaker 1: I don't know, deforestation or drought or warfare or even
Speaker 1: a natural disaster of some sort, um, that really it's
Speaker 1: the way people respond to those and the way these
Speaker 1: systems deal with those changes that really creates the problems
Speaker 1: that you see later on. And we can see that now.
Speaker 1: For instance, one of the things that we're talking a
Speaker 1: lot now about is supply chain issues, right, and this
Speaker 1: is a result of COVID, but it's not a direct result.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not because the crews on the ships
Speaker 1: are at the ports or truck drivers have uh are
Speaker 1: sick it's because of the ways in which all of
Speaker 1: this disrupted things, and especially when we get these really
Speaker 1: efficient but inflexible systems, like a lot of our shipping
Speaker 1: system was um these disruptions result in really big changes.
Speaker 1: So you know, you have these huge ships that can
Speaker 1: only dock a few ports. Once that gets backed up,
Speaker 1: you can't really shift and adjust, and so that's I
Speaker 1: think for me, just a lot of it is seeing
Speaker 1: it play out, where we see the fact that we
Speaker 1: have something that sets it all off, but then we
Speaker 1: have the response of the system or the structure that
Speaker 1: really creates the day to day impact. I suspect a
Speaker 1: big part of kind of why we conceive popularly of
Speaker 1: of quote unquote collapses in the past is based on,
Speaker 1: as you talk about extensively in your book, the way
Speaker 1: in which we look at it kind of in fiction,
Speaker 1: and in fiction it's nearly always like the societal equivalent
Speaker 1: of a bullet in the head, right, the zombie plague
Speaker 1: is out, and then a couple of days everything's fallen apart.
Speaker 1: And the point that you make in this is that
Speaker 1: it's probably I mean, this isn't exactly the phrase, but
Speaker 1: it's probably better to look at it kind of like
Speaker 1: it's like a tumor or something where the things are
Speaker 1: set in motion that are going to lead to things
Speaker 1: falling apart much much um, at a point before a
Speaker 1: lot of people probably would have noticed it. You know,
Speaker 1: the problem can be too far gone, um before it's
Speaker 1: really obvious. UM. And we yeah, yeah, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's that's a good point. And that's the that's really
Speaker 1: something that you know, even with COVID, it shows that, right. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, the problems are not only the existence or
Speaker 1: the appearance of this virus, but you know, first of all,
Speaker 1: how did it appear, And that has to do with um,
Speaker 1: you know, decreasing habitat for wild animals and the proximity
Speaker 1: of human populations to animals. And then we have increased
Speaker 1: sort of um communication and travel, which you know is
Speaker 1: not a bad thing obviously, but it is going to
Speaker 1: change the way in which these things spread. But then
Speaker 1: we have the way that we divide ourselves up into
Speaker 1: nation states, and the way in which we have you know,
Speaker 1: economic systems that are working in certain ways. So you know,
Speaker 1: the vaccine gets here but not there and and and
Speaker 1: so forth. UM. But yeah, that's you know that I
Speaker 1: think is at the heart of it, you have these
Speaker 1: things that have been set in place. You have these
Speaker 1: parameters in in which you're going to have to react,
Speaker 1: and they really set um the stage for what's going
Speaker 1: to happen. You know, you have it's like looking backwards
Speaker 1: four or five moves in chess to see how did
Speaker 1: we get in this situation. It's not just because of
Speaker 1: that last move, it's because of the last ten moves. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that you bring up that
Speaker 1: I like is that if you're looking for kind of
Speaker 1: a historical example of a collapse that that most mirrors
Speaker 1: that we tend to look at it in fiction, it
Speaker 1: would probably be what happened to the indigenous population of
Speaker 1: particularly like North America um after the arrival of colonizers,
Speaker 1: which was by a lot of accounts like ninety per
Speaker 1: scent of the population dead within a fairly short span
Speaker 1: of time, primarily from disease. This this really rapid and
Speaker 1: cataclysmic um um shock. But also, at the same time,
Speaker 1: as much as it does seem to mirror some of
Speaker 1: our you know, kind of fictional depictions of of viral
Speaker 1: outbreaks or other sort of of of societal calamities, um
Speaker 1: the ways in which people survived don't really in any
Speaker 1: meaningful way mirror the are are kind of popular fictional
Speaker 1: depiction of like who makes it out of that sort
Speaker 1: of a situation, you know, the the strapping military veteran
Speaker 1: with a rifle and a stockpile of food or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, yeah, that that, you know. I would
Speaker 1: say that certainly having these skills to keep yourself alive
Speaker 1: is important, and it is true that if you don't
Speaker 1: make it through the first thirty days, you're not gonna
Speaker 1: make it through the next thirty years. But um, yeah,
Speaker 1: the way people survive outside of a few days perhaps
Speaker 1: when they're dealing with some of these uh, what we
Speaker 1: would think of the survival situations is this a community?
Speaker 1: I mean we see that with uh, you know, when
Speaker 1: we look at the Native American history in North America.
Speaker 1: You know, even as populations and entire groups were being
Speaker 1: decimated by these diseases, sometimes of a village in a
Speaker 1: single winner from a wave or waves of disease, even
Speaker 1: in the in the face of that, they reconstituted themselves
Speaker 1: as communities, sometimes um multi ethnic or multicultural communities. I mean,
Speaker 1: there was a whole variety of ways in which people regrouped.
Speaker 1: And I think that that you know, that was the
Speaker 1: message and you know, part of the uh, this image
Speaker 1: of you know, grabbing your bugout bag and heading out
Speaker 1: to the hills is um, it's just doesn't work, you know.
Speaker 1: And and the the stockpiling you know as well. Um,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, when we look archaeologically, you know, we
Speaker 1: always see communications. Yeah, and that's something we really try
Speaker 1: to encourage people do on this show, where obviously some
Speaker 1: amount of disaster preparation is is not just helpful, but
Speaker 1: is I think kind of morally necessary if it's at
Speaker 1: all financially feasible for you. You know it is you
Speaker 1: are it is absolutely the right thing to do to
Speaker 1: try to have two three weeks of of relatively storable food,
Speaker 1: some water, um, you know, some other emergency supplies. But
Speaker 1: kind of beyond that, as you said that first, like
Speaker 1: thirty days, if you actually want not just to live,
Speaker 1: but to have you know, life, have any kind of meaning, Um,
Speaker 1: you have to be thinking in a community oriented situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, because ultimately, you know, what's the difference between
Speaker 1: two weeks or two months worth of food? Right? You know,
Speaker 1: it's good to be gone and you know you have
Speaker 1: to come back. You know. One of the things in
Speaker 1: researching for this for this book, one of the things
Speaker 1: I looked at was the history of how we made
Speaker 1: a living, uh and the history of agriculture. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that, you know, that that I found
Speaker 1: was that the last time that humans lived where a
Speaker 1: significant portion of the population was hunters and gatherers, that is,
Speaker 1: not farmers, there was like one of the current population,
Speaker 1: you know, less than five million people in the world.
Speaker 1: So even a catastrophic disaster that you know, reduced us
Speaker 1: to of you knowent of current population, we're still going
Speaker 1: to have more people in the world than ever lived
Speaker 1: without agriculture, and so we're gonna have to uh uh
Speaker 1: recreate some of these systems. And you know, agriculture by
Speaker 1: and large is going to be a community based. Yeah system,
Speaker 1: it's uh, I mean, you can garden on your own,
Speaker 1: but but the way that it needs to work is
Speaker 1: is going to be a collective Yeah. And I think, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is we talk a lot about. I actually live
Speaker 1: with a couple of wilderness survival instructors and we have
Speaker 1: about an acre of land and we do a decent
Speaker 1: amount of of of you know, gardening, you know, animal
Speaker 1: husbandry and that sort of thing, and it it is.
Speaker 1: Um I've I've spent a lot of my life on farm,
Speaker 1: so I've kind of always had an appreciation for how
Speaker 1: much work it is. And one of the things we
Speaker 1: try to talk about on this show regularly is the
Speaker 1: value of even just having a garden of things like
Speaker 1: guerrilla gardening. Not because I'm not one of those people
Speaker 1: who thinks that like, oh, we need to replace industrial
Speaker 1: agriculture with like individuals tending small gardens. That's not going
Speaker 1: to work, but because the more you kind of interface
Speaker 1: directly with the concept of growing food and with working
Speaker 1: with other people in order to do that, the more
Speaker 1: prepared you are for any number of things that could
Speaker 1: go wrong, Like even if those things don't involve a
Speaker 1: crunch in the food supply lines, the connections you make
Speaker 1: with people doing that sort of work will be more
Speaker 1: valuable than an extra two months of stockpiles. You know,
Speaker 1: when you're in your food buckets or whatever, you're Alex
Speaker 1: Jones dried food buckets. Yeah, well that's that's absolutely right.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the things that occurred to
Speaker 1: me looking into the past at some of these uh,
Speaker 1: you know, collapses or declines that had happened in the past,
Speaker 1: was that a huge percent of the population um um
Speaker 1: was engaged directly in agriculture. And you know here in
Speaker 1: the well in the industrialized world is typically less than
Speaker 1: five percent less than that even in the United States.
Speaker 1: Most people like me don't uh, don't engage in it.
Speaker 1: And you know, I know something about gardening, perhaps like
Speaker 1: everybody else, but I'm not a farmer. I don't really
Speaker 1: have that wisdom. And if I had to do that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, probably it's like a lot of other things.
Speaker 1: When everything is easy, it's not so bad when you
Speaker 1: know when it goes bad, it really helps to know
Speaker 1: what you're doing. Um. And of course everything goes bad
Speaker 1: sooner or later and so um. You know, that's that
Speaker 1: kind of things very important, you know. And I think
Speaker 1: also there could certainly local systems and some flexible scale
Speaker 1: would be really important, you know. So I'm also, like you,
Speaker 1: a proponent of of this sort of thing. You know,
Speaker 1: if we can get everybody to participate in ways that
Speaker 1: we aren't now, that will give us some flexibility. What
Speaker 1: if what if we do have supply chain problems, Well,
Speaker 1: we have a number of people in the community that
Speaker 1: are already doing some of this stuff that could maybe
Speaker 1: be expanded or get us through this period. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, even if you're not like dealing with everyone's
Speaker 1: caloric needs, it could be as simple as because of
Speaker 1: where you're located, you know, when when the oranges and
Speaker 1: other kind of fruits aren't able to come in from
Speaker 1: a supply line, thing there's a shortage of vitamin C,
Speaker 1: and then knowing how to make teata pine needles or whatever,
Speaker 1: or what kind of plants have a lot of vitamin C.
Speaker 1: You know, even though you're not you're not focused on
Speaker 1: meeting everyone's you know, entire caloric needs through small scale farming,
Speaker 1: but you can deal with the a nutrient deficiency or
Speaker 1: something because you understand your environment a little bit better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, probably quality of life issues too. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, for uh, you know kids, and you know
Speaker 1: there's there's lots of there's lots of ways you can
Speaker 1: survive that are pretty miserable. So you want to you
Speaker 1: want to try to uh direct it towards those that
Speaker 1: are desirable. And I think part of that is having
Speaker 1: this flexibility, having this knowledge, having a lot of people
Speaker 1: involved in things. And you know, one of the things
Speaker 1: I talked about in in my book or ideas of
Speaker 1: you know, diversity and inclusion, which we talk about in
Speaker 1: certain ways now and often I think unfortunately it's talked about,
Speaker 1: is if it's done to benefit the people that are
Speaker 1: marginalized and left out only and while it is partly
Speaker 1: that it benefits everybody, of course, I mean, anyone in
Speaker 1: a business knows, anybody in a university knows the benefits
Speaker 1: of of diversity. In the same way anybody that's trying
Speaker 1: to do something understands the benefit of a diverse range
Speaker 1: of experiences. You know. That's why we make these multidisciplinary
Speaker 1: teams that go out and do things. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's so that you have this this wide variety that
Speaker 1: can help you keep going. Yeah. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that I really found fascinating in your book and
Speaker 1: that that kind of made me feel a little bit
Speaker 1: um bad as I you know, I've I've I've spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time thinking about the what happened, what
Speaker 1: was done to and what also just kind of happened
Speaker 1: as a result of the way diseases spread when when
Speaker 1: colonizers reached North America. I had never really devoted that
Speaker 1: much thought to the actual actions that in different indigenous
Speaker 1: groups took consciously to prevent to protect themselves from the
Speaker 1: spread of diseases. You mentioned the Cherokee in particular, Um,
Speaker 1: in your book. Could you talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about that, because that's something as soon as I read it,
Speaker 1: I marked that page because I'm like, I need to
Speaker 1: look up what the studies he's referencing, because I I
Speaker 1: don't know anything about this. Yeah, that, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of that stems from the research of of
Speaker 1: some other archaeologists and they you know what, You're exactly right.
Speaker 1: We don't think about that. We're not taught about it
Speaker 1: that way. You know. We sort of have this this
Speaker 1: contradictory and sort of u uh doubly problematic way of
Speaker 1: talking about this. For for a long time, we denied
Speaker 1: sort of the how traumatic and how much of a
Speaker 1: genocide it was when Europeans arrived. Um. And then after
Speaker 1: denying that, we sort of say, well, Native Americans are
Speaker 1: gone and no longer relevant, so we can cease to
Speaker 1: talk about them. Of course that's not true. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that we see when we look more
Speaker 1: in detail at the histories or we listen to the
Speaker 1: oral histories, or we look at the archaeology. Is that
Speaker 1: there are a number of things that that that people
Speaker 1: did and do to um uh uh to create the
Speaker 1: outcomes that they want. And that was no different for
Speaker 1: the Native American groups, you know, I mean, they had
Speaker 1: ways of dealing with disease, and some of them will
Speaker 1: be will be able to understand it via our sort
Speaker 1: of our system right isolating people cleanliness of minimizing contact
Speaker 1: expect especially with sort of problematic groups like the Colonizer's
Speaker 1: um you know. But in other ways, there are things
Speaker 1: that are gonna be unfamiliar to us and we're not
Speaker 1: gonna see the effectiveness or the value in it. But
Speaker 1: one of the things that that all of these things did,
Speaker 1: that these groups were doing was created or maintained um
Speaker 1: group identity and cohesion and allowed the perseverance of of community.
Speaker 1: And so there are um you know, it's it's easy
Speaker 1: to think about people as sort of passive victims of something,
Speaker 1: especially when it serves your purpose to to think about
Speaker 1: it in these ways, and we just see that it's
Speaker 1: it's not the case. Yeah, there was a remarkable moment
Speaker 1: in the book and I think it was from when
Speaker 1: you were in Honduras where you you talk about you're
Speaker 1: finding pottery shirts and they have these specific kind of
Speaker 1: markings on them from I don't like a thousand years
Speaker 1: ago or so. And you also know a local woman
Speaker 1: who's a potter and she's putting the same markings on
Speaker 1: and you ask her why and her answer is like, well,
Speaker 1: because the pottery shirts that we find from our ancestors
Speaker 1: have those on them. And my initial thought was like, oh,
Speaker 1: what a shame that she doesn't know what those originally meant.
Speaker 1: But then I thought like, well, but is that any
Speaker 1: different from like all of the different things that that
Speaker 1: I do because their traditions, because like they're things that
Speaker 1: like people a thousand years ago in in in my
Speaker 1: line did like, no, it's not like it's it's just
Speaker 1: what people do, and it is a continuation, and it's
Speaker 1: a very there's um, that's a that's that's survival, you know,
Speaker 1: that's that's conscious survival. Yeah, you know, and in that case,
Speaker 1: of course, whatever it meant initially, it now means that
Speaker 1: to her, right, So there's the meaning, you know, um,
Speaker 1: And so it's it's interesting, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things you know, I'm from and I live in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: And one of the things, especially when people come to
Speaker 1: say Appalachians, they're looking for sort of authentic Appalachian Kentucky,
Speaker 1: you know, um, and they already have an idea what
Speaker 1: that is. And if you don't see it, because that's
Speaker 1: not really what people do, then the response is never,
Speaker 1: oh my idea is about what is authentic? Might be erroneous.
Speaker 1: It's I wonder why I didn't see authentic Appalachians. You know.
Speaker 1: It's like, well you did, but you know there's gonna
Speaker 1: be more hip hop and punk groups than there are
Speaker 1: bluegrass groups because you know, these are twenty year old kids.
Speaker 1: You know, they're doing this as much as this other
Speaker 1: stuff and uh, you know more probably, And so that
Speaker 1: that is something, uh that that I think of often
Speaker 1: as an archaeologist. You know, my focus is in the past.
Speaker 1: But if I'm going to understand things, of course you
Speaker 1: also have to understand how are people thinking about in
Speaker 1: the present, and how am I thinking about it in
Speaker 1: the present, because you know, everything, all the stories I
Speaker 1: tell about the past are coming out of are coming
Speaker 1: out of my experience in the present too, And it's
Speaker 1: hard to uh it's hard to separate those and that
Speaker 1: really the best we can do is try to, um,
Speaker 1: you know, reflect on that and see how is it
Speaker 1: that I might be limiting my understanding because of my
Speaker 1: particular experience. And one of the things I really like
Speaker 1: about your book that I also found fascinating, So it's I,
Speaker 1: you know, I I for a while did um conflict journalism,
Speaker 1: and before when when that was just an ambition of mine,
Speaker 1: Before I started to do it, I would see the
Speaker 1: articles that were being written by all these war correspondents,
Speaker 1: and I would just be in awe of like how
Speaker 1: did they get that story? How did they get that access?
Speaker 1: How did they must have put so much work in?
Speaker 1: And then when I actually got there, I realized like,
Speaker 1: oh no, they met they made a contact with the
Speaker 1: local who was good at it, and that person showed
Speaker 1: them around and made all these connections, and like, actually,
Speaker 1: none of this work happens without these local fixers. And
Speaker 1: you make the point that in archaeology you're not generally
Speaker 1: discovering things like even when you're finding shipwrecks, it's because
Speaker 1: these sailors who lived nearby were like, well, yeah, a
Speaker 1: bunch of shipwrecks over there like this is where you're
Speaker 1: gonna go find them. You know, It's always the way
Speaker 1: it is, you know, there um um. And the example
Speaker 1: you're talking about, I was part of this project in
Speaker 1: Forney in Greece, which you know, made the news because
Speaker 1: we found so many shipwrecks there something ultimately like fifty
Speaker 1: shipwrecks around this island. Um and almost all of them
Speaker 1: were shown to us by local folks. Uh you know
Speaker 1: that sponge divers or people that were fish or so,
Speaker 1: you know, people that were out on the water all
Speaker 1: the time. And the few that we found by ourselves,
Speaker 1: I'm sure people knew about them. We just stumbled on
Speaker 1: them before somebody had a chance to to show us.
Speaker 1: It's the same way in in the Honduras. Would we
Speaker 1: would be walking through the rainforest and you know, maybe
Speaker 1: we've been walking for a week, so we're way out
Speaker 1: in the middle of this place. People were constantly telling me,
Speaker 1: the guys that I was with, would say, Okay, if
Speaker 1: we go up this creek, you know, for about six hours,
Speaker 1: and we go over here, here's what we'd find. Here's
Speaker 1: what we'd find over here, Here's what we find over here.
Speaker 1: They knew where everything was Um. And that's you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that you uh uh uh that
Speaker 1: that you learned is you know how reliant you are
Speaker 1: on people that live in a place. I mean, they
Speaker 1: just know it. Yeah, there's no Um, when you get
Speaker 1: right down to it, is as obsessed as we are
Speaker 1: kind of in in the Western Cannon with the idea
Speaker 1: of lost cities. Um, that's not really a thing that
Speaker 1: tends to happen. Um. Yeah, no, no, no, it's not.
Speaker 1: And and in fact, most of the archaeological sites that
Speaker 1: people didn't know about it was just because they were
Speaker 1: so small and ephemeral that no one really paid attention anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no lost city there. They're always known for somebody. Well, Chris,
Speaker 1: I think that's that's most of what I wanted to
Speaker 1: get into in this conversation. I'm wondering before we kind
Speaker 1: of close out, because you you are both the author
Speaker 1: of this book, The Next Apocalypse, which is I think
Speaker 1: a fascinating way of looking at the idea of things
Speaker 1: Paul falling apart and a wilderness survival instructor. If you're
Speaker 1: going to suggest people, you know, a practical kit bag
Speaker 1: to prepare for short and kind of long term problems.
Speaker 1: What are you what are you putting in your bag? Well,
Speaker 1: you know there's the two main things, uh that you're
Speaker 1: always gonna want is is a knife because that allows
Speaker 1: you to make a lot of other things, and a
Speaker 1: way to start fire, you know, and we've all seen
Speaker 1: in the movies rubbing sticks together and you know, friction
Speaker 1: methods and that works, and you can do that, but
Speaker 1: it is incredibly difficult to pain in the butt, you know,
Speaker 1: and for most of us that don't do it all
Speaker 1: the time, Uh, you're just not gonna be able to
Speaker 1: do it when it's forty degrees in raining and you
Speaker 1: really need a fire. You know, you'll be able to
Speaker 1: do it when it's a hundred degrees and dry, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: because everything is about to catch on fire anyway. But uh,
Speaker 1: you know so um and what would what would that
Speaker 1: look like? Well, uh, you need something that will catch
Speaker 1: on fire pretty quickly. And the thing I always takes
Speaker 1: cotton balls. You know, if you take cotton balls and
Speaker 1: a disposable lighter or one of those uh fire starter sticks,
Speaker 1: it will make sparks. Um that those cotton balls will
Speaker 1: catch fire instantly. And if you take one and you
Speaker 1: coat half of it with petroleum jelly. Then not only
Speaker 1: what catch fire, it will burn you know for you
Speaker 1: know a minute or so, long enough to catch other
Speaker 1: stuff on fire. So you know, making fire and having
Speaker 1: some sort of cutting tool are the very basic things.
Speaker 1: But um, you know, the beyond that, I would say, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, clothing or some sort of shelter is is
Speaker 1: the other thing. You know, exposure to elements will kill
Speaker 1: you quicker than anything, and so having some way to
Speaker 1: uh to protect yourself and that's usually gonna be you know,
Speaker 1: first line of defense going to be your clothes. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that that you'll know anybody that
Speaker 1: that deals with sort of survival situations is that most
Speaker 1: people that really get in trouble with things like hypothermia,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not when it's thirty degrees below and
Speaker 1: they're out doing something. It's when it's fifty degrees and
Speaker 1: sunny and they're out in a T shirt during the
Speaker 1: day and then at night it drops to thirty degrees
Speaker 1: and you know they're stuck out somewhere with without proper clothing.
Speaker 1: That's that is when things get really dangerous. So you know,
Speaker 1: I would say, you know, if you can have some
Speaker 1: way to start fire, some sort of knife, and appropriate
Speaker 1: clothes for spending the night out. You know then then uh,
Speaker 1: and you're probably in pretty good shape for most situations. Yeah. Well, Chris,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for talking with with us today.
Speaker 1: Chris Begley, underwater archaeologist, author of the Next Apocalypse, The
Speaker 1: Art of Science and Survival. Chris, is there anything you'd
Speaker 1: liked else you'd like to say or kind of get
Speaker 1: into before we close out for the day. No, just
Speaker 1: thank you very much for for reading the book and
Speaker 1: for reaching out to talk with me, because I think that,
Speaker 1: you know, especially now as we go into sort of
Speaker 1: an uncertain future. I mean, future is always uncertain, I suppose,
Speaker 1: but um as you know, we're really recognizing some of
Speaker 1: these challenges. You know, I really am hoping that this
Speaker 1: sort of um uh, community based idea becomes the way
Speaker 1: we think about things. Uh. You know, it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it's easy or that we're gonna like it. It doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that that's what I want. I mean, tell you
Speaker 1: the truth, I would love it if it was just
Speaker 1: me out in the woods with my family. You know,
Speaker 1: I can do that. It's much harder to be part
Speaker 1: of a community and make things work for a big
Speaker 1: group of people, but that's just the way it's gonna be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's that's ultimately the way in which you have
Speaker 1: a lot more real security because I think, um uh,
Speaker 1: I think people I don't know. The world seems so
Speaker 1: complex and messy that it's easy to imagine that that
Speaker 1: safety comes from getting away from the world. But historically
Speaker 1: that's just not how it works. Now, the world finds you.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the best. Being part of a group
Speaker 1: is always best, and your your little group can never
Speaker 1: defend against the big group. I mean, if we want
Speaker 1: to put it in those terms, you know, you can't
Speaker 1: just hoard everything and uh, it just doesn't work. Might
Speaker 1: work for a little while, but yeah, so that you
Speaker 1: know that for me, that's the message I'm hoping, Yeah,
Speaker 1: people take from it. Well, Thank you very much, Chris.
Speaker 1: For those of you listening at home again, please do
Speaker 1: check out The Next Apocalypse The Art and Science of
Speaker 1: Survival by Chris Begley. That's going to do it for
Speaker 1: us all today. Chris, Thank you again, and have a
Speaker 1: wonderful day, are you too? Thank you wrote Oh boy,
Speaker 1: it could happen here. That's the name of the podcast.
Speaker 1: And I'm Robert Evans, the guy hosting the podcast. Who
Speaker 1: else is with me? Is it? Is it? Garrison? Hello,
Speaker 1: Good morning, afternoon evening. Garrison Davis. Not yet a doctor
Speaker 1: Garrison Davis, not yet, soon soon to be Dr Garrison Davis.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're going to pass the exam
Speaker 1: that I know you're gonna have to pass in order
Speaker 1: to get through this class. But yeah, a little teaser
Speaker 1: for the future. Speaking of the future, this is a
Speaker 1: podcast about the ways in which the future is going
Speaker 1: to be real fucked up and ways in which maybe
Speaker 1: we could try to make it less sucked up. Um.
Speaker 1: And today we have on a guest, Mr Calvin Norman,
Speaker 1: who posted a thread on our sub breddit with the
Speaker 1: very simple, very unsettling title the woods are Bad. Um
Speaker 1: And Calvin, you want to introduce your yourself, your credentials
Speaker 1: and what you were trying to get across in that
Speaker 1: thread because I found it very affecting. Yeah, thanks for ever.
Speaker 1: So my name is, like you said, Calvin Norman, I
Speaker 1: work in forestry. I've worked in forestry for a while now.
Speaker 1: I used to be an industrial forester in the Great
Speaker 1: Lakes region. So like Wisconsin, Michigan. Then I worked in
Speaker 1: the Southeast. I did my masters down there, and now
Speaker 1: I'm in the mid Atlantic. So I've I've kind of
Speaker 1: been around the eastern United States. I haven't gotten that
Speaker 1: west yet, but and I'm a certified forest or candidate
Speaker 1: certified forest I've got a year left on that, so
Speaker 1: I been around. I also do wildlife stuff. It's pretty
Speaker 1: fun and yeah, your your thread. What I found interesting
Speaker 1: that I have a good friend who is in forestry
Speaker 1: or was in forestry at least and got their degree
Speaker 1: and that, and we were we were at hunting in
Speaker 1: the Cascades a little earlier or a little later last year. Um,
Speaker 1: and there's this wonderful moment. We've been following a game
Speaker 1: trail up like this Steve hill side and it was
Speaker 1: kind of a clearing where we were a clear cut,
Speaker 1: but there's deep brush all around. And we get to
Speaker 1: the top of this thing. We look out and we
Speaker 1: just see, you know, these these rolling mountains of the
Speaker 1: Cascades all covered in this the most this lush, beautiful
Speaker 1: green near all these these pine trees and everything. And
Speaker 1: my friend says to me, it's going to be totally
Speaker 1: different in twenty years. Um, it's already a different forest
Speaker 1: than the one I grew up with, and and that
Speaker 1: that is that is kind of the cliffs notes of
Speaker 1: what what you're You're getting too a lot of detail here,
Speaker 1: and I'm wondering if you could just kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: start on that explained kind of what's actually happening in
Speaker 1: our woods, or at least the woods that that you're
Speaker 1: comfortable talking about here. It's a big yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a big content and you have a pretty good
Speaker 1: international base. And I can't speak for the Europeans or
Speaker 1: the Canadians. There's a whole different ball game over there.
Speaker 1: And tropical stuff is just wild, yeah, really cool about
Speaker 1: wild stuff. So mainly talked about the US, mainly Eastern
Speaker 1: United States. So if you look at the eastern United States,
Speaker 1: this is a forest that has never existed before in
Speaker 1: the history United States, UM previews. You know, prior to
Speaker 1: like nineteen twenty, our forest was like depending on the
Speaker 1: source of read, between twenty and chestnut with other species
Speaker 1: mixed in there. And now we have a mainly oak
Speaker 1: dominated forest and we lost all of our chest into
Speaker 1: the chestnut blighte UM out Western You've got a couple
Speaker 1: of other things going on, but fire suppression is just
Speaker 1: changed the forest there. Uh, same here in the East
Speaker 1: coast and into the Midwest. You know, you used to
Speaker 1: see a lot more fires going through. I mean, so
Speaker 1: that was lightning strikes, but no doubt a lot of
Speaker 1: it was you know, intentionally set by the first nations
Speaker 1: and people before the people that we think of as
Speaker 1: the first nations. And um, you know that has mainly
Speaker 1: disappeared except for the southeast where fire has never really
Speaker 1: stopped being at the ground, which is really cool. But
Speaker 1: even their species is composition has changed dramatically. Um. A
Speaker 1: lot of what we're seeing, as you know, changes in
Speaker 1: human management. But there's also a number of invasive species
Speaker 1: that have changed things, you know, like chestnut blight, emberald
Speaker 1: ashbour asia, longhorn beetle is coming in. You know, those
Speaker 1: are just the past the understory. And you know, plants
Speaker 1: is a whole different ballgame. Um, it's it's it's all
Speaker 1: not great. It's all not great. I was talking with
Speaker 1: some colleagues that an agricultural show right before I posted that,
Speaker 1: and we were talking about how the woods were bad,
Speaker 1: and we very easily laid out a scenario where we
Speaker 1: lost the most of our remaining dominantory species. It was
Speaker 1: not at all hard to do. It took about two minutes.
Speaker 1: So not great. Uh. And then the West coast things
Speaker 1: aren't great either. And when you're talking about when you're
Speaker 1: talking about losing these species and stuff like the chestnut light,
Speaker 1: where is that coming from? How much of that is
Speaker 1: sort of as a result of climate change? Like we're
Speaker 1: having a lot of tree species have trouble here in
Speaker 1: the West because of how much hotter the summers are
Speaker 1: and how much drier things have gotten. So how much
Speaker 1: how much of what you're saying where you are is
Speaker 1: because there's been changes to the climate, and how much
Speaker 1: of it is you know, I guess kind of like globalism,
Speaker 1: like people bringing in pests and bringing in blights and
Speaker 1: stuff from other areas and it spreads like wildfire. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that we're just starting to see the beginning
Speaker 1: of climate change, like driving species you know up the mountain,
Speaker 1: off the mountain out west and here, you know, out
Speaker 1: of certain regions, you know, as things are getting hotter
Speaker 1: and dryer or is you know, climates are becoming more extreme.
Speaker 1: You know, here in the Atlantic we had one of
Speaker 1: the wettest years on record. I think it was like
Speaker 1: five or seven, whereas in the Midwest they had droughts,
Speaker 1: but before that we had two years of drought, So
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's more extreme, and that's that's just
Speaker 1: starting to take part. But the extinctions and near extinctions
Speaker 1: have been mainly due to non native pest um. And
Speaker 1: that's just most of it right there. Um, just because
Speaker 1: we haven't really seen the start of climate change, yeah,
Speaker 1: impacting diseases. So like out west with the mountain pinebealle,
Speaker 1: you're seeing more generations of mountain pinebele comes through. I
Speaker 1: was just doing a presentation for some folks in South
Speaker 1: Dakota and something like a third of their total force
Speaker 1: was impacted by mountain pine beetle. Jeez. And and what
Speaker 1: is that like when you actually talk about this, these
Speaker 1: beetles coming in That's the kind of thing that even
Speaker 1: as we've gotten more comfortable talking about sort of of
Speaker 1: of the different kind of collapses spawned by climate change,
Speaker 1: I think that they we tend to imagine more spectacle
Speaker 1: peculiar things. These giants sweeping fires that burned through huge
Speaker 1: chunks of states, and these huge like environmental calamities. What
Speaker 1: is this like what happens when one of these beetles
Speaker 1: hits a forest one of these beetles species obviously not
Speaker 1: like a singular beetle, Like what is actually like how
Speaker 1: quick is the effect and what kind of comes after that? Like,
Speaker 1: I I know, there's sort of a shock wave. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like a bomb going off. I'm interested in
Speaker 1: kind of tracing the root of that explosion, if that
Speaker 1: makes sense. Yeah, So it depends species. Its pecs. Chestnut
Speaker 1: plate was really fast and it just seems to have
Speaker 1: torn through the chest and stative range. So chest that
Speaker 1: went from Florida to Maine and out west like Tennessee
Speaker 1: kind of area there um, and it just you know,
Speaker 1: in like something like fifteen years, the entire species gone.
Speaker 1: Emerald ash board has taken a little bit longer. Got
Speaker 1: here in the eighties, started kind of going off in
Speaker 1: the mid two thousands, and it's killed a couple of
Speaker 1: billion trees. So when that hits a small forest, you know,
Speaker 1: if it's a if it's a pretty you know, beetle,
Speaker 1: that kills pretty fast. Like emyld ashboard, it gets into
Speaker 1: your trees. It starts with one or two and then
Speaker 1: within four or five years it's it's in most of
Speaker 1: them in the forest, and then with emmoral lashboard they're
Speaker 1: dead and five hemlock William delG It is pretty similar.
Speaker 1: It'll just show up one day in a stand and
Speaker 1: then the hemlocks are dead within five seven years. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, sometimes you know what's going on, you know,
Speaker 1: because embal lashboard is very clear signs, and other times
Speaker 1: you don't know what's going on because the tree can't
Speaker 1: be so tall as all of a sudden, trees are
Speaker 1: getting thinner and thinner and then they're dead, or you
Speaker 1: have pests like um oak will and that in that
Speaker 1: trees are dead, you know, in two months, and then
Speaker 1: it spreads out like a circle. You know it kind
Speaker 1: of exactly when you see like a bacteria like growth
Speaker 1: medium with the bacteria spreading out, that's oak spreads and
Speaker 1: it's just like trees are dead, you know, two months
Speaker 1: and they spread out and out and out and scary sometimes.
Speaker 1: Is there anything that can be I mean it sounds
Speaker 1: like with with most of these cases, like with what's
Speaker 1: happened with kind of like the chestnuts, and it's it's
Speaker 1: too late for a lot of that. Is there anything
Speaker 1: that can actually be done to stop this, Like, I know,
Speaker 1: we have all these structures in place to try to
Speaker 1: stop the spread of invasive species, but like once they're
Speaker 1: in there, it kind of seems like usually we're fucked.
Speaker 1: Yeah ye that okay, Yeah, once you get past, like
Speaker 1: there's what's called the invasive species establishment curve, so it's
Speaker 1: an escar, and once you get like right, like once
Speaker 1: it starts taking up, it's like, oh, well, we're done here,
Speaker 1: so let's let's start thinking about the future. And as
Speaker 1: you lose more species, like what do we do here?
Speaker 1: Or if you're like you know, in the case of
Speaker 1: the case of actions like this ash is going in
Speaker 1: a swamp, I have nothing else that's going to grow here.
Speaker 1: So now I just have an open wetland, like I
Speaker 1: can grow any native trees here were done. So the
Speaker 1: biggest thing is preventioned like don't don't bring invasive species
Speaker 1: in or non native species in. I was talking to
Speaker 1: a lady a couple of weeks ago, and she hasn't
Speaker 1: rolled or not. She has hemlock William Deljion a property,
Speaker 1: and she brought in a bio control, or she assumed
Speaker 1: was a bio control from the Japan. It's a beetle,
Speaker 1: and yeah, in this case it was one that had
Speaker 1: been tested and failed because it doesn't make it through
Speaker 1: the winter. But you know, stuff like that's like just
Speaker 1: just don't do that. You know, I areciate the thought there,
Speaker 1: but don't with some of these species we have, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, like hew luckily adult, we have pesticides that
Speaker 1: worked really well and that you apply the order the tree,
Speaker 1: and so it's like, all right, I treated this tree.
Speaker 1: This tree is good for seven years. Some of them,
Speaker 1: like Emerald, last boar, you're done. There's just nothing you
Speaker 1: can do. So yeah, it's a prevention, prevention and then
Speaker 1: then you can quarantine. But then you know, it's like
Speaker 1: where this county is done, So we're gonna just try
Speaker 1: to make sure that only this county dies. Jeez, you
Speaker 1: mentioned a bit earlier like thinking about the future, what
Speaker 1: does that actually look like when when we hit a
Speaker 1: situation as we have with a lot of these species,
Speaker 1: were like, all right, well this ship's we ain't we
Speaker 1: ain't stopping this. What is what like, what do people
Speaker 1: like you do next? Like what is the next kind
Speaker 1: of step for the forests or is it just sort
Speaker 1: of a smoke them all? You got them kind of thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: sometimes it's smoke the while you got them. So like
Speaker 1: beach park diseases going through just roasting beach in the
Speaker 1: East Coast, it's going it's going to the Midwest and
Speaker 1: so there it's kind of like, well, you know, if
Speaker 1: it's in there and your beach or diet, take them
Speaker 1: out and if they're not, don't. There's it's nine fata,
Speaker 1: but there's one percent that can make it. So you know,
Speaker 1: like maybe we find that one percent and last words,
Speaker 1: nine percent fatal. But I've seen, you know, in the
Speaker 1: past couple of years, I've seen two that made it.
Speaker 1: So like if we don't cut them all, maybe someone survive.
Speaker 1: Theoretically we could then like clone or breed or whatever
Speaker 1: the trees that live and and a few generations have
Speaker 1: more of them. Um, yeah, if other ship doesn't happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the chestnup project has been going on for the last
Speaker 1: hundred years, and it looks like I'll take about forty more.
Speaker 1: It's that's a controversial opinion. Some people say it's a
Speaker 1: bastet forty but you know years Oh, the chestnup Foundation
Speaker 1: really it's a really neat thing. So there were some
Speaker 1: chestnuts that were found resistant in some plant outside the
Speaker 1: range of chestnut blite, and so the ideas where they
Speaker 1: slowly started back breeding. So they crossed in Chinese chestnut,
Speaker 1: which is resistant to the blight, which is native to
Speaker 1: China and East Asia, and so they crossed them in
Speaker 1: with the remaining chestnut with the hopes of you know,
Speaker 1: kind of eventually breeding out the Chinese but just maintaining
Speaker 1: the American chestnut and just getting that gene in there.
Speaker 1: And so they started that back in like the thirties
Speaker 1: and forties when they realized what was happening. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: today is two and we are still without American chestnut
Speaker 1: the forest. There are some backbread versions that are more resistant,
Speaker 1: but they will still get in affected. I've been to
Speaker 1: a couple of chestnut nurseries where they're doing experiments and
Speaker 1: it's it's sad because they'll they'll get up and then
Speaker 1: they'll die. They'll get up and they'll die, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's two. There are two over there in the corner
Speaker 1: that made it, and those get you onto the next one.
Speaker 1: But there is some work out of New York, Suny
Speaker 1: in New York where they altered a chestnut and they
Speaker 1: put in um. They just they just changed the genes.
Speaker 1: So the version of the genus makes chestnut play resistant
Speaker 1: is in that and that's getting approved by the E
Speaker 1: p A, F d A and U S d A.
Speaker 1: Hopefully that gets approved. If that gets approved, we get real,
Speaker 1: We get real further along because the resistant trees are
Speaker 1: not the same as the American just the resistant trees
Speaker 1: are more they're shorter and more shrubby, and they don't
Speaker 1: fulfill the overstory and cannot be rolled. Chestnut used to
Speaker 1: playing um. That's that's best case scenario. Worst case scenarios,
Speaker 1: you're like um butternut, which was driven to functional extinction
Speaker 1: at the same time, and we're just nowhere on that produce,
Speaker 1: working on some stuff, but it's nowhere. They're not in
Speaker 1: the woods now. How how much of like because I
Speaker 1: tend to roll my eyes pretty hard when we're talking
Speaker 1: in particular climate change and people are like, well, I
Speaker 1: think that science is going to save our asses from
Speaker 1: this one. We're gonna we're gonna develop some like miraculous
Speaker 1: carbon capture method and like at the last minute, we'll
Speaker 1: we'll we'll be able to reverse everything and it'll be fine.
Speaker 1: I tend to roll my eyes at that. But this,
Speaker 1: and maybe I'm not obvious, I don't understand this that
Speaker 1: nearly the level you do. Is this kind of a
Speaker 1: thing where if there's hope for a lot of these
Speaker 1: species and a lot of these biomas, it's going to
Speaker 1: be and stuff like we figure out how to hack
Speaker 1: these trees to keep them alive, and and like, is
Speaker 1: that really kind of where we are? I know some
Speaker 1: very good tree genesis and tree breeders, but I don't
Speaker 1: think that they have the capabilities of, you know, coming
Speaker 1: up with trees that are resistant to all of the
Speaker 1: various fungi and bugs that are out there. And even
Speaker 1: if they do, it's you know, you have to get
Speaker 1: them out into the woods. You have to plant. We
Speaker 1: have million acres of forest. You've got to get them
Speaker 1: out into the woods. You have to have the nurseries
Speaker 1: to get them out. There's you know, even if you
Speaker 1: were able to create trees that resistant to all of
Speaker 1: these pests, it would be impossible. So no, the only
Speaker 1: the only answer is, uh, don't don't do climate change.
Speaker 1: And to the carbon captured perspective, the only machine that's
Speaker 1: going to capture of the amount of carbon. We need
Speaker 1: our trees. I do. I do forest carbon stuff, which
Speaker 1: is a whole different episode. I want to. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm there. I'm extremely interested in that because obviously, like
Speaker 1: we've we've been supported by a couple of companies who
Speaker 1: like one of the things they do to try to
Speaker 1: be nice is they'll they'll plant trees and stuff, which
Speaker 1: is not useless. But also a lot of people think
Speaker 1: that that's what rebuilding a forest is, and like, no,
Speaker 1: forests are a huge part of the problem with why
Speaker 1: the West is so flammable. As we chopped down all
Speaker 1: these trees and we grew back just the trees um
Speaker 1: to chop them down again, and that turns out to
Speaker 1: not be resilient at all to anything, because trees do
Speaker 1: not live on their own ever. Yeah, that's why it's
Speaker 1: a forest. It's not just right, yeah, no, it's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a planting. There's not the infrastructure to plant
Speaker 1: our way of climate change. There's not the land. It's
Speaker 1: just impossible. And so even even if even if they're
Speaker 1: worthy infrastructure in the lane, that we don't have the time,
Speaker 1: because you know, trees take time to grow, they work
Speaker 1: at a different time scale than humans. Do even your
Speaker 1: your shortest lived trees sixty years. Yeah, and it is
Speaker 1: one of those things where I mean, we we have
Speaker 1: this is what we taught. We kind of started this
Speaker 1: new season which is forever with which is that like
Speaker 1: there's no there's nothing we can do that will stop
Speaker 1: us from continuing to face worse and worse because because
Speaker 1: like consequences of climate change, because the carbon has already
Speaker 1: been admitted, right, you can't just pull it out. Warming
Speaker 1: is even if we were to like make very revolutionary
Speaker 1: changes tomorrow, there's still some degree to which it's going
Speaker 1: to get worse. Um. But when it comes to like
Speaker 1: within your field, what like carbon capture using trees and stuff,
Speaker 1: can you talk to us about like what that actually
Speaker 1: looks like as opposed to sort of the will plant
Speaker 1: a tree for every dollar you spend kind of thing. Um?
Speaker 1: So yeah, I actually I actually can. It's I do
Speaker 1: a lot of my work about forest carbon stuff. So yeah, Basically,
Speaker 1: the idea is to make sure you have the best
Speaker 1: way to get carbon c equestration of the force is
Speaker 1: to have a healthy, functioning forest. And that's you know,
Speaker 1: kind of where these pests and climate change are interfering
Speaker 1: with that and so you know, to maintain a healthy
Speaker 1: functioning force in the East Coast. You know, some of
Speaker 1: these you need to have fire, some of them not.
Speaker 1: Some of them are too wet to burn. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then you know, harvesting needs to take place in some
Speaker 1: of these. Some of these don't need to be harvested. Again,
Speaker 1: we're talking, you know, millions of acres of you for
Speaker 1: us here, so we're gonna be incredibly broad and we've
Speaker 1: got to keep invasives out. You need to keep force
Speaker 1: pest to a minimum, and then make sure that you're
Speaker 1: managing the forest, you know, as best as it can
Speaker 1: be managed. And I say managed, this is not something new.
Speaker 1: Humans have been on the East Coast since you know,
Speaker 1: it depends on the artifacts you want to look at
Speaker 1: and what archaeologists you want to trust. But like five
Speaker 1: to twenty thousand years ago, and the last glaciers left
Speaker 1: the East Coast eighteen thousand years ago, so we had
Speaker 1: people here before the glaciers were gone. So these forests
Speaker 1: have never not had humans hands on them and never
Speaker 1: not been touched and manage by humans. Um, And you know,
Speaker 1: we gotta make sure we're doing the best we can.
Speaker 1: You know, some of That means that we're managing Force
Speaker 1: with what's best for you know, that means managing for
Speaker 1: us for what's best with the worse in mind, not
Speaker 1: with best, what's best for the end of the quarter,
Speaker 1: what's best for your bank account. That's hard to do
Speaker 1: because Force are getting more and more expensive to manage
Speaker 1: and to you know, manage just anybody here in the
Speaker 1: East Coast. We gotta do a lot of fencing. We
Speaker 1: gotta keep deer out of force because their populations are
Speaker 1: so high, it's just ridiculously high, and they've never got
Speaker 1: to come back down. You know, we have to spray
Speaker 1: invasive species, we have to pull invasive species. You've gotta
Speaker 1: go through and you've gotta make sure, you know, you're
Speaker 1: you're preventing all these kinds of stuff. And so it
Speaker 1: can take you know, you can if you do a
Speaker 1: good shelter, would you can like make four th dollars
Speaker 1: out of it, and then you could put all that
Speaker 1: money back into growing your next generation of force. So
Speaker 1: Force she is really going from a profit making venture
Speaker 1: on a lot of cases to like you're barely making
Speaker 1: money or you're you're like breaking even or losing money.
Speaker 1: It's it's no longer you know, if you really want
Speaker 1: to do it, great, You're not always making money, which
Speaker 1: is hard for people to get their head around. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's the kind of thing that in a reasonable world,
Speaker 1: huge amounts of money would be adverted to from other things,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, thirty five, Um, I feel like
Speaker 1: you guys could do a lot with one f thirty
Speaker 1: five worth of cash. I feel like that would solve
Speaker 1: almost all of our problems. Yeah, because the problems that
Speaker 1: you see in force we don't cost a lot to fix,
Speaker 1: but it it costs a lot for a forest owner,
Speaker 1: be that you know, an agency or person, it costs
Speaker 1: a lot. Yeah. It's like all of the issues around
Speaker 1: climate change kind of all circle around, like growth based
Speaker 1: economics and a lot of the like nothing has a
Speaker 1: shared cause, but they all have this similar aspect to
Speaker 1: them where yeah, every every part of them gets worse
Speaker 1: by the extreme focus on economic growth at all costs
Speaker 1: and that suffers that that that makes everything and everyone suffer. So,
Speaker 1: you know, it would be nice if since we have
Speaker 1: a government, it would be nice if they do, you know,
Speaker 1: give more funding towards uh, stuff like this type of
Speaker 1: force management, which I know they do some, but you know,
Speaker 1: a fraction of it compared to what they give to
Speaker 1: like the Pentagon or you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I
Speaker 1: mean even big you know forceries technically agricultor but even
Speaker 1: like you know, like corn and like grow agriculture, it's
Speaker 1: a lot more. Yeah, they have they corners massive subsidies
Speaker 1: compared to compared to everything else. Yeah, like the NRCS,
Speaker 1: the Natural Resources Conservation Service, they do a lot with
Speaker 1: you know, farm agriculture, and you know, they it's very
Speaker 1: difficult for forest ollers to get that kind of money
Speaker 1: into forest. If we could get you know, that money,
Speaker 1: it would be a game changer. But we're not there. Uh,
Speaker 1: there is some change being made in the administration. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like stuff and that doesn't help, doesn't help today.
Speaker 1: It doesn't still unpassed today. Yeah, you can't unkill trees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess is there anything that you're optimistic about within
Speaker 1: your field right now? Like if you I think that
Speaker 1: would be handy both in terms of like is there
Speaker 1: any sort of is there a light at the end
Speaker 1: of the tunnel um, Because I'll admit, like, when I
Speaker 1: think about not having the forests. That's pretty much the
Speaker 1: most blackpilling thing I can imagine, like for myself, Like,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the thing that I have trouble coping
Speaker 1: with emotionally more than anything else. There's lots of horrible
Speaker 1: things about what's coming, but that's the one that like
Speaker 1: really scares me the most. Yeah, I don't think we're
Speaker 1: gonna lose forests as a thing. They're just where to become.
Speaker 1: You know, if without things being done, they will become less.
Speaker 1: They're gonna be fewer of them, and they're gonna become
Speaker 1: much less diverse and functioning. You know. For a lot
Speaker 1: of these you know, invasive species, be they plants, you know,
Speaker 1: especially in basive plants, we have a lot of We
Speaker 1: know how to control them. I was just writing a
Speaker 1: thing about controlling wavy basket grass. Wavy leaf basket grass.
Speaker 1: It's a new invasive species to my area. It's highly
Speaker 1: controllable and we know how to do it. It's just
Speaker 1: again a question of people, you know, getting out there
Speaker 1: and money to do it. You know, if we have
Speaker 1: the people of the money, we can solve that problem.
Speaker 1: Oh also we stop you know bringing that in the
Speaker 1: bat even better, we you know actually took you know,
Speaker 1: i PM is hard, not i PM, but quarantine and
Speaker 1: pest management seriously, and you know, people like stopped throwing
Speaker 1: you know they look like plant out into the park
Speaker 1: just because like I don't want to kill it, Like
Speaker 1: let's let it be free. Don't do that goldfish, don't
Speaker 1: don't throw them in the lake. That's why you have
Speaker 1: huge goldfish coming out of Lake Florida. Don't. Don't just
Speaker 1: cut pets loose and stuff like that. And if we
Speaker 1: can get a lot of that under control, will be
Speaker 1: in a lot better place. Again, I don't think they
Speaker 1: forced to disappearing in the future unmanaged. I think they
Speaker 1: just become fewer and less diverse and less function and
Speaker 1: then you lose spaces species based on them, like birds,
Speaker 1: you know, wildlife, all that kind of stuff. And also
Speaker 1: I mean one of the things that also they have
Speaker 1: to become less accessible, both because there will be less
Speaker 1: of the man um as things get more fragile, Like
Speaker 1: how else do you keep some of these invasive species
Speaker 1: out but keeping people out, which is I think a
Speaker 1: bad move for a lot of reasons. But I don't know.
Speaker 1: I also don't know, like is it possible to have
Speaker 1: a global society where there is not just trade but
Speaker 1: the movement of people on a wide scale, and not
Speaker 1: have this kind of ship crossing. Right. Like, that's when
Speaker 1: I think about as as someone who's more or less
Speaker 1: an anarchist. When I think about the only things that
Speaker 1: a border should exist to do, it's it's keep stuff
Speaker 1: like that out. But I just I don't know how
Speaker 1: possible that is, Like a lot of this stuff is.
Speaker 1: I mean, is this the kind of thing that's just
Speaker 1: spread by carelessness? Because it kind of seems like it
Speaker 1: can be spread to by people who think they're taking
Speaker 1: care Yeah, and both is the answer. There's some very
Speaker 1: good research out there about the relativeness between global trade
Speaker 1: and you know, invasive species. But that also you look
Speaker 1: at like colonialism and colonial societies. There are these things
Speaker 1: called introductory societies who long get the name wrong, but
Speaker 1: basically there are clubs. It's like, all right, I would
Speaker 1: like clubs of people like I would like to see
Speaker 1: this new place that I live in, like the old place.
Speaker 1: Like the European starling was introduced in New York because
Speaker 1: you know, one guy, I wanted to see all the
Speaker 1: birds of Shakespeare in Christ. Oh, I get even better
Speaker 1: for one for you. The moth formerly known as gypsy
Speaker 1: moth as seem as I'm gonna say that word um
Speaker 1: is now found in America because of this one guy.
Speaker 1: I'll put the name of the chat for you so
Speaker 1: you can say it, because I know how much you
Speaker 1: love saying French names. This most here comes the wave
Speaker 1: of comb it's a better anti French racism. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: oh I know it doesn't matter. We still get well,
Speaker 1: nobody does about my Italian accent. It's just the French.
Speaker 1: It's once again the Italians deserve it as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they tell us about at end. Yeah. So so
Speaker 1: this guy, he was a French scientist who who left France.
Speaker 1: He came to the US for a little while. He
Speaker 1: got Massachusetts. He was also also an amateur entomologist, and
Speaker 1: he was like, oh, you know what I think American
Speaker 1: needs is I think they need a silk industry. Now
Speaker 1: they have a negative silk moth. It doesn't produce good silk,
Speaker 1: it doesn't breed fast. So he brought in the la matric.
Speaker 1: I gotta do the scientific name because we changed the
Speaker 1: name on it because the common name is a slur.
Speaker 1: So we're not doing so la Matria disparo. So he
Speaker 1: brought this this moth in from Europe. Uh, and he
Speaker 1: started trying to breathe these two moths, which are not
Speaker 1: related at all. It didn't work, obviously, and then he
Speaker 1: just kind of, you know, he went he went off
Speaker 1: to be an astronomer, and he just let these moths
Speaker 1: go in his backyard and he didn't tell anyone they
Speaker 1: were there. And then all of a sudden these things
Speaker 1: escaped and now they're killing trees, you know, across the
Speaker 1: eastern United States, and they're in Washington, Oregon. I think
Speaker 1: they're in DC a little bit too. So yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's that's that's such a good parable, like a parallel
Speaker 1: to the invasive species that is French people. That really
Speaker 1: does just tie up all all aspects of that amazing.
Speaker 1: It makes me think a lot everything you're saying about
Speaker 1: kut Zoo, which which is in the I've heard some
Speaker 1: people say they're getting a handle on it. I don't
Speaker 1: know how to evaluate that at the moment, but when
Speaker 1: I was last living down there, it was just like
Speaker 1: devouring the entire southeast. Yeah, you can handle it again,
Speaker 1: if you want to spray it, you can. You can
Speaker 1: get what's called it chew groove. So a bunch of goats,
Speaker 1: you can get a handle on it. But again that's
Speaker 1: money and effort. So it's just a question. So you
Speaker 1: do get delicious, delicious goat made? Oh my gosh, I
Speaker 1: tell you what. The people who do goat invasive management
Speaker 1: they haven't made. Would they rent goats out to people?
Speaker 1: They get paid for the goats and they also get
Speaker 1: their goats fence? Would they slaughter them? They even pay that?
Speaker 1: You know, that's a good business model as someone with
Speaker 1: a couple of goats. That does sound like the dream. Yeah. God,
Speaker 1: they don't work on all the invasive species I do.
Speaker 1: There are folks and they probably don't eat those beetles.
Speaker 1: Huh no. No. They also don't like plants with thorns
Speaker 1: on them either, and it's very few goats can handle
Speaker 1: an entire French person either. So yeah, we can't can't
Speaker 1: trust the goats to solve all these problems for us.
Speaker 1: It is nice that they're helping. Um, I don't know,
Speaker 1: so I try to. Are there things either in terms
Speaker 1: of like it acts people can take, or probably more
Speaker 1: more realistically, organizations people could support that you think are
Speaker 1: actually helping try to stop as much of the woods
Speaker 1: from going bad as fast or reverse the some of
Speaker 1: the stuff we've been talking about today, like how can
Speaker 1: we try to have some some room for people to
Speaker 1: do something, if if there is anything people can do
Speaker 1: other than check your fucking shoes for beetles when you
Speaker 1: come back from wherever, burn all of your clothing anytime
Speaker 1: you leave the state. Okay, that's that's a good start.
Speaker 1: That's a really good start. Not even to say sometimes
Speaker 1: it's the county to stop. When you go on a
Speaker 1: road trip, you stop your car at the county line
Speaker 1: and you roll it off of a cliff with tanner
Speaker 1: righte and just let it burn. But don't don't push
Speaker 1: out of the woods. We've seen that. How not into
Speaker 1: the woods, No, into the ocean where eadings fine, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they say that's what they say about the ocean. Great.
Speaker 1: I tell people I work between the farm field and
Speaker 1: the stream. I don't do stream or water stuff because
Speaker 1: it's chemistry in there, so I don't know what happens
Speaker 1: over there. That's fine. I assume everything is great there.
Speaker 1: It does seem to be going fine. Yah Um. I
Speaker 1: think the best thing that you could do is in
Speaker 1: individuals is don't cut random stuff loose. Learn the plants
Speaker 1: of your area. Yeah, learn what's around you and what
Speaker 1: should be there. And like when you see something that
Speaker 1: shouldn't be there and you know it's invasive, remove it
Speaker 1: were legally possible, obviously, don't go like someone's like arboretum
Speaker 1: and it's like slight pulling plants out. It'd be real bad,
Speaker 1: burned down small farms wherever you find. Yeah, oh man,
Speaker 1: the egg people will not be happy about that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not gonna say anything. Um So I think,
Speaker 1: you know, learned plants trees is neat um. And then
Speaker 1: if you um, you know, think of if you're thinking about, like,
Speaker 1: you know, how can you help manage force? You know,
Speaker 1: if you lots of people either own forests or people
Speaker 1: who owned force, and you know, encourage them to get
Speaker 1: a forest management plan or land management plan and get that.
Speaker 1: And then also if you've got a lawn, rip your
Speaker 1: lawn out again where possible and use native plants. I do.
Speaker 1: I do some you know some lawn change stuff. And
Speaker 1: it's just frustrating the amount of lawns out there. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, one of these people one of these reasons
Speaker 1: we're losing so many you know, birds, and we have
Speaker 1: fewer birds and bird species because like they can't eat grass.
Speaker 1: You see, these things eat fruits and insects and seeds
Speaker 1: which you don't get in grass. So you know, if
Speaker 1: you don't own a forest, that's fine, and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: a huge advocate of that. I try to be on
Speaker 1: the show and people, again, we always get this thing
Speaker 1: where there are people who will critique when we talk
Speaker 1: about some of these small scale solutions' is like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, turning your turning your lawn into a permac
Speaker 1: culture garden with local species isn't going to like produce
Speaker 1: enough food to feed your families. Like, no, it's not
Speaker 1: about that. If you could get a couple of thousand
Speaker 1: people to do it, and they convince another couple and
Speaker 1: like so on and so on and so on, then suddenly,
Speaker 1: if you're increasing significantly the amount of carbon sequestered by
Speaker 1: that lawn and you're also making a better habitat for
Speaker 1: birds and whatnot, that that scales. That is a thing
Speaker 1: that scales. If we got a significant number of people
Speaker 1: with lawns to replace them with something like we're talking
Speaker 1: about kill kill that grass, that almost certainly isn't fucking
Speaker 1: native to your area. Plant stuff that is, and and
Speaker 1: and try to reintegrate at least your lawn back into
Speaker 1: the local ecology. If you got a million Americans to
Speaker 1: do a version of that, that's not an insignificant thing. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it is something that you can do in a
Speaker 1: lot of states. There's programs to support it. In my state,
Speaker 1: there's a program specifically for like changing lawns over and
Speaker 1: that program is backed up there out of money until
Speaker 1: they spent it all already. There's definitely interest there them
Speaker 1: a thirty five. Let me sell it to whoever whoever.
Speaker 1: Anyone gets it if they want it, it just goes
Speaker 1: up on Craigslist, all right, Yeah, put it on Craigslist,
Speaker 1: give it to the highest bidder. Um. The other thing
Speaker 1: you can do is go outside, like support your local
Speaker 1: land management agency. Most of these, like forest Service and
Speaker 1: park Service, they depend on money spent by users to
Speaker 1: go spend money at the forest. The only thing people
Speaker 1: can do your fucking boots first though, Oh yeah, definitely that.
Speaker 1: And don't don't bring shit in. Don't don't bring your
Speaker 1: like weird thing in, like your weird plan, because you
Speaker 1: don't want to kill it, kill your entirely seed based diet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you don't, If you hunt, great, that supports conservation.
Speaker 1: If you don't want to hunt, you can still buy
Speaker 1: duck stamps and these other things that support wildlife management.
Speaker 1: In the US, wildlife is funded by the users, So
Speaker 1: those people who buy guns and AMMO, you buy arch
Speaker 1: your equipment, and who buy hunting licenses. So if you
Speaker 1: want to support wildlife, the best thing you can do
Speaker 1: is buy a hunting license, even if you don't hunt.
Speaker 1: That's it's kind of counterintuitive, but it's the core of
Speaker 1: the North American model of wildlife. Yeah, yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: really good point, and it is one of the It's
Speaker 1: also one of those areas when we talk about ways
Speaker 1: in which theoretically there's room to build in roads between
Speaker 1: left and right in this country, conservation and hunting should
Speaker 1: be one right. And there are hunters on the right
Speaker 1: who were actually talking a pretty good, like reasonably about conservation,
Speaker 1: Like it is an area of shared interest. Everybody likes
Speaker 1: wild places, so just quote unquote wild We just talked
Speaker 1: about how none of them are actually wild. They've all
Speaker 1: existed with human beings for forever. But like, yeah, we like.
Speaker 1: We like the outdoors, yes, the outdoors. Yeah. Well and
Speaker 1: what you know, people have been like, so I my
Speaker 1: cross blows right over there. Crossbow, Yeah, you don't have
Speaker 1: to get a gun. I have been wanted to get
Speaker 1: crossbow pilled for a while now. Oh yeah, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: mind getting crossbow killed myself. That shoulder holster for a
Speaker 1: crossbow there we go. Oh yeah, that's great. That's yeah. No,
Speaker 1: this is not a super expensive one, but it's pretty
Speaker 1: much a rifle. Yeah, I mean ballistically at the range.
Speaker 1: Is you use them, there's not any meaningful difference really. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you're a person who you know doesn't like guns,
Speaker 1: it doesn't trust yourself around them. Uh, they're very safe.
Speaker 1: So yeah, get get you one of those if you want.
Speaker 1: It's a fun time cross I also like it a
Speaker 1: lot more than my, uh my guns because it doesn't
Speaker 1: yet coil. But that's enough about that. Well that's great. Um,
Speaker 1: is there anything else you wanted to get into Calvin
Speaker 1: before we kind of roll out today? Uh? You touched
Speaker 1: on forest carbon stuff. That's a whole man a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff on that that's a whole other world. I
Speaker 1: am interested in talking more about that, but perhaps we
Speaker 1: should do have a dedicated entire thing. I mean, we
Speaker 1: should definitely dedicate an entire thing that that. It's an
Speaker 1: incredibly important subject UM and I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: to say about how different um indigenous groups have been.
Speaker 1: Like up in the Northwest in particular, we have a
Speaker 1: lot of um kind of tribal efforts at stuff like
Speaker 1: not just with with the forest, but also with like
Speaker 1: the coastline and whatnot in rebuilding certain populations along the
Speaker 1: coast in the Midwest. When I'm does a great job
Speaker 1: with forest management, I'm actually doing a webinar thing about
Speaker 1: one of our forest pestons. We're having thene come talk
Speaker 1: about their management. Well we invited them. I'm not actually
Speaker 1: sure if they're going to do it yet, but the
Speaker 1: practice we use is based on what they use it there.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's it's really cool what various first nations do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just want to plug trees. Yeah, my favorite type
Speaker 1: of tree probably the redwood. Used to live in Arcade
Speaker 1: to go running in them every day. Um, I know
Speaker 1: that's kind of a cliche answer, what's your what's your
Speaker 1: favorite tree? This is one behind me here, No one
Speaker 1: can see my background it's white oak. You can't make
Speaker 1: a white oaks. So, yeah, that is an impolitant tree.
Speaker 1: Forest products are like one of the only things that
Speaker 1: supports supports forest management. So it supports forest so you
Speaker 1: don't be afraid to use, you know, sustainably managed wood
Speaker 1: and wood products finds capitalism and drink a shipload of
Speaker 1: bourbon always a good call. Really, Um? All right, well,
Speaker 1: Calvin Norman, any any less plugable to plug? Um plants? Uh?
Speaker 1: If you won't learn plants, that's great. You want to
Speaker 1: learn about what's going on your native you know your
Speaker 1: areas around you. There's lots of groups that do that.
Speaker 1: Your local extension service helps you out with a lot
Speaker 1: that most of their stuff is free. So plug that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: go outside and plug that. I don't do twitter good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, well go outside, hugg a tree. Calvin Norman,
Speaker 1: thank you again so much for coming on. Um. If
Speaker 1: you want to see Calan's original thread, just type in
Speaker 1: the woods are bad, uh, and it could happen here,
Speaker 1: read it, or just go to the it could happen here,
Speaker 1: read it and scroll down a bit you'll find it. Um.
Speaker 1: That's gonna do it for us today until tomorrow. Go
Speaker 1: out into the woods. Who out into the woods, But
Speaker 1: wash your fucking boots first. It could happen. Here is
Speaker 1: the podcast. You're listening to with your ears or perhaps
Speaker 1: other parts of your body if you have, I don't know,
Speaker 1: some bizarre form of synesthesia that causes you to taste sound. Um,
Speaker 1: maybe you're tasting us right now. In which case, UM,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna open up the flavor bouquet by introducing my
Speaker 1: co host Garrison UM and our guest for today. Why
Speaker 1: don't you take over now, Garrison, I've done my job. Great.
Speaker 1: That sounds lovely. Yeah, Hey, Garrison, here could happen. Here
Speaker 1: is the podcast. We have a special guest today. UH
Speaker 1: journalisten researcher W. F. Thomas. Hello, Hello, it's so good
Speaker 1: to be here on Behind the Woman's Revolution the Police
Speaker 1: Insurrection Daily. Thank you, thank you, lovely to have you. UM.
Speaker 1: A lot of people say Garrison's voice tastes like surbet.
Speaker 1: By the way, it's a comment. Get a lot, a lot, lot,
Speaker 1: lot a lot of those d M s. Um you surprised,
Speaker 1: not that. UM. So we're gonna be talking about something
Speaker 1: I've wanted to actually bring up myself for a while now,
Speaker 1: but I just have not put it the work in
Speaker 1: and now luckily someone else did the actual work, so
Speaker 1: we now we could just talk about it. We're talking
Speaker 1: about something called a disclosed TV UM, which is a
Speaker 1: broad range of things. It's not it's not just one thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: And I guess I'll hand it over to the person
Speaker 1: who did the actual work in terms of like how
Speaker 1: how would you describe what disclosed TV is? But but
Speaker 1: like before we get into like the journey of the
Speaker 1: platform and thing like what like what is it? Yeah, UM,
Speaker 1: let me start this off by saying, I'm already before
Speaker 1: the publication of the article been publicly threatened vaguely with
Speaker 1: legal action from Disclosed TV, so that will be largely
Speaker 1: informing what I say today. But we do have a
Speaker 1: lot of receipts. Um, you have very scary lawyers here,
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm I'm excited whatever happens, So feel free
Speaker 1: to say whatever you want to say. But UM, Disclosed
Speaker 1: TV markets itself and presents itself as a news aggregator
Speaker 1: UM operating Twitter, UM Telegram, gab get or. They have
Speaker 1: a Facebook as well as well as the main site,
Speaker 1: where they host what one could describe as articles as well, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think Disclosed TV for our purposes, despite like
Speaker 1: they have a very large Facebook presence UM, but the
Speaker 1: way that we usually interact with them, specifically like me
Speaker 1: and Robert and then other people who are like journalists
Speaker 1: orge to antifascist researchers, usually we interact with Disclosed TV
Speaker 1: on Telegram or through Twitter um. Twitter through like it's
Speaker 1: how they like break a lot of current events in
Speaker 1: like a where like you know, a lot of like
Speaker 1: political figures talk about them is is Twitter UM, and
Speaker 1: then Telegram is where they really disseminate these out into
Speaker 1: more obscure groups. And maybe they changed their wording because
Speaker 1: they know the audience is a little bit different. And
Speaker 1: they've been a vector of information for a while. Really
Speaker 1: really with the protests, they kind of picked up a
Speaker 1: lot of there was they were everywhere in terms of
Speaker 1: like saying specific things, not doing sourcing UM and just
Speaker 1: having like basically they are a place where they kind
Speaker 1: of create what they they try to create what the
Speaker 1: news is because of how isolated they are from the
Speaker 1: sources that they actually pull info from, and they're very
Speaker 1: they're very interested in kind of crafting their own version
Speaker 1: of events UM, which appeals to people across the spectrum. Like,
Speaker 1: they don't just market towards the far right wing. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they frame things to kind of attract of a variety
Speaker 1: of people, like the under the extremist banner. Let's say. Um, So,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't just see them in far right circles.
Speaker 1: You see Disclose pop up in a lot of places
Speaker 1: because of the way they framed news and breaking events. UM.
Speaker 1: But they didn't always start out like this. This isn't
Speaker 1: what they always were. They weren't always this kind of
Speaker 1: content aggregator that creates their version of news. UM and
Speaker 1: Thomas did more research into what they were before, which
Speaker 1: I actually had not done that research yet. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: let's uh, let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna start off with talking about how I
Speaker 1: first heard about disclose. Um. So I was living in
Speaker 1: Germany when the pandemic hit UM and got COVID first
Speaker 1: wave in Germany, the March UM. Luckily I was totally asymptomatic. UM,
Speaker 1: but I was kind of stranded in Germany for a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks. UM and how to isolate in a
Speaker 1: vacation rental uh and the Bavarian man who owned it
Speaker 1: just kept coming in talking to me, and I would
Speaker 1: tell him, Hey, it's probably not the best idea for
Speaker 1: you to be coming by and chatting with me all
Speaker 1: the time. And now he got into talking, and we're
Speaker 1: talking in German. He got we got into talking about
Speaker 1: the pandemic, what he thought about it, and he started
Speaker 1: talking about how he thought, oh, the government's making this
Speaker 1: seem way worse than it is. You know, the deep
Speaker 1: state if you know anything about that, and he and
Speaker 1: he said deep state in English. Um. And I was
Speaker 1: familiar with German far right currents at that time, Um,
Speaker 1: but I had never encountered a pilled German dude. And
Speaker 1: that's when I realized this is gonna be a fucking problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and and it lo and behold it has
Speaker 1: continued to be a problem. So as I got back
Speaker 1: to the U S. And and the other thing when
Speaker 1: I was in Germany is the first time I tunded
Speaker 1: I encountered telegram. Um when a German I knew, said hey,
Speaker 1: I I just don't trust WhatsApp because it's on by Facebook.
Speaker 1: Why don't you download telegram? And he that was nineteen
Speaker 1: I think, um, and and it was pretty innocuous to
Speaker 1: me at the time, I didn't realize this would become
Speaker 1: a problem. Yeah, fast forward, UM. I was working on
Speaker 1: my master's project, which UM you can talk about more
Speaker 1: later on, because it's kind of besides the point, UM
Speaker 1: if you don't want to hear about it, but looking
Speaker 1: at Telegram as the cultic milieu UM, using Colin Campbell's
Speaker 1: framework of the cultic MILIEUM to understand specifically how Q
Speaker 1: and on spread in Germany and how Q and on
Speaker 1: interacted with these native underlying conspiracy narratives within Germany. UM.
Speaker 1: Because Telegram is already massively popular in Germany before after
Speaker 1: j six, I think of the band wave came down
Speaker 1: and there was much more migration to the platform. So
Speaker 1: you know, I did the social network analysis looking at
Speaker 1: the conspirat German conspiracy is seen on Telegram and one
Speaker 1: of the big guess notes that came up, and I
Speaker 1: was looking at a number of times shared into other
Speaker 1: groups their channels was disclosed tv UM and that's the
Speaker 1: first time I came into it. I look through it
Speaker 1: and realized, okay, they there is an editorial stance within
Speaker 1: this UM, and that editorial stance largely attracts conspiracists and
Speaker 1: far right extremists to this coverage into you know, this
Speaker 1: is widely shared among conspiracists and far right extremists. UM.
Speaker 1: Fast forward. UM. I'm on Twitter, as many of us are, unfortunately, UM,
Speaker 1: and I saw Disclosed TV just popping up everywhere, UM,
Speaker 1: even from people who who I would think should know better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely are you know, big extremism researchers and journalists UM
Speaker 1: shared it. I remember there one specific one that really
Speaker 1: came across my feed. UM disclosed had had taken a
Speaker 1: video from like the Blaze, Glennbex whatever whatever doing UM
Speaker 1: about the firefighters who were quitting over vaccine mandate or
Speaker 1: something and had all of their boots or whatever. And
Speaker 1: I saw, yeah, lots of people sharing that as well. UM.
Speaker 1: And eventually I got tired of saying, hey, they should
Speaker 1: just suspect don't share it, UM, and decided to write
Speaker 1: an article about it so I could just send my
Speaker 1: article to people. And it's really interesting what I found. UM.
Speaker 1: Disclosed tv started off in the mid two thousand's as
Speaker 1: just this forum for UFOs, paranormal stuff, cryptids, big foot sightings,
Speaker 1: and existed in largely the same format until two thousand
Speaker 1: and twenty one. Um, there were some shifts in in
Speaker 1: the way the site presented itself. Um. It was it
Speaker 1: started off as a member logging where members could write
Speaker 1: articles that were largely long form forum posts and then
Speaker 1: have people comment on them and reply. Um. And at
Speaker 1: one point Disclosed made the jump to functioning as a
Speaker 1: news aggregator while including an editorial spin on that and
Speaker 1: including some of their own articles. Do you want me
Speaker 1: to get more into that now, Yeah, because yeah, because
Speaker 1: like the shift was was it wasn't like immediate as well, right,
Speaker 1: Like they were starting to kind of present themselves and
Speaker 1: more of a news gathering way, you know. Around the
Speaker 1: late of course, during this became a big thing in
Speaker 1: terms of their social media presence. Um, they were trying
Speaker 1: to present themselves as like a news aggregator, right, but
Speaker 1: they still operated that. But they still operated the forum
Speaker 1: on their site throughout most of that time. And that's
Speaker 1: only until recently where they shut that forum down, UM,
Speaker 1: which was you know, full of full of all kinds
Speaker 1: of conspiratorial nonsense. It's very easy to see past for
Speaker 1: most people. Uh, secret you know, secret Arctic ship, which
Speaker 1: is yeah, it's always that's usually Yeah, even going to
Speaker 1: get stuff like watch this s j W get wrecked,
Speaker 1: which which is not a quotation, but just that kind
Speaker 1: of vibe, that style of content. Yeah, going from the
Speaker 1: forum operating than with the you know, their social media accounts,
Speaker 1: to the shift this more of like presenting as a
Speaker 1: news website. Talking about that and the potential effects that
Speaker 1: we see this having on both like the social media
Speaker 1: sites and just the overall trend of news aggregation in general.
Speaker 1: I guess. Yeah. So the first big shift that I
Speaker 1: found UM was the creation of their Telegram channel, which
Speaker 1: is in January one actually, so this is relatively more
Speaker 1: recent than shift that happened UM, and they operated their
Speaker 1: Telegram as a as more in this traditional news aggregator
Speaker 1: since and so that's how they really blew up on Telegram.
Speaker 1: At some point they deleted all of their old tweets
Speaker 1: UM and started operating their Twitter in a similar manner.
Speaker 1: It was after they created this telegram channel UM in September,
Speaker 1: actually overnight on septemb they completely re rebranded the site.
Speaker 1: They took out all the user forums UM. They included
Speaker 1: backdated articles to a year prior UM, and looking looking
Speaker 1: through archives of that, there was a note saying something
Speaker 1: along the lines of we have found so much growth
Speaker 1: on our social media are growing Telegram channel, are growing
Speaker 1: Twitter account UM, and something to the effect of we
Speaker 1: we are changing our strategy and going about this a
Speaker 1: different way. UM. And you can if you were into
Speaker 1: the forum, you can join our discord um which is
Speaker 1: defunct and I'll get I'll get into that later. UM.
Speaker 1: And yeah, looking it was really interesting too because looking
Speaker 1: at these backdated articles UM, they included very obviously plagiarized content. UM.
Speaker 1: They had I believe it's it's all in the article,
Speaker 1: but they had four journalists UM names attached with the
Speaker 1: article using um AI generated images for their pictures UM.
Speaker 1: And as the especially the articles that they themselves published
Speaker 1: UM were very focused on UFOs, paranormal paranormal phenomenon UM,
Speaker 1: as well as content that could cause skepticism within an
Speaker 1: audience about vaccines and lockdowns. And I do not know
Speaker 1: the intent of their editorial board and so I cannot
Speaker 1: speak on that, but of course we generated this effect. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is, they found a way of creating content which
Speaker 1: develops a very specific audience, which grew their numbers, which
Speaker 1: made them, you know, what one could assume would make
Speaker 1: them want to make more of that content because it
Speaker 1: makes more numbers than they can UM use that to
Speaker 1: grow their platform. UM. Yeah. Specifically leading up like after
Speaker 1: after January UM ramping up one of the vaccines were
Speaker 1: coming more and more common in the States and that
Speaker 1: across the world. UM. They have seen a pretty significant
Speaker 1: growth and have changed their platform accordingly exactly. UM. So
Speaker 1: we began looking into who the who the fun owns this,
Speaker 1: what's going on with this UM. Like all German companies
Speaker 1: UM and it is based in Germany, there's a requirement
Speaker 1: by law to include an imprint or impress them that
Speaker 1: includes an address, UM contact information for the site UM.
Speaker 1: There in the company that owns it UM a company
Speaker 1: called Future Bites operates disclosed tv UM, which describes itself
Speaker 1: as a private equity firm and media group. UM and
Speaker 1: looking into the ownership behind Future Bites is a man
Speaker 1: by the name of Uva Brown who has a pretty
Speaker 1: interesting backstory. He's hosted, He's made numerous web hosting sites UM.
Speaker 1: I believe he created some dating sites as well, but
Speaker 1: but my research was not conclusive, so that's a maybe. UM.
Speaker 1: But eventually he sold. He had his most success when
Speaker 1: he sold one of his web hosting sites to go
Speaker 1: Daddy for a lot of money, and along the way,
Speaker 1: in his own as he described, booked a flight on
Speaker 1: virgin to go into space and see for himself if
Speaker 1: the earth, if the Earth was flat. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: awesome cool that that, this is great, thank you. So
Speaker 1: this this is who we're dealing with, um. Sweet. And
Speaker 1: the thing about Disclosed being based in Germany, UM, that
Speaker 1: that becomes an issue, UM, is that Germany has a
Speaker 1: very different uh, look at free speech than in the US. UM.
Speaker 1: For example, even online displaying swastikas UM and denying the
Speaker 1: Holocaust is legal and is a prosecutable crime. They can
Speaker 1: get you jail time. UM. So as we explored as
Speaker 1: I mostly and UM, there's additional reporting from Berny Piper
Speaker 1: and I'll talk a bit more about that later explored
Speaker 1: their discord and their telegram. We realized, Hum, seems to
Speaker 1: be a lot of Nazis here, and by which when
Speaker 1: I say seems to be a lot of Nazis, I
Speaker 1: mean people with swastikas in their profile builds UM with
Speaker 1: you know, names, referencing the Holocaust with the whispers parentheses UM,
Speaker 1: and saying denying that the hologast happened, UM, and also
Speaker 1: sharing the neo Nazi, famous neo Nazi, infamous new Nazi
Speaker 1: propaganda film Europa The Last Battle UM, which was shared
Speaker 1: by prominent q and On influencer ghost Ezra. Yeah I know. UM,
Speaker 1: oh man, this this came up a few days ago.
Speaker 1: One of the one of the channels that me and
Speaker 1: someone else have been watching, UH forwarded me it being
Speaker 1: that that that film being shared at the it was
Speaker 1: it was it was that the the Free Oregon Telegram
Speaker 1: channel was sharing links to that and I wonder I
Speaker 1: would I would like to track back where that link
Speaker 1: came from. UM. Yeah. Not not great seeing that film
Speaker 1: circulate more and more, specially among like you know, the
Speaker 1: free organ Telegram channels, you know, like Anti mask, Anti backs,
Speaker 1: Anti Lockdown channel. Yeah, and seeing the percoloration of that
Speaker 1: type of content. Yeah. So, in preparing for this article UM,
Speaker 1: with the help of of the Logically editorial team, I'm
Speaker 1: a freelancer UM, their current head of content, Ernie Piper
Speaker 1: UM sent an email basically asking, Hey, what's going on.
Speaker 1: You all seem to have a Nazi problem that's kind
Speaker 1: of borderline illegal in Germany, UM, to which for a
Speaker 1: while this for for about twenty four hours as closed,
Speaker 1: just went totally quiet and didn't post Um and then
Speaker 1: came out with a post specifically targeting Ernie Um by
Speaker 1: name and with a picture of him and linking to
Speaker 1: some of his old reporting work as well, Um saying yes,
Speaker 1: Uva Brown owns this. He got his money from Go daddy.
Speaker 1: You know, we value free speech and we condemn hatred whatnot,
Speaker 1: and and saying, oh, our telegram we have a tell
Speaker 1: there's a telegram group, but we have these rules in it,
Speaker 1: and uh, okay, yeah, we we had to shut down
Speaker 1: the discord that got a little bit out of hand.
Speaker 1: We admit that. You know, they had people denying the
Speaker 1: Holocaust with swastka icons in their discord that they didn't
Speaker 1: seem to care too much about until someone pointed it out. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know there's there was additionally very explicit neo
Speaker 1: Nazi content in their telegram channel as well, with the excuse,
Speaker 1: oh well, we're a glowing growing platform. We we can't
Speaker 1: moderate everything. Is well they have They just crossed four
Speaker 1: hundred thousand in their telegram channel and I think about
Speaker 1: thirty thousand and their telegram group UM, which is frankly bullshit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is if if my personal opinion is that if
Speaker 1: you cannot don't have the resources to moderate this space,
Speaker 1: you probably shouldn't the space the space. Um And and
Speaker 1: additionally confirming, oh, okay, we we when we made our
Speaker 1: new version of the site. Yes, we backdated some articles
Speaker 1: from previous user generated content that we you know, didn't
Speaker 1: vet properly. We're trying to fix that now they remove
Speaker 1: some of those articles. Um. And that yeah, we none
Speaker 1: of the people who who are the authors of our
Speaker 1: articles are real people and they're all pen names. Um.
Speaker 1: You know. They also have or at least had a
Speaker 1: tab on their website that said right for us and
Speaker 1: looking for people to send them things and saying you know,
Speaker 1: well we will disclose your bio and link to all
Speaker 1: your social media if you write a story for us.
Speaker 1: And they're there was zero of that happening as well.
Speaker 1: So do you think that, I know, like on the
Speaker 1: rules for their telegram they have the no Nazi stuff rule. Um.
Speaker 1: Do you think they're actually trying to discourage that because
Speaker 1: they're scared of legal stuff or is that just presentorary
Speaker 1: and they I guess you know, this is just going
Speaker 1: into speculations so I think this might be more a
Speaker 1: question for even Robert Um in terms of yeah, like
Speaker 1: is the anti Nazi stuff presentorary? And because it does
Speaker 1: seem to be a lot of their user base is
Speaker 1: fostering that type of thing or is you know being
Speaker 1: moved over from other similar channels. Um? Because yeah, like
Speaker 1: a lot of like the amount that we see disclose,
Speaker 1: like you know, intercept with channels like you know, the
Speaker 1: Rise Above Him the channel, UM, and a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of like eco fascist channels, and a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: channels you know on a like a broad range of
Speaker 1: like actual like fascist topics, like people who are like
Speaker 1: into fascist theory. Um. Is quite high that like the
Speaker 1: amount that disclosed shows up. Um. And I don't know,
Speaker 1: like you could look at all their stuff saying I mean,
Speaker 1: like yeah on on the their rule page saying no
Speaker 1: Nazi bullshit. Um. But then if you spend any amount
Speaker 1: of time looking at at where they're posts are forwarded,
Speaker 1: it's almost primary early people who self describe themselves as fascists. UM.
Speaker 1: So I mean, yeah, it's hard to or Donald J.
Speaker 1: Trump Jr. Yes, Yes, it expands out into a lot
Speaker 1: of you know, just like you know, American journalists suits
Speaker 1: studying streamism could also share Discloses stuff on Twitter, right,
Speaker 1: that is part of their thing is making that and
Speaker 1: you know that that does strengthen them because it gives
Speaker 1: them that legitimacy. So then when people point out that
Speaker 1: they have Nazi problem, like, no, that's not us, that's
Speaker 1: just some of our users who are trolling or you
Speaker 1: know whatever whatever bullshit they want to say. Um so
Speaker 1: I guess, like how I guess the real way to
Speaker 1: frame this is like how often have you seen Nazi
Speaker 1: stuff associated with the disclose with the Disclosed TV brand?
Speaker 1: Because that's the one thing we actually can measure, right,
Speaker 1: we can't measure their intentions, but we can't measure how
Speaker 1: often this stuff happens. Yeah, I mean that's always like
Speaker 1: the best way to measure that kind of thing, rather
Speaker 1: than just sort of like making the allegation sting, like
Speaker 1: we find it in this many channels, we see it
Speaker 1: shared in these areas, it's being discussed by these people,
Speaker 1: and like like that that's I think always kind of
Speaker 1: how you actually build these these sort of networks is
Speaker 1: by looking at what is actually spreading where like that's
Speaker 1: it is thankfully something that you can measure pretty objectively,
Speaker 1: and like they are fostering it with the amount of
Speaker 1: stuff they talk about like George Soros and you know,
Speaker 1: the amount of stuff that they like. The way they
Speaker 1: frame breaking news is is has that editorial bent where
Speaker 1: it's very clear that it's getting pushed in a specific
Speaker 1: direction like there's that is that is a thing that
Speaker 1: you can't observe by reading the type of narratives they're
Speaker 1: weaving via how they report information. Um, the the topics
Speaker 1: that they choose to cover, our topics that resonate very
Speaker 1: deeply with conspiracist and with far extremist communities. UM. If
Speaker 1: I had to suspect late, UM, I will say at
Speaker 1: least since the article has come out, Um, they've done
Speaker 1: a better job of moderating their telegram channel at least
Speaker 1: for now. So good job, disclosed TV no one. You
Speaker 1: can't find links to Europe with the last battle there anymore.
Speaker 1: You can still find you can still find very rampant
Speaker 1: homophobia slurs, um, because you know they didn't. They clearly
Speaker 1: auto blocked some words, but people can shorten them or
Speaker 1: use different spellings for those words to still be used
Speaker 1: in the channel. Um, there's still anti Semitic um coded
Speaker 1: anti Semitic references as well responding to something saying oive
Speaker 1: a for example, which is something that tends to be
Speaker 1: used by a lot of neo Nazis and anti Semites. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, even if you do any amount of research
Speaker 1: on Telegram, you will you will find forward links, forwarded
Speaker 1: links to this channel all everywhere, like if it's it is,
Speaker 1: it is so massive. The footprint that they have currently
Speaker 1: in the in like the the cycle of of forwarding
Speaker 1: posts specifically on Telegram UM and yeah, and they're they're
Speaker 1: getting a lot of traction on it because they have
Speaker 1: stuff framed in a way that's really easy for them
Speaker 1: to have those stuff like line up with the communities
Speaker 1: that promote those types of worldviews UM and promote the
Speaker 1: you know, the narratives that they want to foster. So
Speaker 1: let's see, let's have another quick break and then let's
Speaker 1: maybe talk about your big master's project, which is really interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: can I can? I? Can I do it? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: do that. You know, you know what isn't telegram literally
Speaker 1: these ads unless we get an ad by Telegram, which
Speaker 1: we are primarily sponsored by the Duo Brothers UM. But
Speaker 1: that's for a separate project. My favorite at is the
Speaker 1: is the one where it's the kid playing and they
Speaker 1: find a gun. Oh yeah, that's my favorite. And well
Speaker 1: we are thanks to great job. Great We hope everybody
Speaker 1: enjoyed that kid finding a gun kid firing it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's one of my favorite tweets recently was like somebody,
Speaker 1: it was somebody like clipped a screen grabbing news article
Speaker 1: that was like a toddler has shot someone every day
Speaker 1: in the United States for the last three years, and
Speaker 1: somebody quote tweeted and said, somebody fucking stop him. It's
Speaker 1: very kish. UM. The last thing I want to talk
Speaker 1: about is just kind of why news aggregators are bad
Speaker 1: in the first place, and examples of which we've seen
Speaker 1: the past few years, and how they contribute to dis
Speaker 1: information specifically, and how they don't do sourcing for any
Speaker 1: claims and they try to make themselves a primary source
Speaker 1: even though they're not. UM And then also would love
Speaker 1: to talk about your very fancy project. So yeah, we
Speaker 1: saw a lot of news aggregators that like during the protest,
Speaker 1: specifically that that spawned and killed many a news aggregator
Speaker 1: account UM, which did not help things very much. UM
Speaker 1: and this is is an issue that strikes across the
Speaker 1: political spectrum. Yes, I mean one of the biggest instances
Speaker 1: of that would be an account called an on cat right.
Speaker 1: That was the yeah um who you know marketed themselves
Speaker 1: towards the left wing um. And again I don't know
Speaker 1: what their intentionality was. They may have had their heart
Speaker 1: in the right place. I have no idea, um and
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna speculate on that right now. But the
Speaker 1: effect that they caused was damaging to how information is disseminated,
Speaker 1: specifically in high stress events. Um. You know, like for instance,
Speaker 1: the written house shooting, you know, like stuff like that. Uh,
Speaker 1: like the big accounts, the demos around that before that, yeah,
Speaker 1: before that, yes, yeah, like the the in fostering that
Speaker 1: very fast paced unverified information circulation UM that gets you
Speaker 1: know a lot of retweets, It gets it gets a
Speaker 1: lot of eyeballs on it. But but it's hard. It
Speaker 1: makes it very hard to backtrack claims because they do
Speaker 1: not want to link to other accounts because they're mostly
Speaker 1: interested in growing their own account. Um. So and I
Speaker 1: will say Disclose has gotten better about linking to the sources,
Speaker 1: even if the title and the tweet don't necessarily match
Speaker 1: what is in the story they linked to. Yeah, at
Speaker 1: least someone could take a different interpretation from the two. Yes, So,
Speaker 1: just like you know, news aggregation and the way it
Speaker 1: intersects with disinformation and misinformation. Not just a problem for
Speaker 1: the far right, not just a problem for the right wing,
Speaker 1: not just a problem for liberals, not just for leftist
Speaker 1: This is the thing that anyone, anyone can really grasp onto. Um.
Speaker 1: And some of it's accidental, some of it's intentional. Right,
Speaker 1: there's some some people might just do this kind of mindlessly,
Speaker 1: and some people may, you know, do this aggregation with
Speaker 1: a very specific intent in mind. So just be very
Speaker 1: careful whenever you have an account that always leads with
Speaker 1: all caps like breaking like news. Like if if you
Speaker 1: have an account that always does that, maybe maybe maybe
Speaker 1: don't take that account super seriously all the time. Maybe
Speaker 1: you should uh find other sources of info that don't
Speaker 1: always start the tweets with breaking news and all caps
Speaker 1: or advice to people if they do want something like that,
Speaker 1: find an actual news source. Yeah, there's plenty of valid
Speaker 1: criticism to be made against you know, these mainstream media
Speaker 1: m s M. Centrist stuff from from you know, even
Speaker 1: from the left, there's there's criticism. Um, but you have
Speaker 1: to find some way of finding your own meaning and
Speaker 1: understanding of what is going on in the world around you.
Speaker 1: I think CNN Reuters. Yeah, And on that point, I
Speaker 1: think that is part of why I think Disclosed can
Speaker 1: succeed and or like what they did can succeed. Even
Speaker 1: like when I see stuff shared on the left, even
Speaker 1: by like anarchists, because it is a not mainstream media
Speaker 1: news source, the way they can frame things of sometimes
Speaker 1: rarely will match up with like an actual anarchist views
Speaker 1: and the like, Yeah, I'm going to share it from
Speaker 1: this thing because it does feel like an underground you
Speaker 1: know source. It doesn't. It doesn't. It's not you're not
Speaker 1: sharing a CNN article, so you feel better because instead
Speaker 1: you're sharing something that is not in the mainstream. So
Speaker 1: like I get that, I get that pull to not
Speaker 1: something that genuous reading of a CNN article instead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but instead of you're you know, it's not actually better,
Speaker 1: it's just marketing. They're just tricking you via aesthetics and branding,
Speaker 1: and that's all that it is, right, So maybe you
Speaker 1: should learn learn to see past the marketing and branding
Speaker 1: of those types of things and look at the actual
Speaker 1: content of what's being shared. What is the university project
Speaker 1: thing that has been taking up a lot of your time? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and um, so you're back in the US, and I
Speaker 1: got interested, um, especially in looking at the spread of
Speaker 1: Q and on in Germany, and that you led me
Speaker 1: down this research path, um, and brought me especially to telegram. Um.
Speaker 1: Again before it was largely used in in right wing
Speaker 1: circles in the U. S well, the the Nazis have
Speaker 1: have pretty regularly in the US, but on telegram as well. Um.
Speaker 1: But this led me to look at this and and
Speaker 1: especially to to look at telegram the context of as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, Colin Campbell's concept of the cultic billy you, um,
Speaker 1: which I don't know if y'all have talked about that
Speaker 1: on this we have one behind, okay, but Yeah, to
Speaker 1: give a quick summary, is is the con scept that
Speaker 1: there is this space and when Colin Campbell wrote that,
Speaker 1: it was in I believe the seventies. So it was
Speaker 1: a physical space where people go to find these rejected narratives,
Speaker 1: you know, reject the idea of rejected knowledge, and they
Speaker 1: go to seek this kind of knowledge, and and and
Speaker 1: these things. UM. So he's talking about things like UFO
Speaker 1: conferences or or meet ups, or or alternative bookstores, or
Speaker 1: perhaps maybe signing up at an institute to get a
Speaker 1: degree in metaphysics. Yeah. As what a weirdly specific example, Gars, Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: that does red the red of thought. Yeah, anyway, how's
Speaker 1: that going, by the way, Garrison, it's going good, good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and what you find is is people can very
Speaker 1: easily move between ideologies, UM. And as they move between
Speaker 1: ideologies concepts, specific schools, they cross pollinate these schools UM.
Speaker 1: And this is how you get these kind of highly
Speaker 1: syncretic movements like Q and on UM, like the modern
Speaker 1: conspiracy movement UM, which is incredibly syncretic, and UM some
Speaker 1: of the other really bad ones that are out there
Speaker 1: as well that combine these different views UM. Specifically, when
Speaker 1: you start when you start combining the type of like
Speaker 1: cultural mysticism with politics, often you can have very volatile results. Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: can you think of any examples? I mean, in some ways,
Speaker 1: the modern eco fascist movement is built on a lot
Speaker 1: of this type of stuff, so that that would be
Speaker 1: the easiest, that would be the easiest one. I think
Speaker 1: that the syncretism of because I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people have been surprised to see like you know, kind
Speaker 1: of like natural medicine and whatnot, subcultures and eight like
Speaker 1: alien subcultures kind of colliding with Q and on and
Speaker 1: and these like more like far right neo Nazi type groups,
Speaker 1: and the fact that there are all of these things
Speaker 1: that were associated for years kind of more with the
Speaker 1: left have been increasingly um pulled into this this sort
Speaker 1: of weather system of conspiratorial thinking has been surprising to
Speaker 1: a lot of people who don't understand this stuff. But
Speaker 1: it makes total sense if you if you have been
Speaker 1: paying attention to the scholarship on on what is actually
Speaker 1: like how cults sort of form like it's it's it's um.
Speaker 1: It's like a weather pattern that's been building for quite
Speaker 1: a while. There's a gravity to it that sucks um
Speaker 1: everything in together, and it all kind of it's as
Speaker 1: you said, syncretic um. It's because not to get into
Speaker 1: horseshoe there, but this is even how you get some
Speaker 1: of that crossover, right, Yes, yeah, that was that was
Speaker 1: That was what I was just gonna mention, is that
Speaker 1: even a lot of like the left wing authors or
Speaker 1: you know, post left wing authors who got into this
Speaker 1: like cultural mysticism. Um, you see their texts now getting
Speaker 1: shared by like like open fascists. Even though these authors
Speaker 1: were anti fascist, Um, they are able to still pick
Speaker 1: and choose what parts they're writing to appropriate because some
Speaker 1: of it can kind of synchronize ends a very long time.
Speaker 1: Like if you we've we talked about in our Gabriel
Speaker 1: the Nunzio episodes Fume, which was this kind of like
Speaker 1: we're a large chunk of like the fascist intellectual movement
Speaker 1: got started, um in the post World War One period,
Speaker 1: but also there were like a ton of anarchists and
Speaker 1: a lot of like left wing um like thought leaders
Speaker 1: and whatnot. We're kind of all it was again kind
Speaker 1: of there there was this kind of like gravity center
Speaker 1: that pulled everything in and it all started churning together.
Speaker 1: And um, yeah, we're we're we're we're seeing that happen now,
Speaker 1: um and it sucks. That's great to jump back to
Speaker 1: campl That's one of those examples of those physical space
Speaker 1: of the call and that call Campbell was talking about right, Um,
Speaker 1: where it's it's any place that ideas that are rejected
Speaker 1: by you know, the orthodox kind of the establishment they're
Speaker 1: is overlap. There is not necessarily ideological overlap, but there
Speaker 1: is an interplay between them as people move between them
Speaker 1: and as these ideas come into collision with one another.
Speaker 1: Um and with the Internet, right, whole different fucking ball game.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, because that space is now everywhere exactly and
Speaker 1: and telegram specifically has these specific affordances that make it
Speaker 1: ideal for having this soup of bullshit on it as well. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's additionally one of and this may be changing.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of discussion going on about this, especially
Speaker 1: within the German government, who could actually they already have
Speaker 1: a law that they could use to say, hey, you
Speaker 1: can't have Nazis on you can't have this Nazi ship
Speaker 1: in telegram. Um. But telegrams one of these last places
Speaker 1: where where things are largely allowed to spread without any
Speaker 1: kind of interruption, right, um, which I do think you
Speaker 1: know you look at telegram is used in in um,
Speaker 1: the Hong Kong Uprising as well, it was used for
Speaker 1: it was used in the George Yeah, George Floyd uprising
Speaker 1: as well. Um. And it's the same things that people
Speaker 1: too at time is fake, um, bolish lane of your time. Um.
Speaker 1: But shooting your clock, Shoot the fucking clock. But okay,
Speaker 1: let's get back to the topic. Yeah, but but but
Speaker 1: but drumming back into this Telegram markets itself, is this
Speaker 1: very secure platform. It's probably not right. It does have
Speaker 1: it's certainly not. No, yeah, absolutely not. It does have.
Speaker 1: It does have encrypted chats, but that's only for one
Speaker 1: to one messaging between people. And even then you need
Speaker 1: to go and make you sure that security settings right.
Speaker 1: And again I I don't fully trust that. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't fully try. I mean signal is about barely trust signal. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I trust conversations when everyone has put their own inside
Speaker 1: a Faraday bag in a house and then we walked
Speaker 1: two miles into we walked two miles into the woods,
Speaker 1: then you can have a conversation. Yeah. Um, but Telegram
Speaker 1: market itself is very secure app right, um, which is
Speaker 1: which is largely marketing. You know, it's it's appeal is
Speaker 1: that it's not WhatsApp, it's not owned by Facebook. It's
Speaker 1: probably worth acknowledging that for because it's also very popular
Speaker 1: with a lot of people in um, you know, parts
Speaker 1: of the global South and countries with authoritarian governments, and
Speaker 1: it is has been used for a lot of organizing.
Speaker 1: It can be more secure and all more secure, but
Speaker 1: also more accessible um than what than any other tool
Speaker 1: people have access to. I mean in Syria, it's like
Speaker 1: it's again extremely common for like neighbors, like neighborhoods and
Speaker 1: towns will have like Telegram groups for this little village
Speaker 1: where they A lot of stuff gets done over Telegram
Speaker 1: in places like that. And Telegram sits in this interesting
Speaker 1: space between social media. UM. It's not a full on
Speaker 1: social media site, but it's also not just a messaging
Speaker 1: app like Telegram. It's kind of to categorize. It is
Speaker 1: an interesting sort of like in between type thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you can have essentially unlimited I think the number
Speaker 1: is in the hundreds of thousands for how many people
Speaker 1: can join a group message UM on Telegram. And you
Speaker 1: also have these one way messaging thing called channels, where
Speaker 1: where one person or group of people can send out
Speaker 1: messages that appear alongside everyone else's message feed as well. UM,
Speaker 1: and that can you can also enable comments on that UM,
Speaker 1: which I'll get into in a second. UM. But but
Speaker 1: it's a great way to share information as well. And
Speaker 1: what I was specifically looking at is the forwarding of
Speaker 1: messages because you you can forward a message from this
Speaker 1: one channel into whatever group chat you're in, and it
Speaker 1: links back to that channel. And I was interested in saying,
Speaker 1: how far you know, what connections can we make from this?
Speaker 1: What kind of zigzagging can we find? Um enhancer is
Speaker 1: sucking a lot yea where where someone may may used
Speaker 1: Telegram for for example, a neighborhood group message right, and
Speaker 1: then someone forwards a messages a message for this channel
Speaker 1: UM or for this other group message UM, where they
Speaker 1: talk about, oh, here's kind of help practices to use.
Speaker 1: And then you get into the pseudo science of things
Speaker 1: crossing into further messages from what's forward forward groups and
Speaker 1: channels from what's forwarded into that group and channel, and
Speaker 1: so on so on, until you get to the neo
Speaker 1: nazis eventually UM. And it's also it is it is
Speaker 1: a concerted effort on the part of people pushing their ideology,
Speaker 1: who will go in the comments of these giant channels
Speaker 1: and say, hey, check out my channel. Um, what's not
Speaker 1: a real one? You know Aaryan cooking which is probably
Speaker 1: a channel but probably is great job check sorry, but
Speaker 1: check out check out, check out, check out this or whatever.
Speaker 1: And and especially when q and on moved on a
Speaker 1: lot of promoters, it was awful. Um, there there was
Speaker 1: organized groups of of internet neo Nazis going on and
Speaker 1: trying to pill boomers into neo Nazism. And because of
Speaker 1: the because of the mesh like network of Telegram, they
Speaker 1: try to make those meshes connect via dissemination. Right you can.
Speaker 1: You know, people who are dedicated to these more esoteric
Speaker 1: groups can join more regular like MARKA groups or qut
Speaker 1: on groups and start slowly bringing links to the start
Speaker 1: doing links and forwarding to the more extreme channels. Um.
Speaker 1: And eventually yeah, that does that does work. It can
Speaker 1: be a slow, careful process um, or it can be
Speaker 1: very fast and like bombastic. And it'll depending on the person.
Speaker 1: One of them will latch onto one, one will watch
Speaker 1: onto the other. Yeah. And and before the article came out, UM,
Speaker 1: what I did see was the specific thing of accounts
Speaker 1: that I would associate or or believe to be neo
Speaker 1: Nazi um encouraging people to join their groups and channels
Speaker 1: UM in the in the telegram group message as well.
Speaker 1: And I cannot speak to what that looks like right
Speaker 1: now after the article has come out, yeah, and I've
Speaker 1: been trying to take a break from telegram for my
Speaker 1: day to day life, um and focus on reading actual books.
Speaker 1: So but yeah, that is I can always tell when
Speaker 1: one of us has been spending time on telegram because
Speaker 1: the things we consider jokes get much worse. Yeah. You
Speaker 1: remember when I found that playlist of Blinks covers. It
Speaker 1: was what there was like a hundred of them or
Speaker 1: some full. Yeah, you always find you could, You could
Speaker 1: find the most fucked up stuff. Don't don't do it.
Speaker 1: Don't don't scroll untilsolutely do not. You're not going to
Speaker 1: get this isn't like covering the same you don't need
Speaker 1: to be It's it's not even it's not worth it,
Speaker 1: Like there's no sacred novel like knowledge that we're hiding.
Speaker 1: It's just it's it's just kind of sucks, like it
Speaker 1: just like it just to feel bad. Yeah, it just
Speaker 1: makes you feel worse about life and yourself and the
Speaker 1: people around you. So the scope for your master's project
Speaker 1: what it's kind of the what's the what's the deal
Speaker 1: with like tying these things together? I guess yeah. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: so using this social network analysis to argue that the
Speaker 1: telegram does function as this cultic milieu. Um. Which yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems which seems to be the case. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and the question gets into what is the
Speaker 1: responsibility the platform? Right? Um? Because I fully believe there
Speaker 1: should be something at least similar to this. It has
Speaker 1: been used for you know, purposes the longe with my politics,
Speaker 1: in which I would call good and needed. Um. However,
Speaker 1: they've also allowed this fucking awful system to spread. It's
Speaker 1: it's interesting to see when telegram has had to step
Speaker 1: in and they you know, they have pulled down some ices,
Speaker 1: accounts and channels. Um. And and they have down when
Speaker 1: I was in um Al Hall, which is that the
Speaker 1: camp where all the ISIS prisoners were in Syria, Like
Speaker 1: while Jake and I were in the camp, we could
Speaker 1: see on telegram like ISIS supporters and al hole talking
Speaker 1: about stabbing guards like in real time. It was not
Speaker 1: particularly Uh. They've done like a lot. There's less of
Speaker 1: it than there used to be, but it is still
Speaker 1: not hard to find ices on telegram. Yeah. And they
Speaker 1: they've taken down a few amounts of neo Nazi channels. Um.
Speaker 1: It's it's funny because oh God, maybe cut this. But
Speaker 1: they've taken on some of the nasty channels when they've
Speaker 1: shared iceis Ship for example. Yeah, yeah, I think we're
Speaker 1: we've were familiar with that line of thing. That's something
Speaker 1: we've mentioned before. There has been pressure from from the
Speaker 1: play Store and Google as well, or the play Store
Speaker 1: from Google and and the app store Apple App Store
Speaker 1: from Apple to say we we aren't going to carry
Speaker 1: the app if you don't do just a tiny bit
Speaker 1: better essentially UM which which which also it exists as
Speaker 1: a web client, UM, both as as a web client
Speaker 1: and as a desktop app as well. UM. But that
Speaker 1: would you know, limit some of it um. So, So
Speaker 1: this has become largely discussed in the German in the
Speaker 1: German Parliament because there's a new UM, there's a new
Speaker 1: government in Germany, and and there is this history of
Speaker 1: Germany kind of is the lead for doing things about
Speaker 1: this digital content, especially within the EU. And and as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, there's already alawcal adopt Enforcement Act that requires
Speaker 1: platforms to take down content in Germany. UM that could
Speaker 1: be implemented on telegram as well. There's already a law. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is like the thing why you know
Speaker 1: what I watch happen lots is you know these channels
Speaker 1: will get shut down and they'll make a new one,
Speaker 1: and it will shut down that one and make a
Speaker 1: new one. Right. It's this you see this with like
Speaker 1: discord servers, telegram channels. It is kind of this endless cycle. Um.
Speaker 1: And seeking an end to the cycle is always not
Speaker 1: as easy as what one would hope, UM, because of
Speaker 1: the cyclical nature of building these platforms and connections and
Speaker 1: how the people who run these you know, intersect and
Speaker 1: specifically with with telegrams really easy because the channel gets
Speaker 1: shut down, you're still part of twelve of their channels,
Speaker 1: and odds are one of those channels is going to
Speaker 1: afford you the link to the new channel that was
Speaker 1: that was lost. Yeah, And this is the thing you
Speaker 1: see where they send lists of channels within within extremest
Speaker 1: groups and channels, they will send out a list of
Speaker 1: here's other groups and channels to check out as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean I would So that's something that's you know,
Speaker 1: hard for regular people to actually do. But something I
Speaker 1: think that people who do not own the platforms nor
Speaker 1: lawmakers can't think about is particularly the the cultic milieu
Speaker 1: that does you know, go past regular left right divisions
Speaker 1: in terms of politics and how you know, symbol like
Speaker 1: symbology um and stuff that was you know initially, you know,
Speaker 1: perhaps more anarchist or or left wing is being used
Speaker 1: by people on the right, and some people are really
Speaker 1: confused by that, and there is ways to there is
Speaker 1: ways to understand it, like it is. It does. I
Speaker 1: am very frustrated when I look at you know, people
Speaker 1: online who don't understand why Nazis can use ted K
Speaker 1: and right, it's like, yeah, like it's it's not it's
Speaker 1: it's not it's not not not what It's not not
Speaker 1: really about what ted K actually wrote. It's more the
Speaker 1: symbolic meme of ted K and trying to you know,
Speaker 1: get that, get that line of thinking across is not
Speaker 1: the easiest thing because sometimes it will go in the
Speaker 1: other direction and be like, oh ted K is a Nazi,
Speaker 1: which isn't accurate either, Like that's that's not also the
Speaker 1: most accurate thing to say. So it's it's the cultivalu
Speaker 1: framework of being. Yeah, sometimes these symbols can cross over
Speaker 1: from one thing to another, and sometimes the action can
Speaker 1: be the same. You know, both anarchists and like instructionary
Speaker 1: fascists both want to like attack, like industrialization and attack
Speaker 1: points of industry, right, but maybe their ideologies are slightly different,
Speaker 1: sometimes in specific ways, so it's always a tricky thing
Speaker 1: to kind of navigate. UM. So I think in terms
Speaker 1: of you know, people should think about what symbols they promote,
Speaker 1: uh like publicly and stuff is a good thing, and
Speaker 1: think about news aggregation and how to maybe not not
Speaker 1: just share something because it's countercultural trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what other what other types of narratives the sources spreading
Speaker 1: UM support the work of real journalists because a bunch
Speaker 1: of kick asks people out there um who are doing
Speaker 1: awesome research and work. So I think that kind of
Speaker 1: wraps up the scope of what I want to talk
Speaker 1: about around disclose specifically because I mean, discloses a thing.
Speaker 1: But it's also like it's good as just like an
Speaker 1: example to like this over this broader like phenomenon, I think, UM,
Speaker 1: because like disclose won't be here forever hopefully like you know,
Speaker 1: hopefully in a few years. It's something that we can
Speaker 1: just like look back on and laugh about. Um. But
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's still a good signifier for a
Speaker 1: phenomenon that happens, and the phenomenon even even if disclose
Speaker 1: goes away, the phenomenon is still going to stay, um,
Speaker 1: and it's important to point it out when you see
Speaker 1: whatever the next version of this is. So, And I'll
Speaker 1: also say that the culticnalu isn't necessarily a bad thing. Right.
Speaker 1: This is you know where where the stuff that is
Speaker 1: rejected by the Orthodox goes and clearly eliminating right, any
Speaker 1: kind of culticnal you just means everything is exactly the
Speaker 1: fucking same and falls in line with orthox belief, which
Speaker 1: I strongly disagree with as well. No, there's there is
Speaker 1: a way to be countercultural without being a conspiratorial fascist.
Speaker 1: I would say responsibility in which you were consuming and sharing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that, I would say, like most people who are
Speaker 1: actually counterculture are Yeah, like actual punk is is that
Speaker 1: you know, once you're enforcing traditional hierarchical of viewpoints that
Speaker 1: that ain't punk. That is uh, that's playing into what
Speaker 1: the status quo was. That isn't that isn't revolutionary. Pistols
Speaker 1: would disagree with you, aren't they all? Yeah? But I
Speaker 1: think we can all agree that having living members of
Speaker 1: the sex Pistols was a mistake, and I would I
Speaker 1: prefer Alana Wachowski's version of punk to theirs anyway, So
Speaker 1: hey who cares? UM? So thank you for your work, Thomas. UM.
Speaker 1: I would recommend people reach your article, UM, which you
Speaker 1: can do by googling disclosed TV. Now it will be
Speaker 1: for me. It's the second result that pops up, so
Speaker 1: that school, UM send it to all your friends and
Speaker 1: mutuals who are sharing disclosed TV. UM. You can find
Speaker 1: it on logically dot Ai is the website and the
Speaker 1: full title of the article is disclosed TV conspiracy Forum
Speaker 1: turned disinformation fact Re. Thank you, Thank you for that. UM.
Speaker 1: Do you want to direct people to your Twitter account
Speaker 1: or do you want to be a ghost that fades
Speaker 1: away in their memory? Uh? Just don't be fucking weird.
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter at w underscore Underscore Thomas,
Speaker 1: God damnit, Christ be weird? All right, I guess I'm
Speaker 1: keeping my account Lockford. UM. Yeah, I also want to
Speaker 1: shout out, UM, some of the local mutual aid or
Speaker 1: one of the local mutual aid groups in the town
Speaker 1: where I live or in the area where I lives.
Speaker 1: The Atlanta Justice Alliance. Their cash app is cash symbol
Speaker 1: a t L mutual fund and their venomos a t
Speaker 1: L Mutual Fund. They're helping out. Um they they've done weekly,
Speaker 1: UM weekly provided food and resources for people, and how's
Speaker 1: people living in downtown Atlanta. Um and are a great group.
Speaker 1: And then also people want to give more money to things.
Speaker 1: Shout out Atlanta Solidary Fund who have helped many of
Speaker 1: my friends it out of jail after they were arrested
Speaker 1: at protests. And also you can hire me, yes if
Speaker 1: you researchers, Yes you can. You can't. You can hire
Speaker 1: Thomas if you want. I mean, I've I've I've I've
Speaker 1: known Thomas for a bit. Um they do really good work. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're very They're very they're in my experience, they're very
Speaker 1: careful researcher. They will not say things without thinking about
Speaker 1: them a lot first, which is always great in a researcher,
Speaker 1: or at least not send them money and off putting comments.
Speaker 1: An even mix of money and really off putting Twitter comments.
Speaker 1: One more shot out to my one more shot out
Speaker 1: to my friends at Terroorism Bad Pod, which you should
Speaker 1: listen to and is on Twitter at Terrorism Bad Pod.
Speaker 1: Well that does it for us today. If you, for
Speaker 1: some reason are on social media and you want to
Speaker 1: follow us. You can follow us at cool Zone Media
Speaker 1: or happen or happen here pod um. You can follow
Speaker 1: Robert Evans at I Write Okay, send him weirdly, do
Speaker 1: not do that, and you can send me weird messages
Speaker 1: at creepo time. All right, seem garrison pictures of salads
Speaker 1: that you make, and keep keep doing that for like
Speaker 1: five or six years, to the point that it actually
Speaker 1: becomes funny, because it's going to take a while. I'm
Speaker 1: just happy that people stop sending me deal porn. So
Speaker 1: that's honestly, that's a wind that one's on you though. Alright,
Speaker 1: good finde forbody. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more
Speaker 1: episodes every week from now until the heat death of
Speaker 1: the universe. It could Happen Here is a production of
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