Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 10

Episode Date: November 21, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. Prosecutors describing as a serial killer's savant. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer, it's about the victims.

We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods. Listen to The Shadow Girls on the iHeart Radio app, on Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. What's facing my books? Your grandmother. All of your grandmothers. Wow, Garrison, my grandmother's dead. Well, there's still Facebooky in the grave.

I mean, thank God, no. I think my grandparents briefly got introduced to Myspace before being too sick to use the internet anymore. They were on AOL for a while though. Oh, that's quaint. Yeah, they were on AOL for a while. I don't often say thank goodness for Lewy body dementia, but at least it stopped them from knowing the horrors that were to come in the digital age. They got right off the bus before things got terrible. Yeah, that is. So friends, Romans, countrymen, how do you feel about Metta, which is totally what we're all going to be calling Facebook for now on for forever? My main thought, honestly, is that like the word Metta, the past like two years, the word Metta has been ruined by both like pop culture thinking it's smart and then shit like this. Now that a once useful concept has now been obliterated and we can't use it for anything anymore.

You can't be Metta and the fact that Facebook is attempting to use this as the name of their company shows that Mark Zuckerberg hasn't had a conversation on even footing in his entire adult life. Like everyone is trying to get someone out of him every time he talks to anybody. So nobody would say like, you know, Mark, Metta is a terrible name for a company. But anyway, they did that and they had a big event about two weeks ago where they got up and talked for an hour and 20 minutes about the future of the Internet and what Facebook's vision of the Metaverse was going to be. All this, all this very fun stuff. Okay, so here's the thing, it's a bad idea and normally like bad tech ideas are a dime a dozen and we don't cover them on our show because this is a show it could happen here about collapse things falling apart and the future and what's going to come next. But in this case, talking about Metta is actually really worthwhile because Metta is one example of how the people who are kind of in control or at least in control the significant amount of the world that we live in, particularly the digital spaces that we've all agreed to be locked into. See the future.

I think the thing that like makes it clear why this is in our wheelhouse is an article from wired by Matthew Galt, who's a buddy of mine, he's a great journalist. And it's titled, billionaires see VR as a way to avoid radical social change. And that title does kind of get to the get to the nut of it, but the quotes in this thing are fucking wild. So before we get into Mark Zuckerberg and his vision of the future of the Internet and of humanity. I want to read some quotes from John Carmack. So John Carmack is the guy he made doom, right? Like you can't overstate the the impact John Carmack had on gaming like he invented the first like first, effectively the first popular first person shooter. He was the CTO of Oculus for a while.

And yeah, he's very familiar with like 3D digital spaces. Yes, and he's he's very bullish on VR. And he gave a quote, well, not gave a coat, he talked to Joe Rogan during an interview in 2020. And he said this, some people read this the wrong way and react incorrectly to it. The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted. It is not possible on earth to give everyone all that they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island. People react negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation.

You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot more value to a lot of people in the digital in the virtual sense. And that's one of those things that you can see how a guy like John Carmack, who is again a smart guy who's been ahead of the curve on a number of important things, could could convince himself this is true. This is absurd. And I think what we see in Facebook's video is going to make clear that it's absurd. One of the reasons that it's absurd is that like everything else, the people who are building the metaverse have done like what they've done to the Internet. The Internet before Facebook and Twitter and these like these behemoths used to be weird and decentralized and primarily not for profit. There was there was a period of time in which like the idea that you would actually make money off the Internet like really out of like content or whatever was just silly because it was this it was impossible to monetize.

It was this weird, wild, like creative nonsense pile and you can only kind of make money around the edges of it. But the core of it was just just far too strange and uncontrollable, too wild and free. And that's not the Internet anymore because of the people because in large part of the people who are trying to build these metaverses and the idea that they would allow poor people to have the same kind of resources as rich people in the metaverse. They can't let that happen. They're not the kind of people who would let that happen. They're going to monetize every aspect of this thing. If it becomes real, we ever have like an all-encompassing metaverse, every moment of it and everything you do in it, everything you have in it is going to cost you money. Probably with some kind of bullshit subscription plus adding on like randomized caches and other like loot box type mechanics. Well, in gambling, the children is the business model of the future. By the future, I mean, it's been happening. Yeah, it's the business model they want for. Now, I will state, I think some sort of persistent virtual reality thing will probably happen in some way someday. I don't think any of these people, part of why my thesis of this is none of these people are capable of making it.

It's because they look at this the same way like shitty app developer, shitty like game developers for Facebook look at gaming where it's like everything should cost money, you should be able to pay to win. And it's like, well, nobody likes that. Like nobody, nobody likes those games. Those are not the things that are successful. Like, and it is one of the games that comes up a lot when people talk about the metaverse is Minecraft and what made Minecraft hugely successful. And why you can kind of plausibly see like, oh, this has elements of a metaverse where you're everybody's building these gigantic persistent things that you can interact with and that you can make these incredible people and me like works of art in Minecraft. They did it for free. And they did it because like nothing costs money really in Minecraft. If I'm not mistaken, like you can make anything with nothing. You just buy the game and then you have the game and you can build whatever you want. Your equity is effort, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if like, you know, like one of my friends like learned computer science, so he could like create circuits, right? He like he built a like functioning computer in this game. Yeah, you can build computers. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. If you're going to tell me sometime in the future, virtual reality in the Internet is going to get like so good and so pervasive that eventually people will bootstrap together. Some kind of metaverse. Yeah, maybe like that. That could happen. If it comes from like a cyberpunk aspect where like emphasis on the punk, then sure, I can see this being a thing. But the way tech companies are talking about this, that's not how people use the Internet currently.

It's specifically like the mainstream people. There's no way. Yeah. And there's there's a few more like one of the things that Matt brings up in this article is like VR is a way to avoid radical social change. Is like kind of the one of the reasons why he's number one. And I think why we should all be kind of critical about how realistic it is is kind of the present state of virtual reality, which is about 1.7% of steam users have a VR headset. Steam being kind of the largest app to try to monitor like how many people are using VR, right? Like it's kind of your best. Yeah, it's the biggest PC gaming. Yeah. Headsets sales of VR headsets did go up about 30% during the pandemic. But that was kind of alongside a surge in video game sales. Yeah. VR headsets were already we're already boosting and the pandemic definitely emphasize that because it's like, hey, I'm stuck in my house. What can I do? Well, I'll buy like a $200 Oculus. So, you know, walk around and fight ninjas in my living room. And VR is like real like VR is cool.

I have a VR headset. I've had it for years. It can do one of the things that I talk about like what it takes for technology, new technology to like go viral to become like endemic. It has some of that, which is that as soon as you put one of these on most people, unless you're one of the people that it makes sick, most people, if you put them on and you show them the right thing, they're like, oh, this is actually way cooler than I thought it was going to be. Yeah, absolutely. So that is like I'm not I'm not like has I'm not poo pooing the entire idea of VR. And there's there's there's been some successes on it. Like Half Life Alex sold about 2 million copies, which is huge for VR, but like also nothing for a video game. Like that's like for a big for a fucking Half Life game that shit, which just it just shows that it's still like fractional, which I don't think any of these people are kind of missing. But it does kind of point to, again, the degree to which this technology would have to leap up for anything like what Facebook, what we're about to talk about, like it for that to actually be popular. There's a difference between developing VR gaming and developing this metaverse concept, which goes way beyond VR gaming. Yeah. Yeah. But I so what I find, what I find so like doomed about this isn't the technology, even though I think it's important to acknowledge there's a long way to go just in terms of like how heavy it is how much space you need how graphics not fully immersive it is, you know, yeah, yeah, trying to remove lighthouses making it more mobile. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the control schemes are still kind of jank like, yeah, there's a lot to be done.

But all of that's I mean, think about the first iPhone, right? It was like a fucking Brit compared to the shit today. All of that gets better. Yeah. The first VR headset compared to the Oculus two, it's like a massive improvement in basically every way. I don't think when people criticize this stuff by pointing out like how primitive VR is today, I don't think that means anything. It is like worth noting, you know, its current level of adoption, but it's not people compare this to like 3D TVs and stuff. It's not that 3D TVs were immediately obviously from the beginning, nothing but a but a grift. Because there's nobody wanted what really wanted what 3D TVs had like VR people do want what VR does and eventually the tech will get there. Bullshit is the idea. And this is why I think this article by Galt is so good. The idea that VR is going to allow the poor and downtrodden of the world to have a slice of the good life. And this is something Carmack is particularly bullish about quote, not everyone can have a mansion, not everyone can have a home theater. These are things we can simulate to some degree in virtual reality. Now, the simulation is not as good as the real thing.

If you are rich and you have your own home theater or mansion or in private island, good for you. You're probably not the people who are going to benefit the most. Most of the people in the world lived in cramped quarters that are not what they would choose if to be if they had unlimited resources. Incredibly deranged. Yeah, it's out of its mind. That's not how VR works. I can put on my headset and load up a nice forest and it's not the feeling of being in a forest. That's not how our senses work. So until we can hack our own brains into feeling things we don't actually feel, then it's not a thing. And we're nowhere close to that level of technology. Even just to the degree that he's talking about, if you don't have a big home theater, you could just put it on and have a huge TV, which is a thing that VR can do now. I've tried it.

But it's not good. Garrison, you come over two, three times a week and we watch movies with all of our friends in my living room. The good thing about it, it's nice to have a large screen. I have a big TV, but a big part of the experience is with your friends. You're watching them react like you're eating food together. You're doing all this stuff that will never really be possible in VR. I have a lot of respect for John Karma. He made Doom, right? That's a third of my childhood. He's out of his mind now. If he thinks that that's what people want, what poor people want, you've been rich for too long, sir. You don't understand human beings anymore. The particular type of escape, using VR as that type of escapism is totally wrong, because VR can be escapism, but it's not going to trick you into thinking you're living in a mansion. That's not how VR works, because you're walking around a tiny room in your house and you can't feel anything. You can walk through cupboards, which is a great way to play VR games, as you can just hack it by walking into stuff.

The article notes that Elon Musk is working on a brain machine interface called Neuralink. Yeah, Neuralink, yeah. Who knows? I will say that's a little bit like how realistic all of those dreams are is questionable. That said, something like what they're claiming it is will eventually be figured out. Well, and it probably should be destroyed. It probably should be destroyed. Like you've not put the chip in your brain. Don't do it.

Val's Gabe Newell is really bullish on that technology. Gabe Newell is the guy we have half life for. He and John Carmack, if there's a Mount Rushmore of gamer dudes, they're on it. Val's own esteem. They make one of the better headsets. Yeah. Again, we're about to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who I do not think is a visionary. Both Carmack and Newell are visionaries. Doesn't mean they're right because visionaries are wrong all of the fucking time. It's part of their job. But they're both really, really fucking bullish on this.

Newell is a big believer in like the promise of kind of what the Neuralink, the brain interface technology and VR. He told IGN in 2020 we're way closer to the matrix than people realize, which I don't think is the case. And Newell is the person who I've just talked about like how smart he is. He is even more out of his mind than John Carmack on this shit. In an interview with New Zealand's One News, he talked about his vision of the near future, which is a world in which brains and computers interface and computers can make changes to the human brain. He called the human body a meat peripheral. Jesus Christ. He has lost his mind.

This is the thing about VR and the metaverse in general is over emphasizing that we basically just live in the meat space. And the meat space exists just to make content for the online space. Which is so fucking weak. And the online space is the actual real space and we just have to operate inside our meat space to make content for that. This is like the way technology has been progressing, the way tech companies have been wanting things to go. And it's the most dystopian thing that's going to give so many people disassociated of mental disorders. It sucks. Horrible for you.

I'm going to be super interested to see people of my generation, including myself, how we develop mentally the next 20 years based on how fake our lives have been because of how much we exist and socialize within this false network. It's going to be interesting to watch. I used to be really optimistic about aspects of VR. I actually, when I was in Mosul, I filmed not that like other people did this before I did, but I was kind of one of the early people filming like a VR documentary of some combat of like the Battle of Mosul. Aspects of which were aired as a 360 and a bunch of different like TV networks. And I had this belief that like, yeah, VR, because the visual aspect of VR is so good, you know, you know, even at that point, 2017 was already so good. I had this belief that like, well, if you could, because the first time I ever went into a war zone, it was such an affecting experience. And I thought like, oh my God, if you could somehow carve out this moment of experience and like transmit it to other people, maybe that would mean something.

Maybe it would like have an impact on people. I do think that is possible in the long term. Yeah. Yeah. I think maybe we'll like, we'll see. The question is like, can you ever make people give a shit? Yeah, if you feel like horror games, the level of like anxiety and some degrees trauma of playing like a really well made horror VR game is incredibly intense. And that's something that can be done very well.

So I feel like that type of like surreal experience like a war zone could actually be carried over to some degree in VR to like change people's minds on like, hey, maybe war is not good. Yeah, I mean, that that's the dream. I don't know how much I still believe that. But reading people like Gabe Newell and how they talk about this technology makes me lose some hope. Yeah, it makes me want to throw all the headsets in a river. Here's another thing Gabe Newell said in that interview, Garrison, after calling the human body a meat peripheral. Uh-huh. You're used to experiencing the world through eyes, but eyes were created by this low cost bitter that didn't care about failure rates and RMAs.

And if it got broken, there was no way to repair anything effectively, which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. But it's not at all reflective of consumer preferences. What the fuck? The miracle of the human eye. What the fuck? Yeah. No. Fuck it.

Fuck eyes. Like Gabe. There is some aspects of transhumanism that I like. I like being able to like change like body parts at will with like my mind. But this type of stuff makes me want to throw all technology into a river. I support the idea of like, it would be great if when people lose their eyes completely from like shrapnel or whatever, some sort of like degenerative disease, we could just pop new eyes in there. Absolutely.

Yeah, 100%. We start cloning eyes. I think that's a great thing. But eyes are amazing. Like the eye is incredible. Like the most impressive camera ever. We're nowhere close to replicating the abilities of the human eye. It is not a low cost bitter.

It is like imperfect like everything that is part of the human body. But like he's upset that he can't monetize it the same way, right? That's his problem. He's also talking about like, well, they break down. It's like, motherfucker, have you used a computer? You're Gabe Newell. I know you've used a computer. Like you want to talk about breaking every computer I've ever owned.

I've used steam before. Yeah. I use steam, motherfucker. I would rather have my eyes and I'm wearing glasses right now. Go suck an egg. And it goes on because he can't stop shit talking like reality. He talks about like in the virtual world he wants to build, the real world will seem flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences

you'll be able to create in people's brains. And I want you to keep that in mind. My dear friends and colleagues as we leap now into the Facebook live stream. I mean, first of all, I think would it be worth like explaining to, I know we've danced around what the metaverse is, but for people who are totally unfamiliar, do you think it would be worth giving a general explanation? Yeah.

Will that be covered in the Facebook thing? That's kind of covered in the, because this is Facebook building it. But I think we should, you're probably right that we should give a little bit of context about like where they got this idea, because again, Mark Zuckerberg has never had an original thought in his life. He's not the first one to do this. And Gabe Newell and John Carmack have had original thoughts in their life, but this is not an original thought from any of them.

All of them, everyone anywhere who talks about the metaverse, is whether or not they know it a fan of Neil Stevenson. Yes, this is all based on Neil Stevenson's books. Who wrote a book called Snow Crash, where the point was that in the future, the world is a dystopian corporatized nightmare. And because things are, in part because things are so bad and incredibly highly like advertised and monetized persistent internet

called the metaverse that exists all around us and is totally immersive, has come to dominate everyday life. And it's a bad thing. Like Snow Crash is a story of like, wouldn't this future be horrible? Yeah, it's not like, hey, this is a cool thing, but these tech guys read this and are like, oh, that seems like fun, we could do that.

Neil Stevenson, who is yet another person I respect, made one crucial flaw, which is he gave the hero in his book a katana. And because the hero in his book has a katana, everyone was like, wouldn't this be rad if this were the future? Let's make this be the entire future. It's a real tragedy. We do need to abolish katanas. We would save so many lives.

Honestly, you could probably make a strong case that the katana has a huge chunk of the cultural weight that it has because of Neil Stevenson. He's a big part of that, right? You've got a lot of movies and stuff too. Yeah, but the katana cyberpunk kind of melding. Yeah, and it's a bit dated now, but it's still like a good book to read.

There's a bunch of silly stuff. It's complicated and a lot of other cyberpunk art, some better, some worse. Some worse, cough, cough, ready player one. Yeah, and not every cyberpunk sense, because there's people like Cory Doctorow who do some really cool shit, but most cyberpunk sense has to some extent

borrowed from Neil Stevenson's work. And Facebook's entire idea is based on this. And so the idea is that it is a persistent, fully immersive digital world that interacts with the real world. So you can be in VR, hanging out with friends from around the world in a fake living room, and then call someone and see a video of them in the real world as they're walking to a concert or whatever

and talk to them and make plans. That's the idea, right? Yeah. So this video, it opens with, you've got your little introduction in music and stuff, and then we see Mark Zuckerberg looking like a fucking golem. And so it is. Yeah, and the first thing that I really noticed about this

is that he talks about how we're all going to do this together, meaning invent the technologies and use cases that are going to make the metaverse worthwhile. And when he says all of us, this is not an internal Facebook video. This is a video, the meta video is heavily angled towards developers and investors. And it's been viewed by a lot of people,

like 12 million to date. But he's talking about a big part of what he's saying is that the technology for all of the stuff that we've rendered, because most of what's rendered in this isn't game footage, so to speak, like it's not a game, but whatever. It's, here's how it might look if the technology is ever invented. Yeah, like nothing is like in engine or anything close to it. It's all speculative.

What's interesting about this to me is that he's saying, we're going to build this together and sort of acknowledging that like Facebook does not have the capacity to make this thing they've dreamed about, but Facebook's going to own it. So he's, a lot of like this is him tacitly admitting, I want to take your surplus value to make a metaverse that I then control and monetize entirely at my own discretion.

Which is cool. It's great. It's also like, I think, you know, I think if you want to sign of where this is actually going and like the actual creativity behind this, like, okay, again, everything in that video is a mock-up, right? It looks like dog shit. It does.

It's so ugly. It's hideous. It looks like a fucking connect game, or like a fucking Wii game, which is fine for a connector or Wii game, but I don't want to live there. Like it's always weird and cartoony. Yeah.

So he talks about in kind of laying out why he thinks this is the future. Zuckerberg talks about how text used to be the basis of everything online, but now like photos and videos dominate. And that's a visual thing. Yeah. Yeah. As that change happened from like text to video to photos

to videos, the next change, he kind of frames it like the, the obvious next evolution is to what he calls an embodied internet, where you're part of the experience. And that's the metaverse, which again, if you don't... I think that part has some true elements. I agree. I don't think he's entirely wrong there. Obviously, that's not his idea.

Oh, running out of time. Okay. Thank you for telling me. Meeting is what I've heard about the host and that includes unlimited minutes. Great. Thanks, Zoom. Speaking of metaverses.

Yeah. I'm going to flop onto a share screen and I'm going to show you guys a section from this, from this video. Think about computers or phones today. Now, since we're doing this remotely today, I figured, let's make this special. So we've put together something that I think is really going to give you a feeling for what this future could be like.

We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet. We'll be able to feel present. Like we're right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are. Okay. So I'm pausing it here because I want you to watch this. The room that Mark Zuckerberg is in, he's not in the metaverse

yet. He's in like a house. I think it's supposed to be his house. It is clearly not a place human beings live. It's not an actual house. It has been set dressed. One of the ways you can tell is that all of the books and picture frames on the bookcase are like the same flat tones because

they're not meant to stand out. They're meant to blend in. And very tellingly, this is what's interesting to me. As soon as he steps into the frame where he's going to announce this, the thing that is directly next to his head is the only thing that's not like the same kind of beige as everything. It's a bottle of barbecue sauce that's being used as the bookend to a bunch of books.

Now, meta immediately after this, like people joked about it online and meta started tweeting about it and like trying to make like jokes about, oh, Mark just loves his, you know, his barbecue so much. Like they tried to turn it into a meme because they think it's humanizing. And kind of one aspect of the meme they were putting together is that like, oh, he just forgot to, you know, he just, he's

so into barbecue that he leaves his sauce around. That was put there on someone's orders. Like that was planned. It was to create me. We're seeing Marvel does as well. Yeah. They're releasing promotional images specifically designed to be turned into memes.

And it doesn't work. We said so obvious. Like cause people like, you know, yeah, we're not going to use this cause it's, it's a, it's a dog shit horrible, horrible cinematography, bad colors. It's not a fun meme, but people did fall for the Mark Zuckerberg thing. Like, oh, look at the barbecue sauce.

But yeah, that was intentional to create like a viral thing to try. Yeah. Anyway, I'm going to let Mark continue here after I made my little point. When I send my parents a video of my kids, they're going to feel like they're right in the moment with us not peering through a little window.

When you play a game with your friends, you'll feel like you're right there together in a different world, not just on your computer by yourself. And when you're in a meeting in the metaverse, it'll feel like you're right in the room together, making eye contact, having a shared sense of space and not just looking at a grid of faces. So that's important because a big aspect of what he's trying

to sell here, why he's, he's trying to convince people that this is a real thing is that it's a balm for loneliness. Right? Yeah. He is, he is, and he's one of the people who's responsible for pushing our society to such an atomized and isolated direction. Facebook propaganda has isolated huge numbers of people from their families.

It's, and of course, then there's just the aspect of it that is the lockdown, which has isolated people, a number of a lot of which ties back to disinformation spread on Facebook. But like, he's selling this, you know, as a, this will make you less lonely. It'll make you feel like you're all together. Yeah. And it's, it's, he specifically says at one point, this isn't

about spending more time on screens. It's about making the time we spend on screens already better, which is horseshit because as the Facebook papers make clear, Facebook has repeatedly refused to do things that would have reduced the harm of their platform because it would have reduced the traffic that they've got. And I think those are the kind of decisions you can. Yeah.

I mean, and still like tech, technologically, we're still not there. Like when you're in VR, you, even if you're interacting with other like 3D like personas of people, specifically like VR chat was very popular among like furries. And I think they are honestly the best example of what the metaverse could actually be is how furries use VR chat. Yes.

Even still, that is very different than standing in a room with someone in a fursuit, right? Like it's totally, it's, it's totally different and metaverses and this type of thing. I don't think we'll actually solve alienation. I don't think. No. Because you're not actually touching anyone.

Like it's, it's not, it's, you're not, there's still that, that, that digital fog between you and everything else. Do I think there's some elements of it that could be developed specifically using AR that would make things a little bit cool? Yeah. But it's not going to solve alienation as a concept. In fact, it could actually make it worse. It could make it worse.

Like again, there's some use cases for, I don't know, people who have like ALS, maybe you could develop some sort of rig that would allow them to interact like more with, with people around them and like that could be useful for those people. But like it is not a societal answer to loneliness. And I think one thing that makes that clear is you look at their vision of home spaces. So this is kind of the center of the, of the metaverse they want

to build is everybody has their little digital home that you can set up and you can design to your liking and you can buy things like NFTs to decorate it. This becomes a big part of the pitch that like NFTs are going to be in it. And like that way you know that they have at one point, like somebody buys like an autographed poster for a metaverse concert that's an NFT and they get to put it in their room

and know that it's the only one of those posters or something, which is the dumbest thing I can imagine. Maybe it'll work. I don't know. I don't really see how that's any different from an NFT being revolutionary case than like, you know, being able to buy something in a fucking video game. No, it's just-

The way people already hate to do. Yeah. It's just buying skins or whatever bullshit cosmetic stuff. Number one of the things that's entertaining about this is how bad a lot of the acting is for all of the money and time they have, like Mark Zuckerberg is a shit presenter and this bit where he tries to explain why the home space is so cool. And it shows you like their home space.

It starts at about 430 on the video of people at home want to watch is just a perfect, perfect encapsulation of like how inhuman this world they want to build really feels what even when they try to present it in its best face. Oh, hey, Mark. Hey, what's going on? Hey, Mark. What's up, Mark?

Whoa, we're floating in space. Who made this place? It's awesome. Right? It's from a crater. I met in LA. This place is amazing. Buzz, is that you?

Of course it's me. You know I had to be the robot, man. I thought I was supposed to be the robot. Whoa. I knew you were bluffing. Hey, wait. Where is Naomi? Let's call her.

Naomi. Hey, should we deal you in? Sorry, I'm running late, but you've got to see what we're checking out. There's an artist going around Soko hiding AR pieces for people to find. 3D street art. That's cool.

So I wanted to stop here because this is also part of like what's, it's this perfect, it's like NFT culture and all this shit like the street art they show. This is clearly them trying to be like, there's one of these cool use cases for how the metaverse is going to interact with and influence the real world.

Like this artist pastes this art on a wall that when you look at it in the metaverse or when you film it and you send a video to people in the metaverse, it becomes this big 3D thing. And it just looks like shit. It's just a bunch of like squiggly lines and stuff. Like it's not, like there's good graffiti, especially in San Francisco.

There's incredible fucking graffiti. This is just like nonsense. It looks like, it looks like a fucking NFT. Like it's just this, this kind of shitty. Yeah. It was obviously designed by a computer, not an actual person. Yeah.

And there's nothing like, it doesn't say anything. There's nothing cool about it. And they haven't, again, because Mark Zuckerberg can't conceive of art. There's nothing about this that like makes me think, oh, what a neat futuristic thing. It's just like, oh cool. I can see squiggly lines both in person and on my phone.

I mean, the big part of metaverse and like AR and VR is like, you know, making depth within actually, making 2D space appear to be 3D space. This still just looks 2D. Like it doesn't, it's not, it's not tricking my brain in any way whatsoever, especially with the concept of like filming it on your phone. We have the technology now, like that's not,

that's not the metaverse. That's just filming it already on your little box, as Mark Zuckerberg said. Yeah. And we have the technology to do like that AR thing with fucking, Yeah. Like fucking Pokemon Go did that like five years ago.

Yeah. And it's not what people want. Well, Pokemon Go was successful for a long time. Yeah, Pokemon Go was the closest we ever got to world peace and it was a CIA. Yeah. I mean, Pokemon Go is like the closest we ever got to like the metaverse, like realistically.

Yeah. But people don't want, people don't want to like take photos of crappy street art that then becomes 3D, but still isn't like, I don't know. And it is, it is incredibly grim that most of like, the case uses for metaverse stuff.

The only thing they can imagine it being is like fucking meetings. This is like the biggest thing that they show. He's like, oh, we can make the virtual meetings. They've tried, the video that we just played, they're all in like this spaceship and everybody's 3D, like one person,

it looks like kind of a hologram of their real body. Some people are just like 3D rendered cartoons of themselves. One person's a big robot and they're all like floating in zero G and playing cards. They're all sitting at a table and playing virtual cards. And there's like a bed in the background, but like, you can't go in the bed because it's not a fake, it's a fake arrow.

And you're not floating in zero G because VR will never be able to trick you into thinking, you're sitting in your chair in a room with some shit on your face. You're fucking Carl Havoc and trying to pretend that you're like having a good time playing cards with your friends. It's like, yeah, if I could have a space station house where my friends and I could float around and play cards,

that would be sick, but you're not promising me that argument. You're not actually doing that. No. I mean, there is games that simulate zero G. They don't trick you. They make you nauseous. Sometimes it can be fun,

but like it's I'm not going to be in the same way that eating Hawaiian baby Woodrow seeds can be fun. Exactly. Yeah. So he goes on to talk about the avatars that you'll have, which are basically, he describes them as profile pictures, but much richer because they're live,

which I find unsettling in part by thinking about what will happen when people die to their digital avatars, but whatever. At this point, he goes on to talking about how people, he thinks people are going to actually use these avatars and it's very unhinged. One for hanging out and maybe the fantasy one for gaming.

You're going to have a wardrobe of virtual clothes for different occasions designed by different creators and from different apps and experiences. So one of the things he's talking about that is exciting is that like you'll be able to have a different avatar for like work if you're in a work meeting or like hanging out with your friends. And to me, that says like, oh, so now I'm going to be expected to like maintain

and keep up an avatar for like my job and like dress that fucking thing. And then I'll have to like switch to hang out with people and like, why does that, what does that provide me being able to like sit in a room as an avatar that I don't currently have, like through Zoom? Like why is, in what world is that something people want, Mark?

The only good use case for this is Furries. This is the only way it's worked because they, that has almost like a true representation of their own body. What's this is going to do for regular, for like people who are not Furries is, it'll probably give people a lot of weird like dysmorphia. Or if you're, or if you're trans and you make a female avatar, assuming like, you know, for me,

if I was to make like an avatar that's more feminine, that can be fun for me. But for a lot of people, these weird like digital versions of themselves, well, probably just, they're just like uncanny valley and it'll probably just make you feel weird. Yeah. And he's, he's so focused on like, this as a way for people to work together while being remote, which says a lot, like it's seven, like,

like about a half a minute after this point, or a minute or so after this point, he brags that your home space can even have your own personal office where you work, which is, within the metaverse. Within the metaverse, which really bleak to me just like, yeah, you can go to work digitally.

Yeah. It's going to ruin your eyes. Why would I? You cannot wear VR goggles that long. Your eyes get ruined because it's blasting light into your retinas. Yes. And it's also just like, I, like sitting with a laptop and I have a laptop

and I have a second screen for my laptop and I sit at my comfortable living room table and I write and browse the internet and research and stuff. And yeah, every now and then like, I hunch over too much in my back, it's a little bit sore, but like it's not, it's pretty comfortable and I can get up and move

and do stuff in the house, putting a bunch of shit on me and sitting still and like being unable to perceive the world around me and locked into this uncomfortable digital desk because it's later on, whenever they do, there's this mix of, you can see the videos of the technology

as it actually exists and they're aspirational and the aspirational version, it's like you're in this gorgeous three-dimensional office that looks like something like that. Yeah, you're playing basketball both in real life and in the hologram, which at first of all, just impossible. You're never going to do, never ever going to happen.

That's just physically impossible. But when you see the clips of like, because they do have aspects of this build, when you see the clips of like the workspaces they have built, it's like, oh, 80% of my screen is the Microsoft Word app or Excel or Outlook as it currently exists and 20% of it is like the edges of this little VR office. So all I'm looking at is I'm seeing a full-eye version

of like whatever apps I'm using. Yeah, you can get a VR headset, you can download virtual desktop, you can bring your desktop into your VR space. It's not useful. No. It's novel for the first 20 minutes and then you get bored of it

because you realize that you can't actually see your keyboard so you can't type as fast. There's a great joke about this in the last season of Community. Community has like the best example of the metaverse where he's like, because like the big part of like Epic Games version of the metaverse is like interacting with like brands and all your apps within a 3D digital space,

which is what the Dean does in Community. He has to like run to his email. Yeah, like this is a great example of why this technology is never going to actually catch on for regular people because that's not how they use the internet. You don't want to traverse a 3D digital space to get to your email.

That's asinine. Yeah, and there's aspects of it that are asinine and there's aspects of it that are just impossible. So like a big thing that he's hitting on with this is interoperability, which is like you want to be able to trans travel between different apps, between different programs that different people have made and you want to be able to take like whatever items you buy,

whatever NFTs you have with you. And he's talking about like this will work in games. This is a thing that like you've seen people talk about with like the promise of NFTs for gaming. Like you could get an item that like is yours so they can't nerf it or whatever and like it'll travel for you from game to game. There's a developer I follow on Twitter.

He made the game Adios, which is about like a guy who disposes of bodies for the mob and tries to quit. It's a cool game. He's a good developer. Doc, something or other. He wrote a huge article about like why none of this NFTs can't work for gaming. That also hits on like why what Zuckerberg saying is impossible, which is that like so you're saying that everyone who makes a game

has to build in like a way to handle every single item that you could possibly get in the metaverse and everything that you're having. It's an unthinkable challenge. And like why? And what if a game shuts down, right? Like are you saying they have to continue operating the game forever and updating it forever even once it's no longer profitable

so that you can keep using your item? Like no, it's just it's functionally impossible. But it's what's interesting to me is he's talking about all this. He has to know this is impossible. When he does, there's all these scenes like you said you're playing basketball and like one of them is in the real world and one of them is in VR, but they're both playing in a real world court. And they're interacting with the ball.

With a virtual ball and it's like number one, how is the person in the real world? How do they feel that ball? He says some vague shit about like haptic feedback, which doesn't work that way. Maybe there's a way if you're wearing like a glove that it could trick you into believing you were hitting a ball or something. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks

in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band

called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And not everyone's wearing headsets. We'll get to that in part two, the headset question. But what's interesting is that a huge amount of the coolest stuff, the stuff that you can be like, well, that would be neat. Yeah, if I could fucking play pool with my friend in Germany and it would feel like we were both in the same room,

even though only one of us is standing around a real pool table, yeah, that would be an amazing feat of technology. It's never gonna happen. Certainly not in any kind of reasonable timeframe. Mark knows that all that is going to happen at most is like a digital conference suite that like is damages people's eyes and brains. And he knows that, but he's angry that Zoom beat him to the punch

when the pandemic hit. And this is his, like, that's kind of one of the sinister things about it. There's other sinister shit, which we'll talk about in part two. But you know what, guys? It's time to end part one. This is enough for part one. We'll talk more about... We'll talk about what's really frightening

about a lot of what Mark's trying to build in part two. But for right now, I want to talk about ending the episode, which I guess I just did. Goodbye. I'll see you in part two. Find a forest near you and start exploring at DiscoverTheForest.org. Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here,

the show where we're talking right now about the metaverse that a bunch of rich people think that you're going to want to live in once they ruin the regular world and why it's dog shit. And it is dog shit. So it's just it's just it's just total dog shit. Everything about this seems like a waking nightmare to me so far. If we're actually talking about like what they are what they are immediately trying to because a bunch of this is aspirational nonsense that as we've stated is like

you are never going to play a perfect game of basketball and a mix of real and AR courts with your friend in Hong Kong. Like that's never going to happen. Never. That's not how physics works. That's not how physics works. That's not how electronics works. Maybe when we find out how to literally hack the human brain,

we can like put you into a quasi seizure state that mimics that. The closest thing we have to this right now is actually VR board games is the best is the best example of this or you can play with you can play Settlers of Catan with your friend across the globe. And there's some cool shit you can do with haptics. And haptic feedback is like the basic example of it is when you like touch your phone and your phone like vibrates under your hand to like let you know that you've you've touched like a command.

And there's there's people who think like at some point we would be we may be able to make using haptic feedback like a virtual keyboard that feels like a real keyboard that might be possible. I'm very skeptical of that. That's still like kind of like the idea of a keyboard that isn't there but feels like a real keyboard might be possible. We're nowhere close to that. That's still on the fringes of possibility.

Like this the fucking shit they're showing in this video is like nonsense. We will have laser cannons before we have any of this bullshit. Like we will be shooting each other in space before we have this nonsense. And thank God for that because at least that sounds fun. So the actual center of what they've built in terms of the products that that Facebook is launching now for the metaverse. The core of it is Horizon Home and Horizon Worlds. And I think Horizon is kind of the brand they're going with for all of their

different like meta programs. Horizon Home is the home spaces thing that they discussed earlier where people can like make their own like houses and one of the things they don't talk about in this they keep saying like you can build whatever you want. You can make it look like anything. They don't say a word about how like decorating your digital home is going to be monetized versus how much of it will be sweat equity. And again like the smart thing would be make it all sweat equity.

Make it like Minecraft. Make people be able to build anything they can conceive of if they're actually creative enough and spend the time. They won't do that as they talk about in that like in the video they played like we're like oh this is a cool world. It was made by a developer like yeah you're going to buy the cool shit. I don't I don't know. Yeah you're going to buy it and it's going to suck because all you can do is sit

at a table. Yeah. And it's like you can't go into bed like you can't like all of this stuff is just cosmetic like you're not going to be tricked into thinking it's real. I've been in some cool VR like 3D rooms and like they're cool to look at for like 10 minutes. Yeah it gets boring. Yeah like it's easier like oh yeah it's like the real world but I can't touch

anything. And when they show you the stuff that's closer to real like the different like people chatting in the metaverse and whatever it doesn't look fun. There's a there's a scene where they like show people like watching a YouTube video together in the metaverse and they're all like these disembodied upper torsos because of course VR sets can't can't read your legs. So it's like a bunch of torsos floating around a maximized YouTube video window and it's like I would rather just show a friend my phone.

I would even rather text them a video. You know what's actually more than that is being in person with somebody and watching it on a phone. Or even even without like it's the kind I think that they're expecting that like everyone's kind of bummed when they send a friend a video over signal or text and like wait for them. No I would rather do that than this shit. I don't want to hang out as a bunch of torsos around a YouTube window.

I don't want to have to schedule a VR session every time I want to share a YouTube video. No that sounds horrible and it sounds like I would constantly have to be in VR like he talks about how we're not trying to expand screen time but like am I just waiting around in VR to like show friends YouTube videos? They are real unclear about how often you need to be in a headset. And it's kind of suspicious. It's almost like they don't actually plan on doing anything.

It's all bullshit. I'm going to play another video that they claim to be a use case. And the way this video starts is like this actual person is in an actual real world concert for some guy I've never heard of that Facebook. I think he's clearly some sort of musician with a following that Facebook hired to do a concert for this video. And she like calls her friend on the metaverse and her friend digitally hops into the concert and they like the digital girl and the real girl

are like dancing together at the show which I don't know whatever like that is more possible than the basketball shit. I mean yeah watching of having it like a VR version of standing in a room where a musician plays sure I mean it's not yeah it's doable but it's doable. Yeah I would debate like whether or not it's doable but then after that they see like during the concert this like digital thing pops up that's like do you want to go to a free after party? And first off all of these after parties will cost money and they'll all be dog shit

but that's the same with most real after parties. So I guess that's at least Facebook accurately delivering on the promise of the real world. But I want to play like what happens in this metaverse after party that these two both hop into digitally after one of them so like as this starts the lady who was actually at the concert like sits down at home and gets into the metaverse. Imagine your best friend is at a concert somewhere across the world. What if you could be there with her?

Yeah real yeah real and clear how that works. Like how does the person at the concert see the holographic version? How does the holographic person see that? Yeah is she wearing all that shit while she's dancing? Or is everyone wearing VR and seeing the world through VR? Because I'll tell you what like right now I'm in our break. You're wearing an Oculus this time. I put on an Oculus as a joke and right now I have it on the pass-through mode

which means I can see the real world through my cameras in the Oculus and you know what it looks like shit. It's black and white, it's super grainy, it has no like exposure range, everything is like... You look like you're wearing a sunglasses case in front of your face. I can see the world but I can't do anything because it all is like a horrible digital copy. It's not real, I can't do anything. Aspects of this like at some point pass-through mode will be in color

and the latency will be low enough that you won't really notice it, right? And there won't be latency. But it's not going to be as good as looking at it with your human eyeball. It'll still be a thing. So that girl's going to have to be at a concert dancing, getting super sweaty and like she's wearing something even if it's as small as like regular glasses. I guess that would be better. I'll talk about this more at the end but like if people are actually going to develop this technology

the real way to do it is with AR, not VR. Because with AR, yeah, you could have put on like actual glasses and have like a person show up on the thing and make it look like they're there while actually still seeing the real world. That's going to be the way to do it. Yeah, and I think that is what they're trying to do it. Yeah, I think that's what they're like claiming here but it's really unclear how it's all going to interface, how the AR is going to interface with like the full VR stuff.

Like are we going to have two separate sets of gear, one for when we're in the real world and we can't be fully immersive and one for when we want to dive into the metaverse because they're not going to do both. Do we always carry that around wherever we go? Yeah, but I want to play the section, sorry, I played the video where they were at the concert just because it looks very silly. I want to play the section where they're at the after party because it's dystopian as fuck. So here's the all metaverse after party that looks like a bunch of fucking connect avatars standing around

like a room made out of glowing neon. A digital room, yeah. Nobody's drinking, which is the only good thing to do at an after party that's not cocaine. From the jump, I'm like, well, what is the only good thing about an after party is if you want more drugs and all of the drugs places are closed, so you go to an after party. Maybe at the end you can hook up with a digital avatar. Yeah, it's anyway, I'm just going to play it.

I'm just going to play this dog shit. Where they were. This is wild. Is it? They're just slowly dancing as a giraffe man. Hey, check this out. Charity auction. Yeah, charity auction for NFT merchandise.

That looks like shit. Your new versions of your favorite song. Yeah, it looks dog shit. Well, now you've got to get it. Yeah. It's a horrible 3D chat room. We already have these. These already exist and they're not tons of fun.

The only time they're fun is when you're in first suits and you're walking around a fake city destroying it. That's the only fun way to do this. And the thing they're showing in this is that like an autographed poster for the concert is an NFT that you can buy for a charity auction. And like as they're looking at it, the actual musician walks by and tells them it looks cool. And so they buy it and they have the musician come in for that. Number one to like try to make this kind of like, yeah, you'll be able to do these digital events where you can meet actual celebrities, which like, no. I'm sure celebrities will agree to do Q&As in the multiverse like they do anywhere else, but they're not going to just walk around in some dog shit virtual party. No, because they have money and they can do actual fun things in the actual real world.

They're going to be fucking super models while skiing down a mountain in Lake Tahoe because they're rich. They're going to be like flying in their private jets or driving in a fucking yacht and eating lobster that's been tortured so it tastes better because they're rich. Like they're not going to be hanging out in a digital lobby telling you that a fucking dog shit poster NFT is cool and that you should buy it. Unless you're a millionaire and they want your money because they're Nicholas Cage and they have an addiction to buying Tyrannosaurus parts. I don't know. It's silly. It's ridiculous. Yeah, so one of the things that I thought about when I was watching this is like the concept of metaverse culture. So like at some point, if this is a thing, there's going to be like, like if there ever is a metaverse, people will develop a culture for it. Just like they've developed a culture for Twitter, a culture for Reddit, a culture for Facebook, just as there were like Internet culture or was it?

Final Fantasy World of Warcraft. Yeah, it happens with every community you make online. And that's the thing like there's no I see no space in this thing that Mark Zuckerberg has envisioned as he is presenting it for organic evolution of a culture. None of the things in here are going to make people want to form a culture around it because it's all it looks like it looks like boring yuppie shit. All of it. None of it is actually looks cool or fun. And none of it. None of it is he's not talking about any of it with like the there's there's no openness in it. Like there's no I don't see where a culture could evolve. And if one does, it's going to be directly like in opposition to Facebook moderation.

Like, yeah. Well, yeah. And I mean, and there's there's an extent to which like they can't write because like if you actually let people just like do things like imagine the griefing. That's going to happen in one of these spaces. Right. Like every person's avatar is going to be like 16,000 dongs. Yeah. That just says literally this all it's going to be like this is this is what Twitch looks like. Right. Like every which chat is just a guy posting a hydra made of dongs. Like it like none of none of this can actually work if you let people do literally anything. If you don't let people do anything like why would you know if you don't want to do it?

Yeah. Yeah. Like how are you going to sell them this crap? Like once upon a time there was a game called Second Life. I guess it still exists. People talked about it the way they're talking about the metaverse now. It came just like it was never that. But there was like this beautiful moment where this I think Angie Chung was her name. This like culture writer kind of expert lady was like doing a Q&A and Second Life that was like build as being this like big event for the platform that was going to like make people take it seriously. And a bunch of like users showed up and made a bunch of floating dicks like float through the room during the interview so that like while this person was trying to talk seriously about Second Life just like floating cocks. Floating cocks were zooming past her head the entire time and it was extremely funny and it's exactly the kind of thing that like yeah Mark that's what all of this is going to look like. Any massive event is going people will find a way to grief it and that will in fact be the thing they most want to do.

That will be the actual culture part is fucking with Facebook. Yeah. But you know but the part about that that sucks is like yeah you know like you're an a virtual reality thing right. So like OK what are people going to do in a virtual reality. It's well OK you're going to get you're going to get a bunch of neo-Nazis like figuring out a way to like show you just like the worst shit you've ever seen in your life. Like it's going to be all the stuff from the 2000s were like half of the Internet was just like a video. This is 2010s to like half of Twitter is just beheading videos. Now it's in VR. It's like yeah. Imagine ISIS in the metaverse. It's going to be amazing.

That's something that's even already happening in like VR social media apps. I know of a few specific Nazis involved in January 6th who networked and met with people via of specifically VR chat. So like this is already a thing and making it more broad and then like this small you know because the VR right now is mostly just a small subset of like gaming culture right. And people are into it because there is VR games that are cool like like beat saber is fun right. Yeah there's fun VR games. Yeah absolutely. I am in order for them to break this through into the mainstream they need to make it appealing some way. And the only way they're making it appealing right now is by doing meetings and like concerts. So the next part I want to play doesn't say a lot about the future Mark's trying to build but it's very funny because it's him sitting down with a woman who works in his gaming department. And she's walking him through like what games are going to be integrated into the metaverse.

And it fucking reads like and I think you should leave sketch like it feels like a sketch where the joke is that everyone is awkward and not talking the way human beings talk. And in case you can't watch this chunk of the video and it starts at about like 1934 in the actual Facebook video. All of the video games they're talking about like look dog shit they look like the Kirkland brand of like popular like fighting games and FPS and stuff none of them look very good. So I'm going to play a clip from this because it's very funny. This can build out active communities. Beat Saber has a passionate community. I love Beat Saber. So do I. And Beat Saber just passed a hundred million dollars in my time revenue on Quest alone. It's a great example of a game that keeps releasing fresh content.

They've actually been working on evolving the way that you interact with the tracks and feel the music. The way he's nodding in this like his digital avatar looks more like a person. Here's some Beat Saber. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like regular Beat Saber. Yeah. But it's it's VR. It's already is VR. Yeah. It's already a VR game.

Can't wait to play this. You can already play it with incredible artists to release new music packs all the time. You can do this right now. A little more than I should have. I probably should have been working more on this metaverse presentation. What? Oh, God. Every scene where she's talking to him and he's just like bobblehead nodding just a little bit but not like it's.

He looks so fake. Mark actually will benefit from the metaverse like outside of a financial thing because a sculpted 3D representation of him will be a thousand times better. It looks more human than he looks like more of a person. Yeah. It's I mean it's just like he's scripted it badly and he's a narcissist so he has to be the one to present it again. Oh, I love Beat Saber. Number one, if Steve Jobs were doing this, number one, he wouldn't because he understood what people wanted from technology. But if he were doing something like this, he would introduce like little chunks of it and then he would have a famous person who's charismatic introduce the rest of it.

Yeah. It wouldn't mean fucking him sitting like a bobblehead. And like he would introduce VR and AR into a way that actually integrates how people use the internet already because there is ways of doing it. But it's not this like super monetized NFT like bullshit holographic fake stuff. Yeah. And there's there's aspects of this like he goes through after this like there's a bunch of gaming stuff which is impossible for the reasons we've talked about. Then there's aspects of it that seem cool. Like there's a scene where like an architect gets on to his digital office and like somebody sends him a schematics to a building they're making and he's able to generate it in 3D and walk around the building like,

Okay, that actually seems possible. And that seems like useful. Like you've developed a use case for the all of the architects out there. I'm still not convinced that CAD would actually be better in 3D than it would be like. Sure. It's debatable. I think it may be someday that could actually be useful. Like if you are one of the increasingly small number of people who can afford to like build a house of your own,

I can see why it would be neat to be like, Okay, well, let's do a 3D render of the house and I can walk through it and I could maybe make changes at the last moment as I'm kind of experiencing the flow of the room. That is definitely useful. Where a window is like, yeah, I can that that seems like something number one technologically you could do that more or less now. I don't think it's it's not going to be as instantaneous as this, but if you give it time to render it could be done and it it's something that a number of people might find useful. But again, that's a niche product because like 18 people in our generation are buying homes. I mean, yeah. And also it's it's it's expensive to develop because you would have just modeling an actual life location is a lot of work.

Yeah. Now there is there is a lot of technology that's getting way better at it by cameras and like basically filming a space and the computer can reconstruct it pretty accurately. That is a growing field, but still it is. It's a very niche, you know, area at least. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that is so anyway, there's aspects of this that are ridiculous aspects of this that seem neat. But the longer you watch it, the thing that comes becomes really clear is that all he's really advertising is mass surveillance.

That's the promise. Yeah. Yeah. There's a point in this video where they're showing you how they can like map a real world location so you can be in your actual house put on your VR glasses. And it can map the your actual home digitally in real time. And as you in as you pick up real things in your house, you you see them being picked up in VR and presumably other people in VR could see it. Which we are not quite there yet. I stay pretty in VR technology. We're getting close to this, but we're not quite there.

I mean, we're we're actually we actually are aware what they show in the video. And I'm going to play you a second from it because I want to show you something here. At least I mean like consumer products. We're not we're not at this point yet. Yeah. And I want to show you where we are because this video they're showing like actual footage. So they have built this thing, but there's a catch. And so I'm just going to play it right now.

Right. Out the researcher. So what's critical here is that this is all happening in real time. So if you I'm I've just paused it what you've got here on one side there's a woman in a real like house sitting and picking up like a toy home on her couch. And then on the left you see the VR version of her house which looks close to photo realistic and like the house that she's holding in the real world is floating in the same way that she's holding it like her body isn't there like the stuff she's interacting with is. But if you look at the house she's holding the reason that they're able to do this and it really does work is it's covered in sensors. It's covered in sensors and actually every single thing in the real house is covered in sensors because that's the only way for this to work right now moving is covered in sensors. Yeah.

And it is impressive like as a proof of concept like this this is here we can do this but like it's still light years away from practical and more to the point when you look at this you realize that like well if this is ever going to work. The only way to make it work is for Facebook through this service to map your entire home. Yeah. In real time. Every hour of the day. Yeah. And you can also go on to talk about like how you're going to have gesture commands and like you'll be able to like make an expression or like a hand gesture and that will do things which means that like this service isn't just learning what's in your home and what you do with the things in your home it's it's learning your facial expressions and your gestures and like what they mean and interpreting those at all times.

I can kind of explain where Oculus which is over Facebook I think they're technically renaming Oculus spring to just calling it the meta quest. But wait wait wait the meta quest that's what they're calling it instead of instead of Oculus. God. Okay. So where that right now is basically the only kind of real world interactivity that they have for their VR headsets again for like the consumer models I don't know what's in link development. Is hand tracking. This is the thing they've been working on for a long time is that you put on the headset and the camera and like the cameras and depth sensors built into the headset can see your hands. And like you said you have like gesture controls where you can do certain things with your hand and it'll make certain things happen.

This is the only interactivity that we have. It's OK. It's not perfect. Like it is better than a lot of the other hand tracking systems from other companies. But like it's it's it is very much a work in progress. And the way to make this work is by is very good depth sensing cameras which I think Apple makes some of the best ones right now that they put into the iPhone. The other way of doing this is with lighthouses. So this is like separate separate like separate cameras that you set up around the corners of your house that project different like wavelengths of light and they get it received back so they can map your house.

With not just cameras but also like like in like infrared sensors and that kind of thing. So these are like the two methods of doing it. Facebook is really trying to go full out full on to the everything is built into the headset thing. So yeah no so no like lighthouses everything is just depth depth sensing cameras. So that's why they're working on hand tracking so much because that's something you can actually do. But like I can't pick up anything like the only thing I can pick up is my controllers which because they have sensors built in. They can be rendered in the actual game the same way like my hand can be. So that that's where they're at for that for the consumer products.

It's getting developed again where they're at. You think about what Facebook has already done with the information you provided and how so much of their money comes from selling your data. Yes. The only way for this to work that they've they've. The cameras are always watching everything. Every moment of your existence including like your micro expressions is. Which is why I keep my Oculus in a tiny little box. Yeah.

And here's the thing. If they were to actually develop the technology which I don't think is impossible although it's not particularly close. It's not going to be cheap to store all that. So in order to make it. Outside well it's going to be cloud based but in order to make it like cloud isn't free. You're not to pay. You're not to pay a subscription probably. I think you'll pay some but I think in order to make it affordable so that more people are on it.

They're just going to sell. Sell your data to advertisers. Your data in a way that has never been in a and the government will have access to it. Like yeah it is. It's actually like the thing that he is actually proposing here is I want to build a machine God that knows your sins. Like that knows when your heart rate is elevated that knows what it looks like before you smile that can predict. Like when you're about to make a gesture or laugh because it is so accurately mapped your body and motions. It's actually a nightmare.

Like when you really think about what he is trying to build here. It's like well what's what's the actual use case for this. And it's like well OK so you have a bunch of special forces guys you put them in a VR thing. And then you know you can you can you can have them drill on knowing exactly where all the rooms in the houses where everyone is in where everyone is in a house at any given time. And it's like oh hey this is this is going to be great. This is yeah it's great. Yeah it's it's really cool. They have a so there is a little bit here briefly about where like Mark talks about how the last year or so has been fucking the term he uses is humbling for them.

Oh God. Yeah and you you kind of think that like he's about to say that like oh because we we made life dramatically worse and our service was integral in several ethnic cleansings and a couple of civil wars and like hate crimes on a scale that was unimaginable before it really came into being or that we thought had been at least we thought had been consigned to a century or so ago before Facebook came into being. But no that's not why it's humbling. Why he says it's been humbling is that Facebook has been developing services for other platforms like the App Store where they don't have total control and that sucks. And that's like the thing that that's the that's him admitting a little bit that like a big part of this is they're trying to build a service the entire Internet gets filtered through that they completely control so that they are never in anyone else's wheelhouse. Like everything is done through Facebook and with Facebook's approval as opposed to them having to get Apple to say yes to something. Yeah yeah Facebook is going to become the state.

And that's the thing that's trying to do it says so much about Mark that he's like what's humbling isn't all of the mistakes I've made it's that periodically I have not had total control. It's great. He then from immediately from this says that if we all work at it all of us the Metaverse can reach a billion people by the next decade. Which is very funny. Yeah that he thinks that that's like an enticing fucking thing. So one of the use cases they try to present is they have a beauty influencer who like made like a fucking candle line or something that she sold on Instagram and she's she's very successful on Instagram they bring this lady in. And number one as soon as they started interviewing her. It's it's what I was saying about yeah have a higher celebrity to do this mark you're not charismatic.

She's immediately the most engaging person in the entire presentation because she's a successful like she's someone who understands how she appears on camera. How to make herself seem likable on camera how to like interact with the world on a camera and nobody else in this video understands that. Which is just funny it's not particularly like say anything other than that like yeah have professionals do difficult things mark don't don't hire your weird gawky engineering staff to like be the faces of this thing. They're not good at this and neither are you. I just want to point out so he said that like he can get one billion people the next decade so far there's only been 16 million VR headsets sold ever. Yeah. So getting that to the point of a billion seems like quite quite the challenge. I mean it is a challenge but you could look at like how quickly smartphones went from.

Yeah except smartphones were useful and improving the world in very obvious ways. Whereas the metaverse and even VR in general doesn't improve the world for most people in obvious ways. Yeah but that's kind of what I'm saying is that like the thing that is stupid and doomed about this isn't like oh you would have to sell so many headsets if it was legitimately something every single person wanted on their head. They would sell a billion they would sell a billion in a couple of years you know. But they haven't made that look like like so this this beauty influencer thing is an example of them trying to like explain here's something that people will find cool about the metaverse. And the way they do it is like talking about how you can have a digital storefront where like people can't just buy products but they can interact with you. She talks about how it'll be good for letting her interact with her fans by like bringing them into my home. Oh god.

Which sounds like a fucking nightmare. It sounds like a nightmare. We love our fans but like no. No I do not want anyone from running inside my house. I don't want anybody in my goddamn home. No. I barely want my friends in my home half the time. Absolutely not.

They didn't present us with a use case of how a brand in this case this like candle company this lady made that's big on Instagram could release like a new candle flavor and launch a digital experience with it so you can buy both real and digital products. It's kind of unclear in the video whether or not you're paying for the digital experience or is it like free when you buy the candle. Yeah this is what I don't games is like developing is like you know dropping products at the same time in the real world in the digital world but like the digital version is free because it's like because it's like an ad right. You could try something out virtually before you buy it physically. And that's what like Epic Games is doing. And honestly I think Epic's version of the metaphor is slightly more hinged. They understand more what people actually want. Yeah because like all the stuff they're trying with Fortnite again.

It doesn't seem fun for me but at least it's like an extension of how people use the Internet already. Whereas Facebook's is not that. Yeah and Mark never really understood what people wanted. He accidentally did Facebook trying to make something else like he wanted a place to share pictures of ladies he thought was hot. And he accidentally built a thing that like gave people something they did want which was a way to stay in contact with their friends from high school and college as they grew older. Right like that was the thing about Facebook that made it get huge originally. And he hasn't learned anything since he's just been smart. He's hired people who are smart enough to be like hey Instagram's probably going to be a big deal by that.

You should buy it. You know like that. But I haven't seen anything that's made me think like Mark gets what people want. And this has just made it clear that like he absolutely doesn't. So I want to play this video of like this is the digital experience to go with this fucking candle. That they're they're framing is like a piece of art that everybody is going to want to interact with who likes candles. I'm so thrilled. It's incredible because it again feels like a nightmare.

I am. I am a big candle fan. So same here. It's like a shitty arboretum. I don't see what it has to do with candles. It's Jackie as we walk through this amazing world. I just feel like this is like in this possibility of my imagination. I can't even begin to imagine.

I don't understand what does that have to do with candles. I know. Yeah. Like they have it again. Like there's nothing I can walk around like why can't begin to imagine all the things people are going to do. I can walk around digital spaces on my quest. It's again it's fun for like 30 seconds. And then you see everything and you're like oh well I can't touch it or smell it or actually feel it or do anything.

So I'm going to go back and have a soda and play and like read a book or something. And they've brought in this influencer who like used one of their other services in a way they hadn't initially intended and was successful in that. Which is not a bad idea on its surface. Like yeah bring in creative people and let them play around and make something new to show people how exciting this is. Right. That's the smart thing to do. But all they've presented is like look it's a tiny little weird arboretum. You can walk around and after buying a candle.

And it's like well I like candles but that's not fun. That doesn't sound like a fun addiction. It's a candle buying process. The whole part of the metaverse is like making like interactivity more. Like being able to interact with digital things. And like that's not interacting. That's just walking around. Like unless I can like take a bazooka and blow up the arboretum.

Or fuck the candle. Or fuck the candle. You have to do something. All of the VR games that are fun like super hot or something. It's about picking up objects in VR and throwing them at people. That's fun. And also unless I can pick up this candle and assault people with it in the game. I don't see what really the dried.

Like what's exciting about this. You were saying something Chris. Oh I guess. The thing I keep coming back to with this is that the only way this literally any of this makes any sense. If it's just like a chip in your brain. Yeah. Because all of it all of it is built around that. But it's not like it can't be like we don't the technology for that won't exist for like ages.

And so there it's like it's like they're selling some of it definitely is headset based like that arboretum thing. But yeah. Yeah. But even yeah. But like I mean I think even that right. Like OK. So why would you want like yeah. You're saying like why would you it's like OK.

It's interesting for like 10 minutes. Right. Yeah. The only way that would be like the only way that would be an actually interesting experience is if you could get all of the full sensory experience. If you could smell and feel. Yeah. Right. And that's that's that's like that's that's the thing where they only make sense if it's like a brand ship.

Well I mean there's two versions. There's one it's a brand ship or two it's a video game. Yeah. And Epic Games is doing the thing where it's a video game. And that makes me smarter to me. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

But like they don't you know but they're trying to sell like I think part of what's going on here is also just like this is this is designed to like. Like this is designed to like trick Silicon Valley investors. Yes. What's going on. Yeah. And those people I think are just going to be like oh well we'll have brand ships eventually and so we'll just we'll probably talk about that part more at the end because yeah this is just a scam. This is just a scam. And it is like again to talk about like the dystopian aspects of this Chris as you brought up one of the aspects is that like it's a complete panopticon of perfect surveillance if they actually make this thing.

And number two is the only way to do most of what they're talking about that's cool is to give Mark Zuckerberg physical control over human beings brain chemistry on a global scale which I think is a bad idea. I'm not going to sign up for that. I'm not going to sign up for that. I don't I don't want to walk around in a weird candle room that badly. To your point Chris about like how it's you know there's no sensory stuff is like like the most popular VR games. The reason why they work so well there's one that they don't like break the uncanny valley is because you're in like a barren land like you know beat saber you're not in a place you know you're in the game interface for like for super hot you're in like white washed abstract like concrete spaces right so like there's nothing there's nothing to smell or feel so like you don't feel like you're missing anything because you're in a very like stripped down version of reality. There is a really good VR game.

I forget what it's called but it's based on like an office and you're like fighting robots to break out of like this capitalist office room and it's cool because like yeah it's miserable because it's like it's like an office space you feel like you're in an office because it's nothing about it's exciting right. The games that are in like lush worlds they feel so much more like disconnected because you have like a weird like you have like you have like an uncanny valley thing but instead of like a face or a person it's like an environment. We're running a long time I want to move to something that I think is important here which is there is one moment in this video where they try to address the fact that they've done a tremendous amount of damage to the world and they have repeatedly failed to like anticipate dangers that their services have so they need to like deal with that at some point in this is like. Well what about if like what about bad things that could happen what if like what about like unintended things what about like ways in which this could be harmful to society that you haven't foreseen. So because they're not completely stupid in order to address that they bring on a well dressed or not well dressed but they bring on like a friendly British man. Who kind of kind of reads as like a like a scientific kind of expert guy they bring on a charming British person to like talk about how they're going to not not destroy the world and this is very telling.

So far it's it's such visionary stuff but as you mentioned early on with all big technological advances there are inevitably going to be in all sorts of challenges and uncertainties and I know you've talked about this a bit already but people want to know how we're going to do all this in a responsible way and especially that we play our part in helping to keep people safe and protect their privacy online. Yeah that's right this is incredibly important. The way I look at it is that in the past the speed that new technologies emerge sometimes left policymakers and regulators playing catch up. So on the one hand companies get accused of charging ahead too quickly and on the other tech people feel that progress can't afford to wait for the slower pace of regulation. And I really think that it doesn't have to be the case this time round because we have years until the metaverse we envision is fully realized so this is the start of the journey not the end. So that's telling. That he's like we don't need to worry about like we don't need it like it'll be fine it'll get regulated properly it'll be safe enough because it's going to take so long to figure all this out that surely we will anticipate and deal with all of the potentially toxic side effects of this technology ahead of time. And if you believe that I would say take a look at Facebook's track record with that kind of thing.

But they are smart in having a charming British man do it that's the right guy to have in the only aspect of good casting in this that is the right guy to have come on and try to allay people's fears that this will destroy society. You bring a you bring a charming British man in you know that's how you do that kind of thing. That's when I get canceled for the things I've been doing overseas. I'm going to hire a British person to defend myself. Do they make any more comments about like AR glasses or VR. Yes, quite a few. I wanted to move on to that even though yeah we're so they talk about they have a whole section where they're they're talking about the actual glasses they have. So they announced number one they have a project the goal as he repeatedly says is to make a quote normal good looking pair of glasses that do all this stuff which is the end goal.

Yeah, and he does in order as like a proof of concept he shows us these AR Ray bands that actually look legitimately rad they look like normal at least the private touched a pair of these in my hands but the the the videos that are supposed to be these real products show a pair of what look like normal Ray bands that you can take pictures and videos with you can answer phone calls on you can do like video phone calls on them and stuff like they seem neat and like they look like normal glasses. Yeah. And that is pretty cool. They go kind of pivot from that to announcing that like they have this new thing project Nazar, which I looked up what Nazar means a little bit ago. It's probably dystopian. No, I think it was just yeah. It's a town or it's a surf spot right it's a place in I think Portugal where there's like great waves and Mark Zuckerberg's really into surfing he plays a surfing game at one point in this that is one of the most embarrassing things embarrassing because I've seen in my entire fucking life. But yeah so project Nazar is supposed to be like the first true like VR glasses. So they they do the good thing which is like here's the real technology these Ray bands and look these are pretty neat.

Obviously, that doesn't come close to what they're promising. And this whole thing where they talk about what the the glasses which they say they're making good progress on are going to do. We don't ever see any fucking glasses. Yeah. And that's because they're not really close to to to working yet. I think really hard that the AR glasses are going to be the way to act like if the goal is to integrate digital spaces into the physical space right I think it's a good goal because what that's going to do that's going to make the digital space less fake right it's injecting that into the actual real world. So I think that will actually really help with like this associate of stuff is because it's actually in it's actually in the real world as well. I think that's going to be wonderful when that gets developed. And I think the glasses are definitely going to be a thing within the next 10 to 20 years. There is ways that like figure illuminating glass on the side to make like what it looks like an image. This is definitely going to be a thing that's going to be possible.

Yeah. We're nowhere close to hacking the brain enough to feel sensations and like the only thing I've played a lot of VR the only thing that you can feel in VR is fear. That's the only thing that VR is capable of replicating. That's good as a feeling. It's like you can feel terrified in VR. That's that's that's it. You can't ever look at this. There's one other thing you can feel exhausted. I played a game and I was doing like bowdraws for like four hours and I was like we've developed a way to make you frightened and tired. That is what VR is best. All of the way what Twitter does normally all of like all of like the Resident Evil VR games. Yeah. They're going to make you tired and terrified. And that's kind of it. So we have to close out but I want to do that by playing Mark Zuckerberg lamenting the Internet that he played a major role in building as a way to talk about why we need a Metaverse because it's kind of funny.

Because we're allowed to build and use are more tightly controlled than ever and high taxes on creative new ideas are stifling. This is not the way that we are meant to use technology. Metaverse gives us an opportunity to build it well. But it's going to take all of us creators developers companies of all sizes together. We can finally put people at the center of our technology and deliver an experience where we are present with each other. Yeah. What a ghoul. What a ghoul monster like all of that's nonsense. When you're not you're one of the people who has turned the Internet into an expensive walled garden. It didn't used to be this way. Then Facebook swooped in made themselves for free like integral to all content and then started charging those content creators and like fucking them around and lying to them which led to the destruction of a huge number of websites and a tremendous amount of digital culture. Like your why it feels like a dead walled garden and everything you've presented in this video makes the metaverse feel like a dead walled garden.

But I want to play his last lines in the in this video because this is him kind of summing up his vision for the future via the metaverse. And now it is time to take everything that we have learned and help build the next chapter. I am dedicating our energy to this more than any other company in the world. And if this is the future that you want to see then I hope that you will join us because the future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine. I agree with that part Mark. The future is going to be beyond what you can imagine. What a goal. Yeah. You have no imagination. It's just it's just using trendy tech terms to trick investors into giving them billions of dollars. Yeah. That's like right. That's that's all it is because all of this like this like haptic feedback replicating like human feelings and stuff that we're nowhere close to that.

And when we do it's going to be dystopian but we're not close to it. And it's going to be dystopian or it's going to be better in ways that like we can't yet conceive of. And then eventually it will be destroyed for profit if it actually gets cool like the old Internet was. Yeah. It's yeah. Yeah. But I think both this and even a lot like a lot of like the epic stuff just seems a lot of it's just the new way that tech companies. That's where they think the money vault is is by using these terms and they think using these terms is going to get them lots of extra investor money. So because the actual technology is nowhere really close to this and it's not what people want. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey let's start a coup.

Back in the 1930s a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French in our newest show. We take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say for one my personal history is raw inspiring and mind blowing. And for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads.

From I heart podcast and school of humans this is let's start a coup. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science. The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync. What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. To the Internet anyway it absolutely is not but I don't know I think this was important. I think yeah Facebook is important and has a major impact on the way the Internet is continuing to evolve usually in negative ways. But this is how these people who are doing a lot of damage view the future. So you should know what they're looking at and what they anticipate. But I think I think that there's a kind of optimistic note to this though right which is like OK so we've reached the point where like even like Boris Johnson is going like oh God climate change is coming. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And this is the best they've got. Yeah. This is the vision of they have no they have nothing they have nothing.

And you know what I think like what are the only ways we can win is if we're facing a uniquely incompetent ruling class. Yeah. And if it if the rule if the if the guy were if the guy we have to deal with in order to like not drown every single whale and like have half of the world cities consumed by the ocean is Mark Zuckerberg like. We got a shot. We got a shot. I think there are some smarter people that aren't. Yeah. That. Behind the scenes. Right. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't think I think that's a nice note to end on because it is it is worth the nice thing about this is how clearly they don't understand what the future is going to look like online. Yeah. They have ways in which they're trying to direct the future and aspects of that will come true. They're VR will succeed in some form at some point and it will be potentially an unprecedented surveillance breakthrough. I mean like has some unsettling implications as well as positive ones.

Metaverse stuff is going to develop a lot of other stuff. I think the the move by Twitter to create like this like they it's called like Twitter spaces where it's like this like you know basically like voice chat room. Like a lot of people are moving towards this concept where we try to like inject more like in person interactivity into this virtual framework. Right. Yeah. This would like with like a clubhouse last year during during the pandemic where people are watching like Netflix in the quote same room. Right. Yeah. Like we're seeing people try to do this with varying mixed success. But this is the way tech is is is inching. So it is a good idea to keep your eye on it because it has a lot of implications for like privacy and advertising and all that kind of stuff. We'll continue to cover aspects of this talk about the technology talk about the surveillance implications talk about the visions these people have. But I think this has been these episodes have been useful and like here's what Mark thinks is coming.

Here's what Facebook is pouring like 10 billion dollars into its dumb as shit. Have a nice day. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. Baby. So who is the man behind baby beluga. Every human being wants to feel respected when we start with young children. All good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia comedian new dad and host of Finding Rafi a new podcast from I heart radio and fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the I heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen Whit joined me the host of eating while broke podcast while I eat a meal created by self made entrepreneurs influencers and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke.

Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson the official princess of Compton Asia kidding in Asia. This is the professor we're here on eating while broke and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to eating while broke on the I heart radio app on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Make sure to check out drink champs your number one music podcast on the black effect podcast network hosts and or E and DJ FN sat down with artists and icon. Yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos and I don't want to have to be the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing, yeah, it returned and everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check out drink champs conversation with yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Podcast. All right, well, I've done my job for the day. Wow, even by our standards, that's an intro. That's actually one of your better ones. Thank you. This is, of course, it could happen here a show about how things aren't going so great, kind of falling apart, crumbling a bit, but also maybe things could be better. That would be nice. Let's try and do that today is one of the maybe things could be better episodes and we are talking about the ongoing wave of strikes.

We had strike tober last month with John Deere strikes and strikes and like what you call it, couple of different food companies, bunch of strikes. And today we would like to get an update on all the motherfuckers who are out there striking for better conditions and and better treatment. And today, for that purpose, we've brought on the great Kim Kelly Kim. You are a journalist who focuses a hell of a lot on labor. You've been up and down to some of the coal strikes that have been going on. You were there for the Amazon attempt to form the union. And oh, geez, was that Arizona? Alabama. Alabama, Alabama.

And you're writing a book on the history of labor in the United States. So I'd like to just kind of turn the floor over to you. There's a floor. There is. Okay, there is a floor. There's no ceiling. There's a floor. It is filthy.

Just as a heads up. You know, we're doing our best, aren't we? Yeah. No, we are. Yeah, you are. We are not. I am, I'm trying to keep up with all this labor action, this exciting action, hot labor action. Some hot labor action stories.

So as you mentioned, we're just kind of coasting off of the peak of striketober, which was such a fun thing to kind of see explode in the mainstream consciousness. Like usually labor stories, they're a big deal to the people that are involved in them and people in the labor world who are watching and like rooting for them, but they don't necessarily end up on like, you know, the mainstream, like they don't end up on the TV. They don't end up with like fancy old guys talking about it on Dateline or whatever. Right. But that's something that happened.

And I think there's been a real shift in consciousness that is the company that, and of course, you know, it's like striketober is fun. There's all these big strikes happening at the same time, but we of course need to remember that that didn't happen in a vacuum. There's people on strike now who have been on strike since before, since before it was cool, right, since much earlier, like shout out to the St. Vincent nurses up in Massachusetts and to the coal miners in brookwood, Alabama warrior men who have both been on strike for over eight months and they kind of right.

So literally like third, like they're in the middle of their tour drives for their children because they've been on strike for so long. And they kind of got a little bit left out of the conversation around striketober. And I think that just kind of shows that we need to be paying attention, even when it's not as flashy or new or exciting, I mean, strikes were exciting, but, you know, there's a lot going on. And one of the things I think is interesting and important, especially as we head into a strikes giving, which I guess we're doing.

Yeah, strikes giving, strikes miss, strike in time. Strike you every, I guess you can use strike, strike you every first couple of months. The fourth of strike you lie, strike strike, yeah, yeah, it's, it gets worse. It's really until we get to Labor Day and by then, yeah, yeah, Striker's Day, that one works pretty well. I'm also a fan of strike and tine's day, strike and tine's day. That's cute. Yeah.

Love and rage, baby. We can keep this going. Yeah. Strike a ween. Strike a ween. Strike a ween. There's a missed opportunity there. Although that, that frightens me, Garrison, that the band ween might go on strike and

I don't know. Oh no. Society could handle that. What will we do? We would, we would be completely out of ween. Our reserves of ween aren't going to last long if they stop. Yeah. And that's acceptable.

Yeah. There's been a tragic shortage of ween for years now. I don't know that we can handle a strike. Please continue, Kim. I mean, I didn't realize you were a nerd, Robert. This is, this kind of throws some things into question. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. I mean, as a heavy metal dirt bag, I'm like contractually obligated to say things like that. And as I was pontificating a minute ago, oh right, so as we go into strikes giving, there are still more big strikes on the horizon and potential big strikes on the horizon. But part of the story that I think is also very energizing and important is the organizing

that's happening in the new unions that are hopefully going to end up being formed not necessarily as a result of this wave of attention, but they're kind of caught up in the tide. I mean, we look at the Starbucks workers in Buffalo who have scared the shit out of their employers to the point where they're flying executives in to follow them around the store and be like, please don't vote for a union. We need all of our billions of dollars. We can't share. Or, you know, even workers at Wirecutter who are threatening to strike on Black Friday

and their whole thing is telling people what stuff to buy. Yeah. You know, and McDonald's workers and I think 10 different, these are 10 different cities of 10 different states, 10 different locations just went out on like a one day strike over sexual harassment in the workplace. Kroger workers are taking a strike authorization vote in Texas. We have multiple Amazon organizing attempts happening in Staten Island and a rerun of the election coming up in Bessemer, Alabama.

And there's just so much happening that, you know, I hope that the novelty idea of the strikes told we're strikes giving. I hope like that was fun, but I hope now that people are paying attention that they stay interested and realize that, you know, labor stories, maybe it's not necessarily always like a big strike or like a cool picket line to look at, but there's a lot going on. Like every story is a work story. Every story is a labor story. And people seem like they're finally catching on to the fact that, you know, we're all workers

and wow, cool things happen when we come together. Yeah. I hope that too. And I hope that, you know, the word on everybody's lips who's, I don't know, coming at this from kind of a little bit of a more either radical or desperate point of view, depending on how you want to frame it is like general strike, general strike. And you know, there's, there's been some, there's been people online who keep saying like, okay, well, we're all just going to go on, on Black Friday, everybody general

strike. And it's like, yeah, well you don't, you don't set that up on Twitter. Like the, the unions that are striking now have strike funds and put a lot of thought into it and have like had to take, there's things you have to do in order to not irresponsibly like just screw over a bunch of working people. But it is like, I'm a believer in the potential of something like a general strike to, to force significant concessions. I mean, if we did it right.

Yeah. I guess I, I mean, it's a huge if, because it's never really effectively been like, there's been pieces of it done, like we saw, I think the closest we've gotten in like my lifetime has been when the, the airline workers threatened to go on strike over the, over the budget thing. And you just saw the federal government go, oh fuck, nope, you know what, we can actually pass this thing. I mean, that's the thing, like that threat that I think that when Sarah Nelson said that

even like hinted towards that in 2019 and the government shut down, that sort of, that was a tipping point. I think that's the first time people would, well, really it was probably the first time in many people's lifetimes that an actual labor leader with that platform had even mentioned those words. Yeah. Because general, like general strikes historically kind of are more situated in that late 19th century, early 20th century, like labor swing and its dick around era.

And we've been kneecap so much that that doesn't feel as, as possible. But I mean, the fact that she said, and she was part of the airline industry, if we're ever going to actually, you know, bring capital to its knees, we're going to need the transportation workers, we're going to need the dock workers, we're going to need to like, actually analyze who is moving things around the country, who's making sure things work, and how can we get them to put down, to down their tools and be like, okay, we're going to do something about this. You know, the whole general strike idea, I mean, I mean, and arguably like one of the

first ones was, you know, in black reconstruction, they, the book, there's this argument that the first general strike was enslaved, enslaved people leaving the plantations and, and withdrawing their labor from that situation, like that was a form of striking. And I think the general strike is kind of a amorphous idea, especially online, as more people learn about labor and learn about it. But it's also like kind of a specific thing. Like, you can't just declare like, okay, we're all not going to go to work tomorrow, like, cool.

But there's so much planning that goes into to make sure that people are able to do that and sustain that. And the people that are traditionally, you know, already left out, or the most vulnerable and marginalized, like that their needs are prioritized, because the people that can afford to declare general strike and not show up for a week, like, that's all well and good for them. But what about everyone else who can barely afford to go to work at all? Yeah, I've had these arguments with people online.

And it's often like, well, you're saying we shouldn't like, if we just do it, people will figure it out, like the infrastructure will be built after the fact. And I'm like, that's, I'm glad that you're in a situation where you feel like you could you could handle that kind of uncertainty, but like, a single mother of four, who relies on her her job to like, keep them fed and alive, isn't going to be like, someone will figure out how to feed my kids, like, well, that's not how people work, you know, Yeah, this is where having like a robust commitment to mutual aid. Yeah.

Strike funds and like an actual fabric, like having the fabric of community where you can depend on your neighbors instead of never talking to them, like a general strike would have a huge impact, but on who like, who would it hurt more if you didn't plan it properly, if you didn't have a, if you didn't have an actual grassroots network of people ready to help. If you didn't have the understanding that not everyone can just go run off in the street. Some people like have mobility issues, some people have children, some people are older or sicker, like there's so much that goes into it.

Yeah. It's like your car is fucked up and you know, you need to take it in to get some stuff fixed or it's eventually going to break down entirely. But that doesn't mean the right solution is just get in there and start hitting shit with a hammer. Like you need to, there needs to be like some systemic way you approach it, right? Like there's a proper way to fix an engine. Right.

And we can do that, like we can start building those networks, we can start, you can organize your workplace and plug into the, into like the organized labor framework, which obviously has many flaws, not as radical as I and many other people would like it to be, but they know how to do this shit. Like there's a lot of different pieces that can be pulled together in different organizations and populations that need to work together if we're actually going to accomplish something like this. Yep.

And I don't know if people are ready to put in all that work, because it's more fun to tweet. Yeah. But I have one hearing, as they say in Alabama, bless their hearts. You're spending a tremendous, I mean, as you just noted, you're spending a tremendous amount of time on the ground with a lot of these people talking with them. Are you, are you seeing kind of, how, how are you hearing them talk about the other strike efforts, you know, and other industries that are going on right now?

Cause it has been more in the news than it's been at any point I can recall in the recent past. And I'm wondering how in places like Bessemer, you know, in places like, you know, that coal miner strike you've been at, like how are they being, or to what extent are they talking about other strike efforts? Like, is that, does that seem to be something that there's a lot of kind of consciousness and discussion about, or is it just kind of in the background? I mean, it really depends.

I, like you said, I spent, I spent most of my time with the coal miners over the past year, cause I've been writing a book and I spend my one, my one fun thing, but I've been, I mean, I talk to them every single day and I've been to Alabama lots of times and I, you know, I'm in a group chat with the wives, like I, I know I have a decent grasp of what's going on and honestly, the thing about it is that some, there are some folks who are very engaged and who have made Twitter's and they have their Facebook groups and they do pay attention to what's happening and I do think they feel that kind of excitement and that widespread sense of solidarity.

But one thing that's important to remember, especially for workers who are already disadvantaged or they're dealing with low wage laborers, like it's really hard to go on strike. Like there's a lot of shit they have to figure out. Like there's kids, there's health issues, there's how am I going to pay my rent? Like funds are great, but they don't cover everything. Like I think that's one of the realities that maybe gets sort of glossed over because we're also online and we, like to you and me, feels like, oh, everyone's fucking stoked about these strikes, but for someone in rural Alabama who is just hoping the strike is over soon

so they can go back to work and have some financial stability, they're not necessarily reading your tweets or like signing up for webinars or even paying attention to like cool other strike efforts. I'm sure some folks are aware and they find, have that time to plug in, but most people are just trying to get by and these are folks who spend like eight hours a day on the picket lines and there's no cell phone service out where their picket lines are. Like there's only so much that a normal regular worker on the picket line can do to keep up. Yeah, and you came into this, I think unlike a lot of the people who are actually striking,

you came into this with a lifelong history of interest in kind of labor justice movements and whatnot, which I don't think most people who are in unions necessarily spend a ton of time studying the last hundred years of labor relations. What has surprised you? Like what has like been a new realization that you've gotten since you started covering this stuff on the ground in this most recent period? So the thing that's really sticks with me, and I'm going back to my minors again, because that's, you know, my, one of the most familiarity, but something that I think has so much potential

and I'm not entirely sure how to articulate what that potential is. But so something I have seen is when this strike began most, not all, but the majority of the folks involved in this particular strike were conservative Christian people who were a lot of them voted for Trump, a lot of them were like just in that world, maybe not like, you know, wild mega people, but that's just what was the norm where they are in their community. And they don't really think about it that much. But there are some people that I see, especially those who are involved in the mutual aid efforts

or have been, who have seen Birmingham DSA come out, who have kind of taken this kind of like wider view of what's happening, how they fit in, I've seen their politics and their perspective shift. Like there are some people who are like straight up socialists now that seven months ago would have probably spent in your face, or at least given you a hell of a look if you had even suggested such a thing. And this is a small sample size and this is a unique situation, but I think it really speaks to the potential there to like reach people who are very ideologically, politically

different from what we maybe think of as labor people as progressive, radical, whatever people on like our team, right, but the power of the strike and the power of labor is that there is so much there, there's kind of an inherent common ground, because so many people, most people, a lot of people, most people have a job, a lot of people hate their boss. You can kind of build from that very, very low baseline and find more common ground and kind of you can you can work towards a better understanding, like maybe you're not going to be best friends, but you can potentially shift someone's harmful worldview by exposing them to new ideas, once they trust that you're not just there to tell them they're wrong

and stupid and bad really look, we were coming at this like, I'm going to talk to you like a person, I understand we see the world differently, but like, you know, I'm here to support you, I'm here listening to you, maybe you could listen to what I have to say too, maybe it might change how you see things, and sometimes it works. Yeah, yeah. You know what else works, Kim? Blowing shit up. Well, okay, allegedly.

In Minecraft. Yeah, I was going to say cap ads. Cap ad-alisms. Ads and services, but I like your answer better, so let's just let's just let's just roll out with that. Material support, right? Yeah. There's a concrete example there.

The Birmingham DSA has been very active in fundraising and showing up and just providing support for the miners and the people in strike. And this is not necessarily a population of people that like the idea of socialism, whatever idea of it is that they hold because Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are big cultural standbys there, like whatever they think socialism is, and then have a bunch of socialists show up and just practice solidarity and mutilating, practice socialism, and they're like, oh, these guys are great. Thank you for coming out.

Things like that, where it's like, I feel like so much of radical politics and various tendencies. There's just like a branding problem, and there's a propaganda problem on the right wing, and the mainstream media doesn't tell anybody what anything means, like it's a broader conversation, right? Yeah, I felt for a while like one of the things that leftist organizers need to get better at doing is being willing to drop names when they're not productive, like, okay, maybe these people because of the media environment they've grown up in are never going to want

to consider themselves socialists. But if they are willing to organize together and support the efforts of other working people to organize together against the capital holding class, like then, okay, what is it, why do you need them to like start quoting Karl Marx? Or is it just cool that you've got them doing what they, like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me that like, yes, you can get a lot of these people on board with, again, pretty radical things if you're kind of approaching it from within their world, from within like, I'm not trying to talk to you about burning down the system, I'm trying to talk to you

about how you get what you need. And it just so happens that how you get what you need is taking the system on in a very direct way. I mean, so many ideas that are painted as radical just like, aren't like, that's normal people caring for them, like, it is like community care and common sense. It's just been politicized to this insane extent. And places like, oh, sorry. I'm just going to like, even like a lot of the tenants of mutual aid, you can even see

pop up in a lot of like church communities as well, at least like smaller, you know, closer knit like communities that are actually like based around helping each other, at least I've observed that in a lot of my time traveling across the states. Yeah, absolutely. That's a huge part of like the church is the only mutual aid option in so many like smaller and more isolated rural communities or just communities where the church is a big deal. Like, there's always ways to chip away at these institutions and eventually hopefully burn them down, right, without alienating people and making them feel like you're coming in

and telling them everything you believe is wrong. And I'm making a mistake. Some of these folks, I'm sure they believe things that are absolute garbage. And I would never, yeah, everybody does. But yeah, you know, like there's, you know, but there's, there's just covering the strike in particular has really just taught me a lot about the gray areas in between. Not in a like wishy-washy liberal way, but just in a way of like, how do you relate to normal fucking people who see the world differently, but are in

ultimately the same struggle as you? Like, maybe I could, I mean, going down there. The only time I'd been around that many Trump supporters was like at protest where I was yelling at them or like at my family dinners. So I wasn't, you know, I wasn't expecting to make friends, but then I did. And I think hopefully we've shifted each other's perspectives a little bit in a way that's beneficial. I don't know.

It's been, it's been interesting. Yeah. Talking to people really is a lot different than tweeting at them. Yeah. As a rule, don't tweet would be my recommendation to people. Never. Never. Take your... Talk to your neighbors and be nice to people when you buy coffee or food from them.

And you just amaze what happens. And tell your neighbors, hey, I'm taking my phone down to the river to throw it in. Can I take your phone with me? Can we just all throw our phones in the river? Yeah, you can see how far they'll get you. If you want to, if you're going to start out being the weird neighbor at the strong start. Look, we've already killed the water system, so it's fine. Like just right in the river with the car batteries.

You know, it's good for the eels. The thing I love about our show is just the hope is, is the incredibly hope-injected optimism that we start and end every episode with. But no, I mean, like me, like, yeah, the more people you know in your community, especially people who are like working class, you know, when bad stuff starts happening, the more people you know, the better, because that's a lot. I'm guessing a lot of these people who are like, you know, like old union workers, they have a lot of like physical skills.

Like they know how to do a whole bunch of stuff, and it might be worth getting to know some of those people, even if, you know, depending where you live, like, yeah, they'll probably say something not great, at least for, you know, the first bit. But once, you know, I've a lot of family in like a rural area of Alberta. And like, yeah, my family is like pretty gay. So, you know, once you're in close to those people, yeah, they're going to say something that's maybe not great. But once they get to like know you and really be like, oh, like you're another person,

like people actually, you know, people want to be around other people, and they'll even change the way they talk to be like, oh, yeah, maybe this isn't the best way to hang out around people, because it's going to drive people away. So yeah, I'll change the way I say some things, because like, it turns out people actually, like a lot of folks just kind of want to make their lives a bit better. And that's really their main focus. Yeah, it's hard to know to do that. And it's just this matter of like, so much of what kind of the way that discourse happens online

has poisoned aspects of activism is in like making it difficult for people to relate in that way without feeling like, well, okay, but if I can't get them on board with all of these other things, like I can't talk with them or whatever, like because they're because they don't agree with this and this and this, like we can't organize. No, the purity of ideology. Yeah, I feel like most people who aren't terminally online don't even necessarily have like a specific ideology. Absolutely not.

Yeah, yeah, like they're just stuff that they have learned or they've decided that is true about the world. They just kind of go with it and they're like interrogated all the time. And you can like those are people you can talk to and maybe shit. Like I've done it with my dad. Like I've seen it happen with some of these conservative coal miner folks. Like even something as small as being able to humanize like, okay, if you're talking about something, oh, like, well, the thing you said, like that really upset Joey and you like Joey.

So like maybe think about that and they'll probably be a chiller because like, oh, well, that's, you know, it's Joey, I can't, I don't want to be a dick to him. If we can just find a way to nap that on a very broad scale, life will be a lot better for a lot of people. Yeah, it's this, it's this dichotomy between a lot people want to own the folks they see as like being against them or being on the other side, but also people don't want to be a dick to people that like they like, you don't want to feel like you're a dick. So if you, if you lean more into the we're in opposition, then you're going to trigger the,

well, I want to, I want to make the person who disagrees with me angry side of the brain. But if you can lean into the like, hey, like we can get along, like, and I, and maybe you don't want to feel like an asshole if we get along, then I don't know, that's a productive place to, to continue conversations from and a good way to shift people, I think. And then when you're, and then when your area floods because of severe rain and storms, then we have people that can help. Yeah, it's the importance of interacting with people in person, like offline, which is like obviously more difficult to do because we're still trapped in it.

Yeah, there's like, caveat, caveat, caveat, caveat, but like, it's so much easier to talk to someone and kind of, and like, see the world you shift or even just humanize yourself to someone who is inclined to not thinking of you as someone worth talking to, like, as long as it's not, you're not putting yourself in danger, like there's, yeah, obviously, we're not talking about this, I'm a blonde lady, you know, but still, we're not talking about like, oh, you have to go be friendly to people who like want to murder you because you're trans. No, it's about, no, we're not saying that, but most of these people don't think that maybe they have some regressive attitudes.

No, or, or they'll use the word gay to mean something, you know, not cool, and you'll be like, hey, I have to do it, they'll be like, hey, you know, I'm, you know, I'm actually gay, Jen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or maybe you don't have that, maybe you do, depending on the situation to be like, hey, maybe, maybe there's other words that we can use for this, because yeah, whatever. Yeah. And, and you can shift people into a closer alliance, just by becoming a human in their eyes, and also letting them become a human in your eyes, which is necessary. The other option is not a pleasant one. So I would prefer the option where more people grow to see each other as human and worth supporting.

Right, I know there's a better tactic to me. Yeah, I know there's this argument where like, no one is like, I shouldn't have to educate you, I shouldn't have to put the time in to, to shift you. And like, that is valid. That's fair. Like, you shouldn't have to, but ideally, no, no, but yeah, but if you want to, that change to happen, it's probably not going to happen unless you put some effort in, because they're probably not gone. Actually, I think they're fine. Yeah. And I don't know, there's a bunch of shit that you shouldn't have to do that we're also all going to have to do. Like, we, I shouldn't, we, I shouldn't have to say, hey guys, maybe we don't kill the ocean. Maybe killing the ocean is a bad idea. Like, I shouldn't

have to, no one should have to say that, but we do. Could we not? Could we just stop? Can we just not please? The fact that you shouldn't have to do something also doesn't mean that like, the thing doesn't need to be done. And obviously, I don't think that the primary onus on speaking to, let's say, the kind of increasingly radicalized, white, lower middle and middle class, I don't think that falls primarily on people of color, on the LGBT community. It falls on people like you and me, Kim, you know? Literally, yeah. Yeah. But it still has to be done. Like, it's a thing that needs to be done. And I'm not saying, hey, you out there who, you know, left where you grew up in rural Alabama, because someone was going to fucking murder you, and you had to get to a

place where you could not deal with that. I'm not saying you need to go rolling back to, to Alabama. But it's good that people are talking and working with and trying to build connections with folks out there and change the nature of kind of aspects of the culture and make things better, because that needs to be done. We can't just be like, well, fuck some of those people. Yeah. And that is definitely easier if you are like one of the bros, if you are, you know, a, a bigger cis adjacent dude. Yeah. That is, that is, of course, going to make things easier. For sure. Yeah. I mean, we think about like that's kind of the tax. Yeah, that's the right word. But the fact that you do feel comfortable and you're, you're safe and you're not under a threat in

those spaces because of who you are, like as like a white sister, even a white cis lady, like you, like the price you pay for that is making it easier for everyone else to feel that too. Yeah, exactly. Like that's your job. Other people's job is to survive and be safe. You can be the one that pushes the boundaries on these things. So when someone says something not great, you can kind of call them out in like a bro-ish way and they can respond to that a lot better than, you know, than a lot of other people who they don't know, you know, screaming at them in a no context scenario. Yeah. We're like, oh, like, oh, you don't, I'm like a pretty lady. You don't want to make me upset by being rude. That's rude. Exactly. Yeah. Like you shouldn't,

you should see this thing as rude and not okay. Like the amount of men who have apologized to me down there for swearing, it's so funny. Yeah, man, my dude, I live in Philadelphia, but that's cute. But if I could just harness any of that, like chivalrous, whatever, chivalrous, patriarchal viewpoint, like, hey, apply this to being cool to my trans friends or like not being rude to anyone else, like, sure, I'm down. Yeah. We don't take kindly to misgendering around these parts. Yeah. For a lot of people, at least, like, you know, when I worked at like smaller workplaces, you know, where it's like a small business where I know the owner, even if me and some other employees want to unionize, the prospect is always kind of more weird or challenging

because, you know, it's a smaller business. Maybe it's like connected to like a larger, you know, larger overall industry. You know, like when I was like, when I was like a parkour instructor, right? I had discussions with other, with other like employees about doing, you know, like a parkour instructor's union type thing. But it's hard when there's like not many of you or you like, you know, the owner, what would you say is like good ways to at least get that conversation going among other employees and then, you know, like similar examples from other stuff for people who deal with like smaller workplaces that aren't, you know, like a coal worker, they're not working for like Amazon or anything, you know, it's more like small local stuff.

Right. So like the most important basic building block of all this is one-on-one conversations. It's organizing, right? And even if you just work with like three or four other people and maybe unionizing in a formal structure doesn't necessarily make sense or it seems like it might be too much of a headache, you're still, you know, like a group of workers coming together is still a union. It doesn't matter what the NLRB has to say about it. And you have shared interests and shared challenges and there's things that work you probably want to change. So even coming together and discussing that with your coworkers, like there's no law that says you have to be in a union if you want to get some shit done. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful

folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads?

From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match

and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that

down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can march on your boss, IWF Style, and make them and demand a meeting. You can make a petition. You can do public pressure campaigns, like all of the things, not all of them, but a lot of the tools that we see organized labor, engaging in, and unions engaging in, those are available to everyone else too. It's easier if you're within that framework because you have that firepower

behind you, and you have maybe some legal protections. But just as workers, I guess that's more like the IWW solidarity. You need to use a model light. We don't need to do those stinking badges. We're a union because we say we're a union. We're going to take control of things in our own way. You see this in, I think, what's it called, diversity threats. There's a thrift shop in, I think, Richmond, Virginia, where workers, they weren't being treated properly. I think it was a queer community space that wasn't living up to its values due to actions by management. And so they just put a letter on the door and said, we're not coming to work until you fix this. Here are clear demands. Here's what we need. Here you go. Figure it out. I don't think they're in a formal union,

but they're acting collectively. And that's something that is totally available to everyone, as long as you're in a workplace. If you're an independent contractor like me, and probably some of you, that sucks and it's harder, but you can always find your people. There's always options, right? You don't have to just join a union. You don't have to be a teamster to get shit done. Yeah, I think when you were saying that, I was going through my past experiences at places like that, I'm like, yeah, we did do some of that stuff to varying degrees of success. Sometimes it works out well. Sometimes it doesn't work out so well. But yeah, I mean, there was definitely a while where we did definitely make some decent changes kind of based on that model.

Yeah, it's kind of a shift in perception where you were just doing this because you're a worker and we need to do this. But if you just take a step back and think about it, it's like, this is a labor action. We're a union of workers. Even just that little shift where it's always us against them, but what gets us as a group, as a collective against this manager, against this exploitative practice, I think that adds a little bit of power and a little bit of energy because you realize, you know, I'm still, I think maybe it makes you feel a little less alone. Yeah, absolutely. And like, you know, concerted activity is a legally protective right too. So like there are some bits and pieces of labor law that are useful in these situations too

if you have a nerdy friend who would like to read about them for you. All right. Well, I think that's going to do it for us here at It Could Happen here. Until next time, remember, fuck it, organize. And where can people find Kim Kelly online if we want to send angry tweets? Oh, wow. Just try me, buddy. Yeah. At Grim Kim, because my college radio DJ name will never die. And you can, if you are thus inclined, you can preorder my book, Fight Like Hell, the Untold History of American Labor on the internet, hopefully not Amazon. Hopefully not. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you do like, thank you, but there's other places that are better.

Do you want people to send you a bunch of random knives, Kim? Knives. I mean, I wouldn't... We've had a lot of luck with that in the past. I like knives. I like skincare. I like loose leaf tea. I contain multitudes, really. Send Kim a loose leaf tea skincare knife. One of those exfoliating knives with a tea infuser in the hilt. Wow. That sounds great. Somebody make that product. That sounds like the next behind the bastards merch. Yeah. The tea knife. Yeah. We'll put that out after we get finished. We've got a very exciting Black Friday product this year, which is a mail-to-mail

lightsaber adapter. People say you shouldn't do it. They say it causes electrocution and fires and death, and I think those people are cucks. Buy our mail-to-mail adapter. Show them the woke establishment that you won't be chained. I'm Carolyn Osorio, a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. How many times did you bring the camera? One time. He started fantasizing about having sex with his mother, then he fantasized about killing her. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods.

He was just to all of us kind of strange. Do you know how he feels about prostitutes? Listen to the Shadow Girls on the iHeart radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller, Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space. Activist on the Gender Division of Labor, Attorney and Family Mediator. And I'm Dr. Edina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of iHeart podcasts and Hello Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this time out with us.

Listen to Time Out, a Fair Play podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed, and forgery in the art world. You knew the painting was fake. Listen to Art Fraud starting February 1st on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. This is it could happen here, the show about how things are falling apart and how maybe they could be made a bit better. Right now, today, we're doing an

episode that is based on an essay Garrison wrote and I edited that we think you'll find interesting. So here it goes. Green capitalism promises to deliver us all the same luxuries and commodities that we enjoy today. But without doing net harm to the biosphere, it's the message liberal elites try to hold on when they make their case for being better stewards of the environment than Republicans. This is not untrue, but it's also not true enough to stop your house from flooding or your town from being incinerated in a hellstorm. When it comes to the methods green capitalism posits by which we might reverse course without changing the direction of the ship, one term you'll hear often is energy efficiency. I want to read a statement I found on whitehouse.gov,

a fact sheet on the new US government commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 50 to 52% by 2030. I should note that's 50% of the 2005 levels, which were like 15% higher, something like that. Anyway, here's the quote. The United States can create good paying jobs and cut emissions and energy costs for families by supporting efficiency upgrades and electrification in buildings through support for job creating retrofit programs in sustainable affordable housing, weather use of heat pumps and induction stoves, adoption of modern energy codes for new buildings. The United States will also invest in new technologies to reduce emissions associated with construction, including for high performance electrified buildings.

Now, energy efficiency is in fact a fine goal, and trying to reduce emissions is broadly good. But the sad and kind of weird fact is that increasing efficiency can sometimes mean increasing pollution through what's known as the efficiency paradox, which is of course the title of the episode, because you want us to think of a second title, of a separate title from that, come on. So first off, what does energy efficiency mean? In general terms, energy efficiency refers to the amount of output that can be produced with a given input of energy, output being stuff that energy is used to do like light your house or wash your clothing or power your wall mounted 20 volt vibrator that requires as much electricity as an arc welder in order to use.

Energy savings are the reduction of energy use without the loss of output produced. Improved energy efficiency is expected to bring a number of benefits. First of all, reducing energy usage should result in lower energy bills. Ideally, reduced energy demand also means that energy imports can be decreased. The International Energy Agency has estimated that strict efficiency policies could allow the world to achieve more than 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions cuts needed to reach its climate goals, even without new technology. So there is considerable wiggle room within the existing structures of global society to reduce emissions a lot without fancy space technology.

But despite substantial energy efficiency gains in the past few decades and decreases in output from places like the United States, we as a species are using more energy than we have pretty much forever. And emissions wildly surpass R or the Earth's ability to handle them. Quoting from the Global Carbon Project, quote, global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization. Despite positive progress in 20 countries whose economies have grown over the last decade and their emissions have declined, growth in energy use from fossil fuel sources is still outpacing the rise of low carbon sources and activities. A robust global economy in sufficient emission reductions in developed countries and a need

for increased energy use in developing countries, where per capita emissions remain far below those of wealthier nations, will continue to put upward pressure on CO2 emissions. They use the term developing and developed. We don't prefer those. But obviously, population growth contributes to all that, the growth in the use of energy and the emissions of carbon. You know, more people, more cars in the road, whatever. But it's not really the primary factor that's adding on to the increase in energy use for the human race. We'll talk about that later, though. For now, it's important to note that the full potential energy savings, like in these kind of hypotheticals about how much could be saved by improving efficiency, are usually estimated

by assuming that demand for energy services will remain unchanged after energy efficiency gains. So when they say that we can get 40% of the greenhouse emissions gas reductions we need by increasing efficiency, they're doing that assuming that nothing will change about our overall energy use when we make things more efficient. But time and time again, we see that once products are made more energy efficient, people often end up consuming, producing, or even using more of the thing, which makes the potential savings less meaningful in a net result. Doesn't mean that it's not a net good, but it's not as much as is often calculated in these climate proposals. You can see this demonstrated on the job if you're in, say,

food services. If you happen to figure out how to do a task faster, your boss probably isn't going to let you use that extra time to just chill out and do stuff on your phone. What is the phrase? If you can lean, you can clean. So if you do something faster, now you're just expected to do it faster all the time and output more total work for your boss. This is the paradox of efficiency and it applies to energy as well on a societal level. Increased energy efficiency is a double-edged sword, having the potential to help cut emissions by a significant factor, and having the potential to increase our total energy use, depending on what is made more efficient and how people react to it. The idea that energy efficiency improvements can actually lead to more overall energy use

goes all the way back to the start of the Industrial Revolution. In 1865, economist William Stanley Gevens published a book called The Coal Question, in which he argued that innovation and efficiency, particularly in the case of the coal-powered steam engine, would actually increase the overall consumption of coal rather than reducing it as it had been intended to do. His prediction that efficiency improvements on steam engines would lead to massive economic expansion accelerating coal consumption was very much correct. This idea then, dubbed the Gevens paradox, is still very much worth considering when we discuss efficiency gains and policies that are meant to reduce energy consumption and thereby fight climate change. In modern terms, we describe the process by which

potential energy savings can be cut by greater use of the energy efficient product as the rebound effect. There are two different kinds of rebound effects observed, the most obvious of which is dubbed the direct rebound effect. Direct rebounds are observed when improvements in energy efficiency for a particular energy service reduces the effective price of that service and thus provides incentives to increase its demand. This leads to the overall increased efficiency not equaling to a reduction in energy use as good as you might think. Direct rebounds are observed when improvements in energy efficiency for a particular energy service reduces the effective price of that enough that it provides incentives to increase its demand. You may upgrade to a more energy efficient

appliance, but because of the lower energy costs, you'll use the appliance more often and thus use more total energy. Or in some cases, energy efficiency gains are cut by the fact that more efficient products allow people to use more of that product. For example, someone may get a more efficient fridge that's also much larger and so even though it cools more efficiently, it's also consuming overall more energy. Transportation has a lot of direct rebounds. Despite massive fuel efficiency gains in recent years, transportation is still responsible for 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation's contribution to global warming is quickly increasing with travel producing greater and greater percentages of the planet's carbon footprint. Private automobile

tailpipes will drive this phenomenon for the foreseeable future as the number of active vehicles on the road is projected to grow from 700 million in the year 2000 to 2 billion by 2040. So even though cars are a lot more efficient, vastly more cars are being used. And of course, that's not entirely, it doesn't mean that like more efficient cars cause people to buy more cars, but it does make it more affordable for more people to own cars and to drive them further, which drives up, you know, fuel use and drives up emissions. And you see how the whole problem works. And it's not just cars. When planes became more fuel efficient, ticket prices decreased and more people started to travel by plane. As cost per mile dropped, more miles were flown. The fact that

airplanes got more fuel efficient didn't reduce general pollution by the air travel industry. Quite to the contrary, in fact, the decreased emissions led to an increase in air travel, which shot a hell of a lot more poison out into the sky and also gave us eat, pray, love. So the other kinds of rebounds are indirect rebound effects. This refers to when energy efficiency leads to monetary savings for a producer or consumer who then can spend those extra savings on other carbon emitting goods and services that otherwise they couldn't afford. For example, you buy a more fuel efficient car, you save money on fuel, and you end up with extra funds in your bank account that you can use on a vacation. And maybe you take a flight on that vacation.

So in the end, you emit more CO2, despite the fact that you're emitting less CO2 through your car. You've got 500 bucks extra in the bank and you've fly to Mexico on it, right? That's an indirect rebound effect. So even if a product is replaced by a more efficient one with similar specs, lower energy bills can mean that more consumers will have more money to spend on goods and services. This is generally seen as desirable from a social and economic standpoint, and probably from an individual standpoint, having more money is always useful. But it involves additional energy consumption. It means that you're consuming more, you're emitting more, and so the savings and whatnot haven't actually led to a savings in terms of, you know, from an

environmental perspective. An analysis of EU data shows that out of 29 EU countries, 11 experienced rebound effects of over 50%, which means more than half of the gains in energy efficiency were consumed by increases in energy use. Six of those countries, including Denmark and Finland, reached over 100% rebound effects. This is called a backfire, and it means that in those six countries, extra energy spending overtook all of the efficiency gains achieved. Air conditioning and heating are large contributors to both direct and indirect rebounds. A rebound effect as large as 60% has been shown in increased improvements in efficiency in the residential heating sector, which is something that the White House specifically

crowed about in their paper. In China, long-term rebound effects ranging from 46% to 56% for residential electricity consumption in Beijing have been estimated. All of this data casts doubt on the wisdom of relying on energy efficiency policies to reduce energy demand. I'm going to quote here from a report by the Copenhagen School of Energy Infrastructure. In recent decades, large increases in demand for energy services have globally driven energy consumption. As a counterbalance, energy efficiency has become a key energy policy mechanism to tackle higher energy consumption and emissions, and countries and regions have adopted different targets and policies to achieve energy and environmental objectives. The main goals of these policies are to minimize the

dependence on fossil fuels and mitigate local air pollution and GHG emissions. This has been particularly relevant for the energy-intensive sectors. The development and deployment of more efficient technologies are, along with more technology management, the main channel to achieve these environmental and energy objectives. However, energy efficiency improvements can lead to changes in the demand for energy services, changes that offset some of the expected energy savings. Consequently, forecasts of energy consumption reductions may be overstated. As evidenced by the empirical literature, rebound effects can be a non-negligible issue. Therefore, ignoring them can imply an overestimation of the benefits coming from energy efficiency

improvements. This can in turn lead to decisions such as the overallocation of public funds to ineffective environmental and energy policies. Policymakers need to take rebound effects into account for air quality, energy security, and climate change policy reasons. A rebound effect different from zero implies that the expected proportional reductions in emissions from fuel efficiency improvements might not be achieved. Therefore, the policy goals to reach specific levels of emissions through fuel efficiency enhancements may need to be adjusted accordingly. Again, we have nothing against the idea of making more efficient devices. The point is that energy efficiency can't be pursued in a vacuum. It has to coincide with

changes to a less extractive, cancerous mindset regarding the earth's resources and carrying capacity. Just telling someone you can drive more for less money now or you can afford to keep your TV on all the time doesn't really help anything. My fear is that governments and corporations, the neoliberal Leviathan as we've come to call it on this show, will focus almost overwhelmingly on energy efficiency to maintain economic growth and obscure the overall lack of action on stopping carbon emissions. Think Joe Biden doing donuts in an electric jeep. Through such a lens as the Biden administration, energy efficiency as a foil to climate change is a charade, being used to keep relentless economic growth viewed as a net good. It plays

into the myth that we'll be able to mitigate, adapt, and survive the effects of climate change with little to no change to our current lifestyles. What we need to do is decouple human well-being from energy consumption and consumption in general to effectively combat climate change. This needs to happen at such a scale that advocating for individual changes in lifestyle will never be enough, but that is still a significant part of the puzzle. The trick comes in getting people to accept the fact that their life will need to change, without then telling them and buying this product instead of that product is how you do it. That said, populations of people can and do change their behaviors in pretty profound ways. In 1950, abortion was not at all

an issue for the religious right. Resistance to abortion might make some Protestants distrust you, because that was seen as a Catholic concern. Now abortion is the defining political issue of the ascendant right. Their promise to destroy it is the rock upon which their titanic power is based. In a less calamitous sense, since 2007, we've gone from a time in which smartphones were expensive trash for rich people to buy to today, when they're expensive trash that every human being who can afford to has to carry at all times because they're so utterly integrated to our daily life. So yes, people can change. A bigger challenge, though, will be to change the mindset of industry, which is not entirely or even often driven by consumer demand. As we've seen with the release

of papers proving chevron and other oil and gas companies knew about and deliberately hid research on climate change for decades, big capital will put its thumb on the scale every step of the way. In other words, if you come at the behemoth that is the integrated industrial economy, you'd best come correct. How do we do that? Well, if anybody really knew, they would have, you know, done it by now. The human infrastructure of extractive capitalism is deep and vast and tightly woven into the structure of every government with any real power. So with the full understanding and admission that we aren't claiming to have solutions to that problem, let's talk about something that will at least be part of any real solution to the problem,

degrowth. This is a term we'll explain in more detail later, but we mean it simply as a holistic approach to encouraging reduction in energy consumption and global environmental justice. A paper on the Jeevens paradox and the link between innovation, efficiency and sustainability for the frontiers in energy research concluded, quote, the Jeevens paradox entails that sustainability problems cannot be solved by technological innovations alone. They must be solved through institutional and behavioral changes. While there are still differences of opinion about the scale of rebound effects and ongoing arguments about the macro and micro and longer and shorter term consequences of efficiency, our interest in this topic today is driven by the goal of improving how

we use energy rather than totally overhauling or abandoning efficiency. One example would be the current fight in Europe over smartphone chargers. Most of the rest of the smartphone industry worldwide has jumped onto USB-C as the right kind of port for charging, et cetera, with your device. Before this point, those of you who've been using smartphones for a decade or more remember, there were tons of different chargers and thus a ton of different waste. Every phone had to come with a new charger, a lot of them wound up in the trash. That has been reduced by everyone jumping onto USB-C, but Apple continues to use their own special charger. And now the EU is promising to make a law to mandate USB-C for charging new phones in an attempt to reduce waste. This isn't, again,

a bad thing, but if someone's really concerned with waste among the smartphone industry, planned obsolescence is the thing to go after. Now, targeting planned obsolescence, stopping it, includes a number of things. And for one thing, you have to fight for the right to repair devices, which is something that a number of corporations, not just in the smartphone industry, have lobbied to in some cases make illegal. More than that, it's stopping somehow these companies from making the conscious decision to brick old technology to increase profits. And that aspect of it is the bigger enemy than even the right to repair. As electronic devices become common in more sectors of daily life via the Internet of Things, the overall share of global energy use that goes

to making new versions of old products that could still be working but are designed to break is is really quite depressing. For one example of how large it must be, I haven't found any solid information on the total size. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations

of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly

convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The overall point with all this is that solutions to climate change have to be cultural and not

just based in some version of will invent a better version and that will solve the problem. Hybrid gas burning cars and standardized charging cords are nibbling around the edges of the problem. Relying on technological advances pacifies us in the present and it reinforces the need for certain types of human material codependence. And that kind of codependence leads to increased dependency and more extraction. By no means am I trying to say that innovation is bad. I love Gatchez as much as the next person. Innovation also has the capacity to heavily decrease resource extraction. It just has to be tailored with something more than just we'll make this device more efficient so we can use it more or sell more of them. The capitalist mode of mass resource

extraction and grind for efficiency are intertwined. And if we are to limit the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we as a culture need to rethink how we view efficiency and energy use. For the past few hundred years economic growth has been the road that has led to our current ecological dilemma. The fantasy of switching over to nuclear and renewable energy with a perfectly efficient electric grid to just sidestep climate collapse is it's a fantasy. We missed our chance to do that. Even if we stop all carbon emissions right now, all of them, the carbon already in the atmosphere would push us past two degrees Celsius of warming in about 50 years. So what, besides carbon capture, can we do about this? We as in both you the regular listener and the

ghouls with power and real influence. Well, the 2018 International Panel on Climate Change Special Report indicated that in the absence of speculative negative emissions technologies, the only feasible way to remain within safe carbon budgets was for high-income nations to actively slow down the pace of material production and consumption. D-growth is the planned reduction of energy use, corporate profits, overproduction, and excess consumption designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality while focusing on human and ecological well-being. This isn't just some sort of utopian Marxist thinking, and in fact a lot of Marxists have critiques of D-growth. And D-growth could be applied to a number of different economic and

governmental systems. There are even some weirdo capitalist advocates of D-growth. Discussion about solving climate change can get into uncomfortable eugenics territory if you aren't careful, so I should emphasize here that D-growth is primarily about already wealthy countries limiting their economic growth. When aggregated in terms of income, the richest half of the world, high and upper middle-income countries, emit 86% of global CO2 emissions. The bottom half, lower and middle-income countries, emit only 14%. With very few exceptions, the richer the nation is, the more it emits. It's all part of the resource extraction infinite growth lie, we tell ourselves to keep growing. Wealth is so much more of a factor in emissions than population. North America is

home to only 5% of the world population, but emits nearly 18% of CO2. Asia is home to 60% of the world's population, but emits just 49% of CO2. Africa has 16% of the population, but emits just 4% of its CO2. This is reflected in per capita emissions. The average North American emits 17 times more than the average African. This inequality in global emissions lies at the heart of why international agreement on climate change has and continues to be so contentious. The richest countries in the world are home to half the world population and emit 86% of CO2. We want global incomes and living standards, especially for those of the poorest half of the world, to rise. The only way to do that while limiting climate change is to shrink the emissions

of high-income countries. Even several billion additional people in low-income nations would leave global emissions almost unchanged. Three or four billion poor individuals would only account for a few percent of global CO2. At the other end of the distribution, however, adding only one billion high-income individuals to the wealthiest parts of the world would increase global emissions by almost a third. A programmer in the United States has a higher CO2 footprint than 50 farmers in Uganda. A decent chunk of this is just due to meat consumption. Meat consumption per capita in the richest 15 countries is 750% higher than in the poorest 24 countries. Lowering the population of, say, Uruguay won't do much for emissions. This is not the case when you talk about wealthy

nations. In fact, if you live in, say, the United States, possibly the biggest thing you as an individual could do to reduce emissions is to have fewer or no children. It's estimated that dedicated recycling curves about 0.3 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, while having one fewer child is equivalent to preventing over 58 tons of CO2 emissions a year. Better sex ed and free access to contraceptives could also go a shockingly long way to curbing individual emission in wealthy countries. These numbers are averaged across a whole nation, and just like the case in less wealthy countries, the impact on emissions by having one fewer kid will be far lesser if your middle class are poor than it would be if your upper middle class are rich. But of course,

none of that is going to be enough if industrial production keeps chugging along and advising people not to have children. One of the singular driving motivations for human beings across history isn't exactly a vote-gitter of a proposition. Degrowth is critical, but the question of how to get there is thorny as hell. There are a few easy answers. Abolishing planned obsolescence could be pretty easily pitched to the average person. Cutting down on the number of people who have to commute could have a significant impact on toxic car culture, and again, you can sell that to people. The obvious solutions are good places to start, but they should be seen as opening incisions, meant to clear the way to make deeper, more expansive cuts, and eventually,

hew away at the cancer we planted in the heart of our civilization. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the peach pit. On the podcast 90210MG, join Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210 from the very beginning. We get to tell the fans all of the behind-the-scenes stories that actually happen, so they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades as 90210 Superfan and radio host Sissony sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect, and relive each moment from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to

shouting, Donna Martin graduates. You have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show, and you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 90210MG on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal, and I am Troy Millings, and we are the host of the Earn Your Leisure podcast, where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business, sport, and entertainment. From DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross, and Shaquille O'Neal, I mean, our alumni list is expansive. Listen to them as our guests reveal their business models,

hardships, and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledge is in depth, and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know. We talk to the legends of business, sports, and entertainment about how they got their start, and most importantly, how they make their money. Earn Your Leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game? Unclear as how to stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered. The Earn Your Leisure podcast is available now. Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network,

iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, it's happened could hear. Robert Evans, the podcast that is now begun. This is a show about how things are falling apart, and occasionally how to maybe deal with that, maybe try to steer things in a better direction. We talk about a bunch of stuff. Today, we're going to be talking about more supply line stuff. And in order to kind of introduce this episode, we wanted to bring in Alexis, who posted a thread on Twitter about some of their experiences in the industry in which they work that we all found very interesting. And so we just wanted to bring Alexis on. And first off, have you kind of go over what you went over in that thread and then

zero in and talk about that? So Alexis, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I'm going to let you take it from here, and then we'll drill in once you get through your piece. All right. So I'm just going to go ahead and read the thread that I posted. And then, yeah, we'll go from there. So labor shortage discourse time. I work for a food manufacturing company, specifically bottling and canning various beverages. And we are desperately understaffed. The wages are competitive, but they can't keep anyone on after they hire them. Why? Because we're short on people. As soon as someone is trained, they start throwing massive

amounts of mandatory overtime on them to try and cover the missing pieces while they look for more people to hire in. Folks get burned out and quit. And this is where my hate of just-in-time manufacturing comes in. Now, obviously in food manufacturing, you can't just stock a warehouse with stuff and let it sit for a year. But you can keep a couple of weeks of stock rotating at all times if you devote the warehouse space, employees, et cetera, to doing so. This would give you some flex time to train your new people without having to run everyone into the dirt. So even with a place that is offering decent money and benefits, because this is a union shop, we can't keep people because we're making a conscious decision to only ever have one to two days of stock on hand to

increase profits. Meanwhile, thanks to lean manufacturing, we don't keep a ton of spare parts for our equipment on hand. Thanks to the supply chain disruption, we've got packaging equipment that's been waiting on replacement parts for six months, which further fucks our productivity due to downtime, which makes the company schedule even more overtime to try and make up for the lost cases from equipment downtime, which burns out more employees, which puts us in an even deeper labor hole. I've been warning about just-in-time being a time bomb in the making for over a decade now. When it works perfectly, you're fine. A single interruption causes cascade effects, and since everyone has been doing the just-in-time thing, there's zero slack anywhere in the system.

Grocery stores don't have any extra soda in the back. They get behind. Demand builds up. Distribution doesn't have any pallets in the warehouse. Ha! What warehouse? So they can't answer the surge in demand from grocery stores. Manufacturing doesn't have spare parts for aging equipment, so we can't boost production. Spare parts makers don't have stock buildup, so on and on it goes. The actual proximate cause of this is deregulation of capitalism that has incentivized quarterly profits and made long-term thinking anathema to CEOs. But sure, conservatives blame California for not letting old trucks offload at the ports. That's it. And that's the essence of my thread. I then plug my podcast at the end. Right. Yeah. So I wanted to- I'm curious as to

kind of like- I'm trying to understand what the solution is. We've talked a bit about, okay, just-in-time manufacturing is problematic for a lot of reasons. Keeping more on the shelves is going to allow you to avoid these crunches and is going to make supply line issues like the ones we've been experiencing since the start of the COVID pandemic, less severe and less common. But how do you actually make that happen? Because I guess the traditional free market thing is that like, well, because this has been such a problem for companies, they'll naturally change the system in order to avoid this in the future. I don't feel like that's likely to happen. And I'm wondering like, what do we- what do you think is the way forward here? Well, because some of the problem

is right now, like most companies, you will pay taxes on stuff that you have stored in a warehouse, things like that. So no company is going to voluntarily lower their profit margins if the other companies don't do it themselves as well. So really, there's going to have to be some sort of forcing of companies to have that on hand. And I don't see just being able to write a law that says, oh, well, you're required to have this much back stock on hand as being a functional way to work. And really, as I'm sure, Robert, I know you're well aware, the capitalism itself is kind of the problem. But as far as, I guess, a solution to this sort of thing, you would have to disincentivize the quarterly profits above all in order to force companies

back into long-term thinking. Now, from a purely mechanical standpoint, I guess if you did something to incentivize companies having back stock or flex stock on hand, that might help. But I mean, I'm just a cog in the machine getting ground up. So as far as big solutions, that's, I mean, I've been looking at it ever since I worked in a fricking casket factory, and we started doing just in time there. And just every time that I've been in a place, a manufacturing place, and seen it happen, I'm just like, oh, this is going to go wrong. Because you can't, you can do just in time if all of your suppliers are local, but having it stretched across a global supply chain, it just, it's inevitably going to

collapse in on itself. I'm sorry that I'm not more helpful. No, no, but I mean, this is like the problem, because there's a lot of reasons why the supply chain is global. Some of them are like labor-related reasons. Some of them are cost-cutting. Some of them are just like pure pragmatism. But it's trying to, like, I don't, I feel like it's one thing to say like, well, part of the problem is that like, all of these different pieces come from different countries, and there's a number of shady reasons for aspects of that. But it makes for greater problems when there's a supply line shortage. And then like, okay, well, what are we, what are we going to, are you suggesting that we make everything domestically? Because I don't

feel like that's a realistic solution. Yeah, no. Yeah. And it's just, it's, I'm trying to get a handle on, there's a couple of angles on this. There's, there's what we think is going to happen. And then there's the question of like, is there a way that the system as it exists could make this whole thing less vulnerable? And in a lot of ways, that's going to be separate from the question of what would be better for everyone to happen? Because a lot of what would be better for everyone to happen is a wide, a significant chunk of these things that we have constantly stocked on the shelves are no longer parts of our life, right? Right. There's a lot of things that are made that we do not need, and that are, there's an environmental cost and a social cost and yada,

yada, yada. But I guess, first, I'm kind of curious to drilling in like, how realistic do you think it is that the system as it exists is going to like, mitigate this and come up with better ways to, to do this that render us less vulnerable to the supply crunches? Like, is there, I don't see a great financial incentive in it for them yet, because they, they don't seem to be hurting, right? Like, that's, that's the thing. Well, actually, and again, please keep in mind, this is limited anecdotal evidence. Yeah, because it's going to be different. Like John Deere, I know, was making record profits before all this union stuff happened. But like, that's not everyone. Right. Yeah. So, again, I work for a soda manufacturer. So every time you're, you know,

enjoying your, your Schmech C. Schmola or your, or your Schmego, whatever, whatever, I'm not going to explain which company I work for, because I don't want to get in trouble. And we're, we're actually a captive bottler, which means that it's a separate company, but we work for the big soda corporation. I think that in certain instances, those things will change. Because for example, just last week, we had one of our four lines go down. So 25% of our production capacity went down because we had a motor burnout on the rollers that would move a full pallet out to be picked up by a forklift. And there was no replacement motor in stock. And so we had, I think, 48 hours of downtime on this. Now, all the way up at the top, the

company executives, you know, we're one of 30 some plants, they don't care about why it was down, just that it was down. So in our position here, the people a little higher up the food chain than me are insisting like, Hey, we've been after you guys for months that we need spares like this. And I think that as that sort of stuff happens, as it cuts into potential future profits, you know, it's not dropping their profits, but it's keeping them from being even higher, maybe certain companies are going to be like, OK, maybe we do need a couple more spares on the shelves. As far as on the production side of it, I don't see that happening. I think we're still going to be shipping out pallets of, you know, pallets of corn syrup in infected carbonated

water as fast as we can make them, which you and you were talking about the environmental cost, like you do not want to know how much water it takes to make a single liter of soda. You really don't. But on this on the production like input side, I think that companies are going to start stocking spare parts because it has been and I still have friends who work for other companies that I used to work for. It has been all throughout the system and I live in the Midwest. Every company is going through this where they're having huge amounts of downtime because they things as small as a gasket or an O ring are not on the shelf. And they're finally companies are finally going to listen to what their maintenance people have been screaming at them that we

can't just stagger along and then, oh, well, it's next day delivery. Yeah. And then you freak out that this line was down for 24 hours. Now that it's not even next day delivery, it's next week delivery. I think that side of it, they're going to probably try and fix. But the other side shipping to the consumer, I really don't see that they're going to change that. Yeah. I mean, that makes that makes sense. And we are you are kind of led thinking about this inevitably to like two conclusions. One of them is that I have my I'm sure parts of this the system will adapt as it already has been in fact, which is why like, you haven't seen toilet paper run out as bad as it did at the start of the pandemic again, right? There is a degree to which

the system is capable of adjustment. But kind of in a larger sense, this is number one, I'm kind of left with the feeling that because of the way the system was set up, the and the fact that it was disrupted so severely, it's kind of impossible to get 100% back on track, especially considering the disruptions are going to continue, not just waves of COVID, but, you know, in natural disasters and whatnot shortages of things like truck drivers, like these different little hits are going to keep coming. And I just don't know that we're ever going to like, catch up everywhere enough that like shortages of some sort aren't an aspect of our lives kind of forever. And this is one of those things that if you've spent a lot of time

outside of the United States, that's something a lot of people have been dealing with for years, it's just not something Americans are used to dealing with. And I think I kind of feel like that's just where it is now, like I don't feel like every aspect of our, our production and consumption system is going to get back where it was February of 2020. I think maybe that's never happening again. No, absolutely. It will not ever happen again. You were saying earlier that, you know, there's some practical reasons for the global supply chain, like one of the things that we've had such hard time getting in is any of our concentrates that contain real vanilla. Obviously, we can't grow vanilla in the United States. Yeah, that's the thing you have to,

I mean, that's part of why colonialism exists, right? You need to go get vanilla. Yeah. So yeah, so like, there are certain things that are going to be stay, have to stay global if we're going to continue to make the things that we make. And just from my side of it, being able to see, oh, well, why can't we get this concentrate in? Oh, because it has vanilla as an ingredient and there's been a bunch of droughts and shit. And so vanilla is in a crunch, you know, that sort of thing. So I just, you're right in that, yeah, we're going to have shortages. There's, it's, you know, and it's not just the mechanical side on ours. It's like, we can't get cans in, we can't get concentrate in, we can't, you know, whatever it is that we can't get in is going to slow us down

and demand will build up. I did have somebody in that thread respond and say, I don't see how demand for soda will build up. And I'm like, no, I have a friend who's like a Diet Dr Pepper fiend. And as soon as Diet Dr Pepper shows up now, she buys like eight 24 packs. Demand will absolutely build up for stuff when people feel like they're being deprived of something. When it becomes available, they're going to hoard it as best they can. Yeah. And that's again, with soda, just kind of an annoyance, although that can, because individual people can react in extreme ways can snowball. I'm not going to be surprised if one of these days we have somebody shoot up a fucking grocery store because they're whatever was out. But that's also not a necessity. And I

think that like the concern is that, especially when you look at stuff like, you know, there's a couple of states that had like their wheat harvest and corn harvest that were like half or less than half of normal in big chunks of Iraq, it was like down by I think like 70 or 80%. Like these massive shortages of growing basic food stuffs. And that's all, that's all tied into this. Like it's not the same business that you're on, but it's all tied into aspects of this. And it's all tied into like a lot of our ability to get that food out of the field is reliant upon different kinds of mechanical harvesting equipment, the materials to which to like fix and replace it are often like caught up in this whole just in time problem, because they don't make enough of them. And

sometimes they don't have them in stores. And then there's like a strike at John Deere. And so more aren't getting made. And so there's not what you need to repair the equipment in time to get stuff out of the field everywhere. And in a year, when you already have a reduction of harvest, it's like that cuts down on it further. Like I think, I don't know, it's this, there's always a couple of things to look at, which is like number one, as we've talked about, like how is the system going to try to handle this? What ways are they going to be successful? What ways are they going to fail? What things are you going to have to endure? And what things, I think what I want to talk about next is like, what things do we need to change

in order to like, as communities be more resilient to this stuff, which, you know, has less to do with soda, which again, is not a necessity, but more to do with figuring out how to anticipate and endure supply line disruptions. Right, absolutely. And, and while I'm currently in soda, I have been in everything from automotive to I think as I mentioned, or casket manufacturers. So, you know, that, but when I can go through a casket a week, you know, especially when you're driving your, your, well, yeah, when I'm drunk driving in a, oh boy,

right, right through a trailer park. I mean, you're, you're, I mean, your casket order has got to be through the roof. It is, it is a lot, a lot of people. Yeah. I mean, I do actually wonder how, fuck. I mean, like, I do actually wonder how much, like the casket industry and so like that has been affected by the, by, like, by the pandemic with the, you know, in inflex of dead people and how that's, how that's affected things. But that's something I've been wondering about, but I've not actually spent time looking into. I can't speak to the pandemic specifically. I quit, I quit the casket industry in 2008,

but I do recall my boss, the owner at the time being very, very upset that Hurricane Katrina had a lower death toll than he anticipated because he had overordered the sheet metal to make the caskets and he was very pissed off about having all that extra stock because they were trying to transfer to, to just in time society. Yeah. So that's, that's good to hear. Yeah. Great. Yeah. He, he was in a bad mood for like a month after Katrina because it hadn't reached his expectation. Well, sure. That's a real problem for, for him. Absolutely. No, he's got, that's all of the sympathy, critical support. I mean, that was, that job was grim. I'm just going to say that. That sounds like it. I have a, through a, through a loved one,

a connection to somebody who is like, works for a company that makes body bags and 2020 was amazing for them. They did incredible in 2020. I didn't hear any ghoulish stories. It's just like, yeah, of course you guys made a bunch of extra money. Sounds like that was great for you. Putting, putting in a mental note to go through a bunch of the campaign contributions of people who make body bags and check if they're supporting anti-mass caskets. Yeah. See if big corpse got into this at all. Yeah. I mean, honestly, the thing to, the thing to do is, you know, I'm, I'm not a big fan of the stock market in general, but next time, next time that there's a pandemic, find out which companies make body bags on the stock market and invest in those as soon as,

as soon as the pandemic starts. I mean, I can tell you what, I'm, I'm putting money into big corpse as soon as, as soon as the next pandemic hits. That's absolutely going to happen. Oh boy. All right. Yeah, that's grim. Yeah. I think it's fine. There's a reason why after, after I started working there, I immediately told my husband, hey, make sure if I die before you, I'm cremated. So. Yes. Yes. I don't want to give these monsters any of my money. What I'm looking into is just full, full body stuffing that people can pose me around, but that's a separate topic. Yeah. You talk about that a lot, Garrison. What I did want to mention is like, actually, when you were talking about how they hire in a lot of employees and they make them work horrible

hours and then they, you know, they quit and this is kind of a constant kind of process. And like, this isn't exclusive to that industry at all. One of the worst defenders of this is actually the postal service. I think the postal service has like the lowest employee satisfaction out of any shipping company. And like my, my, my father worked for the postal service for a bit. And when you first join up, you join as like, you join as a, on like a non-career employee path, and then you can get promoted to a career employee path after a few years. But the turnaround for the non-career employee paths is massive. Like local branches can say up to like 90% of people who start working at the postal service will end up quitting within the year. Now that number

can be different based on like nationally and for based on like, you know, based on what state you're in, but, but across the board, it's always around at least 50% for employee turnaround for people who join up the postal service on these like city carrier assistant positions. That's fascinating. Yeah, because, because when you, when you're a non-career employee path, you have to work seven days a week and you can be called into work basically any time, usually working around 10 to 12 hour days. All of the career employees, so all of like, that sounds like what I put you guys through. But like, all of, all of like, all of like the regular carriers get to work like their specific route and that's it. That's their whole day for the people who are new to the job.

They're forced to work tons of routes, fill in whenever someone else can't, and we constantly be doing overtime and working like basically non-stop with only like two, like only two holidays off a year or something. It's pretty intense, which is why, you know, when the postal service comes to have problems and because, and because there's so, there's generally not tons of employees. I mean, like there is lots, like, comparatively, like the postal service is one of the bigger employers in the whole country. But for people when, when employees drop off, filling those positions can be really hard in times of like crisis. So like, you know, last year when there was all those problems with the postal service, all of these kind of issues around the supply

chain and around how people treat their workers, all of them like, like, you know, compound to create one like much bigger problem, which we saw last year with the postal service and like late, in like the late summer. So if it's kind of interesting how it's like, you know, these same issues around like how we treat workers is adding on to this problem of like supply chains and getting stuff delivered and all this kind of stuff. And so what, what I find interesting there is so you're, you know, we're talking about the employee issue and yeah, churn. So I've been, the plant I was working in, which is 20 minutes from my house closed down. And now I'm working 90 miles away, literally an hour and 45. Jesus Christ. Jesus, age Christ. I am, I am working

412s a week and I'm crashing at my parents house, which they live about 60 miles away. So it's a little bit better. But also my parents are still sucks. Yeah. Yeah. And my parents are hard right evangelicals who do not agree with, you know, this. So that's fun. But the plant that I was in was a non union plant. And the one I'm in now is a union plant. And one of the things that I've noticed that's actually kind of different is for once in the non union plant, things were actually better. Because what we could do, what could be done is, all right, we're all working seven days a week. We have enough staffing that if nobody calls in, we have one spare person who normally goes around and gives breaks and stuff like that. Well, we could, you know, basically all take turns

taking a day off during that seven day week at the union plant that I'm at now, though, it's all seniority based. So anytime that they force overtime, they go from the bottom of the seniority list on up. Yeah. So yeah, people, the people who are being forced into those, which I described in the thread, I think it was it was split off in the thread. But the people who were being forced to stay over four hours and then come in four hours early where you, oh, you were working six to two, now you're working, you know, six to six. And then you're coming in at two in the morning, instead of six in the morning, the next day are always the people who are the lowest on the seniority list, which is same thing with the postal service. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's not, there's a number of different, I mean, I've heard that complaint from a couple of different union gigs. And it's, yeah, it's a problem. Yeah. And it's, that's why we get these new people and they get trained up and now they're trained and they're signed off. And then they immediately go from because when you're training, you're not, you can't train on overtime or whatever. But now it's, oh, okay, well, now you're working every weekend, you're being forced over, you're being forced in early, just nonstop. And so, yeah, they get trained for a month. And then a month after that, they quit because they went from working a relatively sane amount to an absurd amount of hours a week. We went 58 days at one

point without a day off. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. My dad went like almost, I think like 300 days without a day off when he started the postal service. A kind of funny thing is like, when you hear the postal service talking about this, like from their own reports and on their own website, what they find a problem with is not, not the turnaround in and of itself, but how they're basically wasting money on training for people that don't end up working. So like that is their main concern is that they're spending all this money on like training for people that don't stick around often. And like, yeah, well, maybe you should address why they don't stick around often. That's, that seems to be kind of the actual issue here.

Yeah. And what I've been pushing for, and I know this is more on the labor side than on the, on the supply chain side that we were focusing on, I've been pushing for instead of three shifts where we keep just getting just hammered with this stuff. I want us to do four shifts, 12-hour days and do like a two-on, two-off, three-on, three-off type swing shift where you have like one shift that works, you know, you work three days one week, four days the next week, and you work 12-hour days, but really you wind up getting a bunch of days off, you know, like that's, if you're going to work seven days a week, that's the best way to do it, in my opinion. There's a lot of resistance to, well, then we have to hire these extra people.

Well, you're hiring those people anyway, and then they're quitting. I mean, like, you're not even getting your value out of them slave drivers. I mean, like you said, this is more, this is more on the labor side than the supply chain side. But honestly, these are, these are like the same side, right? Because if you don't have employee, like this is, you know, this is a fundamental, you know, thing and like how capitalism works, right? You need to have, you know, workers to make there have be any value at all, right? So if there isn't, if there isn't any people to working, then there is no supply chain. It's gone because we need people to do it, both on like the production side and both in

like the transportation side, that's like, you know, UPS, USPS, you know, FedEx, you know, so like the mail carriers and stuff is very important to all of this because you need, in order for there to be a supply chain, there needs to be the chain part, right, where you carry it from one place to another. So it's both on the production side and on like the transportation side for how all of these problems, you know, get. And one of the things that I, in the replies to my thread, which I got into was that part of the only slack in just-in-time manufacturing is the employees. They've pulled all of the slack out of the system on the mechanical side and on the production side of it, on all the physical side. The only slack left is people, and they have stretched us

all to the absolute breaking point. Now, I'm lucky, relatively speaking, in that I'm salary. So like, I'm more on the inventory side of things. So I'm not doing the hourly production seven day a week thing. Like I said, I work 412s. But I can still, you know, and that that's this job, every other previous job, not the same thing. But I can still see where they've taken out like once again, we used to have spares on the shelf so that when something broke down, we could fix the machine and keep running. Now, instead of the spare, the spare is people working weekends. That's the spare part. And that makes total sense, right? You're the capitalist, a better spare that is a part on the shelf costs you money in terms of like you need to have that

space, that's extra rent you're paying, you need to have bought that part. Having your people just kill themselves is much cheaper. You can sort of misuse a Marx here, right? Or like one of Marx's things is like, okay, well, you know, you have this increased machinery, you have this increased machinery, but that means you're producing less value because, you know, you've put more people out of work was like, okay, well, what if what if we just we re extend the workday again, and sort of, you know, reverse all of the gains that have been happening? Well, okay, I say have been happening, reverse all the gains that happened between about 1930 and like 1970 and just, oh, well, what if we just make everyone by 12 hour days again? And that that was, you

know, one of the things that struck me both listening to this and reading the thread was that it's not even just wages, just it's, it's, it's, it's a fun, it's just the fundamental power of balance. And then it's a fundamental power and balance has gotten so bad that even like, you know, the, the, the like sometimes the remains of the union system, it's like, it's not even, you know, like the unions, like, in this particular case, like this, they're not even, it's not even really helping, it's just creating like a, you have a small labor aristocracy that you have everyone else getting just like ground down. In this case, it's that we've got, we've got a small core of people who've been there 20 or 30 years. Yeah. And, and whereas before, maybe even 10 years

ago, they might have viewed the union as a vehicle to help everybody, things have gotten so bad that now it's just, okay, I'm going to use this system as much as I can to cover my own ass because things have gotten so damn bad. And obviously, you know, Reagan destroying the unions and stuff like that helped with that. But yeah, it's the, I, and I feel like the union in, in my job could be very helpful. But it would require certain people in it to instead of looking out for just their own interest because, hey, I've been here 25 years, so I'm in the clear, like, actually go, okay, maybe I should, you know, sacrifice a little bit of, of that power or that privilege to help the people who are just hiring in so that we can keep them so that, that this doesn't have to keep

happening. Yeah. And it's, you know, this is one of the things that has made the John Deere strike that made it so powerful was these, those older workers who, I mean, they had a tiered system, right? So you had workers hired, I think before like 97 got a full pension. And then like after 97 was like a third of that. And then workers hired in the last couple of years weren't getting any pension at all. And a big part of the strike is like, all of the workers saying that's not acceptable, including the ones who had a full pension who had some of a pension, like saying that like the fact that the newer people are getting screwed over isn't acceptable. And I've heard different reasons for why that happened. Because this is this tactic, what you're talking

about and kind of like what happened at John Deere, it was a common tactic, you know, it's the thing we talk about in colonialism all the time, you want to divide the population against, you know, each other, each other one way or the other, give them like make, make them feel as if their interests are not necessarily aligned, you know, so the people who, and there's reasons, I've heard different reasons for why John Deere was different, including the idea that like a lot of these are family jobs. So it was not people, it was people being like, well, my kid's not gonna get a pension and that's bullshit. Anyway, yeah, I just, it's, it's, it's important to talk about like that as a problem, and also to highlight different strikes where that seems to have been

overcome by the workers, like this fact that they were attempted to be played against each other didn't really work out. And where in my case, it very much is like another, another example being, so we'll have people who are lower on the seniority list and like, let's say, for example, one weekend, we're running lines three and five and not the other two. The newer people might only know stuff on line four. But if the new people don't get scheduled to do something, even if they're just being forced in to sweep the floor, the people who have the higher seniority will throw a fit saying, well, their lower seniority, why aren't they in here, as opposed to, well, because they can't run that machine. And then they don't want to train them to run that machine.

It's, it's very, they've managed to succeed where the John Deere capitalists might have failed in making this all about like, all right, working can, and I don't blame the people who have the higher seniority on this, because if my, you know, if your working conditions are hell, and you have the option of, okay, well, on a short term scale, I can screw over this other person and actually see my family once in a while. Most people are going to do it. And especially if that person is somebody who just hired in that you don't know, I'll screw that guy. And that's where, once again, if unions were stronger, if it was more than what is it right now, like two, three percent of jobs are union job. But unions have been so like just weakened that this sort of

situation is allowed to happen, I guess you could say. Yeah. And I think, yeah, that comes back to this, like the solution to the supply chain problem isn't really a, like, it's not, it's not a logistical solution. It's not even really like a capital gain solution, like a tax solution. The solution is that, you know, you have to fundamentally change the balance of power between capital and labor. And, you know, I mean, that, and that, that can be like, you know, I think things will get better if it's, if it's more unions, but like things are going to continue to suck until like the capitalists cease to exist as a class. Yeah. And I think that's like, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's because, yeah, that's always the, and it's one of those like, we get, we get

critiqued on the internet sometimes, because I think people will say like, well, you know, is your only solution to this, you keep talking about like mutual aid and anarchism and like, I just don't feel like that's a big scale solution. It's like, yeah, but the current system isn't going to work very well on a big scale. Part of what we're always talking about is like, how to, how to get your, how to get yourself and your people through the situation, because that's also important. And it's the same thing with like a union, right? Unionizing you and your fellow laborers in your factory, or, or making your union more effective and more able to like advocate for everyone, that's not going to fix the bigger problem. That's not going to deal with the,

the issues that like, that's not going to stop climate change. That's not going to stop supply line crunches on a grand scale. It's not going to stop creeping authoritarianism, but it can make life more bearable for you and the people around you. And that's, that's also part of like getting by in a crumbling world. Absolutely. Yeah. And yep, it's, it requires a bit of more foresight, which I think goes, one of the other purposes behind working us as many hours as they do is when you're so fucking tired all the time from working what you're working, you don't have time to stop and think about the larger implications of things. And yeah. And that's part of what they're going for.

Yep. Yeah. So I don't know. Anyone else get anything? Well, I guess just the clear solution to this is that I need to just stock up on bang, right? I just need to buy all of them. I can't because I love bang. I, I can't stop drinking bang. Are you scared of how much you love bang? I'm scared of how much bang I drink. I will say one of the wonderful mutual aid solutions is if you're very, very nice to the syrup mixing people, they will be kind to you if you are working a double and they will give you a shot of the energy drink syrup before it's been mixed. Oh my god. Oh boy. You should not have told Garrison that. I am going to develop a problem.

Garrison's going to quit his job podcasting just to be able to get your shots of energy drink. I am just going to be shooting up energy drink here on out. That's all I'm doing with my time. I'm sorry. I'm leaving, leaving the call right now finding the nearest factory. And I hope you're happy. My second day on the, on the job in the soda manufacturing thing, I had a 24 pack of energy drink explode all over me. I didn't have a change of clothes. And that's when I learned that caffeine and taurine can soak through your skin. Oh, yes. Oh, no. I mean, basically. I was seeing sound. Okay. So I, I've just been looking up inflatable hot tubs and I feel like if I could order enough

pure energy drink syrup and an inflatable hot tub, I could build basically the equivalent of Baron Harkonnen's rejuvenation bath. Yeah, exactly. But with like pure bang syrup. Yeah, that is, that is, that is my plan. I mean, just be 12 caffeine and taurine. It's just going to be, we're all going to quit our jobs. We're just going to have the same amount of money. They get slower over time because we're again, spending it all on bang. Well, obviously you need, you need the inside person to supply you with the syrup. So we'll just have sort of an oceans 11 situation where you guys pull up to the loading dock and with a tanker, and I'm just hooking the truck up, you know, it's going to be like Scarface, but we're selling

pure syrup. And then Garrison loses his mind and winds up in a machine gun fight in a mansion. Instead of burying his face into a mountain of cocaine, he's instead got just a large pirate's bowl full of syrup. Yes. He's just sticking his hand into a bowl of syrup to absorb the, the, the caffeinated nutrients. When I pee, it's when I pee, it's just going to be straight syrup now. That is, yeah. Anyway, well, that's the episode. If people want to find you a lot, where can they find you? So I host, along with my husband and our friend, Justin, we host a trans comedy and pop culture podcast where we also interview interesting people. It's called the violet wanderers. So you can find

us on Twitter at violet wanders or thevioletwanderers.com or email thevioletwanderers at gmail.com. And that's basically that's my Twitter handle. And I just slowly got sucked into the Twitter hellscape where I originally went on just like, Oh, I'm going to just promote my show. And then I started responding to people. And before you know it, I'm writing 20 tweet rants about just in time on my stupid podcast account. I got into Twitter to converse with a young Justice podcast. And that's why I created my Twitter account. And here I am now. So I was trying to get a Planetside 2 beta key and I got it, but the consequences were I am now here. Yeah. Twitter and its consequences have been a disaster for us.

You're such a child. I remember the first Planetside beta back in the day, Chris. It was an age undreamed of. Oh, Chris. And you all are welcome to come on the show anytime. I will I will bother you to come on my show sometime. And yeah, plugs, plugs, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, the violet wanders were on Apple were on Spotify were on podcast attic, whatever, you know, all your major podcast platforms. The tagline of the show is made for no one. So expect a lot of queer humor, a lot of me calling my husband a slut and us talking about video games, comic books, movies, and then occasionally just randomly interviewing really interesting people who I harass into coming on the show. Like which Robert, I know, you know, Daniel Harper from

I Don't Speak German. I sure do. He's been on a few times. We've had him on and had some fun talking about Nazis, which yeah, seems kind of, you know, counterintuitive, but there's a lot of humor that can be found in Nazis if you know the right places to look. And yeah, I you know what, I just watched a German language movie about Hitler that was made in 2007 by a Jewish German comedian that includes I've watched a lot of Hitler movies, you know, periodically I just get on Netflix and Hulu type and Hitler just kind of watch whatever's there. This is the first time I have seen Hitler fucking in a movie. I've never seen anybody who had the courage to do that. And he is just yeah, he's it's, it's uncomfortable and is one ball just swinging

in the end. It is it is an uncomfortable scene, but not the most uncomfortable scene in that particular movie. It's quite a film. That's I'm gonna say that's pretty amazing. But yeah, come on some come on some time. We'll play a round of incelmageddon, which is a game that I've created. And, you know, if you guys don't want to kill yourselves afterwards, then hey, you survived the game. As long as I can get some syrup out of the deal. That's that's all I want. I will, I will, I will smuggle you some syrup out and mail it to you. Okay, perfect. That's that's going to do it for all of us here today. And it could happen here. Until next time. I don't know. Go, go read, go read the dawn of everything. It's good. It's worth reading. Check it out.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. We've all felt left out. And for people who move to this country, that feeling lasts more than a moment. We can change that. Learn how at thelongleambeginswithus.org. Brought to you by the ad council. The Gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around the underworld.

From criminals and entertainers to victims of crime and law enforcement, we cover all facets of the game. Gangster Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify our promote illicit activities. We just discussed the ramifications and repercussions of these activities because after law, if you play gangster games, you are ultimately rewarded with gangster prizes. Our Heart Radio is number one for podcasts, but don't take our word for it. Find the Gangster Chronicles podcast on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we're like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. With no country to bring him down, with the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.