Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 11

Episode Date: November 28, 2021

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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?

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Listen to Waiting on Reparations on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Look through your children's eyes and you will discover the true magic of a forest. Find a forest near you and start exploring at DiscoverTheForest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. Hey, every buddy, America, hey Americans, America, how was American? That is the podcast. And those beyond. That was a horrible shit. That was maybe your talk 10 words. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast where an incompetent Rube fucks up starting the show, and then we talk about how things are falling apart, or how to make things not fall apart, or some version of things in between those two facts.

Yep. Yep, that's kind of not great time going on right now. A lot of people are- That was our second, that was our bee pitch for the night. It's kind of not a great time. It's kind of not a great time going on right now. It actually is not that far from what was discussed. Yeah, I mean, especially right now, there's a lot of trials going on feet on stuff, and the Amad Arboree trial is happening, the one about Unite the Right is going on, and of course, the kind of house trial.

As of recording is the jury is still in deliberation. Second day of deliberations. So no idea what's going to be the result by the time this episode goes up. I've actually been not commenting on it or trying not to think about it. There's nothing we can do about it. There's nothing you can do. See what happens. A lot of people, there's been discussion about how much civil unrest there's going to be, depending on the result of the trial.

I know there's been a lot of National Guard sent to Wisconsin. It's been FBI door knocks at activist homes trying to scare people so they don't go out and ride or whatever. Discussion online of people planning protests in response to whatever the result is. I noticed today there was a post from, I think, the Ohio Proud Boys claiming that they'd be sending like, was it hundreds or thousands of people armed with like ARs to Wisconsin? Yeah, there's a fucking post. People are saying like, you should take it seriously because it's from a Proud Boys internal chat. And it's like, we've got 300 guys heavily armed heading to, and there's already X number of guys there, and we're going to kill a lot more communists than Kyle Rittenhouse did. And yada, yada, yada.

Yada, yada, yada. If I could give you one piece of advice now, and who knows where the world is at the point at which this episode drops. It's when people talk about, say, if you are at a protest and someone starts talking about the Proud Boys, is it the Proud Boys are coming or the Proud Boys are here? If you don't immediately see uncontrovertible visual proof that they have access to showing it, assume it's nonsense, okay? Yeah. That is my advice as someone who has heard a thousand times people say versions of the Proud Boys are coming, okay? Insist on evidence or ignore it. But, you know, whenever these big civil unrests and types of stuff happens, there's always an increased chance that there'll be some kind of protest-related shooting.

Yes, definitely, absolutely. That may have happened by the time this episode drops. Yeah, especially if people are bringing guns, people are bringing firearms, there's been a lot of, you know, for like the demonstrations outside the courthouse, there's been, you know, guns there. There's been, you know, an increase in the rate of shootings at protests on the West Coast throughout the past few months. So, I'm going to be kind of talking about, you know, some things that you can do if you're at home and you feel competent enough in the aftermath of one of these shootings. You know, if a Proud Boy does bring a gun and shoot somebody, what you can actually do. If video, if you're in a situation where you've been following something happening all day, there's a shooting and like low-quality footage starts coming out of somebody killing someone or someone else. Here's what to do next if you want to maybe be a positive part of that process.

Well, not of that process, but of like the fallout online. Yeah, and because the universe is cruel, I originally wrote this write-up about the written house shooting. Because the universe is a cruel place and it's going to, you know, continue to, this particular incident is going to continue to be impactful. Even though it's not the first, it's not going to be the last one of these. It is still impactful because of how much of a symbol has been turned into. So I think a lot of people forget about how chaotic the night on the Internet was the day of the Kenosha shooting. Like it was wild. Being online as that was going on, no one had no idea what was going on.

People could not agree on who the shooter was beforehand. There was a lot of pictures floating around. It was a nightmare. We knew that people were shot, we could not know how many or who. It was pretty bad and chaotic. And it is always that way in the wake of a shooting. And it is the, in any given shooting, always keep in mind when you're online or in person. And there has been a shooting and people are saying things about said shooting other than we should take cover from the shooting.

If they're saying anything else about it, you have to assume they're probably not either wrong or not entirely accurate. Because it's hard to be. It happens constantly. It's something against any of them. I can remember a moment when you and I were out last year, Garrison, and there was a shooting, I don't know, like 40 feet away. Nobody hurt thankfully, but the immediate report from it was some guy had pulled an AR-15 out of his car. And I think the thing I said to you was, I'll bet you right now it's a 9mm handgun. And sure enough, within minutes there was a photo.

And it's not that those people were like dumb or bad. It's that like shootings are scary, guns getting pulled is scary, and people fuck up in their recollections. It's the same way in which like if a bear comes after you, you may exaggerate the size of that bear in your head because you're scared of shit. Because it's a bear. So I was home on August 25th, and I was actually about to go out to cover a protest in Portland. But then I saw this happened on my phone on Twitter. I was like, I cannot go out. I will be more useful at home.

So with so much uncertainty online or in the details of the actual shooting, it was clear that trying to provide concrete information would be crucial in the hours to come. So I booted up my computer and started to try to begin to search for information and verifiable stuff. So I spent all night looking for details about the shooter, uncovering his supposed identity, ultimately about an hour before the police announced their investigation even started. And 12 hours before the police announced the shooter's arrest. And also to my surprise at the time, I discovered that the shooter was the same age as me. Which is fun. Who had a moment for you. That was a night.

So because I mainly use Twitter and most of the video of the incident was on Twitter, I started my investigation by looking at Twitter. My first goal was to find as many videos of the shooting that I could and collect pictures of all of the alleged suspects, all the people who were claiming, hey, this is the shooter. I think I got a picture of the shooter. Here's who he is. So I kept my eye on trending terms. So I searched under the hashtags like Kenosha, Kenosha shootings, Kenosha shooting, Kenosha protests. Boogaloo was trending a lot. A lot of people thought the shooter was a Boogaloo boy was not. And also a hashtag militia.

So the searches brought up a lot of photos of multiple young men, most of whom were carrying long guns. And a lot of unconfirmed reports that the shooter was a Boogaloo boy was trending on Twitter. This was the main thing that night was Boogaloo boy shot the oldest stuff. That was the main trending topic. A lot of conflicting details. And I did not want to kind of add to the misinformation. So I decided to not make any posts about whatsoever about the end of the shooter until I was 100% confident that I had the correct ID, which takes a while. Twitter wants you to post stuff quickly as soon as you find it out.

And it's way better to hold off your information and wait until you are absolutely sure it's the right time to post it. Because it's correct stuff. Because misidentifying a suspect can have serious consequences. For any individual involved. It's one of the worst things you can do is misidentify any suspect. So I was looking through all the videos that I collected for kind of unique or identifying clothing that the shooter may have been wearing. The first video I found useful was from a right wing videographer named Drew Hernandez, who a few months later called for bloodshed at the Capitol. He also testified at the written house trial.

This video did not actually show any actual shooting. It had a wounded person on the ground being treated by a medic and a man standing over the scene with a gun. And wearing a green shirt, a tan baseball cap, jeans and like purple latex gloves. He had a black and orange bag. The person in the green shirt then runs towards the camera while talking on the phone. And he says into the phone, I just shot somebody or I just killed somebody. It's hard to tell what he's actually saying. It's one of those things where if you think about it, you can hear both ones.

But he says something like I just killed somebody on the phone and he runs past the camera. So this was the first kind of really important piece of information. That was brought up in the trial too. And he was like, I don't remember what I said. Oh, interesting. Okay. And to be honest, even if this was, I don't think any of us believe this was legitimate self-defense. But even if it was, either of those things would be perfectly acceptable things to say. It's a surprising moment.

And you probably wouldn't remember what you'd said. I don't necessarily think he's lying about that. It turns out he was on the phone with the person who bought him the gun, a friend of his. But this was my first important piece of information. The night of, this is before anyone's analyzed any of this stuff. So this is the first video that I can find that's like, okay, here's a person admitting on camera that they shot somebody and wearing a few potential identifiers, namely the green shirt, baseball cap and bag. So now I can search for all of those items together and the rest of the footage collected throughout the night.

Looking over the top viral videos of the night showing multiple people getting shot. This is from later on after the first person gets killed. We can see someone in a baseball cap, black and orange bag and what could be a green shirt running through a street. Somebody runs over to the individual with the gun and kind of punches them in the head, knocking his hat off. So now the person running with the gun does not have a hat. The individual with the gun keeps running, but trips and falls on the ground before people tried to disarm him. Four more shots are fired from the suspect and one more person dies as a result of this. Other person gets their arm nearly blown off.

There is one continuous video of all of this happening, extremely useful, having one video of this whole shot. Yeah, let you time it and everything. Yeah, so the shooter who appears to be the same person is the other video because of the green shirt and the hat at the beginning continues to get onto his feet and runs off again. And the orange, orange and orange and black bag swings in front of him as he's running and a purple glove is also visible. Multiple vehicles drive past like police vehicles. The shooter that walks up pretty close to police vehicle and he just, he just, he just with the rifle and nothing, nothing happens. He like, he like, wait, he waves to the cops and they just keep driving and he walks away. So after finding watching these videos, I had, you know, I had no reason to believe the shooter was in custody.

And I had a good idea of his clothing and attire. So now it's time to, you know, compare this information that I gathered to pictures of the supposed, you know, suspects circulating on Twitter. But, but first, I think now it's, it's the time to listen to people selling new stuff. You know who doesn't. Oh boy. Scrabble to another state to show up armed in a community to threaten people. They don't do it. I'm saying they don't.

That's good. Okay. The products and services who support this podcast. Unless it's HelloFresh. Black rifle coffee, Washington State Patrol. What do you have against HelloFresh? Actually, a number of our sponsors will show up unwanted in your community armed. I forgot the Washington State Highway Patrol and the FBI have both dropped ads now.

Well, also need a California Highway Patrol. Don't forget about those motherfuckers. Like Kyle Rittenhouse, a number of our sponsors may show up in your home neighborhood. I have another one also. Black rifle coffee. Kyle's favorite brand of coffee. Remember? Well, it was until they disavowed him.

Anyway, that's a long story. Here's the ads. Here's the ones that pay this. Just do it. We're bad. Yay. So there was, there was a lot of pictures of suspects on Twitter. Some of them who look nothing like the person we now know who shot those people.

Funny how that happens. It's, well, it's not funny. It's pretty bad. Dangerous misinformation. Yeah. Yeah. It's not great to share stuff like that when these things happened, which is why I said, I'm not going to share anything until I 100% know.

I know that it's, it's actually worth posting about. So in, I'm going to go through, go through all some, some of the pictures and stuff of, I'm going through at least one of the pictures of one of the people, people claimed to be the shooter. So in one picture circulating, you see someone in a green shirt, a baseball cap and big, big, big black rifle, but this man's also wearing shorts, a black hat, not a tan one, has no bag appears to be wearing like a tactical vest that is also green. So not the guy, even though he's wearing a green shirt and hat, not the same dude was pretty easy to check.

You don't, you really don't need to share that kind of stuff. Pretty sure. Pretty sure a lot of people own green shirts. Yep. So two other photos that were circulating, they were claiming to be the guy. We had a green shirt, a tan baseball cap put on backwards jeans. One of the, one of the pictures has a bag in front, which is an orange and black one, one of them doesn't.

One picture has purple gloves on the picture doesn't, but these dudes look pretty similar despite the same differences. I'm pretty sure this is, this is, this is, this is the same guy, but you know, I made a decision at the night, this is probably the same dude, and he does appear to match the shooter a lot better. And there was a few, a few clear pictures of his face here. But honestly, the face of, if you look at all the pictures of the Kenosha shooting that night, the pictures of the suspect are really unclear because the way that the light hit

his face, he looks like an incredibly generic white boy, like extremely generic. It is hard to tell any, any identifying features from his face. I mean, he is an archetype. It's not a person. He looks like every, every white, every white boy. It's really hard to say. Everyone you went to high school with who, I don't know, sniffed a girl's chair when he, like, it's, that's, that's Kyle Rittenhouse.

That was such a gross visual. Now that I decided that I have like, I have a decent collection of pictures of who I believe the actual, actual suspect is, it's time, time, time to figure out who the suspect's name actually is. And this is, this is one of the, this is one of the harder things, but often you can have a lot of help in ways that you might not expect. Often, once you can get a good picture of someone, you know, it'd be like, yes, this, this is actually the dude.

Once it gets shared enough, often somebody knows who this is already. You know, the internet's a pretty big place. I, I believe the first, I believe the first person to actually, like, I, I was, I was the person to, like, prove online who, who Kyle Rittenhouse, that Kyle Rittenhouse was the shooter. The first person to actually tie Kyle's name to the shooter was a neighbor of his on Facebook. They saw pictures of the shooter on, on Facebook and said, hey, I think this, I think I recognize

this guy. I think, I think this is my neighbor. So often, once you start, once you have like enough pictures and those can spread, people feel the fine names, it isn't as hard as you would think that the hard part is, is finding out what personal connections are making those links and finding out where, where those are. But stuff, stuff spreads in a weird way. And right for this, you know, I, I think I was able to prove that it was Kyle pretty quickly for a few reasons.

So after I was doing my, my, my clothing comparisons to figure out, this is to prove like he said, this is the actual person who did these things. The other thing I found that was not, it was not viral at all. But just because I was digging through so much stuff was this meme shared by, by, by some like small Boogaloo account. It was a picture of the shooter, compare, right beside a collection of Blue Lives Matter pictures of someone who looks kind of similar linking to a Facebook page or not, not linking. It was, it was, it was screen-shotted from the Facebook page and I can tell because of

the font and it was like, it said like a written house's photos. So this was the first, this was the first thing I saw on the like buried deep inside like Twitter's, Twitter's, Twitter's images, but by using all of like these hashtag terms was this meme and, and, and then the meme said, so y'all think he's still a Boogaloo? No, no, he wasn't because of all of like the pro police stuff because Boogaloo's generally are not, not that fond of police. They sure aren't. Yeah.

So, so yeah. Given, given, so, you know, if someone was to look at this, you know, look at this meme itself is like, okay, you know, the job is done, you know, and for me, this dude looks vaguely similar ish to the guy on this written house Facebook. The gun looks kind of similar because one of the pictures of the Facebook was, was the guy holding, was the guy holding in AR, but you know, just something looking similar or even holding a similar gun in one picture from a Facebook account. That's not enough to be sure about publishing a positive ID that there's no actual really,

there's no definitive proof there because honestly, if I was to look at these two guys' faces, they don't look incredibly similar because faces can distort with lighting and compression. It can be really difficult. And this is where, you know, trying to ID a shooter is hard and requires complex judgment calls and posting inaccurate information or like incomplete information can have, you know, extremely harmful effects. There's a lot of examples of this happening in the past. You know, probably the biggest example or the most notorious one of false identification

is the Boston bombing incident. So, you know, right after the 2013 bombing, you know, thousands of users on sites like Reddit and 4chan became combing through footage to try to identify potential suspects, screen caps of the people they deemed suspicious went viral online on various social media sites. Unfortunately, the sleuthing work done on 4chan and Reddit was incredibly shoddy and seemingly had way more to do with like racial paranoia than actual detective work and evidence gathering. The New York Post subsequently published a picture on its front page that originated on Reddit

that users had declared that was showing the two suspects without doing any further verification. So, it's real bad how stuff can spread from Reddit like this that's completely unverified to, you know, a newspaper, even as one as unrepentable as the Post, that's still a very popular paper. The Post also claimed that the law enforcement were looking for those two individuals in that picture. One of the people identified by the Post was harassed online. Police later told him just to delete his social media accounts entirely because there was no use at that point. When the FBI did officially release photos of the unnamed suspects, Reddit users again falsely identified these people. One of the people they falsely identified went missing for weeks prior.

His family received media inquiries about the false unverified rumors of their son's involvement and rumors of involvement were spread by reporters from Politico, Newsweek, NBC News, and Buzzfeed. Eight days after the bombing, this guy was actually found dead and his family said it was a suicide. It was not one of the shooters, not one of the bombers. Which is again why even more than the tactics you could use to try and, you know, verify things online, the most useful thing you can take out of this is if there is a mass shooting or other act of violence and people on social media are saying it is this person, don't share it. Just don't share it. Just wait. There's no value in sharing it.

If they don't have anything to verify this as well. So yeah, I'm not going to... Don't. That is the overwhelming thing we want to get across. I'm not going to share this Kyle Rittenhouse boogaloo meme because there's no proof for it. It's not there. Now, eventually after digging, I would realize that this meme comes from his neighbor saying that she thinks the suspect is him. So that's what this meme was created. But still, there was no proof for it. So I didn't share it. So all the Boston bombing stuff was going through my mind as I found this and was trying to dig from my details.

So yeah, I knew that I could not post a name on any social media or any info until I could prove it without a shadow but doubt that this is the same person. Because a lot of times it is possible. It just requires work and time. And a big part of doing this on Twitter is you want to get it out fast so that you're the first person to do it so that you can go viral on your thread of identifying this killer. And like, no, that's not the reason to do image verification. It's not to go viral on a thread. It's because whenever that's your goal, you're going to do shitty, fast work that is going to end up causing some kind of horrible consequence,

like in the case of the Boston bombing. And to be even extra clear, the primary use for this, is that what you're teaching people, image verification, which is something that like Bellingcat, which has been kind of a part-time employer of mine, is an open-source journalism collective that's broken some of the biggest stories in the last couple of years. And in the classes, we teach a class on image verification. And the point is just whenever someone is sharing a piece of what is supposedly breaking news based on video or images that have been taken at the site of a whatever image verification tactics

can help you to know whether or not it's either it's true or false, but also just whether or not the information they're presenting gives you any reason to believe it. Or how the information is useful or how it's been altered. Just knowing you might be full of shit. That's super important. Yeah. Yeah, there's a thing that happens. And anytime there's something that looks like a war starting, there's like this video of a bombing from 2014 in Gaza that goes around.

Yep. It's like... Every time. Yeah. There's actually five or six different kinds of things that are like that, Chris. That are like, oh, there's actually footage from like a Russian video game that people keep getting mistaken for actual combat footage. And it's like, no, it's fucking from a video game.

This has been three wars now. There's this famous footage of like a fucking an airsoft battle at night with glowing airsoft pellets. With the glowing pellets, yeah. And it kind of looks, because it's black and white and not a great camera, it kind of looks like tracer fire. And there's like three wars that people have said like, look, this is real combat footage from...

It happens all the time. And again, yeah. A great account to follow is Hokusai on Twitter. They do really good work pointing out just like kind of more like less high-stakes. Kind of image, image verification stuff. So before I get into the actual verification work of like proving, hey, I can actually prove that by not just someone's face, I can prove that this shooter is the same guy from the Facebook page.

I'll explain that next. First, short ad break, and then we will finish up with this actual proving section. Yeah. You know who is not Kyle Rittenhouse? Oh my gosh. Wow. You have really dropped the ball into all of the transitions today. Yeah.

I am not proud of myself or my place in society at the moment. Here's ads. We're back. I feel terrible. Garrison. And so even though the Boogaloo meme was not hard evidence, it did provide a lead. So after seeing the meme, I did the first most obvious thing that I could see

was compare the gun in the two frames. They do look similar. They're not identical. The optics are different for each rifle. But the stock, the grip, and the barrel do seem to be if not identical, at least extremely similar. Again, it's still not enough to make a positive ID on an individual basis. Like this person is this person.

So the next step is to scour the actual Facebook account itself that is alluded to in this meme and see what I can find there. The goal obviously being to find statements or pictures that will tie this person in the images of the shooter to the person on the account. So that's, you know, clothing, location, intention, you know, all types of things that could tie the pictures of the shooter, the pictures of the person on this account. So Kyle right now says old public Facebook profile was mainly made up

of blue lives matter and pro police images going back as far as 2017. With a few then recent pictures of him holding his AR-15 style rifle. The rifle pictures were like from June. The shooting happened in late August. It appears, I think it came out in the trial that he got his rifle around like May. So yeah, a lot of pro police stuff, a lot of thin blue line, blue lives matter type things. His public page is relatively sparse. And there was no public friends list to look through.

One noteworthy piece of information was that he did list another name for himself as Kyle Lewis. I believe his mother's maiden name. Sure. But even so, even though I wasn't able to view a friend's list and there wasn't many public posts, his page is by no means a dead end. I could still see everyone that has commented on, shared or liked his public posts. He did not many have any pictures himself on his page that I could use for verification. Nothing that I could tie to the shooting besides the actual gun.

So not tons of useful stuff, but there's perhaps there's still other leads to look through like everyone who's liked, shared or commented on his posts. So I opened up new tabs for every single person that interacted with Kyle's posts. While looking over their pages, I was searching to see if any of them had listed Kyle as a relative with a focus on anyone with the last name of written house or Lewis. And, you know, ideally was looking for to see if anyone had pictures of Kyle or someone who seems to be Kyle. One post from May of 2018 eventually eventually proved useful. One comment read, Kyle, you sure do look like a Lewis.

So there's the alternate last name and two people have liked that comment, Kyle himself and someone who is his mom, which I would later find out is his mom. So she said that lived in, is it Anatoch, Illinois? Antioch, probably. Antioch, Illinois, which matches with Kyle's Illinois based pro police posts. He made a lot of like Chicago Blue Lives Matter posts. So I assumed that Kyle was from Illinois and also Antioch. Is that what you said?

Whatever. Antioch. Antioch to Wisconsin. Antioch to Kenosha is only like a three minute drive. So that is also like, OK, that's pretty close. That is doable. So I went through a lot of the relatives pages, but I'm going to focus just on the person who I found out who was Kyle's mom, because they're the one that had the most useful information, right?

A lot of other information I looked through just didn't turn out to be useful, right? So I'm not including all of that here. One post from Wendy's mom featured a younger Kyle wearing a police outfit. I'm sure people have seen this picture online before. I think I was probably the first person to share this photo of Kyle in this younger Kyle wearing this police costume. An unbelievably cringy photo, like even outside of the fact that he took two lives, like just. Yeah. Look, we all have photos we took while in ROTC.

So yeah. Ideally, we would get a chance to grow out of that. There's actually a lot more of these photos. There's photos of him touring. This is stuff I also found that night. Photos of him touring a target with police as he's in a police uniform. He was part of a police young cadets program. He was like 12.

So that's where he got this outfit and he like tagged around with police for like a day or something. And there's photos of him like in a target with police. Even when I was like a shitty right wing kid, that sounded like a nightmare. So yeah. So Kyle's the person who I figured out was Kyle's mom posted this this photo of her and Kyle, which which Kyle liked. And then in another picture of another picture from from Kyle's mom, I found it's a family picture, including Kyle wearing what I would say is like an army green shirt. Kind of similar, but it's a green shirt. Like I have I have shirts that are pretty similar to that.

I'm not good. That's not going to be anything super definitive until we got there is one one picture that that proved to be much, much more, much more useful. Of Kyle on or someone who I assumed was Kyle. You don't you don't you don't actually see his face, but he is wearing horribly cringy American flag crocs, which which I know. Which which so and on Kyle's page, there was also pictures of him wearing those same crocs. So like even though I can't see the person's face, the crocs are the same, probably the same guy. He's also wearing a tan baseball cap. And on this, I can actually see that it has an American flag on the front of the cap, which I did not notice on anything else before.

So that's, you know, that's something different. But again, not that that's not that's not that's not like a red flag. That's just, you know, a thing to a thing of note because the baseball cap is tan and it has like white mesh on the sides. The one the one thing I did, I did make one post before I actually did any kind of claiming to do identity stuff. I did ask my Twitter followers, if there's any pictures of the back of the shooter's cap. And I got them to send me those. And then I got one picture of the back that actually has, I couldn't see like, OK, the back of the shooter's cap also has the flag on it. So I was able to actually show that, OK, so the baseball cap on the back of it.

But they're both tan baseball caps, both have white mesh on the sides. They both have that have an American flag. And then I got another picture that was even closer that showed a tear on the brim of the hat. And if you zoom in on one of the beach pictures, you could also see a tear on the same position on the hat. So this is the hat is the hat is the same hat. The hat was definitely was definitely in both locations. So at this point, based on the gun, based on the hat, based on the location being very close to Kenosha and being closed on the rough facial similarities, there was enough to put stuff together to be like, OK, I think this is probably fine in saying I think this is probably the dude.

So at this point, I wasn't, again, I'm not going to post this immediately. And I'm not going to post something by saying this is who it is without providing the evidence. So instead of like writing a thread, tweet by tweet, I write the whole thread out and then tweet the whole thread at the same time. So I put together the thread documenting my relevant stuff. I wrote the first eight posts at the same time and posted them together with all the evidence uploaded. And then and then as I was writing the thread, I came across another piece of evidence. There was one, I was going through one of the live streams of that night from a channel called the run down live, which I've not heard anything of before or since then. But, you know, one of the many streamers that were out in 2020.

And you can see you can see Kyle inside the frame and then like pans away, but the people are still talking. So Kyle is actually off camera now, but he I think someone like asks him his name and he and the person who I think is Kyle replies Kyle. Now, of course, it's off camera. So it's not you can't be totally sure there's enough context clues and that plus only other evidence. I'm like, okay, this is enough to add to the thread because it again, it's not enough proof by itself, but it combined with everything else completes a much fuller picture. So I posted my like, nine or eight or nine thing thread on being able to prove it's Kyle via comparing stuff like the gun, the hat shirt and demonstrating my work tracking across Facebook and how I was able to like link these two people together. 22 minutes after I posted the thread identifying Kyle, Kenosha police down said they were that they were starting an act an active investigation. I soon added a court document to my thread about a traffic violation by someone named coward and house filed a few days before the shooting.

The traffic violation thing also included stuff like address, which I blacked out the address for that just because sharing the sharing. For reasons I'll suit explain, because again, if it's a track violation, if people really want it, they can find it themselves, right? That's, it's not making it possible to find it. And this was able to confirm that it was in the same location, Antioch. And also this, this proved that Kyle was 17 at the time. This is how we knew that he was 17 years old at the time of the shooting was because of this traffic violation document found online. So the, the address on the violation document was the same one I had linked to Kyle's mom by doing other like OSINT address work. I was able to find out where what her address was. So, so yeah, I, that was that was most of my work that night.

It took about, I don't know, like two ish, maybe it's hard to break up the timing. And it took about half an hour to get from the Boogaloo meme to finding the matching baseball cap on, on Kyle's mom's Facebook page about another half hour to write out the thread. And, you know, about an hour of work previous to that about, you know, trying to find out the actual, you know, footage and categorize it and okay, this is the clothing is wearing. Here's the clothes I need to look for on social media, right? See, see, see, see if I can find these shoes, these pants, this, this shirt, this hat, this bag, that kind of stuff. And I was able to find enough of those items to make it pretty, pretty clear that it was, it was, you know, linked. And that makes you, Garrison, one of the first people in the world to get to know way more about Kyle Rittenhouse than you ever wanted to know. Yeah, a lot more. This nightmare has been going on longer for you than anybody else, buddy. Other than his family.

Yeah. And so I want to note a few other ways to do image verification, specifically on Kyle that I didn't do what other people did after, after I said, hey, this is part of the guy. So afterwards, people found other kind of evidence on Kyle's TikTok and Snapchat. So it turns out, Kyle was Snapchatting his night in Wisconsin, which we would find out later. Here it goes. So he was, he was Snapchatting from Kenosha. And Garrison, first off, I do feel as the representative of Zoomers in this call. Why, why are you guys all using the Snapchats, huh? I don't use the Snapchats.

Well, I'm making you answer for the crimes of your generation. The crimes like, yeah. Do you use the Snap of the chat? No. Well, technically speaking, I have one friend who I only talked to you through Snapchat and we both only use it for that and we don't know why we use Snapchat. Yeah. There's a few people who are like Snapchat people who only text through Snapchat and I don't, I don't get it. Yeah, except, except neither of us are like that.

We just, just specifically there. It's got signal. Anyway, so yeah, the Snapchat is also a TikTok. There is a footage of Kyle attending a Trump rally at TikTok. Also him like assembling and testing out his gun was on a Snapchat. I believe a clips that were also shared on TikTok. So I could have gotten a lot more closer details of the gun if, if I looked on, if, if I looked on Snapchat or our TikTok. And I think if this is, this is good advice that I've taken since then.

And for other people looking to do this stuff, if, if a suspect looks young, you know, Snapchat and TikTok might be, or an Instagram might be apps that are worth, are worth checking out for information as opposed to like Facebook, right? I, lucky, lucky enough, there was enough stuff on Facebook on this instance. Typically, probably cause, you know, Kyle's family was conservative. So, and he was conservative. So higher chance of being on Facebook there. But, you know, in general, if someone's younger, maybe look on younger apps. But yeah.

So, you know, good thing to think about, you know, whenever these like chaotic, panicked moments happen, you know, misinformation can spread very, very quickly. Cannot stress enough how dangerous and irresponsible it is when a suspect is named without proper verification. You know, last, last September, Ian Miles Chong falsely identified a suspect in the shooting of two LA police officers. This resulted in the falsely accused got a man and receiving many death threats online. I think Ian Miles Chong did this like again a few months later. He, he was doing this a lot last year, he was doing, he was really bad about trying to identify people. But, you know, doing solid verification work is possible, but extreme caution needs to be taken.

I need to be very mindful of the consequences of your actions when you're doing this work. Yeah, I also want to put out, Garrison is very good at this. That's why it took two hours and a half hours. It's going to take you longer. It takes a lot longer. Yeah. Like honestly, I was like finding Kyle was just the right mix of things in one moment. Often it doesn't, often it doesn't go that fast and it doesn't need to be, right?

Like a big, a big part of the problem is that if people think about it needing to be like a fast paced thing, that's where, that's where the mistakes happen. I was just lucky to have enough like dominoes fall in the right place to identify Kyle the night of having, having his neighbor say, Hey, this guy looks similar to my neighbor, extremely useful in, in, in, in long run, right? Like that happened faster than that happens in a lot of cases. And so that really accelerated things. Sometimes it will be easy. Sometimes like a good example of when it's harder. We have a decent amount of footage about the individual who placed bombs outside of the RC before the sixth.

That person has not been identified and the fucking FBI seems to have no goddamn clue. But also they were way more intentional in what they were wearing. They were very smart. Whoever they are, they're very capable. The only thing that we have on them is their shoes, basically. Those are, those are kind of the poles of this, right? On one, like with, with written house, you've got this situation where it's like all of the information you need to identify them is there openly online. And part of OPSEC, if you're doing things that are crimes, is to make sure that, like,

Is to limit that. That, that whatever it is you are going to, to the, to the crimes in, there, nothing exists on the internet that connects that to your name and face. And that doesn't, that doesn't always mean black block. That can mean other clothing. Especially if you've been photographed in black block a bunch. Yeah. I think like, if you look at, if you look at the guy who dropped off bombs at January 6th, he's not wearing black block because black block draws attention. He's wearing like a graze.

He's wearing like a hood. That guy, that, well, that individual is either a former Fed or a former special forces. They were very capable. Yeah. They were leaning towards Fed, who showed up in clothing they had never worn, worn before and paid for used in cash, probably from a variety of places. That clothing was burned as soon as they got away. They were out of the state as early as it was possible to do so. Plant them and then immediately get out.

Like, and, you know, by the time the Capitol, by the time their bombs had been found, they were, they were, if they were smart, I mean, gone, you know? Yeah. Like that's how, anyway, whatever. So, yeah. So, like, oftentimes it can be, if someone knows what they're doing, this process can be a lot harder, like in the case of the guy who left the bombs at the Capitol. You know, Kyle was not, you know, wasn't wearing much identifying clothing, wasn't even wearing a mask because COVID was for cucks. So, you know, there's a lot of these things that made this process, you know, easier than a lot of other verifications. But like I said, there still was a lot of false IDs going around that night.

So, it still happens. I'm kind of on the fence myself as to whether or not it would have been safer, like, for our country or the society or whatever you want to call it. If, like, how much more damage or less damage would have been done if Kyle Rittenhouse had been someone who showed up in impeccable, like, clothing that could not be identified from fucking ran off and was never caught. We just knew there was this shooting of protesters in Kenosha by somebody. Like, I don't know how much better or worse that is for society if that happens. I don't know. I'm thinking about terrible things. But sorry.

First off, I want to apologize. Sometimes talking about this stuff winds up seeming like advice for how to commit crimes. That's not the intent. It's just when you talk about what makes something difficult to identify, you're kind of by default talking about, like, here's how to, here's how to commit a crime and get away with it. And it's the kind of thing, like, if you're doing verification work, one of the things that helps is to kind of put yourself in the mindset of somebody who, okay, if I'm in this situation and I do this, what are the decisions that I might make afterwards? And you can kind of try to think through this person. Like, it can be helpful, especially if you're trying to, like, track someone through a day. So you know someone was at this point at a protest at X hour because they shot somebody.

Think through, okay, what else happened that day? Were there other protests? Were there other gatherings? Like, or is this one? 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 iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In a series of events, can I go look for videos from other things in the area that this person might have also been at and may have worn the same clothing? Anyway, image verification is fun. Catch the fever.

It is a fun thing to do. If you're not able to attend in-person demos for physical reasons or whatever, or mental reasons, doing this stuff from home is another way of getting involved, tracking down bad people after they do bad things. Yeah. So if you want to learn more about this with the benefit of also visual aids, Bellingcat has, if you just type image verification Bellingcat, there's beginners and advanced guides to verification. There's talk about manual reverse image search tools and how well they work. There's quizzes. So go there if you find this interesting. It can be quite a hoot. But you know what else is quite a hoot? Ending a goddamn podcast, which I'm doing now. We're done. Goodbye. I I call the union hall. I said it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed. Right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story.

The authorities would parade over. We found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My mission put myself and my friends in danger, though it wasn't all bad. I'm gonna be real if you take. I like you. But now, all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm Tig Torres, and this is Lethal Lit.

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It's not great. Here's a podcast. This is it could happen here, the podcast. If you're an international listener and you're not American, that was really rude. Get the fuck off of our podcast. Just left people out like, no, Robert, are you going to do one for every other country? I think they're being rude for barging in. The internet is clearly American soil. I would pay good money for a wacko sings, but with Robert saying all the countries of the world.

Well, you know what you need to do in order to be able to pay good money for something, Garrison? You need to get money by working? Well, I was going to say you need to be born rich, but if you're not born rich, you have to work. And a lot of people are saying, what if we didn't? And now they have a subreddit, and that's what we're talking about today. Anti-work, not just the subreddit, but that's why we're talking about it today. Because the anti-work subreddit has grown hugely. It's like doubled. It's been around for years.

It's more than doubled. It's almost controlled. I'll have the numbers for later. Okay, great. So Garrison, why don't you kick us off now that I've let everyone know what to expect? I will stop working in solidarity with the anti-work movement. Thanks, Robert. You're welcome. So yeah, the past few months, if you're anything like us, and if you're online in the same ways that we are, you've probably seen a flurry of posts and screenshots depicting text conversations between an employee and their boss.

Typically, the boss asks them to come in when they said they were going to have to have time off or something. The employee objects. The boss then gets mad and makes threats and demands the employee be a better team player or some bullshit like that. And then the employee says something like, well, you know what? Actually, I quit. Good luck filling the shift now. Bye. And then the boss pleads that the now former employee comes back and offers concessions and end of screenshot. So pretty soon, this type of screenshotted text conversation became a meme format with people joking and obviously staging fake ones as well. Similar to the scene I just described. But by all accounts, this trend started incredibly sincerely with genuine text conversations showcasing worker abuse and bosses being unreasonable and cruel.

And some people quitting their jobs to stand up for themselves. And all this stuff is kind of tied up in the worker shortage kind of myths. The great resignation, as a lot of pundits are calling it. Yes, of people resigning and then a lot of big companies complaining about worker shortages. And central to this text conversation online kind of meme trend thing and employee resignations is a subreddit called anti-work. So the anti-work subreddit has been a growing place specifically the past year. Their motto is unemployment for all, not just for the rich. It's a good motto.

It's a solid motto. Their own description is a subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas, and want personal help with their own jobs slash work-related struggles. So back in February, the subreddit's been around since like 2013, but back in February it had like 235,000 subs. And now it has over 1.1 million. Most of that growth has been in like the past two months. It has kind of exploded in popularity. And actually it got so big and there's so many posts on it that now they have to like restrict text message conversation screenshots

to only being allowed to be posted like on one day a week just because of the intense influx of these posts. Some of them genuine, others maybe not so much. And even though the subreddit may not be the biggest in terms of subscribers, it has more like daily posts than something like the Wall Street Bets subreddit has. So even though it doesn't have as many subscribers, the amount of actual like posting on it is higher than a lot of other subredits as well. So it is growing in popularity in multiple ways. It feels a little bit right now like the social media equivalent of a sort of Damocles. Like Wall Street Bets made a not insignificant splash earlier this year.

It was quite a thing for the national economy for a little while there. And anti-work hasn't had that moment, but I kind of feel like it might be getting close to critical mass. Like something might come out of this, which I think would be rad for the record, I think would be rad. Absolutely. And it may not be one big thing, but it could be a lot of smaller things, right? Sometimes it's harder to see bigger change when you're like having more anarchist adjacent ideas. And the anti-work subreddit does try to keep itself being a radical subreddit and does try to fight off neoliberal sentiments and stuff. And there have been some complaints I've seen of people being like,

ah, the liberals have gotten in and people are talking about like, well, I just really want a life that's like, I'm not stressed all the time and I have enough money for bills and stuff. Or like people have been talking about like, oh, this job, like I left my old job and I got into a better situation and that's good. And there's complaints about that. And I think it is important to like push against de-radicalizing the subreddit. But I don't think it's bad that you're getting a lot of liberals in there who are not turned off by the name anti-work. And I think that's, I think it's positive that they're, even if they're, you know, they're not coming at it from kind of a revolutionary perspective, but hey, it's okay to quit my job if the conditions are shit and try to find a place where I'm treated better.

If that's their in-road to this kind of thought, I still think that's pretty awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's not realistic for every single person. Well, it actually, it is realistic for every single person to quit their job, but it's not realistic for only a few people to, right? And sometimes if not, if everyone's not going to do it, like literally everyone, then you know, some people can't afford to quit their job right now because they have like kids to feed or whatever, or themselves, you know, there's a lot of reasons, which I'll kind of talk a little bit more about later. So the term anti-work does not come from the subreddit. Anti-work has been like a post-left term for a while now.

Yes. And it kind of kind of applies to a broad spectrum of like anarchist, adjacent kind of thought around, hey, if we're going to question like capitalism and the state, we should probably also question just the idea of work itself and how it functions and how the state kind of works only possible with the state. And it's that specific line of thinking. A few examples of like, you know, seminal anti-work books. One of them is Bob Black's The Abolition of Work. Crime Think has a really good book just called Work, which is another one that gets referenced a lot, even in the subreddit, and also Bullshit Jobs by David Graber. And Bullshit Jobs was also kind of partially inspired by Bob Black's The Abolition of Work.

All of those are great resources. And specifically like, Bullshit Jobs is great in like a modern outlook on this. Bob Black's book was written a while ago, and Bullshit Jobs is definitely very timely. And even Crime Think's workbook also addresses stuff, or even though it was not written within the past, I think it is maybe slightly older than a decade. But I think they are updating it with more information about like the gig economy and stuff like that. Yeah, and it's not as it's characterized and as anti-work is often characterized by critics. It's not saying like, nobody should have to do anything. In a way, it's not actually, we'll talk about diogenes later, but it's not everyone should just like lay around and do nothing. It's people shouldn't have to do the thing that we call work, which is destroy your body or your mind or both.

It's the most of your waking hours, most of your life in the hope that you'll get 10 years as an old person to not do that. That's bad. That's a bad way to be a person. Like a bad way to have to be. It's not bad to do that. It's bad that you have to do that. Yeah, yeah. And there is a little bit of it that is about finding time to chill out. Which is going to apply a lot of, you know, a lot of the ways if you have to keep a job, you know, the different ways you can go about that job that makes it so it doesn't like kill you. One of my favorite ways to think about anti-work is just like anti-capitalism put into actual practice. So sort of, you know, just debating online about anti-capitalism as some, you know, future thing. It's like, no, like what can you do to actually, you know, make capitalism a less important part of how you live your life every day, which means, you know, not obsessing over careers and all these kind of other things. So I think first of all, it might be useful to kind of think about, like, what do we actually mean by work?

Because work's kind of a, it has a lot of definitions depending on what you, depending on like what you mean by it, right? Is it just like wage labor? Is it just forced labor? You know, is cooking for yourself or your family considered work? Not always. But, you know, like at times when I'm like relaxed, I quite enjoy cooking for friends and family. But certainly it can feel like work sometimes, especially if you just got home from like a work shift. So in a way, like work creates more work. And it's not, it's kind of, it isn't just about like wage labor or something. It can kind of apply to a lot of ways about how you live your life. There's a lot of fucking laying down wood chips or sawd. If that's like your job every day can be like a miserable backbreaking process.

If you actually have a huge yard or like own a little bit of land and you're making your own garden, that can be an intensely like the best part of your week. It can be a great form of play. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not the problem is not the individual tasks necessarily. It's what work is as a as a platonic kind of concept in our society. Yeah. And again, one of the things, and I think this is one of the things speaking, you talked about David Graber earlier, who's an anarchist anthropologist and widely seen to be like one of the most brilliant anthropologists of his generation. He recently deceased, but a book that he wrote before he died with another another fellow came out recently called The Dawn of Everything that talks a lot about how, yeah, these ideas that kind of capitalism has a vested interest in you. Believing that the world was always hard in the way that it's hard by which I mean like in order to get basic necessities, you have to make somebody else rich or find some grift of your own. And as opposed to like, yeah, life is always hard, but life wasn't it didn't always involve labor the way we we think about it. Labor has not been a constant in human civilization. In fact, most of human civilization, people have not done a thing that we would recognize as labor.

And I think also, even if you go towards things that like look more like labor to us, right, like, I don't know, like, like, like, if you look at like feudal levees, right, you're a peasant, you have to give some amount of grain to your lord. But like, okay, we work way longer than medieval peasants did. And not only do we work longer, it's something Graber and David Brungo talk about in that book is like, yeah, like, not only do we work much longer, like, the amount that we work would have been considered absolutely like even even a feudal lord would look at that much work and go no. Like this is this is this is like, yeah. And you know, and I think there's there's another Graber has another point. He wrote a piece called Turning Modes Production Inside Out, where he has this argument that like, okay, so if you take, you know, if you take like Play-Doh, right, you're like you take any of the Greek philosophers, even the conservative ones, and you show them this, the thing the thing that we do every day, right, you know, you have you're you're completely under the command of another person for like, at least a third, probably more of your day. Yeah, I monitor you and Garrison's bathroom breaks. I look at your texts with family and friends. It's it's really not an incredible situation. Yeah, it's an incredibly strict surveillance state. Yeah, Robert Evans. Yeah. Yeah, this is like, like, you know, if you show a Greek person that this is like, this is the apocalypse to them, this is this is the worst thing that could possibly happen is every single person in society has like,

essentially been reduced to a slave. And, you know, that's bad. And it doesn't have to be like that. It's not that they've been, because I want to push back on that terminology, because it can go to some uncomfortable places. It's not that they are treated as a slave. It's that in the hours in which they are expected to labor, there's a societal expectation that they they act as the property of whoever owns the business or manages them. Right. The idea of like, if it if it like that attitude from like, like working in a kitchen or working at a fast food restaurant, like if you lean, if you're lean, if you can lean, you can clean. Like that attitude is saying, you do not have any autonomy when you are at work. You are the property of the of the employer while you are at work. I think. Yeah. And I think and I think, you know, but I think the specific thing with Greece is that like, you know, you the only way you could do that to someone in Greece is if you owned them. Yeah. Like, you know, I'm like, the Greece has wage labor, right? But the only people who like, it has wage labor, but it has wage labor for slaves. And that's like it, right? Like this, you know, and this is not like, obviously not to say that like, you know, we're like having a job is the same thing as slavery.

But it's just to say that like the kinds of things that we think of as normal, like are things that like the people who, you know, the people who run the system and the people who, you know, get cited all the time to justify stuff would have looked at as like the worst thing that could possibly have happened to a society. Yeah. Sure. For sure. Like daily life for a very substantial chunk of the American workforce is that would be a nightmare to large percentages of the human population prior to the modern period. Like, it's, it's, and if you think about it that way, like one of the things Graeber does a good job of going into is like the way in which. And this is also something that comes up in tribe by younger the way in which like during the early period of colonization of North America. It was very common for, you know, Europeans to leave the cities and towns being established behind and join up with the tribes. The reverse never happened. Like, not willingly, not without kidnapping being a part of it. And it's because like their attitude was they were looking at the lives these people were living in these cities and like, well, why would you agree to do that? And this is turning anyway, Garrison, you should, you should take us back on the rails. This is getting more and like.

But first, it's time for products and services. You know what has nothing to do with the fact that human beings are forced to labor for basic necessities in order to keep up a system that steals the freedom of the many in order to provide impossible liberty to the few. You know what isn't related to that. You sure? The advertising industrial complex. Not has nothing to do with it. Totally unrelated. Why would you say that, Garrison? By the way, did you know that McDonald's Egg Muffin is turning 50 years old and it's giving the breakfast sandwich a price to a man? They're they're they're they're selling it for its original price of 63 cents during breakfast hours, 6 a.m. to 10 30 a.m. exclusively on the McDonald's app.

Isn't that cool? I can't. I can't. Do you guys do you guys want Egg McMuffins for 63 cents? That's the original price. I wonder what else the McDonald's app is looking at on my phone. Anyway, here's some ads. Oh, we're back and we're talking about anti-work. We're talking about how works kind of bullshit for our jobs. Yeah. Yeah, we sure are. We sure are. So, you know, like there is there is a lot of people who who like enjoy stuff like gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking and even like fist fighting.

Sure. They're programming just for their own sake. Like a lot of the stuff that we like quote unquote needs to need for society to function. A lot of those things people like doing for as hobbies in their spare time. For example, if you're a police officer, gunning down a man in cold blood might be kind of like your day job and like frustrating and there's a lot of shit you have to deal with. If you're a mass shooter, though, you just love it, you know, you're just doing it. It's not work. It's not work for a mass shooter. That is exactly what the Kyle Rittenhouse thing is, though, like, like, like, like, actually, like, literally that that is what it is. This is we I mean, we're not going to get the verdict today. It doesn't look like not today, which isn't a bad sign.

Anyway, by the time this airs, it may already be done. But anyway, like a lot of people like doing those things without getting paid. And sometimes, you know, often like costing themselves money, right? A lot of these hobbies are, you know, are costly in their own in their own right. And I think it's interesting to, you know, think think of a society where you're free to do those things when you feel like it. And you don't need to drag yourself out of bed at, you know, early in the morning to work, to work a 10 hour shift as a cash register. And it's not just even when you feel like it because there will be things that you have to do. I will discuss this later. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And any like, yes, there is other things. It's not work if you're if you're going out and harvesting food that feeds you in your community. That's not like work in the sense that we talk about modern work. The amount of extra energy we have by not having 10 hour horrible shifts that drain ourselves mentally and physically. And more in with, you know, with the amount of most of the work that we people do as shown in David Graper's bullshit jobs is like not necessary. Like a lot of like a lot of the work that we do as a whole is nonsense. Yeah, there's there's some quibbling about because the book was based off of a study like a survey that kind of showed a lot of a very significant chunk of the labor workforce thinks their job is like pointless and doesn't do anything. And there's been some criticisms of that.

But it is undoubted that a very significant amount of total labor time spent is stuff that isn't necessary for any like reason of like making people's lives better. And another part of like anti work theories is looking is looking at our society as it's built, you know, because it is it is tight to anarchism and be like how much of this is actually necessary. Like, do we do we really need a McRib? Like, do we do we guys? No, we don't. What are you? What are you? Garrison. We do not.

We do not. Sophie, call HR. Call HR. We don't need a McRib. We do not need a McRib. Garrison is 100%. No, I did the company training and they said you can't. The company training says you can't attack someone for their religion and Garrison just attacked the McRib.

So that actually is, you know, it is a religion for a lot of people. Did you see that? They did sell a McRib NFT a few weeks ago. Don't tell me that shit. That is so upsetting. God damn it. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Just saying society with no money would not have NFTs. Yeah. It would not. Gosh. You know, thinking of like anti-work as the theory, you know, it's about cutting down those unnecessary things that fill people's time. And, you know, and for a more, you know, forward-looking sense, it's a general kind of like abolition of the producer and consumer-based society. So, you know, life is not dedicated to the production and consumption of goods and commodities. So, you know, this applies not just to capitalism, but also to, you know, like state socialism, where, you know, work is still, you know, a big part of state socialism.

And you think, you know, it's humans. It posits a future that humans can be way more free when they, you know, can reclaim their time from jobs and employment instead of, you know, spending a lot of their time doing that. And spending a lot of like, not just time, but also just like their energy, right? Because even if you work, you know, eight hours a day, you still have a majority of the day to yourself, but you're exhausted. You can't doom it. You can't do much, right? It drains you of everything. So, you know, the main point, one of the main points of like, of the abolition of work essay by Bob Black is about like, there's no one should work because work is as defined as like a forced labor practice is, you can kind of track this to being the source of most of the misery in the world from, you know, in individual people who are forced to do this.

Like this is where a lot of their pain comes from is this forced labor concept. I think a good way, you know, there is, you know, the point that Robert brought up earlier is like, you know, what about the tasks that aren't fun? You know, what about the stuff that isn't maybe as enjoyable? You know, there's a list of things that could go through. The standard response is who's going to clean up the poop, right? Who's going to clean the poop, right? That's the thing. So, you know, I kind of look at this as like the, I kind of look at this as like, whenever I have to like, turn the compost, which is not my favorite thing to do.

I don't look forward to having to turn over our massive shitty rotting compost pile. Not my favorite thing. Yeah. That's why we have the whip. Oh, no. But no, like if there's like friends around and we're playing music and we're all, we have like some like, I have like an iced tea or a Dr. Pepper and we're like talking as we're turning the compost. It's a lot more doable, you know? It's one task that's going to help all of us in the future and I'm not getting watched over by a boss to fill a certain quota so I can pay my rent, right?

It's this thing that helps everybody and I do it because I want the goal of it to succeed. So, there's always going to be tasks that are less pleasant than others. Now, what we can do is, you know, imagine a world where the amount of work actually needed to be done is greatly reduced so that the tasks that are necessary and some of them unpleasant can be spread out and among more people because less people will be wasting upwards of eight hours a day, five days a week doing mostly pointless time filling work. Because yeah, there's going to be things that suck and we'll be able to do those a lot better if there's more people and we don't have to waste our time doing stuff that is honestly a lot more bullshit than actually scooping bullshit. Wow, what a good joke. Speaking of scooping bullshit, it's time to scoop up some more ads. Wait, really?

Haven't we done two? No, we only did one. Oh, all right. We went a while without doing one. Guys, listen to the products because everyone loves a service. It's not like the thing we're talking about is bad. It's different than that. So, it's fine.

Yeah, we're back and we're still talking about anti-work. This is something that the Crime Think Workbook points out and it's a pretty obvious thing. I've certainly thought of this before is that we've been told that technological progress will soon liberate humanity from the need to do work or from having to do work as much. And today we have the capabilities that our ancestors couldn't have even imagined for the amount of work that we could get done. But these predictions still aren't true. We're still working more than ever, even though we have developed so much technologically, we're still working more than ever. But I think it's silly to think that we'll reach a magic threshold where somehow now we have less work to do because we'll have robots being a server at Adam McDonald's or whatever. There still is forcing people into this thing because this is the only way that we can live.

We've built our whole society around getting work for money. So, this is the only thing that we can do. David Kreber, one of the things he argues in bullshit jobs is that basically... You have the Soviet economy, right? So, the Soviet economy has a policy of full employment. And for a little bit they were like, okay, what if we make everyone work less and then they stopped and then everything went to shit. So, if you can't make people work less hours and everyone has to work, what do you do? It was like, okay, well, you pay a bunch of people to stand at a doorway.

Now, we also do this. And one of Kreber's funniest points that he brings up is that the total number of bureaucrats in the X-USSR increased dramatically after the USSR fell, which is incredible. And what the points do is that Kreber called this total bureaucratization, which is that what we did instead of giving ourselves more free time is created this just endless, enormous, incredibly violent bureaucracy that all of us have to spend all of our time dealing with bullshit from our insurance companies and fighting with the Comcast Service person and all of this just incredibly violent, dehumanizing stuff that... It's a make work program, but it's a make work program that just... The work that it makes is making everyone's lives miserable, and we could just not do this. Yeah, I mean, we could.

It's always more complicated than that, right? Because the thing that is when we talk about anti-work, the thing that's on the other side of this is like, okay, well, what if you get a kid? How are you going to feed that kid? Yeah, how are you going to keep him in a house? Just if you have a kid, but like, yeah, people die in our society when they do not have access to adequate resources, and the only way to have access to adequate resources is to be born rich or to work. Those are your options.

Yeah, that's why I think... Without robust mutual aid and the commitment by a lot of people to try to make sure that a lifestyle is sustainable outside of this system, like it's not impossible, but somewhere along the line there has to be input. Yeah, like we've been talking about anti... We've been talking about anti... We've been talking about anti-work as kind of like a broad, hopeful future goal in some other post-scarcity... Well, not post-scarcity, but like a post-crumbling, post-collapse future. But I think for us now, as you know, the anti-work scenario is about people now, right?

The anti-work scenario is not about a future world. I think the anti-work now is like an alternative to the obsession with living your life with the goal of a career. Yes. It's about, you know, it's like a project to radically reframe how we think of work and leisure. It's like a cognitive antidote to like this culture of like hustle and hard work, which is like taking over our minds and our time. So for those who can't just resign from their job for whatever reason, whatever moment, the anti-work is about like thinking of this movement as like the antithesis to the mainstream capitalist hustle culture.

You know, that includes like slacking off more, finding ways to waste time, possibly even finding ways to steal or scam your boss. I've read certain alleged ways of doing this inside the anti-work. Yeah, Garrison's had my car for days, I don't even know where they got it from, but yeah. No, but like, you know, like there is, you know, like ways to like scam whatever corporation you work for, right? There's been examples shared in the anti-work subreddit. So, you know, it's about actually like finding, you know, making sure that you hate your work because you should, and then figuring out how to live your life with that in mind.

And I think one of the really hard parts about this is for people who like kind of like their job, people who are like either like their job or think it's like kind of important or like they're special to have it, right? It's like, oh, you're like, I'm lucky to have such a good job. Because like when you're stuck in that mindset, you can often put in like a lot of extra unpaid labor because you think it's important. Because you're like, oh, no, this is worth doing because it's going to have some like benefits to the world. So you end up like putting in actually more work that you don't actually get paid for. And like it's about trying to like kill that instinct as well. So that's a whole way to think about like working because like we're going to be stuck.

A lot of people are going to be stuck doing it for a while. So how can you reframe what we do on the job and how kind of jobs live in our minds when we are at home? And I think the best thing about what you've said in my opinion is the idea that like this is not, the importance is not on whether or not this causes everyone to stop having to work immediately. Like whether or not it leads to, you know, directly to like the measure of success of this movement. Isn't that nobody ever has to work again? That's a that's a long term goal. The measure of the success of this movement is that people except in mass that know the American dream as it's sold to people is not a good thing to.

It's not a thing to aspire to work is bullshit and we should aspire to a society that doesn't do it. Honestly, like it's getting back to some of the shit that people were talking about in like when the Jetsons was on TV, the idea that like, well, with labor saving devices, the like a hard work week will be four hours and like that's the way life will be for everybody. And like, and it's the acceptance that like, no, a better future involves me not having, it involves no one having to spend 40 hours a week of their limited human life working at a fucking sonic or like listening to some middle manager berate them for not answering phones fast enough. That doesn't exist for any human being in a world that is achievable and better than the one that we live in. Like convincing people of that and getting that to be widely accepted is I think what I think what is what I would consider the terms of victory in this particular struggle.

Yeah, kind of moving on from this side of things into like the great resignation and the other kind of things that people are doing. So in August alone, 4.3 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs. And the rate of people quitting increased to a decent a decent record high of like 2.9% according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. So and this this this has been a growing trend. You can look at like, I think June was like a like a little under 4 million August was 4.3. So like it was, you know, it's it's ramping. I don't know what I don't know if we have data for September or October yet. This was the most recent one I could find. So yeah, like it's stuff stuff is stuff is going up.

People are because people are like a big part of the anti workers. Everyone is like, yeah, if your job sucks, you can quit it and probably find another one that pays better in decent time, especially especially right now. Like right now, if your job is really terrible, you have a decent chance of finding a better one. This wasn't the case like two years ago. It is the case at this moment. So a lot of the anti workers separate. It's like, yeah, quit your job, like say fuck you to your boss and leave because if they're being shitty, then they don't deserve to have you. So resigning has been a big part of this and there had there has been attempts at other kind of organized stuff.

And this kind of falls into, in my opinion, this kind of falls into the same kind of traps as soul Internet organizing kind of always does. So the big thing that they're organizing for is called Black Friday Blackout, which is about kind of trying to get everyone to as many people as possible to not work Black Friday and not buy anything on Black Friday. So like a post from the subreddit here is like, spread the word, call in sick if you're forced to work on Black Friday, spend time with your family instead, remain at home and participate in your favorite activity on Friday, November 26th. Talk to your family and friends about your work life struggles, pass out flyers, join r slash anti work. So this is, you know, I think this kind of falls into the same like, you know, general strike organized online stuff that we talked about before, how kind of like a lack of like real like in person solidarity and like non Internet, you know, networking and organizing results and stuff like this just, you know, like proposed like one day strikes or actions that are ultimately kind of non effectual right like they can be like a good symbol sometimes but like, you know, they're not it's not it's not really going to matter that much, even if it works. What I think it'd be cool if literally no store was open on Black Friday because everyone quit. Yeah, that would be rad. But that's that's not that's not going to really happen. It would be fun if it did but like realistically it's not it's not going to happen. And there is people in the subreddit who also point this out that there was there was a reply to this post that was like, Oh, look, another online call for a general strike with no union support

whatsoever. Don't worry all this one's this one's definitely going to work. So it's like, yeah, like, a lot of people in the sub also recognize that like, without like actual like organizing support and in person stuff and no networks to support people on like, you know, lengthy strikes. These types of things are kind of are mostly symbolic actions that will have, you know, in the end, little, little impact. They may make you feel powerful as you're doing them, which is, you know, which is good. That is a lot of activism is actually just just about you feeling powerful in that moment. But, you know, as an end goals, remember, it's important to be remember to think like it's not this isn't, you know, this isn't going to reach whatever anti work utopia which I know people people organizing it aren't thinking that. But, you know, it's it's it's important to keep this within context of like the limits of of online organizing, you know, so a lot of people like recommend, you know, focusing on organizing your own workplace and community, discussing, you know, discussing having discussions with with unions kind of in in your area. And yeah, a part of part of kind of the part of the reply to this original, like Black Friday blackout post that that's someone that someone wrote was was a seriously though, I would love for an actual general strike to kick off but

there's a lot of unions on strike right now. So if there ever was a time to kick one off, it's now most general strikes in the past started off with specific strikes that started pulling in other unions and solidarity than anything else. Focus on that and we might get somewhere I think is a decent is a decent advice for the people who are really dedicated on to this kind of like general strike thing is yeah that is that is that is pretty pretty good advice in in my opinion. I want to say something kind of briefly just in general about general strikes because I think we've talked about it a lot on here but they're really really hard I mean there's an example like just to get a picture of how how actually hard it is to pull off there was there was one in Sudan in summer 2019. And you know I mean this is in the middle of a revolution, right? The Sudan is incredibly highly organized is incredibly built and people have been like, you know, I mean people like the like the chant in the street is like, you cannot kill us we already died. Like, you know, they and you know, and it's the whole revolution is being led by the Student Professional Association, which is an association of like 17 trade unions. Right. So this is a population that is enormously better organized than like anything really that exists in the US. And, you know, in the middle of the summer, 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 US 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. Earth Army opens fire and starts killing protesters. And so they call it general strike. And, you know, the turnout is massive, right? It's millions upon millions of people show up to the strike. And on day one, it's successful. And then on day two of the strike, people start having to pull out, especially people in the informal sector, because even with the level of organization they have, they can't support everyone. And by about day three, most of the strike has collapsed because even with level of organization they had, even with, you know, the coordination, even with the fact that they're in the middle of a revolution, they just, they couldn't support particularly the people in the informal sector.

So this stuff is really, really, really hard. Yeah, it is. It is definitely hard. Yeah, like even highly organized, highly motivated people who are, you know, like literally willing to fight to the death will lose. And that's something that you have to sort of keep in mind when you're talking about this, because... A lot of people are more focused on kind of their individual resignations, finding other ways of making money, and just stacking off at work in general. Because those are a lot easier than trying to organize a general strike right now. And I think one of the really optimistic things about this whole anti-work thing, including the subreddit, is that it has made some bank executives kind of nervous. There was a fantastic article by Yahoo Finance.

And by fantastic, I mean, funny for me, you know, they did not think it was as funny about, they talked with like the Golden Sacks CEO. And they pointed to the anti-work subreddit of being, what was the phrase? A long run risk to labor force participation. Good. See, that when I first read that in the article, I just like flashed in my head to that scene from Starship Troopers, where Neil Patrick Harris puts his hand on the brain bug and goes, it's afraid, it's afraid. Yeah, he said, we see some risk that workers will elect to maintain out of the workforce for longer, provided they can afford to do so. Pretty good stuff. And I think another thing that's worth mentioning that hasn't been talked about very much is that, so this is actually kind of working in some sense. Like the last few months, or 2020 in general in the last few months in particular, have seen basically like the highest levels of wage increases that we've seen in decades.

So, you know, like, yeah, we haven't overthrown capitalism yet, but like, if you can keep quitting your job, keep quitting your job at your regular job, work less, keep doing it, it's working. Yeah, this is stuff I wish, we need to, in the future, I would like us to be focusing more on stuff like that. Like this, that is a legitimately, as you point out, Chris, there's a lot of reasons to be very optimistic about some of the numbers that we're getting from what is happening to labor right now. And it is important as we all, like right now, we're all miserable because we're sweating through the written house case. It is important to talk about stuff like that, that like, yeah, some shit people's doing is hitting home. Some other fuckers have found the glowy, vulnerable spot on the boss monster, and it's doing the weird. Turns out it's just not working. Yeah, it's just not working.

Yeah, like, again, as we started the series with like, yeah, General Strike is kind of the best available solution. Yeah. Or path to a solution that I can find. But anyway, what else we got, Garrison? I think that does it for us today. I know Chris has some special, like, sequel stuff happening. So tune in tomorrow for our listeners. For anti-work in China.

And like all of the best sequels, this one will be directed by James Cameron. So we're all very excited. To bring our pal James onto the pod. To bring our pal James and the reanimated corpse of Stan Winston. It's going to be amazing. So check it out. Bye everybody. We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of I Heart Podcast 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of Wes Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Fit. 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, Sisani,

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 iHeartRadio 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. Um... Listen to Art Fraud starting February 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Fuck work! Hey, hey, hey, hey. Good introduction. I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here. That was Chris.

Garrison's also here. So is Sophie, who is changing her name to Sophie. What is your new name? Sophie.com Arena. Sophie.com Arena. She's doing this to deal with the trauma of the fact that Los Angeles just agreed to change the name of the Chase Bank Arena to Crypto.com. It's Chase Bank, motherfucker! It's Staple Center! Oh, Staple Center. Sorry, I'm getting my arenas named after venal brands mixed up.

Yeah, why couldn't you buy more binder clips? Speaking of the pointlessness of work, there are people laboring right now who worked at Staples so that Staples would have enough money to name a place where people go do sports after a place where people get fucking pencils. And now Staples has declined enough that it's just Crypto.com. Fucking Crypto.com. Fucking Crypto.com. Look upon the works of cryptocurrency, formerly mighty Staples in despair. Fucking the Osmondias of the office supply world. I don't know, whatever.

Chris, what are we talking about? We're going to a place. Did I talk about Diogenes yet? No, Diogenes comes in the middle. But right now, we're going to go to a place where they banned crypto mining for the most part. And that place is China. And I wanted to talk about specifically a lot of stuff that's been going on on the Chinese internet and what's been going on in Chinese labor because... So Garrison told me we're doing an anti-work episode.

And I went, oh yeah, there's a version of this in China. And then I realized that, like, A, almost no one has heard of lying flat. And B, it rules. And C, that nobody really know in the US knows what's going on on the Chinese internet because it's effectively siloed. And I mean, there's lots of different ways to silo. I mean, there's literally the Great Firewall. There's factors in different languages. People use different apps.

And the internet's become this sort of like, you know, it's a bunch of bubbles that don't interact with each other. Yeah, the walled garden thing. And the sort of national level walled garden stuff is, I think in a lot of ways, way more dangerous than the stuff, you know, people complaining about if we'll suck an ideological bubble. And like, that's bad. But the fact that we have bubbles like this where it's like, you know... With like actual, basically borders, but online. Yeah, yeah.

Because they're enforced by governments and with force and yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the place it was always going to go once we decided not to be rad with the internet, which everyone collectively decided in... I'm gonna say 2004. Okay. Yeah. Do you think that was 9-11's fault? 9-11 played a role.

9-11 did play a role. The dot-com boom played another role. There were a number of factors, but we can all blame it on... Let's blame it on low tax and continue. So anti-work in China. Before we get into lying flat, which is China's version of anti-work isn't the right word because this actually started a few months before sort of anti-work blew up in the US. But before we fully get into that, to understand what's going on here,

we need to talk about something called involution. Could you say that again? Like what? Involution. Involution. Involution. Okay. Yeah, so this is originally...

This is a very obscure anthropological term developed by my old nemesis Clifford Geertz, who's one of the most famous and most important anthropologists in history who also sucks ass and I hate him. I thought your nemesis was Noam Chomsky. Yes, also, but for different reasons. So should I cancel the hit? Subnemesis. Okay, I have many nemesis that I have told to me.

God, we need a Jody Dean episode at some point. Those are our enemies too now. Thank you. I appreciate allies in my one-person intellectual wars. Although this does seem to be a pretty boring intellectual war. Yeah, well he's dead, so I won by default. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, but what Geertz was describing basically, so he does this field work in Java,

and what he's describing, what involution means, is the system where people keep working harder and harder for this no increase in output, and so there's no rewards for working harder. So in Java, you'd have these plantations. Plantations would get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, but because each new person was only harvesting just enough to feed themselves, you never actually got any productivity increases. Interesting.

Yeah, there's no output increases. Which is not really the case in America in a lot of ways. Yeah, and what's interesting... The reason I want to talk about this also is because basically everyone who's been writing about this, has missed about half of the story of how this incredibly obscure anthropological term that like... Again, I was an anthropology major. I don't think I ever ran into involution while I was studying anthropology.

Yeah, I've never heard that term. Yeah, and no one has ever heard of this. Fucking everyone in China has like a treatise they can spout at you about this now. Interesting. Yeah, and I want to talk a bit about how to merge. And part of this is because in the last about two years, people have been getting increasingly pissed off at just this sort of incredibly competitive nature of Chinese society and particularly work.

And a lot of this is because everyone's working what's what's called 996, which is 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. And actually, I should make this clear, when I say everyone, that's like an average schedule. The schedules get a lot worse than that, but 996 is the one that sort of gets the attention because a lot of people work in, especially the tech industry. This is what we do.

But everyone focuses on the tech industry. Everyone ignores a bunch of migrant workers who also do this and worse. And there's this enormous societal pressure to sort of keep moving and keep competing and keep working. And simultaneously, people in China today are working basically as hard as anyone's worked in China since people would literally collapse from exhaustion in the fields and the Great Leap Forward. That's a lot of people working this hard.

But instead of getting rewards for this, Chinese growth rates have been collapsing for a decade. And yeah, this is the thing you get in the U.S. too. It's like, well, people were like, well, if you work, how do you get into the middle class? But then everyone's working 996. No one's getting into the middle class. China has incredibly low rates of social mobility.

And into this comes evolution. But the weird part about what's happening here is that evolution doesn't enter the Chinese discourse through people complaining about work. It's actually a product of a bunch of middle class people complaining about Chinese industrial policy. And this is the part of the story that nobody really talks about, even though I think it's really interesting because, again, anti-work in the U.S. starts on the left. So, evolution, which is the thing that's going to bring about the Chinese version of anti-work,

is originally a right-wing discourse. And essentially, it's a right-wing very nationalist discourse that gets... The right-wing part of it gets essentially expunged and it gets pulled left. So, originally, China is... I don't have a more elegant way of saying this than China's leaders are more online than ours, like significantly more. They actually... God, that's frightening. That's hard to imagine.

That is horribly problematic. People... Local government offices have these internal sites that show them what people are posting. This goes from the bottom level to the top. People actually listen to bloggers. Some of the people who I'm about to talk about are incredibly influential. There's a bunch of arguments in the early 2000s about how China's going to industrialize. These are basically online arguments.

And the guys who win that argument, Xi Jinping basically takes their industrial policy and implements it, which is the scale of how online these people are. People are taking economic policy from literally... It's not solely that bad. They're taking economic policy from people arguing on the internet. This is an incredibly online society. But the worst part is that for a while it works. The economic policy basically is they're going to increase the size of the Chinese economy

by investing in high-tech industry and moving up the value chain. This has been very standard sort of Chinese economic policy for a while. The problem is in the last about decade it stopped working. And the CCP's response was to do more financialization. And this pissed off the online... They were called the industrial party. This pisses off those guys because their whole thing was don't financialize. Just keep investing in building airplanes and stuff.

And the Chinese economy will work itself out. But eventually even they can't keep making this argument because... Like in 2010, the Chinese GDP growth rate was 10%. And now it's like maybe five and last year... I mean last year was 2020, so it was really low. But I mean the Chinese growth rate has been imploding. And so what you get out of this is this group of people called the cowists. Based on this guy named Cao...

Cao is the guy who essentially introduces the concept of involution. And he's arguing that this is happening because... And I'm going to quote him here. People can't get quote... A peaceful life, get a pretty girl, live in a big house because of the US. And so the solution to this basically is to deal with... But to destroy America as a hegemon. And then once you do that, you can get all of these things.

And as you can tell, peaceful life, get a pretty girl, live in a big house. This is like a very conservative framing of this. This is the Chinese equivalent of 2.5 kids in a white picket fence. And it has all of this associated gender politics and class politics that go along with that. And when the cows are talking about involution, what they're talking about is... They literally mean China's stagnated economy. They're talking about you have more inputs, you have labor technology inputs, your input is declining, and the only way to restore economic growth, the chief prosperity,

is by solving a decline in output by defeating the Americans. But, you know, and this is kind of a big deal. And for a while, in sort of like 2019, 2020, this is going places. But very quickly, people are like, my life fucking sucks. I don't care about this econ shit or this like grand national struggle against the world hegemon. I care about the fact that my life is this incredibly pointless, ever escalating rat race with literally no rewards. Yeah, that would concern me too, if that were a thing that we were capable of feeling in our country. Yeah, there's been some really funny stuff with involution where you read accounts of it,

and you'll get anthropologists going like, oh yeah, this is the thing that's unique to China. It's like, have you worked a job in the US? But, you know, involution, what happens to it over the course of sort of 2020 is it goes from being the general, you know, it goes from being this thing that's about like very specific technical arguments about industrial policy to, one anthropologist put it, quote, the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless, and so people are talking, yeah, we couldn't imagine that. No. Yeah, and it's, you know, and people are talking about finding individual solutions to this.

And so, you know, then this is things like working less, moving to lower tier cities, getting less prestigious jobs. But, you know, and I want to think about this again because this is a really interesting thing where you have a very incredibly right-wing, nationalistic, and sort of like middle class, like nostalgia, kind of like, you know, like, aggressive foreign policy thing. And then it just flips. And part of how it flips, and this is a part of the story that is almost completely ignored, but I think is really important. Did you guys know about, does this YouTuber named Li Zixi, she's the biggest Chinese YouTuber, she has 16 million followers. And most of her followers are not on YouTube because, you know, YouTube is like blocked by the firewall. But she has just 55 million followers on the sort of Chinese version of TikTok.

And yeah, she has across the world, she has 100 million followers, right? She's one of the biggest media stars in the world. And her origins are kind of unclear. The official biography basically says that like, when she was 12, instead of going to high school, she became a waitress. And then she had to like, you know, but she'd gone to the city and then she had to return to rural villas to take care of her grandma. And she makes these videos that are these like, very soft and calming videos with like calming music of her going into the woods and like harvesting materials and making fires out of logs and like cooking things. Okay. And it's just like, you know, it's very much this real utopianism.

There's basically no industrial technology. Yeah. Like cottage core return to nature. Yeah. I know a lot of people who watch it like that just to like soothe them after a day of work, like somebody like dig a cave and turn it into like a bath or something using just hand tools or whatever. Yeah. And there's interesting, this kind of, it's almost like turning to a sub genre, but she's by far the biggest like version of this. And, you know, so she gets picked up by a media company and from 2015, 2016 goes viral.

And, you know, it's interesting because so she's doing this because so she has to go back to like take care of her grandma. And so she like opens a store and she's trying to support herself by and like her grandma by opening a store. And so the videos were like a way to promote the store. And then, you know, now she has 100 million followers and she gets adopted as this kind of like, like national culture ambassador, I guess, by the state. Sure. And essentially, you know, so there's nothing overtly political about these videos at all. Right. Which is essentially offering and like trying to sell is this, you know, this like fantasy of retreat from industrial majority into real life. And I think it's really easy to look at that aesthetic and go like, this is basically fascist.

Like this is reject majority. Some people online when they see that immediately sees up was like, oh, no, it's eco fascism. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, and I think like that interpretation, I think is actually a lot of why I got picked up by the Chinese by Chinese media companies and then like sort of by the Chinese state because, you know, like having an actual positive utopian image of rural life is politically useful to them and something that's like not really hasn't been true since like. This is we've had this for a long time.

Yeah, well, no, I think I would say this, I think this is a thing that's different in China is it there hasn't been like a positive conception of real life really sense. I guess the Great Leap Forward and then argue like there were some people in the Cultural Revolution, but then they actually went there and were like, Oh God, this sucks. And so, you know, so they needed a new one, they came up with this. But, you know, the thing that's different about China than the US is that China's market worker population like is almost the entire size of the population of the US. I mean, it's like 270 million people. Right. I mean, it's enormous and a huge number of these people, you know, I'm some of these people are going from like city to city or like town to town. But a lot of these people are coming from from rural villages into cities and, you know, I mean, these are this is the backbone of the Chinese workforce.

Like these people, like they see their family once a year because, you know, like they can't afford to go home. So they go home once a year for New Year's because they get some time off and they come back. And this is where, you know, like these videos are an obvious fantasy. But, you know, they suggest an alternative to work in the capitalist city that's sort of plausible, you know, especially if you come from rural village. And this is where this whole thing completely backfires on the Chinese ruling class. And, you know, because this cowist involution discourse is about to fuse with this style of rural utopianism into a movement that is going to shake the foundation of work itself. But first. But first ads.

Again, also not connected to anything we're talking about. Nope. No connection whatsoever. Why? Garrison, don't even bring that up. There's no needs. There's no reason for people to think about the fact that about that. Don't think about it.

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After those ads, I am fully Washington State Highway Patrol-pilled. I'm on board. Let's do it. Yeah. In April of 2020, a guy on Chinese social media makes a post. I'm just going to read it. 2020 or 2021? Sorry.

2021. Yeah. April 2021. I'm just going to read this post because it's kind of short and it rules. I haven't been working for two years. I have just been hanging around and I don't see anything wrong with this. Pressure mainly comes from the generation with your peers and the values of the older generation.

These pressures keep popping up, but we don't have to abide by these norms. I can live like Diogenes and sleep in a wooden bucket. There we go. I can live like Heraclitus in a cave thinking about logos. Since this land has never had a school thought that upholds human subjectivity, I can develop one of my own. Lying down is my philosophical movement. Only through lying flat can humans become the measure of all things.

Incredibly based. Oh my God. Oh my God. That's the best. I love that. Can I talk about Diogenes now? Yeah, all right. We'll talk about Diogenes.

Let's go. My man Diogenes, he's from this trend in Greek philosophical thought during kind of the high period of Greek civilization where a bunch of things come out of it. You kind of get anarchism, Western anarchism out of it. You kind of get elements of like Puritan culture from it because a lot of them are very much like the pleasures of sex and like anything pleasing and like you don't do anything that feels good because then you become dependent on it. Like there's a whole bunch of shit going on.

And Diogenes was like one of the first motherfuckers who were kind of playing around in this philosophical space. And when he gets into, so his early life is his dad is kind of a grifter, it sounds like. We know that he got in trouble, he and his dad got exiled for debasing currency, which could be as simple as they were watering down, for lack of a better term, like the gold or silver in currency with less precious metals and hiding it in order to make a profit, right? And like keep the extra gold. That could be what they were doing.

It also could have been like a, it could have been political because some people who were doing this in Sinope, I think is the city, which is now in Turkey, we're doing it for political reasons. And we don't really know why, but there's actual documented archaeological evidence of this, including right around the time he would have been a child. We found from that period a cache of debased gold and silver coins that had been destroyed. So someone had like realized they'd been debased and destroyed them so they couldn't be used. So there's evidence.

Anyway, he and his dad get exiled, which means from an early stage he goes from being somewhat of means. If your dad's making the currency, you're not probably not like a poor family. And then they get kicked out of their city state and they're like kind of stateless. And so Diogenes evolves over time and like gets into philosophy. He tries to, there's this, I always forget the name of the guy that he, he loved it first, but there's this philosopher who's like, you know, this cynical, like that's the school of thought he comes from.

He's like a cynic that Diogenes really wants to study from. And the guy like assaults him as Diogenes is like, Hey man, I want to learn from you. Like he like hits him or something. This keeps happening and eventually he's like, this guy is like, why do you keep doing this? And Diogenes is like, you have something I can learn from and so I don't really care what you do to me. I'm going to, I'm going to keep persisting. And so he becomes this guy's student, yada, yada.

And the guy who he becomes the student of is like kind of a poser because he's talking about like, we need to give up, you know, these kind of like pleasures of like civilized life and return to a more simple time and like not enjoy all of these, you know, the benefits of wealth. And he like, he's also a rich guy and he doesn't give up his money and Diogenes is like poor as hell and stays that way. And so he becomes famous for, he goes to Athens and he becomes famous for a bunch of like troll shit.

We don't actually have, he wrote like 10 books. We don't have any of them. So we don't actually like know what he actually wrote in his philosophy. We just have stories from other philosophers and it's all Diogenes being a fucking troll. So like on one occasion, he, one of his big things was he believed that people, that if something was an acceptable behavior, it was an acceptable behavior everywhere, right? And so the start of this was in Athens, you were supposed to go buy your food in the market, but you weren't supposed to eat it there.

That was like considered rude, like kind of obscene almost. And Diogenes would like get food and then usually by begging, because that was the way he got everything. He had no money. He would like get food and he would eat it right in the middle of the market. And everybody was like, that's disgusting. And Diogenes would be like, well, if it's okay for me to eat, it must be okay for me to eat here.

That's great. Diogenes took it a little bit further than that because he, yeah, I can see a few ways you can take this. He extended that to, if it's fine for me to urinate or shit, it's fine for me to do it anywhere. And eventually he defended himself masturbating while looking at people in public as like, if this is okay for me to do in my bedroom, why can't I do this here, right? It's very like, he's a troll, Diogenes.

And he's also like, again, the stories we have of him is he is like uber anesthetic. So like at one point for a long time, the only thing he owns is a wooden bowl that's his cup and for his food. And then according to legend, he sees this poor peasant child drinking from like cupped hands and he throws away his bowl and he's really angry. And he's like, God damn it, I spent all this effort carrying around something useless. Like I couldn't just push shit in my hands. He's a very entertaining character and a very like fun.

The original Oogle. Yeah. The first one. Yeah. He's absolutely an Oogle. Um, and he's, yeah, he's just kind of like an endearing piece of shit is like his, the idea you get, but also like smarter than, I mean, because, because fundamentally what Diogenes is doing is he's, he's saying like, hey, all this stuff that we think is important

and good about our culture and like valuable. What if it wasn't? What if none of it matters? Yeah. He's like, he's provoking the third. And he's, he's big into like one of his, his like the things he comes back to a lot is that like dogs are clearly happier than us and like better creatures than us. So we should just seek to be like dogs.

Um, and one of the ways he might have died is getting bitten by a dog and his bite getting infected. We don't really know how he died. Um, the other thing about Diogenes, this guy fucking hates rich people. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's, and he's very funny about it.

So Alexander the Great apocryphally, maybe this probably never happened, but the stories that Alexander the Great comes to Athens, you know, while he's on his, his blitz through conquering the known world and finds Diogenes and Alexander the Great was like raised by Aristotle. Right. So he knows his philosophy guys. Like he's, he's, he's, he's seeking Diogenes out because he's a fan of this dude, probably through stories that were told to him in the same way that like I'm telling them to you

now. So he like comes up to Diogenes and he was like, Oh my God, I'm Alexander the Great. I'm a big fan. If I couldn't be Alexander the Great, I would want to be Diogenes. Um, and Diogenes response, well, if I couldn't be Diogenes, I would just want to be Diogenes, which is a fucking flex again, probably never happened, but like, I want to, I want to read this meme that Garrison sent me because it, it happens. It's absolutely a perfect description of what, of what this whole thing is sort of about.

So okay. This is me. The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher, I don't know how to process this name, Aristipus, who was living. It doesn't matter. Some dead ass Greek motherfucker. Yeah.

Some guy who's about to get absolutely destroyed. Right. He's living comfortably, like flattering the king, Aristipus says, if you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils. Diogenes replied, learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king. Oh, birds. There's all sorts of based shit like that.

My favorite. Yeah. No. So our guy, our guy, Plato is like, is like trying to determine, trying to define like a human in the simplest way possible. Oh yes. Yeah. Like the platonic ideal.

And he was, so he, he comes to the conclusion that like, well, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an unwinged biped and Diogenes supposedly goes, grabs a plucked chicken and says, behold a man. Like I found a dude. He would, he would famously walk around town in broad daylight with like a, what do you call it? Like a lantern, like looking around and people are like, what are you looking for? He's like, I'm looking for a man.

He would like look at a dude and you're like, I'm looking for a man. And as, as to say like, none of you motherfuckers are people, like you all think that you're human beings, but you're really just pieces of shit. Like he's just an amazing asshole. Sorry. That, that we should move back to anti-work, but that's who Diogenes is. It ties in. Yeah.

Yeah. And this is the funny thing. Both, both, both American and Chinese, like anti-work people, both fucking love Diogenes. Absolutely. Very popular on our slash anti-work. Yeah. And, and you know, the thing I was reading about the like, you know, learn to live on lentils and you'll never like, have to be subjugated by a king.

That's a lot of what lying down becomes. So very rapidly, this whole thing spreads into this like really, it's like a sort of astounding, you know, it starts out of a meme and it spreads incredibly quickly. And the CCP gets like really, really mad about this. So it like, so this, this starts in April, right? And in May, there's, they have this like enormous media blitz where like, like the, the, the, the party is like outlet basically and Guangdong publishes like a four page long attack on the concept of lying down, like the CCP, the newspapers everywhere publish this stuff.

Like the CCP like bans. That's how you know you've done it right. The term lying flat on WeChat. Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny. It's like, yeah, they do this, but it's too late. Like it's, it's already everywhere.

It's always too late. Yeah. And you know, so, you know, so part of what lying down is, is about, you know, you have this incredibly fast-paced, intense work culture. You have evolution. You're working more and more and you're getting nothing out of it. Lying flat is just going, no, like you just lie down, you refuse to work. But it's, it's also, it's more than that.

And I think this, this goes back to the sort of broader conception of anti work. So one of the, the slogans of this movement is don't buy property, don't buy a car, don't get married, don't have children and don't consume. And you know, the last part of this is implied is don't work. And you know, there's a lot sort of going on here. I mean, you have, you know, it's not just sort of a critique of like, we work too hard. It's about, you know, it's about the sort of whole system. It's about the sort of patriarchy involved in this.

It's about the sort of like forced capitalist consumption. It's about like, you know, the fact that like literally a quarter of Chinese, of China's economy, China's GDP is like all this real estate bullshit that everyone knows is going to collapse. And even when it gets built, like sucks. Thank God we don't have anything like that here. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the fun things about learning history is you get to just watch every country

do exactly the same thing with their housing market. Like you go to Japan. It's extremely funny. It's like, it's great. It's just like, why do you think this will work? One extra fun thing is you get to watch every country do the same thing with farms and it always ended the same way. Yep.

You will want a fundia anyway. Bad. Yeah. So there's a lot of, you know, in order to sort of like facilitate this, you know, you get back to the Diogenes. So a lot of it, what's happening is people sharing tips about how to like make the cheapest food you could possibly survive on so you don't have to work. And so, you know, and people, the guy who wrote the Diogenes post, like he spends $30

a month and he does this by only eating dried ramen and eggs and like rice and there you go. Yeah. Yeah. One way to do it. That's a way to do it. Yeah. This is like the most extreme.

I don't even think it's the most extreme example. Oh, it's probably not. No. One of the things that happens a lot is a lot of people just like have left their jobs to become monks. This is like a whole thing. Sure. Yeah.

I gotta go be a Buddhist. Like honestly. Why not? Yeah. Absolutely. It's great. And I used to live in a place in the middle of fucking nowhere, one of the most like isolated places I've ever lived that like had power.

And one of the people who was like by neighbor they were within several miles of us was a monastery. This is in the United States. And like I went there once because I heard they made good wine to try and get some of their wine and like none of them would answer the door and I could see them inside all staring at me. They didn't do shit and my overwhelming thought was like, yeah, that seems like a pretty good way to do it.

Yeah. Yeah. I see why you guys have picked this life. It was also during the 2016 election. Oh yeah. That's back from the RNC and the DNC and was like, yeah, that seems smarter than what I'm doing. Yeah.

So there's a lot of, you know, yeah, that would be the extreme example like if people are going to become monks. But like one of the things that's happening a lot is again, you know, China hasn't known as my worker population and people are just like, fuck this, I'm going back to my village. And so, you know, and this is, you know, this, this, this is where they really screwed up with the YouTube stuff because, you know, people, you know, they were gambling that, you know, you could just sell this as an aesthetic and, you know, you can sell it as an aesthetic. Like Chinese Tik Tok has this integrated thing in it where like, if you plug like something

to buy it, you can like click it and it'll just, it'll take you like to a link like to the thing it's selling, you know, and so, yeah, they're making a noise about money on this, but, you know, the other side of that sword is a bunch of people were like, I don't have to work this, like, I don't have to work 996 in a city. I can just go home. Yeah. And, you know, and, you know, so, you know, as you were talking about the anti-work stuff, it's not actually possible for a lot of people to leave their jobs.

So the solution to this was there's a culture that developed called petting fish, which and before you talk about petting fish, you said something about plugging things on Tik Tok and, you know, you know, you know, like plugging like advertisements and, you know, who also plugs, plugs advertisements, Chris. Oh, no. Is it us? It's Joe Rogan. It's Joe Rogan.

But our new sponsor is the Joe Rogan Experience brought to you by Honda, Honda, Drive a Car. Do fascism. Honda, really? Yeah, Honda, Garrison. Look, we don't, we're not nearly a big enough podcast to get fucking, to get a Toyota ad. Are you crazy? Yeah. That's what we can dream big.

Yeah. I mean, that is the dream to sell Toyotas. I mean, we could become used car salesmen in the valley. All right. Here's ads. Ah. All right. Cut that.

Cut that. Come on, Chris. Handle it. Cut that. So keep it all in, baby. Yeah. So there's, there's all this thing called the petting fish, which is like Chinese slack off culture.

And it's, you know, as much people sharing tips about how to slack off at work. And it's, it's kind of the equivalent, like, I love that it's called petting fish. And then also like, yeah, it's, it's kind of the Chinese equivalent of like boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I shit on company time. Yeah. And so people do just a lot of like, they have a lot of like genuinely fun things they do, like people, people started putting like fake, uh, beatings on their calendars.

People wouldn't bother them. They like, they just like, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's also what I do. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the, if you want to make, I love the term petting fish as well, but if you want to like make it sound cool, they're waging an insurgency from within capitalism by, by, by type, by trying to take resources away from their employers, um, without being

spotted. Yeah. So the thing in volume one of capital about this, that I, I was like, Oh, I could pull this up. And then I was like, that is too much work. I'm not going to do it. So I don't have the thing in volume one where he talks about struggling between about labor time, but instead you get a bunch of people like this, like smuggling whiskey into work,

taking three hour lunch breaks. My favorite one, my absolute favorite work, drink at work, especially if you're a nurse. Uh, oh boy, we've probably killed about 50 people, fingers crossed, fingers crossed. Yeah. So you know how like companies all have these like, these really annoying, like mindfulness fitness things. Yes. So one of the things people started doing was, okay, so you know the thing, but like

you have to drink eight hour, eight times a day. So they, they would, they would set these alarms that's like, Oh, I have to go drink my water. And so like every, like every like 50 minutes or something, they just go up and like spend 20 minutes getting water and they sit back down and it's like, you've just eviscerated and always part of your work day. And the product of this, you know, the CCP is really pissed off about this. And you know, you get these giant billboards that say, no lying, flat, no petting fish

on them, which would have been literally incomprehensible like a year ago. Yeah. No. It's amazing. Yeah. And you know, and I think this is something, you know, in the US anti-work, like the actual political class kind of has been ignoring it. I mean, you see a couple of financial analysts in China, Xi Jinping like made a speech.

It was like, you know, he had a private speech to a bunch of high level people in the party. And so a part of it got printed like a month ago or something. I've lost track of all time, but like, like, specifically in this speech that Xi Jinping is making that is published in the CCP's official like theoretical journal, he's like explicitly saying like, don't lie flat and saying, quote, happy life is earned through hard hard work. And yeah. And he's also has this, he has his rant about like denouncing welfarism, which is great.

The the communist vanguard there. Yeah. It's like watching the immortal science. Yeah. Socialism with Chinese characteristics, motherfuckers, don't be a welfare queen. That's follow Xi Jinping thought it's great. You know, but it's interesting because people, this is the one people are really freaked out about.

Like I saw, I saw like an American writer about this who, you know, they wrote like an article about this whole thing. And then they were like, this is going to, this is going to cause inflation. It's like, this is going to be the driver of 20% inflation. I'm like, what? Yeah, people just use the word inflation to mean whatever scary thing they want. Yeah. Well, they're like, oh, this will increase wages and that will lead to inflation.

And we'll get the 70s again. And I'm like, oh, God, maybe we'll get a tallow disco again. Did you ever think of that guy that we that we are reserves of a tallow disco are critically low? So, Garrison, do you know what a tallow disco is? No idea. That's a shame. All right.

Let's continue. So is there like any, like you said, this kind of stuff started to like move leftwards. Is there any like actual like leftist organizing in these types of places? So this is the thing I was getting to, which is that like, you know, people are starting to do reading groups, but the problem with leftist organizing in China is that, you know, so state policy in the past three years has been like, if you poke your head above ground, you get a 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? 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 offending 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. Rested. So in 2018, for example, there was a strike at JASIC and a bunch of student groups who had been organizing for a long time tried to do solidarity with it and they all got arrested.

The people who let the strike got arrested, all the students who were doing solidarity got arrested. People got arrested for dancing with like university students got arrested for dancing with the people who were cleaning the floors. Yeah. Oh, god. That's a little bleak. Yeah, like the emotional pressure.

It's incredible. And the other thing that you can see about this was, so for example, there was a guy doing delivery driver organizing. It was kind of weird. He was kind of an entrepreneur kind of doing delivery driver organizing. He got arrested. And then a couple of weeks later, the CCP was like, oh, we're going to do things to improve the conditions of delivery drivers and who knows if that's going to happen.

But basically, for some reason, the people in the tech sector have been able to get away with more for reasons that are probably class based and I think the CCP doesn't take them seriously in the way that they do with students and factory workers. But actually, the fact that the tech workers kind of recently, there was a tech worker thing calling for democratic control of production, which is wild. But other than those guys, you can't stick your head up, you get flattened. So this has sort of been the result of this, which is this lying flat is this mass decentralized movement that there's no one to hit with a hammer.

And I think, okay, one of the other quotes that's been going around about lying flat is it's a poem. It doesn't poem as well in English, but this is the best we've got. Lying flat is to not bow down. Lying flat is to not kneel. Lying flat is to stand up horizontally. Lying flat is a straight spine. And so what's basically happening here is it's a combination of the tendencies you see

in the US where a bunch of people, terrible jobs, realizing that everything's pointless. And then also, this is a way you can fight your boss without the police showing up. And so there's some interesting political stuff. So if you look at the document, there's a bunch of memes here because they're great. So there's been a thing with these people talking about how people are leaks, which they're leaks, they're harvested over and over again, and they're being exploited. Like the plants. Yes, like the plants.

Yeah, like the leaks. Yeah, you eat. And so they have this thing. Leaks that lie flat cannot be so easily harvested. It's just like a knife go like a machete, like trying to swing at a bunch of leaks, but the leaks are flat so they can't hit. I like that too. I see what you do there.

I like all of this, yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, and so the product of this is that, yeah, this stuff has actually been effective enough that the CCP, like, you know, I mean, the CCP is taking it seriously, but you know, there's not much they can do about it because like if someone's just like, oh, I'm going to go from a job that's really high stress to one that's less high stress, like what are you going to, are you just going to arrest them? Like what are you going to do? And so this, yeah, this, this has been building for a while now and I don't know who knows

exactly like where it's going to go, but it's, it's, it's already, you know, it's something that people can do as an individual in a place where organized political action is impossible in a way such that, you know, their individual actions have a collective effect, but one that can't be just, you know, pounded down. Yeah. I mean, it is certainly interesting to see two completely separate like anti-work style movements arise basically around the same exact time with the same exact points in totally different languages.

Right. If you're someone who's interested in massive global revolutionary change, this should probably be a thing that you are looking at and studying and thinking a lot about because perhaps while we're arguing about shit that people started talking about in the 1870s, this, this might be a better thing to do than, than that because, because it seems like there's some potential here. Yeah. And I think, yeah.

I mean, you know, if, if, you know, any, any, any, any actual revolutionary project that makes the world better is going to have to be international. And that's been, you know, that, that, that, that that's been the bane of all revolutionary movements forever, but, you know, okay. So we have, you know, we have something to change the American working class agrees on, which is Diogenes is based in work sucks. Yeah. Yeah.

So as you go forward into your life this week, take a page from Diogenes is his book and go shit on the floor of the free people, shit on the floor of a free people or free people are in H&M, go walk into one and just, just, just go absolutely ruin that tile. I mean, fuck it up. This is why my, my, my, my biggest political advice to friends who has always been to learn to run fast, because if you learn to run fast, you can do so many more fun things. All politics in a store and then run fast and it's done, right? The problem is, is that a lot of people like who want to do this can't run fast enough

and you have, so learn to run fast to do this. There we go. It's like Mao said, all political power comes from being able to shit really fast in the door of a free people, just get the hell out of there. The immortal science. Look, I think, I think, I think we should leave with, with the, the, the, the real immortal science, the, the immortal words of a skeleton from the share zone. Just walk out.

You can leave, work, social things, movie, home, class, dentist, clothes shops, two fancy weed store cops, if you're quick friendships, if it sucks, hit the bricks. Yeah. Yeah. As, as some comedian who I can't remember now said, always have an exit plan. Like that, that, that should be your thought for everything, everything in the world. Hit the fucking bricks. Get out.

Anyway, get out of this podcast episode now. From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadowgirls. I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody, and he started laughing. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer, savant, picking up these girls, getting them in a position of vulnerability, when he got a hold of their neck, that was it. 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. Just 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, do it to all of the kind of things.

You know how he feels about prostitutes? Listen to The Shadowgirls on the iHeart radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and what you can do about it. My name is Christopher Wong, and today I'm going to be talking about sabotage. But this is not the episode on sabotage that you expect. I will not be discussing, for example, the destruction of machinery, throwing monkey

punches, slowdown strikes, or the myriad of other tactics that workers have used since time immemorial to strike back at their bosses. No, instead, I'm going to be talking about a far more common, and infinitely more dangerous form of sabotage. Corporate sabotage. Now the most convictuous form of corporate sabotage is the mass destruction of a corporation's own products. The fashion company Burberry, for example, destroyed $370 million of its own product

in one year alone. Louis Vuitton and Chanel also systematically destroyed their own sold stock every year, joining H&M and literally lighting their own sold products on fire in order to prevent anyone from using them. Quote Business Insider. Richemont, the owner of Cartelier Montblanc, destroyed more than 400 million pounds of watches over a two-year period after an excess in goods in the Asian markets. Nike has also admitted that a New York store slashed unsold trainers before throwing them

away, and last year an Urban Outfitters employee said he was instructed to pour green paint on the unsold stock. These, of course, are only the stories that have baited into the press. And this behavior is by no means limited to high fashion. Grocery stores routinely throw away enormous quantities of unsold goods, and when communities realize they could feed people in need by taking the still-good products from grocery store dumpsters, the stories begin to destroy their food intentionally. But these acts of destruction, as callous and horrifically greedy as they are, are by

no means the extent of corporate sabotage. To explain, I turn to the work of the economist Thorsten Weblen. Weblen is perhaps best known today for the theory of conspicuous consumption, but he wrote extensively on corporate sabotage. In the first part of The Engineers and the Price System, a work that is broadly ignored even by his followers, Weblen wrote a section called On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage. From that work, writers and speakers who dilate on the militarious exploits of the nation's businessmen will not commonly allude to this voluminous running administration of sabotage,

this conscientious withdrawal of efficiency that goes into their ordinary day's work. We are not used to thinking of the ordinary work of a corporation being sabotage. But for Weblen, there was no other explanation for what he was seeing. In the wake of World War I, there was an enormous explosion in unemployment, an enormous need on behalf of the population, but even as the unemployed begged to be let in to create the products that could build the needs of their fellow humans, business owners steadfastly refused to open their factories, as Weblen explained. But for reasons of business expediency, it is impossible to let these idle plants and

idle workmen go to work, that is to say, for reasons of insufficient profit to the businessmen interested, or in other words, for reasons of insufficient income to the vested interests which control the staple industries and so regulate the output of product. Weblen was not alone in observing these or similar conditions. John Maynard Keynes, writing during the Depression, observed nearly precisely the same thing. For Keynes, the solution simply was to have the government step in to increase demand. But for Weblen, this missed the core of the problem. The real problem was that a core of absentee owners had the ability to shut down the factories

in the first place by simple virtue of their ownership. As Weblen argued, it was simply sabotage, no different from the hated strikes of the IWW that so wracked and perturbed the capitalist ruling class at this time. At least the workers could argue that they were simply fighting for a better share of what they had created. The absentee owners, on the other hand, who had no actual involvement in the production process whatsoever, simply carried out sabotage on an enormous scale in order to secure their own returns.

And this was true even in times that weren't marked by massive depressions. In order to make payments to capitalists, Weblen argued, who expect a certain rate of return on their investment, corporations must maintain prices at such a level that they can meet their returns. And the only way they can do this is sabotage. For the good of business, it is necessary to curtail production of the means of life on pain of unprofitable prices at the same time that the increasing need of all sorts of necessities of life must be met in some passable fashion on pain of popular disturbances,

as will always come of popular distress when they pass the limit of tolerance. This sabotage, Weblen argued, was simply a product of the price system. Any production that was too efficient would simply and inevitably be sabotage for private gain. Because in order to maintain prices that would maintain the returns of investors, it was necessary to ensure that production never became too efficient and produced too many goods. Weblen used as his example the 20th century post office, but we could just easily point

to Trump sabotaging the post office in 2020 in a dual bid to privatize the service by causing it to collapse and prevent mail-in votes from being counted as part of his attempts to win the 2020 election. In their book Capitalist Power, Khamnesh Mshom Bikler and Jonathan Needson take Weblen's argument and expand on it. Saying that capitalism, far from encouraging productivity at large, makes things inefficient on purpose. They used the example of public transportation, which is, by essentially any measure, a significantly

more efficient way of moving people around the US. As an example, in the US in the 1940s, 100 electric rail lines were bought up and destroyed by car companies. Those same companies likewise twice destroyed incredibly efficient and popular electric cars once in the 1930s and again in the 1980s, because the profit rate was lower than that of gas cars. They then set out to cause everyone to forget that they had actually done this until Elon Musk figured out a way to sell electric cars that was profitable, namely by selling himself

as a brand and not the cars themselves. Now, if capitalism was simply destroying its own products in order to create Elon Musk's, you could argue that the system at least produced advancements before it stopped them. But the most violent forms of sabotage are reserved for productive systems that are simultaneously efficient and outside of capitalist control altogether. Perhaps the best-known example of this is the British East India Company's deindustrialization of the Indian textile industry. Not to be outmatched by the British forebearers, American settlers and their allies in the

American military exterminated the buffalo herds of the Great Plains in an attempt to starve out the indigenous tribes that lived there. In doing so, they destroyed an enormously productive and sustainable agricultural system. They did so precisely because the system was efficient. So efficient, in fact, that it allowed indigenous tribes to repeatedly defeat the American army and defensive their lands. We are used to thinking of capitalism as a system of production, but here, amidst the fields of buffalo corpses, is something else entirely.

Some appearing in its true form, a system of organized sabotage. To fully untangle what this means, let us return to Veblen. Veblen divided capitalism into two separate processes. The first he called industry, industry, Veblen argued, has existed long before capitalism and will continue to exist long after it, as bit clear and niche and put it, quote. When considered in isolation from contemporary business institutions, the principal goal of industry, its raison d'etre, according to Veblen, is the efficient production of quality goods and services for the betterment of human life.

Industry is an inherently collective undertaking. Its basis is cooperation and integration, the creation of communal knowledge that allows production and scientific advance to occur, and coordination and cooperation between people to create things for each other. Left to its own devices, industry would simply produce goods for people. It has no concern for profitability, rates of returns, or capitalization. Unfortunately, capitalism is defined by private ownership. This is what Veblen calls business.

Business is a system of power that extracts wealth from industry by means of sabotage. Production to serve human need, the basis of industry, is useless to business unless it can be turned into a revenue stream. It does this by taking control of industry and its products and then restricting access to it, bit clear and niche and put it. The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not. Technically, anyone can get in someone else's car and drive away, but give it order to sell

all of Warren Buffett's shares in Berkshire Hathaway. The purpose of private ownership is wholly and only an institution of exclusion. An institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power. As we can see from the genocide on the plains, this power is no abstract force. Veblen tends to focus on the power of absentee owners to stop production, and for good reason. But business stands in the way of industry in more immediate ways too. After all, the purpose of cooperative industry is to make goods to improve our lives, and yet in between us and the proceeds that industry creates to serve our needs, there is a cash

register and a cop. Even the creators of a Louis Vuitton bag, or for that matter, a tomato, have no claim on it once business takes over, and business would rather destroy it than see it fall into their hands. The famous Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin was writing along similar lines to Veblen just a few years before. Veblen, it seems, had been exposed to anarchist ideas through its association with the industrial workers of the world.

In the early 1900s, it was not altogether unusual for economists to move on radical circles. The great Italian economist Piero Serafa smuggled pens and papers to Antonio Gromsi, while Gromsi, the head of the Italian Communist Party, was a prisoner of the Italian fascist regime. Serafa would later extract the writings that Gromsi had written in prison, unleashing Gromsi's prison notebooks onto the world. But Veblen was unique even among these economists for the extent that he incorporated radical

theories directly into his work, as you've seen with his adoption of sabotage as a way of thinking about capitalism. This led Veblen to call the end of the system of what he described as vested interests in absentee owners. Veblen's solution, however, which he described as a quote, soviet of technicians that would manage production for all society, leaves a lot to be desired for. So let us return to the source, Piero Scapotkin, in the conquest of bread. The mines, though they represent the labor of several generations and derive their sole

value from the requirements of the industry of a nation and the density of the population. The mines also belong to the few, and these few restrict the output of coal or prevent it entirely, if they find more profitable investments for their capital. Machinery 2 has become the exclusive property of the few, and even when a machine incontestably represents improvements added to the original rough invention by three or four generations of workers, it nonetheless belongs to a few owners. And if the descendants of the very inventor who constructed the first machine for lace building a century ago were to present themselves today at a lace factory in Bale or Nottingham

and demand their rights, they would be told, hands off, this machine is not yours, and they would be shot down if they attempted to take possession of it. Here we see the competition between two different kinds of rights. On the one hand, the right of industry, the right of creativity, the right of those who produce and care for each other to be able to determine where the proceeds of their labor go, from industry's point of view, this is to each other, to those in need, and to society as a whole. On the other hand, there is the right of property, the right of men with guns to throw

oysters into the ocean because it's not profitable for anyone to eat them. Capitalism has developed a myriad of iterations of precisely the same principle, and the world is now infested by them. Patent trolls haunt the already fraught waters of intellectual property, buying up patents for cheap, or on rare occasions creating something themselves, for the sole purpose of preventing anyone else from using it, making money by suing anyone who dares try. Large corporations, of course, do precisely the same thing, see, for example, Disney's war on the concept of anything, anything at all, falling into the public domain, the sabotage,

and on this, all four of our interlocutors, Veblen, Kropotkin, Kleren Nietzen agree, as long as private ownership exists, because sabotage is all private ownership really is. But it is not simply enough to answer corporate sabotage with their own sabotage. As Veblen pointed out, this is simply the ordinary state of affairs under capitalism. For Kropotkin, the answer was simple. Disrich endowments, painfully won, build, fashioned, or invented by our ancestors, must become common property so that the collective interest of men may gain, forbid the greatest good for all.

There must be expropriation, the well-being of all, the end, expropriation, the means. How precisely to go about doing such a thing has been the subject of endless debate for nearly 200 years, and I am not arrogant enough to propose to solve the problem here. But a system where a company can prevent even the US government from attempting to produce ventilators by simply buying up the company that won the contract and refusing to fill the order to maintain the value of the ventilators it was already producing is a system based on nothing less than ensuring that people will die for a 5% rate of return. If we are to have any hope of stopping the ravages that climate change promises for our

future, we cannot afford to be sabotaged at every step. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. Listen to Before Breakfast on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen in as our guests reveal their business models, hardships, and triumphs in their respective song studios. Here is to the great American settlers.

The millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills. Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say. Start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your creative freedom. Maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your old boss, hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Spreaker.com, S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R. That's a lot over today. 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 was 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 for a

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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.