Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 16

Episode Date: January 8, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propaganda, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The It Could Happen Here Podcast My name is St Andrew and I'll be your host as we talk about politics stuff. With me today is Garrison. Hello. And Christopher. Hello. And Sophie. Hi.

And today we will be tackling, or rather we'll be taking a trip to the anarchist activism in Latin America with Especifismo. But first we need to get into some context here. The first organization to promote the concept of Especifismo was the Federacion Anarchista Uruguaya, or the FAU, which was founded in 1956 by anarchist militants who embraced the idea of an organization that was specifically anarchist. For those who don't know, not long after 1956, or rather two decades after 1956, the US installed a dictatorship in Uruguay that lasted from 1973 to 1985. The FAU survived that dictatorship and went on to establish connections with other South American anarchist revolutionaries. So they helped to support the founding of the Federacion Anarchista Caúcha, or FAG, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, the Federacion Anarchista Cabocla, and the Federacion Anarchista de Rio de Janeiro, or FAG,

in their respective regions of Brazil. And they also helped to found the Argentinian organization known as ALCA, which means rebel. While only coming onto stage in Latin America within the last few decades, the ideas that really make up Especifismo touch on a historic thread that's really run through the anarchist movement internationally since the beginning. As we get into what Especifismo is and stuff, it may sound very similar to platformism. Are you all familiar with that current? Yeah, we're familiar with platforms a little bit, but we can probably, I don't know, explain it for the people at home who do not spend as much time thinking about old anarchist terms. Right, right, right. So, their generic listener, or viewer, or whatever, platformism began with a document that was written in 1926 by the former peasant army leader Nesta Magno, Ida Met, and other militants of the DLU Truda, or Workers' Corps group. They published a document called Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, and it was written in response to, well,

being exiled from the Russian Revolution, and having to struggle really to find their footing after the Bolsheviks turned the work of Soviets into instruments of one party rule. So the power space group, the DLU Truda, they really criticized the anarchist movement for a lack of organization. So they posed an alternative that is controversial to some anarchists, but it's essentially a general union of anarchists based on anarchist communism, that would strive for theoretical and tactical unity and a focus on class struggle and labor unions. Obviously, platformism, like all political ideas, is not a static, you know, the world has progressed significantly in a century, so while there is an emphasis on worker struggle and class struggle, when you speak to most platformists today, I would say, obviously I don't have stats on that, I would say most platformists can recognize that, you know, the new war with the class war is a bit reductive. I've also noticed actually that platformism has been gaining a bit more popularity lately. I don't know if it's just me and my perception, but I don't know if you've all seen that. I have, I've not seen tons of it here, a lot of the type of anarchism I'm around, or at least see is not in Spain, but most of the stuff I see is like around like the kind of like live anarchy type kind of strains and more individualists. But that's just I think a very like Pacific Northwest specific thing that the anarchists here just kind of generally trend in that direction.

So I'm not sure what it's really like across like this country and other places around the world. Yeah, I know I know I've definitely seen it, especially that I think I think it's it's almost like it was bigger a few years ago, but back like 2018 2017, there was a big spike of black rose. It became a sort of serious group for a while. And yeah, people who like called themselves like anarcho communists or anarcho syndicalists kind of generally swam in this general ocean. I definitely saw that as a bigger thing in 2018 than now, at least like locally from my area. I think I was like, yeah, the black rose people, a lot of them like very specifically were as a piece of based on a lot of it was based on like people who had like experiences with a specific piece of various ways. Right, right. Yeah, because I was actually just about to say I think that black rose is more a specialist and platformist. But of course there is, you know, a lot of overlap between these two currents. Right. As for my experience with like platform itself and stuff have seen discussions of it happening more. I mean, that's all I can really see that I've seen. I can't be everywhere at once, but at least if discussions are happening, the likelihood of things coming out of it might be a bit increased, I guess. Another current that has been part of the anarchist milieu zeitgeist wave, whatever is organizational dualism, which came out to the 1920s Italian anarchist movement.

So they use the term to describe involvement of anarchists, both as members of anarchist specific political organizations, and also as militants in the labor movement. In Spain, the friends of duty group emerged to oppose the gradual reversal the Spanish Revolution 1936. And they also ended up emulating some of the ideas of the platform by criticizing, you know, the CNTF is sorry the CNTF is gradual reformism and collaboration with the Republican government. So the Spanish Civil War and stuff, you know, there's a lot of forces at play and we're going to get into it now, but it is, I would say as a side note, important to recognize that there is no monolith when it comes to like these sort of civil wars and historical events. You really have to look at things in context and, you know, try to strip them away from the goings on to the time. Also, the Chinese anarchist movement of the 1910s advocated for similar ideas. I'm going to try to pronounce the name of the group. Hopefully I don't get cancelled.

But it's the Wu Sheng Fu Gong Shan Jui Tong Shi Zhe Hui, I think, which is the society of anarchist communist comrades. And yeah, they advocated for a lot of similar ideas. So there's a lot of different currents around the world influenced by, you know, the historic conditions, but the general thread that, you know, anarchists need to get together and work as a unit is, you know, what's thrust in it, right? And Especifismo is just a fresh continuation of this thread of this trend. What is Especifismo exactly? The three key concepts that I see emphasized again and again. One, the need for specifically anarchist organization builds around a unity of ideas and praxis. Two, the use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and develop strategic political organizing work. And three, active involvement in and building of autonomous and popular social movements, which is described as the process of social insertion.

So kind of core to the whole specific current is, which is rather antithetical to some of the trends that I've seen in the past couple years, is sort of a rejection of this left unity idea, right? This idea that there can be these, this sort of big tent organization that can somehow establish all these different visions simultaneously, right? So Especifist reject the idea of just unity for unity's sake, because they feel it boils down to sort of lowest common denominator kind of wishy-washy politics. They feel that when unity is preferred at all costs, it leaves very little room for unified action or develop political discussion. In fact, in my experience, when you have like a lot of political heterogene, there tends to be a lot of unproductive drama lack of a better word. Obviously, people of different political stripes should work together, and there's no like harm in that. But at the same time, when it comes to certain types of organizations, having a sense of ideological unity is, I would say, pretty important as, you know, you don't want to have all these different groups constantly butting heads for these different visions. You know, you're going to have at least some sense that we're moving in sync, right?

So you're not going to have some people who are trying to establish social democracy and some people who are trying to get like this workers state quote unquote, or, you know, people who just want, I don't know, like a higher minimum wage, right? I mean, everyone's on a different stage of their political journey. But what a specific try to emphasize is that while we can work within these larger social movements, it's important that I guess specifically come together to try to shape those movements in an organized way. And I'll explain because it kind of sounds a bit like vanguardism for some people, this idea that, you know, these, this cabal of like revolutionaries are trying to like manipulate things behind the scenes. But really what specialists argue is that anarchists need a space, linear space for like common strategy and reflection and collective responsibility and, you know, a place to discuss plans and build trust and share analysis and, you know, put together short and long term goals or latch ass. So while the specifics do reach out to and work with social movements, regardless of whether they fit this quote unquote anarchist purity test. And I say that with my tongue planted firmly in cheek, of course, they want to make sure that they can serve still as an active minority so that these movements aren't diluted. And so I noticed I'm like throwing out a lot of different words and phrases and ideas. You know, things like ideological unity and need for sort of a consensus within the group.

And speaking of, I've spoken about consensus on my channel before. So I have a breakdown on it, people can check out of did like, I was spoke of unified strategy, right so you're not just joking around you actually have a mapped out sort of strategy. Like, for example, black socialists in America, they aren't like a specifically a specialist or to my knowledge, but you can see that they have like a unified like clearly laid out strategy, and they're making moves to make it to like achieve it. And they're very public about those moves. Right. Um, I also want to emphasize, of course, in a specific is more the whole idea of this active minority. You know, it's not just a bunch of like, it's not like a passive book club. Right. And the specific group is a group of people who are passionate about, you know, this course. And obviously passionate people have this habit of fighting off more than they can, more than they can chew. Right. So what I wouldn't advise like a specialist and a specific achievement adjacent groups and really just organizations in general is that keep your size in mind, keep achievable goals with insight, because if you don't, you know, it's very easy to burn out very quickly.

With the specialist groups, it's important that they understand the responsibility, but also that they understand their limits. Lastly, and very importantly, social insertion, I think is one of the most important parts for specificismo. And I think even if you don't take anything away from like a specific, specificismo, you at the very least like implement social insertion or at least concepts within social insertion into organizing. Right. Because obviously, anarchists are kind of few in number. But what social insertion tries to point out, I guess, or tries to develop within a movement is just awareness that the people who are making these moves for organizing and whatnot, that they don't relinquish their power to like other figures, or forces, or parties, or whatever the case may be. Right. Social insertion stems from the belief that the oppressed are the most revolutionary sector of society, and the seed of future revolutionary transformation of society lies already in these classes and social groupings. So it doesn't mean social insertion doesn't mean like acting within single issue advocacy campaigns, or, you know, like trying to take over people's existing struggles. It means getting involved in daily fights and daily struggles for people to better their own condition.

You know, connecting with workers, connecting with immigrants, connecting across neighborhoods, working towards racial liberation, working within student struggles and tenant struggles. As people are like part of these struggles, they become conscious of their place in society, right, and part of our role is to try to develop that consciousness. So as people are tempered and tested and recreated, they see their position in the, what's what I'm looking for, in the pecking order, right. They see that their forces that are keeping them down, their structures that are keeping them down, and they change from just being like social classes to being active social forces. So they're brought together by organic methods and by self organized cohesion. What you'll notice with popular movements, like for example, Black Lives Matter, is that unlike what some conservatives might assume, the Black Lives Matter organization wasn't the one like pulling the strings. You know, like the official group wasn't there, you know, telling people, okay, march here, burn that, riot here, move that, you know, it's like the people themselves came together and, you know, really expressed their desire for change. And so really, as they become self conscious actors, aware of their power, of their voice, of their nemesis, which is the ruling elites that control the social order.

As specialists try to keep that thrust, right, what specialists argue is that essentially there's an anarchist undercurrent to popular social movements that should be preserved and maintained and cultivated, right, with popular movements. They're very quickly co-opted by impositions of leadership or by, you know, academic elites, or by political parties. But as specialists aren't there to try to make groups identify as anarchists, right, they're there to just maintain that thrust to be self organized and to fight for their own interests. Because ultimately, that's our natural impulse as humans. You know, it's really the propaganda that tells us, you know, like you have to go through these proper channels, you know, you have to vote with your dollar or, you know, vote for these politicians or whatever the case may be, converse and all these different things, call up your representatives, you know, the natural thrust of a person is not to like relinquish control of themselves, you know, it's to try to maintain that. And so specialists try to push against propaganda that keeps us from maintaining that push against the co-optation that strips that from us. So, do any sort of automatic critiques of a specimen come to mind for you all? I'm not sure about like critiques per se, we need to like think about it more, but a few things like come to mind around.

So like you talked a bit about like the difference between like left unity and creating like an anarchist unity. And for people at home, I would like to maybe extrapolate why those are different things. I know you have a good video on left unity already, but like in terms of trying to like, you know, if one of the goals being creating like an anarchist organization that kind of unifies different anarchists, how that is a different type of unity than just left unity in general. I think that might be a point of clarification. And then the other thing I was wondering about is like, how does this intersect in terms of like individual goals versus like group goals or like organizational goals? And so like, because like there's a, there's a back and forth between like personal autonomy and then, you know, these type of social movements that kind of almost gain their own thrust. Right, right. Yes, to the point about the difference in left unity and anarchist unity.

Well, obviously, anarchists are also fairly heterogeneous. I think our general thrust for self-determination and autonomy and that kind of thing is what brings us together, you know, the difference between like say anarchist unity, differently, some, I would say, key disagreements within the milieu and left unity is that I feel there are some extremely incompatible factors that prevent left unity from being viable. Yeah. When there's a thrust among significant segments, I mean really every non-libertarian segment of, you know, the quote unquote left to funnel our popular energy towards state institutions, whether it be through insurrectionary social democracy or reformist social democracy in the case of MLS and SOC damage respectively. I think that that really keeps us from really working together on anything more than small goals and small projects. I mean, we've really seen the whole left unity idea fall apart, you know, through wars and through even just like what should be discussions between people, you know, like the first international literally split because of the differences between,

you know, the so-called left currents, you know, between the anarchists and the other socialists. So, left unity is not something that I aim to achieve, I think most people know that about me by now. But with regards to like anarchist unity and of course the differences between anarchists, I think the general thrust to maintain the autonomy and self-determination of the people and of the social movements that we are inserting ourselves in is what really clues us together. And of course, that alone, I don't know if that's enough to maintain a specificist organization because, you know, like I noted, the specificists try to develop deeper level, you know, strategies and theoretical discussion and that kind of thing. And so with those sort of discussions, you know, you're going to see a lot more of the distinctions bearing out. But at the very least, I think anarchists generally could benefit from a degree of at least unity in the sense of maintaining or solidarity in the sense of maintaining the libertarian thrust of popular movement. I asked the other thing that you had noted about the sort of friction between individual goals and organizational goals, you know, between autonomy and sort of how social movements end up taking on like an energy of their own.

To be quite honest, I don't think I have like a fully developed answer for that. Yeah. Because on the one hand, a social movement that forgets that it is about, you know, the liberation of individuals is, you know, in my view, a social movement that's quickly going to end up turning against the people who are, you know, fueling it. At the same time, I've interacted with like a lot of people who are pretty selfish or pretty egotistical or just argumentative for the sake of it. Sorry, Sophie, you're going to say something. Yeah, I was just like the thing that keeps popping up into my head is, you know, one of the things that gets misconstrued all the time is who's calling the shots. And I kind of feel like what you're saying is everybody in a way. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that like, Which is good sometimes, but not good other times, obviously.

Exactly. Yeah. Because I think it's very easy to form this sort of almost reactionary. I like island mentality, not island mentality is in Caribbean island mentality isn't person isn't as an island around like autonomy and, you know, personal freedom, you know, like this rendering idea that, you know, I'm step my property, you know, that kind of thing just let people do whatever it's kind of like more so anarcho-cafless conception of what freedom and autonomy is. I think an important part of autonomy and, you know, freedom and Yanukes project is, you know, accountability and is, you know, like consequences, like social consequences and how your actions affect others. You know, like what I can say was recognized is that we are not, in fact, island, you know, our actions or behavior or words affect other people. And so I think it's going to be a constant project to sort of balance individual personalities and protocols.

But I mean, yeah, it's, it's tricky, right, like, you know, we're talking about like some kind of, you know, group organization to work together to kind of, you know, think of achievable goals and create steps to get there. And I feel among a lot of people who proudly declare themselves anarchists, at least like an extremely vocal, like these are like people both like online and in person organizing that are very, are very like vocal and try to very much like make their place known. And we've seen trends away from this direction in terms of like rejecting the idea of goals and demands and just, you know, like this, this more insurrectionary kind of tendency of just making total destroy for the sake of it. Shout out to Inevitable Committee. Yeah, and that I mean, like, I know that like platformism is kind of like, it's not like anti-insurrectionary, but it's like it's, it definitely critiques that type of insurrectionary trend. So I'm thinking about like, you know, this idea, and like how with with this kind of general, you know, decentralized, no, no demands, no goals, kind of general kind of direction that like capital A anarchists are doing how like what's what's maybe some aspects of a specific Fismo that we can actually take into account to be like, hey, maybe there's, you know, like I don't like, I don't like being called like any adjective anarchist. I think it's silly. I like I kind of said that.

I think this year or late last year, like I just got to the point where I'm not like this, you know, that's yeah, yeah, I like the part in desert. It's like, I'm an anarchist of many adjectives. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not always an insurrectionary. I'm not always a syndicalist. I'm not always, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I feel like that would be a really useful kind of thing for people to focus on more in terms of, yeah, it can be fun to make total destroy and that is a very base instinct. But it also would be great to like improve people's lives a little bit. Yeah. And there was some building not just destroying. Yeah. And there's like two, two, two kind of like dueling things. And in turn, I do really like the part of like this type of stuff that it's really appealing to me just because I kind of already work on this myself. So I'm like, oh, I'm already doing this. But it's like the it is, it is like the social, the social insertion side of things.

I think is something that would be a much, a much better way of thinking about, you know, like everyone hates talking about optics, because yeah, it's frustrating. But I think the social insertion method is a better framework for kind of dealing with some of those same problems. Exactly. Exactly. And then like, you know, there is even among insurrection areas and all those, you know, all those types, there still is like a decent amount of like group projects and stuff. And that is, I think, a really good thing to focus on because yeah, there's not many anarchists and it would be cool if there was more. And if we just focus on the parts that make people go, oh, that's kind of silly and pointless, then we're not really going to grow anarchism that much. So highlighting the parts that are like, oh, yeah, you're actually helping people. That's going to convince a lot more people who are kind of already trending in that general, general direction. And then, hey, maybe in a few years, they can also be doing silly destruction for fun, because it is, it is fun sometimes. Right. Yeah.

Like this, as you mentioned, optics, I'm reminded is kind of pet peeve I have with some, you know, instant people where they try to treat like ideologies or specifically anarchism as like a PR project that we have to like constantly be trying to shift the optics and micromanage like every aspect. Like, no, I think the best remedy for like, because you're not going to match the power of mass media. No, what you can do to push back against a sort of propaganda is help people and help people and identify as anarchists as you're helping people. Right. Like that's the easiest and quickest way to dispel people's notions and like conceptions of what an anarchist is. If we were to take like socialization, right, and sort of, I would say distill it a bit and individualize it a bit. I would say that as a practice, you know, just even if you don't know any any other anarchist in the area, right, just being there, being in these movements, helping people and you know, saying, you know, this is what I believe. Just talking to people about what you believe as a person, as you're helping them, you know, that goes a long way, much longer than any, you know, poster campaign or like we pasting initiative or artwork, you know, wall art or whatever, you know, like, actively helping people. Of course, wall art has its place and I doubt a little bit myself, but you know, it's not, it's ultimately like talking to people and helping people and being their people and being honest about your intentions.

Yeah, that I think, you know, we should work in towards. And I think those types of projects are something that the specific model like excels at in terms of like creating like a unity of anarchists who get like, who have like a goal in mind and then go out to achieve the goal, helping people like doing like doing like, like, like, direct, directly helping people is something that that type of organization model is kind of the best at. Exactly. Because you can, yeah, really like organize things much better with a small group like that and create goals that are actually very achievable, whether it be, you know, building a community kitchen or building, you know, heating centers for like for the winter, like under under bridges or whatever, you know, all those types of starting community gardens, all those kinds of things are, I think, what this type of model really excels at. And yeah, you don't need to change your ideology to this one word because that's that's silly, but you can pick up different parts of it and be like, yeah, that actually seems like a useful way of improving the world. We don't want, you know, a politician just rolling hand coopt our project, you know, like just basic things like that, you know, and then from there, you know, as you are talking with people and meeting people who are passionate about issues in these social movements, you know, not only does it keep you from developing this sort of, um, terminally online in group kind of mentality. It also opens up opportunities to you to develop your analyst on the topic of like the individualist social institution. It prints up presents opportunities for you to develop your own, I don't know, like book club and then from that book club could come and a specialist organization, you know, as you begin to develop your politics and your shared politics.

More can come out of it. So don't underestimate, you know, the potential of just putting in the work and talking to people. Yeah, you know, just being there on the ground. And one of the best things you can do to help stay alive in the while things are heading in the direction that they're heading societally is like making friends and forming a friend group. And then, yeah, like actually doing stuff together that makes dealing with everything else that's happening so, so much better. And hey, remember, our old friend, Nestor, uh, Nestor Marko started with a book club. You know, you never know where book clubs can lead. Exactly. Exactly. It's actually it's really interesting. Video clip of Murray Bookchin talking about book clubs and like the power and potential book clubs. I don't know if we could probably link that in the show notes, but it's like a really interesting. Yeah. So ultimately, a specific believe that social movements will reach their own logic of creating revolution. Not when they all just decide to identify as anarchists and wave the black flag, but when the majority reach a consensus and a consciousness of their power and the ability to exercise their power in their daily lives.

So even if they do not adopt anarchism, they still consciously adopt the ideas embedded within it. There are multiple political currents that will exist within any movement. And so it's important that we as anarchists, and I guess specifically as a specialist, are there to actively combat the opportunism that come from, you know, these forces from this, whether electoral or ungoddessed. Within the social movements as well. We can also help to push them further through, you know, pushing for more direct democracy and consensus through federalism and confederating with other social movements through, you know, building up the mutual aid within these movements. Like, if you are, for example, part of a mutual aid group in one neighborhood, you can push them to start reaching out with mutual aid groups in other neighborhoods and creating a network of mutual aid groups that can build into something bigger. You know, combining resources and manpower to really push the revolution, you know. Lastly, I will say that for those who are trying to, like, get into the whole of specifics more thing, I mean, you could start a new organization from scratch. But again, like, easiest thing to do is to just get in there to people and be honest with the people.

I keep saying the people, even though I have my critiques of this amorphous conception of the people, but the point remains that our goal is to spread our ideas, not to get people on any particular ideology, but to get a liberatory consciousness on the ground and to generalize that consciousness. And for those who are curious about a specific fees more in action and social insertion specifically. The federal show and our Easter Gaucher in Brazil has worked with neighborhood committees and urban villages and slums. They've built alliances with the rank and file members of the rural landers workers movement, MST, and they've also worked with trash and recyclables collectors. Brazil, for those who don't know, has a lot of high levels of temporary and contingent employment, under employment and unemployment. So the working class isn't how we traditionally conceive it as like just surviving primarily off of wage labor, but it's more so this sort of subsistence week in formal economy gig economy can deal. So being able to connect with these when charged with collectors, for example, who are part of this sort of economy, the FHG has built a strong relationship with them and help them to form their own national organization to, you know, push for their interests and to collectivize their recycling operations. A specific fees more is also worked with the has also worked in the efforts of the Zabalaza anarchist communist front in South Africa, as they also a strong opponent of social insertion and, you know, really being embedded in the social movements in Argentina in Brazil,

in South Africa, and in the US in the case of black brothers anarchist Federation, a specific fees more has been building as a key point for reference. And so I'll leave us off with a quote from the use of front collective anarchist group online. If libertarian socialists merely organized with libertarian socialists, then they will lose contact with the broader population they need to be reaching. If libertarian socialists merely joined social movements without advocating various libertarian socialist practices that can be used, then social movements can easily drift into being susceptible to reformist, unstrategic, liberal and learningist tendencies and opportunists. If libertarian socialists merely joined social movements and tried to spread ideas and practices in their individual ways. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

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

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Be far less successful than a well-thought-out coordinated effort, and if theoretically specific libertarian socialist groups try to control social movements and popular organizations from the top down, then such specific groups sacrifice their own principles and will reproduce hierarchical organizing. In contrast to authoritarian vanguardist conceptions, aspecifismo groups and aspecifists put their activity towards a self-organization of movements and organizations. Ultimately, as I honestly love this quote from Ashanti Alston, power to the people where it stays with the people.

Peace. Yes, Andrew, please, please plug your plugables because they are good and people shouldn't in fact listen to them. Right. Thank you. Safety first, of course. I will say that you can follow me on Twitter at underscore St. Drew and on YouTube at St. Andrew's. And you can find me here apparently twice a month, which is pretty great. Shout out to it can happen here. Take care everyone. Peace again.

Hello and welcome to our show. I'm Zoe Deschanel and I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and castmates, Hannah Simone and Lamorne Morris to recap our hit television series, New Girl. Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast where we'll share behind the scenes stories of your favorite New Girl episodes, reveal the truth behind the legendary game True American and discuss how this show got made with the writers, guest stars and directors who made the show so special. Fans have been begging us to do a New Girl recap for years and we finally made a podcast where we answer all your burning questions like, is there really a bear in every episode of New Girl? Plus, each week you'll hear hilarious stories like this. At the end when he says, you got some Schmidt on your face, I feel like I pitched that joke. I believe that. I feel like I did. I'm not on a thousand percent. I want to say that was I tossed that one out. Listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Robert Sex-Reese, host of the Doctor Sex-Reese show and every episode I listen to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues and yes, I despise every minute of it. I mean, she made mistakes too. That's true. She did kill everyone at her wedding. But hell is real, we're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you? Listen to the Doctor Sex-Reese show every Tuesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What's new? My year. Shit. Yeah. New year, same shit. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the 2022. No, it's not. We retired this in 2021. We retired this bit. Who where is this?

Time for a new bit. This is it could happen here. Time for more coffee. The podcast about how things sometimes feel like they're falling apart sometimes and maybe we can do things about that. You know what's falling apart is me because I during my break woke up at like 1 to 30 every day and now it's someone's speakable hour in the morning. I hate this. You picked the time. You picked the time. So for for for one of our first episodes of the new year, we have decided to subject ourselves to your parasocial whims.

And we are going to be doing maybe one, maybe two Q&A episodes, giving A's to your Q's. And I've been told you right in the queue. Okay, I've been told that our producer Sophie has a list of questions already prepared so that I can stop talking and she can now. You've been told you're the one who posted the thread. Sophie said that she would read them. I did. I did volunteer tribute, but I might take that back. Let's start with a good one. What has been your favorite episode slash topic to research in this past season? So since we started season two. Oh God. I enjoyed the metaverse Facebook episodes because there's a part of me that really likes shitting on bad tech industry stuff.

It fills a deep part of me, just just really comprehensively thinking about how how terrible the vision of the future, these people have it. So that was probably my favorite. I liked the climate leviathan stuff, the climate leviathan climate behemoth climate now climate X kind of four quadrants. I liked learning about that like oh geez almost a year ago actually by the time I started researching for the show. And I'm decently happy with the way that those topics were presented and how they keep popping back every once in a while. I think in terms of just the favorite episode I recorded was probably the interview with the common humanity collective people just because like listening to a bunch of people who have a very sophisticated and well developed mutual aid project. And then listening to them talk about their political development and how they've been sort of solving their problems was really reassuring and cheerful in a lot of ways. And then research wise it was definitely the spooky area 51 episode where I was like oh I'm going to do a fun episode about the government and aliens.

And it was like oh no here's every war crime ever and like 16 people almost killing everyone on earth. This is a good time. Probably the most fun I had was with the chaos magic and esoteric cacism episode. How silly it is. Yeah that one that one also was just just a pleasure to record. I also loved having Corey Dr. Ohan. Oh totally. Because that was cool.

That was cool. That was that was very cool. Cool of us. I've enjoyed our fiction episodes with Margaret and with Rebecca. Those have been great. And I've loved having St. Andrew. Yeah that has been also very cool. Fantastic. What were you going to say Robert. Nothing.

Oh great. This person says I think I've got my head wrapped around mutual aid community resilience and all the stuff you talk about any tips on how to effectively communicate it to people who might not be at least initially open to it. I mean it kind of depends on why they're not open to it right so it's it's a matter of are they just somebody who has a lot of faith in in systems as they exist or they someone who's kind of coming at it from more of a traditional like liberal status perspective where they they think the option is to get in line with you know the Democratic Party and support that and that will make things better. Like basically are they a top downer or are they somebody who rejects it because it's like communism. And they they don't they don't think that people have any kind of fundamental responsibility to themselves because you are going to have kind of a different approach to trying to reach either of those people. If they're coming at it from kind of more of a right wing standpoint but they're not you know talking about shooting vaccine doctors. They're just kind of conservative.

I think the way to do it is to sort of harken back to some of these very traditional ideas of like American homesteaders and independent you know communities on the frontier and self reliance and how mutual aid is people taking responsibility. For their communities rather than you know this idea I think a lot of conservatives have of like people just kind of lazily taking charity how it's it's different from charity and that it's a community seeing its own needs and becoming independent as much as as possible on the state from the state by trying to meet its own needs and how that is better for people than just sort of being like being dependent upon government programs. I think that's kind of the way in which to reach out to those people with that idea. If they're coming at it from more of a liberal top down approach. I think you can get more into the weeds and may argue about kind of inefficiencies within the system problems within the system I think one thing to really point out that was probably still be fresh to a lot of people that persuasion is how frightening. The first couple of weeks of quarantine where and all of the supply line issues and kind of the early breakdowns be like look. That didn't go away like right you can see that that we're still dealing with a lot of this and we're still having supply line disruptions and the state really has not kind of even under Biden sailed and to clear the gap and so we need these community resiliency

programs and you can you know depending on the kind of person there you can also sort of point out the degree to which there is our attempts at kind of sabotage of any sort of top down government programs by the right and how that's part of why you need community resiliency programs because you can't guarantee who's going to be in the White House you can't guarantee what's going to continue to get funded and outside of kind of any of the the structural issues that make that stuff difficult so I think that's kind of broadly speaking the two different ways you you can broach those conversations with people depending on the tendencies they're they're looking at it from. Let's let's let's get into an unpleasant one. What's the gang's outlook on this year's election and how do you think it might position us for 2024 do we see more violence leading up to the next presidential election. I know we'll be doing a prediction z-ish episode later. But as for this election I have I've not looked at anything about it. I think the Steelers are going to take it all. What what what's board of the Steelers.

One of them. That's great. I mean. Yeah. I mean I I feel like. If Democrats wanted to keep the power that they currently have they will probably need to do some type of symbolic action that makes people think they actually do things. I mean they've managed to have control of every and done absolutely nothing that they. And nothing with it.

So I'm guessing if they want to keep that they should probably do something really soon. Or else I don't see people being super eager to vote in 2022 for the Democrats. Yeah. Yeah I mean one of the issues they've got is this this thing that kind of the technocrats always have where you know as we as Corey pointed out when we had him on there have been some really positive moves by the Biden administration. In terms of like appointments and how different kind of agencies are being handled. But when it comes to the things that he actually campaigned on like it just hasn't it hasn't happened. Shit shit ain't been done. Like the closest we've gotten recently is yet another kick the can down the street a little bit for student loan repayments and I agree I think they need to do.

There's like two big things they could do that might have a significant shifting effect. One of them would be student debt forgiveness and one of them would be fucking a deschedule marijuana even without Congress. Biden could could. Oh yeah absolutely make marijuana not and like that would be number one politically the easiest fucking win in the world because the vast majority of Republicans don't keep a shit about that anymore. It will piss off cops which is probably why you won't do it but like it. What about those two things could have an impact on midterms it's certainly a thing that would like you can campaign on more but I don't I don't know that I think it'll do that. And obviously I guess another big old payment to stay home but I think that shipped on sale. Like I honestly like I don't think they want to win in 2022.

Like they want to get like it so they can sit there and then and go oh yeah we can't do anything because Republicans control the House and you guys need to like. Save us in 2024 this is the most important election of our lifetime. It's like and they will keep doing this over and over and over again until literally the seas boil and everyone you know everyone's being hurt into concentration camps like they will just keep doing this. And like I think that's that's the thing that's actually important about the 2022 cycle is that like the Democrats have you know what the rejection of Bernie Sanders sort of is is the Democrats essentially going we are not a popular party. Right like we are not a party that is going to like like we will not even give the pretense of like having a base that we represent and we do things for like we're just we're just in it for ourselves we're in it to just like. You know give all of our weird like Black Rock friends positions in the government. And we don't you know it's you know it's it's we don't have a policy agenda and we don't care if we lose because if we lose all you people just have to go put us back into office because the alternative is just more death camps. Yeah I mean I think there's a broad belief like within kind of the Democratic Party that things are still business as usual and that the Republican Party is still a political party and so.

Kind of the handing off and switching of power is is is fine that seen as business as usual rather than the Democrats or the Republicans are continually ratcheting away from there being any chance of a switch of power. At least through legal means like that's the whole thing they're doing and the failures to pass any kind of voting rights and the failures to see like. A voting right reform as an existential issue for not just the party but like the concept of. Democracy in this country is is I think evidence that however you kind of try to rationalize in your head why it's happening there's a real disconnect between the party leadership and understandings of the new nature of reality. Yeah one thing I mean they'll be fine right like out outside of like another January 6 killing them all like they'll be fine it doesn't like for them it basically doesn't matter if they're helping us take power maybe maybe some of them will get impeached they'll be like a show trial for like two people or something but like they're gonna be fine and you know that's that's the thing that motivates all of their thinking is they can survive another public administration like we're you know we're dying under both of them. And you know it like I mean this is this is partially you know when talk about sort of the covert response for a second in the relation that has to the election it's like yeah the Democrats are just like. Completely given up even the pretense of doing literally anything about coven.

Literally literally anything yeah just zero yeah it's just go out and die yeah it's we can talk about that that's a separate. Yeah yeah that's a separate issue I think just in terms of like how how to interpret what they're doing with coven and the degree to which I think they even have a chance of. Whatever but yeah it's like they don't care if we live or die like we care if we live or die and we're gonna have to do stuff on our own outside of this because. They're just gonna kill us all yeah yeah I mean I think that it's hard for me to tell where the elections are going to go precisely. Biden's polling certainly isn't great it's also not like wildly out of step with how where presidents often are kind of at this point. In their cycle so it and also it's pretty normal for the party that just won the presidential election to lose at the midterms that's more normal than not. I think so I think the big questions are number one like the degree to which it's a wide sweep which is going to depend on the actual impact a lot of these efforts to kind of restrict. Voting and gerrymander like what the actual on the ground impact is and the degree to which we've seen an actual shift because one of the things that the polls don't often tell us is like.

Yeah, Democrats are not popular most people seem to be aware that a lot of promises have gone unfulfilled but it doesn't also mean that. They like the Republicans who as the party of Trump have are still kind of widely disliked by people so it's kind of unclear to me what precisely is going to go down. By which I mean whether or not it's going to be a pretty normal midterm whether Republicans pick up some seats or like a nightmare blowout. And I do think that has a lot to do with whether or not Biden and like does a couple of the things that a president can do unilaterally that would be really easy for other people to campaign on. Like he they have to like if they actually do want to win they have to they have to make a couple of big Hail Marys they have to do again Biden has to do a couple of the big things that a president can do and then say okay see I did a thing put more Democrats in and we can do this other big thing that a president can't do on his own or something like that like I just don't see I mean you know anything could happen still it's fucking January I think there's a positive if you want to in terms of things that are making me kind of optimistic and in terms of things that are better about when the Democrats are in power and then the Republicans. You can bully the Biden administration to taking broadly positive action which is what happened with student loan repayments right that's why that did get kicked down the can a couple of kick down the road a couple of months. And so I do think there's potential in harassing the Biden administration to taking actions that can make Democrats more popular.

That would not be the reason to do it the reason to do it is so that people don't starve trying to pay back student loans. But it does point to, I think an avenue of hope, if we're trying not to be complete doomers in January of 2022. Yeah, and speaking of avenues of hope, it's time for an ad break. Ah, the only thing that gives me hope is the products and services that support this podcast. And we are back. Back we are. Back we are. You're doing it.

I have a question I would like us to talk about. New your book list. Oh yeah. That's nice and simple. So what's what's some I think we could answer this like, and then they also someone else followed up with saying I recommend some books that maybe not just left this theory of climate change. Also some like fiction stuff as well. And I'm just going to say the books that I'm reading or is on my reading list not I'm not going to recommend books I've already read. I'm just going to say the ones I'm currently reading.

I'm still making it through hyper objects for an upcoming episode. I picked up a really a book I wanted to get for a long time called Islands of abandonment, which is about people. Well, no, it's about places that have kind of been forgotten and regrown or taken have been reclaimed by the area that they were that they were built on. And then I also have a random few books and alchemy that I'm going through as well. That's most of my books. They're horrible. I read the last book I finished in 2021 was in the Garden of beasts, which is by. I think it's Eric Larson.

He's a guy who's written he wrote like devil in the white city and a couple of other books that people have probably read Eric Larson. And it's about the the first US ambassador to Nazi Germany or what becomes Nazi journey. He gets sent there right before like like months before Hitler takes power. And the book largely traces he and his family's journey in Nazi Germany from like kind of didn't really care about German politics and were often broadly sympathetic towards the Nazis. They met like his daughter kind of is very much like on board with the Nazi Revolution for like the first half year that she's there. She's also like simultaneously dead dating the head of the Gestapo and the Soviet like assistant ambassador, which is fascinating. Like it's a very interesting book and the story like the journey this kind of family goes on realizing like what the Nazis are and the perspective of that it's very well written. It's very detailed. I really enjoyed it. The thing that I liked the most was the detail it goes into about the kind of the fates of because it's it's a more obviously as much of a nerd on the history of fascism as I am.

I've read a lot about the Night of Long Knives. This did the best job of kind of going into detail about the kind of dudes who the dudes who were purged in the Night of Long Knives. These guys who were Nazis in that they they were swastikas and they were part of the party and whatnot, but also weren't Nazis enough to not get purged. And in a lot of cases were like starting to fall out of love with the party when the Night of Long Knives had. And so it's these it's really interesting. I recommend it to people. And the last book I started in 2021 and the first book I finished in 2022 was called Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, who is an interesting science fiction author in part because Ministry of the Future is about climate change. It is a science fiction look at about like a thousand different potential solutions to climate change and Kim Stanley Robinson is actually like an expert.

He works for the Sierra Center, I think it's called. He's won a bunch of awards for his work on like trying to like posit different solutions to climate change. He's he understand he's not like coming at this from the perspective of an even even a well researched author. He's he's writing from the perspective of someone who is an actual scientific expert in what happens and how the different solutions might work. And the thing that's really interesting about Ministry of the Future is it's this fascinating melange of like a number of the character. The Ministry of the Future is this kind of hypothetical new UN agency that's put in place after a horrible wet bulb heat event kills 20 million people in India. And they're they're kind of trying to push for very technocratic solutions to climate change. So like one of the big things the book focuses on a lot is this idea of a climate coin, which is a kind of international backed by banks cryptocurrency that that pays as a kind of long term bond for sequestering carbon.

So that like countries like Saudi Arabia that have huge oil reserves actually make more money by refusing to pump out oil and thus get paid in these coins. So it's really technocratic solutions like that. And then also terrorist groups that may be funded by this UN agency building fleets of drones to murder people on commercial air flights. In mass in order to cripple the entire air travel industry and stop carbon emission and carrying out mass assassinations on like CEOs of oil companies living in their private island. So it's this really interesting mix of like kind of liberal politicians and like bankers like working out these very wonky solutions to things and like terrorists who have lost people in climate emergencies mass murdering billionaires. And so it's a very it's the widest possible ranging look at kind of different solutions to climate change and how they might work and it's a very optimistic book. And there's there's elements of it that I kind of the optimism I kind of disagree with. I think oddly enough Kim doesn't give enough weight to the dangers of authoritarian populism and the threat I think they present to any of these kind of potential solutions.

But it's still a very well thought out look at climate change and I think really worth reading. If you want something that will both bring up different because he also goes into a lot of like very scientific solutions like pumping up water from underneath glaciers in order to stop glaciers from sliding and like slow the rate of melt and all these these other kind of like very much like technical here's a thing that we can do that will reduce the effect of this specific kind of climate change. It's really a very good book and it's apparently was Barack Obama's favorite book of the year which considering the degree to which it talks about murdering politicians and business leaders is interesting to me. I think he was maybe more paying attention to the carbon coin stuff than the shooting oil industry executives in their face while they're sleeping. Well he was also a fan of parasite so warmth you do. He may just have been told this is a book you should say you like but it is it is a very good book it is really worth reading. And it's it's it is a work of science fiction but honestly it's like it's also it's well again Kim really understands his stuff from a technical level so I think it's pretty unimpeachable from that point of view.

There are some kind of sociological areas where I don't think the book I think there's some shit missing particularly as regards the problems authoritarianism is going to cause in reaching for these solutions but I think it's still really really valuable. And Chris we're going to hear your responses but first capitalism. Chris. You're reading. We're reading a few things. We're reading more Chuang which is a theoretical journal about China that writes a lot of very very good stuff they have probably the best account I've ever seen of just what was going on during the socialist period and then also the sort of transition to capitalism. Those are those are issues one and two and they just published an issue about it basically how the pandemic response happens in China it's absolutely fascinating. It's also about sort of is this something I've yeah I've talked about a lot of their stuff on the show sort of theoretically or directly but like you know one of their big things is about how in a lot of ways the pandemic reveals the sort of weakness of the Chinese state and in a way that.

You know is you don't see really because both you know both the Chinese state and the sort of like American media have this vested interest in showing like China is this sort of like all powerful authoritarian police state or whatever like the mirror image of it is like this isn't. But you know what you really see is that like this the state has a very strong ability to intervene in like one province at a time. And they can you know when they focus when they focus all the sort of administrative power on like one area right they're extremely effective. They can't really do it in you know multiple years at the same time and this means that you're dealing with all these sort of regional government stuff and it's very interesting the other thing that I have. Well OK so do we want to talk a like a little bit about dawn of everything or do you want to save that for just like. Yeah I'm down to talk about that at any point yeah. Okay yeah that's definitely on my list. That is a long one that's less of a read.

I think most people are going to be less of a read in one sweep than like maybe for over the course of the year like gradually. Yeah yeah it's very very dense and very long but very readable like not to say that it's like. Dense and the I got to like slog through this textbook. It's extremely readable. It's just like there's a lot in there and you're going to want to pause and think about shit. Yeah so so the dawn of everything is this is the last book David Graber ever wrote and it's David Wengarrow also. They wrote it together and it's it's this. Basically an attempt to reassemble. I guess early human history.

And but the thing that they're doing that that's that's really unique is that. So they they're David Wengarrow is an archaeologist David Graber is an anthropologist and they're they're going. So they spent a whole bunch of time going through the sort of early archaeological records. And what they find basically is that. None of the things that you see make any sense at all unless you're willing to. Unless you're willing to accept that people you know twenty thirty fifty thousand years ago and then even you know people like four or five thousand years ago. We're as smart as we are and have the have the capacity to recreate and redesign their own political arrangements. Self consciously which is something that doesn't sound that weird except everyone assumes that they can't.

And that you know everyone does you know one of the other things that they're really sort of heavily doing here is trying to break this. Idea that you know human society sort of evolves and is this linear progression you know you start out with like these small hunter gatherer bands and they get more complex quote unquote. And eventually they develop farming farming developed the state and the answer is just you know when you look through the actual archaeological record none of this is true. You have you know they have a lot of very interesting sort of historical examples of this looking at like what look like incredibly democratic and egalitarian cities and then you know on the outskirts of those cities you have the emergence of the states among of things that look like states among barbarian groups and they have and what I think is maybe the most interesting part of it is that they're they're very concerned with the question of human freedom. But freedom in a way that like we don't like freedom on a level fundamental enough that like we can barely imagine it. So they have these things called the three freedoms which is one of them is so the first one is the freedom just move to leave and to. It's a freedom to you know be in a place and then leave and know that you will be cared for when you get to wherever you're going.

Yeah though these kind of networks that were set up so that people could travel that have like the descendant of those ideas is sort of the way if you've ever if you've ever spent time in the Middle East not unlike hotels and shit. Like it's that same idea that kind of deeper than religious belief about the importance of that has gotten added to like Islam and to a number of other faiths in the area like. But this idea that like there's nothing more sacred than taking care of it of a guest. Like and how that that that existed to enable kind of a sort of cross cultural contract and contact and like recreational travel in a way that I think is would be deeply surprising to people who just sort of assumed everyone before a certain age died within five miles of their house or was you know yeah part of a band of wandering hunters. Yeah and it's interesting in that like like yeah like we in a lot of ways travel less than early people did because you know the people would just leave and people you know people just didn't like their families and so they'd walk like 500 miles and they'd come to a place and they'd be accepted and yeah yeah it's you know the second one I think the one that is the one we have the least capacity I think to understand which is just the ability to disobey orders. To just like anyone tells you do something you could just tell them no at any time and it's not only can you just tell them no.

Like the social expectation is that you is that you don't act is that it's not just that you have the ability to do it it's that someone giving you an order is treated as weird and this is the thing that you know it. But like this this is the thing this is a freedom that used to exist and no longer does and was sort of destroying various ways along with sort of the third freedom they talk about which is about how people have the right to sort of just shift and recreate their social and political arrangements. And people used to do this sort of common people yeah a lot of the what what they're early part of the book is about is about how societies use either there's a lot of societies that would you know flip seasonally right so what like one half of the year you have this just like absolute indicator shift either half of the year it's like well it looks like a hippie commune and you know the fact that we do not like the fact that like we just don't like it cannot conceive completely shifting our political arrangements. Like that is it's also there's this fascinating discussion of like the the fact that. And this is kind of counter to what I always I had always kind of thought that like once is a group groups of people when they when they made the decision to like move to agriculture. And like set founded cities that it was kind of a one way street you know you just keep going along that road and there's actually multiple examples of peoples.

Like this is what what happened to the British Isles or at least in what is currently Great Britain. People's like developing agriculture settling down and then being like oh you know what fuck this and like going back like that that should have happened all the time. And one of the things that's really kind of optimistic about the vision of the sweep of human history in the dawn of everything is the idea that like. No we don't have to keep like it's not inevitable that we just keep doing more of what we're doing now all throughout history large groups of people have been like it's time to let's do something else let's make a radical change like it happens. And it's probably more normal to do that than it is to do what we've been doing and when you I think one of the things that kind of. One of the things that leads to the sense of inevitability of development along the lines that we have is the fact that we only really have about 10,000 years of even vaguely reliable like data or vaguely comprehensive data on human history. But people have been around for tens of thousands of years longer than that and for most of it we've been a lot more experimental than we are now and it's it's always possible. For people to try different things in a way that maybe seems impossible to us now but but necessarily won't for our kids.

Oh yeah the last thing I would tell people to listen to if they're looking for a fictional optimistic thing is Corey doctor's walk away. Yes, give it a read. And if you're looking for like a like a beautiful like not to get your head out of that. One of the things I'm really passionate about is plants and I have this beautiful book called the planapedia. And it's really helpful for caring for your houseplants and it's just like aesthetically just suck the photographs are beautiful and it's one of my favorite things to give friends and family check that one out as well. And another another plant book that I just got for somebody that I really like. I think it's called Wiccan plants it's about all the poisonous plants that you can get. And the ones all the like the poison plants you can cultivate in your own garden, and that's been a lovely read. And I do hope to set up a decent poison garden here in the spring so I would love that for you. Yeah, me too. It's going to be great. Well let's get to another question.

Do you guys want like a fluff question or like a real question? Let's do a fluff one and we can start the next episode with a real real juicy fluff me daddy. All right. Okay. That's a little gift to all of you at home. Oh my God. On the topic of hobbies so so I just garrison like poisonous plants I like non poisonous plants. What hobbies are you into that we may not know about? Um, I guess I can only say one thing here really. Well, I guess I don't know.

Yeah, you should be really careful about how you answer this one. I know what your hobbies are. Let's have everyone else go first. Um, I just got into 3D printing. I'm currently trying to figure out how to get ABS to act adhere properly. Yeah, that was the problem I had with my printer is that it would I would get like a decent way through the first part of the print. And then part of it would like curl curl off. So then it wouldn't print the next layer on correctly. Then it messed up the print.

I was between mental health stuff and that the time I was setting up my printer. This is when I just gave up because it was too much. So I'll be excited to see how you get past this hurdle. Well, I've got a glass bed coming in. I have one too. Yeah, and I've got the enclosure. One of the issues I'm having is just that I'm having a heating issue with the bed. It won't heat up. It stops before it gets to 110, which is what it should be able to go up that high. Yeah, can you manually heat it up hotter?

It doesn't seem to matter. It doesn't seem to matter if I if I set it like I can't obviously like you can you can set it up to heat. But it just keeps I keep getting that like loud error beep. So there's like this is going to be it's going to be a process of jiggering to figure it out. But it's pretty fun. Yeah, I have I have I have a similar problem with my setup right now that I've been trying to troubleshoot for like half a year. I can manually control the heat bed and it does get that hot. But still, I think it may just be a leveling issue. I may need to like clean the bed.

I should also just talk to someone who has done more 3D printing than me. But yeah. Yeah, but it's it's it's fun. I enjoy it. It's very it's radically different from the stuff that I know like do for a living, which is always my favorite thing for like a task to engage in in order to be relaxing because it's it's not at all like reading and writing. No, it's very different. It's very different. So so far I'm enjoying it and I already I printed the thing I need to do to make the the bio the bio lab for like the four thieves stuff. So if you want to check out our episode with Michael from the four thieves vinegar collective, I've 3D printed that part.

So I'm ready to get the other parts and put that thing together. I'm just trying to figure out how to print other stuff with better plastics and whatnot. But yeah, it's it's fun so far. I'm enjoying it a lot. Maybe I'll get bored. Maybe I'll wind up spending way too much money on different 3D printers like the ones that lift the goo out of the resin printers are so cool. They're so they're much like this is what this is what Corey doctor was talking about. Like they are much better at the filament printers in a lot of ways, but a lot of like a lot of the stuff, a lot of the really useful machines that you can make with 3D printers require you to use filament right now.

But the resin ones are like so much more elegant. They're beautiful. I also am really interested in the idea of printing wood, which I did not realize until recently you could do, but is absolutely possible with certain kinds of printers. Nice. And that seems pretty dope. So I don't know. We'll see how maybe I'll be tired of it in a month because my mental health will take a dive. But so far I'm pretty excited.

Cool. Chris. What do I do? Well, okay, so before the pandemic, I was getting into rock climbing, but unfortunately, like I like rock climbing. I'm not like, oh, it's like the best thing you can do for your body. It's a lot of fun. But unfortunately, I mean, it's not like the worst pandemic thing you could possibly do. But like, it's no.

Yeah. If you get up high enough on the rocks, COVID can't get up there. It's like the opposite of a bear. It's really bad at climbing. Yeah. So I guess the other, what do I even do? Okay. So my other thing.

Okay. So deep like. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. In the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. 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? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI.

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

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Deep Twitter lore, people will probably know this about me, but I have been for a very, very long time like an inveterate fan of competitive StarCraft 2. Okay. I am awful at it. I am terrible at that game.

But I have watched so much. StarCraft 2 has become enough of my life that the game was part of my radicalization process. So I wake up extremely early or stay up extremely late and watch Korean StarCraft 2 and non-Korean StarCraft 2, and yeah, it's a good time. My favorite thing about StarCraft in general is thinking about the fact that Blizzard was initially trying to make a Warhammer 40,000 video game, and game's workshop was as always too paranoid of their IP to let it happen and thus lost how many, God knows how many, they would be worth more money than most countries. They would have been printing an impossible amount of money. Andy Chambers would have been able to buy a mountain of cocaine to live inside, but no. Instead, we got all of the infrastructure of modern esports, which seems fine.

Like it's whatever, I don't care, but it is very funny to me that they were like, nah, this doesn't seem like a good financial decision for games workshop. This StarCraft thing. That's the kind of thing where it's like, if they made that much money, would they all just retire? Well, I mean, it's a publicly traded company. The shareholders would have made it a fortune, but yeah, I don't know. It's very funny that they didn't think that was going to be worth it. Let's see, in terms of how these people may not know, I do really like cooking. I taught cooking classes for a long time. It's been the main cook in my family since I was a very little kid.

So I definitely, definitely enjoy that. I did go to film school for a few years. I want to get back into making short video projects. I've been writing some random kind of new weird genre-esque stuff that I would love to rent a studio space and actually shoot some silly things in the next year and throw them up online just for kind of my own fun. And then I also been still doing random occultism stuff. That's kind of how I film my time. Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, I think that's an answer.

That is an answer. We did it. That's an answer. And more importantly, that's an episode. That is an episode. That is an answer. That is a single content. You all got a content out of us. And we will replicate and reproduce another content tomorrow that's more A's to your cues. A content every day except for the weekends because fuck you. That's the promise that we make. And some holidays. Look to your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasure in pebbles.

They see a windy path that could lead to adventure. And they see you. Their fearless guide is this fascinating world. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org. Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. And break us off with some break as we're waiting on reparations. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. So who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where Jair Bolsonaro was once again in the hospital getting all of the feces sucked out of his intestines.

He put him back in the hospital. Jair Bolsonaro, the most consistently dying man in the world. The sickest man in history. It's actually literally full of shit again. You know what this means? In approximately three to four weeks, Steven Crowder is going to get some horrible illness. My hope for both of them is that they find out that each has an obscure disease that can only be cured by piping shit from the other into them. And so they just hook them up via a tube and they're just sucking poop out of each of them and putting it into the other person. That would be very funny. Hot. All right. What's our first question? Our first question. So this was specifically addressed to Chris. So Chris, you can answer first, but I think this is a question for everyone really. What is your favorite piece of history that you haven't been able to talk about yet on the show that isn't deserving of a whole episode? Favorite piece of...

I mean, we ain't talked about the Zapatistas yet because I don't yet feel comfortable with my level of knowledge there, but it's definitely history that's extremely relevant to the kind of shit we talk about on the show. Have I talked about the water and gas wars in Bolivia on the show? No, we've talked about that at all either. I mean, that probably is deserving of its own episode, but like... Absolutely. Yeah. A bunch of people just literally like blocking every road in an entire country and starving out their ruling class because they can't like import food into the city because they've blocked every single road. Extremely cool. I guess in terms of like really short, not deserving of its own episode. I don't know either because I've been able to elongate all my fun periods into episodes. I don't know that there's anything we wouldn't cover. There's certainly things we haven't covered yet for a variety of reasons, often just like, I don't feel like we've had the time to do it right.

There's a lot of work. There's a lot of work. Yeah, it's like, why haven't we done a Mao episodes? Do you know how much shit that motherfucker got up to in his life? I have been mentally, psychologically preparing myself to start working on Mao. This is a... It's the mango colts. It's definitely the mango colts. Did you know about this? No, the mango colts? Yeah, okay. So Mao got... I forget who it was. I want to say it was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Some like dignitary gave him a... This is the beginning of the culture revolution. Somebody gives him a mango. He hands this mango off to a red guard.

You give a Mao a mango. This turns into a cult. They take this mango, they preserve it. They have a shrine to the mango. This whole cult apparatus builds up around people getting mangoes as tokens of Mao's favor. It's this massive thing. This spreads like wildfires. People are doing this in the far western reaches of China. There are places in China where civil wars break out and it takes people a week to send representatives across China to talk to the Central Committee to argue their case. Even in those places, they have mango colts and it is wild. The culture revolution is a time. Well, I know what I'm getting everyone for Christmas this year. Mangoes.

They're my favorite fruit. They're just the best fruit. We'll see if the species survives this next summer. Oh, we will. Yeah. They'll just be growing in Siberia. They'll just be growing in Siberia. Mangoes sprouting from the corpses of fucking antelope. That is beautiful. I can't think of anything. Next question. Okay.

Speaking of history, I like this one. If you could fight anyone in history, wait for it and lose, who would you fight and why? Who would I fight and lose? And lose, too. You'd still get a few good hits in or something, but you'd lose. David Bowie, because it would be hot. Next question. Other people could answer, I guess. No, I think that's a good answer. Perfect answer.

I would happily be hit by David Bowie. Sure, why not? Yeah, and I know that David Bowie really loved to hit teenagers. I would be totally fine with this. Hitting in the other sense scares me. No, I would be fine with anything. I don't care when it comes to Bowie. Wow, that's problematic. I love that for you.

I'm problematic. We got a few questions about the ethics of leaving the United States as things get worse. Oh, okay. That's a good one. Yeah, and this is something that I know we've talked about. You've got that get out of America free card. See, that's the thing. I already have my Canadian passport, so that is something that I can do at any time. And that's something that I probably will do at some point because, one, I can see myself in my 30s and 40s

living in Canada will be a lot easier in a lot of ways in terms of how much money it will cost for me to live and pay certain things. Living in Canada at a certain point will just make a lot more sense for me, so yeah, I probably will move up. And I also know that getting past Canadian border patrol, not that hard. In terms of other people wanting to go legally or illegally, it is actually pretty easy to get up there. If you want to do it legally, that's definitely a lot more work, but also not impossible. Yeah, I think it's important to know that moving to somewhere else is not escaping the effects because the effects are going to reach everywhere, but it can have a lot of advantages.

Especially if you've got kids. Yeah, so I say moving up or moving away from the States is a decent thing for a lot of people. I don't feel the need to stay in fight for something that I don't really care about watching the first place anyway. So sure, do what makes you happy in the time that you have alive. I feel like that's as ethical as you need to get. Yeah, I don't think anyone has a responsibility to like stay in fight to the death in a collapsing country. As a general rule, I'm very sympathetic towards refugees, and that's kind of what you would be if you're talking about fleeing the United States because it's in the process of falling apart and things are, you suspect about to get a lot more violent,

especially if you have, again, like a family, kids. I had options to do that that I've chosen at this point, not to pursue, but I get why people would and as a general rule, like I spent once when I was in Bosnia and Serbia talking to survivors of the genocide there in the 90s. I took a train ride from Sarajevo to like a little town near Srebrenica. And during the train ride, I wound up like hanging out with this dude who had been born and raised in Yugoslavia and had been living in Canada since the Civil War. And he like very through in his kind of broken English explained like, yeah, when the war broke out, all of my friends, all of these other young guys I knew were like, well, you know, we're going to fight.

And I said, no, no, no, no, no. I went to Canada and this is the first time I've been back and that was the smart thing to do. So I'm not, I mean, if you can get out and find a place that's safer, as Garrison said, like there's nothing I think that inherently behooves you to spend your limited time on this planet struggling and especially if you've got a family, like doing what you can to put them in a safer position is great. That said, none of it's a permanent or even necessarily a long term solution. Like the idea of moving to Canada has a lot of appeal. But like, if you think that Canada is going to keep being what what a lot of Americans see it as is the United States collapses into like fascism. I don't know how realistic a proposition that really is. And it's the same for a lot of places like all of these problems are global problems and moving geographically unless you're wealthy enough to move to like some fortified compound protected by contractors.

In a place that is actually insulated from climate change to a significant extent is not the does not bring the degree of security you might expect. I do think there is, I do think it is generally speaking, a noble and positive thing to stay and try to make things better where you are. But, you know, I think everybody I think everyone I think every like single person, whether they admit it or not, would leave at a certain point if they possibly could. And I don't think anyone is. I don't think anyone owes it to the world to like die in a place that they hate just because that's where they were born. And we're back. Okay. Oh, this is a good one. What tool besides bolt cutters should we all own in a collapsed situation? First of all, bolt cutters that should not be your first picture for a tool.

No, no, it should be an angle grinder with a diamond blade. No, even like water filtration. That's gotten me out of a number of tight water filtration systems. Yeah, there's a lot of starters. Like there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff. If not even if not water filtration, you can get tablets or honestly, like you can have a little hand pump filter and water purification tablets along with a little, you know, there's a number of things that are that should be in a go bag. A way to get some amount of already clean water and a way to get more clean water enough food to at least deal with three to five days. Some rope, a good knife multi tool is even better in most situations if you have if you don't mind the weight, a belt knife and a multi tool would be great or a multi tool and a little hand axe, which depending on where you live might be more useful in splitting

wood, a good fire starter, some amount of rubbing alcohol, which is always a handy thing to have on hand, either maps or, you know, batteries for an electronic device that might be able to act as a map. Yeah, that that's all useful stuff. I do I do keep in the boot of my car generally an angle grinder. I have come into especially living out in the middle of nowhere a couple of situations like sometimes somebody has a health emergency and there is a fence in the way. And it's it has been something that is and is I think going to be easier for both cutters are good at what they do. They also require a lot of forearm and upper body strength that is not going to be as much of an option for people. Angle grinder, not a bad thing to have in any sort of like, it's especially if you're like if you're if you're planning a kit like I want to keep shit in my car because the wildfires are coming right. Well, you're probably going to want a battery powered saw. Because depending on the capable even if you have a very capable offroading vehicle, everyone I know who does serious overlanding is like will you keep a fucking chainsaw in there because sometimes you need to cut wood out of the way and you're just not going to get your car over it. So it really depends on what you're doing and like what the what the the the kind of potential threats you're worried about are.

But yeah, I think the basics are way to get water, some amount of food, ability to start a fire, something like a space blanket is useful if you live in a place where it actually gets cold, you should have a space blanket and a wool blanket or a couple of wool blankets. Yeah, because those will retain heat much better will keeps like 80% of its insulating capacity, even when wet and like layering wool and survival blankets can be a really effective way to keep yourself from dying and in bad weather situations. That said, depending on where you are, there may be no realistic way to protect yourself in the like if you are in certain parts of the Midwest at certain parts of the winter, it may not matter so much like what blankets you have access to get stranded. If you're stranded in the wilderness and there's no like structures around you, then yeah, it's negative 30. Yeah, there's only so much you can do. There's only so much. Yeah, I do love collecting lock bypass tools. It's one of my favorite things is just to have these on practice using them. Something I got for when I went to the Earth First Gathering that worked out pretty well was a foldable solar panel that connects to USB that's enough to keep my phone alive always. So in terms of always wanting a map, this little foldable thing is enough to keep my phone able to have a map assuming I have cell service. So I was skeptical of how much this thing could work and it did a decent enough job. It even kept like my iPad Pro powered as well. So it had a decent amount of square footage once you unroll it. So that was very useful. But yeah, I mean, I really like lock bypass stuff. It's one of one of one of my other hobbies. So there's, you know, a variety of tools in that type that's nice to get like a decent collection of. Also, like, especially now, but probably in general, like have masks, like just in general, I mean, just in general, like, sure, yeah, have masks, have lots of them, make sure you can change them.

Yeah, have a gas mask, if that's at all physically, like, respond like fiscally possible for you. Mira is the one I think Garrison and I would both recommend to the 99.9. If you want like a very good gas mask, really good gas is wonderful. Again, all of these kits, there's the kid of like, okay, what is the what is what's necessary. And then there's like, all right, if you have money, or if you have time that you want to learn extra skills, what are other things like lock picks. If you're just a random Joe and you've never like don't throw lock picks in your kid if you've never done any lock picks shit, they're not going to help you. But if that that is a skill that is worth picking up and that will make you like more resilient. Yeah. Oh, and a 14.9 millimeter anti material rifle. You're always going to need one of those they're at they stay supersonic at up to three and a half miles, which is really useful. So definitely definitely and they're only you probably aren't going to spend more than $25,000 getting one set up. So it's really for the price of a fairly new Toyota Prius, you could have an anti material rifle that can pierce armored vehicles at several miles distance and really what is more pragmatic a survival tool than that.

For it. It's only like $30 around. That's just a moderately expensive meal per bullet. Christopher. Do you think that corporations like Walmart or Amazon could become more militaristic? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think I think absolutely the trend that worries me is Amazon's increasing collaborations with and deeper connections with like the FBI and other kind of law enforcement agencies. The degree to which Target has also like with the FBI and like with other agencies because they're they're anti shrink department and whatnot they're like they're certain the surveillance they've built to stop theft is so advanced. Yeah, they have one of the best crime labs in the whole United States. Yeah. Organizations like Tiger Swan, which is a mercenary group that the Dakota Pipeline people, the dapple folks like hired to crack down on the Standing Rock protests and have worked in other. There's other organizations like that that were active during the BLM protests and kind of the I do think we're seeing a paramilitarization of a lot of these corporations. And a lot of these corporations in order to protect their what they see is their financial interests.

And that that is that is proceeding rapidly and it's not. The thing that I'm not most I'm not most worried about them like having armed forces, although there will be some degree of that there's already that's already happened like in Portland and downtown Portland there are armed. They're effectively like mercenaries guarding certain businesses in certain areas like as a result of like, you know, to deal with quote unquote the gun crime or whatever property crime that's raised. But the thing that I think is most concerning is the degree to which they are professionalizing a paramilitary surveillance apparatus. Amazon has done it to do stuff like crackdown on union organizing and whatnot like. So yeah, I'm very concerned with that. I'm I think that the the the dimension of it that's most frightening is not necessarily like the shadow run corporations buying armies, but rather corporations buying like intelligence agencies is kind of the thing that I think will actually be the biggest threat, because in a lot of cases, generally speaking, if I have to deal with an armed security guard or a cop, that security guard is going to be less of a pain in the ass than the cop. Not always, but as a general rule, I'm less worried about security guards than cops, even armed ones.

I think another thing is important to keep in mind is that yeah, I mean, it's like, I don't I don't I really don't think there's a danger that we're going to go back to like East India Company style like people with mass armies because it's literally too expensive like you can't it's too expensive and the armies that exist already do that. Yeah, yeah, you don't need them. But I mean, I think that the thing the thing that's like scary outside of the intelligence stuff, which is terrifying, but it's the stuff they do down like, I guess you call it down the supply chain, which is like, you know, a cold and murdering union organizers with paramilitaries, right? They tend to work through, like, you know, like corporations will back rebel groups, right? Corporations will back, like, you know, in Columbia, you see a lot of this of like you have these sort of like these. I mean, something about something about just directly by land holding holding corporation, some of them are backed by just individual large landholders, but you get these like, you know, you get basically these paramilitaries that are sort of the third wave after the army goes in. And that stuff's very scary. And we're probably we're probably going to see more of that. And yeah, but but but I think it's it's kind of important that there's there's an extent to which again, you'll see them having their own mercenaries. But a lot of the time, it's there's some kind of thing when when when companies really need to kill someone, they tend to outsource that to a like, another sort of paramilitar organization that's like not directly in their supply chain. It's like, it's not directly under the train of command. So yeah, that's that's a good and fun time that will probably just get worse.

Speaking of corporate funkery or whatever, you're gonna get a Coca Cola ad. I hope I hope we do get a Coca Cola ad because nothing suits my quench like a cherry vanilla Coca Cola. Nothing suits your quench. Did you say that, Garrison? That's what I said. Those are words that came out of my mouth. We're back. Okay, Robert, somebody had a question about an article you wrote back when you worked at crack about a woman who was hiding from their family, the end of the article. Yeah, you mentioned that you haven't heard from her in a couple weeks leading up to policy and they want to know if you've ever heard from her again. So yeah, that's a bummer. The pseudonym, I'm not going to use your real name in this, but the pseudonym I used for her in the article was Azame. She was a woman who lived in the EU and was under threat of honor killing from her family who were from Pakistan in origin because she was an atheist, was not a religious hardliner and didn't want to be and for years she had kind of hidden that from her family like she'd moved out on her own, but she'd hidden the fact that like she had a boyfriend, she'd hidden the fact that she'd like played

dungeon, all of this stuff like she played D&D and was like scared that like that was like her dad would literally fucking kill her and this is a thing that happens. This is a thing that happens in the United States in the EU. It's a problem with like fundamentalist Islam and that's not the only religion there's honor killings as a result on but that was her specific situation. One of the things she was frightened about is her family would go back to Pakistan regularly and she was concerned she wanted to go because it was her only way to see her grandparents but she was also concerned that if her parents found out when they went back they would basically imprison her somewhere where she would not be able to get out and get back to her home and she would be forced you know be married off or something. So she was working with an organization in the country in the EU where she lived that helped people extricate themselves and in the kind of one of the last thing she told me is that like well the thing she was looking at doing because she was so worried about her dad was a total break was like one day with the help of this organization she would just be gone and in another part of the EU and would have a complete break from her life and would completely stop living as the identity she had had her entire life. And I never heard from her again after that after like three or four different interview sessions and I still have not and my hope is that she did the thing she said she was going to do and she just completely burned that email and every other way people had of getting in touch with her and she's doing great now but I really have no idea.

I have absolutely no idea what happened to her. Oh, so we would that people wanted to update on the quest for eel horse. Still no still no horse still have not found an entire horse carcass. But but one day it'll happen you know. Okay. It's going to be good Garrison. That gator that I shoved a turkey or a duck inside and a turkey next to was pretty good. It was great after I took it out of the pit as you were wrestling people screaming.

Well, that's the only way to properly cook it the right amount of time is to get drunk enough that people have to fight you to remove it from the fire, Garrison. That's how cooking works. I don't know if you've done much of it in your life. You'll understand one day. This is a question that I find interesting because I feel like it really must understand not to like insult the person asking it. That's not what I'm trying to do. Which question the question is what population can the post capitalist world sustain and thrive on with our ideas and concepts. 8 billion like we currently have 6 billion 2 billion less than a billion.

Like how many people are you willing to lose to achieve sustainability? Because I I forget none of the community and optimistic with proper technology and eco sustainability techniques. We can maintain a population close to what we have now. And yeah, I feel like just the framing of this question kind of approaches. Our current problems and the solutions we have in a weird way because I don't think we're not trying to reach a peak population. We're trying to make sure the people that we have have enough stuff to live well and we have that right now. We we we produce everything we make about one and a half times as much food as we need to to feed everybody. Yet there are billions and millions of people who go hungry.

So it's not a so like it's approaching this allocation issue. Yeah, so approaching this question in terms of like how could the post capitalist world thrive on our ideas. And like I we're not trying to like reach a certain population number. Where I think going it from that way is kind of a little silly because I feel like it should be the opposite. But yeah, I don't know why we don't think we need to start with population thing to go down. The point is is look what we have here's the people. Let's distribute this like a network instead of a top down kind of system. Yeah, I think that one of the things you have to if you're taught if you're trying to talk about social ecology,

one of the things you have to resist is this idea that like their overpopulation is any part of the problem. It is not not right now assumption is a problem. But there's plenty of resources. The problem is again one of allocation. And if you were to actually develop a much more equitable society where people were getting enough, one of the things that we have seen demographically all over the world win the level of kind of win the the sort of resources available per capita in a population increases. Is people have less kids and and like I think that yeah, it's certainly good to say that like in a world that is more equitable, the human population will naturally level off and decrease somewhat.

But that the thing that's not the same as saying that like we need to decrease the population. We need to increase equity and make sure that people have access to the resources that they need. And also that people who are massively over consuming aren't allowed to do that anymore. You know, yeah, that will solve the problems and scale back all of the resources being put towards useless growth and pretty good towards better distribution. Thus, actually, I mean, like the questioner used the term like post capitalist. I don't think we're gonna get to a post capitalist world ever like at least at least not when I'm alive. I don't think like a world. No, will there be post capitalist areas probably, but we're never going to get there. There's never going to be a post capitalist world.

I don't I don't I don't think that. I also think it's entirely possible that we will reach points that people in the time will not necessarily consider post capitalist because it will be the same states and a lot of the same institutions or organizations that were there as a kid. But people who were, you know, looking at it from a perspective today might consider post capitalist because that's generally how change happens. You know, yeah, yeah, you're right. Like how democracy increased in the UK, but they still had like a king. It's like, when did they they're not they never really reached post monarchy, but it's also not the same system that they were run by in like 1400, you know, it's wildly different. And there's much more representation for more people. But it's that is not, you know, that there's also you also have your your Soviet unions and your your killing of czars and which are very, yeah, which which is fine. And and and and I like killing czars.

But change happens in a variety of ways. And change can be revolutionary in its effect without being a clear break. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of like how we're talking about like the capitalist world thriving like I don't I don't view 8 billion people thriving right now, even with that like a lot of they're not like it's not like it's that's not what's happening right now. But we need to change the way like distribution of resources works drastically. And doing that will make everyone's lives a whole lot better. And it will also maybe limit some of the endless growth and those things aren't opposites. And I just, I don't know how like we can save those things, but the path to getting there is certainly a lot more ambiguous. Yeah, I think that that's I think one of the ways in which the left goes wrong often is kind of looking at things that have been tried before and didn't didn't didn't do the trick and saying like what we need is we need us another Bolshevik Revolution, you know, we need to

bring us back that you know hammer and sickle and it's like well you know they they gave it the old college try and they did not win. And you can be angry at that or whatever or you can be like okay it's the same and hey it's every tendency I can look at the fucking thing and you know us and be like well that was based as hell and you know what it didn't do the fucking trick. So I think there's a degree of humility that needs to be had in terms of like what actual, what actual change that makes a more liveable world will look in a way in which that's one of the reasons I did enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson's ministry of the future is a lot of it is about the end of capitalism in a way that is not. It's, it's, it doesn't look like a lot of ends of capitalism have have kind of been posited by. There's a lot of strong arming bankers into like forcing high level economic changes that put in to like really extractive systems and whatnot. It's interesting it was kind of an imagining of how the transition could begin in a way that that isn't commonly talked about, at least on the left and I thought it was valuable for that and I think people should be. I think there's, I think that people can be more creative in how they envision the way that might look than they often are. And I feel like this question actually relates to like stuff like dual power really well because our, our goal as individuals is not feeding 8 billion people. Our goal is to get a garden enough so that we can feed most of our friends off of stuff that we grew for like the summer right like that's like, that's what our goal is to is to build it from that way.

Instead of saying like, how, how can we feed New York in a climate sustainable way that is a very different question than being like, if we want to integrate solar punk and like eco sustainability stuff into our lives now, because if we don't do it and no one really else is really going to, let's start with the people you actually already have connections with because a lot of it is is about building like horizontal connections as opposed to defaulting to this top down system of who has what who needs what. And this is when we when we venture when we dare to venture into the subreddit one of the things I see people like critiquing a lot is like, well, you know, they keep talking about like all of these little like home gardening and like canning and kind of these community level solutions and that's not going to deal with like this massive systemic problem. It's like, yeah, it's not all about that. There's there's what one of the methods in which you can ensure change is keeping you and yours alive and committed on change and part of that is extra hyper local solutions. That also involve increasing your own idea of your autonomy and your own and your own understanding of things like the food cycle which have an impact on what you like vote for and what you support pushing for on like a societal level, the things that you come to better understand in your daily life and and so getting involved in all of these things gorilla gardening and whatnot has an impact on that all I do think people underestimate like the largest cropped by acreage in the United States by a long shot is fucking lawns and replacing lawns with either zero scaping just to increase carbon capture and reduce water usage or with some sort of food growth, doing a mix of that for the vast majority of like lawn area in the United States actually would be a significant thing on a global level. Yeah, that would not be a meaningless change and it is something that people can have an impact on because it is the kind of thing that if we're it were to get popular enough there's a Pokemon point you know where it where it becomes a trend and and like

Pokemon if it gets popular enough it will never die. That's what we say about all of our stuff on our show. If it becomes like Pokemon point or or the NFT point if that's but I don't think NFTs. No, I don't think Pokemon is so much better than any NFT, although the day that this drops that will probably announce the Pokemon NFT game which will be the final coffin in the biosphere. All of all of all of my Pokemons are gone. I've been happy. All my Apes gone. That was my favorite post of the holiday season. Oh, Robert, do you want to give an update on after the revolution? That was asked a couple of times. Yeah, after the revolution sequel. I'm three chapters in. Oh, wow.

It'll be done hopefully some point this year. Garrison has a question on that. Are you going to pay someone else to code the ebook? No, no, no. We pay you, Garrison. I don't want to code. Well, I have to work on the daily show now. I cannot code this fucking ebook. We all have things to do. We don't want to do. Oh, gosh. All right.

I'm so sorry, Garrison. We'll have you code some other people's books just to get the practice in. No, no, stop. No more coding. I will not allow it. In fact, there are there are experts that can do this a lot prettier than I can with my. I think I, Garrison, I consider you an expert now. Oh, no.

In, in, in EPUB coding, I'll put that on my resume. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I think that does it for us today, folks. If you want to follow us on social media so you can watch us promote our own shows again, you can go to Colzone media on Twitter and Instagram and happen here pod. That'd be lovely. We get so much more connections through online. That's wow.

We do. I love online. Yeah. And we're doing a behind the bastards live stream digital show with prop on. That doesn't sound right. That doesn't sound right. This bit is so not funny every single time. It's not a bit. I'm just dreading it. I'm dreading it too, but we're doing it during the summer of 2020.

Some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. 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 iHeartRadio 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? 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 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 iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. February 17th momenthouse.com slash behind the bastards. I can't tell you what to do. False scarcity is the key. Well, do that if you have disposable income and want to watch Robert talk. Yeah, yeah, more than we already do. I guarantee you it'll be worth it.

Well, that's the episode. Thank you for listening. I hope everyone has a better 2022. That would be nice. And I hope everyone has an identical 2022 down to the day. And until in May, you realize that you're actually in like a Groundhog Day style loop. And then you would achieve Nirvana if I'm remembering how the movie Groundhog Day went properly. Sure. Yeah, that sounds great. Have a good year. Make some changes. Make connections with people around you. They're there. You just define them. Talk to people who look like they have cool politics. Or start doing cool things.

And start doing cool things. We should address one last thing, which is the question people ask that gets asked a lot, but we probably can't address enough, which is like, there's no one around me doing any of this mutual aid stuff. There's nobody around me engaging any of the stuff that I want to get. How do I get organized and get involved? Number one, there are people around you doing that kind of shit. It may just be hard to find because of where you are. But if you start doing shit, the simplest thing I can say is try and figure out where there's a need and start filling it. Often you will start meeting other people who are engaged in adjacent projects or even the same thing. And that's a way to get into it.

If you are trying to start, if you actually get so far as to start serving a need in your area in a mutual aid capacity and trying to start organizing and whatnot and you're doing shit, feel free to hit us up on email. Reach out. We are happy to signal boost and signpost people who are have actually started doing shit. It's one of those things, please don't come to, I think this might be a cool idea. But if you start doing shit and you can provide some evidence that you're doing something in your community that's not currently being done, that is a mutual aid type thing or even a charitable type thing. If you're doing it, we will try to help signal boost and can be very useful in that capacity. So it's not easy necessarily, especially depending on where you live, but you do, it's always possible to find a need and fill it, you know. Yeah. I've found that I definitely was easier before the pandemic, but a way that I've met people that are a little bit more open minded to the same things that I'm open minded to is going to like local comedy shows or things of that nature.

Comedy shows, I'm guessing like Farmers Markets. Farmers Markets. You know, wherever kind of weird, not in the normal culture people will go to, you'll probably find someone there with radical politics. Yeah, exactly. All those types of like, like, you know, countercultural, subcultural spaces, you'll probably find someone there who's wearing a backpatch that is something like smashed or something, you know. So like, just like you have to, you know, you're not going to find them by staying at your in your house and scrolling on Twitter. I mean, they probably not. You have to kind of go into the real world as scary as the meat space may be.

Yeah. And I would say another thing to keep in mind if you are in kind of a more conservative area, and even if you do identify as an anarchist, you don't have to frame it that way. You can always call yourself a libertarian municipalist and none of the people who might be offended by anarchist will listen past libertarian and they'll decide you're fine. And that's a great way to start that. Absolutely. Absolutely. Like unironically. It means the same thing more or less.

I mean, there's other kinds of anarchists who are, but like most people who say they're anarchists, if you were to call them libertarian municipalists would be like, all right, whatever. Yeah. I don't want to call me that, but I call call Chris that constantly. That's, that's, that's it. We'll be back tomorrow or maybe not. I don't know. Probably tomorrow. Probably tomorrow.

Maybe. Yep. That's what I'm saying. And it's been said. Bye. You say so. Bye. 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 4th, 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. The case was done 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit podcast, How Men Think.

And that's good news for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone. Get an inside look at what goes on in the mind of men from the men themselves. It's real talk, straight from the source. The How Men Think podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun, informative, and probably a bit scary at times. Because we're literally going inside the minds of men. As much as we like to think all men are the same, they're actually very different. Each week, a celebrity guest host provides honest advice in his area of expertise.

When I agreed to do this reboot, I had a few conditions. No sugarcoating, no mind games, and absolutely no mansplaining. Men are hard enough to understand without the mind games. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen Witt. Join me, the host of Eating While Broke podcast. While I eat a meal created by self-made entrepreneurs, influencers, and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke.

Today, I have the lovely A.J. Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, Kid Ink, and Asya. This is the professor. We're here on Eating While Broke, and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on the iHeart radio app, on Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is going to be shit. This is going to suck. This is going to be trash. Because no one knows what's going to happen.

I have not actually come up with a prediction yet. No, I have one. I have one that I came up with before the show. Have we opened it? Yeah, we've already started. Okay. So we were supposed to, this is it that happened here, everybody, podcast, things falling apart, how to maybe make them fall apart less.

Sophie pitched the great idea of why don't we do an episode that is our predictions for the New Year. It's really not my idea when people ask for it so many times. So this was Sophie's idea that she's been talking about this for a long time. This was Sophie's idea, and it's Sophie's idea alone. It's sprang fully formed from the sight of her head like Athena from Zeus's skull. And we all agreed it was a good idea for an episode. I loved that reference. And then I did not come up with a prediction.

We spent zero, no, spent zero minute time thinking about it. Second, not even a moment. I absolutely love the Athena Zeus reference. That's how I tell people I got Anderson. Yeah. Well, my prediction for the year is that I'm going to keep making references to Athena whenever I do something that pisses Sophie off so that she's less angry. Go for it.

Well, it will absolutely work. Yeah. That's my prediction for 2020. That's your prediction. Okay. Okay. Okay. Wait, before we go into the, to the, to the big, bigger thing.

I want everybody to give one word prediction for how you would describe this coming year, 2022. One word prediction. Boring. NFT. I was just going to say fucked, but I don't think with a pH because it's going to be hot too. I don't think it's going to be that fucked actually.

I think I was going to say mediocre. Yeah. I, I, I'm, I'm foreseeing a lot of blandness. I'm, I'm foreseeing a lot of blandness. My here, here's a prediction I'll make. I think that one of the things that we were seeing last year, especially in the streets with like the far right being so much more active than the left in a lot of places and in a lot of ways is 2020 really tired a lot of people on the left out, a lot of organizers,

a lot of street level people, not just like, oh, I'm tired, but like I was injured. I'm fighting charges. My funds were depleted. I had to, I couldn't keep going out because I have a family and I had to deal with that sort of shit. And I think, I don't think that energy is back yet, but it always ebbs and flows and it does on both sides because at the end of the day, whether you're a fascist or a progressive people have X amount of energy, you know.

And I think we are, I believe we are kind of at the beginning process of folks on the left starting to recover some of that energy. And I think that that is a process we're going to see building throughout the year. I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. And it'll be a multi year process. And I'm kind of hoping 2024 folks are ready to throw down again.

But but we'll see like where that goes. I do think we might have like a few days of people throwing down in the streets for some reason, like something bad may happen. Obviously always late summer. I can, I can definitely see like a few days in July or August where it's like, oh, is the thing starting again? And it goes on for a bit. And then it kind of peters out.

I kind of, I definitely see that being a decent possibility because yeah, I think there will be more energy for that this year and more mental like, like, like ability to do that this year than 2021. Yeah. But overall, I don't see anything super eventful and I hopefully this doesn't like jinx anything and then we get. No, I mean, my my big eventful prediction is that and I will explain what this is based on in a bit.

I think we are going to see a significant sized urban metropolitan area be rendered uninhabitable either permanently or for a significant period of time in the United States due to climate change. And part of what this is based on is the December wildfires that just destroyed a significant chunk of Boulder, Colorado, right? Not talking about like New York City gets swallowed by the waves, but like a place where there's a couple hundred thousand people living, they're not able to be for either ever or an extended period of time because a climate based disaster hits.

Yeah. Maybe it'll be a heat dome type thing. Maybe it'll be like a wet bulb event. Maybe it'll be fires. Obviously always possible hurricane tornado. You know, we saw enough just in the last couple of months in terms of those like record hurricanes that killed like a hundred people in in the south or the fires sweeping Boulder right now.

And again, fucking December. But but I do think there's a pretty good chance we see something like that this year. I think my big one is that I mean, OK, so the the the obvious freebie is that we're going to cross a million COVID deaths or like the the the official count. We like we we've had more. Oh yeah, baby. U.S. official count will hit.

That's that's the freebie. The not freebie is that like. Yeah, it's not even a prediction. Even if that's not an impression. That's that's that's like I think it's going to be warm in the summertime. Yeah, you know, and warm in the summertime is probably like a bigger gamble at this point or very, very warm at the summertime. Yeah.

But I think that the real thing is that like there there is never going to be never locked down in the U.S. never like you. Oh God, no, no. The president of the United States could die and there would be no lockdown like and this is you know, and I think this this is a result of I don't know. I wonder what you do. This is my thesis for what was going on in 2020 was that like I actually think the like the like liberate Wisconsin stuff.

I think that actually worked like those number in 2020. There were all those giant like a bunch of people showed up with guns to cap. Absolutely. It worked. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It worked and it was like but they did.

They did. Terrorism usually works. It's a very effective way to get things done. Well, I think there's an important lesson here, though, which is that like so the state will never like very, very rarely will the state ever like directly like they they they won't immediately back down, right? What they'll do is like they'll make an enormous show of how they didn't grant any concessions and then they will grant concessions.

We're like, you know, this is the thing with the riots, right? It's like, okay, people are talking like, why are we not there's not going to be any more stimulus checks, right? And the reason there's not going to be any more stimulus checks because nobody's rioting. And you know, like see what kind of stimulus checks you get if a couple of targets get redacted. Yeah, like, you know, if you burn down another police station, we will get more stimulus checks. It's just that you have to, you know, there has to be another police station.

Right. But like this is and this is the, you know, the right was extremely effective at this, right? In a way that people just don't really talk about, which is that it is now politically impossible in the U.S. Like no one, no one will ever do an ever lockdown because people will show up with guns and they don't want to deal with that. And they've decided that just just kill, just kill them.

Like, you know, we've already killed the entire population of Seattle. Like they're dead. Like we'll just keep killing more people and more people. And it's just never, I think people often are going, I think people on the left attack the Biden's COVID response for a lot of the wrong things. Like the thing that I would go after him for is like, yeah, we didn't, he didn't just say, here's a bunch of money. Don't go to work.

We're not going back to school. Like stay at home. Here's a pile of cash, which might have worked. It was worth a shot. But past that, a lot of this was beyond by the time he came into office, the armed militant cultural movement against the idea of COVID precautions was so advanced that like, what do you, what, what, what more could have been realistically done other than trying to give people enough money again to actually stay home.

Which again, is the thing I think it's most fair to attack. Well, okay. I mean, I think it's like, like, Shit's beyond Biden in a lot of cases here. I don't like, okay. It was like, well, what could have been done? I don't know. Like if you're looking from the perspective of the state, they could actually have deployed

the intelligence services against them instead of doing like one dumb entrapment plot. Right. Well, sure. But that's also, that starts before Biden and again, by the time he's in office, it's like, you know, but like, yeah, I call their bluff, right? Have a bunch of people show up to the Capitol and then it's like, okay, here's the FBI. Like that, that, that's a thing that like, if, if you're a liberal status, you could do and they just don't want to because like partially they don't want the conflict of

partially because it would actually, it would look really like, it would look really bad for them heading into the midterms. It would look really bad and, and also I think this is less the, the FBI is kind of much more centrist in terms of their politics as an agency, but like when you talk about a lot of federal and state aid, yeah, most federal and state, like I don't know that they can rely on them. Like they don't know that they can rely on them. Even the FBI is like, yeah, they were using the Proud Boys' informants, like on a big

and standard case. Like, yeah. So, yeah, like they're not, they're not, they're not like, I have an appreciation, what I will say is I have an appreciation for the fact that by the time Biden was in office, it may have been an unsolvable problem, which doesn't let him off the hook for things that were objectively bad decisions, like not doing shit for stimulus, like pushing to open the schools like, you know, a number of other things that he's done, but also like, if he had done all of the right things, we still might be at exactly this death toll because

there are cultural issues here that were very advanced by the time he took office. And I do think, like it's whatever, I'm not, I'm not saying this to let Biden off the hook or support the Democratic Party. I'm saying this because people need to have an accurate conception of the problem. And the problem is so much deeper than what a technocrat could have handled by making smart policy. At break. Yay.

At break. And we're back. From outer space. Actual prediction, Republicans will win the Senate. Yeah. Which seems pretty, like, I think there's a decent chance Democrats can keep the house. But I'm pretty sure Senate's going to go back to the Republicans. I mean, they are damn near in control of the Senate as it is.

Yeah. But they, yeah. But I do believe that's going to happen. And let's see. Other, which yeah, does, does not seem, that's not that farfetched of a thing. And I don't know, there'll be some other kind of tech fuckery. The space between Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, there's going to be, I think there's going to be some worsening development of like tech, like technocratic stuff, possibly

in like, possibly with like the mask of trying to like fix climate change or something. But I think there'll be a decent growth of tech power and possibly they're like cooperation with the state or the state like fund, like giving more explicit, like funding and permission to tech power to like do terraforming or like some geoengineering, like there's going to be something related to that sphere that is, it's going to get a lot more visible than it currently is. My big tech prediction is that there is going to be a crime against humanity at some point this year, like on a massive scale, not like just a mass shooting, but like a state level

crime against humanity. And we're going to find out that for the last like eight months, Facebook had been paying the perpetrators a significant amount of money as a result of like some ill thought out ad program that they had. Yeah. Like we're going to, we're going to leap to Facebook actively funding and ethnic cleansing because some, somebody thought up some sort of affiliate program that was not well conceived. That's my fun tech industry prediction.

My fun tech industry prediction is that Jeff Bezos will increasingly become the most cringiest man in the world. Yeah. It is very funny that the picture he posted him on New Year's, he's just wearing a Dan Flash's shirt. He's absolutely wearing a Dan Flash's shirt. And that's incredibly funny. Robert, Robert, that shirt cost him $3,000 because the pattern is so complicated.

It's very complicated. Look at how much the lines crisscross. I just don't like you insisting that it's not as much money despite its complicatedness. That photo was my version of a holiday card I sent to everyone I know. Yeah. I think we're going to see a lot more unions this year. Yeah. That does seem to be a positive trend that we're seeing is a lot more unionization and

some significant successes and a lot more general acceptance of the concept of a union. Other prediction related to tech industry stuff, I think one of the billionaire spaceships things is going to have a disastrous launch. So positive prediction of spaceships going to blow up with people inside it as it tries to take off. That's my positive prediction that it can take some people with it. Sorry to the workers who are going to be probably harmed at that, but it can take some people out so it's going to be funny.

That's possibility. Also, there's going to be a disastrous effect around Austin, that's where a lot of the spaceships stuff is getting set up. No, no, no, no. That's just where the offices are. It's like Bogu, Chica, it's like on the coast of Texas. Oh, got it. All right.

I'm going to go to Austin. Some piece of a spaceship is going to fly through someone's house. No one's going to care about it. They're probably going to kill a family or something. No one's going to care. Nothing's going to happen. Yeah. It'll be fine.

Those are more of my tech industry predictions related to spaceship stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I also think on a more, I don't know how the current civil war in Myanmar is going to shake out, but I think there's a chance that it becomes the first place where there is a successful or at least partially successful revolutionary movement that is to a significant extent armed via 3D printed weaponry. We've already seen a lot of that deployed by the rebels in Myanmar.

I'm interested in watching that because it's the first time we've seen that technology used on a meaningful scale by people that aren't organized crime. Yeah, I think it's still too early to tell how much of an actual, whether or not it's just a distraction from the more meaningful aspects of the struggle or in the more meaningful deployments of weaponry and other tools in the struggle or whether or not it'll actually play a significant role in the armed struggle. It's very much worth watching if you're somebody who pays attention to insurgent movements and what is increasingly possible as a result of new technology.

I have another really bad prediction. Hmm. JK Rowling is going to release a book on gender. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh. Or she'll fund a YouTube channel. Yeah, something.

I think there's a decent chance she has been writing a book about gender and she's going to release it in 2022. I think that is an actual series prediction. Just go away. And a whole bunch of liberal moms are going to buy it for each other and they're going to read it and it's going to be bad. And that is my horrible prediction. She could be so beloved if she had limited her comments after publishing Harry Potter

to repeatedly telling people that those are constantly shitting their pants. If she just didn't use Twitter after anything at all and she could have been a different person. It's the Dave Chappelle thing. Just stay off. We all would have loved you forever if you could have just gone off and counted your money and left us alone. Yeah.

Go be rich somewhere. It's fine to be done. It's fine to be done being famous and influential. You did great. You did great. You never needed to come back. Ever. And I don't.

She did. I'm not sure if she did great. She did. She did. She did. Again, this is all colored. If she had never come back into the public eye, all it would have been is like, you remember that lady who got like 12 year olds to read 700 page books that one time?

People would not be as critical of the actual content of the Harry Potter books if she just hadn't kept coming back and saying shit. Anyway. And then like didn't stop and then did not stop and then was told bad, really, really bad and then kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it. You know what people should be? Look, if you're if you're listening to this and you're a millionaire who was like hugely popular for some cultural reason in the late nineties and early 2000s, think about Bill

Watterson, Bill Watterson 1995, ends the most popular comic strip in the history of comics and spends the rest of his life in fucking Iowa painting landscapes and never talks to anybody with a platform again. And I everybody loves Bill Watterson. Like not a single person has a criticism of Bill Watterson. Just do that. Just do what he did. Just go paint landscapes in Iowa and don't talk to journalists or get on Twitter.

It's fine. Does Bill Watterson believe regressive things about gender? Nobody knows because he doesn't say anything. Think another prediction that is actually decently possible, I think we will get more and more cities and or states to decriminalize hard drugs in certain possession amounts. I think there is a there's a number of bills going around California and a lot of other states and I believe that will start to become more and more common, which will be great. It would be nice if they get legalized, but you know, get get get what you can for now.

Yeah. Speaking of drugs, here's the oil sponsored by heroin by by big drug. Here you go. Have fun. Stay safe. We're back. Let everybody know that if if everything gets legalized, we will be sponsored by methamphetamine so fucking quickly, it will make your head spin.

I will never turn down a drug sponsor, except for like superfoods. We don't do superfoods. We don't do brain pills. But heroin, I would advertise the shit out of heroin. We don't do that. We don't do the hair loss drugs. We don't do that. But heroin.

Mm hmm. Hey, is life depressing and difficult? Don't do it. You know, it'll make life easier. I take it back. Heroin. I hated that. I hope that bit.

Uh, Chris, you were you were saying something before break. My one serious prediction is I don't think we've I think we're we're going to get one more big like Latin American uprising and it will not be in Argentina. I have been eating shit for three goddamn years predicting it's going to be Argentina because it's like, oh, they're getting an IMF bailout like, oh, it is never Argentina. It won't be Argentina. It will be somewhere else. But someone is someone is going to spend like two months doing a bunch of stuff that's

extremely cool outside of Argentina. I kind of think I don't know. I'll be interested to see what happens in Brazil because it's hard to get a sense for the exact numbers. But yeah, there's potential there. There is potential there with what's happened in Bolivia and what's happened in Chile. There's there's momentum in it is exciting. Broad area.

There's exciting. Like, I mean, like, there's huge, there's like enormous protest in Brazil like all the time. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, there's like massive. It just hasn't sort of like, like it hasn't turned into like everyone fighting the cops and like, yeah. And I don't know if it will because like, I don't know.

I mean, this is this is this is my vibes based interpretation of it. But it feels like the workers party has enough of a handle on the protest that they're not going to sort of like explode because the PT just wants to win its election and get out of Bolsonaro. But well, yeah, and I mean, the possibility of any kind of like actual revolutionary insurrection or anything relies heavily on like that path not working for people. Yeah, they're not that they're not being that kind of safety. Well, I mean, I say this, if they arrest Lula again, like, yeah, I don't think Bolsonaro

like I think there will die in his own shit. Like, yeah. Well, that might happen, even if his party stays in power. I mean, that's true. He was actively dying as we record this episode, which is very funny. I got as a result of one of our ad campaigns, several aura picture frames this year. And right now we're loading one up. That's just pictures of sick Bolsonaro to keep him.

I love that. Anytime I walk past, I can look at Jair Bolsonaro hacking up a lung or having shit sucked out of his nose from a tube. I will say, oh, my one more like very fast prediction about this is that Kissinger is going to live. He's not going to die. Oh, damn it, Chris. God damn it, Chris.

Next year. Fuck you. Fuck you, Chris. I allowed myself to hope for one for about, I allowed myself to hope for about eight hours and I think it's going to live. Sad. Maybe I'll be wrong. I don't know.

It would have been pretty cool if Betty White's last action had been some sort of anti-Kissinger jihad. Just take out Kissinger. She becomes the most loved American in human history and like goes out and just like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. She parachutes into Kissinger's house with a flinting knife. I'm going to say in Colorado, Oregon or Washington, we're going to get our first safe drug injection

site opened. I know they've been pretty good shot. They've been very successful inside different parts of Canada, specifically Vancouver, Vancouver, BC, and I believe one of those three states is going to get the first one. I hope it's all of them. Do you want to support some of those people up in Canada? Go to heroin mart and buy a shoot dope, fuck the cop city. Yeah, but safe drug injection and ingestion sites have been very good at preventing deaths

in Vancouver, BC, and they're just a good idea in general, and I'm really excited at the prospect. They're an incredibly good idea, and they also, if you're trying to, again, talk about this to the conservatives in your life, they're cheaper than just letting people be addicted to drugs on the street because people don't steal stuff when they're heroin's free. Also they won't have ridiculous medical bills that get paid by the state. And they're more likely to seek treatment, even if you don't mandate that, especially if you don't mandate that because as a rule, people don't like having problematic addictions

to drugs. And if they can deal with their immediate needs and also know that there's help available, they will often choose to get help. So and I think I have one more actual prediction is that a new Matrix video game will be announced and that is that is all of my predictions. Oh, we should probably talk about Matrix 4 briefly. That's what the people want, Garrison. It is.

It doesn't. And for the record, this is going to be controversial because some people have no taste, but we both think it fucking ruled. It is possibly the best Matrix film. It was really fun. It's very good. If you think about it for any amount of time, it gets very good in the way it addresses the system's power to incorporate revolt as a part of the system, which was already teased

inside Matrix. As a monetized aesthetic. Reloaded. Like the Matrix using the weapon that wants to find you against you and the Matrix weaponizing all of your ideas against you is very good. I know Lana put a lot of thought into this, particularly around who she is, how she's developed and how her work has been turned against her and what she believes, both by like the people and also like corporately in terms of like achieving the correct amount

of meta that it's not useless, drivel while still actually being aware of what it is. I think was done well. I know there's there's some people in like the postmodern thing who think it don't who think it doesn't go meta enough. And I think that's nonsense because if you go any if you point out that pointing out that pointing out revolting against the system is part of the system, then you've lost everybody. Like no one cares because you can add on those layers endlessly and it's just drivel. So I think they got the correct amount of meta.

Well then a band not not abandoning that idea, but moving it on me like, you know, you know, it's more important than being meta is making friends and finding human connections because going through the world like this isolated like Thomas Anderson is when he's in the matrix as and like as a as a game designer, a big part of that problem is that he's very isolated. And the whole point is like, no, you need to find friends, find connections, get like like be have people around you to build a network of and actually start like like loving other people is really one of the only ways out of this looping cycle and layering of matrixes that we always live in.

It was it's a wonderful film. I could talk. I could talk about it for hours, but we could do a whole podcast that's about why we enjoyed matrix four, but it's it's pretty fun and my only the only thing I'll add to that is a lot of people fools is what I call them are angry at the fact that it ended with the brass against cover of against the machine. It was so good. It was so good.

It was so good and and it the cover of that song opens it exact. So the sing the lead singer of brass against became briefly famous mid late last year, and during while playing that exact song on stage, she urinated into a fan's mouth. And the song that the cover that ends the matrix starts at exactly the moment where she peed in that guy's mouth during the live show. And I am certain that Lana Wachowski was planning to use the original rage against the machine version of that song. And then that news dropped and was like, well, let's get these brass against people.

I want I want the piss song. That's my theory is reflecting on the analyst as a character and how he relates to kind of the meat space argument and how digital systems and algorithms and social media operates. If you listen to him talk and within the whole context, within the whole context of the film, he they think there's actually some more insightful points of what you might originally suspect around like social media and digitalness versus during the summer of 2020. Some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Next season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? 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

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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 podcasts or wherever you get your

podcasts is realness is always, you know, always a factor in in matrix films. But the way the way they handle it in this film, I think it's a lot more mature than all the topics they handle in their previous films. And I mean, there's just so many like really good like single lines that offer like really good like, oh, wow, like that's just like a very good point. And then they just move past them so like so effortlessly, like you could focus on any one of those really good lines. And they just offer up so many at many points.

And I like that they turned the Merovingian into Ted Kaczynski. It's just fun. Like at the end of the day, it's just actually really fun and it doesn't feel exactly like the other movies in the series, which is what I want. I don't like reboots. I wasn't a fan of the Star Wars reboot because it was like, I've seen this again. Yeah. Yeah.

I like I like that it I like that a lot of the action in this movie right up until kind of the end feels perfunctory and like I like honest, like kind of saying like, I don't care about this part anymore. Like I've done the guys fighting agents and bullet time that, you know, at the end there's some more some more loving action set pieces. But like from the beginning, it's very much it's much more like a really fun commentary on how Hollywood works and how the video game industry works. There's a fucking Mass Effect joke in there.

There's a joke about like the 1999 or 2000 Matrix video game that happened before Garrison was born. It's so fun. It's it's just a lot of fun as a movie. It's rad. Well, any any other final final predictions before we wrap up this this extremely well thought through episode that we've put our hearts and minds into. We really did.

Dr. Oz is going to go down in flames. Oh, I hope so. Oh, man. Man, I really have no idea what to expect from I have no idea. I'm not making I'm not making any prediction on that because I to I have no idea. The only thing that I'll say is that one way or the other, it's going to be a bellwether if it like goes great for him and he wins easily, we're going to see a lot more. A lot of Dr. Phil is absolutely rolling in the fucking Congress if that works for Oz.

And other other people who are kind of occupy similar cultural spaces will do the same thing. And then we'll have congressional inquiries about whether or not this simple trick will burn belly fat. It's going to be like if it's like like if that's what happens like the thing the thing Trump's going to be remembered for like is is being like well, the thing Reagan's going to be remembered for is being just like like 50 years ahead of his time before we're literally all entirely ruled by just reality TV stars whose wives are great at giving head. Should I did any did everyone already forget the Nancy Reagan throat goat discourse?

Oh, I understand that she wrote. Everyone was so exhausted that if you didn't catch this, it's a very well known secret and has been for like 50 years that back before they got married and probably after Nancy was famous for giving the best blowjobs in Hollywood. Because Garrison tosses the cat every single episode, so I disdain this discourse now 2022. It's a year. We're in it. Okay.

My last prediction is I actually do think this year is going to suck slightly less 2021 did. Yeah, media. Now, I guess this is probably the big one I'm going to eat shit on, but like hopefully you don't. He's going to happen. Hopefully you're right about it. No, yeah, I think that there's a decent chance that we're that it's better, at least in some

ways, the climate stuff as it nearly always will for the foreseeable future will keep getting worse. But yeah, I think there's actually a chance that COVID will get better, not because of any policy decision, but because Omicron literally 90% of human beings in the world get it and those that survive COVID stops passing on as much, which is kind of vaguely speaking what happened with the influenza and other other epidemics. I will be probably foolish in making one more prediction that is like around the fall. We will not see spikes as big as we saw this last year.

I do think there will probably still be some, but I do think the numbers are going to be generally trending down after Omicron hits its peak just because how many people will get infected, how many antibodies plus vaccines will be circulating and how many people have already been who don't take the vaccine have already have like died off. Yeah. We're not saying that to be like flippant or to be like, no, but I just that's what's happening. The world is that you have.

Yeah. It's the world that we live in. I hate it. But I do hope and I do hope and some slightly predict that we'll have less less spiking numbers around this next fall and winter as we did of this current fall winter season. I wouldn't mind ending on a note of appreciation for the fucking booster because we got it. You and I both garrison as did most of our friends and had just a shitload of COVID flying around us.

This was everywhere. I love a lot of infections and we were fine. Fine. I have one of my friends got COVID and her mom who they live in the same house did not like has not gotten COVID because they're wearing masks and they got the booster. And for all my friends that did get COVID that had that were boosted, the vaccine did its job. They're not in the hospital.

Double test positive on a rapid test and then test negative on a PCR probably because by the time he got to the PCR like the next day, his viral load was just so fucking low. Get that third Vax. The vaccine works. Who could have predicted? Who could have predicted? The things that are literally the entire basis of our modern concept of the value of human life continue to be very effective.

All right. Well, that does it for us on unplug, go spend time outside, touch grass, touch your mirror, like trying to go through it because yeah, try to go through your mirror. What's real? See, if maybe you were the digital Messiah and you have been trapped in a simulation where you work at a food lion and you can break three of it, but not fly anymore because now your girlfriend, he does fly with Trinity at the end. He does fly with Trinity.

Sure. Yeah. Just as we all can only fly with Carrie Edmoss, well, with Carrie Edmoss and specifically who has gotten so much hotter as they did. All right. Well, all right. Well, that's that's where we at. The black effect presents features honest conversations and exclusive interviews, a space for artists,

everyday people and listeners to amplify, elevate and empower black voices with great conversations. Make sure to listen to the black effect presents podcast on I heart radio, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Here's to the great American settlers. The millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills and you just kind of fell into it. And you know, it's like totally fine.

Just another few decades or so and then you can enjoy yourself. Of course, there is something else you could do. If you got something to say, you could start a podcast with speaker from my heart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love and maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset. Hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer.

That's a S.B.R. E.A.K.E.R. Hustle on over today. Hey everybody, welcome to It Could Happen Here. I am Robert Evans and this is the show where we talk about how everything's kind of falling apart and how we might put it back together again in a way that works better than it did before or do something different that is even anyway, whatever. It's a show about the future and about the messed up present.

And as a result of that, one of the things we talk about a lot is self-sufficiency. We've had a number of episodes kind of covering the values of like replacing your lawn with food, gorilla gardening, that sort of stuff. And one of the critiques we get is people saying, well, you know, that's never going to work on a large scale. It's never going to replace industrial agriculture or whatever. And that's perfectly true. But the point we're going for here and why we encourage these kind of resilience building

activities is because they do improve the ability of communities to resist when they need to resist and also provide opportunities by which people can reimagine their relationship to, for example, the food supply chain or reimagine the relationship to their community and the kind of things that communities provide for each other rather than having them shipped in by Amazon. And when we start talking about that and we start talking about improving community resiliency for things like, you know, a general strike or even potentially more radical stuff, one of the big issues that any community has to confront is not just food, but medicine.

I do and I'm sure a lot of other people have friends who cannot survive without medications that are very like reliant upon existing supply chains. And to some extent, even the stability of the government, you know, getting your insulin, getting your medication for whatever kind of disease you have that needs constant medication. There's a bunch of different reasons why people are reliant upon the medical supply lines and upon the kind of pharmaceutical industry. And that's one of the big when we talk about building more resilient communities, one of the big hurdles to jump.

Well, today, my guest is someone who is working on bridging some of these problems. His name is Michael Loffer, and he is the founder of an organization called the Four Thebes Vinegar Collective. They are bio hackers, and they are working on cracking certain pharmaceutical medications to allow individuals with resources that are generally available to people who are not rich or pharmaceutical companies to produce life saving medications. The number one thing you would have heard of from Four Thebes is the EpiPencil, which we'll talk about in a bit.

But first, Michael, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's exciting to be able to chat and talk with you and all the people surrounding you who are trying to just unfuck things a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And I most of the conversation I want to have today is on the the unfucking of things variety. But I do think we should start with a little bit of technical talk. First, can you give people an idea of what kind of medications you and other people in

the collective have figured out how to produce, and what kind of resources an individual needs to be able to do some of this stuff? Sure. So, from a technical perspective, most of the things that we focus on are what's called small molecule chemistry. And to kind of describe that blanketly, if you can draw the molecule on a cocktail napkin it probably qualifies as a small molecule. If it's one of these things that like, you know, if you look at the diagram for the molecule

it's approaching, it's got big ribbons that are colored and stuff, that's a biochem thing and it's a whole different set of problems. Now the main foci that we've had have been surrounding access to abortion, access to HIV medications, access to hepatitis C medications, and access to reversal of drug overdose medications. So that's been sort of our main focus, but there have been a handful of others. The things that we tend to look for are, where are there things that there's a great need and there's a huge barrier? And so you see those in those places a lot because the three main barriers that tend

to pop up between somebody and access to the medication they need are either price or legality or lack of infrastructure. And typically the weirdness that comes up mostly surrounds price because of intellectual property laws and marginalization of people who suffer from particular ailments or seem to suffer predominantly from particular ailments. And so if you're poor and you're in a class of people that is seen as something not to be cared about because they're not a strong voter base, then the ability to move access away from those people and put in more barriers and raise prices becomes easier to defend.

So the first drug that we focused on was an anti-parasitic toxoplasmosis is a parasite that's pretty innocuous for most people. Yeah. It's the one you get from cats, right? Or is this not Gandhi? Yeah. No, it is. It is the one you get from cats.

And it's a really fascinating parasite, too. It is. Yeah. It's the behavioral biology of it. It's a really, really fascinating parasite. I probably have it. Yeah. I have three cats.

I definitely have it. Right. And so it's not a big deal for those people, but if you have a massively compromised immune system, especially with people with HIV or advanced stages of cancer, and that's why it was labeled as sort of an HIV drug. It's not. It's an anti-parasitic, but it's used almost exclusively by people who are in advanced stages of cancer, people with fairly compromised immune systems from HIV or something else,

and then pregnant women. And it's not that big a deal. If you have access to the medication, you can merely take it and eradicate it from the body. The difference was, is that something that was a short course of treatment, you take, I think, four doses the first time around, and then one dose each day subsequently for something like 10 days. And that's not a big deal when each dose, each pill was about $13 and a half dollars.

And then Martin Jaquelli jacked up the price to $750 a pill. And so I'm like, well, this is ridiculous. So that was the first one that we went after. And of course, access to abortion drugs. That's a big one that's pretty topical lately. We released a video, I don't know, maybe three months ago on how you can make your own abortion pills without too much fuss. This would be Mithipristone, right?

Mithipristone and misopristol. So you can do it with just misopristol or you can do it in combination. And when you do it with just the one, with just miso, you have about an 85% chance of it working. And if you have both, it bumps it up to about 95. And when you're doing this, and we'll talk a little bit about the hardware, but what is the reagent that you have for this? Because I know that's been a big part of some of the discussions is how do you get the things

you make the medicines from, which is easier for some than it is for others. Sure, there are a couple of different ways that you can go about that. The interesting but more difficult way, of course, is to do the chemistry from scratch, where like you say, you get access to reagents, you do some chemistry and you end up with the active pharmaceutical ingredient, which we lovingly refer to as the API, and then you package it somehow into a tablet or a pill or some other means of ingress into the body. The instructions that we distributed skip the difficult part because misopristol is an

ulcer medication. And so, for instance, if you have access to Mexico or are in Mexico, it's kind of not a big deal because as an ulcer medication, it's over the counter and you can just go in and say, oh, you know, my grandmother can't get out of bed, she needs this ulcer medication. I need just a little bit of it to get her through the weekend. And then no problem. Not so easy in places where it's a little more controlled like the US, however, one amazing trick when looking for medicines, access to medicines that are generally blocked from

people that the existing power structure tries to disenfranchise from access is you look and see if it's similar to use for other classes of person or being that the infrastructure does care about. So interestingly, you look for ulcer medication, you say, well, who else has ulcers that people might think are important people? That doesn't really come up and there are other ulcer medications that are a little bit better. However, there are a lot of really wealthy people in the United States and really wealthy

people tend to keep horses. And horses, interestingly, 95% or something, or maybe more, some ungodly percentage of domesticated horses have ulcers. Now why that is, I'm not entirely clear about, but my own theory is that it has something to do with taking a gigantic wild animal and putting it into a very small box for most of its life. Yeah, it doesn't seem like the thing that horses evolved to do. Yeah.

So that said, people who are horse owners typically have to treat them constantly for ulcers. And the best thing for that is miscellaneous stall. And so you can get miscellaneous stall powder in a tub from places that... Yeah, feed store or something. Yeah, I go to a feed store every week. I'm sure I could buy a bucket of this shit. Probably. So it comes in tubs and the other thing that's great about it coming in a tub is that it's

already in with a buffer. Part of the thing about miscellaneous stall is that the dosage is in micrograms and that's very hard to weigh unless you have a really high precision scale. Well, even your good drug dealers generally don't have a scale that can do that. Right. So but the magic is this is in a tub with a bunch of inert powder and it's already mixed up to be homogenous. And so what you can do is you can do a little bit of back of the envelope arithmetic and

you can measure out much larger quantities and know how much active ingredient you have and then pack that into a tablet. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense and it's also like the... You have kind of the dark side and light side version. It's kind of the light side version of all of those people buying up ivermectin for nonsense. It's like, well, no, there's reasons to buy, you know, like livestock medication, especially...

I mean, I have a lot of friends who took fucking fish antibiotics back in the day and this is kind of a much more... Using it in a much more rigorous way to provide people with something that can is getting... It will be getting increasingly difficult to access in a lot of parts of the country. Yeah. It's just a smart way of approaching it, I think. Yeah. And one of the things that becomes philosophically a bit sticky is when you end up talking about

the importance of independent management of one's own health and decision making not coming from above. There's this difficult moment that I've had kind of having to cop to the reality that if you're building mechanisms to empower people to have access to make decisions about managing their own health. Part of that entails realizing that that will also lead to a lot of people making what I might think are bad decisions, but that the important thing is that it doesn't matter what I think, that people should not be controlled by other people.

And if they make bad decisions, that sucks and hopefully we can help that, but not lamenting the importance of or not backtracking, not having some sort of retrograde threat about offering more access, even if people misuse that access to mismanage their own health. Mismanagement of health happens no matter what, right? It happens constantly and people will ignore things that seem like they're bigger problems and don't get them addressed. And so I have to sort of retreat into this idea that more access to more tools is better and that's just the way of it.

Yeah, the problem with ivermectin isn't the problem. The problem is not that people have access to ivermectin and so they're taking it in a way that is harmful to them. The problem is that people have been blinded by disinformation and so are making a horrible health care decision, the fact that they have access to veterinary medication is fine. Right, exactly, and it's interesting that you say that because I have a friend at Doctors Without Borders and they are starting a couple of pretty strong programs to try and combat misinformation because just from a metric standpoint, they look for what's killing the

greatest number of people at the greatest rate in the worst way and currently the thing that's killing the most people in the worst way at the greatest rate is misinformation. Yeah. And so, yeah, that's really the great danger. And one of the things I find really interesting about kind of what y'all have been doing because obviously the question of how to fight the misinformation in the medical sphere is a much larger conversation without simple answers. When it comes to a question like, oh, hey, this pharmaceutical company jacked up the

price by what 750% for this necessary medication for people, a lot of people who have HIV, what do we, the solution to that is simple, you find a way for them to get it without paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars per dose. The question, some of the work y'all have done is with very mass-needed products like the Miphaprestone, like the EpiPencil, where there's large numbers of people who need it. But a lot of what I think, one of the things I think is really cool is y'all are also working on hacking medications that are very niche. Like very, very few people have this particular disease.

And so the medication is costs as much as a fully loaded Toyota Tacoma, you know, in order to... Oh, and sometimes far worse than that, because of this orphan drug act that got passed in the U.S. and equivalents that exist in other places, you have all of these allowances that are granted to people who invent, I put in air quotes, because really they just purchase the rights to it. These orphan drugs where when you talk about controls, it's kind of the most tragic incidents of that entirely because what's happening is you've got somebody who has a very rare

disease and in many cases you have something that's the difference between somebody who just cannot function and they're dealing with their life kind of moment to moment they're mostly cared for. And if they have access to a particular medication, then they can go through life in a fairly normal sort of way where they don't need to be in assisted living, where they can do sort of basic things for themselves, and that seems so much more predatory. I mean, it's important, of course, you know, to look at things with that macro lens as well and say what can do a lot of good for a lot of people, but then the sort of micro

ethical lens needs to come out from time to time and say, all right, well, here's something that only affects a few hundred thousand people across the world, but these are people who could just go through life normally, if only they had access to a little bit of medicine. And the only reason that they don't is because of misplaced avarice or all avarice is misplaced because of avarice. Yeah. And you're providing individuals or a way for people to help individuals who have this problem and who can't, couldn't possibly afford this because they don't have healthcare

or something, a way to deal with these illnesses. And oftentimes, like even people who are insured don't get the medication that they need or don't get an affordable rate because it's not seen as critical. Yeah. It's like, oh, well, there's a solution that's not as good, but it's much less expensive, so that's the only thing we're going to cover. And so, yeah. And you're saying, well, it should be your decision whether or not this is something

you want to treat this way, and this is a way, if you have access, this is a way for you to kind of, as you've been saying, take your healthcare and your ability to get medication into your own hands and produce the things that you need without needing to beg an insurance company or go fund me $85,000 or whatever. Yeah. Those go fund me break my heart so much, especially when people say, oh, look, how great. He got the money that they needed. And I say, look, I am happy that people get healthcare, but this should be entirely unnecessary.

And the fact that this comes up is criminal. Yeah. We can, as a species, produce this shit for less than the cost of like a lamp, you know? Like why isn't this available? Now I, and that's what I think is kind of so powerful about what y'all are doing and is that so, so often we kind of get stuck in this like the horror of how bad healthcare is, of how fucked up the pharmaceutical industry is. And then we get our relief from that in these stories of people like crowdfunding so they

can get their medication. And what you're saying is, well, what's actually much more inspiring than that is people just making, finding ways to make what they need. Again, kind of the most popular, popular is the wrong word, the most press y'all have received I think is for the EpiPencil, which is an EpiPen is a device that is used when people are going into anaphylactic shock, which is when they have an allergic reaction that will kill them if untreated generally. And you inject it into your muscles or generally like an EpiPen does the injecting, you just

kind of put it in place. And it is a life-saving medication. When people need it, it's the choice between that and death. And they are very expensive. There is a company that owns the patent because of how the EpiPen actually does the injecting. The actual medicine is very cheap and very easy to make, but it's unbelievably expensive. And people die as a result of lack of access. And you've provided a way using both kind of this thing called a bio lab that people,

you've developed plans that people can build it for themselves in order to make this. And also using a 3D printer, you can make an EpiPencil, which is a little less kind of a more analog version, I think, I guess you'd say. No, it's equivalent. It's equivalent. It works the same way. The things that are different about it that are critical, the first one that you mentioned, of course, is that you can build it for a little over $30 US, and you can reload it

for about $3, unlike the EpiPen, which is, I think, it's about $650. $550 for, yeah. And that might be for a pair, but even so, but the other two critical differences are that EpiPens are single use, so you can't test whether it's faulty or not until you use it. And there have been a lot of failures. In fact, there was a big EpiPen recall a bunch of years ago. And there were just these tragic, tragic stories.

Some guy had to watch his little kid die. He had a pair of EpiPens, the kid went into shock, he used it, the thing failed, he brought the other one, the other one failed, and they're in the air, and you can't land in 15 minutes and a little kid died, which just, and I'm sure there are dozens of stories like that that just happens to be one of the ones I know. So one of the things that's great about the EpiPen is because you're putting it together yourself and it only takes four parts, you can test it, you can make sure that it works as many times as you need to, you can dry run it with saline and just double check that

it does what it's supposed to, and so it's safer. So the fact that you can control it yourself, you can reload it, you can test it, all these things fix a lot of these immediate problems that come with, and it still has the benefit that everybody wants from the EpiPen, which is that it doesn't require measurement or knowing how deep to press the needle before you depress the plunger, all that happens automatically and it happens very quickly. And yeah, as you say, we got a lot of press for that because essentially a good timing, we released that the same time that Heather Brash was lying to Congress about why they

hit raise the price on the EpiPens, and so it was in the public eye. Yeah, and that's a huge one, being able to produce that because there's a tremendous number of people who rely on EpiPens, and I think the potential of that project is staggering. And when we talk about the different people who are working on similar problems to you, there's also a group of people who are working on cracking insulin, being able to produce insulin. Yeah, the open insulin project is an amazing group of people, incredibly important. They're working on probably the largest scale public health crisis.

I mean, in terms of queries that we get, I think we get people asking about insulin more than anything else, and I always say, oh yeah, they're very, very bright people who already work around this, go talk to the open insulin, and they're just amazing. I want to move on because I want to talk about kind of the more philosophical dimensions of some of this, but before we get into that, one of the things you and I have been talking about a little bit behind the scenes is I am not a technically savvy person, but I want to try and I'd like to be able to produce an EpiPens. I want to understand this and potentially be able to contribute in a more direct sense,

in part because I'm curious, how doable actually is this? I consider myself a pretty normal person when it comes to technical understanding. I'm reasonably handy, but I'm not a chemist, I have no prior experience 3D printing or anything like that. What is required in terms of financial investment and what is your general estimate in terms of time to get up to the level where you can start learning how to do some of this stuff? I think the barrier to entry is pretty low, depending on how you want to start. As I said, there are different avenues to doing it.

You can, of course, one of the greatest hacks, if anybody listening to this doesn't pick up anything else, here's the best hack in terms of getting access to medication. You have a medication you don't have access to for whatever reason, assuming it comes in a capsule form, you can merely go to a chemical supplier, purchase the active pharmaceutical ingredient, wait out, put it into a capsule, and you've made your medication. That's a very simple thing. That takes nothing more than being able to read a scale and scooping powder into little capsules.

The next step up, there are things that you can do that are a little more involved. If you want to build an EpiPencil, again, this is three or four parts, depending on how you count. You take a needle from one syringe needle set on, you put it onto a different syringe needle set, and then you put it into this auto-injector. It's designed for neophobic diabetics, you load it with the epinephrine, and you close it up and you're done. Then if you want to step into this a little bit further, if something is so barrier for

whatever reason that you can't get the actual ingredient, then you might start messing around with our micro lab. The micro lab, I would say, probably takes around $100 US to build, but it's not super technical. Our latest version doesn't require any soldering. Everything snaps together, which is really nice. You can plug everything in. All the wires are just screw terminals, which is really convenient.

It takes some time, and you do have to load some code, but we're looking to release a new set of documentation in the summer that'll be very, very stripped down of, here's your bill of materials, you can order all of this stuff. Here's how you can put the disk image onto the SD card that you put in, and you should start it, and it'll wake up and work independently. We had a video of our head hardware guy actually building the micro lab from just parts that we're sitting on, laid out on a table, and I think all told it took him about 45 minutes, maybe a little bit longer, but again, granted, this guy's a hardware specialist and he designed

it. So for somebody who's not done before, it might take an afternoon, but it's not a prohibitively long or involved project that would take you weeks to put together or any specialized understanding of biomedical engineering or anything like that. Now I kind of want to move at this point because I think that gives people an idea of what's actually necessary, and they can go to y'all's website or look up, you have plans on a GitHub if they want to kind of look at what's involved, and it's, some of it seems a little daunting to me, like looking at the construction of the bio lab, but that's going to be a project

that I'll be engaging in over the next couple of weeks, so I'll keep people updated on how I do there. I want to move on to talk, Michael, about what you see as kind of the, I don't know, the potential from kind of a revolutionary perspective, from a perspective of actually building dual power of this project, and obviously you are, and I think what would be called the early stages of this idea of kind of democratizing and decentralizing the production of life saving medications, although I guess you could argue in some ways it's kind of a return to more traditional attitudes about health care in a lot of ways.

Yeah, there's a cyclic nature there, and in the sort of Zen mind, beginner's mind, we like to think that revolution is always in its beginning stages, right? And to say over the past decade, roughly looking at trying to find ways to give people more independent access that doesn't require infrastructure to medicines and medical technologies, the hope really is to create a certain amount of cultural shift. I remember at one point a friend of mine who was a business school graduate asked me a very sort of like business school type question where he said, how would you measure success of your project?

And I said, well, we cease to exist as an organization, and he kind of had this moment of like, what do you mean? We shouldn't be pushing this, right? The idea is that eventually the concept of managing your own health is sufficiently normalized that it's not something that has to be explained between people, but somebody says, oh, yeah, I just did that up in my micro lab. In the same way that when you look at the shift that happened between the mid 80s and the mid 90s, where computers were this strange, scary thing that was only accessible or usable

by people who were very specialized to something that everybody knew about and everybody kind of had and everybody sort of use and the same sort of thing that happened between the period of time. I don't know, maybe 10, 12 years ago and now with 3D printing where like stereolithography and rapid prototyping was again the specialized thing that a bunch of people who were essentially out the machine tool industry had started to spearhead and now you say 3D printing everybody knows what it means in the same sort of way. I very much like to see a cultural shift where when somebody is unwell that when discussions

between people happen that instead of the have you had that looked at or you might instead hear from somebody saying, well, have you read up on that to see people actually engaged in their own health and not going through this very typical process of outsourcing responsibility. Now, it's not to say that like experts aren't good people with whom to consult, right? Yeah, we're not talking about replacing the idea of medical professionals who can help you understand what your health and diagnosis stuff like, yeah. There is again this drastic difference between going to a doctor and essentially just like throwing the problem on their desk and saying, fix it, call me when it's over versus going

to a doctor and saying, hey, I'd like to talk about this. I'd like to know more about what's wrong here and I'd like to discuss what the options are and what seems best. That would be great on a lot of levels and then these questions of access to medication then become even more relevant because when you're talking with a doctor and the doctor says, okay, well, we could try this therapy, but your insurance won't pay for it to $300,000. You can say, all right, well, let's just do a little thought experiment and if that fell from a truck, what would I do with it?

And then maybe you can go home and say, I'll call you and let you know how it goes. That's really my, my grand hope and there are so many different ways that that can play out. In fact, I'll tell you a hilarious story in regards to this, which was in 2016, I guess it was when we presented it, Hope, I called Martin Chicago cell phone from stage to try and ask him what he thought about what we were doing, given that I was handing his drug out for free and showing people how to make it. And he didn't answer the phone when I called him then, but he called me back a few hours

later, which was really hilarious. We actually chatted for a while and the guys, I mean, a little detached from reality, but he's, he's, he's no dummy. And when I sort of described what we were trying to do with the micro lab, he had some interesting insights and he said, yeah, you know, one way I can imagine that working really well is if somebody with a little more knowledge of pharmaceutical medicine were to maybe build one of these and serve a small community, I think that could be very efficient. And I was like, that's a good thought.

You chiseling bastard. Yeah. I mean, there's a degree in which that's, that's kind of how I see the most realistic potential. And every individual making all of their medicine, but kind of like, you know, we had during the fires last year when, when our local and state governments during the heat wave this year, like completely shat the bed, we had different mutual aid collectives do things like we are providing people with like, oh, it's a blizzard.

We're providing people with firewood. We are providing people with cooling stations because of the heat, you know, we are providing people with they've just fled their houses. We have kids that have food and basic necessities so they can get through mutual aid collectives that are like, well, we are making, we specialize and we can produce this and this and this medication like these three and we have. And here's the information you can find online about our process so you know that we know what we're doing.

And if you need these things, you let us know when we get them to you. And here's different ways in which people can volunteer if you want to help engage in this mutual aid process, even if you're not someone who's going to be doing a lot of the technical stuff. Well, we need people to go pick up parts or we need people to do this and you can help us here. Or, you know, I see a lot of potential. And I think, yeah, and I think in a similar way, right, a lot of that sort of thing is

already happening in other realms, right, where it's a sort of thing where you might be building something or you, you see some project on GitHub or whatever and some, there are these STL files and you go, oh, gosh, well, I don't know how to do that. But, oh, right. XYZ down the street has a 3D printer. I'll go ask her. She's really good at making these things and you say, hey, look, I have this thing, would this be difficult to print and with their experience, they kind of look at me like,

no, that shouldn't be too hard. You know, I have some time this weekend, maybe I can make that for you. And in the same way, you say, hey, it looks like I seem to have this rare infection from whatever, whatever, or I have this odd condition. I wanted to try this medication because it might be really helpful, but it's not legal in this country. If you think you can put this together, again, you know, you call somebody and whoever's on the other line says, oh, yeah, I have a micro lab, I can try and put a program together

for that and see if I can make it for you. That sort of thing I think is a potentially really positive avenue for that sort of thing to proliferate. And again, eventually to have a cultural shift where the idea of medicine and medical technology not being something that is, comes down from above from some authority, but instead is something that's managed by people who are part of your community, who you already trust. I mean, that's why going to a doctor is so scary. They seem to be the arbiter of your fate.

They're going to tell you whether you're well or not. And that is just the truth. And much better to have it where people are making up their own mind based on learning about their own health and consulting with people who can give them perspective. And if there's more of that and if it's closer to the person who's actually suffering, that I think will be on the whole much better. Yeah, it's this, and this gets tangled up in a lot of the more toxic things we've seen this year, but it's this understanding that with any given problem, if individuals trying

to solve that problem have more autonomy and part of autonomy is knowledge, that's nearly always better. The problem, of course, is that we get into this situation we are now where some people take control of my health care to do stuff that's nonsense, and that brings us back to the question of the quality of the information that you're getting is very important, right? Because if your research is some YouTube video that has convinced you that you need to take this horse paste or something, then yeah, that's not good. But that doesn't change the fact that like with food, like with everything that you need

to survive, the more of a role you have in understanding that, deciding what to do with that, understanding where it comes from and how it is produced, not just like, not only is that I think more satisfying as a human, but it's also critical to your well-being. It's critical to like- Well, on two levels, right? On two levels, because not only when your health is taken from you, it doesn't deprive you of life, but it deprives you of participating in any of the acts that make life meaningful. And part of that key thing that makes life meaningful is having a participatory role

in the things that decide the trajectory of your life. And so when you go to the lengths of managing your own health, two things happen. First off, your health improves, assuming you've made good decisions and get lucky. But second, you're also having a participatory role in your life, and that makes life more meaningful. And it, beyond just kind of the self-actualization benefits, from a perspective of actually enabling people to participate in the move for radical change in our society, one necessary element of that, to any of the kind of things that we need, is a belief in your own agency and

power and also a freedom from the kind of fear that comes from feeling helpless. And there is, I think, probably no feeling worse in the world than feeling completely helpless about a treatable medical problem. I mean, it's one thing. I just went there to my mom when you get a disease where there's just nothing that science can do, right? Like, yeah, you've got this cancer and there ain't shit anybody has for you, you know? That's one kind of horrible.

But I think it's a lot less terrible than you, I have this thing that we can deal with, but I either can't afford it or I don't know that I'll be able to afford it. I had a horrible, I lost my job in my health care in 2017 and so did a person who was on my health care with me that I love very much. And I got this hired here in health care a couple of years later and it happened that a month before I started my health care at this new job, this person who was on my health care with me got diagnosed with a brain tumor and thankfully not a cancerous one, but one that they had to take medication for that would have bankrupted us without insurance.

And thankfully it worked out fine. The timing worked out okay. But there's not a week that goes by that I don't and it is something that makes you less willing to take risks, less willing to participate in things that because you have in the back of your head, well, I have to keep this job, I have to keep this insurance, I have to. Oh, yes. Yeah.

And that's another thing that I find so heartbreaking. There's so many people that I've met totally outside of my activism who meant about working a job that they hate and I say, gosh, you know, I mean, you consider just bailing on it and looking for something else and trying something else and they have this total paralysis of saying, but if I quit my job, I won't have health care. And mind you, like, these were people who were incredibly healthy. These were not people who had any regular visits to health care. They're just scared that if something comes up, they won't be able to handle it.

I mean, it's a perfectly well-grounded fear, but as you point out, what this does is it works as this sort of shadow oppressive mechanism to keep people from exploring, trying things, as you say, taking risks or just doing things that don't involve an optimization toward a stable state of maybe just like, yeah, maybe I'll start a small business and yeah, it probably will fail, but that will be a cool adventure. And most people, so many people, maybe not most, but many, many people get just terrified into this state of inertial paralysis. Yeah.

And it contributes to people being afraid to take to the street to protest the police because maybe they get arrested and maybe they get fired and then maybe their kid can't afford there. Like there's a thousand ways. I think honestly, the fear of losing your health care is in some ways a greater counter-revolutionary force than any law enforcement agency could hope to be because the fear is so much more immediate to so many people. Nobody talks about that.

Yeah. And thank you so much for mentioning it because it's something that oftentimes I try to bring up when I'm discussing things in public for it and oftentimes people kind of raise an eyebrow at me and be like, what's the big deal? And I'm like, no, no, no, like if you look two layers deep, there's something that's really working against people being able to exercise protest. And it's this really silent, terrifying force that seems to underlie everything. And if you could alleviate that, if it could get to the point where people are like, yeah,

what the hell with it, you know, I don't need a job to take care of me, then all of a sudden so many possibilities just blossom in the mind. Yeah. If you have like, say if you're a parent who has a child with, you know, who's insulin dependent, there's not a lot of difference in my mind between the fact that between someone holding a gun to your head and your boss being able to fire you and take away your kid's access to that insulin. There's not a tremendous moral difference to me.

Oh, there's not a moral difference. I'd say getting a gun to your head is actually more likely to survive that. Yeah. It's a lot safer. It's less inevitable. You could talk your way out of that. And yeah, I mean, there's whatever. But there are any number of things that might go wrong there, but if somebody takes away

your insulin, that's the end of the story. Yeah. I guess the more salient point than the comparison is just they're both acts of violence in every way that's meaningful, I think they're both acts of violence. And one way that when I rail against intellectual property as a concept and intellectual property law, the example that I give is they say, if somebody were dying, and you knew how to save them, would you ever not tell them how and just want them to die say, Oh, no, that idea belongs to me and I'm not going to share unless you pay me like no human being that

I think I've ever heard of would do that. Yeah. And yet this happens every day because we've sort of carried these questions of copyright into patents. And despite the fact that they're hundreds of years old, not applicable anymore, assuming they were ever applicable. And people just die because people say, Oh, well, we can make more money if we do it this way.

But there's a fascinating thing going on there when you when you really drill into that idea because I suspect there are a lot of people who have who are are are integral in propping up this system, both of kind of medical intellectual property and of just like the pharmaceutical industry, the way that it works, people in politics, huge numbers of people who are integral in some facet of keeping that going, who also were they to see an individual in immediate medical distress would never think of like try getting their debit card number or whatever like asking them would without thinking attempt because that's what people do. And it's I mean, this is where we get into kind of some of these more philosophical anarchist

ideas about what hierarchy does and what these structures do because structures enable people to participate in evil that they never would as an individual. Yeah, there's this easy route that many easy routes that pop up that allow people or force, I should say force people to be displaced from their humanity in that sort of way, where yes, of course, you you help somebody up off of subway tracks if they've fallen. Yes, of course, if somebody were drowning, you drag them out and save them. And yet, just because it's a degree removed and it's mediated by an agency, suddenly it's so easy to forget and ignore and be sort of complicit in.

Yeah. And I just to go back around to what Four Thieves is doing and what y'all are doing, it's one of the few projects going on right now that fits what my idealistic 19 year old brain thought the Internet would be 1615 like when it was when things were newer and a little less like, oh, this is like one of these days, well, this kind of shit's going to happen. And that is, I think, I mean, that's that's not without value from, again, a revolutionary perspective, the fact that it is pretty rad, you know, Well, I mean, I will not deny the fact that it feels good, you know, I think that I think

that we all grew up with that sort of hope and belief that we were going to open these new doors and there were going to be these new possibilities and things that we had been reading about in science fiction, we're going to become real. And there's there's a great satisfaction in not just witnessing your childhood dreams become realities, but actually, you know, having a hand in it. There's there's something quite satisfying about that, I will, yeah, I will admit. Well, I think that's a pretty good point to close out on today. I don't need to take up too much more of your time right now, Michael.

But as I told people, I'm going to be, I'm going to be trying to get into some of this because I find it just both fascinating and incredibly hopeful in a world where it seems like there are constantly forces conspiring to strip people of their ability to take control of critical aspects of their lives. You and your your colleagues in this are trying to give people opportunities to take some some power back for themselves. And I just think that's it's pretty dope. Thank you so much.

Yeah. And to your listeners, if there are people out there who like what we're doing, you want to support the project, please go find somebody who needs your help, but doesn't deserve it and then go help them anyway. Yeah. Yeah. That's always a good thing to do. Michael, anything else, any like a thing else you want to kind of put this is normally

this section where people plug websites or projects or anything you've got anything in particular you want to throw out there right now? Sure. We're we're hoping to do a bunch of big releases in the summer. So look for those in the meantime. We're always looking for help. So if you're out there and you'd like to be assisted in the project, please get in touch. There's the contact us page in the website.

And by the way, this do not have to be a technical person. We're looking for currently we're looking for writers. We have a lot of documentation that we need to do. So if you're out there and you have, you know, background in in language, then that would be great. But if you're somebody who feels that you're entirely without skills, please get in touch. We have any number of endless small tasks that just need to be taken care of because we don't have enough people.

So if you'd like to participate, we'd love to have you please get in touch. And in the meantime, keep each other healthy, keep each other safe. Thank you so much, Michael. Thanks so much for having me Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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