Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 17

Episode Date: January 15, 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.

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

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Mom, what does the chicken say? Cat. Giraffe. Giraffe, really?

Giraffe. Giraffe. You're not going to get it all right. Just make sure you know the big stuff. Like making sure your kids are buckled correctly in the right seat for their age and size. Get it right. Visit n-h-t-s-a dot gov slash the right seat brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the ad council. Hi everybody, I'm Rachel Bonetta and I have my very own podcast called Benched with Bonetta.

You kidding me? Woo! I'm just here so I won't get fined. Every week I'm going to be talking about all the things I find fascinating about the NFL and I'm doing something that has never been done before. I'm opening my DMs. DMs now open. Listen every Tuesday and join me on the bench. Subscribe now and listen to the Benched with Bonetta podcast on the I Heart Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls, you know. They don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in the art world. I just walked in and saw this bright red painting presuming to be a Rothko. Of course, art forgeries only happen because there's money to be made. A lot of money. I'm listening to how what they're paying for these things. It was an incredible amount of money. You knew the painting was fake.

Listen to Art Fraud starting February 1st on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. Today is mostly them falling apart. I'm your host Christopher Wong. With me, I have Lucy who is a teacher in Chicago Public Schools and is part of the Teachers Union. Today, we're going to be talking about just the absolute shit show that is being inflicted on teachers and students in Chicago Public Schools. Lucy, how are you doing? You know, it's been kind of weird, but all in all, I'm in good spirits. I think my sisters and brothers and CTU are in good spirits, so we're going to keep fighting the good fight.

Hell yeah. Before we fully start to get into the Teachers Union and Lawyer Lightfoot's fuckery, I want to get a bit of context for people who don't live in Chicago or just don't know much about only politics because if you read media accounts of this, you may be sort of misled into thinking that there's even some semblance of good faith going on here from Lawyer Lightfoot. Immediately after she got elected, the first thing she does is she's like, okay, there's too much crime on the subway. We're going to put SWAT teams on them. And so, you know, you just be on the red line and there's a SWAT team. And, you know, because again, this is what happens when you put a SWAT team on the fucking subway, they immediately shot a dude in the back for nothing. There's literally no reason they just shot him in the back. So that was like the first few weeks of Lightfoot. And then during the uprising, she turned the rich part of Chicago into a medieval castle. She raised all the draw bridges into the middle of the city so that no one could get into the central part of the city. It was awful. And then, you know, as he sort of like, there's more and more sort of bad Lightfoot stuff. Most recently, so Chicago got a bunch of aid money from the federal government and she spent $281 million of it paying the police.

Not the schools. Yeah, nope. And CPD, like, these, again, I think I've talked about this before, but like, when the CIA was like our initial torturing program failed, where do we go to like find people who know how to torture? They brought in the Chicago police detective, like, and, you know, and this is, you know, CPD, like, like, there's, there's to have a CPD, right? There's, there's like the torture CPD and then related to them, but not necessarily identical is the part of the CPD that's just a cartel. Like, there was, there was a thing in the beginning of the 2010s were like, it turned out that like the almost like the huge parts of the CPD were literally just a cartel, they were running drugs, they were just like doing shakedowns. And like one person total, like, got arrested by the FBI for it and everyone else is just still there. It's great. It's a, it's a time. So this is, this is who Lori Lightfoot is. She sucks, like everyone hates her, like her, the people who should be her political allies hate her, like Chicago, Chicago got like a police reform bill. And the reason it was like a very mild one, but the reason it happened was just that like, like the, like the alderman passed it out of just pure spite, because of how much they don't like Lightfoot. So this is, this is the, this has been my, my Christopher Shouts at Lori Lightfoot intro to this.

But yeah, needless to say, Lightfoot not acting in good faith, just absolutely. Batman villain. Yeah, it's incredible. No, actually, that's not fair because a lot of Batman villains are kind of right. Yeah. Yeah, she's like the nightmare fusion of like Batman and a Batman villain. Like what if, what if like the worst aspects of both and then made them the mayor? It's, it's a. Yeah, I've been kind of, so I moved here almost a year ago from a smaller city. And I did not like the mayor in my city and he, he really was a big fan of like the Lori Lightfoot playbook, but I guess people weren't as politically involved there.

And my first week working in Chicago public schools, somebody mentioned the mayor mentioned Lori, and everybody kind of groaned. And I was like, oh, you don't like her. You don't like your mayor. And I mean, I knew they didn't, but I was just kind of testing the waters ahead. And this lady looks at me and goes, we hate her. I swear, like if you mentioned her name in this city, people practically spit on the ground. It's like, it's amazing because I get like, like you mentioned a demon. Yeah, it's like, like Chicago, Chicago notoriously, we all hate our politicians, but like Lightfoot, like there were, you would find Roma manual supporters, right? Like, I don't know a single Lori, like outside of the schools, within the schools, everyone I know. Yeah, it's like, even the cops, even the cops don't like her.

Like she keeps, she keeps funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into them and they still don't like her. It's like, it's incredible. How do you unite the teachers union and the police union on something? This is the only thing that they've ever agreed on is fuck Lori Lightfoot. It's really incredible. So, like Lightfoot's latest scheme. Yeah, do you want to explain, I guess go back a little bit into the history of sort of how Chicago and Chicago public schools have kind of been responding to COVID and then how they just did this stuff.

And yeah, I guess like, yeah, give us a background like what's going on right now. Well, I'm going to preface with two things. One, I am fairly new here, so I don't know all of the details. And two, I really want to emphasize that I'm just here talking for myself. I don't represent CTU in any way. This is just, I wanted to talk about my feelings on things. So what I do know is they were doing remote learning. And when I arrived here in March, we were fully remote.

And then in the fourth marking period, so like around like after spring break, we moved to a hybrid model. So we had parents and kids could like choose if they wanted to stay online or if they wanted to be in person. I think like 60% or more, depending on what school chose the online option. Like a lot of parents just were not comfortable putting their kids in. There's been like a ton of talk about, you know, like the most economically disadvantaged families need the schools open, but it's kind of been the reverse. It's been the people who have more means are more interested in opening and people who are less well off are a little more resistant to it. I mean, that's not the same across the board. I don't know if I'm going to generalize too much, but that's been what I've seen.

I think if I had to guess it, there's a lot of history behind that. Like, I mean, first of all, just can your family afford an illness like this, and people living in multi general generational households. I think something that CPS and our government in general really failed to acknowledge is just how how much mistrust there is between government institutions, public schools and people of color. I mean, for good reason, you know, they have been repeatedly just screwed over by these institutions. And I can absolutely understand why they might not trust a school district that says, hey, we'll keep your kids safe because they weren't doing it before the pandemic. So we had, I had like seven kids in one of my classes and like 10 and another, and then the rest of them were online and I'm like sitting at a computer teaching to the kids online and to the kids in the room. All the kids in the room are on their computers too so that we can like still be like one cohesive class. It was hard, and it was like kind of like mentally fatiguing, like just going back and forth like that.

But, you know, we made it work. I was kind of I was really proud of us like we made it work we made it happen. We stayed in contact with the families and the kids constantly. And like as things moved on as numbers started going down more people started warning their kids back. And after spring break they, well, so like after spring break they let people come back and then as we move towards some more and more kids were coming back, which it was the school I was in was handling it very well our principal was really committed to like keeping us safe so there was testing like once a week somebody would come by and be like yo go get your COVID test. I don't know if kids were being tested but I know teachers were. Then summer happens. I ended up in a different school in the Austin neighborhood which is a lot less advantage than the one that I had been working in. And we opened back up fully in person, no remote option like at all like if the only people who could get remote were kids that were deemed medically fragile.

But they had to one submit like tons of paperwork to prove that and to their siblings could not stay. So at that point it's like why what's the point. Yeah. And if you were a teacher who had a medically fragile child in the schools, your kid could be remote but you couldn't. So then, you know, how is that going to work? Yeah. And I found in the school where I was, you know, this is the issue with Chicago and with, you know, most of the country is some schools have more resources than others. And the school, I didn't know where to get tested.

Nobody like told me. I think there was some kind of testing program. Not sure. Definitely nothing for students. I've since moved to a high school that has more resources but still I have not been able to figure out where the heck to get testing, which has been one of the biggest things that CTU is asking for is we want opt out testing instead of opt in testing. So you would automatically be registered to test and if you didn't want to test, then you would have to opt out, which would end up with far more people getting tested and make it a lot easier because I mean a big part of why people aren't signing up is it's really hard. Like, I don't know where to find it. Everyone's like, it's in your email somewhere.

I've searched my email. I don't know. Like we get like 800 emails a day. Yeah, and it's yeah, like, you know, I think anyone anyone who remembers what being in a school is like those they have. I mean, just the absolute worst bureaucratic stuff like it's it's it's like honestly like it like my experiences with like academia and like back in like high school like their tech stuff was like worse than corporate tech stuff which is like astounding. It's ridiculous. Do you want to jump into here into Lightfoot's like, okay, Lightfoot has like invented a new kind of COVID denialism, which is like, like she's now turned into like a COVID test denialist. It's weird.

It's incredible. Like she actually went on this rant about how like COVID testing is a quote quasi medical procedure and how you're going to get lost. Like it's it's bizarre. So this this journalist asked her about the testing because it's and I don't know which journalist that was but I wanted to thank them so much because they I've seen a lot of the reporters are actually out there trying to keep CTU's demands in the conversation as opposed to this like oh, lazy teachers don't want to work like fuck off. We do want to be working. But so I almost thought that she had like mixed up with this person said and thought that they were talking about vaccines, but even so like, stop it. Stop. Just stop doing that. But who is having a reaction to a COVID test?

Like you just sticking they don't even stick it that far up your nose anymore they just do the little in your nostril or like a mouth smile. Yeah, like someone who had like, I genuinely did have a kind of bad reaction because the guy jabbed it up really far and like, I was like sneezing a lot afterwards. But it's like, oh, no, you sneezed a little bit like what does it even mean? It's not like, I feel like people are acting like this test is like this weird new technology. It is it isn't like right before the pandemic. A couple months before I had the flu and I had exactly the same kind of test they stuck a thing up my nose it was hella uncomfortable. It took like two seconds they stuck it on a little plastic thing on my Bob and said, Oh, looks like you have the flu. It's I don't know where this is coming from. I think it's just she is not a very charismatic person and she's not someone who does well under pressure.

And right now she's back into a corner and she's acting out. And it's been kind of wild like I've seen she's she's also throwing other people around her under the bus. Like she says something about Pedro Martinez like she says the teachers aren't in charge of this Pedro Martinez is in charge. She's the CEO and I'm like, OK, so you're being this is setting him up to take the blame on this. I saw another thing that you tweeted about like it was she was like, no, no, it's actually the mayor's and nothing. Sorry, it's actually the it's the principal's responsible for this. The principal's were like, no. Yeah, so CPS is kind of interesting.

This can be really good or really bad depending on what school you're in. But the principals really have a lot of autonomy over their school. I have now been in two schools where that's worked out great. My principal rocks. If she ever hears this, I hope she knows that I said that I think she's great. Also, the principal I worked at the beginning of the school year was awful. So but when it comes to like district wide protocols, like that's district wide. And so CPS apparently had a meeting with principals where I heard some rumors about this too, but I also saw that letter that they had posted.

The principals are one really frustrated because CPS isn't communicating stuff with them very effectively. And so parents will be calling like, do we have school tomorrow and they don't know, but CTU knows and is telling their members. So the teachers all know the like more answers than the principals do, which is obviously really embarrassing if you're supposed to be in charge. And then they're, they were told in this meeting with CPS schools going to be closed on Friday. Okay, schools close on Friday. Great, sounds good. And then Lightfoot gets on the dang news and tells everybody that it will be done on a school by school basis at principals discretion depending on if they have staff. So now all of these principals who had already told their students and families that were closing look like they're the ones who closed it. As opposed like, and that's, it is rare for me to feel bad for a school principal because that's my boss, you know, I don't like my boss, but I feel bad for them right now.

Oh my God, like you're just trying to like make sure that people have the information they need in a timely manner and this lady is up here making you look like a monster. It's so unfair. Yeah, should we talk about what's been happening in the run up to the past sort of winter break and then the stuff that's happening now because it's very grim and bad. Yeah, so a lot of schools have been having COVID cases. There's, I'm not really sure what's going on with CPS is data, it kind of seems like they're not reporting it very faithfully or accurately like, if you look at their tracker, there'll be cases and then suddenly they'll be gone. They never really get a hard number ever like will be like if you have a student in your class who has been quarantined, and we all know what it is but they don't say it they'll be like, you know, Johnny will be out for the next X amount of time due to health reasons please let him join via Google Mead. And they never do that's the other annoying thing is like the students, I think because they are either close contact or they're sick. You know to them it's like a break almost like they're not going to log in randomly like it's, it's just with, I think with kids like once it stops being consistent and it's like back and forth all the time. It becomes very difficult for them to stay motivated, because they're out of their routine like I sometimes hate it when people say this but it is kind of true kids kind of thrive on routine.

So, at this point now I have like a third of my class at any given moment will just not be there. And it will be a different third of the class, every, you know, it kind of like rolls through. So, all of my students are like different points in the curriculum. It's hard to like know what to teach each day because I don't know who needs what it's hard to reach out to the kids that are at home and make sure that they get what they need because I'm so busy trying to catch these kids up and move these on and all that stuff, which I have seen some research I'll see if I can find it after we're done that like pointed out that like remote learning isn't the worst thing that can happen the worst thing that can happen is just flipping back and forth all the time and having huge numbers of kids absent from in person learning. So, we go on break. And obviously, we have Omicron like sweeping through the country and we all knew that there were going to be spikes like we knew that and Chicago had what was if Illinois had some like astronomically high number of new cases, like breaking records all over the place. CPS has had huge increases. Yesterday, we had 43,984 cases in Illinois. So, like it's that's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so over break like the last like the Union had been trying has been trying forever to get CPS to come in and agree to a few things. So, one in February we had a an agreement that schools would flip to remote if they reached a certain threshold that agreement has expired and CPS has refused to come to the bargaining table and negotiate a new one. They're just like, No, we don't need it. We also have been trying to get them to do the opt out testing and a like surveillance testing program in school so we can kind of just have little bits of data to understand like where are these

cases CPS doesn't want to do this. They don't want a threshold for flipping remote because then they would have to flip to remote and they don't want the surveillance testing because then they would have to flip to remote and they just don't want to flip to remote. Yeah. So finally over break you know it kind of came to a head like they were still refusing to negotiate like one of the Union delegates in my building said something about they've been meeting they go to these meetings like you know they're like twice a week. They try to get these meetings to happen and the mayor never comes and the CEO never comes like they they will either send lawyers or they don't show up. Like dude sounded so tired and demoralized when he said that I felt bad for him. But yeah so we voted that we were going to go in on Monday and Tuesday meet with our safety committees get a feel for what's going on in school, and then we are going to have a vote on Tuesday night as to whether or not we will do a remote work action on and I know a lot of people have been like trying to make it sound like this was very sudden but it absolutely wasn't like we had a vote about whether or not we were interested in doing this. And then we had a vote on whether we were still interested on having a vote and then we had the vote and the delegates voted on if they wanted to hold an official like should we do an action vote.

We did. It was like 70% voted yes. There were some complaints that some people didn't get their ballots but they did wait till they had enough yes votes to reach that two third majority that we needed. So, you know, CTU has every step of the way really been making sure this is actually what we want this isn't just like unilateral things like Laurie keeps throwing that word unilateral around it wasn't unilateral it was like at least two thirds of the teachers in this district said, I don't feel safe at school. There's not enough staff in the building right now to even teach half my kids, a third of my kids are out. This isn't working. So, yeah, so we voted that we're going to stay home and work remotely, and then we got locked out. Yeah, which again like I want to focus on this for a second because like even a lot of people who are sympathetic to the teachers unions on Twitter you see this a lot they'll be like the CTU went on strike it's like no they didn't. 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 Aaronson, 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 heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The teachers are not on strike. The teachers are attempting to work from home and the school district will not let them. Yeah. Every morning I get up at 6.30 to make my coffee and I sit down and I try to log in and I know I won't be able to, but I do it anyway. Thankfully, I had thought to download as much of my materials as I could prior to this onto my personal device. So I am still able to create lesson plans and making some very cool social studies slides. I'm so sure that my students are going to love that. Lots of cool assignments for them to do too. This is a lockout and Lori keeps saying this word, illegal work stoppage. It's not a work stoppage. We are actively working. She has illegally, it is in our contract that she can't lock us out and she did.

Everyone's suing each other and saying illegal, but I know which side is right. I am not an enormous specter of the law, but this is one of the rare occasions where the thing that is happening is both illegal and also just wrong. The reporting on this has not gotten the actual fundamental thing which is happening here, which is a lockout, and it's enormously frustrating in a lot of ways. Local media reporting has been a lot better, but any national coverage I've seen has just been like. That's going to be it for part one of this interview. Come back tomorrow for part two when we will talk more about what's actually going on inside the schools. Generally, do the media shop for them because the Lord knows they're not actually getting it right. You can find us at happen here pod on Twitter and Instagram as usual, or you cannot find us. In fact, I encourage you not to find us because good Lord, the internet is bad. Goodbye. 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 the 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 iHeartRadio 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 AJ 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 iHeartRadio app, on 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things going badly and falling apart. And today we are back with part two of our interview with Lucy about how the Chicago public school system is falling apart under the relentless assault of cruelty, malice, and incompetence by the Chicago public schools and by the mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Enjoy. There's another thing I want to talk about a bit, which is when you've been back, when you've been teaching in these classrooms, what is it actually like to teach in these classrooms? How safe actually is it? So, I mean, I've been in a lot of different environments. When I was teaching middle schoolers, I did not feel super COVID safe. They are, I don't know if people know this about middle school age kids, they love to touch each other, especially boys.

They love to wrestle. They're always putting each other in headlocks. I am constantly having to just be like six feet, six feet apart, or three feet, or whatever CDC has said we are now. They don't put their masks on. They put their masks in their mouths all the time, like in their mouths. Oh no. They're constantly finding like weird little excuses to have their mask off. Like they'll just sit there with like, like they're allowed to have water bottles because they can't use the water fountains. They'll just sit there with like a straw in their mouth for like extended amounts of time. And I'm like, I need you to put your mask up. Take quick sips and put your mask up. And they're like, I'm drinking. Like, I'm going to be drinking at the end of this day. Like, I know, take a quick sip, put your mask back up. It's really, really important for your safety. And then I have other kids who are absolutely straight up like terrified of this because like they've lost parents, they've lost grandparents. And it's, it's really scary. At the high school level, it's been a little better. High school kids are a little more rational. But I still have a few who are just like, their masks are down around their chins all the time or under their nose and I'm like several times a like, okay, time for everybody to do a mask check. Make sure your mask is covering your nose, your mouth, your chin. I'll remind them like I have a spouse at home who has an underlying condition and like please don't have me bring home a deadly disease to him. Because that would really not be great.

Most of them are pretty good, but still they're getting sick. Like I think we had like 40 kids out of my buildings on Monday. And like 28 staff members or something like that were out. And we had one sub, which is the other, that's the other issue is this isn't really a question of if we should go remote. It's a question of when will we be forced to go remote. And we can either do that now before everybody has gotten sick and wait for this to subside and get some better mitigation strategies in place. Or we can do it after everybody is sick and then we're going to be scrambling to figure it out and also be sick at the same time. I don't really see how that makes any sense. Yeah, that's the part of this that I've just like, I just like, I don't get it. Like, I guess like fundamentally there's there's like a mental break where it's like I don't understand why. Like, Lightfoot and CPI are so insistent about not going remote. Like, I get that like, yeah, it's it's hard on kids, but it's like, it's, it's, you know, it is the years 2020, 2021 and 2022, like no matter what you do, it's it's hard on the kids and it's like, yeah, I also I wonder how much of it is the remote learning that's hard on them and how much of it is just the everything around them is crashing and falling and burning around their ears because the messaging that they've been getting is that they don't matter.

They're not important. Their safety isn't important. Their families aren't important. And some of them like want to be remote. You know, a lot of them, a lot of their parents want them to be remote. They're like, you know, it's not as good. But at least I feel safe. Some of them even thrived in remote like actually did pretty well and I really wish that it was just an option for those students who actually did well with it that they could just like if we even ended up with like a third of our students choosing it, it would mitigate this so much because that's a third of the people not there to spread it around. I ask like how big how big your class sizes are. Right now, the building I'm in now I have like 25 to 30 in some my it was kind of similar at the last building like they're in that range 25 30 I have like always have like one or two that are like 20 or below that are usually special education like inclusion classes where I have a co teacher. But yeah, it's, you know, some of them are pretty crowded and it really varies by school like there's definitely schools that have over 30 kids in a room and don't have the staff because it's just that's the other thing is like they keep talking about, you know, I keep seeing people be like fire all the teachers and I'm like, good luck. Yeah.

Yes is chronically understaffed. What are you going to do. Yes, like this, but yeah, I think again, like this job is really hard. Like it's being a teacher. Yeah, it's exhausting and it's very, very rewarding like when it's good it's great. When it's bad it is miserable. So, yeah, and like what it looks like and I mean, that's, you know, it depends. It really depends on what school you're in. I think everybody can agree that it is difficult right now. So we have like air purifiers going and masks on and I cannot understand what my kids are saying a lot of the time like I do not know and they speak so quietly. Yeah, like I need you to shout it, say it like you mean whatever it is.

So, you know, that's been challenging and frustrating and exhausting, but the worst thing ever is finding out that one of my students is sick. Yeah. Like I hate when they're, I hate it when they hurt like whenever that one of them is hurting, I feel bad and knowing that their home's sick is it's really upsetting and just, you know, it's distressing for teachers to know that their kids are struggling in a way like that. So that's, you know, we want them to be safe. You know, like these kids it's like, and this is true of the staff too when you're when you're getting sick. It's like, yeah, like some of these people will be okay, but enormous numbers of people are like some of these people are going to die. Some of these people, a lot of these people are going to get disabled. Yeah, I mean, the long term long term infections are really bad.

And we, you know, one of, if people remember, we did an episode with one of our friends who's a nurse and like, yeah, like he had long COVID. His long COVID was like, he couldn't do more than like, like getting out of bed or like, like just walking across a room would just put him in bed all day because there's, you know, there's an enormous range of sort of like, of long COVID side effects. And yeah, it's like, it's, it's, it's like, CPS is just a couple of schools. It's just in like, they're getting people killed. Yeah. And it's, you know, that's like the question like they keep talking about percentages and I'm like, these are human beings. Every one of those numbers is a human. So when you say like only, you know, point whatever percent are going to be long term affected, like, okay, those are people.

Can we stop like dehumanizing them with these like data points? And as for like the, the issue with like how like kids are less affected by or whatever, like the fact is like, the more we allow this to spread around the more variants we're going to see. And we don't know that the next variant isn't going to be the one that is really significantly harmful to children. And we are basically turning our schools into these Petri dishes where this thing can mutate and become stronger. And now we have vaccinated people who are in that mix and it's becoming resistant to the vaccine. So I, you know, I'm a social studies teacher, not a science teacher, but this seems like a bad move to me. Yeah, yeah, it's, I don't know, it's just sort of heartbreaking a lot of ways. It's just like, they've just decided that, you know, and again, like, I don't know why life what's doing this.

Like, maybe it's just like, she wants to share up her base thing because she's trying to build a base among like the just like rich, weird door ciders or something. But like, it's a small business person that's always been people are the small business owners who don't want to close schools because then, you know, their workers won't come in. And I, you know, I want to feel sorry for them, but I don't know. No, I don't know. Fuck you. Because yeah, there's also a lot of small business owners who have been very supportive of us. We had, there was like a taco place offer and free burritos to us. Like, I really appreciate that.

And there's a community who understand that like the lives of our children are so much more important than you missing two weeks of profit. Yeah, like, you will figure that out. And if you want to bail out businesses, we can figure that out. But right now, and also like is saying like, we have, we aren't, we refuse to do anything that might be inconvenient for business owners. Like, what is that? Yeah. And it's like, it's like, yeah. So, you know, and also, yeah, business owners did get bailed out.

Like they got, they got, they got 0% loans. Most of those loans got written off. And meanwhile, yeah, it's like, well, okay, what did life do with the COVID money? She, she gave it to the cops. And oh, hey, guess, guess who's also just a rampant sputter of COVID. Oh yeah, it's the cops. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, resisted vaccines the most the cops. I mean, actually, there is one funny thing which I'm actually very excited about, which is that the cops are doing, they're having their first. So they have a new class graduating, but from the police academies, which is really bad. And there's a whole, one of the like life what's things was that there, there was a huge campaign against building more police academies because, you know, everyone hates the Charlottes Police Department. They're awful. And if you have a hundred billion dollars for a new police academy, why or a hundred million or whatever it was, why can't you put some better ventilation in the schools? Yeah. Well, it's good.

Yeah. It's because like the CPD are like basically feudal lords. They have knights. They go out. They can shoot you like they rob you. They just like any, any, any large number of like black kids on the streets. Like if you just have like 15 kids walking around like eight quad cars will show up. And, you know, the light foot was like none of her like one of her campaign things, big campaign things like no, no, we're going to make sure we build these academies.

And so they're having their first like rounded. They've been having trouble recruiting because of COVID, which is good. Yeah. And they're about to have their first police academy exam and it's going to be in person. And I am. This is the only one of the few. Is this a Jair Bolsonaro or is like, I am rooting for the virus here. Like, please God save us from these cops.

But yeah, I mean, it's, But they're just going to bring it home and spread it around. Yeah. Yeah. That's the sad thing. It's just, it's grotesque. And yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's been this thing where I'm like watching like the school system is just throwing their hands up and saying, we don't care. We're done. The healthcare system is like crashing and burning all around us. Nurses are quitting. Hospitals are like, we don't have room for more patients. Like, did you have a cancer treatment scheduled? Sorry. Did you have a surgery scheduled?

Sorry. I just saw somebody on Twitter saying she has a brain tumor and she's supposed to have a surgery for it. And she can now because of COVID because they have no beds. There aren't any. And you're telling me that the right move right now is to keep the schools open, which has always been in every, every pandemic that we've ever had. Schools and hospitals and prisons are like the place where the whatever diseases spreads. And I know we've been claiming that like, there's not been spread in schools, but we've now seen the data that there in fact is a huge amount, which I've been like screaming about this since we started that. Their contact tracing models are, they're absurd.

They are like Kafka-esque. Like basically, so we start from the assumption that everybody is six feet apart and wearing their mask at all times. Yeah. Which they're not. It's not even, it's not even physically possible in a lot of classrooms for that to be happening. And then two, we start with the assumption that those things work. And so you'll get a call from a contact tracer that's like, hey, on, you know, like last Tuesday, Tuesday of last week, were you within six feet of any of your eighth graders for more than 15 minutes? Fuck if I know.

Tuesday of last week was I near an eighth grader for 15 minutes. I don't know. I have no idea. Yeah. Even if, like, even if I did know what difference does it make, it is an aerosolized virus. It is in the air. And the more you sit in classrooms, the more it accumulates. Like we have seen like studies about this, we've seen studies about how CO2 accumulates in the air when there's crowds. We know that stuff accumulates like that in classrooms very, very quickly. And you're going to tell me that as long as I wasn't within 15 or within six feet for more than 15 continuous minutes.

Not even like, not even 15 minutes like added up throughout the day, just 15 minutes continuously. I'm not going to get a virus. Are you kidding me? Like, that makes no sense. And so then if, and if, and if your answer to those questions are no, because whatever, you were following the rules, then they're like, okay, you got COVID somewhere else. It wasn't at school. Yeah, no, it doesn't. Yeah, it's nonsense. It's like, I go to work and I go home. I don't do anything else.

So I don't know where else it's coming from. Like, yeah, like, and I also just, I want to do a brief digression about like, okay, so like, like, I went to like a, like a pretty good, like a pretty well, like a very well funded, like, just like a Chicago area sort of school and like, okay, those places, those places, ventilation sucks. Like, again, like, again, I went to a very well funded school. Like we had a, we had drowned dead rats falling out of the ceiling. Like, it was, it was incredible. It was one of my, one of my, my, my, my great high school memories was my principal just like running full tilt, pushing a trash can because dead. Oh my God. That's horrible. But my school was wild.

We had how bad it was. We had a chemistry teacher let a kid set off a smoke bomb, like that they'd made, like in a classroom, but it didn't work. So it just like actually blew up. It was a time, but like, yeah, like, like these schools. It does project based learning. Okay. Yeah, yeah, you gotta light the school on fire. But like, like, this is a, this is like, yeah, like, like these schools are not like, they're not safe environments. Yeah. The building I worked in at the beginning of the year was a hundred years old.

It was built in 1920. And there was always this like sewage smell around the bathroom because the pipes were messed up. It was weird. Like, they couldn't fix it. I think it was the, I was the second or third time by building lid on fire. Like we, there was a, there was a whole thing in the building that was made of asbestos. And they just had left it there because it was like, oh, it wasn't exposed. Yeah. Yeah, schools still have asbestos in them. It's over. And like, I get like, I went to like a good, well-funded one of these schools, right?

Like, it's, I don't, I think there's, there's like, there's, there's these two, there's two things I think it like is interesting. Like there's, when you like talk to like the people who want the schools to open back up, right? They'll start talking about like, oh, no, it's fine. Everyone wears masks. Everyone's vaccinated. Everyone's succeeded. It's like, no, no, they're not like this. This is how it works in this like imaginary play world you've like created. Have you ever met a child? Like, have you met your own children?

Oh, that's the best. It's like, well, I've been having my kids wear a mask. I'm like, you haven't, you're full of shit. Okay. Because I told that kid to put their mask on like 15 times yesterday. And I love them. Beautiful face. I hope they get to show it off someday. But right now. Yeah. Cover it up. Please.

Yeah. I'm begging you. And I'm like, I'm not like that teacher who's really authoritarian. Like I've never been good at like writing kids up and getting on them for stuff because it's just like, I don't know. I hate doing that. I hate being that person. Yeah. So it's been like really, it's like a struggle.

It's like, am I going to be the person who nags them every five seconds? Or am I going to be the teacher that they like and want to learn from? Like, you know, this isn't sustainable. So, but you're asking like the attitudes of people who want to open schools back up and I, it's, it's hard because I, I have talked to parents who are worried, but they are also very upset because they see that their kids are struggling. Yeah.

And I really do feel for them on that. Like I really, really do. It is hard to see a kid struggle, but it is harder, I think to see a kid sick. That is really hard. And it's just this, like there are ways that we can overcome the difficulties of remote learning. Like we, we can find ways to give them the emotional support.

We can find better socializing outlets, but I don't know how we fix like you've become very ill and your body isn't going to recover in the way that you thought it would. Like I don't, I can't fix that. So that's something I've heard from other teachers that like the preparatory about learning stuff like is harder and takes more work than. Yeah, it does. It's, it's really rough.

I don't like doing it. I want to be in the classroom, but. Yeah. And I just, I just want to like once again, yell at all the people who are like the teachers are lazy and it's like, no people like they're like, yeah, like you're, like you are advocating to do more work because that's, that's the thing that will keep the kids safe.

And it's. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't understand like the behind the scenes, how the sausage gets made of a classroom. But I think a lot of people have this idea that like we are given curriculum and plans and materials pre-made. And sometimes that's true. It depends on your subject.

Mine is social studies is not a subject where that happens very much, which is part of why I like it because I like to be creative. Um, so like my week looks like, um, there are a lot of hours after school where I am sitting down, I'm looking at the standards that I need to teach, the topics that I need to teach, and I'm researching it and learning it and finding a way to teach that to kids who don't have the same like baseline knowledge that I have.

Um, and then I'm creating like an activity for them. I'm creating, um, you're, I'm finding like material like sources and like videos and stuff that they can watch that are going to help them or things to read. I'm modifying those things for the kids who have, um, you know, learning differences. I'm translating some of those things into Spanish for kids who don't really read very well in English yet.

So like that's the ton of work on its own. And then when we switch to remote, we have to figure out how to do all of that on Google classroom where now it has to all be typed like, or, you know, like, how do I figure, like, how do I do a group project online? How do I let them do something creative that isn't just sitting here answering questions on a worksheet? That's hard. And we've been really good at it.

And I've found all kinds of really cool tools to do that with, but it's so much work and it's work that I'm willing to do because I care about my job. I enjoy my work. I love my students, but, um, you know, and I want them to be safe, but like, you know, it is a ton of work. I'm not just sitting here eating bonbons all day or drinking cocktails. Yeah.

And I think there's, there's like a larger sort of like, like Americans have this like, the sexist sort of like hatred of like, or in disrespect of people who do both care work and a lot of creative work. Yeah, absolutely. And then simultaneously there's this sort of like, you know, there's a resentment to people who get to actually do something that helps people. And, you know, I think like right now we're seeing just the most toxic

fusion of that, which is that like, yeah, I know, like these, like, you know, and instead of like, you know, recognizing the enormous amount of work that that's going into all, like that's going into teaching, like the amount of sort of like the care and love that's going into the creativity that's going into it. And just like, the people, people's willing that like, you're willing list to make like enormous sacrifices to try to keep these kids safe.

They're just like, no, like the teachers are lazy. They don't want to work. They're going on strike. Like, and it's, you know, and then it's like they're doing this. And it's like, yeah, like you, you are like, they're killing their own kids. And it's just like, it's, it's this weird fusion of like, we, I guess this is like combination of like, feminized care labor,

emotional labor, and that sort of like, like intelligentsia, like professional white collar, intellectual kind of thing. And then also we're teaching a more introductory level of our subjects. So we're seen as like discount intellectuals who are also women who do care work. So it's, it's very frustrating. And I don't think a lot of people understand the amount of skill

and expertise it takes to be a teacher and be effective at it. Like it's not just, I need to know social studies to the level that a 12th grader would know it. It's, I need to know social studies beyond that level and know how to communicate it to a high school student. And also I need to know a lot of stuff about like child development. It's, it's really, it's something.

And I, you know, I find that to be fun and challenging, but I wish it was respected. Yeah. And, you know, and then you're talking about like people are sacrificing their own kids. I want to point out a lot like, I think there's a racial component to this. Yeah.

The people who are in wealthier schools and who are mostly white know that their kids are going to be fine. Like they are in schools that actually do have the resources to distance that have air filters that have good ventilation. They're vaccinated. Their kids are probably going to be fine. The kids that aren't going to be fine are low income students of color.

And it has always been this way. It's always been this way with schools. Like when schools were desegregated, we started with private school vouchers and we started with all of these like state testing requirements and withholding funding from schools that don't meet those, you know, test standards and all of these like this extra oversight on teachers. Like that stuff all comes back to white people don't want to

have to worry about black people's kids. That's it. And, you know, they will move their kids out to the north side or the suburbs or whatever. Notice that all of those suburb schools have flipped room. Notice that Lori Lightfoot's kids are in a charter school that is now remote. Lightfoot won't eat.

Lightfoot will not put herself in a room with the same number of people that a teacher has to go to every day. She won't do it. And she was telling people at the press conferences they had to wear their masks, even though she wasn't wearing hers, which was very strange to me. That's the thing. When you get to the politician level, they know it's dangerous.

Like they know it. They know that you can tell. Yeah, like they won't do it. But like, no, no, they're perfectly willing to just send you off to die, to send all these kids off to die. And it's just. Yeah, sometimes I feel I get kind of doomer. And I wonder if like, if that's not the plan, like, is it that?

I mean, I don't really believe that. I think what it really is, is this just like malicious neglect. If you're somebody who's a policymaker and someone comes to you and it's like, I need you to care about this population here that doesn't have a lot of money and needs a lot of things. And you, the policymaker are going to be like, oh, that sounds like so much work. And then somebody else is going to come to you and be like, I

need these things over here. And I do have a lot of money and I do have a lot of influence. And I'm going to make your life difficult if you don't do what I want. They're going to do what that other side wants. And what the other side wants right now is for kids to get back into school so that they can have free daycare so that parents can go to work.

And that's, and that's it. And teachers are standing here being like, I didn't get a master's degree and do, you know, countless hours of professional development to be a babysitter, you know? And no, not to knock babysitters. I was a nanny for a long time. That is hard work. But I didn't get a master's degree to be a babysitter.

I got a master's degree to be a teacher. And I'm in an environment right now where I can't really teach effectively. And all I'm doing is babysitting. They want to warehouse kids. That is what we're doing with the schools. That's why they want them open. And it's, you know, it's, it's hard not to feel like they just

are doing it because they hate us. Even though I know it's not, it just, it does feel that way. I will say, like, I will say that, like, so if you become elected as the mayor of Chicago, like your job is to break the teachers union, like that, that's, like, that's, that's, that's, that's like the role you're auditioning for. And they have been, they have been trying to do this for literally my entire lifetime.

They've been trying to do this like since before I was born. Like that's, and honestly, like wouldn't surprise me if this was another part of this was just them once again trying to break the teachers union. Oh, absolutely. And like, and if, and not even just like, yeah, you know, and unlike, like, not just on the sort of political level, like on the incredible cynical level of we'll just kill them.

Well, it's, it's a labor thing. Like it's not just a Chicago teachers union or even a teachers union thing. It is a labor movement across the board thing that the largest, I think the largest unionized workforce in the country is teachers. And we on top of that are a union of workers who have the power to absolutely bring our economy to a grinding hole if

we want to, we could all go on strike right now and nobody's going to do shit until we go back to work. They could if they, you know, they could try to like replace us with like people who are basically like hall monitors and give kids like canned curriculums, but they wouldn't really be learning very well and parents wouldn't be happy with it and they wouldn't be entering the workforce with the skills they need to make money for the economy to, you know,

make money for the almighty Dow. So the, it has been a project for decades in this country to try to break teachers unions because teacher unions occupy this space where they allow other unions to happen. We have, you know, enough influence on politicians that they can't just disband the labor board and make unions illegal, which they would absolutely fucking love to do. And if they could just get rid of these damn teachers unions,

maybe they could do it. So, you know, and that's what you see with the education reform movement where you have all these people advocating for vouchers and charter schools. And it's, you know, they want to break labor. And I see a lot of, I mean, now I'm going to scold some of my comrades, but I see a lot of leftists who are really skeptical of teachers and don't want to support the teachers union.

And I get it. Like there are a lot of teachers who really suck and there's a lot of teachers who are not radical, like most teachers are not radical. A lot of them are pretty conservative. But at the same time, if you were to abolish schools immediately right now and break up the teachers unions and all that, you're going to end up with rich people go to school,

poor people don't, if you're poor, your kid goes to work. Probably won't be in a coal mine, but, you know, they'll probably be like soldering my computer chips or coding or something for like pennies an hour. And I don't want that world. And if you actually care about labor, then you need to support teachers unions because the public schools are central to all of these communities that we want to be reaching.

And the unions are the only thing making sure that they stay public. Yeah. And it's like, I was like, again, like two, two, two, two, two IANA comrades who are anti-school. It's like yeah, like, okay. I hate school. I'm for it. De-schooling is great, but we need to do other things first.

Yeah, you have to. And like, again, like that you need to like support the workers, not the institution. Like it's like it's like saying I'm a vegan. So I'm going to go after McDonald's and please look at this. Like like some like I my high school was like, oh, like all this was like incredibly conservative. But everyone was still in the union. That was like the one that was the one thing

that was like, well, OK, there were two countervailing forces. One was that the Christians didn't seem to understand what liberation theology was. So occasionally they'd accidentally hire a leftist because they were like, oh, you're Christian, you're fine, you're from America. Yeah, we're not going to question you further. The second thing was 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 get 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 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 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,

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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. That even everyone was in the union. And that was like that was that was literally the only those are the only two left wing, like even like vaguely things.

I've gotten into so many teaching spaces by talking about how I like critical pedagogy and that Friary was a communist. Yeah. Or being like, oh, I'm really, really, really into Chicago history. I especially love the history of like labor in Chicago because it's it's huge. People here care about it and they don't get that. Like I'm an anarchist, you know, and and a lot of the like sort of like education reform language. I think it's very funny.

It is 100 percent just lifted from radical like sociologists and anthropologists and educators who are trying to find ways to dismantle like authoritarian structures in schools. And so they'll come up with these like, you know, like restorative practices and all this stuff. And then they kind of get they make their way up to the ivory tower and then get repackaged in this. It's it's like, I don't know, it's like a machine or something that like

sucks up radical ideas, brings them up to the academy, repackages them to make them nice for politicians and then spits them back out. And it is exhausting and I hate it. It makes me so mad. I'll never forgive people for what they did to the term restorative justice. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have anything else that you like want to make sure that people like understand about what's happening in the schools right now?

Um, I guess just the biggest thing is I want people to understand that, like. This is a question of when and under what conditions are we going to be forced into a remote learning situation? This isn't like we want remote learning because we like it because it's fun. It's because it's going to happen if you like it or not. The schools are going to close if you like it or not, because the unless you're OK with just like people are going to get sick and die and or go into work sick, which I think most of us agree that's insane.

It is there are you we're going to be in a situation where we don't have enough staff to keep buildings open. So either we can try and mitigate that now and to keep that from happening. Or we can just start our hands up and say, fine, let let the schools collapse. I don't want the schools to collapse. So if we could just go remote for two weeks and get some good testing in and have a vaccine requirement and personally, I would like to advocate for remote as an option for parents who want it.

I don't think that's on the table right now, but it's a good option. The table right now, but I think more parents out there should be demanding it. And I also would like to say to parents, you have a lot of power that you don't understand the school districts. Listen to the parents so much more than teachers. One parent's voice is worth like 10 teacher voices. So if you see something going on in your schools that you're not comfortable with, if you have questions, contact your principals,

contact the district, talk to people, talk to the other parents that you know, organize yourselves. If we had, you know, strong parent organizations on our side, we would be absolutely unstoppable and we could have the school system that we want and that our kids deserve. Yeah. And I think I like the right figured this out a long time ago that you absolutely. Yeah, look at what they're doing to the school board meetings with CRT.

Yeah. We could have that for people who are actually good people who care. Like there's no there's no reason that all of the other parents couldn't be going and saying, I want my kids to learn about race and I want them to be wearing masks and I want everybody to be vaccinated. Yeah. So I think I think that's a good note to end on. We, you know, we can make this better. We just have to, you know, work together.

Try. Yeah. Do you have anything that you want to plug? Like, do you have a way to support the teachers or? I think I'll send you a flyer that we have. It has some information for contacting Alderman, getting COVID tests and a petition to sign. If you could post that, I would really appreciate that. Yeah. I would definitely definitely do that.

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. Yeah. Good talking to you. Yeah. Good talking to you. I'm going to be real if you take, I like you, but now all signs point to a new serial killer in hollow falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm going to win. I'm Tig Torres and this is lethal lit.

Catch up on season one of the hit murder mystery podcast, leave a lit a Tig Torres mystery out now and then tune in for all new thrills in season two, dropping weekly starting February 9th. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to lethal lit on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Robert Lam and I'm Joe McCormick. And we're the hosts of the science podcast, Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

where every week we get to explore some of the weirdest questions in the universe. Like if sci fi teleportation was possible, how would it square with the multitudes of organisms that inhabit our human bodies? Can we find evidence of emotions in animals like bees, ants and crayfish? How would an interplanetary civilization function? Disfree will exist. Stuff to Blow Your Mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels and the wonders of techno history.

Basically, this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If anybody ever told you, you ask the weirdest questions. It is time to come join us in the place where you belong. The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday with bonus episodes on Saturdays. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When P.T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865,

what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual and the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American sideshow. So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who are at the center of it all.

In a place where spectacle was king, we will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye. So step right up and get in line. Listen to Grim and Mild Presents now on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at Grimandmild.com slash presents. All right, Robert, do you want to open this up with something? I don't know.

Nope, nope, you're opening. The opening is that is what you just did. OK, well, we're already opened. Welcome to it can happen here, the podcast about how things, things do be crumbling sometimes, including our ability to introduce the podcast that pays for salaries. It's actually a very meta art piece about the. Yeah, we started off very polished and slowly.

This is a commentary on, I don't know, something it's called. Figure it out. Figure out what it's a commentary on it. Yeah, it's called metamodernism. It's the post-postmodern. Anyway, we're going to be talking about disinformation and various bullshit today. So among the many disinformation vectors online, Joe Rogan's podcast

is obviously one of the largest single single vectors. Yeah, I mean, I've said this before, but I'll say it again. I don't think there's a cable news station as influential as Joe Rogan. You know, you could you could make commentary on like, oh, maybe they have a larger viewership, but in terms of like their actual ability to influence large numbers of people, there's certainly no single cable news host that comes close to Joe. And I would argue probably no network that does.

He's extremely influential by virtue of the fact that he's a meathead of people seem to find friendly and engaging. And he is very charismatic. He's good at what he does. He's good at talking. Yeah. So multiple times during the past three weeks, Rogan has brought on two separate quote unquote doctors whom have started to peddle something

called mass formation psychosis, which is kind of a new vector in the anti-vax kind of argument and like headspace. So for like, as for like the it could happen here portion of the episode, this one's pretty simple. Could mass formation psychosis happen here? No way. Not this time. We created it.

Not this time. No. Not this time. It's totally made up. Pure fiction. It's fiction. It's fiction. We made it up.

We made this one up. It's a made up tale. It's a total fabrication. Nope. Not really. It's fiction. Has it ever happened anywhere? I might also argue no.

Nope. Fiction. We've solved the podcast. Total fabrication. This is not a thing. Total fabrication. Made up tale. So yeah.

Well, but when whenever these like Cooke doctors bring up mass formation psychosis, you can actually kind of watch them get close to understanding something real. But then they veer off into reactionary nonsense. Like most powerful nonsense, there is an element of truth that it is spinning off of, you know? Yeah. So let's start off with some of the more kind of deranged examples and well then eventually providing at least some background onto the whole mass formation psychosis idea. And then we'll kind of discuss some of the more slightly interesting aspects of this

argument that Eurogon seems fond of pushing right now. So the first thing I want to talk about is Dr. Peter McColl, which is not the guy that was trending on Twitter last week or whatever. This is someone else that Rogan brought on a few weeks previously who actually started talking about this first. So background on McColl, by most accounts, he was like a top cardiologist for many years. He shares a similar story to other doctors who've become kind of COVID conspiracy celebrities for my friends and co-workers say he was a pretty reasonable guy and a good doctor.

And then he realized he could be worth millions of dollars. Yeah. COVID hit and he started to kind of go off the rails. And he initially began developing conspiracy theories in particular around hydroxychloroquine. And McColl was also in the news earlier this year due to, or I guess in 2021, he had a legal dispute with his former employer, Baylor University Health. So according to a lawsuit, for nearly six months after McColl's employment had ended, he continued to use his professional titles, such as the vice chief of internal medicine

at Baylor University, and this represented himself as a Baylor employee dozens, if not hundreds of times in media interviews in which he spread disinformation about the pandemic. So the type of misinformation that he talks about, you know, pretty basic stuff. Vaccines are neither safe nor effective. He was a very early hydroxychloroquine proponent. He claims that there's no asymptomatic COVID transmission at all, even if you're not vaccinated. And he claims that you cannot get COVID twice. Once you have it once, the post infection natural immunity is 100% a protective against

all future COVID disease, which, of course, is nothing. Nothing works that way. All of the things we just... No illness works that way. Yeah, no. Everything I just said is not true. All of it can individually be disproved by the existence of Jair Bocenaro. He defeats every single one of these claims as you say that, Chris, I'm looking over at

my digital picture frame that is just loaded with like a dozen photos of Jair Bocenaro in the hospital dying. Yeah. So... I recommend everyone do that. It improves every morning. As soon as I walk up to my recording studio, I see Jair Bocenaro getting shit sucked out of his nose from a tube, and I just feel ready to take on the day.

It beats coffee. Wow. That's strong words. The other big thing, and this is how we're going to get into the mess psychosis bullshit, is that he... McCull also asserts that 50,000 Americans have died from the vaccine shots. This is not true. Looking at like deaths possibly associated with it, it is like maybe 1,000 or 2,000,

which sucks, but like that's the highest amount, because again, it's not even... A lot of these things are not necessarily directly causal, so it's hard to figure out what is what. But if there is a number, it's around the 2-ish thousand range, not 50,000. And McCull thinks that or at least promotes the idea that the vaccine is a conspiracy theory to suppress hydroxychloroquine and therapeutic treatment for COVID. And this conspiracy is organized at every level through different regions, corporations, big pharma, Hollywood, and this is the mass formation psychosis, is that we've believed

that both COVID is like a big problem and that the vaccine is the solution. So I'm going to play a clip. Hopefully you guys can hear this of McCull talking about mass formation psychosis. Dope. We've seen mass psychosis in history before. The horrific group suicides that have happened with religious culture. We knew in Nazi Germany, where people in a sense offered their children up to eugenics programs in a progressive mass psychosis, and they themselves walked in the gas chambers

and went, they didn't fight, go kicking and screaming. This type of... That's a mass psychosis. So what Desmet says is there must be four conditions met for a mass psychosis. The first is the population must be isolated. People must be isolated for a plump period of time. Number two, we must have things taken away from us that we previously enjoyed. Number three, there must be constant free-floating anxiety.

Anxiety of more viruses, more disability, more death, more anxiety. And then the last one is the capper. Number four is there must be a single solution offered by an entity in authority, the vaccine. The only solution to the pandemic is the vaccine. We're in a mass psychosis. And what Desmet says is, with the vaccine, there is no limit to the absurdity that we will see. No limit to the absurdity.

So this idea of, here, take a vaccine, take any vaccine. That's absurd. Vaccines are different. There must be a winner. There must be a loser. There must be somebody. I don't know why. Why would it be any vaccine?

It's the same with the mass. Wear a mask. Doesn't matter what kind of mask. Just put it over your face. It's the absurdity of, well, I've already had COVID. The CDC says you can't get COVID again. All right. Nope.

OK. So listeners at home should know so that you understand what this video is, that the entire time he's talking, there is what appears to be the eviscerated corpse of a black woman lying underneath him. Like it's horrifying. It's like very... What is happening? What is happening?

She's like... She's like... I think it's like... One of the dolls that medical students learned how to do autopsies on, it's not a real person, but it does look like the corpse of an eviscerated woman as he's just like chatting. But the face really does look like a person. It took me a... I thought it was like...

I couldn't figure out what was going on for like... Yeah. I mean, yeah. It looks like a real person. The cadaver dolls that they have for trading are quite good. I kind of want to get one for the next time I'm in Texas and want to use an HOV lane, but that's the story for another day. So yeah, that's pretty dumb, especially the notion that people were hypnotized into peacefully

walking into gas chambers. They weren't... I just need to state like that's... Not only is that like... That is objectively untrue to the extent that I could provide anyone interested with thousands of pages of reading from people who survived concentration camps about how they worked and why people walked into them. And a lot of it just boils down to the fact that it was...

They were making a very rational choice, which was, I have no options here. I cannot get out of this, but I can at least make sure that my children are not panicking in the last seconds before we're killed. And a lot of the people, because a lot of the actual like grunt work of loading humans into the gas chambers was done by other inmates who were also not going through psychosis, they were given a chance to survive longer by helping to operate the camps. And those people, you can read some of them did survive and some of them wrote about their experiences, which is some of the most harrowing shit imaginable for a human being to possibly

go through. It is all tremendously well documented. And the most offensive thing I can imagine is saying that these people were somehow... Is saying, number one, it's incredibly offensive to say that they were going through some sort of psychosis and that's why they walked into the chambers and not, this was the best option available to them, given what was going on and what like the situation they had been forced into. They did not have other options.

It was that or get machine gun to death. And maybe you think you would choose a different option. But if you're critiquing them or trying to claim that like the only reason they would do that what they did was that they had lost their minds, I will hit you in the face with a brick, fuck you. That's my answer to that actually. If you are someone who is interested academically in why people did some of the things that they did at the death camps and like how that actually functioned psychologically, it's

like a short book. It's this way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen. And it is a quasi-fictionalized book by a guy named Tadius Barovsky who was a survivor of the death camp. So it's based on his experiences at Auschwitz and Dachau. And he describes the way in which the world of the camps worked and the psychology of the camps worked. And he's not a piece of shit grifter asshole.

He's a guy who lived through all of this. So if you actually care about any of this, just read that. Everything this guy says is wrong. And if I had a chance to, I would hit him in the face with a brick. Please continue, Garrison. Yeah, it really sucks because it's not just a combination of medical misinformation, but also just the most shit sociology. And it creates this a really, a really disgusting package of really bad sociology, medical misinformation.

And like, yeah, he's doing this to, like, because he can make a profit off of it. So he's saying these things. So I know he mentioned a name, Desmond. Desmond is the guy who kind of coined this term. We'll talk about more about him at the end. But for now, let's go on an ad break and we'll be back to talk about Dr. Robert Malone, the other other guy who's been pushing this nonsense. So here's someone else.

I probably will want to hit with a brick. Even more so. Honestly. Yeah. Good. And we're back talking now about mass formation psychosis and the dumb people who are, well, or smart people who are using. Yeah.

I don't think they're dumb. I think they're evil. Yeah. So yeah. So after after McCull went on Rogan's show, it got that show got pretty popular. One big right wing kind of Trumpist media personality named Melissa Tate was permanently banned from Twitter after posting about the podcast and making the following post to her half a million followers.

Global bombshell. Dr. Peter McCull on the Joe Rogan show says Moderna made the code vaccine long before COVID actually hit and that the pandemic was a premeditated and concerted scheme by government and medical entities to then force vaccinations as the solution. So that's the type of narrative that they're trying to foster. Yeah. Because the pandemic has been so good for Biden's approval ratings. It's really working out great for everybody.

US US Senator Ron Johnson also promoted the interview saying Rogan asks excellent questions and McCull provides the answers. So yeah. So apparently the mass formation psychosis Dr. Guy was enough of a hit that Rogan's team decided to very soon after bring on another line conspiracy doctor, Dr. Robert Malone. So during the last week of 2021, Rogan invited Malone onto his show Malone's a virologist and an immunization doctor who claims credit for inventing the mRNA vaccine in a pair of papers from the late 80s.

Spoilers. He did not. There was work on the vaccine before him and work continued after him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And in 89 he published a paper kind of positing maybe mRNA can be binded with other kind of proteins.

He did not really do any work on it besides just saying I wonder if this could maybe happen. And then he decided to dig into this dude a bit. Okay. There were people asking similar questions and publishing papers at the same time. Well, and before in like 78. Yeah. Yeah. So Malone actually thought this was too hard and abandoned this project very soon and

then went to work for like the military to develop other random like he thought the RNA vaccines were too hard. So he went on to develop more stuff around DNA vaccines and has been working with like the military and various like big pharma companies on vaccines for a while. More accurately Dr. Kariko and Drew Weisman are two doctors that are widely agreed and acknowledged to have put the most development work and actually like actually doing the science to make mRNA vaccines a thing. And then of course development of them was due to you know work of hundreds of researchers.

So it's not you know one person does not invent something like this. No. But it makes it for an easy title for your viral video. Yes. And in fact actually logically the that's a journalist website reached out to Malone and for an article and Malone replied back stating that he did not actually literally invent the vaccine but instead developed a vaccine technology platform. And then he presented logically copies with nine patents none of which are the patents

for functioning mRNA vaccines. Of course not. But he claims to have patented mRNA technology. I mean he did it's technology that doesn't work and never has and never has worked and the patents are expired. Anyway I need to patent some shit. That just sounds like a real easy way to make a good grift. Yeah so you know as we've seen with my.

But because because Malone has crafted this you know narrative that I'm the inventor of this thing you know just like we've seen with my like COVID grifting doctors episode behind the bastards just a little shred of like medical authority can be more often transformed with propaganda into something much greater than what it is you know whether that be claiming to the be the inventor of the mRNA or you know claiming to be the former head scientist at Pfizer neither of those have to actually be true to work because propaganda makes it true via like repetition. So yeah it's the kind of thing we're like dunking on these guys like it's important

here to correct the record it doesn't do anything. No the fact that they're lying and nothing that they say is true does not matter when it comes to them having an influence in the community they have. If you get on Rogan it doesn't like like you've already done the thing that you need to do to be able to to profit from this it doesn't matter that you're lying. A few months ago Malone went on to Steve Bannon's show to talk about how the vaccines make COVID worse worse actually and you know this is this is the quote from Steve Bannon you're hearing it from the individual who invented the mRNA vaccine great and has dedicated

his life to vaccines. He's the opposite of an anti-vaxxer right so it's that narrative that it's made so yeah starting around June of 2021 Malone began to make the rounds you know Bannon, Tucker, Glenn Beck and now Joe Rogan. So you know starting in June he had like less than 5,000 Twitter followers and just before his suspension at the end of December for spreading misinformation he had like over half a million. So yeah so right after his Twitter suspension for lying about COVID and causing misinformation

to run rampant around a health issue that's when Rogan invited him on it was right after he got suspended from Twitter and there's been one particular clip from the interview that has really caught like the far right's attention you know the tweet that it's connected to is captioned on Joe Rogan Dr. Robert Malone suggests we are living through a mass formation of psychosis. He explains how and why this could happen and its effects. He draws analogy to the 1920s and 30s Germany. They had a highly educated population and they went barking mad.

They did not they made a series of logical the Nazis did not go mad they were not crazy they were not out of their mind they were doing they were a large part of what they were doing was saying things that they knew were were nonsense and lies in order to get elected because it riled people up and then a large chunk of their policy was figuring out well if this is the shit that we've been saying how do we how do we translate that into policy again reams have been written on this by credible researchers. The people who ran the camps were not insane although they were often deeply depressed and suicidal because it's not good to run a death camp.

They were all making rational decisions and the people who let it happen were letting it happen because it was dangerous and scary to interfere in any way they were all making rational decisions there was no insanity responsible for the Holocaust. Which is worse like yeah yeah yeah what they're doing is like they're trying to give people a way out right like you know this is sort of like oh it's like well the Nazis went insane all the people who followed them went insane it's like no no they don't you don't get that way out like you they chose to do this. Yeah the scariest and most meaningful lesson to take from the Holocaust is that you yourself

could be a part of a Holocaust even if you didn't support the killing because it's extremely easy to not get involved and stop something like that once it reaches a certain level and it's easy for the kind of political organizations that can make things like that possible to reach a point where they can carry that sort of shit out because again it's scary to fucking fight them. It's what it looks like a minute long and I think it's worth watching to see both in the context of when Rogan decides to interject and when he decides not to. Basically European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany.

I hate this guy already. In the 20s and 30s you know very intelligent highly educated population and they went barking mad and how did that happen? The answer is mass formation psychosis when you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don't make sense. We can't understand it and then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere and one of the aspects of that

phenomena is the people that they identify as their leaders. The ones typically that come in and say you have this pain and I can solve it for you I and I alone can fix this problem for you. Then they will lead they will follow that person through it doesn't matter whether they lie to him or whatever. The data are irrelevant and furthermore anybody who questions that narrative is to be immediately attacked they are the other. This is central to mass formation psychosis and this is what has happened.

We had all those conditions. If you remember back before 2019 everybody was complaining the world doesn't make sense blah blah blah and we're all isolated from each other we're all on our little tools we're not connected socially anymore except through social media and then this thing happened and everybody focused on it. That is how mass formation psychosis happens and that is what's happened here. Horrible. Completely wrong in every single way the Germans were not confused because nothing made sense.

They were angry because of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles they were also angry because of what they saw as and because of a myth that had grown up about why they had lost the first world war which was spread by people who were the equivalent in that time of Joe Rogan. They were scared of the left of communism of disorder of riots in the streets and one when Hitler took power most Germans did not like him. They did not blindly follow him. He gradually gained the support of the vast majority of Germany through a number of different

very logical things. One thing that he did that got him a lot of support was he took businesses and homes and money from Jewish people and from members of other groups that the Nazis were targeting and he gave it to Arians. There was a direct financial interest for a lot of people who got in line behind the Nazis and he established a series of programs like the Strength Through Joy program that really did benefit in a way that they had not known before the German working class. A lot of this was again subsidized through the appropriations of things that had been

owned by people that the Nazis were targeting. People fell in line behind Hitler for logical reasons. He did not reach the highest point of his support from the German populace until the taking of Paris which obviously that was something that a lot of Germans supported. They had spent four years failing to take the city in World War I. Anyway, sorry. It's all nonsense. It's all lies.

I think a reason why this is latching on so much to people on the right, like people on the right who don't consider themselves fascists, who would say Nazis are bad. They still are latching on to this because it provides a way for them to not understand how fascism actually works. It provides an alternative explanation that makes them not have to actually think about what fascism is and that's why they're latching on to it and it's already a part of the conspiracies they have around vaccines and power structures. Because it's the conspiratorial basis instead of thinking about power structures from an

anarchist or like a hierarchy lens, it reinforces the worldviews they have and makes them not have to interrogate the ones that they don't want to. It sucks. Malone's sub-stack goes into more of this and it's pretty bad. There's a few quotes that I think really kind of tied this together and then he has some horrible statistics. He says, as many of you know, I've spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory.

Most of what I've learned has come from Dr. Desmond. Dr. Desmond is like the guy who pointed this term and Malone writes, Desmond realized that this form of mass hypnosis, the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20 to 30% of the population in the Western world becoming entrenched with the noble lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media. Of course, the obvious examples of mass formation is Germany in the 30s and 40s.

How could the German people who were highly educated, very liberal in the classic sense, Western thinking people, how could they go crazy and do what they did to the Jews? How could this happen? To a civilized people, a leader of a mass formation movement will use the platform to continue to pump the group of information to focus on. In the case of COVID-19, I like to use the term fear porn. Leaders through mainstream media and government channels continuously feed the beast with more messaging that further hypnotize their adherence.

Studies suggest that mass formation follows a general distribution, 30% of people are brainwashed and hypnotized, fully doctrinaided in the group narrative, 40% in the middle are persuaded and may follow if no where the alternatives perceived and 30% will fight the narrative. Those who rebel and fight against the narrative become the enemy of the brainwashed and the primary target of aggression. So that's the way he thinks. That is how, which is really, it's really subject, like in terms of how he's building

a narrative in his head and specifically building a narrative for other people's heads to view why do I feel distrustful of certain pieces of power, but to love other pieces of power? Yeah. And it's again, like this idea that like, well, Germany was liberals, Germany had an enormous right wing movement, like it was a hugely conservative country in a lot of ways. It would also had a lot of leftist organizing and a lot of leftists in it, especially after World War One. But like the Freikorps and shit, there were these massive, million strong right wing armed

street movements that existed for the entirety of the Weimar Republic. Like it's again, everything he says is wrong. Yeah. And again, it's like the notion that like 30% are fully brainwashed, 40% are in the middle and persuadable and 30% fight the narrative. It's like these people who are upset, these like these specifically conservatives who are obsessed about thinking like, I would have fought the Nazis and because they don't understand how fascism works in power dynamics, they don't understand how, how they're actually

getting pulled into the same thing, but they still view themselves as the rebel, right? Everybody wants to be the rebel in America. Right. Yeah. Like they're so focused on being too. Yeah. Absolutely. So like they're so focused on being the rebel and like we're rebelling against the vaccine.

That is just like rebelling against the Nazis and you're like, what? Also, I just want to say about those numbers, when people start throwing even number of statistics out of you like that, it's because they're lying. Yeah. Yeah. It's because they're full of shit. Yeah. 30, 40, 30.

Absolutely not. No. That doesn't happen. Yeah. That's complete nonsense for one. Yeah. It's. Holy shit.

So again, because now the other thing that happened around this interview, because it became a lot of traction among the right is that whenever these things gain traction, they also develop conspiracy theories that people are trying to suppress it. They're like, look at the Google algorithm when you type in certain keywords. Like I know the day this was trending, it was like, if you Google Dr. Malone, the interview is only like the sixth result. The first one is this YouTube video debunking it and like I did this and like, no, the first result was the obviously viral video of him saying the thing.

Like they just, they can take one screenshot that maybe someone made or maybe because of one person's computer algorithm, that's what gave them and use this as like evidence that this is the entire system of the internet suppressing the thing. I'm like, no, the internet wants things to go viral. Now there's certain things where they like try to shut down the spread of dangerous stuff, but this got very viral. This was not contained in any way, but because of this notion, like they're trying to hide it, you know, it plays into their, them thinking that they are the rebels or something.

And there's also a very practical reason why the people who particularly know that they're lying do this. And it's because all of their success is based on a foundation of the way in which YouTube and Facebook and Twitter algorithmically amplified them and their predecessors. And they know that creating controversy over the fact that they're being suppressed leads to more content that basically algorithmically spreads their stuff more because more people are talking about it because other people's channels start debating it because 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 Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Idiots on the left are like, well, we should at least have them on a platform because we're anti-censorship too so let's debate them and like all of this stupid shit feeds into spreading their stuff. It's a very intelligent strategy. I hate it.

But just in terms of how ridiculous it is, I know a few days ago a congressman, Troy Nels, said that I submitted the transcript from the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast episode with Dr. Malone to the Congressional Record. Big Tech wants to restrict your access to information, but they cannot censor the Congressional Record. None sense. Big Tech is the entire reason why you know about these people. Yep.

Yeah. Entirely. If it were not for Big Tech, Joe Rogan would be narrating videos of robots fighting. So Jack Sobieck got real into this because he loves anything that goes viral, of course. If it weren't for Big Tech, Jack Sobieck would have died in a ditch of an Oxycontin overdose. So he got real into it. He changed his Twitter name to Jack, mass formation psychosebeck or some bullshit like that.

Yeah. Stupid. And it was tweeting about it nonstop for a week and like a kid learning about a new topic because of synchronicity, he's going to project it onto everything he sees now. He's like, this new all-encompassing topic that makes you avoid what fascism actually is and then point out at the things you don't like. So of course, he's going to apply it to everything. He made a tweet right before January 6th as the anniversary of the capital-intempted

coup thing. Regime media has launched a propaganda push against Ashley Babbitt today to psychologically prep their flock for the upcoming mass formation event planned for January 6th this week. This is called priming and it's a textbook mass formation theory tactic. Wait till you see what comes next. And like it is the sixth today has anything happened. You know what happened? Not a goddamn thing.

They got fucking Lin-Manuel Miranda to sing a song. Did you see that that wasn't, he might have said something in the beginning that was due, but the performance has been played before on other things. And I am, you know what? If we're trying to reach across the aisle, I am willing to admit that the popularity of Lin-Manuel Miranda might be a mass formation psychosis. Absolutely. The popularity of Hamilton is a mass formation psychosis.

Absolutely. We're just being assholes, but like seriously, like again, but it doesn't, it doesn't, when it comes to again, like the fact that he said there's going to be this whatever mass formation psychosis event on the anniversary of January 6th, then it's going to be huge watch for it. Nothing happens. Doesn't matter. Never matters.

Will never matter because again, like it's, I think one of the issues that we have here is the degree to which brain, brainwashing and hypnosis and stuff are talked about within kind of discussions of occultic milieu when they're not really a factor, not a factor in colts, not a factor. Not nearly as much as you think. Yeah. Not in the way that you think. There's things that like you could call brainwashing, but the, the, the, and you could even maybe

call hypnosis, although that's a lot murkier. And that is a very technical thing. Yeah. But, but the, what, what actual, like the, the stuff that's actually happening is again, it's always much more logical and rational. If you can just inhabit the mental space of the people who are in those communities because of what they're primed to believe first and because of what is happening socially because of the degree to which they isolate themselves from people who are outside of that bubble.

Like that's why you, it's so hard to get them out. It's not that like magically their brains have been taken over. It's that they have pretty methodically been put into a position where rejecting what is being told to them within this context is immensely more painful than just continuing to believe things that are not true. And there are more consequences for it, you know, you lose a support network. You lose a great deal of, of, of your own opinion of yourself and your self worth if you start to reject this stuff.

And once you can trap people in that, it's the same way that like Scientology works. Once you can trap people in that, the evidence of their eyes and the fact that like they're obviously being lied to and the things that they're being told about don't come to pass. It's the reason why you have a bunch of apocalyptic cults who say the world's going to end on this day and time. That day and time comes, the world doesn't end and the cult goes on, you know? Yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty ridiculous.

This whole thing was started by this professor of clinical psychology at a university in Belgium of Matthias Desmet. He seems to have a pretty bad understanding of history and actual like power structures and does not know the least bit about fascism and is trying to craft this thing to fill in the gaps in his own knowledge and applies it to everything. And I've read some of his stuff. It's nonsense. Again, just like the doctors who talked about it, they're like, yeah, he's using this also

as a way to explain how COVID's not real and how the vaccine is a ploy to do a bad thing. It's all ridiculous. It's irresponsible. And they're using it as a tactic and hopefully it's just going to blow over, but I'm sure it'll pop up every once in a while again, just like it popped up, you know, a few weeks ago. But that's really all I want to get into it. I could say more, but I think we have said enough.

I think we've said enough. All right. Well, fuck it. Yeah, that's all I've got. Read This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Thaddeus Borovsky. It will have a major impact on the way you see the entire world if you if you actually read it. There's some incredible pieces in there.

One of the things that Thaddeus points out is that people only ever have one kind of language for talking about the things that they feel, whether it's something they kind of vaguely care about or something they care about enough to murder over. And so when people engage in acts of horrific violence on a mass scale, they often do it looking and acting like they would if they were irritated at somebody in traffic. And it's the most unsettling thing about being the victim of a genocide that you don't see the kind of hate and the kind of rage and the kind of like what you would expect someone would need to be amped up to.

It's more of like you see more like kind of boredom and irritation and all that stuff. Like it's not anyway, read Thaddeus Borovsky. I desperately wish Joe Rogan would just sit and narrate this book on his show because it would actually a service to the world. Anyway, that's that's the episode. I'm Jake Halbert, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We control the courts.

We control absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy.

He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire on the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about and we're here

to change that. I'm April Dinwoody, host of the new podcast, Navigating Adoption, presented by AdoptUSKids. Each episode brings you compelling real-life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts. Visit adoptuskids.org slash podcast or subscribe to Navigating Adoption, presented by AdoptUSKids. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for children and families and the Ad Council. Thank you for watching this video.

Listen to the Luminary Original Podcast, the Roxane Gay Agenda, the Bad Feminist Podcast of your dreams, every Tuesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Could it happen here? It may be. Robert Evans, host of this podcast, to introduce this today's episode, which is not my episode. It's Andrew's episode. Hello.

Hello. How are you doing, Andrew? I'm good. How do you feel about that introduction? I'm good. I think it's... Could use some work, but we'll chop it. We never workshop anything.

We just roll right ahead. Yeah, abolish work and all that. Abolish introductions. Start in the middle. Why don't we just do that now? In media res podcast. Yeah, we'll make every podcast like Finnegan's Wake where the opening of the podcast is like halfway through a paragraph that the end of the episode starts.

Everything will be a circle. Let's just... Sophie, I think that's the new plan. Okay. Okay. Andrew, what do you got for us today? Right. Today I want to talk about bioregions and bioregionalism.

It's philosophy slash movement slash way of viewing things. It's a lot. So today we'll be exploring what it is, where it came from, and the role I see it playing in our strides towards Anarchy. But first, of course, we should really get some context. Bioregionalism. Have any of you heard of it, by the way? I have heard the term in relations.

I've heard of bioregions. Yeah. Right. Right. It's actually a pretty recent, all things considered, it was coined as a term by a guy named Alan Van Newkirk, founder of the Institute for Bioregional Research in 1975. And as a movement, it really gained a lot of popularity in the late 1970s in the Ozarks, Appalachia, Hudson River, and San Francisco Bay Area regions.

They had a conference in a prairie, interestingly enough, near Kansas City in 1984. And they've also had conferences in the Squamish Bioregion of British Columbia, as well as the Gulf of Maine Bioregion on the Atlantic. And of course, with all these different people coming together, sharing all their different ideas, talking about cool nature stuff, they developed sort of a platform, which they outlined in papers on subjects ranging from agriculture to forestry, to arts, to economics, to community. So while it was a very North American focused movement and philosophy at first, it has also

expanded to Europe and Australia. And these groups, there are hundreds of them all over. They get involved with local ecological work, like preservation and restoration, permaculture and all that, and they also form networks, so they would link on specific issues like water conservation, or organic farming, or tree planting. And of course, bioregional groups also get involved in attempts to make communities more self-sufficient by mapping and utilizing local assets. And well, as you come to see, bioregionalism and maps kind of go hand in hand in the way,

because it really is about that sort of big picture looking at the earth and the environment and our place in it. So what is bioregionalism exactly? In essence, it's a philosophy based around the organization of political, cultural and economic systems around naturally defined areas called bioregions. So what are bioregions? They are areas defined through physical and environmental features, including watershed boundaries, soil and terrain characteristics, flora, fauna, and climate.

Bioregionalism also stresses the determination of a bioregion is a cultural phenomenon and emphasizes local populations, local knowledge, and local solutions. Because humans are actually, surprisingly, parts of nature. Our cultures or settlements, they arise from nature. They arise from the characteristics of the bioregions that we inhabit. So I mean, that to me is a clear bridge between bioregionalism and land back. And it also points to me the fact that while bioregionalism may be a fairly recent philosophy slash movement, it's roots and the ideas it presents are nothing new.

You know, I mean, bioregionalism posits that, you know, human societies must learn to honor our bioregions and the connections between them if we are to be ecologically sound. And this was so active as really old news, you know, for the indigenous peoples who have maintained these lands and been stewards of these lands for thousands of years. I think that thinking in a bioregional scale allows us to establish regenerative and circular economies, effectively restore local ecosystems, restructure our systems using ecological design principles, and of course, deepen our cultural connections to the land we inhabit. So that to me really stresses the importance of bioregionalism in our approach to environmental

issues. Before I continue, I just wanted to say that for those who want to like visualize, because I know this is a podcast, you can only hear my voice. One Earth has a pretty decent map of bioregions on the website, so you can just Google bioregions 2020 and it should come up. They basically have like 185 bioregions on their map. And well, according to that map, Trinidad is part of bioregion NT21E, NT standing for Neotropic and E standing for East, and Trinidad is grouped with South America, and particularly

the Venezuela-Gayanas region, for obvious reasons, being that the Orinoco and other rivers that come from the Amazon flow out to Trinidad's shores, really. So clunky segue, there are a couple different concepts that one might want to keep in mind when approaching or attempting to curate a bioregional understanding of the world. Of course, perspective and a bioregional perspective is important, and it's basically one that seeks to ensure that political boundaries match ecological boundaries, highlighting the unique ecology of the bioregion, encouraging the consumption of local foods where possible, encouraging the use of local materials where possible, and encouraging the cultivation

of native plants in the region. I will point out, like from now, that from what I've read about bioregionalism and the talks that I've seen, there are definitely some, you know, liberal sensibilities, some capitalist realism in the way that some bioregionalists talk about, you know, things like organizing our politics and our states and stuff around bioregions. Obviously, you know, they are pushing things pretty far because they do talk about, you know, going and really orienting our economy around, you know, bioregions and thinking in terms of that, but then at the same time, they're still like an almost part of acceptance

in some of the readings that I've seen of capitalism, you know, I think that's pretty common in a lot of what I like to call almost radical ideas and philosophies and stuff. Of course, when I approach these ideas and these philosophies and stuff, I always try to, you know, keep that anarchist analytical framework in my head, understanding that, you know, these ideas are still being filtered through an ultimately like capitalist society and capitalist world, and so you're going to want to try to navigate that and sift that out and really get the nuggets of gold within these ideas. I don't see states and I think you would agree with me being the path out of, you know,

that's a climate catastrophe for those who have been reading like, you know, against the green and, you know, Graeber's work, we would know that states have been pretty equal cider from their very inception, so I think that if bioregionalism would be effective, I think it would be best if it stayed away from that sort of statist conception. They do emphasize localism as the, you know, political localism, but it's always in the context of, it's often within the context of like the relationship between the local and the state and that sort of thing, but it's like a kind of, I don't know if I'm using this to him correctly, but like Minarchism, does that make sense, or is it some kind of

like municipalism or something like that, but yeah. We should probably talk a little bit about like what Minarchism and municipalism are just so people don't get kind of caught up on the terms and particularly I think that like within a context of like the United States, municipalism is kind of an easier way to sell folks who may be more conservative on certain anarchist principles, it's basically the idea of yeah, strong community sort of control and autonomy as opposed to strong overarching kind of federal or state control over different communities. Yeah.

Yeah. I was going to say Minarchism is kind of like a weird grab bag thing that's like, it's sort of like, okay, so you want to be an anarcho-capitalist, but you can't because you're just smart enough to realize that you can't have property rights without a state. So either the Minarchist state is the only thing it does is enforce property rights. And yeah, I think that's a slightly terrifying vision. But I think, but you know, it's yeah, I think it's a bit more self aware than the average anarcho-capitalist.

Yeah. But you know, this is. Yeah. I think that's a little bit less of a focus specifically on property rights and more of more based out of an understanding that like strong hierarchical federal or even state level control generally winds up creating a lot of a significant amount of like regional, what's the word I'm looking for, inequalities and is responsible for a lot of like ecological devastation and whatnot, this idea that you can have, like one of the things that you

would have with an actual municipal system is you wouldn't be allowed to operate a company like Koch Industries that's able to, you know, be based out of I think Kentucky, but operate a series of refineries in the Gulf Coast that render large sections of that area uninhabitable because you would leave kind of control over what can be actually done in that area to the people who live there rather than being able to have a corporation by land there and have its right to pollute enforced by the state, right? That's kind of like one little example. Right.

There's municipalists. The system in Northeast Syria and Rojava is sort of a municipalist system and one of the things. Specifically libertarian municipalists. Yeah. Because I mean there's a distinction between like municipalism more generally and libertarian municipalism. Yeah.

We're getting into the weeds a little bit here, but these are like that's kind of the basics of what those terms mean just so that people don't get lost when you bring them up because I think a lot of folks, you know, don't have necessarily that kind of, those definitions don't just pop up in their head when you use that word. Right. Right. Yeah. Fair enough.

I also mentioned that states have been ecocidal from the inception, so I feel like I should probably try and find that as well. Urban ecocidalism is basically this idea that came out to the environmentalist movement meant to point to the severe harm to nature, the mass damage and destruction of ecosystems that's caused over decades by these companies and really by the system as a whole. So it's often viewed through like a legal lens as in, you know, these companies should be tried for their crimes and as like for committing ecocide and that kind of thing. It's often viewed like as like a legal like law should be put in place to classify ecocide

as a crime and that sort of thing. Only a few countries have done that, like actually codified ecocide, but it is something that so environmentalists push to really raise awareness of as a crime against humanity and the planet. Yeah. I think it's also kind of important to understand with ecocide is that like there's a lot of focus I think in like left like environmental movements just purely on corporations. And even if you go back to the like 100 companies meme, just like 100 companies destroying the

planet, it's like, well, yeah, like half of them are state owned. Yeah. And this is something like, like with ecocide, it's like, yeah, it's not just corporations that do this. It's, you know, it's the state as a structure. It's the state as an institution. It's the state as exactly. Yeah.

It's their agencies. It's their sort of. And that's what I try to like what I realize is it's kind of important now. I guess it's kind of like slowly like shifting away from by regionalism, but that's fine. But I will say that I've tried to like consciously sort of put into practice is emphasizing that like capitalism is not the only issue, you know, like, yeah, I know people like try to separate capitalism on the state as if they could ever truly be separated. Even people who understand that, you know, aquacaptists are misguided and that, you know,

the state is necessary to maintain capitalism. There's some sort of like disconnect where there's like a whole ton of, you know, organization and me meaning and all that about capitalism. And, you know, oftentimes these sort of efforts are like, particularly with reformist types and unions and stuff, they try to mediate with capitalism through the state, you know, through the government, every local government or federal government, whatever the case can be. And what I really try to emphasize is that it's not enough to have like a theory of capitalism.

I think it's even more important to have a theory of hierarchy, because I think it avoids it helps to avoid getting into these sort of traps of like, well, class reductionism for one, but also like recreating certain structures within your organizations and in your efforts to change things, recreating the very, you know, circumstances you're fighting against. You can't like condense everything into one problem, because try as we might. It's not that everything is one problem. It's an interconnected mesh that binds all of our problems together.

And you can focus on, you know, really big extensions of that mesh, but it still is kind of just a mesh. And the mesh isn't the thing, but it connects to the edges of all of the things. And yeah, that type of ecology can be useful in even relating to bio regions in terms of how they also connect with other territories and entities. I think it also, you know, it was just one of the sort of problems that you have if you know, it's like, okay, so your plan is to take sort of sovereign state power and it's like, well, you do it, right?

But I mean, the thing is, if you, you know, you seize control of power of a state, right? Your borders are essentially just like where the state's war machine ran out of steam. And you know, and this, this becomes a normal problem because like, I mean, if you look at the bioregional maps, right, it's like, there's, there's literally no way you could ever have states with these borders because yeah, it's not like this, it's impossible. Like you just, you cannot do it. And you know, what that means is that states are sort of necessarily going, well, they're either going to be like a small fraction of a bioregion or they have multiple in them.

And that's another sort of, that becomes a sort of logistical problem because, you know, like, if you want to look at like a lot of the worst sort of ecological, sort of like human disasters, it's when you get states attempting to apply, like, you know, state logic to environmental issues. Yeah. Yeah. More specifically, like it's, it's, you know, they have something that like sort of works in one test environment and then they broadly apply it across, you know, an enormous sort

of variety of areas and regions to have their own biosphere to have their own. And that stuff, that's like, that's like the fastest way to kill an enormous number of people. Yeah. Just like forcing a jigsaw piece that obviously doesn't fit into a spot where you wanted to, but you're just breaking the pieces. I just want to say as well that like that sort of, I mean, at least the states are testing it, right?

I remember, I can't remember the exact name of like the, the sort of like ideology or whatever. I think it was like this early Soviet Union, probably one of y'all know the name. This early Soviet Union practice related to like farming that they just applied over like a vast, vast region and up with like a huge decrease in like food production. I can't remember the name of it. Lysenko. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. He just had this, he had this theory and he was just like pushing it and yeah, it led to some serious issues. Yeah. And I think, you know, if we're going to talk about what's important about sort of bi-regionalism, you have to have, if you're going to implement anything, right, you know, especially when you're trying to sort of manipulate biospheres, you're trying to preserve biospheres. You have to have local knowledge from the people who have been living in these biospheres

for, you know, enormous amounts of time. And that's something that states are really bad at and, you know, tend to actively suppress and it's something, you know, I will say this, there's a kind of like, there's like a kind of neoliberal version of this stuff where it's like, oh, we'll do no, we'll have like local knowledge, blah, blah, blah, and then they'll like, well, we'll have local knowledge. But they, this will help them create market solutions to things. It's like that also doesn't work. And it's basically just, if you try to marketize, like, yeah, but, because I really like sits,

it doesn't sit well with me, you know, like these sort of like, you see, like, and you see a lot of liberals like doing it a lot these days, where they'd be like doing the whole land acknowledgments thing and they'd be doing the, um, that thing where they would just like say that, oh, this is from so-and-so culture and whatever, and then just like, boom. And then carry on with business as usual. Yeah. I learned this technique from so-and-so tribe now.

Let me work as a consultant for your company. Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's commodifying the thing and that, that both produces a warped replication and then it also kind of makes the original thing seem like used in a weird way as well. Like it wasn't designed to be. Tainted. Yeah.

Yeah. So we ended a bit of alienation and how we are just sort of separated from, you know, aspects of our actual humanity because of the structures we live under, right? So instead of relating with the environment or relating with our culture or relating with other people, we just relating through like these commodities and these products and these, you know, just pasteurized versions of things. And I think that is also something that sort of plagues like some environmentalists. It's even so this, this is almost like this subtle alienation from the nature that many

of them seek to pursue, right? Yeah, on the one hand, yes, you're trying to, you know, preserve it and protect it and that's commendable. But on the other hand, the way you're going about it is basically like antithetical to those schools because you don't have that connection with the nature that you're trying to help. You know, what I see like a lot of people not recognizing is that, you know, humans are a part of nature, right?

And this is another bi-regional concept, right? This thing called bi-regional re-inhabitation in being that, meaning that we must come home to the geographical and bi-physical terrain re-inhabit, understand its ecologically uniqueness and familiarize ourselves with the stories woven into the fabric of said land, its history, its peoples, its cultures, its flora, its fauna. You know, it's only once we come home to our bi-regions and to our ecosystems, to our places that we can really work together to see its potential, to see how we fit into it, how we can facilitate its healing, you know, bi-region by bi-region.

Yeah, that definitely mirrors stuff I've been working on relating to that type of like cognitive dissonance that you're talking about and that alienation, not just from like human to human, but human to human to place, because yeah, we have like developed this like, this commodified other version of nature that isn't actually what nature is. It's been formed this thing that is separate from us, which is not how we need to think about it, because it should be, we are all part of the same, of that same system. We are not separate from it and we're not isolated from it or its effects, we are just another part of it.

So, it's about getting in like, getting a sense of ecology with both your bi-region and then the biosphere as a whole and getting that ecology, which kind of will break down this notion of nature being an other and I think because of the idea of nature being another that really kind of fosters our extraction that's led to our current problems, because we don't use these problems affecting us, we view them as affecting the territory and if we're not the territory, then we can be safe, but that's not the case. Exactly. Sorry, go on.

I think I may have talked about this on the show before, but there's another aspect here, which is that viewing humans as separate from this abstract nature is how you get a lot of really bad racist environmentalism. If you haven't read The Trouble with Wilderness by Cronin, The Trouble with Wilderness is one of the things that if you do environmental studies at all, this is one of the first things they hand you and the reason they hand it to you is because the image of wilderness that we have is like, oh, it's this completely untapped thing and it's like, well, yeah, okay, so the reason we have this image of a wilderness with nothing in it is because

there used to be people there and we killed them all or forced to be deported them. 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 happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the 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. The Union's pulled up on stuff in North America. Yeah, yeah. And it's particularly like... It's like... It's like... Well, and the... Yeah.

Those forests were literally planted and cultivated. Those forests were, I think even more pointedly, it should be stated, those forests were a work of engineering that's on par with the pyramids at Giza, if not like... Absolutely. Yeah. Massively in excess of it. They are a work of engineering that's every bit as impressive as any city ever built. And every bit is like intense and required as much knowledge and scientific understanding.

People just... We had... All of those people had died by the time white folks got there, generally because of the spread of disease or just because of act... I think... Yeah. I think that's true specifically in the East Coast. But with the West Coast, I think it's even grimmer because the West Coast...

This happened... You still see this. We're like... A lot of the American national parks were literally like... People would go in and ethnically cleanse the population that was there. And then be like, oh, hey, look, it's now wilderness. This is now... And this is like the origin of the environmental movement.

It's all of these just like the most racist people you've ever seen in your life. People... Literal fascists. Yeah. Well, and even before them, like in early 1800s, late 1800s, people like those guys... So late 1800s. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like when those guys are talking about the purity of the wild, everything they think about the wilderness is also just about the purity of the white race. And it's... Yeah. And when you start making that this separation between humans and nature, that's how you get this like... that's how you get these, you know, ethnic cleansing, like, genocide forests. Yeah.

I've been reading this very good book just started last night, and I think we're gonna have the author on the show soon, Chris Begley. He's an underwater archeologist, and he wrote a book called The Next Apocalypse that's about collapses throughout history and how they actually differ from the popular conceptions of them. And he actually talks about a lot of the stuff we talk about in this show. And one of the points he makes is that this idea of lost cities in dark jungles and whatnot is based entirely on misconceptions, first of all, about what jungles are.

And then second, on these very Eurocentric ideas towards what lost means, he points out that every time there's been a lost city or civilization discovered, it's because archeologists just ask the people living there where the ruins were, and they're like, oh yeah, it's right over there. We've known about this since forever. It was never lost. We just stopped living in that specific area. And the other thing he points out is that this idea of a jungle as a difficult and primeval

place is ridiculous. If you had to pick anywhere to be stranded in the world in terms of bioregions, you would pick a jungle like the Amazon, because it's pretty easy to survive there. That's why people live there for so long. Yeah. There's a ton of food. And speaking of the Amazon, the Amazon, because as we've discovered, there were cities and stuff happening in the Amazon, it was like a planted cultivator.

There's food jungle, like food forests and whatnot is the term people use it within the jungle. People set the jungle and the Amazon up to provide them with food in a way that isn't exactly, isn't the same as what we consider to be agriculture, but is absolutely a kind of agriculture. And because people don't see it as agriculture, they were just running around in the forest before we arrived. It's like, who, who.

Yeah. They had, they had essentially built themselves a big smart house in the middle of the woods that provided them with everything they needed with upkeep that we would consider minimal based on like what a lot of our European ancestors certainly like did in terms of labor to keep farms going. Like if you compare, I mean, you could also talk about how like peasants in the medieval period probably worked less than a lot of people in the United States due to. Yeah.

Like everyone works less than we do now. But it's a lot harder to keep like a mono culture farm going than it is to keep a food forest going. Yeah. Because I mean, once it's established, it literally maintains itself. What was the name of the book that you were talking about just now? It's called The Next Apocalypse and it's, it's very good so far. Chris Begley is the author.

I think we're going to have him on next week, but yeah, I've, I've found it so far about a third of the way. And very good. Awesome. I'll check that out. Okay. I was going to say, we're back. You just did it.

That's the intro now. I know. The intro now. It turns. That's the exit and pivot. You're welcome. Here we are. Awesome.

So yeah, once we have like embraced our understanding that, you know, we belong to the land and not vice versa and was therefore a pattern ourselves and our societies facing its needs. You know, that's when we get to that place of bioregional regeneration, which is another key concept of bioregionalism. And lastly, there's the concept of bioregional sensibility, which was developed by Mitchell Thomas Show. And it's about developing the observational skills to observe the bioregional history, to develop the conceptual skills, to juxtapose, you know, the scale of, you know, the community

and the region and the bioreg, the ecosystem, the bioregion, all these different levels of ability to like think in terms of all of them to develop the imaginative faculties to really, I would say, play with multiple landscapes and to develop the compassion to empathize with and work with both local and global neighbors, not just local and global human neighbors, but also, you know, the flora and fauna living next door. There are a lot of different bioregional practices happening all over the world. I didn't know that it started in North America, but I noticed that a lot of the big projects are happening in like South America, you know, in Brazil, Sinaldo Vale, in Costa Rica, Regenerativa,

in Colombia, Regenerativa, and the Annapurna Plurivosity in the Himalayas as well. And many others, they're basically engaging in efforts involving applied education, regenerative agriculture, systems mapping, green belt restoration, there's the, you know, the green belt project in Africa as well. And these are all efforts to really understand and work with the bioregions that these people inhabit. So, just a few tips that I wanted to end this off with, you know, before we end things off. I always try to link the things that I talk about in some way to what people and the groups

they're part of, the organizations they're part of, the communities they're part of, can do, you know, as an action to strengthen their resilience or to develop, you know, autonomy, right? In this case, it is to strengthen resilience and also to develop the vitality of the bioregion you inhabit. So, first of all, I think it's important that we learn as much as we can about our areas and learn especially through action, whether it be through cleanups, you know, observing the space around you, whether it be through observing weather patterns, whether it be

through looking at the way on hikes and looking at the way that the temperature changes and the texture of the soil changes as you go up and down in altitude. I think it's also important to try to get involved with actions to restore natural features and to understand the place that those natural features have in the broader bioregion. Of course, there are lots of sustainable projects happening all over the world, you know, if they aren't in your area, be the change you want to see, start one, make it happen and really also I would say find ways to link projects for environmental sustainability and restoration with projects for human emancipation.

Find ways to, like, support access to, you know, basic human needs within your locality. To find ways to sort of, because when we speak of bioregions and, you know, living within our bioregions and so on and so forth, that's all well and good but if, for example, your region has to import a whole bunch of food all the time to support the population, I think there needs to be ways to decrease that sort of import and to find ways to live sustainably within the area. Raise awareness, of course, as well about bioregional thinking, systems thinking, social ecological thinking and, yeah, just get to work, anti-work work, prefiguring the structures of a more

horizontal, bioregional ethical and sustainable way of life and, of course, disrupt the projects that get in the way of those goals and I see that as tentatively as I can't avoid legal trouble. That's it. Take care, everyone, and be kind to everything. Peace. I call the union hall, I say 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? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade, oh, we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King.

One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Look through 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 through 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is remarkably today not really so much about things falling apart and is mostly about things, in fact, getting better and how we

can do that. I'm your host, Christopher, with me today is Garrison, and we're also joined by Nick and Max, who are two members of the Artist Collective Solar Punk Surf Club, who have released a very, very interesting new game that we are here in part to talk about called Solar Punk Futures. Hello, Nick. Hi, Max. How are you doing?

Hey, doing well. Thanks. Yeah, doing great. Thanks for having us on. So, I guess my first question is, how did you two get into game design and sort of first have the idea to do a sort of like political gaming project like this? That's a good question. So, we're definitely not game designers by profession or trade.

We're members of the Artist Collective Solar Punk Surf Club, and we are particularly interested in creating artwork and social practice that prefigures these kinds of egalitarian futures that we'd like to see in the world. And so, this game was something that we've been kind of a project that we've been thinking about and sitting on for a little while, and was kind of something that made us, got us excited, and we think there's a whole bunch of other reasons that we think it's a really cool project to work on, an important project, and yeah, so we kind of took a deep dive head first into the world of game design and learning how to do that over the past year or so.

Okay, so how about we, I guess, also start with, I guess, explaining what Solar Punk Futures is and sort of how it works, and then we can get into the sort of political aspect of like the sort of game design projects. So, Solar Punk Futures is a storytelling game where players imagine pathways to a desirable future by collaboratively overcoming real-world challenges. The object of the game is to collectively remember one of the stories that grew into our utopia. The idea is that through backcasting, where you assume within the context of the game

that players are already in utopia, and merely remembering back to their ancestor's struggle, that players can transcend the idea that what currently exists must necessarily exist, which social theorist Murray Bookchin described as the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking. So we wanted to make a system to facilitate collaborative performance, sort of a, we call it a collaborative performance of memory, but one that combines sincerity with laughter and speculative storytelling. The game also combines a lot of different elements that we saw in other games, collaborative storytelling, cooperative gameplay, some elements of role-playing, and different kind of mechanics

that we thought would build out that kind of, like I said earlier, those prefigurations of those egalitarian worlds. So we were trying to make a game that had the fiction and the idea of utopia built in in terms of the goals of the game, but it was also, we wanted to build it into some of the mechanics of how the game was actually played, too. My question from here is sort of, well, I mean, I guess, firstly is I think, what sort of specifically drew you to Solar Punk as sort of an aesthetic for this? Like, I know there's been a lot of sort of, like, the kind of social ecology Solar Punk

fusions, but I'm interested in what you specifically do it. So we see Solar Punk as a visionary utopian politics and aesthetic that critically engages the reality of capitalist catastrophe while maintaining a radical optimism about humanity's hopes for a communal ecological future. Nick was just speaking to this. We see it as a restorative justice process on a planetary scale among people between humans and non-human nature. So that means reclaiming pieces of the past pre-capitalist culture.

That means material accountability for old practices. And it also means radical adaptability towards new ones. I think it provided a useful way of synthesizing several currents that we had already been thinking about and involved in between new media and social practice, thinking not just about images and objects in space, but also the set of social relations that those things produce. Yeah, we're also, we're like partisans within Solar Punk. I don't think there's, I don't think there's too many pro-capitalists within Solar Punk,

but I think there are some people who are maybe drawn to the aesthetic but don't necessarily have a politics. But we do think that there's a kind of a latent horizontalism, a latent anarchistic politics in a lot of the aesthetics around Solar Punk. And so as a, as a collaborative, as an aesthetic that is being defined collaboratively by people online and elsewhere, you know, we wanted to kind of stake out a position about what we thought a really realistic utopian world might look and feel like. Yeah, and I think, and this is something else I know YouTube I'm very passionate about,

is about specifically using games as a medium to do this and sort of, and this as like, this kind of storytelling memberance as a specifically political intervention. So could you talk a bit more about, you know, like a, yeah, you know, the questions like, okay, so why this and not on, you know, on the sort of less, like, like why this and not Gorilla Gardening or why this and not some other kind of organizing, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I mentioned it to you, too. Say about that.

Yeah. Well, I'm not gonna hate on Gorilla Gardening. I definitely think it's a pretty cool situation. Yeah. It's also in the game. Yeah, that's true. It's one of the cards, one of the tools that you get to use as an ancestor. Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of different things that we were thinking about

when we were thinking about why a game that I got a little bit into earlier, but you know, for one, I think it helps reach a broad and often depoliticized audience with a fun way to kind of engage in some thorny political questions. I think that games as a participatory medium were especially interesting for people who are interested in sort of anarchistic modes of teaching and education, like education through doing rather than lecture, although, you know, we're also read a lot of good political theories, so I'm not opposed to that. And then I think, you know, games are also fun, and there's a lot of political organizing

and activism work that happens out there that feels, that's hard, and that is necessary to do, but just because a lot of the important work to be done is hard doesn't mean everything that's hard is important, and everything that's fun is, you know, trifling or not going to help us get where we're going and overthrow capitalism and build a new world. So yeah, those are some of the reasons. Yeah, and I think that's especially a sort of interesting point, because I think a lot of what happens in leftist spaces, you get more people doing stuff, and they burn out really fast because, you know, you're doing an enormous amount of work, it's all miserable,

a lot of the times you're getting physically assaulted, and like I think that's one of the things that's interesting to me about this is you need other forms of sort of community building and sort of like, you need other forms of organizing that do not involve you being repeatedly traumatized over and over again, and that, yeah, especially just working on something like this and then, I don't know, just playing with your friends and having things that are like collaborative and joyful and community building is I think very important as a way to just, you know, this is on a very basic logistical level, like prevent people from burning out.

Yeah, and I definitely think that there's a role there to prevent people from burning out and inspiring people with some of the fun ideas, the ideas that they come up with when they're not looking at a Google Doc meeting notes, but instead they're playing a card game and maybe drinking a couple beers, and they're like, oh, how would I combine guerrilla gardening and, you know, performance art to bring about, you know, to solve a specific challenge of capitalism, like deforestation or these are some of the cards in the game. And so I think it can be inspiring, you know, it's also, it can be educational, I played with some family, I think the first time I played when we got the physical copy that

wasn't a playtest was with some family, and they don't necessarily identify as leftists of any kind, but we had a really fun game where we explored ideas of deconstructing borders and, you know, they were, it wasn't like I was guiding them in this direction, it was just kind of the assumption of the game that there was utopia beyond this ingrained capitalist realism, that there just isn't, that there isn't an alternative. And they're like, okay, well, the game says we're already in utopia, so that means there's no private property. And I was like, whoa, that's a, that's a jump I didn't expect from my, from my family.

One thing I'm interested in, in terms of how it functions as a game is like balancing the actual more, I don't know, fun based, like role playing game elements with like, it's kind of structure as a thought exercise and like a world building game, like how, how, how do you approach trying to get a balance of like fun role playing, as well as this type of like reverse world building? I was kind of a, I was still a little bit on the, the YA game in the first place question, but I'm also intrigued by the balancing fun and politics question. If you don't mind, I wanted to go back to the YA game for just a second, because I think

maybe it will lead into this. Yeah. So games are, you know, an ancient form of art, I know I said we work in new media before, but games are actually an ancient form of art. And I would argue social practice. There's a game called Senate, there's a game called the Royal Game of Ur, which both date to 5000 years ago in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia respectively. We did, in making the game, we did a bunch of research on the history of, of games.

There's a 15th century game called the Game of the Goose from, well, present day Italy that paired like these gorgeous illustrations also with like didactic moral instruction in the early, early 20th century, the surrealists created a series of games with the intention of breaking through traditional thought patterns and unleashing the, the potentials of the unconscious. They also wanted to subvert academic modes of inquiry. And then today, you know, some of our most popular tabletop games, you know, you, I think Nick was mentioning this earlier, how they can sometimes inscribe oppressive logics. So, you know, rather than a game where you're competing against other players to drive them

into poverty, or a game where you're trying to colonize other players land, you know, for the purpose of world domination, we wanted to make a game that actually practices the cooperation, interdependence, care, consent, these things that will be needed, you know, for it actually to transcend the social and ecological crises of our day. And kind of to that point, you know, I would say that games always reflect the beliefs and norms of their historical context. So with Solar Punk Futures, we wanted to kind of flip the script and project using, you know, the modalities of like speculative fiction, collaborative performance, as I mentioned,

the values and more is of a desirable future. So games are very, you know, human thing, an ancient human thing. And why do people play games? As I mentioned, you know, education is part of it. But also building social bonds is another important piece and that always is a company. It's a very like academic way of talking about it, maybe, but it is, it is fun. It has to be fun, that's why people do it. Yeah, in terms of the, to get a little deeper into the balancing question, you know, every

game is a balance between a bunch of different competing factors. There's a lot of people who were talking about the balance between randomness and planning in games and the balance between structure and free form. And it's definitely something, if there's any game designers out there thinking about making, you know, games like this play testing, it will help you so much because, you know, the game in a rough form existed in the spring of last year, but play testing really helped us refine a lot of those questions and find that kind of balance between structure and free formness.

We wanted it to be accessible to people who aren't D&D players, but we've also played with people who play a lot of D&D and GM and all this stuff, and they took it in a lot of fun and wild directions that we didn't expect, that helped inform kind of new ways that we could, you know, we added some optional rules in there for people who want to take it in a different direction or add more complexity or even, or for other people who need a little bit, like a handhold and want to flip a coin to decide something rather than, you know, come up with it totally on their own. So I think, yeah, it's a hard thing to balance, you know, all the different factors that go

into a game, but I definitely think play testing and all the people who played with us in those early games really helped us figure out the right balance. And to your earlier point about burnout, like activist burnout, some people who we've invited to play the game, maybe have expressed this idea of like, well, I'd love to, but I don't have time, and maybe they think of gaming, and I know I've certainly been guilty of this too, of feeling like guilt over things that feel like an indulgence, like you should be doing the real work all the time. But, you know, I think it's important to hold that in the perspective of the tradition

of feminism, civil rights advocates, others on the left that have talked about the importance of joy that needs to be integral to our struggles. There's the famous Emma Goldman quip, if I can't dance, it's not my revolution. So perhaps, you know, these ideas of like, guilt and shame or martyrdom or whatever are kind of toxic parts of the old world that we need to let go of. So I guess this is kind of coming back to say that there's, as Nick was saying, there is an ethical prefigurative case of how games can allow people to express themselves through play, but there's also a tactical one, and that games can be a structured way of thinking

about how do we create a liberated society. And one other thing I think is sort of interesting about, well, like, I guess this is somewhat less true of tabletop games as a medium, because tabletop games are a lot of sort of climate sort of storytelling-ish stuff, but like I know, like, so like, I play a lot of video games, right? And it's like, it's like a lot of the structure of what gaming is, is sort of, like, it basically just turns into like another job that you have. And it's interesting, yeah, it's like, you know, and you get the same, you even get like

boo-boo, like, crossover between the terminology of like, you know, like, I think, like, grinding is like- You have to grind. Yeah, like grind. I think that came from gaming first and then moved over into the weird grind set stuff, but like- I think you're right, yeah. Yeah.

And gamification, right? That's another way that, like, gaming is being almost like weaponized by capitalism to get squeezed just a little bit more out of everyone. Yeah, there's a really interesting article whose name I am forgetting because I am, yeah, but Vicky Ostowall wrote it like a while ago. That was about how, like, games are like, it's, you know, it's used sort of mechanically doing the same thing over and over and over again, but it's a problem because it's like, it's labor that's like too perfect, like it doesn't create anything, there's no sort

of like, like, there's no sort of like, like, aspect that produces like value that could be extracted, you're just sort of, you're just doing the thing over and over again. And it's like, and, you know, and then that, you know, becomes a problem for capital in some sense is why there's all these panics about like everyone being addicted to gaming because it's like, well, okay, you're not making money for us. And but I think it's interesting- Instead of playing truck simulator, you could be driving some actual trucks. Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, I think it's interesting that this is a political intervention into that of creating something that's, you know, precisely the opposite of that, that it's, you know, you're not sort of, like, it's not just like an incredible intensification of the sort of like reward systems of working, it's, hey, we're going to come together and we're going to tell, we're going to, you know, make collaborative decisions and overcome challenges. And I think, I think that's a very interesting sort of political angle to come at this from. Yeah, I think a lot of, a lot of tabletop games in particular compared to video games, I think, well, I'll say role-playing games in particular, put you in a driver's seat

in a way that I think is, is hard, right? Like sometimes I'm too tired to, or I think, you know, I have a, I have a D&D night and I'm like, I don't know if I have the energy for this after working all day, whereas I might have energy to play, you know, a video game RPG that kind of walks me, you know, hand holds me through a story, it's kind of more like watching, more passive. But I do think that there's, I just think there's something so important about thinking through what it might be like to live in this utopian society. And it's important, I think, because if we don't, well, for one, a ton of people just

don't even think about it. And so to the extent that this game is something that gets bought or played with families of people who are, you know, one of the many people who have been depoliticized in this country, I think that can be really helpful. But I also think that I've played it and I've found really fun and exciting ideas that I wouldn't have thought about if I was staring at a power map or something and thinking, where can we intervene in my city to, you know, help help solve this or that problem. So I think, yeah, I think there's power there.

So I think one of the other things I think is interesting to me about how YouTube sort of the team put the project together is that it's also like, you know, so like you can buy the versions of it that have like very, very nice art, but you also just put the cards and the rules up for free and you can just sort of print and play it. So I wonder, yeah, if you could talk a bit about the decision to do that. Democratic accessibility is really important to us. It's part of the concept that we wanted to integrate into every aspect of the game's production and distribution.

And so, yeah, the whole thing is available as a free print and play PDF download. It's all Creative Commons licensed. So that's, yeah, and, you know, at the same time, as you mentioned, we, we are interested in materiality and want wanted to create something that could could accompany, you know, a face-to-face interaction as well, which is, you know, frankly, well, I'll just speak for myself. That's probably more my interest, even though I think, you know, like that we have a tabletop simulator version too, which I think is really cool.

But as far as the decision to make the game, you know, free, free forever, we want people to play. We want it to be genuinely useful. This is not a, this is not a capitalistic business venture, we're running a break-even budget and want to just keep doing projects and, you know, elaborating like the solar punk tradition and connecting it to social ecological communalist politics. So if this can be a catalyst towards being able to do more of that, then, then that's, you know, we'll have, we'll have succeeded on our, on our terms at least.

That's the status of physical copies. How can people, if they want to use cards and stuff, what is, how, how would one go about getting those? Yeah. So there's a couple of different ways people can download the free print and play if they like. If they really love it, they want to buy the physical copy. We sold out of the kind of first edition that we were able to afford to print, but we're

raising money on Kickstarter for a second edition. So if people back us at a certain tier there, I think it's $45 or higher, you get a copy of the game when we're able to print them. And so, yeah, so it's a, and of course, as Max mentioned, you can also play on tabletop simulator. But yeah, we're, we're really excited about it. I think we're also hoping to take it around to some, you know, political workshops, probably on zoom for the foreseeable future, maybe game convention, tabletop game conventions

and stuff. And also some art, art shows, to be announced, to be announced, but there's a couple art shows that we're excited to be showing it in. So, yeah. One thing I'm really excited about in terms of playing this at some point is the, I think, starting from the point of like, you're trying to build the world now, you can really easy, it's really easy to run into ruts. Starting at the end point, then working backwards, I think, because that produces that reverse

type of thought, I think it's a little bit easier for it to find the path than just starting here and looking at the world to be like, oh, how do we do anything to make it better? Instead of being at the opposite place and being like, what's, what is the way to backtrack? I think can maybe give you some connections and ideas that you may not have had otherwise. Because we're kind of always stuck in the now, how do we get to now better? So I would be very excited to try this out at some point and experience that backtrack thinking, because I think it's, yeah, I'm really intrigued with that specific aspect of the game.

Because, yeah, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of Solar Punk games within the next decade, probably. And this is one aspect that I think actually is really unique and something that's not just intrinsic to Solar Punk, you know, it's something that's kind of been added on. And that's something I'm really excited about. And yeah, would love to pick this up soon. Yeah, thank you for saying that. I think one of the things that we hope that the game does is help people break through

that capitalist realism, like there is no alternative, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, et cetera. And you know, similarly, if you ask people to imagine the future, it's very hard. And if they are able to at all, it is often extrapolating sort of the worst trends of today into a dystopian future. Yeah, I remember, this is slightly off topic, I remember, so when I was in middle school or something, we had this assignment, we had to like write what our perfect like utopian society would be.

And we like did it and like three quarters of the like society's people come up with were just like the worst imaginable dystopia. It was just like, it's just like grim, sort of. Yeah, if I was going to, if I was going to make what I thought was an accurate prediction of the future, it might be more similar to the first season of this podcast than some of the hopeful futures. But I also don't think the door is closed on any kind of solar punk future. I think it's important, one of the important aspects that we included that makes solar

punk different than just kind of vague utopianism is that we think we ask people to also think about the barriers they run into to think about, you know, who's going to oppose you if you're trying to, you know, deal with polluted water and you find some really great system and improve a region's water supply, you know, Nestle might come in and buy the rights to the whole region, the whole watershed. So, you know, imagining those that opposition, the material conditions that might change and how you'd adapt to them, we hope that's something that people also benefit from who play this game and make some predictions about the strategic decisions that capital is going

to make to oppose your utopian vision. And I hope there are more solar punk games, like you said, I hope there is a preponderance of solar punk art in the next decade, that would be amazing. And you know, to what you were just saying, you're right, solar punk doesn't mean the end of politics, doesn't mean the absence of conflict. So I think we tried to integrate that into the game. What makes a good solar punk story is that it is plausible, yet distinctly anti-utopian, dystopian rather, it provides a glimpse into a future possibility for, say, the reharmonization

of humans with other humans, humans with non-human nature. And that is going to involve some amount of opposition on the one hand and reconstruction on the other, in short, to critique by building as the slogan goes. All right, yeah, plugs time, what do you two have plugs? So yeah, we have an upcoming live stream on Twitch with veterans for peace. They have some gamers for peace. And Tuesday night on the 18th at 8 p.m., they're going to be playing solar punk features with us.

If people are interested in the game, they can download it for print and play on our website at http colon slash slash thefuture.wtf and people can also find the link to our Kickstarter on that website if they're interested in pre-ordering physical copy, which we very much appreciate. We're getting close to funded. That's very exciting. I hope it gets funded. But I want to see more of these because the art is extremely cool. And yeah, well, thank you to you for coming on.

This has been Nick Hadappen here, and we'll see you the next time an episode goes up. I don't know when that's going to be right now, so yeah, wonderful X-Tros. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash

sources. Thanks for listening. 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 AJ Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, Kid Ink, and Ossia, and this is the professor. We're here on Eating While Broke, and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me

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Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Find Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the 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, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts.