Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 19

Episode Date: January 29, 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.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, 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. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect presents, features honest conversations and exclusive interviews, a space for artists, everyday people, and listeners to amplify, elevate, and empower black voices with great conversations. Make sure to listen to the Black Effect presents podcast on iHeart radio, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Get all the real Housewives T you need on the podcast to tease in a pod. Join ex-Housewives Teddy Mellencamp and Tamara Judge as they watch, recap, armchair quarterback, and break down all things from the hit reality TV franchise. This team tells it like it is. Each week we're going to be recapping whatever Housewife is currently airing. Lucky for Tamara, we're going to start, oh my gosh, I know, with Orange County. Listen to two tees in a pod on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Mama, what does the chicken say? Dog. 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. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch. If you want, if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. What's meta? My verse. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast entirely

dedicated to the metaverse, which is the promise of the human future. On With Me, as always, is my co-host, Mark Zuckerberg. Hello. I don't know how Mark Zuckerberg talks. I'm not sure how. Yeah, I don't know whose voice you were doing. He sounds like nothing, like no one, like the absence of a soul. He sounds like there's a noise when it's dial up. That's what's going on inside his head at any moment. When he's not actively making the internet worse, it's just a dial tone in there. Awesome. Harrison, what are we talking about today? Well, yeah, we're going to be talking about the metaverse and how it's different from what people talk about it as. Yeah, it's going to touch on a variety of things that split up into two parts. But first, I would

like to paint you a picture with words, a word picture. A wickcher. A wickcher, yeah. You're walking through your favorite grocery store. There's carts passing by, horrible music playing. The lighting is white and overexposed and underexposed at the same time. It's hard to see and this person who looks like an employee keeps popping up and trying to take you to different sections of the store. You're trying to just ignore her. It's very annoying. All you need to get is the stuff you have on a little list and it's awful. Eventually, you get so fed up with this whole experience that you go to where the wine bottles are, you take them out and you arrange them into a giant penis on the floor because that's the only thing you can do because you're not

actually in a store. You're in your living room and you have a horrible headset on and you're trying to do shopping in a virtual grocery store. That's the actual scope of what we're talking about today is virtual marketplaces and how they interact with seemingly real marketplaces. Yeah, I'm sure this is inspired by, there were a couple of videos that dropped recently, one of them from, I think, Walmart. We're going to be talking about it. Yeah, so a couple days after the 2020 new year, a video went viral across the social medias ranking up over 11 million views on Twitter and it was titled How Walmart Envisions Shopping in the Metaverse. Now, so what followed was two minutes of an embarrassing VR jank, including throwing around

virtual gallons of milk from your cart into a virtual fridge. Many dunks were made, fun was had, but what few people probably realized is that this wasn't a Walmart Metaverse test store. This was actually a five-year-old tech demo from before non-Neil Stevenson fans even knew what the term Metaverse meant. So a few years back, a tech company called Mutual Mobile partnered with Walmart for a project set to, quote, reimagine retail virtual reality. Now, that sounds very fancy and important, but considering this was five years ago and you're not hearing about it until now shows how impactful this thing actually was. The first stated goal of the tech demo, according to the Mutual Mobile website, was to impress influencers at South by Southwest 2017.

So, you know, just like the so-called Metaverse is now, this was largely a promotional project and a way to attract investors. This was never actually a serious thing. I'm going to say it right now. South by Southwest was always one of the stupidest things in the world and when it comes back, it will be still because it's stupid. It's a stupid place for the most insufferable people in the world to come and talk about technology. Some people also listen to music. That's fine. So, yeah, for the experience itself, they used an original Oculus Rift and programmed roughly like four minute linear expedition into a barren, hellish digital Walmart where you pick up and throw. It did sound exactly. My favorite thing about this video is

they were clearly using the audio of some sort of like shooter game because it was like things would, it would sound like you were in like fucking doom going through a portal. It was extremely funny. It was bad. It sounded like hell. You pick up and throw fake wine bottles into your blue digital cart and the whole thing ends with a fake drone delivering an $800 TV that you fake purchased. It's not great. What Mutual Mobile and Walmart were trying to do, they have a statement on their website back from 2017. They said that Walmart envisioned unveiling a fully virtual shopping experience that puts shoppers inside the store without ever leaving their homes. To attract customers and dispel the misconception that they're not as advanced as their more

digital counterparts, brick and mortar establishments are not only accelerating investments in areas like web and mobile. They're also exploring the very edge of emerging technology. Walmart to virtual reality is a case in point potential shoppers can virtually pick up products, read labels, talk to virtual associates and fill their shopping carts. But the goal wasn't just to create something interactive. Walmart needed something that showed the potential of VR in retail while putting them ahead of the competition. This was 2017. This was ahead in some ways, but also ahead in the ways that it's showing how not useful this example is. Obviously, this five-year-old video resurfaced now due to Zuckerberg and Epic Games forcing an

astroturf metaverse into the cultural zeitgeist coupled with their conflation of anything VR to the legendary metaverse, because VR does not equal metaverse, nor is it necessarily vice versa. But now these terms are getting used so interchangeably that someone can stumble across this video and be like, oh, look at this metaverse store when it's not. It's just a VR tech demo. The metaverse, in order to be like the thing that people have been imagining through cyberpunk since the 90s, it needs to be persistent and interact directly with the real world in a number of ways. We'll get into what metaverse could be in the future in terms of the it-could-happen-here idea. Not just a metaverse, but a series of metaverses, what they could be

and how that negates the original idea of it in the first place. When asked by Vice News about the resurgence of their Walmart project, Mutual Mobile replied, the vision of a virtual shopping experience we helped Walmart realize back in 2017 stands validated in the metaverse era of today. This whole experience has only encouraged us to keep experimenting, innovating, and leading the charge with cutting-edge tech. So, I mean, considering most of the virality of this was people joking about it, I, yeah, sure, okay, okay, Mutual Mobile, good luck with that. So, a few days after the Walmart video went viral, rumors of another big box store going metaverse started to circulate. Again, accompanied by a video of a possible 3D

metaverse storefront. Reports emerged starting in India claiming that H&M had announced that it would offer its customers a three-dimensional shopping experience in its virtual store inside the metaverse via something called, now, I don't know if it's Keek City or Seek City. I'm not really comfortable saying either of those things because they sound weird, but I'm gonna go with Seek City. That's a little bit better. It sounds like it's a slur. I know it's not, but it sounds like it's a slur. It sounds like it's a slur. So, I'm gonna say Seek, but it's S-E-E-K. So, this account on Twitter called a Seek VR shared the following from its official Twitter account, shopping in the metaverse with Seek Coin, concept VR store presented to H&M by Seek,

creates mainstream use cases for Seek Coin and scaling virtual reality beyond games. So, I'll get into what Seek is in a bit, but the reports said that customers would be able to walk through the store, choose the apparel they wanted to purchase in the Seek City universe, although the clothes could only be worn in the digital environment. Payment would be made with Seek Coin and customers could have the opportunity to order the same apparel from H&M's physical stores later, but that's your buying two separate things. One of it's the digital skin, one of it's an actual, you know, real thing. So, what does Seek? Seek was launched in 2018. It's a metaverse coin project built on the Ethereum blockchain and their goal is to connect artists,

athletes, and other digital content creators directly with their fans in virtual worlds. Seek's NFT marketplace is designed to enable real ownership of digital items. Well, the only way in which I would actually want that is if it's me having a very sexual Zoom chat with Pit. You know what? We don't need to, Garrison, please continue. Okay. Quoting from the Seek's website, Seek currently offers a range of immersive VR experiences within Seek City, including theater, concert arenas, sports complex, hangout lounge, and more. Wow, it's all the things you can do in your real home, but weird and on the internet. I really hate it. This is horrible. I see a potential appeal for people who are like out

in the sticks or in parts of the world where they're not, they feel no, like they're very politically or whatever disconnected, which is the same thing the internet already does. And maybe it being in VR will make it better. I don't know. I lived in the middle of nowhere and relied on the internet to be social, and I don't think I would have wanted to change the internet in for this because it sounds, yeah. Anyway, it sounds gross and weird. I'll talk about use cases in a sec, but yeah. So end users will be able to use Seek token to make purchases, vote for content, control programming much more after token launch, Seek VR in partnership with Universal Music can realize live performances of world famous artists

such as Bon Jovi, Lady Gaga, U2, Sting, and many more can take place on this platform. So Seek is like, it's kind of the startup, but it's been around for a while. It's trying to do like, you know, virtual venues inside the metaverse. They do have contracts with Universal. So it's a mix of, it's a mix of this coin. So it's a mix of this like cryptocurrency, also trying to use this cryptocurrency in this world they're trying to build up. They're roadmap to metaverse right now. First thing is like payment integration. So using Seek coin, they want Seek coin to be the coin for everything in the metaverse. They want all of metaverse be based off this thing that they invented called Seek coin because

it'll make them money. Next thing they want to do is create a creator enabled ecosystem. So kind of copy the content creator thing we have right now, port that into the metaverse, but again, have everything, you know, you can invest in your creators. So you can vote on what they do using Seek coins and all of, we talked about like personal ownership in the previous episode, but then a lot of it, you know, they have like an NFT marketplace, avatar marketplaces, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of this stuff is built around like concerts, you know, venues, you know, a lounge movie theaters where you can do stuff in VR. That is like, that is the main thing that Seek is trying to do. They do have this one quote somewhere. Oh yeah, the future milestone.

So after they achieve this Seek metaverse where everything is ran through Seek, all of like, you know, whether you're on Oculus, whether you're on Vive, all of it gets run through Seek. It's one multiverse, sorry, one metaverse. Their future milestones are quote, a VR space academy. They do not do not say what that means. Okay. Keek studios again, kind of unclear. I'm guessing like original content. And then the last one is a blockchain metaverse alliance. Those are there. Those are their three big future milestones after they get there. Wait, what was that last one? Blockchain metaverse alliance. I mean, this was like in the Facebook thing too, right? The idea that we're going to integrate

NFTs, but it was also clearly just like they tossed that in there on the Facebook one. There was no evidence they'd thought seriously about NFTs or blockchain. It was just had gotten big while they were preparing the thing. So they tossed them in there. I get the idea, right? Like the thing that they keep pitching with this is that you'll be able to have an item in one game that is yours. The company doesn't own it. You can take it to other games, which anyone who makes games will tell you it was fucking nonsense. Something like that might be vaguely possible in a metaverse where everything was forced to use the same engine. And everyone was also forced to abide by a bunch of strict rules by Facebook.

That's probably violating antitrust laws. And also it seems like a ridiculously sysophistician task with no real benefit. I don't think anyone's going to do it, but I'm guessing that's what they're referring to when they want to jam the blockchain up in the fucking metaverse. Like what else could it mean? The blockchain metaverse alliance. All of the blockchains and metaverse is going to align into, yeah, like they want to put all of the metaverse stuff into one. Only you can wear this shirt in the metaverse. Yeah. So just like the real world. The freedom of the internet. Can't you feel it? The ever expanding possibilities. I do love, because they keep talking about within the context of metaverse games, like

you'll get to unlock a character that's just yours and nobody else can play it. And it'll have special abilities that means he wins all the time. It's like, why would people play that game? I think it was Business Insider. Someone's article talking about how neat it would be for games to work this way and like think of all the money you'd make. People wanting to watch your character win. People don't want to just like watch a guy who's structurally unable to lose because he bought the right character in a racing game. Win every race. That's not, no one's going to pay to watch that. Do you understand what people watch races for? No. Anyway, it's all nonsense. Let's hear from our good friends at our products and services

before we come back and talk more about Seek coins, I guess. I don't know. Seek. Yay. All right. We are back. So, yeah. Seek coins, virtual reality spaces run on smart contracts through the buy-ins smart chain and they run through the Ethereum blockchain. So there's about 744 million Seek coins in supply. The maximum supply capacity is capped at 1 billion coins. Seek coins peaked at $1.16 a year ago after launching at around 4 cents. They're currently being traded for around 60 cents. So that's what actual Seek coin's doing. People do use this. There's not many people. They do have these contracts with universal music, but before this H&M thing, I never heard of Seek coins. So two days after the rumors,

began circulating that H&M was partnering with Seek, H&M said, nope, we are not doing this, but they did not close the door in future possibilities. They said, we'd like to confirm that H&M is not opening a store in the metaverse at this time. We're also not collaborating with Seek. So the official Twitter account for Seek subsequently clarified later on that the store that they were doing was just a concept that was presented to H&M and not a launching virtual store yet. But they do say that they're in discussions with H&M to make this a reality, but it's not a reality as of now. So this kind of begs the question, what about a 3D digital space is superior to a 2D digital space for simple tasks like shopping online? So once you start unfolding

questions like this about the internet, metaverse, AR, VR, there are more in the internal sides to this than you would have initially estimated. But first off, before we kind of have this discussion, we should split this into two categories, one for shopping for like real physical items that you plan on like receiving in person, and then digital items that don't physically exist and are just just on your computer and monitor. So obviously, like there's no clear advantage in most cases to traversing an isolated virtual environment in order to order food, as opposed to just scrolling through a web page. But once you expand out of the confines of VR's sensory deprivation, 3D technology in AR, augmented reality, does actually have some useful prospects,

including some that are already in use. Amazon and Ikea, for example, have options on their perspective websites and apps that can like project furniture options into your living space. So you can see how they fit. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that has some future, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So currently, this is being done on your phone screen, but in AR Glass's application of this, we actually serve its purpose quite well. This is something that people would want. Yeah. The phone screen version is pretty mediocre. And that's kind of the place we're at. We make fun of this stuff a lot because most of it's nonsense. There's a lot of potential in some of these ideas, but there's their potential for like, on the same level that the air fryer has

potential where it's like a thing, a bunch of people will buy, but it's not none of this yet is stuff that's going to completely change. Like, yeah, you might get a few million people to get these glasses and or this app made these glasses for a couple of reasons, but who would use this app to like help plan out how they're setting up their houses. You might get a few million people who do that. It's not going to be like an iPod or an iPhone or like Facebook that no one's had figured that out yet. There's there's some neat products that are going to be valuable, but we're still on the stage where nobody's under nobody's figured out fundamentally what people want from this as opposed to like tiny specific needs in the same way that like

there was a number of futurists who quite accurately figured out with a smartphone like, oh, people want a thing that will give them access to all of the the knowledge and ideas in the world and also let them yell at anybody anytime they want. Like that's something that is going to be incredibly successful and it has and it's changed the entire world. Zuckerberg was like people want to be able to be racist faster and by God, we wanted it and and that was huge. I don't like these are it's a good idea like, yeah, let people scope out how their room is going to look when they're shopping or whatever through AR, but we haven't yet hit that this is going to change the world is being slightly better at using Ikea will not change the world.

Yeah, I think as an avid air fryer hater, I do think a comparing metaverse to the air fryer is actually I love my air fryer, which I love to say to Garrison. I know Garrison hates it when I use the air fryer. Love my air fryer. Anti air fryer action is my new tattoo. They screech like the person at the end of invasion of the body. But my goodness, do they cook my food faster? They air fry it. Fry it with the air. Wow. Yeah, almost like it's impossible. Anyway, mutual mobiles, digital marketing strategists talked with vice after the Walmart video went viral and he explained that like the demo was made to show the potential virtual reality and shopping experiences that they can have for, you know, different people,

including its ability to connect like elderly people or people with disabilities to a shopping experience from the comfort of their own home, something that he thinks might even be, you know, attractive to people who have been through several rounds of COVID quarantine. And I can kind of understand this last argument, you know, during early quarantine, I definitely used my VR headset more often than I had before. And with our alienated capitalist world, I can see the use of walking around a digital store if you're stuck at home, due to something like a plague or if you know, if you have a physical or mental reason that makes, you know, going to a store difficult. Because but like, it's yes, this this can help that. But also, this is always very reliant on how

these types of stores are set up and how these stores like affect your brain, like a big part of going to the grocery store, what it's designed to do, make it so that we're not just following the shopping list. There's like a structured joy of discovery. Everything about the design of the store is to get you to buy things you didn't think you needed before you walked in. And we're trained from birth to like, to find this process pleasurable. So in that way, walking around a VR like Walmart or H&M might actually make some people happy, despite that being sad and dystopian, if you stop and think about it, right? Like, because that's that's actually like, it's a very capitalist thing. But it does make us happy, because that's what we've been trained

to do since we're babies. So there's there is that side of it. For in terms of like, yeah, I can see if I really don't want to leave the house, but I want to get the experience of walking through a place. Maybe I will walk through a target to get groceries. I don't know. Some people maybe might do that. But otherwise, you know, it's much it is much simpler and easier to just scroll through a 2D thing on a web page and do the things you need. That's the thing. Like, it's like, yeah, I mean, absolutely, because I when I was making fun of one of these videos, somebody like called it out as being ableist and was like, yeah, this is this has for a disabled person. If they can use this, they can use Amazon. And like as a person who sometimes I don't shop for

groceries on Amazon, but I've shopped for groceries online, it's fine. The the the it's it's everything it needs to be. You can get your groceries online and the metaverse is just going to make it like weird and off putting and in unnecessarily complicated. Because at the moment, I can get groceries with my phone while I'm like jogging or as I'm like sitting in traffic or like while I'm on a zoom call listening to Garrison talk about the metaverse, as opposed to putting on a headset and like doing the same thing basically as driving there. But more expensively anyway, are you grocery shopping right now? I am ordering 1700 cans of Zevia and 40 pounds of raw beef. That's a normal week's worth of food for me. And that's literally like two days for him.

See, but Robert, you could be doing this while wearing a bucket on your head and walking around a fake store. I could wear a bucket on my head to the real store. They can't stop me. I usually wear a bathroom. This is the first half where it's like, you know, buying actual physical items that you plan to receive in stores, you know, furniture actually kind of makes sense of food. It's a little bit iffy. The only kind of consideration there is if people want the mental effect of walking around a store, if they find that pleasurable, then it's a thing. But you know, it's way more efficient to just scroll through your phone. As for the other side, buying virtual items, whether they be, you know, NFTs, video game skins, or super special exclusive VR hangout

rooms. I don't give a fuck how this works. If you want to walk around a VR mall to buy your VR art and your VR clothes, knock yourself out. I buy Sonic the Hedgehog games. We all have our weird things we do that don't make any sense. Yeah, if that's you. These grocery stores are just going to be like the 700 weirdest people in the country, masturbating as they buy wine and milk. That's the thing, Robert. When I was doing the digital picture in the beginning, I had two scenarios. One where you align the bottles into a dick. The other one I was going to say, you take off your pants and start masturbating. And I decided not to do that one. So I'm happy that you brought it up. That was the right call, Garrison. That was the right call. Because,

yeah, that is the actual use case for this. Is that someone's, people are going to be walking around these fake Walmart's just all jerking off. That's what's going to happen. They're going to have this animation of a real female employee of theirs who like pops up when you do something you're not supposed to do and explains something to you. And it's going to be impossible to remove initially. And people are going to turn it into a whole weird, horny thing. And like they will appear in all these circumstances. It's going to be the only thing that goes viral. Like it's going to be the only thing people remember five years later about the first of these. This is, I'm going to circle back to this towards the end of part two. But this is the

actual way to handle the metaverse. Because we're going to, this thing is going to be forced on us one way or another. We're going to have a form of it. And honestly, the best thing we can do with it is either ignore it, ignore it, or maybe more attractively is to fuck with it. Like that's going to be the thing. That's going to be the thing to do. There was an article a few days ago that the headline is Final Fantasy porn interrupts Italian Senate Zoom event. Someone joined in and started playing porn from Final Fantasy seven. This is the thing to do. This is the way that we need to do it. If there's going to be dumbass meetings on the Zuckerberg metaverse, people need to go in and make it weirdly horny. Yeah. Garrison, I could not agree more. That's the,

what you need to do, citizens of the internet, is look up something awful. Habbo, H-A-B-B-O, hotel. That's the kind of shit that we need to be doing. And there was basically a children's video game. It was an early kid's MMO and a bunch of weird adults and something awful decided to create an unsettling cult of people who all looked identical and marched around doing all of these weird unsettling things in a children's game. It was very fun. Or like in Second Life, when it was the new big sexy thing, there was this very self-important tech writer, investor type person who was doing a Q&A and people just like animated thousands of floating penises going around. This is going to be the thing. This is what we're going to have to do because if it's going to be

this horrible corporate hell, the only way to deal with that is to make it unusable for everybody so that it doesn't get used. And the way to do that is by putting dicks everywhere. Yeah. Dicks and boobs everywhere. If Joe Biden ever decides to do a multiverse presentation or if one party or another has decides to do a multiverse debate, it is everyone's moral responsibility to fuck it up. Civic. Civic. Yeah. It is your duty. This goes beyond civic. This is as a citizen of the human race. You know? As a member of this species, you have to try to find a way to fuck it up for them. So nothing could be more important. So yeah. So if you're buying digital items,

do you never plant them as even person? I do not care how you do it. Knock yourself out. We all have our weird things. I buy sonic DLCs. People do World of Warcraft. If you want to get an art piece, you can only hang in your digital room. That sounds miserable, but have fun. Yeah. I used the Internet to order very off-putting Danish cheese product. Oh, yeah. That did happen. That was off-putting. It was weird. It was like caramel. You tried to trick yourself into liking it when you were eating it, though. I don't remember not liking it because I ate a good amount,

but I've had the second cube sitting around and I've had no desire to open it. No desire. Yeah. Anyway. I did not like it. I don't know that I ever want to eat it again. I love that for you. Quality audio content. So here's the thing. I have not actually been talking about the metaverse. Nothing I've mentioned thus far actually is the metaverse and doesn't have really anything to do with the metaverse besides the technology of VR and AR. It turns out companies like Facebook, Epic, Microsoft and Valve, the way they talk about the metaverse is kind of all a big lie. Like if it's not metaverse, it's an Astros turf top-down marketing scheme to turn more of you

into data and to create and to create viral marketing. That's instead of an interconnected solution to the alienated bubbles of Web 2, it's just a social media network that encompasses all of your vision and encourages even more digital alienation and less in-person socialization. Hey, kids. You know the worst stuff about the Internet? What if it was the only thing about the Internet? What if it was accompanying everything you see instead of just a computer screen? It's like all of the gaming CEOs who were talking about the promise of NFTs. I think it was one of the guys who runs Reddit. I think it might have been Alexis O'Hanion or

whatever their name is who said that in five years, 90% of games will be NFT-based because people don't like wasting their time and not getting compensated for it. They're like, do you know what a game is? Do you know what a game is? So I'm going to talk more about metaverse as big tech or just bigger tech in part two, but this will be wrapping up part one of the digital storefronts and then we'll get into some more applications of this and how we're actually seeing it in the second half. So Robert, do you want to go buy a virtual block of Danish cheese? Um, no, I did. When I was hanging out on top of mountain the other day,

I ran into a guy flying some drones, which I normally don't like, but this guy had a VR control rig for his very nice drones. Oh yeah, those are fun. Those are dope. I might get into that shit, but no, I have no desire to shop. I like going to the grocery store. 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've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not

know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Much of my shopping that way is

possible because it's soothing and nice and I think very human to go be around other people to get food. But yeah, that's the thing, you know, and things like the pandemic where that becomes harder. I think that is where the use cases for the digital stores actually come in, like theoretically, but we've never seen that feeling, that soothing, which it all just looks deeply off putting. The problem is that it's stuck in the uncanny valley. So it's not pleasurable to be in those digital spaces because even though it's being marketed as a solution to alienation, it's just more alienating because it's like very clearly exposing the alienation that we try to avoid. So it falls right in the middle of the uncanny valley and it's not pleasant. But we will

talk more about that in part two. If you want to follow the show on the social medias, that is CoolZone Media and Happen Here Pod, you can keep up with my tweets when I don't know. I don't know what I do on Twitter anymore, but that's Hungry Bowtie. And you can harass Robert Evans at I Read OK. Yeah, motherfuckers. Do it. That's the show. Do it. Do it or I'll kill you. Robert, no. This episode is brought to you by Wix. Are you ready to take your business online? You need Wix, the leading website creation platform that's got all the tools you need to create, manage and grow your brand. Over 200 million people are already using Wix's wide range of solutions to enhance their businesses, like ultra smart SEO tools designed to get you

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

Ask your dad. You actually don't. All right. That was my only goal. This is part two of the metaverse that never was here at It Could Happen Here, and we're actually going to be talking about it. I can't wait until we launch a metaverse show and pretend we never said all this shit. It's going to be the best garrison. You know, Robert, remember when I was talking about Seek City and all of the virtual venues? I just got a message from our beloved parent company, iHeartMedia, that they planned to extend shows into the metaverse, which was announced a few weeks ago. I've always thought that the metaverse was a pretty good idea.

I think we will talk about how the metaverse could be cool later in this episode, but then we'll explain why it won't be. But yeah, iHeartMedia did announce, so Web 3 and the metaverse are the newest consumer platforms for iHeartMedia. Sorry, I was just working in a matrix for reference there. Thank you. Anyway, so I'm guessing for non-Neil Stevenson fans, many of you probably had not heard of the metaverse before last year. VR, sure, you've heard of AR maybe, but probably just as like niche gaming technology, you know, not like a massive successor to the internet, primarily three companies, Facebook, Epic Games, and Valve,

the later two being mostly gaming and software companies, kind of all decided the best way to push their niche VR and software technology into the zeitgeist was with this flashy new marketing, and it kind of worked. Metaverse is now in many more peoples like personal lexicon, but it's not really the metaverse, you know, like the Walmart thing, it's a way to attract investors and drum up free press, but it's still the same old VR and AR applications of the technology. None of these companies are trying to make metaverse a thing that we actually want, or, you know, working towards an interconnected, immersive 3D open source successor to the internet. All of the different websites and services we use, united under one digital roof,

like a super platform that, you know, is made up of all of these sub-platforms, you know, you have social media, online gaming, and all of like the, you know, ease of life apps all accessible through the same digital space under the same digital economy. That thing isn't happening. That's not what people with money are actually pushing towards, even though they're still using the metaverse term. There was a great piece in Wired that came out last month as a part of their matrix VR issue. It was called, the metaverse is simply big tech, but bigger. It was by Cecilia D'Antazio. It's a wonderful piece, and I'm going to say a quote from it right here. By the mid-2000s, it became clear that money wasn't in building individual

websites that we could access on the open web. It was making information sorters, channels, aggregators, and publishers open enough to scale with user-generated content, but closed enough to reap enormous profits. This was the evolution from web one to web two. For nearly 30 years, the gravity of the consolidation has pulled the cyberspace together under the auspice of fewer and fewer corporate titans. The freaky little planets get drawn together, collide, and make bigger planets collide again and make stars or even black holes. Facebook eats Instagram and WhatsApp. Amazon swallows two dozen e-commerce sites, and you're left with these few supermassive players controlling and appropriating the celestial motion of billions of users. This is how big tech

got big. End quote. Now we have all of our isolated toolboxes, and they really fight against any interplatform integration. You have Microsoft Office, and they're office suite. You have Google Workspace. You have Apple's own airdrop, Apple Pages, and Final Cut Pro, plus the nightmare that is Adobe's subscription tools. Google wants you to spend all day checking your Gmail, traveling with Google Maps, watching videos on YouTube and browsing on Chrome. Meanwhile, your friend text you via iMessage uses Apple Maps and calls his mom on FaceTime. This is not a single person in the world uses Microsoft Edge. That is true, but like this this form of the internet is the one that the Metaverse is growing out of. Metaverse is just a way for tech companies to add VR and AR

and the accompanying extra surveillance and data collection to this portfolio, to like their own portfolio of proprietary products. But in order for that to happen, they need to convince us that we need headsets for the next evolution of the internet. So it's not surprising that Facebook and Zuckerberg were the first ones to crack this thing right open. It's they own not only four of the top six social media platforms, but also Oculus, which is the most popular manufacturer of VR hardware. VR has been relegated to niche gaming technology for like, basically two decades. And Zuckerberg decided the best way to sell more of his headsets and software was to give the tech a fresh new paint job and call it Metaverse. And like it's sort of working that there were

approximately 9.4 million shipments of VR headsets in 2021. 3.6 million of which were done during the holiday season after Facebook's big Metaverse event. It's suspected that the Quest 2, which is made by Oculus, aka Facebook, makes up for more than three quarters of all those headsets sold. So demographics data isn't explicitly available. But probably a lot of kids received these things as holiday gifts. Oculus Meta Facebook does not release its VR headset sales figures. But the Oculus app that that you need to have to make the headset work shot to the top spot in Apple's app store on Christmas Day. That was the first time it's ever been the number one app on the app store. So indicating a spike in headsets received as holiday gifts. So they're selling a lot of

headsets. Oculus is selling a lot of their things. I got one a few years ago, but now there's more and more of them circulating. But it's still all relegated to VR because I'm not actually Metaverse. Arguably the closest thing we have to the actual Metaverse is stuff like Roblox and Minecraft. Now, that's not immersive 3D. You're still looking at it through a 2D screen. But it is software that gives users development tools to create their own projects within the shared 3D space. What separates these things and basically all attempts from making the Metaverse from being the ideal Metaverse is still the proprietary aspect. Everything is isolated islands. You can't take your Roblox game into Minecraft, right? It still is isolated to their specific things. But, you know,

nevertheless, Roblox's CEO described the company as the shepherds of the Metaverse in early 2021. And he is kind of right. That's not totally inaccurate. I'm going to quote again from the Wired Piece by Cecilia Dientazio. If big text unchecked growth continues, there will be multiple Metaverses if there are any at all. Each will be interoperable under one tech giant umbrella, the same way Apple is both a walled garden and a convenient habitable terrarium for its dedicated consumers. Users love the seamlessness of Apple's proprietary operating system, the ambiguity of iMessage, and Apple presumably loves the 30% commission it can charge on developers who sell apps in their app store.

So Epic Games is the other big Metaverse proponent right now. You know, they were they were actually making announcements about Metaverse a few months before Facebook did. And the CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweenley, has been outspoken against a Metaverse ran by a big tech giant like Apple. But that's not that's not really genuine because his version of the Metaverse entails a cyberspace made accessible through Fortnite and Unreal Engine, two things owned by Epic Games. So like it's not like he's not actually sincere about creating an open source thing. He just wants to be the one to control it. He's just upset that he thinks someone else might. He tried to sue Apple last year and failed. And the California judge told him that Epic Games seeks a systematic change which would

result in a tremendous monetary gain and wealth. The lawsuit is a mechanism to challenge the policies and practices of Apple and Google, which are an impediment to Mr. Sweeney's vision of the oncoming Metaverse. So it's not actually about like him being against big tech giants and being against a big tech giant ran Metaverse. It's just that he doesn't like that he won't be able to make as much money with it if multiple tech companies work together to make it. Like that's that's that's really what he's concerned about. He would rather be in control of this thing. Because like, yeah, it would be really interesting to see if multiple tech giants work together to create an actual successor to the Internet, like an actual like, you know,

how the Internet's just when you open up your computer and you have access to the net. It's not it's not like running a specific program. You get to go on all the things. It would be interesting if people actually work towards creating that. But no, it's all about creating very isolated operating systems with a very isolated tool like tool chest. Like you can't access Steam games via the Oculus Store. These things don't these things don't work. Now you can Oculus you can use the Oculus on Steam games, but not vice versa. They're making things the way they're making things because they're not trying to design a new Internet because one thing the Internet wasn't designed. It was like the result of a bunch of people who were doing things

that interested them all kind of intersecting and building upon each other. And second, like the they're not they're making individual profit tunnels. They're not actually trying to create they're not trying to like actually trying to think about what people might want next or what people might want beyond the Internet. They're thinking how what can we sell that we're not currently selling and that's never going to be the thing that figures out. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, on that point, I'm going to do one final quote from the wired piece. If these companies dominating cyberspace did decide to collaborate simultaneously, piecing together opposite sides of the quilt to create a digital textile, that would be very polite.

But is there a world in which Microsoft, Facebook, Epic Games, Apple, Nvidia, etc. combine all of their valuable products, Captain Planet style into an architect of the metaverse under open source standards, nobody in particular, reaps billions from that sort of a tall task to overhaul your code and collaborate with your competitors. Why would three or four tech giants partner to make a metaverse when they already spent decades and billions constructing one of their own? So yeah, it's never going to happen. The way the way society is made, the way Internet works, that's not ever going to be a thing. Speaking of companies and things that you can buy online and advertising, here's some ads. And we're back. We're going to talk about

possibly the most successful version of VR technology. We're going to talk about the actual use cases that are generating actual profit. So there was a tweet a few days ago that I'm just going to read the tweet and then we'll talk about the implications. This went very, very viral. I caught this very early on, though. I started writing about it, and then a whole bunch of articles dropped on the topic. A farmer in Turkey has fitted his cows with virtual reality goggles to make them think they're outside in summer pastures. The farmer found out that these pleasant scenes make the cows happier and produce more milk. Future is metaverse. So we're going to talk about the cow matrix. We're going to talk about...

Yeah, it is amazing to go back in time and tell people, hey, you know that hit movie, The Matrix. In the future, we're going to do that, but for more milk, to get milk. So the thing that went viral about it that kind of broke the story for a lot of people was this farmer in Turkey with the pictures of the cows with VR goggles on them. Pretty fucked up. But the idea and the actual technology used came from Russia. Farmers worked together with developers, veterinarians, and consultants at the... Oh boy, here's a Russian town name, or I guess a farm name, Kragskinovka. I don't know. Yeah, that sounds right. That sounds right. I think you nailed it.

But it's this farm near Moscow, and they teamed up, so all these farmers, developers, and vets and consultants teamed up to make this cow matrix project. There was an official statement from the Moscow Ministry of Food and Agriculture reads, the global trend towards universal computerization significantly simplifies work processes in many areas that allows you to achieve unprecedented results. Russian milk producers keep up with the world standards and are even ready to offer the market new and unexpected solutions. On a farm in the Moscow region, a prototype of virtual reality glasses were tested to improve the conditions for keeping cows. Employees of one of the largest

farms in the Moscow region, together with IT specialists, decided to conduct an experiment, studying the influence of virtual reality and developed a layout of VR glasses. So the herd dawned, these VR systems adapted for the heads of cows, and they also had to make the imagery work. They needed to tweak the color palette in the software to make it suitable for the cow's vision, because cows can't see red or green. So there's just shades of yellow and blue. So in order to replicate what grass clicked to them, they had to change the stuff. But yeah, and they programmed a unique summer field simulation program and subjected it onto these cows. The Russian Ministry of Agriculture

concluded that the cow matrix does work. In a statement from 2019, this was a few years ago, officials said environmental conditions have a significant impact on cow health, and as a consequence, the quality and quantity of milk produced. So this is the thing. I talk with someone I know about this, and they're like, well, if it makes the cow actually happier and healthier, then what's the problem? The problem is that you're gaslighting an entire creature's reality. You're like non-consensually gaslighting their reality, and I don't like that. Yeah, everything we do to cows is without their consent. So it's one of those things where it's like... But we're also not gaslighting their reality

in this. We're not depriving their senses of what the world is. No, this seems like an escalation in our war on the cow. Yeah. So this other farmer in Turkey heard about this and decided to try it out on his cows. And yeah, the fucked up cow matrix or the cow tricks does seem to do its job, extracting more milk from the cow to increase profitability. A quote from the farmer said, we get an average of 22 liters of milk per day from the cows in our farm. The milk average of the two cows that wore the VR glasses went up to 27 liters. So yeah, when the story first broke, the most popular article was from a site called Futurism, which made me very depressed about Futurism. Yeah, you should be depressed about Futurism, Garrison. Yeah, it made me mad enough

that I'm going to read some of it to you. Oh, good. Thank God. I haven't been angry in seconds. That cows produce more milk when VR makes them think they're in beautiful green pastures proves that keeping them in agriculture environments isn't healthy, nor does it make them happy. Putting them in a cow matrix does sound a little grim, yes, but you can't argue with the results. Oh my God. I can't. I say you actually can. Also, all this has shown is that like, potentially, if you put cows in this thing during the winter when it's not sunny and bright outside, then they are happier. This has not shown that, for example, taking all cows out of pastures and sticking them in matrix boxes would make them happy. Yeah, because the thing is, they're not in pastures.

They're in little jail cells with VR goggles on their head. That was the use case. The quote from the farmer is like, they're watching Green Pasture and it gives them an emotional boost. They are less stressed, and the farmer said he plans to buy 10 more. It's like, you can spend thousands of dollars on specialized cow VR headsets, or you can use that money to buy more land for the cows to spread out. If we're at that point in society, in order to make enough cow milk, we need to gaslight cows by overruling their senses with a clunky VR headset on their little fuzzy faces, maybe we should stop having milk. Maybe that's it. If we require this to have milk in our cereal, then nope, no more. I'm not going to do that. I refuse. That's already an

iffy practice. If you don't buy milk locally from a farm, you know. If we're doing this, that just immediately checks me out of every... No, I'm just fully, fully not. Yeah, I think that's kind of evil. I think that's kind of evil. The whole industry way by which we produce meat at scale is pretty evil, but that's an escalation. That's an escalation. It's the specific thing of overruling their reality and senses of another living creature like that. For some reason, that upsets me. I'm not just turning them into a way for you to get meat and not just turning them into food, but... Like making their living conditions really shitty and then trying to trick them into thinking they're not. Yeah, it's even worse than

just having them live in shitty conditions, I think from an ethical standpoint. Maybe it's more pleasant for the animal, but from our standpoint, it's worse to me. Yep. Speaking of... I don't know. Don't do this to cows. Is there some segue that we can work this in? You know what does essentially force you to live in an alternate reality that allows you to be more productive for the people who make money based on your existence? That's buying these products and services that support this podcast? Oh, I was just going to say podcasts in general do that, but yes. Yeah, sure. Cool. All right, we are back. And my last big section here is titled,

We Are the Cows. So this is... That's going to give you a sense of how we're going to talk about what's happening. Don't like it. Don't like it. So what the cow tricks really demonstrates though is that the end goal of all this is to make us the cow. And we already are, to some degree, with the internet and smart phones, but this is more, this is an escalation. The people, the ghouls at Silicon Valley and the whole tech world, they want a world where we are forced to don hardware rigs that block out our body's senses and replace the input with digital coded counterfeit. That's the internet that tries to convince you that you're inside of it and it is inside of you. That is what they want, really. Even if we get the metaverse that I would prefer,

the mythical open source interconnected successor to the internet with all its different websites, tools and games that I like altogether and intuitively accessible through a shared digital space, even if we get that, which we won't, and if there's safeguards to protect digital privacy that are built in, which there wouldn't be, that doesn't actually make the real world much better. Like in my opinion, AR technology specifically could be really cool. But redesigning the world to require headsets, goggles or AR glasses would suck. Not only for people who can't get the technology, right? If we redesign the world to be like the only way to interact with systems is through this digital lens, that's going to suck. Now we already have that

to some degree with smartphones and the internet, but this is another escalation of it. And again, like the cow, it's just going to be a way to paint over our late capitalist climate disaster of a world. Metaverse is a tech capitalist solution to our current and pressing political and ontological problems. And I have to use the bathroom really badly. Well, I'll talk for a little while. I think a big part of what Garrison is saying is that instead of relying on these tech industry ghouls to build the future for you, which is a future in which they sell you a way to hide from the hell that they have made of the world and others like them have made of the world. Instead of doing that, you could just spend the rest of your life

listening to podcasts, put blinders on over your eyes, cover up all of your senses but your ears, and just exist forever in a cocoon made entirely of my voice and occasionally Garrison and Chris's and Sophie's voice, but mainly my voice. So you're saying not listen to just any podcast, but podcasts that you benefit from? I don't think people should listen to any podcast that I don't do. That doesn't seem right, Sophie. Where's my angle on that, huh? I don't know. I don't know how long we should vamp while Garrison just leaves in the middle.

I really needed to pee. Well, it's okay. I just told everybody that we're the metaverse now, Garrison, our content. I drank so much coffee this morning, it was a problem. Okay, in similar to all this, remember the John Carmichael interview from 2020? Yes, that's such a bummer. The Doomco creator and former CTO of Oculus. Yes, these bodies are a curse, John. Yeah, on the Joe Duggan show, he openly said,

The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted. It is not possible on earth to give everyone what they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson private islands. People react negatively to any talk of economics, but it's a resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot more value to a lot more people in the virtual sense. We can have virtual devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will be able to have these. Not everyone can have a mansion, not everyone can have a home theater.

These are things we can simulate, though, to some degree in virtual reality. Now, the simulation is not as good as the real thing. If you're rich, you probably have your own home theater mansion in private island. Good for you. You're probably not the people who's going to benefit the most from this thing. Most of the people in the world live in cramped quarters and are not, and that's not what they would choose to be in if they had unlimited resources. There's this piece of art that goes around the internet. It's this dystopian kid in a corner drooling with goggles on with rainbow pictures,

but it's a terrible-looking place. People say, this is the world you're trying to build. People plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them. Carmack's response is encouraging. He says, but is his life really better off if he takes the goggles off and he's in the horrible place? I think Carmack really has convinced himself that virtual reality is a path to making the world a better place. In the interview, he compares VR to the invention of air conditioning. He says, I live in Dallas. It's a hundred degrees here. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air conditioning. People don't generally go,

oh, you're not experiencing the world around you because of air conditioning. This is what human beings do. We bend the world to our will. This is how things get better by building technology and distributing them to people so that they have something better than what they would have if they didn't exist. Now, if you dig into what he's saying here, there's actually a few interesting things because for one, yeah, air conditioning is actually kind of bad. The way we're using it and what it represents, it is a band-aid solution to our continual problem of heating up the earth. And it's making the problem worse every single day. Yeah. And honestly, it's like a band-aid that also makes the problem worse because

AC contributes to a lot of energy use and emissions. It's like a band-aid made out of human shit. But air conditioning is also an actual material change. It can actually help people not die due to heat. The metaverse in VR, as talked about, does not improve a middle- to lower-class person's material conditions. And to say so demonstrates how disconnected these tech bros are from a regular person's reality. The metaverse in VR and virtual worlds are going to be built based on the perception of reality held by those who create them. That's why we're getting shitty digital private movie theaters, fake mansions, and metaverse concerts and H&M NFT stores. They're giving us a simulated version of the world that they actually get to live in for real.

But we can refuse this. We don't need to take them up on this offer. If we're going to be stuck with multiple proprietary branded metaverses that are made by rich tech bros to mirror a world that the rich tech bro gets to live in, the best thing we can do is fuck with it. We can sabotage it from the inside. 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. 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard

some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Side, we need to spam floating dicks

at a metaverse concert. This is the actual thing that needs to happen because like we all know terrorism is fun, right? Everybody loves terrorism, but there's horrible consequences for doing it in the real world. In the metaverse, there's no laws against terrorism yet. You can terrorize however you want in the metaverse and it's just trolling and that's fine. So do as much of it as possible until they make it illegal. The concept that would go really well with this type of thing is the poetic terrorism concept of this applies like perfectly to this idea of how we need to fuck with these digital spaces that are trying to be created because yeah, they're pretty bad. During 2021, Bitcoin consumed all of the electrical energy by equivalent to a country

like Argentina. In 2021, the Bitcoin network handled like 97 million transactions. So this is roughly 0.012 percent of the worldwide volume of non-cash transactions, but Bitcoin was responsible for 0.54 of global electricity consumption on total, which is astronomical. On average, that's like 1,300 kilowatt hours per Bitcoin transaction, which is so much energy. The power consumed by a single Bitcoin transaction on average could power an average US household for one and a half months. It is ridiculous how much and how much it's getting used and they're trying to build, you know, like the seek city thing, they're trying to build this metaverse off of crypto, which they're like, I'm sad because like crypto could be really similar to the metaverse crypto

could be really rad like crypto could be an actually super rad thing, but the way it's being used right now is really environmentally damaging. And this linking of web 3, you know, the mythical web 3 and the metaverse 2 crypto is showing like, yeah, it's kind of like the band-aid solution where it's not actually fixing the problem and it's kind of making the problem worse because they're so set on linking it to crypto right now that it sucks. It's gonna happen and it's gonna suck. What you can do is you can spam Final Fantasy 7 porn, you can spam Sonic the Hedgehog feet pics. This is the only tool we have. But save for actual terrorism, which we're not gonna talk about on this podcast. You can, but we can't talk about poetic terrorism. That

is something that you can do. You can fuck with these systems from the inside and make them unusable. And that's really the only thing. And that's what I'm gonna do in my spare time because it's fun. Yeah. Do do poetic terrorism in the metaverse. Go fuck it up for them. And maybe in the process, here's my dream, Garrison, that perhaps in the process of fucking it up for them, we build something that we actually like. That's the thing, right? Yeah, that is similar to how the internet kind of got originally created. Of course, now it's turned into this hellscape, but that'll probably, that'll probably happen anyway. Take 10 years or more for the metaverse. But we can get a little bit of fun out of it. And we can have some fun with

it like we did on the internet for a couple of years, for it all got real bad. So that is the metaverse that doesn't exist. And yeah, so fight against the cow matrix as best as you can. Do your best. Pull them out. Go to the city for the cows in the center of the world. Make a cow's eye on. Yeah. It's up to us. God, this is depressing. All right, that's the episode. Look the 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 and 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. Hello, hello. Hey, I don't know if you heard, but my podcast, Checking It, has been nominated for the NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Lifestyle and Self-Help Podcast. I'm grateful for the nomination. I almost didn't even do a podcast because I was just wondering, there are thousands of podcasts out there. And why is my voice needed? But a nomination from the NAACP lets me know that I made the right choice. And I encourage you to do. Don't worry if there are thousands of something out that you

want to do. Nobody has your sauce. So listen, you can still vote. Go to vote.nwacpmageawards.net. You have until February 5th, 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And please listen to my podcast. We're part of the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for checking in. Conquer your New Year's resolution to be more productive with the Before Breakfast podcast. In each bite-sized daily episode, Time Management and Productivity Expert Laura Vanderkam teaches you how to make the most of your time, both at work and at home. These are the practical suggestions you need to get more done with your day. Just as lifting weights keeps our bodies strong as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent

of pumping iron. Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart and how to maybe put them back together a little bit better than they were before. I am Robert Evans and with me this week is a guest I'm very excited about, Chris Begley, author of The Next Apocalypse, The Art and Science of Survival. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you, Robert. Chris, before we get into the meat of our discussion, I have to talk about what you do for a living, because for years and years, it was my job to go around the world. I talk to people on pretty much every continent about their different interesting jobs. I've interviewed

everybody from like brothel workers in Nevada to Iraqi counterterrorism, special forces in Iraq, and you have probably the coolest job title of anybody I've met. You're an underwater archaeologist. That's right. Was it just kind of like, were you kind of laser focused on that goal or was it more you were interested in archaeology and you loved diving, and so the two just kind of made sense together? Yeah. Well, I started out as what I now call a terrestrial archaeologist working on land, as most people do, and worked for years in Central America. Honduras was my focus, as you saw in the book, but other places nearby as well. Really, it was about, I would say, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 years ago, I wanted to just branch

out a little bit from that. One of the things that all archaeologists have seen is that there are certain things that really just aren't as explored as other things. One was all of the archaeological resources underwater. We hear about underwater archaeology or maritime archaeology in the Mediterranean, Roman shipwrecks and all that, but there are big chunks of the world where we've done very little to see what's out there. One other interesting thing about that is there are many different things you could look at underwater, but often we look at shipwrecks. Shipwrecks are different from regular archaeological sites because shipwreck is a moment in time. That all happened in one instance. When we're looking at that kind

of archaeological site, we see this snapshot that we don't see when we look at a place that was occupied over hundreds of years. That wasn't my focus, but it became somewhere I wanted to go as I learned more about it. And one of the things I find really interesting, the basic thrust of your book is that the way in which we think about civilizations falling or collapsing or however the ways in which folks tend to discuss that when we're talking about the Maya or the Romans is very different from what archaeologists who tend to study these cultures, how they tend to perceive of what you might more accurately call a decline or a decentralization or whatever. I think there's a number of terms

that we could use, but these ideas that you have these civilizations and then they suddenly fall apart are not really based in rigorous historical analysis usually. There's some cases as you go into the book. And I'm interested in that because you're kind of coming at from a very rigorous historical standpoint in this book. A lot of the stuff that we talk about on this show in a more contemporary sense. And I'm kind of wondering how the idea to write this sort of came together because you started it before the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously, that had an impact on the book. It's all over there. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I do is teach wilderness survival courses. And I don't do that as frequently as some people that sort of

dedicate themselves to that do, but I do it fairly frequently. And it became obvious to me over time that people were taking these courses not just to learn how to deal with being lost out in the wilderness, which is sort of was my vision. What do you do if you unexpectedly have to spend a night out in the woods or two or three? They were really thinking about what do I do when things fall apart? How do I take care of myself? How do I take care of my family using these skills that you could use in a situation where things had fallen apart? And that sort of oriented me towards the fact that people were worrying about the future. I mean, I could see it. I could see it in my students at university. I could see it in the people's faces at the supermarket. There was something going on

there that was concerning people. And a lot of it had to do with climate change. And that, I think, was the focus initially for me writing this. Because what I saw was the prepper community and survivalist community looking at things that really seemed to be short term and didn't at all focus on what we really saw historically. So I think that my initial motivation to write this was really just seeing this concern that was growing among people about what the future is going to look like. And then, of course, COVID hit, and that really brought all this to the forefront. And are there any specific ways in your mind that you kind of think on how COVID altered what you were writing or how you conceived of what you were writing? Like once you have this

kind of vision that's inspired by the things that you're seeing and hearing particularly in these wilderness survival courses, and then as you get started, we have this horrible, horrible plague hit and a number of things start to happen very quickly. How does that kind of alter the trajectory of what you're writing? Yeah, I guess there were some just sort of practical, logistical things, obviously, right? Some things that I intended to do or ways that I'd hope to interact with folks in the course of interviewing people for the book or writing it, you know, wasn't going to be possible. But in terms of thinking about how things happen, the big thing for me was how it became politicized so quickly. You know, that was, you know, in the, you know, well, now you see all of the memes,

you know, talking about the zombie movies where half the population doesn't believe they're zombie. Or something, you know, that was never really on the radar, at least not on my radar before. And so now, you know, it is, because clearly, not only do these things happen and then you have a group of people that are dealing with it, you have obviously the dynamics within the group, which, which of course we knew, but to see it play out in this way, in this sort of dramatic way that really altered the course of history. I mean, the pandemic could have turned out, you know, differently. But it didn't. And part of the reason it didn't was because of the way folks reacted to it. And I'm wondering, because a part, a chunk of your career in a big chunk of this book is kind of

looking at in places like Honduras, where these, these civilizations entered decline. And in some cases, it was very sharp, like within a fairly short period of time, 90% of the population leaves or, you know, is deceased. And you see like the crumbling of a lot of these governmental institutions and whatnot that had had organized life for a while, you see the pretty significant migrations. Is there any ways in which kind of the last two years, as an archaeologist, has changed or informed how you were thinking about these places that you'd been, you'd been studying in these moments in history that you'd been studying for so long? Yeah, in some ways, it brings some of it into a little sharper focus. For instance, you know, one of the things that,

that archaeologists had long talked about was that during these declines or these collapses, that it's uneven. It's not equal for everybody. It's not equal over space and time. And certainly depending on your position in society, there's different ways in which it plays out for you. You know, and that's something that we see, we see it from, you know, access to vaccines to, well, I mean, even things like, you know, if we think about folks that are unvaccinated now, there's a, you know, a chunk of those people that are doing it for a sort of political reasons or other ideological reasons. But there's also a big, a big group of those folks that are doing it because history shows that they should be wary of anything that society tries to do to them.

And so, you know, you have these, these things playing out for different ways for, you know, people from different regions of the country or political orientations or race or ethnicity or, you know, a whole variety of things. And so seeing how uneven it was, the pandemic, makes me think that, you know, it certainly was that way then. The other thing that we see when we look archaeologically is that it's these big structures or systems that collapse that really is the collapse. And the things that cause it initially, whether it's, I don't know, deforestation or drought or warfare or even a natural disaster of some sort, that really it's the way people respond to those and the way these systems deal with those changes

that really creates the problems that you see later on. And we can see that now, for instance, one of the things that we're talking a lot now about is supply chain issues, right? And this is a result of COVID, but it's not a direct result. I mean, it's not because the crews on the ships or at the ports or truck drivers have, are sick. It's because of the ways in which all of this disrupted things. And especially when we get these really efficient but inflexible systems, like a lot of our shipping system was, these disruptions result in really big changes. So, you know, you have these huge ships that can only dock at a few ports. Once that gets backed up, you can't really shift and adjust. And so that's, I think for me, just a lot of it is seeing it

play out where we see the fact that we have something that sets it all off, but then we have the response of the system or the structure that really creates the day-to-day impact. I suspect a big part of kind of why we conceive popularly of, quote unquote, collapses in the past is based on, as you talk about extensively in your book, the way in which we look at it kind of in fiction. And in fiction, it's nearly always like the societal equivalent of a bullet in the head, right? The zombie plague is out and then a couple of days, everything's fallen apart. And the point that you make in this is that it's probably, I mean, this isn't exactly a phrase, but it's probably better to look at it kind of like, it's like a

tumor or something where the things are set in motion that are going to lead to things falling apart at a point before a lot of people probably would have noticed it. The problem can be too far gone before it's really obvious. I think that's a good point and that's really something that, even with COVID, it shows that, right? The problems are not only the existence or the appearance of this virus, but first of all, how did it appear? And that has to do with decreasing habitat for wild animals and the proximity of human populations to animals. And then we have increased sort of communication and travel, which is not a bad thing, obviously. But it is going to change the way in which these things spread. But then we have the way that we

divide ourselves up into nation states and the way in which we have economic systems that are working in certain ways. So the vaccine gets here, but not there and so forth. But yeah, that I think is at the heart of it. You have these things that have been set in place. You have these parameters in which you're going to have to react and they really set the stage for what's going to happen. It's like looking backwards, four or five moves in chest to see how did we get in this situation? It's not just because of that last move. It's because of the last 10 moves. Yeah. And one of the things you bring up that I like is that if you're looking for kind of a historical example of a collapse that most mirrors the way we tend to look at it

in fiction, it would probably be what happened to the indigenous population of particularly like North America after the arrival of colonizers, which was by a lot of accounts like 90% of the population dead within a fairly short span of time, primarily from disease, this really rapid and cataclysmic shock, but also at the same time, as much as it does seem to mirror some of our kind of fictional depictions of viral outbreaks or other sort of societal calamities, the ways in which people survived don't really in any meaningful way mirror our kind of popular fictional depiction of like who makes it out of that sort of situation. The strapping military veteran with a rifle and a stockpile of food or whatever, you know. Yeah. Yeah. That you know,

I would say that certainly having these skills to keep yourself alive is important. And it is true that if you don't make it through the first 30 days, you're not going to make it through the next 30 years. But yeah, the way people survive outside of a few days, perhaps when they're dealing with some of these, what we would think of as survival situations is as a community. I mean, we see that with, you know, when we look at the Native American history in North America, you know, even as populations and entire groups were being decimated by these diseases, sometimes 75% of a village in a single winter from a wave or waves of disease. Even in the face of that, they reconstituted themselves as communities, sometimes multi ethnic or multicultural communities.

I mean, there was a whole variety of ways in which people regrouped. And I think that that, you know, that was the message. And, you know, part of this image of, you know, grabbing your bug out bag and heading out to the hills is, it just doesn't work, you know, and the stockpiling, you know, as well. And so, yeah, when we look archaeologically, you know, we always see communities. Yeah, that's something we really try to encourage people to do on this show, where obviously some amount of disaster preparation is not just helpful, but is, I think, kind of morally necessary. If it's at all financially feasible for you, you know, it is, you are, it is absolutely the right thing to do to try to have two,

three weeks of relatively storable food, some water, you know, some other emergency supplies. But kind of beyond that, as you said, that first like 30 days, if you actually want, not just to live, but to have, you know, life have any kind of meaning, you have to be thinking in a community oriented situation. Yeah, I mean, because ultimately, you know, what's the difference between two weeks or two months worth of food? Right, you know, it's going to be gone. And, you know, you have to come back, you know, one of the things in researching for this, for this book, one of the things I looked at was the history of how we made a living and the history of agriculture. And one of the things that,

you know, that I found was that the last time that humans lived where a significant portion of the population was hunters and gatherers, that is not farmers. There was like one 15th of the current population, you know, less than 500 million people in the world. So even a catastrophic disaster that, you know, reduced us to 85% of, you know, 15% of the current population, we're still going to have more people in the world than ever lived without agriculture. And so we're going to have to recreate some of these systems. And, you know, agriculture by and large is going to be a community-based system. It's, I mean, you can garden on your own, but the way that it needs to work is going to be a collective.

Yeah, and I think, we talk a lot about, I actually live with a couple of wilderness survival instructors, and we have about an acre of land, and we do a decent amount of, you know, gardening, you know, animal husbandry and that sort of thing. And it has, I've spent a lot of my life on farms, so I've kind of always had an appreciation for how much work it is. And one of the things we try to talk about on this show regularly is the value of even just having a garden of things like gorilla gardening, not because I'm not one of those people who think like, oh, we need to replace industrial agriculture with like individuals tending small gardens, that's not going to work. But because the more you kind of interface directly with

the concept of growing food and with working with other people in order to do that, the more prepared you are for any number of things that could go wrong. Like even if those things don't involve a crunch in the food supply lines, the connections you make with people doing that sort of work will be more valuable than an extra two months of stockpiles, you know, in your food buckets or whatever, your Alex Jones dried food buckets. Well, that's absolutely right. And, you know, one of the things that occurred to me looking into the past at some of these, you know, collapses or declines that had happened in the past was that a huge percent of the population was engaged directly in agriculture. And, you know, here in the, well, in the industrialized

world is typically less than 5%, less than that even in the United States. Most people like me don't don't engage in it. And, you know, I know something about gardening, perhaps like everybody else, but, you know, I'm not a farmer. I don't really have that collective wisdom. And if I had to do that, you know, probably it's like a lot of other things. When everything's easy, it's not so bad. Yeah, when it goes bad, it really helps to know what you're doing. And of course, everything goes bad sooner or later. And so, you know, that's that kind of thing's very important, you know, and I think also there could certainly local systems and some flexible scale would be really important, you know, so I'm also like you a proponent of this sort of thing, you know, if we

can get everybody to participate in ways that we aren't now, that'll give us some flexibility. What if we do have supply chain problems? Well, we have a number of people in the community that are already doing some of this stuff that could maybe be expanded or get us through this period. So yeah. Yeah, I mean, even if you're not like dealing with everyone's caloric needs, it could be as simple as because of where you're located, you know, when the oranges and other kind of fruits aren't able to come in from a supply line thing, there's a shortage of vitamin C and then knowing how to make tea out of pine needles or whatever or what kind of plants have a lot of vitamin C, you know, even though you're not, you're not focused on meeting everyone's, you know, entire

caloric needs through small scale farming, but you can deal with a nutrient deficiency or something because you understand your environment a little bit better. Yeah, and, you know, probably quality of life issues too. I mean, you know, for, you know, kids and, you know, there's lots of ways you can survive that are pretty miserable. So you want to try to direct it towards those that are desirable. And I think part of that is having this flexibility, having this knowledge, having a lot of people involved in things. And, you know, one of the things I talk about in my book or ideas of, you know, diversity and inclusion, which we talk about in certain ways now. And often, I think, unfortunately, it's talked about as if it's done to benefit the people that are marginalized

and left out only. And while it is partly that it benefits everybody, of course, I mean, anyone in a business knows anybody in the university knows the benefits of diversity. And the same way anybody that's trying to do something understands the benefit of a diverse range of experiences. You know, that's why we make these multidisciplinary teams that go out and do things. You know, it's so that you have this wide variety that can help you keep going. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I really found fascinating in your book and that kind of made me feel a little bit bad is I, you know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the what happened, what was done to and what also just kind of happened as a result of the way diseases spread

when colonizers reached North America. I had never really devoted that much thought to the actual actions that in different indigenous groups took consciously to prevent to protect themselves from the spread of diseases. You mentioned the Cherokee in particular. In your book, could you talk a little bit more about that? Because that's something, and as soon as I read it, I marked that page because I'm like, I need to look up what the studies he's referencing because I don't know anything about this. Yeah, that, you know, a lot of that stems from the research of some other archaeologists and they, you know, you're exactly right. We don't think about that. We're not taught about it that way.

You know, we sort of have this, this contradictory and sort of doubly problematic way of talking about this. First, for a long time, we denied sort of how traumatic and how much of a genocide it was when Europeans arrived. And then after denying that, we sort of say, well, Native Americans are gone and no longer relevant so we can cease to talk about them. Of course, that's not true. And one of the things that we see when we look more in detail at the histories or we listen to the oral histories or we look at the archaeology is that there are a number of things that people did and do to create the outcomes that they want. And that was no different for the Native American groups. You know, I mean, they had ways of dealing

with disease and some of them will be able to understand it via our sort of our system. Right? Isolating people, cleanliness, minimizing contact, especially with sort of problematic groups like the colonizers. But in other ways, there are things that are going to be unfamiliar to us and we're not going to see the effectiveness or the value in it. But one of the things that that all of these things did that these groups were doing was created or maintained group identity and cohesion and allowed the perseverance of community. And so there are, you know, it's easy to think about people as sort of passive victims of something, especially when it serves your purpose to think about it in these ways. And we just see that it's

not the case. Yeah, there was a remarkable moment in the book. And I think it was from when you were in Honduras, where you talk about your finding pottery sherds and they have these specific kind of markings on them from, I don't know, like a thousand years ago or so. And you also know a local woman who's a potter and she's putting the same markings on and you ask her why and her answer is like, well, because the pottery sherds that we find from our ancestors have those on them. And my initial thought was like, oh, what a shame that she doesn't know what those originally meant. But then I thought like, well, but is that any different from like all of the different things that that I do because they're traditions, because like they're things that like people

a thousand years ago and in my line did like, no, it's not like it's just what people do. And it is a continuation and it's a very there's, that's a that's that's survival, you know, that's that's conscious survival. Yeah, you know, and in that case, of course, whatever it meant initially, it now means that to her. Right. So there's the meaning, you know. And so it's it's interesting, you know, one of the things, you know, I'm from and I live in Kentucky and one of the things, especially when people come to say Appalachians, they're looking for sort of authentic Appalachian Kentucky. Sure. You know, and they already have an idea of what that is. And if you don't see it, because that's not really what people do, then the response is never, oh,

my idea is about what is authentic might be erroneous. It's, I wonder why I didn't see authentic Appalachians, you know, yeah, it's like what you did. But, you know, there's going to be more hip hop and punk groups than are bluegrass groups, because you know, these are 18, 20 year old kids, that's, you know, they're doing this as much as this other stuff, and, you know, more probably. And so that that is something that I think of often as an archaeologist, you know, my focus is in the past. But if I'm going to understand things, of course, you also have to understand how are people thinking about in the present and how am I thinking about it in the present, because, you know, everything, all the stories I tell about the past are coming out of

or coming out of my experience in the present too. And it's hard to, it's hard to separate those and really the best we can do is try to, you know, reflect on that and see how is it that I might be limiting my understanding because of my particular experience. And one of the things I really like about your book that I also found fascinating, so I, you know, I for a while did conflict journalism and before when that was just a an ambition of mine before I started to do it, I would see the articles that were being written by all these war correspondents and I would just be in awe of like, how did they get that story? How did they get that access? How did they, they must have put so much work in. And then when I actually got there, I realized like,

oh, no, they met, they made a contact with a local who was good at it. And that person showed them around and made all these connections. And like, actually, none of this work happens without these local fixers. And you make the point that in archaeology, you're not generally discovering things like even when you're finding shipwrecks, it's because these sailors who lived nearby were like, well, yeah, a bunch of shipwrecks over there. Yeah, this is where you're going to go find them, you know, it's always the way it is, you know, there. In the example you're talking about, I was part of this project in Forney in Greece, which, you know, made the news because we found so many shipwrecks there, something ultimately like 50 shipwrecks around this island. And

almost all of them were shown to us by local folks, you know, that sponge divers or people that were fishers, you know, people that were out on the water all the time. And the few that we found by ourselves, I'm sure people knew about them, we just stumbled on them before somebody had a chance to show us. It's the same way in the Honduras, where we would be walking through the rainforest. And, you know, maybe we'd been walking for a week, so we're way out in the middle of this place. People were constantly telling me, the guys that I was with would say, okay, if we go up this creek, you know, for about six hours and we go over here, here's what we'd find, here's what we'd find over here, here's what we'd find over here. They knew where everything was. And that's, you

know, one of the things that you learn is, you know, how reliant you are on people that live in a place. I mean, they just know it. Yeah, there's no, when you get right down to it, as obsessed as we are kind of in the Western Canon with the idea of lost cities. 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 heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found

himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. That's not really a thing that tends to happen. Yeah. No, no, it's not. And in fact, most of the archaeological sites that people didn't know about, it was just because they were so small and ephemeral that no one really paid

attention. Anything. Yeah, there's no lost city. They're always known to somebody. Well, Chris, I think that's most of what I wanted to get into in this conversation. I'm wondering before we kind of close out, because you are both the author of this book, The Next Apocalypse, which is I think a fascinating way of looking at the idea of things falling apart and a wilderness survival instructor, if you're going to suggest people a practical kit bag to prepare for short and kind of long term problems, what are you putting in your bag? Well, the two main things that you're always going to want is a knife, because that allows you to make a lot of other things and a way to start fire. And we've all seen in the movies,

rubbing sticks together and friction methods, and that works. And you can do that, but it is incredibly difficult to do pain in the butt. And for most of us that don't do it all the time, you're just not going to be able to do it when it's 40 degrees and raining and you really need a fire, you know, you'll be able to do it when it's 100 degrees and dry, you know, because everything's about to catch on fire anyway. But, you know, so in what would what would that look like? Well, you need something that will catch on fire pretty quickly. And the thing always takes cotton balls. You know, if you take cotton balls in a disposable lighter, or one of those fire starter sticks that'll make sparks, those cotton balls will catch fire instantly. And if

you take one and you coat half of it with petroleum jelly, then not only will it catch fire, it'll burn, you know, for, you know, a minute or so long enough to catch other stuff on fire. So, you know, making fire and having some sort of cutting tool are the very basic things. But, you know, beyond that, I would say, you know, clothing or some sort of shelter is the other thing, you know, exposure to elements will kill you quicker than anything. And so having some way to protect yourself, and that's usually going to be, you know, first line of defense is going to be your clothes. And one of the things that you'll know, anybody that deals with sort of survival situations, is that most people that really get in trouble with things like hypothermia,

you know, it's not when it's 30 degrees below and they're out doing something. It's when it's 50 degrees and sunny, and they're out in a t-shirt during the day. And then at night, it drops to 30 degrees. And, you know, they're stuck out somewhere without proper clothing. That's that, is when things get really dangerous. So, you know, I would say, you know, if you can have some way to start fire, some sort of knife and appropriate clothes for spending the night out, you know, then you're probably in pretty good shape for most situations. Well, Chris, thank you so much for talking with us today. Chris Begley, underwater archaeologist, author of The Next Apocalypse, The Art of Science and Survival.

Chris, is there anything else you'd like to say or kind of get into before we close out for the day? No, just thank you very much for reading the book and for reaching out to talk with me, because I think that, you know, especially now as we go into sort of an uncertain future, I mean, the future is always uncertain, I suppose, but as, you know, we're really recognizing some of these challenges, you know, I really am hoping that this sort of community-based idea becomes the way we think about things. You know, it doesn't mean it's easy or that we're going to like it. It doesn't mean that that's what I want.

I mean, tell you the truth, I would love it if it was just me out in the woods with my family, you know, I can do that. It's much harder to be part of a community and make things work for a big group of people, but that's just the way it's going to be. Yeah. And that's ultimately the way in which you have a lot more real security, because I think people, I don't know, the world seems so complex and messy that it's easy to imagine that safety comes from getting away from the world, but historically, that's just not how it works. No, the world finds you, you know. It's the best. Being part of a group is always best, and your little group can never defend against the big group. I mean, if we want to put it in

those terms, you know, you can't just hoard everything and just doesn't work. It might work for a little while, but yeah. So, you know, for me, that's the message I'm hoping people take from it. Well, thank you very much, Chris, for those of you listening at home. Again, please do check out the next Apocalypse, The Art and Science of Survival by Chris Begley. That's going to do it for us all today. Chris, thank you again and have a wonderful day. Hey, you too. Thank you, girl. Hello, and welcome to our show. I'm Zoe Deschanel, and I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and castmates, Hannah Simone and Lamorne Morris to recap our hit television series, New Girl.

Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast, where we'll share behind-the-scenes stories of your favorite New Girl episodes, reveal the truth behind the legendary game True American, and discuss how 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 I tossed

that one out. Listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh boy, prop. You know what's fun is live shows, live podcast shows. Live podcasts are incredible. You know what isn't incredible is the plague, which is why we've decided to find a way to give you all a live show that won't spread the plague, a virtual live show. We had to pivot. And one can say you could really watch it from anywhere. You could watch it from anywhere. You could watch it. If you're on the ISS in space right now, you could watch it. If you're in a trench in eastern Ukraine, you could watch it. If you're driving and don't care about paying attention to the road, you could watch it. All

of these are options with the virtual. Totally eliminated the problems of living in a three dimensional plane. We have. It's groundbreaking. You could call it the metaverse. Anyway, it's going to be February 17th at 6 p.m. PST. Prop is going to be the guest. Sophie is going to be there too. And you can buy tickets at momenthouse.com slash behind the bastards slash behind the bastards momenthouse.com slash behind the bastards. Watch it later. You don't have to watch it live. This is so bad. You guys, we got to do this one more time. What are you talking about? This is great. It was good. I thought everybody was going to be on board with this shit. We're all just saying the same shit over each other all at once. No, it's really bad. So that they notice it. It's

called chemistry. This was really bad. 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 AdoptUS Kids. 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 AdoptUS Kids. Brought to you by the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the Ad Council. Oh boy, it could happen here. That's the name of the podcast. And I'm Robert Evans, the guy hosting the podcast. Who else is with me? Is it Garrison?

Hello. Good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever. Garrison Davis? Yep. Not yet a Dr. Garrison Davis? Not yet. Soon to be Dr. Garrison Davis. I don't know if you're going to pass the exam that I know you're going to have to pass in order to get through this class, but yeah, sure. Little teaser for the future. Speaking of the future, this is a podcast about the ways in which the future is going to be real fucked up and ways in which maybe we could try to make it less fucked up. And today we have on a guest, Mr. Calvin Norman, who posted a thread on our subreddit with the very simple, very unsettling title, The Woods Are Bad. Calvin, you want to introduce yourself, your credentials and what you were trying to get across in that thread, because I found it very

affecting. Yeah, thanks, Robert. So my name is, like you said, Calvin Norman. I work in forestry. I've worked in forestry for a while now. I used to be an industrial forester in the Great Lakes region, so Wisconsin, Michigan. Then I worked in the Southeast. I did my master's down there, and now I'm in the Mid-Atlantic. So I've kind of been around the Eastern United States. I haven't gotten out west yet, but I'm a certified forest or candidate certified forest. I've got like a year left on that. So I've been around. I also do wildlife stuff. It's pretty fun. And yeah, your thread, what I found interesting about, I have a good friend who is in forestry or was in forestry at least and got their degree in that. And we were out hunting in the Cascades a little earlier,

or a little later last year. And there's this wonderful moment. We've been following a game trail up like this steep hillside. And there was kind of a clearing where we were a clear cut, but there's deep brush all around. And we get to the top of this thing. We look out and we just see, you know, these rolling mountains of the Cascades all covered in the most, this lush, beautiful, greenery, all these pine trees and everything. And my friend says to me, it's going to be totally different in 20 years. It's already a different forest than the one I grew up with. And that is kind of the cliff's notes of what what you're you're getting into a lot of detail here. And I'm wondering if you could just kind of like, yeah, start on that, explain kind of what's actually

happening in our woods, or at least the woods that you're comfortable talking about here. It's a big con. Yeah, yeah, this is a big con. And you have a pretty good international base. And I can't speak for the Europeans or the Canadians. There's a whole different ball game over there. And tropical stuff is just wild. Yeah, really cool, but wild stuff. So mainly talked about the US, mainly Eastern United States. So if you look at the Eastern United States, this is a forest that has never existed before in the history of the United States. Preview, you know, prior to like 1920, our forest was like, depending on the source you read, between 20 and 50% chestnut with other species mixed in there. And now we have a mainly oak

dominated forest. And we lost all of our chestnut to chestnut blight. Out west, you're got a couple of other things going on, but fire suppression has just changed the forest there. Same here in the East Coast and in the Midwest, you know, you used to see a lot more fires going through. I mean, some of that was lightning strikes, but no doubt a lot of it was, you know, intentionally set by the First Nations and people before the people that we think of as the First Nations. And, you know, that has mainly disappeared except for the Southeast where fire has never really stopped being at the ground, which is really cool. But even their species composition has changed dramatically. A lot of what we're seeing is, you know,

changes in human management, but there's also a number of invasive species that have changed things, you know, like chestnut blight, emerald ash borer, Asia longhorn beetle is coming in, you know, those are just the pests, the understory and, you know, plants is a whole different ball game. It's all not great. It's all not great. I was talking with some colleagues at an agricultural show right before I posted that we were talking about how the woods were bad. And we very easily laid out a scenario where we lost the most of our remaining dominant tree species. It was not at all hard to do. It took about two minutes. So not great. And then the West Coast things are great either. And when you're talking about, when you're talking about losing these species and

stuff like the chestnut blight, where is that coming from? How much of that is sort of as a result of, you know, climate change? Like we're having a lot of tree species have trouble here in the West because of how much hotter the summers are and how much drier things have gotten. So how much of what you're seeing where you are is because there's been changes to the climate and how much of it is, you know, I guess kind of like globalism, like people bringing in pests and bringing in blights and stuff from other areas and it spreads like wildfire. Well, I think that we're just starting to see the beginning of climate change, like driving species, you know, up the mountain, off the mountain out west and here, you know,

out of certain regions, you know, as things are getting hotter and drier or as, you know, climbers are becoming more extreme, you know, here in the Atlantic, we had one of the wettest years on record, I think it was like five or seven, whereas in the Midwest, they had droughts, but before that, we had two years of drought. So, you know, it's more extreme and that's just starting to take part. But the extinctions and near extinctions have been mainly due to non-native pests. And that's just most of it right there, just because we haven't really seen the start of climate change. But these impacting diseases, so like out west with the mountain pine beetle, you're seeing more generations of mountain pine beetle come through. I was just

doing a presentation for some folks in South Dakota and something like a third of their total forest was impacted by mountain pine beetle. Geez. And what is that like when you actually talk about this, these beetles coming in, that's the kind of thing that even as we've gotten more comfortable talking about sort of the different kind of collapses spawned by climate change, I think that we tend to imagine more spectacular things, these giant sweeping fires that burn through huge chunks of states and these huge like environmental calamities. What is this, like what happens when one of these beetles hits a forest, one of these beetle species, obviously not like a singular beetle, like what is actually like how quick is the effect and what

kind of comes after that? Like I know there's sort of a shockwave, it's kind of like a bomb going off. I'm interested in kind of tracing the root of that explosion, if that makes sense. Yeah, so it depends species, it's species chestnut plight was really fast and it just seems to have torn through the chestinensive range. So chestnut went from Florida to Maine and out west like Tennessee kind of area there and it just you know in like something like 15 years the entire species is gone. Emerald ash borer has taken a little bit longer, got here in the 80s started kind of going off in the mid 2000s and it's killed a couple of billion trees. So when that hits a small forest you know if it's a pretty beetle that kills pretty fast like emerald ash borer,

it gets into your trees, it starts with one or two and then within four or five years it's in most of them in a forest and then with emerald ash borer they're dead in five. Hemlock woolly adelgid is pretty similar, it'll just show up one day in a stand and then the hemlocks are dead within five, seven years and you know sometimes you know what's going on you know because emerald ash borer is very clear science and other times you don't know what's going on because the tree can't be so tall as all of a sudden trees are getting thinner and thinner and then they're dead or you have pests like um oak wilt and that in that trees are dead you know in two months and then it it spreads out like a circle you know it kind of exactly when you see like a bacteria like

growth medium with the bacteria spreading out that's how oak wilt spreads and it's just like trees are dead you know two months and they spread out and out and out and scary sometimes. Is there anything that can be I mean it sounds like with with most of these cases like with what's happened to kind of like the chestnuts and it's it's too late for a lot of that is there anything that can actually be done to stop this like I know we have all these structures in place to try to stop the spread of invasive species but like once they're in there it kind of seems like usually we're fucked. Yeah yep that okay yeah once you get past this there's what's called the invasive species establishment curve so it's an S curve and once you get like right like once it starts

tick it up it's like oh well we're done here so let's let's start thinking about the future and as you lose more species like oh what do we do here or if you're like you know in the case of case of ash it's like this ash is going in a swamp I have nothing else that's going to grow here so now I just have an open wetland like I can't grow any native trees here we're done so the biggest thing is prevention like don't bring invasive species in or non-native species in I was talking to a lady a couple of weeks ago and she has emerald or not she has hemlock willy-a-delga on a property and she brought in a biocontrol or would she assume was a biocontrol from Japan it's a beetle and oh no yeah in this case it was one that had been tested and failed because it doesn't make it

through the winter but you know stuff like that's like just just don't do that you know I appreciate the thought there but don't with some of these species we have you know you know like hemlock willy-a-delga we have pesticides that work really well and you apply them only to the tree and so it's like all right I treated this tree this tree is good for seven years some of them like emerald ash borer you're done there's just nothing you can do so yeah it's prevention prevention and then you can quarantine but then you know it's like we're this county's done so we're going to just try to make sure that only this county dies oh geez you mentioned a bit earlier like thinking about the future what does that actually look like when we hit a situation as we have with a

lot of these species we're like all right well this shit's we ain't we ain't stopping this what is what like what do people like you do next like what is the next kind of step for the forest or is it just sort of a smoke em all you got them kind of thing uh sometimes it's smoke them while you got them so like beach park disease is going through just roasting beach in the east coast it's going it's going to the midwest and so there it's kind of like well you know if it's in there and you're beach or dying take them out and if they're not don't there's it's 99% fatal but there's one percent that can make it so you know like maybe we find that one percent emerald ash borer is 99% fatal but i've seen you know in the past couple years i've seen two that made it so like if we

don't cut them all maybe some will survive yeah theoretically we could then like clone or breed or whatever the trees that live and and a few generations have more of them um yeah if other shit doesn't happen yeah the chestnut project's been going on for the last 100 years and it looks like it'll take you like 40 more it's that's a controversial opinion some people say it's a faster than 40 but you know tell me about three years oh the chestnut foundation really it's a really neat thing so there were some chestnuts that were found resistant in some planet outside the range of chestnut blight and so the ideas were they slowly started back breeding so they crossed in chinese chestnut which is resistant to the blight which is negative to china and east asia

and so they they crossed them in with the remaining chestnut with the hopes of you know kind of eventually breeding out the chinese but just maintaining the american chestnut and just getting that gene in there and so they started that back in like the 30s and 40s when they realized what was happening well you know today is 2022 and we are still without you know american chestnut in the forest there are some backbred versions that are more resistant but they will still get infected i've been to a couple chestnut nurseries they're doing experiments and it's it's sad because they'll they'll get up and then they'll die they'll get up and they'll die and it's like oh there's two look there are two over there in the corner that made it and those

get you know onto the next one but there is some work out of uh new york suny in new york where they um altered a chestnut and they put in um they they just they just changed the gene so the you know version of the gene that makes chestnut plate resistant is in that and that's getting approved by the epa fda and usda hopefully that gets approved if that gets approved we get real we get real farther along because the resistant trees are not the same as the american chestnut the resistant trees are more they're shorter and more shrubby and they don't fulfill the overstory canopy role that chestnut used to play um that's that's best case scenario worst case scenario is your like um butternut which was you know driven to functional extinction at the same

time and we're just nowhere on that produce working on some stuff but it's nowhere they're not in the woods now how how much of like because i i tend to roll my eyes pretty hard when we're talking particularly about climate change and people are like well i think that science is going to save our asses from this one we're gonna and we're gonna develop some like miraculous carbon capture method and like at the last minute we'll we'll be able to reverse everything and it'll be fine i tend to roll my eyes at that but this and maybe i'm not obviously i don't understand this at nearly the level you do is this kind of a thing where if there's hope for a lot of these species and a lot of these biomes it's going to be and stuff like we figure out how to hack these trees

to keep them alive and and like is is that really kind of where we are i know some very good tree genesis and tree breeders but i i don't think that they have the capabilities of you know coming up with trees that are resistant to all of the various fungi and bugs that are out there and even if they do it's you know you have to get them out into the woods you have to plant we have like seven hundred and forty million acres of forest you gotta get them out into the woods you have to have the nurseries to get them out there's you know even if you were able to create trees that were resistant to all of these pests it would be impossible so no the only the only answer is uh don't don't do climate change and to the the carbon capture perspective the only machine

that's going to capture the amount of carbon we need are trees i do i do forest carbon stuff which is a whole different episode i want to i mean i'm i'm very i'm extremely interested in that because obviously like we've we've been supported by a couple of companies who like one of the things they do to try to be nice is they'll they'll plant trees and stuff which is not useless but also a lot of people think that that's what rebuilding a forest is and like no forests are part huge part of the problem with why the west is so flammable as we chop down all these trees and we grew back just the trees um to chop them down again and that turns out to not be resilient at all to anything because trees do not live on their own ever yeah that's why it's a forest it's

not just yeah you're right yeah no it's yeah that's that's a yeah planting there's not the infrastructure to plant our way out of climate change there's not the land it's just impossible and so even even if the even if there were the infrastructure in the land that we don't have the time because you know trees take time to grow they work on a different time scale than humans do even your your shortest live tree is 60 80 years yeah and it is one of those things where i mean we had this is what we thought we kind of started this new season which is forever with which is that like there's no there's nothing we can do that will stop us from continuing to face worse and worse because like consequences of climate change because the carbon's already been emitted

right you can't just pull it out warming is going even if we were to like make very revolutionary changes tomorrow there's still some degree to which it's going to get worse um but when it comes to like within your field what like carbon capture using trees and stuff can you talk to us about like what that actually looks like as opposed to sort of the we'll plant a tree for every dollar you spend kind of thing um so yeah i actually i actually can it's i do a lot of my work about carbon yeah forest carbon stuff so yeah basically the idea is to make sure you have the the best way to get carbon sequestration of the forest is to have a healthy functioning forest and that's you know kind of where these pests and climate change are interfering with that and so you know

to maintain a healthy functioning forest on the east coast you know some of these you need to have fire some of them not some of them are too wet to burn uh and then you know harvesting needs to take place in some of these some of these don't need to be harvested again we're talking you know millions of acres of you know forest here so we're going to be incredibly broad and we got to keep invasives out you need to keep forest pests to a minimum and then make sure that you're managing the forest you know as best as it can be managed and i say managed this is not something new humans have been on the east coast since you know it depends on the artifacts you want to look at and what archaeologists you want to trust but like 25 to 20 000 years ago

and the last glaciers left the east coast 18 000 years ago so we had people here before the glaciers were gone so these forests have never not had humans hands on them and never not been touched and managed by humans um and you know we got to make sure we're doing the best we can you know some of that means that we're managing forest with what's best for the you know that means managing forest for what's best with the forest in mind not with what's best for the end of the quarter what's best for your you know bank account that's hard to do because forests are getting more and more expensive to manage and to you know manage this thing but here in the east coast we got to do a lot of fencing we got to keep deer out of forest because their populations are so high

it's just ridiculously high and they're never going to come back down you know we have to spray invasive species we have to pull invasive species you got to go through and you got to make sure you know you're you're preventing all this kind of stuff and so it could take you know you can if you do a good shelter would you can like make 40 000 out of it and then you could put all that money back into growing your next generation of forests so for sure it's really going from a profit making venture in a lot of cases to like you're barely making money or you're you're like breaking even or losing money it's it's no longer you know if you really want to do a great you're not always making money which is hard for people to get their head around yeah i mean it's the kind of thing

that in a reasonable world huge amounts of money would be diverted to from other things like i don't know yeah f-35s um i feel like you guys could do a lot with one f-35 worth of cash i feel like that would solve almost all of our problems yeah because the problems that you see in forestry don't cost a lot to fix but it it costs a lot for a forest owner be that you know an agency or a person it costs a lot yeah it's like all of the issues around climate change kind of all circle around like growth based economics and a lot of like nothing has a shared root cause but they all have this similar aspect to them where yeah every every part of them gets worse by the extreme focus on economic growth at all costs and that suffers that that makes everything and everyone

suffer so you know it would be nice if since we have a government it would be nice if they would you know give more funding towards uh stuff like this type of forest management which i know they do some but you know a fraction of it compared to what they give to like the pentagon or you know etc etc etc i mean even big you know forestry is technically agriculture but even like you know like corn and like row agriculture gets a lot more yeah they have the corn has massive subsidies compared to compared to everything else yeah like the nrcs the natural resources conservation service they do a lot with you know farm agriculture and you know they it's very difficult for forest owners to get that kind of money into forest if we could get you know that money it would be a game

changer but we're not there uh there is some change being made in the administration but yeah that's like 2022 2024 stuff and that doesn't help doesn't help today it doesn't slow down pest today you know you can't unkill trees yeah i i guess is there anything that you're optimistic about within your field right now like if you i i i think that would be handy both in terms of like is there any sort of is there a light at the end of the tunnel um because uh i'll admit like when i think about not having the forests that's pretty much the most blackpilling thing i can imagine like for myself like that's the that's the thing that i have trouble coping with emotionally more than

anything else there's lots of horrible things about what's coming but that's the one that like really scares me the most yeah i don't think we're going to lose forest as a thing they're just going to become you know if without things being done they're going to become less they're going to be fewer of them and they're going to become much less diverse and functioning you know for a lot of these you know invasive species be they plants you know especially invasive plants we have a lot of we know how to control them i was just writing a thing about controlling wavy basket grass wavy leaf basket grass it's a new invasive species to my area it's highly controllable and we know how to do it it's just again a question of people you know getting out

there and money to do it you know if we have the people and the money we could solve that problem oh also if we stop you know bringing that in that'd be even better we you know actually took you know ipm here's the heart not ipm but um quarantine and pest management seriously and you know people like stop throwing you know they look like plant out into the park just because like i don't want to kill it like let's let it be free don't do that goldfish don't don't throw them in the lake that's why you have huge goldfish coming out of like florida don't don't just cut pets loose and stuff like that and if we can get a lot of that under control would be in a lot better place i again i don't think they're forced to disappear and in the future unmanaged i think

they just become fewer less diverse and less fun yeah and then you lose species based species based on them like birds you know wildlife all that kind of stuff and also i mean one of the things that also they have to become less accessible both because there'll be less of the man as things get more fragile like how else do you keep some of these invasive species out but keeping people out which is i think a bad move for a lot of reasons but i i don't know i also don't know like to is it possible to have a global society where there is not just trade but the movement of people on a wide scale and not have this kind of shit crossing right like that's when i think about as someone who's more or less an anarchist when i think about the only things that a border

should exist to do it's it's keep stuff like that out but i just i don't know how possible that is like a lot of this stuff is i mean is this the kind of thing that's just spread by carelessness because it kind of seems like it can be spread to by people who think they're taking care yeah and both is the answer uh there's some very good research out there about the you know relatedness between global trade and you know invasive species but that also you look at like colonialism and colonial societies there were these things called introductory societies oh i'm getting the name wrong but basically they're clubs it's like all right i would like clubs of people like i would like to see yes new places i live in like the old place like the

european starling was introduced in new york because you know one guy wanted to see all the birds of shakespeare in america christ oh i got an even better one for you the uh moth formerly known as gypsy moth as soon as i'm gonna say that word um is is now found in america because of this one guy uh i'll put the name in the chat for you so you can say it because i know how much you love saying uh french names oh this guy is one of the most friends here comes a wave of comments about an anti-french racism oh no no this guy this guy deserves it yeah oh i know it doesn't matter we still get okay well this nobody does about my italian accent no it is it's just the french it's just the friend once again the italians deserve it as well yeah but they tell us about

at hand yeah so so this guy uh he was a he's a french scientist who he left france he came to the u.s for a little while he got in massachusetts he was also also an amateur entomologist oh boy and he was like oh you know what i think american needs is i think they need a silk industry now they have a negative silk moth it doesn't produce good silk it doesn't breed fast so he brought in the uh lematria i got i got to do the scientific name because we changed the name on it because the common name is a slur so we're not doing yeah so lematria disparo uh so so he brought this this moth in from europe uh and he he started trying to breed these two moths which are not related at all it didn't work obviously and then he just kind of you know he went he went off to be an

astronomer and he just let these moths go in his backyard and he didn't tell anyone they were there and then all of a sudden these things escape and now they're killing trees you know across the east of united states and they're in washington oregon i think they're at bc a little bit too great yeah so it yeah that's that's that's that's such a good parable like a parallel to the invasive species that is french people that really really does just tie up all all aspects of that yeah amazing i uh it makes me think a lot everything you're saying about kudzu which which is in the i i've heard some people say they're getting a handle on it i don't know how to evaluate that at the moment but when i was last living down there it was just like devouring

the entire southeast yeah you can handle it again if you want to spray it yeah you could you could get what's called a chew groove so much of goats you can get a handle on it but again that's money and effort so it's just a question although you do get delicious delicious goat meat oh my gosh the i tell you what the people who do goat invasive management they haven't made would they use it rent goats out to people they get paid for the goats and they also get their goats fed so when they slaughter them they didn't even pay that you know that's a good business model as someone with a couple of goats that does sound like the dream uh yeah yeah oh god and they don't work on all the invasive species i do there are folks no they probably don't eat those beetles huh no no they

also don't like plants with thorns on them either no and it's very few goats can handle an entire french person either so really yeah we can't we can't trust the goats to solve all these problems for us it is nice that they're helping um i don't know so i i try to are there things either in terms of like it acts people can 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 erenson and i'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the fbi sometimes you gotta 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 with like a lot of guns he's a shark and not in the good bad ass way it'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 into heaven listen to alphabet boys on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast i'm lance bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync what you may not know is that when i was 23 i traveled to moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space and when i was there as you can imagine i heard some pretty wild stories but there was this one

that really stuck with me about a soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down it's 1991 and that man sergey krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the soviet union is falling apart and now he's left defending the union's last outpost this is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts what if i told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science the problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an

awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences and a life without parole my youngest i was incarcerated two days after her first birthday i'm molly herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in csi how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made up listen to csi on trial on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts take or probably more more realistically organizations people could support that you think are actually helping try to stop as much of the woods from going bad as fast or reverse the the some of the stuff we've been talking about today

like how can we try to have some some room for people to do something if there is anything people can do other than check your fucking shoes for beetles when you come back from wherever burn all of your clothing anytime you leave the state okay that's that's a good start that's a really good start not even to say sometimes it's the county go one stop when you go on a road trip you stop your car at the county line and you roll it off of a cliff go with tannerite and just let it burn but don't don't push that to the woods we've seen that how that's not into the world no into the ocean where everything's fine yeah that's what they say about the ocean i don't great i tell i tell people i work between the farm field in the stream i don't do stream or water

stuff because there's chemistry in there so i don't know what happens over there that's fine i assume everything is great there it does seem to be going fine um i think the best thing that you could do as an individual is don't cut random stuff loose learn the plants of your area yeah learn what's around you and what should be there and like when you see something that shouldn't be there and you know it's an evasive remove it where legally possible obviously don't go into like someone's like arboretum and like start pulling plants out no that'd be real bad burn down small farms whatever you find them oh man the egg people would not be happy about that but yeah i mean i'm not gonna say anything um so i think you know learn plants trees is neat

um and then if you um you know think of if you're thinking about like you know how can you help manage forest you know if you lots of people either own forest or normal people own forest and you know encourage them to get a forest management plan or land management plan and get that and then also if you got a lawn rip your lawn out again where possible and use native plants i do i do some ant you know some lawn change stuff and it's just frustrating the amount of lawns out there it's like you know one of these people one of these reasons we're losing so many you know birds and we have fewer birds and bird species because like they can't eat grass these things eat fruits and insects and seeds which you don't get in grass so you know if you don't own a forest

that's fine and i'm i'm a huge advocate of that i try to be on the show and people again we always get this thing where there are people who will critique when we talk about some of these small scale solutions it's like oh you know turning your turning your lawn into a permaculture garden with local species isn't going to like produce enough food to feed your families like no it's not about that if you could get a couple of thousand people to do it and they convince another couple and like so on and so on and so on and suddenly if you're increasing significantly the amount of carbon sequestered by that lawn and you're also making a better habitat for birds and whatnot that that scales that is a thing that scales if we got a significant number of people with lawns to replace

them with something like we're talking about fucking kill kill that grass that almost certainly isn't fucking native to your area plant stuff that is and and and try to reintegrate at least your lawn back into the local ecology if you got a million americans to do a version of that you that's not an insignificant thing um yeah yeah and it is something that you can do the in a lot of states there's programs to support it the in my state there's a program specifically for like changing lawns over and that program is backed up they are out of money until 2024 they spent it all already there's definitely interest there um again give them an f-35 let me sell it to whoever whoever anyone gets it if they want it it just goes up on craigslist all right yeah put it on

craigslist yeah give it to the highest bidder um the other thing you can do is go outside like support your local land management agency most of these like forest service and park service they depend on money spent by users so go spend money at the forest the other thing people can do watch your fucking boots first though oh yeah definitely that and don't don't bring shit in yeah don't don't bring your like weird thing in like your weird plant because you don't want to kill it kill your entirely seed-based diet yeah if you don't if you hunt great that supports conservation if you don't want to hunt you can still buy duck stamps and these other things that support wildlife management in the u.s wildlife is is funded by the users so those people who buy guns

and ammo and you buy archer equipment and you buy hunting licenses so if you want to support wildlife the best thing you can do is buy a hunting license even if you don't hunt that's it's kind of counter intuitive but it's the core of the north american model wildlife yeah yeah that's a really good point and it is one of the it's also one of those areas when we talk about ways in which theoretically there's room to build inroads between left and right in this country conservation and hunting should be one right and there are hunters on the right who are actually talking a pretty good like reasonably about conservation like it is an area of shared interest everybody likes wild places so just quote unquote wild we just talked about how none of them are actually wild

they've all existed with human beings for forever but like yeah we like we like the outdoors yes the outdoors yeah well and you know people ask me like so i hunt i have my crossbows right over there oh sweet crossbow yeah get in here hold one second yeah you don't have to get a gun i have been wanting to get crossbow piled for a while now oh yeah i wouldn't mind getting crossbow piled myself yeah get a shoulder holster for a crossbow there we go oh yeah that's great oh that's no crossbow yeah no this is not a super expensive one but it's pretty much a rifle yeah i mean ballistically at the ranges you use them there's not any meaningful difference really yeah and if you're a person who you know doesn't like guns and doesn't trust yourself around them

they're very safe so yeah get get you one of those if you want it's a fun time crossbow i also like it a lot more than my uh my guns because it doesn't yeah recoil but that's enough about that well that's great um is there anything else you wanted to get into calvin before we kind of roll out today uh you touched on forest carbon stuff that's a whole man yeah a bunch of stuff on that that's a whole other world that's yeah i am interested in talking more about that but perhaps we should do uh have a dedicate an entire thing i mean we should definitely dedicate an entire thing to that it's an incredibly important subject yeah um and i think there's a lot to say about how different um indigenous groups have been like up in the northwest in

particular we have a lot of um kind of tribal efforts at stuff like not just with the with the forest but also with like the coastline and whatnot and rebuilding certain populations along the coast in the midwest monometer is a great job with forest management i'm actually doing a a webinar thing about one of our forest pests and we're having them come talk about their management well we invited them i'm not actually sure if they're gonna do it yet but the practice we use is based on what they use out there so yeah it's it's really cool what various first nations do super yeah i just want to plug trees yeah me learn your trees dope my favorite type of tree probably the redwood used to live in arcada go running in them every day um i know that's kind

of a cliche answer what's your what's your favorite tree uh this is one behind me here no one can see my background uh it's white oak you can't make bird without white oak so yeah yeah that is an important tree forest products are like one of the only things that supports supports forest management so it supports forest so you don't be afraid to use you know sustainably managed wood and wood products find a good bourbon company's capitalism and drink a shitload of bourbon always a good call really um all right well calvin norman any uh any last pluggable to plug um plants uh if you want to learn plants that's great you want to learn about what's going on your native you know your areas around you there's

lots of groups that do that your local extension service helps you out with a lot that most of their stuff's free so plug that yeah go outside and plug that i don't do twitter good yeah all right well uh go outside hug a tree calvin norman thank you again so much for coming on if you want to see calvin's original thread just type in the woods are bad uh and it could happen here read it or just go to the it could happen here read it and scroll down a bit you'll find it um that's going to do it for us today uh until tomorrow go out into the woods go out into the woods wash your fucking boots first what grows in the forest trees sure know what else grows in the forest our imagination our sense of wonder and our family bonds grow too because when

we disconnect from this and connect with this we reconnect with each other the forest is closer than you think find a forest near you and start exploring at discover the forest dot org brought to you by the united states forest service and the ad council it could happen here is the podcast you're listening to with your ears or perhaps other parts of your body if you have i don't know some bizarre form of synesthesia that causes you to taste sound um maybe you're tasting us right now in which case um i'm gonna open up the flavor bouquet by introducing my co-host garrison and our guest for today why don't you take over now garrison i've done my job great that sounds lovely yeah hey garrison here it could happen here is the podcast uh we have a special

guest today uh journalist and researcher wf thomas hello hello it's so good to be here on behind the woman's revolution the police insurrection daily thank thank you lovely to have you um a lot of people say garrison's voice tastes like sorbet by the way so comment we get a lot yeah beginning a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot of those dm's um you should probably stop that um so we're gonna be talking about something i've wanted to actually bring up myself for a while now but i just have not put it to work in and now luckily someone else did the actual work so we now we could just talk about it we're talking about something called a disclose tv um which is a broad range of things it's not it's not just one thing uh and i guess i'll i'll

hand it over to the person who did the actual work in terms of like how how would you describe what disclose tv is before we get into like the journey of the platform and thing like what like what is it yeah um let me start this off by saying i've already before the publication of the article been publicly threatened uh vaguely with legal action from disclose tv so uh that will be largely informing what i say today but we do have a lot of receipts um right now we have very scary lawyers here so i i'm i'm i'm excited whatever happens so feel free to say whatever you want to say but um disclose tv markets itself uh and presents itself as a news aggregator operating twitter um telegram gab getter they have a facebook as well as well as a main site

where they host what one could describe as articles as well yeah and i think disclose tv for our purposes despite like they have a very large facebook presence um but the way that we usually interact with them specifically like me and robert and then other people who are like journalists or just anti fascist researchers usually we interact with disclose tv on telegram or through twitter um twitter through like it's how they like break a lot of current events in like a where like you know a lot of like political figures talk about them is his twitter um and then telegram is where they really disseminate these out into more obscure groups maybe they change their wording because they know the audience is a little bit different and they've been

a vector of information for a while really really with the 2020 protests they kind of picked up a lot of all over twitter yeah they were everywhere in terms of like saying specific things not doing sourcing um and just having like basically they are a place where they kind of create what then they try to create what the news is because of how isolated they are from the sources that they actually pull info from and they're very they're very interested in kind of crafting their own version of events um which appeals to people across the spectrum like they don't just market towards the the far right wing sometimes they frame things to kind of attract a variety of people on like the under the extremist banner let's say um so you know you you don't just see them

in far right circles you see disclos pop up in a lot of places because of the way they frame news and breaking events um but they didn't always start out like this this isn't what they always were they weren't always this kind of content aggregator that creates their version of news um and uh thomas did more research into what they were before which i actually had not done that research yet um so yeah let's uh let's talk about that a little bit yeah so i'm going to start off with talking about how i first heard about disclos um so i was living in germany when the pandemic hit um and got covered first wave in germany in the middle of march um luckily i was totally asymptomatic but i was kind of stranded in germany for a couple weeks um and had to isolate in a

vacation rental uh and the bavarian man who owned it just kept coming in talking to me and i would tell him hey it's probably not the best idea for you to be coming by and chatting with me all the time and you know he got into talking and we're talking in germany he got we got into talking about you know the pandemic what he thought about it and he started talking about how he thought oh the government's making the scene way worse than it is you know the deep state if you know anything about that and he and he said deep state in english um and i was familiar with german far right currents uh at that time um but i had never encountered a pilled german dude uh and that's when i realized this is going to be a fucking problem yeah um yeah and and it lo and behold

it has continued to be a problem so uh as i got back to the u.s and and the other thing when i was in germany is the first time i encountered i encountered telegram um when a german i knew said uh hey i i just don't trust whatsapp because it's on by facebook why don't you download telegram in 2019 i think um and and it was pretty innocuous to me at the time i didn't realize this would become a problem yeah um yeah fast forward um i was working on my master's project which um can talk about more later on because it's kind of besides the point um if you all want to hear about it but uh looking at telegram is the cultic milieu um using colin cambell's framework of the cultic milieu um to understand specifically how q anon spread in germany uh and how q anon

interacted with these native underlying conspiracy narratives within germany um because telegram is already massively popular in germany um before after j6 i think of the bandwave came down and there was much more migration to the platform so you know i did the social network analysis looking at the conspirit german conspiracies seen on telegram and one of the biggest nodes that came up and i was looking at number of times shared into other groups or channels uh was disclose tv and that's the first time i came into it i i looked through it and realized okay they there is an editorial stance within this um and that editorial stance largely attracts conspiracies and far right extremists uh to this coverage and to you know this is widely

shared among conspiracists and far right extremists yeah um fast forward um i i'm on twitter as many of us are unfortunately um and i saw disclose tv just popping up everywhere um even from people who who i would think should know better yeah yeah absolutely are you know big extremism researchers and journalists um shared it i remember there one specific one that really came across my feed um disclose had had taken a video from like the blaze glenbeck's whatever empire whatever yeah um about the firefighters who were quitting over vaccine mandate or something and had all of their boots or whatever and i saw yeah lots of people sharing that as well um and eventually i got tired of saying hey this should a suspect don't share it um and decided to write an article about it so i could

just send my article to people and uh it's really interesting what i found um disclose tv started off um in the mid-2000s uh as just this forum for UFOs paranormal stuff cryptids big foot sightings and existed in largely the same format uh until 2021 um there were some shifts in in the way the site presented itself um it was it started off as a member login where members could write articles that that were largely long forum forum posts and then have people comment on them and reply um and at one point disclose made the jump to functioning as a news aggregator while including an editorial spin on that yes and including some of their own articles you want me to get more into that now yeah because yeah because like the the shift was was it wasn't

like immediate as well right like they were starting to kind of present themselves in more of a news gathering way you know around the late 20 teens of course during 2020 this became a big thing in terms of their social media presence um they were trying to present themselves as like a news aggregator right um but they still operated that but they still operated the forum on their site throughout most of that time and it's only until recently where they shut that forum down um which is you know full of full of all kinds of conspiratorial nonsense that's very easy to see past for most people uh secret you know secret arctic shit which is yeah yeah it's always that's usually a red flag yeah even getting to get stuff like

watch this sjw get rekt which which is not a quotation but just that kind of yeah vibe that style of content yeah going from the forum operating then with you know their social media accounts to the shift to this more of like presenting as a news pub site talk about that and the potential effects that we see this having on both like the social media sites and just the overall trend of news aggregation in general i guess yeah so the first big shift that i found um was the creation of their telegram channel which is in january of 2021 actually so this is okay relatively more recent than yeah shift that happened um and they operated their telegram as a as more in this traditional news aggregator sense and so that's how they really blew up on

telegram at some point they deleted all of their old tweets um and started operating their twitter in a similar manner it was after they created this telegram channel um in september so actually overnight on september 20th of 2021 they completely rebranded the site they took out all the user forums um they included backdated articles to a year prior um and looking looking through archives of that there was a note saying something along the lines of we have found so much growth on our social media our growing telegram channel our growing twitter account um and something to the effect of we we are changing our strategy and going about this a different way um and you can if you were into the forum you can join our discord um which is yeah and i'll get i'll get

into that later um and yeah looking it was really interesting too because looking at these backdated articles um they included very obviously plagiarized content um they had i believe it's it's all in the article but they had four journalists um names attached with the article using um ai generated images for their pictures yeah yeah um and as the especially the articles that they themselves published um were very focused on ufo's paranormal paranormal phenomenon um as well as content that could cause skepticism within an audience um about vaccines and lockdowns and i do not know the intent of uh their editorial board and so i cannot speak on that but of course not it generated this effect yes that is they found a way of creating content which develops a very

specific audience which grew their numbers which made them you know one could assume would make them want to make more of that content because it makes more numbers and they can um use that to grow their platform um yeah specifically leading up like after after january 2021 um ramping up when the vaccines were coming more and more common in the states and then across the world they have seen a pretty significant growth and have changed their platform accordingly exactly um so we began looking into who the who the fuck owns this what's going on with this um um like all german companies um and it is based in germany there's a requirement by law to include an imprint or an impressum that includes an address um contact information

for the site um there and the company that that owns it um a company called future bites operates disclose tv um which describes itself as a private equity firm and media group um and looking into the ownership behind future bites is a man by the name of uva brown um who has a pretty interesting backstory he's hosted he's he's made numerous web hosting sites um i believe he created some dating sites as well but but my research was not conclusive so that's a maybe um but eventually he sold he had his most success when he sold one of his web hosting sites to uh go daddy um for a lot of money uh and along the way in his own as he described uh booked a flight on virgin to go into space and see for himself if the earth if the earth was flat my god awesome cool that

this is great thank you yeah so this this is who we're dealing with um sweet and the thing about disclose being based in germany um that that becomes an issue um is that germany has a very different uh look at free speech than in the us um for example even online displaying swastikas um and denying the holocaust is illegal and is a prosecutable crime that can get you jail time so as we explored uh as i mostly and um there's additional reporting from ernie piper and i'll talk a bit more about that later uh explored their discord and their telegram we realized hum seems to be a lot of nazis here and by which when i say seems to be a lot of nazis i mean people with swastikas in their profile builds yeah um with you know names referencing

the holocaust with the whispers parentheses um and saying denying that the holocaust happened um and also sharing the neo nazi famous neo nazi infamous neo nazi propaganda film uh europea the last battle um which was shared by prominent q and on influencer ghost ezra yeah i know um oh man i this this came up a few days ago one of the uh one of the uh channels that me and someone else have been watching uh forwarded me it being that that that film being shared at the it was it was it was at the uh the free oregon telegram channel was uh sharing links to that and i i wonder i would i would like to track back where that link came from um yeah not not great seeing that uh film circulate more and more especially among like you know the free oregon

telegram channels you know like anti mask anti backs anti lockdown channel um and seeing the proliferation of that type of content yeah so in preparing for this article um with the help of of the logically editorial team i'm a freelancer um their current head of content ernie piper um sent an email basically asking hey what's going on you all seem to have a nazi problem that's kind of borderline illegal in germany um to which for a while just for for about 24 hours this closed just went totally quiet and didn't post um and then came out with a post specifically targeting ernie um by name and with a picture of him and linking to some of his old reporting work uh as well um saying yes uva brown owns this he got his money from go daddy you know we value

free speech and and we condemn hatred whatnot and and saying oh our telegram we have a tell there's a telegram group but we have these rules in it and uh okay yeah we we had to shut down the discord that got a little bit out of hand we admit that you know they had people denying the holocaust with swastika icons in their discord that they didn't seem to care too much about until someone pointed it out um and you know there's there was additionally very explicit neo nazi content in their telegram channel as well with the excuse oh well we're a growing growing platform uh we we can't moderate everything as well they have uh they just crossed 400 000 in their telegram channel and i think about 30 000 in their telegram group um which is frankly bullshit yeah that is if if

my personal opinion is that if you cannot don't have the resources to moderate the space you probably shouldn't then you shouldn't have the space yeah the space um and and additionally confirming oh okay we we when we made our new version of the site yes we backdated some articles from previous user generated content that we you know didn't vet properly we're trying to fix that now uh they removed some of those articles um and that yeah we none of the people who who are the authors of our articles are real people and they're all pen names um you know they they also have or at least had a tab on their website that said write for us and and looking for people to send them things and saying you know we we will disclose your bio and link to all your social media if you

write a story for us and there there was zero of that happening as well so do you think that i know like on the rules for their telegram they have the no nazi stuff rule um do you think they're actually trying to discourage that because they're scared of legal stuff or is that just presentary and they i guess you know this is just going into speculation so i think this might be more a question for even robert um in terms of yeah like is the anti-nazi stuff presentary and because it does seem to be a lot of their user base is fostering that type of thing or is you know being moved over from other similar channels um because yeah like a lot of like the amount that we see disclose like you know intercept with channels like you know the rise above movement

channel um and a whole bunch of like eco fascist channels and a whole bunch of channels you know on a broad like a broad range of like actual like fascist topics like people who are like into fascist theory um is quite high like the amount that disclose shows up um and i don't know like you can look at all their stuff saying i mean like yeah on the their rule page saying no nazi bullshit um but that if you spend any amount of time looking at at where their posts are forwarded it's almost primarily people who self-describe themselves as fascists um so i mean yeah it's hard or donald j trump jr who likes yes yes it expands out into a lot of you know just like you know american journalists who study extremism can also share discloses stuff on twitter right

that is part of their thing is making that and you know that that does strengthen them because it gives them that legitimacy so then when people point out that they have a nazi problem like no that's not us that's just some of our users who are trolling or you know whatever whatever bullshit they they they want to say um so i guess like how i guess the the real way to frame this is like how often have you seen nazi stuff associated with the disc with the disclose tv brand because that's the one thing we actually can't measure right we can't measure their intentions but we can't measure how often this stuff happens yeah i mean that's always like the best way to measure that kind of thing rather than just sort of like making the allegation listing like we find it in

this many channels we see it shared in these areas it's being discussed by these people and like that's i think always kind of how you actually build these these sort of networks is by looking at what is actually spreading where like that's it is thankfully something that you can measure pretty objectively and like they are fostering it with the amount of stuff they talk about like george soros and you know the amount of stuff that they like the way they frame breaking news is is has that editorial bent where it's very clear that it's getting pushed in a specific direction like there is that is that is a thing that you can't observe by reading the type of narratives they're weaving via how they report information um yeah the the the the topics that they choose

to cover um are topics that resonate very deeply with conspiracist and with far-right extremist communities um if i had to speculate i will say at least since the article has come out they've done a better job of moderating their telegram channel at least for now so good job disclose tv no one you can't find links to europe with the last battle there anymore you can still god you can still find uh very rampant homophobia slurs um because you know they didn't they clearly autoblocked some words but people can shorten them or use different spellings for those words to still be used in the channel um there's still anti-semitic um coded anti-semitic references as well responding to something saying oy vey

for example uh yeah which is something that tends to be used by a lot of neo-nazis and anti-semites yeah i mean even and if you do any amount of research on telegram you will you will find forward link forwarded links to this channel all everywhere like it's it is it is so massive the footprint that they have currently in the in like the the the cycle of of forwarding posts specifically on telegram um and yeah i mean they're getting a lot of traction on it because they have stuff framed in a way that's really easy for them to have those stuff like line up with the communities that promote those types of worldviews um yeah and promote the you know the the narratives that they want to foster so let's see let's have uh another quick break and then let's maybe talk

about uh your big masters project which is really interesting um yeah can i can i can i can i do it yeah i do the you know you know what is in telegram uh literally these ads unless we get an ad by telegram which we we are primarily sponsored by the durov brothers um but that's for a separate project great my favorite ad is the uh is the one where it's the kid playing and they find a gun oh yeah that's my favorite we're back well we are thanks great job great work i hope everybody enjoyed that kid finding a gun kid and firing it yeah so there's one of my favorite tweets recently was like somebody it was an somebody like clipped a screen grab a news article that was like uh a toddler has shot someone every day in the united states for the last three years and somebody

quote tweeted said somebody fucking stop him it's very good um the last thing i want to talk about is just kind of why news aggregators are bad in the first place and examples of what we've seen the past few years and how they contribute to this information specifically and how they don't do sourcing for any claims and they try to make themselves a primary source even though they're not um and then also like what love to talk about um your uh very fancy project so yeah we saw a lot of news aggregators in 2020 that like during the project specifically that that spawned and killed many a news aggregator account um which did not help things very much yeah and this is this is an issue that strikes across the political spectrum yes i mean one of

the biggest instances of that would be an account called uh anon cat right that was the that's what i was thinking of yeah um who you know marketed themselves towards the left wing um and i again i don't know what their intentionality was they may have had their heart in the right place i have no idea um and i'm not going to speculate on that right now but the effect that they caused was damaging to how informations disseminated specifically in high stress events um you know like for instance the written house shooting you know like this is stuff like that uh like big accounts the the the demos around that before that yeah before that yes yeah like then the in fostering that very fast paced unverified information circulation um that gets you know a

lot of retweets it gets it gets a lot of eyeballs on it but it's but it's hard it makes it very hard to backtrack claims because they do not uh want to link to other accounts because they're mostly interested in growing their own account um so and i and i will say disc disclos has gotten better about linking to the sources even if the title and the tweet don't necessarily match what is in the story they link to yeah at least someone could take a different interpretation from the two yes so just like you know news aggregation and the way it intersects with disinformation and misinformation not just a problem for the far right not just a problem for the right wing not just a problem for liberals not just problem for leftists this is the thing that

anyone anyone can really grasp on to um and some of its accidental some of its intentional right there's some some people might just do this kind of mindlessly and some people may you know do this aggregation with a very specific intent in mind so just be very careful whenever you have an account that always leads with all caps like breaking like news like if if you have an account that always does that maybe maybe maybe don't take that account super seriously all the time maybe you should uh find other sources of info that don't always start the tweets with breaking news and all caps or my advice to people if they do want something like that find an actual news source that yeah there is plenty of valid criticism to be made against you know these mainstream

media msm centrist stuff from from you know even from the left there's there's criticism um but you have to find some way of finding your own meaning and understanding of of what is going on in the world around you i think ap cnn Reuters yeah and on that point i think that is part of why i think disclose can succeed and or like what they did can succeed even like when i see stuff shared on the left even by like anarchists because it is a not mainstream media news source the way they can frame things of sometimes rarely will match up with like an actual anarchist views and they're like yeah i'm going to share it from this thing because it does feel like an underground you know source it doesn't it doesn't it's not you're not sharing a cnn article so you

feel better because instead you're sharing something that is not in the mainstream so like i i get that i get that poll to not something that is a disingenuous reading of a cnn article instead yeah but instead of your you know it's not actually better it's just marketing they're just tricking you via aesthetics and branding and that's all that it is right so maybe you should learn learn to see past the marketing and branding of those types of things and look at the actual content of what's being shared what is the university project thing that uh has been taking up a lot of your time yeah and um so i got back in the u.s and i got interested um especially in looking at the spread of cubanon in germany and that you know led me down this research path um

and brought me especially to telegram um again before it was largely used in in right wing circles in the u.s well the the nazis have have pretty regularly in the u.s been on telegram as well um but this led me to look at this and and um especially to to look at telegram in the context of as i mentioned callin cambell's concept of the cultic milieu um which i don't know if y'all have talked about that on this we have on behind the bastards a couple of times okay but yeah to to give a quick summary is is the concept that there is the space and and when callin cambell wrote that it was in i believe the 70s so it was a physical space where people go to find these rejected narratives you know reject the idea of rejected knowledge um and they go to

seek this kind of knowledge and and and these things um so he's talking about things like ufo conferences or or meetups uh or or alternative bookstores um or perhaps maybe signing up at an institute to get a degree in metaphysics yeah as what a weirdly specific example gary what is yeah sorry i just read the random thought yeah anyway how's that going by the way garrison it's going good good yeah and and what you find is is people can very easily move between ideologies um and as they move between ideologies concepts specific schools they cross pollinate these schools and this is how you get these kind of highly syncretic movements like q and on like the modern conspiracy movement which is incredibly syncretic and some of the other really bad ones that are

out there as well that combine these different views um specifically when you start when you start combining this type of like cultural mysticism with politics often you can have very volatile results yes exactly um can you think of any examples i mean in some ways the modern eco fascist movement is built on a lot of this type of stuff so that that would be the easiest that would be the easiest one the i think that the syncretism of because i think a lot of people have been surprised to see like you know kind of like natural medicine and and what not the subcultures and eight like alien subcultures kind of colliding with q and on and and these like more like far-right neo-nazi type groups and the fact that there are all of these things that were

associated for years kind of more with the left have been increasingly um pulled into this this sort of um weather system of conspiratorial thinking has been surprising to a lot of people who don't understand this stuff but it makes total sense if you if you have been paying attention to the scholarship on on what is actually like how cults sort of form like it's it's it's um it's like a weather pattern that's been building for quite a while there's a gravity to it that sucks um everything in together and it all kind of it's as you said syncretic um yeah not to get this not to get into horseshoe theory but this is even how you get some of that crossover right yes yeah that was that was that was what i was just gonna mention is that even a lot of like

the left-wing authors or you know post left-wing authors who got into this like cultural mysticism um you see their texts now getting shared by like like open fascists even though these authors were anti-fascist um they are able to still pick and choose what parts they're writing to appropriate because some of it can kind of synchronize um despite them coming at it from opposite ends a very long time like if you we've we talked about in our gabriel denunzio episodes fume which was this kind of like where a large chunk of like the the fascist intellectual movement got started um in the post world war one period but also there were like a ton of anarchists and a lot of like yeah left-wing um like thought leaders and whatnot were kind of all it was again kind

there was there was this kind of like gravity center that pulled everything in and it all started churning together and um yeah we're we're we're we're seeing that happen now um um and yeah it sucks and that's that's great yeah to jump back to camp that's one of those examples of those physical spaces that call in uh that call gamble was talking about right um where it's it's any place that ideas that are rejected by you know the orthodox kind of the establishment there is overlap there is not necessarily ideological overlap there is an interplay between them as people move between them and as these ideas come into collision with one another um and with the internet right a whole different fucking ball game um

yeah because that space is now everywhere yeah exactly and and telegram specifically has these specific affordances that make it ideal for having this soup of bullshit on it as well it's it's additionally one of and this may be changing there's a lot of discussion going on about this especially within the german government who who could actually there to have a law that they could use to say hey you can't have nazis on you can't have this nazi shit in telegram um but telegram is one of these last places where where things are largely allowed to spread without any kind of interruption right um which i do think you know you look at telegram is used in in um the hong kong uprising as well it was used for it was used in the george 2020 yeah the george

floyd uprising as well um and it's the same things that attract different people too at time is fake um abolish linear time um but shoot your clock shoot the fucking clock but okay okay sir said let's get back to the topic yeah but but but but drumming back into this telegram markets itself is this very secure platform uh it's probably not right it does have it's certainly not no yeah absolutely not it does have it does have encrypted chats but that's only for one to one messaging um between people and even then you need to go and make sure that security settings are right and and again i i don't fully trust that um yeah i don't fully trust i mean signal is about as good as it gets than i don't fully trust signal yeah yeah yeah exactly i trust conversations

when everyone has put their phone inside a faraday bag in a house and then we walked two miles into the woods we walked two miles into the woods then you can have a conversation yeah um but telegram markets itself is this very secure app right um which is which is largely marketing you know it's it's appeal is that it's not what's up it's not owned by facebook it's probably worth acknowledging that for because it's also very popular with a lot of people in um you know parts of the global south and countries with authoritarian governments and it is has been used for a lot of organizing it can be more secure and also more secure but also more accessible than what than any other tool people have access to i mean in syria it's like it's again extremely common for like

neighbor like neighborhoods and towns will have like telegram groups for this little village where they a lot of stuff gets done over telegram in places like that yeah and telegram sits in this interesting space between social media um it's not a full on social media site but it's also not just a messaging app yeah telegram it's kind of hard to categorize it is an interesting sort of like in between type thing yeah because you can have essentially unlimited i think the numbers are in the hundreds of thousands for how many people can join a group message um on telegram and you also have these one-way messaging thing called channels where where one person or group of people can send out messages that appear alongside everyone else's message feed as well

um and that can you can also enable comments on that um which i'll get into in a second um but but it's a great way to share information as well and what i was specifically looking at is the forwarding of messages because you you can forward a message from this one channel into whatever group chat you're in and it links back to that channel and i was interested in saying how far you know what connections can we make from this what kind of yes zigzagging can we find um and the answer is fucking a lot um where where someone may may use telegram for for example a neighborhood group message right and then someone forwards a message a message for this channel um or for this other group message um where they talk about oh here's kind

of health practices to use and then you get into the pseudoscience of things crossing into further messages from what's forwarder forward groups and channels from what's forwarded into that group and channel and so on so on until you get to the neo-nazis eventually um and it's also it is it is a concerted effort on the part of people pushing their ideology um who will go in the comments of of these giant channels and say hey check out my channel um what's not a real one you know arian cooking which is probably a channel but probably is yeah great job check i'm sorry but but check out check out check out check out this or whatever and and especially when qanon moved on a lot of promoters god it was awful um there there was organized groups of of internet

neo-nazis going on and trying to pill boomers into neo-nazism yeah and there's a lot because of the because of the mesh like network of telegram they try to make those meshes connect via dissemination right you can you know people who are dedicated to these more esoteric groups can join more regular like manga groups or qanon groups and start slowly bringing links to them to start doing links and forwarding to the more extreme channels um and eventually yeah that does that does work it can be a slow careful process um or it can be very fast and like bombastic and it'll depending on the person one of them will latch on to one one will latch on to the other yeah and and before the article came out um what i did see was the specific thing of of accounts that i would

associate or or believe to be neo-nazi um encouraging people to join their groups and channels in the in the telegram group message as well and i cannot speak to what that looks like right now after the article has come out for legal purposes and i've been trying to take a break from telegram for my day-to-day life um and focus on reading actual books so but yeah that is yeah i can always tell when one of us has been spending time on telegram because the the the things we consider jokes get much worse yeah you remember when i found that playlist of blink 182 nazi covers not nazi covers it was what there was like a hundred of them blink 1488 or something 14 yeah you always you could you could find the most fucked up stuff uh don't don't do it don't don't scroll

until you absolutely do not you're not going to get this isn't like coveting the same you don't need to be on twitter let alone fucking telegram yeah it's not even it's not worth it like there's no sacred novite like knowledge that we're hiding it's just it's it's just kind of sucks like it just like it just feels bad yeah it just makes you feel worse about life and yourself and the people around you so the scope for your master's project what it's kind of the what's the what's the deal with like tying these things together i guess yeah yeah so so using this social network analysis to argue that the telegram does function as this cultic milieu um which yeah i have i have my master's which seems to be the case yeah um you know and the question gets into what is the

responsibility of the platform right um because i fully believe there should be something at least similar to this it it has been used for you know purposes along with my politics in which i would call good uh and needed um however they've also allowed this fucking awful ecosystem to spread it's it's interesting to see when telegram has had to step in and they you know they have pulled down some ices accounts and channels um and and yeah they have pulled down when i was in um al hol which is that the camp where all the ices prisoners were in syria like wow jake and i were in the camp we could see on telegram like ices supporters and al hol talking about stabbing guards like in real time it was not uh particularly uh it they've done like a lot there's less of it

than there used to be but it is still not hard to find ices on telegram yeah and they they've taken down a few amount of neo nazi channels um it's it's funny because oh god maybe cut this but it they've taken on some of the neo nazi channels when they've shared ices shit for example yeah yeah i think we're we've we're familiar with that line of thing that's something we've mentioned before okay cool there has been pressure from from the play store in google as well or the play store from google and and the app store and app store yeah apple's app store from apple to say we we aren't going to carry the app if you don't do just a tiny bit better here essentially um which which which also it exists as a web client um both as a as a web

client and as a desktop app as well um but that would you know limit some of it um so so this has become largely discussed uh in the germ in the german parliament because there's a new um there's a new government in germany and and there is this history of germany kind of is the lead for doing things about this digital content uh especially within the eu and and as i mentioned there's already a law called an app enforcement act that requires platforms to take down content in germany um that could be implemented on telegram as well there's already a law yeah i mean this is like like the thing why you know what i watch happen lots is you know these channels will get shut down and they'll make a new one they'll shut down that one and make a

new one right it's this you see this with like discord servers telegram channels it is kind of this endless cycle um and seeking an end to the cycle is always not as easy as what one would hope um because of the cyclical nature of building these platforms and connections and how the people who run these you know intersect and specifically with with telegram it's really easy because if the channel gets shut down you're still part of 12 other channels and odds are one of those channels is going to forge you the link to the new channel that was that was lost um yeah and this is a thing you see where they send lists of channels yeah within within extremist groups and channels they will send out lists of here's other groups and channels to check

out as well yeah but i mean i would so that's something that's you know hard for regular people to actually do but something i think that people who do not own these platforms nor lawmakers can't think about is is particularly the the the cultic milieu that does you know go past regular left right divisions in terms of politics and how you know symbol like symbology um and stuff that was you know initially you know perhaps more anarchist or left wing is is being used by people on the right and some people are really confused by that and there is ways to there is ways to understand it like it is it does i i'm very frustrated when i look at you know people online who don't understand why nazis can use ted k and right it's like yeah like it's not it's not it's not

it's not not what it's not not really about what ted k actually wrote it's more the the symbolic meme of ted k and trying to you know get that get that line of thinking across is not the easiest thing because sometimes it'll go in the other direction and be like oh ted k is a nazi which isn't accurate either like that's that's not also the most accurate thing to say so it's it's the cultic milieu framework of being yeah sometimes these symbols can cross over from one thing to another and sometimes the action can be the same you know both anarchists and like insurrectionary fascists both want to like attack like industrialization and attack points of industry right but maybe their ideologies are slightly different sometimes in specific ways so it's

always a tricky thing to kind of navigate um so i think in terms of you know people should think about what symbols they promote uh like publicly and stuff is a good thing and think about news aggregation and how to maybe not not just share something because it's counter cultural trying to figure out what other what other types of narratives this source is spreading um yeah following real journalists support the work of real journalists because a bunch of kick-ass people out there um who are doing awesome research and work so i think that kind of wraps up the scope of what i want to talk about around disclose specifically because i mean disclose is a thing but it's also like it's good as just like an example to like this overly this like broader

like phenomenon i think um because like disclose won't be here forever hopefully like you know hopefully in a few years it's something that we can just like look back on and laugh about um but it's you know it's still a good signifier for a phenomenon that happens and the phenomenon even if disclose goes away the phenomenon's still going to stay and it's important to point it out when you see whatever the next version of this is so and i'll also say that the cultic milieu isn't necessarily a bad thing right this is you know where where stuff that is rejected by the orthodox goes and you're completely eliminating right any kind of cultic milieu just means everything is exactly the fucking same and falls in line with orthodox belief which i strongly disagree with

as well no there's there is a way to be counter cultural without being a conspiratorial fascist i would say most it takes vigilance and responsibility in which you were consuming and sharing yes and i would say like most people who are actually counterculture are yeah like actual punk is is is that you know once you're enforcing traditional hierarchical viewpoints that that ain't punk that is uh that's playing into what the status quo was that isn't that isn't revolutionary that is like the living members of the sex pistols would disagree with you aren't they all yeah but i think we can all agree that having living members of the sex pistols was a mistake and i would i prefer uh lana wachowski's version of punk to theirs anyway so hey who cares um

um so thank you for your work thomas um i would recommend people uh reach your article um which you can do by googling uh disclose tv now it will be for me it's the second result that pops up so that's go um send it to all your friends and mutuals who are showing disclose tv um you can find it on logically dot ai is the website and the full title of the article is disclose tv conspiracy forum turn disinformation factory thank you thank you for that um do you want to direct people to your twitter account or do you want to be a ghost that fades away in their memory uh just don't be fucking weird you can find me on twitter at uh w underscore be fucking weird do it underscore thomas god fucking dammit jesus christ be weird be weird all right i guess i'm

keeping my account locked for two more weeks um yeah i also want to shout out um some of the local mutual aid or one of the local mutual aid groups uh in the town where i live or in the area where i live is uh the atlanta justice alliance their cash app is cash symbol atl mutual fund or their venmo's atl mutual fund they're helping out um they they've done uh weekly um weekly provided food and uh resources for people unhoused people living in downtown atlanta um and are a great group uh and then also people want to give more money to things shout out a atlanta solidarity fund who have helped many of my friends get out of jail after they were arrested at protests um and also you can hire me if yes if you uh researchers yes you can you can't you can

hire thomas if you want uh i mean i've i've i've known thomas for a bit um they do uh really good work um yeah they're very they're very they're in my experience they're a very careful researcher they will not say things without thinking about them a lot first which is always great in a researcher or at least not publicly send them money and off-putting comments an even mix of money and really off-putting twitter comments oh and one more shout out to my one more shout out to my friends at terrorism bad pod which you should listen to and is on twitter at terrorism bad pod well that does it for us today if you for some reason are on social media and you want to follow us you can follow us at coolzone media um or absolutely don't do or happen here pod um you

can follow robert evans at i write okay send him weird messages definitely do not do that and you can send me weird messages at creep of time all right sim garrison pictures of salads that you make and and keep keep doing that for like five or six years to the point that it actually becomes funny because it's going to take a while i'm just happy that people have stopped sending me eel porn so that's honestly that's a win that's that one's on you though i don't think we could could buy everybody hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of coolzone media for more podcasts from coolzone media

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