Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 206

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Starting point is 00:03:01 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. Hi, everyone. and welcome to It Could Happen here. It's a very special Roundtable podcast today where we're going to discuss

Starting point is 00:03:33 the United States' ongoing campaign of bombing small boats in the Caribbean. I'm joined by Michael Pahlberg, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and a fellow at the Center for National Policy. Hi, Michael. Thanks for joining us. Hi, thanks for out of me.

Starting point is 00:03:52 And Andrew is also here. Listeners of the show will be familiar with Andrew's work He joins very often, but in this instance, Andrew is talking as someone who is from Trinidad and Tobago, which, of course, is very much being impacted by this. Hey, Andrew. Hey, what's going on? Not much. Well, let's talk about what's going on. Because something quite substantial is going on.

Starting point is 00:04:13 What's going on is that the United States is carrying out a campaign of drone strikes against small vessels in the Caribbean. As far as we know, there have been seven strikes, at least 32 people have been killed, two people have been detained and then repatriated, and a number of vessels have been struck. The US, it's bringing its war on terrorism logic to the Western Hemisphere, right? It's claiming that it's fighting narco-terrorism, and it's claiming that these boats are, for the most part, carrying Venezuelan nationals coming out of Venezuela. We've heard from Colombia that one Colombian national has been killed. The two people who were detained were Ecuadorian and Colombian.

Starting point is 00:05:01 Two Trinidadian or Trinidad and Tobago nationals have been killed as well. And this has sparked something of a, well, it was a war of words. Now it seems to be a war of more than that, like tariffs and sanctions. And I believe Colombia has withdrawn their diplomats from D.C. as of today or yesterday. So it sparked significant political turmoil on the Western Hemisphere. I think we have a really good panel

Starting point is 00:05:28 to talk about that. So to begin with, I guess we should start, Michael, can you explain? The accusation here, right, is that these people are members of Trendyaragua or potentially that some other cartels that the Trump administration likes to talk about. We've talked about it prevalent to those groups,

Starting point is 00:05:44 but can you explain very briefly what they are and I suppose the function that they have in Venezuela or what they're doing there versus what's in claim that they're doing? Sure. I do research on organized crime in Latin America, and Réin de Aragua is a real organized criminal group in Venezuela and now all over Latin America. It is a street gang that started out as a prison gang. It does not primarily engage in international drug trafficking, moving large quantities of drugs across national borders or across oceans. It is a primarily engaged in human trafficking and extortion rackets, and it primarily follows

Starting point is 00:06:27 the Venezuelan diaspora people who have left Venezuela, and at this point, it's an incredible 20% of the population over the last 10 years of Maduro's presidency, so nearly 8 million people, wherever they go, and they take advantage of them, they extort them for money, they will also take money to move them across borders, but they're not a cartel in the way that we traditionally think about cartels like the Sinaloa cartel or some of the Colombian cartels that are engaged in international cocaine trafficking. And so it's highly unlikely that if the Trump administration is striking boats that they claim to be vessels transporting cocaine or fentanyl, which is not made in Venezuela, it's primarily made in Mexico

Starting point is 00:07:18 co-using precursor chemicals from China, and increasingly is actually made the United States, even that it's a entirely synthetic drug, that's possible. And Venezuela, of course, is not one of the countries where coca is grown and therefore cocaine comes from. If they are indeed striking drug boats, then they probably wouldn't be traded in Agua. And if they're striking boats with Brandi Aragua, they would be most likely striking migrant smuggling vessels, in which case the death count would likely be much higher. Yeah, yeah. So we should talk about the other Caribbean nations now, I guess.

Starting point is 00:07:49 I want to talk about Trindon Tobago, but we should probably cover Colombia first, right? Because we've seen significant pushback from Petro, President of Columbia. And then we've recently seen the President of the United States accused Petro, who is, again, President of Columbia of being a drug trafficker himself, which is a fairly ludicrous claim on the face of it. But let's talk about Petro, because he has some background. in opposition to organized crime and drug smuggling, actually, right? Like, he's been in this for a while.

Starting point is 00:08:20 Can you explain a little bit of his career and then his recent stances? Yeah, so Petro is a mercurial figure in Colombian politics has been for a long time. He is known for starting his career as a gorilla with a minor anti-government guerrilla movement called the M-19 movement. Now, this is the movement which, I don't know, maybe Western, audiences are familiar with from the Netflix series Narcos for having participated, carried out the Palace of Justice siege at the Corbyan Supreme Court, which was a major disaster in which the Colombian military went in guns blazing to rescue hostages, Supreme Court justices and other people just employed in the Palace of Justice, and most everyone died in a fire

Starting point is 00:09:12 as a result. Petro was not involved in that operation. As far as anyone knows, he was not involved in eight violent confrontations. And this organization, unlike the FARC and the ELN, never really got on the cocaine money train and therefore didn't last as long as those other organizations did. They did demobilized. They did turn to peaceful politics. And Petro began his political career at the local level, became mayor of Bogota, and then eventually reached the presidency. So he is someone with a long political career and does have a constituency, does have a base, and he is the first truly left-wing leader of Colombia, a country that has been famously, both ruled by the right and also very closely ally to the U.S. It's really the U.S.'s top ally in Latin America,

Starting point is 00:09:59 well, in South America, at least, specifically on security given Planned Colombia and a long history of U.S. giving as much as $10 billion over time to beef up. Colombia's counterinsurgency and counter-narcotics fights on our behalf. Yeah, to accuse the president of being a drug trafficker is fairly ludicrous. Like, he's been, like, even in his time as a senator, right? He was, like, I think he was chairing some, like, investigations or committees that look to drug smuggling, if I remember correctly. Yeah, and so I would say Petro has been very critical of the war on drugs approach,

Starting point is 00:10:39 generally, but he does still inherit this longstanding deep relationship with the United States. And he's not exactly a full-on peacenik when it comes to his own internal security. He did come at office promising what he called total peace, possible about it, a platform that was meant to put an end to all armed incertencies in the country by making a deal with the remaining combatant groups, namely the ELN, the dissident bar guerrillas, those who did not agree to the peace deal signed by Santos in 2016, and what's in different terms called the Klan del Gorgpo or the AGC, the Gaetanist self-defense forces, but one of the largest national narco-paramilitary group that descends from the old AUC.

Starting point is 00:11:30 And he has failed in that, and talks have broken off with those other armed groups. Colombia has kind of gone back to war against them. The ELN has engaged in some pretty horrific violence, including a suicide car bombing of police barracks and the dissident FARC as well, taking down a helicopter and a drone attack. So there has been a return to fairly high-level, you know, armed insurgency in Colombia, even if it's nowhere near the level it was from the late 90s and early 2000s. Right. Yeah. And all of this is happening in the Caribbean, which is not a vast ocean, right? It's not a massive area of space. And as Andrew and I were talking about before we recorded, this has impacted other Caribbean nations, nations which are not the target of the Trump administration's aggression, but nonetheless are being subjected to it. Do you want to talk, Andrew, Trinidad and Tobago is in a particularly interesting, so right word. It's not a great situation, right? Because Trinidadian people are being killed, at least two. Indeed.

Starting point is 00:12:41 And the government is apparently completely unconcerned with this. Yes. I suppose I should provide some context. So there have been seven strikes to date, and the fifth strike resulted in the deaths of two fishermen from the village of Lasquevas in Toronto, Diego, being claimed among the victims. The government's Transpigo has not made a statement about it, and the families have not really been contacted or provided any sort of support. Now, for those who are listening, who may not know where Trinandipgo is, it is an independent Twin Island Republic in the Caribbean, and it's actually geographically an extension of South America. There's a gulf that separates it, but it's about 11 kilometers away from Venezuela itself.

Starting point is 00:13:30 and our elections that took place this year led to the removal of the incumbent party and the return of the United National Congress, the political party, led by Kamala Prasad Bissasor, claiming the government in a sweep, a landslide really. But despite that landslide, it wasn't really the result of popular support for the United National Congress. It was more so the lack of support for the previous party, People's National Movement, which lost, I believe, 200,000 or so of their usual voters just didn't show up to vote for them this election. So the opposition party came into power. When the

Starting point is 00:14:14 opposition party was in the opposition, they in many ways appeared to just oppose for opposing sake. They were in power previously from 2010 to 2015, but they were voted out due to, among other things, corruption. And since then, the party has further evolved into a sort of personality cult centered around Kamala-Pasad Bissar, and her politics have also evolved in that time to align further and further toward the United States position. She's become something of a Trump stand. You know, she was kind of towing his line on a lot of issues. She supported Guido, Juan Guido, as the president of Venezuela and actually went so far while she was an opposition leader to call on the United States to sanction Trinandabago after the vice president of Venezuela had made a visit to the country

Starting point is 00:15:08 to meet with the then Prime Minister Keith Rowley. So she has made her pro-Washington stance clear for a very long time and as she's come into power, she has diverted our alignment with our regional block, the Caribbean community Caracom, and their call for the Caribbean to remain a zone of peace and emphasized her continued endorsement for the U.S. military's deployment outside of Venezuela's territorial waters, but still very much belligerent in her approach to this issue. We have gone from a state that was respected as a non-aligned entity that was able to approach various diplomatic partners from the U.S. to China to the EU to India to Venezuela as well. And we've gone from that sort of diplomatic approach to a very clear

Starting point is 00:16:08 pro-West stance that has really alienated us from the rest of the region and really placed us almost in the position of being a satellite state for U.S. policy. You know, she's been inviting the U.S. military if they want to base the operations out of Trinidad. She has opened our doors to that. She has called for the U.S. to kill them all violently, extraditionally, and stated that she is perfectly aligned with what the U.S. is doing in the region, despite its flagrant violations of international law. Yeah. As you said earlier, the them in this instance includes at least at least two of her own citizens yeah and i will say that this sort of zone of peace designation for the caribbean it is something that i would this is my personal opinion

Starting point is 00:17:03 consider more of a hopeful ideal rather than a reality you know the trafficking that takes place in the region does visit a lot of violence upon people is you know by no means in reality a zone of peace, even before the U.S.'s actions in the region. However, though we may not fit that postcard perfect perception of, you know, tropical paradise, it is still necessary, I think, for us to stand in solidarity as a region to speak with one voice when it comes to these issues, especially as a continued existence depends on the observation of international law, the respective. for the UN Charter as small islands our safety is really in numbers and for the Prime Minister

Starting point is 00:17:54 to deviate from that solidarity in such a blatant way it's it's really quite sad but it shouldn't come as a surprise because there have been efforts by the US to divide Caracom in the past during his first term Trump had pulled some Caracom countries into the Lima group which was a U.S. promoted coalition of wrecking governments that was pushing for regime change in Venezuela, and he's now doing the same thing

Starting point is 00:18:26 with trying to get some Caracom governments to facilitate his actions toward Venezuela. They approached Grenada recently to try and get Grenada's assistance in basing a satellite there on the island,

Starting point is 00:18:43 and it's really ironic that they would approach Grenada, which is also quite close to Venezuela, because Grenada was famously one of the countries that the United States invaded in October of 1983. Yeah, I think, I know, I say this a lot, but if you've listened to the song Washington Bullets by the clash and then you go to the border, you can kind of join up all the people from all the countries mentioned there and the outcome of US policy and what that does to migration over time. we should talk about the Venezuelan opposition a bit I guess Michael would you give

Starting point is 00:19:27 I've done a pretty in-depth discussion of Venezuela a place where I have spent a decent amount of time like I wanted to see that revolution myself when I was like 19 and I was you know studying political science I wanted to see what this this like pink tide was about and I have reported a lot on Venezuelan migrants. People who are new to the show, I guess the series I did from the Darien Camp would be where I would point you for my discussion of Venezuela and Venezuelan people.

Starting point is 00:19:58 I still speak to people of Venezuela almost every day. But I think people could do my call with like a high-level overview of the Venezuelan opposition. I guess we can talk about the Nobel Prize as well, which despite what Donald Trump is saying was not awarded to him this year. Yeah, so the big news is that

Starting point is 00:20:15 Maria Corrina Machado, who is the leader of the Venezuela opposition, as we know today, was awarded the Nobel Prize, which was a bit of a surprise. And from a very U.S.-centric analysis, one idea that has been floated is that the Nobel Committee didn't want to award Trump the prize, but thought that maybe awarding it to an ally of Trump would be a way to mobilize Trump also possibly to encourage him to take a more peaceful approach. at a time that the U.S. is threatening armed intervention in some way in Venezuela, whether that is a counter-narcotics operation or more likely a regime-change operation of some kind, even though it's very unclear how they would get to regime change from blowing up boats and blowing up people. Maybe we should pause and talk about regime change, actually, because it's such a problematic idea, right? We have attempted regime changes.

Starting point is 00:21:14 My career for the last several years has been reporting on the United States failed attempts to facilitate regime change all over the world, right? Like, it's not something we're very good at. I don't think that the United States is going to invade. Maybe you think differently, but I think we probably agree that the United States is unlikely to do like an Iraq-style invasion of Venezuela. Can you explain, like, why, I suppose, just for people who, who, you know, think that that's what's happening in the Caribbean at the moment with this

Starting point is 00:21:45 concentration of forces. Well, it's unlikely to happen because Venezuela is a very large country and it would take a lot more troops than what are currently deployed, which is approaching 10,000 now, but that's actually, that includes all sorts of religious support. The actual fighting force, the marine expeditionary unit is actually much smaller. I lived in Panama as a kid, And I was not old enough to be there for the invasion, but I lived there some years after that. That's probably the closest analog to this, at least the way that the Trump administration is promoting this, which is to say a regime change operation that is disguised as a counter-narcotics operation. Famously, Noriega was, it was not a war.

Starting point is 00:22:28 It was an arrest of a foreign leader who was indeed involved in drug trafficking. And we knew that because he was literally a CIA asset whose drug trafficking was being protected as long as he was allied with the U.S. against Cuban-backed rebel groups in Central America. But at some point later, he became too much of embarrassment for the U.S. Was genuinely a brutal guy, pulled off the torch of murder of Hugo Spada for all sorts of nasty things. But the big difference is at that time, and when I lived there, the U.S. had multiple military bases in Panama. Panama was the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command,

Starting point is 00:23:11 the Western Hemisphere headquarters of the Pentagon. We had 13,000 troops already there, ready to go. I think they doubled that for the invasion, which was officially termed Operation Just Cause, originally called Operation Blue Spoon, but they had to come up with the sex year name. And of course, Panama's a tiny country, and Venezuela is 20 times larger than Panama.

Starting point is 00:23:31 Yeah, it's fast. So it's very odd. It's obviously, they have, deployed many more troops in a much larger fleet than it's necessary for a counter-narcotics operation. Incidentally, it's the U.S. Coast Guard that carries out counter-narcotics interdictions and does it very effectively. And, incidentally, does it with the cooperation of other countries which coordinate intelligence or just simply surveillance of suspicious ships or boats or planes and tip off the U.S. Coast Guard, even the Cuban government does that. In fact, it's the Coast Guard that is the U.S. agency that has the best relationships with Cuba. It's oftentimes diplomacy kind of starts with the Coast Guard's ties with Cuba. But anyway, that aside, it doesn't make sense from a counter narcotics standpoint because, look, if you actually wanted to break up a cartel, what do you do? I mean, if you are a prosecutor, investigator, right? You capture the smugglers, you

Starting point is 00:24:32 seize the cargo, the contraband, which is evidence, then you try to flip them up for immunity for whoever your real targets are. Maybe your target is Maduro or someone else in the regime. But you can't do that when you kill everyone on the boat. And I think the fact that in, I think the latest boat strike, they didn't manage to kill everyone. And a couple of them got away. And then the U.S. rather than charge them with a crime, they just turned them back around. And you would think that if the U.S. is so certain that the people on those boats are drug trafficking terrorists that they want to kill them, then you'd think they would have enough evidence to charge them, to prosecute them, but apparently not. So this is all to say, the idea that this is a counter-narcotics

Starting point is 00:25:18 operation doesn't hold up. Clearly, it is meant to be more of a regime change operation. But, again, I don't see how the one leads to the other. I believe that Trump thinks that if he just saber rattles a little bit and possibly tries some decapitation strikes the way that the U.S. did on Soleimani and Iran, that somehow the regime is going to collapse. And that does not make any sense. Maduro has surrounded himself with security, a lot of it, including through Cuban advisors. He keeps his whereabouts very secret. Even if somehow they were to drone strike him, it's not as if the regime as a whole would fall because it is an extremely militarized regime that is upheld by the armed forces who are not going to break with him because they have a hand

Starting point is 00:26:08 in every lucrative business, both legal and illegal, in Venezuela, they're not going to be paid off or not be swayed by a bounty that is currently, what, something like $50 million? I mean, there are people around Maduro that have made upwards of a billion dollars in oil rents. So it's not like you can pay off people to betray them either. Yeah, and it's not nor is it like a cult of personality situation. Like certainly not now. Chavez had

Starting point is 00:26:33 something of a sort of charismatic leadership role, but Maduro is not that. So let's talk about the opposition in Venezuela in so much as like I guess if we go back to the election last year, right? Let's start with the election and explain to people

Starting point is 00:26:49 what happened there and the subsequent sort of avenues that are now open or the avenues that that opposition is now exploring, if that's okay? There was an election, quote unquote, that took place last year. It was brokered largely by the US, the US under the Biden administration, was pushing for some kind of negotiations between the opposition, the Venezuelan government. They convinced enough people in the opposition to stand for elections under what was called the Barbados Agreement in 2023. And this was meant to be in exchange of partial lifting of the sectoral sanctions that have been in place on

Starting point is 00:27:30 Venezuela for a long time, in which the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, really tightened in exchange for the Maduro government agreeing to stand for elections. And those elections happened last year. It was pretty clear from free electoral surveys and from exit polls and from the vote returns that were coming in at the time that the opposite to Canada was going to win by an enormous march, about a 35-point margin. The candidate was officially at Moodo Gonzalez, but he was candidate mostly because Murtiguanian Machado, the now Nobel Prize laureate, was barred from running. So she gave her blessing to Gonzalez to be basically her proxy, and people were more or less voting for both

Starting point is 00:28:16 of them, so to speak. But both he and her are much more popular Maduro, who by all accounts is an extremely unpopular leader, especially in contrast to, as you said, Hugo Chavez, who, for all his faults, was a genuinely charismatic leader. And, you know, he did stand for elections and win them, you know, pretty convincingly. Incidentally, the price of oil was about $100 a barrel when he was president. And he was able to spend a lot on social programs. But that aside, yeah, that helped. Maduro is pretty unpopular at this point.

Starting point is 00:28:48 He is pretty widely seen as both a tyrant and also quite incompetent. at managing basic state services. So he was going to lose unless he stole the election, which he did. The C&E, the Venezuelan election board announced that he had won with just 51% of the vote, which is, I have to say, I give him credit it for being subtle. I expected them to announce that he had won with like 99% of the vote. Yeah, at a sad margin. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:11 No one believed it. And I have to say, one of my critiques of the Biden administration is that I think the whole thing was rather naive. I think they calculated that somehow Maduro would let himself. be voted out of office. Maduro is, what he talked about under a bounty, has a bounty on his head. Many people in the U.S., politicians, the U.S., Republicans

Starting point is 00:29:30 particular, have promised that they're going to send him to jail. So why would someone in that position, you know, give up power? I think, you know, he saw what happened to Gaddafi, and he's, you know, he doesn't want to be jailed or killed. And at the same time, the stick part of the carrot and stick mechanism was that they would simply go back to the sanctions that existed before,

Starting point is 00:29:48 which was called a snapback. And these are sanctions that the Venezuelan government has weathered for many, many years. So it's not really that much of a disincentive. So anyway, everyone basically admits at this point that he stole the election, but what are you going to do about it? The opposition, for its part, has taken different approaches to how to confront him and is famously very divided. The Venezuelan opposition has never really been on the same page. They've never really had an uncontested leader. Maria Corny Machado is about the closest they have had. But she herself really represents more one wing of the opposition, the more, you might say, hardline wing.

Starting point is 00:30:28 For a long time, there was a hardline wing personified by Lopez, and there was a more, I don't know if you call it, a soft line or liberal or just more willing to talk to the regime wing, led by Caprillas who ran against Maduro in the first election. And it's even within those factions, there are competing personalities. A lot of it really is more personal than ideological. But Marie Corne Machado, she is on the right politically. She, you know, styles herself after Margaret Thatcher. She is also, I will give her credit for this, a very good organizer. She has famously kind of gone into communities that have historically voted with the Chavista left and convinced many people to leave that coalition.

Starting point is 00:31:12 And also, to her credit, you know, I would say she is a very brave person. She has remained in the country at a time that many most opposition leaders, including Edmodo Gonzalez, have planned the country. And she's been in hiding. She knows that the regime would arrest, if not kill her, at its soonest opportunity, yet she still shows up unannounced at events, at rallies, and makes speeches. So she has achieved this kind of mythic figure. And this is something that obviously is only going to grow with the Nobel Prize. So then the question is, what will this Nobel do? I think that one calculation is that it'll simply keep her alive.

Starting point is 00:31:51 It'll be much harder for the Maduro government to kill her if they would be killing a Nobel laureate. So that may buy her a little bit more time. The Hunter and me, I was trying to best them on the first one to kill a Nobel laureate, I guess. Right, right, yeah. But will it bring peace? I'm not so sure, because Rick Gordi Machalo has also been very closely allied and supportive of the Trump administration. And her side of the opposition has been encouraging the

Starting point is 00:32:19 military strikes backing sanctions, even though the sanctions both have done nothing to dislodge Maduro and also contribute to a great deal of suffering for the Venezuelan people. And I have to say, look, I'm not Venezuelan. I have no right to give the Venezuelan opposition advice. I would say that if they have tried multiple elections, you know, at least two of which have been stolen, if they have tried, you know, you might say more democratic means and nothing has happened, I can understand why many people would think that a more radical approach is the only option left on the table. However, that approach hasn't done anything either. You know, sanctions have not to dislodge Majuro, blowing up boats of possible drug traffickers, maybe just fishermen, has not done

Starting point is 00:33:01 anything. I think that nothing appears likely to lead to regime change, but I can understand the desperation of people living under what is broadly acknowledged to be an extremely repressive regime. Yeah, and just the grinding poverty of everyday life in Venezuela is so, like I've heard so many stories from so many people of such a difficult existence there. I can understand people's desperation. Andrew, you and I had spoken about like the gulf between the government of Trinidad and Tobago and the people of Trinidad and Tobago right now. And obviously the same is true in Venezuela, right?

Starting point is 00:33:50 Like, it's not the opposition figures living in Spain who suffer when we have these sanctions, right? It's not opposition candidates who get blown up when they go fishing. It's regular working class Venezuelan people. Yeah. So do you want to talk about, like, I'm not even sure what we can do in, in by way of solidarity. with either of these nations. But maybe you have some thoughts on that. I'm honestly at something of a loss myself. Speaking from a small island, I think the US's superpower status is almost akin to an altruish horror. It feels like it's unfathomable. How you could even go about approaching

Starting point is 00:34:30 that at times. You know, I try to remind myself that people have fought and won. You know, people have resisted and want. You know, currently, there isn't that much going on. There are murmurs. They are murmurs of fare, of disdain, of disagreement, of distrust. In terms of grassroots effort, there's a lot still to be done. The leader of the move on for social justice, which is a small progressive fiscal party in Chariant, Tobago, is a guy named David Abdullah, and he has been part of this assembly

Starting point is 00:35:06 of Caribbean people who have been signing and is doing a declaration, reasserting our desire for peace, and that has been signed by various progressive organizations, social movements and figures across the Caribbean. And there was also an effort last week Thursday, that's October 16th, to organize a region-wide day of action in defense of the Caribbean. And so the different actions were taking place all over in 15 countries. We had press conferences, we had statements, and we had pickets at certain U.S. embassies and public demonstrations. It was kind of in the middle of the day on a Thursday, so there wasn't that big of a turnout from what I saw when I had gone. But it shows that there is, and from the at least anecdotal experience,

Starting point is 00:35:55 there is a desire to keep the U.S. out of the situation, you know, despite the issues with the Venezuelan government, despite the issues with our own governments, we don't want intervention, you know, and right now, all we can really levy is our voices, you know, our words, and all we can really do, I think,

Starting point is 00:36:16 besides protest, what is going on is prepare for the worst to ensure that we have, you know, sit and support systems in place, in case, you know, push comes to shove. Yeah, that's pretty bleak. Michael, do you have anything to add on

Starting point is 00:36:33 how people can be in solidarity with the people of Venezuela currently? Well, I've been calling for people broadly throughout the world to have solidarity more with people than with states, and certainly with the Venezuelan people as opposed to the Venezuelan state. I wrote something for the Center for International Policy about this, and listen, you know, it's not my place to police the left, so to speak, but, you know, as someone speaking personally who comes from the labor. movement, you know, comes from the Bernie Allied left, so to speak. You know, I do think it's been a little bit uncomfortable to observe how certain elements of the global left have stood up for the Maduro regime or the very least been the criticism of it has been taboo. And I think

Starting point is 00:37:21 a lot of that is a legacy of Chavez, Chavez having this strong personal charisma, but also that he was willing to confront the United States, the Bush administration, at a time of the Iraq war, especially low point in the U.S.'s global reputation also Venezuela's oil rents at the time, which we're financing a lot of not just social programs of Venezuela, but a lot of financial largesse to allied states and movements around the region. So a lot of left parties reflexively defended Maduro even as his repression and mismanagement just ramped up. I will say that's fading. You know, we were seeing this. within Latin America. First of all, there's kind of a generational divide, and some of the older

Starting point is 00:38:07 generation of Latin American left, like Lula or like Petro, have not been overwhelmingly anti-Maduro, but have expressed skepticism about the electoral results. But then there's a younger generation, such as Boer, Chile, and Arabello and Guatemala, who have been openly, very critical of Maduro and want to just not let him or his camp, so to speak, define what it means to be on the left. And really the only countries that have unquestionably backed him at this point are Bolivian Cuba, but also outside of the region, Russia, Iran, China. So I think that we should ask ourselves, like, who do we think is a more credible arbiter of progressive values? Is it Borch in Chile or is it Putin? You know, even the Communist Party of Venezuela, no longer

Starting point is 00:38:54 past. Yeah, yeah. That's one of my favorite facts. You know, like he has had their, their militants killed, you know, allegedly as well. So it's just, it's not helpful to view the world in this campus lens. You know, I think that if people, whether they identify as on the left or, or whatever, want to show solidarity, I think it should be with the Venezuelan people, which means listening to voices within civil society in Venezuela. There are a lot of NGOs, there are a lot of labor unions, there are a lot of human rights advocates that are not opposition parties that are not running for office. They're not necessarily calling for change, made them very critical of sanctions, but they have tried to push for better changes,

Starting point is 00:39:37 you know, quality of life, you know, reforms that might lead to less repression, open up more space for civil society, and, you know, those things are necessary when people are really living day by day, you know, and I think that if people on the left want to play the long game and understand care about their prospects of the future, they need to understand that the Maduro regime is the worst model for them to be associated with, you know, and this has already been taking place with campaigns, electoral campaigns around Latin America, where candidates on the right run against the boogeyman of, you know, Chavismo of like a Maduro model, and it makes sense. And if a lot of people on the left are very skeptical of Maria Corny Machado,

Starting point is 00:40:18 people like I have skepticism about some of her policy platforms of, you know, privatization and other neoliberal ideas, they also shouldn't be surprised. If there's been a decade of people being told that this model of corruption, authoritarianism, state terror, criminal insecurity, that's what socialism is, then people are going to believe that. And then they're going to, then they're vote against whatever that is. And this model has provoked, you know, the greatest refugee crisis, certainly in the region, eight million people, they're all carrying with them stories about why they left, right? And so if there ever were to be democratic elections in Venezuela, it's pretty clear the country would turn to the right. And I don't think we should be surprised by that. You know, and I think we should also recognize that many of the things that Maduro embodies these strong men politics are things that are embodied by other strong men, not just on the left too. You know, I would just point out that least according to some, Trump has privately expressed a lot of admiration for Maduro. I read

Starting point is 00:41:24 John Bolton's book, and the former national security visor, you know, maybe he has a lot of reasons to lie, but, you know, he did say that Trump privately expressed a lot of admiration

Starting point is 00:41:34 for Maduro being, in his words, too smart and too tough to be overthrown, you know, was really happy to see him surrounded by what he called all these good-looking generals. He disparaged Juan Guaido,

Starting point is 00:41:45 calling him the Beto-Orororque of Venezuela. You know, so I think that there is something we said about strong men, recognizing strong men. And a lot of these authoritarian lessons are not limited to one side of the ideological spectrum. Yeah, definitely. I find that tendency on the American left, on the sort of internet left, to be massively frustrating. Like as someone who went there to see the revolution, who like went

Starting point is 00:42:12 there to understand it, and who spent masses of time with Venezuelan people in the daring gap at the border in Venezuela. I'm very fond of Venezuelan people. And I think, yeah, our solidarity should be with them, not with some strong man state. We saw this in Syria as well, right? Like, it is heartbreaking, genuinely heartbreaking, to explain to people how someone who identifies as a leftist is also denying that their children were gassed by chemical weapons in Syria, right? This campus gray zone tendency on the American West specifically is incredibly toxic. And anybody who seriously considers themselves to be a leftist is massively undermining any credibility they have and they associate themselves with regimes which willingly murder

Starting point is 00:43:03 their own people. I would like to see people stop doing that. Perhaps both of you could finish up by suggesting U.S. coverage of this has not been great, right? Like it tends to focus on on the United States very much. And Venezuela kind of appears as a monolithic entity. Turned down Tobago rarely gets any coverage in the US media. I did see, I think, Reuters or AP had done a piece about how fishermen are reluctant to go out. I would like to see more of that kind of reporting. Perhaps both of you could suggest a couple of sources where people could read about this.

Starting point is 00:43:37 Sure, at least on my end, I suggest looking into our local news. Now, it's not the best source. in terms of actual interrogation of the issues and the ways in which some of the narratives just kind of get repeated uncritically, but you do get at least the occasional interview, the occasional quote from a non-U.S. State Department source. I would also suggest on Instagram, there are a couple pages that bring a more radical, progressive voice from the Caribbean. There's a page called Vintage Caribbean and there's another page called

Starting point is 00:44:18 Trinbago for Palestine and both of those have been doing a lot of coverage on this particular incident lately. So you can look to those as well if you want to get a sort of a grassroots take on the situation. Yeah, I don't really have any go-to sources on this. I would say that

Starting point is 00:44:35 it's enough of an international incident that all the major news sources you're covering it. So you can read really any news source in Latin America, if you speak Spanish fortunes and see how that recording is different. Also, incidentally, El Paiz in Spain, you know, quote knows on the side, they do pretty good reporting. Yeah, they've been doing pretty good reporting. And there's lots of blogs as well and, you know, newsletters that you can check out. I will say just made this unbiased because I focus a lot on crime. The site, insight crime is pretty good in terms of looking into specific criminal groups like

Starting point is 00:45:07 Rende Aragua and calling a question if, you know, if this really is a, you know, it's something that is controlled by the puppet master from Mira Flores, you know, like Maduro and some of these narratives that are justifying this. I would also just as a recommendation, I would say, you know, maybe we should be a little bit skeptical, too, about the timing and the purposes of these things. I did point out in the piece that I wrote for the Center for National Policy that the first boat strike happened on the same day the House Judiciary Committee was releasing a redacted a number of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, you know, and I think that there are many reasons why this administration would like to use this confrontation as a convenient distraction from other things that they would rather not be talking about.

Starting point is 00:45:56 Yeah, leak. I think it's probably a reasonable conclusion given where we're at. Where can people find both of you if they want to follow you online on social media or find more of your writing? We'll start with you, Andrew. Sure. Well, you can find me on my YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Andrew Asim. Or you can just quote my website for all my other links, Andrewsage.org. How about you, Michael? I do have a website. You can look up my name, and that should come up. I haven't updated it recently. I probably should. I'm also on Twitter X, Blue Sky, as my name, M, P-A-A-R-B-E-R-G. So you can look me up there.

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Starting point is 00:47:54 Hey, I'm Cal Penn. And on my new podcast, Here We Go again. We'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author. a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg,

Starting point is 00:48:36 Stacey Abrams, Lily Singh, and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to Here We Go Again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I live below a cult leader and I fear I've angered her. Well, wait a minute, Sophia. she's a cult leader. Well Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the okay

Starting point is 00:49:11 story time podcast, so you'll find out soon. This person writes, my neighbor's been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals and now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they may be part of a cult. Hold up, Sophia, a real life cult? And what is a dirt ritual? No clue. But according to this person, Contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with her ceiling and her neighbors are not happy. Well, she needs to report them ASAP. She did. And now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time.

Starting point is 00:49:47 So do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A combat surgeon with secrets. A world built on power. and privilege, and the most unexpected creative duo of the year. As an actor for so many years, I would always walk into other people stories. And I thought, well, why don't I give it a shot, you know, and try it right up myself? This week, bookmarked by Reese's Book Club goes live from Apple Soho in New York City

Starting point is 00:50:21 with Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, the powerhouse team behind Gone Before Goodbye. Now a New York Times bestseller. I think we both knew right away that this was going to happen. It's a conversation about fear, ambition, and what happens when two master storytellers collide? I've never seen a woman in kind of a James Bond world. Come for the chills and stay for the surprises and find out why readers can't put it down. Listen to Bookmarked by Rees's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Iqadap here, a podcast where Union Good and not everything that is called co-op is good.

Starting point is 00:51:08 Sometimes they're not actually really co-ops. I am your host, Mia Wong. And today we are joined by the people struggling under the tyrannical fist of a co-op thing that shouldn't be possible. And yet somehow. Um, yeah. Yeah, so we were talking today with Ez and Finley, who are booksellers at the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, and yeah, we are welcoming the union back to the show. And dear God, what a disaster. What a year it has been.

Starting point is 00:51:46 Well, it's really great to me, found. I wish we were back with slightly better news or more movements since we were last here, certainly. Yeah. Because when we last spoke, we had just sort of theatrically announced to art management that we were an organized shop with the IWW, and we were going to be bargaining with them for better wages and humane working conditions for us all. And they were like, yeah, you're a union, we so recognize that.

Starting point is 00:52:19 And then they have sat on their hands ever since. yeah so let's roll back all the way to the beginning and explain a little bit about what the seminary co-op is for people who weren't here how many years ago was that now that must have been last year yeah yeah it was a while ago i don't know yeah yeah so the seminary co-op co-op is a set of two bookstores in hyde park the seminary co-op bookstore which is a misnomer on two out of three counts. It's not a seminar anymore. It's not a co-op anymore. It is still a bookstore, although it is a not-for-profit bookstore, which is a mysterious category of business that doesn't exist anywhere else. Baffling. Yeah. Briefly, just to interject, I do think when I would announce events and sort of give this exact breakdown for audiences, like I said not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling, right? And when I was hired, like about three months before we announced, we were unionizing. The way it was put to me was other not-for-profit bookstores. They do a lot with

Starting point is 00:53:27 family literacy or like specifically around women's issues. But that was just like an acknowledgement of the reality that bookstores don't make a whole lot of money. And what we are providing is a not-for-profit bookstore is just the browsing experience. We kept books on shelves for too long. It just, it seemed like a really romantic idea of bookselling that didn't have like a whole lot of legs underneath it, so to speak. So it is nonsense, I would say. But that's me. Just be a library.

Starting point is 00:53:58 Like, we have this. It's called libraries. Say you're a really big bookstore. I don't know. It was vague. Yeah. Baffling. Baffling.

Starting point is 00:54:10 Yes. Yeah. And then I guess the second part of it is like, when they say it's a co-op, what does that mean? It means truly, and as can speak to those, more, that it was founded by Chicago Theological Seminary students. And there was a reason for that. Yeah, like, they did want to buy horse books at the, at the prices that retailers got them wholesale. And so the thought was, I forget their names, but we have the pictures of them. It was like,

Starting point is 00:54:37 A. Kavanaugh or something. But these two guys, just, you know, if you were a student at Chicago Theological Seminary, or even, like, a student at one of the other divinity seminaries nearby, you just put an amount of money and you were part of, like, you got your course book cheaper, you know, and under like a specific manager who came like a couple decades after that, like, then it really became like, this is the neighborhood bookstore. This is part of like, as they say, like the intellectual and sort of cultural life of the university. But yeah, at one point it was a cooperative because like you, you were a member and you got your course books cheaper because you, you know, had a certain amount of shares in the books. But yeah, it was, I think, smarter, not harder kind of scheme.

Starting point is 00:55:18 then when they dissolved the like ownership shares and stopped being a co-op, that was 2019 when they organized as this not-for-profit. It's not a 501c3. They don't have non-profit status. It's this slightly different thing. And so one of the one things that has happened in the past year is we had an interim director who got us like basically a nonprofit sponsor who lends its 501 status to other organizations and allows you to take tax deductible donation.

Starting point is 00:55:48 but, like, up to that point, we couldn't do that because we were not a legitimate nonprofit. We were this other thing. Yeah. So since 2019, it's been that. And then since 2024, it's been that plus Chicago's standalone unionized bookstore. For now, we're hoping that others follow. Inshallah, they will. Yes.

Starting point is 00:56:12 I feel like it is not a great sign of your business being well-run. when you are doing a thing that like rookie activist campaigns do when they're like oh shit we got a bunch of money we need to borrow someone else's 501 C's 3 status

Starting point is 00:56:29 like yeah great great job management like incredible stuff and like for me part of what's been so like just mind boggling is like the not for profit

Starting point is 00:56:42 bookstore whose mission is bookselling does sort of give this you know if we're like a 501 C3 who often does it, they don't turn a profit or they do, they reinvest it back into operations they're doing, but like, part of, and we can talk more about this as we get into like the bargaining, but like store financials have been so obscured. And I hate from like, truly, truly hate from a linguistic standpoint, just sort of the subtle like, oh, we must not

Starting point is 00:57:07 be doing well. Because to me, that feels like the rhetoric that really justifies the pack that I'm paid 1690 an hour and I have a masters of divinity from the seminary of the seminary co-op. Yeah, well, and I think it's also worth noting that, like, even from the perspective of capital, like, all of the giant tech companies didn't make money for, like, decades. And all those motherfuckers were walking off with, like, a hundred million dollar payouts, you know, like, they only ever started making money when they started, like, reeling in a bunch of government contracts for, like, web services and, like, defense contract and shit. And it's like, I don't know, like, this is, I guess on topic, but it's just something that makes you really mad, where people talk. about like running the government like a business and then like you know you get like the post office where it's like oh the post office doesn't run a profit it's like do you know it doesn't run a profit Uber literally has never run a profit ever not once yes not once right like it's like welcome welcome to welcome to fucking 2025 capitalism like companies don't make profits they either get contacts from the government or their entire existence is either conning some

Starting point is 00:58:15 venture capitalist dipshits out of all of their money or it's like Peter Thiel has decided that your like surveillance camera company is ideologically important to him taking over the world so he's going to give you one billion dollars and it's like oh no I'm sorry like our financials

Starting point is 00:58:31 aren't good enough for you to pay you it's like motherfucker like have you seen the rest of capitalism like eat shit pay your workers like yeah oh yeah god damn we keep using that one meme over and over that is like we're trying to balance

Starting point is 00:58:47 Watch it. It's the drill, the candles. Drill, thank you. Oh, the candles. Yeah, yeah. Because our management is so infuriating, and they also, in the year since we've been bargaining, had an interim director and spent most of his tenure searching for an executive director to take over. That person is being paid $160,000 a year to our knowledge.

Starting point is 00:59:14 Jesus Christ. And that's the offer. that we know of. We have yet to get his contract, even though we did make a formal information request for it. Yeah. Which is fucked. And it's also like, yeah, like every time these companies are like, oh, we don't have money. And it's like, okay, I can find like an unbelievable amount of money that you have given to someone to like to give a random non-specific example that has nothing to do with with any company that is in any way related to this show. Alive or dead?

Starting point is 00:59:51 Buy a bored ape Yacht Club NFT? This is like they spent $300 on Google Home Speakers for 57th Street books and I'm like, wow, my having that $300 would change my life

Starting point is 01:00:09 but also like you're paying that union busting lawyer thousands of dollars that you could be paid in reverse. Yep, but that's capitalism. Yeah, they have enough money to make your lives miserable, but they apparently never have enough money to, you know, like, make your lives not miserable because they have to spend that money on making your lives miserable. Yeah. And it's so intentional because making us miserable means that they are wearing down the number of people that they have to deal with and making the people

Starting point is 01:00:40 who are left so tired and so frustrated and so much less capable of fighting them. Yeah. And that feels like just, you know, things leaving. We've also had a number of folks. Like our bargaining unit, like last time y'all spoke last year was like 25 people. Now we're down to 11. And they've refused to hire anybody part-time or full-time. Yeah, of course. But they've been giving seasonal workers sort of like extra hours.

Starting point is 01:01:09 And that is someone's got to start counting. They have like unless they work for 90 days, they don't have to. And because they're seasonal, you know, yada-y-a-a. but they don't really join our union is kind of what I understand why they are not considered eligible, but it's like the booksellers are the heart of the store. The classification of seasonal workers,

Starting point is 01:01:27 and particularly of event runners, has been a point of contention throughout negotiations this whole time, because obviously, from our perspective, we want anyone who's working in the store in any capacity to be involved in the union. We want them to not have this random scab force that they can deploy at will.

Starting point is 01:01:46 Yeah. And that has always been the point that gets revisited over and over again, just when we think we've gotten them locked into being union members, they'll come back with their latest count. And it's like, actually, I think because of X, Y, and Z that we just changed, they're no longer eligible to join your union. But they did just hire, I think, three people that they were training at 57th Street last week, but they've made no formal announcement to anyone that these people have been hired. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:16 I only know that they were, like, in the stores because one of them came to the co-op by mistake instead of 57th Street and was like, oh, I'm one of the new hires. Oh. And so it's unclear if those are the seasonal workers or if those are new hires. Those are, I'll say, the most recent member, like, part-time, full-time member of our staff, who's not me. None of us knew she was hired, and she just came up, took a book right off my cart, and I was like, bitch what? But those were the seasonal workers at the store the other day. Like, I worked one of those Chicago Humanities events with them. And it is like, yeah, Ben, they just changed the qualification of who can be in the union.

Starting point is 01:02:56 Yeah. It's been very intentional and it's been just like over and over. They revisit and reclassify and whittle us down. Yeah. We've done, I think, too, since you last spoke, like a couple of work stoppages. and then picketed outside of our store as well. But that, I don't know, in terms of like sort of regressive bargaining through attrition that we're seeing and that like they refuse to hire other people,

Starting point is 01:03:23 even though they're kind of shooting themselves in the foot, but just like our direct action has, I think, worked against what they're thinking, which is that we're tired and that we're not going to fight back and that we are overwhelmed and we don't know what we're doing. But there are a lot of folks who do have, you know, experience with these sort of direct actions, like a work. stoppage. And I think it's great that we're wobblies, but also, like, I do kind of, like, on the work

Starting point is 01:03:49 stoppage, how flustered and upset, not like upset, but just how flustered and, yeah, just awkward management feels. It's, it's empowering for me. Yeah, but it's very much on purpose. Well, and I think that's one of the cases to just, like, a campaign in the broad sense of continuing direct actions during negotiations. is it is that chance to connect with your coworkers and re-solidify that you're fighting for something intentional in the face of the fact that you will probably start being scheduled more sparsely.

Starting point is 01:04:25 You will have fewer opportunities during the workday to talk to people. And like that's just stuff that's going to happen while negotiations go on. But like making sure that you stay in touch with your union as best you can and like show up for all the direct things that you can helps you internally combat that. is really helpful. Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, like, that's something we ran into organizing here was we spent, like, God, I think it was two years bargaining for our contract, and they didn't have the capacity to literally force half the workforce to quit, but like. Well, don't worry, they don't have the capacity to lose this many people. Those are falling up our job disease, and they are fully how few people they have. Yep.

Starting point is 01:05:06 This whole thing is, it's just like a really, really common managerial tactic. Yeah. Which is just like, we're going to make everything unlivable and try to get as many people as we can to quit and then just make everyone else's lives a living hell. Which is like, this is, I think I've said this before, but it's, it's like, the extent to which the strategy is just the deliberate infliction of terror. Yeah. Well, and the strategy is just tank your business, which seems incredibly counterintuitive from their perspective. And, like, there have been events where, like, it's been a book about, like, Carl Marx, labor organizing, whether it's a history or, like, a sociology book. And folks are like, I waited to buy this book here because it's the union bookstore. And, like, there is a way that us being a union bookstore could look, given, like, that folks up on our board are really progressive people, like, Adam Getichu, like, State Senator Robert Peters, who's, like, running on a pretty pro-labor background. Like, us being unionized could be, like, We are already a tourist bookstore.

Starting point is 01:06:12 Like, folks come from everywhere. And this is such a famous bookstore. But, like, it does baffle me. It does make sense that it's a common tactic. But also, there's so much that could work in their favor if they were not just, like, so committed to busting this union. Wait, hold on. Sidebar. A.

Starting point is 01:06:30 Gritch. She was my professor. Yeah. I talked to her today. Wait, she's just part of the management team now? No, no, no. There's, okay, so this is part of where. Or is this like a different thing?

Starting point is 01:06:39 Okay, sorry, sorry. This is where, this is where, like, us being a not-for-profit bookstore, but not actually, like, having any legal standing as a not-for-profit gets a little confusing. And, like, Finn, you can probably speak more to how this has come up in the bargaining meeting. But when we, I don't know if this was around before the cooperative was dissolved and shares were basically, like, worthless at that point. But there is a board of directors, one of whom, like, is very, very famous, and at least among the folks I know for effectively union-vesting employees at Experimental Station on

Starting point is 01:07:12 61st and Blackstone when they try to unionize, right? Oh, Jesus. And also, there are so many, like, Hyde Park progressives, like RJP, like Atom Gedishu, Eve Ewing as well. And these are people I really respect, but, like, because there's, like, this four cabinet, I think, of folks who have been in and out of bargaining meetings, when we've had employees at other labor unions who do have a connection. to, like, for example, Robert Peters, it does be very clear that, like, this governing board,

Starting point is 01:07:43 which does govern, they have terms, but we're also a retail outfit. You know, usually, like, a not-for-profit, the board of a not-for-profit would be helping with, like, an annual fundraising campaign. It's unclear entirely what the board does in a retail outfit, other than, at least in my experience, like giving advice, writing emails to try to bust this union. You know, before we unionized, albeit I had a very short tenure before we had unionized. None of these people, none of their names matter to me, but because, like, there's so much confusion about, is management going to be representing folks in the bargaining meeting, or is it going to be a board member representative? And just who is accountable to disclose what financial information and when or just any

Starting point is 01:08:25 information and when? Like, Adam Getichu is not one of our bosses, but like, there is just a lot of confusion that I feel about what the board is responsible for in bargaining and what management feels they're responsible for. And I can clear up a little bit of that because what we were told when we first unionized and when the management team was kind of shifting and reorganizing itself around the board was the board is there primarily to advise and supervise and to supervise and hire the executive director for the stores. And so there is a financial contribution. Like they're all significant donors. That's part of the way that they secure their seats as making a large donation to the stores. But then at least according to them, from that point forward,

Starting point is 01:09:21 they have no managerial oversight over the operations of the store whatsoever. It is not their responsibility. They don't make any decisions about the budget. They don't get involved. They don't want to be involved and they were embarrassed by having this attitude when previous management went off the rails and nearly drove the store into the ground by buying stock on credit cards what um but then it's a whole thing that we do not have to get into but that's the same of that this is bonkers yeah oh yeah that is to say that somehow that experience did not act as a wake-up call for this board of directors. And they said, what we will do is hire the next white man we can find and take our hands

Starting point is 01:10:07 back off the wheel. Jesus Christ. Is this an institution that people, like, it would be helpful to put pressure on or? That's what it's hard to say. Because there's this, and I think I talked about it the last time we were on the podcast, but there's this responsibility carousel between management who will in a bargaining session. Because the other thing is, because we can't tell how involved the board is, because they tell us that they're not involved at all

Starting point is 01:10:31 and then they make decisions and we hear about the decisions that they're making. We have asked repeatedly that they be involved in bargaining and that they send someone to represent them or they like participate and have an opinion on the way that the stores are run and they have repeatedly refused

Starting point is 01:10:47 those invitations, requests, demands, etc. Yeah. It seems their involvement has been to recommend that our management hire Jenny Goulds to be their lawyer and that is about as much as they want to do. Jesus Christ. Like two things, too, Finn.

Starting point is 01:11:02 I think there was supposed to be a board member president at the next bargaining meeting, but because our meeting was contingent on having the full financial information that we requested literally a month ago. And when we requested that information, the next day a board member, the president of the board said, okay, we'll get this to you. We got it. I think you might know more about the timing of this, Finn, like at the last possible minute. You got it the day before the meeting. Oh, God.

Starting point is 01:11:28 Yeah. And it was half of what we asked for. Yeah. And then what we said, this is not what we requested and we cannot meet because we said we couldn't meet without this full information. They were like, we're disappointed that you can't do that. And we were like, yeah, shocking. Yeah. We are back.

Starting point is 01:11:55 Let's get more formally into what the marketing process is. has looked like. It sounds like it's been extremely chaotic. They've been not turning over information. It's deeply unclear who's making decisions which all seem and I can say this in my professional opinion

Starting point is 01:12:12 not good. A technical analysis. This is why they pay me the mediocre bucks. Wow, I think you were just so well informed. Yes. Journalistic insight. Yeah. So the way that

Starting point is 01:12:28 we set it up on our end when we entered into negotiations was we had a core team of three people who were going to be our like core bargaining unit who would attend every meeting. And then we had a small team of like three more people, including myself, that were like alternates in case something got scheduled on day that one of the core team couldn't be there. And we made sure that we would always schedule one person who was not negotiating to be at the meeting and take notes so that, like, none of the people who were negotiating had to do that at the same time. And when we first started negotiating, the management team was sending Dan Meyer, the interim director and Nain Kano, who's our deputy director, who is basically the, like, one person on the

Starting point is 01:13:12 management team who is not, she's not supposed to be a direct supervisor. She has not actually let go of the people that she was supervising. But she's, like, in that middle space between, like, supervising management and, like, director management. But she has since stepped down from negotiations because of the way that she's been involved in the rest of store operations. She was like, I can't come to the table anymore. And so the latest meeting that has been rescheduled is going to be with Kevin Bendel,

Starting point is 01:13:42 who is the new executive director. And then one other name that I forget, who is either a board member as thinks or I'm not sure, well, she would be. but it is it is a board member of it i think it is teara goldstein is her name tiera goldstone yeah yeah every so often in negotiating sessions dan or naid would make some reference to like a financial decision that we were trying to bargain about being like not their choice and being something that would be up to the board and we'd be like so take it to the board and they would be like okay and then we would never hear anything about it ever again

Starting point is 01:14:22 incredible work. It seems like a great tactic to never address anything you're supposed to be addressing. And so the way that we were negotiating, we were trying to come to terms on things that didn't affect the finances of the store first so that we could land some easy wins and feel like we were making progress

Starting point is 01:14:44 and then address the stuff that we expected to be thornier later. But then what that ended up being as, meetings went on and on, was them asking us constantly, like, but what is it that you guys really are, like, prioritizing? Like, what is the thing that matters the most to you that, like, you have the least give on? And we're like, it's wages. You know it's wages. It's been wages this whole time. And they're like, but, like, what if we were, like, asking you to give up all your benefits to get wages that you want? And we were like, okay, that's not how negotiating works.

Starting point is 01:15:17 And then, in an email that labeled it, their best and final offer, which is language that they have yet to take back, they sent us a version of the contract bargaining agreement that we, A, let me just back up for a second. When we first started negotiating, they asked us to draft the entire first draft of the collective bargaining agreement ourselves. What? Which is incredibly non-standard. And we were like, that's fine because that gives us. a leg up in terms of like studying the initial terms, I guess we'll do it. But like, yeah, incredibly non-standard, super stupid, not a thing that we should have had to do. Yeah. I've never heard of that before. But so when we drafted it, we drafted a three-year term collective bargaining agreement with a bunch of stuff about procedure and wages and benefits that

Starting point is 01:16:08 we wanted done. And so zooming back forward to that best and final offer, suddenly the draft that they've sent us back of the collective bargaining room and is a two-year term. And up to this point, all of the offers that had gotten anything close to our ask-on wages were in year three. And everything in year one and two was still like 25 cent, 50-cent increases. And so suddenly year three, which was always the only year that made any improvements for us, is gone. And you did not improve any other parts of the contract to make up for that unilateral decision. So that's just regressive bargaining.

Starting point is 01:16:50 It is. It is. Which, by the way, okay, do you want to explain to our dear listeners what regressive bargaining is and while you're not allowed to do it? Yeah. Regressive bargaining is a dirty negotiation tactic where one side, without making any sort of give and take concessions like they should to balance a big move, just unilessing. laterally decides to change a term, especially a large term, like wages, contract term, et cetera. And so it is taking something that has been tentatively agreed upon and, like, in good faith, taken as a part of the contract that would stand and axing it.

Starting point is 01:17:35 Yeah. And you are not allowed to do this. No, no, you're not. This is under the terms, under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act, which, you know, who knows. But by the time of this episode, goes out, there is a small chance it won't exist anymore, a bunch of provisions of it are under attack right now. But, like, that is... We have two unfair labor practices filed with the NLRB since the

Starting point is 01:18:02 terms of negotiation have been in effect, and they are not, in fact, progressive bargaining charges, but issues of status quo, where they're trying to change the way that they do scheduling, change the way that they do, like abstinence, discipline, which are topics that are covered in bargaining and should only be changed

Starting point is 01:18:21 in bargaining while bargaining is active. But they're trying to change them and then say that these have been the policies all along. And so, God. Literally gaslighting. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like actual, actual straight up you could pick up the guy, the psychology textbook point to it. Oh, yeah. Just pick up that whole lamp. And we have their, their words in writing of every separate the way where you can see the language change and be like, no, you are the person who said before that it was this other thing. That was you. Yeah. So we filed unfair labor practice about those things and you can in fact not track them anymore because since the government shut down, you can find a little PDF that explains that all ULPs are going to be pending indefinitely

Starting point is 01:19:11 and that is all you can find. Yeah. And it's also fun because Trump illegally fired one of the Democratic people on it so they don't have a quorum any on the board of the National Labor Relations Board. They don't have a quorum anymore which is a shit show and making any NLRB like attempt to get anything done

Starting point is 01:19:28 to the NLRB really annoying. Yeah. Yeah. I think the direct action has been helpful where like just that reality would just, I think just it would drive me crazy. I mean, it is it is gaslighting.

Starting point is 01:19:43 This is traumatizing. If a boyfriend does it to you, it's a red flag, but when you're does it to you. You know, it's like, yeah, the public's fine with it. It's the cost of business. Yeah, it's the cost of business. It is just the continuous nonstop onslaught of regressive bargaining tactics that like from the minute we started despite the fact that like I was sitting next to the director when we said reunionizing. It was like a split second before she said, yep, we recognize it. And so our direct action at the work stoppage, I remember our first work stoppage, you sat for half an hour. Management was very cool

Starting point is 01:20:14 with that. The second time we did it, we did it for an hour. We should have done our homework better because we didn't know that you can't, like, just like leaflet on store property. Because Chicago is our landlord, I'm kind of like, store property. But I put on my clerical collar. I put on a T-shirt that had like, give on to Caesar, what is Caesar's? And also like a little footnote about, you know, run me my money, you know? There's a more obvious instruction from Jesus out of Luke that's like, pay the work or their wages. But I was wearing my clerical call. I said, up the PA, and I, and I was loud. There was a Hyde Park Herald reporter who, you know, took my comment, who, I remember him walking over to Naid, and I think asking her for her comment,

Starting point is 01:20:56 I had a Bluetooth speaker that was dance, right, playing never, never fight a man with a perm by idols. And I will not forget. I will not forget the way the deputy director approached me. She was like, okay, this is fine. This is all fine. I just want to let you know this is fine, but can you please turn the music off? And it took me about, 20 minutes to just turn the buttons down slowly, but, like, that, we were reprimanded. Yeah, we got a very, very angry email the next day, illustrating what the consequences would be if we tried to do a similar action again in that manner. And so we picketed it outside their store.

Starting point is 01:21:35 That was the next direct action that we did. But, like, I do think our most impactful direct actions have been the ones that have been noisy, that have been incredibly visible. When we picketed last, it was on the first day of classes. We sell, like, a lot of core course books for the college at the university. And so there were students like that we were like, hey, do you have the bookseller who sold you that book to have a living wage? And students, like, the 19-year-olds are so outraged by the amount of money I make as a grown person. I heard so much eat the rich that day from Zillenials.

Starting point is 01:22:09 Hell yeah. Hell yeah. but it's it is clear that when the public is made aware of what's happening at a store that a lot of people love just so much like it is a part of the community and I think so much a part of people's and even like my own before I worked there are experience of being in this like tight-knit bizarre community and folks are upset like they and I think rightfully so and that's just I think really the beauty of direct action is not just that it empowers us but it really just like in a sort of spectacle way, says this is what, this is what they're doing. You want a place that you love to run this way and to treat people like this. And I think they're really effective for that reason, especially because people are really like on our side when they talk to us, but they're also really surprised because like part of the instant recognition thing, part of the being cool with us having union buttons on the register, part of all of that is the fact that management

Starting point is 01:23:10 is benefiting from the illusion that they're on good terms with us. And so, like, one of the reasons that we held that picket was to be like, hey, just because they are not stopping us does not mean they have done anything to improve the material conditions that we have been organizing around this whole time. Yeah. Well, and also, to be incredibly clear about this, like, it's so obvious it has to actually directly be stated, which is that all of the things they are doing are union busing tactics because their strategy here is to do a recognition

Starting point is 01:23:43 and then go for the second place where unions most commonly collapse, which is once you're recognized as a bargaining unit, the second place they fail is getting the first contract, and that that's what they're really obviously trying to do. And, yeah, the fact that people don't understand that they're just running a thing that, like, I'm trying to think of how to even describe,

Starting point is 01:24:03 it was like, like, that bookstore was like, Like, it was treated as, like, something that was, as an institution that was, like, part of the university. That's, like, the way it was, like, treated culturally was this, like, our thing. And these people are running it into the ground because they don't want to pay their workers, like, enough money to survive. It's just hideous. And that's really all it comes down to when you look at what the facts on the ground are, is the decisions that they are making are directly tied to the fact that they feel like they have no money, which is directly to the fact that they feel like they have no money, which is directly to the fact that. the fact that they are paying the executive director too much, which has directly died to the fact that they want to have an excuse to not pay us anything. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, wow,

Starting point is 01:24:46 we don't have enough money because we're spending like $160,000 on an executive director. Have you considered, you can simply eliminate this entire expense by turning this into an actual co-op. You could do it in like one day and you suddenly would not have the administration expenses because those people, wouldn't be there? You could do this really easily. Well, and as the movement in and out of that position over the past year demonstrates, it has no effect on the operations of the bookstore. The thing that has any effect on the operations of the bookstore is the fact that seven people

Starting point is 01:25:23 have left not been replaced and all of their work has been redistributed across, like, increasingly siloed positions to the people who are left so that you have no help on your particular assigned task that is now yours and yours alone and you just feel terrible in your little hole by yourself. Which this is something like I know for a fact

Starting point is 01:25:45 that like multiple people on that board know what a speed up is. Like that's that's a speed up. I know for a fact that you know what this is. And most of them who know what it is have written against them. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:01 Just kind of like expanding a bit larger, the staff at the Museum of Science and Industry has also unionized. And they were outside of their store, you know, threatening to strike. And so, like, I loved on the picket line. Like, I had a sign that said fired Jenny. And I went to explain to the U.S. Yeah, I went to explain to the U.E employee who Jenny was, the U.E employee who worked with the graduate students United at U. Chicago. And she went, oh, I know who Jenny is. And that's, I don't know, just yeah it's sick that like somebody can make their living um making my life worse but a that's that's capitalism and also be like i she has been involved that lawyer and like a number of like she

Starting point is 01:26:43 busting you trying to bust unions at you chicago unsuccessfully and also representing northwestern um in a case where one of their employees accused them of sexual harassment and discrimination you know so it's like you're you're really this this is this is this is the person that you're working with. This is the tool that you're using, you know? This is who you would rather pay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also, it's like that that's a thing where this whole metaphor of like the boss acting as an abusive partner is suddenly getting very literal in terms of who the people that they are employing do for their other shit, which is defending those people. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's almost like there's a structural connection between

Starting point is 01:27:28 management and patriarchy. Wow. Who could possibly, who could possibly have done this? Between systems of abuse. Yeah. Like, who could possibly have written about this? Checks notes, looks at the books that were written by the members of the board. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just so mad about this. Like, Will Nicky after Empire is really good. Oh. It is. Yeah. And I, like, I don't know how much I can like hold those individual board members responsible. No. And it seems like so many of them are like just, now finding out about it, that's some abuse 101 is to make sure that the person that you are exploiting, that you are, you know, taking advantage of, that they don't feel like they can say to people who could help them, this is what's happening to me. And that like the people who would

Starting point is 01:28:13 be sympathetic could, you know, go and take the initiative to help folks. And I'm grateful that we have a meeting with Robert Peters coming up soon. It was supposed to happen that has not yet. and I appreciate how dedicated he is and his staff is to making sure that our union sits down and talks with him. But it is also like... There's a deep irony for him accepting an award from another union and rescheduling a meeting with ours to do it. No, no, no, no, no. It's because we have Jacob. I always say it incorrectly. Ask me. Ask me, yeah. Yeah, the big end. But that's also like part of the other great community support. Like I mentioned that UE employee, but, you know, there are other union employees who just because they love the book, store so much will show up to every outreach event that we have. He was one of the first people

Starting point is 01:29:01 to have a yard sign. And it's funny, he was right next to this guy from my church who also has a window sign. And that's how I found out they were neighbors. Yeah, it's really cute. But I'm proud that we're wobblies because there is a really long tradition of being in Chicago, a lot of radical organizing that I think fits our spirit and also like the seminary co-op spirit. It has been hard that we don't have a lot of resources towards bargaining. But, like, we're good at direct action, and we also have, I'll give the Ask Me Award. I'll give it a pass because Jacob's been so, and other community members have been so helpful in just giving their time and their skills and their expertise.

Starting point is 01:29:39 So, yeah. Yeah, the MSI union, the grad students union in particular, have been incredible allies to us and have been, they were huge, like, presences on our picket because, like, because we did an open store running picket. We had only about half of our actual union members available because everyone else had to be on desks in the stores, keeping them running. And so the majority of the people who were like collecting signatures to get Jenny Goltz fired and otherwise improve our bargaining conditions were people from other unions who were just out there being in wonderful, awesome solidarity with us. Yeah. So my first picket line, I may as, I think I may say this last

Starting point is 01:30:17 But my first picket line ever was the grad student picket line in 2019. That was the first time I was ever on a picket. And it rocked. Oh, yeah. And yeah, it makes it really happy to see that the whole base of sort of union organizing from that has like, you know, it's this thing that like I remember when this was like, you know, like I was there in like one of the big pushes ever when they finally won. And it's like, they're still around helping people because workers, workers fucking fight together.

Starting point is 01:30:45 And well, and then they'll always be like, hey, one thing that we know about Jenny Gulles is she likes to lose. And we're like, thank you. Thank you. Finn, it's not that she likes to use. The quote is she's very good at losing, which that's true. Even better. Even better. And like what you were saying about GSU, I don't remember what I think like 2008, 2007 was like when they said we starting organizing for unionizing the graduate students. I had a roommate who was like, a 12-year PhD student who was around when that shit started. You can just count hanging out with your wife in Australia as field research, I guess. Love this. Love this.

Starting point is 01:31:28 Well, she's just doing postdocs. You're just hanging out. But they had a baby yesterday. Anyway. Oh, good for them. Yeah, like I was around. He came back to finish his PhD like about the time, like when the contract was ratified.

Starting point is 01:31:42 And I just with, what is it 16, 17 months of bargaining no contract. In the name of my blessed Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, GSU has had, like, has such a wealth of knowledge because they've been through, just like heaps of bullshit, and it's years. It's like,

Starting point is 01:32:01 okay, I want to, I want, like, the fucking GSU think, they had a whole thing. When I was there, like, in 2019, the whole thing was that and like, January, this is like one of the most admirable things I've ever seen a union do, which was they refused to take their case because the university was refusing to recognize them

Starting point is 01:32:20 and they refused to take their case to the NLRB because they knew that if they did it there was a pretty good chance that the old Trump NLRB was going to bust every single graduate school union in the country so instead of trying to win for themselves they fucking didn't do it and just like fought on packet lines instead

Starting point is 01:32:38 and it fucking rocked it was like that's rad as hell they're they rocked They're great. Like, yeah. Yeah, shout out, shout out to GSU. Yeah, shout out to GSU.

Starting point is 01:32:50 Well, and they are a great, great, great example to us all in terms of, like, how to persist on a fight through attrition. Because one of the things that, like, you try so hard as a management team to do is just wait until ever and gets tired and leaves. And, like, it seems like grad students would be the perfect population to just wait out because they rotate out constantly. But, like, just the way that they have managed to maintain energy through generations and generations of organizers and get it over the line at long last is so encouraging. Yeah. There's a thing I remember from, I think the last place I read into it was like one of Mike Duncan. things about the French Revolution. But one of the things he talked about was, like,

Starting point is 01:33:47 the ways in which part of what caused the French Revolution was that, like, they spent a whole bunch of time teaching all of these kids, these, like, incredibly radical enlightenment ideas. And then they were like, wait, we live in, like, the most absolute monarchy that has ever existed. What the fuck?

Starting point is 01:34:03 We hate this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, wait, hold on. And it's like, there is obviously always sort of contradictions between, like, the number of people I have

Starting point is 01:34:13 seen write books about labor resistance and then like go bust unions is pretty large. But there's a reason why everyone from like Pinochet through like the Trump administration, I mean back through like the original Nazis, it's like one of the first places, you know, I mean like the Greek riot place had this thing where it was like the first place you go when there's discontent is like you must stop the workers from from allying with the students. You must do this or you're fucked. But the workers and the students love each other. They're all kissing as healthy.

Starting point is 01:34:50 And we're the same person sometimes, you know? So often. Yep, yep, yep. With all my comrades, a kiss on the forehead. Aw. Yeah, and I think, like, that is, I think, like, the positive element of all of this is, like, the way that one campaign winning can transform the lives of everyone else around you is so astonishing. and I've seen it happen in so many places

Starting point is 01:35:16 where like one shop wins and suddenly everyone else is like it could be us, it could be us. Yes. It's possible. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that we're trying to capitalize on that

Starting point is 01:35:28 and trying to make sure that we can be the next person to like capitalize on GSU's win and help MSI do the same. But like as much as we have really suffered from the, at the table bargaining negotiating process and been really sort of beaten down in the past year on that battleground. I think we have learned so much about the allies that surround us and the people who like want to do more than just email our board members. And we're like, we don't know what else you can do because we don't know who makes these decisions for you to

Starting point is 01:36:07 yell at. But we have so many people who have like signed up for an email list with us. So many people who are like ready to go as soon as we figure out what we need them to do. Yeah. And that's been really encouraging and bolstering while management continues to like just not acknowledge us when they feel too cornered. Like they simply never spoke of the picket because it happened outside and so they couldn't be mad about it. So they didn't have to tell us off about it.

Starting point is 01:36:33 But they also just didn't speak of it. Yeah. This is, Chicago is a motherfucking union town. and that's what yeah i'll admit i'm angry when i go into work they don't care enough to get the mold and the dust remediated you know and the ducks and i and i can't really breathe when i go into work um and i also don't have health insurance right oh my god well i do have health insurance but i have to pay for like you know i have to pay for my own premiums for a marketplace thing um and that's that it's not really affordable and um yeah like as as frustrated as i am like coming

Starting point is 01:37:12 into work, it is, it's the people, you know, and I think that's for a lot of folks who have stayed at the bookstore, I don't know how much you relate to this then. Like, it has been like other booksellers, the folks that we've gotten to know through the community, who like, who do make a difference, at least for me and whether or not I stay. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. This is a good fight. The union crew that we have is a incredibly worthwhile team to be on. It is a group of people that I feel very solid standing shoulder to shoulder with. I think that is, like, without question, one of the things that, like, keeps the stores a place that you can work,

Starting point is 01:37:51 even if it's not a good place to work right now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And honestly, I think that would have sustained me a lot longer if my commute were different, you know? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Wait, okay, sorry. Can we roll back to the part where you can't breathe because there's,

Starting point is 01:38:07 I feel like, because there's mold, because I feel like you just drop that very, quickly, it was like, oh yeah, that's like a normal part of the work. What the fuck? Well, so for a very long time, you've been allowed to request that you only work at the co-op because there is a known

Starting point is 01:38:22 mode problem at 57th Street that they can't afford to or can't get the landlord to ameliorate. But there is also, at least in our lung experience, some sort of growth issue in the venting at the seminary

Starting point is 01:38:38 co-op. Yeah, it's it's very dusty at least. And like I, when I wear like a K.N. 95 for a little bit, like that helps a little. I take like five Benadryl usually and then that. That kind of helps. And that's more just I think like, I mean, not more. That is in part like my own health. But if I had the resources to be able to take care of my health and get what I need, maybe I could withstand the mold and the dust and the ducts a little bit easier. But like that. Well, but also like like as an employer, it is your responsibility to not have your workplace poison your employees.

Starting point is 01:39:13 Like, I'm sorry. Like, that part. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that also make them pay for the medical care to treat medical problems that they're having because you poisoned them with mold. Like, what? That's, yeah. What? Jesus Christ! It's so evil.

Starting point is 01:39:30 Well, and we had a couple of clauses in our first draft of the collective bargaining agreement that included demands regarding mold remand. At 57th Street, and I do believe those clauses have been struck in subsequent rounds. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's a thing that you could ask people to do, which is go ask people to complain about the fucking mold.

Starting point is 01:39:54 Like, it seems like a thing you could do. Yeah. That might be a worse, another direct action. I also notice, like, people in the store, like, they cough when they enter, you know? And, like, this is where the, like, the snake eats its own. tail, the wheel turns inside the fucking wheel, right? Because like maybe, like if I'm giving them good faith benefit of the doubt, management would have, if they weren't overloaded with so many tasks that they have to take on, you know, sort of more supervisory management. If you all

Starting point is 01:40:23 didn't have to do all these tasks, maybe you would have time to, if there were people hired in the bargaining unit, perhaps you could yourself have more time to improve the conditions for the store, not just for your workers, but also for the people who enter the stores, but because you will hire new workers until there's a contract. You are just so overworked and it's just like this turns until the boss decides that it does it. And it's like this is their responsibility to bargain in good faith and to treat their workers correctly. Like this is an active decision that they could make, that they are not making. So, yeah.

Starting point is 01:41:00 I got to say that that might be the single wildest thing I've ever heard like an hour into an interview is, oh yeah, they're poisoning us. The mold. Just the mold. Which is also proof that this is the craziest place to work because that doesn't even land on our radar anymore because we've been just like banging our head against walls for a year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I keep going back to the abusive relationship metaphor,

Starting point is 01:41:28 but that is one of the big things about abusive relationships is that because of the information control and because of the way that your world gets condensed down into a really, really tiny, narrow set of experiences where you're isolated and you're only interacting with, like, one person who was controlling everything about your life, it becomes really difficult to see things that are very, very obviously wrong the moment you step out of it. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know, maybe it turns out having absolute hierarchical relationships or

Starting point is 01:41:56 control is an extremely bad way to run literally anything, especially the thing that your livelihood depends on that you do most of your time. Just a thought, wow. Well, and it also just like means that you are too busy to actually interface in any meaningful way with your workers. Like, if I tell you that it took me two-thirds of the day to schedule a 15-minute conversation with any of four managers who were on site to quit, I would not be lying. Jesus Christ, they can't even take your resting bitch. They at one point tried to reschedule that conversation, which I was attempting to have on Friday to Monday. And I was like, I think you want to know this.

Starting point is 01:42:42 Yeah, it's like, managers, you two are getting, you two are getting screwed over by understaffing. Oh, my God. I do think that's starting to take a toll to on management, which is a little encouraging. They're losing it. Yeah. They are not feeling well. And because, like, for me, I don't know, I'm not going to trust a boss. Like, I just stated for three months in the 1997 UAW strike.

Starting point is 01:43:10 Like, that's, oh, yeah. Bosses are canceled. Yeah, you know, I know how that ended. But I remember one of the supervisors who, um, who at one point in her, like, her previous career had been on a picket line for a very long time, um, had been on strike. And she like immediately took one of our little sabbo cat read pens, put it on her backpack. and is otherwise, like, as far as I can tell, generally supportive of the union, but also, man, lady, I wish she would make a stink.

Starting point is 01:43:39 Mm-hmm. Because here's the thing. I think she only talks to us. I feel like the other managers do not speak to her. I, yeah. Am I crazy? Yeah. I could just talk about that for a very long time, and I don't think we have the time.

Starting point is 01:43:53 Yeah. Before we get into, what can people do to help? Is there anything else that you want to make sure that you get to? I think the big thing. thing that we should emphasize, too, is as much as we are complaining and frustrated about the process, we know that this is not impasse and that we are so sure that, like, there is still negotiating to be done. There is still conversation to be had. And that, like, we have been emphasizing that at every opportunity to management as we have to. But, like, just because

Starting point is 01:44:24 as we are tired and frustrated means nothing in terms of us giving up, because this is a fight that is going to continue. Yeah. Yeah. And like to that point, Finn, we're doing this because we love the stores. Like I, the stores were a really important place for me just putting down roots in the neighborhood. And I think when you love something a lot, like you got to be brave enough to wrestle with it. And that our unionizing is the right thing. It is the thing that will like hopefully create an environment where the people who make that bookstore run, who sell the books, in the long run, it will make the institution healthier, I really do believe, and just that we've been talking about, like, this metaphor as the boss of like, as an abusive partner, I think for so many folks when they are, whether it's something like domestic violence or it's in a union campaign, or you're speaking out against, you know, your neighbors being abducted and shot and killed in the street, there is such an expectation that I have to sit by and be quiet while this happens. And part of that, I think what does prevent, and at least in my experience as someone who survived, you know, particular kinds of violence that, yeah, I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing. But us unionizing is absolutely the right thing. It is the right thing for the stores. It is the right thing for the community and for the workers. And I just, as much as I'm frustrated, like, I know myself and my fellow booksellers are doing this out of love. Like, it is absolutely love for the stores and the community we serve. So, yeah. We're never going to feel bad for continuing to fight.

Starting point is 01:45:59 for what is the right thing to do. Yeah. I'm too broke to feel bad. Yeah. Don't be poisoned by bold every time you go to the bookstore, support the union. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:13 Wear your mask at seminary co-op. Take a stab a cap pin. Yeah. Ask to talk to a manager. Make it a long talk. Yeah, honestly. See if you can get one on the floor. We'll help you.

Starting point is 01:46:25 Yeah. So how can people help support y'all? And do you have places where people can find more information about the campaign and follow updates. We have a change.org petition that I think if you can link it somewhere in the description. Yep. Yeah, we will link it in description. Yeah, so that does ask folks to sign off in support of the termination of Jenny Goltz,

Starting point is 01:46:47 their union busting lawyer, as well as releasing like the full site of financial information too. So there's a change. Network petition, you can also follow us on Instagram at some booksellers union. We've got the little icon with the Sabo Cat, sign the petition. There are also some action items on some of the posts, such as emailing the board and management about the release of financial information and also the termination of Jenny Goltz's employment. You can also email those emails on that post about the mold, too, if you want me to breathe at work. Yeah, I'm so mad about this. This is I am going to lead the description with their poisoning you.

Starting point is 01:47:28 Because, like, I'm so angry about this. Thank you. I'm too tired to be angry about it. I'm so glad this, and one with a French perspective, has remembered that the mold is totally bogus, because I had forgotten. It's crazy. Yeah. It's so bogus. It's also, like, it's in such plain sight.

Starting point is 01:47:48 Like, if you're in 57th Street books and you look to the right of the air conditioning unit and room one. You would see that shit growing on the wall. Jesus Christ. And it's like, but I also feel like if I talked to management, which I tried about this, it just is not a priority. My breathing. It's not a priority. Yeah, it is wild. Thank you for reminding me that. Someone, one day when you win, someone's going to write a paper about necropolitics in this or something like, good Lord. Jeez. Yeah, some shit. But yeah, sign the petition. Follow us on Instagram, help us make a ruckus. And come talk to us and our managers at the bookstore,

Starting point is 01:48:30 because we love to talk to people while we sell them books. Yeah. Yeah. We'll take any good will we can get. Very much so. Hell yeah. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and just for doing this in, I don't know, like a place that was really special to me when I was, yeah,

Starting point is 01:48:51 when I was there for a long time. Thanks for your help. Thank you for following up with us. Of course. It's really nice to have this platform every so often. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Starting point is 01:49:01 Hell yeah. Well, hopefully we will have you back on when you fucking win and... Yeah? Yes. Elevatory round. I'm buying, I'm personally buying the Cool Zone Media team around at Jinnies when we win our contract. I'll come through, y'all. I will come back down to High Park just.

Starting point is 01:49:23 for the celebration. Change everyone's oil while you're down, too? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, don't take that long. I won't be ready for a second. Yeah, this is Bidic had happened here, and you two can resist both your abuser and your boss even wouldn't have the same person.

Starting point is 01:49:42 And you should. Hey, man. Get them. Being a parent is basically a juggling act. Dinner, hockey practice, homework, a last-minute science project, and someone's always, always shouting for you from another room. So yeah, I'll take any shortcuts that actually works. And that's why I'm all in on HelloFresh.

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Starting point is 01:50:49 Try Hello Fresh today and get 50% off the first. First box with free shipping. Go to Hellofresh.com and use promo code Rescue 50. That's Hellofresh.combeau rescue 50. Here we go. Hey, I'm Cal Penn. And on my new podcast, Here We Go again. We'll take today's trends and headlines and ask,

Starting point is 01:51:09 why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early?

Starting point is 01:51:42 We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lili Singh, and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially, go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to Here We Go Again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I live below a cult leader, and I fear I've angered her. Well, wait a minute, Sophia.

Starting point is 01:52:14 How'd you know she's a cult leader. Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime podcast, so you'll find out soon. This person writes, my neighbor's been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals, and now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they may be part of a cult. Hold up, Sophia, a real-life cult? And what is a dirt ritual? No clue. But according to this person, contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with their ceiling, and her neighbors are not happy. Well, she needs to report them ASAP. She did, and now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time.

Starting point is 01:52:55 So, do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A combat surgeon with secrets, a world built on power and privilege, and the most unexpected creative duo of the year. As an actor for so many years, I would always walk into other people stories. And they thought, well, why don't I give it a shot, you know, and try right up my thought. This week, bookmarked by Reese's Book Club goes live from Apple Soho in New York City with Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, the powerhouse team behind Gone Before Goodbye. Now a New York Times bestseller. I think we both knew right away that this was going to happen.

Starting point is 01:53:40 It's a conversation about fear, ambition, and what happens when two master storytellers collide? I'd never seen a woman in kind of a James Bond world. Come for the chills and stay for the surprises. And find out why readers can't put it down. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Andrew Sage.

Starting point is 01:54:12 I run Andrewism over on YouTube, but I'm here on this. this podcast with the one and only Mia Wong, who does this podcast most of the time. Exactly, exactly. And I think you and I both have something in common, which is that we are people.

Starting point is 01:54:32 And we are two people, but the world has a lot more than just two people. It's a really convoluted way of saying that for this episode, we're going to be talking about population. You know, how many of people there are and how many of them there will or will not be in the future and all the different conversations that end up happening around that.

Starting point is 01:54:53 Most of which suck. So it's a time. True. True. Oh, boy. Yeah. I mean, every single one of us humans is a product of billions of years of reproduction. But for most of that reproduction, population growth was pretty slow.

Starting point is 01:55:10 You know, the world's population is estimated at around 5 million. in the year 8,000 BC. So 5 million is like the population of New Zealand right now or Costa Rica or Ireland or Norway, but spread across the entire planet. Can you guess how many people were alive in the year 1 CE though? 30 million? That's actually an underestimate. It's 188 million.

Starting point is 01:55:41 Jeez. Right? So that's between the current population of Bangladesh. and the current population of Brazil, which are at 169 million and 230 million respectively. But that's spread across the entire planet. So, I mean, imagine that, you know, a whole world of people so spread out. I mean, they were concentrated in Sydney areas, of course, but you had all this vast forestland and plains and entire continents that barely had people compared to today.

Starting point is 01:56:13 And the reason the population grew so slowly was really because, I mean, humans have always been doing the dew, you know, but death was kind of a very present phenomenon. You know, you had famines, you had plagues, you had the occasional war, and you especially had a lot of infant mortality. Yeah. And that's what really kept populations in check. you know, I remember hearing, I don't even remember who it was, but this one person had like 19 children and only eight of them survived to adulthood. Yeah, they honestly did pretty good by those metrics, like, yeah, the infant mortality rate was unbelievably high.

Starting point is 01:57:01 Yeah, yeah. So families had a lot of children, but only a few of them made it to adulthood. And thanks to early industrialization, things were able to change. ginger. You know, we improved our agriculture, we invented refrigeration, we got better fertilizer, and most importantly, we developed advancements in sanitation. You know, the doctors were actually washing their hands. You know, we developed vaccines so children weren't dying of measles and mumps. Imagine that. Oh, good Lord. And we also had an overall improvement in medicine. You know, one of the greatest inventions of humanity, I think, is the vaccine and it's such a wonderful

Starting point is 01:57:44 thing that there's not this massive movement of people who challenge its very legitimacy in this day and age and threaten all of our lives as a result. You know, imagine being in that world. Oh, God. So we eventually hit one billion in the year 1804, which is just below the current population of China. And things really began to accelerate from there. We end up creating something called a j-curve of exponential population growth thanks to, like I said, the declining infant mortality and improvements in fertility and food production.

Starting point is 01:58:23 And then the other billionaire milestones started rolling. By 1804, Haiti had just gained its independence. Napoleon I was crowned emperor of France, and Lewis and Clark had begun their expedition across America. In 1927, that's 123 years later, we hit 2 billion people. You know, by then

Starting point is 01:58:46 we had Trotsky being expelled from the USSR, which had just been founded. We had Charles Lindenberg completing the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. And then, also in 1927, we had the release of the first feature-length film to feature synchronized sound for dialogue.

Starting point is 01:59:05 Quite the first, time to be alive. You fast forward to 33 years later, 1960, and we hit 3 billion people. By then, Nigeria had just gained its independence, JFK was in the White House, Ham the chimpanzee went to space, and the FDA approved the first ever birth control pill. But the birth control pill didn't really kick in in terms of hampering our growth for some time. By 1974, 14 years later, we hit 4 billion people. By then, we had 4 billion people. By then, we didn't. Nixon had resigned, Turkey had invaded Cyprus, Portugal overthrew its dictatorship, the godfather part two came out and Abba was still at the top of the charts.

Starting point is 01:59:47 1987, 13 years later is when we got 5 billion people. That's when we had most of the major colonies around the world gaining their independence or having already had gained their independence. You know, Thatcher was beginning her third term and The Simpsons first appeared on TV. 12 years later in 1999 we had the Y2K panic the Clinton impeachment the SpongeBob premiere the introduction of the euro and 6 billion people made their debut on planet Earth 2011 12 years later we hit 7 billion people and that was in the midst of the Arab Spring a tsunami hit in Japan the Occupy movement the premier of Game of Thrones and really the beginning of small smartphones and social media taken over the world. Finally, by 2022, which is 11 years after 2011, we hit 8 billion people amidst Russia invading Ukraine, the growing popularity of

Starting point is 02:00:49 TikTok and Elon's purchase of Twitter. So from 1804 to 2022, we went from 1 billion people to 8 billion people. And the UN expected to grow by. about 1.9 billion between now and 2100 so we'll end up reaching from 8.2 billion people to 10.2 billion people and population is projected to peak at 10.3 billion in 2084 and then decline to 10.2 billion through the end of the century. So with this rapid population growth, there has been a lot of fares surrounding overpopulation, particularly in the late 20th century in early 2000s there was a lot of conversation around you know this population bomb this worry that there were too many people now at least early on in the population boom i think it makes

Starting point is 02:01:47 some sense to have concerns you know there had never been this many people on the earth at any point in time prior you know if you're watching the numbers climb and climb and climb you might have thought we were headed straight for a planet covered in cities and some kind of of collapse. But even before we even hit a billion people, the idea of overpopulation being a significant problem wasn't new. In late 1700s, Thomas Malthus argued that population would always outpace food supply. And his prediction was that there'd be too many people, not enough resources, and a decline into famine, disease, and mass death. Now, he was obviously proven wrong, But in 19th century, Britain, Mathis's ideas helped justify the harsh welfare policies that that government ended up implemented, like the spread of workhouses around the country.

Starting point is 02:02:46 Also, we speak about famine as if it's this natural phenomenon that can't be helped that is just almost like a hurricane or a tornado, but famines are usually not actually the result of not having enough food. You know, Amartia Sen found that famines usually happen despite food surpluses. The issue is usually distribution and not scarcity. You know, a famous example being, you know, during the Irish famine, Ireland was still exporting tons of food to feed its colonial overload. So we fast forward to 1968 and the biologist Paul Ehrlich publishes the population bomb. He describes visiting Delhi and feeling the crush of overpopulation, convinced that mass starvation was imminent in the 1970s. Now, I think that book that he published was one of the main influences in the widespread panic around overpopulation. You know, governments started to scramble about it.

Starting point is 02:03:50 A lot of policies were born likely from people reading that very book. You know, some of these policies were fairly benign. you know, you promote family planning, you improve access to contraceptives, you improve education for women especially. But other approaches were very harsh and brutal. You know, you had sterilization campaigns, forced sterilization campaigns taking place in India and Puerto Rico and in the United States. China's one-child policy also gets a lot of attention, but it was only one example of a widespread brutality around the impositions placed on women especially in that time, the fear of too many people and that anxiety leading to the control of women

Starting point is 02:04:43 and their bodies. And it's a scary prospect, especially if you were a minority in this time, if you were a cultural, racial, religious minority, because it made very ordinary human activity, things like moving around, having children, just existing, made it seem like an existential threat to civilization, to humanity that needed to be dealt with by any means necessary. So they had some positive outcomes of, couldn't quote positive outcomes of the overpopulation concern. You know, you had questions.

Starting point is 02:05:25 as foreman's empowerment, you had the proposal of improved urbanization to reduce the sprawl of human activity. You also have people proposing things like extraterrestrial settlement, which you know, is not really realistic as a solution for a multitude of valid reasons. Yeah. I think it's really funny, you know, whenever people push that sort of, yeah, humans are destined for the stars kind of narrative. You know, it's a story, a really powerful story coming out of science fiction. And it's good that it has inspired people to learn more about space and, you know, dedicate their lives to the study of the stars and that kind of thing. But this idea that were going to be shipping off like millions of people off planet to settle on other planets

Starting point is 02:06:15 I think is pretty safely in the realm of science fiction. Yeah, that's a full, like get back to me in a thousand years and we could maybe start talking about moving like thousands of people yeah even thousands or hundreds of people i mean we don't have those those massive generation ships we can't even get those off the ground at this stage in our spacecraft and we also have a lot of issues to resolve on earth before we spread our problems across the galaxy as far as I'm concerned. But beyond these solutions, the ideas and public discourses around a population have also birthed a lot of conspiracy theories.

Starting point is 02:06:56 You know, I'm sure you might have heard a few of them in your time. Oh, boy. Yep. This is one of the big Alex Jones things, for example. So he's convinced that there's like a giant plot by the globalist to kill off an enormous part of the human population to like stop over population or something. it's yeah

Starting point is 02:07:17 yeah honestly any combination of conspiracies concern how we smushed together to fit that kind of narrative

Starting point is 02:07:24 and they could talk about all the vaccines are sterilizing people the chem trails the the 5G towers

Starting point is 02:07:32 the Bill Gates microchips the even the food supply all these things allegedly being used

Starting point is 02:07:39 to sterilize people not to say that there isn't validity to any claims of the things that we consume contributing to lower fertility, the fact that we clothe ourselves

Starting point is 02:07:54 in like polyester, you know, we still don't have a full idea of the impact of microplastics on our bodies. You know, there's valid concerns about some of the consequences of the ultra-processed foods that, you know, fill our grocery shelves. But that's the sad thing about conspiracy theories. You know, they have some kernels of truth mixed in to bolster their validity,

Starting point is 02:08:22 but then they mix it up with a bunch of garbage about, you know, that's a nonsense. Yeah. And then, of course, I mean, some of these conspiracy theories are kind of benign, you know, like if you think it's 5G towers, I guess you'd put a,

Starting point is 02:08:36 I don't know, a tinfoil hat on your junk, but... I mean, to be fair, there was one of the 5G guys who did, like, blow himself up at a giant car bomb. I did not hear about that. A couple of years ago. Down. Oh, yeah. Luckily, he only

Starting point is 02:08:52 killed himself, but giant, giant car bomb in the middle of I want to say Memphis or something. Down, yeah. But, yeah. So, like, every once in a while, you get some real, oh boy, stuff from that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, honestly, people could take even the simplest. things and turn it into a threat to themselves and others, if they're not in the right

Starting point is 02:09:19 headspace or they haven't been given the right support, sadly. And obviously, like, none of the conspiracies are benign. I mean, if you have people rejecting vaccines, you know, it's almost like we're in the world that I alluded to earlier, you know, where we have a resurgence and measles, for example. Yeah, Jim O'Neill, who's the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and the acting director for the CDC literally on Monday called for splitting the MMR vaccine. It's multiple vaccines, which is basically, which is just straight up the Andrew Wakefield. I think like I said

Starting point is 02:09:57 this on seven podcasts on this show now, but this is literally just straight up the Andrew Wakefield anti-vaccine thing from the original giant anti-vaccine panic in the 90s. That was the autism vaccine thing. Yeah, yeah. And this is, this is the guy who's, currently running the CDC. It's just being like, no, yeah, you should do this thing that's, again. Yeah, yeah, you guys are cooked. Yeah, again, this thing that was developed specifically so that Angie Wakefield could sell his own vaccine. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:10:27 I mean, that's the thing. If I was conspiracy-brained, I would say that actually the popularization of vaccine conspiracies on social media sites contribute to exactly that kind of population control that those same conspiracy theorists fairmonger about. But that's if I was conspiracy brain, which I'm not. God, so someone, someone believes that somewhere. Absolutely, there is someone who's like the anti-vaxxers are a conspiracy to call the global population or something like. Oh, God. No, because, I mean, we have this very straightforwardly effective human invention, one of the best in our, in the history of humankind.

Starting point is 02:11:06 And you're telling me that a couple people on Facebook are now responsible for, the entire government rejecting the effectiveness of vaccines and, you know, jeopardizing the health, the entire population. Come on. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the true believers are in charge now. Indeed, indeed they are. True believers and, of course, people who stand to profit from the dip in the sails of paracetamol and whatever else. So there are those conspiracies about population, and then there's the typical far-right Nazi conspiracies about great replacement, right?

Starting point is 02:11:53 The idea that shadowy elites are orchestrating falling birth rates among white populations while encouraging immigration from the population boom in Global South. I mean, of course, not all the global South is booming population-wise. A lot of places are also experiencing decline. It's a global problem, but we're going to get to that. And connected, of course, to those great replacement types. You have the eco-fash with their worries about the environmental impact of population and their twisted belief that environmental collapse could be solved by reducing the number of people, which usually ends up targeting marginalized groups, which is exactly the kind of thinking that inspired real violence,

Starting point is 02:12:35 like with the Christchurch shooter in 2019. And of course, the actual drivers of ecological collapse are not poor families in India or Africa having too many kids. It's the overconsumption of the global north. You know, if you actually wanted to reduce consumption, reduce the impact of population on the planet, are you going to start with fewer people or are you going to start with fewer billionaires flying private jets? You know? It's not about the number of people, the headcount. It's about the lifestyles and the cities.

Starting point is 02:13:08 systems that support those lifestyles. You know, believing population is a very cheap, simplistic, and cowardly get out of jail-free card for the rich minority that drive this systemic crisis. Yep. The thing about this, obviously, is that if you believe that you need to reduce the human population, that it's your obligation to go first. Yes, but we are going to talk about those types of people in the next episode.

Starting point is 02:13:35 But, you know, speaking of the population, I think there's nowadays at least an opposite concern that is dominating the headlines. You know, in wealthier, more developed countries, fertility tends to be lower. And that's tied to things like better education, more women working, urban living, greater choices, greater access to contraception, etc. But in less developed countries, fertility is usually higher because children are often seen as both helping hands and future caregivers. and education and access to birth control are more limited.

Starting point is 02:14:09 But the global fertility rate is now steadily dropping due to that increase in development, greater access to birth control, greater education and women's rights. And there's a fair nowadays that there won't be enough people to support the system as it has been built. Remember capitalism is predicated on endless growth. When its population starts to decline, naturally, everything that is building towards in terms of the amount of consumers, the amount of infrastructure, the amount of workers, those are not going to be there anymore, especially as more and more people end up dipping out of the workforce as they age.

Starting point is 02:14:56 So in 2012 23, the global average had dropped to just 2.3 children per woman. which is less than half of what it was 60 years ago. According to the United Nations, fertility will keep falling throughout the century, and by the year 2100, the global average is expected to dip below replacement level of 2.1 to about 1.8 children, poor woman.

Starting point is 02:15:21 Now, some countries are already there. Japan sits at 1.2 children per woman. Italy, Spain, and much of Eastern Europe are well below 1.5. South Korea is famous. a demographic outlier at 0.7 children, poor woman, which is the lowest facility rate in the world. And that means, obviously, that on average, Korean women are having less than one child each. For very valid reasons, I might add, considering the economic and

Starting point is 02:15:52 cultural conditions in that country. Now, I don't live in Eastern Europe or Southern Europe or East Asia. I live in the Caribbean. I live in Trinand, Tobago, but speak it anecdotally at least, which obviously is not representative of the full picture, I can count maybe on one hand the number of people I know my age who think that they'll be able to bring children into the world, whether they want to or not. You know, very few people I know actually want children, or if they do want children, they don't think they'll be able to afford to have children. But maybe that's just selfishness. What do you think? I mean, I don't know. Like, I am not interacting with a representative sample in the population.

Starting point is 02:16:43 But, no, yeah, I mean, it's a lot of people who are like, no, and it's too expensive. It sucks. I don't want to deal with this. But, again, like, not a representative sample here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could just look at the economy. Things have been getting worse for my entire life. You know, there hasn't been any point in my life where anyone in my generation could look around honestly and say, yeah, you know, this is, we be cooking, you know, it's time to double, double it. You know, let's have a child. You know, the housing situation has gotten worse. The cost of living as a whole has gotten worse. Childcare costs have gotten worse. And of course, outside of that economic stuff, there's also cultural. attitude shifts, you know, people realizing, I don't need to have a child to be fulfilled to find meaning. You know, people are able to pursue higher education and also they're more

Starting point is 02:17:43 educated about the process of childbearing in general, including the very valid medical concerns surrounding that whole process. I mean, if I were a woman, I would not want to have a child, you know, the consequences on their bodies, on their minds and their health, the risks to their very life are not something that can be swept aside as it was previously. People are aware of it now. People are talking about it now and they are empowered to make decisions that be right for them. You know, a lot of people are also very much focused on their careers, either by choice or because they don't have any other choice but to focus on putting food on the table. You know, people are also getting married later. And as a whole, we have shifted

Starting point is 02:18:32 to what a more individual society. So, you know, in the past, you did have the extended families, the close-set communities that made raising children a bit more manageable. But today, it's a bit rarer to find. And you tend to see a lot more nuclear families, or even just individuals going out at it alone. You know, less support and more isolation and, so it makes it very difficult. And then there's the existential angst of it all. You know, I can't forget the fact that there are multiple wars waging around the world. You know, there's a lot of political instability in much of the world.

Starting point is 02:19:08 And, of course, the biggest issue of all climate change, which makes it, honestly, it makes it feel irresponsible to even think about bringing a child into this mess. So a declining fertility, a decline in population, it has. has the government's panicking. You know, China went from having decades of a one-child policy to now desperately trying to encourage people to have more babies. They're offering cash bonuses and housing books and extended parental leave, but it's not really working, you know, as populations are aging, there's a lot more elderly people to care for

Starting point is 02:19:47 and fewer working-age people to support them. So that is, you know, a recipe for pension crises and labor shortages and spiral in health care costs. So some governments are even trying to raise the retirement age, which as France and a protest have shown, it's not going to go over well with much of the population. Nobody wants to work an extra five years, an extra 10 years more when they've already put so much of their lives to these dead end, pointless and, you know, mentally and physically draining tasks that really just line the pockets of their bosses. it is worth pointing out the last year there was a pretty massive raise in the retirement age people in China that's being phased in a way where it's going to take over the course of 15 years it goes up gradually to sort of like spread out the anger over it but yeah it is worth noting that china's is like significantly increased or is going to significantly increase over the course of the next 15 years yeah and then on the other side of things

Starting point is 02:20:56 they're raising the retirement age now, but the young people who are working today are more than likely not going to get any kind of pension. Yeah. You know, I'd rather the world of my 60s don't look like the world of my 20s. That would be my preference.

Starting point is 02:21:14 So I would rather that we've reached a point as a society where pensions are not the necessary band-aided they are right now. But until then, you know, there's quite... The powder keg. Yeah. We also have in Eastern Europe, you know, you have countries rolling out pro-natalist policies that tie financial support directly to family size. I'm going to get a bit more into pro-natalism in the next episode.

Starting point is 02:21:42 But there's also the darker side of that pro-natalist push in terms of the policies meant to reverse the population decline. some governments instead of making life better for potential parents are criminalizing they're turning to anti-choice policies they're restricting abortion they're limiting reproductive rights they're demonizing child-free lifestyles Russia actually recently criminalized what they called child of free propaganda you know yeah and then this is also part of a broader conversation about population where they have the immigration concerns as a political flashpoint and because a lot of wealthy countries because of their population decline are starting

Starting point is 02:22:28 to rely more on immigrants to keep their economies going but as a flip side that tends to fuel backlash from the far-eyed groups who are able to frame it as a threat to national identity and because the system of the state and capitalism is not interested in actually taking care of people those immigrants become a very useful scapegoat you know obviously I'm in support of people moving and living wherever they want to move and live as they please. I don't believe in borders, especially as the climate consequences are hitting those of us in the global south first. Yeah. But I also am not a fan of the way that some progressives end up talking about immigration, where they act as if, you know, the global south is like a population bank that wealthy

Starting point is 02:23:15 countries could tap into and, you know, pull population from regardless of the consequences on the home countries of these people. You know, it's like, let immigrants come. And I'm all for that. But then it's also like, your government is destabilizing their governments, your, your system, your economic system, and the global economic system is making life in those countries unlivable. And I think the priority also needs to be on dealing with that issue and not just shrugging

Starting point is 02:23:45 and saying, well, you know, at least immigrants are able to help our economy stay afloat, even as their countries languish and suffer. So to kind of wrap things up, where does this all leave us? You know, for centuries we've fared having too many people and now we're starting to fare having too few people and both anxieties are shaping policy, fueling conspiracy theories and sparking culture wars. And whether the future holds overcrowded cities or ghost towns

Starting point is 02:24:16 really depends on the direction of politics, economy, culture, and urban design. Tic. On the next episode, I'm going to be talking about the ideas around population, the pro-natalists and the anti-natalists. But until then, I've been Andrew Sage here with Mia Wong on It Could Happen. Peace. One of your kids is asking for a snack, another is building a fort out of your clean laundry, and you're staring at a half-empty fridge and thinking, what are we even going to eat tonight? Or you could just hello fresh it. With over 80 recipes to choose from every week, including kid-friendly ones,

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Starting point is 02:25:29 But somehow, they tend to eat the vegetables they made themselves. Try HelloFresh today and get 50% off the first box with free shipping. Go to HelloFresh.coma and use promo code Mom50. That's HelloFresh.ca promo code Mom 50. HelloFresh.C.A. HelloFresh, Canada's number one meal kit delivery service. Here we go. Hey, I'm Cal Penn. And on my new podcast, here we go again. We'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like,

Starting point is 02:26:21 Are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lili Singh, and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to Here We Go Again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:26:58 I live below a cult leader, and I fear I've angered her. Well, wait a minute, Sophia. Adia knows she's a cult leader. Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime podcast, so you'll find out soon. This person writes, my neighbor's been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals, and now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things are. keep getting weirder. I think they may be part of a cult? Hold up, Sophia. A real-life cult? And what is a dirt ritual?

Starting point is 02:27:26 No clue. But according to this person, contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with her ceiling and her neighbors are not happy. Well, she needs to report them ASAP. She did! And now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time. So do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A combat surgeon with secrets, a world built on power and privilege, and the most unexpected creative duo of the year. As an actor for so many years, I would always walk into other people stories. And I thought, well, why don't I give it a shot, you know, and try it right up myself?

Starting point is 02:28:12 This week, bookmarked by Reese's Book Club goes live from Apple Soho in New York. York City, with Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, the powerhouse team behind Gone Before Goodbye, now a New York Times bestseller. I think we both knew right away that this was going to happen. It's a conversation about fear, ambition, and what happens when two master storytellers collide? I've never seen a woman in kind of a James Bond world. Come for the chills and stay for the surprises and find out why readers can't put it down.

Starting point is 02:28:45 Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's book. Club on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Trick or Treater, I heard. Ah, hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here, the spooky special. I'm your host, Garrison Davis. Once again, there has been far too. many important world events taking precedence that we here at the show are unable to provide listeners with an entire spooky week's worth of themed episodes. But I know how important Halloween is for many millennials. So I've taken it upon myself to produce two spooky episodes to bookend the holiday. This episode that you're listening to right now, as well as another that will

Starting point is 02:29:43 release Monday morning or Sunday night. As the world is becoming an increasingly spooky, scary place, I needed to up the ante to exceed the weird and eerie fright that comes from living in America and the world in general in 2025. So last week, I traveled from New York to Brussels, briefly caught up with my close personal friend and colleague Tinton, and then took the train to Germany, Very scary indeed. Once in Germany, I was confronted with seemingly occult words and symbols. People spoke in odd incantations. I came across a map that appeared via my black scrying mirror, the iPhone, which upon deciphering led me to an old power plant warehouse in East Berlin. I entered this dark looming building, and inside the air was thick with smoke and incense. Figures dressed in all. black emerged from the fog, witches, wizards, and magicians. I followed them into a candlelit room where hooded occultists conducted a ritual welcoming us to the 2025 Acculture Conference. A Culture is a bi-yearly conference, that's once every two years, focusing on the intersection

Starting point is 02:31:04 of occultism and culture, pop or otherwise. This is arguably the most prestigious occultism conference in the world. I have been wanting to attend for years, and I was finally able to go, this go around, on the condition that I make four podcast episodes. The two that I'm releasing this week and next will cover some of the core, magical, and topical currents throughout the conference, mostly via a panel discussion between myself and three other attendees. And then before Christmas, I'll have two fully scripted episodes, interrogating these concepts further and discussing the use of a cult practice in 2025. So to start, let's meet our panelists. I should introduce my magical travel team for this conference. Let's start with Delta, a Belgian magician and artist,

Starting point is 02:32:04 which I recruited to join me in this wacky adventure. Delta, say hi. Hello. What do you do, Delta? What's your magical specialty, I suppose? Well, it's kind of a mix of... Into the microphone. It's kind of a mix of things where part of it is just... Into the microphone.

Starting point is 02:32:24 I'm sorry. You can get pretty close to it. Okay. It's kind of a mix of things, really, between conventional chaos magic and more theoretical, like weird theory stuff. like Mark Fisher and the CCRU adjacent things. We talk a lot about Mark Fisher, some bland stuff,

Starting point is 02:32:47 meta-fiction, theory fiction, hyperstition, Delta and myself talk about magic through the internet quite a bit and how it combines with cultural theory, which is relevant to this conference. Let's move over to my left. I've been recruited along on this magical journey. I'm Ryan. I practiced the Vajriana.

Starting point is 02:33:09 a Greco-Egyptian magical practice and also am involved in a Haitian voodoo house. Prior to that, I was also an academic for a good period of time where I studied Renaissance rhetoric and political theory, philosophy, and economics. So my contributions are going to be wide and varied. We've been making a lot of Hegel jokes this weekend. So many Hegel jokes. Our last crew member, which people may have heard before on various shows. Hi, my name's Elaine, and I make art and research a lot of Renaissance script and work magic.

Starting point is 02:33:50 And though most of the things I do are a lot of idiosyncratic practices and based on various folk magic and chaos magic and Balkan folk magic. Before we continue the conversation between myself and my three guests, let's start by discussing the word. a culture, the namesake of the conference. Obviously, this is a combination of the word occult and culture, and it describes how the two influence and possibly undermine one another. I'm going to read a quote from the person who originated the term. Quote, a culture is a word that was inevitable. During the hyperactive phase of the Temple of Psychic Youth in the 1980s, we were casting around for in all embracing term to describe an approach to combining a unique, demystified spiritual philosophy with a fervent insistence that all life and art are indivisible.

Starting point is 02:34:50 At any given moment, our sensory environment is whispering to us, telling us hidden stories, revealing subliminal connections. This concealed dialogue between every level of popular, cultural forms, and magical conclusions, is what we named a culture. Unquote. That is from Genesis B. Peoridge, a musician, magician, artist, a cult leader, and hashtag slightly problematic queer icon. In the 70s, they started the band Throbbing Gristle, pioneered industrial music, and later started the Chaos Magic organization, the Temple of Psychic Youth, and its associated band Psychic TV. Though a culture did not just describe this sort of personal spiritual movement, it carried a strong offensive element targeted against society and perceived systems of control.

Starting point is 02:35:44 Through there are many projects, including Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and the Temple of Psychic Youth, Peoridge utilized art and magical practice to conduct a quote-unquote war on culture, similar to another figure that will soon get to William S. Burroughs. A culture describes a process of cultural osmosis. the occult bleeds into and morphs culture affecting everything from pop culture to politics and philosophy but as a part of this osmosis the occult becomes increasingly commodified knowable safe territory marketable the hidden occult loses its very essence of being hidden despite its use as a tool of attack against mainstream culture like most countercultural forms the

Starting point is 02:36:33 has been largely recuperated. Even creative works, which are genuine explorations into the occult, fall into this recuperation paradigm. They get turned into products, consumed by a mostly secular audience, like the works of dueling wizards Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Now, some occultists rejoice, knowing that this wide exposure will influence more people to become interested in or adopt occult practices of their own, while others bemoan this dilution and commodification of what to them

Starting point is 02:37:11 is an important spiritual practice. As the modern occult revival, along with a heavy helping hand of scientific advancement, de-territorialized Christian hegemonic religion, now the occult itself has been re-territorialized, which is not to say that the occult is no longer a field of play, which is what this conference attempts to assert. Let's go back to the panel. In terms of the conference itself, as we'll get into later, the term occulture very specifically seems to be focused on the study of the interrelation of magical practice and the material aspects of occult culture

Starting point is 02:37:55 and its influence and appropriation by wider society. So in terms of political projects or social projects, you can probably relate this. I think that it would be fair to say that it's something like culture jamming, if we're looking for some familiar concepts for people to map onto. That is to say, a focus away from simply solitary practice in the ways in which occult elements influence broader aspects of our society or are appropriated, whether that's through consumerist forces or through various artistic practices or even. the production of, for example, film, television, movies. So I think that's a fair assessment of the impacts of a culture.

Starting point is 02:38:38 And relevant to our discussion later, its influence in the tech sector and the emergence of AI, which the current manifestation of has some heavily occult origins. Regarding around a whole bunch of people in the 90s who were writing about AI as this occult project and then that influenced many an AI engineer and coder, who are now building this stuff. And it's becoming an ever-present part of our lives.

Starting point is 02:39:03 And the occultists now are trying to incorporate it into their own practice, which we will discuss in a sec. Any other notes on a culture as a concept or what this conference is doing with the concept? I think a culture is a concept is something that's basically been around as long as there's been magical practices, just looking at so much of things like, you know,

Starting point is 02:39:27 the concept of the British Empire, being invented by John D because of conversations he was having with angels. So I think that naming it and calling it something is also very much felt like an attempt to sort of regain control over the ways that magical practice and greater society seem to influence each other as opposed to a more unintentional way that they have been going back and forth for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There may also be one other aspect that's important for our American audiences, given that we're recording this in Deutschland.

Starting point is 02:40:09 This conference varies significantly from other American equivalents or something that might be an American equivalent, formerly, Pantheicon, in and around San Francisco in San Jose specifically, or Paganicon in the Twin Cities, which specifically has much more of a new-age, neo-pagan reconstructionist. And so most academic discussion is viewed with some suspicion. And I'm hesitant to say that there's an anti-intellectual trend because I don't necessarily think that's true. However, there is a resistance to the kind of academic styling

Starting point is 02:40:45 that we saw very prevalent at this conference to talk about the occult, more generally as an area of study in addition to just idiosyncratic practice, or part of a larger social neo-pagan movement, which is, again, very much the focus at most U.S.-based conferences. As an editorial note, when we're talking about magic, to clarify,

Starting point is 02:41:11 we're not talking about stage magicians. We're referring to magic with a K, that is rituals and practices based on occult knowledge that seeks to cause change in accordance with will, whether that's change within yourself or in our consensus reality. A cult magical practice can also serve as a form of spirituality, mysticism, an alternative religious practice, or an alternative to religion, with its beliefs and practice,

Starting point is 02:41:40 largely influenced by historical esoteric orders, mystery traditions, paganism, witchcraft, herbalism, astrology, hermetic philosophy, and alchemy. And all these things are influences. I'm not saying that the actual historic manifestations of these things are the same as the modern occult practices that are influenced by these things. Because often, these can be wildly varying, especially when you talk about things like witchcraft and alchemy, which have been misinterpreted or reconstructed into completely new forms than what the historical manifestation of them actually contained. But a lot of modern-day occultism has manifested as an individually mediated spirituality, containing some of the group ritual or ritual aspects of something like

Starting point is 02:42:27 Catholicism, but with the individuality of Protestantism. Many conferences have an opening ceremony, and as I previously mentioned, a culture had an opening ritual. This accomplishes a very similar goal to any opening ceremony, to get attendees in a certain headspace, prepare them for the rest of the conference, and set a certain mood in which the rest of the events will kind of follow suit. The acculture opening ritual called upon the attendees' demuregic capacity, how they are part of creating the reality of what this conference is, and how it will continue for the next few days. Back to the panel. The framing of the ritual was a blindfolded woman holding the scales of balance and each person put a intention for the week or for the conference or for themselves

Starting point is 02:43:20 into a stone which was handed out to each person who entered the ritual and at a certain point these stones were placed on to the scales of balance to create an equilibrium between the two sides of the scale along with the you know chanting meditation and a lot of incense A significant deal of incense, given that we were in a former German forge warehouse, the, you know, billowing smoke that existed throughout the conference from fires to incense to various other inflammatory items was rather impressive. But in terms of actual ritual design, it met several elements that I found to be rather impressive. One, it was encompassing of all of those elements that we would later expect to see in the actual body. of the conference itself in terms of like the artistic performances, the musical, you know, metal golf, you know, music that was, was played, but also a very practical and open approach

Starting point is 02:44:21 to ritual. It was highly inclusive. Everyone who was there participated. It did an exceptional job I felt of actually bringing, setting intention and adding to, I don't know, at risk of sounding to New Age, the vibrations that we all felt as we engaged and were present. The theatrical quality, I have to say, was also very much... Dark and spooky. Dark and spooky, but something to be admired. They did a very good job. Definitely one of the more high effort rituals of the weekend in terms of the performative aspect,

Starting point is 02:44:52 with there being little less than a dozen hooded, cloaked figures stationed at different points, either holding specific positions in a meditative state for probably over half an hour, standing still in a position that would become uncomfortable and swinging in. sense or holding torches or lights. Setting intention specifically is usually you talk to these people. The first step of any kind of magical working is setting your intention for what the work is supposed to do or accomplish in you or out into the world. Mirroring the opening ritual, the culture 2025 little booklet has a few paragraphs on the concept for this conference, talking about the cosmic craftsman as the demiurge who shapes matter and spirit.

Starting point is 02:45:38 like, who embodies creation and transformation, revealing both the light and the hidden, the shadowed face of the divine, as well as having cosmic balance and balancing destruction with creation and order and chaos and the hidden and the scene. The last paragraph in which I will read, I think relates specifically to this show and the cultural political aspects, quote, in the age of relentless acceleration, the craftsman becomes a figure of resistance. His patience and ritual discipline reclaim sacred time, restoring a rhythm beyond the acceleration of modern life. A culture 2025 invites us to dwell in this threshold where creation, intuition, and the hidden divine converge. And with that, we converge on

Starting point is 02:46:27 an ad break. Welcome back to the It Could Happen Here, Spooky Special on the Acculture Conference. The figure name dropped the most throughout this conference might surprise some people because I'm assuming most do not consider him to be an occultist or really a serious occult figure. The most discussed individual, at least in my experience of the conference, was not Alistair Crowley, John D, someone like Helena Blavatsky, but in fact, William S. Burroughs. And now we'll return to the panel to discuss the Barosian current. Let's talk about what I would argue was the strongest current throughout this conference.

Starting point is 02:47:30 I'm going to call the Barosian current relating to writer-beat, poet and a mystic and occultist in his own right, William S. Burroughs and the magical technology that he either invented or popularized in the second half of the 20th century and played a significant role in influencing successor movements such as chaos magic and even the work of the CCRU and Land and Fisher. The very first talk that we attended was specifically on Burroughs and Burroughs' ghost haunted the remainder of the conference thereafter. And, and in the very first talk, and introduced a few of the key tensions throughout the rest of the conference, which we will discuss specifically technology and AI.

Starting point is 02:48:17 So our first talk by Kastar Obstrup, who I believe was Swedish. One of those. One of those. He was working at the University of Copenhagen. University of Copenhagen, certainly Scandinavian, of some flavor variety, focused on William S. Burroughs and Brian Geysen. I think that it's important, and I appreciated this claim at the outset, that they argued that both Geysen and Burroughs are actually closer to the late Surrealist

Starting point is 02:48:44 rather than to the beat poet's generation, which we typically associate them with. Which, interestingly enough, I made both of these figures far more compelling to me. My understanding of them, I mean, despite my familiarity with the cut-up method and, you know, several of the things that Burroughs had written, I always considered them far more beaten, and therefore less of interest to me specifically, but this proximity to the surrealists, especially the latter surrealists, I found particularly compelling.

Starting point is 02:49:15 And I think that that brings us to the real focus of this talk was Burroughs' cut-up method and another book that he published on The Third Mind, which gave way to the latter discussions on artificial intelligence and large language models. So Burroughs definitely popularized the cut-up method, which Geisen originated, but Burroughs changed its different forms and manifestations

Starting point is 02:49:38 to various mediums of art, like the tape recorder and his own writings and just words and language. And I guess the reason why I think talking about this current is important to start, this also revolves around this idea of magic as this form of resistance or this like a culture jamming practice,

Starting point is 02:49:55 which Burroughs framed his own work and his like a work that we could describe as like esoteric or inspired by esoterrorism. or achieving esoteric goals, is specifically for this cultural infusion to disrupt mainstream culture in some capacity to go against the one God universe, sometimes in an anarchic way, sometimes in a libertarian way. There's a mix of motivations at play here. Same thing with Robert Anton Wilson, which I'm sure you've heard Robert Evans talk about before. These were contemporaries. These guys were friends. And operating under like,

Starting point is 02:50:33 similar goals of disrupting culture through these techniques, which they thought literally disrupted the linear flow of culture or mechanisms of control, such as language and linear time, which later gets developed on by land and fissure. Yeah, I think looking at some of my notes, some of the things that stuck out to me, especially in view of the fact that the other classes going on at the time began with Alistair Crowley, but we're diving into a lot of more classical and historical magical traditions, was that language can shape reality, which is something that would also be held up by a lot of the classical magical ideas, that sound and image have a cult power, which is very

Starting point is 02:51:22 true in a lot of magical traditions dating back to the Picatrix and more ancient texts. And that tech available at the time can be a magical instrument, which the tech available currently and for William Burroughs is very different than classical tech, but is something that has been done for a very long time as well. What really changes is stepping out of the idea of a linear representation of it and into something that could be edited, cut, and reprogrammed specifically using technology. allowed that as opposed to something that you're trying to control solely through, say, more spiritual, magical acts, it's something that you can do with a tape recorder. And this is, like, you know, based on forms like social engineering and the manipulation of the reproduction of reality, which Burroughs believes language plays a key role in, even though I might disagree with him on a few ways on like the nature of like a language as a human concept versus

Starting point is 02:52:25 this like alien concept, which is like infected. the human. Delta, you should explain what the cut-up method is. Yes. Well, the name itself kind of is self-explanatory, but the idea of being essentially to take any form of texts or writing, cut up the words or pieces of sentences, jumble them up in a hat or a bucket or whatever, and then kind of like play a jigsaw puzzle with language. We should. shifting sentences into new ideas and new forms of poetry, especially, which I'm just looking up my own cutups right in front of me. To force, like, randomized combinations of words that you would not choose to combine on your own volition and seeing what sort of thought that generates

Starting point is 02:53:16 what kind of meaning can be constructed through that combination. Exactly. We're on some of the first cutups done with books and just making holes, cutting out words, and seeing the other words that would appear underneath and if new meaning would arise through the surprise combinations. Words from like the future or the past presenting themselves into a current present within the book. Yeah, I think one of the borough's quotes

Starting point is 02:53:41 is when you cut into the present, the future leaks out. Which is related to the concept of time sorcery that was talked about towards the end of that discussion. I think another element to the cut-up method that's important, especially as it was framed in this, a culture context. as the we quoted from the or as I wrote this quote down from the actual lecture itself reality is made of words images and vibrations and sounds and images have occult power

Starting point is 02:54:08 and therefore these sounds and images and words can be marshaled or used edited cut through rearranged for the purposes of reprogramming it's fascinating because I think that this really is something that carry through to the whole conference. And not just the Burroughs method, but what this Burroughs method, or the Borogian current of the conference, it seems that there was a problematic,

Starting point is 02:54:38 I mean, we started basically with Derrida and we ended with Derrida. With discussions of like critiques of the master narrative that we get from, you know, Deleuze and Leutard and Baudreard and these people. But the goal of this cut-up method was to rewrite the master narrative. So again, back to that concept of culture jamming, as Gare said, this concept of the one-god universe, this cut-up method is meant to interrupt the linearity of words, of language that is a process of control. So I take issue with this concept of language as a virus because that implies that it's a foreign body. And, I mean, as true post-structuralist, I guess, that I am, there is no outside. language. And I think that that's actually something that shines through in this third

Starting point is 02:55:28 mind concept. As two people work together on something, there's a composite mind that like emerges and affects the work is the concept there. So when two people collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you through the revelation of the new that was already present. And I think that that's really important to point out. Because it's not as though that there's this this outside thing, the implication is from this method is that the new reveals itself through this process that's already present in language. Because this is a question that I had throughout is that if language is this foreign entity that dominates us through control and the method itself is language, then how are we not just re? I mean, I guess it's

Starting point is 02:56:17 a kind of inoculation if we have a, you know, a theory of language that is based in, you know, What do we call this? What is it that we all just got during COVID? Cabin fever? No, no. The things that we inject into our body that created the entire... Vaccines. There we go.

Starting point is 02:56:31 That's the ticket. Inoculations. Not all of us got vaccines. Okay, Karen. You heard it here first. Vaccine deny. No. Where was it going with this?

Starting point is 02:56:46 Speaking of methods of control. I mean, a lot of it... Hey, the new just came out there. Wait, just one moment. Sorry, Elaine. I likened this to this process of dialectics, but that's because I couldn't shut up about Hegel the entire time we were there

Starting point is 02:57:03 because I don't think enough occultists are talking about Hegel. Why is no one talking about Hegel? Everyone should be talking about Hegel. I mean, as fun as it is to think about this, like, third mind as, like, an egregore figure, which we've mentioned before, is like a group thought form.

Starting point is 02:57:22 like a being or a force that is generated through multiple people believing in it. You make up an imaginary friend, in a way. That's more of a severator. But true, okay. In egregore is a form of thought that they gained its own, like a autonomy and becomes kind of like a little tiny god, I guess. Or they also combined the third mind idea to like network consciousness. The one last thing I will say on this before we get to the AI aspect, I guess, on this culture jamming non-linearity is the concept of the circuit jump, which was playing back words from politicians in different contexts as a sort of like a uno reversal psychic attack, which I don't know if that actually works, considering the current political situation.

Starting point is 02:58:18 But this is certainly a tactic to which I have employed many such cases. And we see a lot of people attempt to do this. And I think there are certain figures who have their own very strong magical force field protecting them, which has been pretty evident through the past 10 years, including the president of the United States. But as a circuit jump, is it playing something from the wrong time in a different, context as a, as a form of attack, the most famous version of this, which isn't necessarily for political ends. So this was for personal ends is the Burroughs Cafe incident, which I have, I've been a fan of for years, in which he was slighted by a cafe. So then he started recording.

Starting point is 02:59:05 All that happened was they changed their menu, and he couldn't order the one food that he ordered every day. There's been some menus that have changed that I would continue using this tactic, where he recorded sounds from, from outside of, like, people. talking or arguing or walking by or plates dropping and then played them back outside of the cafe for a series of months until the cafe closed. And this is like the funniest, the funniest form of this sort of magical obsession because this really is just a crazy guy playing loud sounds in front of a cafe until they close. I mean, it worked of, yeah, playing back sounds of, you know, arguing, fighting, plates smashing, which would probably create a negative

Starting point is 02:59:48 of aura around this building. But that is the most funny Burroughs, the circumjump moment, although in Burroughs' life is full of these humorous and sometimes worrying of anecdotes. There's one other thing that stuck out to me, given what a lot of the other talks in that space ended up dealing with, along with AI and stuff, was really the speaker talking a lot about the fact that for Burroughs and Geysen, the reproduction of reality is how control occurs. And so the goal was to manipulate the reproduction of reality, because if you can manipulate the reproduction of reality, you are also manipulating reality itself, which I don't think

Starting point is 03:00:35 anyone went into nearly as much, but is something that we're seeing with, say, even the Republican party releasing deep fake videos of Democratic politicians. Yeah, and this is something our... materialist friend Mia does talk about is how there's a quote from some neocons about how how like Democrats just have to kind of like, you know, like react to reality versus the Republicans who generate it. And they like decide what reality is. And you can see this with all of the sort of like moral, moral panics which have spread across the United States and around the world the past few years, whether that's gender ideology, whether that's immigration, whether that's this non-existent

Starting point is 03:01:13 crime wave, or it is a genuine like creation of, of reality. And this goes into, you know, Burroughs' ideas later get developed by a group of academics and occultists that formed the CCRU. This included, say, Plant, Nick Land, who then turned to the dark side, and the since-past, Mark Fisher, who put a name to some of this sort of phenomenon called the Hyperstition, which is, Robert has talked about before on the show, but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a fiction that becomes true through the creation of the fiction and the dissemination of this fiction and this is part of how reality can get formed is through these falsehoods that

Starting point is 03:01:57 through repetition and dissemination become self-manifest. The thing about that though is like the hyperstitional model itself requires the acceptance of the idea that everything is a fiction. Yes. Like, well, I mean, a lot of, most things go through a process like this.

Starting point is 03:02:17 Yes, yes, yes. But doing such a thing, like, intentionally and like offensively, right, which is, which is the idea that we're discussing here in, like, a political context is this, this offensive reality formation where you literally decide what is real and, like, what isn't. And, you know, if you have hundreds of millions dollars in, like, a news company at your disposal, this can become easier. Are you saying that media companies are currently cutting up reality to shape it in the image of the people who fund them.

Starting point is 03:02:48 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they are, they are much, it's funny, because like, occultists, I think, are the people who are often... Some sound clips are you going to use from the conference? I will later in my written work, but I think, on that note, I think occultists are a class of people who are maybe the worst at doing magic. Because the people that are really good at this sort of. thing are perhaps way better at the occult element of hiding their, their, you know, awareness of

Starting point is 03:03:21 what they are doing because a lot of them know what they're doing. They just actually keep it more occultic, whereas the magicians will not shut the fuck up because there's always a, there's always a new book to sell. That was an excellent segue to an ad break, Elaine. Thank you for that. And now a word from our sponsors. on this note though i agree with you completely as a former academic and just a healthy level of skepticism going into any magical conference i sat down i listened and i've been to enough conferences listening to magicians attempt to map on rather poorly magic onto a cultural figure and i think burroughs is really unique here but my academic pretense was to sit here and

Starting point is 03:04:15 and to listen and think about, you know, language as a pharmacon, think about Derrida, De Luz, Bauderard, Leotardt, when they're discussing the master narrative or rewriting the master narrative. But what's unique about Burroughs and why I gave up that, you know, academic mapping of philosophy and asking myself, why are we having this conversation? We could just go read these texts. They talk about similar things, but the point is that those texts talk about similar things. And what's unique about Burroughs is that he's actually doing... He's a doer.

Starting point is 03:04:43 He's a doer. This is fundamentally the difference between the Vita Activa and the Vita Contemptaiva. Like, I'm thinking in terms of philosophers and it took me half of this talk to be like, no, he's actually doing shit. As soon as we get out to him actually

Starting point is 03:04:56 standing out in front of the cafe and doing this, he's not just developing a method, but by virtue of the fact that he's inviting other artists, like the slides upon slides that we saw of him, you know, working with new machines that he was creating and trying these things, he was actively involved in this practice.

Starting point is 03:05:14 which again makes him far more magical than most occultists. Don't come for me. Absolutely. AI, specifically we'll be discussing debates and uses of generative AI in this conference because the last Acculture Conference was in 2023 as these large language models and image generation platforms were just starting to gain popularity. And now they have a a stranglehold over the stock market and many people's imagination. The first, I guess, real debate around AI happened as the three of you stayed to listen to a panel after the William Esperos panel as well as an Austin Osmond Spare panel, a proto-Cathsman-Sporee, who's a contemporary of Alistair Crowley.

Starting point is 03:06:04 I left to go listen to a mathematical, thelemic ontology talk. which was probably less interesting than the panel. I'd like to hear you guys talk about the debates around AI and how they emerged in this panel and then also juxtaposing that to the different forms of like AI discussions around AI that dominated a large part of the rest of the conference. Well, actually, AI came up because the initial discussion question for the panel was what does it mean to talk about art as magic in the digital era?

Starting point is 03:06:34 So everyone was very specifically being asked to discuss the differences between the creation. And the creation process is magic when you can use AI, when you can use large language models to just generate things. And if the generative method using AI was at all related to, say, the cut-up method or other things. So that was the initial conversation that began, that whole panel. Well, and that was certainly a topic that was begged by the other two talks that we didn't really discuss. the Austin Osmond Spare was about automatic drawing. So this conception and of, you know, this drawing that is coming from the outside,

Starting point is 03:07:19 coming from the subconscious, coming from within, all within one line. All within one line. But more than that, it was a very traditional kind of European 1970s lecture. You know, you had a lovely Italian man who stood in the front that was ready to smoke a cigarette while trying to get through, you know, a very well-formulated, well-argued essay while a series of images presented to us behind him that covered an overview of artists that are doing very similar things, or he argued, exists in a similar kind of vein, and the occurrences of not just magical tropes, but cultural influences that happen independently.

Starting point is 03:07:58 So artists all over the world. The third talk by, I believe, Kate Lady, yeah, the ritual transformation and hybridity in Leonora Carrington's Judith, which was a stage production, which happened in Mexico City, I believe. So we had a few pictures of this, but Leonardo Carrington's art very specifically has to do with this hybrid of like animals and mythical figures and creatures, and the stage production was incredibly intense. I really appreciated this talk a lot.

Starting point is 03:08:29 But the then focus on talking about, you know, generative artificial intelligence in these large language models and the role of art or what it means to do art in this era was related to this idea of the third mind, of automatic drawing, of this concept of hybridity, of this, like, transformative or this discovering of the new through a synthetic putting together of different elements or images, words, sounds, costumery,

Starting point is 03:08:58 these kinds of things. So it was a natural question to lead, but the audience members took it in a very strange direction that I would like you all to talk about. I mean, the initial question was really that people started asking after the panel topic was proposed was, so what did the panelists think about AI art?

Starting point is 03:09:20 Do the panelists think AI art is magic? Do the panelists think that AI art is channeling? Do the panelists think that, you know, Putting a prompt in a language model is the same as doing some sort of trans-state automatic writing. There was a lot of variations on functionally that. All of the panelist's reaction was, no, it's not. And a lot of them did not immediately really want to even dive into that topic and were very annoyed at the question initially. That's actually not true because I got triggered almost immediately because it was our first speaker that responded, not to that first question, but to the second question.

Starting point is 03:09:57 And the second question had to do with the role of technology and whether we see that there's a possibility for these tools, you know, as a technology, a tech ney, in magical practice. And our first speaker's reaction was to sit back and give us a tentative yes. To the tech. To the tech. That's correct. To AI, they were like, their initial reaction was still also no, but.

Starting point is 03:10:24 Yes, they indeed got there. But it was unclear at first. first, and I was a little raw about it given that seemed completely contrary to the talk that, you know, that he had mentioned before. There was a question about NFTs. Do you remember this question? Oh, I tried to put it immediately out of my head because of the fact that it started with like, well, NFTs failed because people like weren't ready to embrace the blockchain as a generative idea for making art as opposed to the fact that. but why would I own an NFT if I can screenshot the picture?

Starting point is 03:11:01 Yeah, well, it was this idea that, like, NFTs themselves were part of this breaking up of the control process, the linearity of money and financial systems, that somehow it was related to the cut-up method. It was one of those questions that was a narrative before it finally got to your question that really just invited the readers to respond. There were others that talked about this, too,

Starting point is 03:11:25 and related their own personal experience to the generative AI process that, you know, they approach AI, not with the expectation that will provide sense, but it'll almost have this or, again, this, they related it to the third mind. They, this idea that, again, you and the AI come together and somehow reveal the new, which I at this point was absolutely seething. Yeah, I think the closest, actually, that we had to some really, like, someone even trying to approach it was asking about.

Starting point is 03:11:57 If you're making this art, if you're generating these new things, does it matter that corporations are controlling the algorithm by which you're doing so, which started to touch on some of the problems, but still was definitely relying on the base assumption that using a large language model to produce stories or art, that you're interacting with something else that's actually capable of creating at all. And to her credit, my girl, Kate Lady, who was talking about Leonora Carrington. the one that seemed to be kind of tangentially separate from the other two, but the hybridity really made it. Was the one that just gave us a great, straight Marxist answer of like, no, this is bullshit. Let's actually look at the material implications as to where this is coming from and the environmental costs of running these programs,

Starting point is 03:12:47 of server farms, the destruction of space, of, you know, livable areas throughout the United States, that these are questions that we need to ask and are not. separate from these questions of magic. So I really shout out to her. I appreciated that response because it was instant and it was it was heated. It is also like I mean from my perspective it's also a labor issue right because these large language models and generative AI just scrape like so much data that that's like writing from real artists and created by real like painters and whatever and it is the

Starting point is 03:13:27 appropriation of human labor to shit out some advertising, essentially. That is like my main, well, aside from all the ecological and the political issues with it, it's like very much that labor angle to it that frustrates me. Well, in the context of the talk, it was really important to then ground, and this is the comment that I made that the panel broadly seemed to agree with, although I didn't really leave them much opportunity to disagree with me. I mean, you're all right. Thank you.

Starting point is 03:14:02 Go on. So this, Burroughs' concept of the third mind, this book that he wrote, right? When two minds collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you, again, not about creating the new, but about revealing itself in what was already present. Yes. But the idea is that you have to. to have two minds in order to get this dialectical third mind

Starting point is 03:14:30 that was inherent in the conditions, the situation, the language of the two. When one interacts with any form of large language model or chat GBT, I and my mind, and with what I carry, sit in front of a computer

Starting point is 03:14:48 and type my input. That's one mind. Can you tell me where the second is? Because even if you're cutting up a book, there's a mind in the book, there's a story, there's an actual thing there. There's a thing that you are interacting with that were thoughts that were produced by someone that you are cutting up. You are not just scraping the toilet bowl of human production. But even if we're going to be generous and say that these large language models are the ones that are doing the cut up process and you are secondary, or tertiary or even further down the line to it.

Starting point is 03:15:27 I mean, it doesn't involve a human intelligence at that point. So just in terms of the, you know, the Berosian current, it's just not a third mind. It's the material conditions are such that it is not and cannot be a third mind. Where I would like to take this discussion is actually to the very next talk that I attended was part of a three-talk series called the Politics of Terror.

Starting point is 03:15:54 And the specific one that I think continued on this line of thought and even stuff like automatic writing was from icon to index by Thomas Leek, the generative logic of tarot, in which he discussed, I'll have to check his name later, but discussed an author in the 80s who was trying to use tarot as a way to remove the human element of writing, try to create an automatic story using the taro archetypes, assembled in a randomized shuffling to generate a story based on the linkages between each of the cards and remove his own, like, agency and directing where the story goes, except for trying to bridge each card of one to another. And the presenter was discussing if this bears any, like, similarity to, like, generative text models. The presenter said no.

Starting point is 03:16:48 The presenter said, no, this actually is not like LLMs, which purely operate on a people-pleasing, probabilistic capacity to follow one word after another in accordance with whatever the prompt of the person who's operating the AI wants it to generate. Though the presenter stated that, like, this author who was using Tero probably would have loved using an LLM to try to accomplish this goal of his, trying to access kind of like a form of automatic writing. similar to like Austin Osmond's bear, but without human input, the shuffling of the cards and forcing the human brain to make connections between these archetypes still contains a creative human process based on randomness in the shuffling of the deck versus the people-pleasing probabilistic generative text that LLMs produce. This concludes the first episode of my Acculture 2025 coverage in part two releasing Sunday night, The panel will discuss digital technomancy, traditional magical practice,

Starting point is 03:17:54 and why people are doing occult practice in 2025. See you on the other side. Being a parent is basically a juggling act. Dinner, hockey practice, homework, a last-minute science project, and someone's always, always. shouting for you from another room. So yeah, I'll take any shortcuts that actually works. And that's why I'm all in on Hello Fresh.

Starting point is 03:18:27 Fresh ingredients, super easy recipes and over 80 options every week so everyone eats. No one complains and I get to feel like I've got it all together, at least for dinner. And the best part, you're in total control. Skip a week, pause any time, pick what works for you. It's dinner on your terms. They even have 15-minute recipes. Perfect for those nights when everyone. Everyone's hungry and patience is officially off the menu.

Starting point is 03:18:52 And with so many options, even my pickiest eater found something they loved, which means no more backup mac and cheese. Try HelloFresh today and get 50% off the first box with free shipping. Go to HelloFresh.combe and use promo code Rescue 50. That's Hellofresh.combe.combe, here we go. Hey, I'm Kelpen, and on my new podcast, Here We Go again, And we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host.

Starting point is 03:19:31 Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lili Singh, and Bill Nye.

Starting point is 03:19:57 When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to Here We Go Again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio

Starting point is 03:20:14 app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I live below a cult leader, and I fear I've angered her. Well, wait a minute, Sophia. How do you know she's a cult leader? Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime podcast, so you'll find out soon. This person writes, my neighbor has been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals, and now my ceiling is collapsing.

Starting point is 03:20:38 I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they may be part of a cult. Hold up, Sophia. a real-life cult? And what is a dirt ritual? No clue. But according to this person, contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with their ceiling and her neighbors are not happy. Well, she needs to report them ASAP. She did. And now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time. So do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast

Starting point is 03:21:11 on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or where wherever you get your podcasts. A combat surgeon with secrets, a world built on power and privilege, and the most unexpected creative duo of the year. As an actor for so many years, I would always walk into other people stories. And I thought, well, why don't I give it a shot, you know, and try it right up myself? This week, bookmarked by Reese's Book Club goes live from Apple Soho in New York City with Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, the powerhouse team behind Gone Before Goodbye.

Starting point is 03:21:44 Now a New York Times bestseller. I think we both knew right away that this was going to happen. It's a conversation about fear, ambition, and what happens when two master storytellers collide? I've never seen a woman in kind of a James Bond world. Come for the chills and stay for the surprises. And find out why readers can't put it down. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app,

Starting point is 03:22:10 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No. Yep, it's, it could happen here. Electile disorder. Executive disorder, which is our weekly newscast, which we've been doing all year. So we should know what it's called by now. Yeah, that's why I'm so good at doing it. I'm naming it.

Starting point is 03:22:43 Well, this show covers what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you and me and everyone else. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, and Mia Wong, and we are covering the week of October 22nd to October 30th. Yep. So I think we should start off the bat by the same thing we started off last week with, which is that as you're listening to this. Happy Halloween! Yeah, well, that, on the upside, Halloween, woo, spooky on the end. The downside, like 40 million people lose their SNAP benefits the next day on Saturday.

Starting point is 03:23:20 Yeah, but what's spookier than that? Look, one thing you can't say about the government is that they're not failing to celebrate the holiday. I am scared of the consequences. Yeah. Stock up on the trick-or-treater candy, I guess. Steal as much candy as you can after people, you're going to need it to stay alive. See, a group of children, you run. past him.

Starting point is 03:23:44 Kick them. Oh, they're kids. They can't stop you. Yep. Hold it above your head. They can't reach it. No, it is extremely grim. And there seems to be no indication from the Republicans of the Trump administration that

Starting point is 03:23:56 they are going to work with the Democrats to resolve this without sacrificing health care for millions of Americans. Yeah. So Gavin Newsom, a friend of the show, has deployed the California National Guard to assist food banks in the state. Oh, my God. Yeah, like, look, the thing is when you participate in the largest crackdown on protected First Amendment speech in recent history, you don't get to show up and hand out snacks

Starting point is 03:24:23 and feel good. And many food banks, including some in the Bay Area, have refused the help of National Guard members, right? Because they have this very obvious concern that some people might be reluctant to go to places where the soldiers who are standing right next to all the different immigration agents in L.A., are now working. And so this will have the opposite of a positive effect in those instances, right? People are afraid to go to food banks and going to remain hungry.

Starting point is 03:24:52 The consequences of this will be negative. Like the issue, I don't think, is a lack of person power. The issue is a lack of funding. The state has mobilized $80 million in funds, but millions of Californians will be going hungry. And because of the failure of state authorities to stop federal authorities deploying the National Guard to L.A. and to other areas where immigration enforcement was happening, this stunt that Newsome is going for could have very negative consequences for

Starting point is 03:25:21 food banks and for Californians who are hungry. Something sick and cool you can do if you have the means and the time is to pick up food from food banks for people who need it. A lot of people might be concerned. One of the biggest problems is how much food banks get food also through these programs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean support, yeah, food banks themselves are going to be struggling right now. I actually did a thread on blue sky where... Were you going to say Lyft Twitter and then corrected to blue sky? I was going to say Lib Sky.

Starting point is 03:25:54 Yeah, yeah. I fact-checked myself. It's blue wave sky. There you go. You cannot get that past me. I could pick up on what you were doing immediately. Garrison Davis, like a viper struck, yeah, the core of my thought process. yeah so if you're on if you're on skeeter then you can you can find the little thread

Starting point is 03:26:15 I'm making the show notes with food banks that are looking for donations and you can also use that to find a food bank in your area if you're interested in that but yeah this is a serious problem this is the should be the biggest news story I'm thinking particularly of those folks in Alaska right who found themselves as climate refugees due to this storm right which flooded their villages and now not only face it. the loss of their villages and their homes, but also all their cashed food. These are people who often would have hunted or fished or relied on storing food for the winter and now finding themselves then able to access federal benefits.

Starting point is 03:26:54 Doing the thing that like, there's a representative of Clay Higgins of Louisiana made a tweet today blaming snap recipients for not stockpiling a month's worth of food. What the fuck? Does he understand how this works? He said, try to get your head wrapped around how many panties. you can stock with $4,200, which is what people get on average per year, he says, with SNAP benefits, in properly shopped groceries. Any American who's been receiving $4,200 per year of free groceries and does not have at least one month of grocery stock should never again receive SNAP because, wow, stop smoking crack. That's inhumane. Dealing with the shit that

Starting point is 03:27:28 they talk about is almost pointless, because they're all liars. But like what you said, Like, people are unsnapped for a wide variety of reasons. They're largely employed. They're just not getting enough money to actually, like, survive and feed their family. And, like, the $4,200 a year for a family is not, in fact, enough to stockpile a huge quantity of food. No, it's not. Like, it's remarkable how to attach the people who make our laws are from. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:28:00 The working class experience. There is no way that guy knows how much a banana. costs. No way. Zero. No, he has no idea. That man isn't shopped for himself in fucking 20 years. Yeah, yeah. That guy does not know how much it costs to buy a mac and cheese for your kids. And obviously, you know, we hear we talk about storing food, about canning your own food, and there are things you can do even on a budget when you don't have much money to build a stockpile. And that's why I encourage people to pay attention to things like prices at the grocery store when things are a lot cheaper because they're in season and learn how to do things.

Starting point is 03:28:34 like pressure can, right, and pickle different foods and want to, because there's, there are ways that you can, and this is why, right? It's not because you should be doing that of your irresponsible. It's because we, even when it comes to the social safety net, you know, that we have, what little of one that we have, you can't rely on it because at any given point, it could become a fucking, fucking football for Democrats and Republicans to fight over and go away, right? Like, none of this stuff is reliable, which is why people, people ought to, if it's at all possible, be doing stuff like that, right? Not because they should have to do that, but because you cannot rely on the government, right? And I don't say

Starting point is 03:29:15 that as like a critique of people or to like shit on people. It's just like it's a fact. It's a fact that people need to increasingly accept because this is not going to be getting better in the long run. Yeah. Let's talk about Graham Platner. All right. Oh, God. All right. Let's do it. Talking about a touch politicians. A couple of weeks ago. James brought up Graham Platner, who is running for Congress in Maine, and some ads that he had put out, which were really, and I still think are really good ads, not good ads in terms of, they were effective, objectively. He raised a lot of money. He was leading in the polls prior to us. We'll talk about a bunch of scandals coming out. He's no longer leading, but he was doing very well for a while. So his campaign, the strategy that he was following, which was largely a mix of talking about and really pushing investments in social. programs and particularly health care and attacking the billionaire class in very stark terms,

Starting point is 03:30:11 talking about the need to effectively get rid of that as a group of people, like taxed them out of existence. That's a popular, you know, and a good thing to campaign on. And the success that he had early on is evidence that there's a lot of legs to talking about that kind of stuff in the way that he did. And he talked about it in a very combative way, right? This guy who was a former Marine, some sort of fisherman, I think, whatever kind of kind of, he's like, once this is one of those main fishermen.

Starting point is 03:30:36 I think it's an oyster farmer or some shit. Whatever, they have up that nonsense state. Um, sorry, Maynites. And they're called maniacs, technically. I think they're called Mainers. That can't be right, Garrison. So he was coming across as a very like blue collar guy, right? Like a very, and kind of crude, but crude in a like, I'm a straight talker sort of guy.

Starting point is 03:30:56 And that worked. That was a, that was a good campaign. And we, we highlighted that because I think it struck, you know, James is the one who brought it to our attention, but I think it struck all of the, us as a, oh, yeah, this is a guy who is kind of doing, talking to voters in a way that we wish more Democrats were, right? And then in the last couple of weeks, oh, God, so many scamps come out about this guy. The most well-known of them is that for the last 20 years of his life, he has had a Totenkov tattooed over his pectoral. That is the death's head. Now, it dates back

Starting point is 03:31:30 before the Nazis. It was a, I don't know if this was the very first use of it. but the very first prominent use of it in military history was as the insignia for a unit called the Death's Head Hussars, which was an elite German cavalry unit. I mean, I'm sure I think they did still exist in World War I, but that was well past their prime. And it was then adopted by the SS. And it was worn by a number, by a lot of guys in the SS,

Starting point is 03:31:55 but it was specifically the insignia of a unit called the Totenkov SS, which existed to guard concentration camps and death camps. So having one tattooed on you, Bad. Yeah, not cool. Platner has said, basically, it was a dumb tattoo I got when I was young and just joining the Marine Corps, and I didn't know what it meant. And I am willing to believe that, like, a 19-year-old who joins the Marines would make

Starting point is 03:32:19 a bad tattoo decision. Because I have a lot of friends that were in the Marines, and they all have bad tattoos. Right? None of them have death heads. Also, you got it, well, in, like, Croatia, well, drunk with other Marines. I don't believe, yeah. And he was hammered. And yeah, the probability of walking into a tattoo shop in Croatia

Starting point is 03:32:40 and coming out with a Nazi tattoo is extremely high. Sure. Yeah, it's not low. Yeah, yeah. They're on the flash seat for Friday the 13th. They probably are. If it had just come out that he'd had this for some period of time, being like, yeah, I got like, I was hammered in Croatia,

Starting point is 03:32:57 and I got a fucked up tattoo and realized it and got it covered, I'd have been like, not a story, right? like man gets bad tattoo as dumb kid but number one he kept it to fit he got it covered in like the last week or so let me tell you that was a real piece of art that he covered it with which is a wild choice

Starting point is 03:33:18 to just keep it for that long but also he claimed I had no idea until it like came out as a story because I forget what outlet but some news outlet found out that he had it and was going to publish it I think his team told Pod Save America when he went on the Pod Save America

Starting point is 03:33:31 when he went on the Pod Save America pod. Yeah, but he had heard that there was opposition research. Yeah, because he had sent out to like another thing that he went on, like a picture of him with his shirt off, and they were like, wait, what? Like, there were a few of them floating around, huh? If you've lived that kind of life, there's going to be pictures of you with the shirt off, you know, like.

Starting point is 03:33:56 They're refusing to acknowledge, yeah, I knew earlier in my life that it was a death's head and like there's reports from people who knew him that he called it a toten cough and joked about it. I didn't know that. Now let me be clear. I don't actually think Graham is a secret Nazi sleeper agent.

Starting point is 03:34:14 I really don't. I think he's a guy with really questionable judgment, which is reason to be very critical of his campaign. And yeah, I take a lot of issue with how he's responded to this because rather than again, just kind of doing a

Starting point is 03:34:30 he's gone on the this is my enemies in the democratic party trying to silence me thing and a very weird coalition has propped up kind of around him trying to argue that this is a circular firing squad kind of deal like there was a jacobin article being like it's fucked up that people are going after graham and the pod save guys are defending him like it is a weird coalition uh that's circling around this fella what do you think that jo rogan of the left meant vibes essay We wanted a guy who took loads of steroids and didn't have problematic opinions. I'm never going to say this in any other instance about Joe Rogan, but he wouldn't have gotten that tattoo because he knows what a death hit is.

Starting point is 03:35:14 I don't know if he knew in like 2007 or whatever. I think there's a very strong alternate world where 2007 Joe Rogan is traveling in Croatia. Joe Rogan gets a totem cough. And also accidentally gets a totem cob tattoo. It's not impossible. Right, you're right. I guess I'm just assuming he's watched enough World War II documentaries to know. Yeah, but watching those while smoking weed, so he doesn't remember anything.

Starting point is 03:35:39 That's fair. These are fair points you're making, Garrison. So a couple of surprising things about this, and this is not the only scandal that's kind of come out about him recently, but number one, it did not immediately take a strong hit to his polling. This seems to be primarily just because a lot of voters aren't aware of it, because in polls where they informed people that he had a Nazi tattoo, his support drops dramatically

Starting point is 03:36:05 by like 30 points. That said, he was leading until like two or three days ago, I think was the most recent poll that came out that had a main governor Janet Mills in the lead above him. We're not talking about the main race. We're still in the primary, right?

Starting point is 03:36:20 So he's challenging Janet Mills for the primary. Sure. And yeah, at present, according to SoCal Strategies, who did a poll very recently, this is the most recent poll. Mills has 41% from likely voters, and Platner has 36%, although about a fifth of respondents are undecided. And yeah, this is a pretty dramatic upset, because prior to the whole Nazi tattoo news coming out, Platner was leading Mills by about 34 points.

Starting point is 03:36:47 So this has gone from Plattener look to have it in the bag to, it's pretty close. Mills is ahead, not by a lead that's so commanding that it's a definite thing, you know, a standard polling error could have them basically be neck and neck and we all should know at this point how frequently that kind of stuff happens. Yeah, polling. Never wrong. But yeah,

Starting point is 03:37:09 so I don't know, it's one of those. Somebody got angry at us on the subreddit being like, I can't believe they're hiding that like this has happened, you know, with this guy that they endorsed. Like, no, we didn't endorse him. And number two, like, this shit was breaking when we were recording the ED last week.

Starting point is 03:37:25 We made like a reference about it. but not much had come out, and there certainly hadn't been time for us to really look into what was going on here. And it's not, this is a main Senate primary. This is not like the very top of our list of crucial things to hit the second it happens. We can wait on something like this

Starting point is 03:37:42 to see how stuff's shaking out a little bit. No one's voting yet, so it's not like we're influencing the election by not coming out or whatever. Yeah, like, we only get to cover so much. We have one hour of like news roundup show a week And the blue sky Twitter drama about Graham Planner is not as important as the fact that millions of people are losing their food this week. No.

Starting point is 03:38:05 One thing that is interesting, and I do think this is an important race just because of kind of what it says about what sort of strategies are working now and igniting the base and what kind of stuff does matter in terms of scandals. I think there are some things that are really relevant here. One thing that is interesting to me is that according to a poll, a very recent poll, the article came on October 26th, 2025. a majority of young Democrats still back Grand Platner, even after the whole tattoo thing. And this is really interesting to me because the data shows that in general among likely voters, his potential support plummets when people are made aware that he had the tattoo. But young Democrats are by far the group most likely to have become aware of it as soon as the story broke because young people are much more online than older people.

Starting point is 03:38:50 And among young people, he's still well ahead, which I really just do think. speaks more than anything to the strength of the rhetoric he has been using the platform that he came out the gate with it's and and the rhetoric right his combative rhetoric is really attractive to young voters especially explain your generation to us garrison why you like this there there there's a lot of stuff that the zoron campaign kind of like ignited around yeah no you're you're right exactly absolutely rhetoric and then you know Sanders and aOC had their like anti- oligarchy tour which i mean i we don't need to like debate like the the use of like that term.

Starting point is 03:39:27 But no, there is a huge frustration at the geriatric Democratic Party. And this sort of populist rhetoric is very popular among young people. As it has been since the Sanders campaign in 2016, this isn't like newer revolutionary information. The fact that this guy has gotten to this point has gotten either past scandals or navigating through it despite his like, you know, very questionable background, in military and military private contracting, his misogynistic Reddit posts,

Starting point is 03:40:00 which were unearthed as like an attack against him, which I think he actually handled that scandal fairly well, using it as a parallel to chart his like own political journey. So yeah, I can understand why a whole bunch of young people who are reading about this aren't going to actually care at all about any of these stories and still vote for him because of what he's saying. Yeah, and I want to be clear, I didn't bring this up because I think it's bad, even that, like, young people are still supporting him.

Starting point is 03:40:28 I think this is something that people, especially in the Democratic Party, who care about winning, and I think it's people on the left who are trying to look at what can we do to get more progressive and combative candidates who are going to do something, both about the right and about the billionaire class, what can we do to actually, like, when you should be paying attention to this, because this rhetoric works. Yeah. And because surely there's one other guy who can say these things. Yeah. There's got to be another guy without a Nazi tattoo who can say this stuff, right? Sure, you can find one person who could use rhetoric as good on camera and has not had a Totenkov tattooed on their chest for almost 20 years. Yeah. And also, the most wild part about this, I don't even think, is that.

Starting point is 03:41:18 It's that this guy was in Blackwater. like so he said it's Constellus but he calls it Blackwater he was yeah that's the other scandal so please let's let's yeah he deployed to Afghanistan for Blackwater

Starting point is 03:41:34 in 2018 that was the first Trump administration no one in any point in this process went hold on wait this guy went to fight in Afghanistan like in 2018

Starting point is 03:41:48 like yeah they prosecuted the guys from you saw Nisar Square, yeah. From the Nassar, Square massacre, yeah, after the square. Like, those people got prosecuted four years before that. And he joined Blackwater in 2018. And to be clear, because this is something James brought up when we talked about this in our chat previously.

Starting point is 03:42:08 He didn't technically join Blackwater because Blackwater has changed its name and I think merged with a couple of countries. It was a different name. But, to be fair to Mia, he called it Blackwater. He said I worked for Blackwater. there's a way in which like I'm okay with people fucking up if they acknowledge they fucked up right like I'm okay with him saying

Starting point is 03:42:30 I did this and it was wrong so I left and I regret doing it I mean that that is what he's saying though it was specifically after this deployment yes that this is where he says that like this marked his like political quote unquote radicalization

Starting point is 03:42:44 or like during the path of like how he viewed his life in politics specifically was negative experiences during this deployment yeah yeah And I guess that is something I have really complicated opinions on. Because I'm not, and I really have a lot of issues with folks on the left who are like, anyone who was ever in the military is forever, baby killer.

Starting point is 03:43:03 Deeply unsurious. Like, I think that's deeply, deeply unsurious and incredibly counterproductive. And I don't, I think that, like, it's good that someone can do something as fucked up as joined Blackwater and realize that they did a horrible thing and change. maybe doing it in 2018 is too recently for me to want him in Congress as a progressive I don't know yeah it was like that was it was like a decade after

Starting point is 03:43:33 like he was one of the so he wasn't one of the like the torture guards but like when he was a Marine he was like one of the guys who was like assigned to guard Abu Ghraib yeah I think yeah after the torture scandal but it's like it took you it took you like a decade after that yeah is that maybe the thing I'm doing is bad

Starting point is 03:43:51 Like, I just, oh, God. Well, yeah, and that's kind of like the, because I don't, you know, I don't think having been stationed to guard a place where horrible thing, like war crimes were committed, necessarily dams you forever because, like, you don't choose where you're stationed to guard. Who knows when he became aware what was going on in the place he was guarding. But at some point he did.

Starting point is 03:44:15 And that wasn't like the moment where he was like, oh, fuck. You know, and I, again, I have a lot of friends. I have friends who were with the very first infantry unit into Iraq, one of whom, as they were invading, was like, you know, this is criminal guys, right? You know, we're breaking, you know, this is fucked up. You know, this war's bullshit. Pat Tillman was saying that, right? Like, during the invasion. This guy, this guy shipped out in 2016.

Starting point is 03:44:41 Yeah. Like, it took him a, I would I was a reasonable long time. And also, when you read his interviews about it, he's like, I did it because it was fun. which is just like... That's honest. Yeah, it's honest. It makes me insane. Look, I mean, that's why people join the Marines as they, like, money and or their

Starting point is 03:45:01 adrenaline junkies, right? I'd rather he was honest about that shit, actually. Like, I... Yeah, but it's just, like, distressing. I actually like that. And, again, I do kind of like... Because there's not a... There's not a perfect answer as to, like, well, when should you have had a change of heart

Starting point is 03:45:18 about something like this? before you can, like, be trusted as a political leader on the left. And I actually don't really know. I think I would be inclined to be, like, give him the benefit of the doubt on that stuff more if it weren't for the Nazi tattoo. Yeah. If Nazi tattoo shipped out with Blackwater, 2018. Yeah. Those things together are kind of sketchy.

Starting point is 03:45:45 Maybe do a couple of tours as a dog catcher first. Like, you know, I'm seeing a lot of, because there's a whole lot of like, well, no one else who has a chance of winning in Maine is supporting the progressive policies he is, you know, you can't have it all be perfect or whatever. He's, you know, we should at least hope that he gets in and he does the things he's saying. And I guess like if he does get elected and it's not the most likely thing right now, but it's certainly not impossible. I guess I hope he does the good stuff he says that he's done. I just have a lot less faith. in that given both what's come out and his reaction to it, right? It's his reaction to it. It was really disqualifying for me. Like, there's a world, I guess, I didn't know that he told people it was a totem cough. That's pretty fucking

Starting point is 03:46:30 incriminating. But yeah, there's reports from people who've said that. It's unclear. Okay, there's reports. Got it. We don't know objectively, but people have talked to the press who knew him and said that he described it as a toten cough to them several years ago. Okay. Yeah. If his response had been like, oh, fuck,

Starting point is 03:46:47 I didn't know. Let me get that covered up in immediately. But his response was so bad to defend it and to be like, there's a conspiracy against me. It was really bad. It's that failure. And it also just shows like a lack of judgment and a lack of ability to like be critical of his own actions, which is worrying.

Starting point is 03:47:06 It shows the kind of Trumpian fancifulness that really worries me. Yeah, demagoguery kind of thing. A lot of populists are like this. Like this is, this is a part of populism. I don't think you can fully decouple it. That's probably true, Garrison. That's probably true, but I don't know. I'm not going to tell you how to vote.

Starting point is 03:47:29 I've made a habit of never telling people how to vote. So if you're in Maine, enjoy your Mc Lobster and do whatever your heart tells you is the right thing to do, my friend. But also, please don't eat a Mc Lobster. It's clearly poisoned. You know, avoid a McLobsters at all costs. Yeah, buy an oyster instead.

Starting point is 03:47:49 The strongest endorsement Robert Evans can make. Yeah. Is it not buy a McLobstre? Avoid a McLobster at all costs. Yeah, if you're on the West Coast, avoid shellfish in some months at all costs because you can get paralytic shellfish poison.

Starting point is 03:48:05 Oh, yeah. I mean, some people, that's just basically getting free muscle relaxers, James. Let's do it out break. For muscle relaxers. Okay. All right, we are back. Can I do my Halloween ice Nazi?

Starting point is 03:48:34 Sure. Bovino segment. Is that how you say his name, Bovino? Gregorovino. It looks like a bovino to me. Sure, why not? So we're going to talk about him playing dress-up and how Board of Patrol

Starting point is 03:48:47 disrupted a Halloween parade. So last weekend, while conducting an immigration enforcement reign, Border Patrol disrupted the route of a children's Halloween parade in Old Irving Park in Chicago using tear gas and arresting several people, including two U.S. citizens. A crowd gathered around after Border Patrol

Starting point is 03:49:05 arrested a 35-year-old construction worker who has lived in Chicago since he was four years old. Jesus. Neighborhood residents said that Federal agents then deployed tear gas without warning. That following Tuesday, the architect of Operation Midway Blitz, Greg Bovino, appeared in Federal Court as a part of a lawsuit alleging excessive force and violations of a TRO restricting the use of tear gas and crowd-control munitions.

Starting point is 03:49:34 Bovino seems to be flagrantly violating this TRO as he was photographed, personally throwing a tear gas canister into a crowd in October 22nd during a raid on a launch. and Home Depot. The DHS says that protesters were throwing rocks and Border Patrol issued warnings, though this account is contradicted by video of the incident. U.S. District Judge Sarah Ellis told the Border Patrol chief, quote, kids dressed in Halloween costumes walking to a parade, do not pose an immediate threat to the safety of law enforcement officers. They just don't. And you can't use riot control weapons against them, unquote. This TRO

Starting point is 03:50:14 requires that crowd-controlled munitions may only be used if someone poses an immediate threat to law enforcement, with agents instructed to give two verbal warnings before tear gas or pepper spray can be deployed, and to wear body cams, badges, or visible IDs. This order was issued on October 9th. And to get an idea of how closely this is being followed, the Vino himself still does not wear a body cam, and told Judge Ellis, quote, I have not received a body worn camera nor the training, unquote. Yeah. So border patrol agents have generally, just to give some context here, not worn, body-worn cameras for a number of reasons. Firstly, they just don't want to. Secondly, no one is making them. Thirdly, they believe that it is possible for people to detect the Bluetooth signal that the camera gives out and thus find them. This is something that's theoretically possible, as best my research can tell. You can make your own judgment as to which of those factors is weighing most heavily on. on their choice, no, to wear them, but they have never been required, like,

Starting point is 03:51:16 as a group to wear body-worn cameras all the time. No. This judge is trying to force them to. They're just refusing to follow the order, despite Bavino saying that 99% of agents have these cameras, which is a bizarrely specific claim. Yeah, like...

Starting point is 03:51:36 Yeah, is he the 1%? Like, I guess. He's just, like, he's just, so obviously lying. It's just, oh, God. Yeah. It's just, it's lying. I think that should be enough to say. Yeah. I don't know if I said they'd never wear them. To be clear, they have gone forward and back on wearing them, but it was earlier this year the specific security risk. They have access to the cameras. Yes, yes. They're just refusing to follow this order.

Starting point is 03:52:03 Yeah, yeah. Now, the same complaint that alleged that Bovino threw a canister with a justification into this crowd. Also details an incident from the next day, October 23rd, where agents, without wearing identification, as required by the order, shot a protester in the neck with a pepperball from five feet away, and while driving away, pointed a pepperball gun, and I'm going to read from the complaint, quote, and then a real gun at declarant Chris Gentry, a combat veteran who was lawfully standing on the side of the road, voicing his opposition as agents were driving by in their vehicles. The agent who pointed the real gun at Mr. Gentry's face said, quote, bang, bang, your dead liberal, unquote. Great. Cool. Anyway, plaintiffs have requested body cam a footage of

Starting point is 03:52:51 this incident, which has yet to be provided. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that they do this every single time there is any kind of protest. They do stuff like this. They've been pointing guns at people the entire time. They've been here. They've been putting a lot of guns the past few months. As As we have reported, they have shot two people. They've shot more than two people, yeah. Yeah. Saying something like this is insane. Yeah, no, yeah.

Starting point is 03:53:16 It shows obviously like a complete lack of concern for accountability, right? No. Like absolutely no thought that you could be held accountable for this. Yeah. No, it also shows a desire to kill liberals. Yes, yeah. Which liberals need to be aware of. I mean, yeah.

Starting point is 03:53:32 Yeah. You can't let this organization continue to exist, nor can you let the people doing this stay free if you ever take power again. There has to be accountability, and there has to be an end to the ability of any law enforcement agency to exist knowing that they are unaccountable and cannot be punished for the violence that they do to civilians. Yeah, I guess I'll take this point to mention that we have come. covered CBP and DHS's previous shootings in previous years, and the internal review process they have for those which has led to a lack of accountability, even when compared to other law enforcement officers. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:54:18 During this hearing this last Tuesday, the judge declined to alter the TRO, to ban the use of tear gas completely, saying that she believes Bovino, quote, understands where I'm coming from, and quote, I don't know that we're going to see a whole lot of tear gas being deployed over the next week, unquote. Cool. Great. Amazing, amazing stuff coming out of our judiciary. Greg's picking up on the vibe, so we should be fine now. Yeah, this Bonfino guy seems incredibly trustworthy, though Judge Ellis did instruct Vivino to meet with her every weekday evening throughout Operation Midway Blitz till the next hearing in November

Starting point is 03:54:59 to provide instant briefings on use of force. Though just one day later, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Judge Ellis's order requiring these daily reports. In some other Bovino moves... Earlier this week,

Starting point is 03:55:16 news broke that top ice field office chiefs are set to be reassigned and replaced by senior Border Patrol and CBP officials, with the goal of netting more arrests to boost deportation numbers. Yeah. So the role of Border Patrol generally is to patrol the physical border and to do enforcement in that 100-mile border zone, right, their role of ice.

Starting point is 03:55:43 The majority of ICE agents are not the people that you see out there jumping out of cars and doing these smash-a-grabs, right? The majority of ICE agents, people who will work in an office, who will check in with migrants through their intensive supervision program, which is one of their, quote, unquote, alternatives to detention, right? Both of these agencies, you know, are relatively aligned with what I'll call, like, Donald Trump's agenda, but Border Patrol particularly has made a name for itself. Like, Bovino himself and other Border Patrol chiefs were, there was a time when it looked like they were going to force Bovino to retire,

Starting point is 03:56:19 and that time was 2023, a briefing against a Biden administration, Right. Bavino has been kind of particularly emblematic of this new Border Patrol approach. And it is particularly BP that has been aligned. Just with a lot of things that, you know, they had issues getting people vaccinated, right? Like with this whole kind of political social milieu that is representative of the modern right, we see with ICE agents, like some of these people, I'm not going to say they joined, like looking to help, you know, make the word a happy place, but like they are reasonable civil servants, right? Like I've talked to plenty of migrants who have gone to there and you'll hear from some of them

Starting point is 03:57:02 in a scripted series next month. Gone to their eyes check-ins have been like, that was fine, that person was professional, that they seemed genuinely concerned for things I'm facing. And, you know, I was not unduly harassed made to feel uncomfortable, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the Border Patrol agents are like particularly brutal. I have not heard that same. That was a reasonable professional about Border Patrol agents from migrants. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:57:27 Border Patrol also has a pretty high churn, right? So they have a lot of people who have joined since, let's say, the first Trump admin. Yeah. And that may kind of change things because those people are joining specifically because they want to fuck with migrants. And while that's always been a thing for Border Patrol, a lot of people joined Border Patrol because it's the easiest way to become technically a federal agent? Yeah. And it can be a path to becoming a better kind of federal agent.

Starting point is 03:57:57 Sure. It's a career thing, which is part of why there's so much churn, part of why. BP, just to characterize some of the issues the organization has had, right, has consistently offered waivers for the academic qualifications that other agencies would not offer waivers for. They have a problem, a serious problem with sexual assault, not just of migrants, but of women in the Border Patrol. They call the women in the Border Patrol the Fias 5%, because this is an agency that, that has not succeeded in getting more than 5% of his agents to be women. Like, it is an agency that has, I guess, for one of the better term, radicalized, even within DHS agencies.

Starting point is 03:58:35 Yeah. I mean, all of the most brutal incidents of use of force in, like, Portland in 2020, that came from Fed's was Border Patrol. That was Bortak. Yeah, Bortak. Yeah. I would encourage people if they want to get a sense of how Border Patrol sees itself to go to the social media page that Bovino curates and has curated for a while to look.

Starting point is 03:58:55 And again, he was, my understanding, like, hemmed up for his social media post in the Biden administration. He's obviously not being restrained in that way now. Go and look at, I think it's called Border Patrol Special Operations Command or DHS Special Operations Command, which includes Bortak, go and look at their pages, right? Like, these guys, they see themselves in the realm of, like, a military branch or a paramilitary police. and that is what they're doing in Chicago. Yeah. NBC is reporting that the White House has approved the reassignment of at least a dozen directors of ICE field offices with sources telling Fox News that the cities will include Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Philadelphia, El Paso, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, and New Orleans. This is almost half of the ICE field offices in the country. This turnover is being orchestrated by DHS Secretary Christine Nome and DHS Senior Advisor. Corey Lewandowski

Starting point is 03:59:50 with some of the replacements being hand-picked by Bovino. This is like Bovino being able to shape ice how he sees fit using his border patrol like background. And these changes are reportedly motivated on differing

Starting point is 04:00:06 views on tactics across agency leadership with the ICE strategy and like the Tom Homan strategy of focusing on targeted removal of known criminals or immigrants with pre-existing deportation orders versus the Border Patrol tactic of doing these large sweeps and round-ups

Starting point is 04:00:23 around places like Home Depot, laundromats, restaurants, neighborhoods, urban centers. So Bovino has been on this for a minute, right? Like, I'm now realizing we need to cover his career in more depth, but like I've seen this, oh, where did Bovino come from stuff? In 2010, when he was out of the Blythe Border Patrol station, I believe, Blythe, California, for those not familiar,

Starting point is 04:00:45 Bovino was part of a raid on bus and train stations in Las Vegas, right? Like these broader kind of drag nets have been something that he seems to have, there have been a characteristic of his career, right? So that would make sense for him to be the guy advocating for this now. The official statement made by DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin at this point says, quote, while we have no personnel changes to announce at this time, the Trump administration remains laser-focused on delivering results

Starting point is 04:01:14 removing violent criminal illegal aliens from this country. She followed up this statement with a tweet, naming a whole bunch of people involved in all of these news stories, including Bovino and, like, praising them for their patriotism. Let's take a look at two pictures of Bovino here for his courtroom attire. Who wants to describe what Bovino is wearing here? It looks like a statue of Stalin.

Starting point is 04:01:41 He looks like a guy in the SS is dressed. dressing as a guy in the SS for Halloween. I don't think it's very stolid. I think it's very German, actually. That is an SS-looking coat. I'm sorry. It's intense. He has the little stars on his collar.

Starting point is 04:01:59 And yeah, this, this like boxy wool trench coat. It's very, with the like shaved sides of his head, it's very clear what he is trying to evoke. This is a little bit coy, but like, come on. come on dude and to follow this up like DHS is really is really pushing Bevino now as like the face of

Starting point is 04:02:21 this mass deportation push and they're making fucking like Fashwave hype edit reels of show it go out it's mad of Bovino and I will I'll play the whole thing but really it's the first two seconds that demonstrate what's

Starting point is 04:02:39 going on here this will be linked in the notes I didn't realize it was hamster dance Coldplay on the soundtrack like I had never listened to that Yeah, that's a choice We're not going to play much that audio Garrison, we're going to play all of that audio

Starting point is 04:03:02 We are not playing 30 seconds of copyrighted audio But just the first, literally the first two seconds of him doing what is very clearly a C. Kyle and then transferring it in just like military hand signals. But like, come on, dude. And then throughout this, the rest of the little Fashwave edit, it's like pictures of him in his like, you know, tactical gear.

Starting point is 04:03:28 And then pictures of him in what I would describe as an SS-inspired military dress uniform with the little, you know, the stars, the trench coat. It's like very clear what he's doing. DHS Twitter account has been doing these little cute Nazi posts for a long time now. They know what they're doing. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:03:47 But specifically, this now being like the new kind of face of this whole operation, both by playing a hand in restructuring the leadership of ICE and deploying to the forefront of places like Chicago as he leads and orchestrates the mass deportation

Starting point is 04:04:03 operation. Yeah. Like Operation Midway Blitz? Like Blitz? Really Blitz? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Un-fucking believable. The fact that this guy was not canned by any previous Democrat administration, like abolishing ICE is obviously like not enough here

Starting point is 04:04:23 because as we're talking about the way that like Border Patrol has actually been the ones leading the most brutal of these raids, I think like there is a specific focus on like ICE because that's like a safer target, I get. Like it feels like because like people know what you're talking about.

Starting point is 04:04:39 All of DHS we need to get rid of. Yeah, the fact that this guy wasn't fired is going to be looked back upon in the same way that, like, Allende promoting Pinochet is looked back on. Just. Yeah, it's, yeah. How else do you describe it? Yeah, like, if there was going to be a free country, all of this shit, all of the DHS agencies, all of this needs to cease to exist as a minimum. and these people need to be, like, hauled in front of a Nuremberg Tribunal,

Starting point is 04:05:10 and that's the minimum viable, there might be a democracy after that. We need so many Nuremberg's. Yeah. And, like, it's not, I don't want to, you know, gloat about this. It's not hard to have seen this coming. We have talked about this for years, right?

Starting point is 04:05:28 Yeah. This began in the 1990s with Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Hold the Line. We've documented this extent, We've documented the fact that under the Biden administration, there was virtually no oversight, right? That they were able to detain people outdoors without food, water, or shelter, and deny that those people were detained. This is all stuff that we've covered. If it wasn't in your news diet, then you should question the news sources that you were using.

Starting point is 04:05:56 But, like, it was very easy to see this coming. And as Mia said, very little was done to prevent it during the last four years. Yep. In somewhat more amusing news, during the ongoing trial over the different federal agents deployed to Portland and the necessity of that federal deployment and potentially the mobilization of National Guard troops in Oregon being sent to Portland, which is still being fought over in the courts, Portland police were brought up on the stand and testified that during one night out at ICE, federal officers gassed Portland police. and fired pepper balls at one officer. And when Portland police confronted federal, not ICE, sorry, but these are federal FPS agents outside of the ICE building.

Starting point is 04:06:45 Yeah. And when Portland police confronted the FPS agents afterwards, they responded, help or get out of the way. And this is simply, there's no actual, there's no rules of engagement, right? Rules of engagement for, you know, soldiers and the like are supposed to be. stuff like you don't fire until a certain standard of danger exists, right? You don't, there are rules at which point you are allowed to engage with which kinds of weapons, right?

Starting point is 04:07:15 Your ROE may say one thing about using a nightstick or mace, and it will say something else about using tear gas or whatever. There's no actual ROE for these guys. They're allowed to just kind of fire whenever they want, and they're not well-trained. They're not very good at what they do. Most of them have not actually had the kind of training agreement supposed to have with these weapon systems they're using. And they're just kind of firing willy-nilly,

Starting point is 04:07:38 which is why they've been hitting cops repeatedly. Most FBS agents are contractors. They're not full-time law enforcement officers. Right. Talking of things that it would have been easy to see coming, I want to talk about ICE's facial recognition app. So I've seen a piece in 404 Media. It's 404Media is the most annoying outlet to read pieces in because they will send you 17 emails a day.

Starting point is 04:08:05 Furr4Media suggests that ICE is claiming a facial recognition match in its app Mobile Fortify is a definitive determination of somebody's status. They're quoting here the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Benny G. Thompson, as saying, quote, mobile fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens a risk of detention and even deportation. He also said that, quote, ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a definitive determination of a person's status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship, including a birth certificate, if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in this way, in ways it's developers that CVP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant and unconstitutional attack on Americans' rights and freedoms. Thompson is misguided if he thinks that, like, this is new. It is new in that it's impacted U.S. citizens. Yes.

Starting point is 04:09:08 This article, for reasons I cannot explain, does not mention CBP1, right? And this is often a case on immigration reporting that we see now. It's completely lacking in context. The context here is that CBP1 is an app developed in the first Trump administration. it's often referred to as a Biden app because the definitive political question of our time is who was president in 2020. There's just no way to know.

Starting point is 04:09:34 It's impossible to say. There's no data on anything happening that far back. Unfortunately, I have a new one which is more recent, which we're going to talk about next. GROC is this real? Yeah, but CDP1 was effectively determinative for migrants, right? We've covered this in great detail here.

Starting point is 04:09:56 There were some public records about CBP1 that I've looked at extensively. There's sort of too long, didn't read version. The app did not work well on Android phones, especially previous generation Android phones, which are very common among people coming from the global south. The facial liveliness scan, so what the facial liveliness scan does is that, let's say, Robert is coming to the US, right? They wanted to check that the phone is being held by Robert, that it's not been held, and someone's not holding up a photograph of Robert in front of the camera.

Starting point is 04:10:26 Right. So you sort of move it around and it determines that it's a real 3D face, not a, not a photograph. It really struggled with black faces. I've seen this firsthand. All this stuff does. It's the same thing with like how there have been like motion activated faucets and stuff that wouldn't recognize dark scale. Yeah, it's a data set that they put in, right, to my understanding.

Starting point is 04:10:49 The results of those scans were determinative. for migrants, right? It could determine their ability to make an asylum appointment and therefore to enter the US and make a claim for asylum. This caused people to remain in various, very dangerous situations. It is probably led to people dying. It's another example of why we have to pay attention to the border if we want to know what's coming down the pipe domestically. And talking of shit that is coming down the pipe from the border domestically, I want to talk about public lands again because Utah Senator Mike Lee is back on his bullshit this time. He has another bill. People will remember that Mike Lee tried to insert in the budget reconciliation bill a massive sell-off of public lands, right? And what Lee does is he uses whatever terminology he thinks will make people support this crusade he has against land zoned by the public fair if we want to access. The last time he tried to wrap it up in language about affordable housing. If you read the bill, you you would have seen that it wasn't going to result in any affordable housing.

Starting point is 04:11:54 This time, he's wrapping it up in the language of border security. And this is where we're going to return to the defining political question of our time, who is president, because Lee, who introduced a bill in October of 2025, said, and I quote, Biden's open border chaos is destroying Americans' crown jewels. Families who want to enjoy a safe hike or camp out are instead finding trash piles, burned landscapes and trails closed because rangers are stuck clearing up the fallout. Cartels are exploiting the disorder using these lands as cover for their operation.

Starting point is 04:12:28 This bill gives land managers and border agents the tools to restore order and protect these places for the people they were meant to serve. Diligent observers will notice that Biden is no longer the president of the United States. And further diligent observers will notice that many people currently working for the federal government on public lands are being laid off or furloughed due to the government shutdown. What Lee's bill would do is allow DHS to identify illegal roads in public land areas and then to upgrade them to navigable roads. This is important because the 1964 Wilderness Act doesn't allow motorized access to

Starting point is 04:13:10 wilderness areas. And what Lee is proposing is that they would identify these illegal roads within a hundred-mile zone. He is proposing a blanket change to the 1964 Wilderness Act to allow the construction of roads, which would completely change the nature of wilderness in the United States. And like, sometimes a slippery slope argument can also be a fallacy, but in this case, building roads into the wilderness will permanently change the nature of their wilderness and will lead to other losses of protection on public land. Lee makes the argument that it's important for search and rescue and for border access. There is already mechanized access for

Starting point is 04:13:52 search and rescue. Like a search and rescue helicopters, for instance, can access wilderness areas, that they have agreements in place with land management agencies which allow them to do this already when there is a risk to human life. The bill also talks about removing invasive species and reducing fire risk by removing fire fuels down by the border. Again, I'm guessing what this would do would be this this would I mean if you fire fuels like look at the southern border near where I live right like think of the California sagebrush chaparral like clearing fire fuels there would completely change that landscape forever it would remove much of the value that this wilderness has not as untouched right people have lived in this area for 10th of thousands of years and that they have

Starting point is 04:14:39 touched that nature and they have lived alongside it worked with it but it is an area that is significantly less damaged than most of the United States, right? The bill would also inventory fires and damage to wilderness caused by migrants. I guess this is just an attempt to say another bad thing about migrants. It also prohibits any housing of migrants on federal lands unless it is in a prison. It's Lee taking this border hawk stuff and strapping it onto this crusade that he has been on for a long time. to deprive people in the United States and people visiting the United States of access to their public lands and eventually to sell those lands off to the highest bidder.

Starting point is 04:15:24 He introduced it on October 2nd. It's in the committee stage right now. This probably is one of the things that folks could call a representative about and suggest it's a very bad idea. Talking bad ideas, Maduro has announced a formation of an international brigade to defend his incredibly corrupt regime in Venezuela. I say this is someone who has been to Venezuela and written a PhD about the Spanish Civil War. This is a very bad idea.

Starting point is 04:15:53 Don't do this. Maduro does not need your help. Fuck that guy. Talking of things that don't need your help, here are some adverts. I can't believe you're throwing the People's Republic of Venezuela under the bus like that, as they're facing down war with the United States of America right now. Standing in the breach against imperialism, yeah, I read all about it. What happened is hashtag solidarity, James?

Starting point is 04:16:31 Sorry, I read about it on the gray zone, and I'm changing my opinions. Having spent more time than I'm sure half the staff of the gray zone in Venezuela. Speaking of spooky, the shit Trump's getting is part of of negotiations. Woo. Tarry I don't like it. Rocky Casbah.

Starting point is 04:16:50 Rocky Casca. To do like it. Rocky Casper. Rocky Casper. All right. So as we talked about last week, Trump has been in East Asia to do a bunch of meetings for conferences already happening. and this is where terrific negotiations have been being handled.

Starting point is 04:17:14 This has been being held in South Korea. South Korean president Li J. Myeong presented Trump with South Korea's highest honor and also gave him a giant golden crown. Have you all seen the giant golden crown? It's that easy, folks. All you got to do is all you got to do is just these little stupid things. And then he loves you. Giant gilded crown.

Starting point is 04:17:38 I haven't seen the crown. I'm going to look at the crown right now. Look up the crown I am beseeching you all However big you think this crown is It is way larger than that It is Oh wow

Starting point is 04:17:50 Yeah no it's Jesus Wow It's like the size of a fire hydrant Yeah Maybe they directly They directly took The one that they took from Prince Andrew

Starting point is 04:18:04 For being a nonce and melted it down Or something It's really something Now, Li J. Myeong is a name you might recognize because he's the guy who was famous for that video of climbing over the fence to stop the coup last year. And one year later, he's giving Trump what I think might be the largest crown I have ever seen. Now, this crown is being described as, quote, a gilded replica. So I don't know how much of this is actually gold. I suspect it's gold paint or whatever. I don't know. I do not have confirmation on it. But, you know, great. Great things happening in sort of like a revolutionary anti-coup movement, which has ended with giving Trump the giant golden crown. Yeah, and apparently they got like a kind of favorable sort of okay-ish kind of trade deal out of giving the president of the United States giant golden crown. So in terms of tariff news, while in China, Trump had his long-awaited meeting with Xi Jinping, they struck a deal. Trump decreased the quote unquote fentanyl tariffs to 10%, which leaves the tariff rate for all Chinese

Starting point is 04:19:15 goods at 47% down from its previous 57%. China has agreed to not do rare earth mineral restrictions that we talked about last week and has also pledged to buy U.S. soybeans. Again, it's deeply unclear how much of this is actually going to happen. I think my guess is that they probably won't do the harshest of the rare mineral restrictions, but I will believe the soybean purchases when I see it, and I haven't seen it yet. There's also been some interesting news out of the Senate

Starting point is 04:19:45 where there's been a couple of symbolic votes against some sets of tariffs. The Senate voted 50 to 46 to end the state of emergency that supposedly allows Trump to do the Canada tariffs and also voted to block tariffs against Brazil. The four people who voted against both of these who voted with the Democrats are Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Morowski,

Starting point is 04:20:09 which it kind of makes sense because Collins and Morowski are supposed to lead the two moderates. Rand Paul is like just hates tariffs. He's a free trade hardliner who, whenever I talk about this, I will say, he has had, as much as all of this is his fault, he has had one great light ever, which is I have a trade deficit with my grocery store.

Starting point is 04:20:28 It's like actually really good. Is he like an Austrian, like economist, like libertarian type? Like, I know he's like a libertarian guy. I'm just trying to figure out what specific flavor he is. He's like one of the Austrian like gold standards, but also like those people are still free trade people, like really hard line. Last time I heard Charlie Kirk talk in person, he was debating like five Austrian economists. Wow.

Starting point is 04:20:54 The most annoying people in the entire world. Honestly, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. That sounds like, yeah, that sounds like, why would you agree to do that, especially if you're already rich. I don't understand it. I don't understand. Now, okay, it's also worth noting, though, that despite these votes, none of this is going to take effect because the House right now effectively does not exist as a legislative body. It sure does. It doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't exist in general because they keep not calling sessions because every time they try to call a session, the Democrats, in the one political theater thing that, like, is kind of a good idea, but they're still bad at it. They keep being

Starting point is 04:21:34 like you have to release the Epstein files and the Republicans keep being like no so we kind of don't have a House of Representatives. I keep thinking about that one scene from Mars attacks where the president's like, you've still got two out of three branches of government and that ain't bad. Yeah. Except in this case, it's very bad. We basically have one branch of government. We have one branch of government. Yeah, we have one branch of government. And like, but that doesn't work as a Mars a tax joke. Yeah. But and also it's worth noting the House voted to not allow any tariff legislation until March 2026, a thing that it could apparently do. It is totally normal.

Starting point is 04:22:08 Sure. Oh, wow. Yeah. You know, so, and speaking of things that are totally normal, we're going to close this with Trump getting mad at Canada because he saw an ad they were running. Oh, my God, yeah. That was, oh, God. It was a bunch of clips of Ronald Reagan being like tariffs bad because Reagan, Reagan's domestic protectionism took the form of currency

Starting point is 04:22:30 devaluations and not tariffs, et cetera, et cetera. But, like, yeah. And Trump saw this, lost his mind, said that it was AI. There's a whole saga here about him claiming that it was, like, also unauthorized usage of footage, which is a fiasco. And then also, all of the tariff negotiations that have been happening to the U.S. and Canada have been called off. And he just put another 10% tariff on them because he was mad about it. Go Jays. Yeah, totally, you know, I totally absolutely a thing that, like, in a lot of, like, in a

Starting point is 04:23:03 elected head of government does and not a guy who just received a massive golden crown oh Garrison that's not a Blue Jays hat but you know this is a Blue Jays hat Mia how fucking dare you try to

Starting point is 04:23:17 she's plain my own my own country to myself it's Toronto's team Garrison's wearing a hat for those who are not working for Cool Zoned media it's the Toronto Blue Jays oh my god yeah yeah Toronto Blue Jays I thought it was the Toronto

Starting point is 04:23:33 of blue jays, yeah. Yeah, but there's not a J on it. Why? Well, no, it just has the maple leaf. But it's only three points. It's not a traditional maple leaf either. James, are you going to she-splain my own country to me? Garrison, when it comes to birds and leaves.

Starting point is 04:23:49 I am going to Canada's splayed to you. It rocks. Yeah, but that's fun. That's just how tariff policy is set now is you pissed off the king, and he decided to put a tariff. this is I don't know I don't really know

Starting point is 04:24:08 how to do analysis of the fact that we just have a child king setting tariff policy it's great look quick fact check do you read can you read this oh wow it does say blue jays it does

Starting point is 04:24:18 do you read this genuine MLB merchandise okay wow wow wow yeah they no one would ever put that in fake MLB merchandise it simply wouldn't be allowed yeah

Starting point is 04:24:32 I've never seen any genuine MLB merchandise in markets in Iraq, for example. Yeah. Hey, I'm the owner of a proud, fix-and-gand shirt that I bought at a market in her bill. All right. All right. All right, everybody. Okay. I think it's politically important for the Blue Jays to win the World Series and contribute to the American Century of Humiliation.

Starting point is 04:24:56 James, I still have my, my Tumberland boots that I bought in Syria. I have a 5.1.1 jacket. Oh, and I've got a greater Dota's track suit when I was in Istanbul. Do you want to do this Fed election monitoring right now or next week? Yeah, let's do it now. Let's talk about talking of things which are not as they seem. California Attorney General, look at that, Harrison. That is why they pay me the medium bugs.

Starting point is 04:25:24 California Attorney General Rob Bonta is warning. That's such a fake-ass name. Sorry, sorry. Continue. Garrison is wearing that hat for those not watching this podcast on top of the head in the fashion of a fez. California Attorney General Rob Bonte is warning about election interference by the federal government. The federal government has sent monitors to California, to a number of different counties in California, in order to monitor the elections that are happening here on the 4th of November.

Starting point is 04:25:56 To be clear, federal monitoring is not. uncommon. The Biden administration did it in more than 80 places in 2024, for example. But Bonta seems convinced this monitoring is going to lead to election denial, election interference. Here's Gavin Newsom talking on X about this. So today in the Trump administration announced they're sending election monitors to five specific counties here in the state of California. They have no business doing that. They have no basis to do that. In fact, we have a statewide election for a statewide constitution. This is about voter intimidation.

Starting point is 04:26:33 This is about voter suppression, period, full stop. And it's a pattern, isn't it? It's consistent with what they've done with the federalization of the National Guard and the intimidation and the chill that that's created. They'll do that right around Election Day as well. Same thing with ICE and Border Patrol, mass men. Watch that space showing up in and around polling booths and voting places. But this is a bridge too far.

Starting point is 04:26:56 And I hope people understand it's a bridge that they're trying to build, the scaffolding for all across this country in next November's election. They do not believe in fair and free elections. Our republic, our democracy is on the line. We all need to wake up. I'm actually a lot more concerned with the stuff around, I think he's probably right, that we will see like more federal agents around polling places in election time. What California is doing in response is assigning monitors to monitor the federal monitors,

Starting point is 04:27:27 which will be interesting. And it seems unusual, right, for the federal monitors to be monitoring. One of the things that's on the ballot this year is Prop 50, right? Which would redistrict California. It's gerrymandering. It's a gerrymandering proposition to... It's revenge gerrymandering, let's be clear. It's gerrymandering.

Starting point is 04:27:44 The bill is specifically we're going to do this, but we're going to do this if there's redistricting in Texas. Yeah. Yeah, it's a, yes, it's an attempt to rectify the debate. very obvious gerrymandering in Texas. It's kind of mad. Mutually asserted destruction is applied to gerrymandering. Yeah, yeah. Neither of these things are great.

Starting point is 04:28:08 That's here we are. I think that's all I had on this, actually. Cool. Yep. I think that's... That a sewed? That's where we're at. All right, everybody.

Starting point is 04:28:18 Well, until... What? Breaking autism news. Oh, God. Texas is suing Tylenol, specifically a pharmaceutical company, Justin Johnson for marketing Tylenol to pregnant women and failing to disclose what Attorney General Ken Paxton calls, quote, a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders, unquote. They don't market it to pregnant women.

Starting point is 04:28:38 Like, generally, they're... They says, if I'm not mistaken, it says on the bottles, don't take if you're nursing you're pregnant, probably. We covered this in a previous episode, but generally drugs are not very few drugs are marketed to to pregnant people, right? Be the women or otherwise. Yeah, no, the only thing you're supposed to take is a pregnant woman is cocaine. And you've got to make sure it's pure. Non-binary people tell you can take anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 04:29:01 If you're not pregnant, it's okay to do whatever. Yeah, if you are pregnant, not a woman, it's okay. Go right ahead. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, I guess. Wait, no, I don't think that's how it works. Transmastic double? Yeah, yeah, yeah, true. I think if you have a fetus gestating in you, you're only supposed to do cocaine.

Starting point is 04:29:19 Definitely the least autistic group of people, non-binary people. Yeah, definitely. Definitely, they can just take whatever. Or do, or do take whatever? Yeah, do you have many drugs? Like, they'll say that you should consult with your doctor. Consult a doctor. Yeah, and none of them are risk-free, but it's a cost-benefit analysis, right?

Starting point is 04:29:37 We covered this. The autism and Tylenol, like, correlation versus causation based on that one Swedish study. This is, I'm interested to see how Johnson & Johnson argues this in court, and if that will have effects across, you know, the rest of the Trump administration's anti-tylonal push. if they're able to successfully defend their product against Ken Paxton. So critical support to Tylenol, I guess. Welcome to the resistance, Big Pharma. Jesus. Jesus, yeah.

Starting point is 04:30:06 If people want to listen to more on that, we can go back and find out previous episode. All right, everybody. Until next time, try not to be on a fishing boat anywhere south of the U.S. southern border. It's not safe right now. Good luck, trick-or-treating. Happy Halloween. Good luck trick-or-treating. It's not safe right now.

Starting point is 04:30:27 Oh, yeah. Don't be trick-or-treating in a boat this year. We reported the news. That sucks. Yeah. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

Starting point is 04:30:49 For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia. check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock Elite Gaming Tech at Lenovo.com. Dominate every match with next level speed, seamless streaming, and performance that won't quit. Push your gameplay beyond performance with Intel Core Ultra processors.

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Starting point is 04:31:46 It's the true story of the almost perfect crime and the Nimrods who almost pulled it off. It was kind of like the perfect storm in a sewer. I was dumb. Do not follow my example. Listen to Crimless, Hillbilly Heist, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I live below a cult leader, and I fear I've angered her. Wait a minute, Sophia. How do you know she's a cult leader? Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime podcast.

Starting point is 04:32:18 So we'll find out soon. This person writes, my neighbor has been blasting music every day and doing dirt. And now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they might be part of a cult. Hold up. A real life cult? And what is a dirt ritual? No clue, Dakota.

Starting point is 04:32:36 To find out how it ends. Listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Cal Penn. And on my new podcast, here we go again. We'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? Each week I'm calling up my friends like Bill Nye, Lily Singh, and Pete Buttigieg to talk about everything from the space race

Starting point is 04:33:00 to movie remakes to psychedelics. Put another way, are you high? Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to here we go again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 04:33:19 This is an IHeart podcast. Thank you.

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 206

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