Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 89

Episode Date: July 1, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. Happy Monday.

And we have a very special Monday episode. We're doing a return of our shitty mayor Monday episodes for this Monday, June, whatever the day it is, 26th, during the 6th week of action in Atlanta to stop cops. So that is ongoing. We're recording this is slightly ahead of time so we can release that during the week. So we don't know what exactly how exactly things are going to go. I'm pleased to report nobody's been arrested so far. Everything's gone great. Yeah, it's sure. So yeah, we don't quite know what the first kickoff rally is going to be quite yet, but we do want to talk a little bit about a certain mayor for this shitty mayor Monday.

And I have convinced Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective to do my work for me this episode by writing probably too many words about Mayor Andre Dickens. It was only a little over what you told me to write. That's good, that's good, that's good. So yeah, let's hear about Mr. Dickens' man to take it away. All right, so Andre DeShan Dickens was born June 17th, 1974, the younger of two children. His mother divorced Dickens' birth father Dickens was born June 17th, 1974, the younger of two children. His mother divorced Dickens' birth father before he was born, but a stepfather adopted him

in his sister when Dickens was seven. Working as an airline mechanic, Dickens' stepfather taught him how to take things apart and put them back together, creating an early interest in engineering for young Andre. He grew up in Adamsville neighborhood, which went to Benjamin E. May's high school, which is in Southwest Atlanta. Dickens says the neighborhood kids were rough around the edges as he told Atlanta magazine, quote, we fought often. But when the fighting escalated to bats and brass knuckles, he changed course and turned to baseball and books instead. At age 16, Dickens decided that he wanted to be mayor after watching then-mayor Andrew Young.

This is about the time he also met Shirley Franklin, who son he played baseball with. Franklin was mayor Young's chief administrative officer at the time and spent time mentoring Dickens as a teenager. She would also go on to become mayor herself. Okay, so Andrew Young, I know that name because that's the street where the Hard Rock Cafe is. The street where the hard rock cafe is. This is the street where the hard rock cafe is. He went on to become an ambassador.

Ambassador to the hard rock cafe. That's also where the SWAT vehicle hung out in front of the hard rock cafe. Cross-mahooters. Exactly. It's a very notable street in Atlanta. Yeah. After a week-long minorities interested in technology

and engineering program at Georgia Tech, this summer before his senior year, someone from the program handed him an application to Georgia Tech, which he filled out while waiting on his mom to pick him up. Tech was the only college that Dickens applied to. I mostly know Georgia Tech is the place that like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin go to recruit a whole bunch of their employees. Yeah, you know, it's the tech engineering school of the South and all the good weapons manufacturers need to get their good Southern engineering. Yeah.

He did not go that route, but it is kind of rare for black politicians in general to come from schools outside of the HBCU's. We've got that like big HBCU district here in Atlanta. Can you explain what that is, for us historically black colleges and universities. There are a group of them in just off downtown Atlanta in an area called the Atlanta University Center.

So they're all kind of together in that area. And that is where most of our elected officials who become mayors come from. Dickens is only the second mayor since 1974, not to graduate from one of those HBCUs. But Dickens did join Kappa Alpha Sia historically black fraternity when he went to tech and was a member of the student government kind of keeping his dream of being mayor alive. But after graduations, he briefly left the state before returning home in 2002 to take care of his ill mother.

This is around the time that he started his public service career and he joined NPUD. NPUs are neighborhood planning units. Advantage is broken up into 25 of these neighborhood units and they're each given a letter of the alphabet. So their advisory boards that give input to the city but they can issue zoning variances and some NPUs built up like considerable power over their neighborhood. So this is where a lot of people like first plug into a Atlantic government. Okay, so it's like, is this like really like the zoning board

process and? Yeah, if you need to get approval to have a bigger awning, then you're supposed to have, you gotta go through the MPU to get it. Got it, okay. So I'll consider that from when I wanna expand my awning. Yes, you're oning through the MPU to get it. Got it. Okay. I'll consider that from when I want to expand my awning. Yes, you're awning or build your awning really. Okay.

Yeah. At this point, Dickens and his sister also founded a business called City Living Home Furnishings. And the company was exactly what, it's a furniture store. It's a furniture store. You found a furniture store. And in an interview with Georgia State University later in his life.

Dickens reflected that this is where he determined that he needed to act rightly to ensure his good reputation. What? What? What? He's holding a furniture store. Teach him this lesson. Oh, well, he said, imagine I'm on TV saying, trust me.

And all the people would have to do is call the Atlanta journal constitution or radio and say, your furniture was trash. Your history to somebody who are all these places, that you've really got to be consistent. It's what he said. And you know, turns out the- Was his furniture trash? Now I have to know.

Wow, spoiler when he goes bankrupt. Turns out the AJC wouldn't be much of a problem for Dickens as we've learned. Yeah. The paper would be on his side, bobbing those easy questions and helping him build support for Cops City. So like I said, the family business failed in 2010. You can't actually blame Dickens for it. It was a product of the great recession. Okay. I wonder if we can still find any of his furniture lying around. So there's actually a store called City Living Home furnishing and I don't know if it's,

but like somebody just laid it all or yeah. I tried to look it up and I couldn't like figure out if it was just somebody using the same name or not, but there's one that exists in like West Midtown. Okay, oh boy, sorry, I'm gonna get a lot of comments from people that landed out because you said a west of midtown I'm sorry west side or whatever you want to call it

It's a it's a south west Piedmont. Yeah, I don't know There's also sono like south of north. Yeah, we have all these these fun Little little street or neighborhood names, but so after the failing business he changed course and went to GSU for a master's of public administration in economic development. So this was after 2010? Yeah, after 2010, in 2011 he started attending his master's program at Georgia State University and then he graduated in 2013 just in time for the municipal elections season. So Atlanta City Council, as we've learned now, it's comprised of 12 district seats

and three citywide seats or what we call at large seats. And so Dickens ran for post three against an incumbent named H. Lamar Willis. Dickens kind of historically, when he has these campaigns, either has really good fortune or good insight in choosing his opponent or opponent's, a month prior to the election,

Willis was disbarred after the Georgia Supreme Court found that he violated numerous professional conduct rules, including in 2009, placing a settlement money from a child injury case into his personal bank account instead of giving it to the fair. So wait, wait, really? Yes. And this guy, this guy is now back in Georgia government. He is, he's part of like the belt line. That, that makes sense. Management program. So like I, I, this happened earlier this year. Stealing money from injured

children. I think he gave it to the child eventually, but you're supposed to put these in like escrow accounts and not in your own account. Not your personal account? No. So, uh, former Mayor Shirley Franklin and indoor stickins in the 23 race are former Mayor Shirley Franklin indoor stickins in the 2013 race, which drew iron attacks by both Willis who called Dickens out for his bankruptcy of the furniture business. And what Willis alleged was, quote, unlawful use of Georgia Tech government property. So on the bankruptcy, Dickens went into about a million dollars in debt and had some tax leans against him, which he's now discharged through both bankruptcy and settling the tax leans.

But the unlawful use of Georgia Tech government property. A Georgia Tech government property. What is that? I have no idea. I don't know what they've searched. Pretty hard to try to find it. And I can't. Other than Willis making the claim, I found no evidence. Do you like a computer?

Who are like, what is it? I'm assuming probably something like, he went to a computer lab and used it off hours for some personal weird business. But yeah, I found nothing that actually really backs up the claim against him. So he won the election in November with 53% of the vote, which is surprisingly strong victory

for like a relatively unknown candidate like Dickens was at the time. During his first term, 2013 to 2017, Dickens worked pretty quietly, but towards the end of his term, he started to introduce legislation, make a name for himself. So he created a $40 million affordable housing bond, as well as a study to raise the minimum wage for city employees to $15 an hour, which ultimately led to the city enacting that wage. Dickens ran for his second term, unopposed. So naturally he won.

So that's 2017 to 2021. And this is where the story starts to get interesting. We'll see the themes that will play out in this first, you know, a couple of years as mayor. Well, and we will learn about that story after these messages from our lovely sponsors. Or if you're subscribed to the new Apple Premium Plus, the Cooler Zone video, you just hear us do the ad breaks without Niaz at all. So, in lieu of that, buy gold, buy gold, play, buy gold, play the guitars.

Goal play the guitars. Thank you. Buy gold, play the guitars. All right, we are back. I'm strumming away on my electric gold-plated bass. This doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound like it's supposed to. Yeah, Dan, cut out all of the bad bass.

Actually, I can go get my accordion. I didn't play that instead if you want. Let's not. All right, well. Continue. So we're in 2018 now. So in 28, normal year a completely normally year for Atlanta, nothing happened anywhere else in the world.

One of the biggest conversations that was going around in Atlanta in 2018 revolved around an area of downtown called the Gulch. So this is the area that's surrounded by most of our sport team venues, kind of like where Centennial Olympic Park is. And the streets are all elevated in that area around above ground level. And at the bottom of the ground level, it's like these early 20th century, like railway lines, but it's mostly parking lots for those, those, to the stadiums, yeah, stadiums. And it's known as the Goultch, because you know, kind of which is a break in the ground. Yeah, it's like a Gulch kind of.

Yeah. So back in, it's like a Gulch kind of. That's the name. Oh, wow. Back in 2020, 2012, then Mayor Kaseymri presented an idea to give a Los Angeles based firm a million dollars to build the Gulch into a mixed-use high-rise area. The legislation finally passed in 2018, but Andre Dickens voted against it, saying correctly that there wasn't enough focus in the development plans on housing affordability.

And this helped cement Dickens reputation as a housing affordability advocate. Yeah, because he also did that $40 million. Yeah, just did that $40 million bond, and we'll have some more affordable housing stuff later. But I should say we're like five years on now and the Gulch hasn't begun, but they're trying to get it done before the World Cup comes in. Yeah, they're also, it seems like they've been preoccupied with another construction project that's getting much more of the mayor's attention, which oddly does not have anything to do with affordable housing. No, it does not.

Dickens also introduced legislation that led to the creation of the Atlanta Department of Transportation, which if I'm being fair was a good idea and pretty necessary to help a dress-abennist decaying road infrastructure and improve the outside. No, the roads here are fine. Yeah, so you drove on, you complained when we had this last week of action about DeCat Avenue and all of the potholes. Yeah. And that is now repaved. That got repaved a couple of weeks ago.

They're in the process for repaving it. So it drives that. I love to see you infrastructure working. My favorite part, my new favorite part is, is that usually around more land drive, there's an area where you're trying to get to the wani forest that is always constantly flooded, no matter what. And that's my favorite area of Atlanta.

And I hear that if you get rid of a forest, that will improve flooding. That helps the flooding, because there's more space for the dirt to soak in water. Exactly, that is how that works, it is science. So in 2019, Dickens introduced legislation to create a task force to decide how to repurpose the Atlanta City Detention Center or ACDC, which is really weird every time I hear ACDC

I think of this jail and everybody else is talking about something entirely different. So, it was built in 1990s leading up to the Olympics and replaced in older jail that now serves as our primary homeless shelter. So, that's what ACDC is now. It's called the Gateway Center now. That was the old jail. ACDC is the current jail. Okay.

Okay. So in a press release, after a bottom sign this legislation to create the task force, who's bought, sorry, who's, who's bottoms? So from 2017 to 2021, Atlanta had a mayor name Lance bottoms and she was great and did not approve legislation about cop city at all. She did not. She did. She did. She did. She did. She did. So that was a lot. You just lied to me. I lied. I lied. I'm sorry. You were new purposely spent spread misinformation on my news podcast. Okay, so Michael Smith was bottom's press secretary and also currently serving as Dickens press secretary. Okay. So we wrote that this legislation that authorized the task force actually authorized

bottoms to close the jail, but the ordinance did not create that authorization. Only authorized the task force to recommend future uses of the site should it close. And this is going to be important. The task force met for about a year before turning in options which brings us to June 2020. We're gonna skip straight over there with all of this going on. So what was happening in June 2020 in Atlanta?

There were some protests going on, which we're gonna key in just after the jail fight, but the task force offered four options and the city indicated that was going to go with the second cheapest of the four, which was redoing the facade of the jail and turning the interior into a center for diversions. So instead of having a city jail, we would have this multi-story diversion center to stop people from going into the criminal justice system. And in the middle of the summer of 2020, this was,

how is that not just a jail? It's you don't enter the criminal legal system. Yeah, so you don't talk to, you're not in front of a judge. You are not technically arrested. You are given resources and you are given options to attend courses or counseling or whatever you need instead of entering the criminal justice. So we have a diversion program here called Pleasing's Alternatives and Diversions or PAD, which operates in every zone of the city and is

is a you know if somebody gets arrested like stealing basics of substance stuff, they are supposed to contact Pat and enter them into a diversion program where they get help instead of going to jail. Okay. And it works to the extent that the city of it, or it works to the extent that APD actually does contact Pat and and it depends on kind of the zone, how effective it is. But basically at this point, everyone agreed that the jail was going to end its time

as a carceral space and become this diversion center to help people avoid entering the criminal legal system. So put up in that, that is the plan. Okay. It is during June of 2020. During June of 2020. During the entire nation is in enough form. Because of course, the bigger news of the summer of 2020 was the George Floyd uprising and at that point in the end of the killing of Rechard Brooks by

Garrett Rolf at the Wendy's in Southeast Atlanta. Yeah. So after the killing of Brooks, Dickens posted on an Instagram saying, quote, I am saddened to start this day with news of another black person killed by police, and especially dismayed to see it happen in our city. Police must de-escalate situations like these before they turn deadly. Once the suspect fled unarmed and intoxicated through a parking lot of bystanders, this could have become an investigation rather than astrooting. So undoubtedly spurred by the pervert and uproar of that summer, Dickens also co-sponsored legislation with fellow council members Antonio Brown and Michael

Julian Bond that would prohibit APD from using crowd control munitions and military style vehicles against protesters. Okay. This legislation though unsurprisingly went nowhere and we were and I was here gas to get shot by the overall you know the rest of the summer. Yeah. And they still are using them to this day. Yeah. But this is also happening at the tail end of budget season. So our budget season goes from like March to April to June of every year. And the biggest debate in council that summer was about withholding 73 million dollars or about a quarter of the Atlanta police departments funding. And so we were actually positioned to defund the police. And while the legislation

was under debate in city council thousands of residents called in for public comment. This is the only time that I've, the only time estimate I've seen for this public comment was about 17 hours according to mainline scene. I I seem to recall it being longer, but around that, which is comparable to the last public comment session related to Cops City. Yeah, and comparable even to the first public comment session. Yeah, so the actual vote happened on these, especially called Saturday session of city council.

At the time, like all other municipalities, council was meeting remotely through Zoom. So the actual vote happened on a, especially called Saturday session of city council. At the time, like all of the municipalities, council was meeting remotely through Zoom because of COVID, and we're going to play a clip of one of the few things that Dickens said during that debate.

And to set the scene, council member Dustin Hillis, one of the very pro-cop members of council proposed a much smaller cut to the budget in the amount of like a few million dollars to remove just quote unquote non-essential expenditures from the DVDs budget. Sure. Without risking cutting into actual pay for police

or the raises to police salary that Council and the mayor's office previously promised. Because this was a special session on Saturday, Dickens was driving around his mother So there's gonna be a bit of background noise and the quality is not super outstanding but and It's now as much as I'm trying to figure out a way to support it If it comes down to being two million dollars or three million dollars or five million dollars It just is so short of reimagining.

You can't re-imagine something that's almost $300 million. And only take two to five million to re-imagining, right? And to kind of think through what all needs to be done at the center of strong single that we want reform and we want change. What we hear in this clip is Dickens really doing what he's going to continue to do for the rest of his career. Make overtures to the public while still ensuring that at the end of the day, the police are taking care of. He really wanted APD to know that their personal salaries were not only safe, but they were going to grow and he would always be a champion of that.

salaries were not only safe, but they were going to grow and he would always be a champion of that. So we're going to skip here over the Copsity vote in 2021 at this point. I think it's been if you're listening to this show, you're also probably somewhat there are several episodes that you can pause here and go back and listen to it to kind of catch off. Yes. Yes. On on on how that happened in in 2021.

So suffice it to say that Dickens did not fight against the legislation in its council phase and was one of the 10 votes to approve the Copsody lease in September of 2021. If anything, Dickens was one of the quieter members of council when it came to debating Copsody lease, you didn't really say much while the debates were happening. So the last few months, of course,

of the Copsody fight happened during election season. And instead of running for a third term as council member, Dickens threw his hat in the ring for mayor, which was an open race with mayor bottoms with drawing her can't see all the way back on May 6th, of a mid rumours that she was on the short list to be Biden's nod for VP. Which did not happen.

Which did not happen. So to understand how Dickens won this election, because spoiler, we're talking about Mary Dickens. Yes, but we should he mayor Monday. It's a mayor Dickens. We've got to talk about how it ban a run its municipal elections and how Georgia election law plays out in effect.

And who the presumed front runners of the race were. First municipal elections are run on a nonpartisan basis. There are no party primaries to weed out weaker candidates. To run all you need to do is get the required number of signatures, pay the fee and file on time. So this leads to a pretty wide field of candidates than you see in most elections. Second is that quirk in Georgia election law

that everyone is probably familiar with. By this point in time from last few national election cycles in order to win Georgia outright you need 50% of the vote plus one. If no candidate hits that number then the top two candidates go to be runoff election. The state law also applies to any municipal elections for cities with population higher than 100,000 people like Atlanta. Like Atlanta, which has 600,000? Just around 500,000. I think it's like 490,000 at this point.

But the greater metro area is like... The greater metro area is something like 6 or 7 million. Yeah. So the two front runners of the race were not exactly popular figures. I would go so far as to say, like in many cases, votes were cast against them, like kind of like with Trump instead of in support of. Instead of voting for Biden, you're voting against Trump, yeah. So former mayor Kaseem Reed was one of those candidates.

He left office in 2017 after a second term. And then I have this two consecutive term limit, which Reed had reached. However, you can run for a third term if it's not consecutive. Okay. So during Reed's second term, lawsuits and scandal propagated heavily amongst the things that which Reed had reached, however, you can run for a third term if it's not consecutive. Okay. So during Reed's second term, lawsuits in scandal propagated heavily. Amongst the things that came out both during and after Reed's administration was that Reed made nearly $900,000 in illegal bonus payments to staff,

had a bribery scandal in his office that resulted in an FBI investigation and ensured that airport contracts went to his friends and associates based based on legalist legalist mayor and to make matters worse for read a month after he announced his canisese the a jc release that it believed read was under investigation for allegations of wire fraud for quote using campaign funds to make purchases of jewelry resort travel linger, and furniture.

I mean, that would make sense considering everything else you just said. That's not really surprising. Then on the other side was Fleece Amor, who accurately and not was seen by opponents as the face of Copsity after Joyce Sheppard, who introduced the legislation authorizing the lease for Copsity and lost her seat on counsel for that reason.

While never forced to do so since City Council President's only vote in tie-breakers, Moore did say that she would vote in favor of copsity if it was needed. Then a week before the election, Felicia Morris campaign, Instagram account posted a video with Lee Clevenger, a white Republican donor, and supporter of Morris campaign. Clevenger can be heard saying all of Atlanta mayors since 1979 were, quote, not interested in anything except lining their own pockets. I should have notes.

I feel like there's going to be some, uh, since 1974, a black person has been mayor every single time. Yeah, that's, yeah, that Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah. So that sounds like he's a racist. Over so well. Yeah. More remove the post and return the campaign contribution from Cleveland juror and

said later, quote, it was an unfortunate statement by that constituent. And I should have corrected him or walked away. Unfortunate statement. Not unfortunate. Unfortunate. If someone say something incredibly racist. So this was the setting that led to election night. That Tuesday to everyone's surprise, Dickens eaked out a second place victory above read with just under 600 votes.

For a total of 22,153 votes, four Dickens more had a much better showing with 39,202 votes. But neither of them was over 50%. But neither of them broke 50%. So he went to a runoff. So during the runoff, more really courted conservative Buckhead. Buckheads like the Northern, we have more conservative,

like not suburb, but like neighborhood of Atlanta. Neighborhood, it's the one that wanted to turn it into its own city. Yes, one to get to here. Buckhead's accession, which is built on a whole bunch of legacy of red landing and segregation and blah, blah, blah. Oh, we'll talk about that. OK.

Good. Good. Yes. So more also earn the endorsement of RE. The guy who just said the racist thing? The guy who, no, the former mayor who lost to Dickens for second place by about 600 votes. OK. So I'm trying to keep all these names straight here.

There's a lot of names coming into my head now. In a situation that led many progressives in advantage to look at the guy who well, he voted for cops to still supported closing jail was willing to cut $73 million from APD and had a been a pretty consistent advocate for affordable housing on council. So it was between Moore and that guy. Yeah. So progressives made a decision and went for Dickens. And in the runoff, Dickens won by a landslide

with 63% of the votes. OK. So 44,655 votes. Moore actually lost 13,000 votes from her general election total. Interesting. Thus, Mayor Andre Dickens becomes our next leader. Turn out, for the runoff was in line with what we saw

four years earlier when Keisha Lance Bottom faced off against Garrison's candidate of choice, Mary Norwood. Get, get, wait, wait, don't put, what do you mean, my candidate of actual? You're not back to what if she runs for Mary again, right? No. Oh, I misunderstood everything that has happened. She's a scary woman

So the norwood bottoms run off only had 4,000 more voters than we did in 2021's runoff I know that was that was the 2017 election 2018 elections. Okay. No The me norwood that was the 20 of one. I I'm going to act like I know Atlanta history. Yeah, I was almost correct you on some of the Atlanta history here as I fail ignorance to have you explain

concepts for the audience making me sound more ignorant than I am, but actually then explain to you. I continue. Sorry, I was going off the ramp. We should say that 2017 runoff was actually much more evenly matched, bottoms only one by 800 votes. And that's scary. Yeah, that's scary, because Mary Norwood cannot be the mayor. So Dickens has said that he won with consent to govern,

and it's not really stretching it when he says that Atlanta supported him in this particular election with this particular opponent. We largely did. Sure. In the interim period, Dickens does the usual things, he appoints a transition and seem. This included your usual cast of characters, but it is also worth noting that it included

Dave Wilkinson, President and CEO of the Atlanta Police Foundation. I've heard of them. The Atlanta Police Foundation, it's like a charity for police or something, right? Yeah, it's a nonprofit, you know, you're standard nonprofit. Okay. They do cool things. Tax deductible tax. Yeah, you can donate to them tax deductible.

Just like this. They might advertise on the stream. Like the streamer destiny. And that's the second destiny reference in as many episodes. So as soon as Dickens is sworn in, he faces the Buckhead Session crisis. And we explained a little bit earlier what Buckhead is, but Atlanta is a very large metropolitan area. And much of Fulton County itself was at one point part of unincorporated

Atlanta. And then in 2005, an unincorporated area just to north of Buckhead called Sandy Springs was the first to become its own city. The initial breakaway cities that happened after that were predominantly white and racism played a heavy role in their formation, but starting in 2016, newly formed Black majority cities also started cropping up around the metro area like the city of South Bolton and Stonecrest. So Buckhead wanted to do the same thing. They wanted to become their own city. And by no means was that popular sentiment in Buckhead, but it's more complicated because the city of the drives were not part of Incorporated Atlanta,

the previous ones. Buckhead is Incorporated Atlanta. It is Atlanta. It's part of the Atlanta Public School system. It's also an APD zone. It has its own parks, roadways, and water system that are all like city of Atlanta property. Yep. So to have the best chance of actually succeeding, Buckhead needs a state congressional vote. Otherwise, it would require a citywide vote, which it would. Why would people vote? Yeah, yeah.

So in 2022, it found that Buckhead's session bill started working its way through the legislature. The bill didn't make it very far. This first time around, it dies on February 11th, so just a couple weeks into the session. But in order to kill it, Dickens reached out to Governor Kemp and other Republican leaders and developed a working relationship early on in his term as mayor. Dickens also kind of to quell this Buck secession played into the race of crime narrative, that bucket secessionists were claiming was the reason that they wanted to secede. Dickens in partnership with local law enforcement agencies and the Atlanta Police Foundation

created the repeat offender tracking unit. They claimed most of the crime problem in Atlanta comes from repeat offenders and by sharing information about so-called criminals between agencies crime would drop. Of course, this is very problematic from an abolitionist perspective. Once someone enters the criminal legal system, they're always a criminal. It haunts you. The task force only serves to reinforce that. And in response to the formation of the unit Southern Center for Human Rights said,

quote, if APD is planning to double down on the very strategies that they themselves admitted, do not work in pursuit of a solution that keeps people behind bars, the effort is doomed to fail. You know, that else is doomed to fail. Our audience is actually buying these products that are advertising on our show for some reason. Probably. But who knows? I've heard the blue apron cooking boxes are really convenient if you live in active and busy lifestyle, like Matt

from the Atlantic, here in the Nebraska Lative. I actually use Hello Fresh. Okay, good, because I think they're the ones that actually are advertising on our show. So thank you, thank you for that. Great work, you already got it. All right, we are back. All right, so kicking back in with the Buckhead Session Movement,

in order to modify Buckhead, there is also an opening of a police precinct in zone two in which Buckhead sits. This is the third precinct in Buckhead, which is made up of just 28 square miles. That's wild, because like, Portland only has like three or four precincts in total. Yeah, so we have six zones.

And Portland has more people in Portland proper than Atlanta does? I think our territory is more expansive. Yes, yes. But we are spread out. But population wise, there's actually more people in Portland proper, just pretty funny. I should say that the third precinct in zone two

was planned before Dickens took office, but he made sure to talk about it a lot earlier. Yeah, I bet. So, and then in what would fit perfectly as a scene in the wire, Dickens spent both this year and last year talking about how crime and buckhead dropped more in both years than any other zones? What's the wire? Well, there's a podcast about the wire. Oh, really a podcast? Yes. Huh. I forget the name of what's the wire. Oh really a podcast. Yes, huh?

I forget the name of what what's the wire? It's a it's a TV show about oh Police in is it like what is it like one of those like a millennial shows? Are we doing a bit? Is this like one of those millennial shows? It did come out in the early So this is like succession for old people got it a session for old people. Yes Highly recommend watching it and check out the podcast that I can't remember the name of. Yeah. Plug someone else's podcast. Great.

Great job. As the Buckhead Session issue wound down, a Southeast Atlanta apartment complex started to draw increasing attention from the press due to rampant issues in the complex. A lack of care by the owners. So this massive apartment complex operator called millennia. The company had a reputation across the country as terrible, and it is deservedly so. At Forest Cove, the complex was unfit for human habitation.

Oh, really? And we have to acknowledge that Dickens here had an out just to blame millennia, but in February, he told the approximately 700 residents that the city would be moving them to safer housing while the complex was either fixed or rebuilt. The rollout of this wasn't perfect on April 13th of this year, Sean Keenan, a local reporter. Friend of the show, New York Times reporter Sean Keenan makes another appearance. So Keenan released a new story of this year, April 13, 2023, showing that the first, that a quarter of force-cove residents were relocated to complexes identified as dangerous

dwellings on the AJC's residential watchdog list. That's pretty funny. So I have learned a little bit about Atlanta's rental situation here, and it seems like it kind of sucks to be a renter in Georgia. It seems like you have almost no rights, no protection. I didn't have air conditioning for a little while. And it turns out that you are not guaranteed air conditioning in any rental, which is hard being like in Atlanta. Because I never had AC in Portland, but that's Portland. It's not, we're not dealing with the Atlantic, humanity, and the land to heat.

No, it's pretty miserable. Thankfully, my air conditioning did get fixed eventually, but yeah, there's no recourse for things like that. So until that report by Kenan, it had appeared that the city was doing diligent work, taking care of displaced residents and ensuring that they retained access to care and services with as little disruption as possible and by and large that that happened.

But, you know, for a quarter of residents not so much. At this point, more questions are cropping up. So the story is likely going to continue to develop, but at, you don't really know where it's going to go. Going to go. Because this is like current events. Yeah. Yeah. So another force code issue that will probably come up later in Dickens term was that he made a promise to residents that they'll be able to return to the apartment complex eventually. But Millenia was denied hot assistance to fix the property and it's unlikely that they'll do so on their own. So the fate of the complex is pretty up in the air. The city does own approximately

80 acres in the neighborhood which could and should go to building low income housing, but it's prime real estate for further gentrification. So we'll see how that plays out. No, one of the first things that I noticed when I was visiting Atlanta last year was that all of the most of the sectionate housing has been converted into luxury condos, or new five-story apartment complexes.

And no, the speed of the gentrification was kinda surprising to me, coming from Portland. There's still gentrification in Portland, absolutely. But did the expansiveness of it here in the speed of which it's accelerating was surprising to me? Yeah, and we're not building low-income housing complexes, but what's happening here is that they're adding a certain percentage of new,

like if you're building a massive complex, a certain percentage of your off, like your dwellings have to go at a certain point of the average monthly income. Yeah. But that's not really addressing this large scale issue that is going to still have hundreds of them that it costs like $3,000 and you have a dozen that are low income. And you do the bearish amount to skirt by while still filling up most of the available real estate with very expensive apartments. And I should plug here. There is a fantastic book called Red Hot City by a GSU professor

named Dan Emmerglock. If you want to learn more about gentrification in Atlanta, it's great. Yeah, absolutely. And that's vital reading. So towards the end of Dickens' first 100 days in office, APD chief Rodney Bryant announced that he was going to retire. Bryant was not very well liked by city leadership.

Police of Moore had made a campaign promise to get rid of Bryant on her first day in office. But Dickens said he'd give him 100 days to improve public safety and kind of see where things were at before firing him. And what happened after those 100 days? Bryant stepped down and Dickens tapped then deputy chief Darren Sheerbaum at interim replacement. I've heard of this guy before. This is the guy who made that weird confession about having sex in the woods with all those police officers. I heard that of podcasters, Hilly. That's, that's so crazy. Uh, Sheerbom, who may or may not have said those things, uh, his prior role was overseeing

the cop city development. And he was also pretty well liked by APD officers. So dick, it's officially hired him in October of 2022. But if you're a leftist or even just against cop city, this is actually like kind of a loss of a lost cheer bomb is incredibly PR savvy as you saw in that city council meeting. And he does pretty well when he's talking to them. No, when I was first doing stuff on copsity, I remember when he was just like this spokesperson for it, he wasn't actually like the chief yet. And then he became the chief in like last fall

and they've gotten better at their propaganda since then. A lot better. Yeah. And, you know, I watch this like every week, he does a pretty good job. Yeah. This brings us to budget season 2022. In April, Dickens tells the agency that he wants to hire 250 APD officers a year for three years,

hoping that the total of 750 new hires will net a 450 increase in officers for the department. Okay. So hiring a lot, some of them might not stay on. Yeah, I'm sure you're on right now. Other people might not stay on, but you're trying to net to get another 400 or so officers. Yep. So Dickens also approved $4,000 bonuses for APD, paid using American Rescue Plan Act money.

Great, great, great, great. Just a fun. Initially, in June, Dickens promised police a raise of 3.5%. But in November, it became apparent that the city would have a budget surplus. So Dickens and Council raised that to 9%. Bringing APD to a total of a 27% raise over the course of three years. Funny how much money they're just getting pumped this past two years. And I don't know what happens like three years ago, but it seems like something shouldn't. No, I mean, like you were talking about how like how how how Dickens was like previously working to get like a

70 million reduction in police budget, you know, probably like in some ways probably just like for PR race and Strict because during 2020 that was the popular thing to do. And now he's just like funneling millions and millions dollars towards the police foundation, towards individual officers, towards raises, bonuses, you know, standard mayor stuff. Oh, and we're not done. In November, it was an early Christmas for APD. Dickens also debuted 40 new scat and so scat is the Savannah College of Art and Design, it's a big art college in Georgia.

Yeah. So they designed these police Ford Explorer vehicles for an officer take home program. They look like shit. Each vehicle cost $60,000. So the pro-crisis. Total price tag of this was $2.4 million to improve officer morale. Oh yeah, let's get them. Two million dollars with their cars just to make them happy. 70 additional take home vehicles are in the pipeline. Once equipment becomes available to out. Cool.

So yeah, this program is just continuing to grow. Fuck whatever, scad designer was paid to fucking design those shitty cars. So one of the things that was missing during this budget season back in spring was the very thing that helped Dick and solidify his image as a progressive council member, affordable housing.

And his initial budget, Dickens put no increase in affordable housing for his alleged. You had a budget surplus, and you're like, no, let's give all the buddy to the police who are already getting a $90 million training facility. Let's give him even more money. Sure, great. So Dan Immergloch, the GSU professor I just mentioned, he was, you know, he's an affordable

housing advocate and he was part of Dickens Transition team and he told Capitol B after the prospective budget was released, quote, for this to be his first budget to make a step backwards is extremely disappointing. And that's basically how all the progressives felt. Yeah. So Dickens did cave to housing advocate pressure and he added an additional $7 million in the affordable housing budget

before the budget was passed in June. Cool, cool, cool. Remember back in 2019 and 2021, everyone was in agreement that the jail was gonna close? Yeah, they were gonna convert it to that other thing. Yeah, it was gonna be a center for diversion equity. Yeah, it was going to be great. And by this point, it actually had a name, the John Lewis Center for Diversion and Equity.

Great. But in June of 2022, City Council voted down legislation authorizing the mayor to close the jail. Then plans came out in early August that instead of closing ACDC, Fulton County in Atlanta, where in talks to rent 700 beds from the facility to Fulton County to address the overcrouting problem at Rice Street, Fulton County's main jail. Maybe they should just keep us people in jail. Actors warned that the lease would not alleviate these issues and that city council needed to instead focus on decarceration.

And then there was an ACLU report that came out later in the year that found 45% of the overall jail population in Fulton County is unindicted. Yeah, they're just holding people that actually have been indicted for the crime. Great. Remember, it was Dickens who introduced the legislation to find a way to repurpose this jail.

He said in a statement when the least of Fulton County was coming up, quote, as I've continually supported since my time on the Kansas City Council, I remain committed to fully repurposing the ACDC facility for non-incarceration purposes. But we are also confronted by a real and immediate crisis of overcrowding at the Fulton County jail. Many of these detainees are Atlanta residents and our conscience calls us to act. This is a temporary lease agreement and will allow the city of Atlanta to play a role in alleviating this humanitarian crisis and to provide the necessary time for Fulton County to develop and implement a long-term solution.

Humanitarian. Because we always know adding more prison beds really reduces the problem. So the temporary solution that we're talking about is a four-year agreement and Fulton County is paying the city of Atlanta $50 per bed per night. So when the full 700 beds are taking, Atlanta will be making $12.7 million a year. Remember when we had to release all those people from prison in jail in 2020, did overcrowding and then violent crime dropped. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. So the $12.7 million sounds like a lot of money, but before the lease went into effect, ACDC's average population was under 50 individuals per night. The city's Department of Corrections budget is $16.1 million a year. So the city is still going to lose money running

this jail even with Fulton County paying for their state. For their state. For their state. For their state. Yeah. Then on April 14th of this year, the news came out that the Sean Thompson died in Rice Street, jail, having been neglected and ignored by Fulton County deputies. When they finally checked on Thompson, they found that he had been eaten alive by bugs as he laid dying. And this was in September of 2022,

just after Atlanta approved this lease. The cell Thompson was in was so disgusting that a jail employee refused to enter without putting on a hazmat suit first. Oh, imagine what it was like to live in there. That's crazy. And this death isn't the result of overcrowding. Thompson was in jail on simple battery charges and being held on a $2,500 bond.

He was also unindicted. There was no reason for Thompson to be in jail at the time of his death. If he had the money, he probably would have been alive today. Yeah, it's just blocking up poor people. And yeah, so this is the sort of thing that Dickinson Council have enabled with this new jail lease. Before we get into Dickinson Cop City in 2023, we need to talk briefly about some more American Rescue Plan act.

Shikhanry Dickinson Council pulled off this year. At the end of January, Atlanta announced that it was returning $10 million in ARPA funds, earmarked for rental assistance, the city never used it. What is just using for rental assistance? So this naturally upset a lot of people. Public comment was quite feisty that day. Adventists, of course, increasingly pricing out its legacy residents as we just talked about, and $10 million would go a long way to helping combat that. And then to add insult to injury a few weeks later, Council

passed and Dickens signed legislation that gave $500,000 in ARPA funds to the Atlanta Police Foundation to provide additional police and first responder housing. So really reinforcing the city is going gonna take care of please before everyone else. Yeah. Oh boy. So let's move on to how Dickens handled Cop City since January 18th, I think it's probably a good place

to start the killing of Torquitita by Georgia State Patrol officers. The day that everything happened, Dickens wished the Trooper ACVD recovery. I can find nowhere in which Dickens made any comment other than it's unfortunate that Tortugita was killed. Not surprising, he never accepts any level of responsibility for tort's death and insisting instead

that that responsibility lies with Georgia State Patrol or to Cap County. He refuses to acknowledge the fact the city's insistence on trying to build Cops City, both insured tort and the officer's presence in the woods. And APD's involvement in the raid, like, yeah. So this moment also kind of changed how Dickens approach his Copsidie.

Before he was relatively quiet, but he begins this like full court media press after January 18th. And we don't know the exact details, but it does seem like to Cab County, Atlanta officials in APF came to an agreement in January to pass this land disturbance permit. In February after a student protest at the Atlanta University Center and letters from AUC faculty that opposed construction

of cops to be an expressed solidarity with protesters, Dickens announced that he would hold a forum with the president of Morehouse College, David A. Thomas, who was a vocal cop city supporter. This was a big problem for Dickens as the colleges that make up the AUC and we didn't talk about which ones those were earlier. It's Morehouse, Spellman, Clark University,

Morehouse College of Medicine. All of them carry with them an incredible amount of historical and political power in the city of Atlanta. So keeping AUC support is pretty vital if you want to continue to run for elections. The attendance at the forum was limited to only AUC students and faculty, but a stream was duped and broadcast on Instagram live.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a complete copy, but there are definitely highlights that have made it out. Overall, Dickens was pretty patronizing its sarcastic to students. Several times, students called the mayor out for his behavior, but he continued to show to stain the rest of the night. One student called him out for his lack of prioring acknowledgement of toward-step and Dickens' usual

sidestep responsibility, again saying that it was unfortunate, toward died but insisting he was the wrong person to blame because it didn't happen in the city of Atlanta and the officer was not from APD. At one point Dickens went on a tirade after a student called him a sellout. This we do have audio for. Hey, let me just tell you this with you.

I ain't never been a sellout. You can't, you can't, you gotta check. You got the wrong resume that you looking at. I know we, I know we like to yell and shout out things just to be heard. You've been heard, you've been heard. But guess what? You picked the wrong resume to pull them on a race car.

Whatever Dickens was hoping to accomplish that night, he failed. Several memes and audio remixes of Dickens performance went viral in the Atlanta Twitter sphere and continue to crop up this day. Like, I am not a sellout one, I don't know if you've seen it. I'm still ruined by the Dr. Han, good doctor memes that just reminded me of the IMA surgeon memes. So great job. Great job.

Yeah, great work. So Dickens of course continue to try or to build or manufacture support for Copsody over the next two months. In March, he was visiting the neighborhoods around Copsody to hear feedback from residents. And he of course started in the wealthier neighborhoods and he only went to the less affluent neighborhood, which like, Copsity is actually in. Yeah.

After a member of the community stakeholder advisor committee called him out for only favoring the wealthy communities. Local residents have told ACPC that Dickens skips over the houses with DTF signs out front. That makes sense. Yeah, checks out. He's done several interviews now on Copsody

with both the AJC and WAB, a local public radio station. The AJC interview was particularly interesting, because one of the interviewers asked Dickens what would happen if Copsody ended in a cost overrun. Dickens told her that any large overruns would be paid for by philanthropic dollars from the foundation. He said this. He said this. But a member of his cabinet already confirmed that APF,

two APF city was willing to pay 32 million dollars at that point. And of course, we've now learned that that number is 67 million dollars. I do follow the city of the manas twitter account. I do follow the city of the manas Twitter account. No, I don't want to see that shit. I know they have turned it into just a cop city propaganda channel. It's a non-stop propaganda channel, which is really fun to watch because every cop city posts is bombarded with negative replies and tweets. I've seen these posts. I know I have talked about how they launched their own website, I'm trying to combat all of the stop cop city websites and yeah, they've really accelerated their propaganda the past few months and yeah, just turned the actual city of Atlanta

account into a cop city propaganda platform, which is funny because they also will often advocate and say like, this isn't the city of Atlanta's project, this is the APF's project, which they'll often like use that refrain. And yet we have the City of Atlanta account being turned into a mega phone to promote to this project. Yeah, the Atlanta Police Foundation doesn't actually give interviews to like news anymore. Yeah, well, they filter everything through the City of Atlanta, which normal charity organization. It's completely normal for them to never show up at City Council to talk about anything and to hide from the public.

It's fine. So meanwhile, Dickens is, of course, like, dogged by opposition to cops at every turn. On April 13, three Georgia State University students with the support of this keynote speaker interrupted a global symposium studies that Dickens was giving opening remarks. Dickens grows increasingly frustrated as the disruptors will not leave. And eventually Dickens and his retinue like just walk out.

On April 11th, Dickens had hired a new senior policy advisor named Karen Rogers. Dickens brought Rogers over from the Atlanta Police Foundation where she'd spent seven years working in community engagement and he brought her on, of course, to advise about cop city. On April 18th, the Cap County Medical Examiner released the autopsy on towards death and that same day, just before the article came out that the autopsy was released, Dickens held a press conference on the steps of City Hall. He was surrounded by a group of nearly 100

all older black leaders, including former mayor Bill Campbell and Andrew Young. This appears to have been a hastily thrown together event and only a few media outlets were even aware that it was happening. We didn't get an update that it was going on. I didn't know that was happening. Yeah, it just kind of cropped up and seemed to take everyone by surprise. Of course, it looks like

the press conference was held to counteract the autopsy report coming out that day. Yeah. But that failed. The autopsy report was the bigger story. Notably, the AJC did not print the autopsy report on the first day, but it was pretty well covered elsewhere on the landscape. And the autopsy caused a second city councilor to speak out against cop city, and a growing number of state representatives have started to speak out, you know, as that happened, and as the rest of the solidarity fund. But Dickens is, of course, unmoved and preparing for this fight to last a while. Then, of course, there was the City Council vote on June 5th, and there had been some work done behind the scenes to try to get this set back to committee. Apparently Dickens had like peeled off a city called the Maybe Votes into his office early that morning, and peeled off the boats in to ensure that the cops continued on. I wrote this, of course, like, like two months ago.

I just point. Yeah, a couple quick highlights. Again, the affordable housing. So with our affordable housing, it is supposed to get a certain percentage of our general operating budget. And it started out at one and a half percent and then it was supposed to go up to 2% and 2.5% is where it's going to cap out. So this year, it was supposed to go to 2%, he kept it at 1.5%. But he did announce a public-private partnership to offer $100 million in affordable housing bonds. Really?

Yes. So we love our public-private partnership and plan-away things to get things done. Yeah, that seems like the way... I mean, that's what I'm excited about for the extra $30 million bond to APF. That'll certainly get paid back in a reasonable time period. In a completely reasonable time period, and, you know, that'll get paid back. I'm sure, and we're not going to continue to pay anything, and APF is not going to make any money off. No, this is not.

This is the truth. Surely this is the heart. Surely this project's not a massive taxpayer sinkhole. So that's it. That's the mayor. That's the mayor. That's where we are. And then when's the next mayoral election?

So 2025. And of course, Dickens has to move the needle. There were like some calls for a recall campaign around Dickens, especially amongst the movement. Like, I personally don't think that it would have any chance of succeeding. There's kind of, there's a perception that he's doing okay. And, you know, when you have somebody that was provoked by the FBI for corruption, just a few years ago, your standards of what a good layer is.

Kind of changes. And then people seem to be putting lots of, some of their dedicated efforts in terms of electoral sign-up stuff is being put towards the referendum, which got approved a few days ago to continue. They need to collect about 75,000 signatures from people who were residents of Atlanta and registered to vote in 2021,

which seems like a pretty high bar. That's a lot of signatures. So. So a lot of signatures and because the organizers say this meaner's book clerk was like playing games and withholding approving the signatures. So they don't have, approving the referendum and so they don't have the full

like 60 days. It's not like two weeks or something. No, it's a 50s and 70s. So I think it's like, it's, they have to have them by August 15th. Which is, yeah, a lot of signatures. And August 15th is a round when a construction was supposed to start for Coffsettie.

So yeah, and then for other mayoral candidates, I've heard rumor that friend of the show ontologically evil Mary Norwood may be interested in trying to run again. So this is like her kind of move, is she runs her mayor. Well, first she does a term of city council, and then she runs for mayor,

and then she doesn't get the mayoral spots, so she takes a four years off, she comes back runs for city council, runs for mayor, takes four years off. So we were now in her, you know, mayor, her city council term. And if she's going to do this for a third time, then she will run for mayor in 2025. Which would suck. Yeah. I mean, she came close last time.

She did. And I think how depending on I think depending on how progress in the Cupsity construction goes, she has a way to frame this being like, like I was the one who was actually in support of this popular proposal the whole time. And look, we succeeded only because of me. Yeah, she can do that.

And there's, so then as demographics are changing, we're no longer a majority black city, the population is down to like 48% black people. So there are, Dickens is being called possibly the last black mayor of Atlanta. And you know, that will be a shock to our systems. And Mary Norwood would be like just a way to quickly kill that. Yeah. And like, like I said, the only way to accurately describe her is just ontological evil. Like she is, she, she is just that bad.

She's like, she's, she, yeah, it's not great. It would not be fun, but she, she's not the mayor. It is, it is Mayor Dickens, who is the shitty mayor of this episode. And based on how much power he has to change things and how much what he's decided to do with that power when instead of actually supporting all the affordable housing things. He's funneled millions of dollars to cop city to the Atlanta Police Foundation has refused any measure to revoke the land lease ordinance. And even even even if not to not to cancel a project, even just to move it somewhere else,

he's refused every step of the way. And yeah, we'll see how that does them in the next election cycle. Yeah, I'm really interested to see how he plays the referendum. I mean, I'm interested to see if the referendum will even be a threat at all, because if it fails to get a significant portion

of signatures, then he may just ignore it because why would he bother to talk about it? Yeah, there's definitely not going to devote any resources to it until they're sure that it is a threat. But once, once it, you know, potentially becomes a threat, they will, they've got to start doing something. Yeah. Well, we are, we are like, what, two or three days into the week of action at this point.

I, I don't, I don't know what, what things they're like, but, two or three days into the week of action at this point. Definitely. I don't know what things they're like, but there's still some days left. So yeah, if you're in Atlanta, try to stay safe and stay as dangerous as you feel comfortable. Say hey to us when you see us. Sure. Do you have any things you would like to plug Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective?

Yes, so I am Matt and I work for the Atlantic Community Press Collective. If you want to check out our work, our website is atlpresscollective.com. We also do a lot on Twitter. Our handle is at Edmanta underscore press. And our Instagram, where we post a lot of our videos is ATL press collective. And then you can also donate to a solidarity fund not at the regular solidarity fund website still I believe it's I believe it's still the the national bail fund one right I believe it is still the national bail one until probably until that court case is settled got it all right so yeah make sure you go to the right site for the for the Act Blue National Bay of Bale Fund towards the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. Anyway, so that was the shitty mayor of today. Mayor Andrey Dickens, I'll make the joke again.

I think it's funny that the previous mayor was named bottoms, the current mayor's name Dickens, it's Dickens, Dickens bottoms. Anyway, that's the joke that I made before. I'm going to keep making it until he's until he's no longer mayor Unless someone else runs for we could do Norwood Dickens bought it now Rather joking with that because that would be so that we so don't put it into the universe exactly That doesn't need to matter anyway Yeah, see you on the other side. Stay safe, stay dangerous during the week of action.

Ta-ta. In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an alphabet soup. With the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI, all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for the A.A. but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit.

It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world, and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not 55 grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm

steal. Who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? 35 grades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm deal. Who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology?

And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries,

conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, artist and baker and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit.

On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to moms Thanksgiving, Jurassic. Sometimes I might get it wrong. sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Ha ha. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me, as I talk

to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh. Does this podcast come with a therapist? Ha, ha, ha, he can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast. It could happen here. It's me James today and I'm joined for a rare example of Daniel being on the podcast. Yes, welcome, Daniel. And James, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here to talk with you on the podcast that I edit every single day.

Yeah, yeah. Normally you just hear me, but at this time, you get like the, like the, like the subultim speaks, but it's Daniel. And I couldn't, I couldn't really go anywhere with that. So I just, I just left the two halves of the joke out there. Neither of them with a partner. I'm very sad. Yeah, so, Daniel, we're here today to talk about first aid kits.

And the reason we're talking about first aid kits is because it is pride month at the time of recording. And that, of course, in the United States means that people are worried about being murdered by homophobic psychopaths. Unfortunately so. That is the world that we live in. It shouldn't be, it's fucked up. Hopefully it won't be this way forever because all these people are wrong and will die eventually and that will make the world better. But fingers crossed. I eventually and that will make me well better. But fingers crossed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can hope, I guess.

Maybe they're raising a new generation of turf, or whatever. I didn't think it did, yeah. We, hopefully not, let's not put it in big. Yeah, so I just wanted to talk because I've seen a bunch of people online, like a lot of people who are in the like LGBTQIA community or who are going to pride, just being like, oh, fuck, like in January, I can see why people are very afraid,

right? Because violence against queer people is at least seemingly increasing. I'm not going to give you training because this is a podcast and you can't learn first day on a podcast and you can't learn it on YouTube either, really. I wanted to talk briefly about supplies and then places to get training. Because that is very important. I have bought my first aid kit that I used for work.

I have quite a few of these for work, I don't like to repack them. And I know that you have bought one that Jeffrey Bezos kindly sent you. Yes, exactly. Yeah, at the height of the George Floyd protest, et cetera, I was out there in the streets and kind of after observing what was happening

in Portland and after listening into and editing, it could happen year episodes and what gear and Robert were covering, it felt, if not necessary, but very prudent to invest in something like this so that should there be a need to help people in the streets, I was there unable to do so. And whether or not this was a good for a state kit, I think we're going to find out today. Yeah, that's the aim of the game.

I should point out that like, my medical training is pretty basic, right? I'm not that kind of doctor. But I do have a wilderness first responder and a wilderness first aid, and it's not the bleed training, and I've done CPR training, and I've done hostile environment first aid training.

So a bunch of stuff which is focused around very, very, very basic first day, right? In all of those cases, it's like, make sure the person doesn't die immediately and then get them to someone who is better trained than you so that they can help them more. Amen. Which is like, listen, if you are learning

about medical stuff on a podcast hosted by a guy who has a PhD in modern European history, then that is what you are doing too, right? Like, yes. And we're going to talk about that, because you can, for sure, for someone up, if you go sort of outside of your scope of knowledge, and that is, I understand the desire to help,

but we have to help in the way that it's most helpful, I guess, not do any harm. So, yeah, let's go over, let's go over, I guess, my first aid kit, and then we can open yours and see what's the same and what's different, right? So, this is one, I like it because it's small and it fits into small of my back, and if

I really needed to, I could just like wear a kind of baggy shirt and it wouldn't be too obvious. I also have one that fits around my ankle for time, so I really don't want people to know I have it, but a bit I also want to have it. And then you can wear some sick, flair jeans or something, and people just think you're a trendy kind of guy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I've held no. And so, yeah, in mine, it sort of goes on to one of your back, and then you can pull it away,

right? Has a big, old red handle. You can pull it like that, and it comes away. That's smart. Yeah, it's nice. That's one thing I will say right off the bat is like, I've seen a number of people get hurt in a number of different situations. I've seen a number of people render first aid, including myself sometimes successfully, sometimes sadly not successfully. And if you have a big bag of shit and then you open your bag of shit and you're just throwing stuff everywhere, stuff falling on the ground. That's not helpful, right?

Like, the things that will kill people that are preventable for the most part in, like trauma injuries, right? Like, the stuff that we might see if we're going to a pride, if we're attending a protest. And if we fucking work in a school in America, right? And it's largely like attention, pneumothorex, a whole sucking chest wound, and losing blood. And losing blood is, I believe, the sort of most common preventable

cause of death in intramarine injuries. So most of this is gonna focus around losing blood. And that's where type of training called Stop the Bleed comes in, right? I of training called Stop the Bleed comes in. I believe it's StopTheBleed.org. You can Google free stop the bleed classes near me. I have previously posted a link to where you can put in your post code, zip code, and find free stop the bleed

training near you. Nice. And again, that will cost you no money at all. It will cost you about half a day every time. Oh, great. Yeah, it's a great thing. Actually, it's one of the few things that municipal governments have various things put on well. If there is no one near you, I've heard of people hitting up fire departments and I'm

getting them to put one on if they can demonstrate some interest. Because it's very basic and most fire departments will have paramedics, right, which is a step up from an EMT. Sure. So those folks can help teach those things very well. Very cool. So what is in here for stopping the bleed, and I'm not going to teach you how to use it because that's what someone else does.

They pay someone else's job. Yeah. So before you open it up, this is a tourniquet. Some people will pronounce it incorrectly. They will say. They're a tourniquet. Some people will pronounce it incorrectly. They will say that those people are wrong. Get that hard tea. We'll tourniquet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the American way. There you go.

Yeah, so it's what this guy is, it's for like bleeding your limbs, arterial bleeding your limbs, right? It just goes around, cinch it down, and I'm not telling you how to fucking use it, then you tighten it up, right? Just goes around, cinch it down, and I'm not telling you how to fucking use it, then you tighten it up, right? The things I want to emphasize about this are one, the type of tourniquet that is. So this is called a combat application tourniquet. It's made by a company called North American Rescue. There are a few other ones that I would use.

The other one I have, I think, is the softy wide. And I have some of the Revex med ratcheting tourniquets as well. They use like a bower if people have used ski boots or cycling shoes, they'll be familiar with a bow. Cool. The one to buy is the one that you use when you do your training. Right. And it's going to be a Sam as another one, as is another. These are are these are all, the don't it case you want to buy if you're confused about which one you used, the ones that are proved by the T-Triple C, it's a committee on tactical casualty care, tactical casualty commit, something like that.

Those guys have tested them extensively right to see which ones work, which ones don't. It is, this is not somewhere to save money. They're about 23, 25 bucks, you find them on sale. It's not, yeah, I mean, if that's a big expense for you, then I understand. And it's okay not to have one, if that's a big expense or to save up and wait. Like that's okay.

It's better than using an improvised tourney case. So there are not very many, very good studies, at least that I could find on improvised tourney case. Some places still teach an improvised tourney case. I've taken a wilderness first responder where they taught it. I've also seen one not work and I will tell you that's not an experience that I want to ever have again in my life. I don't think it's one I'd like you all to share with me. So I would suggest if you're going to be using a 20k then buying a cat is kind of the standard. I wouldn't buy it from Jeffrey Bezos because if Amazon.com is a website that he owns. from Jeffrey Bezos because, if you say Amazon.com is a website that he owns. Believe it or not, yeah. Space cowboy Jeffrey.

So the reason why is that all of these different, there are knockoffs, right? There are fakes of this. Sure. They go in different, they go in the same bin from what I'm told, and then the person who's a picker, just maybe grabs one, and sometimes you can end up with a fake. What can happen with a fake is the strap can break, or the windless. So the windless is the guy that tightens it can break. Ah, okay. Either of those things is going to lead to the tourniquet failing, right? It's not going to apply enough pressure, and that's going to,

it could do a number of things, right? It could just fail to start the bleeding. Depending on if you've misidentified the bleeding, you could give someone a compartment syndrome or something. It's going to be very painful, it's going gonna be very painful anyway, and you'll learn that in your course, which you're gonna take, you're not gonna just listen to me on the podcast. No, I won't. Thank you. And so you do want a real one,

and the easiest way to obtain a real one is to buy one from a reliable source, rescue essentials, Chinook, medical and North American rescuer or all people who I've worked with. I said that rescue essentials sent me a bunch of shit before I went on a work trip. It was lots of it was outdated or the open box or something and I was able to donate that to fixes and journalists I was working with. I thought that was very cool of them.

Cool. They are for a stop the Bleed Month discount. I think stop the Bleed Month is May, so we might be out of that now. But those are all places where you can buy these tonicase and know that you're not getting a fake one, right? So we'll provide links to that in the description of the episode. We will. Yeah, yeah, I'll make sure that those are there for you to click.

So there are different generations. I think generation seven is what I have. Generation six is also fine. You probably won't find one sold before that. On the off-tiles you do, I would stick to a generation seven or six. It does have a little timestamp, so you want a little sharpie as well to write the time on. That's more important.

It's possible that you might put this on somebody, say you're at a pride event, and there is something terrible happening, like a mass shooter and you might be there for a while. Let's say you're in Texas and all your cops are fucking cowards. Then unfortunately, if you're able to rent a rage someone and then you both of you were able to not get hurt any further, you could be there for a while. Then it would be relevant what time the tonic has applied normally. Right.

You know, in the US, we would hope that you would have medical attention pretty quickly, because that threat would have been stopped and then EMS would be able to provide help. So that's where the time thing comes in, right? And so you want to have a tiny Sharpie when you have a tourneygay. And you can get North American Rescue SD cell, little tiny half-size Sharpies, and I shove them in the pouch with the tourneygay, and then there they are, and then you always have a Sharpie. So we go inside. There it is. Look at that. I'll do the part of contextualizing for the non-video audience. Thank you, Davil.

Of course. Paying a picture with words, if you will. So we're going through this now. If we focus on pleading again, right? There's a couple of different dressings that you have. So again, I'm not going to tell you what to use for wear, but you would use the tonic on one part of your body. The other things you're

going to use would be a pressure dressing. So you can get a ton of different pressure dressings. I like the O-Lay's ones, O-L-A-E-S. It doesn't hugely matter. Those ones just have a little bit of gauze that you can pull out so you can pack a wound too. Sometimes if you get a nice training, they might let you practice packing some wounds, they might have a little fake wound that you can pack. You'll learn a lot about how to do that there. Those allowed the wound, some of the other ones don't. But honestly, sometimes they're called as really bandages. They will not colonize Palestine if you put them in your first gig. But that's what this guy is. And sometimes they have a lot of packaging on.

So you want to take them down to the last layer of packaging. None of this shit is sterile. None of this stuff is, again, it's not supposed to be in for a long time. Right. So it's okay to have that either just bear or in its furflare packaging. I want to get textual as one thing from a video perspective, just for everybody listening. As James is showing me his first aid kit, it looks like every item that he's talking about other than the Ternike is individually wrapped and also strapped down. Yeah.

It looks like I would say about seven or eight individual items within there. And they all have their own pocket and they're all strapped down. And that's something that immediately looking at mine, I basically have, you know, small plastic baggies that I will hold up to James right now, small plastic baggies of just like a lot of loose shit. And it's just way too much stuff in here. I would say of what I see in James's bag versus mine. I think, I mean, first of all, there's stuff missing like there's no turn decay in here. There's a lot of different gauze things.

And there's, but there's, you know, in mine, I have like 700 different bandages and like there's aspirin in here. And like some things that feel like they're more for a camping trip, then they are really handling a first aid scenario in which you need to save someone's life. So, one piece of advice that I'm getting from James, as he shares this, is that what's important to carry around is the stuff that is going to give you immediate access to the ability to save someone's life. So, think about as you are like packing your bag. What I have here that I bought online that I'm still glad that I have is basically a collection of a bunch of different miscellaneous first aid stuff

rather than a very stripped down specific list of items that I can use to save someone's life in an emergency scenario. Yes, I know. Excellent point. And you can see them all, right? When you open this guy, this guy is also like, size such that I can pull it off, pop it on the floor, open it up, have my workspace in front of me.

If there's anything I'm not confident doing, like when horrible things happen and people are bleeding, you do not, in that time, gain skills. Right. At that moment, speaking from, like, more experience than I would like to have, if people are in a really bad way in front of you, it's not a fun time and you get scared and you might panic.

That's okay. That happens to everyone. People aren't supposed to see their shit. And if it's certainly of this your first time seeing it, it's not unreasonable at all to freak out and not know what to do. You can just hold any of this shit up, say, hey, I have a tourniquet.

Hey, I have a pressure dressing. And someone who's at that time is able to help can take that and know what they're doing, they can help. So it's totally fine just to have this shit. And if you don't know how to use it, don't go beyond your scope of knowledge that you have that shit and you can provide it to someone else.

That's fine. So yeah, everything's in little elastic bands. I've got this stuff which is called QuickClot. We've talked a lot on the podcast recently about indigenous medical technologies. This is an example of one, right? So it's using, I think, Kaelin. There's some that use Kaelin,

some that use something that came from crab shells, but this is an indigenous medical technology that now is sort of, it's been refined over time. This just contains a thing that stops, it helps blood to clot, so hemostatic agent. Right. So when you're packing a wound, you could use this first, and this would help with blood clotting. It's also, the type I have is detectable on X-rays, which helps a lot. There are some older types which are powder's, those are probably best avoided, and you want the gauze that is impregnated with the hemostatic agent that you can. This stuff got really pricey recently, like I think the best price I've seen

for this is 35 bucks. Oh wow. So yeah, this guy is going to cost you the most. Do you have an idea why that is? I think a lot of people probably bought it in 2020, might be part of it. Maybe it's some kind of supply chain thing. I don't know where they get the ingredients from, but they just went up in price a lot. Link, a lot of people were sort of reaching out about, hey, why is this shit so

expensive? Sure. I don't know. But it's not like 100% necessary, but it is a very helpful thing, and it can make a difference in some cases, right? So that's your human static gauze. What else I've got in here is a pair of trauma sheers, and that's just if you need to remove someone's clothing to access a wound, that is kind of important. So, for instance, I was doing a training once, and I'll prefer to speak about those things. So, like, where a guy was presented to us with gunshot wound, and like, if you don't rip off his trousers, like, you know, if someone's been shot and you're there helping them, again, like,

if you're not comfortable doing this, you haven't done the training and don't be just ripping off of strangers clothes, that's weird. In general, it'll be ripping off strangers, first of all. Yeah, yeah. That comes in time. In this scenario. Yeah. Yeah. So like, and they have this cool kind of thing around his leg that bled, like he had like two wounds, sort of pumping out blood. It's like a cool kind of bleeding simulator. But let's do crazy shit. They'll go in one part of your leg and hit the bone about to round and go out. In fact, they don't always travel into straight lines and not laser beams. So by exposing their wound, you can sometimes see that exit wound. And so you'll know that there are two wounds, right?

Yeah, depending on how you're gonna treat it, you're gonna pack it, you're gonna put a tourniquet on it. But that will, that's what these are for. You can also get things which are called, I think it's called a clothing knife. I actually keep one, here we are. I've talked it into the belt of my plate carrier

that I used to work just so that it's like right here. It's the same place I keep my diving knife, so then I know it's there. And what it does is these are handy things to have in your truck to it's a container. Yes. You've seen it. So it's a contained blade, right? I like this little chap because in addition to the contained data has little glass breaker.

Yes. I was going to say we have one in the car. So it's like a see some people might know it as a seat belt cutter. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. seat belt cutter and usually on the other side, like you said, they have a glass breaker. So, but that is a much more contained one. And that looks nice. The one in my car is like the size of a small hammer because it's like much to be like, you know, give you the forest to hold it in smack of window, but also the kind of thing. That is super useful. I think everybody should have one in their car.

Yeah, you could put on your key ring even, right? This is the size of like a matchbox. Or like a key fob. It's like the size of a key fob. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you have a newer vehicle than I do, then you will have a little bit of a key. That's true.

So I didn't mean to be a car classist here. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, my, my okay. Mine's approaching classic status. But yeah, we'll put a link on the webto for this little chap as well. Great. We're not fucking getting a affiliate revenue from this guy. No, we're not. Guys, we're just trying to help you out.

Yeah. No, think about this is like, it's quite hard to stab someone with trauma she is because they've got this little knob on the bottom. But like, it can be quite a lot of chopping and things. So these are probably also cheaper and you won't end up using the masseurs and getting them blunt. So that is my little getting people's clothes off. And then the last one, I have a couple of burned dressings in here. That's just because so many people got burned in 2020. It pro tip from me though. Yeah, it would be to if someone shoots something out, you don't pick that shit up. Don't make it up. Just don't. In my prepping, I got fire resistant gloves. I got like, I got gloves that were

treated for like, I don't remember, like 500 degrees or something like that. In the event that I needed to throw back a gas canister, but I think I was thinking. That's what you're talking about. I mean, I was way too rambo about the whole thing because I still have not encountered a gas grenade once yet. So, you know. Yeah, I'm wearing a cross-crossed,

but I mean, I don't know. I'm down. Yeah, maybe. I'm ready. Just get him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dave, I love that for you. It's great. Yeah, so you kind of, instead of having. Yeah, yeah, I love that for you. It's great.

Yeah, so instead of having the gloves right, just avoid picking it up. But people do get burned from that, from other stuff, right? So a burned dressing, not really necessary, because it's unlikely, if someone is burned to the extent that it's threatening to their life, you aren't helping them with your little box of stuff.

Right. So that's fine. And then these guys are vented chess seals. Ideally, you do want vented chess seals. I was reading a study the other day. It's just this sort of greater survivability. And what you are doing with those is that this is for a sucking chess wound. It's not named that because it sucks. But it does. It does. But it does. Exactly. But it does.

Yeah. But it is, this is for like, I guess penetrating chest trauma. And what, these guys, I bought an impact too. High fin are a good brand. I think Halo or another brand. There are some knockoffs on Amazon.com. I wouldn't buy just like, again, it's pretty worse than a little bit extra of these. So these are the ones that have gone through extensive testing,

that it issued to lots of militaries around the world. They're very flat, right? If you wanted to, you could distribute the shit about your person, it's just gonna be harder to get it. You're not gonna remember which back pocket maybe you've shown what in. I'm sure. These are very flat and very easy.

They're giant stickers. And you, again, when you do your training, we'll learn how to use them. But yeah, I would avoid like the Rhino. I think Rhino is one of the brands after you know, Amazon and stuff. Just like get a hyphen is kind of the standard. There's an older type as well. But if these hyphen are more compact and they're preferred. And when you're searching hyphen, if you happen to research, it's h-y-f-i-n.

We're gonna put it in the chat, but just for a word that is phonetically very similar to another common word, hyphen is h-y-f-i-n. Ah, yes, it's a h-y-p-a-g-n. Mm-hmm. Yep, so, well said, Donald, that is a, well said, that is a, that's a, a chest seal, right? Chest seal.

Chest seal. Here is the other type, just's a chest seal, right? So, chest seal. Here is the other type, just for you of you, this is an Asham and chest seal. So, they're not preferred, so stick with the hyphen. These are kind of bigger and don't pack as well. And yeah, I would stick with the hyphen. The other thing I have in here is a, like a space blanket. Oh, of course.

Just a survival wrap, interesting. Yeah, so when you are losing a lot of blood, you get very cold. And so you do want to keep that, you do want to keep that casualty warm. This isn't going to really be enough on its own, quite honestly. Like, you need to probably actively heat someone, but it's better than nothing. And it's, again, it's very small. Again, I've given tons of these out in various different situations that weren't a casualty situation, so that they're nice thing to have.

You don't generally want to be packing shit, just because it's a nice thing to have, and we'll get on to that. But this, again, is very small. There's almost always space for it, so I cleared that. I also have a little source of light, like a little torch, flashlight for American listeners, and ASH. And that is there for being able to see things, which is very handy actually when you're trying to help somebody who is bleeding. Another thing to include would be gloves. I have my gloves somewhere else on this belt,

so they're not here, but medical gloves, right? And again, you'll probably learn this in your course, but like a lot of people like to buy black ones, I don't know why, cops wear black ones all the time, right? Just makes it a little more difficult if you're doing a blood sweep, which is a thing you'll learn about in your class.

So it's actually quite hard to see blood on black, especially in the blood conditions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So blue tan, something like that is kind of preferable. And I do have those in the first day of the day. Nice. Yeah, if you want to have those somewhere ready to go, I think they're on the front of this bag. So you can slap tape thing. Nice. Yeah, if you want to have those somewhere ready to go, I think they're on the front of this bag, just you can slap those on. Nice.

Just, you know, you don't know where the people have been, what they've been up to, and it doesn't matter, you still want to help them, so you just want to take care of yourself there. So, though they're honestly the main things I have in there, what I don't have in here is equally important, right? I do not have tampons in here. The reason I do not have tampons in here is,

well, it's too far, I'm not a person who menstruates and even if I was, I wouldn't have my first aid kit. And secondly, because they are not very good at the terrible at dealing with like massive bleeding, right? Massive hemorrhage. That's not what they're for. And if people are familiar with what they are designed for, like the volume of blood is not the same as the volume of blood that you will see from arterial bleed. Yeah, that is close. Yeah, believe me, again, like I've had the misfortune

to see people die from blood loss. And like that is a lot of blood. And it's coming out fast. And you ain't stopping it with a tampon. It's just kind of stopping someone who is better equipped from helping. So if you want to carry tampons and you want to have them available in case someone needs them, that is great. That's very kind of you. Put them in your car, put them in your bag that you go around with, please, but don't confuse them with a trauma dressing.

No, correct. Because they are different things. Don't plan to improvise anything. We'll be really, right? Like, it's just, when we have excellent tools available that is designed for this job, just use them. And it's fine not to be able to get all this stuff at once, right? You could spring for the chest seals first, and then save a bit of money, get the toner. That's fine. But yes, can you improvise a chest seal with some duct tape and a credit card or a crisp packet in theory, sure. But these are like 12 bucks. So let's just get them if we can. And have people improvise toilet case successfully with Cervat, yes, have those failed and resulted in lots of life,

yes, like in some cases, your belt isn't a 20k, right? It doesn't have a windless, it's not going to get tight enough. It might snap. Have people use successfully, yes, is it a $23 thing which works much more effectively? Yes. And it's a serious thing. It's fucking, it's very real. Like, again, speaking from experience, like this shit will affect you deeply and you want to know that you did the best you could. So, and if you can't afford any of this stuff, that's totally fine. Like, just take your time and acquire it. I think an important thing to add at this point is to listeners of our show are, I think, overly familiar with the way that we have introduced the idea of mutual aid, like the point of mutual aid. And what I mean by that is that you are not a one person revolutionary.

Like, the whole idea is community effort. And so, especially with something like this, this is like a kind of a two effort. And so especially with something like this, this is like a kind of a two-part point. Especially with something like this, consider that you are part of a community that can help people overall. Maybe it is not you, the individual listening to this episode right now, that is like, I'm gonna go invest in all of these things

because I will be the first aid person. Maybe there's someone you know who's already interested in this. And this is information that you can pass on to them. Should they be wanting to invest in equipment like this? And another thing to think about in terms of why James is offering specific items is because think about a hobby that you like doing. Think about anything that you like doing a lot. You know, you don't usually buy the cheapest version of the thing. And now this is not me necessarily advocating

for overspending or buying expensive things, you just wanna buy stuff that lasts and that works well and that does the job because overall, that stuff will last longer than anything that is cheaper in the immediate moment. I think people can say the same thing about things like work boots, about tools, about anything that to you is worth investing your time in. So if this is something that you value, if being a first responder or being that person who's there,

if taking a stop to bleed course is something that's important to you, consider that these things are more than just like good things to have on hand. They're an investment on your future and your interests. So just something to consider that, like while some of these things may, I mean, nothing sounds outrageously expensive that you've said so far. I think the most expensive thing that you talked about was $35. Something that's in that range. Yeah, you can spend a lot on the pouch, but I'd be sure you shouldn't. Sure. Like don't buy some fancy hype beef Instagram gang guy pouch and you're right. Exactly.

Yeah, that I think, yeah, the sea locks go is probably a much expensive thing I've spoken about. And on the point of durability, I do want to say, I've seen people practicing with their 20 Ks and I would suggest getting another one to practice with. Totally makes sense. So North American Rescue Rakes of Blue 1, it's exactly the same. It works just the same if you need to use it you can, but over time those things fatigue and they're not designed for multiple uses.

Have they been used multiple times? Yes. Do people wash them and wash the blood of them and use them again? Yes, again, we shouldn't plan for a suboptimal setting. And we're sort of going to be a pretty fucking suboptimal moment. And I talk about suboptimal stuff, Daniel. We have to start. Yeah, to talk about Ronald Reagan. That's my bad.

I should have been the one being like James, when you take an ad break. But here I am, a season professional. We're back. We've returned from my ad break. So I wanted to talk about resources for training, because I think those are very important, right? And that is where you're going to learn stuff.

I am not telling you how to do this. I would suggest hitting up, stop the bleed. I think it's stop the bleed.org, stop the be training in my area. There's a website that will link in the description. There's a part of that website where you can put in your zip code and find trainings. And then if I think about where I've got my training,

it's through an organization called Noles, National Outdoor Leadership School. So once you get past, start to bleed, you've got a couple of like most community colleges who have an EMTB course, EMT basic. That's quite a commitment of your time, but you can learn a lot of very important things. It can be a career for you if you want it to be.

Certainly, it can be an adjunct to other careers you want to do if you want to work in the outdoors. If you can do an EMTB and then do a wilderness EMT, that opens up a whole range of expeditions to you. So, community college should be free. Most of those courses are free or very affordable depending on where you are. Nulls courses are not free, nor are they very affordable. They are very expensive, but they are very good.

You look at REI, probably puts them on. Nulls does have scholarships for people who are more marginalized from the outdoors, or they did last time I spoke to them. So those might be worth checking out. And then there are apps which will give you resources. Resources are not the same as training, right? Like, training is knowing what to do. It's not sometimes it's knowing where to look, but in situations like this, like, you don't want to be on your phone. For more advanced stuff, for stuff where you're doing care in the field, right? If you're doing, or, you know, wilderness first responder,

if you're trying to think times that I've done stuff with that, one time I was climbing up a mountain and a big old rock fell on me. I had to split my leg and... Oh my god, what? I was bleeding like, yeah, yeah, it's good times. Yeah, don't, yeah, don't, watch out for rockfall. split my leg and oh my god what's this bleeding low yeah yeah it's good times Yeah, don't yeah, don't don't watch out for rockful audience I just want to throw something out there every single time James tells us any story about his life

It is just this wonderfully vivid like Colorful story about something that has happened to him or an experience that he's had, or a profession that he's had that just adds to the tone of interesting facts about James. So if you, I don't know, I highly recommend you listen to every single episode that James is on because you have lived a fascinating life and that is merely a split second up.

That's wild. I'm glad you're okay. Yeah, I'm fine. But yeah, you know, clearly, here we are. With that, right? Like, especially in wilderness medicine, there's an emphasis on using what you already have. And because you can't bring everything into wilderness, right? So that's where I'm saying knowledge doesn't wear anything. It doesn't take up any space in your pack. And so you can use an air mattress pretty well to splint a leg injury. You can use one of those foam. So air mattress is the guy that you sleep on. Yeah. Yeah. So you can kind of what a fine dangle those up around a leg. You can use a therm arrest or similar

other products are available foam sleeping mattress. You can use a hiking pole, right? Tent pole. Tent pole are kind of nice because you can break them down into sections to get the right length. Then all you're using from your first aid kit is your tape, right? Or I like ski straps. I attach everything in my life. It's important to me with ski straps. So I love the ski strap and I had some ski straps and you can just split that bad boy with

a couple of ski straps, a couple of tent poles, back of the net. You're not having a great day at that point. This is not the kind of medical care you'd hope for in a professional setting, but if you've got that and you've got a crutch, you can get yourself to a higher degree of care. So when we're doing stuff like that, I believe Noles has a wilderness medicine app. There's Deployed Medicine, which is a US military resource for field care, which can help to remind you of stuff that you've already trained on. It's not going to teach you to do stuff.

You shouldn't just read about it on there and use it. And there's a new one called Goz. G-O-E-S, which literally launched like this week, goes health, which it's offline. So it gives an offline database of wilderness medicine, and it helps you kind of with diagnostic cues of stuff. So when you do your wilderness earth responder, at least when I did it,

someone must have had an exopic pregnancy and had a very bad outcome because they'll ask you with all these questions, like what could this be? What could this be? And like they want you to be able to know what an exopic pregnancy is. So like, but there's like a sort of flow chart that you can follow, right, to help you be like, what could this be? And like they want you to be able to know what an end topic pregnancy is. So like, but there's like a sort of flow chart

that you can follow, right, to help you be like, what is this? Is it a pen to site? I was always going on here. So, sure. Sure, sure. When, because you probably won't remember every cent, if you take a woofer course and then two years later,

you know, before you're resertified, like something happens, a lot could happen in two years. You won't have remembered everything that you learned in your course, right? So, right. Some of those apps are useful. But the most important thing, this thing where you will learn to use all of the items in this iFat, it's not the bleed, and it is free. And that is where everyone should start.

And they're not going to teach you how to use all the things. So if we bust open the bag that you got, Daniel quickly, it's over stuffed. There's a lot of things in there. Yeah, a lot of ice and things. I mean, literally, like, there is a pouch of emergency drinking water. Oh, yeah. Wow. There is a, which I'm gonna call it,

a bright stick, like a little light stick. There is about, which I'm gonna call it, a bright stick, like a little light stick. There is about a hundred different kinds of, which I'm gonna call it, like look at this literal, just like pile of band-aids, just like hundreds of band-aids and alcohol wipes and oh, there's a whistle. Yeah. A whistle, should you get lost in the wilderness? Mm-hmm. This is a very handy and urban overall disaster.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, for this. I don't think any of this stuff is necessarily bad. It's just there's just way too much. There's gauze pads. There is this ABD pad, sterile, extra absorbent pad. Yep. That, you know, I don't think it's going to do what it needs to do, but there's a shit ton of gauze in here.

And there are, look at, you wanna talk about things to cut open, you were talking about clothing scissors. Yeah. These little guys are, I don't think are gonna do that. No, that could terminate your tape and stuff. Exactly, trimming tape. There's also tweezers in here.

It's not really, this feels like for people who are in the wilderness and they get a splinter. Yeah, yeah. And that's stuff super handy to have in your truck or your car or your bike. Motorcycle guys and this is a great thing. I'm the first aid kit. Yes. Yeah. It's not going to immediately stop you from dying from loss of blood, which is what we're

concerned with. No. If you do ride a motorcycle, you really want to fucking have one. Totally. I ride a bicycle and I have seen some motor vehicle accidents and I'm just going to say motorcycle folks ought to have that. Someone else can grab it off your motorbike and use it if you've heard yourself. Sure. Nick, I've seen that happen before.

So, yeah, that stuff is all very handy. It's all very nice. It can make you feel better, right? Like, I imagine there's a ton of ibuprofen and paracetamol and benadryl. That stuff is great. That stuff's super handy, right? Another thing I would add is some of that stuff can be life-saving. If you have an allergy, you need to take something for that. Put that in your first aid kit because that's particular to you.

If you need an epipen, then have your epi pen, of course, right? You know, I'm sure you do anyway. If you have diabetes, have your glucagones from sugar. And all of that stuff is, of course, important. But in terms of like dealing with what we perceive to be an increased risk of like homophobic violence, which normally manifests itself as people getting shot in this country, then the little scissors and the ABD pad, the band-aid aren't what we need, and they're just going to get in the way. So even if you have those, great, keep them in the car. I gave tons of people band-aid because they got blisters in 2020, right?

Because people are not familiar with walking out fire, their boots, people decided to wear heavy boots because they were worried. All understandable things. It's a lot of band-aid, a lot of horseshoe plaster, sort of, you know, like second skin. Great. I'm happy to give you one of those things. I'll keep in a different pocket that, right? So I'm not just, you know, sorting plaster blister plaster, there's someone's been shot. And that's a good tip, regardless of what you're doing, what you're even if you're doing,

you're bringing more stuff from walking. But that's great, aspirin. I bet people need that sometimes. So ibuprofen if their knees hurting from walking a lot. Great, pound that shit. But like, that's not what we want. We don't want to be administering medicines really. It's certainly if we're not trying to do so

after a trauma thing, because some of the pain medicines we might be taking might inhibit blood clotting, right? So we don't want to be doing that before that person goes on to a higher standard care. It's gonna fucking suck for them, but the best you can do is stop that person dying or help someone else who's qualified to do that

by just saying, hey, I have this stuff. And it's all pretty compact, you know, like it's, it's, you know, the size of a paperback book, decent sized paperback book, something like that. And having it, may or may not be, hopefully, right, you just buy this thing and it sits around for a while. And eventually, if you've been having the tourniquet in the sun for years and years, you want to replace it, the UV can cause them to decay. You can just put them inside a pouch. I've made all kinds of pouches for them. You can buy an expensive one on the internet or you can just use a piece, so a piece of nylon, which is what I do. The two rubber bands and put it inside your waistband of your thing. I think the two rubber bands and put it inside your waist band of your thing. Many, many such solutions exist.

But yeah, I would encourage everyone, I think I've said it's about 28 times, to get training and not just to just go and do this. If you can't access that training straight away and you want to get the stuff where you look for training, that's fine, just don't be doing stuff. You don't know how to do because, you do because someone might confuse out for someone who is qualified and is helping. And then if you don't know what you're doing and you make a mistake and that could be worse than someone, if someone comes in and they're doing triage right there saying,

who do we need to treat now? Who do we need to treat later? Who can't we help then? And they see you doing that. Okay. That person's covered. You want to be sure that you're covering what you're doing. So, yeah, just make sure you get the training. We're not trying to scare you into not going to things. Please don't feel afraid.

I know it's very easy to feel afraid. That's of course, the goal of, you know, most of these people that ask is welded to their gaming chair and they will never actually come into the streets and hurt you. They just say stuff on twitter.com. Like, you're fine. But it's very reasonable to be prudent. And certainly, this stuff I have in my truck, I have it in my bag, I have it in most places I go. And you know, you get used to it, it's fine. And take it of course, and I'm a work trips and I try and leave lots of it with my colleagues who can't access it so easily in other countries. So yeah, I hope that's helpful. It's peace of mind. It's peace of mind. Yeah, it is. It's it's it's and look, I guess just to wrap up like you are not

I don't watch television really. Hul, what's Hugh Laurie's deal? House. Oh, house? Yeah, other super doctorate like you can't heal every one. Bad things happen. But there's just peace of mind and trying to do your best to help everyone. And that's relatively accessible and not too expensive. I think there's an iFact fund which gives you the way for free as well. So cool. That's worth looking into. And if that's if someone can find that,

they can send it to me and I will post it. But yeah, it's peace of mind and it's not too hard to get that training. So go out there and do that. Wonderful. Do it with someone you love. Do it for fun. Do it with your friend.

Make it do it, go on a date. Yeah. Find someone on Tinder. Find some on Tinder. Yeah, do it. Yeah, do it, go on a date. Yeah. Find someone on Tinder. Yeah, first date. Yeah, do it. Let us know how that goes. Hey, what's your favorite color? So what are you doing this weekend?

Want to do a stop the bleed course? I think that's very sexy. I would. I'd 100% be into that. Exactly. Yeah. No. Please don't DM me with potential stop the bleed.

No, do not do not do. Do not DM James. No, don't do it. But do not do not do James. No, no, no, don't do it. But yeah, hopefully that helps people. Wonderful. Well, James, thank you so much for this awesome information. It's been an absolute pleasure being on the show with you. Yeah, that was lovely.

And we'll post links on the chat or post sorry post link. Yeah, the chat that we have with all of our listeners. Exactly, that's that's have with a lot of listeners. Oh my gosh. Exactly. That's my Twitch shit coming through. We'll post links in the description of the episode. And yeah, I look forward to doing this again with you. Yeah, Donald, talking of your Twitch shit, where can people find you? Oh, a Twitch shit.

They don't need to find me anywhere. But if you want to find me, you can find me at Twitch.tv-dj underscore dannel d a n l and If you want to come ask me what Robert smells like I will not ban you But I will time you out for 10 minutes So you know just you know know that I'm happy to have whoever wants to come watch the watch the twitch stream But um, I'm not gonna answer any weird questions about my co-workers As he should be Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, James. In the podcast, Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an alphabetsuit

with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for C.A. But I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say,

can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not specified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel. Who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We've spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon

civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to moms Thanksgiving

to wrestling. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good, because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me. As I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs

about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Does this podcast come with a therapist? Ha, ha, ha, he can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, Today's podcast come with a therapist. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha a podcast where by attempt to do a British accent, spend overwritten by Robert Boston accent, because I can't get it out of my head.

I... This is the podcast where we treat Britain with the level of respect that it deserves. You're getting this shit right now because the entire rest of this episode is going to be unbelievably depressing. Oh, wow, Mia, that's such a good accent. I believe you're one of my authentic countrymen.

Wow, it's so good to chat to another fellow Brit. It would be, it would be selfie from Mars, who does many things, including things. Wow, I'm getting impressions of Americans doing impressions of rich people. One of my favorite impressions to do. Oh God, you know, this is being recorded. It is being recorded at like a Geneva convention crime time for podcasts. So it's going great. It's going great. I have consumed so much caffeine that I have seen the face of God. Yeah, but Sophie, welcome to the show. And I wish it was for something that was not this bullshit, but.

Yeah, this is pretty grim. Yeah, so what specifically is this bullshit? Right, yeah. The government of the United Kingdom, despite its reputation as Turf Island, has been kind of falling behind the US in terms of like actual ability to use the state to discriminate and get trans people killed. And having seen this, Risi Sunak was like,

oh shit, hold on. And has now compelled the British state to take a series of steps that we would include like doing mandatory outing of trans kids to their parents and schools. Yeah. Well, it's still quite tough, Islandy, right? Because it's like, yeah. This has always been the comparison between British transphobia and American transphobia. Your guys are all like, you're going to hell on out.

I'm gonna make sure you personally get there with my shotgun. And our guys are like, bloody hell, that's not right. Do you have a license for that gender? You really shouldn't be walking around in public without proper registration for all of your genders,

you're carrying their mom. And that's, you know, like, so in that regard, we're still very much tough island. Like, the, uh, you've got, you've got bills coming through that like invalidate other existing, you know, I mean, I'm talking myself in circles already because we, even this legislation also invalidates existing legislation because bigots can't write laws that make any sense, whatsoever. But yeah, I think, I mean, this is still using

like my numbing bureaucracy to enforce horrible bigotry. So in that sense, it's still very on brand for the British government. Yeah, so, okay, can we walk you a little bit of like what specifically it does? Because this is one of the, this is my, what, what are the canners that I've been on? Is that most of like 99% of the people who cover this stuff are really, really bad at actually like saying what a law says because,

oh, God. Yeah. Sure, sure, sure. So the first thing is about changing names, uniforms, and what pronouns are used for a student, they're making it so this can't be done without parental consent. It should also be said that all of this is guidance, like they're putting out guidance to schools, and so when I said earlier that this is in conflict with existing legislation, we have the Equalities Act, which should actually protect against, basically everything that they've said here, they don't care. If the government puts out guidance, legislation like we have the Equality's Act which should actually protect against basically everything that they've said here they don't care.

If the government puts out guidance it's as ever with fascism like they're deploying stochastic methods they want to embolden people who would already be looking for any excuse to be shipped to trans kids to be able to do it even though it would actually break the law. Yeah, so that's my thing.

So my understanding of this is it's closer to the kind of thing you get in the US where like, sometimes you have a state of attorney general will just like issue an interpretation of a ruling. So it's like that is my understanding of it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it's guidance, all the guidance that they've given out would actually break the equality's act. They don't care. So point one, no pronoun or uniform change without parental consent, point two, no hiding any changes from parents. So if a kid is like, hey, you singular member of staff that I trust, the only adult that I know who I feel like could possibly keep me safe. My parents are violently queer phobic and I think that if I come out to them I might be in danger.

Please help me. The guidance is telling them no you should definitely tell those those horrible parents. No matter how dangerous how much of a danger the child is telling you that they're in. Head can say no to protect other kids. Now this is a really interesting point that we'll have to come back to because headmasters in the UK, there's a whole class thing going on there that we should talk about. But yeah, so the head teacher of the school can say no to protect other kids. So explicitly the justification is that kids being out. It's not even the justification that a kid coming out of trans would be dangerous to them because they might get bullied. It could be

dangerous to other kids. So it's. And any kids, gender questioning, or just generally, any kid trans in any way, basically is just being kicked out of competitive sports in schools. Yeah, which is interesting, because it's a kind of like smorgasbord of a bunch of the... Well, okay, the preventing kids from coming out

because it might cause other kids to come out thing is like, I think that's genuinely new. I've never seen that one before. But the rest of it, I think, is like, you know, there's been, we've talked about this on the show, like there's been legislation in the US that has forced, that has forced schools to out kids. Yeah. Yeah.

And obviously the sports bands are, you know, sort of like, I've pretty kind of like, erred, like, erred transphobic panic thing. Yeah, absolutely. All the biological advantage and all of this nonsense, which is like, you know, you could argue as one thing when you're talking about like a bodybuilder who a body builder who has been a body builder for 20 years and is now just starting to take estrogen and blah blah blah about biological advantage but when you're talking about like two 12 year olds, it's like, where's the by-law? I don't know which one I'm betting on. You know, this is a thing. I think there's a kind of specific...

I think part of the business a kind of like specific like, like I think part of the business work in the US was like, there's a very specific kind of sports brain that Americans have where like, like there are like people, people are really obsessed with high school sports and also calling sports. Yeah.

And I think I think that played a role in part of like how, how this played out because people were like you know people are People are like very very Concerned about this Like why on earth they care about college football is right Well, I mean I'm sorry not in control, but like like high school football. It's like this is like yeah, but why wait sure Okay, whatever we built like a national cult around watching like 17 year old just show each is like yeah, but why wait sure okay whatever we've built like a national cult around watching like 17 year old just show each other's brains, but Jim really like you. Yeah, no, it's

what like what's what like it's like the only the only sports we really we really care about aeropian football, you know, our football and like I just I just, I, it should be said, there's also a kind of creepy, uh, uh, cult of youth thing going on with our football. It's like, we don't, we don't, uh, have the, you know, grown men screaming and crying, watching, um, watching high schoolers and, um, university level, uh, athletes, uh, uh, go against each other, but like there are, you know, it's seen as, um, you know, equivalent to the draft as like an opportunity for walking class kids to get out of their situation is like, maybe you'll be a football star. Yeah, so the thing with opportunities to, yeah, exactly.

Like opportunities to prove that you're the next Ronaldo or whatever, um, all through our society. But yeah, like, um, I don't know, it would be, it would be, like, a lot of, a lot of English people suddenly very invested in lots of sports they never cared about before, when like football has been the only one they cared about their entire life, and they're like, yeah, what about the biological differences? And I'm like, my guy, the, the place that this would impact you is in, is in, is in professional football, and even supposing a trans woman were to get up into like the professional competitive level of women's football

You don't watch the women's football, but even if you did like there are already constantly like in the analyses of games people are constantly like you know this player is Really fast or whatever so we know that the the the posing is going to make a concerted effort to try and block them off specifically. I'm just waiting for when a women's football team at the professional level brings a trans woman on as a deliberate distraction. So that she can look like she's going to try and get the ball half of the opposing team try to block her off and then the rest of the team just go and score a goal. No, I want to take it back to say something I've been meaning to say, which is quite serious. You and I are both trans, but not like we want out as trans as kids.

And I do think it's really important to acknowledge that when we're having conversations about trans kids, because in my exposure to trans kids and also chatting with trans people, I know who were out as kids, there's just a repeated frustration over and over again of just like even the most well-meaning adults who are trying to talk about this, and I'm saying that may will be us. Are still talking for these kids. And so it's an incredibly dispossessing and paralyzing position. And obviously, children are one of the groups in our society with absolutely the least agency and constantly talked over and had decisions made for them. And you can make arguments about how just that is. But we all recognize that

there are plenty of cases where kids should be able to tell adults what's going on with them and adults ignore them. And then this is a really clear case of that. And so I have been talking to in preparation for coming on to do this interview. I've been talking to people I know who work kids who are out and also talking to people I know who work with with trans kids just so that like just so that what I'm presenting is not just like my kind of my broad feelings about how it might be you know. Yeah. But yeah, I want to talk about the head teachers thing. Head teachers can can say no to protect other kids Is a really fascinating part of this. Sorry, can we back up? What actually is, so what actually is a head teacher

because we don't have this in the US? That is exactly what I'm trying to add. Yeah, so okay. So how, well let me ask this, how does someone become a principal in your system? I, I, actually that's a good question. I, I, I think they get hired by the school basically. Actually, that's a good question. I think they get hired by the school basically, but it's, I don't know if they're,

that actually is a good question. I feel like I should do this. Okay, and I don't. I don't think that's a good question. I'm just kind of teach a become a principle because he, again, in the framework of youth liberation, in the same way as we might say A-CAB, you might point out that teachers are people put in a systemic position to often deny kids agency, but it's not quite as clear-cut as A-CAB. Teachers are fucking great and big-up teachers

unions and tons of teachers are both like massively underpaid and feeling the cost of living crisis really hard, and also pretty based people. Head teachers on the other hand, a different school of fish entirely. Like they have different unions, they have a different social life, they have a different class characteristic,

because like head teachers are paid so much more than teachers. And yeah, they're also like administrative. I don't know if like headteachers are paid so much more than teachers. Yeah, they're also administrative. I don't know if headteachers need to have even ever actually taught, but they're generally really comfortable, very well paid, and they are there to do a lot of administrative stuff, and often they're quite political. So specifically giving the power to say no to whether a kid comes out or not to the head

teacher is like, that feels very, very deliberate on the whole part of the Tory government, right? Because that's not like your form tutor or whichever preferred teacher that you have lots of classes with, your English teacher or whatever, like someone who sees you maybe most days. It's this person who's like a figurehead to the school who has no personal relationship to you whatsoever is being given this, yeah, this ability to just deny your transition. And that's utterly, utterly fucked. And like I'm saying, it's a very conscious like class move, a class based move in this guidance, utterly fucked. And like I'm saying, it's a very conscious, like, class move, a class-based move in this guidance, I think.

Yeah, I mean, it really seems like they had to, you know, it seemed like a thing where the Tory government realized they couldn't rely just on regular teachers to act as gender bureaucrats. They had to find someone who is like even like who has just no social attachment or social relations to like the actual kid who's trying to transition. Because you know, like it is genuinely like, I don't know, but most like as as like as shit as teachers

can be like generally speaking, like your teacher does not want to torture their kids. Like that's like, that's not a thing that they want to do. And I don't wanna leave it unsaid. Like I've been through the UK education system. I've encountered some teachers who definitely just want to torture their kids. Yeah, but like, but like, again,

most teachers are actually pretty good. And like, genuinely concerned with not only what the safeguarding rules say and what the protocols are, but actually the moral duty of taking care of kids and making sure they're actually safe. Now, that still can have problems. So, like, one person that I talked to, one of my friends who was out when she was really quite young, she had like a teaching assistant. So when kids are like struggling in school and they need extra help with their school work, sometimes like some lessons or topics are deemed as kind of, like, less necessary for them. Let's say maybe it's like their religious education

lessons or whatever, right? So they get to skip those ones and then they go and do, like, I think you might call them remedial classes or whatever, like they're doing extra stuff to make sure that they- Sober classes. They can get the basic, yeah, but it's within the school hours. Oh, that's interesting. So it's like, they'll sort of say, you don't need to bother with this one, we'll go and do these classes instead

to make sure that you can get a passing grade in English. And so that's a person like a kid like that will have the most developed relationship to, because firstly, they are in every class that they set through, and they also do special classes that is just one-on-one between the care and that teaching assistant. So my friend said that she had like, she'd come out to this teaching assistant and the TA made it really clear that like she would have to sort of escalate this, like she would have to try to talk to more people about this situation

and probably talk to her parents. And because of that, she sort of took it back, stopped talking about it, wouldn't go any further away, and didn't come out to more people for really long, like, for years after that point. And so, you know, like, you can already see that's an impact that, like, that this will have more directly, because that's, impact, that this will have more directly, because that situation is being described as the ideal outcome basically in some of this guidance. But I think also it's important to acknowledge that we can imagine a best case scenario in my friend's story from however long ago

that maybe that TA talks to other teachers who understand and those teachers automatically think like all her parents going to be understanding can we approach this in a way that gives her space can we get her in touch with maybe like people who do youth work with queer kids to like give her a venue to discuss this stuff without having to alert her parents. Now, so and we can imagine that best case scenario. I mean like the impact immediately like like I say, was that she didn't come out for a long time.

But that best case scenario is effectively eliminated if the guidance is just like, you have to tell the parents. The parents absolutely definitely must know. And I think the thing as well about not keeping anything secret from parents, I'm gonna just say what does it say? No hiding changes from parents. Is I think that like, that's a guidance that's pointing not just towards like the administrative part,

like you're saying with what seems more in the jurisdiction of Agenda bureaucrat, like if a kid says I'd like to change my name on the class register, but like if a teacher knows that the kids are using a different name and pronouns with their friends, right? Anyway, besides all of that, like, again, if we're imagining that best case scenario, like this thing about the head teacher can decide

that their transition would be a danger to other kids, like that's so above and beyond, like that's the bit of this guidance that I find to be probably the most utterly morally reprehensible. Because I think that a lot of trans kids are already familiar with how the pre-existing safeguarding systems could cause them all these problems. But this is a new thing. It's just like on top of all of that stuff, even if you do

have support and things are relatively okay for you, apparently the head teacher can just decide that you're not allowed to. And that's utterly utterly insane to me. I have another friend who was out when he was younger, he knew from a very young age, he actually was lucky enough to have supportive parents. And so he was able to come out to people and come out to his parents. But even with supportive parents, like he, like, that there was still massive pushback from the school, which is like,

you know, again, like, it seems utterly ridiculous if you've got both the kids saying, very clearly, I know for sure this sort of ideal is. And like we have additional hindsight here that he's very happy with himself now and has been, you know, living his authentic life for, you know, however many years, but like, but, you know, all the support around him at the time and the school still says no. They're just, yeah, the head teacher thing is actively pushing that even harder.

And I just find that, yeah, just awful. Yeah. You know what else is awful? Living under capitalism and being bombarded with adverts for products and services. But the products and services themselves, that great, isn't that right, Mia? Yeah, yeah.

I am legally contractually required to not disparage the products and services that support this podcast. This broadcast brought to you by Opengate. Wow. And we're back. Hopefully several more billionaires have been panchated at the bottom of the sea. Yeah. I'm so glad so many billionaires listened to it could happen here and took that. That juicy limited time offer to only pay $200,000 for a ticket on the next submissible.

Yeah. Like following up from what I was just saying about my friend who was out when he was a kid and had supportive parents, he also highlighted to me how it impacted his medical transition at the time as well because a lot of medical systems for transition and this true in the UK use some degree of like social transition as a requirement to prescribe any kind of medical transition. And so if you're a kid and you know for sure this is your deal and you want to avoid the traumas of going through the wrong puberty, which obviously is just like absolutely horrifying, then you need to be out and have the support of everyone around you, right? And that means like not only you need to be able to

evidence like yeah it's going well at school and not being bullied for being trans at all which okay yeah like hopefully not. And I have supportive parents my all my grandparents know as well and they're all on board or whatever like but like if a school can just say no to a kid coming out, that's like that denies such a huge part of the social transition, which will then stop them from being able to medically transition. And like I'm just you know, maybe cis people need to spelling out, so I'll just say it like if you can't so if you can't medically transition, you're less likely to be well accepted in your social transition.

So there's a really deliberate like catch 22 of if you you know of stopping someone's social transition and therefore stopping their medical transition and therefore, right It's just it's just trying to stop trans people existing altogether Yeah, and I mean I think it's sort of particularly grim in the UK system where you like it's way harder to well, okay. Outside of the places where it's been made increasingly illegal in the US, it is way, way harder to get like to just to get gender, from a care in the UK. And it requires a lot of bullshit that like you don't have in the US, and it's much, much more like pathologized,

which is kind of insane, because it's pretty pathologizing the US too, but the UK has cranked up the gender bureaucracy level to like, they found the one that goes to 11 and we're like, fuck this shit, we're just these like 200 more dials. Yeah, it's all, it's looking at our country, you might be led to the idea that we've been practicing bureaucracy based fascism for hundreds of years already and gotten it down

to the the science. And well, that's a conclusion you could draw. Yeah, I was going to say as well, like, we talked last time I was on about, like, why is the UK like this in general? And I think that it's worth putting this into, this puzzle piece into a broader picture, right? Like, we've just had a national story about a woman who is being prosecuted for having an abortion later than the allowed limits in British law,

which is obviously the beginning of the right wing trying to push back on abortion. At the same time, like a few weeks ago here, Americans probably haven't heard about it, but there was a place in London called the Autonomous Winter Shelter. So this was some anarchists who, some of whom I think we've interviewed on Red Planet before, who go kind of place to place and they squat on occupied buildings and they turn them into various things. But one thing they've repeatedly done is during winter periods turn them into homeless shelters,

but they run as autonomous shelters. And basically, it got to the spring and they still hadn't moved out of this place, because I mean, there were still homeless people that they wanted to help. And so the Metropolitan Police, London's finest, sent down dozens of pigs in riot gear to forcibly like evict them. And I just think that like, it's really, it's just really important to see the premise that like states are aware that they are policing the collapse, right? We'll be very familiar to your audience. But I think there's the specific context of Fortress Europe going on with Britain, because even though Britain has Brexit itself out, we still have a lot of the same concerns

in right-wing politics that drive the thinking of Fortress Europe. And so a lot of our, for instance, immigration stuff is increasingly draconian and fashy. And I just think that putting these three pieces together, we can kind of see a bit of what's going on the government actively trying to to clamp down on people's bodily autonomy uh... trying to stop any other kind of gender expression

being in place and also trying to like stop people from doing uh... mutual aid in organizing that will lessen the impact of uh... of of the collapse yeah and well i i think it's a very deliberately you knowen the impact of the collapse. Yeah, and I think it's a very deliberately. One of the things that I think is very common, across the broad historical sweep of movement is, well, the number one thing you do, when there's a massive social movement going on,

you need to stop it. The sort of most dramatic thing you do is you start a war. So for example, the American movements of the 60s are immediately followed by the massive intensification of Vietnam. I think the most blatant example that I could think of is in 2006 in Mexico, you have simultaneously this massive zapatista campaign, you have Omelow, basically declaring,

well, there's a contested election in Omelow, like declares himself president, even though technically lost the election. And then simultaneously, the city of Wohaka does an uprising and take control of the city. And they hold the city for like a hundred days. And basically immediately after, like so the Mexican army gets deployed and like takes back the city. And immediately after the like the full on entrance of the

Mexican army into the war on drug starts. And this is like this is a very, very common social pattern right of the way the way you defeat, you know, I'll be just literally like straight up uprisings is by doing like one is is by doing a war. The second thing you can do is you start you, you, you, you, you pivot away from the social issues that are like that sort of your mass protests, your uprisings are about. And you go back into domestic politics and you go back into social reproduction, you attack them there. So, you know, I mean, like it like China has a good example of this of like all of this sort of like discontent that had been boiling around the revolution and around, you know, like things

around like things about gender roles, which was, you know, like actually genuinely happening at that time, all of the sort of upheaval is capped off by the one child policy. Yes. Or if you know, we go back to the US for a second, right? We have 2020, we have this massive uprising immediately after the uprising, we get all of the anti-transit intensifies so unbelievably enormously, right? Yeah, and this is incredibly deliberate in a lot of ways. It's very, very concrete attempt to reassert sort of patriarchal and cisgender control over people, over sort of families,

over sort of society writ large. That was part of my point is that is how we can see what the British state is up to very, very clearly. Like they are trying to create a more rigid control in their population. And you know, this is why I mean, like, calling it tough island, but like a lot of toughs will pretend that they, you know, will fight for abortion right. So whatever, actually there was a protest to do with the, to do with that abortion

case I mentioned the other day and a bunch of anarchists and trans people showed up. And there were also some people from women's place who is a turf organization. Obviously, they were trying to box them out and be like, piss off, you don't belong here. like they were trying to like box them out and be like, piss off, you're doing belong here. And then like a far right preacher showed up with like anti-abortion stuff and a megaphone and trying to like, and so obviously like all of the trans activists, the authentic leftists like started

like getting in that guy's way and ruining his day and making it so he couldn't do any of his stuff. And obviously the turf stone character, like they're not not yeah, they're not there to actually fight against anything But you know especially so when you when you look at that bigger picture like I say it's just like If you're looking at the bigger picture you can tell there is no There there is no divide between like the bodily autonomy of cis women and for that matter transmasking non-binary people who are a scientific male at birth and trans rights.

There's no conflict at all. It's the state is trying to crack down on bodily autonomy, on a gender expressionist part of a bigger project of implementing more authoritarianism. I guess there's a feeling I keep on running against recently, which is just like waiting for the desperate leftist causes to kind of realize and act like all of this stuff is one side. Because from the states point of view, as you're saying, starting a war, tightening immigration policies, restricting abortion, cracking down on queer people, all of these are from the States point of view methods within

methods in their toolbox to achieve one greater goal. I think that we need, well, to say we need class consciousness, it seems too obvious to say even, but we need class consciousness would be, you know, it just seems too obvious to say even, but like we do. We need a consciousness of the fact that like these issues affect everyone, even if it seems like it doesn't affect you in your everyday life, you know, if you were a cis-hat white man who is a self-employed adult, utterly libertarian steel man, you don't depend on anyone, like it is still going to affect you because it is the state gaining more power over everybody by doing these things.

One thing I wanted to say also about the kids who I've gotten some feedback from was like there is a big mood among trans kids that they've been told that things were going to be getting better. When I said that story about my friend who had the teaching assistant, she said that for her growing up it was absolutely nightmarish and the bullying was really intense and the support for adults was non-existent. And then there was a little window where people started to become more aware of trans people and and from the liberal side and all of the like corporate pink washing and whatever and it seemed like a broad like culture of acceptance is being brought in and

Now it feels like that's being revoked, but like you know, I mean how she put it was like she she feels like it's just sort of Backed in normal because like that's what she already grew up with, but like I But we have to think about it from the point of view of kids who are trying to exist as trans kids right now. They have been told by liberals that things are getting better. We're aware of trans people now. We're going to fight for trans rights. And it's very clear that they're not getting better. that they're not getting better. I just want to say two trans kids who might hear this, might get any of this sentiment

that I completely feel it myself, having come out at the tail end of Liberals being like, yeah, we love Trannies, sorry, Donald. Having come out right at the tail end of that, now shit's getting unbelievably bleak. I also feel that. I guess it's the saying about, let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair, because I, from where I'm looking around myself, as an adult, politically active and engaged adult, like there aren't any answers in the left liberal, so multicultural and accepting kind of space. That's entirely dependent on profit,

and Target is emptying all the fried stuff out of their stores now. Capital does not care for the queers, but we can care for each other. I think it's really important to say that finding queer community is really important. But that's obviously true, but also queer community being class conscious and radical and organized are also really, really important. I am seeing that. I do want to say, in covering this obviously really grim situation that's being enforced,

that we're not just sitting by and letting it happen. It's just that we are, as leftists, we're always this tiny radical fringe for the time being. And so we're doing what we can. I just don't want trans kids to feel like there are absolutely no adults who are in the Venn diagram of, like, understanding how fucked this is and actually having a proportional idea of the solutions that are necessary. Now, we're not also, unfortunately, none of us are currently

in the third Venn diagram circle of having the power to stop it yet, but we're doing everything that we can for the time being, right? Yeah, well, there's something that's important to think about with this too, is the reason this is happening is it like is, is because like there was actually a period of time when we were winning, right? And that's not particularly true in the US, but I mean, I think it's still also true in the UK, right? Like, like the reason there had to be a backlash like this was because like things worked, you know, for a brief amount of time getting better, but even with how bad it is now,

even with how bad it's getting, it's always like, being a leftist is always hard to sort of make these kind of libeltyleological, like the moral arc of the universe, like Ben Sourcesters arguments, but we are going to beat them. It will take time, it will take an enormous amount of struggle, but we are going to beat them. It will take time, it will take an enormous amount of struggle, but we are going to.

And, you know, and like, and I think that's something that is very, very, very important. Like, this is not hopeless. Like, it is not. It is simply not. We have already achieved in one thing that like our forefathers fucking only dreamed of, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And we are going to full mothers and sisters. Full mothers, yeah, that too. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think I completely agree. And I want to like double down on what I'm saying about the liberals, the like the liberal promise that you've been given of acceptance within like their

framework, that like Hillary Clinton will stand up and say, she loves trans rights. Yes, that one was a lie. That was fucked. That was bullshit. Liberals lie. I hope that you have already figured this out because I believe kids are smart enough to figure this out because Liberals love to lie. But in terms of it getting better, it will, even if the way that it gets better is that we break free, is only in breaking free of these systems. I am not going to make any promises that the society that we live in as it is now is going to come back around and will have trans people treated the way that

the gay people were treated in the year 2000. That one maybe, but I'm not holding my breath for it, but it will get better one way or another, and it may well be the way it gets better is that we have and it may well be the way it gets better is that we have stronger and more radical communities of mutual aid and care and those of the spaces where it's safe and good for trans people and possible for us to strive. Yeah, and I think this is something that, like part, you know, if you look back as sort of how the history of like, like if you look, if you look at just like the history

of sort of like gay rights, right? Like a big part of what that looked like that has been sort of, you know, just like wiped from the sort of public memory, right? Like the stuff people remember of, you know, just like wiped from the sort of public memory, right? Like the stuff people remember is, you know, the sort of like really flashy activist stuff. But a huge part of what that looked like was just, you know, I have a couch, right? You can sleep here, like, we will take care of you. We will, like, we will feed you.

We will take care of you, we will feed you, we will take care of you emotionally. And, you know, as bad as that shit was, they were, you know, as many people as we lost, like, there are so, so many people who are, you know, like alive and thriving and, you know, living authentic with themselves and are, you know, like, like genuinely, like are genuinely just having a good time. Because, yeah, that's my live reality right now.

I have so many friends in the quick community who are housing insecure, who don't have jobs or whatever, and we have each other. Like I think I got this butcher I've been dating went to an event for like working class butchers the other day. She came back with some pins and she was like, do you want any of these? And I picked out this one that says,

we are dikes and all we have is each other. Because that is like in the like, dyke community that I'm in, like that's so incredibly true. And we have each other's backs. And like, yeah, like it will continue to be true that we're taking care of each other's backs. And like, yeah, it will continue to be true that we're taking care of each other. I guess it's been already for me for years now.

The thing to get angry about is how many people we will lose in the meantime. Because if you were gay in 1979 or whatever, and you were about to go into the AIDS epidemic. It just, you may even then have had a sense. I think a lot of people didn't, but we have hindsight to know that things turned out, quote unquote, OK, in the end. But so many people will last in the meantime.

And for me, that's the thing I'm angry about is just like, how tedious this liberal bullshit is of enacting this like staged fuss of like, escape goting bigotry, in order to like control the population, in order to divide the working class with this bigotry. And like at some point we will we will move past it and things will be more chill and like trans people will not be the ones with the with the crosshairs on us either be either because we have abolished and smashed the crosshairs or simply because they've moved on and I'm just angry about

how many people will be lost at the end time. Yeah. Yeah. I think I said something we should circle back to in terms of sort of the immediate school regulations is like, you know, okay, so the people who are making these laws know this, but like a lot of the trans people who are killed are killed by their parents. That is a very, very common way for trans people to die. Yes, you come out to your parents and your parents kill you. Yeah. And that is fucking bleak as shit. And again, like these people know this,

like there is a recently a recording of Rishi Sunak, just like, like, just, you know, okay, so the thing about sort of, you know, this has been changing in the US now because we've gotten to a point where like, right when people can just like say slurs and it's, you know, publicly, publicly such, but for like, for like a long time, you like say sl say slurs and Daniel bleeps them. That's fucking crazy to me. You know, I'm, look at the censorship I'm dealing with is what I'm saying. You know, I, I say, Tranny, I say, Faggot, I say, Dijk and Dannels, they're just ruling with an iron fist. What's, what's up with that?

It would be very funny if it just none of this was censored at all. Just like, no, yeah, but like but like, you know, there's a recording of Rishi Soonak, like just like actually saying the shit, like, like actually just saying like the really sort of bofurt anti-trans shit that he believes, like in private. Yeah. And like, yeah, like that, that's like these people like want to hurt us. Like that is that is that is that there's something that's incredibly clear based on both. They're sort of what they say in private and what they do in public.

Yeah. And, you know, fuck them. Uh, yeah, Barry Rishi, Sunaq in the submarine. Uh, get it, get it, get it, get it. Get in the fucking contraption. Godspeed's number submarine and critical support to comrade orca. We will deal with Sunaik.

I'm speaking on behalf of the ocean. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what to say about it because again, like I was not out as trans as a kid, I don't want to give empty assurances to people who are going through something that I did not go through. The we didn't, did not go through, but I do want to say that like, as for, and it gets better, like, we care for each other, and we will continue to have each other's backs. I've been reading a lot of, I've been reading a homo-saccer by Georgi Oganbin

for a little while now, about the class of, whichever in whatever society you're talking about, like class of people who are treated as the exception from the model of the state, like the people who are treated like it wouldn't matter if someone killed them. And it's obviously hitting close to home because that's the point of the book, right? And I don't know, it's given me a lot of pause

for thought over this kind of stuff that we have each other. It does immediately give you a perspective that invalidates all of the all of the apparatus of the state because it's all like, wow, that's a nice world you got over there. I'm just not part of it. I'm just not welcome in it. But it's a but the bit where I can, it's great. It does. It works incredibly fucking hard. It might be like irresponsible to discuss in too much detail, but it does web, actually. But like, yeah, as much as like kind of explicitly, intentionally like separatist arguments

are frowned upon. And I think for good reason, like, having each other's backs when the rest of society does not is necessary, and it is what we, because it's necessary, it is what we're doing. Yeah, well, I will say to you, like, you know, as much as there are a lot of cis people who suck, there are a lot of cis people who will have her back and who will fight for you. And yeah, and like, and that, and that, and I think I think part of, like I think part of the, what, what this stuff is about too, right?

Like is, like part of the culture of fear and the culture of terror that all of the stuff is supposed to bring it to being is to make it harder for, there's this sort of obvious one of like, okay, you wanna force trans people back into the closet, you wanna wipe with existence. But simultaneously, it is also trying to isolate trans people from cis people who will support them.

Sure. And it's effective at that, right? But simultaneously, actually working together, we are unstoppable, and that's the reason they're doing all of this shit. Yes. Because they have to make sure that it doesn't happen. Yeah. And I think as well, it might be, this is one side of it would might feel like the uniquely queer side

of the divide and conquer experience. Because when we say there are so many more of us than there are of them, we're talking about the working class or we're talking about human beings around the planet as opposed to the ruling class or we're talking about like people of color as opposed to white people or whatever, but for queer people, it's like we're very conscious

that we're actually factually a minority of the population. But yeah, me is right. There are cis people who care. There are cis people who authentically care and authentically at the very least want to offer support. One thing that I'd say we're working on like showing cis people the avenues because the channels of support that they can go through because when yeah, because like, yeah, that is the thing about the cis ally as they may care with their entire bleeding heart, but they're not

going to come up with, they're usually not going to come up with the way to help themselves and they so they often need to be pointed like, big neon flashing sign. Here's how you help, here's how you help. Yeah, so you have to guide them, you have to guide them this all of the power of the proletariat in the retraction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To that effect, in lieu of just telling your audience

to, you know, form bonds of solidarity and mutual aid with the queer community in the UK, which like, guys, please, you can check out the Good Law Project in the UK. They do a lot of really important legal work. I've already been doing a lot of important legal battles to try to turn back this tide of anti-trans legislation and court rulings and so on. And they the accept donations to, to like specifically to their fund that relates to trans cases. So you can, if you're a cis ally and listening to this and you have some spare cash, you can

go look up the Good Law Project and donate to help the legal fight at least. Because again, this guidance is actually against the law, as it stands. So I don't know that the Good Law Project has announced a fight to stop it yet, but I imagine that they will do something of some kind sometime soon. And yeah, I mean more support to them will only help. Yeah, and speaking of more support, where can people find you? Well, I'm Sophie from Oz. I have a video essay channel on YouTube. That's my main gig. I have just now nearly finished my project. The world is not ending, which is about go figure, the climate collapse, and what is going to happen to us over the next 100 years as a planet, surprise, not just total extinction, spoiler warning,

working class revolt. And it's great. So it's a, oh, thanks, babe. So it's a great time to join my Patreon because this project, if you're working on for such a, such a long time, is nearly done. I also stream on Twitch, so via underscore FRM, underscore Mars.

But speaking of Twitch, I think the thing that appeals to your audience the most besides that project will be my show Red Planet, which I do every Sunday, APM to 11pm, UK time on twitch.tv slash Red Planet Live. It's a commy roundtable where we have four very based hosts usually, but not always, talking to some based guests who are organizers and activists doing cool stuff to make the world a better place. For example, this week, and I don't know when this episode is coming out, but this week, as we're recording it, we're going to have Michael Loffer on who helps, like, teachers people how to make Mifha Priston and Missa Prostal,

the at home abortion medications for people in places where it's illegal. So that's the kind of stuff you can expect on a red planet. Check out red planet. It's cool. Yeah. I think this will be out next, like Wednesday or something. Cool. But then that episode will be up on Spotify and YouTube. Yeah, this has been Naked Happen here. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Happen here, pod. I guess you can find me on Twitter while I'm still around at MECHR3 or just find the

ice must be destroyed person. Yeah. God, go, go, go, go into the world and make life hell for transphobes and the British American governments. Just support, support working class, engage in mutual life, blah blah blah, and don't like it, there's the show where we hate McDonald's. I'm not sure who's to be a long professional McDonald's hater. And with me to talk about hating McDonald's is Mira who's a freelance journalist and union organizer. Mira, welcome to the show.

It's free to be here, thank you for having me. Yeah, so, okay, so there's specifically, there are lots of the hating McDonald's is like an ancient anarchist tradition. I think, I'm actually not sure how well it is known today, but I'm about 80% sure that the tradition of breaking Starbucks windows was actually originally like a, it was actually originally a thing about breaking

like it came from like a bunch of campaigns. I think it didn't definitely in France I think also in Mexico that like anytime a Starbucks Starbucks Jesus Christ any time McDonald's would open up every moment immediately start breaking the windows That's the only proper waiting in the comic Donald That's the only proper way to handle our McDonald's and the most incredibly professional opinion. But the reason we're talking about McDonald's is that yeah, you tried to organize a McDonald's union, which is I guess the other thing you could do with the McDonald's other than lighting it on fire,

which is pretty much you could do it. You could. Well, I guess there are those people in France who took it over in turn to do to like a food co-op or something, but Third thing you can do with it. Discover a third a third thing to do with the McDonald's and get the towers Yeah, but yeah, I wanted to talk about I guess

What you know, okay, I wanted to use you yeah, so you've written a very good piece about this in Strange Matters called by Mick Union that is really good and I wanted to talk about sort of the piece, the sort of nitty-gritty aspect of like what it's like to organize a union and also just about McDonald's because Jesus Christ, good Lord, oh no. I have so much to talk about, so more than happy to. Yeah, so I guess, okay, I think we should start with just the sort of McDonald'sness of it all. I wanted to start with just talking a bit about what it's actually like to work on the McDonald's

because I, well, okay, hey, I feel like it's not actually universal experience anymore for like people who have worked at a fast food restaurant and B, I think people who, it's a thing you bought out of your collective memory very quickly because it sucked. But yeah, yeah, so what is it actually like when you show up to your shift? So McDonald's was my first job and it was a hell of an introduction.

Yeah, the moment you would come in, you would be most days bombarded with constant orders on screen because they have these little screens both in the front and back grill areas that like showed all the orders they had. And like a good 60, 70% of the time I came in, that people would just be swamped with orders. They'd be running around being like, oh, thank God you're here.

We need someone to get on right now. And it's like, you don't even get a moment to breathe. Like, as you're standing there waiting to clock yet, other punching machine, you're just like, oh, dear God, I'm gonna have a fucking terrible time. And as you're running around, you know, cooking everything after you clock in, you're getting screamed at by your bosses right by you. And they're like, oh no, a customer complaint

because there was too many pickles on their sandwich. And then you'll hear someone yelling from the drive-through window on top of that. And then you might have people at the the drive-through window on top of that. And then you might have people at the front calendar. This was before proven, so McDonald's still had front counters when people would come in. I don't know if every McDonald's does, but everyone I've been to since has just closed down internally.

And I envy that. But you would have people yelling from there. And if you were one of the unfortunate souls who ended up working directly facing the customers and not just cooking, you would be the one getting screamed at by all parties involved. I later worked at a Wendy's where I got a taste of that. And I walked out three days in the morning. Yeah, that sucks. Yeah, and I think that, you know, I think like one of the things I think I think like compounds this is,

you know, okay, I will, I will, I will, I will do a theory, which is that I think people have a really weird understanding of what it means to have a job on a sort of theoretical level that dates back to a genuinely very weird period in the 20th century where people actually had like stable hours. any of this works, right? Like, you, you know, you, like there is no actual stable amount of hours. You just get, you get some number of hours, like a week that you're assigned to. But then, you know, but this leads to a thing

that we've, oh God, like, like literally every single field we've talked about, you need icing, has this problem, which is just understaffing, because why the fuck would you have enough people to do a job when you could have less than enough people to do a job and gave him less? That was my experience, Emmeq Doll, then fast food in general. You would get such inconsistent numbers of hours that you wouldn't know how much money

you'd be making in the month. Because for all you know, this month, you could be working, you know, every regular day, every business day of the week. You could be working only weekends, or you could be like, I was after the union got busted, spoiler alert, working three hours on Sundays in the mornings, and that's it, if they really wanted to. And there's nothing that outside of a union you can do to prevent them from. And outside of, you know, niche legal areas where you can maybe push back, you can't really do much if they decide just not to staff you. And there's people working

there who they had like a full-blown kids, families were lying on them in that job. They weren't making much. Pennsylvania minimum wage was $7.25, and you know, they were paying us that. And so if the little they could get, they would maybe get like, at best, $100 a week with their hours, unless they were able to get into like a managerial position, whereas the only one were you'd be kind of guaranteed hours, in the sense that they desperately need you so they'll throw you on, whatever. Beyond that, you also don't know the days you're going to work too.

Yeah, yeah. Also, the thing I was going to ask is, how much time do you have between finding out you're going to be on a shift and then like being on the shift. You can have anywhere from several days notice to under 12 hours notice and there is no way to predict what's going to happen the next week because it all depends on when you're going to get staffed. There are points I found out day of when I was going to be working. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm like, this is a thing that is becoming, this is the way that labor used to work

in the 1800s. And then, you know, this is sort of like phased out because it turns out this is actually a stunningly inefficient way to actually like run a business. But, you know, we've reached, the thing that happened at the end of history is, it's not the history ended, it's that like, capital needing to be efficient ended. And now they just like do this shit, and it's like,

well, okay, so it doesn't matter if this is like a terribly inefficient way to run things. It's, you just, like, it's a mechanism designed to just like absolutely destroy like the sort of psyches and lives of the people who are doing the thing. Yeah, that is completely accurate. They do not give a rat's ass about anyone working there for a second. Everyone working there is completely expendable. Even if they're a manager, there's been points people have worked there for like three,

four months and got promoted to a manager. There's everyone is expendable and they make sure you know that too, and how they treat you. You're not treated with any dignity, with any respect. You're just completely thrown around at their whims and the ways of upper management, the regional managers and the like.

And it's awful. Because how they get away with that model is they know there's always going to be some people who are desperate to work in a McDonald's either because they're young and need to get a first job or they're down on their luck and need to get something to pay the bills. I've even hitting hard times, trying to reapply at McDonald's since working there because I needed to pay the bill. I was in that exact position again, and fairly recently. And so it's, it's

not a fun place to be in the money. Yeah. Of course, they didn't let me work there again because I believe I'm banned from ever working in a McDonald's again. Yeah. That's it. That's another thing that I think is not that well understood, but like loss of companies just have basically not even, like there are people that I know who are blacklisted, like from shit they did during Occupy. Like people like, yeah, like that, there, these things, these things suck.

And if you like, you know, this is, I guess one of the sort of issues of doing any kind of organizing is that like if you lose like stuff can go like very badly for you Which sucks, but also simultaneously if you don't organize things who go very badly for you, so it's you know Yeah, yeah, I Guess there's one other thing I wanted to ask, which I don't know if you know, do you know if your McDonald's was a franchise or if it was actually owned by the company? So yes, it was a franchise. It wasn't owned by the official company in any major sense. I actually met the franchise owner during the course of union, which was a fun time when we were in the process of getting busted. Oh boy. Yeah, so do you want to explain what a

franchise is and I guess like how that sort of model works? Yeah, so most McDonald's out there are Fritzchus, which basically means McDonald's will kind of let independent people buy out their stores and own and manage them in a certain region for a portion of the profits. In the Scranton area, which was where I did the union, they were all owned by one single family who was ultra rich in part because of the McDonald's and in part because of family inheritances. And these folks, And these folks, they would be the kind of, we treated it as like the headhunches the same way that CEOs get talked about at most companies.

They weren't the CEOs, of course, but like as far as in terms of managing breathe, restraint, and area McDonald's went, they were the main ones in charge. And of course, McDonald's corporate always had the final say over everything. But they manage tens of thousands of restaurants across the world so they don't really get involved in any of the nitty gritty, which is why they kind of let people own these franchises. Yeah, which I think is really interesting. It's like they've managed to somehow combine like the worst aspects of working for a major corporation with the worst aspects and working for like a small business

tyrant, which is interesting too, because it's like, I don't know, because this is like one of the weird things about McDonald's. Right? McDonald's corporate doesn't make money from hamburgers. They're basically a real estate company that like sells franchises to people. But simultaneously, but that means that they can do things,

like they can force their franchises to do things that are unprofitable because it doesn't matter to them. Like they're still getting paid, like they're still getting paid, they're licensing franchising fees or whatever, like no matter what sort of like shit is happening there. Yeah, and that's, I don't know. It's, it's, it's, it's,

it's actually just like a really interesting, it's right to me it's like the exact arrangement that's like the most likely to create a fascist. She's like, because like, you know, you have a group of people like, and I think it's a good argument. This, this is what, like, quote unquote economic anxiety is, is you have like a bit, you have a sort of people, I think it's a good argument. This is what quote unquote economic anxiety is.

Is you have a sort of middle level of, like this, you know, middle level of person who is a capitalist, but is also getting squeezed from the top down, like by larger corporations and then also is facing bottom up pressure from workers. And so there's a solution to this. It's just like ruthlessly, like, you know, just just like ruthlessly do a fascism against

like everyone who's working for them. Yeah, scratch a liberal and fascist reads. Yeah, it's more true than McDonald's and fast food really than anywhere. Yep. The McFascists reign supreme. Yep. The McFascists reign supreme. Ah, so speaking of McFascists, the products and services, these are two distinct sentences, they are not related. The FCC, please, actually, no, we fuck you. The FCC doesn't, well, no, no, the FCC does not regulate us.

I think we're actually regulated by the FTC. So fuck the FCC does not regulate us. I think we're actually regulated by the FTC. So fuck the FCC That's why I could swear on this podcast because they don't We're back okay, so having having returned to more Macfascism. Yeah, okay, so I guess we should start talking about how the union organizing started and how I how the union organizing started and how, I guess, the sort of immediate mistake that you all made attempting to get this off the ground. Yeah.

So it started with me. I was the first one there to bring up the concept of a union because then I was like only 17. I was new to anarchism still and so I was young, green and eager to get shit done. I still am, I'll be above. So that's old. Yeah. But I had a few contacts to local IWW people through just the very, very faint activist networks that were up there. And by faint, I mean a total of like five people. So I got in contact with the IWW guy. I believe I used the name Mark. Yes, I used the name Mark in the article to protect his anonymity, so I'll just keep consistency.

And Mark was the one who convinced me to take more major steps. He was the one who I talked to and got consultation about it if he was the one who gave a lot of initial guidance. And there was a few friends of mine that had there. They're also not really anarchists. Most of them were just like your so-shedems, but they were eager to get something done and help out. So, you know, can't complain there. And it was like a small core group of us who all wanted to get involved and get this out and done. And we had never done anything like this before. Northeast Pennsylvania does have a strong history of unions there, but we were not part of that history initially.

And so it ended up going south, unfortunately, pretty, it wouldn't well at first, but I think some of the main issues we had in hindsight doing things, especially now having more experience, you know, organizing under my belt. In hindsight, we rushed things way too much. We were trying to get everyone on board. We didn't do sufficient one-on-one conversations with people. We didn't do sufficient people, we didn't do sufficient intel gathering and we didn't, we relied too much on our technical tools and left too much contributing evidence that we trusted too many people with. We didn't really have a strong way of going about it that would have been better for what we were

doing. Yeah, and I guess this comes to one of the main things that you're talking about here. And I think it's one of the main things about, you know, you need to organize it like, like pretty much no matter who you talk to, right, politically, the, the, the, the, the things that are important to get a union to work are kind of similar, which is that, yeah, like it's usually a very slow process. It's a process of building relationships and it's a process of figuring out who in your work, well, who in your work pays people sort of trust and respect and like make friends

with and figuring out how to sort of, how to get them involved and how to get, I don't know, how, unions are not just sort of like abstract things, like they're built of actual social relationships that you have with another person and the relationships that they have with other people, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I wanted to ask about, how, okay, when you were sort of starting to do this, right?

How were you sort of identifying the people you needed to talk to and what kinds of things were you doing to try to get them involved and try to map out how the workplace functioned? So the first people identified were people that I thought I could trust. And the corporate people I had were folk that in the Guards of the Union, I, in hindsight, was a trust. We all agreed on the same issues, and we all had the kind of similar or more gun co-added to. I think me, definitely the most out of everyone. We fell into a pitfall where I was kind of pushing the union by myself for a bit, which

is definitely easy to fall into. But in terms of identifying the workplace leaders, the natural leaders found there, we've mostly relied on conversations with Mark to do that. We talked with him about who worked there. We gave a brief list of everyone who worked there, and we kind of just pinpointed them the specific people we saw as leaders and left that. And I mean, as far as basic charting goes, it wasn't terrible, but there is definitely a lot to be desired, and it could have been far more fleshed out.

What do you think that would have looked like? Or, you know, what does that look like in sort of like other campaigns that you've run that were like the first one you ever tried to do at 17? So, charting and I would do it now, it should be done from the start before even approaching the first person unless you extremely trust the person like you are just bonded for the life you know you can't go without them unless you have like really deep trust with the person initially you shouldn't approach anyone but you get going into it you should start off with if you can reaching out to an i. WW rep, but if you can't make a detailed chart of who's in your workplace, what positions they're at, what team they're on, like in terms of, if they're on one person's managed area or another person's managed area, you should figure out who they're close to, who they listen to, relevant demographic information because you want you, you need to be intersectional,

and you want to be able to figure out above all else whether or not you've had a way from work one-on-one with them, and whether or not you've had any talk to them prior about unions and where they might stand. On unions, you want to document all that, and it doesn't have to be the most detail, you can just do a spreadsheet with it, but it can definitely be a lot to document. It's no joke. It's not something that should be rushed. It's not fun. I've, you know, there's, there's nothing really that's a blast about trying to sit there

and be like, I yes, let me fill out paperwork about my work place and employees, but it will come back and save you so many times and give help you formulate strategies for going forward. And we rush things and talk to things like talking to people on the workplace floor and just said, hey, do you want to do a union? Yeah. And call that a day. day and said that was one on one. And it wasn't. Yeah. Should we explain what a one on one like is supposed to be? Yeah.

So one on one is it doesn't necessarily have to be on one on one, but it should be between at least a union organizer and another person. They could potentially be another more seasoned organizer helping the more end-offest one along with during the one-on-one. That could be a thing, but ideally they are just one or two organizers talking to one workplace employee about initially, anyway,

just a non-committal discussion on where what their issues are in the workplace, what grievances they might have, and what their current status is on workplace organizing. Yeah, okay. Another thing I wanted to get into is the role of like having a way to talk to people outside of work and having just sort of a collaborative space where people talk about. And I think this is something that like,

I don't know. I think this is one of the big things. I think that this is one of the big things that's changed in the past, you know, maybe like decade and a half or so, is that the actual space in which people talk about a union, like tends to be a physical space anymore, it tends to be sort of either like a signal chat or like a Facebook chat, like a, I guess, what's out technically is owned by Facebook. But yeah.

And so I want to talk a bit about that. And also, I guess, get into the sort of security problems that you can have with this because yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what we did. We had a group chat on Facebook Messenger to talk to everyone about the union and everything like that.

And there's a lot of pros to having a centralized group chat. Don't get me wrong. It makes an easy way to communicate when you're trying to take actions to other people. It can be helpful to do any last minute coordination needed. It can be useful to make sure everyone's on the same page. But there's also major drawbacks to it. One, as you mentioned, there's big privacy concerns, and we ran into that during the campaign. If with anything organizing, you're only as secure as you're weak as slick.

And if you have people you do not completely 100% trust in your group chat, someone could leak everything, either wittingly or unwittingly, in our case it was wittingly, but you very well could have someone who isn't being careful and might show the group chat to someone else who they shouldn't unaccident. And unless everyone's on the same page about best security practices, you're not going to get very far with having that. And for another, doing any form of organizing over text and a major capacity is really hard. There's so many issues with like making sure people are understanding their tone and communicating properly and just meeting each other on the same level that you really can't do over text like you can do in person. A text medium should, in my view, only be better to facilitate interactions

that are later done at best in person, but if not, they can be done through like video calls. Yeah, and like as much as Zoom can be really annoying, like it is way more productive than trying to do things to text like Just like having just like just like having a weekly zoom meeting, you know, like Like there's there's a lot of like cases where you like, you know, you literally physically can't like be in the same place And you know, and if that's that's the thing you're dealing with like yeah doing video calls and

Stuff like that makes it way, way easier. For sure. It is a way better medium to do anything union related with. And it's also much easier to bond with people over video chat too, and that's a huge part of the union is connecting with your fellow workers and meeting each other on that same level and bonding over your shared interests, over your shared what you desire from a union, what you desire from a union, what you desire from your workplace. And you can't really do that easily anyway over text. I'm sure someone somewhere has done it, but it's not recommended for me anyway. Okay. Unfortunately, we need to do another thing that's not text, which is ads.

You can tell by do a do a great on the ad pivots here. It's fine. I was I was watching I was watching I was his name The guy The the the right way shithead guy who like had a thing with Samantha B for a little bit Glenn Beck That's the one I was watching Glenn Beck and I was like oh no this guy this guy's this guy's ad pivot was just racism So you know we can do pivot was just racism. So, you know, look, we can do,

we can, we can, we can, it could happen here. Our second slogan, better ad pivots than Glenn Beck. And we are back, hopefully. I don't know, maybe we'll get extremely unlucky and everything will be broken and this will immediately cut to a third ad. But assuming that it doesn't,

I wanted to talk a bit also about sort of the kinds of things that are necessary to get people to believe that a union can work because that's, you know, like, or organization isn't just sort of a purely like, isn't just a purely mechanical thing. It's also about morale. As much as it's about social relations, it's about morale, about people believing in the thing. So I wanted to ask, yeah, I just talk a little bit about what that process is sort of like and what can happen to it. what can happen to it? Yeah, so that's something an issue we ran into and make union fairly early on was keeping people motivated for the union and getting people wanting to be involved because one of

the most common things you'll hear when trying to organize the union is people like, oh, I can't afford to lose this job. I have a family to feed, I have bills to pay. You'll see people saying they don't want to risk their careers if you're in a more like professional environment. You'll see people just not wanting to take the risks that could jeopardize them. And it's important when you're kind of trying to address those concerns to meet them where they're at. You're not going to, you can't make those concerns go away because they're real. When you're organizing a union, there is a risk you could get fired and get punished for it. It happened to me.

It's a concert the territory. But if you do things safely and you do things right, it's a much safer option than not doing it. And that's the main thing you kind of want to talk to people about is detailing their grievances and talking about how nothing's going to change without a human. You can't butter up to your bosses and expect them to suddenly turn around on you.

The most they'll do is play pretend for a little bit until things go right back to normal. And you kind of want to talk to people about also why it's more beneficial to them to just stick with the union because their strength is in numbers. And that's something that a lot of regular folk can kind of lose is that they're not going to be in a boat. When someone's viewing getting involved a lot of the time they're thinking, oh, if I get involved, I'm going to get fired. They're not thinking about the strength and numbers. Sure. Just you yourself are the only one pushing for change in a workplace. Yeah, there's a decent chance you'll get fired. But if you have a whole

crew of 10 people, all who are essential running the operations, pushing for change, suddenly you're going to see things shifting a much different way. And so building that solidarity among people is important. And I think is the, I don't want to say the absolute best way because there isn't an absolute best way to handle those concerns, but it's definitely a way that can be effective if done right. Yeah, and I guess, okay. I guess we should go into how it sort of came apart because unfortunately, you know, and this I think is a thing that is depressing but true, which is that a lot of you like to statistic well, actually, I don't have the numbers. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna actually say that, but a lot of you in campaigns don't work and you know, sometimes it's

because like something bad happens sometimes because it's just, you know, stuff happens inside of your control. Sometimes it's, I don't know, like a pandemic starts. But yeah, we talked about what happened here and how do you sort of avoid that because it sucks. So there's a lot of things that can be at downfall in the union. In the case of McDonald's, in the union, in the case of McDonald's, are main downfall. There was a lot of little things we did wrong. That didn't help at all. That definitely just made matters worse in the end. But the straw that broke the camel's back

was not being careful with who we trusted. And Dan, as I referred to in the article, camels back was not being careful with who we trusted. And Dan, as I referred to in the article, he was the one that caused the penultimate destruction of it. The COVID contributed heavily. But I feel like if it weren't for Dan, the Union could have had still a fighting chance in spite of COVID.

Now if it weren't for COVID, I think the Union also could have had still a fighting chance in spite of COVID. Now if it weren't for COVID, I think the union also could have stuck around. But the mixture of external factors and eternal did the downfall, but in terms of things we could have actively prevented. Dan was the main thing that we could have done approached way differently. We could have approached handling new people in a much better light. We should have had a centralized group being the ones with all the communications and everything. And let people prove their trust to the union over time by doing tactics for it and just by building relationships with people and fostering stuff that's already there. Because Stan was too faced, we all thought he was our friend, which is why we thought we could trust him. But he was in it just to try and get some

benefits for him, which is why he snitched. He thought maybe he would get, you know, some type of promotion or something. He didn't, which side note, it doesn't help you to snitch on your union. If anyone out there is thinking of doing it, you're just gonna screw yourself and everyone else over and nobody likes to snitch. Yeah.

But we should have been a lot more cautious with how we approach people and shouldn't have just been doing things for for the sake of doing them like we shouldn't have been approaching people inside the workplace we shouldn't have been inviting everyone and everyone to all our confidential group chats. We should have been cautious of who we were around and what we were saying around people and how we were going about it. That's the core of it. I mean, is recklessness. Yeah.

I mean, I think, obviously, it is not good if the existence of your union a bunch of your stuff gets leaked. This is not necessarily fatal. Like I've been involved in campaigns where like that's happened and we want anyways, but it could definitely be, you know, especially like, especially early on in the process and especially like the morepricarius stuff is. Yeah, it's not great. Oh my God. Pretty bad, pretty quickly. I guess the thing that I wanted to ask about was historically up until the last,

I mean, I think was, was, was, was burger failed the first like modern fast food union? I think it might have been. It was that the burger filling, Jimmy John. Yeah, it was one of the two up up until like really the last like like, I think like post like 2015, 2016, fast food has been really, really difficult to organize. And a lot of unions either just didn't try or did these weird PR stunt campaigns that

were like, fight 15 attached things where it's like, well, we're not actually really trying to get a union. We're trying to get PR stuff for 515. But this is, I don't know, this is the thing, I think it's interesting about the IWA, about the IWA, this is the thing that's interesting about the industrial workers of the world specifically is that they've actually like gone in and seriously attempted to do it

and they sort of finally broke through to a couple of places. And you know, this McDonald's campaign didn't work. But what was kind of interesting to me about it is like, I don't know, like how kind of, I don't know if normal is the right word of a campaign it was, but it looks a lot like, I don't know, it looks a lot like campaigns that I've been involved in that were like not

in the fast food industry. I guess I was wondering a bit about, to what extent were the sort of tactics shaped by the very specific weird conditions of fast food and to what extent it was just sort of like the stuff you'd use in any workplace? So a lot of our base model was just stuff you'd use in any workplace because at the time we were doing this, I think the only fast-food unions that were around were like Julie Johns and Berberville. I think those are the only two that have any publicity. This was before, often like major Starbucks campaigns.

Yeah, that's all pre-empties. Yeah, and so we didn't have much of a playbook for how to approach things in a faster environment specifically. A lot of what we were actually emulated the model on was factory environments and things like that because there is somewhat of a similarity of having worked in both

Between fast food and factories with factories and both fast food You have a kind of assembly line model, you know crank out We're crank out work crank out work get things out at a rapid pace and stick to your job. Maybe do a little bit of cleanup now and then, but you stick to what you're doing. And you're kind of isolated from other stations a bit. You have some overlap, but only in so far as your job will allow. But you might be able to talk to each other and you share break areas.

That kind of structure informed how we approached it. By us, what we tried to do was talk to people we didn't have external contacts with in areas that were away from cameras in areas that were away from other people who might be able to hear. But there is better ways of doing it. And I think other campaigns benefited out there, likely benefited from having more seasoned organizers at the core of it. Because that's also at least for me in my experience with it, something that didn't help us was having someone with no real experience doing something at the forefront of that.

I'm not to say that someone with no experience can't do amazing things. There's countless examples of unions that were ran by people with no experience at all, who just jumped right into it and did amazing jobs. But it's important to get a diversity of people with different walks of life at the core of it. People with different perspectives, so many different people involved at the core as a kind of central organizing committee can do you wonders with a union. Because we had just a few young left-leaning people, few young left-leaning white people, most of which were male presenting.

I wasn't out as trans there, so I was presenting as masculine. The other people I was with, they were all cis men, with one exception, with two exceptions, sorry, memories a little on the fritz, but we needed more people with different perspectives in there. We needed more, and there was plenty to be found in the workplace. But we just, we neglected to include them in the core organization committee. And I think that's something that could really benefit unions. Probably is a major strength of a lot of the successful ones is having a diverse main primary group of central organizers.

I don't want to say central organizers, more like core organizers, because the solidarity union model is like hierarchical, but just a central group of people involved that seek to do the main like work? Yeah, and you know, I mean, this has been I think like one of the things that made the like the Starbucks campaigns work was like. They well, with Starbucks can take specifically it was a lot of like find the queer expression in the workplace and start talking to them. But having the core group of people working on things, being as diverse as possible, is good both in an immediate practical sense

and it is long-term strategic sense. And the faster that happens, the better. Yeah. Okay, do you have anything else from this that you think people should know about? I would say if you can get external help from a union, if you've never done it before, and even if you have having someone to balance ideas off of, you know, wonders, there's a lot of folk with the IWW that are more than willing to offer a helping hand to people

trying to get started on a U.A. campaign. All you got to do is reach out and ask. And I'm sure there will be someone in your local who's willing to help. But even if there's not, you can probably get someone to help you more remotely too. And even just a little bit of guidance can go a long way. Yeah. Union good McDonald's bad. Be careful while you're organizing. And yeah, be strategic and smart about it. Well, okay, do you want people to find you first and if so, where?

Yeah, I can be found over, unfortunately, for now on Twitter at my magazine, also on Mastodon, much more preferably. And those are the main places I'm at. If you want to reach me to, my email is found on my Twitter and message on myrallocene.gmail.com. It's the best way to get hold of me. Yeah, we'll put a link to the Strange Meta article in the in the description. So you can read that to you because it's great. Um, yeah, Murad, I thank you so much for joining, but I was gonna say us, but I guess it's for thank you so much for joining me. Uh, yeah, it was, it was great talk to you. It was your fuck, McDonald's. It was like success.

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Yeah, it was really great being on the huge fan of this podcast for a while. So I was like, what would that when I first heard about potentially being on here, I was stoked and also yeah, fuck McDonald's. Yeah. Yeah, I guess, yeah, this has been the podcast that you're listening to. You can find us at Happen Here pod on Twitter and Instagram. You can find the rest of the stuff that people do at Cools on Media. I guess I actually have not plugged the do show that's been happening.

There'll be a couple episodes out by the time we do this, but Cools on has done a show with Jake Hanerhan called Sad All the Garks. That's about the Russian All the Garks who've been mysteriously dyag. It went over the past, like says, the start of the war in Ukraine. Yeah, probably only getting more relevant as whatever fucking bullshit is happening, they're right now plays out.

I don't know, but by the time this goes up, you'll probably have a better idea of what happened or didn't happen. But yeah, go listen to that. Yeah, and go start a union in your workplace or alternately light light something on fire, legally not the place. Something, campfires, explorers, we can make this, we have the technology.

Union spores. Best kind. Welcome back to It Could Happen here, a podcast about it, it being bad things happening here, here being, you know, wherever you are. We're talking specifically about wherever you are. I'm Robert Evans, one of the hosts of this podcast. And with me today is a guy I have a lot of admiration for, probably my favorite YouTube documentarian, which I guess would be the fastest way to sum up who you are and what you do. Dan Olson from the channel Folding Ideas. Dan, hi. Hi.

How you doing? I'm doing well, thanks for inviting me. Yeah, now Dan, you and I have have a topic of shared interest to discuss. But the first thing I wanted to talk about is your name on the internet is foldable human. Yeah. I don't feel like I could fold you very well. No, okay.

So back in high school, I used to be like, I was a really small guy. Like I was a really small guy. Like I was a really skinny guy. Uh-huh. And you remember all the ads from the 90s for exercise equipment? I do remember some of that, yeah. So the tagline that they always used for like the as seen on TV exercise equipment was that it folds for easy storage.

Ah! And being dumbass kids, you know, it's like one person in our friend group, like, has a car, but there's like seven of us, and so someone's got a ride in the trunk, and it's like, well, Dan gets to ride in the trunk. Like, we're gonna stick Dan in the trunk, because he folds for easy storage, because I was a small guy. And so, it, so I don't know why when I was like busy, like trying to brand the channel, like, you know, a decade ago, I was like, I had this phrase that I was using with students

that I was interacting with, was like, well, let's unfold that idea, you know, come on. But like, that was kind of like on my mind. So I was like, ah, well, we'll call the channel like unfolding ideas. Unfolding didn't really like just sound good. So I was like, well, folding ideas. And then, well, aesthetic parallel to that, foldable human, I don't know.

It just, it came to me and it sounded good. And it was nowhere on the internet. There was like no overlap. So I'm like, all right. Interesting. We're good to go. SEO locked in. That's an example of a thing that I, you know, we're talking, we're going to be talking

a lot about stuff that's unsettling about our modern era and how the internet has sort of altered human dynamics. One of the things that I think is kind of neat about it is its ability to kind of preserve and amber aspects of you from the deep past. Like I have one of my emails, like my personal email is a Gmail that I got back when you had to get an invite

to get a Gmail, right? Like when Gmail first became a thing. And it's like, I'm not gonna say it on here because then my email will get bombarded with shit. But like, it's like a stupid joke that doesn't really make any sense. And every time I give it to someone, they're like, why is that your email?

Because I was like 12. Like, I don't even remember why I set this thing. It's just this like moment of something I thought was funny when I was pre-pubescent, frozen in amber forever because that's the internet does that in little ways for each of us. I definitely abandoned my original something awful account because some likes like,

you know what, maybe not that username anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so Dan, if people are not familiar with you, and I'm going to guess a significant chunk of our listenership is kind of one of the biggest touchstones for you recently, which you put out a video about the NFT craze that a lot of people have credited with helping to kill it. Me among them, it's a wonderful, wonderful,

but line go up was the actual title. Line goes up, yeah. Yeah, line goes up. Very good breakdown of how they work, why it was a con. And you've been doing, I think, kind of the first really, the first time I became aware of you was you did a flat earth documentary, which is very good. I did an article recently on on AI Kids Books that was partly

inspired by an investigation you did into these audible slash Kindle Grifters, the Michelson Twins. So you do that kind of thing. Like you kind of run across things that are troubling or confusing to you, and then you investigate them to a pretty impressive extent and put together very clear video investigations. That's, I think in a nutshell, probably pretty accurate.

Yeah, that's kind of where the channels ended up. Yeah, it's been a few different things over the years, but that's kind of the phrase that it's in right now is this kind of like, I don't know, like, yeah, documentarian place. Yeah, and a lot of your stuff seems to focus on, basically, like, the topic of kind of online grifter culture and sort of its intersection with like,

different weird cultic milieu, like there's kind of a cross, especially like with NFTs, a real bit crossover, but Twix to the two, right? Like it's kind of, I think a lot of crypto culture was kind of this intersection between old school cons and kind of internet cult dynamics. So I wanted to talk today about the problem of scam culture in the United States because by any sort of like objective reckoning, I've been looking into this, there are more scams and more fraud than it right now in the United States than at any point previously. And basically from all sides, like phone scams are at the highest rate they've ever been,

people are getting like, I think the statistic I've got is that in March 2021, I think is kind of when that peaked at like 4.9 billion Robo call scams, which is like just kind of an outrageous increase over where it was a few years ago. The rate of fraud against elderly people seems to be at an all-time high, at least in terms of dollar amount. One of the unsettling quotes that I came across when I was looking into the degree to which old people are being scammed. It's often through various email scams that are kind of based on getting trust or frightening them that like someone else is trying to scam them. And so they need to give in from it. Anyway, the thing that the quote that I came across was a regulator talking about this and being like, yeah, I it's not it's no longer like smaller even medium

dollar cons. People are stealing generational wealth, which was really interesting to me. Um, and then there's kind of like fishing attacks are at, uh, pretty close to an all-time high. I mean, there's a, I'll send you, there's a graph that I came across in a, uh, what was the source on this? Uh, in a Comparitek article that it, I mean, it's just a straight line up from January, 2029 to like the end of 2022. And so I'm, I'm, I'm kind of looking at all this and there's a couple of different causes, right? Like some of the stuff the SEC did under Asget Pie gets blamed for why it's gotten even worse with, with phone scams, although that's not the whole story. AI powered tools have tools have been a big part

of like why phishing attacks have increased so much. But then, like you've got like the degree to which the elderly are being conned, which is like this, kind of at this intersection of a few different things, how much more online old people are today than they were, you know, 10, 15 years ago for population bubbles. Yeah, multi-vailant dynamics.

Yeah, but kind of the commonality is that like scams are all around, like people, we're all kind of being assaulted by scams. On my last. On my last. I just grabbed my phone and like of my last like 15 text messages, maybe it's like, pick up is available, a couple like three with four with actual friends, and then interact. You just received an e-interact transfer. High, long time no talk. Just got your money, okay, we'll send soon. 389 can now be routed to your institution, submit why.

The Canada Revenue Agency has sent you money. Your verification code for Visa transfer is, and it's like, it's like just constant. I hadn't even, because like, I'm not gonna be shocked at all if I get a phishing text message during this conversation. Yeah, like between my email and like my text messages or just phone calls, right? I get, every day I get two or three calls from scam likely, you know?

Yeah, my good friend scam likely. Yeah, my old buddy, he's always got, I always got something cooking. But yeah, it's, and I, this kind of like, I started focusing on this more a couple of months ago because, you know, I had vaguely noticed, boy, it's just like nothing but fucking scams coming into me through my phone these days. And then a couple of months ago, I got a phone call from my bank and it was one of those things like everyone else, my cell phone lets me know when like a call is from scam-likely or when it's from,

when it had the name of my bank on there, it was the right number. So I pick it up and a human being is on the line and they're like, is this Robert Evans? And I'm like, yeah, and then we've seen some fraudulent activity on your account. Can we ask you a couple questions? And that is, I've gotten that call before legitimately,

it's not a weird thing for your bank to be like, hey, let's talk about these charges. Are you in the country right now? It's like, no, I'm in New York. So we're seeing activity out in New York, that's you. Yeah, did you just buy something in Florida? No, I never go to Florida. But so yeah, so I didn't actually get to see where they were going with this.

Nothing suspicious had happened, but like after they say that, I'm like, okay, yeah, like what's the charge? And then my phone disconnects, right? Like it's, you know, again, where I live, you know, Oregon is the middle of nowhere. So like sometimes connectivity is not great. So I call them back, you know, and I get on the phone with a person and they're like, yeah, what seems to be up? And I'm like, well, you guys called me saying that like that there was some possibly fraudulent activity that we needed to talk about. And the lady on the other end is like, no one here called you.

Like I'm looking at your record. I can tell when someone's getting a call. We don't have any record of that. And I explain what happens. And she like goes back, talks to a supervisor and is like, so that was a scam. They've, this is something we've seen more and more lately. They're able now to actually just spoof our, our banks. And this is, my bank is a significant size institution. They're able to spoof our phone number now. And so

you can't tell through the caller ID. And like it was this whole thing, we're like, obviously I know don't give certain things over the phone, even if they're pretending to be your bank. We never got to that point where anything was actually compromised, but it was just like, well shit. Like what are you, like that's, this is now well beyond the thing, we're like you're getting called and someone's offering you

a, you know, to make a bunch of money, you know, holding an Igerian prince as well, there's something if you send him your bank account. This is your bank calls you and your phone tells you that it's your bank and a human being who sounds just like the bank teller. Like it's gotten so, and I think kind of the broad, obviously each of these individual vectors

by which scamming has increased is a worthy story and a separate story in a lot of ways. But they also come together in this like, well, you know, it's not, it's not like weird at this point to note that everybody seems angrier and everybody seems paranoid. And you hear more stories about people opening fire on folks pulling into their driveway to turn around. And there's, you know, that story, obviously, there's guns and stuff that's also connected to that. But I wonder how much of the paranoia and anger is at least exacerbated by the fact that

everyone is fighting off a million scammers at all times? Yeah, I think that's a good observation. Like, just we're seeing this erosion of public trust in reality. Yeah. And some of that is like deliberate and political. And a lot of it is just coming from like, the fact that technology has enabled spam in unprecedented new vectors and the fact that you can automate bombarding people with noise is just kind of, it's eaten away at all of us.

Because how do I trust anything? I mean, and this is the thing, is it like, okay, so I've been keyed into this and thus paranoid for a decade now. So if I get a message that's like that from my bank, if it comes in text, then it's like, I don't interact with the original thing that it came from. I then go on the website, it's like, I don't interact with the original thing that it came from. I then go on the website.

It's like, all right, I call my bank to inquire about it. Like never communicate through the channel that you're first contacted in. Yeah, if you're dealing with your bank. And it's like, but is that level of paranoia healthy? And it's like, that also takes effort. That means you have to have the foresight to be like, do not panic, see the thing, process it,

consciously go somewhere else, and like, you know, activate a different channel. You know, if they contact you through text, you know, go through like email or like live chat if they contact you through email, call them on the phone, not with the phone number that was at the bottom of the email, go to the website and it's like,

that's effort, that's effort. I don't even have that much energy in me some time and a lot of other people just like absolutely don't and that leads to like just exhaustion, vulnerability, all of the things that feed into like paranoia, distrust, etc, etc, etc, etc. And it's relentless. Like online advertising is basically useless at this point. Oh yeah. Because like if you ran, if you ran a legitimate ad, you know, unless you have the money to run a real, proper,

basically TV commercial. Like banner ads? I don't know one legitimate banner ad for a car company in the last year. Everything else is like a hearing aid scam or, you know, liquefy your belly fat using the metaverse. Yeah, and it's this constant like, number one, it's led me to the situation where when I see an ad on social media in particular, but with any sort of like print in an online ad, my assumption is it's probably a con, right?

Even if it's like, oh wow, that shirt looks nice. Well, that company's probably not gonna shit me that shirt, right? Or it won't be right, like yeah, it'll be fucked up. That photo is absolutely not from the company that is running this ad. Yeah, you just, you assume you distrust as a first measure. You see a banner ad, you see the aesthetics of advertising,

and the assumption is that it's like, you see a banner ad, you see the aesthetics of advertising, and the assumption is that it's like, ah, that's going to get me to sign up for some subscription that's going to be buried in recurring payments that I will never be able to cancel. And it's interesting, because I mean, I'm not sure if this has been your experience, but like I can acknowledge, I think I morally have to acknowledge like part of my success financially as a creator has been as a result of that. Because one of the things that we've seen in the ad market is that text ads, ads for print and shit,

do not work, do not function in any way, shape or form. And a lot of like random, intersiddled ads don't work well, but creator ads work well. And so there's money in it, right? Because people listen to, like people have a degree of like, okay, well, this is like, number one, it's just like the process of consuming a YouTube video or a podcast

is different from an article. But like the ads work better, because it doesn't feel the same as like the scrum of shit that like is getting pushed into every conversation you have on Twitter. Yeah. A human that I can confirm exists has at least taken a look at this. Like this is not at least like not a complete con or whatever, right? Yeah.

Or if it is then like then the host has also been kind of like, conned by that and whatever. Like it ends up, yeah, we're in this together. Like it ends up being at least like a little bit sort of, sort of distance, distance from that. You know, like the, the frickin, you know, by a square foot of land in Scotland and, and become a lord and that whole thing

is like a scam being run out of China. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one of the kinda like weird ironies for me is it's like, okay, so line goes up, came out while the crypto ecosystem was in, it's like biggest ad blitz ever. They had the Super Bowl ads coming up just like a month later.

Fucking it. That's like weeks afterwards. And so, you know, like the vast majority of the like mid-roll ads that ran on that video were crypto.com, were fpx, were Binance, and the ad rates that they were paying, like the CPM that they were paying to run on crypto relevant videos was insane. It was like 2011 all over again. 2011 was the only good time to be in digital content creation. There's like a lot that's unsettling about that. I think one of the things that is like most frustrating to me is that degree to which it's meant that we've gone backwards.

Like there was this, people who like study tech and kind of the way socialization around big tech works talk about this thing called the trow of disappointment, which is when you get a new technology, everybody, we're in like the hype phase for like AI right now, right? And then at a certain point, it becomes clear which aspects of the hype were right,

the degree to which the technology is capable of doing things that kind of the evangelists were claiming. And to which extent the hype was wrong, right? And what areas is the tech always going the fall short? Um, and that's called like the trow of disappointment when people start to real and then, you know, things kind of are supposed to level. Half past.com is not in fact magic. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. You can't just keep shoveling money into this shit forever and in the hopes of exponential returns. Um, or as a consumer, like at a certain point, I can remember the time when money into this shit forever and in the hopes of exponential returns. Or as a consumer, like at a certain point, I can remember the time when phones were exciting and I was, especially as a journalist, like really interested every new year at what new things they're capable of. And then after a couple of years, it was like, well, every phone is, like, there's no

difference now. There's no excitement in getting a new phone. It's just like, well, this, my old phone is broken, so I need a new phone. But like, I'm not like, wow, the new capabilities of this device. But I feel like there's another, I don't even, I don't really know what to call it, but there's also this kind of thing where we, the internet helps to create or is the method through which is disseminated a new labor-saving device. And then the scams reach such a density that the amount of labor you're able to save is minimal, right?

Like that's, I feel like there's like a, that's at least one of the things that I've noticed, especially with like digital communication, with just communication in general, right? My smartphone made it easier to stay and touch all the time. And now my smartphone, like, obviously, I still carry the damn thing everywhere, but like my text messages are mostly scams, and my emails are mostly scams, and most of the calls that I get are scams, like.

Yeah. Yeah. I've actually been finding myself drifting back towards email as a communication medium, just because the spam filters are better. You know, mature and sophisticated. And for the most part, they work. Like they're, yeah, that it's like,

I can actually, people can actually reach me by email. That's pretty cool. And, you know, like there's a whole tech, like really kind of the big thing is there's this whole technological element to it. And you know, when you, when you sort of pitched the idea of this conversation, the first two places my brain went to were John Romulus Brinkley, the goat testicle doctor. Yes, yes, yes.

And high in year of new media radio. And, and of course,, Marshall McCluen. Yeah. You know, like those are the two things that my brain immediately was like, this is sort of like relevant to it because like, Brinkley was, he was a pioneer of radio. He absolutely advanced sort of the format of like what radio could be and how you could use radio to not just extract money from people, but get them onto your side such that after they have given you their money, like they're not just your victims.

You're not just rolling into town and selling them some snake oil and then like skidattling as fast as possible. You have made them into your fans, into your followers, and the way that he did that by connecting his scam to like a sense of identity. He wasn't just this fake doctor. He was also effectively a pastor. Yeah, people who had defended after there was no longer any chance of them, like after it had been sort of proven

that the thing that he was promising was not real, right? Like once there was no more, it's almost like, you know, that play the music man. Yeah, yeah. If you at home are not, like I'm not a huge musical theater guy, this is a pretty famous play, but like the basic idea is this guy tells everyone,

come to this con man comes to town, tells everyone he's gonna make like a big band and raises money for it and his plan is to like, take the money and run. It's kind of what the monorail sketch and the simpsons is based on to a significant extent. And if I'm remembering correctly, I shouldn't have brought this up

maybe because I'm actually not that knowledgeable of that musical theater. But my recollection of the way it goes is that like he falls in love or some shit and feels bad and you know, they wind up, he winds up becoming not a con man. But like I think the modern version of that is he just, he gets people to like adopt as a religion

the idea that these fucking trombones and uniforms and tubas and shitter on the way. And then they attack the local newspaper and string a journalist up in the center of town for telling them that we're 10 years into this and he hasn't started a band anyway, whatever. Yeah. And so the other one, McCluen, his famous postulate, the medium is the message, which remains a radical observation to this day, is just this assertion that the medium itself is more

important than any given message on it, or even the combined weight of the individual messages. Now I think in some regards, McCluein kind of went like overboard with that, because he said that it's like content doesn't matter at all. And it's like, I think content matters. But the point still stands that like the medium itself, the like the invention of radio, the invention of television,

the invention of the internet, the invention of social media had a bigger, like has had a bigger impact than any given thing on it because that's the thing that ultimately we warp our lives around, that we restructure our homes around, we restructure our physical environment around, we restructure how we spend our days is like our time usage gets warped around the medium itself and thus the medium becomes the portal for information to travel through. Absolutely, and it also, I mean, I think there's an extent to which that is true of kind of the way parasocial dynamics impact things like political belief. Yeah. I think there are a lot of people, and I think there are a lot of things that people,

a lot of especially when it comes to like radical politics, that people adopt because somebody who they had come to already like expresses those politics, right? And so something that maybe never would have gotten any purchase with them, suddenly is able to get purchase with them because like a dude that they or a lady that they had a parasocial relationship expressed this kind of stuff. And it just, it's not that it like hacks their brain. It's not that like people are, you know, little robots. It's that this is kind of the way influence works. It's the same reason why like your reason why like people often wind up believing similar things to their

parents or similar things to their friends group. If your friends are all saying on the positive end of things, if you grow up like I did, I don't know about your high school, if you were like, I'm the one like that. I was just thinking the same thing. My vocabulary in high school. If you were like, I'm the one like that. I was just thinking the same thing. Like my vocabulary in high school was, yeah. Yeah, there was a slur that starts with F that was like every third word out of not just my mouth, but everyone I knew knows,

but the movie Super Bad captures this to a significant degree of fidelity to be honest. Yeah. That's just the way shit was in like the early odds. And then, you know, the people I hung around with, suddenly there were more people who were openly queer and suddenly people weren't talking that way. And I stopped talking that way. It's just how people are. Yeah, just from like somebody that I admired being like, hey, you don't see that. I don't think that's cool. Oh, I get you right. That is kind of fucked up.

Yeah. And then, you know, the, and it's, it's not an, like, yeah, I can, I can go to my, the subreddit for my show and see people being like, yeah, I started getting interested in like anarchist politics and history and stuff because of something Robert said. And I don't think that's bad because I think anarchist history and politics are useful, even if you're not an anarchist, right? It's valuable to understand that history. It's often undertold. But this is the same dynamic. This thing which has benefited me

and to some extent benefited some of the ideas that I think are should be more widely known. This is also why there's more Nazis, right? Like it's every way, which way. And so McCluen, you get these new mediums. You get the internet. You get the subdivisions of the internet. Like you get social media, you get email, you get these new mediums, you get the internet, you get the subdivisions of the internet, like you get social media, you get email, you get, you know, instant messaging

and whatnot. And because those technologies have this gravitational effect around them that alters the trajectory of how we structure our lives, they become, because they are potent, because they are valuable communication vectors, they become prime targets for for grift. And the thing is that all of these technologies that have accelerated communication, you know, people have long been pointing out like the negative impacts of social media and just like the the effect on like self-esteem, self-perception of just being exposed to other people's curated, idealized version of themselves so constantly

You know, it's like's like that's already impactful in potentially negative ways. And that's when you're dealing with like real people. But then you add on to that that it's like, oh, you go on Instagram and you can be following a bot and not even know it. And the algorithm is going to float this stuff. And so particularly if you're looking down these addictive, infinite scroll feeds, you don't have the filter of pre-interaction to gauge those things.

So I follow you on Twitter and I know that if I see like, oh Robert Evans has retweeted this thing that it's like, okay, so like he's taking a look at it and it's being through like the filter, the filter of his brain. And so I can probably just like, you know, take my trust in that thing up like one notch, right? But if I'm just scrolling down the algorithmically curated, this is what our computer has determined is similar to things that you have already looked at. It's just so much more fraught,

but it's really easy to be complacent and just be like, oh, I trust this thing. I trust this platform. And that's where we get into the trow of disappointment is this, like I trust these algorithms, these algorithms do a really good job of like, oh, I watched Dan, and so the YouTube algorithm introduced me to like a bunch of other really good creators.

Cool. Oops, I watched one video on flat earth. And now my, my recommends are full of like COVID denialism and anti-maskers and, you know, the trucker movement and, and all of these other like wedges to just sort of slowly rot my brain. Yeah, it's like it's, it's like kind of the way our parents told us, or dare or whatever, told us drugs worked, when we were little kids, where someone's like, oh, you want some pot? Here's some straight up heroin, right?

Like you want some of this too? Like you want some crack cocaine? No, and I, it is, you know, you were talking about like, yeah, you see, you follow someone and you see them share something and if they're a trusted source for you, you know, it bumps it up a notch. And even that, you know, that's the way it, like, it works for me as well, but there's a degree to which

I find it like problematic, especially because like, we all fuck around on the internet too. I had a thing go crazy viral recently where someone posted an obviously Photoshopped image of a logitech controller at the bottom of the sea and was like, look, the controller's survivors. And I shared it to make a joke, right? And the joke was that, well, the controller we're going to find out was one of the more functional things about that terrible sub.

And I even posted underneath that, this obviously is not a real image guys, but like, then I saw, like, I wound up finding, it went, the post that I did of it went so viral that like, it wound up like screen capped and in some different Reddit communities for people to talk about. And it was only the first post,

not the one where I was like, obviously, this is fake. And like, it was joke. I, you know, it was, it was a, it was a, it was a shit post. I didn't, we were, we were bancing online. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But also I'm like, I wonder how many people now think that literally there's a log attack controller that they found at the bottom of the sea because of that. What is, what are the ethics now of like making a, making a, of making a jive, but JAPE as somebody who's got a following? Where does that come into? And I don't know.

I'm certainly not clear on it because I seem to be incapable of not shit posting. I spent too much time on something awful as well. It's so hard to give up. I miss it. I miss the days when I could just make like tasteless jokes on Twitter and a couple hundred people would see them and go like, that's funny.

And now it's like, ah, if I'm a little too ironic, someone's gonna be like, oh crap, are you serious? Like that happened? And it's like, no, no, that did not happen. No, no, no, that did not happen. This is fake. I am me. I am telling lies for comedy purposes.

It was a bit. It was a bit. I was doing a bit. Um, no, and that's like, you know, something awful, which is kind of the, the, the, the, the, the did, it's like the, um, oh crap. Now I've forgotten a very basic science term. You know, the big, uh, the big puddle

of boiling goop that life came out of. Uh, the primordial primordial primordial, primordial primordial primordop that life came out of. The primordial of digital culture. That's what something awful was. It was a forum website that gave birth in various ways, some direct and some indirect to forechan, to Reddit, to Twitter culture, to all of these different to anonymous, to all of these different things, you can trace a lineage back to something awful. And the motto of that website as written by the terrible person who founded it was the internet makes you stupid. And at the time, what that kind of meant was, and if you're younger, or if you just weren't very online in the late 90s, early 2000s,

you may not remember this long period, but there was a fairly long period where the default assumption in regular society was whatever happens online doesn't matter, right? Like it's fake matter. It's probably fraudulent. It's almost certainly like made up. You can't trust anything online.

And real people are not on the internet, right? Like, it's kids, it's nerds, but like, you know, guys who run banks aren't online, you know? Like the idea that the richest man in the world would spend all of his time shit posting was absurd. Like, so. He really should be busier than he observably is. He certainly, it seems like it, although I guess so should I. Um, if I'm being fair.

Um, but yeah, it's, um, there's this, uh, this degree to which digital culture is still very much, it's a huge chunk of it of it like we all want it to not matter We all want a place where we can just shit post and bullshit because shit posting and bullshit and comes out of Like the very same impulses that like determine a lot of how we interact with like our friends, right? You know, we all need sometimes where you can just sit down, have a couple of beers or whatever and like, say shit with your, with your buds, you know, and it's not, it's not being recorded, it's not going up anywhere forever. You can just kind of like talk. This is the, it's a, it's a field, almost social experimentation is a huge part of maturity of growing up, but becoming a person. And I think we all get kind of, there's a degree of like the

accessibility of the internet that makes that impossible to entirely get over, even though it is demonstrably untrue. What happens on the internet matters quite a lot, and you can have a real significant, you can influence your own life in very negative ways by saying the wrong thing on the internet at the wrong time. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, lots of people have observed this fact that it's like on Reddit, you're not on Reddit, I mean on Reddit too. But, you know, on Twitter, like once, you know, once a month, Twitter elects some 10 follower anime profile pick with a single tasteless joke and makes it the full-crime of reality. Yeah. And it's like that's a and the thing I don't think this is actually

that far off topic just because like it's it's this warping of reality, this warping of like what is real, what is trustworthy, what are the like impacts of things. And the fact that like, you know, 10 follower account can become, can become international news. Yeah. Has to sit alongside the endless bombardment of dick pills and global leaders. Like I had this joke that I was trying to formulate over the weekend of like World War II with Twitter

where it's like, you know, just a joke hinging on the idea that some like follower bot would observe this. Like, ah, it's like, you know, two posts in a row. Like it's like the USSR has rolled into Berlin. Stalin has unfriended the president. I hope this doesn't mean anything. You know, that it's like that you have like, you have international politics happening

in the same space as fake international politics, as the same space as just like this endless bombardment of, you know, of curated reality, fictionalized reality, unreality, and spam. And no one knows what's real anymore. No one knows what to trust. And the instinct and a lot of people is to just give up trying to parse the difference. And that makes us us increasingly vulnerable. Yeah, and I think a big part of what's, kind of at the core of the problem here

is what you've said here, it makes us vulnerable. The degree to which this can be weaponized is really significant. Like, one of the things that we saw that I think is kind of low-key a significant moment in sort of info conflict shit is this weekend, last weekend from what we're talking now. There was a mutiny by the Wagner mercenary forces in Ukraine and southern Russia against the Russian government.

Or at least, that's what it appears to have been now, right? This is Russia, a lot of this is really weird. So I'm not gonna say, we know, we certainly don't know entirely like what happened there, like what's going on there. But a couple of things happened very quickly for one. Folks on the right, and there were also a lot of kind of like shit head left people who adopted this too decided that liberals were cheering on the head of Wagner

You've got any pregoation because like they believed he was a reformer and that like they'd all fought this guy He was like objectively a piece of shit and a fascist is like they're cheering him on because they hate Putin so much And they've convinced themselves that he's going to fix Russia. And he's like, no, I didn't see that. Like, look, I love calling people out when they have shitty takes specifically on this specific war because I've been covering it since 2014,

but like, I didn't see that. And none of the people talking about how liberals were doing this provided any evidence of it. And it happens all the time, right? Sometimes people will like take a post that has like 30 likes and be like, this is what the left is saying. But like with this, there was even less. Like I didn't see a single post where someone was like, Progojans gonna like fix, you know, corruption in Russia or whatever. No one was saying that. They just invented that this was going on. And it, part of it is that like, you know, the way Twitter works now

made it a lot easier for for disinfo to spread from this thing. Like there was very famously a this was going on. And part of it is that like, you know, the way Twitter works now made it a lot easier for for disinfo to spread from this thing. Like there was very famously a guy who is a, an absolutely a con artist, just started sharing up on chavideos from there with like bad commentary that was inaccurate. And Elon Musk was like, this is the guy I've come to trust about. We can say Elon Musk. Yeah, we can say Elon Musk. I don't know. It's a problem, Dan.

Uh, so you beat me to Elon Musk because I was going to say that it's like the con artist was, but then it turns out that he was just retweeting that guy. It's like, he got, of course, he got involved anyway. Yeah. Uh, yeah. And it's the, I don't think this, the solution was not because we lived, you know, our parents and grandparents lived to the day where most people would be like, well, you know, folks who are in politics maybe need to care about this. I might want to get the broad strokes of it, but like random people,

you know, shouldn't be influencing what's going on with these international relations. And that's how you get shit like the Dolas brothers carrying out coups all over the world on behalf of the US government where most Americans are like, what are we doing Guatemala? I didn't know we had guys in Guatemala. And that wasn't great, but also this new thing where if you are a personality, if you are in media,

then you are obliged to be a part of every big thing that happens everywhere, even if you are demonstrably incompetent at that and everyone is demonstrably incompetent at that past a certain point, you know? Yeah, and that's been, oh boy, has that, that's been a lot to deal with. And it, it, it going back to the original thing

that started this conversation, that's part of how so many of these cons perpetuate, is that like people are only competent, including famous people, including people with followings, in limited areas. And once you get out of your area of competence, it's easy to get fooled. And if there's a bunch of people who trust you because of the things you were right about, then they can very easily get fooled when you get fooled. One of the big hazards there is that One of the big hazards there is that, and this is a longstanding observation, is that Huxters, con artists are going to be more willing than anyone else to pretend to be up to

date on it. They have no compunction about being, it's like, oh yeah, I'm an expert on submarines and Ukraine and Russia and Belarus. Yeah, yeah. You know, so there... The reason it's a con man is because it's a confidence man, because they get your confidence, because they act confidently and give you reason to trust them, and they have no moral compunction about lying to you. And they are always going to be faster

with the take faster with the confidence statement, faster with the solution, faster with a call to action to buy their book or dick pills. Yeah, and it's, in often, I think part, one of the things that's made this all so much harder to catch and so much more durable is that it's, it used to be as obvious, you used to be able to see like, okay, well, this guy's a con man, but like,

I'm not a person who can be conned by someone selling diet pills. That's not my vulnerability. So I immediately recognize this guy as a con man, or I am not a person who can be conned by Christianity stuff because I'm not a Christian, so I'm not vulnerable to this con man. And now so much the cons are downstream of the following and of the fame, and so a lot of people are getting taken

in by con man, and maybe the fact that person's putting in a link for their supplements on every viral post, you don't buy their supplements, but they'll come up with something else for you. Once you're in the funnel, or even if they never convince you to buy anything, if you're sharing their content, that's bringing more people into the funnel.

That really wasn't the case. That wasn't the case with, you go back 10 years talking about like young living, or some other multi-level marketing company where they're selling, you know, essential oils with fraudulent health claims. They weren't getting random people to spread their business without paying for shit. And now you can do that. If you're a con man and you've already got followers because you bought a bunch and you're

on the Ukraine shit, you just grab whatever videos and say whatever about them, frame them in whatever way is likely to get people to share them the most. Then suddenly you gain 200,000, 300,000 followers in the space of a night or two and your ability to scam people and get money out of them has increased several times. The con is downstream of the platform, right? So, you know, that's, you get this guy and maybe he's shilling thing X or thing Y, he's got a couple, you know, whatever different con he has. But regular people can be in the business

of spreading his platform, of increasing his profitability, even if they're not vulnerable to the con. Maybe they're not the kind of person who's ever gonna buy weight loss pills or supplements or whatever kind of thing. But if this guy starts, you know, sharing all of these videos on the fighting in Ukraine, you know, at a moment when it happens to be the opportune moment to do that and they go crazy viral, well, then that guy is able to triple his following and, you know, and have people who are not interested in his con spread his

shit, which gets him followers, which brings more traffic to whatever the money generating part of the con is. Yeah. It's, it's all a sales funnel. Our, our, just, our, our daily lives, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our

our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our society into just like a giant nested series of sales funnels. Yeah. I don't know. That's bound to be a solid foundation. I don't see what we go wrong. That seems like that will go well for us. How do we get any ideas on how to fix it? Should we just state a problem and then run away? I mean, the easy thing to do would be to restore trusted our public institutions. would be to restore trust in our public institutions. If we could have sort of like, I don't even wanna say like a unifying cause,

but just a sense of common, like shared commonality and trust in our local society, strong, not just really strong families, but strong family units constructed or natural or however you want to define or construct those, but local with good infrastructure around us so that our physical spaces are appealing and comfortable to live in and provide us a sense of enrichment and fulfillment, the easy stuff. Just fix infrastructure, fix society, fix media,

and then I think we're good. Yeah, yeah, so that's good. So if we fix everything that we want to have any more problems, that's great. We're on the same page. Not mean it is really like, and this is, it's also, there's also this kind of like problematic element

of when you're like, well, we wanna, like a problem is that there's zero trust in institutions, objectively a problem because it means that when say the CDC is like, hey guys, there's a plague, we should probably do this and this and this, it immediately becomes a culture war thing. And so you can't actually confront serious problems

the way that you need to be able to confront them. It's just not possible anymore. Likewise, but the other issue is that like, well for a significant chunks of the population, there's never been any good reason to trust, the institutions because they're marginalized groups and whatever, when the institutional trust was higher, the government was fucking them in this way and

that way. And that's also, so I wonder, I think there's a significant extent to which we need new concepts of what an institution is and should be. We need, it's such a ground floor problem because like, I don't know, we're never getting back to a point where Americans trust the CDC. Like that's just not gonna happen, you know?

Like whatever the way forward is on us having less, the overcoming the anti-vax anti-science shit around medicine, it's not getting everyone to love the CDC, you know? That's just not ever going to happen again. Yeah, and part of the complexity here is that it's really easy to sort of say that, you know, it's like, okay, well, the solution is like strong central institutions. And it's like, that's not correct at all either,

because like, I mean, the, my go- to example for that would be that it's like, look at the LDS church, look at Mormons. They have a very, very strong central institution that provides this like social anchoring point for a lot of their lives. And yet, Mormon communities are incredibly vulnerable to affinity fraud and MLMs, you know, like Utah Salt Lake is like the, the, the is the locus of MLM culture. And so the strong man, this is why we need strong leaders, isn't the answer in its own way, even if it's a very tempting sort of like answer to gravitate towards.

Yeah, that's that's I don't know um I don't actually know. The part of the problem is that like there are little solutions right there are little things that you can do stuff like advocating for um you know a more functional idea of like a more a more functional legal definition of like what an auto dialer is and what counts as like illegally sort of like flooding phone lines with with with cons and stuff or restricting, you know, the ability of people like a bill collectors and stuff to utilize, you know, the phone system and some of the ways that they do. And that can make stuff better. Just like, at a certain point, we will develop tools that mitigate some of the harm AI is doing in the conspace, some of its ability to automate and push it to people at scale, will get reduced. At a certain point, that will happen, right?

Because it happens with everything. AI is not unique. You've heard of the red queen hypothesis, right? Yeah. It's kind of a way of like, for there's, it's kind of like a way of looking at evolutionary theory. There's this point in Alice in Wonderland where, you know, the red queen kind of like traps Alice in this situation

where like she's got to keep running as fast as she can, but it's like a situation like a conveyor belt sort of situation. So no matter how hard she runs, she never gets ahead, right? And that's kind of the way that like the evolutionary arms race works, right? Like, you know, one animal develops a defense against a predator and the predator develops a way around it.

And like, the, the, like that's kind of the best case scenario for how we adapt to cons. I think actually like technology And like, that's kind of the best case scenario for how we adapt to cons. I think actually technology just moves too fast now for us to be able to keep up, right? Like we're not just standing in place, we're consistently following behind. And I don't know, I don't know what we do here. I mean, yeah, so there will be technological solutions to specific manifestations.

I mean, a big one like in there, to not bant is that at a legal system, the governments need to do something about the robo calling and the text messages because they're rendering a vital piece of like civic infrastructure unusable. Yeah, people don't trust their phones anymore and that's bad. Yeah. Because it means they stop using it.

You know, it's like, there's, yeah, there's very real like consequences and we need to be able to trust that we're talking to people who aren't just trying to get our money. Yeah. Yep. Well, Dan, you got anything you want to plug

at the end of this here? YouTube channel folding ideas, everyone should check out if you have not already. Yeah, the YouTube channel, that's going to be the big one I'm still on. I'm on socials at Foldable Human though I'm trying to wean myself off of them because they're broken and being broken on purpose and they're bad for my soul. So I still I'm addicted so I still keep coming back but I'm a lot less active than I used to be.

Oh sorry I didn't hear. I was too busy getting anxious because of a thing on Twitter. Uh, no, yeah. Dan, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate your thoughts on all of this. I'm looking forward to your next video, your next investigation, whatever that happens to be. A folks should check out if you haven't,

line goes up, your documentary on NFTs. You should check out Contrapreneurs, is I think what you called your, your Michelson Twins documentary. Yeah. Check out everything Dan has done. Thank you, Dan, and that is the episode. You can all go home now and deal with the fact

that your bank information just got stolen by somebody in Macadonia. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here,

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