Chapo Trap House - 520 - We Went To A Zoo feat. Zack Kopplin (5/3/21)

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

Will and Felix report from their trip to the zoo. We review the woke CIA ad, and then discuss restaurants finding themselves hurting for employees when their lazy, entitled potential workers aren’t “economically coerced” to labor for “poverty wages”. We’re then joined by journalist Zack Kopplin to discuss his new piece on how corrupt mineral mining contracts have played a big part in our 20 year occupation of Afghanistan. Then, more zoos, animals & apes talk. Follow Zack on twitter: @ZackKopplin Check out Zack’s piece here: https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/how-afghanistans-president-helped-his-brother-secure-lucrative-mining-deals-with-a-us-contractor And get tix for our show at the FRQNCY1 streaming festival here: https://frqncy.live/frqncy1

Hello, hello, greetings friends. It's another Chopo coming at you this Monday afternoon. It's me, Matt, and Felix. And in a little bit, I will be discussing corruption in Afghan mining contracts with the journalist Zach Complin. Before we get there, just some regular, regular Chopo business to attend to. So let's kick off today's show with, I think maybe hopefully a new feature on the show, it's Zoo Report. That's right. We're reporting on the animals at the zoo. Felix and I went to the Bronx Zoo on Friday, and we've come back with some interesting animal facts. I'm afraid Matt could not attend our day outing to the zoo as he is banned from all wildlife preserves, zoos, circuses, and things of that nature. Look, is it a crime to try to dose

the elephants with LSD so that they can escape? If so, lock me up. There's a photo of him at the ticket booth, and it says, do not let this man into the zoo. Do not let him into the Bronx Zoo. All the apes get too damn horny when they see him. So Felix, what did you make of the zoo? What was your favorite animal experience on Friday? Are there any animal facts that you would like to share with our audience? I feel like the best thing we saw was the two gorilla kids playing. That was awesome. They were sort of rough housing. They were doing a little light scrapping with each other, but the best part of it all was that it all kicked off when one of them just took a giant armful of hay and just like splashed it on the other's head,

and he was running around with a little cap of hay, just throwing hands at his brother. Gorillas love hay. In captivity, they seem to hang out with hay and do a lot of hay tricks. There were some things I found artistically interesting. There was a monorail portion that me and Will rode, and everything on the monorail was pretty cool. We went past this one part of the zoo that has three different types of African deer that were hanging out. Asian deer, I believe. I think they were Asian to quote the cable guy. I don't know. I forget, but they were also... They were a very cool deer species. Yeah, there were peacocks walking around them too, but then a few 50 feet away, right under the monorail, there was a red panda just

living alone under the train tracks. He was a houseless person. They have this red panda, and he's literally living under a monorail overpass. He's playing a harmonica. He's cooking beans over a garbage fire. Yeah, that's the Coleman Francis of red pandas. I feel like you have to have a better setup for them. They love playing with each other, so you need at least one more, and you should make them live there. They were like, coming up on your right, if you'll just look down, you'll have about a one second window to see the red panda that lives under the monorail. Yeah, it's like everyone loves red pandas. They should have played a bigger role. I feel like it was probably Enrichment Day or Enrichment Time when we went. We missed a lot of animals like the

gibbons. We missed a lot of famous monkeys and apes, but we saw a lot of lemurs, which is great. Everyone should love lemurs. On the monorail, they were like, I'm sorry today. You'll not be seeing our Siberian tiger, but make sure to go over to Tiger Mountain to see some of our Malaysian tigers before you leave. Went over to Tiger Mountain, Tiger Mountain closed for the day. I will be seeking a refund. That's like when I was a kid, we went to Universal Studios, and the Jaws ride was broken. That sucks. That's the whole fucking point of going to Universal Studios. I do want to hold myself accountable for eating too many chips at the zoo. I don't think it can happen to you, but then it does. Let's talk about... I have not seen this yet,

but apparently everyone is talking about this new ad produced by the CIA that is quite something. I wouldn't say they're going in a new direction for the agency, but the central intersectional agency is, I think, what they're attempting to pivot to now. I have not seen this ad yet, but should we watch it now? Let's see if we can take this on. Let's see if I can process this. I've got a 42-second version and a two-minute version. Do you want the long cut? Let's get the long cut. Let's do the whole CIA director's cut, the Snyder cut of the CIA ad. Yes. Let me just share this. The Carlucci cut. Here we go. When I was 17, I quoted Zora Neale Hurston's How It Feels to Be Colored Me

in my college application essay. The line that spoke to me stated simply, I am not tragically colored. There is no sorrow damned up in my soul nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. At 17, I had no idea what life would bring, but Sora's sentiment articulated so beautifully how I felt as a daughter of immigrants then and now. Nothing about me was or is tragic. I am perfectly made. I can wax eloquent on complex legal issues in English while also belting Guayaquil de Misamores in Spanish. I can change a diaper with one hand and console a crying toddler with the other. I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cisgender millennial who's been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my

existence is not a box-checking exercise. I am a walking declaration. A woman whose inflection does not rise. I believe she's walking by a portrait of Alan Dulles. I did not sneak into CIA. My employment was not and is not the result of a fluke or slip through the cracks. Okay, no, there was a photo of her shaking hands with Gina Haspel in one of the little montages here. I am educated, qualified, and competent, and sometimes I struggle. I struggle feeling like I could do more, be more to my two sons, and I struggle leaving the office when I feel there's so much more to do. I used to struggle with imposter syndrome. Oh my god! You're used to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling

like I'm supposed to apologize for the space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort. What? My brilliance. I am proud of me. Full stop. My parents left everything they knew and loved to expose me to opportunities they never had. Because of them, I stand here today a proud first-generation Latina and officer at CIA. I am unapologetically me. I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are. Know your worth. Command your space. That's... Wow. I mean, okay, I gotta say, so I don't know why people are like especially pissed at this one because it's like, I don't know, I feel like this is hilarious. It's great. Obviously. And it's also like, well the CIA isn't like, they didn't become more evil

by doing this. It's like, they're equally bad whether it's Angleton or like somebody who has to huff in a bag when they get quote-tweeted. It's still the same thing. It's the same thing. Yeah, like people... It's the same job. Yeah, people get so much like psychic damage from like, you know, reading completely earnestly into like a CIA PR piece. And it's like, this one seems pretty easy, okay? Where does the CIA always get its people from elite university? Yep. What the elite universities talk like now. That's it. There you go. That is all of it. It is, you gotta have a fucking college degree to work for the CIA. And the type of person who goes to college and then works in the public sector

has a certain vocabulary that they absorb and that they identify with. And so this is an appeal to them. This is how you get the next generation of college dipshits to fill out your ranks. Is it... Okay, I understand they're using all the language of these like, you know, sort of like striving, specifically-minded lunatics. But like, isn't the main hurdle though, the fact that like, if you've ever admitted to doing drugs, you can never be a CIA agent? Like, I remember like the FBI when they were trying to recruit hackers couldn't find a single person who it doesn't smoke weed. Yeah. And then they just fired some people. Remember the Biden campaign because they said, yes, I've done weed on their fucking applications,

like genius. I was gonna put a point out like, just two things I picked up on in this commercial is yeah, like she's like, it's like the woman, the narrator is like walking down one of the corridors at Langley, past like oil paintings of like the former directors like fucking Richard Elms and fucking Alan Dulles. She walked by like a framed case of William Casey's kayak. But then in one of the photos, like in this sort of photo montage, it's like of her, you know, becoming a case officer or whatever. She's right there shaking hands with Gina Haspel, like the torture fucking lady, like the lady who was like was the architect of like the CIA's torture program or one of them at least. Yeah. And then covered the whole thing up.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But sitting of covering things up, I did notice that one of the most repeated bits of pablum and drivel that was that was in this ad is that she kept saying, I will not apologize for who I am. I will not apologize for the space I command. And then she kept saying, I will not apologize. Like the guy with smallpox and deadwoods. I apologize. I apologize. Shut the fuck up. So it's like, yeah, it's just like this is, the CIA is not going to apologize for being intersectional or any of the coups and torture that they've done. Yeah. That's the thing. It works out both out of it. If you're ambivalent

about joining the CIA, this gives you reason. It's like, you don't have to apologize for working for the CIA because they're pursuing good goals, which include employing you and giving you something to do as social justice, because if it's totally individualized, if there's nothing, if everybody is really out for themselves because we live in a racist patriarchy that doesn't allow for anything other, then your advancement as a someone who's oppressed is, uh, is progressive and it makes the organization progressive. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is, I mean, I would love to think that the CIA is now populated by just like the most failbrained millennials who like just can't fucking process anything, uh, are just debilitated by any number of anxieties and, uh, depressive maladies.

But I don't know. I feel like they're able to steal themselves. But as you said, even if that were true, Felix, it wouldn't make the agency like any less like evil or effective at what they do. Like it's like the, the individual personalities, the people working at it kind of don't matter. They're part, they're part of the, the Borg down. I mean, they're part of a system and an institution that has prerogatives that are like above and that exist independently of the people who staff it. Right. I think your takeaway from this, like if any, you should just be like, Oh, it's the same thing, but this is, this is funny. Like they're not, I just fail to see how they're more evil doing this. Like, yeah, of course, yeah, of course,

they're like using this like sort of, uh, bullshit academic language. Well, I think that's the thing is for a lot of people, this academic language means a lot to them and they think that it is definitely what it is to be a radical or a socialist or a leftist, whatever thing they, they value as their, uh, political self-identification and then seeing it in the mouths of the CIA cheapens it. And so that is why they're so horrified by it and have to like extra condemn it because they're uncomfortable seeing, Oh no, the, the stuff can be used by, uh, the fucking CIA. That's not fair. You're cheating or something like that. I will even go farther. Like if you, if you're like into that type of presentation, the like, uh, spaces and stuff like,

like, I don't know, you know, keep doing that. Don't get down on yourself. You really like it. Like it's like, yeah, everyone's going to co-opt everything. I don't, I don't, I don't care about it, but like, Hey, you know, I don't, I don't stop looking at paintings because George Bush likes them. You know, I look at paintings every day. Another, but, but I mean, like, yeah, no, I, I, I, I thought the amount of psychic damage caused by it. I mean, A, people got to get outside, B, you got to jack off before you start posting every day. That is for sure. Another interesting, uh, thing I picked up on in, in, in the ad was the invocation of imposter syndrome, which I think is funny because like they has given the CIA's history of literally

creating duplicate human beings to sort of like reverse engineer narratives, you know, like the two Oswalds, the two George HW Bushes. I mean, like, it's a common tradecraft thing of having these doubles exist everywhere. So I just love the idea of like imposter syndrome being fit into like a, a, a sort of tradecraft that involves the creation of actual imposters and duplicates. Yeah. Uh, I guess that's, you know, MK Galtra was a mass gaslighting. I mean, literally. The, the, the, uh, the taking up of spaces thing is hilarious because it's like, yeah, you said command spaces. I don't know how to apologize for commanding spaces. Yeah. But it's like, it's like, yeah, didn't most of the exist in a space? You know what I mean?

This is in Patrice Lumumba trying to be in a space. Well, yeah, I don't know. I, I, I, um, for me, I would put the entire CIA video in like my, uh, my Monday laughs column that I write for USA Today, but it did, it caused a lot of anguish with people. Yes. And hey, as long as it's got people talking, you know, hey, that's, that's what it's all there for. Like they, that's why even if this is just about mostly honestly about recruiting college kids, it's also a Psyop because everything the CIA does is by definition a Psyop. It's great. Yeah. What do we learn Palmer? I don't know, sir. I don't fucking know either. All right. Well, let's, uh, why don't we talk about, um, another area, another, another institution

of American life who is, uh, also having trouble hiring people. I'm talking, of course, about, um, uh, service industry restaurants and sort of local bar and grills. Um, I'm just, uh, reading here, this is a business insider, uh, says here as labor shortage is forcing chains like subway and Duncan to cut hours, close dining rooms and push employees to work harder than ever. It says here fast food chains are keeping dining rooms closed and cutting hours due to a lack of workers. Some employees who have been hired are working extra hours, resulting in more mistakes and burnout. Quote, everyone is struggling to keep stores open from lack of staff set a subway franchise. So, I mean, what's going on here? And like, and then this is filtering down from like,

you know, giant national chains like subway and Duncan to yeah, like the locally owned bar and grill and the, the owners of these restaurants, which are like, you know, like, like small restaurants, like family owned restaurants are like those people are like the, like the Cardinals, the Archdukes of small business tyrant to tyranny. Like that, that is like the small business tyrant mindset is the local bar and grill owner and the way they treat their employees. But like what they're, they're very tight right now because of COVID, obviously, um, their labor pool has received a stimulus check and unemployment benefits from the government, a stimulus check and unemployment benefits while COVID is going on. And they're complaining about the fact that for, they're

having this labor shortage because they're finding that many of the people that they would normally be hiring to do like, you know, a job for like $11, $12 an hour are simply finding that they are getting by just as good, if not better, being on unemployment than working a job at, you know, shooter's bar and grill. So, um, to that end, there's an article here, um, from the dispatch, it's titled, we just can't do this anymore. Business owners who want to hire workers are finding it impossible to compete with the pandemic relief packages enhanced unemployment payments. This is from a Waterville, Ohio, uh, says you're on Waterhead, Ohio. On a typical pre pandemic Monday morning, Dale's diner would be buzzing just down the

hall from Hall of Framers and next to the local hardware store at the heart of this two block downtown. Dale's is a much younger sibling to Dale's bar and grill founded in 1926. Still, the diner has become the community institution in the 10 years it's been around. The local history society meets here. The high school football team often comes for a big meal before games, a big meal before games. That doesn't seem right. I guess carboloading. I don't know. I never really did. Yeah, I don't know. Um, the local, uh, on this Monday, however, one day after Easter, Dale's is empty other than the couple who owns it. And the journalist who is curious about why they announced it's closing two days earlier. As we chat, a steady stream of would be customers

who hadn't heard the news pause to read the announcement on green paper posted on the front door and windows facing the street. Each visitor met with a pop apologetic shoulder struggle from Liz over the past year. Dale's struggled through the pandemic completely closing for two months before Ohio allowed for limited capacity indoor dining in late May, shedding about 25% of its overall revenue, a loss that left it's profitless, even with the help of two cash infusions from the paycheck protection program. Unemployment benefits extended and elevated through the pandemic are keeping would be applicants away. The $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan passed by Congress extended the $300 federal payments to unemployed workers through September

2021. The calculation is simple. Many low and unskilled workers can make as much money not working as they could with a job, sometimes more. So they stay home. So, uh, I mean, like, I, I, it's just so there's a labor shortage because employers are finding out that they're just not spending, they're not paying their fucking staff enough money to do these these jobs. You should, I don't understand, you should want to get out of your gaming chair and for just for your own virtue, you should want to go and get yelled at by bud court from heat all day when you could be saying, oh, that's that's what human virtue is is because work is virtue. Yeah, this is, so I've enjoyed this one because it's like, well, a it seems like people finally like hit

their breaking points with these jobs. These jobs systematically keep people. And they have the ability to do so because they have some money that they can, they can, they can, they have an alternative to being compelled to fucking work there. You think about how, uh, these companies treat these jobs and it's like everyone's kept in a part time position. So they don't have to meet certain obligations to them. They're underpaid. They're for, they're forced to work at a moment's notice for very shit pay. And, uh, the way that they, the way that they tried to dress it up after having them do the exact same shit during the pandemic, making them be the only people who have to go to work today, who have to wear a fucking mask for, you know, eight hours on their

fucking feet was to call them heroes and then really do nothing further. And it's like, this is exactly what these companies deserve for this, but it has been funny because, you know, for the last two years you've had these like Republicans who write these books that are like, you know, grand worker party, the populist future, the GOP, and it's like they have instantly folded because it's taken them more than five minutes to get a Dairy Queen treat. They now want, they want like, they want like Great Lakes pill heads to be impressed into servitude. Yeah. We got to create a Corvette labor system going door to door to get people to fucking work the friolator. Yeah. They, yeah. They might make this into like prison labor soon. Yeah. Like

every day when the doors open, the fucking bus from the jail shows up. No, man. I, you know, it will be like getting like the gang press system where it's like, yeah, you're, you're in Ohio. You pass out at your friend's house. You stink. The friend who you think stole your headphones. You wake up and you're shackled to like, you are now an HM at his majesty's fud ruckers and your chains of the friolator over, you know, under the cruel overseer, like, you know, Captain Bly or something like that. But you speak about like they're Republicans and their attitude on this. Look who shows up giving a coat in this piece. We wanted people to stay on unemployment roles and stay home says Michael strain, director of economic policy strain hours and Arthur F.

Burns scholar in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute. But why would we want to with the pandemic receding vaccinations increasing the economy opening? Do the same thing. This is Michael strain. You may remember from such articles as call me, Mr. I insist an article he wrote for the Washington post demanding that everyone refer to him as Mr. Strain rather than Mike or Michael, especially young people. It's cool that like if you spend enough time in a think tank, the Washington post will let you write your like DDLG fantasy in the outbed section. I like the name of the names of some of these restaurants here. It says Paul Ruiz owner of where you at seafood. The inlet and he goes, he's going to like the business owners in Ohio. Ruiz

and Rudsky say the generous government benefits are the primary impediments to hiring. You can't incentivize people not to work says Ruiz a long time Air Force veteran. You need to have incentives to get people to work, not to stay at home. You've got the hard workers who want to have a job, but the others need that motivation. And by others, he means like the vast majority of every normal person. Yeah, it's like under propagandized. Basically, people always overestimate individual cash payouts from the government. They're not like disability payments. Most of this stuff is like really not enough for most people to live on. But obviously people think it's more than it is. But you know, even if everyone was getting $500, $600 a week, which they're not. I mean, these are

always the people who like demand everyone learn what economics is. And it's like, well, if there's a labor show, if you can't. Yeah, it's interesting how that works. Demand. If you supply and demand of labor is not intersecting, what are you doing wrong here? No, it's someone else's fault. Yeah, no, I mean, like left unsaid in all of this is the idea that like they could staff these jobs if they paid more. But then like these people tell you, if I paid more, then I couldn't keep my business open, meaning me as a business owner couldn't profit from running where you at seafood. I mean, to which I say, I don't know, have a better business. What do you want from me here? It's not a human right to own a restaurant. Yeah, like, you know, yeah, and exactly what

these people are demanding is that the government create quote incentives to get people to Shanghai people back into the fucking, you know, their preferred incentive is just the market, which we can pretend is some, some totally neutral force. Hey, that's the market rate. Sorry, that's what you get. But when you do something like raise the amount people get in from the dole or whatever, it changes their equation. And you realize how much of that really is up to us, how much people feel compelled to work is up to us. It's not just the fucking market. We have, we can turn the knobs and make jobs more or less or numerative and more or less exploitative. Yeah. One thing I hope, you know, 50 years from now is that we are able to look back and how we

treated service jobs and people in those positions and be amazed that people in our time treated them the way that we do for so long. But it makes me hope now that there's so much trouble filling these jobs that maybe more people will recognize how terrible these jobs are to have, how much they wear on the lives of those who have to do them. I mean, and also especially that like restaurant worker is one of the highest risk jobs you can have for terms of like contracting COVID. One last quote here. This is a Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican from Northeast Wisconsin says that while the problems aren't new, they're becoming more urgent. I can tell you this, the single most consistent thing I have heard from

Wisconsin businesses of any size, small, medium, large in any industry, ag manufacturing tech for my entire five years in politics is this. Our biggest problem is finding workers. We cannot find workers with the basic skills who can pass a drug test and who are willing to show up to work. And I love it like, okay, who can pass a drug test? Like, oh, what? You need to have clean piss to fucking like off the floor or whatever. It's like, it's another thing if they won't submit to my system of control. What the fuck? Exactly. And then like, and then who don't, who aren't willing to show up to work. And it's just like, like, you don't think employers are part of that equation in terms of like what people are willing to endure or people who might just

willing to make the rational decision that I would prefer to be, you know, desperately precarious and impoverished rather than having to submit myself to the, to make not that much money or certainly not enough money that would make a difference in your life to the, you know, yeah, like to the whims of fucking Mike Gallagher and the shitheads who fucking piss in his ear moaning that they can't find enough workers to do the awful jobs at their shitty businesses. And that insistence is because this is a low skilled job, it should have a low wage. But in a system where we can control like how miserable work is, you got to consider that the big misery of service industry work and food industry work more than anything is dealing with fucking customers.

And there needs to be a fucking premium on that for anybody to want to do that shit, because that is where everybody gets to be a petty fucking dictator. Yep. What the goddamn, there's no pickles on their fucking McYummyberg. Yeah, when I, when I had a job working like customer service and like very early on in it, I was sort of like dumbfounded by how angry people were and just like the abuse that they would just heap on you because the $5 trinket manufactured in China that they ordered like next day shipping arrived broken. And it's just like, what involvement do you think I have in

this fucking process? But what he said to me, always stuck with me, he said that, well, like under capitalism, consumerism is like what we give people to vent their rage. Yeah. It's like the only acceptable way that like the people are allowed to like be angry and exert power over other people. Yeah, and that's... It was like once you're on the hook, no matter how fucking trivial the transaction is, the person at like the point of service is subordinate to you, no matter who you are.

And that's one of the big reasons that consumerism is one of the big dissolvers, social solvents of class solidarity is because it gives everybody a taste of being the boss. And in a world where you don't really see a lot of options for advancement, just that that little vacation of power, it's seductive and it alienates you from people who have to do those jobs and you start creating ideas in your head about why they have it coming. Yeah. Well, it's a bipartisan system too, because like, yeah, for generally how it's been for a while is for more right-leaning people, the workers, the person you scream at, take out all your rage on, you get to be a boss that's part of the perk of going to a restaurant or whatever.

For more liberal-aligned people, what it's been traditionally, and they'll get into the other thing a lot, but is that they're totally invisible. You get to work in your mind a job that like a real person has. You're a fucking creative director, whatever bullshit. You're a graphic designer. The knowledge economy. Right. And you don't have to go to work in an office during COVID. You have basically enough to get the creature comforts and little trinkets that demarcate you as a real person, but everyone who's like doing your grocery shopping or working at your restaurant, they're just not a real person. Even if you're an Uber driver, they're right in front of you. They're an invisible person. You just choose to block them out like you do if you live in San

Francisco or New York and you just see rows and seas and seas of miserable suffering people who are homeless. But they found a way to add the first thing to the more liberal interpretation of it, where you can fucking complain about the guy who does your grocery shopping. Well, yeah. The male Instacart shopper's thread is the perfect example of that. It's not just that thread. I've seen that multiple times about how bad male Instacart shoppers are. It's like, you have a servant. Whether you want to admit this or not, like that's what this is. That's the number one appeal of that entire section of the economy now to people is delivery drivers and shit, is that you get to have a servant without having a servant.

Exactly. There's no personal relationship. Without the anxiety, the social guilt of directly employing somebody in that kind of intimate setting. So you get to treat them, even though they're your fucking servant. As actually, no, he's a he's a male boy who's messing up my my fucking order because of his toxic masculinity. What? I'm sorry. We need to teach men how to listen. If you sell me pasta is not the same as macaroni pasta. Okay. I saw someone say, train your staff. Like, what the fuck do you think this app is, lady? There's no staff. That's the whole point. There's no training. There sure shouldn't have any fucking training. They just say, Hey, do you have a phone that can download this app?

Okay. If you can get to this place and pick up these things in the next 20 minutes, you get five bucks and then they go and run and do it. That's it. It's just dangling a fucking bill in front of somebody's face. And you know, like, like, you know, if you if you if you do get groceries on on the internet or get you delivered to you, especially during COVID, it's just like, look, I'm not trying to like rake you over the coals for that either. But like, it's just like, especially now under COVID, like, don't you feel a little bit guilty? And if it doesn't come to you, like, exactly as you specified or like wanted it to, you can just like, just let it go. Yeah, still tap progenerously. Like, I mean, like, just like in acknowledgement of like, just like how

how your own sloth is being indulged by like the convenience of like these apps and things like that. Yeah, when I am, I like really hurt my back in January. And I use these a couple of times. And it's like, yeah, I guess sometimes like, they like, one or two things wasn't there. But it's like, when you go to a grocery store, they don't often have they don't always have every single thing you want to like, it's not this person, if your brain automatically goes to like this person fucking up, like, I don't know what to tell you. And it's like, yeah, no, this is not a company with employees, really. But doesn't this kind of tie back to like the the central and intersectional agency ad that we just saw where it just sort of like, Oh, the problem is not this like, you know,

horrendous system of like, like Matt said, like, you know, servitude and like sort of digital surfdom that, you know, you're able to take advantage of. And as Matt said, you have the have the convenience of having a servant with none of the guilt of like the personal relationship of like an upstairs downstairs sort of social. You don't have to worry about longing glances through a window. Yeah, exactly. But like, but now your your anger at like, um, your your servants being like, restive or undisciplined can be communicated in the sense of like, men just don't listen to women. Or like, if you're a CIA agent, you can command spaces and control bodies, shall we say. But you're doing it because, you know, you'll never feel like an imposter again,

because the agency is like, also read, you know, Langston Hughes. And it's empowered you. It empowered you to live your truth. Well, there we go. I think we should transition now over to our guest interview for the day. Another another another chock full episode for you. Okay, now we're Zach Copeland. Okay, joining me now is journalist Zach Copeland to talk about a piece of investigative reporting he did about corruption in Afghan mining contracts. And Zach, I want to begin with, you know, when when we ponder the last, you know, 20 plus years of the war on terror and the motivations for why America fought these horrors or continues to fight them, oil is often brought up as a reason and a motivation for like, you know, no blood for oil

and things of that nature. But as Afghanistan now officially winds down, our America's official military involvement. What are people missing about Afghanistan? People pointed that as like, oh, well, that's a country that doesn't have oil. Why was America there for 20 plus years occupying that country? Yeah. So Afghanistan traditionally was associated with heroin production. But during actually the Soviet invasion, they had the Soviets had done an incredible job mapping mining deposits in Afghanistan that weren't really used. They had identified what were theoretically trillions of dollars of minerals. So in about 2009 2010, there was this Pentagon group. It was a little bit weird. It was called the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations.

And it was kind of like it was a little pet project of David Petraeus's. And in Afghanistan, they hired a Russian speaker, who basically went through all of the old Soviet maps, and then they went and confirmed them with their teams and realized there was potentially there was the low end estimates are a trillion dollars of minerals in the ground in Afghanistan. High end is upwards of three trillion dollars. And that's gold, copper, lithium, which is again, if you're going to talk about electric cars, you need lithium, chromite, which is made for stainless steel, which is what I've been looking at. And precious gems, really, there's a ton under the ground there. And so that is that has been a motivation for large American firms in the last decade. And American politicians,

including Trump, was very interested in Afghan minerals. So there's this, yeah, this, this Defense Department group that was at the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations. Yep. Okay. So like, what was their sort of, what was their, what was their remit to like their remit to like operate in Afghanistan? What was their goal? What were they trying to do? And what did they accomplish? So theoretically, they were supposed to create jobs, and they were operating in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and actually, you'll find it funny. Pete Buttigieg worked for them at this time. But was that why he was in Afghanistan for like the month or whatever that he spent in country?

Fear, we don't. So he hasn't ever said, but it, if I had to take a while to guess, because there's been a little tidbit, it's like he had that map of Afghanistan. Yeah, sure. That's the profile of him that said it like it is living room or his study. He had this huge like very detailed map about Afghans mineral resources. And he said a few little things that kind of hint that he was involved with the natural resources team. So presumably, but we don't, I mean, again, basically this group, this group was kind of, they were all wildcard. So basically, the Pentagon went and hired a bunch of business people to like, promote Afghan cashmere and like to promote mines and to, they, to go look for a little bit of oil. And they, they kind of, at the beginning,

they did what they wanted. And actually, the minerals group was especially interesting because they seemed to think of themselves as special forces. So the person, there's this woman. Her name is Emily Scott King. And then she met her husband over this guy, Mark King. They got married. And he, he's like a ex, he was like a special forces reservist. And they were actually like living on a special forces base, inappropriately. They apparently, according to some of my sources, had like unregistered weapons. And we're kind of, the way they saw themselves at least according to my sources, we're like doing special operations missions. Married to minerals.

Yes. Very little oversight. And, and this kind of culminated in their, their premier project was out in, in Kunar province in Afghanistan, where they were hanging with some, some of the special forces team said, Hey, we've got these buddies, this guy, Muhammad and his deputy Farhad, who run what's called the local, the Afghan local police, which is basically a militia group, pro-government militia. And they've been buying all these minerals and they'd really love to sell them, but they need to crush them first. So these guys brought in, they spent $3.8 million dollars and brought in a mineral crusher onto a NATO base, where they were processing ore with $3.8 million dollars in mining equipment on a NATO base. And it was like, they gave this mining equipment to

essentially local warlords so that they could not just take chromite out of the ground, but they could process it into a product that would come to market at a much higher value than just the raw like material, right? And it's actually more absurd. Right after I published my piece, someone sent me a Twitter post by an ex special forces guy who was reminiscing on his time in Kunar, where he was talking about bringing the same task force team out to one of these mines, which was Taliban controlled. And apparently the Taliban were, they were mining because they didn't have mining equipment. So they were shooting artillery at the rocks, which you get about 50 percent,

breaks up the portion, you can go bring your crusher. The other 50 percent's aerosolized. Yeah, they need better loss prevention if that's the way they're mining. Well, it's a serious carcinogen. Oh, wow. Okay. So not great. Really bad. Well, so there's a very funny phrase that keeps turning up in your article here. And it's artisanal mining, which is a phrase that I've never heard.

It just, it lands funny because like those two words, you don't normally associate them. But what does artisanal mining mean and involve? Yeah. So yeah, so this is funny to me too. It's actually a trade term, but when I write it, I'm like, it's a little bit weird. Basically, it's stuff that's not done by a big, like a real process. So the artillery mining is an example of this, or mining basically a guy with a pickaxe and some dynamite who doesn't have a company, who doesn't have safety equipment, who doesn't have a license, which is the big thing. The government in Afghanistan is supposed to register all the different mines and take tax and come and make sure it's not going to the Taliban,

stuff like that, right? But because it's really, there's not much actual government oversight in Afghanistan and people are just trying to make a little bit of cash. There's lots of guys who are going out literally with with some dynamite and getting some minerals. And they might have to pay off the local warlords, or they might just be poisoning the local streams. I mean, there's all sorts of bad things that can happen, or they might be using child labor. And all those things kind of are risks of artisanal mining, which is just against the local mining. And this also gets complicated because these are like government-backed militias who are doing this mining and been given the mining equipment. But according to Afghan law, it is

illegal for anyone associated with the government to have a mining contract, correct? So like, but that was not that was not the case in this matter, as you might imagine. Yeah, no, they were and they were buying again, they were buying from who knows where likely Taliban mines. And just because again, these things, the little secret of war also is that all the state of public enemies are still quietly doing business with each other. Whether you're talking Iraq with different Iranian-backed militias or Afghanistan with the Taliban, they're all people are buying people all at the commander level, everyone kind of has lines of communication open, especially on the business side.

Well, because it's like a huge country and like vast swaths of it are completely like under the control of the Taliban, but like the minerals are there or opium to be processed into heroin. Like you mentioned, another very important expensive resource there, that you got to buy it from someone to get it to work it, right? And the people you're buying it from are the ones you're officially at war with. But how did like, so how does the president of Afghanistan and his brother factor in this? So like you mentioned, that mining project that was done by these this task force and the special forces guys that got busted up in 2013 because it was illegal. But the people behind it didn't give up. So the woman I mentioned Emily Scott King,

her husband, and some other of the special forces guys, they all ended up in the private sector. And they're part of a consultancy called Global Venture. And Global Venture was then hired by a military contractor called SOS International. And this company is basically, I view it as a cut out for General Petraeus' office. It's got a bunch of his former deputies on board. And as well, it's kind of an upstart military contractor, but it's very well connected in the military contracting world and making a ton of money. And they brought this plan that they had to crush minerals to this company, SOS International, or they go by SOCI. And the problem was, again, it's all illegal. So how do you fix that? Another special forces guy had an idea,

he wrote actually a whole thesis that we found on his name was Ryan Hartwick. He wrote a thesis about how special forces should be involved in Afghan mining and how to do it right. And he suggested, well, you got to give some sort of benefit to the political leaders. And that appears to be what SOSI did. It took two years, but we found a variety of evidence. And the key piece, and this is the really hard part, they incorporated their business deal in the United Arab Emirates, which is a very secretive business country. They have lots of tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions. And of course, so they hid the ownership of their company in there. But we found, we managed to pull a document out of there that showed that the brother of the Afghan president had 20% of the

company that these guys were working on this mining project with. And then at the end of 2019, this connection appears to have come through. The Afghan president signed off on two specific special rights for this military contractor SOSI. They are allowed to purchase minerals that were locally mined in six Afghan provinces, including Kunar, the one that this whole thing started in. And they're also allowed to buy over 20,000 tons of chromite that had been locally mined that somehow, I guess, through confiscation, maybe the government had its possession. So these rights, again, they're not legal under Afghan law. This is all done extra legally. And it is benefiting the president's brother, which again, violates, at least for the company's, American

law and probably Afghan law. Well, I mean, it wouldn't be a story about international corruption and resource extraction if there weren't also fail sons and fail nephews involved in this corruption, because you have here Sultan Ghani, who is the president's nephew, who got a whole bunch of, wait, and some other fail son, they got like, make work jobs in DC think tanks and shit like that, the same way everyone else does. Yeah. So the president's nephew actually worked for SOSI. The funny thing about it, I heard he went by G-Money in high school.

G-Money? G-Money. That was one of the little things I picked up when working on this. But he worked for about two months for SOSI. And that was actually how I originally got tipped off as a SOSI employee told me, hey, because I've been asking about Iraq. And they said, you know, also, SOSI is corrupt in Iraq, by the way. So they said, you know, by the way, the president of Afghanistan's nephew worked for us. And I was like, what? And so basically, they said, this was likely part of making the deal was that not only are you cutting him in, we'll give your son an internship just to sweeten things up so you get something on his

resume. That was what the speculation was at SOSI. Speaking of destroying Iraq, you mentioned that Paul Wolfowitz is also on the board of SOSI as well. And he's probably the biggest name. So I mean, like, if SOSI is a cut out for the Department of Defense, and like, and you quote people in the article who say that, like, it's an open secret that SOSI is just like, like shorthand for the Pentagon or the DoD. Yeah. But like, so like, from their perspective, I mean, they see the running on the wall, like, they know they're headed for the exit, like how is SOSI and like all the money associated with mining a way for them to continue to make

money off of this or a way to continue, like, what would otherwise be their policy had they not had to officially leave the country? I think so. I kind of want to go in two directions on this. The short answer on mining specifically is mining is kind of what's called a J curve industry. So you start off really slow, where you're losing money, where you're building the factories, where you're getting, you're figuring out where the minerals are, and then suddenly you make a ton of money. And that's kind of the end of the J. So theoretically, they could be making in a couple years, they might be making bank off this. Now, the other answer to this actually is to go to Iraq. So I've done a bunch of work on SOSI in Iraq. And they, they have a history of

essentially not only making money on the public side, but on the private side, where they were, they, they basically made a deal with a former president of Iraq, Nouriel Maliki, who of course was propped up by the US government, the CIA, and actually Joe Biden personally, and was largely responsible for the fall of Northern Iraq to ISIS through his kind of sectarian violence and death squads. But anyway, so they made a deal with him where they got control of one of the largest military bases in Iraq. It was called Camp Taji, and they, they only kicked out last year after almost close to a decade. And they had, they had a memo from the prime minister that said, only SOSI can access this base. It's their land. And so every other company that wanted access that

base had to pay SOSI. And SOSI essentially was running a hotel. And because of that, it appears they actually got very invested in other kind of commercial businesses. They actually, there's, there's stories about them running not just the base as a hotel, but actually a large hotel in Baghdad. And now they've, they've kind of, they were apparently printing money, like hundreds of millions of dollars through these businesses, and have been trying to diversify into various other cybersecurity intelligence fields also. So it's, it's kind of become a monster. You quote an anti-corruption expert in your piece who says, intelligence and special forces do what it takes to achieve their mission. Their military mission may have ended, but these guys may have

thought they can make a ton of money and advanced our national security at the same time. I mean, making a ton of money, I mean, like that's obvious what's going on here. But like, how do they, how do they see this as advancing our national security when they're, you know, essentially buying chromite from Taliban-controlled artisanal minds? So this, I'm going to go back to this woman, Emily Scott King, because she did a fairly, she did an interview for a, a conference on special forces in 2019 that was fairly revealing. She said basically that this is a way to reintegrate the Taliban into Afghan society by mining, where basically you can have local commanders running mines and processing centers in their chain of command the way they're used to. And this can

be used to, to kind of create peace. It was kind of the original idea of the task force in the first place, which is we end the war by getting buy-in from all the people who are fighting and to making money instead of fighting, or at least pinch off some of their support. That's the theory behind all of this. And now, I mean, I guess like, there's this larger idea of like, okay, so like, Joe Biden says, like the Afghan war, the Afghanistan war is officially over. The US military is pulling out. But like, as with all these things, if you read the fine print, it makes clear that like certain operational functioning and certain aspects of what would be done by the US military is in some small way going to still be handled by military contractors. And it's like, and

is that what we're talking about here is like ensuring that these minerals come to market or that like are being sold to, I assume, Western and American corporations? So in terms of where it's being sold, we've heard rumors of Canada. And there seems to be some evidence that presumably it's also going to China through Pakistan, because that's a big market for chromite. In terms of staying in Afghanistan, though, that's it's an interesting question, because what will likely happen is we'll kind of see the Iraq model, where in Iraq, you have bases that are the contracts are facilitated by the local government. So in Iraq, it's by the Iraqi government, where they pick out a contractor and they theoretically give

the US some money to handle it in the US. The US will do all the contracting side of it and send sending people to be guards, to do laundry, to be janitors, to supply the oil, all that kind of stuff, or the fuel for like the fighter jets. And that will all be handled by, for the most part, American companies. In that case, the Iraqi military, and presumably, it will continue happening in Afghanistan, even with the pullout of the US. And we know there's going to be an interest because there will be unacknowledged special forces in Afghanistan. We're pulling out the conventional occupation, but the US is still going to have drone bases and kind of hunter-killer teams that are operating there, presumably, and they're going to need some sort of support.

And again, we don't, I mean, if you're an American politician, right, it sucks when you have to say soldiers are dying. It's pretty easy to brush away a contractor dying, and so it lets them avoid accountability. And this is, I'm afraid, is transitioning to that kind of status quo, another full-on shadow war, which is the easiest thing for a politician. I mean, you mentioned her before, but sort of a main character in this piece is this woman, Emily Scott King. And like, how do you find her to be like an example of like the way she sees herself as sort of almost a, I don't know, like a cowboy or sort of a Lawrence of Arabia style figure? It seems like that. I mean, she calls herself a mining futurist. And what I'd

heard from her colleague is basically that she rose very fast so that she was, for example, briefing Petraeus and was kind of basically, she was put in charge of all the mining by this task force. And it does seem like they decided that they really, like, what they were, again, it's they were doing good and they're making money as they saw it, right? And so why stop when this task force gets shut down? Why not get the Afghan president on board? And it's impressive. I mean, her Rolodex is very clearly large. And you have to ask, how did she get that? Okay, so, and then, okay, so what is Southern development? Like, is that's another one of these sort of umbrella companies involved in the mining industry in Afghanistan? Yeah, so Southern development,

or it also went by Sodevko, was the subsidiary that was used as a cutout for this project by this military contractor, Sosie. They, it was originally owned by the Afghan president's brother. We found archival documents back to 2005 showing that. But sometime around 2013, and this is kind of funny, the Afghan president today and his brother ran in the same election for president. And around that time, the brother's name was stripped from this company and it just kind of went dark. The public director in Afghanistan only shows Sosie today. And I was told basically, it was removed to avoid causing any embarrassment due to the politics. But again, the documents we found in the United Arab Emirates show that the brother still owns 20%. How did you, how did you

get onto this story to begin with? I mean, you mentioned briefly, it was like, you were looking into Iraq at the time. But like, what does this story say to you, like, overall about the like 20 plus years of the American military's occupation of Afghanistan? I mean, so getting on the story, it's really, it is the broader point for me, which is like, and I know I'm talking to an audience that thinks war is a scam. But this is, it's really worse than you can even know. Which is, it's like I said, every like, at the at the command level, it's entirely driven by money. And you can talk about the individual grunts, the troops on each side who are might be driven by ideology. But the leadership is all cashing out. So you've got, for example, all the, like all these

military contractors are filled with three star and four star generals, who've had to negotiate with different politicians in these countries and different militia leaders. And they get out, they sign up for the military contractor, and they call up their old contacts and say, Hey, can you cut me a deal on transporting fuel through Iraq or Afghanistan, right? And you get 50%. I get 50%. And the militias don't attack us. And of course, you're enriching the same people you're fighting, who then, again, at the commander level, have a motivation to continue fighting. I mean, like, I know stories by people who are importing Humvees in Iraq, about this company out of southern Iraq, and they, all the Humvees were getting all their trucks are getting blown up until they hired

the local militia. And then the militia delivered all the Humvees, and they never got blown up until the next day, when they're under the control of the military. And then that creates more demand for another delivery and another delivery. And eventually, the militia leader who was doing the transport retired to Dubai with the American next military guys from the US who also made a ton of money. And now they're all drinking buddies, despite being on opposite sides of the war. And they all got massively rich. So I mean, yeah, like this, the classic war is a racket, right? Like for forever, like, I mean, you know, except for the most of the people dying in it, like, it's just everyone on both sides are just they're getting paid because they're like, look, we have

the skills, we're here, like no one else is doing this job. Like I might as well, you know, you know, sort of just feather my nest for when I get out of the military, right? Well, yeah, I mean, you'd bankrupt Dick Cheney if you hadn't if we hadn't relied on military contractors. So but like, yeah, I mean, I guess like, I mean, looking to the future as like this war officially winds down and like how you know, the war on terrorism is sort of faded from the American consciousness. But like, our military is very much engaged in like, all over the world. It like, yeah, just like in terms of like how contracting has become part of the American way of making war and like the path of Pentagon functions. Yeah, no, it's it really has. And it's it's just an easy

way for the US to avoid a cap. I mean, America, a likes capitalism, B, we like war profiteering and C, our politicians don't like actually taking responsibility for things. And military contractors provide all those things. But I mean, but like, and it also provides a way for essentially, the function of a war to continue, i.e., like lining everyone's pockets without any of the news stories about like how horrible it is that a war has lasted 25 years, like someone's kid is fighting in the same war that their dad died in or whatever. Exactly. You can say it's over. And I mean, there's the soldiers are mostly gone. And it's just you and then you can instead hire out some ex apartheid because this is the other thing that's kind of fascinating. You can hire an ex apartheid mercenary

from South Africa, who is still really bitter and racist, to go do guard duty instead of paying an American soldier to do that or risking an American soldier dying. So that's what we do now instead. And if they do anything fucked up that makes the headlines, then you're just like, well, that's not us. Yep. That's just some guy we hired. Yep. And I mean, what's and the depressing thing also about it making the headlines, like this story was so hard to pitch it. I tried about 40 different editors before we found a home for it. No one really cared. I was told in the process that this was not vital, which so it really people people people aren't interested in the war. They're even less interested in the in the kind of the shadow war that comes after. Well, Zach Copeland,

I want to thank you for the piece and your investigation into this. If people want to read it, the link will be in the show description. But if they would like to read more of your reporting, where should they go? So I post most of it on my Twitter, because again, I work for an organization called the Government Accountability Project, which is a whistleblower group. But we don't publish ourselves. So it's kind of scattered around. I've done a lot for a bunch of different outlets. So the easiest thing is my Twitter, because that's where I have it all on it. I don't have a unfortunately, essentialized database of stories. Well, the link to your Twitter and the link to this article about corruption in the Afghan mining contracting

will be in the show description. So I'd like to say thank you, Zach Copeland, for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having gone. It's fun. Hey, what's up, everybody? So would it surprise you to learn that the boys did like 20 more minutes of riffs and goofs about zoos and animals and which types of apes or which types of guys during the zoo segment earlier? Well, they did. And I felt the episode, you know, kind of flowed a little better to put the new stuff and interview up top and then put this this animal segment back here. So just kind of popping in right now to say that that's what you're about to hear because there's not really an intro or an outro or any context for this. So here's a more zoo talk. Oh, and also while I'm here, I haven't mentioned the frequency

festival in a week. So why don't you go get tickets for that? Frequency.live, FRQNCY.live, our live streaming festival appearance on June 5th. I think we're going to have some cool stuff announced about that soon. I just had a talk with our old set designer who's going to be like building a stage for this thing. There's going to be like sets and shit and lighting design and all that crap. It's going to be very cool. So get your tickets now for our live streaming festival performance on June 5th at frequencyfrqncy.live. And now back to the dry boys with more on those wonderful animals we all know and love. I have two interesting animal facts that I learned at the zoo that I'd like to share with our audience.

The first being the largest mammalian predator species, the largest mammalian predator species, making it like an apex predator on the island of Madagascar, which is an enormous island. I mean, just massive, like a very distinct ecosystem. The largest mammalian predator is about the size of my cat, Marty. Yeah, I think Marty's actually bigger. They're like the same size and weight. It is known as the fossa, which is an interesting combination of cat and dog. But while we were there, Felix kind of blew me away, as he normally does with the thoughts that he has. But he came up with a, he said that all mammal species, it's a new way of categorizing mammalian species, and he said that all mammal species can be broken down into three categories, dog, cat, or person.

Yeah, no, that's it. God damn, he's right again. Yeah, he's right again. Like you don't think it holds up, but like a taper is like, that's like a dog. Okay, a lemur, that's a guy. Like all primates are guys or people. I mean, the problem is like the hooved mammals, it becomes a little bit more difficult to suss out. Dogs. Yeah, no. Okay, so like, do you think there's sort of cat like horses or dogs for sure? Yeah, a horse in a Labrador is the exact same personality. Like a zebra might be a cat. Who's a cat? Like who's a cat in the cat file of there? Zebras, because like I found out. Yeah, zebras and cats, undomesticatable. And the red-leaved zoo animal, they killed a few

zookeepers every year. They injure and kill more zookeepers than any other animal. See, I think a lot of the deer species are very cat-like and kind of furtive and quick and just sort of, you know, sort of skittering about. Yeah. Obviously, obviously the big cats, I mean, they're cats, it's in the name. I think there are actually more cats than dogs. Like a red pandas in cat. Is a, what's a capybara? That's a dog. I would say it's a person. A raccoon is a cat, right? No, I say person. I say capybara are people. Yeah, because they do like, they're like interested in every species like a person would be. Yeah, like if bears are guys, then capybaras are guys.

Yeah, bears are absolutely people. My second animal fact, though, I'll say this for you. Felix and I were treated to a very, very up close and personal view of two hyenas, which have never seen them up close. They're enormous. They're terrifying. Yeah. They're terrifying. They are so big. And the little animal fact to learn about them is that they have the strongest jaws of any mammal and their bite is something like 1300 pounds of pressure per square inch. I think I've read that hyenas can gnaw through steel bars if you give them a long enough time. Yeah, they're fucking horrifying. Like that will be what comes after humans. I have an idea. It'll be like a hyena society. Please tell them I am God. Look, you can say what you want

about hyenas. They might look scary. They might have incredibly strong jaws, but they make a great open mic audience. Yeah. Just very easy laughers. Yeah. No, it's yeah. They like keep the pace. They're like how like stov up the atmosphere on compound. Yeah. Also underrated African wild dogs, not as big or menacing as hyenas, but they're very, very cool looking, very beautiful animals, very impressive, very impressive to look at. That's how that's what I like about like species like that. Like obviously, like you're primarily when you think about going to the zoo, you're like, oh, I want to see the gorillas. I want to see the tapers. But then like it's cool seeing things that are just like a dog or a cat, but they're like more fucked up in their ears around.

And it's like, oh, okay. I can see like, I can see where these two things split off. Capacin monkeys. We saw some of those. Those are good. Those are beautiful. Very, very good. Those are obviously, you know, guy person. Yeah. The birdhouse was fucking sick. There were some very good birds in there. So I forget how big parrots are sometimes. Oh, man, they're giant. They're huge. They're huge. Yeah. That's what I love about the birdhouse is that it's like you have parrots who are like, that's a guy. Like they're very smart. Like a lot of those are guys too. Yeah. Crows, guys. Crows are 100% guys. Yeah. They're all really smart. But then like

you have like birds who are just like, bugs, like they're so fucking dumb. And it's like, they don't look that different from the smart birds, which is like a lot like people. Like if you were another animal, like trying to figure out who's a really smart person and who's really stupid. It's like, you wouldn't really be able to tell by appearance. Like they probably know, but we don't. Another thing Felix said to me at the zoo that stuck with me for the last couple of days is we were coming out of the, we were just, we were coming off the experience of watching these two gorillas fight with each other, which is like, you know, you know, for Felix and myself, almost like a spiritual experience, you know, close, you know. And I was like, you know, I mean,

I know, I know I don't need to convince anyone, but if like you find yourself skeptical of like the theory of Darwinian evolution, like just look at any ape and try to tell me that that's like not pretty much identical to a person. And Felix just said, yeah, when I look at chimps, I just see an evil person. That's, yeah, no, that's what, like, you guys know my like unified theory of primates, right? Uh, I know, I'm not sure if we do. Every primate contains like an element of humanity. And it's okay. Interesting. Like orangutans represent like a sort of scientific curiosity. Gibbons, uh, express like a, like a type of fun loving and seeking of like fun and enjoyment and laughter. Uh, gorillas exemplify like a true love of family that you don't see in every mammal

species and chimps represent evil. Being smart and evil. Yeah. They're the, they're the intellect unrestrained. Yeah. Just like put to the task of killing each other and dominating. Yeah. Yeah. Like I just like, I was thinking of like a like chimps and it's just like, yeah, like it's just like a person. If they were not burdened by knowledge of like sin and, and sort of self awareness. Yeah. You know, like just pure aggression, but they like your tool wielding aggression without any humanity, but they can be nice. Like there are like, like they can be taught. Like there's that video that champ like very gently feeding a turtle, but it's like, yeah, I feel like you have to like kind of train them to be that. Okay. But what about, what about the chill

horny chimps, the bonobos? Yeah. Bonobos are horny humans. They're sex nerds. They're sex nerds. So they're not evil. They are like, they can be evil. They can be evil, but they're not as essentially evil as chimps because they also can get things out through their weird sex games. It's just, it's interesting because it's like, there's all this, uh, evidence of like orangutans and lar gibbons, like to not, not very territorial by primate standards, uh, subspecies. And they, like, yeah, there's a, all these videos of gibbons going over to where tapers are and like grooming them and be like, Oh, what's this thing? This is awesome. Or like, if you put a orangutan and gibbons in the same place, like the orangutan will just like very gently shadow the

gibbon because they'll be like, Oh, this thing's awesome. Like, what's up with you? And it's like a chimp would just like enslave those things. Just start sharpening a stick immediately. This is funny. On the, on the day we went to the zoo, I saw, I saw a Twitter post. It was like a screenshot of a Facebook page of someone who worked at a zoo and there were like, uh, you know, bad news today. We had to shut down the, uh, we had to shut down the baboon exhibit because one of our females just, uh, sort of like miscarried and had a stillbirth and the entire troop is grieving. And by grieving, I mean, they're tearing up the stillborn infant and throwing its body parts at each other. I will, I want to defend the baboons. I feel like that maybe has its own

meaning to them. What do baboons represent? Scary people. Oh yeah. Like people who look scary, but are actually the kindest. Yeah. Yeah. Or they could just be, could they could just rip your face off. I mean, it's just, they're just, just scary individuals. Facebook guys. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. Baboons, like I'm baboon Facebook. It's like, when I get pissed, I get really quiet and that's when you have to watch out. I get really quiet, but my ass gets really red. If you can always, yeah. My genitals and asshole get inflamed. When you see them and they've got like their asshole just flapping behind them like a fucking whoopee cushion attached to their butt, it's gross. They're gross. Baboons are gross. I'm sorry. That's, that's what happens when I see

someone disrespecting the flag or kneeling for the national anthem. My asshole just sort of like, it comes like a fucking prolapses. It just prolapses and it just starts advertising to everyone. That's why they're, that's why they're guys because like a really gross looking person is like like uniquely gross to you in this way. Like as a person that another animal can't really be. That's like, you're repulsed by them. Not the way you'd be repulsed by an animal. Yeah. Like if you saw a person like just really messed up and you had to avoid looking at them. Yeah. If you see like a dirty, fucked up, disgusting dog, like major bite and it's like, you can go on your day. As a dog. Oh, yeah. Oh, but like, but like a largib and largibbons are

like handsome. Yeah. Like gorgeous. And of course, a silverback is one of the biggest hunks in the universe. Yeah. Enchanting. They have like, yeah, they're like models. They have like beautiful cheekbones and shit. Just real quick. I was talking about animal news. You brought up major Biden. Do you guys see that they're getting, they're getting a cat for the White House? Yes. Getting a cat is going to chill out the dog. Major is going to have a great lunch. You know, if I've, if I've studied cartoons, I know how this is going to end, folks. I think I know how they're going to, they're going to deal with major Biden by having Obama show up for Thanksgiving. That's going to be a great Jen Psaki clap back moment when

like they get the cat. Then like a month later, they're like, we've never had a cat. What are you talking about? So just be like, like, like, like, like Steve Ducey's son will just be like, yeah, what, what happened to the cat? Come on. Really? And then she'll just sort of like, you know, like purse her lips and be like, we're focused on not cat related issues. We've moved on from the cat question. Yeah, we've moved on from the cat. Okay. I will have to circle back on that one. That's an excellent question. Oh, such an important question. We will circle back with you and we'll circle back with you. It's an interesting question, but we'll, we'll circle back. That cat is like, major is just going to like daintily open the carrier cage and just swallow him whole like

an anaconda. That poor cat. You know, like when you first get cats in a new space, they'll like they're very, they're very skittish. So like they'll run to like some hidden corner of the house and just sort of stay there for like a week or whatever until they get their bearings. They're going to, they're going to open up the like the carrying case, the little cage that the cat comes in. The cat is going to just dart out, but dart out like through a door into the open mouth of major. It's just like going into a door, but you're going into the stomach of a dog. Yeah. No, that's like, well, there hasn't been a lot of major news. Do you think they're like drugging him? I honestly think that they're replacing him with some sort of Boston Dynamics

device. Yeah. That was like, Biden having a big shitty dog that he can't fuck. That's so perfect. That's why he won. Like this, because yes, that is an American relatable thing that is wildly more relatable than anything Trump has ever said or done is, yeah, you know, he's okay. He's a good guy. Well, he's shitting on your fucking lap. That's like, that's such an American dink to have just like the worst dog in the world. And to be like, he's actually really smart. Get less bad and gross and just expecting everybody to put up with it because it's like charming. Yeah. He's like, he jumps up on you and he's like untrimmed claws, like just pierced through your stomach. And he's like, Oh, he love, he loves people. He loves you. Pissing on the

resolute desk. Ah, that's our boy. Well, I'm going to say a dog piss on the resolute desk would be a lot easier to deal with than cat piss, which is like xenomorph blood. If you've ever encountered it, it is the most toxic substance known to man, it is, it is awful. It is all like, it will, it will permanently stain any hardwood floor it comes into contact with. I mean, not like I have any, you know, security deposits still outstanding because of issues like that or anything. My cats are very well behaved to all future renters. All right. All right. So that was that was the chopper zoo report. Hopefully we'll be, I don't know, to visiting some more zoos in the future, and we'll give you some more animal news coming through. But I think it's good to check in on

the, the animals, just what they're up to. It's fascinating shit. Yeah. No. Like that's the thing. Like zoos are like, obviously it's like kind of like on the whole, on the whole like sub optimal because it's like, yeah, a lot of them like shouldn't live in zoos, but for a lot of animals, like animals that live in zoos, like a lot of the times they've been like rejected by their mom or like they just, they couldn't make it in whatever conservatory they're in. They couldn't hack it. Yeah. They got fired. And it's like, they got fired from nature. That's like, that's like, they're usually run by conservation societies. And it's like, I mean, you got to fund a conservation society somehow because it's like, that was the other thing we're talking about at the zoo. Like,

if Bill Gates or like Jeff Bezos, like if they wanted to in like an afternoon, they could like kill everyone who's poaching like they could like everyone who like every rich guy who like hunts elephants and shit. They can just get like Wayne LaPierre. Yeah. They could put a bounty. Like they could have some sort of crowdsource bounty stories I've ever read in my life. Yeah. No, that, that, that's what put me into the, I honestly think you should, that should be a death penalty offense. Yeah. You're not, you're not. I honestly 100% to believe that there should be no capital punishment for anyone committing a crime against another person. But there are certain classes of animals that I think you have to have a death penalty for killing

to make the point. Elephant, great idea. And elephants are number one on the list. Elephants are like, if you, yeah, if you see an elephant, you're like, that would be cool to kill that thing. Yeah. You're a monster. Yeah. You're fucked up. You're so fucked. You are, you cannot, you cannot function among us as anything other than a fucking poison as a carcinogen. But like that story in particular where like they couldn't even kill it and they had to shoot 10 times. Yeah. He couldn't, like big bad NRA guy takes three shots, gets knocked on his ass by the recoil and the fucking guide has to finish it off. Like a cartoon, you wouldn't do that. It would be too on the nose to have the NRA guy be a fucking pussy who needs somebody to tie down

an elephant and even then can't finish the job. No, we were just talking about like just sort of like the sense of just like absolute cosmic injustice that like Don Jr. could go to Africa and kill an elephant. Like they're like, that those two beings exist on this universe, like perceiving, like being aware of being alive. And one of them gets to kill the other one and like cut off its tail for a photo is, I'm sorry, like monsters. There's no God in like a world where that can happen. Yeah. Yeah. Like Don Jr., like the elephant is like more self-cognizant than Don Jr. 100% has deeper emotional connections to its family. But like what should happen is like when there's like a George Soros or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, like someone with like

tens of billions of dollars, right? Their thing should be like they all protect a different animal. And like, you know, for people who have to like get involved in the poaching industry in those countries, it's like, yeah, it's a bad situation, but it's like, yeah, if you have $70 billion, you can take care of that. And then that's the thing. You don't even have to make it like an armed force. How about you just economically develop those areas? Yeah. And people don't even have to think to do it. And then you also have significant bump up security too. And then the rich guys who hunt them, it's like, okay, Wayne LaPierre than Bill Gates. Who's like higher in the NWO? Bill Gates is like the cardinal of the NWO. Wayne LaPierre is no one. He's nothing. He's

a pig. Bill Gates is as meaningful as an Afghan poppy farmer. They could wipe him off the planet with a drone strike in an afternoon. No one would care. Yeah. But like, they're not doing that because they're bad. Well, yeah, that's the worst thing they do. It would be to do something worse because they can't do anything but evil. So like, so zoos, like zoos exist to like raise money for conservation and like get people interested in animals. I wish there were other ways to do it. But yeah, no, I mean, conservation, you should, you should see like the destiny and the duty of humans to protect all the glories of nature, or at least stop fucking destroying it. Yeah, stop fucking just like, I just, if you, if you're one of these guys like Wayne

LaPierre or like like a dentist that pays money to like go on like a big game so far and essentially just be driven up to like a sleeping leopard and then blow his brains out. Like, I like, if you're paying money to do that and going like in country on one of these like safari hunts, I think you should have to like understand that like, while you are hunting or stalking this animal, like you are being stalked by like a team of highly trained killers, highly trained ex-military operators. That's like a great thing you can do with like Navy Seals and shit is like not even give them the context of it. Just like, they are stalking the hunters and it's like, you can tell them whatever stupid thing. Yeah, they're in al-Qaeda. Yeah, it's, oh, they're in al-Qaeda. Oh,

these are, these guys work for Chrissy Teigen and John Legend. Yeah, like if they're Q-Dip shits, it's like, yeah, these guys are the, the Kapal. They're the adrenochrome people. Yeah, and it's like, and you'd be pretty much right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But there's another thing. Yeah, that's a great idea. We've solved so many problems at once with RCC. You know, and like we, like Felix and I said, like this would be a great way to deal with all of these like mercenary types and like, you know, keep them employed, but like crucially out of the United States of America for the rest of their life, but like not killing people, because like Wayne LaPierre is not a person, but you just keep them over there and you airdrop them like,

you know, protein shakes and Joe Rogan podcast episodes and they'll be happy. They're loving it. They're loving it. They can still go on Facebook. Yeah. They can still post. Insane arguments, but it's like their job is to make sure rich guys don't kill elephants or like whatever other amazing spaces. Or like, I mean, whatever there, there has to be like a sort of like a, like a, like a pay, some sort of like pay, like paycheck imposed price, a price tag. There's gotta be a price tag. There's gotta be a price tag. And I think, you know, just like, yeah, like all of the sort of the, the canopy of like ex-military mercenary guys, I think can be put to work. I'm just sort of being like, I'm assuming for crowdsource bounty on elephant

killers out there in the world. Yeah. And this is like, this gives me no pleasure to take something away from the Greeks, but sorry, they would be used to protect octopuses from you. Like they're too smart. I'm sorry. You can't do it. Octopus, like after humanity, it's going to be a society run by octopuses. That's true. The cephalopods will inherit the earth. Yeah. No, that's, that's what it's going to be. Yeah. I hope you enjoyed the Hannibal news. I think we should call this episode, we went to a zoo. Yeah. We bought part of a zoo. All right. Cheers.