It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 103

Episode Date: October 21, 2023

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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. you, but you can make your own decisions. Ah, welcome back to Behind... Wait, no, sorry. It could happen here. We'll keep that in so that our audience, who I know is deeply tied to the myth of my own perfection, knows that I too err. Speaking of perfect creatures who have never made a mistake, our guest today is Dan Olson. Hello. Welcome. Hi, Dan. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. Not making mistakes. Exactly. Exactly. You are the Buddha I met on the road, and I'm going to say, hello, teach me how to be flawless. the road and I'm going to say, hello, teach me how to be flawless. All right. So first, have you heard of gold? Yes. Yes. I was about to talk about gold.

The perfect investment, Dan. The perfect investment vehicle. Never fails. So, Dan, you are a YouTuber, an investigator, one of my favorite researchers. We had you on recently to talk, well, a couple of months ago. I don't know, time, flat circle, et cetera. But we had you on to talk about your work reporting on the NFT bubble bursting and on the metaverse bubble bursting.

And more recently, you just published a two and a half hour documentary investigation into the GameStop stock cult, which is a lot of people are aware of the first part of this, which is that in January of 2021, a bunch of folks started like buying via some weird Reddit movement, started buying huge amounts of GameStop stock, which in a period of pretty exaggerated decline caused it to briefly surge in value to absurd levels. And I think that's where most people kind of and then, you know, eventually it fell apart. And I think that's where most people kind of stopped paying attention.

Yeah, they they remember that week where it was like in the news and then they just kind of assumed like that was it yeah so yeah it's it's been a it's an interesting and weird ride because the evolution into like cult-like behavior was it was a very strange journey uh it happened surprisingly rapidly uh but also not that surprisingly. Once you fully unpack it, you have this internet movement that is very nebulous in its origins. Not in its origins, sorry. The origins are very straightforward. WallStreetBets is a gambling sub that uh had like itself describes as if 4chan found a bloomberg terminal so sure you know uh it's it's crass it's irony poisoned um you can get just as much social clout for losing thousands of dollars as you can for, for winning thousands of dollars.

In fact, there's an argument that there's more clout for loss porn than there is for like actually posting big gains. Obviously like not, not like the healthiest or most wholesome community you could, you could imagine, but you could, uh, you could imagine, but you know, um, out of that plus COVID madness plus stimulus checks and just general nihilism, uh, arose this

kind of Frankenstein short squeeze play on, on GameStop, umStop that weirdly never actually happened because the play just sort of turned into its own self-fulfilling thing. That enough people believed in the idea of this short squeeze play that they just kept piling in and piling in. And suddenly, the short squeeze doesn't actually matter at all because there's enough critical mass flooding in that you just get this massive pump anyway, which convinces people that, Oh,

the squeeze is going on. Cause in the moment you don't actually know like what mechanisms are driving the price movement. You just see number going up. Uh, and so more people kept piling in, piling in, piling in. I got piling in i got a phone

call from you know from a friend of mine who's like hey have you heard about the game stop stuff and i'm like yes i heard about it two days ago so if you heard about it today it's it's way too late do not it's over it's over uh and sure enough like i went back and reviewed our text messages and like and if he had bought he would have been a just massive bag holder like it plummeted, you know, hours later. And like for people who are not finance people, which I certainly am not, this is like if you watched the big short, that's kind of the tack. I mean, number one, that movie is seen as a blueprint by a lot of these guys. Obviously, there's folks, knowledgeable financial folks who have critiques of that movie, but it is,

it is accepted as like almost kind of like a sacred text within the GameStop stock. Yeah. And, and it's weird because like they're the GameStop enemy, the, the, the,

the ape. Okay. Well, I'll just use their lexicon. We'll go over it real quick. They call themselves apes for reasons that are not worth explaining. Their enemy are short sellers, but short sellers are like Dr. Burry short sold the housing market.

And Burry is that's Christian Bale's character, right? Christian Bale's character. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all of the main characters in that movie short sold the housing market. Like that was their play. That was the big short. Was there like,

look, there's this bubble. We're going to short sell it. Then when the price goes down, we close our positions out and keep a tremendous amount of money. And we should go, just because when I watched this with a friend, they did not know what short selling was. It's not, I think, a normal, it's not a thing normal people will ever be in a position to do. The basic idea, and this is all occurring with like stocks and commodities,

but the basic idea is you make an agreement with somebody to get basically a loan of a bunch of shares in something, right? Yeah. And with the understanding that you will give those back at a point in the future. And then you take those and you immediately sell them for their present value, right? sell them for their present value, right? And your hope, your goal is that the value of that drops, and then you are able to buy back an equivalent amount to repay the loan and have made a profit based on the gap between those two numbers, right? That's the idea. Yes. That's the idea. You can, as an individual, do this uh you can you can take out a short position

with your broker you can you can do it through derivatives like puts um i wouldn't recommend it yeah it's it's it's not like normal people stock stuff yeah it's not normal people stock stuff like you're there's nothing legally barring you from doing it but it it really is kind of this like advanced play. You got to know what's going on, especially because like a thing that a lot of people in the description sort of skip over is that while you're borrowing it, you know,

you're borrowing a thing and thus there's the expectation that you'll pay some kind of like, you know, borrowers fee, um, akin to akin to interest on like the value of the thing that you've borrowed uh but like it's it's not interest on you know like a housing loan where the interest and like where your payments all are geared towards paying off the loan it's just kind of like all right you owe me five bucks

every single month forever as long as you're holding this. And so, you know, if you're not paying attention, like you need to be very actively managing these kinds of positions. Otherwise, like your borrowing fees will just eat up all of your profit. Yeah, and it's the kind of thing where like today, most of those kinds of trades aren't even really made by people directly.

They're made by massive banks of computers and algorithms and shit. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I think that's that's enough background back to the kind of cult aspect of it, which is, I think, much more relevant for for what we're talking about here. One of the points you made early on that I found really interesting is is that a significant

amount of the initial GameStop, GameStop, I'm going to keep doing that, hype was driven by influencers, right? Yeah. And that there's evidence based on kind of the US government's analysis of this that got published that like regulators are paying additional attention, increasing attention to the influences that, that, or to the impact that influencers can have here, because there's this concern that especially working in groups, there's like an ability for people like this to disrupt the economy to a significant extent to a way that would affect

like normal people. Yeah. So one of the weird kind of so pump and dumps have existed forever. Right. The thing was, is that so the the meme stock run up it wasn't just GameStop it was about like 15 20 like in in January 2021 like so late 2020 early 2021 it was about 15 20 different companies you know Nokia Blackberry Bed Bath and Beyond like you know, just kind of a bunch of over-the-hill companies that were all sort of part of this wave. And the issue was that in the GameStop price run-up, so the price went from at the end of 2020 as everybody, as sort of the meme wave begins begins and, and particularly once Ryan Cohen, billionaire chewy founder,

chewy, the cat treat or dog online dog food sales. Yeah. Yeah. When he buys in like that kind of like puts the stamp of approval on the whole thing. So it goes from like four and a half dollars up to 19 something. And then at the end of January,

it goes from 1920 dollars up to $19 something. Then at the end of January, it goes from $19.20 up to $480. In that spread, the short sale – there was short interest in GameStop. There was, in fact, a reckless amount of short interest in GameStop. But the price increase was so huge. The volume of participation was so big. So many people were jumping on this that the short interest closing their position, the actual like short squeeze portion of all of this is only like 10% of the price movement. All the rest of it is just people FOMOing in on this thing that they heard about through their cousin. Yeah. I think another thing that's interesting to me is as this thing has evolved, you mentioned that the actual price got up to close to around $500. By the time this thing transitions into being this millenarian apocalypse of apocalypse cult, right? Like not, you know, nukes and stuff, end of days apocalypse generally, but like a,

the entire economy is going to come, the belief that kind of has evolved broadly, and obviously, there's different kind of factions is but is that like, there is going to come a point where like, the, the price of GameStop stock will increase to such an insane. Some people say hundreds of millions, billions of dollars per share that it effectively allows all of these apes who have bought shares to hold the entire world economy hostage until they have their increasingly arcane demands met. Right. Yeah.

That is the belief. And that is the belief. So so out of that, like, okay, so the shorts closing was only like about 10% of the total movement. So that leads to the conclusion that, you know, that the events of January 2021 weren't a short squeeze, which is actually kind of true. Like, it wasn't purely a short squeeze. It was actually very little of it was a short squeeze, which is actually kind of true. Like it wasn't purely a short squeeze. It was actually very little of it was a short squeeze. But because it wasn't a short squeeze, like that term then allows the creative individual

to fill in the gap and just say that it's like, just say that it's like, oh, the short squeeze never happened. Therefore, it's still, just say that it's like, oh, the short squeeze never happened. Therefore, it's still on the table. It hasn't happened yet. Therefore, it can still potentially happen. And in fact, if we just look at the trend line, I bet since it hasn't happened, since it didn't happen, and the position that they held in December was so reckless, it's only gotten worse since, which means that these short sellers must be getting desperate, which means they're going to be willing to engage in whatever level of depraved criminal activity is necessary to protect themselves. Therefore, it's just getting more and more and more and more extreme. Therefore, when this finally goes off, it's not just going to be like,

it's not just going to be a $500 price point. It's going to be a nuclear explosion that's going to topple the entire economy. Yeah. And that's this like train of logic. And what they, and it all comes from that just like missing the fact that it's like, oh, it wasn't a short squeeze because it was mostly FOMO. The short squeeze was buried under a mountain of,

of FOMO. Yeah. But so it wasn't a short squeeze. It's like, yeah, it's all just like based in these like word games of like, ah, you said it was,

you know, that the dumb and dumber, you know, it's like, what are the odds? A one in a million. So you're saying there's a chance. It's like,

well, that's not what I'm saying. It's interesting because of the impossibility of the things they're actually hoping for, but also their fundamental belief that it's inevitable in part because this is not wildly different from the psychology of needing to believe that you are going to paradise in the afterlife. Yeah, hallmarks of millenarianism. of like needing to believe in that you are going to paradise in the after. Yeah. Hallmarks of millenarianism. Yeah. Yeah. Because of that, what you get is a lot of people who think that they are thinking scientifically,

but what they're doing is taking an end point. And the end point is that, you know, this specific, you know, these hedge funds or whatever are evil and, you know, illegally bribing or whatever the government to stop us from succeeding. Or there's this other conspiracy. You're starting with this end point and then working backwards and finding ways to explain the things that have happened within that framework. Yeah, and here's the things that would need to be true in order for the thing to happen. Like the thing that Citadel must have ordered Robin Hood to stop letting people buy and share GameStop stocks rather than like, you know, what what actually happened, which is that Robin Hood simply like could not exist if they allowed this to continue.

Yeah. And, you know, legally, I don't believe there's anything that was stopping them from doing that. was stopping them from doing that. It's medieval peasant brain kind of stuff is what I initially like. That's how, when I was watching your documentary, I was like, Oh, it's this,

you know, this need to find this kind of like magical answer to the problem. And then I like interrogated that conclusion and was like, well, no, it's not. This is just the way people's brains work. Right.

We're like, we're, we're pattern making. This isn't medieval peasant shit. They're no dumber than we are. Like that's what this shows yeah and one of the things that i love just kind of on that is that like you if you had a time machine and you went back a hundred thousand years and and found a bunch of you know homeless literal literal cavemen yeah actual apes more or less you know but like hundred thousand hundred thousand000 years ago, that's modern humans.

Like genetically, that's genetically modern humans. You could just like implant yourself in their tribe and teach them calculus and, you know. Soon they would be shorting GameStop stuff. It's like, like we're like, things don't change. It's like, yeah, no, we've been, we've been doing this ever since we were, you know, this pattern seeking doesn't change. It's almost like it is basically endemic to the human psyche. There's a really good question that, that I've gotten in response to this is just like,

is this just secular religion? is this just secular religion? Are we just wired to need faith in some shape or form? And if that is not provided by some institution, we will just invent it. And it's like, I don't have the answer to that, but signs point to yes. Yeah. Now, so I wanted to talk a little bit about one of the other things that you brought up that I thought was interesting is the way you've got this cast of – and these are the influencers. or put out these, publish these prospectuses with dozens or hundreds of pages laying out, you know, the arcana of how these different sort of anticipated apocalyptic financial moves are going to go out, right? Yeah. A lot of these people, the belief is that I think is accurate, at least this is what I got from your documentary. Maybe I was interpreting you wrong is that most of these or many of these people are not believers. They're manipulating a group of people because there's money in it. And one of the tactics that you see used a lot is kind of faux humility, right? I'm just a dumb

ape. You shouldn't trust me. I'm not qualified to give financial advice, but here's the secret history of the universe. Invest your money here now. So, I mean, you've seen this a lot with, with various like cult leaders and pseudo cult leaders and just general like grift fluencers, you know, there's always this question of like how much of their own, how much of their own hype do they believe? How much did they believe when they started?

How much did they eventually just like convince themselves of as people, you know, follow them? And I think it's very much like kind of an individual case-by-case basis. Some of them are absolutely true believers like from the get-go. Some of them, like a lot of them are like soft believers, you know, where it's like they're not hardcore into it you know if you really pressed them like it's not motivating their their daily decisions but what they're taking from it is like social reinforcement that they found a group of people who respond to them who like their posts who leave messages it's like oh man this blew mind. I can't believe the system is like this fragile, you know,

my tits are jacked lighting the fuse on the rocket ship, buying more moon tickets. Yeah. And they, and they respond to that very socially. And, and, and out of that sort of soup of like reinforcing messages, it's really easy for people in those influencer

positions to just kind of like hold uh conflicting like hold the conflicting beliefs of like i know that this is impossible but also it is like fulfilling me socially to say these things, I'll just juggle that inconsistency. Yeah. And the way the mechanics of social media, and particularly in this case, it's the mechanics largely of Reddit. That's not the only place this occurs, but Reddit is certainly like the homeland, you could say. The way in which upvotes and downvotes work and the way in which upvotes and downvotes take critical content, people who are trying to induce some accuracy, or you might even say sanity in the discussion, and that that gets pushed down and hidden after a certain point of time with enough downvotes,

as opposed to the stuff that is fundamentally unhinged, but is utopian, gets upvoted. unhinged, but is like utopian, gets upvoted. It's the physical, like the actual mechanics of how the site is structured to work at a fundamental level in forced groupthink consensus. Absolutely. Oh, and I mean, and the best part about it, and we see this all across Reddit communities, which is this like, it's the social enforcement of truth that people will take this social mechanism of upvotes and downvotes and use it as proof against the claim. That it's like, oh, well, if your negative sentiment were true, it would have been upvoted. Yeah. Yeah, because like there's this underlying there's this kind of just like implicit belief that people will recognize truth and will upvote truth and thus upvotes and downvotes are are an accurate filter on reality, which is demonstrably not true. Yeah. So yeah, that's intensely at play here because you'll see apes who will then reference the fact that if this insane theory were false, why did it get so many upvotes? And it's like, well, because it hyped you up. It made you excited.

People are not rational actors. People are not rational. it hyped you up. It made you excited. People are not rational actors. People are not rational. You got a tingly feeling in your tummy when you read it and the person told you that you were going to be a millionaire. Yeah.

That's why. It's like asking, why do we like magicians? Of course we like magicians. It looks nice. It's fun. It makes us feel a sense of wonder. Yeah. I want to discuss one of the terms that you use a lot

that I missed the first couple of times because this is not a community I had studied. I thought you misspoke at first when you described someone achieving a financial windfall as wife changing money. I just thought you, like I do that all the time on the show. It's deliberate. That's a term, yes.

Yeah, no, no. After the third time you used it, I was like, oh, okay, this is a thing they say. Yeah, a lot of people are like, I thought you misspoke. I'm like, no, that's because I. Yes. Yeah. No, no. After the third time you used it, I was like, oh, okay. This is a thing they say. Yeah. A lot of people are like, I thought you misspoke. I'm like, no, that's because I was tricking you. Like I was, I was deliberately like sliding in this term, like, because like, cause they use it like obviously as a, as an entendre and I was like, okay, like I'll just use it

straight face with no explanation, you know, three, four times and then finally explain it at the end and, and make a lot of people angry when they realized that like, no, they weren't just mishearing me. the sort of like crass irreverence slash misogyny of uh of chan speak and just this you know wall street bets will use this kind of like celebration of of making so much money that you can afford to be misogynistic uh and and just like swap your wife and And it turns out that as we know, you make a joke like that often enough, you're eventually going to attract the people who are just straight up like, yeah, I hate my wife. Yeah.

I want to be able to replace her using my crypto or my, yeah, whatever, my game stock. Stop. God, gains. I was wondering if you might lay out one of the things, the parts that was most interesting to me was the whole Teddy Day. Teddy Day. Oh boy, Teddy Day is fun. Can you explain Teddy Day to our listeners? Okay. So Ryan Cohen, who fancies himself an activist investor. He buys into GameStop and gets a minority, pretty substantial holdings that count as a minority thing. You need to file a bunch of

paperwork with the SEC that say, it's like I hold greater than 10% of this company. And he used that position to basically get power inside the company itself as chairman. As of a couple weeks ago, he's now CEO. So Ryan Cohen gets heavily involved with GameStop. And he's like, I'm going to turn this around. Because what seems to be his anxiety in life at the moment is this sense of legacy. He doesn't just want to be like, oh, I got lucky with an online pet food sales thing. I'm a real, I'm a big boy finance guy. You know, I save dying companies. Real rich guy hobby. He puts out a series of children's books called Teddy,

named after his late father. And these are, it's five books that have a target audience of two-year-olds that because you know when when you're rich and you want to do something like that you want to vanity publish books you don't just like go to an off-the-shelf vanity publisher you make your own vanity publisher because in the scheme of things like that's just not that expensive so amazon has made it easier than ever easier than ever so he founds this llc you know air quote founds pays the like 600 bucks in filing fees to create this llc teddy publishing um files a whole bunch of trademarks you know we're talking like a few thousand dollars all in all in order to file like in order to just file a bunch of paperwork and this is all just like the scattershot stuff of like okay we're making a product aimed at children let's file the trademark

for teddy very broadly uh and so it's going to cover like basically children's merchandise across the board you know what if we want to put what if we want to put the characters on blankets or bottles or cups or plates or party supplies or whatever? So these trademarks are just incredibly wide-ranging across just merch. Yeah. Just merch. Yeah. But the existence of these trademark applications and this LLC becomes the seed for Teddy, the company, as this, like, the mechanism through which Ryan Cohen is going to collaborate with apes in order to trigger moas because i guess this is the important thing about the mythology apes believe ryan cohen is on their side that he is he is their inside man he is working with them he is as frustrated as they are that this hasn't happened yet

but for like arcane legal reasons he needs to like, he needs to operate like a, like a clockmaker. You know, he has to do everything very delicately and indirectly and like his hand cannot be seen pushing on the scales. So they think that this becomes a thing that they imbue all of their hopes and dreams into is Teddy LLC. That it's like, this is the thing that he's going to use as the mechanism to do this. He's going to buy GameStop via Teddy. He's going to buy maybe some other company via Teddy. Teddy's going to get bought in to like it's going to get bought by gamestop like one way or another there were like hundreds of competing theories all rooted in in this but then back in january of this year a insanity starts in two so in both both GameStop forums and Bed Bath and Beyond forums, the two meme stocks that are linked by Ryan Cohen.

They they create this idea called Teddy Day, which is a combination of a bunch of things. So Ryan Cohen tweeted several Titanic references. James Cameron's Titanic was being re-released this past February on a day that aligned with National Teddy Bear Day. day that aligned with national teddy bear day and so two different communities of apes for completely separate reasons latched on to this idea of teddy day uh it was it was uh friday february 10th uh 2023 they latched on to as, uh, just this, that like, this is the day. This is when it's all going to come together.

This is when he's going to make his big move. And a major driving piece of evidence that they had for Teddy day was that in one of the Teddy books, the kids learn to read a clock and the hands on the clock are pointed to 10 and 2 so ryan cohen left them clues in this children's book published six months earlier warning them that that february 10th was going to be the day that it all went down. It was that, that was the day of the apocalypse.

That was Teddy day. And it got just like the, the, the spread of this got just like absolutely unhinged on the forums. Like it was all that super stonk and BBB, why we're talking about for for a week and a half leading up to it. The hype was unreal. And then, of course, nothing happened. I don't know if you noticed this, but the US economy did not collapse last February.

Oh, that's good. I have been living like a post-apocalyptic. And then the moment that like the great disappointment happens, some of them like bleed off. But for the most part, like it, nothing can actually like stop the inertia. They can just discard it. And, and they did, they, you know, no one talks about Teddy day anymore, except for the fact that like it had a brief Teddy Day 2.0 as. October 2nd was like upcoming because, you know, maybe it wasn't the 10th of February, it was the 2nd of October, you know, and and sure, like I'm willing to bet that when next February rolls around, we'll get Teddy Day 3.0. Yeah, I'm sure. It just keeps – the same thing has happened with different kind of Christian apocalypse cults, right? Yeah.

Where you'll have a guy pick a day, then the day comes, and then there's always a reason. because this becomes so much of someone's social life, because it becomes part of their emotional support network, because it's like fundamentally you changes the way you talk. Like you learn so many new words that make it into your diction that like it's easier to just keep rolling the expected date ahead rather than like acknowledge that kind of fundamental hit to your self conception that admitting you got played would take. Yeah. Yeah. The guy who does so religion for breakfast.

Yeah. He he picked up on the fact that like I was using phrases like a great disappointment in in the video, like very deliberately because it's like it's the same. It's the same mechanism. So the great disappointment was like, that's the event that caused the seventh day Adventist to come into existence. Because it was like a, a expected date of the apocalypse of the second coming,

like didn't happen. And you end up with like this, then fragmentation of the aftermath, a bunch of people just bleed off, but you end up with like a couple different factions, ones who are like, ah, well, the date was like, the date wasn't wrong per se, or like the idea wasn't wrong,

just like the date was wrong. Like maybe it's off by a hundred years or whatever. And you get other people who are like, actually it did happen. It just happened in secret. Like, obviously it wasn't gonna just like happen in Times Square. It happened like

you know the the millennium is already kind of like rolling underneath normal like normal looking society it's going on right now it's just day to day life hasn't changed and that's how you know it's happening is that nothing's changing it's like

okay cool so completely unfalsifiable rad awesome love that for you yeah so one of the things that kind of related to that i have been thinking about a lot lately is um we've got this story that keeps you know popping into the news every couple of usually a couple of times a year that uh what called nons are increasing as a percentage of the population every single year, which is like people who are not affiliated to any religion. And I've seen, especially a few years ago, you know, atheists that I knew who were kind of like more active as active in atheism as a movement really celebrating this, I think the assumption that that means that atheism is growing more popular has been fundamentally inaccurate. I think what we're seeing and what this is evidence of is that non-affiliation

with an organized religion is more common than ever. People are rejecting organized, settled religion at a kind of unprecedented rate. That's certainly undeniable. But that doesn't mean they're not the same. They are still believers. And this is an example. Right, right. This is people are creating.

The Internet has given created a tremendous capacity to build religions. Uh, and that's what people are doing. Um, that's what this is. Yeah. And it's like, how long lasting will it be? I mean, I, I don't in, in the scope of, uh, in the scope of world faiths, I don't think, uh, uh, GameStop ism is, uhism is poised to stand the test of time. I don't think we'll be seeing an ape emperor anytime soon. the thing is is that like you go back through history and like you you look at like religious archaeology and like you you start sort of breaking away from sort of this idea of christian hegemony as being effectively like that it's like okay you know once the christianization of rome happened

like it was it was then locked in on like until you know martin Luther, and then you get like fragmentation into sex, but like, it stays like locked in. And it's like, it's like, no, when you start really digging into the history, it's like, this is just, this is always going on. This is always boiling under the surface. You look at like Puritanism in America through a non, like through just kind of like a human lens of like what you know about how people behave. And you suddenly start seeing that it's like, oh, they were just like in a constant perpetual state of internal fragmentation as people had different ideas about like what was supposed to happen, what should happen, and just kind of formed cliques and factions. And sometimes those factions got big enough to split off, and then they lasted 10,

20, 30, 50 years, and then either folded back into the main thing or whatever. But this kind of like churn in faith and belief is just – it's always there. It just – in an organized, codified faith, it's a lot easier to lose track of it, particularly from a historical perspective. It's a lot easier to just look at like the bigger picture and be like, ah, it was all the same. It was homogenous. And it turns out, no. Yeah. Sorry, and it turns out, no. Yeah. Sorry. That was a very,

no, no, no, no, no. There was, I, I threw a lot of like very big assumptions into a very tightly packed,

uh, uh, statement there. Um, no, no, no. I,

I think that was great. Um, and yeah, that's, that's kind of, I think what I, uh, what I had to sort of ask about.

You know, just sort of this fascination with the way in which almost anything can become a cult these days, thanks to sort of the social dynamics of the different online communities and how they reinforce each other. Like, this is kind of at the center of almost everything that's a problem right now, one way or the other, right? Yeah. I think the thing that is new and modern really is the ability or is the – I don't want to say ability – the phenomenon of decentralized self-organizing belief systems,

you know, that like, there's these, a lot of the, a lot of the meme stock influencers, you know, they're not leading it. They're just like nudging it.

They're not in charge of it. And if they, if any of them like tried to like really like seize the reins, um, that, that would get them like exiled, you know, any, any kind of like overt out and been like, I am Q, listen to me, gets immediately just like just demolished by the faithful. Because like it's antithetical to their whole thing to have a really identifiable leader. identifiable leader that that the leader is mythological is is useful and beneficial to the uh to the organization and those kinds of like those kinds of movements they're not unique to the modern age but the modern age has made them very easy to form almost by accident. Yeah. Well,

Dan, this will be something for people to continue to keep an eye on. Cause it's not going to stop. Probably. It's not going to stop. Oh boy. Like there's going to, there's going to be some like amazing doctoral dissertations on this subject in like 10 years.

Yes. I would, I would certainly agree with that. Well, Dan, you want to let the people know where they can find you? They can find me on YouTube. The channel name is Folding Ideas, and I'm on socials, Twitter, Blue Sky, etc., etc., etc., as Foldable Human. Excellent. All right. check out dan's uh videos check out his youtube channel like and subscribe and uh check us out but you already have because you're here

so continue to check us out Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit.

The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that

shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real

conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything, from music and pop culture, to deeper topics like identity, community,

and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcast. It's chaos in Congress. This is this is it could happen here the podcast about things falling apart. And just this is a just a falling apart episode, although it's a kind of funny one. Yeah, I'm your host Mia Wong. And with me is Garrison Davis.

though it's a kind of funny one. Yeah, I'm your host, Mia Wong, and with me is Garrison Davis. Hello. Chaos everywhere, but especially in Congress. So I just realized you grew up in Canada. I did. Which means- I did, yes. Can you explain what the Speaker of the- do you know what the Speaker of the House is? For America? Yeah.

speaker of the house is for america yeah uh it's the guy who like presides over the things and has the hammer and he yells um you know that's that's that's that's that's pretty close okay see see come on yeah yeah it's not bad it's not bad this is okay so we're gonna go into a bit more depth about what this person does because i don't know the american constitution was written by absolute clowns and there's some wild stuff there but however comma you know so somewhat more seriously this is a very this is a very sort of consequential and dangerous moment in american political history and in this moment congress is in chaos. It is it is it is the most nonfunctional it has been in my entire life. And that is that is saying something like Congress has been nonfunctional for my entire life. This is the worst it has ever been. And the reason

it's the worst it's ever been is that Kevin McCarthy, who is the now former speaker of the House, was removed by a vote of no confidence on October 3rd, which when this comes out, that will be exactly two weeks out. And he is removed because he tried to cut a deal with the Democrats to avert a government shutdown until the 17th. And he got the deal through. It would have been crazy if we had a shutdown until the 17th. God, imagine. Imagine. Jesus. Fuck. Here's the thing. OK, there had a shutdown until the 17th. God, imagine. Imagine. Jesus, fuck.

Here's the thing. Okay, there's no shutdown until the 17th. There's also a chance, like a real serious chance, that the shutdown starts and we still don't have a Speaker of the House. Oh, yeah. Like, it's not that high, but it could happen, which is nuts. This has never happened before. Yeah, and so I guess we should go into specifically what hasn't happened before.

The thing that hasn't happened before is that no sitting speaker of the House during their term has ever been removed by a vote of no confidence, which is nuts. Because, again, and I can't emphasize this enough for most of the 2000s, the speaker of the House was a guy named Dennis Hastit, who was literally a pedophile. And he was not removed by a vote of no confidence so like this is this is the level of of you know weirdness that we're in like it like literally the the 200 something year history of the u.s this has never happened oh and from my understanding you don't actually have to be an like an elected member of the House to be the speaker, which means they could carry on this tradition and they could get Polanski as speaker of the House if they could find enough votes to carry it over. You know, at this point, this will get you later. There was a there was a two day span, two and a half day span where Trump was trying to get himself elected a speaker.

Yes, yes, yes. And then that which would be probably the most as speaker of the House. Yes, yes, yes. And then that has fallen apart. Which would be probably the most funny result. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, but, you know, so. Because then he also has a path to the presidency. Yeah, yeah. They just have to get two impeachment votes somehow.

If Biden and Harris are taken out. This is how Trump can still win. This is the path, guys. Unfortunately, he's well, I mean, here's the thing. OK, legitimately, if Biden and Harris die in a plane crash tomorrow, I actually think Trump could win the would win the Speaker of the House vote. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But this is this is this is how Bernie can still win. This is the path.

So. all right. So, you know, we're in this. We're in, I don't know. We're just, you know, this is all, like, nuts. But, like, again, we are just, we are in the wilderness. Like, we're in complete chaos land. No one, the U.S. has never been here before. And, okay, the other thing we need to mention is, okay, so, you know, you were saying that there has there hasn't like, you know, we need to bring back the like pedophiles to be the speaker of the House.

So speaker of the House, not a pedophile. The guy who removed him as speaker of the House, he's removed by Matt Gaetz. Probably, probably. Yeah. So here's here's what I can say legally about Matt Gaetz, the guy who led eight Republicans to join the Democrats in the vote of no confidence. He is a man best known for being investigated for the Department of Justice for trafficking underage girls. What I can legally say is that he was suspected by the Justice Department of being a pedophile. There are there are like there were receipts from his like on his phone from like cash app of him sending money to underage girls. So, you know, bad things, bad things happening there.

That investigation got killed because the bourgeoisie protects its allies. But comma, we do not have speaker of the house right now. So something I think I guess we should also mention is so there's like a there's no speaker of the house. There's some guy they put in who's like is not actually an acting speaker of the house. Yeah. And this has thrown the entire American political system into chaos because with no speaker of the house, the house of representatives cannot pass bills. I can't do it. They cannot pass any bills at all. And because of the way that the American system was designed,

not having this one person shuts down the entire effectively shut. It shuts down the entire legislative branch, right? Because you can't get anything passed in the Senate without also getting ratified in the house. And this has just shut down effectively, like most of the American government outside of the, like, you know, I mean, so the executive branches and all the departments and stuff are still

functioning, but there is no legislative branch right now. Effectively is, is, is what has happened, right? I, I, I think maybe subcommittee meetings are still running, but they can't pass any bills. And this is both a blessing and a curse. Normally this, I think would just be a curse. I don't know, maybe right now, this is probably the best possible time this could have happened because the consequence of this has been, the U S has been unable to follow through on its most sort of just rabidly genocidal impulses about palestine because again the house literally cannot pass any bills until they figure this shit out so we haven't been able to send money to israel we haven't been able to send like god forbid like we

haven't been able to pull any troops which i don't know if they i don't know if there was actually the political desire to do that anyways. But, you know, the fact the fact that there was no speaker in the immediate wake of the stuff that's been happening in Palestine means that, you know, they've they've been restrained from just like glassing the entire Middle East, which is which is good. middle east which is which is good uh the downside is that again we have until november 17th to uh pass a funding bill to avert the government shutdown and not only is there like no progress on a deal about that bill like the american legislator is currently incapable of passing any bill much less the spending bill so things are going great in the American political system. And OK, so we should we should ask the question, why is this happening? And there are both sort of short and long answers to this question.

Both of them effectively have the same root, which is that the Republican Party is a coalition. It's one that usually has pretty broadly compatible politics the Republican Party is a coalition. It's one that usually has pretty broadly compatible politics, but it is a coalition between different sectors of capital. So think, for example, you have your different right-wing tech mogul billionaires, like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. But these people align on a lot of stuff, but they don't necessarily have the same interests as like a weapons manufacturer or like coke industries or i mean just like you know like one one of the big sort of tensions for example is that the republican party has a lot of backing among the financial sector uh the financial sector has very little interest in conflict with china because they have an enormous amount of capital

like tied up in chinese firms uh there are a lot of other like people who have a lot of like like even this is this is a thing between elon musk and peter teal right or like musk is kind of more pro china than like the average like republican tech billionaire because he has a bunch of contracts in a giant factory in china and so so okay so this is a coalition between different segments of capital who disagree. This is also a coalition between different, like, right-wing social movements who are also, you know, a very powerful part of the party. You have evangelical stuff. But, I mean, you know, the consequence of this and the consequence of the sort of shift right of American politics has been you now have this party where there are, like, libertarians alongside neocons. You have more moderate conservatives and you have basic people who are effectively neo-nazis and the fact that

the coalition is like this now the fact that it is genuinely more so than it's been in a long time a very broad and diverse coalition this has made the House of Representatives effectively unmanageable. Okay, and this has been a real issue in the Republican Party for a while now, partially because – and this is why we're getting the government shutdown stuff. Like a big part of Republican strategy for the last decade basically since Obama took office has just been shutting down the government and doing arch-obstructionism so that nothing can get done. Wait, Gary, have you been, do you remember? The last government shutdown? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was only like two years ago.

Yeah. It feels like, maybe it was longer. It feels like it was pretty recent. There was, no, it wasn't. No, I think it was in 2018. I think it was like. Yeah, see, because in my brain, we're still in 2020. Oh, yeah. We're actually less than 2020.

So what I said, when I say two years ago, what I mean is 2018. Yeah. I mean, that one was funny because that was a that was a Republican president. Yeah. Yeah. Which is very funny. Yeah. But, you know, back when Obama was in office, like this just happened all the fucking time.

Like every other week, there was like a threat of a government. Every single time a bill like a funding bill, was going to pass Congress, a bunch of family members get furloughed at one point because the government actually did shut down for a long time. But there's a real problem with this, which is that

this political strategy encourages effectively, it encourages creating chaos. And this is something that trump has been very good at sort of exploiting but it also means that there's now this like cadre of politicos who've come up who are like incredibly right-wing and effectively the only thing they know how to do is obstructing anything from functioning and this is what mccarthy ran into he ran into gates and his sort of like band of mary well i don't know i was going

to call them a band of mary weirdos but that's way too complimentary his band of like absolute fanatics and the real issue here is that okay so there's currently two vacant seats in the house so this means right now to win a vote in the full house to become speaker of the house you need 217 votes sorry hold on there's new shit happening like right now uh mccarthy thinks that jim jordan has 217 votes i don't know if i believe him i don't know well i'll just explain what's happening now and then we'll put that at the end as like breaking news insert that at the end daniel thank you um or keep it in right now it's a funny bit yes because this situation

is still is still developing as of time of recording so yeah like as yeah something we should mention you know this this process is complicated enough that like yeah as we are recording it stuff is changing rapidly like stuff has been news is coming in. So what's been making it hard is that in order to get 217 votes, right, the Republican majority is only they only have 221 votes. So if you want to become speaker of the House, you can only lose four total votes. And this means you have to win both the moderates and Matt Gates's coalition of fanatics. And this is effectively impossible. It is,

it is unbelievably difficult. Um, McCarthy was able to do this because he pulled votes from the far right by like promising things like impeaching Biden and stuff like that. And also sort of cutting, cutting his own deals with people like Marjorie Taylor green, who like, and this is this is the other thing about about this impeachment vote is that it's not actually a purely ideological lines like far right versus moderate vote because no like he he even split the more

extreme contention of the republican party in Congress. It's really bizarre. Well, it's not bizarre because you can't understand it, but it is certainly interesting where the dividing lines ended up being for a lot of the people that we consider mostly being on the same side, right? Because usually people imagine like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, usually in the same kind of far right voting bloc. And to see like divisions over over this vote is certainly an interesting aspect of, you know, possible fractures within the even the extreme contingent of the Republican Party. Yeah. And this and this has been a really interesting dynamic, but it also makes it just like impossible. Like you have to in order to do this, you have to

somehow appease the moderates and Gates. Like you're dealing with multiple different right wing fringe factions. Yeah. And this is, you know, we'll be talking more about the Freedom Caucus in a little bit. But. You have to like you're at a point where you're trying to appease so many different groups of people who all have kind of competing agendas who also just have like personal beef with each other and as of right now time of recording which is 2 p.m pacific time on friday no one has been able to actually pull together this vote um we're gonna take an ad

break and then we're gonna do you know who else actually needs to be appeased by these same people is is it the products and services that support this podcast ronald reagan coin looks down upon congress every single time that guy hits that little hammer and ronald reagan coin also looks down upon all of you i think i i think i have a good idea where to put my new uh my new 401k investment in. I'm going to do all gold coin, move all that over to gold coin. It's stable. It's going to be worth it. It holds value. And that is definitely my plan.

Oh, we're back. Hello, everybody. Sorry, I did not realize you were already back so soon. I was just talking with me about expanding my investment portfolio. Anyway, as you were saying. so what has happened after that the answer is an absolute clown show um i mean this is this is one of the most like genuinely let's let's not disparage clowns shall we that's true this is unfair to us this is we could have clowns in the audio we could have closeted clowns in this phone call.

That's true. That's true. OK. Yes, I've been being unfair to clowns by comparing them to the Republican Party. This has been this has been one of the most pathetic displays of politics I've ever seen. And I have followed the political trajectory of Israeli labor. Like this is this is it's been truly awful. So all right. Soccarthy is ousted the problem immediately is that no one has anywhere close to enough votes to replace him like like and when i say no one like mccarthy mccarthy what like this wasn't just a power move for gates then like he he would like was was he looking to take the spot or no no there's gates has

absolutely no shot of of winning he would get like 10 votes maybe like basically nothing um what he was trying to and this this is, this is kind of, Gates is in this kind of obstructionism thing where he's trying, the thing he's trying to do basically is he's trying to like, he's trying to set up himself as a political flank of like the most Republicans and everyone else are these like sellouts who work with the Democrats. Yeah.

And he's, he's also been trying. So, so Gates's preferred candidate is a guy named Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan is the found he was the founding head of the powerful far right freedom caucus. And he's a real he's a real piece of work. He's bad. I feel like Jim Jordan has been a recurring character on this show. Yeah. Sometimes he's not a very nice fellow in my.

No, he sucks. Like, he's not quite like a full-on neo-nazi in the way that like yeah but like he's not good he's he's he's from like the far right he's i guess you would call the like the more acceptable far right of the republican party like he's from the freedom caucus like is is a like a very right-wing organization even within the republican party but they're not seen as like weird fringe fanatics in the way yeah at the very least they will happily hold the door open towards people that are even like like even way way more extreme uh yeah yeah yeah and that's true he's been serving

uh in congress since like 2007 yeah he's a very he's a very he's one of the guys who's he's been like the architect of a lot of well not the architect he's been one of the the figures behind a lot of the sort of um like government shutdown stuff he's been he's he's been one of the guys who's kind of like i don't know like he didn't because he didn't come in on the tea party wave he came in before that but he's been he's been a guy who's been pushing that kind of sort of like that kind of very very right-wing politics um his his original opponent was steve scalise who is a kind of semi-mccarthy ally kind of and you will see him described as being more moderate than than jim jordan and that is maybe kind of true in the sense that like he's being bad in the fact that like like jim jordan is being backed by like marjorie taylor

green matt gates and like donald trump um this is after trump gave up his bid to like become speaker of the house himself he backed which would have been the funniest outcome yeah it would have been very funny but however we don't we don't live in the funniest possible timeline sadly we live in the worst one yeah yeah so that didn't happen um so the problem is the other guy is is again this steve scalise and again he's called a moderate scalise also wants there there is a report of him calling himself and i quote david duke without the baggage and in in the early 2000s he spoke at a david at an at a rally for a group founded by david duke what without the baggage what is left of david do like how what does that sentence actually mean like what do you

think about that sentence like we should i guess we should mention, so David Duke, if people don't remember, David Duke was the grand wizard of the KKK. The grand wizard of the KKK, yes. Yeah, so when he says David Duke without the baggage, what he means is that he has David Duke's politics, but he doesn't have the immediate what-the-fuck association you get when you mention the head of the fucking KKK. That's what he was going for. Right.

So this is not a good guy. He's being presented as. And again, this is what passes for like a moderate. I mean, he's kind of in the moderate right. But this is what passes for a fucking moderate Republican in 20, in 2023. Right. Like these people have always sucked.

They've always fucking been like this. And, you know, but problem. Yeah. Yeah. It's a real issue that, again, like this guy and you know but problem yeah yeah it's it's it's a real issue that again like this guy who is like speaking at like it should like in any even remotely normal political system having given a speech at a rally for an organization ran by david duke would immediately be disqualifying but you know no like you can just do that you you can do that and you're going to be a moderate in 2023 but the problem with the problem scalise has is that scalise's problem isn't that again like clan bullshit it's the fact that the way that votes for the speaker of the house work is that so there's an internal blind vote inside of the

inside the republican party where each each each representative gets to anonymously vote like each republican representative gets to anonymously vote for their preferred candidates so jim jordan like kind of narrowly loses out to scalise in the first round in the first vote so he he loses 113 to 99 and so scalese comes out as the guy who's the nominee for the republicans right problem is scalese lasts one day as that guy because the problem is to actually become speaker you need to win a vote on the house floor and the vote on the house floor with everyone in the house including the democrats that's where he needs to win 217 votes he did not have it he so incredibly did not have it that again within a day of him winning this vote he is out so scalise is now out of the race um what what has been so the the developments literally as we are recording this

jim jordan has won a vote to become like the next uh he's the next person to win a vote because he was running against just a fucking clown sorry i'm being offensive to clowns he's just like a nobody like just like some dipshit the republicans like picked off off the street right like this is where we're at like there's no one like if jim if jim jordan can't do this like there's like i don't know like it would like bring mccarthy back like there's nothing he like jordan jim jordan's like the last even semi-serious political figure of the republican party who could even conceivably do this so jim jordan has won the vote inside of the Republican Party. However, comma. And also the other important thing that happened literally as we were recording is that he's been he's been endorsed by McCarthy now, which is kind of a big deal.

McCarthy has said publicly that he thinks that Jim Jordan has the votes. I don't believe him and I don't believe him because immediately after he said that it came out that Jim Jordan is 60 votes short. On the floor of the House, 60, 6-0. He is screwed. There's no way. Like, he has to get through 60, 60 votes. And there's no way.

I don't see a path for him to do this, even with McCarthy's support. Like, I don't think there's a way for him to do this even even with McCarthy's support like I I don't I don't think there's a way for him to do this um as of time of recording the thing that has happened is that the Republicans have all gone home because they get out at five and he's going to try to spend the weekends like building up support trying to build up enough votes in the house to like win speakership but yeah this has not worked it seems like it's it seems like a pretty uh pretty i don't know like a chance it's it's possible that like on like monday or tuesday or something when they're like when this comes out i'll be eating crow and i'll have to record like a special update but yes because this does come out after the weekend so yeah but i we will

i don't buy this i i absolutely just do not buy that. Jim Jordan has enough votes. This is this. This is this is my analysis. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But. Guessing it's 60 votes and like there's no way there's no way. So this is this is this is a fact. This is the current state of Congress right now. Like we don't we don't have a legislative branch. Everything is in chaos. Nothing can happen. One down, two more to go.

We're almost there, fellas. Yeah. Well, the executives, if we can knock out the executive, if we can knock out the executive, the judiciary will fall by itself. Yeah, so that is certainly certainly exciting there's always always good things to look forward to yeah um but you know i i think that i think a closing note on this is that the the fact that the u.s effectively can't do anything right now while it's in the middle of a pretty serious like a couple of well like one it's in the middle of like several very very serious uh international political crises and wars is has i don't know it's

it's it's been the thing right now that has been restraining the u.s from just like really going all out and trying to get everyone in palestine killed so guess there's that, but I don't know. Our government is a joke. Yeah. And I guess the last thing I want to say is I want to invite all of you, everyone who's listening to this, to look at these absolute numbskulls. Look at what they're doing right now. They can't even pick the one guy who is necessary for the entire legislative branch to function. And I want you to ask yourself, could we do this? Could like any of you and like your neighbors and your friends run a political system better than this? Because I bet the answer is yes. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.

Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished

and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening

in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. As mass bombing continues across Gaza, 2.3 million Palestinians remain trapped in the strip as the Israeli military conducts a total blockade. Israel has cut off water, electricity, and fuel, while intentionally restricting humanitarian aid from being sent into Gaza. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. On October 7th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech addressing Palestinians inside Gaza. A part of the official English translation of the speech reads, quote, all of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding, and operating in, that wicked

city, we will turn them into rubble. I say to the residents of Gaza, leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere, unquote. The next sentence in the speech was left untranslated, but it roughly read, quote, we will target each and every corner of the strip, unquote. According to the UN, by last Thursday, October 12th, about 423,000 people had been displaced from their homes by Israeli airstrikes. That's about 25% of the Palestinian population. Many sought refuge in crowded United Nations shelters set up in schools, but even those shelters and hospitals were attacked by air. Last Friday, October 13th, Israel issued a military order for all citizens in northern Gaza, including Gaza City, to evacuate their homes within a 24-hour period, in apparent preparation of a major ground assault on the besieged enclave.

Over 1 million Palestinians live in this area. It's almost half the population of Gaza. In between bombings, Israeli military aircraft dropped thousands of leaflets into Gaza City, advising civilians to immediately leave their homes and the UN shelters, but not to actually try and leave Gaza, as the leaflet warned that if anyone approached the Israel-Gaza security wall, they would, quote, expose themselves to death, unquote. Israel laid out just a few roads that it was supposed to be, quote unquote, safe to travel southbound. Thousands of people in northern Gaza began to flee towards the Strip's southern half on Friday morning. But as they were following Israel's orders, civilian convoys transporting Palestinian families out of Gaza City were bombed by the Israeli military at three different points along the evacuation route. At least 70 people were killed, with hundreds morebed by the Israeli military at three different points along the evacuation route. At least 70 people were killed, with hundreds more injured by the Israeli airstrikes,

as they were trying to follow Israel's impossible order to evacuate everyone from their homes in just 24 hours. Between Netanyahu's speech and the evacuation order of northern Gaza, this leaves people questioning, where exactly are these people supposed to go? A Palestinian in Gaza told the Associated Press, quote, we can't flee because anywhere you go, you are bombed, unquote. Gaza isn't that big. It's only 25 miles long, and it's completely surrounded by Israel and the Mediterranean Sea, save for a small section on the southern tip which borders Egypt. With Israel sealing off access to Gaza, the only way in or out is the Rafah border crossing

located at the southern end of the strip, bordering Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. The Rafah crossing is a critical passage for humanitarian aid and serves as a vital gateway between Gaza and the outside world. One of the very first targets of Israeli bombing this month was the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. It was targeted by three air raids in a 24-hour period, severely damaging the crossing, preventing it from operating, and resulting in fatalities. There's video and audio of the bombings where you hear hundreds of people make a singular scream. It's pretty gruesome. With Israel undergoing a quote-unquote complete siege of Gaza, this crossing was the only way to send humanitarian supplies into the Strip and to let willing refugees flee the assault. The Egyptian foreign minister has said that Israel has yet to allow the reopening

of the crossing. Egypt is expected to assist in delivering humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the enclave, but it has rejected proposals to accept fleeing Palestinians into its borders. proposals to accept fleeing Palestinians into its borders. Both Egypt and Israel operate a blockade of Gaza to strictly control the passage of people and supplies going in and out of the Strip. There's no freedom of movement to enter or leave Gaza, even when there's not a declared war. One can't simply leave Gaza. There is no Gaza airport, at least not since 2002. Historically, the RAFA border crossing into the Egyptian peninsula was only open to the public very sporadically, and often for very narrowly defined categories such as medical patients, religious pilgrims, foreign residents, or residents of Gaza with foreign visas or passports.

But I don't have to tell you how hard it is to leave Gaza, even when there's not a war, because late last year, we interviewed two Palestinians for a still upcoming episode that's being worked on. During the interview, they touched on their own experiences escaping Gaza. So we're going to play some of that interview for this episode. And I'll jump in occasionally to add some context. So here is Ahmed Matar and Abdullah Al-Khassab, athletes from PK Gaza, one of the most recognized parkour teams in the world. My name is Ahmed Matar.

I'm 26 years old. I'm from Gaza, Palestine. And I do parkour. I live at the moment in Sweden because I moved to Sweden six years ago after I got invited for the Air World Challenge. It's a parkour competition that was organized in Sweden in Helsingborg and since that time I just live in Sweden because I just did not want to go back for so many reasons that we can just talk about it later in this episode. Hey guys, I'm Abdullah, I'm 25 years old and also I'm a parkour athlete and I'm also right now in Italy.

I got the chance to travel to Italy because I participated in a in a movie or in a film which is the director

is Emanuele Girosa he's an Italian movie it's called Mojamba my friend he was the main character

I was one of the characters in the film so we got a chance to to participate in a festival in Sishia. And it wasn't really easy. It was really hard to do it because, you know, having a visa, Ahmed also knows that getting a visa as a Palestinian,

especially from Gaza City, is something really, really hard. And even though it's not just about having a visa, it's about traveling outside Gaza. This is also a, really hard. And even though it's not also about having the visa, it's about traveling outside Gaza. It's something else. This is also a completely different story, but we could manage that. And I've been here in Italy.

I came to participate in Sicilia, first of all, me and my friend, we managed to get Schengen visa and it was just for five days. And now I'm here in Italy for almost 11 months. In Dallese, when you were there, you don't really feel free as free, because you're surrounded all the time by so many obstacles,

which is really crazy. And it drives, even though because we were really kids and we didn't have a really good childhood somehow. and we didn't have a really good childhood somehow. Yeah, I remember since we were kids, we were seeing the tanks or what is it called? Yeah, the tanks that bomb something. We were seeing it in front of the street and we were hearing bombs and shooting.

And that was before 2005. That was like, since I was four years, I could remember all of that moments where the tanks are crossing our road and we were seeing that attacks happening between people together and bombs and flights and drones. And that's something that for sure affects us as a kid that we get the fear whenever we we see some bones and just we

want to hide from the bones and we want to to be close to the family for me all of these things that happened around me affected me that I wanted to be that guy who would like to to enjoy life in the same time Gaza was a place that we had the situation we where we are the psychologically or how is it called like when you are affected by the situation where we you know that you are you can be dead any moment or you can get a bump close to you any moment or someone close to you who died i mean kids the most important for the kids just you know safety and we didn't have safety the safety is what kids really want you know all the time i mean when you're a kid you just need your mom or your dad next to you because you really feel this kind of safety

but when we were kids we we couldn't have this kind of feeling because even our parents, they were not really sure what might happen to us or to them. So how they will protect us. So it's not really easy for anyone to protect the others, you know. No one able to, you know, to do that. to do that. That's something that affected us for sure because we've grown up in such things like that.

Maybe for me now, if we were talking about this, it's maybe something usual, which is something normal because I'm really good used to it somehow, which is not normal. I mean, it shouldn't be normal for anyone, but for us,

we call it kind of normal because we're used to it. And now, it shouldn't be normal for anyone, but for us, you know, we call it kind of normal because it's kind of, we, we used to, and now when I really, because before I, I was really kids or I didn't know what, what is really going on. I was really terrified and I was really scared and I didn't know what is really going to happen. But now when I'm, I'm kind of, you know, adult and I know what is really going on and I see the kids when, when, because for example, the last four, especially when I'm even outside Gaza,

it's completely different, you know, because when you're inside Gaza, you're with your family and with your friends, it's really different. But now when I can see how the kids, they are screaming, how the kids, they have this kind of feeling, you know, that they are really terrified of the bombs because it's next to them. So I can really remember myself and I just go through back, you know, the stories that really happened.

We have the memories, a lot of memories before about that. It was really crazy. We're going to go on a quick ad break, but when we get back, Ahmed will talk about his long experience trying to leave Gaza. When Ahmed was younger, he began to share videos online of his athletic skills, slowly gaining notoriety around the world

for his pretty impressive parkour ability. Soon, both himself and PK Gaza were being invited around the world to impressive parkour ability. Soon, both himself and P.K. Gaza were being invited around the world to perform parkour or to enter into parkour competitions. P.K. Gaza was invited to the Arabian TV show Arabs Got Talent, but they were unable to go on the program due to difficulties traveling outside Gaza. During this time period, the Rafah border crossing into Egypt was only open around six times a year and for only a few days. To catch a flight out of Egypt, you need to have all of your proper paperwork, tickets, and a valid visa, which lines up perfectly for when the Rafah border crossing happens to be open. And you have to also hope that you're not in the back of the line to

get through the border crossing because they only let a certain number of people through each day. Ahmed was invited to participate in the Red Bull Parkour Challenge in China and even successfully got a visa to travel, but wasn't able to leave Gaza because the Rafah border crossing was closed during the time frame when the visa was valid. when the visa was valid. The U.S.-based World Freerunning and Parkour Federation tried to help Ahmed travel to the United States to participate in the WFPF's 2016 competition in Las Vegas, but Ahmed was unable to get an American travel visa due to long wait times to use the northern border crossing into Jerusalem, and even if you did manage to get into Israel, it was quite difficult to receive a U.S. travel visa as applicants were frequently denied. A parkour gym in Italy frequently invited Ahmed to participate in their summer and winter events, but the Italian embassy denied requests for a travel visa three times. In late 2016, Ahmed got invited to the Airwhip Parkour Challenge in Sweden,

and with the help of some Swedish friends, he was able to secure a travel visa in just two weeks. Unfortunately, when Ahmed got the visa, the Rafah Crossing was closed. But by pure luck, just one day later, it was announced that the crossing would be reopening. When he went to the crossing, he learned that there were 30,000 people in line in front of him. With the crossing only set to be open briefly and the temporary visa set to expire, it was not looking great. After a very challenging series of events that Ahmed is about to explain, he was able to get to Sweden. And just last year, he starred in a

play about his own life and his journey traveling from Gaza to Sweden. Tell us a little bit about this. Is this going to be a play about your life that they're doing in Sweden? So we have had the premiere for the play on the 29th of May. So we have been doing

the show for a while now. We have had eight performances at the moment and the play is about me, my family and my friends from Pekin, Gaza Also, it talks about the journey from Gaza to Sweden, which was the biggest part of the play. Yeah, talking exactly about how it is to face the visa embassy, Egyptian

control, Egyptian security when we get out of Gaza that they have to. Also, Palestinian side that they have to interview was every, like if I had the visa, let's say I got the visa after some tries, then I have to apply for the travel, which I have to stand in the queue behind all of that people who already applied before me, which is imagine I'm 30,000, my queue number is 30,000, and I have to wait.

And, okay, let's say I got in front of all of that people, and today I am here in the Palestinian side. And this Palestinian side in Rafah border have to interview me and check all why do I need to travel, show me your documents. If I have any mistake in my documents and i go back to gaza even if all my documents i have the visa and everything and then if he don't want me to travel then i have to stay in gaza okay let's say i did pass the palestinian side i am in the egyptian security side and there one time the egypt Egyptian security sent me back to Gaza.

After waiting, I had the visa and I was like, no, what are you going to do? I'm going to do parkour. I have a parkour competition. What is parkour? You jump and then you go jump back in Gaza. I had to go back. My family did not expect I would be back in Gaza because I was at home around 5 a.m. in the morning. And I was a whole day waiting to get to the Egyptian side.

And then from there, he sent me back. And yeah, in the end, I mean, without the help I got, I would not have traveled because 30,000 people in front of me, I have the queue number, but I am behind them. And I have the visa that will expire in two days. Let's say that it starts in two days and it will expire in 20 days. And if I don't travel in this 20 days, my visa will expire and then I cannot travel to Sweden and the only thing I had to do was like going to the crossing the first day with my father he went with me and we just stand

there in front of the crossing it's you know there is a control there is a list with names that you cannot really cross if you don't get any help so I go there and then we just waited around six hours me and my father then the sunset came and good dark and then he was like I cannot do anything we have to go back and then we went back home the day after my father my father please can we go I have to travel I have the visa I just will expire and then he was like, well, I cannot do anything. He don't know what he will do, my father. So I told him, okay, I will go for the guy. We have a guy close to us, like let's say my neighbor, but he's a far neighbor. And he was the manager of the crossings between us, like managing of coordinating the visas

or like the list between us and Egypt. So he can really do whatever he wants. He can enter Egypt whenever he wants. He's a very friend between Egyptians. He's the manager of the crusade. He's the boss. So I go to him and I wait for him

outside his car. I was close to his car, waiting him to get out of his home. I know he go to his work around eight in the morning. Then I wake up at seven in the morning and I go there waiting him to come to his car. I see his car and I was really happy that he did not leave to his work. And I knew that he's still there. And then I was waiting, waiting. And then he came.

And then I show him my visa and I really have to travel to have the competition and they have to join this competition and then he was like okay but do you have the queue number yes but I am the last in the list okay but how will we do I cannot tell you but I have already told him, I have already been into Egypt before, but the Egyptian security sent me back to Gaza. And he told me, do you have the registration of that at the time you traveled? And I told him, yes, I did have at that time.

And he was okay. Follow me to the crossing. I told him, yeah, but can I go with you in your car so you don't forget me when you go there because he he's very like people just run after him and the person marianne then there i i had to tell him i want to go with you and he said yes okay you can come with me and then he told me but you cannot stop i told him can i stop her and say goodbye to my family first? Because they did not know that I will travel.

I just took a very small bag with me in case. I really had like a backpack with me. And he said, yeah, but you cannot stop. I have to go now. And then I was okay. I called my mom. Mom, he's going to help me, but I cannot stop to say goodbye. And then, yeah, I went to the crossing and

he put me into like a VIP list that I had to go like in a very special bus that was just five people in it and I was very like respected by the control there and it was like i got all the way today to egypt and in egypt i really met the same guy that he also asked me about parkour and he was like oh you and then my friend the guy the manager of the crossing told me show him what parkour is i really had to do a flip for him. I did a workster in that room where he, the control chick. And I was, oh, wow, so cool. Okay, here is the stamp. Enter to Egypt. But in Egypt, I had to go into that airport.

He did not know. You know, the Egyptians don't understand the visa. Like if it's in the visa, it says that it's going to be valid in this day. If it's valid in this, like imagine I in the visa it says that it's gonna be valid in this day if it's valid in this like imagine I get the visa today but it's not valid yet but the crossing is open today and tomorrow and the day after I have to travel in this three days then the crossing will close for another six months so I have to travel in that days otherwise I will lose my visa. So my visa was not valid at that time I traveled from Gaza. So he thought that it's valid. So he was, oh, go to the airport now and travel from there.

He thought that I can travel to Europe directly. But if my visa is not valid, Europe would not let me in. So I had to stay in the airport that time that my visa was not valid, which was five days. And then in the end, I traveled. But I had to wait in the airport because he did not understand my visa. No one should have to do a Webster front flip to cross a border. Because there was still one week left until the visa became valid,

Egyptian security sent Ahmed straight to the airport to wait for the week. While in limbo at the airport, the Egyptian authorities locked him in a small room without his phone or his belongings until the visa became valid. After many harsh difficulties and compounding inconveniences, Ahmed boarded his plane for Europe. Ahmed has built a life for himself in Sweden. He's been teaching parkour classes there for years now. In fact, that's how the play came about. The mother of one of his students is a theater director, and she became interested in his story. By his account, life is much better for him now. But he still is not free to see his own family or to go back to his original home. Getting into Gaza

is almost as hard as getting out of Gaza. And hopefully you guys can get back and see your families too, because I know that must be really difficult being separated and not being able to get back. Yeah, it's been six years almost.

Jesus, man. That's really hard. But you know, Dramaten, the theater, invited my brother and luckily he got the visa from first time. He got help from the same guy that helped me. He went to him and asked him

and he put him into a special place. He traveled from Gaza without having to wait and then now he's here. Oh wow, he didn't have to do a backflip in the visa. No, he did not because he's an artist and he had the visa and everything. So he got the visa because in Dramaten, the theater center invited him to be a part of the show with his piece of fabric that he drew. And Abdullah the same way with the travel. So everyone was like, you know, if you don't have someone to help you, you will not travel. Right. Yeah. It shouldn't be that way.

not travel. Yeah, it shouldn't be that way. Abdullah had to get it also held because his visa also was also one week, one week, and he had to travel in that week and he's named the last of the list. Unfortunately, Abdullah had some internet issues and some of the audio isn't usable, but he similarly only made it out of Gaza because he had a friend who had a contact at the Italian consulate. When Abdullah tried to apply for the visa, the office wasn't taking any more applications, but this friend was able to explain Abdullah's situation to the consulate, and they decided to give him a travel visa. Abdullah also had to travel through Egypt and was forced to stay in a small prison cell for three days without food or water. Once he got to the Cairo airport, the German airline he was booked on refused to accept his paperwork because they didn't want the responsibility of stamping his passport.

going back to Gaza, Abdullah was able to find a manager of sorts and explain his situation with the travel visa and needing to go to this film premiere for this parkour thing. You know, it's not the easiest thing to explain. Not everyone knows what parkour is, but the manager was sympathetic. And then just like what happened with Ahmed, they requested a parkour demonstration to see if this guy was actually telling the truth. So the already exhausted Abdullah did a backflip in the airport as he was recovering from the COVID vaccine. And then the manager, seemingly satisfied, transferred him from this German airline to an Egyptian airline. And he was able to make it to Italy and escape the prison of Gaza. When you're anyone who's in prison,

the only thing that he thinks about, I mean, when you're in prison for the whole life, I mean, the only thing that you think about is just how to escape, no? I mean, that's normally because you just want to be free because you're in prison. I've never been into the prison.

I mean, I've never... No, we both... I mean, I've been to the prison of Gaza but not the real one. Exactly, that's exactly what I mean. So we both we were in a prison which is open big prison and the only way that we were thinking about is how to get out of that and the only there was really possible just not to use perfor as an opportunity for us so we can get our freedom and somehow now you're in sweden i'm in italy we have this kind freedom but at the same time it's really hard because our families our friends and everyone we still connected not the quality freedom so it's like still connected like i mean i was trying to meet my family last this summer and i

applied for the egyptian visa because i still don't have the swedish passport so i have to apply as a palestinian to go back or to visit egypt so i applied for the egyptian visa to visit my family because my mother was in Egypt and she was there to attend the marriage of my uncle but she was there in Egypt with my sister and yeah I applied for the visa I never got the visa so I had to stay in Sudan soon it's like i'm not free yet i mean yeah i will get the buddhist passport soon i don't know when but i'm sure it's not more than six months from now because i have been applying i have applied six months ago and it's usually not more than a year to get the decision and usually it's accepted if you have everything correct

in the country like if you're legal and you pay the tax and you're working you're studying and know the language I'm good there just like I have to wait so in the end I will be able to meet them I would not be able I would not say I will be free to enter Gaza whenever I want because yeah, to enter Gaza at the moment I hear from people, it takes like three to four days and you suffer in the way, just like you have to stay in the car these three days. And every thousand kilometers, a thousand meters, you get stopped by a control, like a road control that they need to check everything you have,

every bag you have. Yeah, that's for sure. They take it out in the road and you have to put it back by yourself. And then the car continues. Another thousand kilometers, another control. And then in the end,

you arrive like Gaza and you say, this is the worst part of my travel to Gaza because they don't want to do it again. They don't want to get to Gaza and suffer the same way again. And the same to get out of Gaza. To get out of Gaza, I mean, if I have the Swedish passport, for sure, I will have the ability to travel from Gaza without worrying about getting a visa or not. But in the same time, yeah, I need to wait on a queue.

When will I travel? When I will be able to travel from Gaza? Is it going to be one month, two months, three months? Because it's like thousands of people who want to travel. And they just allow 500 people a day. And that's maximum. And then they don't allow any more of that people and then also they they close the crossing at any moment and I remember the time I traveled from Gaza was

the crossing was closed for six months, three, six months and it was not open at all and it was 31 000 people in the front of me in the queue 31 000. so imagine like i was the last person in the queue and they have to wait all of these people to travel and the crossing was open just the three days every three months that means like in this three days it's 1500 when is the rest gonna travel when will i have to travel and imagine you have a visa that is valid for like 10 days if you get the visa just for an event in europe that is just three days and then you get the visa for 10 days and then if you don't travel in that 10 days your visa gets expired and then you have to apply for a new visa and then if you don't travel in that 10 days your visa gets expired and then you have to apply for a new visa and then after that you have to wait

because if you get the refused visa you cannot apply directly you have to wait three to six months and then you can apply for the new visa so it's really terrible I don't want to go through all of that process again and that's why I decide stay in Sweden and work in Sweden and get a Swedish citizenship where I can travel freely

without worrying about oh getting a visa or not and because till now because I'm not Swedish I have to think about getting a visa or not will I be refused visa or not? And even Egyptian embassy refused my visa and they did not even answer. I call them every day. Did I get the visa? When will you give me the visa? I go to their officer in Stockholm, the like, oh, you have to call us, send us an email.

And I call and send the email. Oh, we will call you when you get the visa. But will you call me back if I don't get the visa? No, we will call you when you get the visa but will you call me that if i don't get the visa no we will call you when you get the visa they were calling okay and then they said i'm not coming to egypt yeah that sounds rough and i know for a long time abdullah was in gaza when you were in sweden right and ab Abdullah was trying to get the visa to travel. Last time we spoke, you hadn't been able to get one. So I'm glad you did. I'm glad you're now a film star. He had been applying many times. We went together many times and they also like there is a Sweden also invited him and you had also and they got refused visa and i'm sure he applied before also to italy and he applied

for england yeah so i also applied italy i got refused italian visa around four times and uh i from Oslo. I did an event in 2013 and USA invited me for Las Vegas and WFPF invited me for an event in Las Vegas that I could not make.

And also Germany, Hamburg and Hanover invited me. And there was many events that I could not make. In the end, I could make it to the airwaves, but the first year of the airwaves, they invited me to 2015. And I applied for the visa. I did not get it.

And then the year after, 2016, I got the visa because I had the help also from another private invitation. So I got double invitations that it made it stronger for the consulate, the embassy in Jerusalem to accept the visa. And it was like, yeah, it was 21 days visa. And directly when I arrived in Sweden, I was like, my friend knew I don't want to go back so they took me to the immigration office in Helsingborg in Malmo and there I extended my visa for six months first and in that six months I wanted to work and stay here so I started to look for a job and I started my own job actually like start to work with parkour myself like making classes that I was teaching in English and I had

one of the students translating to the kids in Swedish and so he was getting free classes and it was tough at that time I was like it was hard for him also to translate because he was not more than 13 years old and he was so shy and everything and I was forced to learn the Swedish language because of that because I wanted to work and I just started to know hands, head and work and I just start to know hands head and knees and it was easy because it was similar to English and by time the kids had taught me to speak Swedish at the moment because it was the only way I learned Swedish it was my way to learn Swedish it was I was with the kids all the time the kids language was the easiest to take, like to pick out, because the kids have a simple language that you can really learn much faster than talking with an adult that talks really fast and talking very advanced Swedish.

I dreamed to travel from Gaza, and then I made it. I did travel from Gaza, and then you think, okay, what do I want to make next? And then I want to work with and then I I want to work with parkour then I start working with parkour I never expected that I would be in the biggest theater stage in Sweden and then I am here in the biggest theater stage in Sweden that's just like being able to come and watch my story and watch me performing parkour and telling my story. It's like, I never thought about it. I just, parkour brought that to me. As an extra note, earlier this week, James spoke with Ahmed and Abdullah. And as of a few days ago, at least both of their families were okay. Obviously,

this is an ongoing situation, but I just wanted to add that in here because that's the most up-to-date information we have. Ahmed is still in Sweden, is still doing parkour. You can find him at Matar Gaza on Instagram or his website, matargaza.com. That's M-A-T-A-R, Gaza.com. Abdullah is still in Italy and is studying to become an English teacher. calm. Abdullah is still in Italy and is studying to become an English teacher. And just last February, Ahmed and Abdullah were able to see each other in person for the first time in quite a while. The documentary that Abdullah is in is called One More Jump. It's about very similar questions on whether it's worth it to stay and fight for your country or try to escape and

fulfill your dreams. Thank you once again to Abdullah and Ahmed for your country or try to escape and fulfill your dreams. Thank you once again to Abdullah and Ahmed for talking with us. I'll link their social medias in the show notes below. See you on the other side. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Or wherever you get your podcasts. of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.

Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities,

artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.

Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Shereen, and I am so happy to be joined by my guest today. I've been so excited to speak to him. I am joined by D.V. Kashi. He is a pro-Palestinian activist from New York and Israel, and there's just a lot of stuff I want to talk to you about. So welcome. Pleasure to be here. Great to meet you, Shereen.

I want to start with just some background for the audience to just like kind of get to know where the perspective you're speaking from. Can you tell me a little bit about your family history and where you grew up and where your parents are from and all of that? Sure. My parents were both born in Israel. And they, like many Israelis, moved to New York City in the 80s and had myself and my two siblings. And as my grandparents were getting older, to whom we were very close, my mom decided to move back to Tel Aviv in 2000, so right before the second Intifada. So when I was 13, eighth grade, I moved to Tel Aviv for the first time. And, you know, obviously in in our grandparents house uh both of whom were

iraqi jews who immigrated to israel in the early 50s um and so yeah so when i moved there uh in eighth grade i was completely pretty much a shock in terms of what I was used to in New York. Obviously, I had friends from many different walks of life, many different backgrounds here. I was very used to that, right? I didn't grow up in, you know, a very staunch Jewish community. I had Jewish friends, but I didn't solely have Jewish friends. And so that's what I loved. That's what I embraced. But when I moved to Israel, it was very jarring. You know, I'd studied in Hebrew for the first time. And, you know, everything that we studied in school was pertaining to the Jewish identity.

So every kind of history class, you know, you'd study about the Roman Empire and the Jewish people, you'd study about, you know, ancient Greece and the Jewish people, and it's okay to learn about Jewish identity, but intertwining it with every aspect of the school curriculum, and really thinking about the person really kind of hammering home this notion of persecution, really kind of understanding how, you know, and again, I think it's important to understand your history and history in general. But I think that kind of introducing this notion of persecution as a tactic to re-traumatize people that aren't directly experiencing the trauma, right? So everyone in the world learns about the Holocaust, but did you know that in Israel, Holocaust

Remembrance Day isn't on the same day as the rest of the world's Holocaust Remembrance Day, because they want to own their own kind of version of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, right? And so, you know, when you think about the Holocaust, you think about other Holocaust, other genocides that have happened, and Israel's failure to recognize those genocides, like the Armenian genocide, right? And the fact that, you know, many people don't know, but, you know, throughout history, Israel has armed genocidal forces with Israeli made weapons to, you know, support imperialist motives and colonialist powers around the world. So, you know, even now with what's happening in Armenia with the Azerbaijanis, right, Israel is on the wrong side of that equation, right? And so it's never been about standing with the side of the oppressed for Israel.

It's never been about, you know, ensuring that what happens when they say never again, actually never again, never happens again to anyone around the world, right? Think about their policies, their racist policies around refugees, right? I think people don't understand, right? I have a very unique perspective because I understand kind of the minds of the colonizers. I can humanize the colonizers. I think there's a dangerous kind of maybe thinking about things from a bit of a different angle than kind of people are used to. And also bringing it back to the events of the last 10 days or 11 days at this point. I think, you know, I've always kind of looked at and identified with the Palestinian struggle, right? And I've always seen it as a human rights struggle. And as such, and as many well-regarded activists and thinkers and intellectuals have always talked about the unification of struggle for the Palestinian people. I've also

felt, you know, by virtue of this self, this imposed identity of, you know, Israeli, I've always felt directly responsible for the oppression of the Palestinian people, even though I've never done anything myself to champion or perpetuate that oppression. I've always worked against it from a very, very young age. Now, people always ask me, you know, kind of annoying questions like, you know, why do you care so much about the Palestinians when so many people in the world are suffering? And the answer to that question is I care about all suffering. But this is something that the government that supposedly represents me, the entity that supposedly represents me, is directly perpetrating. And frankly, after going to many protests in New York and in Israel itself, I've realized that this

is the most important human rights struggle of our generation, for sure, but of modern times, because it stands for all of it's essentially the last beacon of direct colonialism. Right. We all know how kind of neocolonialism works. But neocolonialism through, you know, different capitalist structures, right? America has been able to perpetrate neocolonialism without actually having to occupy other people, you know, save for Iraq for almost 20 years or 15 years or whatever it was a very long time. But Israel is directly and physically occupying on other people. And they have been for the last 75 years, right? Officially for the last 75 years. And that's been a constant, right?

It's not, hey, you know, here's a country and let's, you know, fight. Let's continue our kind of battle in that way. It's been, it's always been, if you're a scholar of Israeli history, of Zionist history, you always, you start understanding that the goal was to take over all of Judea and Samaria, right? And that's kind of how the settler government that Netanyahu has in power has been speaking for years, right? I'm really upset and really kind of frustrated by the way that the Western media has been portraying what's happening over the last 11 days. Because even Israeli media, Haaretz, which is an Israeli newspaper, which is a very prominent one, right, isn't portraying it the way that the Western media is portraying it. Yeah, I've seen that.

They're criticizing the Netanyahu. There's so many people in Israel that are scared, right? All the leftists are scared. They're being persecuted. There's signal groups doxing friends of mine, people literally fighting for human rights. They're doxing them. People literally fighting for human rights. They're doxing them.

Israel Frey, he's an orthodox reporter that's been staunchly pro-Palestinian. And he's a very prominent member of the press. An angry mob of right-wing extremists tried to knock down his door the other day. And he had to escape from the back door and run away so they don't potentially kill him. And so these voices are being silenced in Israel. No one is talking about that. Everyone in the West is beating the drums of war. The media is supporting that. We've seen on kind of a micro but tragic level what happened to that six-year-old kid that was stabbed to death by someone just because of the anti-Islamic, anti-Palestinian rhetoric that's being perpetrated. And so everyone's kind of losing their shit as all of a sudden everyone's saying the same thing because everyone is being pushed to justify

this war. But people are starting to wake up, right? The UN's woken up and very, very slowly people are starting to wake up because they're seeing that genocide is actually being committed. And so you can't throw your full weight behind genocide, but they're walking it back too slowly. And the people that I'm disappointed by are people that are supposedly smart, spewing complete nonsense rhetoric about two sides, right? I struggled, right? This is important. I struggled. I know people who were killed in the Hamas attack, personally and intimately know them, right? You know, my ex girlfriend's best friend was killed, right? We've hung out many, many, many times. She was a very sweet, very kind person. We know an activist who was literally, because people don't understand,

and this is for a lot of the kind of pro-Palestinians that have, and I completely empathize, and I understand why people believe what they believe, believe me. But this is for a lot of the pro-Palestinians that, you know, immediately called all of them settlers, right? And I think it's important to distinguish, because if there's ever going to be a path forward in this mess, we have to offer a new rhetoric that deconstructs the nationalist ideologies. Okay. I don't put the Palestinian flag or say free Palestine, which I do as a nationalist ideology. I say that as a deconstruction of nationalism, as a, as, as as as a call to freedom for all right the oppressed as well as the oppressor right if you actually read everyone's quoting um everyone's

quoting fanon right everyone's quoting all these revolutionaries if you actually read the material that they said che guevara even said the true revolutionary is guided by deep, with deep feelings of love in their heart. And he said this at the risk of sounding absurd, he said that. Direct quote. The people perpetuating in Israel, I can say this from a firsthand account, I know very good people that are guided by nationalist and fascist ideologies. However, they've been manipulated. They've been lied to. They're fed propaganda 24-7 through the news. And the sentiment in Israel right now, and I can tell you this,

I'm getting messages from people. They think everyone is trying to kill Jews. That's what they believe. That's what they've been told. They think this is Armageddon for the Jewish people. that's what the media narrative is in israel okay in spite of the fact that there are many people that are against what's happening there are many people that directly blame netanyahu for this but they're being scared to believe that they're going to be attacked on all fronts and they have to do everything they can to neutralize the threats. Okay. That is,

that is the survival kind of, that, that is a fact. Does that mean that every single person in Israel is a terrible human being is evil as some people say? No, that is not true at all. Right. And, and, and, and my point is, and what a lot of the revolutionaries said, right, Paulo Freire in the pedagogy ofressed said, in the process of dehumanization, the oppressor dehumanizes himself. Putting that aside, though, I think that, you know, for me, I see, I know people that died, it was very difficult for me to post in the first two days, I think there were some problematic justifications for the massacre that didn't sit well with me because I'm a humanist. But in the same token, right, I think that I understand the context. I think it behooves us

to understand the context, right? There's a really famous quote, I forget who said it, but if you started the clock or started looking at kind of the colonization in America from when the Native Americans started shooting the arrows, you'd think that the Native Americans were the aggressors, right? If you started looking at, you know, the colonization of Algeria when the local population started rebelling, you'd think that they were the aggressives right yeah and that's not to say in the same breath that terrible things happen to amazing people there right what people don't know and a lot of the pro-palestinian movement doesn't know is that many of the people living in the area around gaza are actually activists, like very anti-Zionist activists, right? Many of the testimonies of the families of those activists are saying to stop the genocide. That's not going to bring back their friends, their family members.

Those are the people that were, a lot of whom were killed in the attacks because that's where they live. They work with, you know, organizations in Gaza, like acknowledge that, right. Understand the complexity saying, Hey, you guys are all settlers. That's just dumb. It's not factually true. Their grandparents were, their great grandparents were a hundred percent, but now they're generations and generations of people, right? Just like in America, they're generations and generations of people, right? Just like in America, they're generations and generations of people that descended. Are they to be held accountable for the actions of their ancestors?

Doesn't make any sense. They should be held accountable for actions that they take now for sure, right? Holding your government accountable, you know, thinking about an actual solution to this terrible situation, that 100% people should be held accountable for. But to call them settlers as a justification for their deaths is something that I will never do, right? And I don't think it helps the struggle, right?

I think it's important to say, and then simultaneously also say, did you guys know that Israel played a very major role in establishing the Hamas? Like, don't be stupid. Open a history book. See what happened, right? Understand. Don't just be quick to call and quick to say both sides. It's not a both side situation, even though the aggression was terrible. Those two things can be true. It's a devastating, tragic event, right? And I know many great people that were killed in it. But in the same breath, we have to remember what caused it. Yeah, context is everything,

right? Context is everything. Israel funded the Hamas. Bibi has direct quotes in Israeli newspapers saying we have to fund the Hamas in order for Palestinians never to have a state. He directly said that. How do you guys ignore these statements? They've been very, Bibi has been very clear as to what is going to happen and what he's trying to accomplish. And then on top of that, to compound things,

the settlers in his government right now, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are two settlers. They literally are settlers. Like, in accordance with the national law, they're considered settlers. They literally are settlers. Like in accordance with the national law, they're considered settlers. Okay.

Illegal settlers. And they're the second and third most powerful people in Israel. Okay. I don't think people understand or know, but those two guys, there's a, there's a famous rabbi. Okay.

In Jerusalem. He's an extremist fundamentalist rabbi, Jewish fundamentalist rabbi. What he's been calling for, for a long time, Kahana Tzedak is, Kahana was right. He was a very fascist rabbi that was basically calling for the extermination of all Arabs. And they're basically, they're called kahanistim. And that's, it's basically what the left in Israel used to call this government. Memshalash al-kahanistim means government of kahanists. Okay.

That is what, that's who's running the country. And this rabbi has been calling for in a biblical sense. And we all know when people have an utmost, you know, devotion to religion, that guides them. Right. Not our world. Our world does not guide them. have an utmost, you know, devotion to religion, that guides them, right? Not our world. Our world does not guide them. The religious texts and the religious leaders are the ones who tell them what is right and what is wrong, right?

In religious fundamentalism. And so what this rabbi has been calling for, for years, has been a war to end all wars. Okay? That is what he's been telling them. That is what they've been operating wars. Okay? That is what he's been telling them. That is what they've been operating under. Okay? Their allegiances are to him, not to the Israeli people,

literally to that ideology. And so they're in the government right now. Over the last year, they've been essentially adding illegal settlements at a rapid rate, emboldening and empowering settlers to commit violence that we haven't seen in many, many years. Levels of violence we haven't seen in many, many years, even before this latest aggression. I'm talking about over the last 12 months. And the biggest, most annoying thing that I hear from Westerners that think they understand, right? They're like, oh yeah, we really care about Palestinians, but Hamas has to go. Two things to that. One, the fact that there are Palestinians on the West Bank and the Palestinians in Gaza

doesn't mean they're not the same people. There are Palestinians in 48 as well. They feel deep feelings of solidarity because they're all oppressed in different ways, right? It's solidarity under this grand Zionist oppression that they experience. And so I think that it's a fallacy that it was an unprovoked attack. It's a fallacy right it's not the case the fact that al-aqsa kept getting uh bombarded by settlers on purpose on purpose i don't put it back like they did this to get a provocation they've been provoking to get the retaliation for hamas they've been doing this for years this is nothing new right every time hamas shot rockets over the

last five years is because Israel was attacking al-Aqsa right right after Ramadan if you remember or during Ramadan sorry and so every time a barrage of rockets came in right after that barrage of rockets because Hamas wanted to show that someone is sticking up for them but I'm just saying you have to understand the context when you're in a blockade when you're living in a concentration camp worse than a concentration camp frankly right every electricity is controlled water is controlled food is controlled you're not able to leave right you're not able to freaking leave when you want you're not able to come when you want not able to a 60 kilometer strip of land is the most densely populated strip of land in the entire world

depression is the highest the highest rates of depression i think the highest rates of child suicide are in gaza okay when you're living under those conditions i have no idea how you're like i don't i have no idea what that would feel like. So how can I judge anyone, any response to that, right? In the same breath, I can also say it's a tragic thing that innocent people died, and they're innocent people. And I think it's important to hold that complexity. Also for the Palestinian cause, I think it's important to not lose sight of our humanity in criticizing the grave injustices that Israel has committed and putting the blame squarely on Israel's shoulders that Hamas exists. Yeah, I think that's something that I keep coming back to is whenever someone is just all about condemning Hamas, which is like, yes,

as you mentioned, like, innocent people shouldn't have died. But I blame all the violence that's happening in Israel on Israel. Like it's not, you can't just start like at a slave revolt as the beginning of history of slavery. It's like, no, actually they did that for a reason and they had no other choice. And I mean,

for Palestinians, I think like what's the biggest context that's missing is like, they've tried everything. I think like what's the biggest context that's missing is like they've tried everything. It's not their first choice to to kill people that didn't deserve it. It's I think I think that's what's been really annoying with the the people that have chosen to speak out that have never spoken out before. They are so narrow in their view of this that it's so damaging because they have so many followers or they're talking about the wrong things and all of those things like kind of perpetuate a really dangerous environment where like a six-year-old kid

can get stabbed to death or i don't know i agree with everything you said and i really appreciate you saying all those things um before i forget we we're going to take our first break, so don't go anywhere. And we're back. Something you mentioned early on that I have been thinking about and getting really angry about is why people are surprised or like unexpecting you to speak out about Palestinians if you are not a Palestinian. I am not a Palestinian. I am not a Palestinian. I'm Syrian. And I am extremely vocal about the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian...

I've always been 100% free Palestine till I die. And it's almost like surprising to people. Like, why are you so worked up? Like, why aren't you so worked up? That's what really gets me is your humanity and care it shouldn't be contingent on your identity if you actually give a shit um and i think that's what i really want to like relate to people is this is not the palestinians struggle solely for themselves like this is a struggle for all like if this genocide obliterates the

palestinian people that's on humanity's shoulders that's not like that is so indicative of how depraved humans have become it's just so upsetting it's just a complete obliteration there has been videos of settlers saying they want to flatten the whole thing make it a parking lot uh i mean i don't even have to tell you what like actual media and like politicians have been saying because it's like at uh i mean i don't even have to tell you what like actual media and like politicians have been saying because it's like atrocious but i think that's what i want to relate to people is like if you're not if you don't care examine that because that is troubling to me if you don't care about actual genocide and maybe that word has been used too much to like make

people give a shit but it really makes me question people's humanity when they are able to kind of just like shrug it off and continue about their day. I've been practicing being hopeful. I think it's really important, especially in times like these, to be hopeful because without hope, and it sounds cheesy, but it's true,

we're not empowered, right? We're not able to act. And I think what's exciting, what's, I guess, heartening to me is actually the people's response to what's happening. Yes, there are many influencers and celebrities that posted the wrong thing. I'm also seeing many that posted the right thing. I'm also seeing many people that I'm surprised by.

I'm seeing many people that I wasn't surprised by posting the wrong thing. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Frankly. But I'm also seeing many people, white people, you know, black people, people of all kinds that are disconnected from an identity perspective to the Palestinian people, doing so much, showing up. I saw images from the protest in the other day and there,

and I'm not talking about the Jewish protest, which was amazing, right? What JVP did with, if not now in front of Chuck Schumer's house was incredible. That's solidarity. That's true. That's, that's real, right? That's, that's, that's, that's humanity, right? That's what humanity should be. That's real solidarity. i'm talking about the protests though that was palestinian led in midtown and i saw tons of jews there and i'm not talking about the satmar anti-zionist you know hasidic jews those are great right and they're they're helpful i'm talking about like regular regular ass jews right like me right people with like not even wearing yarmulkes like people with you know small yarmulkes that aren't like, you know, Hasidic or anything, holding up signs

to help liberate the Palestinian people. In spite of the Hamas, in spite of everything that happened, they showed up, they were not scared. A Palestinian flag doesn't scare them, right? It shouldn't scare anybody it shouldn't it shouldn't but again I want to be I want to I want to maintain my uh my um I guess I want to maintain the view of objectivity yeah I think again you know devil's advocate I think when when and again this is not not me blaming right it's more so offering kind of a perspective to to question um how to kind of move forward um when people israelis jews whoever right are indoctrinated to believe that um palestine means no place for me. Okay.

And then you couple that with the anger, anguish that the oppressed people are feeling and saying, yeah, fuck, fuck that. Like we, we don't want you here, right?

Like you, you look what you're doing to us. I think that they view the Palestinian flag as a replacement of, you know, the flag of Israel, which many people actually kind of, not many people, some people view it that way. And I think that the way I see it and the way many people I know see it, it's a flag that represents liberation from oppression. It's a flag that represents liberation from oppression. Liberation of the Palestinian people who are being actively oppressed by Zionism. Right? An ideology.

Right? You know, perpetuated and executed by people. But it's still an ideology. Also, just like, because this always comes up, but being anti-Zionist has nothing to do with being anti-Semitic. And I think they always get conflated. And that's on purpose to make people afraid to speak up about Israel. I can only imagine how brainwashed Zionism becomes to the whole education and everything. Is that something you experience firsthand? Yeah, 100%. like the education and everything like is that something you experience like firsthand yeah 100 i think what we've seen over the last decade right the fact that netanyahu has been in power for over 20 years that's that's like dictatorship level stuff and people in america

like oh yeah the west you know there is a semblance of you know power to the people in america are like oh yeah the west you know there is a semblance of you know power to the people in the west a semblance of it right we're seeing how much the media is in cahoots with you know power against the people right now which is very very scary and everyone should be up in arms no matter where your your feelings lie um but there is know, there's a new president, you know, every four years, a president is termed, right? You can't be you can't be a president for more than two terms, right? These are real things, right? These are real protections. You have three different branches of government, right? You have local level, local government, you have so many different checks and balances that are, you know, corrupted and co-opted in certain ways you know through lobbyists and you know corporate interests

etc i'm aware but at least you have that system in israel that system doesn't exist okay there's no constitution uh and a prime minister can't be turned and so now Bibi Netanyahu has been in power and figured out how to survive attempts on his throne many times over through building coalitions with right-wing extremists, which frankly are against his interests. He wanted to perpetuate status quo and just be in power. This has made it difficult for him to just be the guy who kind of, you know, makes everything okay for Israelis, right? Now Israelis are scared shitless. And so, but putting that aside and going back to your point, the Nakba was never even discussed until recent history. Like it was not, like no one even knew what that word means.

Right? We celebrated it as Yom Ha'atzmaut, Independence Day. So the Israeli Independence Day is the Palestinians' Nakba, which means the great tragedy for those who don't know. The catastrophe is what they call it.

The catastrophe, yes. And so, but what's interesting and very sad is that in recent years because of the world actually and when israelis tell you you don't know what you're talking about don't comment on things you don't talk about that you don't know about you most likely if you've done any any literally any if you read one book on palestine if you're on palestine by noam chomsky and elon poppe like you know more than israelis know about their own situation and i say that wholeheartedly because i know what they study, right? They omit large swaths of information in order to form the psyche through the narrative that they perpetuate. And so, but because of recent

external and global pressure, because of the fact that the world's the new generation of young people have educated themselves on Palestine, you know, cataly Palestine, a lot of them catalyzed by the social justice movement, the Angela Davises, the Chomskys of the world, who always, since the 60s, have been talking about black liberation is incomplete without the liberation of Palestinians, unifying struggles. struggles. They know more about history of Israel and Palestine than Israelis do. Okay. I've always been super impressed. Not like, not to say that people are dumb. I actually think people are very smart, right? If they're willing to look. But every Palestinian friend of mine, every single one knows so much about Zionism and Zionist history, right? They're scholars of Zionist history, right? But Israelis have no idea about Palestinians and Palestinian history. That's just, I think it's really unsettling because, I mean, for those who don't know, the catastrophe was like-

Mass displacement. Like the mass expulsion of like 750,000 Palestiniansinians ethnic cleansing massacres extreme like just a disgusting show of uh forcing someone to leave their land and taking it over uh it was uh atrocious and her and i i think the fact that they can't even learn about power or like learn deeply about palestine or palestinians it's like another way of ethnic cleansing and like forgetting they even exist. And I think that's very unsettling because you can't just forget. I mean, at the same time, they say like history is written by the people that are in power, right?

Or the people that like win the war, quote unquote. And they're very capable of convincing a big amount of people that like that they were never here. I think being hopeful is a practice and i've definitely fallen into you know bouts of of depression and and and hopelessness and hopelessness also um i think we all do but i think it behooves us to practice hopefulness especially in times like these um because without it we don't have the power to liberate the oppressed right yeah um and i think you know yeah i mean like like you said it it's it's i I think it's also important. I keep saying the Palestinian struggle is the people's movement all over the world. And we're seeing that. It's not me, I'm nobody. But we're seeing that people understand that. Like I said, people are smart. You don't have to go to an Ivy League school to be intelligent. You don't have to go to, you know, an Ivy League school to be intelligent, right?

Paulo Freire talked about banking intelligence, right? When you just consume information from a teacher perpetuating the injustices and maintaining the system of oppression, right? You can be as educated as you want in that form of education and not understand the world and understand the inequalities around you, right? But if you feel those inequalities, if you have that empathy, if you're able to expand your consciousness a little bit to also include those that you may not identify with or as or, you know, that maybe are not tangible, their experience is not as tangible to you, then you're able to understand situations pretty clearly and easily. And I think the world is showing up because they understand that, right? Sure, the Arab world is showing up, and that's incredible, right? Because they understand,

right? This is like, what I always say is Palestine is the last kind of, like i said earlier the last direct colonialist project that exists in the world direct right um in terms of direct and active how about that uh colonialist project that exists in the world and the arab world you know if you read edward said and orientalism you understand how the west basically uh created and othered kind of the Arab world in order to create that separation and division, in order to create, you know, a world that serves self-interest, individualism versus kind of communitarianism of the kind of East. And so when you, when you think about it in that context, you start understanding that, you know, this is, and this is a struggle against kind of Western imperialism, right? This is a struggle to free all oppressed people because that's what,

that's what Zionism in Israel currently stands for. And everyone who perpetuates it and people that talk about intersectionality and anti-racism and all of that and they still say and they still don't understand that this is literally in a real-time manifestation of the shit that they've been reading in history books right and we're seeing it and it's jarring and resistance is fucking jarring right like it was jarring to me i could barely watch it i had people crying i'd you know and this i didn't say this earlier but i had you know family members that didn't want to speak to me and like you know people cursing at me and like friends from you know middle school sending me hate messages my mom is receiving death threats wow right like this is real shit

right and so like this isn't like an abstract like like, and, and so, you know, that's what, that's what people don't necessarily understand when they just approach it academically. And I, I, I commend them. And I think it's important to like understand the intellectual context of things. Like I've done the work, I've read the books, but I think it's also important to kind of take a step back and contextualize things all around, right? And only through that contextualization can we re-humanize both the oppressed and the oppressor

in order to actually have a path forward that's inclusive of all, that doesn't pit people against each other, right? Jews lived on that land for many years before Zionism. We all lived peacefully, I want to say. That's what I'm saying. Everyone lived just fine before the introduction of Zionism, which is a very modern, very fascist ideology. Not only Zionism, though, right? Think about Sykes-Picot, right?

though, right? Like think about Sykes-Picot, right? The British-French treaty that was signed in 1920 that sliced up the Arab world according to their whim, didn't take into account any demographic, any ethnic geographic relations, didn't take into account any of that. And that is what set the tone for a lot of what we're seeing in the Arab world today, right? Compounded by the introduction of a European ideology into the region that served European interests is what we're seeing to this very day. And the Palestinians bear the biggest brunt of it. I wouldn't say, like, I would say, like, in recent years, there's tragedies all around due to Western imperialism and Western intervention. Right. I take that back. Right. Like, I don't want to compare tragedies. But but the tragedy of the Palestinian people, there's no one really advocating on their behalf.

Yeah, I was going to add a wrinkle that probably ninety nine point nine percent of the population doesn't know, including Palestinians and Arabs, because it was actively erased. But up until Sykes-Picot, up until Western imperialism, Arab Jews were an integral part of Arabic culture. Okay. My grandparents from Iraq, right? Iraq wasn't. The Iraqi Jews were not Zionists. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Iraq that lived there since Babylonian times, right? There are many, you know, many empires that came through the Arab world, right? So displaced, replaced, etc. But they were there for hundreds of years, at the minimum. not there due to the Spanish Inquisition, right?

But actually were there before and never left, basically. And so, you know, they were musicians, you know, they played right? Like they were statesmen, they were very integral part of the culture, right? And I have many Arab friends that do know this and they're like, yeah, it's the biggest, one of the biggest tragedies is kind of the betrayal of the Arab Jew, right? And they understand, right, like, at this point in time, and this is not only Iraq, it was Egypt and Yemen and Morocco, there's a huge Jewish community, right? Like, these people live there. Nazism is not an Arabic concept. They're

trying to paint Arabs as Nazis. Even growing up, I would go to Syria a lot. And my grandfather would like, he would only get bread at Jewish bakery. Like he would take the walk and go there. And it was normal. No one cares. Like no one gives a shit, really, what your religion is in those communities. And I think, I mean mean this is obvious for people that

are reading about all of this but the media and zionism and israel they're purposely conflating what's happening with religion to make it more complicated for people to make it this like ancient battle of all time right when it's not about any kind of muslim versus jewish versus arab versus whatever it's it's really so simple to the point where it's kind of silly. And I think they make it so complicated for people to be scared to talk about it. They're not informed enough. They don't know about religion. They don't know about the history.

You don't have to know about any of that to know that oppression is wrong and genocide is wrong. 100%. And every resistance movement in history was considered a terrorist movement in modern times, right? Even Israeli militias, right? You had the Lehi, the Etzel, and the Agana. Okay? They were considered terrorist organizations because they would attack civilian British

and they would attack civilian British and they've attacked civilian targets during the British mandate. Yep. Sounds familiar. No, I mean, that's very important to bring up. But you know what those, you know, those three militias became? The IDF. The IDF. Exactly. The three militias that formed that formed the IDF once Israel was given statehood were considered terrorist organizations. The IRA is a terrorist organization, right? Nelson Mandela was on the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008. These are real things. These are all facts.

But I'm saying even if you're thinking about it from the perspective of attacking civilians, okay? Wrong, in my opinion. But when you don't have – if you look at you look actually here another another fact right look at what the hezbollah is doing okay they were they were considered terrorist organization they're armed to the teeth israel scared shitless of the hezbollah threat i'm hearing it from people on the ground right they're attacking military targets they're showing the world that they can because they can they used to not be able to. Now they can, so they are.

When a population is oppressed, suppressed to the level that the Gazans are, what military, do they have F-16 fighter jets that they can go and bomb, I don't know, the Kirya? Did you guys know that the biggest military base in Israel is in the middle of Tel Aviv? Yeah, in a residential area. In a residential area? Yeah. So what if the Gazans had F-16 fighters?

What if Hamas had F-16 fighters? They wouldn't want to bomb that? Yeah. Are people that dense that they don't understand how this thing works and what oppression looks like? A lot of my Palestinian friends always say, the world wants us to be the perfect victims. Yeah. And in a lot of senses,

the burden is always on the victim, right? In these oppressive scenarios. So I always tell them, guys, like, we have to be smart. We have to make sure that, you know, again, like, it's trauma that I can't, you know, I feel in my bones, but it's not directly happening to me. And so I can't, I'm not, it's not from a place of judgment. It's from a pragmatic perspective.

We have to understand that that's the trap that they're setting for us. The Hamas enacted, the Hamas did exactly what the right wing government wanted them to do in order to justify the plan that they had all along. I'm not going to go so far as to start perpetuating conspiracy theories because it's not my place. So I'm not going to say that they planned this and it was an inside job. I'm not going to say that. But what I will say is it served the interests of the right-wing government. And the one thing I wanted to say, because I keep going off on tangents and I apologize. No, you're fine.

But to your point about the Nakba, I said, in the last 10 years, it's pretty crazy to see the narrative shift. Israel has been so emboldened. They feel so invincible because of the international support that they have. Now they acknowledge the Nakba. Now they acknowledge the Nakba. But you know how they acknowledge it? They say, yeah, the Nakba happened. Let's do a second one.

Yep. Right? And so now all of a sudden the Nakba existed, right? And they're basically saying, hey, let's do a second one. All the right-wing government officials are saying the second Nakba, let's do it now. That's what they're trying to do. That's what they're trying to do in Gaza. It feels like the first one never ended.

It feels like the first one just never ended, right? I always say that. I agree. But I'm saying, I'm talking about mass expulsion right now. They're trying under everyone's noses to utilize genocide and ethnic cleansing to displace millions of Palestinians from Gaza. And God knows, they don't have a, they don't, this was like a biblical idea, right? Like the Judean Samaria, this is not like a, there was no like specific plans that people had. Like this is a biblical,

fervent, ideological idea. They don't freaking know what they're doing. They don't want to go to war with Iran. They're scared of the Hezbollah. Like these are real things. These are real threats. Like Israel hasn't fought a real opponent since the 70s in the Yom Kippur War. That's what I'm trying to say.

Like this showed how vulnerable they are. And they're scared. I'm telling you, like I know the sentiment on the ground. Like people are scared out of their minds. They don't think they're not very confident in Israel's military. Right. Like that's why they're bombing the shit. And like, that's why they haven't invaded.

They said they're going to invade. Baby's talking this big game they haven't done yet. Because they're scared. The thing to remember also is that the IDF does not actually act in the best interest of the civilians. If anything, there was a report from an Israeli woman who survived the massacre at the music festival that said

a lot of them were shot by their own forces. It was indiscriminate shooting. The biggest casualties for Israeli soldiers up until this was friendly fire. Yeah. That's I mean, I just think that's so important to remember

because it's they're framed as this very like ideal warrior bullshit and it's so far from the truth. That's what I'm saying. They're 18 year old kids. Yeah. These aren't like US Marines that are career assassins. Have you ever seen a US Marine next to an Israeli soldier? No, I'm serious.

No, I know. It's become a trend to be a soldier, if anything. You see these young people. TikToks and stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's very um cool thing to do uh because there was never a threat though israel israel has been you've grown up in israel believing that you're the most powerful entity and you can do whatever you want whenever you want right and and that notion has been shaken to its core and if you're part of the propaganda machine if you you're caught in the propaganda machine that is kind of zionist is, you're basically now, your whole world is crumbled beneath you, right? You're completely in survival mode.

Everyone's posting. Everyone's like, you have to eradicate Hamas. They're not even eradicating Hamas. What are they doing? They're just emboldening Hamas. Like this happens all the time. It's just happening on a much bigger scale right now. just happening on a much bigger scale right now.

Any Hamas leader, the thing I was basically looking for, like a big, like a major Hamas leadership, you know, attack. And once they're able to neutralize, you know, in their words, numerous high-ranking officials, I think they'll declare victory, even though they're not going to be victorious.

They're not going to bring back the 1,400 people. I mean, they're also going to kill the hostages at this rate. You know what I mean? Like, they're not like... They've already killed more than 22. Yeah. That's... How much do you actually care about your civilians and the hostages, like the foreign hostages either? Like, it's your... But... I don't know. They're just clearly showing their ass, in my opinion.

I want to have a clear message, though, to kind of people that are on the fence in the West that are being fed propaganda through Western media outlets that is quite clear at this point. And some of them recognize this, and that's why they come to my page and they're like, oh, you know, thank you. I didn't know. I didn't know. in Israel there are many people not even ideologically that want to bring the hostages back and don't understand why Israel is doing what it's doing before and not even talking to them about the hostages

yeah I've seen videos of them pleading I'm not talking about left wing activists I'm talking about average Israelis Netanyahu has failed the Israeli people that attack I'm not talking about left-wing activists. I'm talking about average Israelis. Netanyahu has failed the Israeli people. That attack, the fact that, and again, I don't know if people know this,

people who know know, but maybe some don't. That attack was a complete military failure on behalf of Israel. And that happened because over the last six to nine months since the right-wing government took place, took power, they've been using the IDF to support, empower, embolden, and protect settlers in the West Bank. And that's why settler attacks have increased. That's why settlements have increased. That's why settlements have increased. That's why there are more settlers than ever before. And what they were doing on that very day, people don't already know, I hope they do, but if they don't already know,

the IDF was in the West Bank on Sukkot, which is a Jewish holiday, and they were protecting settlers in building a sukkah, that structure that people sit in, in the middle of Hawara, a Palestinian village. And they were protecting them and chaperoning them so that they can break into a Palestinian village

to build a sukkah in order to antagonize Palestinians. That's, say what you may about anything else, the fact that that is the priority of the government, you know, you're doing the oppression, you're already committing the oppression, you're already subjugating the Palestinian people, you know that Hamas is Hamas. You're going to remove the security forces from the border to embolden and empower settlers instead? It doesn't make any sense. No, it's, I mean, that's why the most unsettling things I've seen coming out of Israel are those right-wing protests where they're like, death to Arabs and whatever. Or like, they're attacking people and the IDF is like, either helping them or standing by.

If you're on the fence about this still, you are literally for genocide. Those are the two differences. It's either you're for genocide or you're for genocide. Those are the two differences. It's either you're for genocide or you're against genocide. And if you're considering the options, examine yourself. That's not right. I was just sent this tweet.

Apparently yesterday, the Twitter for Israeli prime minister at Israel PM said, this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness between humanity and the law of the jungle. Are you fucking kidding me? That's like Nazi Hitler shit. There are so many lives that have already been lost and the ones that have not been lost are never going to recover.

They've lost so much other than their life. lost so much other than their life. There are so many terrifying and horrific videos that I've seen that no one should have to go through. And not only are they going through it, they're getting funded and encouraged by most of the world. I cannot accept that. Sorry, I don't want to cry, but I might. I mean, that's where we're at at this point. justification for anything when they see tweets like that or when they see justification for killing all the people because they're all barbarians or whatever it is i urge you i urge you to seek out palestinian sources of news actually see what's happening in gaza listen to people who are not advertising anything to you and it's like pleading for their lives um i i just this can't be how we end up as

a people i it's very very sad it's extremely un like no words to describe how devastating and i think if you are listening and you are wondering what to do there are places you can donate to i can put some links in the description of sources that i trust um of people to follow and all that stuff so you can look at the description for that um i think what's very important that people maybe aren't taking too seriously is how important social media and like spreading awareness has been because the only reason the resistance has come this far is because of that, because more people are aware about what's going on. People aren't accepting that Israel is doing this. So I think we just can't stop. As much as they want the world to

forget that Palestinians were even there, we cannot forget Palestinians. And I'm not going to stop talking about it. And you shouldn't either. This is why I'm speaking out. I just got a message from Palestinian friends. You are our voice now. We're not allowed to spit out a lip. They are arresting anyone who speaks or shares the truth. Please, I beg you, don't give up on our people in Gaza.

We need your voice to stop the genocide. Thousands of lives have already been taken. We can't stand this anymore. Please listen to that, everybody. Please. It's very hard to fathom and internalize what's happening. Yeah, it's a lot. And we're privileged enough to think about it that deeply. People in Gaza, Palestinians, they don't have the luxury of anything other than their nightmare of a reality. kind of pushback that we keep hearing is Hamas this, Hamas that. Yes, please. And I think that, again, remembering what we kind of mentioned earlier in the call, how liberation movements for occupied peoples have always been deemed terrorist organizations and even targeted civilians, right?

So not only by the definition of terrorist organizations are terrorist organizations. So even if that's what we believe, and let's just say that that's, you know, we, we accept and agree that that's what Hamas is. Um, I think it's important to understand that terrorist organizations have become political organizations time and time again. And I think that it's also important to understand, historically, the Hamas as an entity, again, I remind you, was created and partially created and funded by the State of Israel. Emboldened by the State of Israel because, I want to be very clear, up until the 90s,

right, Oslo Accords, the peace process, people say, oh, the Palestinians didn't want peace. To your point earlier, the Palestinians were willing to take almost anything at that point. Arafat, who was considered a terrorist before he became a statesman, right, was on the table with Rabin, was on the table with Rabin, had an agreement in place, okay? And then people don't know. If you're not a scholar and you don't know, you should know. Baal Goldstein, an Israeli terrorist, came in to a mosque. I believe it was in Hebron.

I don't remember exactly. And he killed more than 30 people during prayer, just indiscriminately shot innocent people in a mosque. So one of the biggest tragedies, right? And then he was, not only did they, the response, you know, Rabin's response to that was, it was locking down Hebron, the Palestinians in Hebron. So, because he was fearful of what the Palestinians would do in retaliation. The immediate response by Rabin was locking down the people of Hebron, okay,

instead of going and doing something about the settlers that committed the crime or that emboldened the person committing the crime. That's number one. Number two, that sparked the retaliation, because when people don't have justice, they take justice in their own hands. So that sparked this series of attacks in Israel, right? Devastating attacks in Israel. But it was that that did that.

And it was his, he could have handled that differently, but he didn't, right? And that was what sparked the response. Then in turn, okay, again, who, putting that aside, right? And sorry, little tidbit, his grave, Baal Goldstein's grave, is guarded by the IDF as some, and many, many, many consider him a national hero. Yeah, I've seen photos of people like crying at his grave like it's, he's saved their family or something. When he's not just, when he literally just like went into a mosque with a gun and shot 30 people who were fucking praying. Yes. And that's what people are idolizing. Exactly.

It's rotten to its core is my point. This is what you're supporting when you support the state of Israel. Okay. This is part of what you're supporting. Now, taking a second step, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish Israeli, not by a Palestinian. Even in spite of everything, the peace process was still going on because they did everything to foil it, right? And then they assassinated the Israeli prime minister.

And ever since then, right, then you had Ariel Sharon and whatever that tried to continue a peace process in some capacity. But ever since then, for the last 23 years, no one has been talking about a peace process. They blame the Palestinians for every act of resistance. They don't listen. They believe that they talk the way that politicians discuss the Palestinian kind of oppression is managing the occupation. Okay. Managing occupation.

No one's talking about peace, not left, left, pseudo left, whatever you want to call it, not liberal Zionist left or center or right. No one is talking about peace. No one is talking about any semblance of peace.

I find it very particular, right? And this is my, this is why I'm saying we live in the twilight zone. That Donald Trump's four years in office, okay? He had Kushner that, you know, say what all the bad things, right? About his behavior his behavior he was trying to through normalization deals with their world trying to get a deal for the palestinian people albeit the most absurd sort of deal if you ever read what what the abraham accords actually entailed right like weird like highways and weird right like not a deal that anyone should have accepted but putting that aside he was talking about it. There was

discussion, there was Palestinian, like the word Palestinian was being said by the office of the president. In the last four years that Biden was in office, no one said anything. No one did anything to advance peace. No one even brought a bogus deal like Jared Kushner to the table. I don't make it make sense. I don't understand. They basically bought into the Zionist idea that we can just live, continue living while millions of people are being oppressed and occupied. This is the Democratic Party. And that's why we see the media now the way it is, because they're controlling the media narrative too, right? So open your eyes, see it for what it is, right? Don't get clouded. Don't let your judgment get clouded by this two-side BS aspect. Hold space for

the killing of innocent civilians, including the killing of Israeli innocent civilians, the killing of innocent civilians, including the killing of Israeli innocent civilians, while simultaneously understanding that this is all because of the aggression of colonialism and specifically the perpetuation of the Zionist project as a colonialist, nationalist, ethnostate. And that is what I ask of you guys to do. to a Palestinian. So I very much thank you for your activism. And I don't know. It's we're not living in a just world. And so we just have to stick together. I also want to mention

the other reason why social media is so important is like one, there's a there's a reason they cut electricity to Gaza. They don't want anything coming out of there. They want them to die in a blackout and two they are literally arresting people for following palestinian accounts now yeah so i mean if that's not totalitarianism like what the fuck is i don't what anyway so uh that's it for today. I don't think I can do any more. But again, I'll put some sources in the description to donate to, to keep raising awareness. If you have people in your circles that are still hesitant about having a stance on this, have conversations. It shouldn't be complicated. It really shouldn't be because it's not and that's all I have so thanks everybody

thank you for having me welcome I'm Danny Thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows Andrel, won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners,

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where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And speaking of falling apart, when we're talking about the crumbles, the slow and sometimes rapid erosion of institutions in this country, nothing is quite as relevant as the tech industry. I'm Robert Evans, obviously on the line with me

is Garrison Davis. And we also have someone new with us today who's going to be talking tech and particularly talking about the NFT crash and some of what that has to tell us about both how the tech industry functions now and about how kind of our economies of hype contribute to a state of what Ed Zitron, who is our guest here, tends to call the rot economy. Ed, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. Yeah, I'll just hand it over to you at this point. So you may remember two years ago where kind of ghoulish half-wit libertarians emphatically

told you that NFTs, non-fungible tokens, would change everything. That people wanted to own a unique digital object, and indeed, that the said uniqueness of said object, say a picture of an ape, or an animated GIF of a sports moment, would be worth millions. The hype was insane. Justin Bieber paid $1.3 million for a bored ape,

which is one of 10,000 procedurally generated pictures of a monkey. And celebrities like Mila Kunis and Lindsay Lohan would fund and create their own NFT projects. In fact, multiple celebrities raised millions of dollars for these kind of noxious little creations. Their logic entirely hinged upon the idea that something being a one of a kind somehow made it valuable, and that a digital token connected to a picture or a video was, means anything, I do not think that's meaningful in any way. But listen, got a bit of advice for anyone listening. When anyone tells you to ignore your eyes and your ears, to dull a voice in your head that says, huh, that sounds really goddamn stupid, or to of course put a bunch of money into an unproven asset, you should always try and work out how they're going to get paid in the end.

But nevertheless, it's important to know the fundamentals of this crap, this noxious industry. Now, of course, we're talking about cryptocurrency. So these are tokens on a decentralized blockchain. In this case, a non-fungible token, what's known as an NFT, is a unique digital identifier on a blockchain like Ethereum or Polygon, one that cannot be copied, substituted, or divided like a regular token. Ownership, in this case, who owns the NFT, is based on whoever owns the wallet that said that the NFT in question is actually stored, meaning that if someone tricks you into sending your Bored Ape to somebody else, they technically own it. These NFTs of images, say the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pudgy Penguins, what have you, are connected to images. So by which I mean you are quite literally buying a JPEG. You are buying a tokenized JPEG. These images are kept on something called the Interplanetary File System, IPFS, and you have an IPFS address that attaches to each token. What's important to know about this is this is another decentralized project where there's no real proof that your IPFS

address isn't going to disappear in 10 years. So you could end up buying one of these tokens and be left with bugger all. Like I said, you're effectively buying a very expensive JPEG that may or may not be an image of something in 10, 15, 20 years, or even five years. So like I used to buy a whole bunch of digital games for my Nintendo Wii system. Right. And these were not physical games and now i cannot

re-download any of these things even though i bought them because the digital system is just nintendo is no longer supporting it is this because it's kind of like a similar mechanism here in terms of there's like all this necessary internet infrastructure to like host these digital assets but we we don't actually control that infrastructure right so it's different than holding like you know uh a disc or in the case of an nft like an actual physical picture of a monkey what's really funny is the example you just gave is one of the few examples of where nfts could actually be useful huh digital games right now are in this position where like you said and you find this a lot with

streaming products as well where you can buy something you buy a video game you buy a movie and you own it on apple tv apple has complete power to pull that down if indeed there was a non-fungible token that contained the video in question that might be quite useful that might be really useful in fact unlike unlike NFTs in general, which are not useful at all, you are just buying a JPEG that leads to an image and owning this JPEG, this NFT might get you inside a discord, perhaps a special discord of like-minded people who have spent a lot of money on something very silly. Sounds like a party. It's so good.

And it was really something. These things have been around since at least 2014. I think CryptoKitties was one of the original ones. You could breed horrible-looking cats. Oh, no. These horrible cats have sex and create new horrible-looking cats. Well, you didn't get to see the sex. Don't worry.

Okay. Which to me was the only reason I invested. Let me Google Crypto Kitty Rule 34. I'm sure I'll find something. I'm sure that there is Crypto Kitty hentai. But now... Make sure to put Reddit in the search

phrase there. You're going to get better results that way. Will I get in trouble for sending these results in the group chat will people get mad i i feel nothing anymore yeah um honestly there's not as much as i thought there would be i'm kind of disappointed world is a vampire yeah so the thing about this is the gold rush, this huge multi-billion dollar NFT industry that kind of popped and dropped in the last couple of years was something created by a kind of perfect storm of post-lockdown financial hysteria. You saw it with like AMC and GameStop stocks. You saw it with crypto in general. And it was the sense that you were getting in early on something and it kind of resembled in a funky way, like Beanie Babies baseball cards, but also with the kind of stench

of the fine art industry. But I also think that during the pandemic, and I'll get to a little more of this later, people really got this defined sense of how unfair everything is, how you can't just go to college anymore. You can't just work really hard and get a mortgage. You have to effectively find a way to cheat. And this seemed like a cheat they had got in on early. The problem is they didn't. And I'll kind of get into that later. But another part of it, the part that really stank to me was that they were selling this ugly obviously rotten dream that you were owning part of a future media property yeah yeah yeah like you you were going to be part of disney or marvel the board apes when you bought a board ape you

allegedly got the right to distribute it and build a show or merchandise and in fact seth green bought an ape that he tried to build a tv show around classic 2022 idea building a tv show around an nft oh did you guys see the ad for that show by the way we watched the first few episodes no no that was a different nft show that was a different board ape show i can clarify here there was a there was a show called the red ape family that was about an adjacent property that included red apes but other nfts but then seth green was also trying to make a a show that was like almost like who framedamed Roger Rabbit, where it's a mix of like cartoons and like real background sets. Oh, no.

But it's just like about Seth Green, who is a monkey as a bartender. Like it looked like dog shit. What's really funny is someone scammed him out of that ape. Yeah. So he had to pause. He had to pause production on his show. This is the future of entertainment, folks. Because he didn't have the intellectual property rights anymore.

And then he ended up having to pay a hundred grand to get it back. And the show never, I cannot find the show anywhere. But this is the thing. Putting that aside, people genuinely thought they were buying like Amazing Fantasy 15, first appearance of Spider-Man, stuff like that. They thought that they were buying something that would give them access, but also some degree of ownership over a future IP. And frankly, I can understand how they were scammed because you had people like Alexis Ohis ohanian the founder of reddit who through his vc firm 776 sunk 54 million dollars into an nft project called doodles claiming in january of this year 2023 that doodles this year

this year in fact now to be clear the funding was last year 2022 okay okay but he claimed this year and to be clear doodles is a collection of nfts and an associated cartoon that kind of looks like adventure time but significantly worse yeah that makes sense alexis said that doodles wanted to build the next generation of disney and a whole world of ip that is giving people a stake and a sense of ownership sure so. Sure, buddy. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Alexis. How does being rich feel? So to be clear, what Doodles was is still was a collection of 10,000 NFTs of Doodles procedurally generated like most of these. And it's worth taking a step back here. Why are so many of these projects 10,000 images images it's because there's

absolutely no creativity not even a little they just it's is there like a is there like a false scarcity aspect which is trying to like inflate value is that like another reason for why they would have like these limited batches because i i know the original Ape ones were like around 10,000 as well, at least initially. Yes. There's always like a couple thousand, 10,000. But when you take a step back and really think about it, that's actually a huge amount. It isn't a scarce good. It isn't.

It may be to the people who are pumping and dumping them, 10 000 isn't creativity there's what like it's maybe 30 different spider-men but that's not 10 000 of them and none of these have a name none of these have a character i will get to the two characters and doodles because there are just two the more that you talk about this and just kind of based on my paying attention to it, I kind of feel like part of what we're seeing is like the intersection of two cultural myths, right? One of them is like the myth about how, I mean, it's not entirely a myth, largely accurate about what happened with Apple when it went public, right? And you have all of these hundreds of like nerds who had just been like working class kids who become worth hundreds of millions of dollars overnight.

Right. Which has become part of kind of like our, our cultural memory of like how tech is supposed to work ever since. And then the other is like star Wars. Right. And the way in which George Lucas revolutionized, uh, capitalizing on every silly idea you've ever had, like a lot of NFT, a lot of the nft hype is based on the belief that like you could be you could you could buy into the next like glurf strebo or

whatever fucking weirdo george lucas character and it could get a movie you know because yeah it's all infinitely capitalizable yeah the kind of buck shittos of the world yeah yeah and you're actually right as well because i don't know if you remember when Episode 1, Star Wars Episode 1, came out, they deliberately made the box to look like the old Return of the Jedi figures, which were now worth thousands or hundreds. A lot of money.

But there is that full scarcity aspect, and it is like that, except even worse, because there's less value to it. Because when you buy a doodle, as you will, putting thousands of dollars into something called a doodle, one might wonder, what exactly is the value of this? Because doodles do not actually convey any intellectual property. Bored apes kind of do. The legality is muddy. You can merchandise your doodle for up to a hundred thousand dollars

of physical goods so t-shirts you know why you would buy a doodle t-shirt i'm not really sure but you could sell it just the theoreticals here are amazing but doodles really is cool was sold on the idea that it allowed you to steer the company, to vote on the future of Doodles, which is kind of similar to Bored Ape Yacht Club. You could get ApeCoin if you had NFTs of the apes or the mutant apes, and you could then vote in these votes about the future of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, but not Yuga Labs, who owns the Bored Ape Yacht Club, but not Yuga Labs, who owns the Bored Ape Yacht Club. So really, you were just controlling a vague sense of nothing. In the case of Doodles,

you could vote on what they may do in the future. It was never really obvious. Was Doodles a DAO? Doodles is a DAO. Okay, okay. And the funny thing to remember about almost all of these as well is, not in the case of Doodles,

but in the case of like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the Ape Chain, I hate this crap. Andreessen Horowitz owns 14% of all ApeCoin, of their initial drop. They own multiple crypto products, large chunks of these total tokens, and so they can control these votes if they need to. But what's also important to know is, none of this stuff involves the actual goddamn company. Nobody owns a thing. These decentralized autonomous organizations, DAOs, are always framed as this kind of democratic process, carefully leaving out the fact that a democratic

system with transactable votes is by definition a goddamn kleptocracy. But on top of that, you don't own anything. You don't have anything with these companies. You don't get stock. You don't get anything. You just have one of 10,000 images that may in 10 years not actually go anywhere. It's farcical. The only thing dumber than that, however, is the fact that Doodles is no longer an NFT project and will no longer cater to speculators. According to a statement from Marsh by the co-founder Jordan Poopy, Castro Poopy is. Okay. Well, see, this is where I'm putting, you know what, Garrison, I'm putting the whole

company pension plan behind this guy. Poopy's got to be the one who makes those calls from now on. It's really going to suck as well if you were like a speculative investor in doodles already and you find out that your whole thing is going to be worthless because of a guy called Poopy. I think that that's just very special to me. Yeah. Yeah. Continue. I'll continue so just to be clear less than a year before this

according to their investor this company was positioned to continue to define the nft industry and onboard millions to the blockchain and become one of the most inclusive creative joyful media brands in web3 and beyond this is the same company that had now officially rug pulled their entire customer base. And by the way, if you'd have invested at the time that the $54 million funding round, so towards the end of 2022, you would have lost money. You would not have gained money. There was no liquidity event that would give you anything. Also important to recognize with, so other than Alexis Ohanian, the other investor in Doodles was FTX Ventures. So in March of 2023, you kind of sat down with your morning coffee and you read the announcement

from Jordan Pupicastro and found out that your FTx backed nft project had lost about 85 of its value and now the company was not backing you in any fucking way yeah but i mean ftx is putting out super bowl ads they seem stable they seem like that'd be fine what could happen be fine but what what's great about this is it is probably one of the largest rug pulls i've ever seen and nobody is in trouble nobody's mad at alexis ohanian doodles sold people on a dream a stupid dream but a dream yes yes very very goddamn stupid one that you'd be investing in participating in the future of intellectual property and have some industry over its future. You would theoretically, though, obviously, when you read this now, it sounds dumb. And also when you read it at the time, it's you were meant to be buying into the next Disney, the next Marvel.

Yeah. This is what was sold. That is another huge aspect. I think a lot of people who grew up with pop culture and want to take part in the creation of culture and media, but Hollywood systems feel so foreign and unattainable. what the entertainment like landscape will be and you're like oh this is this is like my chance i can be one of 10 000 people to like contribute towards this next big you know cultural thing in 10 20 years but i mean obviously that's like in retrospect it's very clearly a scam for some people like probably myself and many people listening initially this sounded like a scam but it certainly was alluring for a good deal number of people. I mean, this is kind of reminding me that there was this very similar kind of DAO, big, big failure around Dune.

They were wanting to put out. Oh, yeah. They wanted to buy. They wanted to buy the deck and the rights to Jodorowsky's Dune. Yes. Yeah. they wanted to buy the deck and the rights to yodorovsky's dune yes yeah and and put out media and put it like their own like animated series uh which is funny because initially they just they weren't even gonna bother with like the intellectual property which is really funny

because you know a big part of of this this nft stuff is like you own the ip of each nft character right and as they as this kind of project progressed, they slowly started to realize that what they've done was probably just commit massive fraud, and they completely collapsed. This Dune NFT DAO project was being boosted by a lot of very mainstream publications. It was extremely hyped up,

which led people to assume this is a legitimate entertainment project that you could participate in by buying this small little piece. Last year, it very clearly kind of fell apart, as was kind of predestined. And what's really sad about this is we can laugh at these people. We'll get to this in a bit. And we should. We can laugh at these people. We'll get to this in a bit. And we should. We can laugh at these people. We should. It's very funny.

But at the same time, a lot of people got screwed here because they trusted in people like Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit. Unscathed, despite the horrifying things that Reddit has done, Alexis Ohanian, insanely rich, married to a tennis star. God bless him. Hope they're happy. But nevertheless, Alexis has managed to fairly easily escape all blame for the fact that

he misled everyone with this and other things, but this in particular. Because the dream of Doodles, God, that sucks to say out loud, by the way. Yeah, it sure does. The dream of Doodles was that you would buy one of these 10,000 things and that you'd be part of a community and you'd be able to steer the Doodles movement. The Doodles community. Jesus Christ.

I know. The Doodles revolution, I think, is more accurate. And the Doodle-easters. No, that's not what I'm talking about. No, no, no. I like that. I like that. Let's go with it.

Doodle-easters. Doodle-easters, Doodlers, they're all the Doodooers. No, that's not a term. No, no, no. I like that. I like that. Let's go with it. Doodlesters. Doodlesters, doodlers. They're all the doodoos. Yeah. But you would be investing in the future of IP. You'd have part of this. And you'd be, you know what? Put aside the money.

Put aside all the cash because they're not doing speculation anymore. It's not about that. Let's just focus on the community, which is dying, which is completely dead i would argue so fairly recently doodles had to remove the 50 quorum which would require 50 of nft holders to interact with the project to push a vote through they had to remove that they didn't say why they had to remove it i guess because nobody gives a shit. Because nobody cares. Nobody gives a rat fuck about any of this. And then voted to appoint a founding community council to make decisions about where the Doodle Bank.

Oh my God. Jesus Christ. Would be spent in the future. So the Doodle Bank was where some of the revenues went from the secondary sales of these NFTs because the companies always take a cut because rent seeking, baby. Anyway, so if you were interested in the community aspect of Doodles, you're kind of shit out luck because they've now entirely deleted their visions and guidelines document, which is the part of the website that tells you how any of the community shit works. And nothing is happening right now with them. There's nothing going on. This is the ninth most popular NFT project, and they have attempted to and indeed succeeded

in removing their association with NFTs. Now, one would think, okay, maybe they have a Discord. Of course, they did find it. 85,000 members. Oh, wow. okay maybe they have a discord of course i did find it 85 000 members oh wow except it felt more empty than my discord which has 600 people in it 85 760 members as of when i opened it last and the newsstand section did not have a post in it since August 30th, which was announcing that the Doodles-Crops collaboration had sold out. Terrible news to the least fuckable people alive.

And their other official channels really hadn't been updated since May or August. The General Hall channel, which is where everyone was talking, was mostly just bots and people saying the words, Dudes Rule, that's D-O-O-d-s rule no real communication it felt like several chat bots kind of what you know how you see oblivion or skyrim npcs walk up to each other kind greetings to you imagine that with nfts 85 000 bloody people i even tried to, I'm not going to say antagonize them, but I did ask them, are you happy with your investment? No responses. I was like, how'd you feel about no response? Someone responded with dude's rule once.

And it's insane because you won't believe this. The valuation of this company in their $54 million funding round was $700 million goddamn dollars. And their chat room has the charm and vibrance of a dying mall. This is meant to be the next generation of Disney, and yet it has no fans. There are people who will shoot you to death for insulting Spider-Man. There are people who will scream at you for not liking the latest Star Wars thing. These are super fans. Yeah. There are people who will do that with obscure video games you've never heard of. But for Doodles, this nearly billion dollar enterprise, the future of Disney, not one of these people cared anything about this. All it was, there's like. There are no super fans, loyalists no evangelists nobody excited no one even expressing an emotion just a bunch of freaks who got conned saying gm every

two minutes or hours actually what how it was so strange because i've been in chat rooms since i was like 11 i've seen varying levels of chat rooms in various games. Even the smallest community was kind of hopping at some point. This thing had no life. It was so strange. It's just like a digital ghost town. And the reality is what I said earlier. There's 10,000 of these goddamn things.

These featureless, procedurally generated things. There's nothing to them. These NFT companies, these ones that allegedly want to replace Disney, they're incapable or unwilling to do anything approximating world building or law development. which is worth 700 million goddamn dollars, which got $54 million, has three characters that I can find. There's Hap, there's Catmello, and there was another one which I could not find a name for. There is maybe 10 minutes of footage in the years that this thing was meant to exist. It's just so bizarre. It's so utterly craven and half-assed. People attack Disney and Marvel through Disney, obviously, and Star Wars. Oh, they're pushing this crap out. They're just churning this shit out and saying people will buy anything. In comparison, Disney are steadfast auteurs. They are creative agents, like into Salvador Dali. They are the, compared to the NFT people, they're gods. Because even Disney's least likable properties get more attention and

have bigger fans than this. There are Disney adults who would like crying and falling on their knees when the lockdowns ended. None, yeah. None of these people would care. None of these people, if Jordan Poopy Castro died tomorrow, nobody would shed a tear or even remember, apparently. And it's just, I think the way to look at this, and especially Doodles, is that there is just within the NFT world and actually within the tech industry writ large, just this deep, deep-seated loathing for creativity, storytelling, and the customer. Pendleton Ward, who made the original Adventure Time,

don't know if you remember, which is very clearly where Doodles is ripped off from, just compare them. They look very similar. He made it over a decade ago. It's a five-minute long video. He made it on his own without funding, without anything. And it's beautiful, and it's weird, and it's great. And you're like, wow, I'm so glad this guy did this. Doodles, which has tens of millions of dollars sitting around, has put out seven goddamn minutes of teasers and advertisements for brand collaborations. That's it. That's all. Something about Pharrell, something about Crocs, something about allegedly Doodles having a cartoon? I don't goddamn know. But my theory is that none of this was ever about creating

anything. This was an attempt to go back to what you were saying earlier to recreate that sense that I just bought the Star Wars toy that will be worth $3,000 in 10 years. That's all this was. Well, I'm pretty sure they're well on their way because I'm looking at

the Doodles site right now. You can buy a rug featuring my favorite Doodles character, Hap, for $100. So. Are you serious that these motherfuckers are selling a rug? Yes. Yes. The Crocs are sold out, unfortunately. I know you were really wanting to get those.

They're sold out. They were $120. Jesus Christ. out unfortunately i know i know you were really wanting to get those they're sold out they were 120 bucks they're selling they're selling little vinyl toys for 185 dollars they have a cat mush they have a cat plush for 40 bucks they have a puzzle for 22 dollars and they finally have the before mentioned rug so. So, yeah. It's just wonderful. It seems like a good investment. These things are selling out fast. You gotta get in.

Your character could be the next one. Yeah. But I think that the ultimate thing is none of this was about creating anything. That really is it. It was creating just enough to sell securities to suckers. And now all of it is falling apart. The SEC just sued a group of celebrities for an NFT cat cartoon called Stoner Cats. Yeah.

No, I was really excited about Stoner Cats. I was really pumped up for seeing Stoner Cats. about stoner cats i was really pumped up for seeing stoner cats but sadly the sec charged the creator for unregistered offering of nfts which are securities and they raised eight million dollars it's just very sad very funny by the way that the sec now is to get him like gary genzler has to look at stoner cats and say all right let's let's take a look at this oh that's not good the howie howie test is gonna have fun with this but i think nfts were and are probably one of the more nihilistic parts of the tech industry yeah because they did the bare minimum to convince people. They made up all, it's kind of like that episode of The Simpsons where they remake Flanders' house and it's just a fascia and it effectively falls down after being touched.

With a load-bearing poster, yeah. Yes, exactly. And it's just enough to make people believe this could be worth enough. Because it's never really obvious what actually makes something worth something in the collectibles market. There are established artists who might, I personally own a bunch of original comic artwork, a lot of it by Arthur Adams. And that market is fairly small because there's only so much one man can do. And the value comes from what people are willing to pay. But in that case, it's beautiful pencils and inks and it's gorgeous. You want that on your wall. In this case, it's, I'm buying something that sounds like it might be valuable there's not really a fundamental

community that sounds fine but when you push past even the first layer it all falls apart and that's because in my opinion the nft hype was just a long con on customers in the media it's a scam a scam where companies built the appearance of value without ever actually generating anything there's nothing to oh some vinyl figures who cares nobody's done the board ape yacht club has the world's shittiest cartoon they did a flash game called dookie dash yes i did i did see dookie dash i what was great was... Game of the Year 2022. Game of the Year 2022 immediately, by the way, scammed. Just immediately someone broke it.

They were like, how did this happen? But that's the thing. Yuga Labs worth a couple billion dollars. Doodles worth 700 million. Nothing to them. Not a single interesting idea in any of them. But they existed to con people into believing this completely thin view. And also the nihilistic part is he was talking about people collecting art and collecting creative things, but without actually ever seeing the value in the object the object's creativity was only as valuable as it was sellable but not even sellable to an enterprise it was just like to another person

who could continue the chain of shit i think there is a large untapped market for this though that doodles is actually trying to exploit because i just found probably one of the most upsetting things i've discovered today which is saying something because i've seen a lot of a lot of bad stuff today today's a war crime footage a lot of war crime footages but there is a doodles immersive experience in chicago for children oh no children create their own doodles and you can pay 28 per person to spend an hour in this doodles themed art installation in chicago i'm looking at i'm looking at the availability there is yeah let's see if we can book one for the team there is 10 slots open each day all the slots are open tomorrow so i think we should get a flight like tonight.

Yeah. Right now. We got to book this ASAP. Yeah. That's going to sell out. I'm going to send you this link because it is the most, one of the more disturbing things I've found. I don't want to go to the doodles camp.

Every, it's $28 per kid for one hour of walking in this one Doodles themed room where first your kid creates a Doodles character so you can enter Doodle World. You go through a rainbow portal. You slide down rainbows, play in puffy clouds and crash a spaceship. And then you romp through a whimsical world until your hour is up and then you leave after spending 28 per child it's like if a committee designed fucking uh uh meow wolf right yeah yeah it's like a committee of people on thorazine but if you watch this video as well of this doodle's world here's the thing you don't see anything of anything there's nothing there's a picture of the guy who i've already forgotten the name of hop i can't believe you forgot hop's

name i can't believe i forgot hop but it's 185 dollars to get a figure you have to remember god damn it and but that's that's the thing this is just it's a uh masterpiece of emptiness it is a meaningless thing there is nothing to doodles if you know no it's it's it's vapid there's nothing to any of it and nft investors were sold this dream of kind of an access to wealth they went for both sides that like oh the artist will make money because every nft sale you get some royalties some rigid residuals which theoretically is a cool thing that when an artist has a piece sold on someone else they're gonna i like that idea i always always have. And in turn, by buying into this quote unquote art, you can generate your own wealth and you can be part of this positive chain where everyone wins, but you're

also early. So you get to feel smart, except the problem is that you're more than likely left with a worthless piece of shit. You're left with nothing. So fundamentally, there will be, and I don't believe more than a couple thousand people made any money on NFTs. The majority of the people who bought NFTs are going to be left in the red, and every new entrant is just another sucker to hopefully dump an investment onto, because there are no nfts that have a fundamental value there's not one it's not like this no it's that disney marvel none of these major things no it's that none of them got involved they didn't want to fucking touch us dc did a

a vague idea of buying comic covers but even then it was half-assed because why why would you do it i've been saying this since 2021, that these things had no value, that it was just an attempt to sell people this vague sense of participation in a new economy. And in fact, there was a study that came out, an analysis of 73,257 NFT collections. 95% of NFTs on the market are now totally worthless. The value of these collections is zero Ethereum. Almost every single person encouraged to invest them by the New York Times, by CNBC, is a victim of a massive legal fraud peddled by internet charlatans like Alexis Ohanian. I'm not saying he's one of them,

but there are people within the NFT industry who also wash trade these things, which means that they effectively sell them to themselves. And there's actually increasingly impressive research that suggests that most NFT sales were just wash trading, just people pumping and pumping and pumping. That's why Justin Bieber's ape that he bought for $1.3 million is worth about 60 grand now. He'll be fine, but other people won't. And that's what's really anger-inducing. That's what fills my veins full of poison. NFTs were never worth anything. And the majority of the industry is made up of fake goddamn transactions. And the people who will suffer are the majority.

And the majority are not rich. The majority are not anything other than desperate people who were manipulated. It's like with fucking the FTX collapse, which is funny in a lot of ways, but also one of the big bag holders wound up being like a teacher's pension fund. Right.

Like that was massive. And obviously I think that like in addition to going after Sam, regulators should be looking at who the fuck made the call to put people's pension money in fucking brain genius kids' gambling den. But it is like there is like real harm to it. And that was like always the plan. Everyone who was involved in pushing this was trying to like – the whole game plan was to create this critical mass of hype that broke people's ability to actually analyze what they were doing. That just kind of made them panic and throw money in because they felt like otherwise they were going to miss out on their chance to retire. Right. That was the whole thing.

That's why the entire social media hype around this was all based on you're going to stay poor forever if you don't get in on this right now. It's so disgusting and yeah, just evil, evil people. And they were never a great investment. They were never the future of IP. They're just a vehicle to extract capital from retail investors, from regular people who, to your point earlier, who didn't invest in Apple earlier or Google early. They didn't get the chance. They didn't buy the Star Wars toy. So this was their chance to get ahead. And if these are just an exploitative scam, they create just enough. It's a true scam as well. They create just enough to get people in the door and just enough to make

that investment defensible. And it honestly shared a lot of the language of the Joel Osteens and conspiracy theorists and other televangelists telling people, to your point, oh, you're not going to make it. Oh, have fun staying poor. What a noxious fucking thing to say. What a disgusting thing to say to someone. And what's funny is they use the other scam that some companies in the tech industry used, FTX, for example, where they would raise rounds of venture capital, which gave the appearance of a real enterprise where things were actually happening. And then they sold them this dream of, oh, you could own a piece of this, despite the

fact that not a single goddamn NFT actually granted stock options, voting rights, or anything else. Because if they did that, it would immediately become a security. So they'd never do that. You don't have consequential votes. You don't have any industry over this industry you just have a thing that can be it may not be fungible but the operating environment for it is absolutely fucking fungible if doodles was truly non-fungible they wouldn't be able to change the doodles quorum they would just have to sit there and do nothing but what's also important to realize and as i've said before but i'll say it a goddamn again is they really didn't try very hard the board ape yacht club which is the biggest one the 10 000 horrifying looking apes owned by a company called yuga labs they

were valued at four billion dollars in 2022 despite the fact that they said they were going to go hollywood they've not actually created anything they did that they said they were going to go Hollywood, they've not actually created anything. They said they were going to do a metaverse product. They sold NFTs of this metaverse thing that they've never shown called OtherSide, I believe.

It crashed Ethereum. And they had that video game where you travel through a toilet looking for poop. Dookie Dash. Yeah, this is the new Disney, everyone. This is it. This is the new Disney.

It's the metaverse that will never get built. It's the cartoon about monkeys and toilets that actually advertised Dookie Dash. The rich, deep lore of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, by the way, is that a monkey did a poo so bad that a key came out to another dimension. But then the monkey somehow put that key in a beer that the monkey drank. And then the monkey did another poo where it put it into the sewer pipes, thus making it necessary for you to pilot another monkey to go and get the key. Very fucking stupid. Very bad, ugly ugly like the designs suck that's the other thing these aren't even good looking and this is a company worth four billion dollars

four billion dollars and all they've done is not make a metaverse but make a lot of money make a terrible series looking of cartoons that may or may not go anywhere, and an E-Balms World clone that got scammed almost immediately. Someone found a way to exploit it immediately because it's a flash game. These are not creative enterprises. These are not entertainment companies. They're shell corporations for ill-gotten revenues, for secondary market sales of 10,000 bullshit pictures that were hyped up by the media who could not analyze it properly. They just saw the large amounts of money that were being made. The crooked ways, by the way, the ones which were clearly pumped, everyone covered them. World of Woman. Do you remember that one? World of Woman, the NFT? That was my favorite one

because there were so many guys in the crypto world who like, yeah, I bought a world of woman NFT. I support woman. That's, that's, I love it. No, it's so good. And it's because all of it's exploitative. NFTs are vehicles to exploit people, particularly Americans who are desperate and fairly questioning their place in the world that is continually turned upon providing basic social services and the ability for its citizens to thrive. There are few honest ways for the average person to accumulate wealth anymore. It's nearly impossible to buy a house, returns on the market suck, the market's already confusing, and yeah, all of that's quickly outpaced by the fact that you have student loans, health insurance, and inflation is making things more expensive than ever. And I would argue that that is really the root of what's so evil about crypto.

It's inherently exploitative. It is inherently linked in all of these ways to religious dogma, that you're buying into something, that you're finally part of something meaningful, something that will grow, something that will make you whole in a way that your predecessors might have been just through living normally. This industry, it took root because most people can't thrive. Everyone has to hustle. Everyone has to struggle. You can't do the things that people even 20 years ago could do. You can't work a normal job and buy a house anymore. You can't get a mortgage in many cases.

You can't just go to college and probably pay those loans off in five years. God, no, that shit's going to follow you decades and nobody's helping you. And then along comes these, along comes this very technological, cool sounding, non-fungible token. This thing where, oh, I could be part of this new art market. I can be the smart one for once. I could be ahead of everyone. And the people on the other side of that transaction are telling you everything you want to hear. They're the next Disney. They're the next Marvel. You're going to be part of something. You're going to make it. That's what you'll do if you buy into this. All of those crypto people are totally fine. All of them, the Winklevosses, Alexis Ohanian, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, they're all doing great. They're

multi-millionaires, several times times over the people on the other side are victims victims of what i would argue any just society would decide was a financial crime and i think that every single venture capitalist who put money into these products and who pumped them should be held accountable they won't because that is the modern tech industry because that is the modern government. There is no justice for the victims of NFTs. And it's really horrifying to watch. Yeah, I know.

Sometimes it can be hard to be sympathetic for these folks because we imagine them being like, you know, Fedora, Reddit, you know fedora reddit you know characters but i think if if you have the capacity to feel sympathetic to like former cult members this is kind of the same thing this is like this is it's it's really the same process and a big part of actually beating cults is the ability to be sympathetic to former cult members that is actually like a crucial part of getting people to like get past this sort of thing yeah and that's that's going to include not just the innocent but some people who did some pretty ugly things um and yeah i think that's and that's hard but critical yeah and i always try and push people

to think of that because it is very easy to your point to look at the fedoras to look at the wag me guys we're gonna make it people and say these are the majority i would argue most people and i'll say this haven't been in too many telegrams of too many rug pull projects just watching the vast majority of people are desperate yeah just want their investment to turn they just want something because there really isn't much way out for most people that really isn't yeah most people get lucky and that's how they live what used to be it what used to be just like the general purpose good life 2.4 children housewife picket fence just doesn't happen for anyone anymore and you're left with this in a society where that happens where there's so there are so few opportunities to thrive for people you get things like this you get these massive cons and i think that it will be hard

for this to take root again i don't think crypto's done screwing people i think that it will be hard for this to take root again. I don't think crypto is done screwing people. I think that they will find a way to pump this in the future. Yeah. Which is why you should buy our new CoolZone coin. You know, for just the price of $45 a coin, you can ape in. And we're recommending right now just kind of transferring your whole 401k over into CoolZone coins, which you can do by just sending it to our mailing address in the form of a check.

We'll get your coins to you. Don't worry. No problem. I will personally take care of that. Well, Ed, thank you so much for putting this together. I think it's important to kind of look at this sort of stuff in Well, Ed, thank you so much for putting this together. I think it's important to kind of look at this sort of stuff in retrospect, especially as the next con builds up scheme, you know, interest rates will drop eventually. And then there will be another attempt to fleece

large numbers of people possibly using Larry David. Although he may have learned his lesson this time. Ed, do you want to give the people some notes on where they can find you if they want to read your stuff? You can find me at where'syoured.at. That's my newsletter, where's your ed at? And you can find me on Twitter or X the everything app or ratemynews.biz as it will be called soon. At Ed Zitron. I'm also on Blue Sky. You can find me as Zitron, Z-I-T-R-O-N. Well, check Ed out any of those places and check us out here. You already found us once. So presumably you will not forget how to find us the second time.

Until next time, you know, don't invest money in unregistered securities. Don't invest money in unregistered securities. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

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