It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 115

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

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and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Call Zone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. 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. Bucket We Ball. All right. Yeah, Bucket We Ball. Welcome

to It Could Happen Here. We have a pretty sizable panel today. I'm Garrison Davis. I have been forced to watch many hours of Daily Wire Plus exclusive programming at gunpoint. My co-hosts, mostly Robert Evans. Uh-huh. We are joined by Mia Wong. I was not involved in the kidnapping. I want this on the record.

We have a sports consultant, James Stout Hello Hi, I'm here to talk about sports That's right, and we have our resident Subject matter expert in basketball Sophie Rae Lichterman I'm so afraid I'm so afraid

So How many of you have seen At least the trailer for Lady ballers because i'm assuming i'm the only one that's actually watched this movie i tried to watch through the trailer of lady ballers and then i had a realization that my time on this earth is finite and precious and so instead i went and looked at a cloud okay anyone else i saw part of the trailer do do we want to watch a one minute trailer yes absolutely yep sure i haven't taken on enough trauma this week let's watch a what a one minute trailer gare okay time to get blackpilled let's do it i'm gonna subject uh the panel here to the

lady ballers trailer which then you will hear their reaction to afterwards jesus christ so this was mostly an excuse for them to like slow-mo video of hitting women right yes that was the primary reason for doing this yeah i didn't need to see that whole thing that was really upsetting the reason why i wanted to actually show you is because i'll never get that minute back as what i'm saying it's not is what I'm saying. It's not even like... It's not even like offensive or triggering. It's just poorly made. Yeah, it's shoddy.

It's just not very good. And before we continue, I want to actually talk about why we're talking about this. Because, you know, whenever I say to my friends, hey, do you want to come over and watch Lady Ballers? Everyone's like, why would you do that? And the reason is... Did you say this a a long garrison i saw this twice the reason is is because i think it is actually important to know what your enemy is up to i it's important to see what they think

good media is it's important to see how they are they are trying to shape the world around them and i think fiction gets a lot closer to the actual outlook these people have than sometimes their non-fiction stuff like that's why robert has done deep dives onto on uh on ben shapiro's books on behind the bastards for years whenever these guys get the opportunity to make their own complete world whenever they get to play as god and create a thing that reflects their soul it's a lot more uh insightful than like a two-hour podcast of them ranting so that's why i decided to actually put a lot of work into digging into this movie so i i have i have the structure of this episode split

up into three parts can you stop sharing your screen it It's very distracting, the image. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating to see what Garrison gets recommended. There is a screenshot of all the grab photos from a bunch of Daily Wire Plus content. Unfortunately, Sophie, I do have some slides to show the class. I'm sure you do, but could you remove that one thing? You know, Sophie, just to bring this up, we have Garrison's address. We could swap them and put an end to this. I'm not going to answer that on a podcast.

Yeah, silence. I have this episode structured into three parts. The first one, we're going to go into just a very basic overview of the plot, so we have an understanding of what this movie actually contains. Then we're going to go into just a very basic overview of the plot, so we have an understanding of what this movie actually contains. Then we're going to go into the production of this movie, because the actual behind the scenes development of this film is also incredibly insightful.

And then finally, we're going to go into jokes and ideology, because these two things go hand in hand. Both of them reveal more about how the other operates. So, first off, i have i have the title card for lady ballers here in the movie it's not it's not very good and this movie was written directed produced and is starring the daily wire ceo jeremy boring so this is like this is a wait

this is a one guy yes that is He made a film to have himself in. What a sad man. We start in 2008. He is incredibly boring, Sophie. Excellent observation. He's incredibly boring and tries to make himself look like Jordan Peterson as much as he possibly can. And it's quite disturbing. Well, Jordan Peterson is now his employee.

My God. We start in 2008 jeremy boring has a horrendous tony stark goatee which i'm currently showing showing the class on my slideshow oh no jeremy no that's that's a self-harm level of facial hair yeah can we zoom in on that what's what's happening here oh jeremy no you have to not do that not good why does it stop why is there a little break that's not good like i said a horrible tony stark level goatee uh he is the coach of a high school basketball team who's about to lose the tennessee state championships the coach gives an impassioned speech in the locker room that ends with the team chanting the coach's motto, quote, You hear this line throughout the movie constantly.

Winners are just losers who win. This is a core part of how this movie operates. Now, the team's able to pull it together in the second half, and Coach Jeremy Boring leads the team to victory, becoming three-time state championships. We then flash 15 years later coach jeremy is failing to keep the attention of the new generation who are too busy on their phones to learn basketball and is fired from his high school coaching job to make matters worse he's recently divorced and his wife's new boyfriend is a liberal who's brainwashing his daughter played by matt walsh who i have a screen cap here as well okay what the actual fuck do we know the budget for this movie by the way not exactly but it is not cheap based on how much they paid for casting it is this

cost multiple hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars I wouldn't be surprised if they put a few million into this it's very funny that part of the integral part of the plot is someone being angry about being divorced and not at all telling that is a huge part of this movie is big divorce energy which actually will

play into the ideology of the film as well so we have Matt Walsh here in a wig with a man bun uh he's wearing like a like a like a burgundy button-up dress sitting on a manicured lawn with like rainbow flags and stuff anyway so this is this is who jeremy was cucked to now jeremy gets a new job at a restaurant that happens to be drag themed uh there are no there are no actual drag queens just men in ugly wigs and poor fitting clothing here he meets the former star point guard of his basketball team from 15 years

ago the coach enters his former player into a local track and field contest to win five thousand dollars but the men's events are full luckily the former basketball player is still wearing his wig from the drag restaurant. Why? Why is he still wearing his wig? It doesn't matter what often sees drag queens doing. If we're going to continue this, you cannot question the screenwriting. Great. Jesus Christ. Okay, good to know.

Thank you. But the woman at the sign-up table is luckily covered in trans pride pins and mistakes the former basketball player for a trans woman and adds him to the women's division. With a little convincing and some fake boobs, the coach gets the player to agree to compete in the women's division. The guy easily wins every event in the track and field match as the women competitors just scowl at him.

This attracts the attention of a local female reporter the journalist character who is weirdly horny for jeremy boring like uncomfortably horny for jeremy boring something it's like oh jeremy jeremy you wrote directed and started this you you created this whole scenario yeah very very interesting what what else would the the made woman character do than be horny for jeremy yeah it's white god made ladies the journalist sees through the coach's scheme but proposes that they team up to create a national news story by having trans women or people pretend to be trans women compete in the US Open for the global games by

exploiting their new diversity and inclusion clause. Very funny that they think this is how... This isn't a real thing. This isn't a real thing. They don't understand how journalism happens. You don't create the story. It's very funny. This movie despises journalists.

That is how they do yeah yes it's very correct they've revealed that they kind of didn't take journalism 101 no the the whole point of the daily wire is literally creating new stories themselves like yeah yes oh god i've seen the next picture but to play basketball once again they first have to put the old team back together first First, they recruit two brothers who own a used car dealership. Then they travel to Michigan to find another teammate who is living Ted K-style

in the woods after being traumatized by an enemy team mascot as a teenager. None of this is explained. They just wanted to do that trope. They just want, okay. Needing one more team team member they recruit the desperately lonely gay coded towel boy who now owns a mansion after selling his tech company after learning

about the coach's plan to play in the women's league the team is initially upset but after another impassioned speech about winning from the coach the players agree to join the lady ballers the coach's daughter stops by to explain the Lady Ballers. The coach's daughter stops by to explain gender identity concepts to them that she learned in school, like how women can have beards, just like her art teacher in kindergarten. The Lady Ballers easily win their first basketball game and skyrocket into fame as the first all-trans women's basketball team. After their first taste of victory, they start competing in all women's basketball team after their first taste of victory they start competing in all women's sports obviously dominating every single one because these like burnout old dudes

are going to be better than professional every female athlete they encounter yes yeah that's the it's the it's the joke about like i take the stage against Serena Williams, confident that being a man will allow me to beat her. Her past sails through my body and I die instantly. Yeah. Now, this this whole winning all of the sports section is conveyed through the classic cinematic technique of the montage, which is just as bad as you can imagine. I have a clip from the montage here which is really a shame given that the montage was invented famously by soviet cinematographers is now is now being used for this this was definitely a reference to this definitely

definitely reference to soviet era film absolutely is this photo you're showing me fake joe biden sniffing this person yes it's like he's sniffing little jonathan van ness so this is this is this is the gay coated towel boy oh uh who was invited to the white house's international women's day oh my god and we have joe biden standing behind him sniffing his neck and and rubbing his shoulders it It's called The Washington Rag Magazine. Democracy Dies in Print. Very, very clever. Very, yeah.

Really, really. Cutting, scything. Insightful. This is such a bummer, Garrison. After the Lady Ballers' wave of success, the coach's ex-wife confronts him about what he's doing and calls the Lady Ballers not real girls to the shock of her new woke boyfriend this is this is actually a really important scene now the coach's daughter expresses to him that she

wants to be a boy because she wants to be a winner and because, quote, boys are better at everything, unquote. Which the coach denies, but he does admit that boys are better at all sports as well as, quote, driving, parking, most of the stem fields, rock and roll, and opening pickle jars, unquote. This is not played as a joke. This is played completely straight. and opening pickle jars, unquote. This is not played as a joke. This is played completely straight. The coach then explains to his daughter that girls can be better at all sorts of things,

like, quote, being nurturing, sensitive, empathetic, being better at doing lots of things at once and caring for a lot of people at once, being better at communicating and building community, and they civilize men. It's the only reason we have a civilization. No women, no world. Unquote.

Which is a deeply revealing line from Jeremy Boring. Yeah, I mean that's how these, yeah. That's how they see the world. God, that's so boring. That's such a lame take. He then explains to his daughter that the main

thing that women can do that men can't is give birth. And that's the special gift from God. The coach goes home after his talk with his daughter. The journalist is waiting for him there. He's expressing concern about men competing in women's sports, but she rants about how divorce is evil and threatens to cancel him if he doesn't cooperate. Garrison. What?

Garrison, sorry. Why is only one person in this green cap wearing a wig? That's a great question, Sophie. That never gets explained. Are you going to show us some montage? I'm very excited to see it. I'm not showing you. No, I'm not showing you my pirated copy of Lady Follower.

I'm sorry. For reference, listeners, there's like a screen cap from the movie and it's the entire basketball team and all all the men are not wearing wigs except one guy this is actually a different basketball team which i will i will get to one person wearing a wig let let let me get to it other people get to it this is very carefully structured plot sophie you got to understand the genius of jeremy boring's scripting requires time to digest so the lady ballers arrive at their final qualifying game but instead of finding a woman's basketball team to play against the opposing team the cowgirls is now suddenly all made up of extremely large black men accompanied by this female journalist.

The lady ballers get absolutely smoked during the first half, but during halftime, the coach has a change of heart. He tells the team to man up and forfeit all of their previous qualifying wins because they don't want their legacy to be erasing women from women's sports. Jesus Christ. So this is the opposing team made up of, I think it's just, it's some college basketball team in Nashville. And yeah, only one of them is wearing a wig. It's played off as a joke.

It is all kind of racist. Shocking. The female journalist tries to assassinate Jeremy Boring with a sniper rifle, but misses because the coach happens to lean down to pick up a penny. What? Yeah, normal. Totally normal thing.

I mean, this is the second piece of media release in the last few months where the lesson is always take a second shot. This is also the plot of Marvel's Echo. The journalist needed to stay at it. The journalist got close. Yeah, aim sent to mouse of Marvel's Echo. The journalist needed to stay at it. The journalist got close. Yeah, aim sent to mouse. It'd be fine. Then suddenly, the first player to join the Lady Ballers

comes out to the coach that they actually feel like a woman. But the coach convinces them that they are delusional and then assaults them in the genitals and walks away. What the f- Why? Sorry, the next screencap. Why are they like this? Every screencap

just gets worse and worse. Yeah. That is a child. Yeah. Right before the second half of the game starts, the coach replaces the ladyballers with his daughter and her friends. The other team that helps the little...

Why? Yeah, that's a thing you can do in sports. Because they don't want their legacy to be replacing women in women's sports, so instead the coach uses his daughter and her friends to be like, look, girls playing sports. It doesn't make very much sense.

But the other team helps the little girls play the game, but they ultimately crush the little girls play the game but they ultimately uh crush the little girls 418 to 6 and this is played off as like a funny a funny bit we cut to nine months later the brothers used cardiac their ship is now also a kid's sports center where the coach is now teaching and he has changed his motto to quote winners are just losers who do what's right unquote. What? That's not true. What? This is the real ending of the movie

but, but. That doesn't make any sense. That doesn't make any sense within the context of the movie. No. That's nonsense. No, we're not moving past that. What the fuck? That's that's nothing. I'm so angry.

This fucking tagline. And they didn't take any time to make even coherent. Winners are just losers who do what's right. Because the lady ballers are the real winners. Because they admitted to losing at sports to do what's right, which is to not lie about being women. I think that's what they're trying to say, but it doesn't make very much sense. It's all very convoluted.

Yes. I mean, my high school basketball coach told me to cry on the inside like a winner after my shoulder popped out of its socket. But that's just good advice, Sophie. That's what I tell everybody on the team. I cried on the inside like a winner most days. When Garrison started getting traumatized by the Daily Wire, that's what good advice sophie that's what i tell everybody on the team garrison started getting traumatized by the daily wire that's what i told them my high school rugby coach just relocated my shoulder for me and told me to get on with it so i'm glad that we both have shoulder trauma this screen cap is just wow sorry gary please

continue so after this what's played off as like a heartwarming ending, we cut away to a car parked from across the street, looking at the kids playing basketball. Ominous music starts playing. It's Matt Walsh's character holding a long lens camera, taking pictures of the scene. He takes his man bun wig off and Matt Walsh says, quote, another sweet daddy Walsh adventure comes to a satisfying conclusion. The camera zooms back

to reveal Candace Owens sitting in the passenger seat. She remarks, I don't understand how you did anything to help make the situation any better. To which Walsh replies, don't you? And then starts doing the most forced, unconvincing, maniacal laughter I've ever heard. The camera pans down to the car's headlights and we cut to credits and the most sonic the hedgehog ass butt rock plays as the film closes so there's this is played as a reveal that matt walsh's character was actually secretly matt walsh who was manipulating this whole situation to show people that trans women in sports is bad that's what they're trying to play off as the twist ending that this was all a quote-unquote daddy

walsh adventure we do have a post-credit he actually said he actually yes literally said another sweet daddy walsh was the phrase daddy walsh used at any point previously in the movie no because okay previously walsh was playing this liberal boyfriend, but we now reveal that was all part of his scheme. This was all part of Matt Walsh's scheme, actually. Garrison, I'm going to need you to cut the audio for another Sweet Daddy Walsh adventure because I think that will be something we can use a lot. That's fair.

I will add that here. Another Sweet Daddy Walsh adventure comes to a satisfying conclusion. What are you talking about? I don't understand how anything you did helped to make this situation better. Don't you? But we do have a post-credit scene. In the post-credit scene,

we see the basketball player that came out as trans to the coach in the climax of the film in conversion therapy, talking about their childhood to none other than Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Oh, for fuck's sake. Garrison. Great. Why are you doing this to us? I'll say this.

It sounds like a movie. Does it? Does it really? Not a very good one. Yeah, not a good one. But a movie. Do you know what is really good for all of us? Ad break?

I think taking a quick ad break to digest and think about what we've all just experienced. I kind of just want to scream into the void, but yeah. All right, we are back. Wasn't that a fun recap of The Daily Wire's hit new movie, Lady Ballers, streaming exclusively on The Daily Wire Plus. So let's go into the actual production of this thing, because this is also deeply revealing. So The Daily Wire has a sports podcast called Crane and Company, hosted by two brothers who claim to be former athletes. A few years back, Ben Shapiro approached them with the idea of making a documentary about them trying to join some women's sports leagues. This idea, however, was quickly abandoned due to the obvious fact that women's sport leagues don't allow men.

And the Daily Wire hosts apparently did not want to go through the process of transitioning and the years of hormone. It was necessary to qualify for women's sports for a documentary that would exclusively stream on the Daily Wire Plus. Man, I would have respected it if that had been what they did, though. That would have been a different thing. I will actually insert

this clip here, just because it's really useful to hear them say this. Because they just admit the quiet part out loud here. So, you approached me and you said we should make a fictional film about this topic now to be fair i think i'd actually suggested the crane boys that they do this as a doc yes i originally went to them and i said you guys should like go try out for a bunch of ladies leagues and that became not possible because as it turns out most ladies leagues don't allow in actual men and they weren't willing to go the full distance in terms of what it would require in order to you know the actual hormone treatments

and everything to play in some of the ladies leagues but in any case it turned into this so there we go a very clear admission from ben shapiro that this entire premise is fake, that this premise could never work. And so after disproving their own premise, what's left to do? Well, the CEO of The Daily Wire and failed Hollywood producer Jeremy Boring wanted to take this idea from Ben and just do it as a fictional movie. Because fiction's arguably more powerful than reality. as a fictional movie, because fiction is arguably more powerful than reality. So, for his directorial debut, Jeremy

wanted to make something reminiscent of early 2000s comedies, and he has frequently referenced Dodgeball as a big inspiration for this movie. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Which, to be fair, is an insult to Dodgeball. No, that's an actual movie.

Yeah, and contains some genuinely funny scenes. No, that's an actual movie. Yeah. Contains some genuinely funny scenes. Yeah, some characters. A script. Like, Vince Vaughn actually is a conservative, but he's also an actor. I think boring is definitely stuck in the early 2000s as culture, because that is when he tried to break into Hollywood. So that's kind of what his idea of what movies are is very much is trapped in in the early early

2000s he has a he has a quote from that interview with ben shapiro quote there's not been a true comedy made since barack obama became president obama destroyed three things, rock and roll, and America. Other than that, he was an average president. Unquote. Oh my god. Oh, fucking hell. Obama just doing drone strikes on every fucking rock band? That's it, yeah. That's why he took a predator drone to Linenskinnitz's house. If only. If only. Jeremy Boring also remarked quote it became impossible to tell a joke in

the obama administration because obama made a pact with culture shapers that they should change the fundamental understanding of themselves unquote and he's talking about how comedy became a a a way to progress social change instead of a way to point out the absurdity in the world so jeremy decided to move forward with the production of lady ballers in mid-march of 2023 which if you are good at math you'll realize is less than a year than uh when it came out the script for lady ballers was written in just two weeks. Sounds right, yep. Well, that I absolutely believe. Did they use GBT?

It is, it is, it is possible. The entire production had to be very rushed since Jeremy needed to be in Hungary in the beginning of July to shoot The Daily Wire's new fantasy miniseries. But Jeremy says the biggest production hurdle wasn't budgetary or the very tight

pre-production and shooting schedule, it was the casting process. Every single actor they approached for every single role that is a direct quote said no. Even the conservative actors who have said that they want to work with the Daily Wire have

already worked with the Daily Wire. Even cancelled actors declined after hearing the pitch for Lady Ballers. Man. Which isn't surprising, because the movie's not very good. Yeah. So instead of hiring actual actors, they just decided to use Daily Wire employees. Love this. Obviously, writer, director, and Daily Wire CEO

Jeremy Boring stars as Coach Rob. I'm refusing to call him that. I'm just going to call him Coach Jeremy because that's who he is. The three hosts of the sports podcast The Crane and Company are three of the Lady Ballers. Matt Walsh plays the hippie husband of Coach Rob.

They claim to have been high school or college athletes yeah this is a different thing yeah i i can imagine ben shapiro was used as a football but that's as close as they get ben shapiro was the one on top of the uh the cheerleading tower he's a little guy He'd have been good at it. Yeah, we have Matt Walsh playing the hippie woke husband. Daily Wire hosts Michael Knowles and Brett Cooper, both of whom are failed actors, play newscasters.

Then we have Daily Wire hosts Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Andrew Clavin, and Jordan Peterson all have cameo roles. So I was able to excitedly point out to all 11 Daily Wire employees to my friend as I forced them to watch this with me. Are you still friends? So we have mental health care through the company, right? Yeah.

We might need to get a 5150 on Garrison just for a couple of three day cycles till they clear this out of their heads I was actually disassociating and thinking about how one day I hope to cast all of us in a basketball movie oh no you mean the movie about the actual time

that I outshot LeBron James sure yeah that makes sense so I've seen Robert send a pool ball about head height across a crowded bar once. I'm sure it would be very similar. That was just a brief demonstration of my power, James. Yeah, no, you really dunked that pool ball. It was incredible to see.

I thought the worst basketball movie I saw was the one on Disney Channel where they had two twins that were basketball players, but they weren't actually twins and they looked nothing alike. And it was just really, really poor production and bad. But this is it. I thought the worst basketball movie I've seen was Space Jam 2, but this now... No, no, no. You loved that movie. You talked about that movie for so long. It's not a good movie, Sophie.

It was really bad. So, Lady Ballers was shot in less than a month under the fake name Coach Miracle. Now, according to reporting from the Nashville scene, background actors and crew were misled about the production before signing on to the movie. Of course. Just being told it was a basketball comedy. The name The Daily Wire was hidden in the contracts, and extras had to sign NDAs.

It appears the production company went by the name Bonfire Legend, which is also the production company going forward with The Daily Wire's fantasy miniseries and a few other upcoming projects. Be on the watch for anything called Bonfire Legend if you're signing up to be a background extra for a movie in Nashville.

I was able to locate the online casting sheet for the movie, and it has this description. Quote, casting extras, kids, skilled sports. Sports is in parentheses, by the way. It doesn't make sense as as as a sentence but casting extras kids skilled sports and background for a misfit team inspired basketball comedy misfit team yeah for sure yeah that's good god i found their uh i found they like uh their recruiting thing for the Coach Miracle Project.

Oh, God. There's some terrible shit in here. I guess they seem to want to start. It was supposed to be about T-ball initially. Well, there is a scene where when the athletes start entering all of the women's divisions, they do enter a T-Ball contest as well. That is during the montage. I guess they just couldn't give up that great idea.

Despite the non-disclosure agreement, local background actors in Nashville did come out and warn people about the production once they figured out the Daily Wire's involvement in the movie's anti-trans messaging. One extra, a trans man who unwittingly signed onto the movie, said that Daily Wire fans from around the country traveled to Nashville to be in the film once they learned it was shooting in Tennessee. And according to background actors, certain props and costuming

were hid on set to downplay the transphobia while shooting. After some extras voiced concerns and objections to props and signs which read stuff like baller pride and various other kind of like trans related jokes. To quote the Nashville scene, quote, during a break from filming, several actors voiced their objections and were quote unquote screaming about the Daily Wire's involvement with the film before being escorted out of the building. Unquote. Protests were held outside of filming locations for the duration of the building. Unquote. Protests were held outside of filming locations for the duration of the shoot. These protests also served to inform unaware cast and crew about the movie's messaging. Filming was initially supposed to take place at Belmont University, but that got cancelled as the Daily Wire's deception regarding the production of the film

was made public. So good on everyone who was coming out against this after they realized what was happening good on everyone for protesting disrupting these sorts of things i think is a vital importance um at the very least so that you can inform anyone who is signed on to this that of like what this actually is because you know if you're a trans person who signed up to be a background extra and you find yourself on a Daily Wire set, that is a very dangerous place to be. So that is extremely important. Ted Cruz, who was an aspiring actor, according to Jeremy Boring, in his youth, was asked to do a cameo.

Oh my God. Oh, that scans so much. Jesus Christ. Every one of these fucking fucking guys all of them are all aspiring movie like directors wanted to make it in hollywood but they can't because they don't have any talent yeah aspiring is a generous failed would be a failed failed we need like a public works jobs program for these people or something to stop them from doing this stuff like have them i don't know we need to integrate we need to integrate hollywood casting agents with a system of suicide booths and we need to put a sign outside those suicide booths that says marvel movie backlot casting or something like that and when these people fail out we just send them into the booth and tell them they got a great role they They're going to be the new Spider-Man or whatever.

I'll be describing Canadian Hollywood. You are describing Canadian Hollywood. After Ted Cruz shot his cameo, he beat Jeremy Boring in a one-on-one basketball game. So that's a fun fact for you, Sophie. That would be a comedy. That's a fun fact for me. Because you love basketball. Yeah, but nobody needs...

That's a real case of the stoppable force meeting the movable object. Yeah. Do they have the low hoops, do you think? You know, the ones for children who can't jump up to dunk on an adult-sized hoop yet? There's a really good line from Jeremy in an interview discussing the production of this film. After shooting a wrestling scene with a professional stunt woman jeremy said that he was driving in his car on his way home and he thought to himself quote we're genuinely being terrible to women in the making of this movie unquote which is the most true thing he's ever said yeah bro but he tried to he tried to justify it by saying this is actually

happening in the actual world uh referring to men injuring children and little girls in sports games which just isn't true that just isn't true grown men are not entering little league and assaulting little girls that's just not happening i really just there was a video of the ted cruz basketball game because ted cruz has to have the ugliest jump shot that has ever existed i don't think he can jump yeah exactly oh he definitely has like a he has he has a one foot vertical at least i think yeah but he definitely shoots like two hands and like jolty it's it's it's weird how much jeremy in interviews has to like reassure himself that like this quote this movie is absurd but it's only as absurd as the real world unquote despite already admitting that the entire conceit of this movie that that men can

fake being trans to just win all of women's sports is just divorced from reality. It's not true. Like, this doesn't happen. And now I will do one final quote from Jeremy that made me really upset before we take another ad break where he's talking about the thematic similarities in this film. Quote,

Tonally, the film is a lot like Dodgeball, but thematically, it's much less like Dodgeball. It's much more like the death of stalin unquote which is an insult to a perfectly good movie the death of stalin slaps the fact that jeremy boring is comparing his dog shit basketball movie to the death of stalin starring steve buscemi insulting yeah you don't get to you don't get you don't get to compare yourself to armando iannucci if you've never written a thing which you didn't this was not this is not writing deeply upsetting i mean i think the closest thing i can compare it to is the disney

channel original movie double team to where the twins were not actually twins and the plot was bad. Go ahead and don't Google that. Double teamed. Let's have a capitalistic palette cleanser with these lovely products and services that support my Daily Wire plus addiction. all right we are back oh my god sophie's showing me the picture from the disney

channel movie it does not look good no i will say it does look slightly better than which isn't isn't saying much clearing the bar which is lying on the ground lifetime's better let's get into some of the jokes and the in the ideological underpinnings of this film and i also just have a few other just random fun facts um i i have here saved the the the the font choice for the opening credits of this movie which is not very good if you if you look at the font for the daily wire plus presents a jeremy's movie which is another title card is just a jeremy's movie which isn't how you do title cards for films but whatever yeah or sentences no we have just one minute into the film there is a your mom incest joke uh between two brothers every time you say something it just fucking comes

out of no way this is there's actually a lot of incest jokes in this movie why immediately we have like overexposed cinematography the whites are clipping it it doesn't look good we have this joke in the first few minutes with this gay coded uh uh towel boy who's sniffing the sweaty towels from the other teammates during the during the opening credits montage they put oh this horrible film grain filter on this basketball footage i have i i have a i have a example here. It doesn't look good. It doesn't look good. What's happening here? Is that guy breakdancing?

No, that's him doing a foul, I think. It's him doing a fucking Tim Robinson face. Yeah, he does kind of have a Tim Robinson face. Oh, my God. And also during the opening credits, we have the great line, Introducing Jeremy Boring. Very fun.

We have a kids and their damn phones joke. Sure. Oh, I'm certain. With phone notifications being used as a punchline during a failed impassioned speech. We have what was first a funny joke. We have a stealing catalytic converter joke, which is immediately ruined. Oh, oh, oh, come on. It's offensive to Robert.

I will not stand for this. My culture is not a costume. Yeah. The catalytic converter joke is immediately ruined by turning racist by having the one black kid in the class drop his cordless reciprocating saw the movie then acknowledges the racism by having the coach receive a phone call from his boss telling him that it's racist to tell teenage boys not to steal which the coach justifies by saying the bible says not to steal in response his boss fires him because you can't teach the bible in school uh God, I wish it worked like that. That is how Coach Jeremy loses his job.

When picking up his daughter from school, the teacher standing outside is inaudible because she was wearing like six COVID masks, one of which says, quote, we say gay. And then the teacher goes into a coughing fit because Jeremy does not have a catalytic converter. And Jeremy just tells her to smile and wear makeup. Jeremy asks his daughter what they learned at school today.

And she says that they had a moment of silence for the workers exploited by the capitalistic system when learning about the Cold War. His eight-year-old daughter also informs him in class that a girl showed her her penis in the bathroom jeremy's upset at this but his daughter accuses him of being transphobic and says okay boomer very very very funny stuff airing his grievances uh jeremy jeremy suggests that he might move his daughter to a private school to which his daughter replies quote private schools reinforce white patriarchal privilege unquote based based child based child destroys terrible

film about how your children hate you and your divorce it's just such a powerful daily one a lot of the movie's jokes are just jeremy boring's fake daughter saying like accurate like academic level things and that's just the joke is that she's like right jeremy has been cucked by a liberal hippie played by matt walsh as we've said who refers to the coach as my lover's former lover which is which they play as an ongoing joke and uh liberal matt walsh talks about how he likes eating bugs and vaccines to stay healthy. This is coded as a joke, that vaccines keep you healthy. Walsh is not a great actor. Eating bugs and vaccines to keep healthy.

Yeah, that's what we do. I did get that right. All right. Cool. Now, Walsh is not a good actor. He is a black hole of charisma. He can really only do deadpan delivery so watching him try to play like a sincere hippie leftist is just like uncanny

but jeremy plays the most divorced man ever which he pulls off fine so is he acting in that role i gotta give him credit right what you know they say In front of Matt Walsh's house, we have these fake yarn signs, which I'm just gonna read. Quote, in this house, we believe crickets are delicious. Silence is violence. Speech is also violence. No one is

illegal, but Europeans coming to America was bad. Guns don't kill people. White people kill people. Also guns kill people. Also true. also guns are true also true trans rights are human rights feelings don't care about your facts pride month is every month social credit scores matter in inclusive inclusion the earth is literally going to burst into flame any day i like that he just kept trans rights or human rights in there he didn't even change that couldn't think of a funny riff on it it was just like yeah fuck human rights no one is illegal but europeans coming to

america was bad so true yes this is a more base yard side than the ones that like live people actually have yeah yeah you could have just got a real one outside my house yeah that was a very funny very they are of the fact that like 12 people in this country eat cricket protein like it's yeah it's it's such a they're such a baby thing to be scared of like you all eat lobster yeah come on i'm saying like you know yard signs could be improved is what i'm saying they couldn't even get like a cab on there like it seems like there are some really easy things to include they don't really have anything related to police in this movie at all maybe that's why i'm getting mad about j6 at the coach's new job at the drag themed restaurant

uh jeremy boring has to like put on drag and then reflects on sexual harassment by saying, quote, I didn't know men could be so handsy. He then sexually assaults a female barkeep immediately after finishing that sentence, which I guess is like played as a joke. But he like he likes he like slaps of a female barkeep on on the butt after after reflecting on sexual harassment. When reflecting on his life since 2008, the coach says, quote, I've stayed the same, and the world has changed. One day it's all about winning. The next day they want you to lead from behind. Don't be so mean to kids.

Don't push them so hard. Don't make fun of losers. How are you supposed to win that way? Unquote. It's just an interesting look at Jeremy Boring saying, like, he is trapped in 2008, and the world has moved on, but he is still there, which I think is totally true.

Him, Ben Shapiro, all of them are trapped in 2008 and the world has moved on and, and they are unwilling to learn and grow and change as people. And this is just a really interesting, um, admission of that fact. I think there's an interesting thing here too,

with like the way that this this this this kind of like this this has to do with also the like the why they're so obsessed with college campuses but the way that they're like they're stuck in high school sports oh yeah it was just like this powerfully american thing like no one else in the fucking world cares about high school sports like no one i mean real people don't care about any sports wrong robert evans is coming for the core of my existence like it is it is like a reactionary nostalgia like like it is it it is it is a very like like a hauntological reactionary conservative drive i also want to point out that that laugh that robert just did the little evil laugh he

just said is what they were trying to go for at the end of that movie and i know i know look look what they have to do to mimic a fraction of my power sure spending millions of dollars on a dog shit basketball movie. So, like many of the Daily Wire's own staff, the character of the former high school basketball player was also an aspiring actor, but wasn't able to succeed because, quote,

it turns out white males of non-exotic sexualities is the only ethnic group not being cast by Hollywood these days. Unquote. Yeah, man, I haven't seen a white guy in a movie in forever. Nope. Just go to L.A.

No white dudes. I love that, like, one of the wokest movies of last year, the D&D movie, still had a white guy as the main character. Like, they're all over the place. Not to mention a white guy sports movie very uncommon like yeah come on i just love the turn of phrase non-exotic sexualities and then referring to that as an ethnic group yes i've noticed that too yeah what makes the sexuality exotic we then have a joke quote i heard disney was going to make the new snow white a neurodivergent black lesbian unquote which is just jeremy being mad about the new snow white movie

because he's trying to make his own snow white movie oh god yeah that is it about cocaine uh oh probably i can see that divorced dad on cocaine dad on cocaine. It'll be great. Absolutely. Yeah. I hate my kids and I love cocaine. That's the entire script. When referencing white men, Jeremy says, quote, it wasn't that long ago when we were champions, winners, unquote. I mean, you never were, Jeremy. Just learn how to cry on the inside like a winner like the rest of us, Jeremy. Yeah, there's plenty of white men who are champions at various things, just not you, because you're a fundamentally disappointing person.

When the coach is fighting with the woman at the track and field sign-up table, the woman threatens him with a taser and says, I will tase a white man. When the former basketball player runs up to check on the coach after he's tased, the woman says, holy crap crap i tased an ally after which uh after getting his player enlisted in the woman's division jeremy says quote i was happy we could get this worked out without without having to get social media involved oh my god at the sign up tape to which the woman at the sign up table says quote please i have a family and a queer dog. Very funny.

Very funny stuff. What the fuck? All right. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're really upsetting me. Please continue. We have Jeremy saying lines like, do you know how much faster a man past his prime is

than a female athlete? And not, not faster. Not, not fucking fast. Like not like i'm sorry i have been sorry this shit makes me so angry we also have high school boys could run faster than a world record of female sprinters no they can't man stop like also for fuck like just say you hate women just say you hate women this is yeah sophie you are actually you're actually stumbling across the actual ideological core of this movie which is just hating women yeah yeah that makes sense hating women hating trans women just being hateful

yeah being bad at sport and wishing you didn't suck at everything you try and do yeah they put they put a horrible digital video filter over all their fake news footage. By the way, the fastest female marathon runner, Tigist Esefa from Ethiopia, did it in two hours and 11 minutes and 53 seconds. I would love you to pay Ben Shapiro's entry fee. I would love you to throw some random high schoolers

at that record and see if they can beat it. I do hope that somewhere on the internet there is data of Ted Cruz's athletic... Go ahead. I want to see Matt Walsh try to do a two hour and 11 minute marathon because his heart will explode. But also I want to know Ted Cruz's times from high school. That's got to be yeah yeah yeah what kind of fucking track runner were you yeah yep yeah yeah yeah and they're they're right that like the fastest males are faster but the the fastest male marathon is faster

by like eight minutes nine minutes well and like testosterone is a massive performance enhancing drug yes but it's not like the way they're saying we're like well any man could beat the best women no very few people can do a two hour and 11 minute marathon yeah like even when i i spent most of my 20s being paid to exercise i trained all the time with ladies who were also like paid to exercise right when we were when i was racing bikes i trained with women who are pro racers all the time women who are very good at sports are just very fucking good at sports like even men who are professional athletes are gonna be like on their level most

professional athletes can't do a two hour and 11 minute marathon only like people who are really fucking good at marathon i'm pretty sure i could lap this guy yeah that is high school ted cruz yeah magnificent christ so we have we have this reoccurring joke with these two newscasters played by two of the daily wire hosts throughout all of the news footage there's a horrible like fake like digital video filter just overlaid on the footage. It looks really ugly. And the newscasters keep saying, brave and beautiful trans women, as if they're being forced at gunpoint to acknowledge that trans women exist. There is a few Bud Light jokes in there. We have a joke about Jeremy stealing most of the winnings from the track and field contest. When the journalist character is called out for transphobia by the coach when she accuses the athlete of faking being a woman she responds

by saying quote save it i'm a journalist i literally cannot be shamed and then and then says that you can only be a woman if you get menstrual cramps which is really funny because this is this is actually one thing that happens if you go on hrt for long enough you actually do start getting menstrual cramps so the actual line she has about only only real women have menstrual cramps is like one of the things that hrt actually does does give you uh which is just kind of funny yeah i love the idea as well like before you uh enter the women's basketball game you have to like provide evidence of your menstrual cramps in order to uh to be basketball game, you have to provide evidence of your menstrual cramps in order to be allowed to compete.

You have to provide empirical proof of cramping. The cramp inspector has arrived. The journalist also says, quote, men are stronger, faster, meaner. Soon all of the best women will be men. Cheating low-life men. But after the first meeting between the journalist and the

coach where they agree to work together the journalist invites the coach home and jeremy gets femdommed this is this is this is a reoccurring bit in the movie that jeremy gets femdommed by this journalist i'll believe that i have i have a screenshot here of jeremy tied up in bed I have a screenshot here of Jeremy tied up in bed. I'll believe that. Yeah, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Nah.

When trying to put their old team back together, they learned that the one black guy from their old team was found dead with a hole in his head due to a laser from space. I think this is a Jewish and space laser joke. It's not explained. What? Why? Yeah, wow.

What? Is it a joke he was caught doing? They have like a list. What don't know i can't say guys there yeah i have this information you do here i can't i can't do they just feel like they have to take the anti-semitism box is the circle back that a black man died is that literally the whole joke i i and and he was probably he probably got killed from a from uh from a laser in space and that's why that is all the joke is that's yeah odd okay also just looking at the screen cap of this photo why is it decorated with like urban outfitters like

lighting because she's a journalist oh yeah it's definitely you don't have a an outfit as room in your house you didn't get one from the from the journalism union no i was i was not provided a neon love light oh yeah i got one of those on on my return from syria right yeah i got another one the movie is full of stock footage and a lot of royalty-free music um and there was there was literally a jeremy's razors commercial shoved in the middle of the movie alongside a whole bunch of other daily wire product placement and if you didn't know jeremy boring started his own razor company after harry's razors dropped uh their ads on the on the daily wire so he started his own razor company he also started his own chocolate company both of which uh have product placement in the film.

But Jeremy's Razors has a whole like an ad just edited into the middle of this movie. I think I think this is like a Wayne's World reference, but it's hard to say. Yeah, there is that. I think you're right there. There is a rape whistle joke, just a joke saying that rape whistles exist. And that's the joke. And then when the coach's daughter explains gender theory to the lady ballers, we get a fantastic series of shots depicting a gender conspiracy board. Red string connecting terms on a whiteboard, such as demiboy, demigirl, paraboy,

which I actually like paraboy. That one's pretty good. Paraboy's good. Paraboy's good. Is that when you're a boy with a parachute? Yes. L-T-B-T-Q-I-A plus A-B-C-D-E-F-G, etc. We have the word panda as a term i don't know what that means f i've never heard of that one ftm mtf afab amab other non-binary pansexual uh saxosexual

don't know what that is um they have someone who just fucks anglo-saxons because that's maybe they fuck saxophone i've i've finally found a type of homophobia that i approve of they have saxosexuals supposed to be stopped at the center of the gender conspiracy board they just have frogs which is i guess an alex jones joke um but here is a picture of the gender conspiracy board lots of this lots of the red string on this board just connect to nothing it's just red string yeah that's a bad conspiracy board i've made a lot in my life and that one's not very good this is so mid no also it's really lame to do it to make like a whiteboard your conspiracy board like get cut out pictures and bits of like text and stuff

from from printouts and and nail it to the wall you know like actually go the extra mile basic ass whiteboard it's that looks like something someone makes for a movie not something a crazy person makes in the throes of paranoia like come on so i i'm just gonna speed run the rest of these come on hit me we are we're kidding we are kidding a little long um yes when one player asks what is a woman another responds by saying just shave your legs, tell each other how brave you are for things that require

absolutely no physical courage, and don't be afraid to cry at work. Unquote. All things I do as a cis man, actually. As I've established, cry on the inside like a winner. There is a part of their ongoing newscaster segment.

They get increasingly more racist costumes after being forced to go on two weeks of sensitivity training. Michael Knoll's character learns that they are, quote, a raging scoliosexual and also one and two thousand and forty eight percent Dakota. So he says, I know what it's like to overcome diversity. And then the other newscaster says that her old name is her slave name she is a white woman these costumes only get more racist the more the film goes on as the lady ballers enter onto the court for the first time all the seats are empty because quote it's ladies basketball boys nobody watches during during their first game that's the thing right i just all these people who are suddenly so fucking concerned about women's sports manifestly do not give a fuck about women's sports.

Correct. You weren't there when the prize money was shit or when people were being sexually assaulted by their coaches. You don't give a fuck. It's just a vehicle for transphobia. And just a vehicle for transphobia and how much they hate women. During their first game, the Lady Ballers keep whispering in the ears of the players from the other team

that they're lesbians, some of whom are revolted, some of whom are turned on by this. Referee Ben Shapiro in a cameo role says, keep it clean, keep it tucked to the players as they start their first game.

The game is full of constant fouls as the male players just flagrantly assault the other team. The stands start to fill up the longer the game goes on and someone in the audience says, this is great, it's just like watching men's basketball. This is just a reoccurring bit is that

all of the footage of basketball with men versus women, it's just the men assaulting women during playing and just doing fouls. They're not actually playing basketball. They're like punching women and stealing the ball and like that's that's how they play uh one of the lady ballers feels a little guilty after winning their first game after seeing a woman on the other team cry and then in the locker room he says to the boys quote aren't we just using our innate strength and speed to wail on a bunch of girls in a competition where

we wouldn't stand a chance against other men. But then he gets a notification that he got a brand sponsorship and then changes his mind. The other lady ballers gets invited to Nike commercials and to speak at the White House on women's rights. The journalist calls this the virtue economy. After their first win, the journalist is about to fuck Jeremy

Boring in the locker room, but stops and says the last thing I need is another abortion this year. And says do you know what it's like to be a female field reporter in the 29th biggest media market which i don't understand how that relates to the abortion it's not very funny here's a screenshot from the wrestling bit where you see yeah totally a totally real uh weight class distinction between a guy who's like over 200 pounds and a woman who's like 140 pounds. Totally how sports works. Also, the guy doesn't look very familiar with the ways and means of wrestling. No.

The two brothers enter a woman's shower together and say, one small step for dudes, one giant leap for lesbians. The joke is that men are going to sexually assault women, I guess, which, again, is only more revealing about how these guys think about women uh during the victory montage uh almost all of the basketball gameplay is just the men assaulting women we have lots of fouls and slow motion shots of like men's dicks and crotches colliding with the female players faces that's sure that's most that's most of the footage yeah yeah most of the footage that i'm sure Boring watched over and over again in slow-mo. in which he gives the eight-year-old pitcher a concussion. There's a joke about how girls have sex with each other at sleepovers, which leads to an incest orgy.

That's just a reoccurring side plot, is this incest orgy joke. Oh my god. Jeremy Boring says to his ex-wife, when his ex-wife is complaining to him about all of his deception, he says, my former lover the turf um and that's that's played as a joke here's more of these increasingly racist costumes oh my god from my goals and oh for fuck's sake no and fucking stop oh my god pretty bad fuck

so yeah wow garrison wow look right it looks like i'm so embarrassed for these people yeah they don't look like they're having fun they just know uh anyway uh i have i have a few more of the incest jokes written down but i don't think i need to read them yeah the journalist character const all of the journalists throughout the film including these two newscasters and and the main journalist character, constantly make fun of and insult people who have kids. This is like the Daily Wire making some point about how journalists hate families, I think.

It's kind of unclear. It's because they pay us like shit. So we're all too poor to have children. So that's all of the jokes. Now I'm going to get to my actual end thesis on this no but i think i think you do have a good theory there that like this is this might be set up to start like a matt walsh some kind of like cinematic oh yeah because because we have the final shot of matt walsh actually orchestrating the whole thing uh anyway so the actual ideology of this film is that men are better at almost anything that requires skill, but women are maybe better at emotions, and they can make babies, and that's the one benefit to being a woman.

This belief was paraphrased in the movie itself by the journalist character, saying, quote, Boys and girls are different, but at least girls can have babies. in probably what's the most extremely telling scene, in which many of the Daily Wire staff have referred to as the heart of the movie, where the coach tells his daughter, it's true that boys are better at all sports, as well as driving, parking, stem fields, rock and roll, and opening pickle jars. Girls have one special gift that boys can never have, making babies.

So to this type of conservative, women are just emotional baby-making factories who also serve to quote-unquote civilize men. It's the only reason we have civilization. No women, no world. This is how they view women. They view women as a civilizing force thrust upon men and as a factory for reproduction. That is the only utility that the Daily Wire sees for being a woman. Now, this scene with Jeremy Boring and his fake daughter is immediately followed up by another very, very preachy scene in a way that really breaks from the movie's pacing. The coach is talking to the journalist character about his divorce and how he's worried that it's really starting to affect his daughter. The journalist then goes on a very out-of-character rant about how, of course, the divorce is affecting his daughter. Quote, 70% of people in prison come from broken families. Your daughter is now twice as likely to do drugs, twice as likely to drop out of school, four times as likely to have trouble fitting in, three times as likely to end up in therapy,

twice as likely to commit suicide, 50% more likely to have health problems. Do you people even freaking do a Google search before deciding to blow up the planet your kids live on? Unquote. So this is the Daily Wire taking a break from the movie to express their belief that divorce is the root cause of societal decay. This is the other, I think, core part of the movie's ideology. How the fact that women are divorcing men is causing most of the societal problems that we're seeing in America. most of the societal problems that we're seeing in America. And then, which is probably the most frustrating scene, where we have the first kind of lady baller player comes out to the coaches, maybe feeling like they're actually trans. The coach then instructs them to ignore anyone in their life who might be loving and accepting,

like their family, and instead just listen to Jeremy Boring saying, quote, you're confused. I get that. We're all confused sometimes. If you need help, buddy, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to help you get it. But you need to believe me when I tell you this, you're not a woman. You're just a lost man in a lost world with shitty parents and a coach who've all gone along with this lie instead of hurting your feelings and telling you the truth. The player then asks, how can the coach be so sure that they're not a woman? To which Jeremy Boring then punches the player in the genitals and walks away.

He has no answer for that, right? Jeremy Boring has no answer to someone who actually says, no, I'm trans. The only answer to him is to assault them. This points at the Daily Wire's actual, like, ideological core. They want you to ignore everyone in your life who loves you and accepts you, and instead just listen to them. To briefly paraphrase a review from Rolo Tony, this organization is built around the phrase, facts don't care about your feelings, but they're telling the audience the exact opposite. To actually just ignore everyone in your life who actually loves you, ignore the facts of your actual sense of being,

and instead listen to The Daily Wire and pay a $100 subscription service to The Daily Wire Plus. That's the actual point of the movie. And this film doesn't even qualify as like a parody movie because a parody comes from a place of appreciation that reifies the actual original source material.

This movie is too self-invested in the Daily Wire's own microcosmatic world to actually even succeed in any sense of parody. And the moral of the film is that a healthy man would never want to be a woman because women are so much genetically worse than men. But because women are worse, we should let them have their own fun. We should let them have their own fun. We should let them have their own sports because they have no chance of ever competing with men in anything. This movie can't fathom why someone who was born a man would want to transition into a woman for

any other reason than fame and success because women are so much just like inferior. At the heart of this film lies a deep hatred of women and a misogynistic core to its transphobia. Misogyny operates as the film's own justification for its transphobia, as the film spends most of its time making fun of women and women's sports as it does the idea of trans people. There are no actual trans characters in the movie. The film doesn't even deal with trans issues, besides just, like, drag and the word non-binary being a joke. There isn't actual any jokes. It's all about how women suck. That's the actual point of the movie. And for all of that, the actual like attempts at humor just don't work because most of the humor is just saying classically offensive things and acting like

that itself is a punchline, which doesn't work as comedy because the people saying those lines also genuinely believe the offensive things they're saying. It only works as a joke if the conservative audience can imagine a liberal audience getting triggered while watching, which isn't actually humor. And the only other type of humor we have in the film is anti-intellectualism. Characters like Jeremy Boring's daughter saying random like gender theory terms and that being plays a joke with no punchline. None of it actually works. I mostly feel bad for all of the child actors who got duped into this and all of the extras. That's the actual end result of this film is that the Daily Wire tricked a whole bunch of people in Nashville, including like innocent kids, into participating in this just very low

quality piece of propaganda that just deeply hates women. And that is my actual thesis on how this movie operates and the core of the Daily Wire's own transphobia, being this misogynistic center and worldview that men are superior to women. I mean, I will say, I think

they've done a good job in, they've created a companion piece to Whipping Girl where if you need to explain to someone what trans misogyny is you just show them this movie yeah yeah alright well I think we've said enough about Lady Ballers

hour and 15 minutes I never have to talk about that again thanks for ruining my day Garrison alright everybody enjoy the daily wire I guess minutes. Yeah, I never have to talk about that again. Thanks for ruining my day, Garrison. Alright, everybody. Enjoy the Daily Wire, I guess. Or not. Bucket we ball. 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast,

Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect

my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts it's the one with the green guy on it

hello everyone welcome to it could happen here a podcast that i'm enthusiastically introducing for the third time uh because i've just sounded so half-assed uh the first two times that i've made myself do it again i'm joined by my friend and your friend shireen lani hi shireen hi that was lovely to witness yeah wasn't it great that's i really put on my podcasting boots and uh you know went back to the podcasting phase to uh do another day in the podcast minds and it's beautiful yeah beautiful thank you for having me uh happy to be here um yeah that's that's all i have to say yes you can tell it's two content creators who are excited to create content i'm glad we're not on twitch we would fucking we would be uh we'd be in the poor house oh yeah it's like eight hour streams can't do it all right so we're not here to talk to talk about how uh uh how we've been in the podcast minds for too long today we

are here to talk about uh clothing in the cold why podcast minds for too long today. We are here to talk about clothing in the cold. Why are we talking about this? Because right now it's record cold all across the US. It's very, very cold. Because I've been spending a lot of time outside, both helping drop water for migrants crossing the border, helping out in the Kumba, and a lot of days just doing my recreation stuff in the

mountains that i like to do and i think that like i guess education i guess a lot of people have been aggressively marketed at about what to wear when they're outdoors be that people who are working or people who are recreating and i think it's good to have a little bit of clarity around it especially as we're entering like this might be the worst winter of our lives it might also be the best winter of the rest of our lives right climate change is making more and more people exposed to more and more extreme weather all over the world so I want to talk a little bit about the stuff I've learned in 30 something years of playing outside uh about how to stay warm in the cold and so that's what we're going to do i've got this broken down like i think the really important thing to think about when you are picking your outfit uh it's obviously having having all your

colors match uh it's very important uh but more than that it's like thinking about um thinking about your outfit as a system rather than as a series of individual things and i think this is where like the way outdoor companies market is really bad they'll be like oh yeah this jacket is badass and it's warm and it's waterproof and it's windproof and it's also breathable and like that's you probably would be much better off with three cheaper jackets and one very very expensive jacket and specifically i guess i've seen a lot of people come a cropper when their very single jacket gets wet right and then you either got one layer or you commit to wearing a wet jacket um so we're going to talk about the different parts of your clothing system what you should look for and uh why you should pick certain things. I'll try and recommend things that are cheap as well

because I know that money is hard to come by and the world seems to be constantly trying to extract money from us. So this system is based on... Do you know who Mark Twight is, Shireen? No, I don't know who Mark Twight is, but I'm looking at the same document you are and I read his name maybe six times and every time it was Mark Twain and, but I'm looking at the same document you are, and I read his name maybe six times, and every time it was Mark Twain, and I was so confused. But it's not, it's Mark Twight.

Legendary mountaineer, Mark Twain, which is equally good for, you know, if you're going on a boat down the Mississippi River or climbing a mountain. Yes, exactly. But no, I don't know who Mr. Twight is. Mr. Twight's a famous mountaineer. He's good at climbing mountains. Wow, that's cool. That's cool to be famous for that yeah i know yeah a boy can dream like maybe maybe in another life uh i'll not have to podcast i'll just be able to raise fluffy animals and climb climbing the mountains sheep yeah that is the dream uh you know every every uh every time i don't want to sit down and write my book and think about the amount of livestock i could possibly purchase if i sell lots of uh lots of books

yeah well one day talking to sheep actually let's talk about base layers because um one of the things they can be made out of shireen is wool from sheep nice that was good yeah i know yeah i am i am i am a professional podcast guy so your base layer is the thing you wear next to your skin right and a lot of people i think this is where like people say have you heard the phrase cotton kills no no yeah you've not heard that okay i have not heard that i mean i i'm i'm glad you're making an episode about this because like most of the things i've learned about keeping warm have just been i'm i'm glad you're making an episode about this because like most of the things i've learned about keeping warm have just been like things i've heard you know what i mean

i've never like researched what actually will help me or what will help other people because i think like even like when you provide when you are going to provide or like cheaper options that's a good thing to like donate to people too now you know what will actually help them versus like something else but yeah totally like i know like for a lot of unhoused people for instance like you'll get donated a lot of crappy cotton t-shirts but those are terrible right the little the little gaps in the cotton they get wet and they stay wet and it is much worse to be cold and wet than it is just to be cold. Right. And these, the whole system of clothing designed by Mark Twight, Mark Twain's brother,

Mark Twight, he, the, the idea is not to keep you dry. The idea is to let you dry off quickly. Right. So you can get wet, you can sweat,

but it's much more preferential to be able to dry off quickly. And that's what cotton doesn't do. And so that's why cotton is, is considered to be like your worst choice here. Wow. So if you're a base layer, you want to go with, there's two options, I guess. Well, it's like many things, it's a continuum, not a binary. And so you've got wool on one end and you've got synthetic on the other end. Wool is really nice because it doesn't smell right like uh if you have like

athletic clothing that's synthetic it can get really stinky if you wear it for a few days it only gets stinkier wool tends to be much better for that it also uh doesn't catch fire and melt to you which if that's important in your line of work then then that's useful that what are you wool is naturally fire retardant really where it's like yeah yeah yeah does everyone know this they're clearly not shireen but sorry that was me so do sheep are sheep fireproof yeah i mean i think i i mean obviously a high enough temperature would still be fatal for them but like it and it yeah that's that's shireen's take on yeah yeah no yeah that uh when we don't respect the sheep enough that's a very powerful ability yep yeah there's not even a sheep pokemon that could like i was just thinking pokemon as you said that i was like what a good defense well yeah yeah yeah

someone send me a picture of a sheep pokemon that you've designed and i will describe it on the podcast i don't know it's unfortunately not a visual medium but i'd still like to see your sheep earrings all right so wool is flame retardant it's very useful in certain lines of work it's not so important for other people but i will say that like even sitting around the campfire um it is actually really shitty if your clothes melt to you um i've had gloves melt on my hands and it was unpleasant well then that was only like a little bit but again i can i can assure you that uh that people sitting around campfires do have their clothing catch on fire this is not a like a thing um it's why all your tents have to be treated with a flame retardant uh treatment

it's that stuff that make when your tent you know if you put a tent away when it's wet and hot you leave it in the back of your truck it gets really sticky when you when you get it out that's a flame retardant treatment on your tent oh wow learning a lot about fire today so the the problem with wool though is that you have to treat it with care like you don't want to be tumble drying wool right and it can kind of get misshapen um there are like hybrids the thing called new yarn which i like a lot um which is like a wool synthetic hybrid i have lots of class stuff made of that and then uh there are full synthetic things like um i have a little base layer here again this being this being mainly a podcast, only Shireen can see this. I'm describing a piece of clothing. It looks like cloth.

All right, we're going to be fucked here for the next hour or so. But what am I looking at? It looked kind of like textured or something. Yeah, so it's like got this... Yes, yes, it's ribbed. I'll try. We'll just move right past yes yes it's ribbed i'll try to leave we've just

moved right past that it's uh it's ribbed it uh and that's to allow like the the little bits that touch your skin keep you warm but then the the channels allow for it to breathe right for moisture to move away and wick away from your body so and that's the that's the synthetic hybrid or this is synthetic it's uh spandex and polyester it's got this like it's very thin you can see through it but it's also very warm made by a company called beyond clothing i would caution people against having too thick if you're planning on actually hiking or being active or like you know let's say you work in construction uh you work in agriculture maybe you just have a job you have

to go to remote places you're a doctor who has to treat people in remote places or you win turbine engineer or you work on railway lines or something um you know if you're going to be active having too thick of a base layer can be really annoying because if it heats up that's kind of your last option and if it's really thick and you've tried to rely on that for most of your warmth then you're going to overheat and then when you, then you're going to overheat. And then when you overheat, you're going to sweat a lot. And when you sweat a lot, that sweat is then going to soak your layer, right? And then when it gets cold, you're going to be wet and cold.

That is bad. So consider if your base layer like a lightweight or a mid-length thing and try and get your warmth from something else is what I would suggest. I really like the new yarn ones like i said there's one made by black diamond called a rhythm uh t-shirt which i really like i've loaded those they're often on sale you can get them really cheap um if you're looking for something really cheap i would say to just avoid cotton so you can look for things which are polyester or nylon and those are going to be a lot better than just your cotton t-shirt they are going to smell they're going to get pretty stinky but uh you

can often find them for around the same price right um if it's very cold you may want base layers your legs as well good ones for those are hard to get cheap i like ones that zip all the way off like like like uh you know like like chippendale style yeah but you want zips all the way down the side oh zippers so they're not pull on no yeah because then you have to take your boots off right so if you're oh wow they think of everything drop your trousers put those on because taking your boots off in the snow and then hopping around no i mean it sounds very uh impractical so that's cool they thought of that that's very smart yeah yeah it's a nice uh it's a nice yeah technology has given us many things uh there's a company called kuyu uh who's chiefly a hunting company but they make a really nice like

side zip leg base layer um which i think i would recommend for a lot of people if it's really cold where you are with i guess trousers generally it's they're a lot less complicated than upper layers but um the the things you want in the cold really are again something that's not going to like cause you to sweat a lot uh so i wouldn't suggest everyone like going around in waterproof trousers i really like ones that um have vents like mechanical vents so you can open up so you can cool off these guys right like they they're the pockets are mesh so if you open the pocket not only can you get your accessories out but you can also like vent off the heat that way and so that way you don't soak them out with sweat right um there's a company called beyond

who makes every possible weight and size of trouser i really like their stuff i use their stuff a lot um you can get knee pad pockets as well which are super useful not only if you're like uh be like you see them in military gear a lot but if you're working say in construction or carpentry or something like that you have to kneel a lot it's really nice table on the pad um so those get a recommendation for that the for a cheap one the prada make a pant called the stretch zion which i think is really nice climbing them all the time they can often be found really cheap your next thing is your active insulation so that's you need to warm yourself when you're active right so there's two types of insulation the system is active and static and one is for when you're

moving and the other is for where you're stationary and your active insulation is people used to call this a mid-layer but that was back when people wore like wool jumpers and you kind of had to keep it covered from the world or it would get wet and stretched out and very, very heavy. But sometimes this will actually be the outer layer. So I think mid layer is a great term. That's what they used to call it. People used to use fleeces a lot. Fleeces are fine, but again, they can get very, very heavy if they get wet.

Some of them don't breathe very well and they can sort of very quickly become too hot if you're exercising. And they're not very windproof. They don't block very well and they can sort of very quickly become too hot if you're exercising and they're not very windproof they don't block the wind at all so a much better choice is something called a grid fleece so like the base layer i was talking to you about it has like a little grid pattern that allows for moisture and air to move away from your body so like you're less likely to overheat there's a really cool fabric called polartec alpha which you should look for rather than like looking for a specific item if you look for polartec alpha or polartec alpha direct then you can scout around for stuff that's on sale and find something that's really nice um it kind of looks a bit fleecy but but it's also a grid pattern it's really warm and it's very small i have a few things that are like made of that i have one from a moot called alpha 60 so there

are different weights right 60 90 120 60 is the least i think 90 it's grams per square meter but 90 grams per square meter is pretty much a good mid zone for almost everyone so that's what to look for in those if you're looking for a cheap mid-less or a cheap way to stay warm while you're moving around the u.s military has this thing called a waffle top because inside of it looks like a waffle right um i guess grid was no they like to give things baby names in in the u.s army oh look shireen's got one yeah like that yeah i love a waffle top i'm always cold all the time so i just i'm also a cold person but like that yeah i love a waffle top i'm always cold all the time so i'm also a cold person but yeah yeah i do love a waffle top yeah but yeah those waffle tops you

can get them super cheap everywhere online uh i would caution people against getting it can be easy to find like a thing which has got like a waffle backer and a soft shell front and it's like your wind shell your rain shell but those are really warm and they're really big and bulky and it's quite hard to wear them if you're actually moving with any sort of intention so that's where you want to keep your things separate so you can choose um choose what like exactly how warm you are rather than being forced to be like a certain level of warm and talking of forcing people to do things shireen well it's time for us to force them to listen to some adverts let's do it

we're back uh so shireen's voice and we are talking now about the other part of keeping yourself warm which is static insulation this is the like big warm jacket if one likes uh your happy jacket uh the one that like makes the cold go away right the deal here is that like a big puffy jacket is pretty crappy to wear again if you're moving with any intention right like unless it's seriously like arctic cold then it's hard to hike or climb in a big puffy jacket and so what this guy is for is for when you stop moving so if you're hiking that would mean when you stop to regroup or you stop to have a snack or to put your camp together or whatever. It's good to have like a really big jacket that is warm that you can toss on immediately.

Putting clothes on once you are cold is generally not the deal. The deal is putting them on so you don't get cold because all you're doing with all these layers right is trapping air against your body that is warm that's what the little little the grid parts in the grid fleece do and that's what all the little feathers in the down jacket do right they're just trapping pockets of air that you heat up so if you wait till you're really cold it's going to take you a lot longer to get to get warm the thing to do is once once when you're moving you're nice and warm you stop you're going to get cold so if you toss on that jacket then and then you can stay cold stay warm down jackets are really complicated if there are a couple of issues with like cheap down jackets that make

them probably best avoided one is that if you're not using ethically sourced down that the uh the industry can be pretty abusive right that down is comprised of feathers that come from ducks and geese it's not very nice to ducks and geese uh to kill them and steal their feathers and and um if you're going to do it at all if that's something that you choose to do you should at least try and find ethically sourced down in my opinion the other thing is that down natural down when it gets wet it clumps up and it doesn't work anymore it uh it doesn't insulate you right no like nicer downs modern more like modern downs are treated with water repellent coatings so they don't tend to do that as much but the other thing with down is like you like a lot of numbers get

thrown at you when you're looking at a down jacket like if you if you look at the money internet it's all kinds of information some of that stuff is bullshit the things that are important are the fill power and the fill weight the fill power is it tells you how many cubic inches of loft one ounce of that down will fill so a higher number is better right a higher number is more puffy and then your fill weight tells you how much of that down is used in a jacket so a higher fill power jacket with a lower let's say a 400 full power jacket with 60 grams of weight would be as warm as 800 full power jacket with 30 grams of full weight so once you get your fill power and your fill weight then you get a pretty good idea of how warm a jacket is going to be um so the other alternative to natural down is synthetic down right

where that stands out is like it can get wet and you can generally like baby it a bit less but it doesn't pack down as well and it is tends to be heavier and you don't get full power but you do get full weight so if you're the jacket I use is synthetic because I like to shovel in my bag and sometimes it's wet or sometimes it gets a bit wet. I don't like to have to try and baby it so much. I also, for ethical reasons, prefer that. There's a company called Primaloft, P-R-I-M-A. They make synthetic insulation sort of very good.

And they make some from post-consumer recycled plastics. And they have some that are biodegradable as well. So I really like... Very cool. Yeah, it's cool, right? Like, I saw something a while ago on how ducks and geese are treated, if I look down, and it may be very sad. I was like, I didn't really want to ask,

because I don't really need to know more than I i already do because i don't buy that stuff anyway but do they are there birds that die exclusively for their feathers or at least do they die for meat and their feathers i think they die exclusively i'm sure they are eaten but they are raised like the commercial product is their feathers basically because they kill them much younger yeah it's shitty there are like ethically sourced downs which i think if you know if if you're a consumer of animal products for the most part i avoid them most of my wool stuff i got uh before i was vegan but i think if you're picking between wool and down i think the down industry is it's hard to be mean to sheep in a way that

people are mean to poultry uh because sheep just aren't having it they'll die uh also you're not like shearing wool is different than plucking feathers yeah yeah well yeah then killing an animal to to yeah there's a distinct thing going on there so yeah i prefer not to have i have a few down jackets um that you know but i keep them baby and look after but um for the most part i use the generally these are called belay parkers they're the sort of static insulation layer because when you're belaying when you're climbing right you don't put them on for climbing but then when you're on belay you're stationary so you put them on and it's nice to have a hood on these two right because you don't want to be like oh i've got to get my beanie out got my jacket on you want to just be able to put your one big warm jacket on and then you're warm um so is it

true that you can lose like heat from your head and your, or like, I've always heard that like, if you wear a beanie, you can stay warm better. Is that not true? Yeah. I mean, you can lose heat from your head and so it's a part of your body. I mean, okay. I know technically that makes sense. Yeah.

But yeah, it's like maybe it's like a mom thing to say to their kids where it's just like, cover your head. Don't go out when your hair is wet. Yeah. You can lose heat from any sort of exposed surface area, right? to their kids where it's just like cover your head don't go out when your hair is wet yeah you can lose heat from any sort of exposed surface area right uninsulated part of your body um i think sometimes people overestimate the role played by your head like you know people say you lose 90 of your heat from your head this isn't true right like okay this is why we don't climb mountains in like fur hats and speedos like um you you do want to cover your head when it's cold and it can

make a big difference especially like your ears you know where the circulation is close to the skin they can get cold your nose right you can get frost nip your nose and your ears um so like you do want to cover those things having a like a keffiyeh or uh is it a snood is that what it's called i don't know okay but that's enough yeah okay a buff is a trade name uh what is it a buff a buff under yeah oh no kofi is a great suggestion good job yeah yeah i have a kofia that i've worn up and down many mountains it's really nice because if you tuck it into the neck of your jacket it kind of blocks all the wind gaps and then it's already warm because it's been inside there so when you go from jacket to sleeping bag you just wrap that guy around your shoulders and then it's you're warm um

multi-purpose you know, I love, and also if you have a coffee, you can use it to pre-filter water, right? Cause you want to get rid of the turbidity. So like if you're, if you're filtering from muddy water, you can put your coffee over the lid of your bottle and then rubber band it down scoop. Yeah. Yeah. Many use make a sling out of it.

Um, I once used it to, to hold gauze on a leg wound that i had wow you've lived a life yeah many of my fears lived a life i'm just i'm just here for the ride so yeah that's your uh your down jacket if you do want like a down animal down duck down jacket uh the decathlon ones are really good for the money decathlon is a french sport it's like french rei or european rei it's huge in europe not so big in america but that stuff's excellent value also if you want to get really dorky about down jackets and warm jackets the ultralight subreddit uh a place where i'm definitely go sometimes uh more times than i should uh is you can you can find like someone has made a spreadsheet uh ranking like the fill power fill weight and price of different down jackets so if

you want to get into it you can get really into it there you can spend a lot of your life uh on that subreddit if you want to so the next layer and this kind of plays into the the the two insulation things it's it's your wind layer so a lot of the way we experience cold as humans is through wind right because of the uh the way we that's why we have the concept of wind chill right the air rushing past you cools you a lot more than that same temperature without the air rushing past you and this is often how we experience cold in the outdoors especially right so having something like active insulation is great but often like that alpha fabric for instance it's you can see through it it can be very warm but it doesn't do anything to

block the wind and that's sort of by design right because it's allowing vapor to move out which is what you want but you do, especially in windy conditions, need a layer to block the wind. That's your wind layer. It also helps a lot in not trashing your expensive insulation layers. Like a very nice down jacket will sometimes have a very low... The denny account is like the thickness of the fabric. So a nice down jacket can often have a low denny account.

It's not really designed to be like... It's not like recently i've been out in hukumba building shelters for people right so i'm constantly carrying lumber and uh you know using tools and cutting stuff and and if you wear your fancy expensive super light down jacket you're going to shred it uh and then you're going to end up with little patches of duct tape all over it. And now your expensive down jacket is not as warm as it used to be. Well, well, yeah, sad time for you.

So you can avoid this by either just not wearing it for that or covering it with, with a wind layer, which also helps because even those down jackets often like the wind can get right through them. So a wind layer is, is a really nice option for a number of those reasons also you can often just wear it above your base layer and even down to pretty cold when you're moving trail running like people trail run i'm sure they'll have

have already know this but if you're hiking your trail running if you're climbing uh a wind layer can really like increase the range of temperatures which you can work in without getting too cold and and like they're very small mine is like the size of maybe a tennis ball um when i pack it down but it makes you a lot warmer and you don't want one that blocks all of the wind because then you won't be able to it won't be breathable right oh you want something that's a little bit breathable. The one I have, I looked up the one I like, it's called a Mountain Hardware Core Air Shell,

but core is spelled with a K. That's how you know it's cool. Of course it is. Yeah. You got to get it in there somewhere. And then wear is spelled like, you know, like wearing clothes. So double puns on their spellings it's made of a stuff called pertex quantum air which is really cool it feels like

silky um but it's a synthetic fabric and it's really nice and it's very small and it's very light and you could put it in in you have like uh if you're wearing like cargo trousers you know uh you could put it in the side pocket or cargo shorts if you're that kind of person so those if you're looking for a cheaper thing to block the wind like you can find pretty cheap wind cheaters right out there you don't want something that's very plasticky and then kind of clammy you're going to sweat up in uh you can get surplus british windproof smocks that are really nice i use those all the time when i'm working outside because i have loads of pockets they're a nylon cotton blend so they're not all cotton and they uh they're very like robust you know they're not going to wear

wear down or like get destroyed if you're carrying lumber or you know rock climbing right if you're into climbing like a lot of this stuff will you need something with a thicker face fabric otherwise you're going to destroy it when you're climbing especially if you're climbing somewhere like joshua tree where like the rock is like sandpaper and it eats your clothing the final layer is your waterproof right you it's a final one because like you want to avoid wearing your waterproof really like i think far too many people wear like they rely on waterproof coats when it's not raining enough to need one uh the problem with waterproofs is if rain can't come in moisture can't really come out even fabrics like gore-tex pertex and they say that they're breathable but

i think anybody who's tried to exercise hard in a gore-tex jacket will tell you that they're not like um like if you're hiking with a group and you all put on your gore-tex then you need to move slower because you're going to overheat and then you're going to get wet from the inside because you're sweating i mean that's not what you want and so waterproof is important because when it's really wet and you're outside you don't want to get soaked right but it's also not something you should be wearing most of the time what you want to look for in a waterproof again there are like statistics numbers um one of them is the it's it's the pressure resistance of the fabric like it's expressed in the it's the height of a water column in millimeters until it can like push through the water resistance of the fabric does that make sense no not at all okay thank you

for your honesty that's good um it's if you imagine like fit like i have a a tube right it's a linear tube like a cylinder and then i put it on my waterproof fabric right put my waterproof fabric at the bottom of the tube and then i put one millimeter of water it doesn't do anything two mils three mils four mils i keep adding until until it pushes through the fabric so that's that's called like a pressure what do you call yeah that's a pressure it's sometimes expressed in pounds per square inch as well okay cool it's useful if you're like skiing or snowboarding and like safety of your skiing or snowboarding badly and you're going to spend a lot of time like sat on your ass um then uh or you know otherwise

working in snow like kneeling in snow that's very handy there's also a statistic which is probably more useful it's the millimeters of rain in 24 hours before it like wets out and becomes permeable so if you live somewhere really wet like belgium or the uk belgium just sticks out in my head as a place where it rained all the time but maybe that's just my bitterness you're looking for like something in the 20 000 range that's a jacket that you can pretty much wear all day in the wet and be fine a gore-tex pro fabric i know is 28 000 so i think that's kind of your gold standard uh but uh anything over 20 000 is fine and then breathability is the last one uh moisture vapor transfer rate and again anything over 20 000 is good um the other

thing to look for in a waterproof is taped seams and like you know the bits where it's stitched together if there isn't tape behind those seams then water can get in through that stitching um and like i've seen people get very expensive jackets which inexplicably don't have taped seams um i think it's like maybe a a fashion jacket or something but I have like wet like down every seam like they take off their jacket I would love to see you with a group of like people just that are wearing these kinds of clothing and just like you judging them quietly that's me every day serene every day when you see me I'm judging people for their outdoor clothing it just it

just happens inside my head it's my inside voice i'm happy that people are outside and i just want them to have a comfortable enjoyable experience that's a good like um thing to focus on if you want to like make sure it's like not a fashion jacket versus like utilitarian whatever you know like is it gonna actually be helpful or are you just gonna look cool or is it gonna do both yeah you can do both uh like i like you should feel good in what you're wearing and wear things that make you feel happy about yourself and your body and and however you want to appear it's fine like i don't give a fuck just want you to be comfortable and safe but he will judge you i won't judge you i i will judge you if you're doing something that might put you in danger or someone more equally.

Like you can put yourself in danger again. I don't care. Like if you want a free solo, if I can have it, but don't put other people in danger without their consent, I guess, which you're doing if you go outside, because someone has to come get you if you get in trouble out there.

And that's not a risk-free endeavor. All right. Returning from my judgmental character to waterproof jackets it's a you know shereen you know what else i am judging how my voice sounds no i'm i'm remaining aloof from judgment i would never uh but but i am judging the products and services that support this show and i'm judging them poorly because gold is not a good way to spend your money. But we still love our jobs. We do love our jobs.

Yeah, we do. I do enjoy my job. I like my job. I just, I want you to have nice jackets and not Ronald Reagan commemorative coins. So here's some adverts we're back and yeah we're going to talk a little bit more about waterproof jackets i think it's important the other thing you want to look for right uh so your um your tape seams are good uh and then i like to have mechanical venting which is yeah you mentioned that earlier what does that mean so that this is

these are vents that i can open where as opposed to venting through the fabric i want to vent through a zip that i can open up right so like i'm wearing a puffy jacket right now that's a mechanical vent right if i why am i saying that because obviously your jacket is mechanical venting shireen can see me no one else can it's like the sixth sense uh i'm a dead person and shireen is the only person who can see me that is wait can i just get that straight so just unzipping your jacket counts as mechanical venting yeah so like if you have a nice waterproof jacket it will have pit zips okay got it just want to what a fancy way just to say unzipping something well yeah yeah okay well because you but you want like this this is not

right if i unzip and it's a pocket inside that's not mechanical venting because james just unzipped a chest pocket for those listening everyone yeah welcome to the podcast where I do stuff and Shireen tells you what I do. Yes, pockets are not mechanical vents, right? They went away. So you've got pit zips. Some of them will have chest zips. Oh, okay.

Ways to force that hot air out and allow breathability to happen, right? So I like that in rain jackets uh and then i also like a hood right because having a wet head isn't fun and so this this one i like to have a hood and the belay park i like to have a hood um sometimes a wind jacket i like to have a hood if you're doing climbing and you're doing uh i never really wear a hood when i'm cycling but uh other helmet actually if you're caving or canyoneering might be a good idea to check the hood situation with the helmet that you wear for

that activity so like for climbing you know you lots of people will say they have a helmet compatible hood but i don't know what helmet those people are wearing uh because it they don't fit over like even a pretty low profile climbing helmet so if you know if you can go to your local outdoor shop take take your helmet uh you know don't don't be afraid of trying it on with the helmet on and you want these all really to be cut to allow you to move right like a lot of modern outdoor gear it looks really nice like when you're going about town but it's cut kind of too tight in the look while it looks very trendy it can inhibit your movement right and and so you want to be aware of that you may have to size up and it's not because you've

got bigger it's because clothes have got smaller also if you're layering that would make sense anyway right yeah definitely and you want to have your waterproof cut so it can go over your stuff right because if it rains you just want to chuck that thing on and likewise you want to have that big belay parka cut so that it can fit over your other layers right because again you want to be able to chuck that on as soon as you stop and your windproof jacket too so you can use it to protect your more expensive um you can even i know people who do the windproof jacket over the gore-tex uh just to protect it right um i have two gore-texes i like i have one that's very small and very thin and that i um

like keep as an emergency like if i don't expect it to rain or expect for it but i'm going on a week-long trip i'm not gonna you know want to be completely fucked if it rains so i bring a little one it's called the mountain hardware minimizer and kind of the name gives away this is very small it's made of gore-tex pack light which is like the the lower tier of acceptable gore-tex but it's fine you know like i go outside a lot and i use it and it's fine it doesn't breathe quite as well but um you can uh again overcome that right with some with some zips that unzip and then if it's going to be right all day i have a jacket that's a bit heavier thicker packs bigger but um the one i have is from a hunting company called follow

f-r-l-o-h it's really nice often for some reason hunting stuff in recent years has got a lot better and outdoor stuff kind of has... Hunting stuff used to be shitty. But it's kind of overtaken it for some reason. And sometimes it's also nice to have stuff that isn't bright orange and isn't like... Do you have a theory of why that is? Because people have a metric shit ton of money. And wealthy people have got into backcountry hunting because they want to have a big dead thing.

But these are not people who maybe... Some people are sending it really fucking hard doing hunting, doing like 10, 12-day hunts. And they're hardcore outdoors people as well. And they're very wealthy people. They like to be uncomfortable. And they will spend a lot of money on expensive jackets. That's my theory.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk those are the two things that you really want with any waterproof you do need to take care of them i think with gore-tex everyone should be aware of it has what are called forever plastics in it and they are really not good for the environment um and not only are they not good for the environment when it's made and this isn't just gore-tex right i'm not gore-tex is a brand they make fabrics and i'm not just it it's it's with all those like uh those those kinds of multi-layer laminate waterproofs and the it's not just when they're made it's also when water sloughs off them right like so when it rains on you and then that that the rain you know the raindrop goes into the stream the stream goes into the river and the

river goes into the ocean um the little forever plastics are still there and that's not good um it it i would imagine as with many things it it's more not good than we know right now um so some brands like uh fjallraven won't use gore-tex in their stuff for that reason they don't have any forever plastics instead they use waxes i think people are kind of maybe have forgotten or like you don't see as much of it as you used to but uh wax jackets are really good if it's going to rain all day if you're not so concerned about weight you can get like a waxed cotton jacket or wax canvas jacket um like carhartt makes some right or filson i have a nice filson jacket that i wear a lot and it's way way less fragile, but it is much heavier.

But it's also better for the planet. So that's something to consider. If you do have a Gore-Tex jacket, it's not something that I feel good having five Gore-Tex jackets and buying new ones every year. You should try and take care of them. And there's a product called Nikwax, which is really good. You should use Nikwax stuff when you're washing any of your outdoor but if you're washing down you should use nick wax down

wash or you'll really fuck up your expensive damn jacket um so i think that's a good thing and then yeah wax like consider how often you're really out in an absolute downpour and if that's not very often like maybe you're okay with a wind layer or just waxing the shoulders of your... I have a cotton jacket behind me that I just wax the shoulders of. It's like a smock with lots of pockets and I just put wax. I bought some Greenland wax, which is a Fjallraven thing, and wax the shoulders. So the shoulders are impermeable to water. Does it look different?

Does it look shiny? Yeah, it looks a little bit shiny, but it's not bad. And if you do it better than me, then it won't look as shiny. Yeah, I can see that. Not that bad. No, it's not that bad.

It's kind of fun. Maybe other people do other things for fun, but I kind of like it. You get a hair dryer and you grab the wax on and then you melt it in with a hair dryer that's what i do on saturday nights insight into my life uh so the last thing that i wanted to talk about was extremities right um i have rainos where like oh i do too oh really yeah really rain is going yeah look at my hands someone else that has it no yeah my feet are like yellow right now i mean not yellow if i press them they get yellow but like my feet and hands are always cold all the time yeah yeah same uh and it's miserable i hate having cold hands literally look at this wait i just bought these recently these are electric

hand warmers oh wow and i keep them now i just walk around with these all the time that's that's great yeah it's nice to have warm hands and if you too if you're a fellow hands colder there are some things you can do uh i think sometimes people wear really thick gloves that that stop the hands moving and that doesn't really increase circulation. Or they'll have cold wrists and then it's kind of like a temperature, you know, that blood's getting cold around your hands. So I found like having a base layer or a active insulation layer with thumb loops really helps.

Because then the thumb loops make sure that the sleeve goes all the way into the glove. And I would encourage you rather than wearing one big ass pair of gloves to have like a glove i know this sounds really dorky but like a glove system so like a thin fleecy glove and then a shell glove which is either waterproof or windproof um and then if you want to you can then stack that with a mitten on top of that right yeah i love them mittens are so cute yeah get your uh person who sews in your life to sew your pair of mittens have them join with a little string so you can run that through the sleeves of your jacket you don't lose them i used to have those yeah me too i like... Or maybe I just imagined having one. I can't figure out what are memories and what are not memories anymore.

But I love those kinds of mittens. Yeah, maybe I'll make... I'll knit you some, Shireen. James! Yeah, wouldn't you? I can't believe you have... Wait, how did you say it in British voice? Mittens. No, no, no. Ray-nouns.

Ray-nose. Ray-nose. Is that how you say it? Yeah. Ray-nouns. Ray-nose. Ray-nose. Is that how you say it? Yeah, I think so. Like, Ray-nose. They're French. Anyway. That's what I'm guessing.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I think mine maybe, I don't know, maybe it's just from being naturally cold, but holding onto the handlebars of a bicycle racing over cobbles for years and years and years has really fucked the circulation and sensation in my hands. Yeah, I can imagine. my hands yeah same thing that happens if you work a um jackhammer wow my hands get cold yeah it's good not good not good for the human body to do anything that much outdoor research make a good glove system but they

only make it for the military and they won't sell it to you which is lame yeah there's a lot of like so one of the reasons that uh some of this surplus clothing comes up is because it's designed as a system which is good right it's one piece designed to work with another piece uh and like for instance patagonia makes a uh protective combat uniform for the army as much as they would like to not talk about it it's still true and uh i've written about it before but they um they make a really good system and it's great and it's just got like they actually have like this little graphic that's like if it's this cold wear this if it's this cold and wet wear this if it's this cold and windy wear this and it's very handy for

people especially people who may not have grown up or had that kind of experience or just had the chance to try different products because they're very expensive right it's very handy to be like okay this isn't this and you only need these five or six pieces that way as opposed to having dozens of jackets and dozens of different things for different weathers so like it it works very well and it frustrates me that they don't do the same thing when selling to people who are not in the military um yeah so the other things i wanted to do with extremities real quick uh socks socks it goes the same way as gloves like you don't want a sock system yeah i'm glad that you're picking up when i'm putting down a shireen i have a sock system but it's not your it's not

anything about this tell me about your yeah well my my feet are always cold this is not a sock but i do wear this in my house oh wow shireen is showing me uh it looks like uh it's kind of a moon boot but made of fluff it looks like a yeti's foot it's very warm i don't wear shoes in my house so i either always have those slippers on or socks but my sock system is these socks can never mingle i have outside socks i have house socks and i have bed socks and those socks remain in their sections an outdoor sock cannot come in my bed that makes sense it does yeah i'm fascinated to learn more about this when we start recording i'm going to inquire more about shireen's sock collection uh yeah very interesting to me anyway yeah that's

neuroticism but i think so same thing with gloves you're saying like they should be layered So same thing with gloves. You're saying like they should be layered? Yeah. I mean, with socks, I think the big thing is to not always be trying to... I think people want to wear like a big, thick wool sock because it's cold. And then if you're going to cram that into your same boot, you're going to restrict circulation. You're not going to be able to move your feet, right?

So what I would do instead is either have a couple of pair of thin socks or use a warmer fabric so like alpaca wool is very warm for its weight the other nice thing about wool socks is again they insulate when they're wet right so um your feet are going to sweat when you're moving and uh and so you want something that's not going to get your feet cold right especially if you're a person who already gets cold feet so um merino wool is good alpaca wool is very good but yeah you don't want to restrict with like one big fluffy sock um you can get insulated boots if it's really cold i right down until below freezing i don't like insulated boots because again i don't like my feet to get sweaty and uh well you wear your feet for that kind of weather they get really cold just gore-tex boots

um i wear the same boots for almost everything unless it's like jungly if you're going to get wet like gore-tex boots suck right because they take forever to dry so like if you're in the jungle and the water's going to come over your boots then you shouldn't wear gore-tex boots if you're not i have some do you like to know exactly what boots i have sure i mean we're not sponsored though maybe no yeah yeah yeah i did get some of this shit for free when i was working in the outdoor industry but no one's paying us to say this uh i have solomon quest 4d gore-tex boots i think i have those wait i have those with no which ones do i have i did like a bunch of research a couple years ago when i got my new hiking boots and i feel like

i have the solomons or those were the ones i no no i do have the solomons because i returned the other one that everyone likes the which is what's it called the hokas the hokas oh yeah no yeah hokas make lovely running shoes i'm not i don't have a preference for that i think i mean i just didn't understand the hype so i remember switching over to or returning those and getting solomons wow look at us yeah yeah team solomon over here yeah they're vegan too um oh i didn't know that yeah that's fun if you have leather boots you can snow seal them around this time of year and then there'll be a bit less breathable but a bit more waterproof but um yeah consider not over cramming like thick socks into boots of the same size if you if you're going to get a specific pair of winter boots get

them a size bigger and then you could wear a thicker sock i would probably do that before i went to an insulated boot until it was really cold like arctic stuff you don't need an insulated boot um vasque makes some nice insulated boots that i've used and then hats is the last one hats again like uh it depends a little bit on the temperature but i have a couple of wool beanies that i got years and years and years ago and they're very good and they're very warm um the only thing is when they get wet they kind of stretch out a bit so they uh they don't love getting wet you might want to put a uh put a hood over yourself otherwise a fleece beanie is really good people are sleeping on the fleece beanie but like a micro fleece stretchy beanie it's very nice um i tend to take them when i travel because i'm a cold person and planes are cold um so if i have that and my little keffiyeh in my bag then i can kind

of wrap myself up uh on the plane and i probably look a bit weird to everyone else but i don't care because i am warm and planes are cold i think that it's the end of my ted talk on well warm warm clothing yeah we talk for an hour about cold shireen i didn't think we'd keep it under an hour wait really yeah no that's it i've been training my whole life for this shit like i uh i love i used to like my whole job used to be to tell people what to wear and and take with them when they go outside wait really yeah outdoor industry journalists for years and years and that was how i started my little when i was a little baby journalist you're the expert here a little baby journalist i wrote i don't think i'm an expert but uh i will say well i tell you what there's my other little soapbox you will read a

lot of reviews and sometimes like like the reviews for boots did they stitch harine in a good direction not everyone who's writing those reviews is going outside very much is what i will say uh or sending it very hard uh some of them undoubtedly are but a lot of them are trying to get you to click a link which will return a certain percentage to the website that you're clicking the link from and so four or five percent back right and you may for instance some of the brands i've mentioned here don't have that. It's called affiliate marketing. And if brands don't have affiliate marketing, you generally can't put it in articles for lots of magazines about the outdoors.

This is something that I fucking loathe. And you can't be honest and say, this is my favorite thing. Everything's designed to be SEO'd and to get you to click something and to return some affiliate revenue to the website. So it would take a lot of those reviews with a pinch of salt and also just small brands struggle to get into into a lot of into a lot of magazines because they don't have the marketing money to send piles and piles of free stuff so yeah be cautious about what you read and if you look around you know if you're looking at this shit

like like i absolutely have jackets that cost several hundred dollars that i got for free or i made some employer pay for because i was going somewhere horrifically inhospitable to human life like alaska or alaska's actually lovely i'd like to live there that's the dream right one day i'll podcast my way to a million dollars and raise sheep in Alaska. I was looking for tickets to Alaska yesterday, actually. Oh, hell yeah. I want to see the real life. After the show, we're talking about Alaska.

Yeah. Yeah, I need to see those lights. Yep, yeah. Yeah, go get after it. But I don't really support moving to Alaska and colonizing people's land because you shouldn't do that. Fair, fair.

Don't do extra colonizing. I'm already doing enough. I feel bad about it. So, yeah, I would suggest people take those reviews with a pinch of salt. There are websites like GearTrade where you can find used stuff, eBay, OfferUp. A lot of people buy outdoor stuff,

go camping once, get cold, get wet, get sad, slap it on the internet and sell it for pennies versus what it's worth so uh you don't have to buy any of this stuff new most of these companies also have bomber warranties uh and i'm just going to leave that there as to the combination of secondhand purchasing or warranties but you can probably join the dots wow yeah thanks for having me for this i learned a lot thanks for joining me shereen and sharing with me your sock system i mean yeah that was really intimate no i think this stuff is

like underrated how important it is i feel like i mean like unless you're always outdoors and you're like you're an outdoorsy person i think you wouldn't know exactly the best way to keep warm and it's good to know like what will actually help someone if you want to i don't know donate stuff to them so yeah we have been plagued with donations of really shitty blankets for instance it's no one's fault i genuinely understand that people care and like it i'm so proud that people want to help and it makes me so happy to see people taking the money that i know none of us have enough of and and buying stuff but like for instance a thick wool blanket is going to do so much more than two or three very thin micro fleece blankets you know if you're looking towards your local

unhoused community right again like think about things that are durable and that will still insulate when they're wet and wool if you if you do wool then then that's a great choice for a lot of those things um and uh but perhaps we can have one of my unhoused friends on to talk about like effective donations the best way to help people who are unhoused is to give them money and they can buy the things that they need because they know about the things that is good that is a good point and so. Yeah, that's my last thing for today. Give people who need things money so they can buy them. All right.

Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye. 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. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get

on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Elections!

No, we're not talking about those elections. This is It Could Happen Here. We're talking about a bunch of other elections and how fucking terribly they went. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and with me is James Stout. Hi, Mia. I'm stoked. I do love a good election. It's great to vote for people.

We are kind of talking about elections today but the thing that we're actually talking about is what has happened to the left since 2011 and anyone who was around 2011 2013 and like any time after that one of the arguments you got constantly was okay so 2011 you have occupy you have the movement of the squares you have these mass millions of people like assembling in squares and trying to do direct democratic stuff and you know figuring it out and making it work and it not working and you know all the complicated and messy things that happen when you have real political movements and that entire time there was an entire chorus of dipshits whose only line was well if you want to get serious about taking power you have to get into electoral

politics and these people got their wish and now we are like almost a decade and a half out i think i think we are finally in a position to objectively analyze how well this shit went. And, oh boy! So, join us as we wander from disaster to apocryphal disaster and go over the wreckage of all of these very, very once-promising and inspiring social movements. Joy, I'm so excited. I'm so excited to hear yet another attempt at making the world better that in fact failed. Yeah, so, okay, there's actually two places we could start here.

So I'm going to let you pick. Do you want to start with Sars here or do you want to start with Podemos? Let's start with Podemos. I do enjoy a good Spain. I've just been reading about another round of exhumations today so uh i do love a country that uh has baked into its constitution amnesty for people who did fucking mass ex it like spain has more mass graves than anywhere apart from uh is it rwanda or cambodia cambodia cambodia is the only place i think that beats spain from spain for mass graves jesus christ yeah a country which i cannot say enough has not finished its civil war

and remains a post-dictatorship and will until uh it recovers allows people whose fucking parents and grandparents were murdered in the street to uh recover their remains and grieve for them sorry i thank you for coming to my TED talk no no is good well i mean and part part of the context of this whole thing is that this is one of the underlying things that causes the enormous uprisings in spain 2011 they have one of the biggest i mean actually literally one of the reasons occupy happens is that there are specific people who are in like actually we've talked to vicky also while on the show about this like she was in catalonia when this stuff started there's there's like a million there were individual squares where there were like a million people oh yeah i was in catalonia when this stuff started

yeah and like and that's one of the things that brings occupied to the u.s people who were there for that being in the u.s and like being in zuccotti park when occupy started and so you know they have they have one of the largest and most powerful like anti-austerity movements like anywhere in the world is very well organized but one of the things that happens in this is very quickly there's an attempt to hijack this because people see the number of people who are in the streets they see they see this as an opportunity to you know take electoral power right this is the whole's like, we're serious about taking power, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Podemos in particular is influenced by, like, some of the people on Earth who I hate the most.

They're influenced by, like, they deliberately call themselves post-marxist like left populist philosophers their their model is peronism it is a shit show it is a catastrophe like every single party who's ever tried their strategy of taking power has failed like left populism as an elect as specifically like this kind of left populism at a strategy has a worse record for taking power in Europe than left-wing military coups like it's that bad to be fair left-wing military coups rarely succeed at the ballot

box so they use other means they're a more effective way of getting into power than this fucking left electoralism shit so for people who don't really remember Podemos was like them and Sarsia were like the thing in like post-occupy,

in that moment of like, these are the big left electoral successes. These are the things that are going to take power. Podemos specifically, so the thing Podemos calls itself, their whole strategy is to build what they call the electoral war machine. Their entire strategy is just to win elections. That's it. That's their whole strategy is to build build what they call the electoral war machine their entire strategy is just to win elections that's it that's their whole thing they're going to pull together a bunch of leftist groups they're going to win elections do they ever win a single

election no zero the entire time it has been since the formation of potatoes it has been what like 13 years they have lost every single election in a row they were in the uh they were in the sanchez coalition government with the facility yeah well so this is this is the other interesting thing is that but the thing that putamos is like thing right originally was well they had this whole sort of one of the things that's very popular in the early 2010s was this whole like oh we'll have a political party but it'll like take like uh it'll it'll take its policy from these direct democratic assemblies those assemblies never material that was all a lie yet anytime someone tells you that their political party is going to take its direction from like assemblies in the street they're lying to you they're trying to get you out of the street don't

believe them so that that was all nonsense but the other big thing about about podemos was that they were supposed to be like the big like third force in in spanish politics right they were going to be like the new force that was going to come in they were going to wipe away all the corrupt politicians and they specifically their big thing was that they refused to enter coalition governments now for long fast forward to losing like six straight elections. And now what is Podemos? Podemos is the permanent minority government coalition partner with the Spanish Socialist Party. And before you get excited about the Spanish Socialist Party, like they suck. Like they are literally. I will always stand anyone who digs up Franco's rotting corpse and flies it across the country. That does rip. anyone who digs up Franco's rotting corpse and flies it across the country. But they're also mostly

like, they're also I mean, they've kind of been forced to go a bit to the left, like by Podemos and like by the sort of transformations that happened, but they're also just like a bunch of dealable shits. Like literally, this is one of the parties that Podemos was formed to run out of power. And now they're just

a permanent minority coalition government. Pabloablo inglesias who is podemos is like great political strategist he was like he was like their guy he was the guy he wore cool leather jackets and shit like he was the guy who was like in every tell you what you see a politician in a leather jacket you fucking run yeah you you run a mile right it's peak dad's trying to look cool energy he he has retired from politics it just abject failure because nothing ever fucking worked um one of the one of one of the big things that you know one of the big recent things nepotavis did was help the socialist party crush the massive wave of metal worker strikes that swept spain in 2011 and in 2021 so great stuff happening there like they're you know they're not literally

fascists and that's that's their selling point uh they they fucking lose every election and they yeah ran ran ran the social movements into the ground yeah it's uh they literally had a thing didn't they like yeah their their men at their initial manifesto was like to convert indignation into political change. The movement that began the occupation of the squares in Spain was called the Indignats or Indignados in Catalan or Spanish. Their whole thing was to channel this energy into a process which is literally designed to stop shit changing. Yeah. And guess what?

It didn't fucking change. They lost every election. They've never won an election. They're never going to win an election. Yeah, remain in the streets, my Spanish friends, and Catalan friends, and Basque friends, and Galician friends, and other friends in Iberia. Yeah.

So, all right, moving on to... So, you know, we talked about how Spain had one of the biggest, like, movement of the squares type things. Greece, I think think technically gets the honor of having the first post-2008 uprising which was actually not an economic thing it was the cops like murdered a fucking kid and people just lit shit on fire like it was it was fucking wild it was there's a quote about like those first protests that i i always i was thinking about in in like the height of 2020 when i was watching that guy in the elmo mask with a molotov like which is you

know that that those first protests it was like people it wasn't it wasn't that people were trying people weren't trying to build a political movement they just wanted destruction because yeah yeah they were angry and they wanted to burn shit down abject abject fury at the cops just murdering this child um and partially also they murdered this kid like in in exarchia which is like uh greece's anarchist like neighborhood so yeah terrible idea by the police terrible thing greece has repeated massive protests one of the reasons they're having these protests is that greece is forced to accept these like crippling austerity measures by the Troika, which is this group that was running the bailouts in Europe composed of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, which is basically the executive branch of the European Union with reps from all of the EU countries. and the product of this is that the only faction that ever actually mattered in the troika was just germany effectively what was happening was germany was imposing like a bunch of economic sanctions on yeah this is when like the european union became like what germany says we do

especially if you got to this stuff in the context of these massive protests greece elects syriza which is supposedly this left-wing party that is going to you know specifically the mandate they were handed was stop the austerity and literally they they are in negotiations with the troika they have a plan in hand to tell the troika to fuck off and for greece to leave the european union to set up capital controls to start like you know this is a process that would have like the only way this could have functioned is they start you know they start literally like seizing property from like a bunch of fucking yacht owners and instead of doing that literally at the last second with the plan in hand at the

negotiating table seriza folds instead they cut a deal with the Troika, they impose literally the exact same austerity measures they were put in power to stop, and then, you know, now having done this, they're now facing their own giant anti-austerity protests, and the thing that Syriza does

is ally with the riot police, who by the way, one of the ways that Syriza got people to support them was specifically by running on basically completely rebuilding the greek police force because greece's police force oh yeah fuck me just straight up a bunch of nazis and when i say that i i literally they they vote i think it's 97 percent of their members voted for the golden dawn which is like the greek neo-nazi party yeah and like so many of these people vote for the golden dawn that they can be considered like a significant part of the total of of the golden dawn's base yeah and perhaps more importantly of of its like street fighting element that yeah that kills anti-fascist right those guys

like the golden dawn eventually comes apart because they they ordered the assassination of an anti-fascist rapper from parliament and then had the guy killed yeah yeah just fucking bad shit and those are the people who the greek police are supporting but sarzia sarisa needs them because they need the police to smash the anti-asterity movement to stop people from like knocking off their governments and stopping the austerity and they do it it works eventually after years and years and years and years of just smashing these like smashing these protests with police they're able to you know they're able to stamp out the sort of the the giant social movements and the consequence of this is that they turn over greece

to just like a bunch of just murderously far right anti-immigrant shitheads who are the people who currently run Greece they're unbelievable like just unbelievably right wing these guys are so right wing they were trying to find ways to claim credit for getting it like getting those like several hundred people on that migrant ship earlier this

year killed like that's that's who currently runs Greece and that's who Syriza like turned and that's who cerise like turned power over to because they literally did nothing and destroyed their own base yeah it's probably worth like stopping to note here that like fear-mongering around migrants has been the thing that has moved like straight up fascists into power in much southern europe right like italy and greece and like even if you're not a person who lives at the border like this shit is absolutely like the playbook that the far right

is using all over the world and they're absolutely using here right now and we have an election year here and and like you owe it to the world to correct that bullshit disinformation whenever you can now that we're talking about greece can we just briefly mention the archer of syntagma the biggest chad ever to walk the earth yeah yeah sorry i can't do it i can't do an episode without this guy if you are not familiar with uh janice micheladis uh it's this absolute legend dude who took a bow and arrow to the protests given a 13 year sentence and then escaped from prison i think was recaptured and then it went on hunger strike for a while just just a series of exploits that they're truly legendary uh incredible they they replaced this with fucking i just being another party that

imposed austerity yeah like no no one's replaced that guy he's still uh he's still remaining true to the cause but but as as as they they replaced the political movement that produced this guy yes with like just just genuinely the greatest glow down in human history just terrible stuff yeah it's it's very sad it could have been a wonderful thing there are still like greece has still a very strong and, like, respectable anarchist movement. I'm trying to get over there to... They squat large areas of

housing for migrants to, like, allow migrants to live in it, and it's extremely based. I'm trying to go spend some time with them next time. I forgot to mention this. So, they also do this in Spain. And, so, I've talked about this on the show before, but I should mention it here since we're doing this. So, one of podemos is like regional allies is barcelona and camus first thing that barcelona and camus did upon taking power was evict an immigrant squat because they

knew it wouldn't have enough defenses to stop the police evicting them so fuck these people those people used to be anarchists they're traitors fuck them yeah and this happens constantly right like the senate entered into government in 1936 with the Spanish Socialist Party and got completely owned by Moscow in an extremely predictable fashion, and all their friends got, in some cases, literally flayed alive. Perhaps consider not doing that next time.

Yeah, so speaking of being flayed alive, do you know who else will flay you alive if you don't buy their stuff? Is it their products and services that support this podcast? isn't it they're fucking they're all over that shit we can't say that can we just bleep it ian all right we're back so all right we need to talk about two other places where this kind of stuff happened we're leaving europe we're gonna go we're gonna go to briefly we're gonna go to the anglophone world no deeply cursed place so in the u.s uh all of these same people gained power uh

their giant political project and their only real political project was attempting to elect bernie sanders uh bernie sanders lost two consecutive elections first to hillary clinton the most unpopular democratic presidential candidate in modern history and then lost the second election to joe biden the man so senile he forgot what president he served as vp under and i'm only mentioning this because these are these these are the people who spend all of their time talking about how serious they are about taking power. And they got their ass kicked by, again, Hillary Clinton, the most unpopular candidate in the entire history of like the modern history of the Democratic Party. And Joe fucking Biden, a man like I just OK. And instead, the one guy they did run and managed to actually get into power was one John Fetterman.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, look, he's had some banging tweets, but he's been a complete fucking turd in his time in office. I'm pissed about this because from the very beginning, I was like, this guy sucks ass. He's Zionist. He's anti-immigrant. He fucking sucks. He's anti-trousers. He opposes anything below the knee.

No one fucking believed me. His campaign was run by a bunch of fucking DSA people. And instead they elected John fucking Fetterman, who hates everyone who fucking worked with him, is just screaming the same fascist anti-immigrant border shit. He's also in the pocket of Big Egg. He's introduced a bill to not allow people to call vegan egg substitutes egg what he's not even in like the pocket of like good big egg like he's not in the pocket of like

big people who haven't realized that they're trans yet no no he's in the pocket of bad big egg i think that's an act of solidarity like as a man with a giant bald dome he somewhat resembles an egg so he feels like communion with other eggs i think that's what makes sense yeah so okay that's the us at some point we're gonna do another episode about the all of the just fucking absolute dipshits that they elected and that the dsa elected in la who've been doing like just sweeping homeless camps so fuck them but that's not that's not today uh we're we're instead gonna move to corbin so all right so the british left in the beginning of i know it's like this is like impossible to imagine now but in the beginning of the 2010s the britain had a vibrant and expanding

left it had a bunch of street movements they had the student protests they had a bunch of riots and all of that energy and all of those fucking people you know got got sucked up by corbinism and corbin lost an election to boris fucking johnson a man who was ousted by his own party and replaced by liz shorter term than a cabbage trust like you know and all these people all these people i've had to talk to these people for fucking years and years and years right and their whole thing was like well okay like but the the media rigged the election against us and the labor party was trying to sabotage us like yeah no shit what the what the fuck did you expect was going to happen did you seriously think if you even like just like remotely wanted to challenge capital at all did you seriously expect that the bourgeoisie were going to play by the

rules what the fuck did you think was going to happen you you think they were just going to fucking sit there and let you take power because your ideas were somewhat popular like no of course they fucking were of course they were going to sabotage you and the whole fucking thing about the media it's like well yeah of course you know like yeah obviously the media in in britain is run by the fucking burdocks it's their press is an unbelievably insanely right wing sure however comma you guys are the ones who decided to pick an arena where your candidate and your entire political project can be sunk by negative press attention you picked that arena to fight and then on top of that you ran a completely conventional political campaign right literally all you did was fucking canvas

you ran a completely conventional political campaign that everyone's fucking pikachu facing that they had like one of the worst labor losses in modern history right like okay what what the fuck did you think was going to happen right and this is this is again this is one of the reasons why electoralism doesn't work because if you're in a field that is entirely about the popularity of one person and there's an entire apparatus that is able that is better able than you to directly communicate to the entire population to tell them that that one person is fucking bad of course you're gonna fucking lose like what what what did you think was gonna happen and now you know the labor party is run by cure starmer who is like the most right-wing labor candidate

since like tony blair he prosecuted the people who were in the streets in 2010. That is where we've got to now. We have a choice between Rishi send gunboats into the channel to sink the small ship Sunak and the guy who wants to lock you up for taking a bottle of water from boots in 2010.

It's not a choice. The corporate left has been basically completely liquidated the only thing that's left of it are these media organizations who are all tacking right as fast as they can possibly fucking move because that's where the fucking money is and because you know starmer actually used to be a trotskyite and all of these people know that the way you actually if you are on the left and you want to take electoral power in britain the way you do it has become a conservative and it will work yeah yeah i mean look look look at tony blair right he was extremely successful in like criminalizing being a teenager and these insanely right-wing policies again people aren't

familiar with anti-social behavior orders in britain they should they should look them up and like machines that make noise to keep young people out of public space like it's a fully yeah like the shit he was doing was insane and uh but if you ever continue to well look britain's electoral system and you think america's electoral system is fucked check out first past the post like fully insane one of the areas i lived when i was a kid like you just didn't have an option there was some like someone named giles or a similar kind of like giles vibing name or a token lib dem candidate and like you know mom but you because your only choice really like like which is why i did not engage in the practice of voting in the united

kingdom but yeah it is a fuck system yeah and and again it's like well yeah you you chose a rigged system to participate in in the first place and then just like well's like well yeah you you chose a rigged system to participate in in the first place and then it's like well you lost well yeah it was like yes you can complain that it was rigged against you but you should have known that going in if you were genuinely serious about taking power you had to know that and you fucking didn't and now your entire country has been absolutely destroyed so yeah that that that's the uk and we're going now and so from there we're going to pivot to latin america where there is a very very long history in fact a lot the latin american parties we'll be talking about mostly aren't even parties that took over from the

momentum of 2011 like like uprisings they're from like the 2001 movements of people who hijacked like two generations back of social movements by this point. And I think that the post-2011 stuff was inspired by the pink wave stuff in Latin America, right? Like it sort of goes around in a circle. Yeah. So now we're going to check in on how the pink tide is doing. And the answer is absolutely dog shit. So we're going to go to Ecuador first.

So, okay. Ecuador is right now a complete fucking disaster. It shouldn't be like this though in theory correa is like the is the guy and he's like the leftist guy in ecuador he's like he is their guy who came out of the pink tide and in theory his party should win like basically every ecuadorian election from now to the end of time they should in theory have the easiest job of like every every any electoral those are talking about in this party they have had they had a decade in power to just completely destroy all of their political opposition and you know to completely rebuild the economy and

political landscape in a way that would have made the right-taking power impossible instead his party is completely unelectable and have been out of power for eight fucking years after Lennon Moreno, who is the guy that they, literally the hand-picked guy that they picked to run their own party, purged them all, tried to have Correa arrested, and spent the entire rest of his career being a right-winger. Now, even after, even after they got purged from their own party by the guy that they hand-picked to put into power next after they would turn out to be a right winger even after that happened they still should have been able to win like every fucking election however comma korea instead of like doing normal leftist stuff spent like his entire career sending riot police to beat the shit out of indigenous

ecological protesters who didn't want the drinking water to be poisoned by mines which means there are a huge number of like indigenous leftists who should be part of like the left-wing base who will not under any circumstances vote for correa even if he was running against literally the devil because he'd fucking beat the shit out of them like fuck you and you know and this one i should briefly explain like okay this is this is obviously a very very simplified this is yeah it's a political i mean i'm going to do a political compass thing that's very simplified but i think gets across one of the major kind of like breaks in a lot of latin american countries that have real lefts and also whose economies are largely based on resource extraction which is that okay so you know you you have you have your

kind of political compass like you would in the u.s you have a lot you have a left right axis but in a lot of these countries the up down axis isn't like statist anti-statist the up down axis is on the one hand you have like developmental extractivists, and on the other hand, you have ecological anti-extractivists. So what this means in practice is there's this giant divide over whether or not you should do drilling on indigenous land. So, for example, you have the current right-wing Ecuadorian government, which is extractivist and right-wing. And this means they think you should drill on indigenous land and you should take all the money you get from that and give it to rich people there is you know correa's government was extractivist and left-wing which means that you know you you do you do all the mining on indigenous land but

then you take the money and you give it to a welfare state and then opposed to him was a bunch of anti-extractivist indigenous ecological groups who want redistribution, but they don't want people poisoning their water with mines. So they oppose Correa because they don't want their shit mined. And then there's also, Correa's also opposed by these liberal environmental NGOs who don't want the Amazon destroyed but also like poor people can go fuck themselves and this this has made the the the way the constellation of these things have have worked out means that like what should be like a pretty normal left right political alignment thing has gone completely nuts there's a bunch of like there's a bunch of sort of like ecological indigenous groups who have gone hard who have like swung right because the right-wingers are

the only people who will support them against Correa. Meanwhile, the actual like indigenous electoral opposition in its various forms is a complete fucking disaster. Pachacutec, which is like this is the big sort of like indigenous electoral alliance.

They keep running this guy named Yaku Perez who is like he's like the only person in the entirety of Ecuador who's more unelectable than Correa is. Like, nobody fucking, even the addition of his opposition to Correa, like, doesn't like him. So, and, you know, eventually, Yaku Perez, like, left the party, but it doesn't really matter because they still just lose every single election. The left is they're completely dysfunctional and you know there's there's other like things going on here too which is that like for example correa's like has an unbelievably hardline anti-abortion stance

like he he threatened to resign if his party tried to pass legislation that would allow abortion in the case of rape like that's how anti-abortion this guy is fucking that's bad this is like like okay yes this is this is this is a very very catholic country right sure even by that standards that's fucking nuts like yeah that's bad oh yeah that's uh that's rough you know so the the product of this is that a a country that has a like a decently centered left electoral like electorate in, has produced three straight conservative governments. These governments have absolutely annihilated the Ecuadorian economy and the welfare state and left it prey to organized crime, who, unlike the just completely dysfunctional Ecuadorian state, can at least provide a semi-stable income. But the downside of this is that they're organized crime.

state can at least provide like a semi-stable income but the downside of this is that they're organized crime so you know not things going very badly i you've probably seen some of the like absolutely wild videos of stuff of like people storming like like armed groups just like storming uh like tv stations they assassinate they've assassinated actually several presidential candidates now yeah that was uh it's been there on a wild one yeah it's it's really bad on christmas eve i was talking to a family from ecuador um who's had come to the u.s to get some medical treatment for their son who very manifestly needed help and they were telling me like just of their life experiences and like it was bad uh it was like i i've been to some uh some places where violence it happens and like the stuff that they were telling me was was shocking it's gotten really really bad since basically between 2015 and 2017 and it's just progressively gotten worse as these right-wing governments have stayed in power

and you know right now right now there there hasn't been an alternative to them because the electoralists who are again the people who are supposed to be serious about taking power are just a complete fucking disaster and can't do anything yeah correa can't literally can't go back to ecuador now right i i think he might be i think he can go back now there was a while where there was a warrant out for his arrest i think he's back now okay yeah but the the ray of light for ecuador is ecuador still has a lot of very like of of very military street movements who've been winning have actually been like winning concessions from governments when they go when they go into the streets so that's good. Inshallah, one day the electorals get the fuck

out of their way and they win. But it hasn't happened yet. Things are really bleak. On that note, do you know what's not really bleak? The possibility of buying gold coins to insulate ourselves against

inflation. Yep. You'd be stoked if you had a ton ton of gold necrodor wouldn't you yeah currency's going to shit sitting on your pile of gold like scrooge mcduck you'd be you'd be living the dream all right and we're back so all right we're gonna take a couple of other i'll take a few other places that the electoral left has won in uh chavismo is dead as a doornail uh maduro's slashing pensions all arising the economy is cutting a bunch of deals with american oil companies and has arrested the leadership of the Venezuelan communist party. Again, keeps doing this.

So, you know, things, things going great, like obviously not helped by the blockade, which is very bad, but like, you know,

not great. Morena, which we're not going to talk an enormous, at some point we're going to like actually do a thing, like actually go a thing, like actually go talk to the Zapatistas, but things are not good there right now. So the left in theory kind of has taken power in Mexico.

Unfortunately, the moment they took power, they immediately tacked right-handed control of vast swaths of the country over to the military, built a train through a bunch of indigenous land, and then it gave that to the military. Yeah. Switched a bunch of military commands around because they like claimed that the old guys were corrupt.

Yeah. And, you know, and one of the other things that's been really bleak about it was that like the whole premise of Omlo, like coming into power was like, he ran in the campaign hugs, not bullets, right? His whole thing was he was supposed to be ending the war on drugs.

Did he end the war on drugs? Absolutely not! Gave shit ton of power to the military. People still getting fucking slaughtered. Yeah, I don't know. I definitely saw a bunch of dudes in ski masks with a.50 cal chilling just the other side of the border sent by the government two days ago. And instead of

doing that he's also been like continuing to like escalating the war against the zapatistas who've been getting just like people getting fucking murdered by a bunch of these government backed paramilitaries uh it's really fucking bleak out there right now yeah so that that that's been that's been the legacy of omlo finally winning a mexican election is the most right-wing possible omlo government like i will say they're better on trans stuff than everyone like the other parties who are all completely nuts but that's about the only bright spot yeah i mean like they were in bilateral negotiations with the u.s and like when the u.s clicked its fingers and said shut down these gaps in the border

they sent a bunch of National Guard soldiers to sit right at the gaps in the border wall. They've been doing a bunch of horrific anti-border shit. AMLA was also just pretty friendly with Trump. Yeah, there was a populist thing there. Yeah.

That fucking sucks. We're going to close on the MAS mas oh boy so there's been a bunch of stuff happening in bolivia that i i don't i i don't think most americans have heard much about so the mas movement for socialism there's some other shit, but yeah, they are. Well, okay.

So for most of the time they've existed, it's been even more Alice's party. However, comma, it was always kind of a weird coalition because the MAS is, is this coalition between like the social movements. And in, in this context,

like people say social movements, this includes like, say social movements this includes like you know like giant like movement groups but also like unions and stuff so it was a coalition of these unions and these like developmentalist capitalists who were welded together by even more allies than some of his allies and you know the sort of common ground of forging a like quote unquote indigenous plurinational state that's based on like oh based on forging a welfare state based on like mining and extractive stuff and like oil drilling and stuff and also based on the emergence of this new sort of indigenous middle class right now it has

split in two between an evil morales faction and who was the former president was president for a very very long time and luis acre who was the who is the current president oblivio but has been kicked out of the mas by evo and his faction so this is a disaster they both of them both acre and evil morales have these they have a lot of personal alliances within the social movements. And this means that it's been a very, very messy split. And, you know,

this is not okay. If you look at these two people, you would expect it to be an ideological split because Acre is from like the developmentalist right of the party. Like he was, he was a banker. He's been in charge of the bolivian central bank for a long time he was like finance minister so he's from like the center right like developmental

faction of the party evo technically speaking has been the representative of like the the sort of like the social movement faction of the party uh he has a lot of allies in a lot of coca growers unions stuff like that but it hasn't broken like that because this isn't an ideological fight this is just these two guys both want to be presidents and so they've literally torn the entire bolivian left in two over over this fucking bullshit yeah never before happened on the left two dudes wanting to be in charge yeah and and this is this has been really really messy and and it's not breaking down the way it's not breaking cleanly politically down because there's a lot of like people from the anti-extractivist left of the party who are pissed off at the way that evo has like personally tried to seize control of what are supposed to be

independent social movements and i know people hear that and are like wait what's what's the problem with like social movements being integrated with the state because like we don't the u.s doesn't have social movements like not not in the way that like that latin america has them like dlm is the closest thing that we have to that but imagine if like blm was like an actual leftist group like the actual like organization black lives matter yeah like capital leftist blm yeah yeah it was like it was like a leftist group that would like lead protests and strikes and shit like we don't have that that's like not a thing here and so mostly when people hear about the stuff they're like wait what what does that mean like why why are we complaining that like these that social movements are being like folded into the

state or like folded into this bureaucratic apparatus so i'm gonna run through an example of what that looks like in practice so we're gonna we're gonna talk about the briefly talk about the confederation of indigenous peoples of bolivia so yeah based yeah so we talk about the we follow flag i i didn't have anything in there on it it is very funny given given what we're about to talk about it is very funny that all of the pro-mas people in in in the u.s had that as their flag as like their had that flag as their profile picture when this coup was going on it's one of the cooler flags out there it rips it does rip so so back in 2011 this is like this is like eight years before the coup um the the confederation of indigenous people of bolivia opposed building this road

through protected indigenous territory that the government was trying to force through so they opposed it their opposition didn't do anything they you know they joined in this enormous protest movement against this road construction um evo and his supporters had the confederation's offices stormed by riot police and tried to replace his leadership with loyalists this failed initially and the you know so the the confederation of indigenous peoples of bolivia had been part of the like of the mas's like formal alliance right after that they were like fuck you man we're out uh they left and then the confederation split between the groups who were pro-evil and everyone else so another faction of the confederation split between the groups who were pro evo and everyone else so another faction of the confederation split from the regular confederation and went back and joined and

calling themselves the same thing and went back and joined the mas again so like this is a shit show right and a lot of it is like you know it's it's it's it's comes down to these sort of like loyalty testings like are you willing to back every single thing that evo wants to do and if you're not like they're going their faction and this is the thing that like this happens in the fucking dsa all the time right like everyone in the dsa is constantly trying to purge every other faction install their loyalists like in charge of whatever fucking working group right but you know this is happening in a place where the left actually has power which means that instead of like you know a series of weird elections and like purging people from positions you're storming their offices riot police yeah

this is why a lot of sort of groups you would expect to be backing evil arts and are backing okra instead but really truly this is just two guys having a dick waving contest uh this is what happens when you do electoralism um yeah and but you know it's also worth mentioning the reason we're in this situation in the first place is that evo refused to just like in 2019 refused to just let someone else in his party run like if literally anyone else had run the nas would have just trivially easily won the election there wouldn't have been a coup it wouldn't have been the potential to do one but he refused because he wants to personally be in power and this is what allows the 2019 coup to happen and the second the second reason that we're here

now is that in 2021 and i don't think i don't think most american leftists like know about this i think people know about the coup i don't think people know about the stuff that happened in 2021 which is that there was this massive series of there was this massive series of of like barricades that went up to bring down the coup government so this is the thing that happens periodically in bolivia this is like this is how the social movements took power in the first place is that they you know bolivia because of the way the terrain works very very mountainous country very narrow roads not many roads into a place you could just block all of the roads that go into the capital and you could just block all of the roads that

go into the capital and you can just you can shut down the entire country's economy by just doing these roadblocks they very nearly this is actually like again the origin of the nas is that they very nearly like completely destroyed the believing government with this in 2006 um and then evo pulled his people off the barricades and was like no we're gonna do an election he easily wins the election because he's you know he's doing the thing we've been talking about this whole episode which is harnessing the power of of these social movements in order to get elected and it works like he becomes president but in 2000 you know in 2021 it happens again and these groups are getting very close they they've they've done enough damage that they forced the coup government to

like actually have elections which they didn't want to have but they're on the verge of like actually knocking the government out of power and evo once again pulls all of his people off the barricades because he doesn't want the barricades to like disrupt his chance of winning the election and so instead of like bringing down this government and like ushering in like sweeping like left wing reforms, whatever, on like the back of a revolutionary seizure of power, we have the M.A.S. split between two dipshits. And yeah, these are these are very, very serious about taking power. You can tell this because they've split the party over personal bullshit. Yeah, every time right like leaderism is the curse of the left and it uh yeah it stops us doing things because it's always just dudes chest something at each other yeah and and and this is the second part about it

is that this is it's this is a product of leaving the streets and we're going to close on chile we did a very optimistic episode on the protest in chile a couple years ago because it looked like they were actually winning that's not true anymore after the the whole okay so chile in 2019 has these massive massive street protests um they they successfully forced the government to call a constitutional convention to like replace their pinochet constitution but that got everyone off the streets and because it got everyone off the streets i both successive attempts to have a constitution have failed it's deeply unclear what the fuck's gonna happen with the constitution it's possible they're gonna end up with a constitution that is even more right-wing than the current one because they've

blown literally their moment of opportunity by pulling everyone out of the streets and now the rights resurgence is a complete fiasco yeah the the repression of indigenous people has continued unabated under the new quote-unquote left-wing government so yeah it's it's a complete fiasco and that that is today's lesson which is if anyone when people tell you that they are the ones who are serious about taking a wielding power and they want you to go vote for them we have they have failed everywhere for a decade do not let them do this to you again don't leave the streets yeah instead don't leave the streets don't give someone else fucking power take it for yourself

that's that that that's that's all i've got yeah that's a good place to end i think yeah don't uh don't infantilize yourself by electing some instagram prick to make decisions for you 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. 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. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show.

I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Welcome to Good Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage of

the YouTube channel Andrewism. And one of the last times I was on here, I was discussing political cults generally, drawn from the work of Dennis Turish and Tim Woolforth in their book On the Edge, Political Cults Left and Right. We learned about the rollercoaster emotional ride that individuals experience during cult recruitment, where their feelings and ideas are manipulated and they are drawn into an exclusive and isolating group. We explored the common techniques used by political cults, including creating rigid belief systems, immunity to falsification, authoritarianism, arbitrary leadership, deification of leaders, intense activism, and the use of loaded language.

We also highlighted the contradictory positions often held by members of political cults, such as advocating for liberty while supporting totalitarianism, believing in equality alongside leaders accumulating privileges, promoting sexual morality while exploiting members, and demanding free speech rights while suppressing dissent within the group. And we also examined Robert Lifton's eight conditions that indicate the presence of ideological totalism within cults, which include milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, the cult of confession, the sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and the dispense of existence.

If you want the details on all that that you can check out the first episode in political cult series or you could pick up the book on political cults yourself as i said on the edge political cults left and right by dennis turish and tim walforth i also had an episode where i spoke about the trotskyist and right-wing cult of lyndon larouche which was primarily based in usa but today uh joined by garrison i want to take a look at the deadly cult that arose from the japanese student movement the united red army very exciting stuff in my research for this episode i looked at dead bodies and living guns by yoshikuni higurashi the Japanese Women's Liberation Movement and United Red Army by

Setsu Shigematsu, and Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers by Patricia G. Steinhoff. So, let's get into it. And to do so, we're going to need some historical context. Not necessarily as in-depth as digging into the evolution of post-war Japan, which is such a deep and complex period in history that it really deserves and is given special attention by historians that I have not the knowledge to muster. We do, however, need to take a look more specifically at what the conditions were like in the country in the late 60s and early 70s. After the war, Japan was transitioned into something of a liberal democracy with all that that entails. You entails, the US rolled in and

occupied Japan and forced all these changes and reforms. And so by the late 60s and 70s, you have post-war children who were now adults and had gone through and witnessed these systems firsthand. They saw the limits of democracy and capitalism. Japanese society was firmly under the thumb of the US as well, which created its own grievances amongst the population. The Japanese government had become a key supporter of US imperialism in the Cold War era. Both the Korean War and the Vietnam War were facilitated through the US's military bases in Japan, and the Japanese left did not like that at all. Naturally, in response, the state would crush them, as states are apt to

do. When the Japanese were taken to the streets in solidarity, the state increased their surveillance, repression, and incarceration. Some on the Japanese left would come to see Japan as a police state with the US backing. But that wasn't the left's only issue with Japanese society. Japan's economic success post-war, thanks to the US, had brought the establishment of a mass consumer society that gave the population, even in rural areas and among poor factory workers, greater access to information and consumer goods. And that ended up posing an issue for the left in Japan because many of the organizations were struggling to adjust to the shifting tides. To quote Yoshikuni Igarashi directly, the new left's critique of post-war society had long been too rigid to address the rapidly changing social conditions of Japan. Each person was complicit with the political and economic mechanisms that produced

social injustice insofar as he or she took advantage of them. It was simply impossible to undo the effects of the system when many in society cherished their newly found agency as consumers. So the left in Japan was fixated on this very romanticized image of the rugged workers and not really engaging with what the workers themselves thought about and wanted to see transformed in their circumstances like yeah it's understandable that workers despite being exploited would also cling to some of the comforts they've gained even under those poor circumstances and these left organizations weren't adequately engaging with that they were engaging with the fact that yeah this poor factory workers poor and suffering but they also appreciate the fact that they have like access to all this these new new

technologies and all this new entertainment media and all that stuff they were still stuck in this very late 19th and early 20th century sort of understanding yeah so they were kind of ideologically stuck and disconnected they had this one vision of the struggle and it wasn't really being updated with the changing times so it's no surprise really what will result from this late 60s status quo first i think we should start by understanding the various associations of sekigun which is the red army there were three major related groups under the label of Sekigun that shared a very particular vision.

To quote Patricia G. Steinhoff, 1. You have the original group led by Shio Meitakaya, which began as the Sekiguna of a major student organization in 1968 and dropped the ha designation becoming second sometime after became independent in mid-1969 nice two you had a remnant of the original second which in 1971 joined with another group to become rengo sekigun united red army and remember that because of the focus of today um and they became under the leadership of the Sekigun head Mori Sunyo

and then three lastly he had a group that developed in Lebanon beginning in 1971 under the leadership of Okidaira Takeshi and Sekigun member Shigenobu Fusako and formally broke with Rengoku Sekigun

and this group formally broke with Rengoku Sekigun. And this group formally broke with Rengoku Sekigun, the United Red Army, in 1972. They were called the Japanese Red Army. So you have the Red Army faction, Sekigun Ha, which dropped the Ha designation and became Sekigun. And you had a remnant from the original Sekigun, which joined with another group to become Rengengo Sekigun, the United Red Army. And then you had a group that broke away from the United Red Army and became the Japanese Red Army.

Very classic Marxist-Leninist party-splitting practices. So in the early days, Sekiguna, the parent revolutionary org of the later two groups, beckoned Japan's brightest students, the children of many elites. And when I say elites, I mean these youths would have been regular-degular academics, doctors, bureaucrats, and corporate careerists, if not for them joining this organization. Having passed their entrance exams, immersed in the anti-mainstream culture of the universities at the time, they seized that freedom to create organizations against mainstream Japanese society. The Red Army Sekiguna had split from its parent group, a national student organization called the Communist League, informally BUND, over a quote, unresolvable policy dispute. And the BUND itself had come out of the first major factional split in 1958

in the post-war Japanese National Student Organization, known as Sengakuren, which was formed by folks who had been expelled from or left the Japanese Communist Party. So, just to bring you up to speed there, you have the Japanese Communist Party, and then some people who were expelled from that party

created their own organization known as Sengakuren, and then that Sengakuren organization splits do you know what else could benefit from a split right now it's this episode with this ad break and we're back one of the splits that came out that was the communist league which became known as the bund and the bund had a split within it that birthed the red army and the red army had its own splits yes as so as all these groups love to do. Yes, lots of splits in. And according to Steinhoff, Bund actually had a really remarkable history of internal factional splits.

In fact, even for its own cohort, it was quite exceptional. It generated over 50 separate groups in addition to Sekiguna, which had become Sekigun dropping the Ha, as ha as i said after became independent from bund in 1969 again nice and then after the split second going immediately copied the already outdated communist party setup that bund had initially inherited from its own parent organization i mean everything from the central committee to the politburo to to the secretariat, to the formal representation from regional and local units, though a lot of these structures mainly existed on paper according to former members. So what was Psychagon doing? Well, the members were already experienced in orchestrating mass activities typical of the era's student movement. They excelled in producing and

disseminating political publications, organizing meetings, and coordinating street demonstrations. But eventually they realized this stuff just isn't working. They needed something bolder. The group aimed for innovative action rather than organizational innovation, adopted the Red Army moniker, and aligned themselves as soldiers within a loosely structured central committee and despite being a legal entity in post-war japan sekigun quickly found itself at odds with the state due to its provocative intentions and actions the group openly declared its intention to engage in legal activities, no kind of upset whatsoever, triggering intense police surveillance and a confrontational relationship from the outset. Their journey transitioned swiftly from public legal events to clandestine and unlawful activities such as weapon making, hijackings, bombings, weapon theft and bank robberies.

And with that unfamiliar territory came many mistakes and much relearning. So they went from having meetings and making zines to doing other stuff, is what I take it, translated to a modern politically active audience. They went from doing like peaceful protests you know peaceful marches sit-ins that sort of thing to like bank robberies yeah bombings yeah and on top of that they really had the they had the inflated sense of self to grandiously label their attempted uprisings as the tokyo war the osaka war sure sure kyoto war i mean their actions in a sense it is some urban guerrilla warfare that they might have been engaging in with some of these actions very clandestine very direct and and violent and stuff and there was a steep response a lot of a lot of like

more of these like extremely violent militant insurrectory type can kind of get that inflated sense of what they're doing and even though i i don't think ted k is an insurrectionist but still it's a it kind of um it's it's like did he think that blowing someone's fingers off every five years was gonna trigger the collapse of industrial civilization and you're like maybe maybe not but that doesn't seem like a really great plan um yeah if you're just taking someone's fingers off yet you think you're like the only one who's standing in the way between industrial society and the future of a desolate earth. But I don't know. It is a complicated thing sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah. It's always hard to gauge the successfulness of your own actions. Indeed. Indeed. But I mean, in this case, I think we can gauge the success because, well, first of all, the actions all eventually led to police raids, arrests and indictments. Sure. And also, we could measure success based on the achievement of particular goals.

And all of their attempted uprisings were made with the aim of global revolution based on Trotsky's ideas. Okay. Yeah, so they were trying to build an army that would not only lead in revolution in Japan, but also aid in revolutionary activities worldwide. So some of their members even sought support and training from groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Huh. Yeah, and eventually,

they tried to organize guerrilla training with intent to attack the prime minister's residence, but a police raid foiled their plans and arrested 53 of their members which led to the core of the organization to go underground and then while they were underground their style of organization had to evolve initially they resemble the sort of cumbersome bureaucracy of a communist party but eventually they reinvented themselves to become similar rather to the japanese managerial styles of the time period in short uh because i'm really trying to get to the juicy bits of what was happening the communication hurdles that they faced due to that underground police surveillance

led to a sophisticated telephone network managed by leaders' wives and girlfriends. Organizational decision-making went from egalitarian debates to hierarchical orders, and after any activities, they engaged in evaluations to refine their approach for next time. So given all that history and context, what happens next really shouldn't be all too surprising. In December 1971, the few remaining not arrested or dead members of Sekigun's underground army joined forces with another group

in a similar situation called Kakomei Saha, or Revolutionary Left, to form the United Red Army, a.k.a. Rengo Sekigun, which established themselves in a remote cabin in the Japanese Alps in the dead of winter in Guma Prefecture and tried to work out the ideological and organizational differences that came from uniting the two organizations. The new group was led by the Red Army faction leader, Tsunio Mori, and second in command by Hiroko Nagata the leader of the revolutionary left and quick quick digression it's actually a big deal Nagata was a woman and that was sort of a win in a sense I mean a win not in a broader sense probably not a win

considering what happens next but a win in the sense that at the time there was a big issue with the japanese new left and its patriarchal nature where women typically only had any kind of say or authority in relation to their male partners so it was kind of nice to see nagata get elevated to a position where she didn't have to be connected to a male figure in the movement in order to have any kind of say or any kind of political sway of course what she did with that say uh what she did with that political sway was not all too hot but yeah i digress under the direction of mori and girl boss nagata about 25 united red army members underwent revolutionary training to prepare for armed struggle against the state at this point though you have to wonder what exactly

they were hoping to achieve they weren't even connected to any legitimate workers' struggles in the country, they weren't organized in their communities, but they just created these revolutionary cells where they would hold firm to their rigid political aims and refuse to engage in reality. To quote Yoshikuni Igarashi directly, from the earliest days of the new left, confrontations with the police were endowed with performative value. By taking the beatings of police batons on their heads and being sprayed with tear gas, rally participants presented themselves both as victims of the state's repressive power and as agents of resistance against it. However, by the early 1970s, it became obvious that their performances were not enough to break through the status quo.

It was also apparent that popular support for the movements had reached its limit and was starting to wane. it became obvious that their performances were not enough to break through the status quo. It was also apparent that popular support for the movements had reached its limit and was starting to wane. As new left organizations began to see the futility of trying to build widespread support, their acts of violence lost their performative aspect. Rather than presenting themselves as both victims and agents of resistance, as they had done before, many organizations, including the Red Army and the revolutionary left, began to escalate their violence. The activists engaged in this increasingly brutal struggle became a sort of self-appointed revolutionary elite, a group that demanded of its members a stepped-up bodily commitment in the form of an ever-intensifying

regimen of physical training and corporeal deprivation and a willingness to die for the cause. The United Red Army's revolutionary struggles at the mountain bases demonstrated the process through which violence came to dominate the lives of its members. At another point in the journal article, he says that while the paradigmatic shift caused by Japan's high-growth economy demanded a new theory and practice of political engagement, United Red Army members merely wished to undo the effects of economic development, literally seeking to establish a critical purchase outside

of the existing system. Aspiring to transform themselves into a revolutionary elite, they physically distanced themselves in mountain bases, while valorizing violence as a means to achieve alternative political conditions their two-stage strategy of exiting and then striking back at the system however proved completely inadequate at one point early on two members in this you know mountain cabin in the japanese alps decided that they wanted to peace out of the united red army probably go back to living a normal life so in retaliation nagata organized their assassination with the help of united red army members yeah like how dare you leave uh yeah i mean i don't this whole red army saga is is a really great example of how an extremely militant leftist force really really

does mirror so many so many cult dynamics and like i i the stakes are high i get it like you you have a lot of like intense shared experiences with people it can produce a whole bunch of emotional volatile reactions i'm sure what they all went through i can oh i can barely even begin to understand with with my like with my background in more like uh like anarchist instructionary action but yeah you know it's the whole the whole hitman squad for whenever members like age out in their like late 20s is certainly an interesting move indeed and if that wasn't bad enough it gets worse so clearly the fact that people want to leave means that the character of their members are not good enough so the united red army wanted to improve the character of its

members so under mori and nagata's directives they underwent a purge through a process of collective and individual self-criticism it's always self-criticism with these people so before long self-criticism became this sort of high stakes test of each member's revolutionary commitment calling to question everything from their engagement in romantic relationships to their appreciation of material possessions any such attachments were seen as evidence that these members were not committed enough to the cause in fact they were the worst thing you could possibly be a counter-revolutionary. And then things got worse. So just to clarify, and this is according to Patricia G. Steinhoff,

who studied the organizational structure of these groups, when the United Red Army came together, they engaged in standard consensus decision-making procedures, which is how they came into agreement that the members needed to be toughened into revolutionaries capable of fighting the police. But despite engagement and consensus from time to time, the organization was very strictly vertical. The central committee had a separate room from everyone else in the cabin, and the intimate conditions made it easier to stand out if you weren't cooperating with directives. To quote one section of the article, when the top leaders introduced violence in order to speed up the transformation of the weakest members, no one was able to confront leadership to stop it. Those who disagreed tended to use

traditional Japanese methods of indirection, expressing opposition by silence and withdrawal. And given the purpose of the group's activity and the expectation of full participation that is built into the ground rules of consensus decision-making, silence and withdrawal were interpreted as unrevolutionary weakness, and participating in violence against others was soon defined as evidence of one's own sincere commitment to become a better revolutionary. Those who failed to participate energetically in the violence against others became the next victims of the pooch yeah that that all makes perfect sense to me actually yeah i want they deemed somebody to be a counter-revolutionary

the others would be ordered to punish them through beatings torture and exposure to the elements without food or shelter as you can imagine people died so when the first victims died the leaders said that they had died of defeatism because they couldn't overcome their own weakness uh-huh six weeks later in february 1972 12 of the 25 members were dead oh and steinhoff points out that ironically in between bouts of the purge the united red army members were able to break into work groups and carry out tasks like building a new cabin planning the next attack and burying the bodies of the dead comrades yeah so watching that you're like jumping between these purge sessions and like building a cabin with your buds you know honestly i don't doubt it like i this this all does make a sort of weird

sense to me like i've seen i i've seen radical groups kind of fall apart in not ways that lead to like mass purging as in like murder um but i've seen groups fall apart in similar ways to this you'll you'll have like a smaller insular clique who tries to remain really active and like keep going and doing stuff while also spending all their extra time towards continually purifying their member base because once you once you start that like purification and uh process like you can't stop you you have to keep the spotlight on someone else so then it's not on you like you have to be proactive in constantly purifying the member

group um or else someone's gonna set their target on you like it it has it i can i can totally see how this would have this would have uh gone down and i think smaller versions of this still remain to be a massive problem among radical organization structures even structures that claim to be horizontal they still have like an insular a click of like the people who are like the cool group who's going to replicate a lot of these same things and how even though it's not technically vertical practice, they still are able to do a lot of these same top-down and overriding decision-making processes. Yeah, and this is really what sort of motivated me to start to talk about political cults a bit more. I mean, that and reading the book, looking at this case and reading the book,

because I really, I want people to recognize that it's not like this strange, out-of-this-world thing that could never take place in your personal life. Like, it's very easy for any political organization to become a cult. Like, there's no ideology that's immune to that and so through these case studies and through the breakdown to the various components and elements of cult uh cult and cult behavior cult tactics i want people to be able to recognize the

signs because what i really hate the most and this is why i focus mostly on left-wing cults not as much right-wing cults is to see people who had so much potential to contribute meaningfully to like revolutionary change and then they just get all their energies redirected into self-criticism sessions and purification rituals and revolutionary lopping. Let's take an ad break here and we'll be right back to continue talking about the body count of the Red Army. Okay, we are back so 12 bodies dead and buried but on the upside they have a new cabin so true come on you know it's it's it's a small price to pay. So eventually the leaders, Mori and Nagata, left,

which gave each of the United Red Army members a chance to escape before they too succumbed to the fate of death. So I find it really interesting is that all of them wanted to leave, but they didn't find it in themselves to leave until after the leadership left. They were all too scared of each

other yeah and so they want they took that opportunity to escape before they too died um and of course the police were hot on all of their tails uh mori and agata got arrested and eventually there were only five members left and they were armed to the teeth they ended up hiding in a mountain lodge and managed to capture a hostage which was the wife of the owner of the mountain lodge and Setsu Shigematsu describes very succinctly what came next quote between 19th and 28th of February these five remaining members of the United Red Army held off over 1,500 riot police at the lodge, which was called Asama Sansu. This armed standoff and hostage-taking incident became an unprecedented television spectacle. Television news coverage of the incident began on 19th February, with hundreds of media staff on-site

to work the story. On 28th February, continuous live televised news coverage lasted for 10 hours and 40 minutes. This constituted an unprecedented broadcasting event in Japan's media history that has never been surpassed in terms of its duration and ratings. At the climax of the police operation on the 20th of February, with 89.7% viewer ratings, according to the National Broadcasting Corporation, almost the entire country was watching the same thing on TV. The United Red Army's form of small-scale insurgency against the state was thus rendered hyper-visible, and this drew unprecedented attention to this new left sect.

So after the remaining members were captured between the interrogations, media interviews, and autobiographies, the whole of Japan and the world got to hear what really went on. Immediately after the hostage situation, despite their rather fringe style, Immediately after the hostage situation, despite their rather fringe style, the U.R.A. actually had some public sympathy until the truth of how bad things were came to light. They even made a movie about it. The news of the purge practically devastated not only the broader Sekigun organization, but also transformed the course of the radical left in Japan and beyond. Remember, they did have a branch in Lebanon, which thankfully did not make the same purging mistakes.

Still though, many in Japan lost hope in revolution as a result of the publicity of those actions. Political activism had already been on a decline in the late 60s and early 70s, but the shock of the purge was like a nail in the coffin. A lot of people literally distanced themselves from their own leftist movements because of how staggering that news was. The purge literally purged leftism as a major force in Japanese society. And it's only recently with writers like Kohai Saito that Marxism has started to gain some attention again. And this is like around what? This is like the, are we in the 60s, 70s?

Yeah, yeah. All this took place in the, the purge took place between December 1971 and February 1972. Really, really the last dying breath of the militant Trotskyites, I guess. Indeed. If we look at the techniques used by political cults,

rigid belief systems, check. Immunity to falsification, check. Authoritarianism, check. Immunity to falsification, check. Authoritarianism, check. Arbitrary leadership, check. Defecation of leaders, most likely. Although I didn't see any evidence of that specifically, I wouldn't be surprised. Intense activism, check.

Use of loaded language, I'm sure. Yeah, I bet. use of loaded language i'm sure yeah i i bet you see basically all of those tactics employed in this organization and you just see the result of it and i think it's stories like these that need to be known so that such mistakes can be avoided in the future so yeah that's the avoided in the future. So yeah, that's the story of the United Red Army. This has been It Could Happen Here.

It certainly could happen. No, I think it is a really good example. Now, it doesn't map on one-to-one, because I don't think many people are doing exactly what the Red Army did

in terms of their style of militant struggle. But there's smaller scale versions, and there's still the kind of insular group dynamics, whether that's like just an affinity group, whether that's like a larger collective. I think there's a lot of lessons to learn from the Red Army, and it'd be to learn from the Red Army and it'd be wrong just to dismiss this whole example as being a little bit too far-fetched

or just too different. Because it is a really tragic story and I feel like people could learn more from this than what they initially think. Indeed. I agree. So don't go out there and start to

unite your army, folks. Try and avoid that. If you want to build a cabin, you can do it without burying 12 of your friends. Anyway, thank you. Thank you for that, Andrew.

No problem. Where can the fine listeners find you on the internet? YouTube.com slash Andrewism and nowhere else. Oh, I guess also patreon.com slash St. Drew. But other than that, I can't be found on the internet. I don't exist. Good for you. Good for you.

Just like the Red Army, who doesn't exist anymore. 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they don't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.

Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and coping with dystopia. And one of the first signs of our dystopia coming to be was the establishment of the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security more broadly. Obviously, DHS, much more problematic than just the TSA. We did a couple of episodes on them with Behind the Bastards back in the day. But you know, the TSA came to be right after 9-11 and both its establishment, you know, the seeming necessity of it and the kind of impositions into personal privacy that it made commonplace. We're both harbingers of the very fucked up era we find ourselves in now.

And the TSA is an interesting law enforcement agency to me. From the perspective of a normal person, I think they're kind of the least objectionable of our federal law enforcement agencies, right? They at least, I should say, of all of the cops that we have in this country, they're the ones you're least likely to have a serious problem with, right? Like they're not real cops in the way that most cops are. They don't like ticket or arrest you generally unless you're one of the startling number of Americans who gets caught with a loaded handgun trying to go through airport security. and I've flown way more often than I want to remember. Mostly my experience with TSA agents is they check your ID, you know, they stare at an x-ray machine where your shit goes through it. Sometimes they alert and swab some stuff. But, you know, for me, it's usually not that big a deal. For most people I know, it's not that big a deal. Obviously, you know, the degree to which it's a problem is going to vary widely depending on whether or not you're

a white dude. But that said, still less potential for things going horribly, violently wrong than with a lot of police interaction. So I'll give them that. And it's interesting to me that kind of given this fact, the TSA is so hated, not by I think most Americans, I think we're all kind of frustrated by them. We know, you know, they're not great at their jobs. They get caught in tests, letting shit through all the time. It's kind of a pain in the butt. But there's a chunk of Americans who fucking hate the TSA. And they hate it because of how invasive it is. And it's a little weird if you're a regular person, because going through airport security is still less invasive than like applying for an apartment, which a lot of people do more regularly than they fly, or taking a trip to the DMV, which again, a lot of people do more regularly than they fly.

But people, you know, with money, upper middle class and rich people, that's where you really get most of the hate from the TSA. where you really get most of the hate from the TSA. Now, obviously, there's some from principled libertarians, and I tend to think they have a point there. But there's a lot of people who really hate the TSA, specifically because it's kind of the only law enforcement friction they deal with on a day-to-day basis. They live in a neighborhood where they're not getting pulled over. The cops, their job is not to fuck with the people who have money. So the only time they're going to get patted down and deal with that thing that is a pretty common experience for Americans in a lot of cities is when they go through the airport when they fly. And they also fly often because they have more money. So I find myself in this interesting position when reporting

on the TSA of there's real abuses there. There's a lot of real threats there. The fact that they do get so much up in our business and that we've normalized it is an issue. And at the same time, like I always know when I do something like this, the people who get angriest about whatever I write about the TSA are going to be the worst pieces of shit in the country. So it's a fun balancing act. Now, obviously, as I'm trying not to gloss over, there are some really good reasons to be pissed at the TSA. Like this 2015 story from Denver of several agents who were caught running a groping scam. Basically, one female crew member would point out the men that she found attractive and a colleague would signal that person out for a pat down. And they basically

say like, oh, it's alerting something around your groin or inner thigh so that like she could fondle them essentially. Now these people got fired. TSA went after them when they got caught. But who knows how many people they groped in the interim period. A video in 2023 caught TSA agents at Miami International Airport

stealing from passenger bags in the security lines. There's like footage of it. Obviously, the people who do this are going to be very, very stupid because like there's, you know, as a TSA agent, there's cameras all over the place. You're in the fucking TSA. And the video is just this guy like reaching his hand into a bag, pulling out cash. It's not hard to find headlines that are similar, though, going back about as long as the TSA has existed. What interests me more are the massive violations of privacy and the potential involvement the TSA and their normalization of those invasions of privacy has in the expansion of the surveillance

state. So this year, at CES 2024, when we found out the TSA had a booth and they were there to talk about their new facial recognition scanners, Garrison and I had to go check it out. And the interview that we conducted is going to kind of be the heart of this episode. But I wanted to get over a little bit more of a preamble first. So the TSA started testing facial recognition scanners on a voluntary basis at 16 domestic airports in, I think, 2022. They expanded it to 25 airports or so last year, 2023. They are in 27 now, according to what we were told by a representative, and the goal is for this technology to go nationwide. Obviously, not everyone is thrilled with that idea. And I'm going to quote from a June 2023 article on CBS News.

Five U.S. senators sent a letter demanding that TSA halt the program. You don't have to compromise people's biometric security in order to provide physical security at airports, said Senator Ed Markey. Pekoske, who is the TSA representative, says he agrees with senators in that he wants to protect privacy for every passenger. I want to deploy technology that's accurate and doesn't disadvantage anybody. Privacy advocates worry about the lack of regulations around facial recognition and its tendency to be less accurate with people of color. Most images are deleted after use, but some information is encrypted and retained for up to 24 months as part of the ongoing review of how the technology performs. What's left out of that article is that the TSA

is also allowed to maintain biometric data taken from non-citizens, people entering the country from foreign countries, migrants, and the like, and they're able to keep that and share it. It's kind of unclear the extent of that, but they're not bound by the same rules with those people that they are for citizens. And there are other issues as well, as we'll get into. So Garrison and I were both excited to have a chance to chat with a TSA representative. This guy was less excited to see us, and we will get into that story. But before we do, it's time for an ad break. And we're back. So Garrison and I show up at the CES booth and it's kind of a small one.

You might imagine it's about the size of like three normal office cubicles maybe. There's a couple of tables. There's like a little podium thing in the front that's got their logo on it. They have some stickers, including one that's like, it's like peanut butter is a liquid and it's a cartoon of peanut butter,

which I was informed when I commented on it by one of the TSA people that yes, peanut butter is a liquid, which is one of those things that it's both absurd and also like, well, actually, I don't know how else you'd categorize peanut butter if you're the TSA. So I guess it's something I can't have much of an issue with. Cream? But is a cream different from a liquid?

I don't know. That's for the philosophers to decide. So Garrison and I come up to this booth and there's a guy standing behind the podium. And the way stuff works at CES is you have generally a mix of actual officers from the company. Sometimes it'll be like a CEO or an executive in the case of a smaller company. Other times it'll be regular employees or like engineers and stuff who can answer technical questions. And then a bunch of most of the people that you talk to are like PR reps.

I don't know who the guy was that was at the booth when we first showed up, because as soon as we said we wanted to talk about their facial recognition cameras, he saw we were media and he instantly did the PR equivalent of throwing his buddy on a grenade. He like backed off. He was like, let me get something for you. He pulled his coworker over and then he fucking vanished. And I'm going to play you a little bit of audio of that. We're interested in what you have here in terms of facial recognition.

It's the cat too, right over there. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. What are you saying? Because I know right now, like if you've got a pre-check or, oh gosh, what's the other one? The independent company.

Are we on a live interview now? I thought so. I mean, we came up to ask to talk to a The independent company that does it. Are we on a live interview now? I thought so. I mean, we came up to ask to talk to a TSA representative. Okay, sure. Yeah, sure. Hang on just a second. So the guy we found ourselves in front of was R. Carter Langston, who is actually the press secretary of the TSA.

And by God, I don't know if I've ever seen a man less happy to see me. Eventually, we started talking, and I have to give Carter credit for professionalism. His eyes said, I despise you both on principle and am enraged to be doing this. But his voice remained calm, even, and his responses were, to be quite honest,

pretty polished. I'm kind of interested in sort of how you see this altering the way we do air travel over the next five, ten years, right? Because obviously right now people are using facial recognition if they have PreCheck or they have, I'm spacing the name, but you know the independent company that does get you past the line and stuff. Like they do like facial recognition when you are in the airport. Is this something that you see as coming more broadly to everybody going through security in the future?

Eventually. Yeah. Eventually. So right now it's at 27 participating airports, and it's not at every single, we call them travel document checker podiums. It's not at every single travel document checker podium, TDC for short. But it is growing and becoming, we're deploying more and more as funding becomes available.

We're using facial recognition to identify passengers. It's a significant improvement over the previous way we were identifying passengers. looking at it based on what that individual knows about the 50 states and territories and what their credentials look like. The technology actually takes that over and does a much better job of validating the authenticity of that ID. And then the facial recognition component with a picture, a still image, taking a picture of the passenger standing in front of the travel document checker podium, and then matching that picture of that person standing there live against the credential

photo, and making a match that way. So we know that the credential is valid. It's true. It's accurate. We know that the person standing there is also the person on the credential. We can verify the boarding status and the screening status of that individual and can provide them with where they should go next for their screening. Because the officer is able to discern, based on all of the information provided at the back end of the monitor that they reviewed,

they can see all of those items have been checked. There's a boarding status and there's a screening status. And then just tells the passenger where to go to follow up for screening. So I'm interested in how someone becomes basically enrolled in this, right? Because my assumption is at this point, just the picture you get when you're getting your driver's license or your state ID from the DMV is not sufficient for a facial recognition system, right? Simply having the picture in the government space, you need to have somebody like get their face scanned, their irises scanned or something like that in order

to have them in the system, right? it's not in the system at all so with the way we're rolling these out at airports and checkpoints is once a passenger has been identified and and goes into screening all of the information that was captured is gone we don't store any of the pictures. Participation right now is completely voluntary. There's signage right there at the checker podium to indicate that passengers can opt out. They don't have to participate.

And all that happens at that point is the same officer will turn basically over to the alternative process, review the ID, review the boarding pass, and allow the passenger to continue. Too easy. They don't lose their place in line, and they're not delayed in any way from getting straight.

But in terms of the people who choose to use it, right? So if you're in this system, is it literally just comparing your face to the face on the ID? You're not like enrolled separately the way you are if you are in like pre-check or something? No. Okay. No, it's not. There's not a database associated with this. And so no, that's not our use. Now, some of the airlines have partnered with us. They saw a benefit in it. And they're using similar technology for bag drive for their frequent flyer miles program participants. So that is

there's a database associated with that, obviously. And so those passengers have an entirely different experience. But the way that we're using it at the checkpoint is, as I just said, for identity verification. You caught that, right? How he says participation is voluntary right now? Well, I hadn't come across this information at the time. But afterwards, I read a fascinating Washington Post article from last summer about Portland Senator Jeff Merkley. Jeff Merkley says that when he was trying to make a flight at Reagan International Airport,

he was told that if he didn't verify his ID via face scanner, he would face a significant delay. Quote from the article, there was no delay. The spokeswoman said the senator showed his photo ID to the TSA agent and cleared security. So basically, he was lied to. Somebody lied and said, you're going to, if you don't want to like be delayed and maybe miss your flight, you have to submit to a face scan, which is one of the things that privacy advocates were worried about from the beginning. But you know what privacy advocates aren't worried about? The products and services that support this podcast. And we're back.

So I think when it gets right down to it, the silliest part of all of this to me is that the TSA isn't even claiming they need to run faces through like some futuristic database of terrorists, right? Like they want to scan our faces so they know if this like bad guy they're tracking is in the airport disguised using a fake passport or something. That's not actually what it does. Facial recognition the TSA is using, right now at least, just takes the place of the TSA guy. You hand your ID before you go put your shit in bins, right? Like, you know, you go up and before you can go take your stuff out of your bags and put it in those bins, you hand a guy your license, sometimes your license and boarding pass. He looks at it in your face. If you wear a mask, he tells you to take it down for a second, and then he lets you go in, right? That's what the facial recognition scanners are actually doing here. That Washington Post article also cites an anti-facial recognition activist, Tawana Petty,

who says that she was told by a TSA agent at the same airport, Reagan, that undergoing facial recognition scanning was not optional. So people are already being told this is a requirement. And obviously, as a spoiler for where this goes, the bigger, deeper question is like, how long is that going to be the case, right? So, you know, that's kind of the big concern, right? Is that they're saying it's optional now. It obviously won't be forever.

And some people are just going to be told they don't have a choice. Like that's kind of bullying, strong arming people, threatening that they'll miss their flight if they don't submit to it, which makes me extra suspicious about their data retention, right? And that is the question we asked as the interview went on. Where is the TSA's biometric data, or really, where is passenger biometric data actually going to go once the TSA has it? In terms of just information storage, is there, I know, I've been seeing more of these like signs the more that I travel. I do a decent bit of traveling for these sorts of systems. And I'm curious about how this works for non-U.S. citizens. Because I know there's certain, at least in some of this technology

that's being used by Customs and Border Patrol, they do store images captured of non-U.S. citizens for a certain time period. They do take pictures of U.S. citizens when entering the country at lots of airports. Are these two systems interacting at all, or is the TSA system and Customs and Border Patrol system more separated? Well, first of all, I can't speak for Customs and Border Protection, but I can tell you that we have two very different use cases. So their use case is very much oriented in the customs arena. And then ours

is, as I just mentioned, at the checkpoint and solely for the identity verification. And if an international passenger comes in with a credential that identifies them, you know, a credential that identifies them, then the unit would obviously accept that credential. It's a photo, it's a photo credential. So again, all that the system would do is validate that that person on that credential is also the same person that's standing right there in front of the travel document checker. Okay. Most of you are probably aware of this, but the TSA actually does not have a good record of protecting private data. Now, this is not old man Robert being a libertarian. It's just documented history. The TSA initially claimed their full body scanners, which took what are essentially naked pictures of passengers, never stored photos and couldn't transmit them. But in 2010, this was revealed to be a lie when we gained access to documents that

included technical specifications and vendor contracts, which indicated the TSA required vendors of these scanners to provide equipment that can store and send images of screened passengers. Now, this was supposed to only be in testing mode, but if it can store and send images of screened passengers, it can store and send images of screened passengers. Now, this was supposed to only be in testing mode, but if it can store and send images of screened passengers, it can store and send images of screened passengers. In 2012, a former TSA agent accused his co-workers of saving nude body images of passengers from the body scanner and making fun of them in back rooms. He said that safeguards were put in place to ensure the agents manning the scanners never saw the people they were scanning outside of the scanner, but that these policies were frequently violated. Basically, every privacy policy they had was frequently violated by agents so that they can make fun of people's dicks, right? That's the story. The TSA retired its old scanners the next year,

replacing them with a device that showed less detail and particularly provided agents with less clear looks at people's dongs. In 2021, a TSA agent in Minneapolis was accused by airport police of taking dozens of photos of young women going through flight screening. The TSA's record here, both in terms of the agency itself and in terms of its employees, is certainly not worse than numerous police departments, right, or the FBI. This is something to keep in mind. As frustrating as all this stuff is, literally every local and city law enforcement agency has worse cases, and by God, so do the feds. Could make a case that as frustrating as a lot of this is, the TSA is less of a threat to privacy than most other federal law enforcement agencies.

But that's beside the point. For one thing, normalizing facial recognition technology in the airports is a step towards normalizing it everywhere. The data that is gathered will not always be deleted. And more to the point, there's no way to know that the system isn't going to expand in directions that we all find deeply uncomfortable as it goes on. That's why you kind of have to nip this stuff in the bud, especially since they're not really promising extra security here. When you look at the scandals of the TSA,

a lot of it has to do with the fact that they'll be getting tested by some other law enforcement agency to see if they can like sneak shit through, right? And the TSA will let a bunch of guns or a fake bomb or whatever through because people aren't paying attention. Facial scanners aren't going to catch that.

And it's kind of unclear to me what they are going to catch. My other bigger issue is that even though they say they're going to throw away biometric data, they're not going to keep it more than 24 hours outside of special situations, which they do kind of leave themselves an in there. The fact that they say they're deleting this stuff doesn't mean they are going to delete that stuff. And I brought up this troubling history of like lack of respect for privacy, violations of privacy by TSA agents in the past within the context of this new system. And I want to play Carter's answer for you.

I am curious, you know, there were a couple, last five or six years, a couple of cases, stories that blew up of pictures, images of passengers who were on the body scanners being shared, right? There were a couple of scandals about that. Has that influenced your attitudes on the data retention policy that should exist for the facial recognition system? So let me first tell you that we follow the National Institute of Standards and Technology, their guidelines and standards to AT. Not only that, we publish online our privacy impact assessments. So we're very transparent in our use of this technology, how we're using it, what we're using it for. And again, it's completely voluntary.

Nothing is stored. Nothing is stored, and it's simply for identity verification, which is really the linchpin for transportation security. I mean, we've got to know that who we're letting into the secure area of an airport is, in fact, the person that they say they are. So, yeah, that's more or less how the conversation ended. Carter was very happy to see us go. And I don't think Garrison or I were particularly surprised by anything we heard. But I did find it interesting that he kind of confirmed the goal is eventually for this to not just be everywhere, but be something that you can't opt out of. eventually for this to not just be everywhere, but be something that you can't opt out of.

And I do partly wonder how much of that is them looking for a way to get more data on people, maybe even to share to other law enforcement agencies, and how much of that is kind of the same reason a lot of, you know, AI style technology and kind of facial recognition does sort of fall under that umbrella. If you're going to have a general intelligence, one thing it has to be able to do is recognize people's faces. So it is a piece of that. And I think that just like a lot of other applications of that kind of technology are inevitably used to cut workforces. That's kind of probably the chief thing the TSA is looking to use it to do, right? If you can replace the guy who has to look at your ID, or at least most of them, with facial recognition scanners that do the same thing,

then you can save on your budget, right? Now, the downside of that may be to us. The upside is it could be faster. The downside, of course, is there's a really good chance it won't be. The robot will be even more racist than a TSA agent might be, you know? It's one less chance to deal with a human with whom you might be able to talk something through. Anyway, we'll all see where this goes. But for today, this has been It Could Happen Here, and I have been Robert Evans. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off

our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a

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