It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 120

Episode Date: March 2, 2024

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds 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. 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. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, Call zone media. there's going to be nothing new here for you but you can make your own decisions welcome to the kidnapping show wow okay we're just about doing the intro all right i i wasn't doing the intro i was saying that wokeness has won the super bowl ah yeah because yeah okay okay hold on this is my this is this is my moment i've got the soapbox this is it could happen here everyone has the taylor swift conspiracy wrong taylor swift is completely uninvolved in the nfl's conspiracy to make sure patrick mahomes wins every fucking game all of these fucking all these fucking boggin chuds or fucking johnny come late doesn't care about football fans real fans know if you look at every fourth quarter of every fucking chiefs game before taylor should have got involved it looks exactly the same.

All right. This has been, it could happen here. We may or may not cut that. I can't believe that the liberal Taylor Swift, Joe, Joe Biden's puppet, Taylor Swift and Travis Pfizer,

Kelsey stole the Superbowl from the good Christian people of San Francisco. The only bastion of conservatism left in this country it is so incredibly funny like okay so it's so incredibly funny to me a that they're not mad at patrick mahomes and b that somehow okay the chiefs like imagine you're a chiefs fan right you have been for like 30 years. What are the most racist? You have been doing an action called, and I quote, the tomahawk chop. Like, you are the most racist person in your entire small town. And then all of these fucking dipshits online, all these fucking right wing dipshits immediately are like, all of you guys are like fucking pussy woke libs.

And it's just like just like like imagine being that racist for that long only to be immediately tossed aside it it is kind of baffling that in like the country's national divorce over wokeness somehow the liberals get to keep football like this is that's so bizarre that that now football seen as like a liberal cuck thing to enjoy among large swaths of of republicans at least at least online republicans um it's really fascinating this this is how we're gonna beat them in the fucking civil war because we're going to take the college campuses which means that we're going to have the only watchable footballs these bastards are gonna be reduced to watching fucking high school games.

Like speaking, speaking of watching football. Yeah. So the thing this episode is actually about is if you watch the Superbowl or like God help you, you've tried to use YouTube without an ad blocker, a thing I do not recommend at all. You have seen ads for Temu with its team or Temu Temu.

Temu. Okay. Yeah. It has the absolute the absolutely oh good god yeah this this app this one this one's bad folks this one's i i went insane and have been spiraling for like two weeks now writing this so you know so it has the absolutely dog shit tagline shop like a billionaire wait that's its tagline yeah yeah oh that's weird it's funny the other thing is they only have one ad right they it's the same i did not i did not like single bowl it's not just super bowl like it's not it's been on youtube for like ages but yeah so this begs the obvious question what on earth is this thing and the answer is that temu is the american version of a chinese shopping app called pin duo um you will hear people pronouncing it pin duo duo um that's because they're hacks and frauds.

So, but I'm just going to call it. So the company, the parent company for both Temu and Pinduoduo changed their name to PDD. So I'm just going to call it that. So, yeah, PDD is China's worst tech giant. They have worked multiple of their employees to death. They probably also use slave labor. Those are unrelated stories. So today, welcome to the abyss.

This is the story of Tamu. I have stared into it, and now you motherfuckers are coming with me and staring into it some more. Well, it's more like we're listening into it, because it doesn't really have a visual. No, no, you're staring into it. Okay. You will get visuals. Okay. To this bullshit i will i'll start hallucinating in my office yeah so time it was the american version of of pdd pdd it roughly translates to more savings together so it's like a co-op actually it probably sells stuff from co-ops

okay huh so pdd is the second largest shopping app in china behind alibaba alibaba is china's like version of amazon basically they're the second largest app. Alibaba reportedly has 863 million users per year. That's a lot of users. Yeah, that's multiple USs. PDD has been claiming that they have 740 million monthly users. It's unclear if that's exactly true, but it's probably around there, which again, that is twice the entire

population of the u.s so this is a fucking unbelievably massive company and to understand what what this what this company is and how it became probably the worst of the chinese tech giants we have to go back to the very beginning and the very beginning is this guy named colin huang huang is a weird guy i don't know he's he's he's he's the chinese version of the american tech bro so he's you know he's he's he's a recognizable like asshole who started a giant company but he's not exactly the same so he he so he graduates from uh like college in china and in the early 2000s he goes to the university of wisconsin to get a master's degree in computer science which it like it should be illegal for anyone to get degrees in computer science uh terrible stuff

zero out of ten no one should know how to use computers i can't believe you believe in the statist legal system to prevent people from learning. So find social sanctions. We're going to make it morally illegal. You're going to get chased out by people with rocks on the street. If you try to type something into a computer. So, okay. So he,

he, he's at the university of Wisconsin. And while he's there, he basically like posts his way into becoming the pro basically the protege of a Chinese tech billionaire, Duan Yongping. This is an interesting relationship um duan is like is a very very influential chinese tech tech billionaire he gets every single article calls him the warren buffett of china i i don't fucking know but like you know for like for an exact example of like how big this guy is like vivo and like the one

plus company that makes phones those are both like spin-offs of like things that he built but yeah so you know so this is this is an interesting relationship for huang because and it's also interesting because like the the narrative around huang and pdd is that they're like these like hungry upstarts like clawing their way up from nothing and they can like go after alibaba and the chinese like tech market wars because they're like they're ferocious they have like nothing to lose i'm like they're rich and fat alibaba and like nah like this guy has had the backing of like a bunch of really powerful chinese tech guys like from the absolute beginning um another part of like the huang lore is that duan like took him to this really famous dinner where Warren Buffett was offering if you

donated like $620,000 to charity he would like eat dinner with you and like talk with you about like finance stuff and so Dwan like buys this thing to go eat dinner with Warren Buffett

and brings Hwang with him and he Hwang H Huang's the founder of PDD again so he gives him credit for like this like financial wisdom that he got here's from an interview with Sai Jin this is a Chinese outlet

what Buffett said is actually very simple and can be understood by my mother perhaps what this meal meant most to me was that I realized the power of simplicity and common sense. Human thoughts are easily polluted. When you make a judgment on something, you need to understand the backgrounds and facts. After understanding it, what you need is not wisdom, but whether you have the courage to use reason when facing facts. Use common sense to judge. Common sense is obvious and easy to understand,

but our various biases and personal interests formed due to growth and learning blind us. So this is like entrepreneurial bullshit, but this is like a big formative thing. It's like, ah, he got the wisdom of Warren Buffet, and then he listened to it. It's just like, what there's what, what the, what the thing I think is more interesting is that he talks about what in the

same interview, what Dwan taught him. Dwan also taught me a common sense thing in business price fluctuates around value. The price will definitely fluctuate, but as long as your value increases, the final price will be close to the value. This common sense allows you to focus on increasing the intrinsic value of the company

and not be overly concerned about price fluctuations in the capital market. And this to me is fascinating because the first half of that is like orthodox Marxist price theory. Like in Marxist price theory, right? The whole thing about it is that price is determined by value.

The value of a commodity is determined by like the amount of labor hours socially necessary to produce it and eventually like price sort of like fluctuate you know the price can change it's not price isn't like identical to uh like socially necessary like labor time but it like fluctuates around it and so that's like the first part of it which is the marxist thing except this is like china like modern like 2020s china so marxist value theory has been degraded to like make your company valuable and don't worry about stock prices and market fluctuations it'll work out in the end so true so true based based i mean the funny thing is this is actually better like than, like, most of the shit that, like, American CEOs use. But it's also, oh, God, what has happened to my poor value theory?

My beloved theory of how capitalism works has been turned into this weird tech bullshit. Tragedy. of how capitalism works has been turned into this weird tech bullshit tragedy so meanwhile back in 2004 duan convinces huang to turn down a bunch of these jobs so so he's he's he's like a computer science graduate right and he's being headhunted by like a bunch of the sort of like mainstream tech companies at the times like oracle microsoft and they're giving they want to give him like an enormous amount of money but his mentor is like, no, no, no,

don't take this tech job. Take the Silicon Valley tech job, join Google. And so he joins Google. And this is, this is another like very famous thing. It's like, ah,

he wanted to join the like up and coming hungry tech startup. But here's the thing. So Google, he joins Google in 2004, which is kind of early, but Google also goes public that year. So, you know, this ends up working really well for him because he gets a bunch of stock options. Those stock options are worth millions of dollars.

That's a lot of also some of the startup capital for like later companies he found comes from that. And Huang really quickly like works his way up the ranks. But he gets put in charge of launching Google in China, and this is a fiasco. It does not work at all. Huang blames too much oversight from people at the senior leadership at Google, which I

can get, but it just doesn't work at all. He searches in 2006. By 2010, Google has pulled out of china entirely like they're not they're not trying to push the the fucking search engine because nobody uses it so okay having having that having like unbelievably bombed out of his first tech job he he he does the like entrepreneur thing he starts like a couple of these like shopping like online shopping companies they do like fine and he sells them but they don't like do incredible and so okay so this is the part that a lot of the accounts of him

leave out like the sort of like fawning accounts leave out is the next thing that he does which is he sets up this like really shitty game studio and they make like a bunch of like absolutely unbelievably weird and horny uh mobile games so they make like mafia city joy spade texas hold'em poker um they have this game called girl x battle that is like you you assemble a harem of girlfriends and then have them fight other people and stuff like absolutely have you played any of these oh no absolutely not i refuse i think i've actually seen mafia city ads before but it's like like it's the absolute most dog shit like bargain basement i guess they're kind of pre-gacha games i was just wondering how far your dedication to research went here but not far enough look here's the thing my dedication to

research went exactly far enough that i refuse to install any of these apps for reasons that we'll get into next episode i was like absolutely not in fact this doing this research actually caused me to uninstall chow bus which is like a chinese food delivery app because i realized that it was constantly running in the background to like to drive up it's like uh user engagement metrics that's that is completely fair although if you were even more dedicated you could have bought a burner phone to download all these apps onto and test it on that so there you that's true but i know i i refuse to let that shit connect to my internet like under no circumstances you can go to a starbucks you can go to a see i'm just throwing out options here i look i probably could have done this but

no absolutely not actually well it's actually really hard to download the chinese uh version of this for reasons that we'll get into next episode all right all right but okay so like he's running this shitty game company and he has a genuinely brilliant and terrible insight which is that he he sees how addictive like mobile gaming and how addictive like microtransactions are and he goes oh shit what if i put this in a shopping app except that because that's the reasonable way to explain it but like the thing he actually did was like why okay so his actual thought process was why are we not selling games games are all like advertised to men right like these the apps that he's making are like weird horny stuff for

guys why are we not making games for women which is reasonable but then his follow-up was uh effectively women be shopping and he was like so true we'll make a shopping thing it's just like we'll make a we'll make we'll make an app that makes shopping into a game and so and one of the things he's also been doing one of the like the kind of like search engine optimization scams where like he just keeps making different shopping like shopping websites and hoping that one of them will like climb in the search rankings but eventually he hits on a like a combination of using the like dog shit like addictive mobile gamification stuff from his mobile games in a like in an online shopping app and he hits on that as the idea for a new shopping app and this is what turns into pdd now do you know what didn't turn into pdd

and is in fact better oh hopefully these ads that are not for taboo we better not get a fucking taboo ad hopefully i it's actually possible it's oh god well careful what you wish for and we're back so pdd doesn't start in the way that normal tech app things do which is to say that pdd starts as an online fruit vendor now okay if you know anything like a like a farmer's market online like what yeah okay so so if you know anything about how like amazon worked right so amazon goes from books to a bunch of stuff to food to a bunch of stuff to food. PDD does this backwards. They start in food.

Now, this is very weird. And the reason this works and the reason that PDD starts as a marketplace for rural farmers to sell fruits and vegetables like directly to consumers is because, unfortunately, of the structure of the Chinese agricultural market,

which we have to talk about a little bit. So something I talked about, I don't know how many years ago this was now, but a while back, I did an episode about this company that poisons 300,000 babies by making poisoned milk in China. And one of the things, that was a bastard's episode,

one of the things I talked about in that episode was how the Chinese agricultural market is incredibly fragmented. We don't have time to do a full history of rural de-collectivization here, but the upshot of it is that it results in a lot of farmers working really small plots of land who are forced to sell their goods to a series of middlemen who make the actual profits. And because these farmers have a tiny amount of land to grow stuff on or they have like two cows right

they don't have the financial leverage to negotiate with like the middleman the middleman can just set prices on them and and the product of this is you have a really really fragmented market where there's just like all of these like unbelievably large numbers of these really small sellers and part and you know and and this and this this locks all these people into middlemen the middlemen can set the prices that the middlemen set the prices incredibly low and they're locked in because they don't have another distribution method because the only thing they can do is sell to these like agricultural middlemen companies the the companies like above them like your grocery companies are like actual milk company who packages the milk they love this stuff because

it means that they don't have to like pay the farmers they can just buy like the goods directly they don't have to deal with like employment stuff they don't have to deal with quality control too because they can pass that on to the middlemen now something else we talked about in our anti-work lying flat episodes like three years ago is that china has these like far like rural influencers that was it was like a huge wave of these people that sort of like emerged you might actually have seen you've seen the videos of just like someone in rural china like cutting wood or something oh yeah totally totally yeah so those those things were like okay the u.s catches up the stuff on the chinese internet like usually several years after it like happened there and that makes sense yeah and the next thing in line after the original sort of

influencer waves was these like was this wave of like pharma influencers and these people they're using a like a different uh chinese like it's like another it's like another tiktok clone basically and they're doing the thing that they're doing is okay so you you know you have your regular influencer who's trying to sell you like the image of rural life right and then you have the farmer influencers who are trying to sell you the image of rural life and also their potatoes and this is this is like the marketing strategy this is this is this is this is how you can skip the middlemen and like actually sell your fruit is by becoming an influencer which it's so cursed it's so cursed i hate it so much that is kind of dystopian it's just the the constant the constant performance yeah but the problem is that the alternative to

it is even worse because pdd realizes this and they're looking at these markets and they're like hold on these farmers are already selling their goods for like next next to nothing if we come in pay them a bit better use our text or like our tech money to our tech startup money because they have an enormous amount of tech startup money if we use that tech startup money to give them rebates we can do things that like you know we cannot charge them commission right? And if we can do this, we can turn around and sell these fruits for like $0.

Okay, $0 is a slight exaggeration, but when I, like they're selling these fruits for an, are unbelievably cheap. Like we are talking 10 mangoes for $1.39. Which is like a steal. Outrageous, right? And, you know, this is is incredibly successful what they're doing basically is a giant version of the amazon gambit right they're eating shit and taking losses to

sell all of this stuff although they're losing less money than you'd think like the actual price of these goods is already so low and we're going to come back to that too because that that's an aspect of what's so messed up about this whole thing. But, you know, so they eat shit that takes some losses, but they really, really quickly build market share. So this is a very, very smart strategy, because it's not just in the sort of rural market. China has a shit ton of like small and medium-sized producers that make a whole bunch of things, or like guy with one factory, person doing like craft production stuff.

And PDD's plan is to pull together all of these sellers like this this whole all all of these people from different markets into just one giant like one giant like market that they control now importantly unlike amazon and this is unlike alibaba too because alibaba works on a fairly similar model to, well, okay. In a lot of ways, it's a similar model to Amazon. It's not identical. But unlike those two companies, PDD doesn't run their own logistics network. It's all third-party. The shipping and all that shit is done through third-party logistics stuff.

So their shipping companies, they don't own warehouses. so like their shipping companies they don't own warehouses like that stuff you know what they're what they do instead is they use the shipping companies and warehouses that were developed in like the earlier parts of the chinese tech boom and they're able to just use that infrastructure to you know to ship all their stuff right and this means that the company is extremely lean in the sense that like they don't have a lot of physical assets like they know and this means they don't have to deal with labor costs or like the logistics problems of actually having to like you know i'm actually having employees packing boxes or making things they're just an app it's it's well they're like the original model of uber in some sense right

where like you don't like uber doesn't fucking own or wasn't supposed to be owning cars i mean i guess uber is a bad example because they were trying to do the the automated car thing but that was a fiasco but you know the thing that pdd makes is just an app but it's it's an incredibly addictive app like it's it's it's a shopping gotcha game which is like maybe the worst sentence in the history of the human language um and this was like this was around the time like i want to say like 10 ish years ago give or take a few years where like microtransactions were becoming massive like all like it it took over gaming it took over so many parts of just being online it took over apps like it just it just infected everything and

we luckily kind of pushed back on some some elements of that but we're still not all of it but like there was definitely some some degree of like oh well we are simply not going to be buying all of these games if it's just full of micro micro transaction bullshit and then fortnight took over and we're back in hell again but whatever actually it's it's pretty funny um china kind of recently the chinese government like did a crackdown on like loot boxes and stuff because they were some of some of the some of the regulations they put in place are nuts but some of it was like you can't sell loop you can't sell gambling the children yeah yeah and this caused like although it's funny because they're kind of walking it back now because it hurt their gaming market so much.

They're like, well, shit. Okay, we have to. We need those kids. Yeah, that's the only way to make money. Yeah, but you know, but PDD is like brilliance or sort of like the absolutely evil shit that they realized is like we can just we can just do this for shopping. And so like the moment you log in, right, there there's these flash deals and there's these group deals. The group deals are the thing that PDD is based around.

So the way it works is you get these group deals, and so you get a link, and you send it to people. And the more people click on the link to buy the thing, the cheaper it becomes. And then you send the links over WeChat, which is the sort of catch-all Chinese messenger social media app that everyone uses to talk to their boomer parents. so and then you send the links over wechat which is the curve like catch all chinese messenger

like social media app that everyone uses to like talk to their boomer parents and so the thing that your boomer parents are doing is they're sending these shopping links to each other and you know and the the the more like the more people click on these links the cheaper the good becomes so when it was the more people are buying it the more people you rope into buying stuff from this app the cheaper it is and the more deals you get you buying stuff from this app, the cheaper it is. And the more deals you get, you get things like they'll just like give you like, quote unquote, free money. If you spend enough money in basically like in the same way that like microtransaction works, right? Whereas like, you know, in a game, it's like if you play the X number of games, we'll give you like in-game currency.

Whereas this is just like we'll literally give you money. We like send things to you. God, that sounds like hell. It's awful. It's so bad. And very importantly, right? It's this giant loop that it not only gets people to spend money, but it gets people to bring their friends in because you have to bring your friends in to get the group

deal. So everything gets cheaper and cheaper. And the tactics they use are absolutely wild. They get in trouble in 2021 for this promotion called Bargain for Free Goods, where you get a link. And the claim was that if enough people clicked it, you would get the good for free. And so this guy tried to do it, but he couldn't. He could only get it to point nine percent of the cost. So we sued them for false advertising.

And the claim got thrown out. But the company had to pay him like money so like this is the kind of shit that they're doing um wechat actually like blocked their links for a while because you know because like some enormous portion of messages suddenly were just like these people sending these spam links to like every single person they know trying to get them to buy like a fucking toothbrush so that your toothbrushes can be cheaper right but eventually we chat kind of like you know we chat gives up and they start like allying more with pdd i mean there's a whole there's a whole complicated story i'm not going to get into here about like the like china's really really ferocious like tech company wars, because like in the US, you know,

like our tech monopolies are relatively stable, right? Like they've sort of portioned up the internet into, and like distribution and stuff into just like basically like local monopolies, right? Like Google is like the only search engine company. There's basically no competition there, right? Like there's some competition in terms of social media, but even then it's like, and it's not like the chinese version where it's like unbelievably

ferocious competition um sometimes they cooperate but yeah you know it's it's really fierce and pdd you know the thing that they do right is they they pair this app stuff with direct to consumer sales and pdd is really the pioneers of this um she in and okay so i i she in is that fucking fast fashion clothing company i i learned today that he is actually pronounced she in because the name of the thing is she in like sh e she and then she's like she's in yeah yeah i hate it so much i'm so sad i i mean i feel slightly better because like i kept trying to read it in chinese it was like it doesn't fucking make any sense like it's just baffling it doesn't and it's like oh no it's because it's in english yeah but pdd is the precursor of sheen's like strategy right like they're they're the originators

of this except they're you know they're what they're doing basically it's it's a fact it's kind of like drop shipping but you know the sales are being pushed by these these sort of gamified app stuff and this means they have this like real-time supply management system that tells producers like like they can like they go down and like tell their sellers like what to produce more of based on like app sales so you know like the way it works is you start off with a small it's like a small number of things and then you get ads to push that those like fucking toothbrushes or whatever and then as like sales ramp up you ramp up productions you can ship people more toothbrushes.

Now, do you know who else will ship you toothbrushes that will probably be better quality than the PDD toothbrushes? Oh, no, we can guarantee all of our sponsors have only the top quality toothbrushes. That is what we call the cool zone guarantee. Go to Toothbrush.com and put in the keyword Mia for 10% off on your top of the line Tootsbrush. Please don't do this. So, all right. VDD just, it takes rural China by storm sure it sounds convenient like yeah yeah for some people and it's really really cheap is the thing right and the thing about rural china is you're dealing with a level of poverty that like is like almost unimaginable.

It's not unimaginable in the U S but it's like unbelievable. Like it's something that like, like we don't really have it in the same way because, okay. So like an example of the kind of stuff we're dealing with, right? Like, so China's GDP per capita in like the 60s was lower than Haiti's, right?

This is an unbelievably poor country. And there are places in rural China that are still like basically not quite that poor, but are like unbelievably poor in ways that like, you know, we're talking about people who are like people who are doing kind of well in these regions are making seven hundred dollars a month like that's like on a good month right they're making seven hundred dollars a month which is that's eight thousand four hundred dollars a year and that's that's that's if you have 12 good months right if you have normal months it's more like six thousand dollars a year and so you know and when when you're in a place where people are using stuff like this and again that's someone who like has a job full time is

making like six thousand dollars a year and so people use pdd to shop because it's incredibly cheap and it's also addictive and when i say cheap like we're talking like two dollars for a pair of jeans cheap right and like that's that's also like cheap in yuan too. It's like unbelievably low prices. I mean, this kind of reminds me a little bit of that recent Tucker Carlson, Russia is great actually media stunt. Oh, yeah. Where he's like, look, all of these groceries only cost $100 in American currency. And it's like, yeah, because they're getting paid like $200 a week.

They're not taking home very much money. So all of the costs slide very differently. You can't just compare this one to one. Yeah, although the thing I will say about PDD is that their prices are unbelievably low by Chinese standards. This is also why they look so low by American standards, too, is that these are low by Chinese standards. And because they're so low by Chinese standards, people buy stuff from it.

The cost of this is that the stuff they're selling is really cheap. I mean, the other cost is the unbelievable exploitation of the Chinese working class. But we'll get to that we'll get to that next episode the the main cost of the stuff being cheap is that the stuff they buy like sucks ass like literally this is something the ceo talks about is that their gambit is that okay we'll ship you 10 mangoes for for like a dollar 39 two of them will be rotten but that means you still get eight mangoes that is still an unbelievable deal right like that's the thing and like you know the stuff that they get like sucks here's from the chinese media outlet sixth tone which has done a lot of good coverage of pdd they they

they used to be better they're like the kind of like lefty like state media outlet um they used to be better and then their staff got run out because they they went they walked too close to the line so but here's here's what here's they've done a lot of they well because the most of the pd coverage came from before their people got run out so quote following the ipo a number of purchasers a purchase is allegedly bought from pdd were shared online including a hair dryer that broke out in flames after it was switched on at a power bank.

Hey, that also happens in America. Don't worry. That's true. I know you're like, I know you're like, oh, I'm missing out on all these great deals, all these great products. Not true. This could also happen in the States. Yep. There's another one where they had a power bank and someone ordered it and they

came and it was just four triple a batteries in a container that's funny that's good that's a good bit that's yeah that's pretty good you know there's stuff like like one of one like six was interviewing people in real areas you bought stuff and they were like yeah i bought i bought a fishing rod for like two bucks it was broken I bought a pair of shoes and it literally fell apart after three days. So like, I have complicated feelings on this because I think there is a place for gambling in purchases. If,

if for example, on Amazon, if every fourth product you bought there was a completely like defective, like purposefully like lower quality version i think that would be a net good for the world we would have probably we would have less people using amazon and you would kind of get slightly punished so i think this actually could be a good thing if used correctly where we would we purposely sabotage every like fourth person who buys anything online but the problem is that

people fucking love gambling like that that that's that's just gonna make people do more because now there's more of a downside for trying to get your fucking deal so i mean and this is the thing right like you're rolling the dice every time every time you take a you order like an electric generator online and they send you a double a oh my god it'd be so funny well i mean now hey you too can now shop on temu you too can experience getting shipped just fucking bullshit you order some nice hawaiian coffee and they send you some like chamomile oh god devastating so this this whole thing of you buy stuff that sucks or doesn't work and the fact that pdd starts in rural china means that like initially there's this like real class

element about how you who uses pdd it's seen as like the site for poor and gullible people who don't yeah care about quality yeah it's like it's the place where lower class people shop yeah sure yeah and why that stops being true kind of because everyone starts using it but comma the other problem they have is that it is absolutely rife with counterfeit products um right after they go public in 2018 there's like a chinese state investigation into the sale of their counterfeit products and pd's response is like well we're just a marketplace anyone can sell sell on it. How are we supposed to control who makes counterfeit stuff? Sure. This is actually like, it gets to a kind of like cultural thing where, you know, this is one of the things that happens in rural China. This happens in a lot of places where like almost everyone is wearing like clothes that are like knockoff brand stuff because it's just the cheapest clothes.

stuff because it's just the cheapest clothes and like that's the kind of clothes that's being made that you can afford if you're you know like you're trying to sort of make it in like in rural China so you get like you know you have like entire villages where you walk in and everyone's wearing like like Niki and like

Adidas or something like it's like this stuff gets really wild really fast. So here's from that, that Sijing interview with Colin Huang again. So here's Kaijing. It's a Chinese media outlet. So they're, they're interviewer.

One of the best selling products on PDD is a bottle of aphrodisiac priced at 27.8 yuan. That is like three, almost $4 with a total of 4.7 million orders sold. Do you think this medicine might be real? Here's the CEO. First of all, medicines or healthcare products sold on PDD's platform must have national certification marks. Secondly,

the gross profit margin of health care products is already extremely high just like facial masks do you think the 200 yon facial max is useful so again again what is happening here is that like they have sold like one point 4.7 million orders of of like a fake aphrodisiac and when the CEO is asked about his response, it's like, well, but who can really say if any health products work? Like, whoo!

That is a pretty funny bit. I mean, it sucks that poor people are losing money, but... To be fair, if you are trying to buy an aphrodisiac, I don't really care. Sure, sure. Yeah, but like, you know, so part of it, like there's something like fake hack medicines.

This is like the Chinese version of the American like grift, like right wing grift, like supplement market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the brain pills to help your libido or whatever. Yeah, but this also gets a lot darker. your libido or whatever yeah but this also gets a lot darker um one of there's one of the stories that kind of like made the rounds chinese social media that sixth tone reports on is that people found pdd like advertising like sleep medicine as date rape drugs yeah fucking bleak there's like fuck and that's the thing there's like no fucking content moderation on this right so people just do that shit and it it really sucks but on the other hand none of the

constant bad press like stop pdd's rise right and now it is time to leave colin huang behind so until until about 2020 pdd's rise was synonymous with its CEO, Colin Huang. But in mid 2020, Huang resigned as the CEO and kind of like exited public life effectively. Like not entirely, but kind of like he like took he like he resigned as CEO. And then 2021, he resigns as like chairman of the board. And he's like, you know, he's doing this like philanthropic stuff instead. And he's you know, he's doing his like philanthropic stuff instead and he's you know he's doing his like post-ceo life thing right and we've never gotten a good answer as to why he stepped down but i i

have a theory and i think my theory is pretty good and also it goes into have i garrison have i explained to you the thing about i don't remember if I've done it on this show, uh, talked about the, the, the Chinese payday loan app thing. Hmm. I don't think so. Okay. So, all right,

we are now going to do, we're going to close this episode out on one of the most absolutely insane moments of Chinese internet history. So, okay. One of the things that happens in the Chinese tech market in the late 2010s and early 2020s is this mass proliferation of app-based payday loans this is one of the worst things

i have ever seen um what effectively happens is that around like 2014 2015 a bunch of chinese tech companies especially like delivery companies like sort of like china's version of grubhub and doordash and alibaba they're like amazon equivalent gets in it too. And these people realize that they can start their own payment platforms. So basically like all these companies are making their own version of PayPal, but then they realize that they can use these platforms to give out payday loans so that you can in one app, take out a payday loan to order delivery, or you can in one app, take out a payday loan to order delivery. Or you can, in one app, take out a payday loan to buy shit from Amazon with the payday loan. Tencent gets in on it so you can buy micro-transactions with your payday loans.

This, as you might expect, spirals out of control immediately. The interest rates on these loans are enormous. And this means that they make an unbelievable amount of money and so apps just start like shoveling these loans in people's faces the moment they log on to apps but the thing is like this doesn't stop with just like the big shopping apps right by by 2019 it's not just you know like when i say this is going to apps right like you're fucking like imagine if twitter was trying to offer you payday loans like that's the midpoint of this that that might happen that might actually happen based maybe based on the plans for the twitter to become the banking app yeah well that's actually the funny thing so so elon musk really really likes china and part of the reason for this is that you know a bunch of tesla factories are in xinjiang um part of the reason for this is that, you know, a bunch of Tesla factories are in Xinjiang.

Part of the reason for this, like he's trying to like recreate the like WeChat environment, but everyone doesn't like it. Yeah, right. Like people don't actually like it. But the thing is, the other thing that he really loves is the number of hours that you can get people to work in China that you can't really in the US. So we'll get to that fucking next episode. But, you know, OK, so like your fucking twitter is trying to sell you payday apps but then it gets to the point where your

fucking flashlight app is trying to sell you trying to get you to take out payday loans like your like photo app like every fucking app on your phone is trying to sell you payday loans that sounds incredibly annoying this is this is one of these things right that like okay like as bad as like american apps are right like as bad as like the version of capitalism that we have in in the american app ecosystem like the wildest shit is always going on in the chinese tech market which is like even more insane than the american tech market so and this is like we don't actually have this year. And I've, I've, I've been trying to figure out why it never happened here. I think it has to do with partially with banking

regulation and partially with like the fact that like the actual American payday loan companies don't want other companies to like cut in on their business. So I think that's what's happening. But like in China, it's literally like, and this is happening in like like like 2019 2020 2021 that this stuff is happening so you know and it's an all and this this gets i mean it turns into just a fucking nightmare because you know obviously like this turns into this giant wave of people who got it in over their heads and can't pay their loans back because they took out a payday loan with 30% interest. And also, and this is one of the fun things, companies just straight up lie about their interest rates. Like there's a lot of examples of companies saying we have a 9% interest rate. And then, you know, in the contract, it says 9% interest rate. And then when they try to get you

to pay it back, it's like 30%, right? Like this is like, you know, and sometimes they're even, they're, you know, you're getting up to like 100 200 interest like these are like organized crime levels of interest and you know like ollie like the tech giants are all into it alibaba isn't quite as big into it as like some of the other companies but like they're doing it like they absolutely are doing the payday loan shit and i mentioned alibaba here because in late 2020 jack ma who's the founder of alibaba just like disappears he's just gone for like several months uh nobody nobody knows where he is and then he reappears in like 2021 but he's not doing tech ceo stuff anymore he's doing like weird public education tours in

like rural china and this causes like a huge um a huge like kind of thing in the american press because what they're reading it as and they're kind of right is that there's just in 2021 there's this enormous raft of financial regulations on tech companies and this gets interpreted as like a crackdown on tech companies that like the ccp is trying to bring the tech giants in line like they've disappeared jack ma and you know one and this is something, something that a story that gets lost in this and the American press is that like, one of the big things they're trying to do is stop is stop all of these fucking companies from turning their apps into payday loan factories. you know, like, I'm not, like, a CCP fan. Like, it is well-known. Like,

it's, like, my dislike of the CCP is so large that, like, a not insignificant number of people in the US think I work for the CIA, right? But, like, this is, like, those fucking tech companies were, they were like, they were, like, on

the edge of completely annihilating the chinese economy they were very they got very very close to just like reducing like enormous swaths of the entire chinese population into like pure app-based debt peonage it was a fucking disaster and this is part this is a big part of why this like tech crackdown came in because the ccp was like holy shit if you guys do this like you're actually going to like, like you're, you're going to, you're going to fucking nuke the Chinese economy.

Like we cannot allow every single fucking app to be a payday loan, like service and things. I mean, it's still not great now, but things have gotten a lot less bad in the, in the payday loan, like thing since then. But,

you know, again, like it, it had to get bad enough that your flashlight was trying to get you to take out a payday loan for the ccp to actually like go after their like tech giant darlings and i think what happened is that i i i i think what happened is that colin huang like saw which way the wind was blowing and he was like okay there's gonna be a giant crackdown

now to its credit this is the only time I will give PDD credit for anything PDD actually didn't do the payday loan shit I think because Colin Huang was just like smart enough to be like this is a fucking terrible idea like if we try to get our like rural customer base hooked on payday loans all these people are going to just be completely

broke in like nine months so pdd doesn't do it but he takes this moment like he picks 20 like july 2020 which is like a couple months before jack ma disappears and he just fucking nopes and he's like i'm out and yeah like things you know and he he picked a good time and this meant that like you know he never really faced any consequences for you know he he wasn't really caught up in the crackdown he he got out fine and you know he he picked he picked the right time to do it and pdd's future in america was still ahead of it but when the chinese media began to uncover the dark side of pdd in 2021 colin kuang was nowhere to be found and that is what we're covering tomorrow we haven't even gotten to the bad stuff yet

haven't even got to temu proper yeah well the Temu, and we will get to Temu next episode, but Temu's like a 2022 thing, right? So it's really recent. It's only been around for like two years, which means that if we're going to talk about this, 90% of it is going to be PDD because PDD is like nine years old. But yeah, tune in tomorrow

for a bunch of absolutely harrowing shit yeah this is a good half an year we love to do this so exciting I love learning about new harrowing shit hi I'm Ed Zitron host of the better offline podcast Thank you. 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 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden.

We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say

this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Take It Up and Hear, a podcast featuring a sound-activated strobe light that you can't see because this is not a visual podcast. Unless you have, like, synesthesia and you can, like, start hearing, seeing the strobe through our voices, in which case good for you. Wish that was me.

Yeah, so that's Garrison. I'm Mia. We're back again. We're back again for Descent into Hell. Yeah, so last episode we talked about Colin Huang and the rise of PDD, which is China's second largest shopping app, and the Chinese version of the app Temu. So we're now in the post Colin Huang era, an era I think actually might be worse than the

original era, which is kind of stunning. But, you know, here we are, here we are. And this era actually starts really well for PDD. This is like 2020, 2021. China's lockdowns are actually incredible for PDD because as we talked about last episode, PDD strategy is group shopping, right? It's about getting a bunch of people to buy things together to make it cheaper, thus pulling in more and more customers. Now, China had real lockdowns. And in a real lockdown, this is increasingly how people got food. The strictness of the lockdowns vary across, depending lockdown this is increasingly how people got food you know the strictness of the lockdowns vary across like depending on what province you're in right but like my family was in inner mongolia and in inner mongolia in like the first lockdowns you could

send you could only send one member of your family outside per week to like you know to go get groceries otherwise everyone else fed all times has to stay indoors and this meant that people started pooling together to like all buy groceries and then sending one person out to like go pick up the delivery and this this ingrained pdds like fundamental strategy of like buying into the into the consciousness of the chinese public because they've just been doing it for like a year right and as 2020 for word on pdd like skyrockets um this this is this the period from like 2020 to like 2024 has been the period where pdd's grown the most i mean it was already pretty big before then but now

you know it's it's now like the main competitor of alibaba it was like the previously unassailable like online shopping giant the company grew so much that it forced the other like shopping companies to get into the fruit market because it was like clobbering them there so badly so yeah it was wild but then a bunch of absolutely terrible stories broke about pdd in both the Chinese and American press. So we're going to start with the stuff that's, I guess, less bad, and then it's going to get worse. So question number one, is the PDD app malware? Ugh. All right, we're just really jumping right in here.

Oh, this is the mild shit. Are we allowed to say this legally are we allowed yeah uh okay well here's the thing so google play removed the app from its play store oh okay so all right so so okay we we need to be very specific but we're talking too bad for google that it's probably too bad yeah so very specifically this is the thing we're talking about right now is not temu we're talking specifically about the chinese version of the app pdd and this was released on the google play store in like the mid-20 the mid-early like like i think it's like 2021 or something and okay so this again and to be clear again this is not temu this is specifically the android version of pdd and this is interesting too because

so most people in china like don't use android or sorry they don't they don't you they don't use google play right like they they don't that that's not like the app store where they get their apps from so when pdd released like their app on the app store this is this is them specifically going to the western market like their app on the app store. This is, this is them specifically going to the Western market. And did they have infrastructure set up in the States to support this type of like drop shipping or like how,

how does this work? Yeah. Uh, we'll get into it. It was like kind of a little bit like gig economy stuff in China, but how, how are they going to move that? Okay.

Yeah. All right. Well, we'll get into that more later. We're temu this first one didn't like it didn't have that many users because it was just like the chinese app but like here okay so okay there's something we also we need to get out of the way first which is that there's like a massive panic in the u.s about chinese apps being like chinese government trojan horses like especially tiktok so unfortunately before we start this we have to sort out kind of or like you have to make a judgment about what level of app surveillance is like the level of app surveillance you get in

the u.s because all of your apps are spying on you and then what is like above and beyond the like quote-unquote normal level of spying and like tiktok is tiktok is unbelievably invasive right like it is true it's a privacy nightmare but like so are most apps like tiktok's worse than normal but it's not but tiktok is run by the chinese communists so so this is something we're gonna get into and this is this is true pde too um the us actually gets like the stripped down cucked not as bad version of Chinese apps. Like TikTok does not have a bunch of the like integration stuff that that and the Chinese like version of it has were like has this thing where like, I guess Google's kind of doing it now, but like you can directly like like influencer can hold up a product and

you could tap the product and go buy it. Google is trying to do that now. Yeah, but china had that like like doyens had that for like ages right it's like so like the the versions of the apps that we get here are actually less bad than the chinese ones which makes the whole panic so funny to me it's like no no no like they're sending you like a better version of the app like well that's because when uncle sam calls in our version we have to take out all of the maoist influences i don't know whatever whatever so all right all right so like you know look like

so we have to we have to sort out the difference between stuff that's just like the weird moral panic and what what's actually malware so cnn did an investigation of this app so originally there was a chinese company that a chinese security company was looked at this app and was like they're using a bunch of android exploits like they're like they're using like they're they're effectively hacking your phone right they're they're they're deploying a bunch of exploits of things that are like broken in in like in android and allowing you to like this like lesson do stuff they're not supposed to be able to do and so cnn brought in a bunch of different security

like analysts and like they brought in security companies like look at it and here's what they found well i don't know if you would trust the cnn they're literally called the communist news network god damn it quote the app was able to continue running in the background and prevent itself from being uninstalled which allowed it to boost its monthly active rate uh hyper on it i don't know how to pronounce this guy's name i'm so sorry this guy this guy's this guy's name has an umlaut over the o i'm an expert at pronouncing foreign names give it to me let's get it's hypp umlot o n e n good luck you know what i'm just gonna take a i'm gonna take a sabbatical i'm so sorry to this guy who i think is fine this guy's security analyst said it also had the ability to spy on competitors by tracking activity on other shopping apps and

getting information from them he added toshin which is another guy, found PDD to have exploited about 50 Android system vulnerabilities. Most of these exploits were tailor-made for customized parts known as Original Equipment Manufacturer Code, which tends to be audited less than ASOP, which is like another kind of code,

and therefore prone to more vulnerabilities, he said. PDD had also exploited a number of aosp vulnerabilities including one that was flagged by toshin to google in february 2022 google fixed this bug in march he said i've never seen anything like it it's like super expansive sergey toshin android security expert uh is the guy who said that. Sorry. I've never seen that. And Android Tracen said, I've never seen anything like this. It's like super expansive.

According to Toshin, the exploits allowed PDD to access users location, contacts, calendars, notification and photo albums without their consent. They were also able to change system settings and access user social media accounts and chats, he said. Now, that is pretty bad. I will mention that a lot of your normal apps can also do shit like that. Yeah. Like, that's stuff that you can get out of Google. But some of it, it's not good. The other thing that they were doing is,

they were doing these things called privilege escalation attacks, where they're trying to get a higher level of privilege on the system so they can run code they're not supposed to be able to so you know how like sometimes when you're running something on a computer you have to run it as admin so the thing actually works yeah like discord yeah i actually discord i've been trying to stream alan wake 2 to my friends and oh my god it has been such a nightmare i i'm gonna personally write the ceo of discord a letter yeah but like so like so there's there's like the the the way the system security works is there's certain levels of users that are allowed to do certain things certain people who aren't

and this is supposed to stop people from running malicious code and so they're doing these privilege escalation attacks where they're trying to be able to do stuff that only admins can do. And so I showed this to, so I was trying to get a gauge on how much of this is real and how much of this is insane. And so I showed it to my friend who's a software engineer and he was like, what the fuck? The privilege escalation attacks and the attack on the original equipment manufacturer code, like OEM stuff, that's just not normal. That is actual malware. That is not normal app bullshit. This thing is trying to hack your phone. So in 2023, Google pulled the app from the store because everyone was like, what the fuck? Wait, this is just literally malware.

So what were they trying to do? Here's CNN again. It was in 2020, according to a current PDD employee, that the company set up a team of areas and smaller towns initially, while avoiding users in megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai. The goal was to reduce the risk of being exposed, they said. By collecting expansive data on user activities, the company was able to create a comprehensive portrait of the user's habits, interests, and preferences, according to the source. habits, interests, and preferences, according to the source. This also allowed it to improve its machine learning model to offer more personalized push notifications and ads, attracting users to open the app and place orders, they said. So this all makes perfect sense with how we know that PDD operates, right?

They're trying to build detailed profiles of rural customers so they can serve them more efficient ads, and they're doing it by apparently just straight up running an in-house hacking team like a pretty large one so they supposedly that team got like axed and they don't do it anymore but who knows so okay this is not even close to the most batshit thing that PDD gets up to we're going to escalate up to how weird this stuff is so one of the things that PDD has a six toners reporting is that they have these

really strict non-compete clauses that prevent people from like so if you take a job here and you get fired you leave you can't take another job at a tech company for like two years this is like fucking like any tech company like fucking like i don't know they're really expensive like fucking like setting up your grandma's website like might get you in trouble it's like it's it's a real

disaster we have these in the us too and they absolutely suck so i think there was a ruling about them an ftc ruling to ban them recently maybe oh no they're proposing i don't it hasn't gone through yet no they are trying to get rid of them but yeah they're still in the osu but these ones are really strict and apparently they're like pdd is really aggressive about it to the point where like people people will take other jobs under fake identities and like pdd's hr will like track them down oh wow like yeah like they're like headhunting these people well like like inverse headhunt like they're like they're literally just hunting down people trying who are trying to get like jobs right and this apparently led people to adopt secret identities

to like hide right and so this gets something i i did not believe the first time i read it which is that apparently and i originally read this in nike which is usually reliable but i read this and i was like no way uh the thing that they said was that employees at work like who work for pdd apparently use pseudonyms and like never tell each like almost never tell each other their actual names that's i mean that makes sense uh and apparently also they're banned from like like information level information control is so strict that like you can't you're not allowed to know what like the structure of another work group is. And like I read this, I was like, I don't believe this. Right.

And then I started running into like other outlets like Financial Times was like, yeah, no, no. Apparently they talked to the time they talked to people who work for the company. They're like, yeah, everyone uses pseudonyms. I didn't fucking know anyone's real name or like there was like one person whose real name that i know wild i don't know why they're i've never seen i've literally never seen this before with any company i it's it's fucking nuts i got nothing yeah i do you know who no one at this company knows my real name so that's true i i do actually operate by pseudonym yeah that's pretty funny that is not unlike a sizable portion of the cool zone media team but all of us are fake names robert evans that's not robert

evans the real robert evans was the producer of that movie yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah anyway do you know who also has trustworthy names that you can trust these products so true jeff wow that was a really funny joke bill oh we're back sorry i was just talking to the two fake fake name people who are listening in on our call right now me i continue so this is where we get to the truly bleak stuff so all right in 2021 one of pdd's employees in in Xinjiang just worked a shift, came home, and just straight up fucking died in her bed from overwork. This very quickly turns into a giant media thing because this woman, she's in really good health, and she just fucking is worked so hard that she lays down in her bed and dies then a worker who posted a video of an ambulance outside of pdd's headquarters with the caption another brave

warrior of pdd has fallen which great caption terrible situation great caption he gets fired for it and then very quickly like after that so they have like a uh the company has like a q a thing like it's effectively what happens is someone responds to like one of their social media accounts with and asks them uh what do you think of the pdd worker who died after working overtime should pdd bear responsibility their corporate account responded and i quote look at those in the underclass who isn't exchanging life for money i never thought of this as a problem of capital but as a problem of this society we live in an era where we spend our whole lives working hard you can choose a comfortable life if you accept the consequences of comfortable living

people control how much effort they make everyone does i can't believe there's people who genuinely like advocate that china is a like a communist country so deranged that's insane they're really talking like this like god this is this is like this this is like and this is like so this is this is like this and this is like and this is like so this is one of the things that like i just like i don't know like i i just can't fucking get over this shit because like i have a bunch of fucking family in china and you know do they fucking quote carl marx no they quote steve jobs because they're all these like fucking insane entrepreneur bullshit like like fucking literally like grind set like work until you die by your bootstraps yeah it's insane it's like no it's your fault that you work too hard this is actually labor's fault and not capital like this this fucking blew up in the chinese media people got like

people got really fucking pissed and pdd at first was like no this is a fake post we never did it and then people were like no no it's not this is we found the post right they take they take it down people like had saved screenshots and eventually the company was forced to admit that it was actually their account but then they said that it was a social media contractor who put it on the corporate account quote by mistake oh sure sure yeah that's so that's like me when i search my twin peaks not safe for work fanart on the coolzone media account it was a mistake guys didn't mean to post it there

I don't know how that happened it got past the mods people understandably are not happy and then 11 days later a PDD employee jumps off a fucking building. Again, also because they've been working so hard. And this is where we need to talk about PDD's labor conditions, because they are fucking appalling. fucking appalling. Here's Sixth Tone. A former PDD employee who left the company a year ago told Sixth Tone under conditions of anonymity that excessive work hours are common practice. Around eight months after he joined PDD in early 2019, he said employees were told they need to work at least 300 hours per month, amounting to nearly 12 hours per day, six days a week. We're going to get more into that.

That's a schedule called 996, where you work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. This is incredibly common in China. This is actually a good schedule in a lot of Chinese work environments. It can get way worse than that. Here's another quote from that Six Tone article. The company cares a lot about our work hours it has become company culture even if staff has finished working if they'll just stay in the office i was one of the lucky ones i only had to work from 11 a.m to 10 p.m and my manager was nice

to me jesus this person added that employees arriving after 11 a.m. would have their daily wages docked by three hours. It's fucking insane. It's nightmarish. That same worker talked about how she would like, and this is a thing that's like, you see this a lot in different accounts, is that people would just literally break down crying

at their desks because they were so overworked. Are these like office jobs these are fucking office workers these are tech workers these are fucking tech wow like app design right the these are the fucking bougie tech jobs they're not like the chinese because they're getting overworked in like a factory or like an amazon warehouse these are fucking tech workers and this is this is the thing about this right is that like we we only we don't like there hasn't okay so the chinese media this

actually like becomes a huge thing in the chinese media is that these people are dying there was another there's also around the same time a delivery driver lit himself on fire like as a protest for like the amount of shit that he had to deal with and this was a big like a huge thing in in the chinese media but almost all of the reporting and the coverage and stuff like that was about the tech workers but like fucking so many people work schedules that are worse than 996, right? Like that is a, that is a, that is a tech worker schedule, right? There are a lot of places where people were fucking way worse shit. The sort of countervailing force to it is people who like, you know, we talked about

this kind of in the lying flat episodes is people working for like one day and then eating just like plain rice with some, like whatever fucking the cheapest thing they can find, they can fucking get out of it and not working for two more days and working another day. But like, it's, it's so bad. Like the labor conditions are just appalling. And you know, like a bunch of stories sort of started coming out about how bad pdd's like conditions are there was one on wechat that broke that i saw via six tone about the toilet situation in pdd's largest office building so this building has 1,000 people per floor. It has eight total bathrooms per floor. 1,000 people. They don't

even have one bathroom for every 100 people. How does this even function? I mean, like, I suppose it just doesn't. People are, like, peeing under their desks or something? People fucking, like, you don't eat in the morning. Or you try to hold out to lunch when you can run

to a different building and try to use the bathrooms there but like you know you're trying to hold it all day or you just yeah or you fucking do that you go you go you you use your lunch time instead of eating to fucking go somewhere else you starve yourself there are like there's a bunch of reports of guys just like shitting in urinals because there just literally wasn't time for them to fucking actually like use a stall so they're just like they're they're just like they're they're pooping in urinals um maybe the worst picture i've ever seen in my entire life is this is going to be the episode our pdd started installing timers over the toilets to show how long how long people had been there so there's just like a like a a fucking clock over you that starts

when you when you fucking close the door to try to get people to go to the bathroom faster it is just appalling the conditions and again these are the conditions of the office workers. It's apocalyptically bad. So I realized when I was researching this story that I actually ran into PDD earlier. So before I did this story, I hadn't looked into Temu at all. And I realized that I had ran into PDD earlier when I was tracking this story about tech workers banding together to basically on GitHub, these story about uh tech workers banding together to like basically

like on github these these uh office workers like tech workers like made a giant spreadsheet where everyone would document their hours and like their pay scales and stuff and it was like you know it was this sort of like you know it was it was this thing to like demand better labor conditions i'm pretty i'm pretty sure they were actually demanding like like workplace democracy too it was pretty wild but the thing that you get out of that is that pdd has the worst the worst hours of any tech company they are pdd is so bad that other chinese tech companies got worse in order to compete with them yeah i mean that is the hard thing about setting the bar so low is that it allows other people to lower their own bars. Yeah.

Yeah. And it makes just everybody worse. Yeah. And again, like I can't emphasize enough the extent to which these are the office workers, right? Like these are the people who are making the best money out of this, who are treated better than like the fucking factory workers and the fucking like people in the rural areas like fucking doing farming right but again we don't we don't know

a huge amount about what those workers lives are like because they're not urban tech workers and urban tech workers can get their stories into the press but like you know migrant migrant factory workers rural workers there's you know there's just not the kind of attention that you can get out of a big story about like an urban

office building and you know i mean these labor conditions are so bad that people are just straight up fucking dying and the chinese government eventually gets involved like their their their version of the supreme court eventually rules that like working people 12 hours a day six days a week is illegal but it doesn't really matter like a lot of those people still have those same schedules yeah and you know and like this this is not a this is not a problem that can be solved just by like court rulings right so yeah it's it's really fucking bad um we're gonna we're gonna take an ad break i don't i don't have a good transition out of that shit and we're back so all of this brings us to temu and its slogan shop like a billionaire

so oh god this the slogan it's so it like it evokes like a like a nauseous reaction in me yeah it's so it it epitomizes everything that is wrong about our current way of living. And the way we idealize. The rich. And put them on this like pedestal. For how you should live your life. But also knowing that you will never actually be there. This is as close as you're going to get. And it's also a thing where like.

It's a completely unreal. Like this is not how fucking billionaires shop. Like billionaires don't shop. Like you think those people fucking shop. no no they don't they have they have over like saving three dollars on a on like a mango you're like no yeah like what the fuck are you talking about yeah so yeah like i i hate it i hate it so fucking much um you know so as we said like this is the time is the American version of PDD if you're in the US you've probably

seen Temu as apparently there are not that many of them in like other countries like I have British friends who are just like what the fuck are you talking about Mia I've never heard of Temu before the Super Bowl for whatever it's worth the big place where they were advertising was YouTube but if you're watching YouTube without an ad blocker

don't I can I don't know if i can legally recommend new probably probably that's on your phone i can get it it's an app i don't do it i don't know if it may be legal it may not be i can't say i will never advocate breaking the law no definitely by youtube yeah yeah yeah that's definitely the way to go absolutely but you know so like they okay like most famously yeah as you're saying like so they spent 27 million dollars buying three super bowl ads it's all the same ad and it sucked um but you know okay this is only a fraction of their fucking budget right uh here's from the Wall Street Journal, quote, Temu's marketing budget reached $1.7 billion in 2023, and that figure will grow to nearly $3 billion in 2024, JP Morgan's analyst estimate. Last year, Temu's marketing spending contributed to an average loss of $7 per quarter,

according to Goldman Sachs estimates. They are buying so many ads. They are literally driving other companies out of the ad market like ncc yo has been talking about how they can't afford to run ads because ads are getting too expensive because they're buying so many fucking ads here's reuters quote u.s companies dependent on commercial spending uh or spending on commercials not commercial spending they are buying commercials yes yeah like uh facebook they say meta i refuse to fucking call that company meta like fuck that shit their facebook are being saved by chinese retailers like temu and shian they represent 10 per those two companies just

temu and shian represent 10 of meta's revenue last year the facebook owner said of Meta's revenue last year, the Facebook owner said. So Temu is hemorrhaging money right now in order to do this, right? JP Morgan thinks they're losing $3 billion a year, but they also project, and to be fair, these projections, these projections are wrong so much of the time, but they're projecting that Temu will be making $3.5 billion a year in 2027. And all of this raises the question why and to answer that we need to get into chinese development economics so the chinese economy has

a problem and this is a problem that the ccp has known about for a long time it's the problem of turning a sort of like a low on the value chain like manufacturing economy into a consumption driven economy now the problem with transitioning into a consumption driven economy is that people don't have enough money to boost consumer demand. The Marxist way of saying this is that under capitalism, both output and consumption are double determined by your wage, right? Your wage determines both firm output and also how much you can consume right in non-marxist terms oh no no one has enough money to buy things in your new consumer economy my brother in christ you set the wages okay thank you for explaining that where the fuck are these people supposed

to be getting money from to buy your shit if you won't give them more money like wait wait wait from to buy your shit if you won't give them more money like wait wait wait so you know you can't do this by just making them like work more hours you know you can work people for like 12 15 like 20 hours a day but there's only 24 hours a day like there's an actual definite there's an actual definite limit to the amount of exploitation you can do via increasing labor hours. This has always been capitalism's problem, right? Like, the sort of rapacity of capitalism has hit the secular limit of time itself. So the solution to this

is to expand into new markets where consumers have more money, which is to say, the U.S. So PDD initially targeted, like, poor rural Chinese workers, right? And this is kind of the same group that Temu was targeting now in the U.s um their initial base is people who like buy from dollar stores but they've been spreading rapidly temu has outpaced xian to become the second largest shopping app in the u.s and but the important thing really yeah yeah they're second

behind amazon yeah they're like they're destroying xian like wow yeah i did not know they were that popular yeah i mean like estimates are like well i've seen estimates to say they have 100 million users i don't buy that i've seen that the estimates that i think are more reliable are like 54 million users in the u.s although well the thing is we don't we don't have post super bowl numbers between 50 and 1 well i think i think it's more like 50 i i wouldn't i wouldn't accept 100 million ones i think that's bullshit. We don't have good post-Super Bowl data yet, kind of the issue. But yeah, they're clobbering people.

But the important thing about specifically the American market for Temu is that the equivalent person who shops at a dollar store in the US still has unfathomably more money than that same person in China. Because partially this is because of the strength of the American dollar. Partially this is because American wages are just like unfathomably higher than Chinese wages. And that's true even when you account for like the relative strength of the dollar to the yuan. even when you account for like the relative strength of the dollar to the yuan so you know the other kind of important thing about Temu strategy is that

they've been using this kind of like loophole that was set up in US customs law to allow people to like bring presents home from countries so like if you go to another country and you bring a present home and it's worth less than $200 you go through like an expedited customs thing and you don't have to pay tariffs on it yeah so i i mean so temu and like a whole bunch of these companies just ship every

single one of their packages in in quantities where it's like 799 and not 800 is that illegal yeah yeah yeah it's really funny it set off, like, massive intracapitalist war because, like, a bunch of, like, American right-wingers, like, American manufacturers, like, the Republican Party, are like, we need to close this gap. But then all of the fucking shipping companies are like, no, this is a vital part of the American consumer economy. And there's this, like, giant war going on,

like, both in Congress and, like, in the... Huh. Like, in the press over whether they should... whether they should close this loophole. Now, on the other hand, there are real challenges to Temu being the first company to break into the...

Chinese companies really, truly break into the American market. Shein has done well, but they haven't... They're not a rival to Amazon. They're not like a rival for it to amazon right like they're not big enough to like knock off one of the sort of like american tech giants and temu's problem is that okay so if you compare temu to to pdd right the chinese version pdd is supposed to be about spreading through word of mouth right it spreads by like someone in your

you know you as a as someone buying something for pdd taps your entire friend group and your family to get them to buy something for cheaper right but the problem is that like fucking night i just i forgot how great marish this whole structure is it's so bad but the thing is like americans don't really do that like there have been attempts to do like groupon things they never worked and americans also don't group shop right because we're i i don't know more weird bourgeois individuals i don't fucking know this is not a thing we're full of we're full of a lot more like individualistic impulse buyers yeah that is that is kind of a large part of uh what the american shopping class is me is is built off of. And this is an issue for Temu because they don't have the word of mouth thing that drove them in China, so they're relying on

just top-down, massive ad buys and stuff. And there's kind of a limit, and it's something that Temu understands. There's a whole thing in the Chinese tech industry about the power of being able to leverage people's like private networks right timmy understands but they don't have a way to break into the american market because it just doesn't work like the chinese market so instead they're like buying three super bowl ads right now there's another issue which is that the goods that they sell suck ass and they break instantly i you know that's an issue but i don't know it's the u.s lots of things suck and break instantly but like it is something that's been driving sort of negative

sentiment from people who've used it as they're like they buy something and it's just like sucks and they're you know they're unhappy about it what the thing i think is maybe the biggest problem is that their delivery times are really long by american standards because they're shipping overseas temu had to build an actual logistics infrastructure where pdd like didn't right because pdd is just using like chinese versions of fedex or whatever right and temu's kind of doing that but in in you know in order to make it convenient for chinese sellers uh the way that they the way that they sort of like set this up is they have a warehouse in Guangdong and every seller

ships it to this warehouse and then Temu deals with getting it shipped overseas. The problem is that this is really slow, right? It takes two weeks for things to show up. And that's not that slow by normal standards, but this is the US. Everyone's used to Amazon.

By current American standards, that is like a tortoise.marishly slow because america we we have gotten used to a level i'd say gratification like yeah like this is a level of power that was previously reserved for like chinese emperors and we'd fucking use it every day to order fucking nail clippers from amazon right like or in my case a whole bunch of materials to build a black lodge which i will then return as soon as my party is over incredible you know and this is this is a this is also something that's kind of new for temu because pdd was built on being able to on doing sales or a fast enough they could sell fruit to people right do you know how hard it is to sell fucking fresh fruit to people, right? Do you know how hard it is to sell

fucking fresh fruit to people? That's like, it's legitimately really difficult. Well, yeah, you can't ship, you can't have a two-week ship for mangoes. Well, you can, but it's, I mean, it depends. You have to have an actual logistics infrastructure

set up for it, right? You can't just ship it in like an Amazon box. They have to be specifically ripening along set up for it, right? You can't just ship it in like an Amazon box. They have to be like specifically ripening along the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Temu is also up to do that, right? And this is an issue with all of their stuff because, you know, they're trying to do direct-to-consumer sales. But the thing is, in China, it's really fast. And here, it's slow.

And the upside for Temu is that their stuff is really cheap, right? It's unbelievably cheap and you know obviously they're losing money on the sales and most of the money they're losing on the sales is from their ad spending not from the actual sales and this is this is where you get into again the really bleak part about this where okay so why are these why are these prices so low? And part of it's tech money subsidy, but a lot of it is just labor, just pure, pure, unrivaled labor exploitation. You know, with the Chinese workers movement,

like as like a sort of like collective mass movement, just completely broken by Tiananmen. And then again, during the crackdown through the 2010s that wiped out whatever sort of classical workers' movement style thing may have popped up from the strikes in 2011. There's no mass countervailing force in Chinese politics to try to raise wages. Independent union organizing is illegal you will get arrested the actual unions that exist like the all china union federation doesn't do shit we don't really have that kind of like fake union thing here it's like it's like a different but you know like

they're they're i don't know this is this is this is maybe not the time for me to try to explain china's union system like the unions are fucking bullshit they don't do anything like if you go to them and be like my wages are too low they'll try do anything like if you go to them and be like my wages are too low they'll try to get you to like negotiate with the company directly right like like as an individual and like it's they're nonsense they're completely useless and you know the result of this and the result of just like the incredible poverty of of the chinese working class and the fact that you know a lot of chinese migrant workers who are the people who are actually making these goods so a lot of some of its real workers some of its migrant workers but a lot of

these people's wages are lower than they otherwise would be because they're drawing revenue off of like they're off of off of like the plots of land that their family has like back in the countryside when they like when they they like migrate to another city to, to find a job. Yeah. So like all of these factors are just institutionally like smashing the price of like, like smashing like wages and there's no, there's no fucking, there's not, there's nothing really there to resist them and,

and act like, you know, it's not like the Chinese working class, like completely takes it lying down. Right. But it's like their resistance strategies are trying to work as little as possible but that doesn't that's you know and that's something that can be very effective in the sense of like you're working a lot less but it's not something that drives up like wages and so

when when you're looking at temu and you're seeing a pair of jeans for two dollars like what you are seeing is the raw exploitation of the chinese working class and this is also true of like the rest of the fucking shit you buy from china right like almost all of the price of like a shirt that you're buying i mean chinese textile manufacturing is kind of like not what it used to be right but like you know but like you're buying like fucking some bullshit from china like if you're buying from like another drop shipping company right like the thing you're actually paying for you're paying the drop shipping company you're not fucking paying the workers they're not they're

fucking not making shit all like all of the stuff that's like i mean it's not like 100 but like a huge portion of of the fact that the price is higher on non-Temu sites is just like it's just markups because this is just what the Chinese economy is it's just sort of like it's unbelievable exploitation and this brings

us to the thing we're going to end today on which is does Temu use slave labor oh okay and the answer is probably but it's hard to tell so this has been a big thing because temu is one of the companies that the state department brought up when they were doing their investigations into like like xian was the other one into like are these companies using xinjiang slave labor and you know this is labor from people put in in in the fucking camps i i think the answer is probably because i mean so the thing is the state department doesn't have any actual evidence right

like they're all and they're they're doing this incredibly what we'll get into this in a second but like you know obviously they're doing this because this is like this is an intra like capitalist feud thing right the state department's talking about this because they're pissed at china yeah this is like a nationalistic project for the united yeah but comma it's also probably true because these like and this this is like the thing specifically with with pdd that we've been talking about is that they don't, and Temu's like, they don't vet the sellers of stuff, right? Like we talked about last episode that like people were selling sleeping pills as date rate drugs,

right? They don't fucking vet it at all. So yeah, probably like quite possibly. Yeah. The stuff, the stuff that they're selling from Xinjiang and they have a pretty large presence there,

like was using sort of like prison slave labor from the camps there however comma we can't talk about prison slave labor without talking about the fact that fucking every goddamn u.s firm also uses prison slave labor everyone from fucking mcdonald's to starbucks to walgreens jc penny like fucking every every company every american company you can fucking think of uses slave labor or their slave labor in their in their supply chain and they're using slave labor because in the u.s under the 13th amendment slavery is legal as long as the person as long as the person being enslaved is incarcerated so you know like it doesn't fucking matter like this this is this is the problem it doesn't matter whether you buy from the u.s or china China, right? You're getting fucking slave labor.

So if you want to not do that, your only option, if you do not want everything you consume, like the food that you eat, if you don't want everything that you use in your daily life to be the product of unfathomable human exploitation, your only option is to destroy the monstrous economic system that reduces humans to commodities and tear up the fucking roots of every single

one of these companies from San Francisco to Shanghai and burn it to the ground. Those are your options. It's not. Your individual consumer choice is not going to make it any better. That's what I got i okay all right well oh god like wasn't the super bowl great this year yeah what a game what a game

almost almost double overtime that was crazy i i don't know that was that was the worst chiefs team of all time and they nobody could fucking beat them. We're so doomed. We're going to get Patrick. We're home is going to win like a fucking 12 Pete. It's so over for every other sports team. Better things aren't possible unless you make them possible. 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. 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck.

You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and

you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today's episode is one that I've wanted to tackle for a while and there are many different avenues to go about it. I think today is a little bit more focused and I want to talk about food, Palestinian food to be exact, and the way that it can be used as resistance, as part of a culture that is being eradicated essentially. The appropriation of Palestinian surface culture by Israel has been happening ever since Israel's inception. Surface culture encompasses tangible and observable elements that contribute to the

distinctive identity of a cultural group or region. Music, food, dress, and other aspects often define a nation's surface culture. Authentic culture evolves organically over generations, at least it's supposed to. But Israel has a sort of top-down approach to culture that lacks genuine identifying characteristics. Throughout its history, Israel has either fabricated, annexed, or reconstructed both surface and deep cultural elements through what writer Jamal Kanj describes as, quote, falsehoods, myths, and fables. Unlike the conventional, slow, and organic development of culture, Israeli surface culture came pre-packaged by appropriating those very elements from the age-old traditional Palestinian culture. A prominent aspect of any society's culture is its local cuisine.

In 1948, Israel ethnically cleansed Palestine of all non-Jewish Palestinians, took over their land, and brazenly claimed Palestinian culinary treasures like hummus, falafel, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh salad, couscous, frikeh, kibbeh, mjadara, pita bread, and many more. They claimed them all as Israeli. All it took was to identify a Palestinian dish and then add the noun Israeli before its name. Going through the complete list of plagiarized Palestinian cuisine would take me way, way too long, especially because I feel like Western familiarity with Palestinian cuisine remains somewhat limited, but I do want to explain one example that clearly shows just how foreign appropriated Palestinian food is to Israel. Hummus. The Arabic word hummus does not

exist in the spoken Israeli language, Hebrew. Pronouncing the word correctly is actually a bit challenging for most Hebrew speakers because there is no hard ha in the Hebrew alphabet, and in general, when Hebrew speakers attempt to enunciate hummus or any Arabic word with the hard ha, they mispronounce it as ha. In this case, hummus, not hummus. And you might have heard this a lot recently when it comes to Hamas. The full name of the dish hummus becomes even more challenging when adding its second part, tahini. The H in tahini is also a hard H, so an Israeli would distort the Palestinian dish hummus b'tahini to hummus b'takhini. This is an insult to the Arabic language, culinary etiquette, and to Arab chefs in the Levant kitchen around the world. To paraphrase Palestinian-American comedian Mo Amr,

hummus does not exist in your lexicon. You can't pronounce it. How can it be your national food? Even more amusing is when an Israeli writer posited that hummus and eggplant, baba ganoush, were, quote, Israeli foods because that's how the Spanish Inquisition identified secret Jews, from the food they ate. A similar hypothesis to this is the argument that foods like hummus, falafel, frikeh, etc. were brought by Jews who came from the Arab world. Of course, the diverse citizenry of the Arab world or the Muslim-Arab Spain, it must have had hummus and eggplant in their cultural diet. Jewish citizens cooked and ate the food because they lived in the culture that produced the food,

not because they created the food for that culture. Arab Jews also exist, but that would still make all of this food Arabic food. Writer Jamal Kanj writes, Since Israelis contend that Jews have the right to claim foods brought with them as Israeli food, why don't they claim Russian dishes as Israeli food? Better yet, why don't Israelis from New York claim American steak as an Israeli food too? I know it's kind of said in jest, but he does raise a serious question. Why does Israel appropriate Palestinian and Arab food, but not food brought in from Russia, Europe, Poland, or America?

It is simply because Palestinian food provides the Israeli top-down culture with a distinctive surface cultural identity. It also features atypical exotic culinary dishes to Western kitchens, and this makes it a lot easier to hoodwink the West regarding the origin of their made-up surface culture. The gall of claiming Palestinian culinary treasures is not only historically inaccurate, but also offensive and disrespectful. It is quite common for countries to adopt elements of other cultures, including their cuisine. For example, American cuisine celebrates a rich tapestry of international dishes, like Asian, Italian, and Mexican food. However, the foods remained appreciated for their origin, with no real

urgency to appropriate them as America's national food. Kange suggests that unlike Israel, it could be that the United States does not have the same obsessive need to fake a culture to justify its existence. In contrast, the Zionist movement envisioned Israel's survival as being predicated on erasing the history of the rich heritage of Palestine's culture and its people. And all of this is extremely relevant to what is happening right now as Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians. Because genocide and ethnic cleansing isn't just about lives lost. It's not just about physical death were never there to begin with. And this has been a narrative that Zionists have said since Israel's inception.

A land without people for a people without land. Israel's inception, a land without people for a people without land. But this appropriation of food in both the physical and cultural ethnic cleansing of Palestine, this didn't start on October 7th. The slow ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been going on for over 76 years, and the stealing and claiming of Palestinian food as Israeli is intrinsically a part of that. It brings me to the topic of today's episode. Today my guests are Reem Asil and Jabril Younes. Reem is a multiple award-winning Palestinian Syrian speaker and chef based in Oakland, California, working at the intersection of food, community, and social justice. Jibril is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist who has

worked with Reem on multiple projects, including a show that we touch on in this episode. With food as a tool, we talk about utilizing Arab hospitality to build a strong, resilient community, as well as celebrate Palestinian joy. Here it is. Hello, everybody. This is Shereen. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today, we're talking to two people I love and respect very much about a topic that I think is really underreported on and that's food erasure and how it's part of ethnic cleansing and i think it's a really important topic to talk about right now especially with the genocide happening in palestine so let's just jump right in without further ado welcome my guests reeb and jabril hello hello hello hey just so our audience can

get to know you guys a little bit better how about y'all introduce yourselves and like what you do and uh yeah yeah reem you want to go first sure um my name is reem i am a bay area based palestinian syrian chef uh i own a restaurant called reems california and our mission really is to build community across cultures and experiences through the warmth of Arab bread and hospitality. Beautiful. Wow, that was so succinct. My name is, thank you for setting me up so well, Reem. I've done it a few times, you know. Yeah. My name is Jabril Yunus. I'm a filmmaker based in Pasadena. And I am also a Palestinian artist in general.

Yeah, no relation. Both of our last names are Yunus, but that is how we met. A white person said, you guys have the same last name. You should meet. And we met and now we're friends. But I really like the partnership that you guys have and the collaboration that you guys, from my perspective, have established. Can you guys talk about what you've been working on recently together? Yeah.

Yeah. So we've been working on for the past since like 2021 or late 2020. We've been working on a documentary series that is named after reem's cookbook which is you should pick it up it's one of my favorite cookbooks that i own it's called arabia uh and it is a documentary series exploring the foodways and diaspora of arab people across southwest asia north africa and i think the general log line and dream can dive into a bit more of the general log line is you can tell this like through telling the story of the food you can tell the story of our people in diaspora uh and it underscores a lot of i think what we'll talk

about today which is sort of food identity identity through food and uh resilience and through food but also i think one thing that's always been really important to, to both of us is how much we see the show is like a celebration of our culture. I feel like there are so many, so many trauma stories from not only Palestinians, but Arabs in general. And I think something that was really important to us is like, yes, let's talk about all of it we're an extremely i think you

know we're extremely politicized as a people but also very passionate but also let's celebrate all the things we love about ourselves and love about our culture and the tastes and smells and sounds and sights so reem how would you i feel like that's sort of the setup but how would you describe it yeah i think um that's exactly it and and our hope is that the being able to break down the barriers or um have a lens into our world for um the public is is kind of a gateway to understand the context and the politics behind why things are the way they are and to really fight the dehumanization that Arabs have experienced, particularly in the West. And so, you know, while this is a show about food, it's also, it's very much a show about people and how interconnected we are. about people and how interconnected we are so yeah we're really excited to be able to break down some of those barriers of understanding in a way that could actually lead to people

you know fighting anti-arab sentiment in this country fighting islamophobia all of these things when they have that kind of lens or that that view into our world yeah and i mean it's been pretty interesting can i can i keep vamping a little bit uh it's been pretty interesting i mean i think the the sort of like thought that started the show really was why it's so easy and i think we'll talk about this later too in depth but like why is it so easy to find so many different cultures food you know like you have i'm going to use asian food as an example because i live in the san gabriel valley so it's like all around me but you have korean food and japanese food and so many different types of chinese food that are all specifically called what they are and where

they're from right they're all like identified correctly and that can extend to the latinx world and their food it can extend to european food it's all very you know like people call it what it is and then you sort of get to you get to you know southwest asia and north africa and suddenly the food stops being called, you know, what it is and starts being called Mediterranean or starts being called Middle Eastern. And I think that the idea was like, I had gone to Anaheim where there's a neighborhood called Little Arabia here. And there was a Palestinian restaurant. I was like, so excited about it. It was called the olive tree. It's closed now,

but, um, I was like, so, so excited. And I got, I always get so, so excited when I find a Palestinian restaurant or Yemeni restaurant.

And, um, you know, I mean many of them, but I think the reason I get so excited is because it's so hard to find those places. And I think there's a reason why. And so, you know, three and a half years later, the show has sort of grown from that initial thought and interest and become very, very different.

And it's, you know, effort to humanize Arabs, which is something I think is, you know, it's unfortunate that we still have to do that. But I think we kind of do, especially right now. But yeah, we've been pitching for like, you know, we worked on it together for a while and then have just been pitching and going through pitches and talking to different companies and getting a lot of great feedback and getting some really weird feedback

for the past like few years. And we can talk about that more if you want, but. Well, I'd like to talk about some of the more interesting feedback, I guess. But I also want to ask you, Reem, how did you get involved in food? Where did that passion start? Yeah, I would say food has always been in the backdrop, for better or for worse of my life experiences particularly when everything falls apart for me in my life um i i grew up kind of as a whatever the the term i've heard is like

the third culture kid right um where the the arab identity was really strong in our household and that was particularly through food but then also and a stranger in a strange land uh outside of the home uh where it was predominantly your typical americana suburban culture and so i was kind of like even though food was there i the intertwining with identity it made me like run away from it a lot because it reminds you of your otherness. And also just the nuances of seeing my mom being a working mom and struggling in the kitchen. So I was like, I'm going to be a feminist and I'm never going to touch food. I'm never going to, I'm going to be a feminist and I'm never going to touch food. That was like, and then every time, like, you know, and then I did like the, what the immigrant child does, like overachiever, like go to college, try to be the president and then realize that's

not what I want to do. When I spent many years in the nonprofit world, I was doing organizing work. And while that work was really rewarding to some extent, it was really draining and not fulfilling in a deeper spiritual level. And so every time I would burn out the food and particularly the food of my culture would come back in some shape or form. where I was in another bout of burnout and depression and really questioning everything. And it was a trip that I took to the Arab world with my father. Seeing particularly bread in these street corner bakeries be the anchor for this community that I had, you know, as a kid of diaspora, like really longing to feel connected to.

And it was through the food that I like felt connected once again. So my mom did something right. I'll give her the credit for that. But I was like, I need to explore this more. I need to understand what is this. And so then food became a source of healing for me to like come back to my identity and come back to my culture. But then also just the power of food as a community builder that like transcends all cultures. Like I really loved that as a community organizer who had been working with other communities who struggled just like my own.

Right. So that's kind of how I got into food by way of my love for wanting to belong and my love for connection of community and then slowly became obsessed with food itself I mean who doesn't love food but um it is a place of both trauma and healing for me so it became kind of a way to transcend that no I think it's a great thing to bring up how it's a trauma and very healing as well um I to kind of talk about like the feedback I know you've had a restaurant in the Bay Area for a while was it similar when you tried to make the show come together like did you have similar

barriers and feedback like were you like familiar with some of the things that people were saying or was it completely like a new game yeah so the context uh that I started my restaurant and I want to say it was probably much different than even what it is now today although certainly there is backlash but I would say I was one of the first few chefs who were saying nope I want my food to be called Arab. And I really wanted to counter these kind of watered down labels of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean or, you know, Levantine. To me, those were all colonial terms. And it was like a bad word to say Arab. And I wanted to reclaim that identity. I was like, if I'm going to come out, I want to come out as my whole self and not this person, this scared person that was stifled all my life.

And I understand why the immigrants before me came, you know, did it that way because they needed to make a living. And, you know, there was a lot of anti-Arab sentiment, especially in the wake of 9-11, that kind of climate here. And so I had this like lovely idea that I'm like this generation where i can like break it down and make it cool i'm like i'm gonna mainstream it you know and i got pushback actually for my own family because they had those fears they were like just you know start like don't even start with like a zahtar benda ushe nobody's gonna now it's like the hot thing but so that was the context in which i was opening my business and um nobody had done it really before so i could kind of create my own rules and people like what is this and i still got like a lot of like oh is this you know um mediterranean or you

know people it took a while to train people to say Arab and then put the layer of Palestinian identity you know my Palestinian identity at the time that I was opening my restaurant was really important it was you know I had started my pop-ups on the in the wake of Israel's second to worst now we're seeing the worst of it um incursion on ghazal in 2014 in which they killed you know over 3 000 palestinians in one winter um and we were devastated by that we were devastated um about the state of organizing with palestinians and i really wanted to as i opened my restaurant not be scared to talk about my whole self. So everything about Reims, even though we're not pushing our politics in your face,

the very act of being Palestinian was seen as political, just existing. And we had a mural of a Palestinian activist who was based in Chicago named Asmi Aroda, who was deported by the government, it made a made an example of to say if you're Palestinian and you're outspoken about Palestine this is what will happen to you and I put her on the wall to remind my community and to remind myself that we don't need to be scared and I got a lot of backlash for that but I think even in that time despite the backlash the amount of community support amount of opportunity for people to learn was that much greater and so i ended up getting a lot more um positive attention for my bakery overall as a result of that how many james beard norms do you have just a few a few it makes me happy every time i wake up with a nomination i'm like i wonder what the

zionists be thinking just a few a few james gives me a little bit of like hope yeah that like our success is kind of like what is threatening you know because we are truth we are in the business of truth telling and we do it in a way that's very human you know based in our humanity and our dignity and um our restaurant was really i think powerful in that way that a simple art piece or the simple act of uh making food and calling it palestinian was that threatening um to the powers that be? You know, like that's such an interesting backdrop also to talk about the feedback we got from the show because like, I think Reem's experience was so visceral in that way.

And I mean, what she described as well. And I think you can look it up and there have been articles on Vice and stuff about it where people can read about her experience and everything that happened. And, you know, I think maybe we undersold your intro a little bit,

Reem, like you're a bad-ass and, you know, the James Beard noms and a lot of great and awesome press. And, but, um, I think what's interesting about the show is with Reem's,

with Reem's, uh, the restaurant, you know it's very specifically palestinian and arab food and the show while it yeah it's being made by us who are palestinian people it's not only about palestine and that's been something we've sort of had to overcome. Like I, the show is about Arabs and it's about our foods and food ways. And as much as the food, you know,

the show, as much as the show focuses on, on Palestine, it also focuses on Egypt and Yemen and where, you know, I mean, the Yemeni coffee tradition is like where Arab coffee kind of came from and started from. And it also focuses kind of came from and started from.

And it also focuses on Lebanon and Morocco and Algeria. It's been an interesting. Yeah, go ahead, Reem. Yeah, just to that point, like it's not about, I mean, first of all, these states are border. They're border. They're colonized states in some shape or form. they're border they're they're colonized states in some shape or form and and the idea is to fight the tropes of the arab as one thing right like it's showing the breadth and depth of our culture that like we're not hamat it's not a monolith we're not homogenous and and even the

ethos of reams kind of is very similar to that idea that yes we are palestinian but we're also syrian we're also oakland we're also california like those things don't need to compete with one another um i hate you know like you know my identity kind of coming on the scene yes i'm arab and yes i'm palestinian but those are political identities the reason we call our food palestinian is to draw attention to the ethnic cleansing and erasure of our people that's why we call it palestinian is to draw attention to the ethnic cleansing and erasure of our people that's why we call it palestinian but it's not there's there are certain foods that are not in here i mean they're enjoyed all over the arab world and they look different but you can't like the claiming of ownership of food is yeah so we try to i think

this show is really trying to fight against that trope of the, it's called Arabiya, which is kind of like a tongue in cheek. Like, what do you think of with the Arab woman? And it's like, let me take all of those stereotypes and like turn them on their head. It's the same thing with like all of our foodways in our culture. There is no singular way of what an arab is we all have kind of our unique stories and histories so when we choose to call things what they are there's a context and a history for that and that's what we're trying to share yeah exactly i think i mean i really really relate to the idea of of really wanting to be represented with food.

When I find a Syrian restaurant, I freak out. There's one in El Cajon in Southern California where it's like my family and I go there every weekend when I'm down and when I'm visiting my parents. It's just like a place where we feel like the closest we can get to home again. like a place where we feel like the closest we can get to home again. And I think it's a really important reminder that, I don't know, food can be really powerful. And before I keep rambling, I'm going to take a break and we'll be right back. And we are back. Reemem you mentioned something earlier that i think is worth touching back on the idea of like existing being already like a political act i think that is like it's a burden

for a lot of people of color a lot of marginalized communities and i think hand in hand with that is the fact that like our food is also like a political act like making sure it's couscous not is really couscous or whatever it is that we're trying to fight against how did how do you see food and especially now i think people underestimate how many levels there are of ethnic cleansing because erasing erasing food and appropriating food is a huge part of that right so can i get your take on that both of your takes you mean like beyond appropriating yeah i mean i think food food is a uh is a tool of it is weaponized historically uh against people um i mean most notably obviously with 75 years of occupation of Palestine one of the many ways besides the dispossession, killing, expulsion is to sever us from our food ways and when you sever someone from

their land that creates the food ways you sever them from their land, that creates the foodways. You sever them from their culture, from their existence. Then there's just the more immediate way, as we're seeing this genocide unfold, where you can starve a population to death. And so food then becomes kind of this powerful tool to break a people. And why we see people like food become a form of resistance for people but even here in our communities I mean this is not unfortunately unique to the Palestinians you've seen the pillaging of indigenous folks here in this country the same things kind of cutting them off from

their foodways their means of subsistence of supporting one another of you know being connected to their culture and now you're seeing in communities through economic policy like food deserts and people not being able to access their food or have sovereignty over their food production so it is absolutely a tool and and and something that we talk about at reams a lot that like the fight for palestine is the fight for food sovereignty everywhere and vice versa right well i i'm glad you brought up the idea of uh or just the fact that like Israel and the Zionist regime has like taken Palestinians from their land. And I've talked about this before on this podcast, but like the olive tree is a very significant part of Palestinian culture. And like olive harvesting is a huge part of

Palestinian life. And so when you burn down thousands of olive trees, or when you kick people out of like the agriculturally rich parts of the land, you're denying them so much more than just olives. It's like very deep. And I think when people that are not as informed about Palestine question, like, why is there a watermelon? Like, what's this? And what's the olive about? And I think that goes to show how powerful food can be.

And just for those who don't know, the watermelon became an active or a symbol of resistance because the Palestinian flag was not allowed to be raised for a while. And it has the same colors as Palestinian flag. And so that's just like a really beautiful way that food has become this like powerful symbol. And so I just, I just trying to trying to I don't know emphasize that a little bit I guess Jabeel what's your take yeah I mean I think that I I think just I'll speak like a

little bit more domestically I feel like Raymond's so eloquent and talking about the historic parts of it but I mean even here like domestically in Los Angeles or California I think one of the things and it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, one of the things that's difficult is there are so few identifying parts of, or just restaurants in general, like correctly identifying restaurants, Syrian or Lebanese or Palestinian or what have you. And they, they hide under these names, which when I'm not going to name like specific restaurants here, but like, which when other restaurants open and maybe they're owned by an Italian person or just other people that aren't Arab. And suddenly they're taking the food and misappropriating it and calling it. Yeah.

I mean, Israeli couscous or like an Israeli salad or Israeli falafel or, Hey, here's all this food and it's shawarma and it's kebabs and it's many each. And we're, we're an Israeli restaurant. Like these are things that are really difficult.

Cause I think, you know, those things tend to be, unfortunately just like more approachable saying Mediterranean tends to be more approachable and what you get ultimately is a population of I would say a larger population of non-Arab people that don't really understand what they're eating and they're not educated on where it comes from and just the amount of people you know anecdotally that i personally have met who like don't know that this food is arab food or don't know like what where the food comes from which is so

interesting to me because it's not an experience that i think many other cultures or ethnicities have and so yeah i mean i kind of always joke that i feel like a really close example is if you know somebody started like an american person started making sushi and they're like this is american food and um yeah it's just not at the same time and so i think that the need to assimilate for generations before Reem's and I, I have an empathy for the want of safety that they were doing and the want to make a living and the reasons they did it. I think Reem kind of alluded to that earlier. But where it's left us now is a population of Arabs in diaspora that I think are harmed for it. You know, like we don't have, we don't show up on the census and it's all sort of one part.

It's all, they're all different parts of the one problem. And I think that when you take the food and you don't give it its correct name and you don't, or you give it the incorrect name, it hurts all of us in ways that like we can't even imagine whether it's it it's at work or in diversity and belonging initiatives not including swan amina people or whether it's just in foodways and not being included or not being included in the census which leads to us not having as much community support uh around our people or not knowing medical statistics. Like, I think they're all, they're symptoms of a bigger issue. And I think one of the ways you combat that issue is through knowledge and shared learning

and shared experience. And I think food and food ways are one of the main ways that people experience and learn about other cultures. And I think if people look at that in their own lives, you can apply it to any culture of food that you really love, and maybe it's not your own. And you've learned something about those people through that. I think the main dishes of any culture, I think the main dishes of any culture, it says a lot about where that culture has been, where they come from, what their history is. And I think people being able to experience those things and go to a Mexican restaurant and learn about a certain dish and where it comes from or why it's there or why it's named something is an experience that allows them to learn about a culture. And we just don't necessarily have that here.

And then when you add on, you know, misnomers or incorrect labels, it becomes even more damaging and also just hurtful and very annoying. Like it's so annoying. And I like, I don't want to go, I'm sorry.

Like there are restaurants in LA that I like, just don't want to go to. And maybe the chefs are really nice and they might be allies in some ways or maybe they're not but like I would rather give please like I would rather give my money to like an Arab person making our own food rather than going to experience it in a different way you know what i mean like i don't i don't know so i think that's kind of like how i generally feel and the less professional answer is i just find it like really annoying and i'm like come on y'all there are so many listen like we're not la is not new york we have like not as many arab places to go uh they're sort of few you have to seek them out a little bit more here but i'm like come on

y'all we're out here yeah go find go find us like go find give your money to like this syrian immigrant who moved here and started this place that everybody loves and you know i yeah i don't know there are a lot of big restaurants are very popular restaurants here. And I'm just like, nah, dog. I don't want to pay. I don't want to pay $35 for tabbouleh. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think it's twofold. Kind of like who has access to resources versus who doesn't, right? Who gets highlighted?

You know, there's that piece. And what's palatable to the American public and what's not right like i always say like for for instance i think like reams we kind of we do things a little bit different um obviously we honor tradition we honor the soul of arab cuisine but we play around with it and one could argue are we is this like americanizing the food and we're like no it's just through the lens of a gas pork palestinian syrian by way of california um but we i think when we first came on the scene i mean there there is something to be said about the privilege that I have as English speaking, as this generation that can like, what do you call it? Translate the foods to a mainstream public in a way that's like really compelling. Like a mediator almost.

Yeah, I'm a mediator. I'm like, but that comes from a little bit of racism like that. People don't want that. They want the food, you know. And so like, I am this palatable character in some ways and that's a contradiction that um i'm constantly like i don't want to be uh but it's like what do you call that the trojan horse right but then once you come into reams it's still it's very mean, there's nothing, we're not tricking anyone, right? But we're also truly ourselves and that's not for everybody.

So we don't want to be a gentrifying space where like, if you're going to come in here, you have to deal with the community that we're in just as much as the food that you are obsessed with now, right? Because Eater wrote about it or whatever. So we really, and that's not for everybody right like and and that just speaks to a like a bigger problem of like if you like the people as much as you like their food like our food is not just for sale you can't just take some of it and leave the rest of it and i think that's why the American public is so comfortable with our foods being represented by people other than us. We're not, we're not, we're never the tellers of our own stories because again, this dehumanization of Palestinians. And it's

particularly interesting now. And I would say like Reams has always been transparent, but I've heard from counterparts in who are now, you know, like there are other restaurants now coming out. I think there was even just an article that was released today on Eater about the Palestinian category on Google. And, you know, people are now calling their restaurants or maybe leading up to this last four months calling their restaurants Palestinian. And that was palatable enough. It's like, cool. Like, it's this culture that's really beautiful. But then when it came down to it, when we're experiencing a genocide, it made people feel uncomfortable.

So it's like they want to like it doesn't stop at food, you know, and I think our food, at least for me. Like it doesn't stop at food, you know, and I think our food, at least for me, and I would say for a lot of people who get into like expressing their food ways here in the US, like you can't just take some of us, our food, and then dismiss the rest of us or dehumanize the rest of us. And so I think that is the contradiction that we're always dealing with is like, how can we offer this beautiful culture but not tokenize it? So it becomes depoliticized because it is political. And if you're engaging with Palestinian cuisine and consuming it, you can't do it without either being an active participant one way or the other right um and what is happening to palestinians and so we kind of pushed the envelope on that and you know for us at reams that has yielded a real ever-expanding community of folks who have really uh of folks who have really uh maybe a few years ago knew nothing about Palestine we got to do it in a way that was right and so we were you know we we met people where they're at we bring them along

it's not like we're like you know beating anything over people's heads but we're like this is what it means to be truly authentically ourselves this is is our story. This is the history. This is the painful atrocities. And, like, if you're going to eat our food, you have to engage with that in some way. Like, you can't just be comfortable. And, like, it's cool to eat Palestinian food. I don't want to see our food as a trend, right? Yeah.

So while it's cool to see a lot of Palestinian restaurants now gaining popularity, and hopefully, you know, Reem's has paid some path for that. We got to make sure that we're doing it in a way that's intentional and responsible so we don't get tokenized. I think one, just like piggyback on one thought, one thought that you brought up Reem that I thought was really interesting was piggyback on one thought one thought that i think you brought up riam that i thought was really interesting was like being able to tell our own stories and often we're not we're not and i think that relates to like a lot of what we've talked about today but i mean even like sharing our own

experiences like you know i don't think it's necessarily a choice to be where you you know to be who you are it is what you are and i think ultimately there's this real pressure for for arabs and and palestinians as well to sort of let other people tell our story for us let other people make the food let other people photograph the traumas and the joys like if you go to any like art bookstore and try to find like an arab photographer photographing their own people whether it's the wars or the joy or art like you'll find maybe one you know and i've been to them and said hey do you have any i'm looking for like this and i want it from an Arab person. And like the only one really is Shireen Nashat, who's Persian, but I don't know. I think it's, I think it's just really interesting how, uh, I think there's like a real fear about talking about for a lot of us about talking about our own experiences publicly.

publicly and um i think a lot of that a lot of that comes from just like being sort of conditioned in this country to minimize ourselves and minimize our identity and i think essentially well there are real retributions for that yeah we get jailed we get deported we get um fired from our jobs we don't get book deals we don't get show deals yeah as we're experiencing so it's like that's real like yeah and i mean a lot of the a lot of the stuff we've a lot of the feedback we've gotten on the show i mean early on a couple years ago we started getting feedback that i mean there were like two or three when we first started pitching and I won't call out names, but they were like major companies. And one of them was we already have like our minority food show. Like that was one of of the pieces of feedback we got was they were worried that Reem and I, like that our identities were too inherently political.

that Reem and I, like that our identities were too inherently political. And it's like, okay, but there's like nothing we can do about how you perceive us. What we can control is saying, hey, we want to make an Arab joy show. And we want to like show off the things we love about our culture. And we want to talk about how great the food tastes and talk about stories like immigrant success stories of people coming to this country and yeah we'll talk about the trauma and sure we'll talk about the politics because that's what we're passionate about but like to to get that feedback even a couple years ago when you know it seemed like everybody was sort of every culture or people were getting their turn to sort of shine was I was like, really, are we still are we still here right now? Yeah. And yeah, I mean, it's gotten it's gotten weirder as time goes on.

And, you know, I don't know. No show exists like this in the way that probably no restaurant existed like Reams did when she opened it. And I think it's going to take like someone who just really believes and is a champion for Arab people, for us to make something that just shows how much we love our own people and how excited we are to be Arab and how excited we are to be Palestinians and how fucking awesome our food is and how great our culture is and how fun and exciting it is. And all these things that people love and eat, we just want to show them like where it comes from

and who we are. And in addition to that show that we're all regionally very different, like we call in this country every type of arab food is called mediterranean whether it's moroccan or lebanese or egyptian and they're all so different they're all wildly different yeah and i think that yeah like the fact that we haven't been able to tell this story is is wild you know like the fact that no one has and we've come really close we've gotten into deals before we've gotten into shopping agreements more recently and sort of you know the outcome felt punitive after october 7th and um yeah i think that ultimately the fact that like we we and it doesn't i you know truly i hope it's me and reem but like the fact that like we, we, and it doesn't, you know, truly, I hope it's me and Reem, but like the fact that no one has been able to tell this story for a group of people that is so huge in the Arab community, in the Muslim community, like that no one has been able to serve this demographic of people with a food show is wild.

a food show is wild and there's so many of us who would be so excited i would be so excited like i would be bummed that it wasn't me but i would be thrilled that it happened for the community and um i don't know if not now when you know like the time for the time for equity and justice is always. And I think that's generally how I sort of feel about the. The show and just being able to like, I just want to tell the story for my community so, so badly. And yeah, I mean, I don't know. I feel like I went on a bit of a tangent. That's kind of where I am right now. Well, in a time of in a time of genocide where literally our people,

and this is not just Palestine, there's a regional, the dehumanization of Arabs is costing us lives. Yeah. So it feels that much more important to do this work now. Yeah. People are so used to seeing us, seeing Arabs like traumatized. They're used to seeing us in pain. They're used to seeing our countries destroyed and seeing our buildings turn

into rubble. I think so much of our culture is so beautiful and so much of it is about food and art and joy. I think it's really, yeah, I would be so excited for that show too, because I, if I was a little kid watching that, I would have felt so much better about myself. And to, to your point, a couple minutes ago, Reem, you were talking about how you're not exactly a mediator but growing up there's almost this like shame about having like you're not arab enough you're not american enough you have a foot in both worlds but it's really a strength you know in your experience and in our experience like we can use

that but in both worlds to our advantage and try to show the american community how beautiful our community is. And I don't know, I think it's, yeah, I love you guys. That's what it comes down to. Love it. Yeah. But I really do appreciate you both doing this work and, yeah, reminding us that this work and yeah reminding us that it's Arab culture isn't something to be feared I don't know the dehumanization has gotten to a point that it's just really terrifying and so I think the fact that even existing is like political or scary and yeah to be to your point everything is so much more digestible for people than Arab or than Muslim or whatever like in LA we have a huge Armenian community and they're really embraced and I would love that to happen for us too. The backlash of

being Arab feels very real and visceral right now it feels like we are in a time of the years after 9-11 again and especially with this upcoming election in 2024. It's a really, I think, a scary time of censorship for Arabs in general and Muslim communities, regardless of who the candidate who wins our political campaign, it's quite clear that the policies towards us, you know, the foreign policy, but also domestically how that has translated into hate crimes against Arabs simply for being Arab is a really scary thing. And so, yeah, it's just a new thing that we're going to have to navigate in this new era. Yeah, I think on that note, community is so important.

And I'm really grateful to continue to foster the community around me as well. And I think with food, with Palestinian culture in general, it relies so much on us remembering and continuing to talk about it and not letting anyone forget about it. And so I think food is the same way. It's just reminding everyone, this is where it comes from. This is how important it is. This is what it means to the culture you can't enjoy some of our culture not all of it i guess and i feel like that happens all the time i really appreciate you guys both being on the show and uh talking a little bit about your stories and yeah i can't wait to see the show happen one day because it will happen awesome thank you yeah thanks for for the work that i'm doing especially as it relates to food um and hospitality um i was one of the founders of an

effort called hospitality for humanity and you can find us on at hospitality the number four pal pal you know uh we continue to do things at reams and you can see us on the socials at reams california um and then you can obviously follow my whereabouts at ream.asil asil i could put all your links in the description as well um but jabril do you want to be found on the internet? And if so, where? I don't know how much I want to be found on the internet. I will plug that I think everyone should call their senators and demand a ceasefire immediately.

And also consider donating to one of many nonprofits. But the one that I have is Gaza Emergency Appeal. And just ask for a ceasefire as much as possible. one of many nonprofits, but the one that I have is a Gaza emergency appeal and, uh, just ask for a ceasefire as much as possible. But also if somebody demands my name, they'll find me. Demand, demand a ceasefire.

Don't ask. Don't ask. Sir, please. Can I have, can I have a ceasefire? Can I have a ceasefire? But no,

please. Uh, everyone that's listening, keep talking about Palestine, keep sharing info from Palestinians

themselves. And yeah, free Palestine. Free Palestine. Yes, free Palestine. Hi, I'm Ed Zetron, host of Thank you. 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. El 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 iHeartRad Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's

Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I am once again your guest host, Molly Conger, and today I'm going to tell you about something that is happening here. Here being my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. You might have seen the news recently that Patriot Front leader Thomas Ryan Russo was arrested in Texas on an out-of-state felony warrant. On February 23rd, authorities in McLennan County, Texas arrested Russo and booked him into the county jail. The jail roster lists the offense as burn object to intimidate O slash S. That OS means out of state, and it lists Virginia as the state issuing the warrant. And Rousseau's arrest certainly made a splash. When the news hit,

Nazi telegram channels lit up with posts about his arrest. Gab feeds were flooded with hastily made graphics decrying this political persecution. This sudden spike in interest in a little used Virginia Code section might make you think Rousseau was the first person to be taken into custody on this charge, that perhaps he was targeted for arrest in some kind of grand political plan to take him out of the game. But he is in fact the 11th person to be arrested in just the last year for participating in the Tiki Torch March at the University of Virginia on August 11th, 2017. These cases have been working their way through the system here for long enough that some of Russo's co-defendants have not only already been found guilty,

they've served their time and gotten back out. But with this sudden surge in interest in this case, I want to give you all a little background on the other ten. If you'll indulge me for a moment, though, I'd like to read you something I wrote nearly a year ago, just as the first cases were being unsealed. There is no statute of limitations on felonies in Virginia. With that in mind, here's section 18.2-423.01-B of the Code of Virginia. Burning object on property of another or a highway or other public place with intent to intimidate. Any person who, with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons, burns an object on a highway or other public place in a manner having a direct tendency to place another person in reasonable fear or apprehension of death or bodily injury, is guilty of a Class 6 felony. On August 11, 2017, hundreds of torch-bearing

marchers traversed the grounds of the University of Virginia. They'd come to Charlottesville from across the country, taking Friday morning flights or taking turns at the wheel for cross-country drives and rented vans with guys they met on message boards. Arriving early before the big event the following morning, they gathered at Nameless Field, a grassy acre near the UVA tennis courts with a deceptive name, and distributed tiki torches. Men with walkie-talkies clipped to their belts, some with wired earpieces, barked orders. Elliot Klein, an ambitious young white nationalist organizer calling himself Eli Mosley after the 20th century British fascist Oswald Mosley, shouted at the crowd as they

formed into a line, we're picking big guys, no females. Klein and his security team would be selecting the biggest marchers to lay down their torches and keep the perimeter as the march moved through the university grounds. They might need their hands free. The march wound its way through grounds, up the lawn, then up the steps of the University of Virginia's iconic rotunda. On the other side of the rotunda, gathered near the statue of Thomas Jefferson, a small group of anti-racist protesters waited. In her testimony during a later civil trial, one of the women who was terrorized that night said of the sound of the approaching crowd, when we heard the roaring, we just linked arms and held hands and started to sing. She said at first it sounded like thunder, like the earth was growling. As they grew closer, but before she could see the light of the torches,

she began to make out the chants. Hundreds of voices raised in unison shouting, BLOOD AND SOIL! Testifying about that night four years later, she said she could still hear it sometimes, in her nightmares. And by the time the small group of mostly students realized the magnitude and ferocity of the approaching mob, it was too late.

They were surrounded, fully encircled at the base of the statue by hundreds of torch-wielding white supremacists. For a few minutes, minutes that those trapped at the base of the statue said they believed might be their last as they were doused in lighter fluid, maced, and punched, there was a melee. The police made no move to intervene as streams of pepper spray were let loose and cries of medic were audible above the roar of you will not replace us. When the trapped counter protesters were finally able to flee, stumbling blindly with burning eyes and covering their heads in a hail storm of fists and torches, the marchers declared victory. Richard Spencer, an organizer of that

weekend's rally, climbed the base of the statue and delivered a victory speech to the still-roaring crowd, now shouting, Hail victory! Hail Spencer! As Spencer told them, we occupy this ground. We won. We own these streets! We occupy this ground! We won! We are the state of our land! What in the hell are we doing out here? What in the hell are we doing risking our lives? We're risking our lives for our people, for our ancestors, for our future.

That's what we're doing. Do you think an Antifa can defeat our strong? Do you think an Antifa can defeat our group? They have no conviction. The marchers dispersed to their various hotels, campgrounds, and Airbnbs. Spencer later said cheekily that he booked his under the pseudonym, literally, Hitler. They had to rest up for the real battle in the morning. And while they slept, a young man from Ohio was driving through the night, perhaps already knowing that his gray Dodge Challenger would be impounded as a murder weapon before he slept again. He checked Twitter and retweeted a post. David Duke had tweeted images of the Torch March, celebrating the alt-right's success that evening with the caption,

Our people on the march, will you be at Unite the Right tomorrow? As he left Ohio that evening, the young man of the Dodge Challenger got a text from his mother, a text we've all probably gotten from our mothers. She said, be careful. And James Alex Fields Jr., in one of the last texts he sent before a lifetime behind bars, replied to his mother with a photograph of Hitler and the words, we are not the ones who need to be careful. Years later, the word Charlottesville has become synonymous with those two fused images, Fields' mangled challenger, and an iconic photo of the crowd, torches in hands, the rotunda at their backs. Fields was convicted, both in state and federal court,

of Heather Heyer's murder and multiple counts of aggravated malicious wounding. Daniel Borden, Alex Ramos, Jacob Goodwin, and Tyler Watkins went away for a brutal gang beating of a young black man. Richard Preston, an imperial wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, did some time for discharging his firearm in the general direction of another young black man, while shouting, die and word. But all in all, for all the violence of both days, there was a curious reluctance to bring charges for anything that didn't rise to the level of attempted murder, and some things that did. There are thousands of photographs, videos from every conceivable angle taken by victims, bystanders, professional photojournalists, and even the marchers themselves. Their faces are uncovered. Their motives are clear. And the law

is fairly straightforward. But the University of Virginia lies within the jurisdiction of Albemarle County. In 2017, Albemarle County Commonwealth's attorney Robert Tracy chose not to bring any burning objects cases under section 18.2-423. He didn't think he could make a case against the Tiki Torch mob. Or maybe he didn't want to. The Commonwealth's attorney for the city of Charlottesville at the time, Dave Chapman, wrote in a memo in October of that year that he did believe

the cases could be made, but they weren't his to prosecute. But in Virginia, prosecutors come and go, and a felony lives forever. In an October 2019 debate between then-sitting prosecutor Robert Tracy and his challenger Jim Hingely, Tracy again scoffed at the idea of indicting these cases, even saying that Hingely's belief that it was possible was a sign he was inexperienced and

wrong for the job. A month later, Hingely won the election. And now it seems he's trying to make good on his campaign promise of proving Robert Tracy wrong. In February 2023, the Albemarle County Commonwealth's Attorney's Office quietly sought, and got, indictments under the Burning Objects statute. A grand jury agreed with Hingely there was probable cause to believe that objects had been burned with the intent to intimidate. Fugitive warrants were issued. Arrests were made by local police in far-ranging jurisdictions. And now, nearly six years after that hot night in August, the extraditions are starting. I want to share with you the stories of the men who carried torches that night.

Some of them are now facing felony charges in Elmiraul County. Others may come to share that fate. After the crowd dispersed that night, and after the deadly rally the next morning, those men went home. Some started businesses. Some died. Some trafficked drugs, beat their wives, choked their girlfriends, went to grad school, went to prison, started families, ran for office, left the movement,

tried to lead the movement, or just tried to disappear. There are as many stories as there were flames in the night, when their voices joined as one, shouting, Jews will not replace us. Then going their separate ways, back to the communities they came from. And now, some of them are on their way back. This time, against their will. So I wrote that about 10 months ago, last April, just as the first cases were unsealed. Obviously, a lot's happened since then. But before I get into a recap of those first 10 cases, let's hear a brief word about some products and services.

So, if Thomas Rousseau is number 11 on this list of tiki torch defendants, who were the first 10? The grand jury that convened in February of last year handed down the first five indictments. Will Zachary Smith, William Billy Williams, Tyler Dykes, Dallas Medina, and William Fears. Will Smith of Nacona, Texas was the first in custody. He was actually already in custody here in Charlottesville when the first charges were filed. He had been indicted on a separate felony charge back in 2018 for pepper spraying the counter protesters that night, but remained a fugitive until his arrest in January 2023. So when the prosecutor brought the torch charges to the grand jury in February, it was probably an easy first choice. Will Smith pled guilty to the torch charge in May in a sealed plea deal that dropped the much more serious pepper spray felony and was allowed to return home without being sentenced.

Billy Williams traveled here with Will Smith back in 2017. The pair were acting as bodyguards for Robert Hazmador Ray, the Daily Stormer blogger who is actually also still a wanted fugitive on a felony charge of pepper spraying those counter protesters that night. When Billy Williams was extradited from Texas in April of last year, he was denied bond after some apparent dishonesty regarding his relationship with Robert Ray. Through his attorney, he denied having had any contact with Ray while he was a fugitive. He in fact claimed they barely knew each other, having met only a couple of times. I can tell you that's not true. But after claiming that they'd had no contact in the intervening years, the prosecutor revealed in the bond hearing that law enforcement partners had

shared information with his office that they believe that not only had they been in contact, but that Ray had been living with Williams, living on his property while he was in hiding as a fugitive. Williams, too, pled guilty to the burning object charge in July, receiving an active sentence of six months. But with time served and good behavior, he was home barely two weeks after entering his plea, but not before he missed the birth of his seventh child with his common-law wife. Tyler Dykes was arrested on St. Patrick's Day. He'd been out with other members of the white supremacist group the Southern Suns Active Club trying to hang a racist banner from a highway overpass in Savannah, Georgia, when he was, unfortunately, bitten by a dog. I do not have information on what came by a dog. I do not have

information on what came of the dog. I hope he's okay. Concerned about infection, though, Tyler Dykes went to the emergency room to have the wound looked at. In Georgia, as in most states, emergency rooms contact the police to report dog bite injuries. An officer was dispatched to the hospital to take a report from Dykes about the dog bite incident, which is a fairly routine situation. But somewhere during their interaction in the hospital, the officer ran Dykes' name to the system, and it came back with a warrant. A panicked Dykes sent his hate group group chat a quick text. I'm being arrested by Virginia. Nuke my account. I'm being arrested by Virginia.

Nuke my account. In video of the melee at the base of the statue on August 11, 2017, Dykes can be seen throwing punches, even after everyone else had stopped. And then celebrating the victory by marching around in a weird, tight little circle with his right arm extended in a Nazi salute. Dykes pled guilty to the torch charge in May and received the same six-month active sentence Williams had gotten. With time served and good behavior, he was released in July. I wonder if he expected to see his elderly parents waiting for him in the parking lot

outside the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail that day. But he never made it that far. U.S. Marshals took him into federal custody before he ever walked outside. He's currently out on bond, awaiting trial on 10 counts for his participation in the January 6th insurrection. Dallas Medina of Ohio turned himself in in April and was allowed to return home on bond. He had been an active member of an extremely online group of mass shooting enthusiasts calling themselves the Bull Patrol, so named after the bull cut hairstyle sported by their idol Dylan Roof. Patrol, so named after the bowl-cut hairstyle sported by their idol Dylan Roof. After a feud with Chris the Crying Nazi Cantwell ended with Cantwell in federal prison, the group more or less fell apart in 2020. Medina hasn't appeared in court since his bond hearing in April, and he

doesn't yet have a trial date. William Fears was booked into the Albemarle-Charlesville Regional Jail in June after being transferred from the Texas prison where he was serving a sentence for domestic violence. Just two months after Unite the Right, William Fears beat and choked his girlfriend. A few days later, he traveled to Florida with his brother Colton Fears and their friend Tyler Tenbrink to see Richard Spencer's speech at the University of Florida. He knew when he left town for Gainesville that week that his girlfriend had reported the assault. Having already been to prison for abducting and stabbing a different ex-girlfriend years earlier, he knew another conviction would put him away for a while, and he wanted one last shot at starting the race war before they got him. In video from the torch march, William Fears can be seen swinging his torch at a counter-protester,

screaming, Die, commie! Fears remains in custody, but does not yet have a trial date. William's brother Colton Fears joined him at the Albemarle-Charlesville Regional Jail in September. I suspect the jail probably kept them separated, but it still would have been the closest the brothers had been in years. When the brothers were in Gainesville in October of 2017, their friend Tyler Tenbrink shot at a group of anti-fascist counter-protesters after Richard Spencer's speech. Thankfully, no one was injured, but Tenbrink was convicted of attempted first-degree homicide. Colton Fears was driving the car when the men left the scene of the shooting and spent five years in a Florida prison for accessory after the fact to attempted first degree homicide. Colton was released in 2022 and returned home to Texas, where he was then arrested

in August 2023 on the burning object charge. After pleading guilty in October, he was allowed to return home prior to sentencing. Ryan Roy of Vermont turned himself in in May. If you've been reading the voluminous leaks that seem to be constantly springing forth from Patriot Front's online comms, you may know him better as Rex. It looks like he's stayed quite busy in the years since Unite the Right as a member of Patriot Front. He is currently home on bond and does not yet have a trial date. Jamie Troutman of West Virginia turned himself in in October. Under the pseudonym Alt-Right VA, Troutman was an active organizer and planner of the Unite the Right rally.

He was present at many of the precursor events that took place here in Charlottesville during the Summer of Hate, including the two other torch marches, smaller torchlight rallies that were held in downtown Charlottesville in May and October of that year. Like Dykes, photos show Troutman was present at the Capitol on January 6th, though in Troutman's case, no charges have been filed. He, too, is home on bond with no trial date set. And before we get to the last two of those first 10 cases, let's hear from someone who has also not been charged in connection with a militant reactionary attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. These products and services. The final two of these first 10 torch cases are the messy ones. So we've got these four guilty

pleas, and we've got four cases that are sort of moving along slowly down the messy ones. So we've got these four guilty pleas, and we've got four cases that are sort of moving along slowly down the usual path. And then we've got two cases where the defendants have had some success bogging the cases down with motions. Jacob Dix of Ohio was arrested in July. Dix is seen in photos and video on the 11th and 12th with two other Ohio men, his roommate Ryan Martin, photos and video on the 11th and 12th with two other Ohio men, his roommate Ryan Martin, who recently passed away, and Daniel Borden, one of the men convicted of beating a man nearly to death during the rally on August 12th. I'm sure we'll learn more about Dix as his case progresses, but I have found him in photos with the Traditionalist Worker Party at the Nazi rally in Pikeville earlier that same summer. In his torch case, he has been granted both a substitute judge

and a special prosecutor based on a sort of nebulous, though very loudly argued, conspiracy theory involving the wife of a judge who is not even presiding over his case and a prosecutor who has a history of expressing anti-racist political views in his personal life. Dix is out on bond. With the recent ruling granting him a special prosecutor, we may be seeing a trial date get set in the near future. And finally, Augustus Sol Invictus. Until Rousseau was arrested last week, the biggest name in this batch was Augustus Invictus. Even before his name was on the flyers as a headline speaker at Unite the Right, Invictus was no stranger to the headlines. In 2016, he ran for U.S. Senate in Florida as a libertarian.

His campaign was marred by such controversies as his own past statements on eugenics, a 2013 ritual sacrifice of a goat, his legal representation of white supremacist militia leader Marcus Faella, his legal representation of white supremacist militia leader Marcus Faella, and numerous police reports from both his wife and his teenage girlfriend alleging domestic violence. In the years since, Invictus never did become a U.S. Senator, despite a second attempt, and never did get convicted of domestic violence, despite many, many more police reports. He's also no longer a pagan. Asked recently about the goat blood drinking ritual he performed in 2013, he quipped that he drinks human blood now, just a little transubstantiation joke about his recent conversion to traditional Catholicism.

Invictus was arrested on the burning object charge in Florida in June 2023 and held for a month before being extradited to Virginia and released on bond. Like Dix, he has been granted a substitute judge. He too was seeking a special prosecutor, but no ruling was made at his last hearing. Currently, his case is docketed for trial next month, but I'm willing to bet that gets postponed. So that's more or less where we are now. Rousseau is the 11th man to be charged in these cases. We've got four guilty pleas on the record, leaving him as one of seven open cases. We can expect to see Rousseau extradited from Texas to Virginia in the near future. I would say maybe a week or two, although some of them have been

held for up to a month before a deputy can get down there and bring them back something i was really surprised to learn in all of this is in most extraditions for state cases like this like these are not federal cases these are local cases when someone gets extradited long distance a deputy just flies down there and then they fly back together on a commercial airline. It's not like a con air situation. They're just on an airplane together. So it really depends on when a deputy can sort of get down there and get them. So he'll be extradited sometime in the next few weeks. And then once he's booked into the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail, he'll get an appearance in court. It's anybody's guess right now who he'll hire to represent him.

Former Proud Boy and current Patriot Front lawyer Jason Lee Van Dyke was thoughtful enough to reply to one of my tweets about Rousseau's arrest to say that he will not be taking this case. As much as he would have loved to try this case, which he said that he would do a very good job doing and he could definitely do it, and unfortunately he just can't, he cited the difficulty in finding local counsel to assist. He's not admitted to the bar in Virginia, so he would need someone who is to sort of sponsor him in and be responsible for him in the case. So he said, you know, he can't find local counsel. And also, it would just be too time consuming and too expensive to try a case in Virginia as

he's located in Texas. So it won't be Jason Lee Van Dyke. I've been writing about these cases in my newsletter, The Devil's Advocates. It's on Ghost, which is like Substack, but it's not Substack. It's Ghost. And I'm looking forward to writing some updates very soon. The finding out for this particular fucking around has been a long time coming.

And I can't help but wonder if these cases had been brought sooner, Patriot Front might not even exist. You know? I suspect once Rousseau has gotten a lawyer, he will ask for a bond hearing. That's probably what's next. It's impossible to know how much information

other law enforcement agencies are interested in sharing with the local prosecutor, but that kind of information sharing did play a critical role in some of the other cases. In bond hearings for Billy Williams and Tyler Dykes, information about the defendants' associations and activities collected by other local police agencies and federal authorities was what kept them in custody. In Dykes' case, several police and sheriff's departments in south carolina and georgia shared information that he was a suspect in some like swastika vandalism cases some firing cases it's not clear if the feds shared information ahead of time about the january 6th case but it is

it is clear that the prosecutor's office was talking to other law enforcement agencies who'd been keeping tabs on these guys and i think you would be a fool to think the feds don't have some information about Rousseau that might raise a judge's eyebrow. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. 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 the 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 Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. 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 iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.

One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions. Like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down.

I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise.

Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Today, I'm with Garrison yet again, and we are tackling really the genesis of this podcast. Everyone's favorite subject, collapse. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I'm just a light topic for your morning or evening commute. I mean, if it's 2024 and you don't know what collapse is allow me to illuminate also why are you listening to this podcast it is ostensibly about collapse indeed

in essence collapse is the significant loss of an established level of complexity towards a much simpler state it can occur differently within many areas orderly or chaotically and be willing or unwilling it's not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular global event although the longer the duration the more resembles a decline instead of a collapse so collapse is really a lot of things happen all at once people typically say you know you're talking about the climate talking about resources and the decline of resources talking about mass extinction talking about societal unrest and breakdown and inequality and truly pick your poison rather we're talking about you know the f increase in global demands, the gradually slow transition to renewables,

the destabilization of our food and water systems. There's no one cause, but several compounding pressures. As Pablo Servin and Raphael Stevens aptly summarize, to maintain itself and avoid financial disorder and social unrest, our industrial capitalist civilization is forced to accelerate, to become more complex and to consume ever more energy. Its dazzling expansion has been nurtured by the exceptional availability, though this will not last long, of fossil fuels that are very energy efficient, coupled with a growth economy and highly unstable levels of debt. But the growth of our industrial civilization, today constrained by due physical and economic

limits, has reached a phase of decrease in returns. Technology, which has long served to push these limits back, is less and less able to ensure this acceleration and locks in this unsustainable trajectory by preventing the development of new alternatives. Sounds familiar? A little bit. At the same time, the sciences of complexity are discovering that beyond certain thresholds, complex systems, including economies and ecosystems,

suddenly switch to new and unpredictable states of equilibrium and may even collapse. We are more and more aware that we have crossed certain boundaries that guarantee the stability of our living conditions as a society and as a species the global climate system and many of the planet's ecosystems and major biochemical cycles have left the zone of stability that we were familiar with heralding a time of sudden large scale disruptions which in turn will destabilize industrial societies the rest of humankind, and even other species. Yes, I agree. In terms of the hows of collapse, you know, it might be slow, it might be quick, it might be happening now already, or maybe just really kicking off seriously in the near future.

Today we'll really be talking about the sort of different ways of conceptualizing collapse, Today we'll really be talking about the sort of different ways of conceptualizing collapse, different frame devices we can use, and addressing the variety of responses that people have to collapse. In a future episode, I want to take a look at, I suppose, a more... This could be like the pessimistic episode in a sense and the next one will be a bit more you know how not to spiral into despair

yeah how to have a good understanding of the reality of our crumbling systems but not just be a doomer who stays inside and scrolls all the time and is just depressed but thankfully you have more options than just being a doomer. And we're going to get into all of those responses very soon.

There are quite a few interesting ones. Alrighty. First of all, we need to talk about some different ways of conceptualizing collapse. For example, we have Dmitry Orlov's five stages, which is like a roller coaster of chaos with each stage more intense than the last first we have stage one financial collapse everyone losing faith in business as usual financial institutions going belly up savings vanish financial freefall say goodbye to your savings account loans pensions basically what went down in argentina back in 2001 sounds familiar yeah yes yes next we have

commercial collapse now it's not just about money it's about losing faith in the market shall provide commodities end up being hoarded shopping centers are closing for business and we might even bring back barter and then boom we have the next stage political collapse trust in the government will take care of you crumbles governments try to maintain order with curfews and martial law but local corruption takes over services the roads unmaintained the rubbish piling up all of actually makes a really bold claim here and that is that the u.s might be on this on the track of these like stages like i know that sounds like a really like a radical claim to make i i feel like everyone listening to this has a a decent understanding that like these things aren't just

switches that are either on or off this is like a sliding scale and the u.s is a decent ways on this scale already um i mean that's what that's what the the first five episodes of the second season of this show was really all about and specifically in terms of the climate and how it's not like everything all falls apart at once. It's that these systems that we've grown to rely on will slowly crumble away until they've become

basically nothing, or they've just become corporate puppets, or they've just become they're not actually real anymore in any kind of impactful way. We saw a little bit of this during COVID, how many systems that we relied on just weren't really around anymore or weren't, were not actually reliable.

Exactly. And you see this whenever, like whenever there's a massive amount of wildfires that takes over a whole region and it displaces hundreds of thousands of people, usually the response to that is not the government's going to come in and save everybody, it's a whole bunch of really poor anarchists set up a series

of tents to give people food and to get people organized to find places to sleep and like that's the actual response to these crumbling institutions it's not just like you know, fall out New Vegas, we're living in the apocalypse immediately, it's

a lot more uh fuzzy yeah yeah and in a sense i kind of get the people who wish it was a bit more straightforward and simple you know because if it's like if it was like a major event right like if it was an alien invasion that just happened i think it's a lot easier for people to conceptualize something like that and respond to it and i just mobilize all your efforts and all your focus is on solving this issue because it's right in front of your face when you're talking about like geological time scales and multiple decades of you know slowly breakdown and you know have all these election cycles and you have all these uh tipping points the scientists are telling you about and

then you know someday eventually it's raining during the dry season and dry during the rainy season and there's no snow in january and all that jazz onward the social collapse this is where according to all of faith in your people will take care of you disintegrates civil wars brew the population becomes a thing clans take over like a post-apocalyptic drama unfolding and then the van and then the grand finale is cultural collapse which is a loss of faith in the goodness of humanity and as a result of that loss of faith kindness generosity empathy all falls out the window i completely disagree i think with all of the solution here i think that these times of crisis can often bring out the best in people of course we also do see the worst in people but i don't think it'll ever reach a point where the the bad of people's behavior so vastly outweighs

the good um to the point where people just completely lose faith in our capacity for mutual aid and that kind of thing there is of course a bonus stage that all of throws in which is ecological collapse where rebooting society in an exhausted environment it's like good luck with that you know it's very difficult to do it becomes a sort of a well that we end up trapped in so that's one way of understanding collapse and there's also c.s hollings four phase model of ecological change and according to him all systems go through cycles of four phases a phase of growth where the system accumulates matter and energy a phase of conservation where the system becomes more matter and energy a phase of conservation where

the system becomes more and more interconnected rigid and therefore vulnerable a phase of collapse or loosening and then a phase of rapid reorganization leading to another phase of growth in often very different conditions this is more of a i suppose optimistic i mean i read it as kind of optimistic because it recognizes that you know something like things break down and that's it like even in death there's like a life and there's like a reboot and then is of course the conditions that reboot will be different end it's just that the conditions that growth and healing might be kick-started with would be very different from the ones that were there the conditions that were there originally another author's views on the subject a guy named john michael

once said that quote, the difference between my view and that of many others in the collapse field is that a lot of them assume that the first wave of crisis will be followed by total collapse. And I argue that it'll be followed by muddying through and partial recovery, then by renewed crisis, and so

on. Thus, I don't think it's actually that useful to have a single metric for what counts as collapse, because collapse is a process, not an event. The collapse of industrial civilization has been underway for quite some time now, and will still be a going concern for longer than any of us will be alive. And then there's David Korowicz's sort of choose-your-own-adventure style collapse, where we have sort of three options that we could have we could go down there's one of linear decline there's one of oscillating decline and there's one of systemic collapse first up we have linear decline which is optimistic in a sense it's assuming everything

will respond proportionally to its causes so for instance if oil consumption goes down gdp follows suit it's a very gradual and controlled decline which gives us time to transition to renewable energy and to change our ways it's kind of a dream scenario for some deep growth enthusiasts or some of those who champion a transition to a greener future we kind of want it to be a slow collapse not a rapid collapse because it gives us time to respond and adjust accordingly of course the other side of that the catch is that when it is that slow it also sort of gives an excuse for inaction an excuse for delaying and putting off and procrastinating on the changes that are necessary a more realistic scenario according to to corwiss is oscillating decline

where you have economic activity bouncing between peaks of recovery and recession but with an overall downward trend it's almost like an oil price rollercoaster where the higher prices lead to recession and a dip in prices sparks better growth. But with each cycle, the system loses a bit more of its mojo, for lack of a better word. The debts pile up, the investment possibilities dwindle, and it's kind of like the catabolic collapse idea that

john michael gray came up with it's not too fast and so in a sense it still gives society some room to adapt and the last model that corbis has is the systemic collapse model which sees our civilization as a super complex system with all these intertwined feedback loops and so by crossing these invisible changeover points and dealing with small disruptions could end up leading to unpredictable changes it's like a roller coaster without a clear track non-linear cumulative and potentially brutal you know it's like no kind of safety approval was passed on this roller coaster whatsoever. It's a death trap, and there's no telling where the cart will veer off course. Really, the how of collapse depends on who you ask, but with all these models, there do seem to be a couple clear points.

Best articulated again by Savine and Stevens. One, the physical growth of our societies will come to a halt in the near future. 2. We have irreversibly damaged the entire Earth system, at least on the geological scale of human beings. 3. We are moving towards a very unstable, non-linear future where major disruptions will be the norm. 4. We are now potentially subject to global systemic collapses prospects look bleak to me they look extra bleak when you consider that some people are still stuck on the is climate change real ha ha ha global warming and yet it's cold ha ha ha level of discourse but for those who are made aware of the issues,

I've noticed people adopt a range of responses. I think one of the first responses that I see to collapse is slumber, right? They catch like a whiff of what's going on and decide to just turn over and go back to sleep. To purposefully embrace ignorance, disregard new information and shun any understanding of what's going on. Perhaps, you know, they're guarding their fragile sanity, which is understandable, but people sleeping, but we need to face these issues is a disaster waiting to happen. These issues are not going anywhere and we really need people to have the courage and the boldness to face them instead of turning over and going back to sleep. Similarly to that response, you have the denial response where people

face with this reality, reject it consciously, and construct their own. Or they search for information that comforts them rather than exposes them to the truth. They construct a media bubble that shields them or a social circle that could protect them and reaffirm their core beliefs. Everyone is capable of denying reality, but it's become quite prevalent in the age of technology, where we can easily shut out any truths that make us uncomfortable. And then there's apathy. Like slumber and denial, people respond with apathy to protect themselves in some way. After all, if nothing really matters, there's no need to try, no need to think, no need to bother.

It's easy as just disconnect. As humans, I think we have a really tough time responding to non-immediate threats. It's been said, as I said earlier, that no, climate change isn't happening too quick. It's happening too slowly. It's not obvious enough. And slowly it's not obvious enough and because it's not obvious enough it's very easy for this next response to be made manifest that is preoccupation of course this is more of a fall of the system but people these days are all busy you know everyone can afford to invest in exploring and understanding the world's problems even if the threat is so

existential that their office busy work or retail servitude would ultimately amount to nothing. But I'm not talking about those people when I talk about preoccupation. I'm talking about the people who respond to the issues of the world by purposefully distracting themselves with busy work, constructing a convenient excuse

to not challenge the structures that they are under or maintain, like running away from the predicaments of collapse but the predicaments of collapse catches up to all of us sooner or later and on the flip side of the people who busy themselves with busy work are the people who dive into mindless consumerism which is coupled with apathy to some extent if nothing matters and everything's falling apart you might as well just indulge consume distract yourself with games music party and drugs and drinking it's like slumber except you're aware of the reality and just plug in your ears to just dance

but at least for those that plug their ears they don't face what I've called overwhelmment. Some people respond by trying to wrap their minds around the depth and complexity of collapse to the point of obsession and just kind of end up losing their minds altogether. I don't think there is any human mind that can completely consume and comprehend every minute problem we face. I think that's why we are a social species because we can kind of distribute that

understanding of all the various problems so that no one person has to handle all of it. We really are going to need to come together to understand collapse. Because as individuals, to deal with something so complex, abstract, far-flung and frightening, it's frankly subjecting yourself to that as almost a form of self-torture or self-flagellation. And what we need is the opposite we need people building each other up and healing our communities and coming together so we could solve this crisis of course there is such a thing as being too caught up in that sort of hope.

A trap that a lot of people fall naturally into because in a sense, we are biologically predisposed towards optimism. We tend to hold on to hope in some future outcome they'll just work out. And it's sort of a blind hope because it can't adjust to the ever-shifting reality it strips us of our ability to see clearly and to take realistic and necessary action we give up our agency and leave things in the hands of the leaders and the

experts we stay passive we waste time precious time that can be spent on real harm reduction, just going with the flow. We prevent the necessary conversations with the blind hope when we fixate so much on whether we can fix it or how we can fix it without considering what we need to do if we can't fix it. You know, what happens then? happens then blind hope manifests in a few different forms but i think whatever form comes into it ultimately and it ultimately and inevitably leads to disappointment waiting forever for a future that won't come that exists solely in one's mind irrespective of reality it's quite frankly a form of denial that it takes a bit of a journey to move towards a greater level of emotional maturity to handle the tough conversations and let go of the false hopes

like the idea that we'll somehow reverse all the damage our planet has been dealt with scot-free but once we have done that and once we have strengthened our resolve and strengthened our ability to process and to engage with the reality of what's happening, we can take action with knowledge that, no, our leader is not going to do anything substantially enough. And no, this moves far beyond reform. It really is a hard pill to swallow but if you can

take it you'll be better off to resist we really don't need blind hope and resistance i think hope is important i'm distinguishing it from hope blind hope however is a distraction and sort of connected to the blind hope conversation are the people who respond to this crisis with the obsession with individual change people who believe with a few tweaks here and there that we can continue our perpetual growth we just have to switch to veganism or recycle or carpool every once in a while and that that's individual level action on a large enough scale would resolve the crisis um they place a lot of stock and blame on individuals entirely and they don't engage with the wider structures of society.

A lot of liberals, of course, fall into this camp. And speaking of liberals, we see a very pernicious trend of progress worship as another response to collapse. The author Dennis Meadows actually points out a curious trend over the past four decades. There's a constant shift in justifying why we shouldn't change our behavior. Back in the 70s, critics were saying there are no limits. Anyone who thinks there are limits, they just don't get it. In the 80s, they're saying, oh, actually there are limits, but they're very far away. We have nothing to worry about. Nothing to lose sleep over.

And then into the 90s, the limits are no longer as distant. And then the supporters of growth, they chime in with, oh, well, you know, the limits are close, but no worries. You know, the markets and technology will swoop in and fix everything. And then you reach in the 2000s

and it becomes clear that the tech and the markets might not cut it becomes clear that the tech and the markets might not cut it and the narrative spins again regardless of whether or not the market or tech can cut it we still need to push for growth because that's the golden ticket to the resources we need to tackle our problems it's basically a game of justification hopscotch it's almost a cult of progress that any and all growth is good, that no matter the consequences

on our finite earth, we can just expand and expand eternally. A lot of the responses I get to my discussions of degrowth or post-growth or whatever, it's like, yeah, but you can't do that because then the GDP wouldn't grow and wouldn't elevate people's standard of living and you know it's not fair that

wait wait wait andrew are you a malthusian nothing of the sort nothing of the sort but i think that we should not be falling into this trap of being like oh well you know it's not fair that these rich countries they got to reach that level of development and then we have to like and then what we're going to step in and stop other countries from doing so and it's not that i mean i'm speaking from a not rich country what i'm saying is that the what i say to these people is that the path of development these rich countries took is not sustainable. It is literally doom and a sore. Yes.

The entire population cannot strive for the level of consumption that Americans strive for. Do I think the development needs to take place? Absolutely. not on the trajectory not following the footsteps of these rich countries this this global north and its legacy of decimating the world you know places like india places like the caribbean places like places in africa you know we do need to know, improve housing and improve access to water and improve access to education, all these different things. But chasing after this sort of careless economic growth narrative and path is just going to accelerate all of our destruction i agree with the need for reparations from global north to global south that will allow us to reach the level of uh to reach the quality of life um that I think every human should have access to.

But I don't think that that is the same thing as saying that, oh, well, you know, every country should have their own equivalent of Britain and the US's industrial revolution. And who cares that that ship has sailed, that window of opportunity has passed. Yeah, and I think going back to your series of episodes on cults, when you're talking about the cult of progress,

I think that gets thrown out as a very trendy term, but I think it has a lot of truth in it for this specific reason in order to maintain the type of progress that is necessary to sustain this at this current point what seems to be a very unsustainable method of interacting with the planet you have to rely on growth as this thing that you can't actually like predict it. It's you can't actually predict a real end point for it. You have to only assume and only hope that it will get there. It's,

it's this, that's why there's this real sense of acceleration as I'm throughout these whole industries, because people know that if we continue just doing this way, the planet will not be functional, at for us um in like a hundred years uh probably you know in much less time as well but the reason why they're all continuing is that they have the people have it have this idea in their heads that if we just if we just keep accelerating if if we keep going we have to go faster and faster and faster because we'll find something along the way that will magically fix

the problem well if the only way to fix the problem is to continue accelerating and we'll find this thing that doesn't currently exist but we'll find like this like supernatural device or discovery that allows us to kind of fix the little problem we've made for ourselves and it is a very like religious belief that if if we just keep going we'll like get some like deep this some like some like deep special insight we've reached the point where people are literally looking to the heavens like almost in a supernatural sense yeah to find a solution like oh well we'll just be able to keep on going because asteroid mining and da-da-da-da-da.

We'll just go and settle in other planets and I'll continue our expansion endlessly and we can just keep on going. You also see this with people developing AI. They're like, if we get an AI smart enough, it'll be able to tell us how to fix our problem. And it is a deeply

spiritual drive. It is a very cultish drive. Like we have to keep going, even though we are currently dooming ourselves by continuing, we have to continue because that's the only way that we'll get this out of this problem. It's like, we can, we can, we can only dig deeper. Like we've gone so far into the center of the earth. It's faster to dig on the road it's faster to dig out the other way than actually try to turn around and fill the hole again it is a very cultish spiritual drive to like continue this to continue and like explicitly like accelerate development because we've realized we've done something that's uh from our current point of view almost irreparable

but there's this there's this belief that the only way to fix it is if we keep going, then we'll somehow stumble across the magical thing that will fix our problem. I want to talk specifically about the sort of I mean I know there are other people in the world who also have this response even the global south who will also have this response but I see a lot of Americans responding to my like decreased advocacy whatever saying well what about the

global south you know I mean never mind I live in the well, what about the global South? You know, I mean, nevermind. I live in the global South. What about the global South? And what really gets me about it is just how it's almost like a way of comforting themselves. Sure. It's, it's, it's using the struggles of marginalized people to not interrogate your own role in the continuing destruction and systemic oppression

that produces this great economic and difference in quality of life. Because then you'll have to confront the fact that maybe your lifestyle and the privilege, some of the lifestyle and privileges you enjoyed really should not be enjoyed by anyone ever like maybe that level of thing was never sustainable in the first place and we could have done with less and and i know it's i really i really hate having this kind of conversation on the internet because i think it's very difficult to get into the level of nuance as necessary because then you know people will say oh well i'm from a

working-class background i have from this and that i've also faced some deprivation i get all that but then there are other things where i'm like you know can we live in a world where everyone has access to amazon one day shipping two day shipping you know can we live in a world where everyone has access to amazon one day shipping two day shipping you know can we live in a world where everyone owns a car even if it's an electric car i think there are certain standards of i guess lifestyle or milestones of lifestyle that we've come to accept that i think in retrospect we will look back and say wow that was an aberration of human history that we were even maintaining that sort of infrastructure even maintaining that level of consumption you know i'm sure a

couple generations online people look back and be like, wow, is he telling me nearly every household had a car and that everybody was just on the roads driving all the time and we built our cities, our infrastructure around vehicles when we knew very early on, when the oil companies knew very early on that eventually we would run out and we just didn't care. I'm kind of all over the place with this but you were going to say something well i was also going to mention like in these in these sorts of discussions it also can be often overlooked that just because you live in the united states or any other kind of big place that doesn't mean like it's that's not the United States isn't one place there is a difference between living in like a five thousand dollar apartment in a downtown like city center versus living on the outskirts of town in like a house

that's falling apart right or living on the street or um or living in the middle of utah versus living on the coast like there's or living in uh like uh montana like there's there is such a large difference even for people in the states for like many many like not everyone is able to live in this like very um are arguably very very unsustainable very like hyper hyper modernity way there is there is there's millions of people that of course like no i'm i'm i'm not saying that against your point i'm saying like this is this is also part of the problem like we have we have tricked ourselves into thinking that if you if you live in the united, that must mean you are like, you are one of the elite few, but there is millions of people

who are living in like some of the most, some of the harshest conditions in the world, even in the richest country in the world. Like it is- Yeah, and degrowth is not coming to take from one's meager lifestyle. If one lives in those circumstances, you know, degrowth is not coming to take from one's meager lifestyle. If one lives in those circumstances, you know, degrowth is really coming after those on the other end of that spectrum of

lifestyle. No, if any, it would be, and it would be a greater equalizer between people living in countries. It would be an elevation of your standard of living. Yes. As, as, as well as looking at quote-unquote the global South or quote-unquote third-world countries.

There's this idea of I think we've had someone on this show talk about this before, Joey, the fourth world. You are living in third-world conditions but in a first-world country. And how all of these types of these, all of these types of systemic inequality and differences in like a cost of

living, living conditions, they all, they all combine together in really gauzy and fuzzy ways. Even if you live in the United States, Canada, England, like Germany, wherever. And it produces this extremely, extremely bizarre mishmash of. Circumstances. Of circumstance. Yeah.

You can, you can walk by someone who's driving like a $500,000 car. Meanwhile, you are literally being forced to live on the street. That is such a bizarre dichotomy. The few times I've been to the US, seeing that dichotomy in real is something else. I mean, of course, there's an income inequality and there's vast disparities in wealth and churned out as well. There are people who live on the streets

and there are people who go to yacht parties every weekend. What I want people to recognize is the way that these elites get you to advocate against your own interests is through that sort of, and connect you to their cult of progress and get you invested in their cult of progress hook you in is through that sort of temporarily embarrassed millionaire mantra they hook you in by saying yeah they're coming for our stuff eventually you'll get to my level too and then you wouldn't want people to take your stuff away either you know like my my tech development is gonna rise or gonna bring all of us up you know uh and you shouldn't let these people stop you rather than no well obviously these rich guys gonna get brought down a peg but by bringing them down a peg everybody will have a better quality of life but instead of recognizing that they deceive people with this techno opium.

They bring people into this trap of capitalist realism that either you live in the deprivation of the worst of the worst of people's livelihoods under capitalism, or you live in the excess of the best of the best of people's lives in the capitalism and there's nothing beyond those two options and so obviously the degrowth people want you to be living in the former option and you should oppose them because of that another response i see is that there are a lot of people who are just completely like have complete faith in our leaders who believe that you know once we get just the right people in office things will work out the truth is of course the system corrupts even the best of intentions politicians are a class unto themselves and their actions reflect ultimately their own interests and the interests of their backers. Nation states, governments, rulers, it's their job, it's in their job description to maintain structures that ultimately harm humanity and there's only so much they can do

to affect the status quo. Placing our salvation in their hands is an exercise in futility. Investing your future in the confines of electoralism is a waste of time. But it also demonstrates how effectively mass media and schooling has broken down and limited our imagination. I like to call that statist realism. The idea that there's no alternative to this hierarchy of rulers and ruled. That people just need to submit to the wills and whims of others rather than organizing for themselves and their communities there's of course the response of apocalypse worship rather classic response among those who end up obsessing over collapse and honestly the worshipers of the apocalypse also hold to a form of blind hope you know the accelerationists

doomsday preppers cultists extreme survivalists zombie video game enthusiasts believers in the end times they all seem to have a whole sort they seem to have a real excitement for collapse or they fix it really heavily on the ideal version of the end of the world like Like, they can't wait for the world to end. They embrace the sort of, we're all on our own mantra, barricade themselves, bunker down, stockpile weapons and essentials.

They gain up for a violent future because they anticipate that others will react to the situation similarly to how they intend to react so they're taking like a page from mad max and like yeah i'm gonna be immortal joe so i don't end up a thrall of immortal joe yeah i mean if it's not obvious the people who respond in this way freak me out you know those who look at what's going on and instead of resisting or trying to change the circumstances they just accept it as things going according to schedule or prophecy or they try to make it worse i don't know if you've seen um leave the world behind oh my god yes horrible yeah that i'm sure you remember that one character and his, that prepper and his whole response to the crisis before him.

Complete and utter selfishness. Which is a betrayal to his character inspiration in the movie Tremors, which showed the correct way to be a a prepper which is to actually help the people in your community i actually haven't seen that movie a lot it's my list it's well it is a it is an old movie about a worm that takes over a small town it's pretty silly but it's a stephen king movie uh i don't think so, no. It sounds like something Stephen King would write. It's not really a horror. It's more of like a comedy thriller. A comedy, okay. It's not a comedy, but it is an innately funny situation.

Also because it's like filmed in the 80s or 90s. The way it's aged just makes it more funny. But it is also a good movie um and and uh yeah after after after this i mean it's it's kind of like what if like an earthquake or a tornado hits this small town except this is more like adversarial it's like this like worm is like like like causing like the town's buildings to like cave in because it's like digging underground causing the town's buildings to cave in because it's digging underground. And we see this fantastic, fantastic prepper character is able to help everybody out

because he is prepared for such a scenario. How kind of him. Yes. Unlike that douchebag and um and leave the world behind yes we'll talk about that movie after yeah i mean the last response i really wanted to cover was despair pessimism seeing the worst expecting the worst living in utter defeat weighing down actual efforts with pessimism jumping into my comment section to be more in our fate

i mean according to those in despair there's nothing that we can do to affect our future and in my eyes those on this duma pill are just as misguided as those who are hyped up with blind hopium i think it's okay to admit that we don't know what's going to happen you know i don't claim to be a prophet i don't think anybody should the ipcc reports for example are a consensus of scientists and their understanding of the situation some scientists are going to be more conservative in their report in their reporting others are a bit more catastrophist but either way i really don't think we need to get into the weeds of just how bad it is or exactly how it's going to happen what matters is that things need to change some way somehow i think it's important to

try and understand as much of the situation as you could not to the point of obsession um to take note of how you respond to the issue to look at the various responses i covered and see if you fit into any of those camps and to recognize that the worst case scenario is far from inevitable my advice is really to prepare for the worst in whatever way you can and put hope and build for the best build community build connections build your skills build your strengths um and push in any way that you can in whatever sphere you find yourself for meaningful change. Because, say it with me now,

it could happen here. It certainly could. That's it for me. I'm on YouTube, Andrewism. I'm on patreon.com slash stdrew. That's it. All power to all the people. Peace. 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. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex- sex positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships and culture

in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds 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. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome to Gracias Come Again,

a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your

favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.