It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 129

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999,

five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, 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, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Today, Shreen and I are talking to our friends at PK Gaza, Ahmed and Abdullah. You might remember them from an episode we did last October, and I've interviewed them before for Men's Health magazine in the UK. PK Gaza is a group that teaches parkour and free running to young people in the Gaza Strip. They've been doing this for a long time, and they have some great

videos you can find all over social media and YouTube. Both Ahmed and Abdullah had the opportunity to leave Gaza. Ahmed now lives in Sweden, Abdullah lives in Italy. We spoke a couple of weeks ago, but very little has changed since then. And I just wanted to note that Abdullah's audio is a little bit rough, but we thought what he had to say was really important. So we hope that you'll take the time to listen to it. My name is Ahmad Matar. I am 28 years old at the moment. I'm Palestinian from Gaza.

Currently, I live in Sweden since eight years ago. And yeah, I live in Sweden since eight years ago and yeah I live in Sweden I work with parkour and I live from parkour and that's what I do here and the last summer was my first time visiting Gaza since eight years and yeah but I'm back in Sweden I was back in Sweden one month before the war started again and yeah a lot of a lot of things to say a lot of things to express and but yeah that's me Ahmed Ahmed Matar, 20 years old, from Gaza. Hello, guys. Nice to meet you all. I'm Abdelaziz Gassab, and I'm 27 years old. I'm also Palestinian. I'm proud of that.

I'm from Gaza City originally, and I live in Italy right now for almost three years. We wanted to talk to them about how it feels to be outside of Gaza and wake up every day wondering if a bomb has killed your family or if your family is getting enough to eat. How have you been coping with, like, dealing with... It's bad enough for those of us who don't have family watching the horrible things that happen every day and, like, every morning you look on your phone and it's something worse. How has it been for you guys, just to give people an insight into how you're coping from my side i can say yeah life is stopped since the day that the war started six months since this war and every day just

watching the news i go to work and then i come back while while i'm at work i'm just watching the news i'm listening to the news and that was my life since six months at the moment and i don't feel to do anything else i cannot feel like to train I cannot feel like to enjoy or to forget what's going on there because it's my family there my friends my people if I feel like I want to forget about it and feel like I'm I'm like betraying my my people my family so I prefer to just watch the news, feel the same as them, and just do my best to to help them with what I can. But it's actually like I just feel helpless at the moment that I cannot do anything to them in a situation like this at the moment.

Abdullah said that when he chose to leave Gaza, it was one of the most difficult moments of his entire life. He knew that if he stayed, there wasn't much hope for his future and he'd have to give up on so many of his dreams that would be achievable if he hadn't been born in an open-air prison. Now that he's left, he can pursue his dreams in Italy, but he struggles to express how difficult he has been finding being so isolated and distant from his friends and family. I mean, one of the most important things in our life, if it's not really the most important, is family. Since I really left Italy, it was not really easy for me because I knew that I would be alone and I would be away from my family. But I took that decision because

I knew that somehow I have to, let's say, somehow to sacrifice. And because, you know, I was focusing somehow on my future, my goals, which was not really almost impossible. It's impossible to do it where I was, which is going to say it was the hardest decision I've made ever in my life. That's even before anything really started. I'm going to explain how I feel since months back. I'm sure that everybody knows right now if he's going to put himself in my place

that he wouldn't have the right words to express his feeling. And I'm sure I'm someone right now who doesn't really have the right words to express it and to tell you what I feel and how I feel because it's not something that easy for anyone to experience in his life. So that's how I feel. We wanted to ask him how they were able to keep in touch with their families. I remember I was talking to Ahmed in October,

and we were talking about how hard it was just to find out if your families were okay every day, right? Like just to contact them and check. Is that still the case? How has it been just trying to contact your families over the last six months? It is actually still the same that they have to try calling and calling and calling the whole day until they catch up.

Like the connection is cut off or it's almost like impossible to get connected with them. So I have to try the whole day until like i get someone answering me because it's like i guess it's because it's a small place where they are like in rafa and there is more than one and a half million people and the everyone is trying to call to gaza and to check with everybody in there so it's make it hard to to get connected easily with them so I try like every day and yeah for sure I in the end it's it's better than before at the moment when they were in canyons it was like that I had to ask my friends who live close to my area and then they tell me if my family are okay or not. And sometimes I'm having no information about them for a whole week and just worried if everything is okay with them.

At the moment, I just wish for the best. That's what I am at home washing everything is okay with them but without knowing if it's them or another family who got bombed because the tv is not showing a name or a family anymore because it's you know you're talking about more than 35 000 people could getting killed and to mention the names of every person getting killed it's something impossible in the media i guess i just want to mention how how does it feel for anyone who's really listening right now how does it feel if you know that you know someone who's really the most important in your life and And you know that he's in danger somehow.

And you're trying to call, call one day, two days, three days, or even for a week sometimes. Sometimes it happens two weeks and three weeks. And you know that people, they are dying every day. And it might be someone from your family that, you know, might something, you know, happen, and you cannot reach them because of the signal, because of the connection, or whatever it is. How would you feel?

Ahmed said he hadn't actually seen his family for nearly a month because they hadn't had good enough signal for a call. Abdullah, on the other hand, hasn't even seen a picture of his family since bombs began to fall on the place where he grew up six months ago. Like I have not seen my family like face to face on a camera or for more than three weeks at the moment. The moment I saw them and they have to go somewhere really high building to so they can have internet that's a if they get this internet and in the same time it's very dangerous for them to go on high buildings so yeah you know sometimes when my father sent me a picture of him on messenger more than a month ago and then i was like just shocked how to see his white hair like oh gray hair everywhere and he just changed in these six months totally like

i would not recognize the same person like he was before the war because i was there seven months ago in gaza and he was totally young like you know he's he's just 50 years but it's not that he had gray hair everywhere like how i saw in his picture and then i see how suffering they are facing how tough life they are having at the moment just through his face his yeah his picture that he sent to me which is really just for sure hard to see that how how they are growing too fast because of this genocide we all come yeah I just want to add that I'm happy that you, Ahmed, had the chance to see your father. I still, for the last six months, I didn't see a picture or talk to you with all my family. I understand. my family just understand I they really risk their life to to go and talk to me

and then I always I also tell them to not do that when I when I see them come to that building where they go to get the internet. I was just telling them, go home, be at a safer area, but still, like, they tell me there is no safe area. There is no safe area, and it's the same anywhere. But then it's still like, yeah, it gave more fear that when you are on a high building, any high building getting targeted in Gaza. I have been having an extremely hard time looking at what's happening through my phone,

witnessing the suffering of people who might as well be my family. They all look and sound like my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my parents, my siblings. I can't even imagine experiencing this if it was my actual family. I genuinely do not know how I could cope with not being able to reach them for months or not even knowing if they're okay. I wanted to know if Ahmed and Abdullah have found ways to cope or at least ways to get through each day. Do you guys have a community that you can reach out to? Do you guys talk to each other a lot? How do you guys stay sane? How do you not lose your mind as everyone else goes about their life? We talk to each other, me and Abdullah, almost every day in the evening.

We spend more than four hours at least in a call. And besides that, while we are sitting calling each other, we are watching the news. And yeah, we have to be informed about everything is happening. That's how it makes us feel better, at least, to know what's going on and to follow the news. Anything else can help, but I think I would not feel happy to go and enjoy while my family is not enjoying. And I don't feel good about it. It's not that I should enjoy.

I feel like I'm not going to enjoy until my family is safe, until my family is enjoying. And it's going to gonna take years I guess you know the trauma that affected them from this genocide is gonna take a while to heal to recover they will take a long time to recover from this and I don't know if I am affected by it or not but you know my life as i told you has been just watching news for six months and nothing else i don't know how is that affecting me in the long run like after the war ends but for me parkour has always been a way to to recover and i'm sure parkour will help me later

i'm always trying to stay to talk to myself because i guess it's really important everybody has to talk to himself because it's the most important thing and yeah i'm not like a man you're positive you're straight to people's belief try not to lose your mind try just to be normal because at the end anyway you don't have anything that you can do in your hand you know uh that you cannot change something like i really have a friend of mine that already told her i'm really proud of myself that at least I'm trying to stay normal I'm trying to keep myself and act as a normal person

but the main question is I don't know to where I would be able to I'm afraid that once it's going to happen that I'm going to lose everything and I'm going to destroy everything of course you know sometimes I'm trying to get out I'm going to lose everything and I'm going to destroy everything. And of course, you know, sometimes I'm trying to get out. I'm not trying to be alone.

I'm just trying to keep my mind and my life a little bit more busy as much as I can. I've known Abdullah and Ahmed and several other members of PK Gaza since 2020. I worked on a story about them in 2021, which was about the last time I could sell stories on Gaza, because for the most part, you only get to write about people in Gaza when they're dying. I asked him about the well-being of some of the other members of the team. Saeed, yeah, he's in our thoughts all the time and we will never forget him for sure. Said was like the last person I saw in Gaza when I left Gaza. And he was with me, helping me with everything so I can leave from Gaza to Egypt.

So he was helping me with all the process I need in the crossing area because it's very busy and you need to have to know people in the crossing area so they can fix you and help you and to carry my stuff with me and I know Saeed since I was born I can say. Saeed's father and my father are very close friends and since I grew up like since I started to be aware on this life I met Saeed and we were friends neighbors we were always playing together and then we decided to go for a kung fu club and we started to train kung fu and martial arts together and at the age of nine years me and Said also met Abdullah and met the other guys who does also martial arts so we started to do martial arts together and then we met the parkour guys

muhammad ishjahbir and abdullah and chassi which made us turn into parkour after and everything i was doing in like in my sports life and outside of my sports life i was always meeting saeed as a friend as a brother and we were at each other's houses and eating together and yeah Saeed was really meaning a lot to me because I have always known him as the good guy who helped everyone who need help and lately said was there like the manager of the parkour Academy that we created there and he was taking care and teaching kids for free and volunteering and putting from his time so more kids can go there and learn parkour and my brother was one of them and he was helping him and during this war

said was the only one that informs me about my family in Gaza about how they are because he was the only one he was connected to the internet at that time so I was going through him about my family and we were talking every day during this war and suddenly I just saw news about him that he got killed together with his brothers while trying to rescue some people from under the rubble and then another rocket bombed them and killed them all. I could not understand it and still cannot believe that Saeed is gone. It's something that I would not believe that they go to Gaza and Saeed is not there. I cannot imagine how it feels to his father, to his mother, and that they lost the three of their sons at once. Yeah, but Saeed will always be in our memory, in our heart,

that we will never forget. Palestinians, they are really different than anybody else. When the bomb is really happening, everybody is just trying to escape, everybody is just trying to run away. the bomb is really happening. Everybody's just trying to escape. Everybody's just trying to run away. What Saeed and his brothers did,

they just went after that building was bombed, they just went to help others, to take others from under the rubble, you know, to help them, to see if they are injured, if they can help others. And that was their fault, that they were trying just to help others and then they could bomb three of them that's that's what happened with them and that's what most of the

but they were really brave and yeah it's it's such a loss that nobody can imagine. It's hard enough losing a friend so suddenly. It's even harder when you have been able to see them for months and never got to say goodbye. We asked about the last time they spoke to their friend and we asked them to share some of their memories of him. So he was, Saeed was telling me, listen to this sound. And then while listening, I was just hearing shooting and then he was telling me this is a quad captor

The quad captor is like a drone that is developed to shoot at the same time So it can film and see everything moving and shooting it at the same time so it can Kill people who which is moving and he tells me that everything is moving in this area everything is moving around us is getting shot and he was at his home and together with his family and i was telling him just said leave the area go somewhere that is better and safer or something that you don't have to hear this sound that you maybe can get killed inside your home because you know this quad captures is a drone that can go inside windows anything that it can go from the roof and enter your home and yeah that's uh what he told me what he told me was like yeah but if i live home i will get killed and if i if i leave another place i will also get killed because it's not safe anywhere it's

the same so if i die at our home or outside our home it's the same and in the end i go to the heaven it's directly it's better for me and that's what he was saying and that's what he received he wanted the heaven i guess and but we we wanted him back in our life we did not want him to go go but yeah that's life it take the good people from us always that's the end of part one but we'll be back tomorrow with the second part of our interview with Ahmed and Abdullah from Gaza Parkour hi I'm Ed Zitron host of theline 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 real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy

floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. 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 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 percent. 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. Since October 7th, Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, many of them children. All over the world, people have taken to the streets to call for an end to the killing, to show solidarity with the people of Palestine amidst their genocide. This is an unprecedented act of solidarity, but it's also been a long time coming, and we wanted to know how it made Ahmed and Abdullah feel. I walk in the streets here in Sweden and I see the people wearing the kofiya, the Palestinian kofiya, and it's something that makes me feel for sure happy and to see that the people start to be aware of what's going on in Palestine and Gaza start to understand that we have an occupation that we that finally you need to look in our cause and solve it this is Palestine this is Palestinians that they need their freedom. They need to live as any other person on this earth.

And to see this support of the people, it's the most important for us to live. It gives us a sense of freedom while we are not free yet. While we are not free yet. Just make us. Give us hope. That something will happen in the future. It's because it's a story of. Oppressed people. Who have been suffering for years.

I guess these people. Need attention. Need more effort of the people so they can get their freedom as when they have done about the black lives matter and it's also it should come from

the people that's how the world get affected if the people go against their governments against the decisions of their leaders that's how the world get affected if the people go against their governments against the the decisions of their leaders that's what gonna change the public opinion the the leader's opinion also i wanted to ask about like people want to help now more than i think they ever have in this country people are aware people who weren't aware before people who couldn't have told you like where like palestine was in relation to the map maybe now want to help and that's cool that's great like i think obviously people have a lot of learning to do because this isn't an issue

that's been very well covered by the media in the u.s for decades right the media in this country has also dedicated itself to dehumanizing muslim people um for a very long time but extensively over the last 20 years so like two things that come out of that i want to ask like if people want to help where and they have money that tends to be the easiest way to make a difference right but you've told me before that a lot of the ngos your parents your families end up buying the food that gets donated so is there an ngo that that is better and then like what can people do to learn i guess like to learn more i mean either from you guys or things or books or films that you think are good i mean the all the companies or the organizations that works in gaza yeah for sure they're trying their best but yeah as you have

seen that most of the trucks are standing outside rafah crossing and they are just allowing 200 tracks a day for 2 million people who are hungry who are suffering so yeah for sure like the food is not enough and when someone want to get this food he have to or who he or she they have to buy the food and it's more than 10 times more expensive than what it was before and sometimes it reaches even more and even the vegetables it's like higher than the prices here in europe imagine like a country under a war no work no jobs everything is stopped and the prices are going higher and higher because the stuff is very limited and the food is limited and everything is limited so for sure like people want to sell the stuff that they have so they can earn money so they can buy another stuff and that's how the people are doing in gaza So if they get something maybe for free,

which is very rare that it happens because it's too many people. And for example, my family are buying the food and I know how it is for them that it is hard for them to get the stuff that they even need because all what they have is food that is packed in cans beans mostly beans actually and that's what they have ever everything if they tell me we have been eating beans or a lot of these and pasta and they buy this stuff it's not that it's for free. Sometimes every other month,

every other two months, they get a bag of flour so they can make bread. And it's not just food aid that can be hard to get your hands on in Gaza. Even sending money is difficult. Yeah, it is starvation for the people. People are really like suffering from that and cannot imagine how is my family living that situation because i really find it hard these times to even send my family money because of how like most of the offices are closed that can that can receive money from outside Gaza. So it's, most of the offices are very busy that they have to stand in a queue for more than 10 hours, five hours sometimes.

And in the end they tell them, oh, we're sorry, we are out of cash. And that's what happens. Yeah, and imagine like the same money going and coming back in there so it's sometimes there is nothing in the banks there is nothing in the offices that is exchanging and receiving money from outside like western union is not working anymore money gram is not working and now the people are using something like a crypto coin like usdt and and you know to send a hundred dollar for example

they take like more than 15 percent of that and then in the same time you also have to pay another 10 or 5 percent for sending because the usdt is not equal with the usd because it in the crypto coin it's uh more expensive so you need to pay more dollars to get usdt and then there they receive it as a dollar and so So, yeah, to support, I suggest if anyone wants to support or have the money that wants to support a family or people in Gaza, the only thing is to actually contact the family that they want to support directly because, yeah, all the support that goes through the organizations the international organizations it takes very long time and in the end it reaches

Gaza and it's not enough for the people and then the people have to buy it it's not that goes it for free. Although millions of people are trapped in Gaza right now, we also know that some Gazans have been able to leave. We've seen fundraisers pop up for people trying to get themselves or their families out of Gaza. We asked Ahmed and Abdullah if they had an idea how much it would cost to leave Gaza right now. But then imagine Egyptian government are charging $5,000 for each truck entering Gaza. And they're charging every person $5,000 to leave from Gaza. So it's something else to help with. If you want to help someone to leave from Gaza,

it's also help our families or something like that, I can say. I mean, I'm trying to get my family out of there because I don't see any better future in Gaza at the moment. Imagine like this, what happened to Gaza will need at least more than 10 years to recover. All the schools are destroyed. All the houses, our home is bombed. You know, to rebuild the home, it's not just about rebuilding a home. Even if the bombing stopped today, the crisis wouldn't.

Almost all of Gaza's infrastructure, its hospitals, universities, schools and streets, has been destroyed. There's nothing left in Gaza. There's nowhere to go if you're sick. There's nowhere to buy food or clothes for your children. There's nowhere to buy the materials to fix your bombed house. Given all of this, it's hard to see a future for people there, which isn't very difficult. So we asked Abdullah and Ahmed about rebuilding.

You need to rebuild everything. You know, where will the water go? Where will the water come from? The electricity, everything is bombed. You know, you need to build a whole new city, Where the water come from. The electricity. Everything is bombed.

You know. You need to build a whole new city. Which will take at least. At least. At least. At least 10 years. It's much much more. And. Well.

The affection of it. On the people. Themselves also. What they have suffered. What they have. You know. It's gonna take them long time. To heal.

So. I think. I did not want to take a step a step like this but i will ask in the end my people who follow me to if they want to support the people and if they want to support any member of my family to get out of Gaza because I don't see it any better and I'm not ready to lose any of my family and yeah imagine like I have a brother who's 12 years old at the moment and I have a sister which turned 16. And another sister which has two kids. And one of them was born in the war. Like four months old at the moment. And what about these kids? What will they do if they stay in Gaza?

And you can apply that on the rest of Gaza people. Abdullah's family and his brother brother's sons his brother's kids uh so yeah that's the best is i don't know but most many many people want to really get out of there at the moment because they think about what happened to Gaza it will take years and it's my family's future and I don't know for how long it will take to fix this future if they stay in Gaza and if they still stay alive because if they enter Gaza at the moment my family is in Rafah and close to the borders area with Egypt. And that's the only place where most of the people at the moment, like more than one and a half million, are staying in a very small area.

and if Israeli enter Rafah that will be just yeah the hugest disaster that would could ever happen on earth that imagine 36,000 people killed and that's the one that is confirmed on the list that they found. But, you know, thousands and thousands are like they cannot confirm. Like they are written unknown. They don't know who they are. And there's thousands under the rubble that they cannot get out. And many missing. So it can be, it could reach to 100,000 together with the injured people. And that's not a small number.

And imagine if they enter to a place like Rafah, that will be just like double what have happened, at least. I hope that would not happen but I see that Israelis are very decided that they want to do that even if no one would be able to stop them they say and

they would do it even without the support of anyone without the support of the USA or without and that shows how criminals they are I can say that they want just to

slaughter all the people in Gaza they don't care about civilian or not civilian yeah I I want to do my best to help my family and I see I have to do my best to help my family and I see I have to take them to a safer place

and I don't know if it's possible if they stay in Gaza. Like anyone else, Ahmed and Abdullah want their families to be safe. But because they were born in Palestine, they don't have the privilege of not having to constantly worry about their family's safety. They also don't get to be the ones making choices that impact their safety. Instead, these choices are made by other people. Those people don't know Ahmed and Abdullah or their families. They might be IDF drone operators or US diplomats.

To those people, their families are just numbers but to Ahmed and Abdullah, their families are just numbers. But to Ahmed and Abdullah, their families are their whole world. How it works to get people out of Gaza is like you have to send someone in Egypt to pay for the government in Egypt. So they put their names in the list of Rafah borders so they can travel. That's how it works. and they charge every person at least five thousand you pay more than you are able to leave earlier if you don't pay or you pay five thousand you stay and wait in the queue if you don't pay you get you die in gaza yeah you're worth nothing that's how it is i don't know how it is for abdullah for Abdullah how does he feel about the future of

Gaza at the moment how do you feel like for the next 10 years watching your family I cannot imagine that's the thing that's why it lead me to steps like that because I always never wanted to my family are very you know loving to the country that they don't want to leave Gaza. My mother was like, no, we build home first. And I was trying to convince her by just explaining the situation and the next 10 years from now, which is another disaster after the war, which is make her understand more. Yeah, so true. To think about her children, future.

And yeah, but in the same time, I understand the love for the country. I always love Gaza, and I even have Gaza and everything in my life. I have it in my name, even like I always, if I say my name, I say I'm Matar Gaza as my name. You know, I don't say I am Ahmed Matar, but in my social media even it says Matar Gaza since always,

not during the war. And it's because I'm proud to be from there because it's the place that taught me the strength, it gave me the power, it gave me like, it taught me a lot of values that I use in my life at the moment that made me patient, made me strong and that's what is Gaza, it made me the person I am that I always hope and I always dream. I always have an extra dream because we always dream as a people from Gaza. Abdullah told us that his family is similar to Ahmed's, not wanting to leave Gaza because of their love of the land. Their priorities are to help their families. He said that when people ask him, how can I help? His view is that everyone has their own way of

supporting. It does not necessarily have to mean financial help if that is not a possibility for someone. He stressed the importance of posting on social media to continue spreading awareness and how the Palestinian struggle is a struggle that concerns all of humanity. You know, at the beginning, I was thinking like, I want to go to Gaza directly after this or during the war, but the worse I see it, the harder it make it like that. Even if I go, what will it help with my family like home is destroyed everything is destroyed not just our home our whole area like our neighbors everything over or our hood is destroyed which is as we said, would take a long time to fix. So going to Gaza, yeah, for sure it can help.

But in the same time, in the long run, it's not the thing that will make a change for my family's safety and future. And that's why, I don't know i am stuck into between two things like going to the place where i grow where i learned all of these values to be strong and but in the same time living life where everything is destroyed where you don't have a future or decide to be in a safer place where you maybe fix a future but away from your country from your heart because you know for us Gaza is our heart we really love Gaza we care about everything in Gaza but that's where I'm stuck between safety and future and the heart Gaza the place where we love we really appreciate you both of you guys sharing

your your feelings and your stories and I think Abdullah made a great point about how even if you can't support financially, there's a huge benefit of continuing to share posts about Palestine and continuing to talk about it and not letting life just go as usual and making people remember what's happening and not letting them forget. So I think that's important to remember for all the listeners. Just if you're able, like the least we can do is talk about Palestine. That's the very least, very least you can do. Thank you. It was a pleasure to talk to you and share this story with you for sure.

And to tell you the situation of every person who's living outside Gaza, away from their families. That's, I guess, that's I guess not just me not just Abdullah it's every Palestinian from Gaza who's living away from their family they are really suffering I can say because we are not

living normal since this genocide started in Gaza and we hope it will end soon so we can see our families and yeah, stop the killing of these people

from these children because it has been a war and a genocide on the children, women innocents more than 15, 000 children have been killed and much more disappearing and yeah women and so it's more than 70 percent of the people who being killed are women and children and also breastes, L3 and men,

teenagers. Guys, where can people, if they want to follow along, like to hear more from you guys, just to see your stories, where can they find you, like on social media or online? You can find me on my Instagram, Matar Gaza.

Abdel Kasab 23. That's my account on Instagram. As Ahmed was saying, I really appreciate everything. I mean, we are here because also we really want as much as people to know about it. And just to think and to know

that Gazans and Palestinians, they are not really numbers. They are people. They are people that everybody has really heart and is beating all the time. And we have feelings. We have everything that any human being in this world has. And this world.

It seems like everybody is really listening right now. And we are all equal. There's nobody better than the other one. At the end, we are all right now and we are all equal. There's nobody better than the other one. At the end, we are all the same. So, we are not numbers. I would like that everybody remember this.

There's so many and so much really bigger stories behind everyone. Everyone that we really killed. Everyone has a family. And you have to think, what if there is just, you know, a person that he lost,

everyone from his family, that's one story. The other person that he lost his kid, that's another story. The other person lost his mom, that's another story. The other person lost his dad, that's another story. So the person lost his dad, that's another stupid story. So

everybody has his own story. That's why I'm just trying to show that we are not just lumpers. There are so many other things that we have and we would feel often. So even though the people, they're still alive,

and they are alive, they are dead. They are not alive because literally they have nothing. Even whether they lost someone in the family or whether they can die even from hunger. Thank you guys so much. Yeah, thank you, man. Thank you both. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Hey everyone. It's me, James. I hope you found those enlightening. I know they're difficult to listen to, but I think they're important as well.

I just wanted to update the end of the episode to let you know that Ahmed has made a fundraising page. He's raising funds for his family who are still trapped in Gaza. If you'd like to donate to that, we will include the link in the show notes, but I'm also going to read it here just so you can remember it, your driving or what have you.

Hey everybody, the URL has been updated actually. It is now gofundme, G-O-F-U-N-D dot M-E, gofundme dot me forward slash F6B1F7BE. So go to that GoFundMe and please donate what you can. It will also be in the description of this episode. Thanks. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people

in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. 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 Ches 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 Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 8, 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. you get your podcasts. Welcome to a special Mayday episode of It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Neil Wong.

It wasn't too long ago that unions were finished. The percentage of American workers in unions plunged towards the single digits. The unions that survived battered and broken shells of the mighty behemoths that shook the world for a hundred years embraced so-called business unionism, which set out not to conquer the world in the name of labor like its great predecessors, or even, really, to bargain for higher wages, but to make companies profitable in order to keep their jobs. They took pay cuts and job losses without a fight, forcing their membership into line and effortlessly crushing the endless slates of reform caucuses that sought to put the fight

back into the working class. Even the cutting edge of Marxist theory held the time of unions was over. Workers were too atomized, too divided, too far from the immediate processes of production, from the discipline of the factory, and from the massification of the city to assemble the working class in its old fighting form. There would be riots, to be sure, barricades, blockades, occupations. But not strikes. Whatever the working class did next, the age of the union was over. For much of the 2010s, that prediction was a smart bet. The bold proclamation of Wisconsin trade unionists that organized labor would turn back the tide if the Tea Party fell to ruin under the failure of their attempt to recall Wisconsin's hated union-busting

Governor Scott Walker. The Tea Party's march continued unimpeded, radicalizing even further in the wake of the 2014-2015 uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore to produce not the victory of the working class, but Donald Trump. Even success stories like the rejuvenation of the mighty Chicago Teachers Union, AFT Local 1, by a bold reform caucus called the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE, who waged a pair of unexpectedly wildly popular strikes, or core, who waged a pair of unexpectedly wildly popular strikes, was tainted by the reality of limited wins and labor conditions in Chicago schools that remained appalling. Even as the left returned in the wake of Occupy Ferguson and the election of Trump, union membership continued to plunge, and capitalists and Marxists alike continued to herald the Union's demise.

They were wrong. History, it seems, delights in irony. It was the dead-enders fighting hopeless battles and reform caucuses losing union election after union election. It was the wobblies fighting losing campaign after losing campaign, desperately trying to organize the unorganizable fast food and retail workers. It was rank-and-file Marxist trade unionists waiting 60 long years, their comrades dead and gone, for somebody, anybody, to hear their plans for shutting down capital's logistics networks. It was labor notes, 16 staffers compiling endless analyses of labor struggles for a crowd that couldn't have filled a baseball stadium.

Who was right? Unions are back. While still small compared to the height of union power in the 1950s, 2023 saw a wave of massively popular strikes waged by unions from the massive behemoths like the UAW and the Writers Guild to tiny independent coffee unions whose members larger existing unions are rather spit on than spend a single cent attempting to organize. Only the direct intervention of the president to break a rail worker strike strike before it could start, and the last-second

portrayal of Teamster's leadership stopped 2023 from being this largest strike wave of the modern era. Basking in his triumphs and conspiring to win more was Labor Notes. Labor Notes is a curious beast. It is simultaneously a journal that publishes news about labor struggles, a network that brings together a group of disparate rank-and-file union reform movements, largely but not exclusively from the U.S., maintaining a strong emphasis on solidarity and organizing with workers in Mexico, and a labor conference that runs every two years. It is a relic of another time, whose time, it seems, has come again. Labor Notes was founded in 1979 as a way to coordinate and expand the inter-union connections formed in the United Mine Workers of America's 1979 bituminous coal strike. It's one of the last direct connections to the era where labor was strong. Unwittingly tasked with keeping the flame of labor alive during the neoliberal downpour.

Two weeks ago, they held their largest conference ever. 4,500 people crammed into the Wyatt Regency next to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. At least a thousand people who tried to register were turned down. I personally watched interested workers turned away at the door because the venue's conference halls had already reached the max capacity for fire safety. Labor, we can safely say, is back. It is returning to the South, the great rock unions have shattered upon for a hundred years. It's moving in new directions, towards service workers previously thought impossible to organize. Most of all, it's moving towards something we'd almost forgotten was possible. It's moving towards victory.

The first thing you notice about Labor Notes is its staggering diversity. Young punks in battle jackets sat on benches next to old anti-war protesters from the 60s. Independent trade unionists and feminist activists from Mexico rubbed shoulders with battle-hardened American Union nurses. White middle-aged longshoremen and women plotted with young queer Amazon warehouse workers to maximize the power of logistics strikes. You saw old industrial organizers from the 60s passing down lessons and tactics and stories of strikes that otherwise would have vanished into the mists of history. Media workers fighting for their first contract. The lowliest rank-and-file workers chatting in breakout groups with union presidents.

For all the talk I've done in this show about how many union organizers are trans, even I didn't expect to see this many trans people. It's a cross-section of the American working class come to fight. And that, above all, is what this Labor Notes conference was about. Fighting. The most direct conflict came on the first day of the conference, when Palestinian Union activists called for a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the hotel. The cops arrested three people in an attempt to clear the street. This, rather predictably, was a terrible idea. Instead of backing down, the crowd of several hundred union activists almost immediately surrounded the lone car and demanded they

let their prisoner go. What happened next, to use a technical term, fucking ripped. What happened next, to use a technical term, fucking ripped. A bunch of kids had a rave to the changing police sirens. A 50-year-old white dude from the electrical worker stood next to me, a Chinese trans woman from a podcast union. A bunch of longshoremen, teamsters, staffers from unions you wouldn't believe even if I told you. Palestinian trade union activists, nurses, punks from independent unions no one else in the crowd could have named. An entire mass of unionists stood their ground and refused to let the cops take one of ours. A tradeswoman with drums marched around the police car, and we all sang, which side are you on? After two hours, the police gave up to a crowd screaming union power at the top of our lungs. It was an incredible display of solidarity that set the tone for the rest of the event. We were going to fight the bosses together, and fuck them if they came for us. This is not to say there weren't divisions. A group of protesters broke away from the cop car

to demand that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, the darling of the Chicago Teachers Union, come tell the cops to let our people go. Now, whether or not this would have worked is up to some debate. These cops were not Chicago Police Department. They were the cops of Rosemont, which is technically a separate entity from the city of Chicago. However, Labor Note staffers and

securities tried to stop the protesters from reaching Brandon Johnson and ended up throwing punches at the protesters as, to quote one observer, Union Brother fought Union Brother. This fight reveals one of the important tensions in the movement. Should unions continue to back imperfect center-left politicians in exchange for some political benefits, or should they take a hard line against politicians who betray their fundamental political principles? Brandon Johnson is a microcosm of the debate. On the one hand, he was elected with enormous resource expenditure from the Chicago teachers' unions. On the other hand, he's been locking immigrants in tuberculosis-ridden camps as the city lurches from crisis to crisis.

Even many of Chicago's other unionists were never happy with him in the first place, as he failed to use his previous position to come to the aid of striking nurses. When the two points of view collide, there is a fight. On a national level, the conflict is the question of Joe Biden and Palestine. At Labor Notes itself, there's strong support for Palestine. itself, their strong support for Palestine. Palestinian solidarity panels were packed to the rafters with workers from every sector imaginable and activists from across the world. I saw UAW workers deeply unhappy with the union leadership's decision to endorse Biden,

a decision made by maybe five members of an executive committee without a vote from the union. But therein lies the issue. committee without a vote from the union. But therein lies the issue. As much as Labor Notes represents the bleeding edge of the labor movement, UAW President Sean Fain, fresh off the UAW's astounding 73% victory at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, gave the conference's closing address, there remains massive bastions of conservatism in the labor movement who have actively fought against even statements on Palestine, much less concrete actions. Unions are still weak, and the positions of activists within them are still tenuous. favorable shops have yet to turn broader popular support among rank-and-file workers for Palestine into substantive strike actions, and it's deeply unclear to me if any such action is possible at all.

My pessimism on labor's willingness and ability to stop the genocide in Palestine, a pessimism reinforced by watching the rapid spread of student campus occupations while labor remains silent, or perhaps more precisely, dormant, is broadly in tension with my optimism at effectively everything else that I saw there. There is incredible organizing going on at Labor Notes. People are coordinating rank-and-file links between unions whose staffers and leaderships hate each other for grudges whose origins have passed into the mists of time. There was quite serious talk about plans to line up contracts to expire in 2028 to effectively create a miniature general strike.

Or, perhaps more precisely, to create a version of what's called the Spring Offensive in Japan. Spring and offensive are the same word in Japanese. And so, labor unions decided to have their contracts expire in the spring, thus maximizing the power of their strikes. This effort to have contracts aligned in 2028 is, broadly speaking, a larger version of the spring offensive. that discussions and organization were quite serious and there was significant enthusiasm as well as discussions of the potential difficulties of getting people's contracts to actually align. People are organizing to bring their unions together on a sectoral base to share resources, coordinate, set standards for contracts, and generally help each other more effectively oppose the bosses and unions that rule them all. Labor Notes has also, from the beginning, been an incubator for reform movements inside of unions attempting to wrest control from corporate administrative caucuses.

These reform movements almost always lose. The last 50 years is littered with defeats in union election after union election with sub-10% turnout. And yet, little by little, these groups are starting to win. We heard from a number of smaller rank-and-file efforts that had successfully taken control of their unions. that had successfully taken control of their unions. The first major victory was a rank-and-file slate taking over the management of notoriously corrupt and cliquish Teamsters. Now, I have my issues with the new Teamsters leadership, too. There are something like two entire hours of this show dedicated to how angry rank and file teamsters

were over the fact that ups workers didn't go on strike last year due to their leadership cutting a deal with management but on a broader level the victory of the teamsters reform slates and the defeat of one of the oldest union i don't know if administrative caucus is really a that that's a bit of a euphemism for the ups sort of corrupt leadership dictatorship but their victory on a broader level was a sea change in american unionism their victory was followed by the victory of Sean Fain in the UAW, a man who, as much as he's angered members by endorsing Joe Biden, walked into Labor Notes and gave a speech about the class war and the authoritarianism of corporate greed. Certainly, there was much to annoy trade activists concerned with Palestine,

in the sense that his central metaphor labor is the arsenal of democracy was in bad taste as he described the unions that he leads as the successors of liberator b-52 bombers which not you know not precisely the metaphor i'd choose as your own members are protesting the bombs falling over Gaza. But on the other hand, if a giant speech about the class war and the need to organize across borders

is now the conservative wing of progressive trade unionism, the future is bright. The kind of militant union actions we've seen over the past year have coalesced into a sort of strategy of fight as you build it is based on a very basic strategy that you would think unions would have already been doing however comma see everything i've ever said about administration administrative caucuses and business unionism and corporate

unionism. The strategy is, if you win things for people, more of them will join unions. This strategy is already bearing fruit in Chattanooga and has international implications as well. We heard from organizers that workers in Mexico and China were keenly watching the UAW strikes, and for good reason. These strikes are ultimately their fight too, and slowly but surely, workers across the world are starting to realize it. The degree of internationalism at this labor house was remarkable. I came into an early China panel fully expecting the same kinds of praise for the CCP that I've seen in other leftist events held in the city of Chicago. Most recently, the sort of fiasco China panel held at Socialism Conference that degraded into an argument about whether or not Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa are socialist. Here, there was none of that. For sure, there were some slightly

weird German Maoists defending the Cultural Revolution, but on the other hand, there wasn't any defense of Chinese capitalism or their failed bankrupt model of corporate unionism. Chinese capitalism or their failed bankrupt model of corporate unionism. On top of cross-border organizing sectorally, the conference has a deep and ingrained pro-immigrant position. Sean Fain is probably the most high-profile political figure I've seen actually discussing the horrific treatment of migrants at the border right now and taking time to remind everyone that immigrants are just workers trying to find a better life. This, however, makes his support for Joe Biden, the butcher of Yakumba, even more questionable. Still, you can see the wheels of history turning.

You can see it there, in the muffled buzz of conversations drifting through hallways, in the roar of the cheering crowd, in the bright laughs of co-conspirators who moments before were strangers, in the drowsy chatter of abortion workers who let a trans woman sleep on their floor to hide from the police, in the chants of a hundred workers refusing to let the cops take one of their own. You can see the outline of the great leviathan the ruling class thought buried stone dead in the 1980s. You can see the working class waking from its day's slumber, shaking the sleep from its eyes and the dirt from its back. You can, for the first time in decades, hear the clatter and the roar as it tests its chains. The great behemoth is beginning, just beginning, to assemble the iron will and terrible power necessary to turn its dreams into reality, to break its chains and shatter its cage and reclaim the world it built with its blood and sweat and tears. That day is not today.

It's not tomorrow. But for the first time in my life, it could be the day after that. This has been It Could Happen Here. Happy May Day, everyone. everyone. destruction of Google search, better offline as 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.

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 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 Parente. And I'm Jemay 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. Hey, everyone. Robert Evans here. And this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. after flying back from Texas, where my dad died, to Portland, waking up and basically immediately interviewing a group of protesters in Arcata, California at the Cal Poly occupation in Humboldt,

and then driving to Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where there has also been a campus occupation. And both of these occupations have some stuff in common. And I wanted to talk about what was happening with both of them, because I think it's relevant. And obviously, it's relevant to what is currently one of the larger stories going on in the country right now, which is that a series of occupations on campuses protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza have spread to more than 100 schools in the United States. You will have heard of this. Now, we have covered some of this in recent episodes, particularly what was going on in Colombia, at least at the initial stages of that.

And today, again, I'm here to talk about two occupations. One of them is at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California, and another is at Portland State University in, you know, Portland, Oregon. As an odd aside, I have lived in both of these cities, which is peculiar. It doesn't really mean anything, but I thought it was weird, and obviously, I still live in Portland. Protests started in Arcata first. On October 22, 2024, students on the Cal Poly Humboldt, also called CPH, campus occupied Siemens Hall. These students were not members of any specific group, but were all acting in solidarity with Gaza and were inspired at least partly by the solidarity encampment at Columbia University. It started with a small number of people, about 45 or so. These are a mix of students, some alumni, and a few random Arcadans.

Arcada is a pretty progressive town. You might call it hippie. That's generally the reputation that it has. Campus police showed up. There was a series of negotiations, which here means they told everybody to leave. And at that point, the police began escalating things. Because the Arcada police force is pretty small, cops were called in from the surrounding area. Quite a few of them. There were helicopters. It's much more of a to-do than this fairly sleepy community in the Redwoods is used to having.

Community members started to show up as well because, hey, something was happening. A write-up from CrimeThink's website describes what happened next. Quote, police from every department in the county showed up, including a helicopter, canine units, and off-duty police. Students responded by swarming them. The cops' initial plan to carry out a mass arrest was thwarted by a series of clashes both inside and outside of the building. The occupiers beat back police advances despite facing brutality unlike anything we have seen over the last decade of struggle in Humboldt County. Again, it's a pretty sleepy place. There were two arrests and a number of injuries. The arrests were apparently quite ugly, but police were unable to clear out the occupation.

Decades were thrown into place as the fighting continued off and on until a crowd of people from the surrounding community, including other students and faculty, showed up outside and effectively surrounded the police. After six hours, the police retreated. The university declared a lockdown, and the students were able to spend the next few days extending their defenses as well as setting up infrastructure, including a kitchen. Early on the morning of the 29th, a team from It Could Happen Here sat down with two of these students to discuss the occupation. I go by Stinger online, and I have been part of the occupation since, I think, the morning of day two. I think it was the night after the cops tried to enter the barricaded building and got pushed back. I think I've been here since the morning after that. Yeah, Blue, and what's been your history with this?

I came here on Tuesday morning. I came here on Tuesday morning I just attended a meeting with everyone and I've just been here helping at the MAC mainly because I feel like that's where I'm the most useful what's the MAC? the MAC is the mutual aid kitchen

where we've been handing out food and I've just been helping prepare food for people and trying to let other people involved do more things. Because I know I'm the most useful in the mech personally rather than being anywhere else doing anything else. By the time we talked to them, the rumor mill widely expected the police to carry out a major attempt to clear the occupation that night. As I write this, 10.13 p.m. PST on the 29th of April, local police have

just given Siemens Hall a dispersal order. So, we'll see how that goes. Hey everyone, Robert here. We saw how it goes. Police cracked down, arrested a bunch of people, and ended the occupation. We will talk more about that a little at the end of the episode. But because their initial efforts to clear out the occupation failed, police have had to spend nearly a week watching and waiting as students dig in. Yeah, police have not tried to like actively push us out like we've seen on other campuses where like they've totally like raided and like torn down tents and everything and i think uh we also i think a big part of it is like logistically we're in a small like city and we don't really have the police force necessary yeah which is why they've been trying to call you know unfortunately they've been trying to call you know unfortunately been trying to call officers from other places because uh especially like i feel like in the evenings especially we have a

lot of people um both from the community and students on campus who have been occupying the quad but what's so funny is that our main intention was not, like, the original intention was not to barricade that building. It was just going to be occupied, not barricaded. But because of police actions, I feel like we've actually stepped up more. So they kind of shot themselves in the foot with that one. years. In late 2020, Garrison and I reported from an eviction defense at the famous Red House in Portland. The basic idea is that local protesters were trying to stop police from serving an eviction during the pandemic. There was a clash outside the house and some arrests, but police pulled back when protesters were still on the ground and in numbers. Said protesters began to fortify the area around the house and eventually the entire neighborhood. By the time the police realized what was going on, they had a nightmare on their hands, an occupation that would have been impossible to clear without significant violence. The end result of the situation was that the city government essentially negotiated an end to what was happening,

rather than just sending the police back in to evict residents. There is much more to the whole situation than that. This is something people still get angry about because the patriarch of the family at Red House was a weirdo sovereign citizen type, but the goal at the time was to stop evictions during the pandemic, and the tactics of the day worked. The cops backed off, the city came to the negotiating table. It was a successful action, whatever you think about the individuals involved in it. After the call that Garrison, Mia, and myself had with those Humboldt students,

and we will hear more from them later, I got a message from a source that an occupation was also brewing on the Portland State University campus, or rather, that it was going on, and folks were worried things were about to escalate. But don't you escalate until you've listened to these ads. Anyway, here they are. We're back. Actions at Portland State University started on Thursday the 25th, and it was initially pretty simple. One tent and one banner strung between trees in front of the Branford Price Miller Library steps.

Social media did its thing once this first tent was up and the encampment slowly grew to maybe half a dozen tents by midnight. At around 1.20 a.m., the police swept the encampment. Only a few people were awake and less than 20 people were present, against maybe 40 riot officers. The police pushed people out of the encampment. They went straight for the supply tent and took everything, loading medical equipment, food, etc., into City of Portland trucks and hauling it away. It was a bad night for a lot of people. But what I gleaned from interviewing some of those folks was that they had learned one crucial lesson, which was that Portland police weren't willing to fuck with people or property that was sitting on the PSU steps. of the PSU campus police.

PPB could police the park outside, but either couldn't or just didn't want to be arsed in dealing with the complications that might be caused by going into school property themselves. So the school had to deal with the unenviable complication of the fact that these were their students protesting at a famously progressive school, and having their cops clear them out, especially if it caused violence or somebody got seriously hurt, would be a real PR headache. The administration at Humboldt University and famously progressive Arcata ran into a similar problem. In the days after the police backed away from their initial confrontation, students developed a list of demands by consensus.

Here's one of our sources from the Humboldt occupation again, and their description of the demands have been cut together from a longer interview. Some crosstalk has been edited out to make things flow a bit more clearly. Anyway, here's those demands. Okay, so students with the mediation faculty have reached out to administration in hopes of re-engaging negotiations. So we would like administration to agree to the following three demands. One, de-escalate. We demand the immediate removal of police from university campus. We also demand the immediate re-enrollment of students who have been suspended and a promise to not suspend, re-suspend, or expel any student protesters as a result of these accusations

because they were claiming, you know, that we had committed property damage and trespassing and things like that. And that was a lot of the reasons that they gave for suspending us, like in the email we received about interim suspension. Two was divest. We demand that the Cal Poly Humboldt Foundation commits to an audit and subsequent divestment from any funds related to Israel, Israeli products, or Israeli companies. And this includes those that own factories on stolen Palestinian land in Israel. There are four specific funds that at the minimum we demand the divestment from within the next six months. These were TILCX, DFSTX, FEUPX, and DODFX. And we did research into these holdings that these funds have and how the companies that they may have holdings in are connected to israel so for example tilcx their top three holdings are in

qualcomm wells fargo and chubb qualcomm is an information technology company that does the majority of its technology development in israel so they have like factories there and um that's kind of where they develop their smartphone chips and tracking intelligence which is kind of like two of the main things that they work on and sell and and uh wells fargo was part of a $500 million loan deal with multiple other lenders that support that was supporting Elbit Systems, which is an Israeli military weapons manufacturer. So those are like two of the big ones just from the first fund that we had looked into. And our third demand was declare in solidarity with universities across the globe and for all Palestinian people, including their martyrs and refugees, we demand a ceasefire

statement from Cal Poly Humboldt calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Palestine. And we encourage all other California state universities and universities of California to do the same. As we were writing this, it was, we found out that the faculty administration had released a ceasefire statement, I believe, but the actual like university like admin had it like the whole university admin, but like the faculty had released a ceasefire statement faculty specifically I know there's there's definitely faculty that have there's some faculty who have been with us since day one like camping out with everyone since day one and it's like a lot of the faculty we like we are totally comfortable putting our trust in

like some of these faculty like if there like, we are totally comfortable putting our trust in. Like, some of these faculty, like, if there was an emergency, like, I would call them, you know? Like, if there was an emergency on campus where, like, I was about to be arrested, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to call up this, like, professor. Like, they have been, like, trying to, you know, update us with whatever they hear from admin. But just in like the past few days, we've actually kind of discerned that upper admin has sort of cut off contact with lower admin and faculty. And this is something that we talked about with faculty members as well, because of the significant faculty support that we've been receiving. Administration is literally just not

telling faculty anything anymore. Yeah, it really seems like it's turned into just this pure conflict between everyone who is part of the process of an education fighting against the admin who are not part of that process, who are trying to stop everyone with cops. Back in Portland, that first failed encampment brought more people out the next day, Friday the 26th, and by noon, more tents and a few banners had been set up. Student organizations had put together lists of demands. Now, these demands have varied and have been edited a few times after long democratic consensus sessions by people present. The list I was presented with when I showed up

on Monday included three demands. Number one, PSU should release a statement condemning the genocide of Palestinian people with weapons provided by the U.S. Number two, the university should end the sale of Israeli products on campus and any programs that would involve sending students, employees, or faculty to Israel. And number three, the Board of Trustees should terminate all relationships with Boeing and other companies complicit in the ongoing genocide. Their list included Leopold, an Oregon based company who makes rifle scopes, but also companies like Intel and Hewlett Packard. Boeing was the company I heard referenced most by protesters. The aerospace company, which is involved in the manufacture and design of just so many weapons, has a partnership with Portland State University.

Later on Friday, the same day that these lists of demands started coming together, the school president, Ann Cudd, announced a pause to the school's relationship with Boeing to address these protester demands. Precisely what pausing this relationship means is unclear, and a lot of the people I talked to felt like it essentially meant nothing. But Cudd wrote, quote, PSU will host a forum at which these concerns can be carefully framed and debated. We will organize a two-hour moderated debate in May to include faculty and student voices. So, you know, whatever that means. By late in the day Friday, media had started showing up in numbers to report on the occupation, which was still quite small, but bigger ones were happening all over the country,

and if you're local news, you want to do anything you can to tie your area into whatever the big story is nationwide. So, you know, good excuse to show up. There was also some conflict between local student groups at this point and unaffiliated groups of activists, some of whom were also students, over whether or not to keep occupying over the weekend and keep attempting to, you know, keep an occupation in place despite police crackdowns or to save their strength for a new concerted push on Monday. At any rate, some people stayed, and by 7 p.m. that night, Friday night, the Portland Police Bureau showed back up in full riot gear.

Park rangers told protesters to exit the park area, and a standoff ensued. While some protesters confronted police head-on, a smaller group of activists used this as a distraction to move a number of tents onto the library steps, having noticed that PPB didn't seem to be willing to go directly onto campus property. Once this was done, the folks confronting the riot line gradually pulled back to the steps. The police seemed confused or at least put out by this. They left for a while, then returned briefly to cut down the banners hung on the trees. I was told a number of people mentioned this kind of laughingly

when I was around that the way in which the police justified this was that a recent anti-camping, public camping measure meant to target the homeless specified that the kind of thing that a banner hung, like basically the fact that the banner touched trees in two different areas or like touched two different trees meant that it would count it as a tent and so they were allowed to take it down. It all sounded pretty silly to me, but students and others on campus property in the library were left to barricade the area around the library at will. They started with pallets brought by an anonymous benefactor. Both sides of the staircases into the library were initially blocked. This only lasted until Saturday morning, when Ann Cudd, president of the university since August of 2023, visited the encampment. Different protesters I

have talked to related this event in different ways. Some described her visit as essentially chill. Others described Anne as quite angry and even threatening them. I was not there. The end result was an agreement, though. If protesters allowed students to continue to have access to the doorway into the library so students could still use the library, PSU wouldn't send in their cops or call in the city cops to clear out the occupation. After what one source described as much-heated discussion, protesters agreed to this arrangement. Now, variations of stuff like this are common in occupations at schools that get this far. School faculty are often sympathetic

to student actions, or at least to the students taking part in them, and supporting crackdowns is dicey for the administration. At Humboldt State University, the administration attempted to de-escalate and eventually euthanize the movement by trying to provide a safety valve, a way for students who'd had enough to leave, along with the suggestion, but not the actual legally binding promise, that they wouldn't be punished if they did. And here's another clip from that interview. I understand that the school even set up basically a booth where you could come and officially like deregister yourself from the protests in order to not get expelled or something like that. Is that a

like, I think you're, it was unclear to me from what I read, like exactly how that system was supposed to function, but it seemed kind of shady. So they wanted us to, so they set up a table by one of the exits and they wanted us to like, give them like our information. And they were like, if you do this,

you won't get immediately arrested. But keep in mind, they said not immediately arrested. And they even clarified like in their alert about this, they were like, by the way, this doesn't protect you from any future consequences. So it was like, why would we do that then? What is that doing for any of us? I don't think a single person took that opportunity. Back in Portland, after the detente with the school administration, things continued awkwardly but smoothly for the next day or so. Protesters continued to fortify the library defenses while students entered and exited and used it at will, although the school did shut it down early on Monday. space available to them to set up minimal infrastructure. As in Humboldt, a small kitchen tent was put up along with a larger medical tent, a designated smoking area tent, and an art station

for people to make signs to hang from the barricades. Donations began coming in on Saturday night and flooded in on Sunday, to the point that by Monday, protesters had stopped accepting donations of a lot of stuff like food and water, but also things like batteries and generators, because they just didn't have room to take any more of them. During these weekend days and nights, those at the encampment discussed demands, their plans, and strategy for the future. One topic of discussion involved the houseless. Would local houseless people be welcome inside the encampment, and would they be welcome to some of the donated resources? The ultimate decision, and I hear that this was not a particularly controversial one, was yes. Now, I should also note here that the Humboldt students we talked with claimed that

their school's treatment of houseless residents earlier, like a couple of years ago, was one of the inciting incidents of this occupation. Obviously, the genocide in Gaza was the spark and purpose for why the occupation at Humboldt happened and why this occupation at PSU happened, but nothing happens in a vacuum. And I wanted to include this bit from the interview because I think it's interesting. We're joking that this is like the third strike for administration because in 2022, the LA times released an article about how administration was kicking homeless students off campus for living in their vehicles jesus and i believe our university out of all the cal states has the highest rate of homeless students

yeah and so this kind of this outraged a lot of people including people on campus we actually had a few days encampment on campus for that too i believe and i feel like that never really got it got partially resolved but admin was like really fighting against all the possible options because there was like a couple of people arguing that like keep in mind i don't even think these people were from campus but apparently the two people like filed complaints about how the people are living in their cars were like messy or something and so one of our requests was like okay maybe like we can get a few more dumpsters or trash cans in the area where people are living. Yeah.

And admin just totally fought back against that. And so that was like what we're jokingly calling like, oh, that was like strike one. And then strike two, we were saying is the faculty strike that happened earlier. I think this semester that was, I think, all over the state. But it really only lasted like one day, despite the momentum for possibly lasting longer than that. And admin sent out an email saying, like, if your faculty isn't holding classes, put their names here. Jeez. And obviously all of us were like what are you talking like

you want us to like you're asking us to snitch on our like professors and faculty right now so that's what we're joking is like strike two because we're like uh we're not doing that and then this is what we're calling strike three and i was like joking earlier to everyone i was like strike three and we're out strike three and they're out and everyone was like joking earlier to everyone. I was like, strike three and we're out? Strike three and they're out? And everyone was like, yeah, I freaking hope so. Campus occupations like this are always complex things, not just in the different motivating factors that come together to make situations like this possible, but in the ways in which extant student groups and organizations that arise spontaneously due to the pressures of the moment interface and interact. When I arrived at the pressures of the moment interface and interact.

When I arrived at the encampment at about 1 p.m., I was introduced to several media liaisons for the occupation. They were extremely careful with what they said. A lot of it was just kind of repeating the list of agreed-upon demands that the protesters had come up with. I did ask about a few other things. I wanted to know how protests in 2020 and protests on other campuses had impacted the tactics being seen here. The most common response I got to my questions were variations of, that's not something we'd like to talk about. But they did go into detail on a couple of things, and one of those was what it would take to actually conclude this occupation. They noted that if representatives of the campus administration, including the president, were to come to them and make concrete steps to divest

from Boeing and other military contractors that the school currently has a direct financial relationship with, that that could be the basis for moving forward in some way to start reducing the extent of the encampment, possibly. So that seemed to be kind of their line. If we actually see some real evidence that the school is divesting from these military investments that they have, you know, we'll be willing to negotiate further. But what the school has done thus far, basically just announcing a pause and saying, we'll meet about the Boeing thing later. That's not enough. The liaisons I talked to also made it clear that they found the wide wave of campus actions around the country inspiring and that that had had an impact on how things were being carried out at PSU.

I was pretty impressed by their message discipline, to be honest. As a journalist, you want people to talk to you, but actions like this are dangerous, and cops aren't the only danger. Anytime your movement gets press, the attention that it attracts will also attract grifters, particularly of the right-wing variety. People who want to find someone they can catch saying something aggressive or dumb or that just sounds bad out of context. You, as organizers and activists, want to keep attention on your goals and message and away from that kind of bullshit. I should also note that there were some mentions of their desire that the campus essentially carry out an amnesty policy for people who had already been involved in the occupation so that nobody would get kicked out of the school as a result of their participation

in this movement. I've heard similar things from the protesters in Humboldt. Yeah, it was an interesting conversation. And what's also interesting are these ads. And we're back. As my time at the protest on Monday wore on, individuals from the occupation would occasionally march through the crowd and around the encampment, which grew at its height of the day to around 500 or so people in the late afternoon. This was a mix of protesters, including people from a march that had formed elsewhere and ended up at PSU, and some bystanders, a lot of whom were students at nearby dorms. People who were members of the occupation would ask passersby and media not to film protesters and encourage folks to get involved and help with the occupation.

Pamphlets on their goals were handed out, and pamphlets on radical political action were passed around. There were also some people tabling for different causes. There was one group of people who were taking down folks' information in order to support essentially a ballot measure that would increase the tax on corporations worth more than $25 million that were based in the city of Portland, which sounded nice to me. And in addition to that, there were people who were working to organize a, you know, one of those, sorry, it's very late, but essentially how people are,

a lot of people are attempting to get people to organize to like register as unaffiliated in the primaries, especially in order to like, you know, make a statement to the Biden administration about their support of Israel. There were folks who were trying to raise and get people involved in that as well. So again, you know, it was like many protests of this size involved a lot of people. Sometimes in the past, especially in Portland, I have seen kind of more extreme and, yeah, let's say extreme activists get angry at stuff like this, particularly when it's asking folks to like fill out or sign petitions. There's some concern, obviously, that like that could effectively dox people who were there. I've always found that concern a little silly.

I think people can be trusted to kind of measure their own threat matrix and decide, am I going to be doing anything at this protest? That means I shouldn't put down on a piece of paper that I was around here. That issue I didn't notice at this protest. Everyone seemed pretty copacetic, and as a general rule, it was quite peaceful. Folks seemed more or less on the same page. The mostly masked protesters that I met were a pretty diverse lot, and this included a number of Muslim students, at least one of whom I watched pray before taking their place on the barricade. I also noticed numbers of students in hijabs watching from nearby windows, and eventually from the park out in front of the occupation. From conversations I had on the ground, I became aware of the fact that several student organizations were hesitant to support particularly the weakened occupations as they had had concerns for the safety of their Palestinian members.

One particularly salient fear was that foreign students who participated and were arrested might risk not just their academic status, but their ability to stay in country. And I know that a number of the protesters I met there, who were particularly white folks, felt like one reason they needed to participate was that they could participate without taking that kind of risk on. For the largest portion of the day Monday, I watched as activists reinforced the barricades on one side of the library, and the crowd grew quite large in the park. Some signs I saw among the crowd and on the barricade included, mass college protests are always on the right side of history,

and fuck your homework, people are dying. There were speeches, but not much in the way of action, until very late in the day when all but maybe 150 or so of the crowd had filtered away. My notes at the time say the big change happened at around 6.55 p.m. By this point in the early evening, I had seen very little of the police. Every now and then a few PSU cruisers would come by, circling the area, and small groups of four or five hecklers carrying makeshift fishing poles with donuts on them would run beside the squad cars, basically trying to like tempt the police officers to go grab the donuts. This seemed to demoralize the campus officers enough that they mostly stayed away. I believe that at this point, the city's

plan and the administration's plan was to avoid doing anything fucked up and violent in front of such a large crowd because that would be to risk restarting the whole 2020 Portland protest cycle again. Remember, it's not just as simple as can we crush this protest, but if we go kick all these people out now and, you know, a bunch of them get seen in broad daylight getting beaten and gassed, does that mean we have to deal with thousands of people in the street tomorrow? Honestly, staying away was the smart play on behalf of the police, and as a result of them making the smart play, protesters in the encampment were themselves confronted with a choice. The space that they had been allowed by the school to occupy

in this sort of weird detente situation had been filled, both with donations and just the number of people who were inside the occupation. There was no room to make it any bigger. So their next options were either, number one, expand the occupation to the park. And the Portland Police Bureau has the ability, the legal ability, and obviously the gear to clear out the park. In addition, just from a tactical level, it's difficult to defend an encampment in that

park the way that it's set up. You really don't have, you know, you're kind of surrounded on all sides. The police can really mess with you. I've been gassed in that park a few times, I'm quite aware. The other option they had was take the entire library building and force a response from both PSU and the city government. This would obviously give them more room to maneuver, give them more room to take in more people, and it would force an escalation with the city government and with the school, which is, you know, what they were looking for. Again, this is overall about particularly their school

not divesting from companies that they see as complicit in the genocide in Gaza, and about, you know, wanting to force a response from that school's leadership. You know, there's a lot more to it than that, but that's what they were trying to do, and that's what they chose to do. A little before 7 p.m., someone on a bullhorn came out and began asking all of the people who were still there who was willing to engage in real militant action, and for those people to come help occupy the library. Those who were less willing to risk charges, but still down for the cause,

should form ranks out in front of the property. There were people with shields, etc. They looked like little bitty phalanxes. You know, people had a mix of umbrellas and shields, and usually two lines thick or so of people linking arms. And I thought at first they were just kind of getting ready for the police to come in to sort of resist the charge if they occupied more of the library. But that's not what happened. For a few minutes, different organizers kind of put these groups of people together and

drilled them, walked them through basic tactics, talked about what they should expect. And not long after this, two different PSU police cruisers began to approach from two different streets. Both of these different groups of people, these little platoons, split up, and one would confront each vehicle. The officers were badly outnumbered in both cases, and they pulled back, you know, and essentially left the library without anyone really watching over it. The activists who were inside the library used this as an excuse to occupy the rest of the building. Once the police cruisers had been forced back, the protesters from these platoons started grabbing heavy objects that were just around them on the campus and dragging them back to fortify the entrances and exits to the structure.

Much of this took the form of black-clad activists swarming onto a sports field behind the library and grabbing soccer goals, football training, sleds, and other heavy pieces of equipment and using them to wall off exits and entrances to the ground floor of the building. I watched one group of protesters cut through locks to liberate a pair of dumpsters, which quickly found their way into the barricades in the front of the structure. I did not enter the library. I'm fairly certain that would have been illegal, but I did see numerous people running around on floors above ground level, setting up the space for a proper occupation. I was told by at least one person that activists were purposely keeping the interior space accessible to those with wheelchairs, and there were a number of folks with wheelchairs who I saw outside at the occupation. I did not see any specific people inside. I left after 9pm,

having been on the ground and wearing my armor for about 8 hours the day after landing back in Portland. That was all I had in me, but quite a few people were still present both outside and inside the library when I left. Roughly an hour after I got home and started writing this episode, at about 11 p.m. PST, a series of frantic late-night phone calls resulted in the president of PSU, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, the chief of police for Portland, and the city DA Mike Schmidt holding an emergency press conference. Local KATU reporter Tanvi Varma summarized the conference message this way on Twitter. Quote, PSU president said the protesters have damaged property and are broken into the

library. She says she cannot entertain property damage or breaking and entering. She asked them to choose to engage civilly. She says they'll be asking PPB to remove the trespassers from the library. PPB police chief says he'd like to resolve this with no force or arrests. He has asked those who are breaking the law in the protest to stop. It's unclear to me at present how any of this is going to shake out. As I type this, the occupation at Humboldt is under heavy attack, and it sounds like it's going to be quite ugly. Hey, everyone. So, you know, again, this is a little messy because I wrote this late last night.

I woke up in the morning to listen to the edit of it and some things that happened. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, about 25 people were arrested after more than 100 riot officers arrived at the Cal Poly Humboldt campus and cracked down on the Gaza protest occupation. Riot police arrived around 2.30 a.m. Legal observers say no injuries. It's kind of really unclear to me how bad it was, what actually happened. But quite a few people have been arrested. And at this point, it looks like they're being charged with some pretty gnarly crimes, conspiracy, I think assault on a police officer. So this is one of those things that's going to be an ongoing story. The university accused the occupiers of doing more than a million dollars worth of damage to

university property. I'll actually just read a quote here from an MSN article. Those arrested faced a range of different charges depending on individual circumstances, including unlawful assembly, vandalism, conspiracy, assault of police officers, and others. In addition, students could face discipline for conduct violations, while any university employees arrested could face disciplinary action. That's them quoting a university news release. So that's kind of where we are with Cal Poly Humboldt. I wanted to note that the folks that we talked to, who I hope are doing well, had requested that we send people to donate to a bail fund, if at all possible. If you want to find that and support the Humboldt protesters, you can go to rally.org slash ARC bail fund. That's rally.org slash ARC bail fund.

So that would help out with those folks who currently need it. bail fund. So that would help out with those folks who currently need it. There has also been a request to call the university and request the release of Humboldt protesters for Palestine. The CPH University Police phone number is 707-826-5555. There is a suggested script, which I'm going to read here. Hi, my name is blank, and I demand the immediate release of the arrested Humboldt student and faculty protesters for Palestine. They should not be charged, let alone raided and attacked, for being on the right side of history. They include, but are not only, Fern McBride, Olivia Fox, Jared Cruz, Ruhala Agasella, Lana Word, Allison Merton, Isaiah Morales, and Adelmi Ruiz. So that's where things are with Humboldt University. My thoughts are with the people who were arrested,

the people who were forced out of the occupation. As of the recording and airing of this episode, the occupation at the PSU library is still in progress, and what will happen there is less clear. Throughout today, Tuesday, the police and city government have made some pretty aggressive statements about clearing out the occupation, about, you know, criminal behavior there being unacceptable, about their suspicion that there's been significant damage done to university property. For their part, protesters have promised they will not damage any books.

You know, we're going to see what's going to actually happen. What is clear to me at this point is that in the last day or so, the situation has gone from managed, something where the police were every now and then clearing out tents, and it was relatively under control, to something so out of control that it necessitated a late-night press conference by the whole city government. So, we will see where everything concludes with the PSU occupation, if the police come in and carry out a raid, as was done in Humboldt, or if the university administration is willing to actually come to the table and make some of these solid steps towards divesting the university from companies like Boeing, which is what the protesters are demanding. All really unclear. But yeah,

we will continue to cover this. And you all continue to, you know, be angry about bad things. And yeah, I don't know. I'm still very tired. Good luck to everybody who is out there in the streets. I don't know. I'm still very tired. Good luck to everybody who is out there in the streets. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to give an update on Wednesday night. I'm recording this around 4.40 p.m. on Wednesday, but a day after I recorded the original ending to this, some more stuff has happened. The occupation has continued. You know, on Monday night, only a small number of people stayed behind. I think there may be something like a dozen, I was told, who actually slept in the library that night. There was kind of an anticipation that the cops could come at any minute.

The next day, word spread about the occupation, and there were a lot more people in the library on Tuesday night. And as a result, it seems as if plans that had initially been down for the police to raid on Tuesday night were canceled. The government of Portland published an article today, and I'm going to quote from it here. whenever possible. That has not been my experience with them. If police action can be delayed to a time when conditions are safer, we will do so. An example of this occurred Tuesday evening. A plan was in place to resolve the library incident. However, conditions changed and the incident commander made the decision to delay for the well-being of all concerned. My guess is that the conditions that changed largely were how many people were on the ground, as well as the fact that they didn't feel comfortable with their understanding of how much access students had gotten. They didn't have a full operational plan involved.

The police publication notes that there was a rumor circulated that the planned operation was scheduled due to a decision made by the DA's office. This is because the current district attorney, Mike Schmidt, is considered a progressive. He made a decision not to prosecute all of the acts that he could have prosecuted in 2020 and has been kind of consistently attacked by the police and by conservatives in the city for this decision ever since. Schmidt did prosecute quite a few people in 2020 and beyond and has from the beginning of all of this said that his office will prosecute students involved and anyone else involved with the occupation. I think this is just election year messaging by the police going after Schmidt

because they want more of a hardliner in. In either case, nothing was done. Tuesday, the occupation continued to spread. On Tuesday night, students had a movie night. On Wednesday night, as I basically as I record this, there's a barbecue. And a lot of this is occurring kind of outside of the library and like the lawn area around it. The idea basically being to keep numbers up in and around the library occupation to make it more politically costly and just harder for the police to actually force everyone out. While all this has been going on, faculty and student organizers have been meeting with the president of the university. Students refused initially to come to a negotiating table unless their demands for full amnesty were guaranteed for students and non-students who were

taking part in the occupation. This is something when I talked to folks on Monday night, the focus was on, there was some talk of amnesty, but a lot of the primary thing I was told about was that the school needed to divest from Boeing and other arms manufacturers. The demand for amnesty has grown as the occupation has become more of a real thing, which it had started to be by the end of my time there on Monday. there on Monday. There was some initial talk from the university president that she was willing to not press charges if, you know, the students who were involved agreed not to violate the student code of conduct for the rest of their time at the university, and basically handed all of their names over to the university. That was not an agreement that wound up coming through. It's very similar to what we saw at Humboldt, right, where you've got this school being like, well, we'll offer some sort of amnesty, even though we can't really promise full amnesty because the DA can choose to prosecute people still. But if you sign your name up on this list that you were here and committing crimes, we'll kind of try to do something.

That did not wind up de-escalating the situation. And as I record this, the library at PSU is still occupied by students. We'll see how all of this goes. You know, I've heard a number of things from inside the occupation. It's kind of one of those things where the full details of what's happening will shake out. It's been, as these things always are, a little bit messy. The first night I was there and up through, you know, a sizable chunk of Tuesday, you can find articles from media who showed up saying that protesters wouldn't let them in. And then at some point, the people at the gates, so to speak, changed and a number of

press got in and took some pictures of the occupation. You can find those online. There's a lot of local reporters, KOIN and whatnot, who have published different things about the occupation. It's been interesting to see like the reactions of different reporters because they change based on like the reporter who's there and kind of I think how personable they are with people and the folks that they wind up meeting. So you'll find some local reporters be like, everyone was really nice.

And some local reporters being like, everybody was really mean, and they wouldn't let me in. And it's, you know, these are not uncommon things to encounter when you're seeing press interact with a protest like this. One of the things I do find interesting, that has been emphasized to me by some of the older protesters who have been taking part in aspects of this occupation, is that the student protesters who are organizing and leading this, who are of course younger and were too young to have generally been involved in like 2020 stuff are really open-minded, you know, despite kind of political disagreements that may exist between people, there's this understanding that like folks are a lot less ossified and their beliefs about what constitutes valid action and what constitutes, you know, how people should proceed with things.

Like generally that has been impressed upon me by some of the older activists is that these younger student organizers seem much more open minded and optimistic about accomplishing things and trying new things. And this is definitely a different kind of occupation Portland has seen. I noticed some of that on the first night. Earlier in the recording, I made that comment about how I noticed that people were out kind of taking petitions and whatnot for different bills, taking advantage of the fact that there was a crowd who had gathered for the protest, and that in the past I had seen folks like that have issue with members of the crowd. And I didn't really notice that this time. have issue with members of the crowd. And I didn't really notice that this time. And I guess maybe that comes down to some of what some of these older activists have told me, which is that a lot of the student organizers here are kind of less set in some of their ways. You know, we'll see as

this all continues to develop. There's a very good chance that by the time you hear this episode, by Thursday morning, the police will have raided. That's definitely been happening all around the country. As we have researched and recorded these episodes, there have been police crackdowns at Columbia University, at UC San Diego, at UCLA. We've seen a lot of pretty hideous things on the news in regards to these student occupations. And there's a very good chance that Portland will have joined that parade of ugly videos by the time this comes up. But as I record this,

there's a barbecue going on and I hope that will be the case tomorrow as well. Bye. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron host host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually

do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. 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 you get your podcasts. 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 gonna get 15% every single year, but if 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 8, 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. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis.

And once again, it does continue to be happening here as a massive wave of police repression is levied against students protesting the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Since it's been so busy and hectic, I thought to end this week on a bit of a lighter note. Last week, I did an episode on a new movie titled The People's Joker, an unauthorized Batman parody through the lens of a surprisingly genuine queer coming-of-age story by transgender filmmaker Vera Drew. If you want to hear me geek out about that movie and gay Batman stuff, you can listen to that episode from last week. But this episode is going to delve more into the DIY nature of this movie, some behind the scenes, and how you go from an idea to a piece of wacky queer art playing in

a movie theater or a TV show on your local cable access TV station. So I talked to two trans women who are currently making independent queer media, the aforementioned Vera Drew, as well as Ella Uriman, host of the late night comedy show Late Stage Live. Transgender and a comedian, the two most persecuted classes. So I've been keeping up with Ella's indie transgender Gen Z comedy project since it first got announced earlier this year. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with the late-night comedy news format, and I myself have thrown around the idea of playing with that format. So when I first heard about Ella's new show, Late Stage Live, my first thought was, damn it, that's such a good title for a show, and now I can't use it. Just this immense sense of jealousy washed over me, and I've had to watch everything she's put out since then.

Hi, I'm Ella Yerman. My pronouns are she, her. I am a comedian, journalist, writer living in Brooklyn. I host Late Stage Live, which is a queer Gen Z public access late night show on Brooklyn Public Access and YouTube. And I also host T4T Comedy, which is Brooklyn's premier all trans stand up comedy show. We film in a Brooklyn public access studio called Brick, B-R-I-C, in front of a live studio audience. And the like vaguest pitch I give to people who have no idea what the show is, is that it's what if The Daily Show was hosted by a transgender woman?

And we draw a lot of comparisons to The Daily Show by virtue of sort of similar formats, but myself and my writers are really interested in sort of, for lack of a better term, queering the late night format and sort of exploring what late night can do for a younger, more radical political audience. The Daily Show was like a really big radicalizing force, I think, for a certain generation of people. Really, Jon Stewart took that show and turned it into a really powerful tool for getting people engaged and aware of things that they might not have otherwise been aware of. But the culture has really shifted in terms of politics, in terms of media consumption. Since Jon started The Daily Show in the 90s, we have shows like Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver.

We have shows like My Coworkersworkers and bosses at Some More News. And when we have like all of the alternative media sphere ranging from like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones to the Young Turks to everybody and their mom on YouTube. Now, kids these days don't really watch the news. I don't know anyone my age who's tuning into MSNBC. A 2022 Statistica survey of Gen Z reported 60% of respondents never go to local or national papers for news. And only a respective 5% checked their local or national papers for news daily, weekly, or once a month. But 50% of Gen Z check social media daily for news, with 75% reporting they check at least once a week. TikTok reigns supreme for information dissemination. Over one-third of adults under the age of 30 regularly scroll the app for news, often treating it like a search engine. With the rest of

the youths and young adults going to YouTube as well as other social media apps to fill in the information gaps, as well as podcasts such as this. My writers and I, especially Reid Pope, my head writer, and I talk a lot about just like where our generation is getting its information from and where it's consuming media and how ideas and political ideas are being disseminated, especially in the age of short form content with TikTok and the democratization of information. We did a whole episode about sort of misinformation and the democratization of information a few months ago, where there's like obviously all of these benefits to the lack of centralization of media consumption. We're seeing a lot of that with the Palestine stuff right now.

People don't have to rely on the New York Times. People don't have to rely on these big media institutions with their obvious biases to get information. But it also sort of engenders this, I think, this very specific attitude towards intellectually engaging with information. The platforms and the systems that we use really encourage very quick opinions and fast reactions and picking up your phone and talking immediately about something as quickly as possible.

Hot take political environments. And we were really interested in looking at a format that has historically been more about a team of people with multiple perspectives coming together to create one piece of analysis and taking longer to look at those pieces of analysis and being able to really like dig into data. And then like what putting that into a late night format means. We have a live audience, which a lot of like stuff on YouTube doesn't have.

And we, we have a lot of the trappings of like OG late night we have like sketches and we have correspondence and we have a theme song and a lot of that has sort of gone away as we've moved more into like a youtube media sphere so it's been exciting to both bring that back for like aesthetic and nostalgia sake and then also to sort of see what and i think the show's in early stages, so I am excited to keep playing with this, but finding out like what exactly the package does for the content. We talk a lot about like form follows function and vice versa, but I think there's like intentionality behind presenting it as a late night show. It's not just like for aesthetic value. Speaking of late night televised comedy,

The People's Joker follows an aspiring comedian who goes by Joker the Harlequin as she attempts to host a Lorne Michaels TV show legally distinct from SNL. Oh, and on her way, she transits her gender and fights Batman. The project started a few years ago because a friend of filmmaker Vera Drew jokingly commissioned her for $12 to make a re-edit of Todd Phillips' Joker movie. Phillips had been in the news cycle complaining that quote-unquote woke culture was making it too hard to make comedy, which is interesting coming from a guy who's continually made some of the most successful comedies of the past 20 years, but I digress. Here's Vera Drew talking about how The People's Joker ballooned from an ironic re-edit of the in-cell Joker movie into a whole new piece of queer cinema.

Yeah, I started doing it. In earnest, I started actually re-editing the movie. I had worked at Absolutely Productions for years as an editor and had kind of come up as an alternative comedy editor. So, you know, at that point it was probably just going to be like a lot of fart sound effects and whoosh noises and slips and slide whistles. But as I was working on it and kind of just making this like big piece of

like found footage video art, as I was working on it and kind of just making this like big piece of like found footage video art, like a narrative kind of just like fell into place. And I, I, it kind of just came in an instant and I was just like, Oh, okay.

I think I actually want to make like a coming of age film, but I want to make like a parody of the Joker, like in, in that process and kind of just like tell like a really earnest and super personal autobiographical story about my life and growing up in the Midwest and coming out as trans and comedy and, you know, my relationship with my mom and toxic relationship I was in and stuff and,

but kind of process and, uh, mythologize all of that through Batman characters so that's kind of the origin of the movie I guess I had also kind of been kicking around an idea for like a body

horror like a trans body horror movie before that that was basically like about a drag queen who was physically addicted to irony and like couldn't like survive without it but it was also like destroying her from the inside out and the two ideas kind of like merged together and into this sort of i guess like veradru i watched a lot of Batman growing up. But from a weirdly young age, I was also always weirdly fascinated by late night TV. My parents never watched the news, but they watched late night. They got their news from Stephen Colbert. They got their news

from, at least at a certain point, Jimmy Fallon, although that fell off quite quickly. But I've just always been incredibly fascinated by the whole late night format as a cultural source for news. At a certain point around 2017, YouTube started pushing late night clips into everyone's feeds and everyone just got so inundated with this style of political comedy. I also grew up on The Daily Show and Colbert. My parents are both journalists, so I probably am a little biased towards being someone who did read the paper growing up, who did like watch CNN growing up. But I recognize there's this huge chunk of America who gets their news from, yeah, Colbert's monologue, from Letterman's monologue, from the Colbert rapport which is such a a crazy very scary i had so many like conservative family members who did not realize the colbert rapport was satire that's so frightening

took it as a legitimate news source well i mean when trevor noah took over the daily show they tried to do like their version of the colbert rapport with jordan klepper's the opposition and i think there were a number of reasons that didn't work out, but one of them being that the, the like the Colbert report was parodying the other Fox news guy. Yeah. It was parodying all that whole like realm of people. And,

and the opposition was parodying info wars, which is almost an unparodiable thing. So like the, like the, the right wing media ecosystem has shifted so far that, that you can't really get a Colbert report now. It just doesn't work. But yeah, like there's so many people who get their information directly from that. And we, I think a lot about like the creator responsibility, like, which is a word that gets thrown a lot around in social media spaces,

but it's interesting to think that Colbert now and Stuart and even like Seth Meyers have this like responsibility as like informants to their audience in some sorts of sole source of news for those people. When we were writing our misinformation piece, we did talk about how in 2015, there was a poll that came out that said that like the majority of liberals, like the highest percentage of liberals got their news from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And I think a lot about the excuse Jon used to give to conservatives at the time who would criticize him for not doing his due diligence on any given subject. He would often say, well, we're a comedy show.

The show that comes on after us is puppets making prank phone calls. And he would sort of like deflect that responsibility by saying, I'm an entertainer first. And I think that one of the big things that has changed in the last 20 years or however long is that the line between entertainer and journalist has totally blurred with like the rise of like video essays on YouTube and, and just like, again, like the democratization of information and content creation. Everyone is sort of an entertainer. Everyone is sort of a journalist. There is like a responsibility that comes with having a platform. And so obviously, like our show takes a great deal of care to make sure that the information we're presenting is accurate and correct and

that the analysis we're doing is as empathetic and thoughtful as we can. I do think there is real value in going after late night as a specific culturally impactful mode that isn't just comedy, isn't just the news. And in its quest to be a little bit of both, it becomes its own thing. I've always been interested to see what a late night show with my politics would look like. And I think to some degree you can look at Jon Stewart in the 2000s, and I've been watching Stewart's new stuff on The Daily Show every Monday, mostly just to see how he's going to handle this landscape, which is very different from when he left in 2015. Nowadays, I think you can look to Jon Oliver as being probably slightly more radical, but even still, there's a decent gap. Certainly some YouTube shows try to fill in that gap, but I've really enjoyed watching the Late Stage team apply classic late night stylings to a more radical queer form of politics, including, like Ella mentioned, correspondence segments, as well as actual reporting.

Late Stage Live did a recent piece on the effects of libs of TikTok. It was a really good look at something that I oddly hadn't seen anyone else really interrogate before, actually looking at the people that Libs of TikTok has targeted and how that has literally affected their lives. Obviously, we are still like growing and trying new things. I was really proud of the Libs of TikTok piece. It was the first time we'd done like firsthand reporting on the show. And it's something I want to keep exploring. One of my favorite parts of the daily show is the like more serious,

like field pieces they end up doing that obviously also have comedic games applied to them, but also are like real journalism that maybe mainstream news institutions don't cover. And that's really exciting. And obviously coming from like a specifically queer perspective, there's not a ton of specifically queer news. There's a few magazines, but there's nothing huge.

It Could Happen Here will return after these messages. We now return to It Could Happen Here. Something I noticed about both Late Stage Live and The People's Joker is that they're not just made by queer people, but the work itself feels queer. I think part of the reason why is that both carry this spirit of patchwork and collaboration, proudly featuring a sense of punkish outsideness that's uninterested in being tamed for a cis straight audience. The end result is one wholly reflective of the community that has fostered the art's creation. To extrapolate on this, let's return to my interview with Vera Drew. I know for a while you were getting people to send in to like send in stuff to get put in the film there was kind of it was like a very collaborative start to this project and i i am i'm interested in that

aspect of like how this is like both like a collage multimedia piece but also it's not like the work of like one singular artist it's like a very like queer community made thing and it definitely feels that way especially with all of like, all like the sets, all of like the art. It's so many different styles mashed together into like this beautiful mosaic. And I'm interested in like

your decision to have it be that collaborative thing and how that kind of came together. Thank you for asking. Because yeah, I don't really get to talk about that that much. And it's definitely like a part of this that really, I think,

is why the movie just feels inherently queer you know we had just this incredible team of people working on it because you know like I said like I did cash in like every favor I had you know to cash in but you know the movie started as this like

video remix thing and then I think as we were writing the script and it became more narrative driven it was just like we were always writing this script that was very impossible to film uh you know just a very like there's a batmobile and like yeah you know yeah fuck you gonna do that but we weren't really thinking about that as much we were just like let's just write this movie and let's just write it as like a comic book movie. Let's have the tropes of a comic book movie and a queer coming of age film and just fully execute those. And I think the idea of it becoming this mixed media piece was very gradual, I think.

It was one of the many things about this. This movie was made very intuitively like i never had a budget really i would never make a movie like this again it was it was very like kind of figuring it out as you go in a lot of ways especially just on the like business side of things yeah it has that kind of inland empire uncanniness a little bit totally there's definitely that it's definitely uh i'm i'm working backwards um this this is my inland empire and you know like 20 years i'll have my eraser head finally yes yes but um it really just kind of followed that like sort of intuitive path and i kind of announced what i was doing and and i said you know my friend and i are making this queer joker. And anybody who wants to help us, write here.

And at that point, it still was in this loose space of what is this really. But just so many artists came forward. And most of them, artists who had never worked on film or TV before. So it was a lot of just fine artists and painters and illustrators and visual artists. And then a lot of people too just that I had seen for years on trans Twitter or featured in

very fringe zines and shit like that. So it's just like, holy shit! We could really make this movie that looks like nothing you've ever seen before. And we can do it too in a way that we're creating original art. All the art in it is original. I mean, we recreate a lot of sets and stuff

from famous comic book movies, but it was painstakingly created. And every character had its own character design, original character design. We couldn't just take Mr. Mix-a-Plick and put him in the movie. We had to go, okay, how can we queer Mr. Mix-a-Plick? Okay, we'll make a Mix Mixy and they'll be like a weird floating Hanna-Barbera cartoon type. It's kind of more HR puff and stuff was the vibe we went for there. Very Sid and Marty Croft. Even with a community of queer artists, how does one go from the idea stage of

say, hey, let's make a more queer and radically oriented late night comedy show to having it actually be filmed and then broadcast? So I asked Ella what allowed her to get this project off the ground and what her process was like going from an idea to something that's now on air. So like I said, I've been writing for Some More News for three years and I love that job and I love my co-workers there. But they are doing one thing and I, over the last year or so, sort of started to realize that I also wanted to be doing this other thing. I wanted the live studio audience. I wanted a very queer focused show. I wanted an in-person writer's room ultimately, or like a

local writer's room because everyone else at Some More News is LA based as far as I'm aware. And I'm the only East coaster out here. And I just wanted a whole bunch of things that Some More News wasn't doing. So I was like, okay, I guess I have to do that myself because there's no one else doing it that will hire me. But I was grateful that I had my experience with Summer News and continue to have my experience with them, because I structured our writer's room very similarly to them, and I took a lot of inspiration from their early stages in terms of the creative side of things. And then in terms of finding people and making it happen,

something I've learned my whole life as a creative is that you just sort of have to fucking do it. I've been like self-producing work since I was 18. When I was 18, my community theater in my hometown had a big all hands meeting where they were like, Hey, we're out of money. What do we do? And I said, you should do a Shakespeare play. Cause you don't have to pay for the royalties for that. And they were like, well, we don't have anyone who wants to direct a Shakespeare play. And I said, okay, then I'll do it. And they were like, okay, then you do it. And I sort of had to just do it.

And I did it, and it was messy and pretty amateurish. And then I did it again the next year, and it got better. And I did it again the next year, it got better after that. And then after I graduated college, I started doing stand-up again. I did stand-up a little bit pre-transition, and it was terrible. And so I stopped to become a girl. And I started doing stand-up again, and I realized there wasn't a ton of spaces in the stand-up scene for trans people. And so I stopped to become a girl and I started doing standup again. And I realized there wasn't a ton of spaces in the standup scene for trans people. And I said, okay, so let's host a

trans show. And I found a bar and I got in touch with the bar and then I just started DMing comics. And I said, Hey, I don't really know any of you because I'm not really integrated into this comedy scene, but please. And the show slowly grew and I started to meet more people. And then by the time I had the idea to do Late Stage, I had been doing my show for about a year and a half, and I was pretty integrated into the comedy scene. So I was never worried about finding writers in terms of quantity. I reached out to my head writer, Reid Pope, last April after seeing a similarly live show by my friend Kay Loggins called Kay Night Live that she does every so often. And I helped her with the production day on that. And it was a

13 hour production day. And I just remember having so much fun realizing that you could find people in your artistic community, like enough people who are willing to do it. So yeah, I reached out to read in April and I said, hey, I have this idea. And they said, cool, here's a list of like people I think would be fun to work with. And we reached out to a small handful of writers and some of them got back to us and some of them didn't. And we slowly found our team of people who were able to commit to a first monthly and now weekly writers meeting. After the writing team was assembled, they still needed to find a place to record the show. The director and executive producer, Octavia, helped find the public access station in Brooklyn that Late Stage now shoots at, which is open to the public. You have to take a five-week course there where you get certified in all of the equipment.

And then you just get to sort of reserve their space and do whatever you want there. And over the course of those five weeks, Rita, Octavia, and I would take this, like, biweekly class, and afterwards we'd go out and get food, and we would just talk about what the show needed and where it was. Every time a role popped up in discussion that we didn't have yet, Octavia or Reed or I would say, oh, I know someone, and we'd pick up the phone

and call them immediately. And so it was a very organic growth in terms of production team at first. And that just comes from, like, working within your own community and, like, finding an artistic community. I don't think I could be doing this two years ago. Like I'm really grateful for having hosted a standup show for many years first to integrate myself into that community and knowing a lot of like hardworking multifaceted artists. Once again, the ability to make friends both in your local community and even online remains one of the best ways to get

shit done the collaborative multimedia collage aspect not only imbues a project with a sense of diy queerness it also makes tackling a project as gargantuan as the people's joker a bit more feasible we'd have these like artists with like you know like maddie forest makes beautiful puppets and just beautiful art so it's like okay like obviously we're gonna add maddie ask maddie to make the mix-up puppet and like it'll be like a sid marty croft puppet and like one of the other artists that came through was salem hughes who makes these like 3d like low poly 3d models and at that point it was like okay well that obviously has to be like our bat cave like we'll make it look like a like a doom like n64 video game or something and the

batmobile too so it's just kind of like figure like breaking up everybody's role into these individual pieces and like kind of going by like both local physical locations, reserving one artist for each physical location that we'd see pop up and things. Paul McBride did all of the Joker apartment shots. And we recreated Joaquin Phoenix's Joker apartment, but changed the color and the wallpaper and blah, blah, blah. And Paul, again, another person who just... Paul just makes 3D models just to like relax i guess

like he just makes these beautiful interiors it was like okay cool we'll make like a beautiful like hyper realistic interior i never really forced my aesthetic on anybody i really just allowed people to just kind of like lean into their aesthetic and just do what they wanted and kind of like just run wild and be like okay so you make low poly art like we'll do just do that in this case and our amusement park set was made by this artist at pratt and he just makes beautiful dmt like psychedelic imagery so it's like we got this you know hyper crazy, weird perspective amusement park from him. And we turned that into a 3D model. Rather than going like, how are we going to make this work?

This is a flat painting. It's a location we keep seeing in the movie. How are we going to make it work? But it was just saying yes and to everything and really allowing everybody to just play to their best strengths and i knew that like my voice and my vision were always going to be there like my face was going to be on screen for most of the movie and like it's my story like i was never really worried about losing myself or disappearing in the art at all and uh instinctually i just kind of knew it would make the movie feel very clear.

And that's really just what it was. It was really just this big kind of DIY community art project. And it was a big task for me to kind of find the unified aesthetic. But thankfully, I've done VFX. I had a lot of other VFX artists helping me work on the film. like I've done VFX. I had a lot of other VFX artists helping me work on the film and we were able to kind of find a through line in the way like all filmmakers have to, you know,

you just stick to a color scheme, you stick to a very certain type of pacing and, you know, and musically too. Like, I think we, we really like, we're able to like bridge a lot of the things together just by like having

constant music playing. And, you know, I think I was really influenced by natural born killers and pink floyd's the wall and also hedwig and the angry inch i think were like kind of the big three and also return to oz those are the big four and just to round it out to five uh then batman forever of course but i think like a movie's never really been made i think plenty of movies are made like this all the time, like where these like little communities of people get together.

But like, this was like an intercontinental kind of community project. And it was beautiful. Like, I'm so glad we did it. And it was, it was an opportunity to, to really hopefully like get a lot of artists visibility in,

in spaces that they normally wouldn't be visible and an opportunity to, to like work with a lot of artists' visibility in spaces that they normally wouldn't be visible. And an opportunity to work with a lot of really talented people and make them feel valued. I just worked on so many things where it's like, you get art back from somebody and then you're like, we got to send this back or you're fired or whatever. And this is like, I never wanted to be that. It was very much like, this is kind of all of our movie in a way. And now that the movie's out there too, I really think of it. It's like, it's just, it's got its own life. Like it's kind of no longer mine.

And it kind of never really was. It was always like ours. It was always mine and my friends and all the people that worked on it with me. And I think that is just really cool. And thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about it. Because I think it's one of the things that kind of gets lost about this project a lot just because of how personal it is

and because of our legal stuff. But I would have never been able to make this if it wasn't for the team. We will return to It Could Happen Here after these messages. We now return to It Could Happen Here. What I find most inspiring about projects like The People's Joker and some of the other indie no-budget trans films by filmmakers like Alice Mayo McKay and Mia Moore, films by filmmakers like Alice Mayo McKay and Mia Moore, as well as projects like Late Stage Live, is that they demonstrate that we don't need to rely on big studios or big production companies to greenlight things in order to make our own stuff.

You can just make it, which is not to say that it's easy, but the biggest drive to getting something done is literally just getting it done, is just doing it. And if people see you doing a cool thing, oddly enough, some of them will want to help you, which is kind of a bizarre notion, but it does end up being true. The core thing I've learned about producing work over the last many years is

people are willing to do stuff if you do it first. If you prove to them that you're committed to something and have a cool idea, people will jump on board. Yeah, and I think that's been proven by how excited our audience has been for the show, how willing people have been to jump on. And our entire crew and writing staff is volunteer right now.

We're making a little bit of money on Patreon, but certainly not enough to pay the 20-plus person team that ends up working with us every month. Although that is the goal down the line. But yeah, people are willing to do a cool thing and volunteer their time. Artists want to be making stuff, and so it's just about doing it.

And then just doing it again. When I first started hosting my stand-up show, we did it the first time, and I spent months thinking about it. And after the first month, I was like, oh my god, that was so hard. How am I going to find enough trans comics to do god that was so hard how am I gonna find enough trans comics to do it a second time how am I gonna have the energy to do a second time and my boyfriend at the time said if you want it to be a monthly show you just have to do it every month for a while even if it sucks and then eventually it will suck less and he's right he's still right and I'm still doing that show two years later

and we did late stage the first time and it was several months push to get the first script out. And we got the first episode out and we were like, Oh my God. Okay. Let's do this again in one month. Can we do it? And we did it a second time and it was also fun and good. And, and then you just like figure out how to make it easier each time. And I will not deny that it is hard work. We are all slowly killing ourselves to make this show. I work a 40 hour food service day job that I came directly from to do this interview. Everyone else few weeks, someone comes into a writer's meeting and is like, guys, I lost my job. Ha ha. So I will not deny that it's hard.

And I don't ever want someone to think me saying just do it is like, it's easy because it's a lot of work. And all of my team is like incredibly talented and has years of experience doing things. Everyone in the comedy scene in Brooklyn talks about like wanting to get staffed on a late night show which is awesome and i would love to get staffed on a late night

like that though that's the coveted job at the end of the line for for the stand-up community but like you don't have to wait for that you can just make the work you're doing and i've had conversations with my writers where they've all been like this has been a really cool opportunity because at the very least i've sort of found out if i would actually want to write on a late night show um we talk about that as a coveted job but but maybe I don't want to do that. It's a very different skill than stand-up. And that's been a fun learning curve as well as hiring a bunch of stand-ups to write long form political analysis. You sort of have to herd cats to some degree. Even with a supportive community, the work can be really grueling, and the road from a finished movie to

being on the big screen can be a monumental challenge. The People's Joker is slightly unique in this way because of its peculiar copyright status of being a fair-use superhero parody using some of our culture's most recognizable iconography to tell a very personal story. Right before the movie was set to premiere at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, back in 2022, Warner Brothers sent a vaguely worded but threatening letter, which resulted in the People's Joker being pulled from the festival, save for one late night screening. Yet throughout the legal chaos, Vera Drew remained steadfast to ensure the movie would be released the right way, on the big screen where it belongs. This film has had like a.

I guess a troubled history. Some might say. And how are you able to like stick with this project. After encountering like hurdles and problems. Because like at a certain point. It's like is this like a sunk cost fallacy or something. How did you decide to like actually stick with this. And like really fight for this. As a piece of like expressive art?

Gosh, you know, I mean, I think I feel like I just didn't have like a choice really. Like I think when, with the movie done and with how well just our first screening at TIFF went, like it was just like, I was kind of at a point where I could shelve it because that was really the other option. Put it just away for a few years and come back and maybe

in public domain is a little bit more... It falls under public domain because it will and at least Joker and Batman will be in public domain because it will. At least Joker and Batman will be in public domain in 10 or 15 years. So that was an idea, I guess, that was floated to me a few

times. I didn't want to wait that long. And I really put all I had into this movie. I cashed in every favor I had ever accumulated in Hollywood financially. I took out a huge loan to finish it. And it was just this big, deeply personal thing that I had made that originally really was just for me and my friends.

It was just a thing that I had just made. Maybe I would have shown it to like my Patreon or something, but like after a certain point, like it, you know, once we had that, like premiere, it was just like, like,

I can't just post this to YouTube. I can't like just dump it somewhere or like shelve it. All my agents and stuff. I have way too many agents now. And they all were like telling me to, that, that basically like it's, it's,

it's okay that it's not coming out. We can basically just use this to get the next project going. But I mean, I quickly realized in that process, like this movie is like a fucking, like you don't show this movie to a studio executive and then they immediately are like, yeah, let's, let's hire this person. They just want to like have lunch with this crazy bitch who made the Joker movie. So it was like...

It just quickly became clear where... The people around me who had the best interest of the movie at heart and also just what felt bad and what felt right. And what felt right really was

taking the movie out just to festivals and doing a secret screening tour, which is what felt right. And what felt right really was like, taking the movie out just to festivals and kind of doing like a secret screening tour, which is what we did. And that was really exciting and kind of like a jokerfied way of sort of getting this movie out there. And that was really just on an emotional and personal level, really what carried me through. I was lucky enough to be in attendance at one of the secret festival screenings a few years back, and I was delighted to hear that nearly two years after it initially premiered at TIFF, the People's Joker was able to secure a distribution partner to put the movie in

theaters nationwide. So once again, I was fortunate enough to rewatch a piece of queer Batman art that otherwise would have never been made under Warner Brothers' thumb. And I think this is also the case with Late Stage Live and many of these new independent queer projects. They most likely would not be produced by one of the massive media conglomerates that controls almost everything you see. The small independent nature of these productions actually gives them an opportunity to be much more queer and politically radical

than what would be allowed under Disney Universal, Sony, Paramount, Warner Media Incorporated. We're like obviously far more radical politically than any other late night show on the air right now. And it's something we've been thinking about as we attempt to scale and try to find like people who are going to fund us is that there are certainly people who could give us a lot of money who would also then really want to like limit the kind of speech we can make and the kind of opinions we can have. And so there's obviously a balance as we look for funding and growth opportunities. But BRIC, the public access network, their whole thing is free speech. And so part of working with them is their commitment to free speech and

radical programming. I'm really interested in the choice to have it also be on cable access. I find that to be oddly compelling in an interesting way. And I wonder like what led you to that decision? So part of that is like rules and regulations at Brick, the studio. So you take a hundred dollar five week class with them to learn how to use their stuff. And they offer a lot of other classes too. You can you take a $100 five-week class with them to learn how to use their stuff. And they offer a lot of other classes too. You can take a podcasting class to use their podcasting studio or a field class to be able to rent out equipment and go do stuff in the field. A lot of people make documentaries with their equipment. It's a very cool team. If you're in

Brooklyn, you should go work with Brick. They're awesome. But one of the contingencies of working in their space is that when you film something with them you do eventually owe them a product that they air on their network and that for us is the show we're not doing a ton of other stuff right now although you know with infinite money and time we would love to be doing many other things but brick is awesome and really values like free speech and creator freedom and so even though we owe them a product we get retained full ownership of our stuff and so the way it is in in in this zany internet landscape is that youtube is the place to get eyes on a project like if i thought that public access tv was going to be the place to to like blow up i maybe would be like focusing much harder on promoting that end of distribution. But I think for what we're making and what we're

doing, YouTube and the internet is like how to build an audience. But it does lend it like an interesting credibility to be on public access. And aesthetically, we really like leaning into sort of like the 90s public access vibes. Part of that is the equipment we're using. Our cameras are not the most modern. So you get a slightly grainy vibe. You get the backdrop is like string and papers strung together. We're filming in 4.3, which is a really strong decision. Well, actually we film in 69. We export in 4.3, whatever. But it like gives us a very distinct visual look, I think. Next episode, we'll talk more about how so much queer video art feels like it's forced to be on YouTube and attempts to break out of that bubble. When the People's Joker was stuck in legal limbo,

there was a lot of pressure just to put the film up online for free. And as much as patience is painful, resisting that urge and waiting for the right distribution partner to come along really paid off in the long run. I was just surrounded by other filmmakers in the genre community and who would see the movie at this festival and be like, you need to just wait. The person who's going to help you is going to come. And if that doesn't happen, you can self-distribute, which I did not want to do. At a certain point, it was just like, I had spent so much money finishing it. I would have ruined my life, I think, if I

self-distributed it. I just couldn't. I didn't have the bandwidth. And I want to make films. I don't want to distribute them at this point. Maybe someday. But right now, I just want to tell as many stories as I can. I had a lot of support around me and there was just so much enthusiasm

from people like you who saw it at festivals last year who were basically like, holy shit, and just all the kind of responses we're seeing now to it. I got little micro doses of that last year, which literally was... I mean, it's probably fucking tacky to say,

but it was just the darkest year of my life. I was really just an anxious mess the entire time. But I really did make this movie to not only understand myself and sort of mythologize my life and my friends' lives and stuff like that, but I made it to get better. I made it to kind of heal not only my relationship with my gender, but my family and my art and how I want to make stuff. And I think what's really beautiful, what happened in that dark period and up until now,

and even right now, this movie does really require me to take care of myself emotionally and mentally in ways that are what I've always needed. So it's been a cool kind of just like really expensive therapy ultimately, even though a lot of it's been really grueling. That does it for this week at It Could Happen Here. In the next episode after the weekend, I'll conclude my conversation with Vera Drew and Ellie Uriman talking about the pitfalls of representation

moving beyond the YouTube bubble and the future of queer filmmaking. You can go to thepeoplesjoker.com for information on tickets and showtimes, and you can find Late Stage Live by that name on all platforms. And to support the show, you can get behind-the-scenes content on Patreon at Late Stage Live. Solidarity to everyone out there this week. See you on the other side. live. Solidarity to everyone out there this week. See you on the other side. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. 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 iHeart Radio 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. Every Thursday. 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. 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.