It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 16

Episode Date: January 8, 2022

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Hi. And today we will be tackling, or rather we'll be taking a trip to the anarchist activism in Latin America with Especifismo. But first we need to get into some context here. The first organization to promote the concept of Especifismo was the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya, or the FAU, which was founded in 1956 by anarchist militants who embraced the idea of an organization that was specifically anarchist. For those who don't know, not long after 1956, or rather two decades after 1956, the U.S. installed a dictatorship in Uruguay that lasted from 1973 to 1985. The FAU survived that dictatorship and went on to establish connections with other South

American anarchist revolutionaries. So they helped to support the founding of the Federación Anarquista Caucho or FAG. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. The Federación Anarquista Cabocla FEDERACIÓ ANARQUISTA CA BOCLA AND FEDERACIÓ ANARQUISTA DE RIO DE JANEIRO IN THEIR RESPECTIVE REGIONS OF BRAZIL AND THEY ALSO HELPED TO FOUND THE ARGENTINIAN ORGANIZATION KNOWN AS AUCA WHICH MEANS REBEL. WHILE ONLY COMING ONTO STAGE IN LATIN AMERICA WITHIN LAST FEW DECADES, THE IDEAS THAT REALLY stage in latin america within the last few decades the ideas that really make up especificismo touching a historic thread that's really run through the anarchist movement internationally since the beginning um it may as we get into like what especificismo is and stuff it may sound very similar to platformism. Are you all familiar with that current?

Yeah, we're familiar with platforms a little bit, but we can probably, I don't know, explain it for the people at home who do not spend as much time thinking about old anarchist terms. Right, right, right. So, dear generic listener, or viewer, or whatever,

platformism began with a document that was written in 1926 by the former peasant army leader, Nestor Magno, Ida Mett, and other militants of the DLO Trudeau, or Workers' Cause Group. They published a document called Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, and it was written in response to, well,

being exiled from the russian revolution um and having to struggle really to find their foot in after the bolsheviks turned the worker soviets into instruments of one-party rule um so the power space group the dl truda they really criticized the anarchist movement for a lack of organization. So they proposed an alternative that is controversial to some anarchists, but it's essentially a general union of anarchists based on anarchist communism that would strive for theoretical and tactical unity and a focus on class struggle and labor unions. Obviously, platformism, like all all political ideas is not a static you know the world has progressed significantly in a century so um while there is an emphasis

on worker struggle and class struggle um when you speak to most platformers today i would say um obviously i don't have stats on that i would say most platformers today, I would say. Obviously, I don't have stats on that. I would say most platformers can recognize that, you know, the no war with the class war is a bit reductive. I've also noticed, actually, that platformism has been gaining a bit more popularity lately. I don't know if it's just me and my perception, but I don't know if you've all seen that. I have not seen tons of it here a lot of the type of anarchism i'm around or at least see is is is not is not in this vein but most most of the stuff i see is like around um like the kind of like-anarchy type strains and more individualists.

Right, right. But that's just, I think, a very Pacific Northwest-specific thing that the anarchists here just kind of generally trend in that direction. So I'm not sure what it's really like across this country and other places around the world. Yeah, I know i've definitely seen it especially the i think i think it's it's i don't know almost like it was bigger a few years ago but back like 2018 2017 there was a big uh spike of black rose um yeah like

became a sort of serious group for a while and yeah people who like called themselves like anarcho-communists or anarcho-syndicalists kind of generally swam in this general ocean yeah i definitely saw that as a bigger thing in 2018 than now at least like locally from my area and i think i will say yeah the the black girls people a lot of them like very specifically were especially people, a lot of them, like, very specifically were Especifismo-based, and a lot of it was based on, like, people who had, like, experiences with Especifismo in sort of various ways. Right, right, yeah.

Because I was actually just about to say, I think that Black Rose is more Especifist than Platformist, but of course there is, you know, a lot of overlap between these two currents. Right? As for my experience with like platform with someone stuff have seen um discussions of it happening more i mean that's all i can really see that i've seen um i have the everywhere at once but at least if discussions are happening the likelihood of

things coming out of it might be a bit increased i guess another current that um has been a part of the anarchist milieu zeitgeist wave whatever uh is organizational dualism which came out of the wave whatever uh is organizational dualism which came out of the 1920s italian anarchist movement so they use the term to describe involvement of anarchists both as members of anarchist specific political organizations and also as militants in the labor movement in spain the Friends of Turuti group emerged to oppose the gradual reversal of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. And they also ended up emulating some of the ideas of the platform by criticizing, you know, the CNTFA's, sorry, the CNTFAI's gradual reformism and collaboration with the Republican government. So the Spanish of war and stuff you know there's a lot of forces at play and i'm gonna get into it now but it is i would say as a side note important to recognize that there is no monolith when it comes to like these sort of

civil wars and historical events. You really have to look at things in context and not try to strip them away from the goings-ons of the time. Also, the Chinese anarchist movement of the 1910s advocated for similar ideas. I'm going to try to pronounce the name of the group. Hopefully I don't get cancelled. But it's the Wushengfu Gongshanzhui Tongxi Zhehui, I think, which is the Society of Anarchist Communist Comrades. And yeah, they advocated for a lot of similar ideas. So there's a lot of different currents around the world influenced by the historic conditions, but the general thread that anarchists need to get together

and work as a unit is what's thrust in it, right? And Especifismo is just a fresh continuation of this thread, of this trend. So, what is Especifismo exactly? The three key concepts that I see emphasized again and again are 1. the need for specifically anarchist organization built around a unity of ideas and praxis. Two, the use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and develop strategic political and organizing work. And three, active involvement in and building of autonomous and popular social movements, which is described as the process of social insertion. which is described as the process of social insertion.

So kind of core to the whole specific current is which is rather antithetical to some of the trends that I've seen in the past couple years is sort of a rejection of this left unity idea. This idea that there can be this sort of big tent organization that can somehow establish all these different visions simultaneously right so a specific reject the idea of just unity for unity's sake because they feel it boils down to sort of unity for unity's sake because they feel it boils down to sort of lowest common denominator kind of wishy-washy politics they feel that when unity is preferred at all costs it leaves very little room

for unified action or developed political discussion in fact in my experience when you have like a lot of political heterogeneity um there tends to be a lot of unproductive drama lack of retread obviously people of different political stripes should work together um and there's no like harm in that but at the same time when it comes to certain types of organizations having a sense of ideological unity is i would say pretty important as you know you don't want to have all these different groups constantly butting heads for these different visions you want to have at least some sense that we're moving in sync right so you're not going to have some people who are trying to establish social democracy and some people who are trying to get like this worker state quote unquote or you know people who just want i don't know like a higher

minimum wage, right? I mean, everyone's on a different stage of their political journey. But what Especifist tried to emphasize is that while we can work within these larger social movements, it's important that anarchists specifically come together to try to shape those movements in an organized way and i'll explain because it kind of sounds a bit like vanguardism for some people this idea that you know these this cabal of like revolutionaries are trying to like manipulate things behind the scenes but um really what a specific argue is that anarchists need a space they need a space for like common strategy and reflection and collective responsibility and you know a place to discuss plans and build trust and share analysis and you know put together short and long team goals all that jazz

um so while the specifists do reach out to and work with social movements regardless of whether they fit this quote unquote anarchist purity test um and i say that with my tongue planted firmly in cheek of course um

they want to make sure that they can serve still as an active minority so that these movements aren't diluted and so i noticed i'm like throwing out a lot of different words and phrases and ideas um you know things like ideological unity and the need for sort of a consensus within the group um and speaking of i've spoken about consensus on my channel before so i have a breakdown on it that people could check out if they'd like um i also spoke of unified strategy right so you're not just joking around you actually have a mapped out sort of strategy like for example black socialists in america they aren't like a specifically a specifist org to my

knowledge but you can see um that they have like a unified like clearly laid out strategy and they're making moves to make it's like achieve it and they're very public about those moves right um i also want to emphasize of course in a specificismo the whole idea of this active minority you know it's not just a bunch of like it's not like a passive book club right and a specific group is a group of people who are passionate about you know this cause um and obviously passionate people have this habit of biting off more they can more than they can chew right so what i would advise like a specific and a specific engagement adjacent groups and really just organizations in general is that keep your size in mind keep achievable goals within sight because if you don't you know it's very easy to burn out very quickly you know um with the specific groups it's important that they

understand their responsibility but also that they understand their limits lastly and very importantly social insertion i think is one of the most important parts of a specifismo and i think even if you don't take anything away from like a specifismo a specifismo you at the very least like implement social insertion or at least concepts within social insertion into organizing right because obviously um anarchists are kind of few in number but what social insertion tries to point out i guess or tries to develop within a movement is this awareness that the people who are making these moves, who are organizing and whatnot, that they don't relinquish their power to other figures or forces or parties or whatever the case may be. right um social institutions stems from the belief that the oppressed are the most revolutionary sector of society and the seed of future revolutionary transformation of society lies already in these classes and social groupings so it doesn't mean socialization doesn't mean like acting within single issue advocacy campaigns advocacy campaigns or, you know, like trying to take over people's

existing struggles. It means getting involved in daily fights and daily struggles for people to better their own conditions. It means, you know, connecting with workers, connecting with immigrants, connecting across neighborhoods, working towards racial liberation working within student struggles and tenant struggles as people are like part of these struggles they become conscious of their place in society right and part of our role is to try to develop that consciousness so as people are tempered and tested and recreated they see their position in the what's what i'm looking for in the pecking order right they see that there are forces at play that are keeping them down their structures are keeping them down and they change from just being like social classes to being active social forces

so they're brought together by organic methods and by self-organized cohesion what you'll notice with the popular movements like for example black lives matter is that they're unlike what some conservatives might assume the the Black Lives Matter organization wasn't the one like pulling the strings. You know, like the official group wasn't there, you know, telling people, okay, march here, burn that, riot here, move that. You know, it's like the people themselves came together

and, you know, really expressed their desire for change and so really as they become self-conscious actors aware of their power of their voice of their nemesis which is the ruling elites that control the social order as pacifists try to keep that thrust right what a specialist argue is that essentially there's an anarchist undercurrent to popular social movements that should be preserved and maintained and cultivated right with popular movements um they're very quickly co-opted by impositions of leadership or by academic elites or by political parties. But our specifists aren't there to try to make groups identify as anarchist. They're there to just maintain that thrust, to be self-organized and to fight for their own interests because ultimately that's our natural impulse as humans you know it's really the propaganda

that tells us you know um like you have to go through these proper channels you know you have to vote with your dollar or you know vote for these politicians or whatever the case may be. Canvas and all these different things. Call up your representatives. You know, the natural thrust of a person is not to, like, relinquish control of themselves. You know, it's to try to maintain that. And so, especially if it's trying to push against the propaganda that keeps us from maintaining that push against the cooptation

that strips that from us so do any sort of automatic critiques of Especifes come to mind for you all? I'm not sure about critiques per se we need to think about it more

but a few things come to mind around so you talked a bit about like the difference between like left unity and creating like an anarchist unity um and for people at home i would like to maybe extrapolate why those are different things i know you have a good video on left unity already but like in terms of trying to like, you know, if one of the goals being creating like an anarchist organization that kind of unifies different anarchists, how that is a different type of unity than just left unity in general. I think that might be a point of clarification. And then the other thing I was wondering about is like, how does this intersect in terms

of like individual goals versus like like, group goals or, like, organizational goals? And so, like, because, like, there's a back and forth between, like, personal autonomy and then, you know, these type of social movements that kind of almost gain their own thrust. Right, right. Yeah, so to the point about the difference between left unity and anarchist unity, well, obviously anarchists are

also fairly heterogeneous. I think our general thrust for self-determination and autonomy and that kind of thing is what brings us together. The difference between, say, anarchist unity, where there are definitely some, I would say, key disagreements within the milieu, and left unity is that I feel there are some extremely incompatible factors that prevent left unity from being viable yeah when there's a thrust among significant segments i mean really every non-libertarian segment of you know the

quote-unquote left to funnel our popular energy towards state institutions, whether it be through insurrectionary social democracy or reformist social democracy, in the case of MLS and SOCDEMS, respectively. I think that that really keeps us from really working together on anything more than small goals and small projects. I mean, we've really seen the whole left unity idea fall apart, you know, through wars and through even just like what should be discussions between people you know like the first international literally split because of the differences between you know the so-called left currents you know between the anarchists and the other socialists so

left unity is not something that i aim to achieve, I think most people know that about me by now but with regard to anarchist unity and of course the differences between anarchists I think the general thrust to maintain the autonomy and self-determination of the people

and of the social movements that we are inserting ourselves in is what really glues us together and of course that alone i don't know if that's enough to maintain a specificist organization because you know like i noted a specificist try to um develop deeper level you know strategies and theoretical discussion and that kind of thing and so with those sort of discussions you know you're going to see a lot more of the distinctions bearing out but at the very least um i think anarchists generally could benefit from a degree of at

least unity in the sense of maintaining or solidarity in the sense of maintaining the libertarian thrust of popular movements i asked the other thing that you had noted about the sort of friction between individual goals and organizational goals you know between autonomy and sort of how social movements end up taking on like an energy of their own um to be quite honest i don't think i have like a fully developed answer for that yeah um because on the one hand a social movement that forgets that it is about, you know, the liberation of individuals is, you know, in my view, such movement that's quickly going to end up turning against of people who are pretty selfish or pretty egotistical or just argumentative for the sake of it sorry sophie you're gonna say something yeah i was just like the thing that keeps popping up

into my head is you know one of the things that gets uh misconstrued all the time is who's calling the shots. And I kind of feel like what you're saying is everybody in a way. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that like. Which is good sometimes, but not good other times, obviously. Exactly.

Yeah. exactly yeah because i think it's very easy to fall into this sort of um almost reactionary i like island mentality not island mentality is in caribbean island mentality is in person isn't as an island right around like autonomy and you know personal freedom you know like this rendering idea that you know i won't step from my property you know personal freedom you know like this rhetoric idea that you know i won't step my property you know that kind of thing just let people do whatever it's kind of like more so anarcho-catholic conception of what like freedom and autonomy is i think an important part of autonomy and you know freedom and yeah like this project is you know accountability is, you know, accountability and is, you know, like consequences, like social consequences and how your actions affect others. You know, like what Anarchist is able to recognize is that we are not, in fact, islands, you know, our actions or behavior or words affect other people and so I think it's

going to be a constant project to sort of balance um individual personalities and broader goals but I mean yeah it's it's tricky right like? Like, you know, you're talking about, like, some kind of, you know, group organization to work together to kind of, you know, think of achievable goals and create steps to get there. And I feel among a lot of people who proudly declare themselves anarchists, at least, like, and are extremely vocal. Like, these are, like, people both, like, online

and in person organizing that are very, like, vocal and try to very much, like, make their place known. We've seen trends away from this direction in terms of, like, rejecting the idea of goals and demands and just, you know, like, this more insurrectionary kind of tendency of just making total destroy for the sake of it and shout out to the invisible committee yeah and and that i mean like i know that like platformism is kind of like it's not like anti-insurrectionary but it's like it's it it definitely critiques that type of insurrection trend. So I'm thinking about, like, you know, this idea

and, like, how with this kind of general, you know, decentralized, no demands, no goals, kind of general kind of direction that, like, capital-A anarchists are doing, how, like, what's maybe some parts of a specifismo that we can actually take into account to be like hey maybe there's you know like i i i don't like i don't like being called like any adjective anarchist i think it's silly i i i like yeah i kind of said that um

i think early this year or yeah late last year. I just got to the point where I'm an anarchist. That's the cool stuff. I like the part in Desert. It's like I'm an anarchist of many adjectives. I'm not always an insurrectionary. I'm not always a syndicalist. I'm not always a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I feel like that would be a really useful kind of thing

for people to focus on more in terms of, yeah, it can And I feel like that would be a really useful kind of thing for people to focus on more in terms of, yeah, it can be fun to make Total Destroy and that is a very base instinct, but it also would be great to improve people's lives a little bit. Yeah, some building, not just destroying. Yeah, there's two kind of dueling things. And that's why I do really like,

the part of this type of stuff that is really appealing to me, just because I kind of already dueling things um and in terms it's why i i do really like like the part of like this type of stuff that it's really appealing to me just because i kind of already work on this myself so i'm like oh i'm already doing this but it's like the um it is it is like the social the social insertion side of things i think is something that would be a much a much better way of thinking about like everyone hates talking about optics, because yeah, it's frustrating, but I think the social insertion method is a better framework for kind of dealing with some of those same problems.

Exactly. Yeah, and then like, you know, there is, even among insurrectionaries and all those types, there still is like a decent amount of group projects and stuff, and that is I think a really good thing to focus on, because yeah, there's not many anarchists, and it would be cool if there was more. And if we just focus on the parts that make people go, oh, that's kind of silly and pointless, then we're not really going to grow anarchism that much.

So highlighting the parts that are like, oh, yeah, you're actually helping people, that's going gonna convince a lot more people who are kind of already trending in that general general direction and then hey maybe in a few years they can also be doing silly destruction for fun because it is it is fun sometimes um right yeah like this as you mentioned optics i'm reminded it's kind of pet peeve i have with some you know internet people where they try to treat like ideologies or specifically anarchism as like a pr project that we have to like constantly be trying to shift the optics and yeah micromanage like every aspect like no i think the best remedy for like because you're not gonna match the power of mass media no what you can do to push back against that sort of propaganda is help people yeah and help people and identify as anarchists as you're helping people right like that's the

easiest and quickest way to dispel people's notions and like conceptions of what an anarchist is if we were to take like socialization right and sort of uh i would say distill it a bit and individualize it a bit um i would say that as a practice you know just even if you don't know any other anarchists in your area right just being there being in these movements helping people and you know saying you know this is what i believe um just talking to people about what you believe as a person as you're helping them you know that goes campaign or like weed pasting initiative or artwork um you know wall art or whatever you know like actively helping people of course wall art has its place and um i dabble a bit myself but you know it's um it's not It's ultimately like

talking to people and helping people and being there for people and being honest about your intentions that I think we should be working towards. I think those types of projects are something that the Especifismo model excels at in terms of creating a unity of anarchists who have

a goal in mind and then go out to achieve the goal. Helping people, doing directly helping people is something that that type of organization model is kind of the best at. Because you can really

organize things much better with a small group like that and create goals that are actually very achievable. Whether that be building a community kitchen or building heating centers for the winter, like under bridges or whatever. All those types of starting community gardens, all those kinds of things are, I think,

what this type of model really excels at. And yeah, you don't need to change your ideology to this one word, because that's silly. gardens all those kinds of things are i think what this type of model really excels at and yeah you don't need to change your ideology to this one word because that's that's silly but you can pick up different parts of it be like yeah that actually seems like a useful way of like yeah we don't want you know a politician just rolling here and co-opt our project you know like just basic things like that you know um and then from there you know as you are talking with people and meeting people who are passionate about issues in these social movements you know um and then from there you know as you are talking with people and meeting people who are passionate about issues in these social movements you know not only does it keep you

from developing this sort of um terminally online um in-group kind of mentality it also opens up opportunities for you to develop your and this is on the topic of like the individualist social institution. It presents opportunities for you to develop your own, I don't know, like book club. And then from that book club could come a specific organization. You know, as you begin to develop your politics and your shared politics more can come out of it so don't underestimate you know the potential of just putting in the work and talking to people yeah you know just being there on the ground and one of the best things you can do to help stay alive in the while things are heading in the direction that they're heading societally

is like making friends and forming a friend group and then yeah like actually doing stuff together that makes dealing with everything else that's happening so so much better and hey remember uh our old friend nester uh nester marco uh started with a book club so hey you know yeah you you never know where book clubs can lead you never know exactly exactly it's actually it's really interesting um video clip of marie bookchin talking about book clubs and like the power and potential of book clubs um i don't know if we could probably link that in the show notes but it's like a really interesting yeah if you send me like i'll make sure to include that so ultimately a specificist believe that social movements will reach their own logic of creating revolution not when they all just decide to identify as anarchists and

wave the black flag but when the majority reach a consensus and a consciousness of their power and their ability to exercise their power in their daily lives. So even if they do not adopt anarchism, they still consciously adopt the ideas embedded within it. There are multiple political currents that will exist within any movement. There are multiple political currents that will exist within any movement, and so it's important that we as anarchists, and I guess specifically as a specificist, are there to actively combat the opportunism that comes from these forces, from this electoral or vanguardist within these social movements as well we can also help to push them further through um you know pushing for more direct democracy and consensus through federalism and confederating with other social movements through you know building up the mutual aid within these movements like if you are for example part of a mutual aid group in one neighborhood you can push them to start reaching out with mutual aid groups in other neighborhoods and creating a network of mutual aid groups

that can build into something bigger you know combining resources and manpower to really push the revolution you know lastly i will say that for those who are trying to like get into the whole especificismo thing um i mean you could start a new organization from scratch but again like easiest thing to do is to just get in there with people and be honest with the people and i keep saying the people even though i have my critiques of this amorphous conception of the people but the point remains that our goal is to spread our ideas, not to get people on any particular ideology, but to get a liberatory consciousness on the ground and to generalize that consciousness. and social insertion specifically. The Federalist Sao Anarquista Gaúcha in Brazil has worked with neighborhood committees in urban villages and slums. They've built alliances with rank-and-file members

of the Rural Landless Workers Movement, the MST, and they've also worked with trash and recyclables collectors. Brazil, for those who don't know, has a lot of high levels of temporary uh and contingent employment underemployment and unemployment so the working class isn't how we traditionally conceive it as like just surviving primarily off of wage labor but it's more so this sort of subsistence work informal economy, gig economy can deal. So being able to connect with these,

when charged with collectors, for example, who are part of this sort of economy, the FAG has built a strong relationship with them and helped them to form their own national organization to, you know, push for their interests and to collectivize their recycling operations. Espresso Fismo has also worked in the efforts of the Zabalaza anarchist communist front in South Africa, as they also are strong opponents of social insertion and, you know, really being embedded in the social movement.

social insertion and, you know, really being embedded in these social movements. In Argentina, in Brazil, in South Africa, and in the U.S. in the case of Black Brothers Anarchist Federation, Especialismo has been building as a key point of reference. And so I'll leave us off with a quote from the Youssef Rund Collective, an anarchist group, online. If libertarian socialists merely organize with libertarian socialists, then they will lose contact with the broader population they need to be reaching. If libertarian socialists merely join social movements without advocating various libertarian socialist practices that can be used, various libertarian socialist practices that can be used, then social movements can easily drift into being susceptible to reformist, unstrategic, liberal, and Leninist tendencies and opportunists. If libertarian socialists merely join social movements and try to spread ideas and practices in mere individual ways, they will be far less successful than a well-thought-out,

coordinated effort. And if theoretically specific libertarian socialist groups try to control social movements and popular organizations from the top down, then such specific groups sacrifice their own principles and will reproduce hierarchical organizing. In contrast to authoritarian vanguardist conceptions, Especifismo groups and Especifists put their activity towards the self-organization of movements and organizations. Ultimately, as I honestly love this quote from Ashanti Alston, power to the people where it stays with the people.

Peace. Andrew, please plug your pluggables because they are good and people should in fact listen to them. Right. Thank you. uh safety first of course i will say that you could follow me on twitter at underscore saint drew and on youtube uh at saint andrewism and you can find me here apparently twice a month yay which is pretty great shout out to it could happen here take care everyone peace again peace again welcome i'm the end thrill would you join me at the fire and dare enter

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, what's new my year shit yeah new new year same shit i'm robert evans this is behind the no it's. We retired this in 2021. We retired this bit. Who, where is this? Time for a new bit. This is, it could happen here. Time for more coffee. The podcast about how things sometimes feel like they're falling apart sometimes. And maybe we can do things about that.

You know what's falling apart is me. Because I, during my break, woke up at like 1.30 every day. And now it's someone's speakable hour in the morning. I hate this. You picked the time. You picked the time. No. For one of our first

episodes of the new year, we have decided to subject ourselves to your parasocial whims. And we are going to be doing maybe one, maybe two Q&A episodes, giving A's to your Q's. And I've been told...

A and U right in the Q. Okay. I've been told that our producer, Sophie, has a list of questions already prepared so that I can stop talking and she can now. You've been told you're the one who posted the thread. Sophie said that she would read them. I did.

I did a volunteer's tribute, but I might take that back and see how much energy I have. At some point, yeah. I might take that back. Let's start with a good one. What has been your favorite episode slash topic to research in this past season?

So since we started season two. Oh, God. I enjoyed the Metaverse Facebook episodes because there's a part of me that really likes shitting on bad tech industry stuff. It fills a deep part of me that really likes shitting on bad tech industry stuff um it it fills a deep part of me just just really comprehensively thinking about how how terrible the vision of the future these people have it so that was probably my favorite i liked the climate leviathan stuff um the climate leviathan climate behemoth climate now climate x kind of uh four quadrants i i liked learning about that like oh geez almost a year ago actually by the time i

started researching for the show um and i'm decently happy with the way that those topics were presented and how they keep popping back every once in a while. I think in terms of just the favorite episode I recorded was probably the interview with the Common Humanity Collective people just because like listening to a bunch of people who have a very sophisticated and well-developed mutual aid project and then listening to them talk about their political development and how they've been sort of solving their problems was really like reassuring and cheerful in a lot of ways and then research wise it was definitely the the spooky area 51 episode where i was like oh i'm gonna do a fun episode about uh the government and aliens and it was like oh no here's every war crime ever and like 16 people almost killing everyone on earth this is this is a good time probably the most fun I had was with the chaos magic and esoteric

episode that was a hoot how silly it is yeah that one also was just a pleasure to record I also loved having Cory Doctorow on oh totally because that was cool that was very cool Just a pleasure to record. I also loved having Cory Doctorow on. Oh, totally. Because that was cool.

That was cool. That was very cool. How cool of us. I've enjoyed our fiction episodes with Margaret and with Rebecca. Those have been great. And I've loved having St. Andrew. Yeah, that has been also very cool. Fantastic.

What were you going to say, Robert? Nothing. Oh, great. this person says i think i've got my head wrapped around mutual aid community resilience and all the stuff you talk about any tips on how to effectively communicate it to people who might not be at least initially open to it um i mean it kind of depends on why they're not open to it, right? So it's a matter of are they just somebody who has a lot of faith in systems as they exist? Are they someone who's kind of coming at it from more of a traditional like liberal statist perspective where they think the option is to get in line with the Democratic Party and support that and and support that, and that will make things better. Like, basically, are they a top downer? Or are they somebody who

rejects it because it's like communism? And they don't think that people have any kind of fundamental responsibility to themselves? Because you are going to have kind of a different approach to trying to reach either of those people. If they're coming at it from kind of more of a right wing standpoint, but they're not, you know, talking about shooting vaccine doctors, they're just kind of conservative. I think the way to do it is to sort of harken back to some of these very traditional ideas of like American homesteaders and independent, you know, communities on the frontier and self-reliance and how mutual aid is people taking responsibility for their communities rather than, you know, this idea I think a lot of conservatives have of like

people just kind of lazily taking charity, how it's different from charity and that it's a community seeing its own needs and becoming independent as much as is possible from the state by trying to meet its own needs and how that is better for people than just sort of like being dependent upon government programs. I think that's kind of the way in which to reach out to those people with that idea. If they're coming at it from more of a liberal, top-down approach, I think you can get more into the weeds and argue about kind of inefficiencies within the system, problems within the system.

I think one thing to really point out that will probably still be fresh to a lot of people of that persuasion is how frightening the first couple of weeks of quarantine were and all of the supply line issues and kind of the early breakdowns. Look, that didn't go away. You can see that, that we're still dealing with a lot of this and we're still having supply line disruptions and the state really has not kind of even under biden sailed in to clear the gap and so we need these community resiliency programs um and you can you know depending on the kind of person they are you can also sort of point out um the degree to which there is our attempts at kind of sabotage of any sort of top-down government programs by the right and how that's part of why you need community resiliency programs

because you can't guarantee who's going to be in the White House. You can't guarantee what's going to continue to get funded and outside of kind of any of the structural issues that make that stuff difficult. So I think that's kind of broadly speaking, the two different ways you can broach those conversations with people, depending on the tendencies they're looking at it from. Let's get into an unpleasant one. What's the gang's outlook on this year's election,

and how do you think it might position us for 2024? Do we see more violence leading up to the next presidential election? I know we'll be doing a Prediction Z-ish episode later. But as for this election, I have not looked at anything about it. I think the Steelers are going to take it all. What sport are the Steelers?

One of them. That great uh uh i mean yeah i mean i i feel like if democrats want to keep the power that they currently have they will probably need to do some type of symbolic action that makes people think they actually do things i mean they've managed to have control of everything and done absolutely nothing that they and nothing with it so so i'm guessing if they want to keep that they should probably do something really soon um or else i don't see people being super eager to vote in 2022 for the democrats yeah yeah i mean one of the issues they've got is this this thing that you know kind Don't see people being super eager to vote in 2022 for the Democrats. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, one of the issues they've got is this this thing that, you know, kind of the technocrats always have where, you know, as we as Corey pointed out when we had him on, there have been some really positive moves by the Biden administration in terms of like appointments and how different kind of agencies are being handled. But when it comes to the things that he actually campaigned on, it just hasn't happened. Shit ain't been done. The closest we've gotten recently is yet another kick the can down the street a little bit for student loan repayments. And I agree. I think they need to do... There's two big things they could do that might have a significant shifting effect. One of them would be student debt forgiveness, and one of them would be fucking deschedule marijuana. Even without Congress, Biden could effectively make marijuana not.

And that would be, number one, politically the easiest fucking win in the world because the vast majority of Republicans don't give a shit about that anymore. It'll piss off cops, which is probably why he won't do it. But like, those two things could have an impact on midterms. That's certainly a thing that you can campaign on more.

But I don't know that I think he'll do that. And obviously, I guess another big old payment to stay home. But I think that ship done sailed. Like, honestly, I don't think they want to win in 2022. It doesn't feel like it. think that ship done sailed like honestly like i don't think they want to win in 2022 like they want to get creamed so they can sit there and then and go oh yeah uh we can't do anything because republicans control the house and you guys need to like uh you guys need to like save us in 2024 this is the most important election of our lifetime it's like and they will keep doing this over and over and over again until literally the seas boil and everyone you know everyone's being heard into concentration camps like they will just keep doing this over and over and over again until literally the seas boil and everyone you know everyone's being heard into concentration camps like they will just keep doing this

and and like i think that's that's the thing that's actually important about the 2022 cycle is that like the democrats have you know what you know what the rejection of bernie sanders sort of is is the democrats essentially going we are not a popular party right like we are not a party that is going to like like we will not even give the pretense of like having a base that we represent and we do things for like we're just we're just in it for ourselves we're in it to just like you know give all of our weird like black rock friends positions in the government and we don't you know it is and it's you know it's it's we we don't have a policy agenda and we don't care if we lose because if we lose all you people just have to go put us back into office because the alternative is just more death camps yeah i mean i think

there's a broad belief like within kind of the democratic party that things are still business as usual and that the republican party is still a political party and so kind of the handing off and switching of power is is is fine that's seen as business as usual, rather than the Democrats or the Republicans are continually ratcheting away from there being any chance of a switch of power, at least through legal means. Like that's the whole thing they're doing. And the failures to pass any kind of voting rights and the failures to see like a voting right reform as an existential issue for not just the party, but like the concept of democracy

in this country is, I think, evidence that however you kind of try to rationalize in your head why it's happening, there's a real disconnect between the party leadership and understandings of the new nature of reality. Yeah, well, this is the other thing. I mean, they'll be fine right like outside of like another january 6 killing them all like they'll be fine it doesn't like for them it basically doesn't matter if republicans take power maybe maybe some of them will get impeached there'll be like a show trial for like two people or something but like they're gonna be fine and

you know that's that's the thing that motivates all of their thinking is that they can survive another Republican administration. Like we're you know, we're dying under both of them. And, you know, like I mean, this is this is partially, you know, if we talk about sort of the COVID response for a second and the relation that has to the election, it's like, yeah, the Democrats are just like completely given up even the pretense of doing literally anything about COVID. Literally, literally anything. Yeah, zero. Yeah, it's go out and die. We can talk about that. That anything. Zero. Yeah, go out and die. We can talk about that. That's a separate issue, I think,

just in terms of how to interpret what they're doing with COVID and the degree to which I think they even have a chance of whatever. Yeah, they don't care if we live or die. We care if we live or die, and we're going to have to do stuff on our own outside of this because they're just going to kill us all. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think that it's hard for me to tell where the elections are going to go precisely. Biden's polling certainly isn't great. It's also not like wildly out of step with how where presidents often are kind of at this point in their cycle. So and also it's pretty normal for the party that just won the presidential election to lose at the midterms. That's more normal than not, I think. So I think the big questions are, number one, like the degree to which it's a wide sweep, which is going to depend on the actual impact. A lot of these efforts to kind of restrict voting and gerrymander, like what the actual on the ground impact is and the degree to which we've seen an actual shift. Because one of the things that the polls don't often tell us is like, yeah, Democrats are not popular. Most people seem to be aware that a

lot of promises have gone unfulfilled. But it doesn't also mean that they like the Republicans, who, as the party of Trump, are still kind of widely disliked by people. So it's kind of unclear to me what precisely is going to go down, by which I mean whether or not it's going to be a pretty normal midterm, whether Republicans pick up some seats or like a nightmare blowout. And I do think that has a lot to do with whether or not Biden does a couple of the things that a president can do unilaterally that would be really easy for other people to campaign on. Like he they have to like if they actually do want to win, they have to they have to make a couple of big Hail Marys. They have to do again.

Biden has to do a couple of the big things that a president can do and then say, OK, see, I did a thing. Put more Democrats in and we can do this other big thing that a president can't do on his own or something like that. Like, I just don't see. I mean, you know, anything could happen still. It's fucking January. I think there's a positive if you want to in terms of things that are make me kind of

optimistic and in terms of things that are better about when the Democrats are in power and then the Republicans, you can bully the Biden administration to taking broadly positive action, which is what happened with student loan repayments, right? That's why that did get kicked down the road a couple of months. And so I do think there's potential in harassing the Biden administration to taking actions that can make Democrats more popular. That would not be the reason to do it. The reason to do it is so that people don't starve trying to pay back student loans. But it does point to, I think, an avenue

of hope if we're trying not to be complete doomers in January of 2022. Yeah. And speaking of avenues of hope, it's time for an ad break. Ah, the only thing that gives me hope is the products and services that support this podcast and we are back back we are back we are uh yoda-ing it i i've i've i have a question i would like us to talk about um okay new year book list oh yeah that's nice and simple so what's what's some i think we could answer this like and then they also someone else followed up with saying uh recommend some books that maybe not just left this theory of climate change also some like fiction stuff as well and i'm i'm just gonna say the books that i'm reading or is on my reading list not i'm not gonna recommend books i've already read i'm just gonna say the that i'm reading or is on my reading list not i'm not going to recommend books i've already read i'm just going to say the ones i'm currently reading um i'm still making it through

hyper objects for an upcoming episode um i picked up a really a book i wanted to get for a long time called islands of abandonment which is about um people well no it's it's about places that have kind of been forgotten and regrown or taken have been kind of reclaimed by the area that they were that they were built on and then i also have a random few books in alchemy that i'm going through as well that's most of my books horrible um i read the last book i finished in 2021 was in the garden of beasts which is by what is his name i think it's eric larson um he's a guy who's written he wrote like devil in the white city and a couple of other books that people have probably read yeah eric larson um and it's about the the first u.. ambassador to Nazi Germany or what becomes Nazi Germany.

He gets sent there right before, like months before Hitler takes power. And the book largely traces he and his family's journey in Nazi Germany from like kind of didn't really care about German politics and were often broadly sympathetic towards the Nazis. They met like his daughter kind of is very much like on board with the Nazi revolution for like the first half year that she's there. She's also like simultaneously dating the head of the Gestapo and the Soviet like assistant ambassador, which is fascinating. Like it's a very interesting book. And the story, like the journey, this kind of family goes on, realizing, like, what the Nazis are and the perspective of that. It's very well written. It's very detailed. I really enjoyed it. the fates of,

because it's a more, you know, obviously as much of a nerd on the history of fascism as I am, I've read a lot about the Night of Long Knives. This did the best job of kind of going into detail about the kind of dudes who, the dudes who were purged in the Night of Long Knives. These guys who were Nazis in that they, they wore swastikas and they were part of the party and whatnot, but also weren't Nazis enough to not get purged. And in a lot of cases, we're

starting to fall out of love with the party when the Night of Long Knives had. And so it's really interesting. I recommend it to people. And the last book I started in 2021 and the first book I finished in 2022 was called Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, who is an interesting science fiction author in part because Ministry of the Future is about climate change. It is a science fiction look at about like a thousand different potential solutions to climate change. And Kim Stanley Robinson is actually like an expert. He works for the Sierra Center, I think it's called. He's won a bunch of awards for his work on like trying to like posit different solutions to climate change. He understands – he's not like coming at this from the perspective of even a well-researched author.

He's writing from the perspective of someone who is an actual scientific expert in what happens and how the different solutions might work. And the thing that's really interesting about Ministry of the Future is it's this fascinating melange of like a number of the character – the Ministry of the Future is this kind of hypothetical new UN agency that's put in place after a horrible wet bulb heat event kills 20 million people in India. And they're kind of trying to push for very technocratic solutions to climate change. So like one of the big things the book focuses on a lot is this idea of a climate coin, which is a kind of international backed by banks cryptocurrency that pays as a kind of long-term bond for sequestering carbon so that countries

like Saudi Arabia that have huge oil reserves actually make more money by refusing to pump out oil and thus get paid in these coins. So it's really technocratic solutions like that. And then also terrorist groups that may be funded by this UN agency building fleets of drones to murder people on commercial air flights in mass in order to cripple the entire air travel industry and stop carbon emission and carrying out mass assassinations on like CEOs of oil companies living in their private islands.

So it's this really interesting mix of like kind of liberal politicians and like bankers like working out these very wonky solutions to things and like terrorists who have lost people in climate emergencies mass murdering um billionaires uh and and so it's it's a very it's the widest possible ranging look at kind of different solutions to climate change and how they might work and it's a very optimistic book um and there's there's elements of it that i, of the optimism I kind of disagree with. I think, oddly enough, Kim doesn't give enough weight to the dangers of authoritarian populism and the threat I think they present to any of these kind of potential solutions. But it's still a very well

thought out look at climate change. And think really worth reading um if you want something that will both bring up different because he also goes into a lot of like very scientific solutions like pumping up water from underneath glaciers in order to stop glaciers from sliding and like slow the rate of melt and all these other kind of like very much like technical here's a thing that we can do that will reduce the effect of this specific um kind of like very much like technical here's a thing that we can do that will reduce the effect of this specific um kind of climate change it's really a very good book um and it's apparently was barack obama's favorite book of the year which considering the degree to which it talks about murdering politicians and and business leaders is interesting to me i think he was

maybe more paying attention to the carbon coin stuff than the shooting oil industry executives in their face while they're sleeping. Well, he was also a fan of Parasite, so womp-dee-doo. He may just have been told this is a book you should say you like. But it is a very good book. It is really worth reading. And it is a work of science fiction, but honestly, it's like, it's also, it's well, again, Kim really understands his stuff from a technical level. So I think it's pretty unimpeachable from that point of view. There are some kind of sociological areas where I don't think the book, I think there's some shit missing, particularly as regards the problems authoritarianism is going to cause in reaching for these solutions.

But I think it's still really, really valuable. And Chris, we're going to hear your responses, but first, capitalism. Chris, your turn. Yeah, I've been reading a few things. I'm reading Wuchuang, which is a theoretical journal about china that writes a lot of very very good stuff they have probably the best account i've ever seen of just what was going on during the socialist period and then also the sort of transition to capitalism that's those are those are issues one and two and they just published an issue about basically how the pandemic response happens in china it's absolutely

fascinating um it's also about sort of is this something i've yeah i've talked about a lot of their stuff on the show sort of they're obliquely or directly but like you know one of their big things is about how in a lot of ways the pandemic reveals the sort of weakness of the chinese state in in a way that you know is you don't see really because both you know both the chinese state and the sort of like american media have this vested interest in showing like china as this sort of like all-powerful authoritarian police state or whatever like the mirror image of it is like this isn't but you know what what you really see is that like this the state has a very strong ability to intervene in like

one province at a time and they can you know when when they focus when they focus all the sort of administrative power on like one area right they're extremely effective they can't really do it in you know multiple years at the same time and this means that you're dealing with all these sort of regional government stuff and it's it's very interesting the the other thing that i have... Well, okay, so do we want to talk a little bit about Dawn of Everything? Or do we want to save that for just like... Yeah, I'm down to talk about that at any point, yeah.

Okay, yeah. That's definitely on my list. That is a long one. That's less of a read. I think most people are going to be less of a read in one sweep than maybe over the course of the year, like gradually. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very dense and very long, but very readable.

Like not to say that it's like dense in the, oh, I got to like slog through this textbook. It's extremely readable. It's just like there's a lot in there and you're going to want to pause and think about shit. Yeah. So The Naught of Everything is, this is the last book david graver ever wrote and it's david wengro also uh they wrote it together and it's it's this basically an attempt to reassemble i guess early human history and but the the thing that they're doing that that's that's really unique is that so they they're uh david wenger is uh uh archaeologist david graber's anthropologist

and they're they're going you know so they spend a whole bunch of time going through the sort of early archaeological records and what they find basically is that none of the things that you see make any sense at all unless you're willing to accept that people 20, 30, 50,000 years ago, and then even people like 4,000, 5,000 years ago, were as smart as we are and have the capacity to recreate and redesign their own political arrangements self-consciously which is something that doesn't sound that weird except everyone assumes that they can't and that you know everyone does you know one of the other things they're really sort of heavily doing here is trying to break this idea that you know human society sort of evolves in this this linear progression you know you start out with like these small hunter-gatherer bands and they get more complex quote-unquote and eventually they develop farming farming develop the state and the answer is just you know when you look

through the actual archaeological record none of this is true you have you know they have a lot of very interesting sort of historical examples of this looking at like what look like incredibly democratic and egalitarian cities and then you know on the outskirts of those cities you have the emergence of the states among of things that look like states among barbarian groups and they have and what i think is maybe the most interesting part of it is that they're they're very concerned with the question of human freedom but freedom in a way that like we don't with the question of human freedom but freedom in a way that like we don't like freedom on a level fundamental enough that like we can barely imagine it so they have these things called the three freedoms which is one of them is so the first one is the freedom to just move to leave and to it's a freedom to to you know be in a place and then leave and know that you will be

cared for when you get to wherever you're going. Yeah, these kind of networks that were set up so that people could travel that have – like the descendant of those ideas is sort of the way – if you've ever spent time in the Middle East, not in like hotels and shit, like it's that same idea, that kind of deeper than religious belief about the importance of – has gotten added to like islam and and to a number of other faiths in the area like but this idea that like there's nothing more sacred than taking care of a of a guest um like and and how that that that existed to enable kind of a sort of cross-cultural contract and contact and like recreational travel in a way that I think would be deeply surprising to people who just sort of assumed everyone before a certain age died within five miles of their house or was, you know, part of a band of wandering hunters. Yeah.

And it's interesting in that like we in a lot of ways travel less than early people did because, you know, people would just leave and people, you know, people just didn't't like their families and so they'd walk like 500 miles and they'd come to a place and they'd be accepted and yeah yeah and you know like the second one i think the one that i is the the one we have the least capacity i think to understand which is just the ability to disobey orders to just like anyone tells you do something you could just tell them no at any time and it's not only can you just tell them no like the social expectation is that you is that you don't act is that it's it's it's not just that you have the ability to do it it's that someone giving you an order is treated as weird and this is a thing that you know it like this this is the thing this

is a freedom that used to exist and no longer does and was sort of destroyed in various ways along with sort of the third freedom they talk about which is about how people have the right to sort of just shift and recreate their social political arrangements and yeah and people used to do this sort of i mean people yeah a lot of the what their early part of the book is about is about how societies you there's a lot of societies that would you know flip seasonally right so what like one half of the year you have this just like absolute dictatorship the other half of the year it's like well it looks like a hippie commune and you know the fact that we do not like the fact that like we we just don't like it cannot conceive of completely shifting our political arrangements like that that is. It's also, there's this fascinating discussion of like the,

the fact that, and this is kind of counter to what I, I had always kind of thought that like once as a group, groups of people, when they, when they made the decision to like move to agriculture and like set founded cities, that it was kind of a one way street,

you know, you, you, you just keep going along that road. And there's actually multiple examples of people's, like, this is what happened to the British Isles, or at least in what is currently Great Britain, people's, like, developing agriculture, settling down, and then being like, oh, you know what? Fuck this.

And, like, going back. Like, that sort of shit happened all the time. And one of the things that's really kind of optimistic about the vision of the sweep of human history and the dawn of everything is the idea that like, no, we don't have to keep – like it's not inevitable that we just keep doing more of what we're doing now. All throughout history, large groups of people have been like, it's time to – let's do something else. Let's make a radical change. Like it happens. And it's probably more normal to do that than it is to do what we've been doing. And when you, I think one of the things that kind of, one of the things that leads to the sense of inevitability

of development along the lines that we have is the fact that we only really have about 10,000 years of even vaguely reliable like data or vaguely comprehensive data on human history. But people have been around for tens of thousands of years longer than that. And for most of it, we've been a lot more experimental than we are now. And it's always possible for people to try different things in a way that maybe seems impossible to us now but necessarily won't for our kids. Oh, yeah. The last thing I would tell people to listen to if they're looking for a fictional optimistic thing is Cory Doctorow's Walk Away.

Yes. Give it a read. And if you're looking for a beautiful, to get your head out of the... One of the things I'm really passionate about is plants. And I have this beautiful book called the plantopedia and it's really helpful for caring for your house plants and it's just like aesthetically just so the photographs are beautiful and it's one of my favorite things to give friends and family check that one out as well another another plant book that i just got for somebody that i really like. I think it's called Wicked Plants.

It's about all the poisonous plants that you can get. And the ones, all the like the poison plants that you can cultivate in your own garden. And that's been a lovely read. And I do hope to set up a decent poison garden here in the spring. So I would love that for you. Yeah, me too.

It's going to be great. Well, let's get to another question um do you guys want like a a fluff question or like a real question uh let's do a fluff one and we can start the next episode with a real real juicy fluffed fluff me daddy all right okay that's a little gift to all you at home fucking hated that christ oh my god uh uh on the topic of hobbies so so i just garrison likes poisonous plants i like non-poisonous plants uh what hobbies are you into that we may not know about

um i guess i can only say one thing here, really. Well, I don't know. Yeah, you should be really careful about how you answer this one, Garrison. I know what your hobbies are. Let's have everyone else go first. I just got into 3D printing. I'm currently trying to figure out how to get ABS to adhere properly. Yeah, that was the problem i had with my printer is that it would i would get like a decent way through the first part of the print and then part of it would like

curl curl off so then it wouldn't print the next layer on correctly then it messes up the print and yeah i was between mental health stuff and that at the time i was setting up my printer this is when i just gave up because it was too much so i'll be excited to see how you get past this hurdle well i've i've got a glass bed coming in so i'm gonna i have one too yeah and i've got the enclosure one of the issues i'm having is just that i'm having a heating issue with the bed it won't heat up it stops before it gets to 110 which is what it should be able to go up that high but but it's just... Yeah. Can you manually heat it up hotter? It doesn't seem to matter. It doesn't seem to matter if I set it...

Like, I can't... Obviously, like, you can set it up to heat, but it just keeps... I keep getting that, like, loud error beep. So there's, like... Okay. This is going to be... It's going to be a process of jiggering to figure it out. But it's pretty fun.

Yeah, I have a similar problem with my setup right now that I've been trying to troubleshoot for like half a year. I can manually control the heatbed, and it does get that hot. But still, I think it may just be a leveling issue. I may need to clean the bed. I should also just talk to someone who has done more 3d printing than me um but yeah yeah but it's it's it's fun i i enjoy it it's very it's radically different from the stuff that i know like do for a living um which is always my favorite thing for like a a task to engage in in order to be relaxing because it's it's not at all like reading and writing no it's

very different it's very different so so far i'm enjoying it and i already i printed the thing i need to do to make the um the bio um the bio lab uh for like the four thieves stuff if you want to check out our episode with um michael from the four thieves vinegar collective uh i've 3d printed that part so i'm ready to get the other parts and put that thing together um i'm just trying to figure out how to print other stuff with better plastics and and whatnot but yeah it's it's fun so far i'm i'm enjoying it a lot um maybe i'll get bored maybe i'll wind up spending way too much money on different 3d printers like the ones that lift the goo out of the The resin printers are so cool.

This is what Cory Doctor was talking about. They are much better at the filament printers in a lot of ways. But a lot of the stuff a lot of the really useful machines that you can make with 3D printers

require you to use filament right now. Yeah. But the resin ones are, like, so much more elegant. They're beautiful. I also am really interested in the idea of printing wood, which I did not realize until recently you could do, but is absolutely possible with certain kinds of printers. Nice. And that seems pretty dope. So, I don't know.

We'll see how. Maybe I'll be tired of it in a month because my mental health will take a dive. But so far, I'm pretty dope. So I don't know. We'll see how maybe I'll be tired of it in a month because my mental health will take a dive, but so far I'm pretty excited. Cool. Chris. What do I do? Well, okay, so before the pandemic,

I was getting into rock climbing, but unfortunately, I like rock climbing. I'm not like- Oh, it's like the best thing you can do for your body. It's a lot of fun. But unfortunately, I mean, it's not like the worst pandemic thing you could possibly do,

but like, it's no. Yeah. So if you get up high enough on the rocks, COVID can't get up there. It's like the opposite of a bear. It's really bad at climbing. Yeah. So I guess the other... what do i even do is okay so my other thing okay so so deep like deep twitter lore people will probably know this about me but i am i have been for a very very long time like an inveterate fan of competitive starcraft 2 okay i am awful at it like i i am terrible at

that game but i i have watched so much starcraft 2 like i i starcraft 2 has become enough of my life that like like the game was part of my radicalization process like okay yeah i wake up extremely early or stay up extremely late and watch korean starcraft 2 and non-korean starcraft 2 and yeah it's a good time it's i my favorite thing about starcraft in general is thinking about the fact that blizzard was initially trying to make a warhammer 40 000 video game yeah and games workshop was as always too paranoid of their ip to let it happen and thus lost how many god knows how many they would be worth more money than most countries like been printing an impossible amount of money like

andy chambers would have been able to buy a mountain of cocaine to live inside but but no instead we got all of the infrastructure of modern esports which seems fine like it's whatever i don't care but it is very funny to me that they were like nah this doesn't seem like a good financial decision for games workshop this starcraft thing i wonder like that that's the kind of thing where it's like if they made that much money would they all just retire like well i mean it's a publicly traded company like the the stock the shareholders would have made a fortune and the the but yeah i i don't know it's very it's very funny that they didn't think that was going to be worth it let's see in terms of hobbies people

may not know i do really like cooking i taught cooking classes uh for a long time um that's been the main cook in my family since i was a very little kid so i definitely definitely enjoy that um i did go to film school for a few years i I want to get back into making short video projects. I've been writing some random kind of new weird genre-esque stuff that I would love to like rent a studio space and actually shoot some silly things in the next year and throw them up online just for kind of my own fun. And then i also been still doing random occultism stuff um that's kind of how i fill my time yeah yeah it's fun yeah i think that's an answer that is an answer we did it that's an answer and more importantly that's an episode that's an episode. That is an episode. We'll be back tomorrow. That is an answer.

That is a single content. You all got a content out of us, so enjoy that. And we will- Be proud of yourselves. We will replicate and reproduce another content tomorrow that's more A's to your Q's. A content every day, except for the weekends, because fuck you. That's the promise that we make. And some holidays.

And some holidays. In some holidays. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeART and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast welcome back to it could happen here the podcast where jair bol Jair Bolsonaro was once again in the hospital getting all of the feces sucked out of his intestines. Yeah.

Just yet last night. Again? They put him back in. He's back in the hospital? Jair Bolsonaro, the most consistently dying man in the world. The sickest man in history. Just actually literally full of shit. Again.

You know what this means? You know what this means? You know what this means? In approximately three to four weeks, Steven Crowder is going to get some horrible illness and he'll be sent to the hospital as well. God willing. This is the only

cycle of time. My hope for both of them is that they find out that each has an obscure disease that can only be cured by piping shit from the for both of them is that they find out that each has an obscure disease that can only be cured by piping shit from the other end of them, and so they just hook them up via a tube, and they're just sucking poop out of each of them and putting it into the other person. That would be

very funny. Hot. Alright, what's our first question? Our first question, so this was specifically addressed to Chris, so Chris, you can answer first, but I think this is a question for everyone, really. What is your favorite piece of history that you haven't been able to talk about yet on the show that isn't deserving of a whole episode?

Oh, favorite piece of history. I mean, we ain't talked about the Zapatistas yet because I don't yet feel comfortable with my level of knowledge there but it's definitely history that's extremely relevant to the kind of shit we talk about on the show have i have i talked about the the the water and gas wars in bolivia on the show no no i don't think we've talked about that at all either yeah i mean i thought i mean that that probably is deserving of its own episode but like absolutely yeah a bunch of people just literally like blocking every road in an entire country and starving out their ruling

class because they can't like import food into the city because they've blocked every single road extremely cool i guess in terms of like really short not deserving of its own episode i i don't know either because i've i've been able to elongate all my fun periods into episodes yeah i don't know that there's anything we wouldn't cover there's certainly things we haven't covered yet for a variety of reasons often just like i don't feel like we've had the time to do a lot of work there's a lot of work yeah it's like why why haven't why haven't we done a mao episodes like do you know how much shit that motherfucker got up to in his life i have been i have been like mentally like psychologically preparing myself to start working on mao at like this is a uh that's that actually wait no i haven't it's the mango cults

it's definitely the mango cults did you did you know about this no the mango cults yeah okay so so mao got like i forget who it was i i want to say it was the prime minister of pakistan some some like dignitary like gave him a man this is this is like this is the beginning of the cultural revolution somebody gives him a mango and he like hands this mango off to like a red you give a mao a mango and like they like like this mango off to like a red you give a mawa mango and like they like like this this turns into like a cult like people like they they take this mango they like preserve it it's like they have like they have like a shrine to the mango and like there's this christ this whole cult apparatus like builds up around just people getting mangoes as like tokens of mao's

favor is this is like it's this massive thing said this this this like spreads like wildfire it's like people are doing this in like the far western reaches of china where like like in in in places where like there's like like important things cultural like there are places in china where like civil wars break out and it takes people like a week to like send representatives like across china to go like talk to the central committee to argue their case. Even in those places, they have mango cults. It is wild. The Cultural Revolution is a...

It is a time. It is... I know what I'm getting everyone for Christmas this year. I love mangoes. They're my favorite fruit. We'll see if the species survives this next summer. Oh, we will.

Yeah. They'll just be growing in Siberia. Things will just be horrible. Yeah, they'll just be growing in Siberia. Mangoes sprouting from the corpses of fucking antelope. That is beautiful. I can't think of anything. Next question.

Okay. Speaking of history, I like this one. If you could fight anyone in history, wait for it, and lose, who would you fight and why? Who would I fight and lose? And lose to. You'd still get a few good hits in or something, but you'd lose. David Bowie because it would be hot. Next question.

Other people could answer, I guess. No, I think that's a good answer. No, that's the perfect answer. I would happily be hit by David Bowie. Sure, why not? I know that David Bowie really loved to hit teenagers. I would be totally fine with this. Hitting in the other sense, Garrison.

No, I would be fine with anything. I don't care when it comes to Bowie. Wow, that's problematic. I love that for you. Problematic. Uh-huh. We got a few questions about the ethics of leaving the United States as things get worse. okay that's a good

one yeah and this is something that i know we've got that you've got that get out of america free card and i see that's the thing is that like i already canadians i already have my canadian passport so that is something that i can do at any time and that's something that i probably will do at some point because one i can see myself in my 30s and 40s living in canada will be a lot easier in a lot of ways in terms of like how much money it'll cost for me to live and pay certain things like living in canada at a certain point will just make a lot more sense for me so yeah i probably will move up um and i also know that getting past Canadian Border Patrol, not that hard in terms of other people

wanting to go legally or illegally. It is actually pretty easy to get up there. If you want to do it legally, that's definitely a lot more work, but also not impossible. Yeah, I think, I mean, like, it's important to know that, like, moving to somewhere else

is not escaping the effects because the effects are going to reach everywhere but it can have a lot of advantages um especially if you get like kids yeah so i i say moving up is or moving away from the states is a decent thing for a lot of people i don't feel the need to stay and fight for something that i don't really care about watching the first place anyway um so sure do what makes you happy in the time that you have alive i feel like that's a that's as ethical as you need to get yeah i don't think anyone has a responsibility to like stay and fight to the death in a collapsing country. As a general rule,

I'm very sympathetic towards refugees and that's kind of what you would be if you're talking about fleeing the United States because it's in the process of falling apart and you suspect about to get a lot more violent, especially if you have, again, like a family, kids. I had options to do that, that I've I've chosen at this point not to not to pursue. But I get why people would. And as a general rule, like I spent, I spent once when I was, um, in, uh, in Bosnia and Serbia talking to survivors of the genocide there in the nineties.

Um, I took a train ride, um, from, uh, Sarajevo to like a little town near Srebrenica. And, uh, during the train ride, I wound up like hanging out with this dude who had been born and raised in Yugoslavia and had been living in Canada since the Civil War. And he like very through in his kind of broken English explained like, yeah, when the war broke out, all of my friends, all of these other young guys I knew were like, well, you know, we're going to fight. We're going to fight. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. I went to Canada and this is the first time I've been back. And that was the smart thing to do. So I'm not, I mean, if you can get the, if you can get out and find a place that's safer, as Garrison said, like there's, there's nothing I think that inherently behooves

you to spend your limited time on this planet struggling struggling and especially if you've got a family like doing what you can to put them in a safer position is great that said none of it's a permanent or even necessarily a long-term solution like the idea of moving to canada has a lot of appeal but like if you think that canada is going to keep being what would a lot of americans see it as as the united states collapses into like fascism? I don't know how realistic a proposition that really is. And it's the same for a lot of places, like all of these problems are global problems and moving geographically, unless you're wealthy enough to move to like some fortified compound protected by contractors in a place that is actually insulated from climate change to a significant extent, does not bring the degree of security you might expect. I do think it is, generally speaking, a noble and positive thing to stay and try to make things better where you are. But I think every single single person whether

they admit it or not would leave at a certain point if they possibly could um and i don't think anyone is uh i don't think anyone owes it to the world to like uh die in a place that uh they hate just because um that's where they were born. And we're back. Okay. Oh, this is a good one. What tool besides bolt cutters should we all own in a collapse situation? First of all, bolt cutters, that should not be your first picture for a tool. No, no.

It should be an angle grinder with a diamond blade. No, even like water filtration. That's gotten me out of a number of tight spots over the years. Water filtration systems, fire starters. There's a lot of stuff. Even if it's not water filtration, you can get tablets. Or honestly, you can have a little hand pump filter and water purification tablets along with a little. There's a number of things that should be in a go bag, a way to get some amount of of already clean water and a way to get more clean water,

enough food to at least deal with three to five days, some rope, a good knife, a multi tool is even better in most situations. If you have if you don't mind the weight, a belt knife and a multi tool would be great or a multi tool and a little hand axe, which, depending on where you live, might be more useful in splitting wood. A good fire starter. Some amount of rubbing alcohol, which is always a handy thing to have on hand. Either maps or batteries for an electronic device that might be able to act as a map. Um, yeah, that, that's all useful stuff. Um, I do, I, I do keep in the boot of my car generally an angle grinder. Um, I have come into, especially living out in the middle of nowhere, a couple of situations, like sometimes somebody has a health emergency and there is a fence in the way. of situations like sometimes somebody has a health emergency and there is a fence in the way um and it's it it has been something that is and is i think going to be easier from a bolt cutters are good at what they do they also require a lot of forearm and upper body strength that is not

going to be as much of an option for people so angle grinder not a bad thing to have in any sort of like it's especially if you're like if you're if you're planning a kit like i want to keep shit in my car because the wildfires are coming right um well you're probably gonna want a battery-powered saw um because depending on the capable even if you have a very capable off-roading vehicle everyone i know who does serious overlanding is like will you keep a fucking chainsaw in there because sometimes you need to cut wood out of the way and you're just not going to get your car over it um so it really depends on what you're doing and like what the what the the the kind of potential threats you're worried about are.

But yeah, I think the basics are way to get water, some amount of food, ability to start a fire, something like a space blanket is useful. If you live in a place where it actually gets cold, you should have a space blanket and a wool blanket or a couple of wool blankets. Yeah, a couple of wool blankets. Because those will retain heat much better. Wool keeps like 80% of its insulating capacity even when wet. And like layering wool and survival blankets can be a really effective way to keep yourself from dying in bad weather situations. That said, depending on where you are, there may be no realistic way to protect yourself.

If you are in certain parts of the Midwest at certain parts of the winter, it may not matter so much what blankets you have access to if you get stranded. If you're stranded in the wilderness and there's no structures around you, then yeah. If it's negative 30, yeah. There's only so much you can do. There's only so much you might be able to do. I do love collecting lock bypass tools. It's one of my favorite things is just to have these and practice using them. Something I got from when I went to the Earthverse gathering that worked out pretty well was a

foldable solar panel that connects to USB that's enough to keep my phone alive always. So in terms of always wanting a map, this little foldable thing is enough to keep my phone able to have a map, assuming I have cell service. So I was skeptical of how much this thing

could work, and it did a decent enough job. It even kept my iPad Pro powered as well. So it had a decent amount of square footage once you unroll it. So that was very useful. But yeah, I mean, I really like lock bypass stuff. It's one of my other hobbies. So there's a variety of tools in that type

that's nice to get, like, a decent collection of. Also, like, especially now, but probably in general, like, have masks. Like, just in general. I mean, just in general. Sure, yeah. Have masks. Have lots of them.

Make sure you can change them. Yeah. Have a gas mask if that's at all physically like respond like fiscally possible for you mira is the one i think garrison and i would both recommend to the to 99. if you want like a very good gas mask a really good gas is wonderful again all of these kits there's the kit of like okay what is the what is what's necessary and then there's like right, if you have money or if you have time that you want to learn extra skills, what are other things? Like lockpicks. If you're just a random Joe and you've never, like, don't throw lockpicks in your kit if you've never done any lockpick shit.

They're not going to help you. But if that is a skill that is worth picking up and that will make you, like, more resilient. Yeah. Oh, and a 14.9 millimeter anti-material rifle um you're always going to need one of those they're at they they stay supersonic at up to three and a half miles um which is really useful so definitely definitely and they're only you probably aren't going to spend more than 25 000,000 getting one set up. So it's really, for the price of a fairly new Toyota Prius, you could have an anti-material rifle that can pierce armored vehicles at several miles distance. And really, what is more pragmatic a survival tool than that?

Ammo for it? It's only like $30 a round. That's just a moderately expensive meal per bullet christopher uh do you think that corporations like walmart or amazon could become more militaristic as yes yeah i mean yeah i think i think. The trend that worries me is Amazon's increasing collaborations with and deeper connections with like the FBI and other kind of law enforcement agencies. The degree to which Target has also like with the FBI and like with other agencies because they're they're anti shrink department and whatnot. They're like they're the surveillance they've built to stop theft is so advanced yeah they have one of the best crime labs in the whole united states yeah yeah um organizations like tiger swan which is a mercenary group that the the dakota pipeline

people the dapple folks like hired to crack down on the standing rock protests and have worked in other there's other organizations like that that were active during the BLM protests and kind of the I do think we're seeing a paramilitarization of a lot of these corporations, a lot of these corporations in order to protect their what they see as their financial interests. And that that is that is proceeding rapidly. And it's not the thing that I'm not I'm not most worried about them like having armed forces, although there will be some unquote, the gun crime or whatever property crime that's raised. But the thing that I think is most concerning is the degree to which they are professionalizing a paramilitary surveillance apparatus. Amazon has done it to do stuff like crackdown on union organizing and whatnot. So, yeah, I'm very concerned with that. Yeah, I'm very concerned with that. I think that the dimension of it that's most frightening is not necessarily like the shadow run corporations buying armies, but rather corporations buying like intelligence agencies is kind of the thing that I think will actually be the biggest threat.

Because in a lot of cases, generally speaking, if I have to deal with an armed security guard or a cop, that security guard is going to be less of a pain in the ass than the cop um not always but as a general rule i'm less worried about security guards than cops even armed ones i i think another thing is important to keep in mind is that yeah i mean it's like i don't i don't i really don't think there's a danger that we're going to go back to like east india company, like people with mass armies. Cause it's, it's literally too expensive. Like you can't, it's,

it's too expensive. And the armies that exist already do that. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need them. But, but I mean, I think that the thing,

the thing that's like scary outside of the intelligence stuff, which is terrifying, but it's the stuff they do down, like, I guess you call it down the supply chain, which is like, you know, like Coca-Cola murdering union organizers with paramilitaries, right? They tend to work through, like, you know, like corporations will back rebel groups, right? Corporations will back, like, you know, in Colombia, you see a lot of this, like, you have these sort of, like, these, I mean, some of them are backed just directly by landholding corporation some of them

are backed by uh just individual large landholders but you get these like you know you you get basically these paramilitaries that are sort of the third wave after the army goes in and that stuff's very scary and we're probably we're probably going to see more of that and yeah but but but i think it's it's kind of important that there's there's an extent to which again you'll see them having their own mercenaries but a lot of the time it's there's some kind of thing when when when companies really need to kill someone they tend to outsource that to a like another sort of paramilitary organization that's not directly in their supply chain. It's not directly under their chain of command. So yeah, that's a good and fun time that will probably just get worse.

Speaking of corporate fuckery or whatever. Are gonna get a coca-cola ad i hope i hope we do get a coca-cola ad because nothing soothes my quench like a cherry vanilla coca-cola nothing soothes your quench did you just say that garrison that's what i said those are words that came out of my mouth we're back okay robert somebody had a question about uh an article you wrote back when you worked at crack about a woman who was hiding from their family the end of the article yeah you mentioned that you haven't heard from her in a couple weeks leading up to yeah and uh they want to know if you've ever heard from her again so yeah that's a bummer the the pseudonym i'm not going to use her real name in this, but the pseudonym I used for her in the article was Azameh. She was a woman who lived in the EU and was under threat of honor killing from her family who were from Pakistan in origin.

Because she was an atheist, was not a religious hardliner, and didn't want to be. And for years she had kind of hidden that from her family. Like she'd moved out on her own, but she'd hidden the fact that like she had a boyfriend. She'd hidden the fact that she'd like played dungeon, all of this stuff. Like she played D and D and was like scared that like, that was like her dad would literally fucking kill her.

And this is a thing that happens. This is a thing that happens in the United States and the EU. It's a problem with like fundamentalist Islam. And that's not the only religion there's honor killings as a result on, but that was her specific situation. One of the things she was frightened about is her family would go back to Pakistan regularly, and she was concerned. She wanted to go because it was her only way to see her grandparents, but she was also concerned that if her parents found out when they went back, they would basically imprison her somewhere where she would not be able to get out and get back to her home and she

would be forced you know be married off or something so she was working with an organization in the country in the eu where she lived that helped people extricate themselves and in the kind of one of the last things she told me is that like well the thing she was looking at doing because she was so worried about her dad was a a break, was like one day with the help of this organization, she would just be gone and in another part of the EU and would have a complete break from her life and would completely stop living as the identity she had had her entire life. And I never heard from her again after that, after like three or four different interview sessions. And I still have not. And my hope is that she did the thing she said she was going to do.

And she just completely burned that email and every other way people had of getting in touch with her. And she's doing great now, but I really have no idea. I have absolutely no idea what happened to her. Oh, so we would, the people want an update on the quest for eel horse. Still no, still no horse still have not found an entire horse carcass but one day it'll happen

you know it'll happen it's gonna be good Garrison that gator that I shoved a turkey or a duck inside and a turkey next to was pretty good. It was great after I took it out of the pit as you were wrestling people screaming.

Well, that's the only way to properly cook it the right amount of time is to get drunk enough that people have to fight you to remove it from the fire, Garrison. Uh-huh. That's how cooking works. I don't know if you've done much of it in your life. You'll understand one day. This is a question that I find interesting

because I feel like it really misunderstands, not to insult the person asking it, but that's not what I'm trying to do. Which question? The question is, what population can the post-capitalist world sustain and thrive on with our ideas and concepts a billion like we currently have six billion two billion less than a billion like

how many people are you willing to lose to achieve sustainability because i i forget and are optimistic with proper technology and eco-sustainability techniques we can maintain a population close to what we have now and yeah I feel like just the framing of this question kind of approaches our current problems and the solutions we have in a weird way, because I don't think we're not trying to reach a peak population. We're trying to make sure the people that we have have enough stuff to live well. And we have that right now. We overproduce everything we make

about one and a half times as much food as we need to to feed everybody yet there are billions and millions of people who go hungry so it's not a so like it's approaching this question allocation issue yeah so approaching this question in terms of like how could the post-capitalist world thrive on our ideas and like i i we're not trying to like reach a certain population number where i think going it from that way is kind of a little silly because i feel like it should be the opposite as be yeah i i don't know why we i don't think we need to start with population then go down the point is is look what we have. Here's the people. Let's distribute this like a network instead of a top-down kind of system. Yeah, I think that one of the things you have to, if you're trying to talk about social ecology, one of the things you have to resist

is this idea that overpopulation is any part of the problem. It is not. Overconsumption is a problem. But there's sort of resources available per capita in a population increases is people have less kids. And and like, I think that, yeah, it's certainly good to say that, like, in a world that is more equitable, the human population will naturally level off and decrease somewhat. But that the the thing that's not the same as saying that we need to decrease the population, we need to increase equity and make sure that people have access to the resources that they need, and also that people who are massively overconsuming aren't allowed to do that anymore. You know?

That will solve the problems. And scale back all of the resources being put towards useless growth and pretty good towards better distribution thus actually i mean like the questioner used the term like post-capitalist i don't think we're gonna get to a post-capitalist world ever like at least at least not when i'm alive i don't think like a world no will there be post-capitalist areas probably but we're never gonna get out there there's never gonna be a post-capitalist world i Probably. But we're never going to get out there. There's never going to be a post-capitalist world. I don't think that. I also think it's entirely possible

that we will reach points that people in the time will not necessarily consider post-capitalist because it will be the same states and a lot of the same institutions and organizations that were there as a kid. But people who were looking at it from a perspective today might consider post-capitalist

because that's generally how change happens, you know? Yeah, yeah, you're right. Like how democracy increased in the UK, but they still had like a king. It's like, when did they, they're not, they never really reached post-monarchy, but it's also not the same system that they were run by in like 1400, you know? It's wildly different and there's much more representation for more people, but it's, that not, you know, that there's also you also have your your Soviet unions and your your killing of czars and which are very. Yeah, which which is fine. And I like killing czars. But change happens in a variety of ways. And change can be revolutionary in its effect without being a clear break

yeah i'm trying to think of like how we're talking about like the capitalist world thriving like i don't i don't view eight billion people thriving right now even with that like a lot of they're not like it's not like it's that's not what's happening right now and we need to change the way like distribution of resources works drastically and doing that will make everyone's lives a whole lot better and it will also maybe limit some of the endless growth and those things aren't opposites um and i just i don't know how like we can save those things. But the path to getting there is certainly a lot more ambiguous. Yeah, I think that that's I think one of the ways in which the left goes wrong often is kind of looking at things that have been tried before and didn't didn't didn't do the trick and saying like, we need is we need us another bolshevik revolution you know we need to bring us back that you know hammer and sickle and it's like well you know they

they gave it the old college try and they did not win um and you can be angry at that or whatever or you can be like okay it's the same and hey it's it's every tendency i can look at the fucking mock noists and be like well that was based as hell and you know what I can look at the fucking mock Noah's and be like, well, that was based as hell. And you know what? It didn't do the fucking trick. So I think there's a degree of humility that needs to be had in terms of like what actual what actual change that makes a more livable world will look like in the way in which that's one of the reasons I did enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future is a lot of it is about the end of capitalism in a way that is not, it doesn't look like a lot of ends of capitalism have kind of been posited by. There's a lot of strong arming bankers into like forcing high level economic changes that put ends to like really extractive systems and whatnot. Um, and it's,

it's, it's interesting. It was kind of an imagining of how the transition could begin, um, in a way that, that isn't commonly talked about, um, at least on the left.

And I, I thought it was valuable for that. And I, I think people should be, I think there's, I think that, um, um,

people can be more creative in in how they envision the way that might look than they they often are yeah and i feel like this question actually relates to like stuff like dual power really well because our our goal as individuals is not feeding eight billion people our goal is to get a garden enough so that we can feed most of our friends off of stuff that we grew for like the summer right like that's like that's what our goal is to is to build it from that way instead of saying like how how can we feed new york in a climate sustainable way that is a very different question than being like if we want to integrate solar punk and like eco-sustainability stuff into our lives now

because if we don't do it, no one really else is really going to, let's start with the people you actually already have connections with because a lot of it is about building like horizontal connections as opposed to defaulting to this top-down system of who has what, who needs what.

And this is when we venture when we dare to venture into the subreddit. One of the things I see people critiquing a lot is like, well, they keep talking about all of these little home gardening and canning and these community-level solutions, but that's not going to deal with this massive systemic problem. It's like, no, it's not all about that. There's one of the methods in which you can ensure change is keeping you and yours alive and committed on change. And part of that

is hyper-local solutions that also involve increasing your own idea of your autonomy and your own understanding of things like the food cycle, which have an impact on what you like vote for and what you support pushing for on like a societal level, the things that you come to better understand in your daily life. And and so getting involved in all of these things, guerrilla gardening and whatnot has an impact on that. Although I do think people underestimate like the largest crop by acreage in the United States by a long shot is fucking lawns and replacing lawns with either zero scaping just to increase carbon capture and reduce water usage or with some sort of food growth. Doing a mix of that for the vast majority of like lawn area in the United States actually would be a significant thing on a global level. Recommend everyone the book Food Not Lawns.

Yeah, there's it's that would not be a meaningless change. And it is something that people can have an impact on because it is the kind of thing that if it were to get popular enough, there's a Pokemon point where it becomes a trend. And like Pokemon, if it gets popular enough, it will never die. That's what we say about all of our stuff on our show. If it becomes like Pokemon. Let's hit the Pokemon point. Or the NFT point, if that's, but I don't think NFT is. No, I don't think NFT is.

Pokemon is so much better than any NFT. Although the day that this drops, they will probably announce the Pokemon NFT game, which will be the final coffin in the biosphere. All of my Pokemons are gone. in the biosphere. All of my Pokemon are gone. I've been hacked. All my apes gone. That was

my favorite post of the holiday season. Oh, Robert, do you want to give an update on After the Revolution? That was asked a couple times. Yeah, After the Revolution sequel. I'm three chapters in. Oh, wow. So it'll be done hopefully some point this year garrison garrison has a question on that are you gonna pay someone else to code the ebook uh no no no

we pay you garrison i don't want to code yeah well i have to work on the daily show now i cannot code this fucking we all have things to do we don't want to do. Oh, gosh. I'm so sorry, Garrison. I'm so sorry. We'll have you code some other people's books just to get the practice done. No. Stop.

No more coding books. I will not allow it. There are experts that can do this a lot prettier than I can. Garrison, I consider you an expert now. Oh, no. In EPUB coding. I'll put that on my resume. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I think that does it for us today, folks. If you want to follow us on social media so you can watch us promote our own shows again, you can go to CoolZone media on Twitter and Instagram and happen here pod and wouldn't that be lovely we get so much more connections through online that's wow that really does I love online yeah

and we're doing a behind the bastards live stream digital show with prop on that doesn't sound right that doesn't this bit is so not funny every single time. It's not a bit. I'm just dreading it. I'm dreading it too, but we're doing it.

February 17th. MomentHouse.com Are tickets still available? They are. MomentHouse.com Can I buy them and scalpel them to the fans? I can't tell you what garrison get in there false scarcity is is the key well do that if you have disposable income and want to

watch robert talk yeah yeah more than we already do i guarantee you it'll be worth it well that's the episode thank you for listening i hope everyone has a better 2022 uh that would be nice and i hope everyone has an identical 2022 down to the day and until in may you realize that you're actually in like a groundhog day style loop um and then you achieve nirvana if i'm remembering how the movie Groundhog Day went properly. Sure. Yeah, that sounds great. Have a good year.

Make some changes. Make connections with people around you. They're there. You just have to find them. Talk to people who look like they have cool politics. Or start doing cool things. And start doing cool things, yeah. We should address one last thing, which is the question people ask that gets asked a lot, but we probably can't address enough, which is like, there's no one around me doing any of this mutual aid stuff.

There's nobody around me engaging any of the stuff that I want to get. How do I get organized and get involved? Number one, there are people around you doing that kind of shit. It may just be hard to find because of where you are. But if you start doing shit, the simplest thing I can say is try and figure out where there's a need and start filling it. Often you will start meeting other people who are engaged in adjacent projects or even the same thing. And that's a way to get into it. If you are trying to start, if you actually get so far as to start serving a need in your area in a mutual aid capacity and trying to start organizing and whatnot,

and you're doing shit, feel free to hit us up on email, reach out. We are happy to signal boost and signpost people who are, have actually started doing shit. It's one of those things, please don't come to us. I think this might be a cool idea, but if you start doing shit and you can provide some evidence that you're doing something in your community that's not currently being done, that is a mutual aid type thing, or even a charitable

type thing, if you're doing it we will try to help signal boost and and can be very useful in that capacity so so it's not easy necessarily especially depending on where you live but like you do it's always possible to find a need and fill it you know yeah i've found that uh a uh definitely was easier before the pandemic but a way that i've met people that are a little bit more uh open-minded to the same things that i'm open-minded to is going to like local comedy shows or things things of that comedy shows i'm guessing like farmer's markets farmers you know, wherever kind of weird, not,

not in the normal culture people will go to, you'll probably find someone there with radical politics. That's prop. Exactly. All those types of like, like, you know, countercultural subcultural spaces.

You'll probably find someone there who's wearing a back patch. That is something like smash to something, you know? So like, just like you like you you have to you know you you're not going to find them by staying at your in your house and scrolling on twitter i mean they probably not you have to kind of go into the real world um as scary as the meat space may be yeah and i i would say another thing to keep in mind if you are in kind of a more conservative area and even if you do identify as an anarchist, you don't have to frame it that way. You can always call yourself a libertarian municipalist and none of the people who might be offended by anarchist will listen past libertarian and they'll decide you're fine. And that's a great way to start that. It means the same thing, more or less.

I mean, there's other kinds of anarchists who are, but most people who say they're anarchists, if you were to call them libertarian municipalists, would be like, all right, whatever. Not me, don't call me that. Call Chris that constantly. That's it. We'll be back tomorrow.

Or maybe not. I don't know what day this is. Probably tomorrow. Probably tomorrow, maybe. Yep. That's what I'm saying, and it's been said. If you say so. Bye!

Bye! Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is going to be shit. is gonna suck this is gonna be trash because no one knows what's gonna happen i have not actually come up with a prediction yet no i have one i don't i have i have one that i came up with before the show yeah have have we have we opened it yeah we've already started okay um so we were supposed to this is it could happen here everybody podcast things falling apart how to maybe make them fall apart less um sophie pitched the great idea of why don't we do an episode that is our predictions for the new year it's really not my idea when people ask for it so many times. This was Sophie's idea. She's been talking about this for a long time. Sophie's idea alone,

it sprang fully formed from the side of her head like Athena from Zeus's skull. And we all agreed it was a good idea for an episode. I loved that reference. I did not come up with a prediction. Did you, Garrison? No, spent zero minute time thinking about it. Not a second, not even a moment. I absolutely love the Athena-Zeus reference. That's how I tell people I got Anderson. Yeah, well, spend zero minute time thinking about it. Not a second, not even a moment. I absolutely love the Athena Zeus reference.

That's how I tell people I got Anderson. Yeah, well, my prediction for the year is that I'm going to keep making references to Athena whenever I do something that pisses Sophie off so that she's less angry. Go for it. It will absolutely work. Yeah, that's my prediction for 2022. That's your prediction?

Okay, okay, okay. Wait, before we go into the to the uh to the big bigger thing i want everybody to give one word prediction for how you would describe this coming year 2022 one word prediction boring Boring. NFT. I was just going to say fucked. But with a PH, because it's going to be hot too. I don't think it's going to be that fucked actually. I was going to say mediocre. Yeah, I'm foreseeing a lot of blandness and mediocreness a lot of blandness my here here's a prediction i'll make i think that one of the things that we were seeing last year especially in the streets with like the far right being so much more uh active um than the left in a lot of places and in a lot of ways is 2020 really tired a lot of people

on the left out, a lot of organizers, a lot of street level people, not just like, oh, I'm tired, but like, I was injured. I'm fighting charges. My funds were depleted. I had to, I couldn't keep going out because I have a family and I had to deal with that sort of shit. And I don't think that energy is back yet, but it always ebbs and flows and it does on both sides because at the end of the day, whether you're a fascist or a progressive, people have X amount of energy. And I think we are – I believe we are kind of at the beginning process of folks on the left starting to recover some of that energy. And I think that that is a process we're going to see building throughout the year. I agree with that. Yeah, yeah. And it'll be a multi-year process.

And I'm kind of hoping 2024 folks are ready to throw down again. But we'll see like where that goes i do think we might have like a few days of people throwing down in the streets for some reason like something bad may happen i like obviously always possible late summer i i can i can definitely see like a few days in july or august where it's like oh is the thing starting again and it goes on for a bit and then it kind of peters out i kind of i i definitely see that being a decent possibility um because yeah i think there will be more energy for that this year and more mental like like like ability to to do that this year than than 2021 um yeah but overall i i don't see anything super eventful and i hope

that this doesn't like jinx anything and then we get – No, I mean my big eventful prediction is that – and I will explain what this is based on in a bit. I think we are going to see a significant-sized urban metropolitan area be rendered uninhabitable either permanently or for a significant period of time in the united states due to climate change and part of what this is based on is the december wildfires that just destroyed a significant chunk of boulder colorado right yeah not talking about like new york city gets swallowed by the waves but like a place where there's a couple hundred thousand people living they're not able to be for either ever or an extended period of time because a climate-based disaster hits. Maybe it'll be a heat dome type thing. Maybe it'll be like a wet bulb event.

Maybe it'll be fires, obviously always possible, hurricane, tornado. We saw enough just in the last couple of months in terms of those record hurricanes that killed like 100 people in the south or the fires sweeping Boulder right now. And again, fucking December. people in um in the south or the fires sweeping boulder right now and again fucking december um but but i i do think there's a pretty good chance we see something like that this year i think my big one is that i mean okay so the the the obvious freebie is that we're going to cross a million covet deaths or like the the official count we like we we've had more hell yeah baby u.s official count we'll we've had more yeah baby you are certain this is the freebie the not freebie

is that like yeah it's not even a prediction if yeah that's not even a prediction that's like saying I think it's gonna be warm in the summertime yeah you know and warm in the summertime is probably like a bigger gamble at this point yeah or yeah but very very warm at the summertime

yeah but I think that the real thing is that like there there is never going to be never locked down the u.s never like you oh god no no the president of the united states could die and there would be no lockdown like and this is you know and i think this this is a result of i i don't know i i wonder what you do. This is my thesis for what was going on. 2020 was that like, I actually think the like, the like liberate Wisconsin stuff. I think that actually worked like those.

The number in 2020, there were all those giant, like, like a bunch of people showed up with guns to cap. Absolutely. It worked. Yeah. Yeah.

It worked. And it was like, but they did. They did. Terrorism usually works. It's a very effective way to get things done. but i think there's an important lesson here though which is that like so the state will never like very very rarely will the state ever like directly like they they they won't immediately back down right what they'll do is like they'll make an enormous

show about how they didn't grant any concessions and then they will grant concessions or like you know this is the thing with the riots right it's like okay people are talking about like why do we not there's not gonna be any more stimulus checks right the reason there's not gonna be more stimulus checks because nobody's rioting and you know like yeah see what kind of stimulus checks you get if a couple of targets get redacted yeah like you know if if you burn down another police station we will get more stimulus checks it's just that you have to you know there has to be another police station burned down right but like this is and this is the this is the you know the the right was extremely effective at this right in a way that people just don't really talk about which is that it is now politically impossible in the u.s like no no one

no one will ever do another lockdown because people will show up with guns and they don't want to deal with that and they've decided that just just kill just kill a million like you know we've already killed the entire population of seattle like they're dead like we'll just keep killing more people and more people and it's just never i think people often are going i think people on the left attack the um biden's covid response for a lot of the wrong things like the thing that i i would go after him for is like, yeah, he didn't just say, here's a bunch of money. Don't go to work. We're not going back to school. Stay at home.

Here's a pile of cash, which might have worked. It was worth a shot. The armed militant cultural movement against the idea of covid precautions was so advanced that like, what do you what what out what more could have been realistically done other than trying to give people enough money again to actually stay home, which, again, is the thing I think it's most fair to attack. Well, OK, I mean, I just like shits beyond Biden in a lot. But I don't like. OK, it was like, well, what could have been done i don't know like if you're looking from the perspective of the state they could actually have deployed the intelligence services against them instead of doing like one dumb entrapment plot right like well sure but that's that's also that starts before biden and by again by the time he's in

office it's like you know but like like yeah i call their bluff right have a bunch of people show up to the capitol and then it's like okay here's the fbi like like that that that's a thing that like if you're a liberal statist you could do and they just don't want to because like partially they don't want the conflict and partially because it would actually it would look like it would look really bad for them heading into the midterms it would look so bad and and also i think this is less the fbi is kind of much more centrist in terms of their politics as an agency but like when you talk about a lot of federal and state aid, huh? Yeah.

I mean, most federal and state, like, I don't know that they can rely on them. Like they don't know that they can rely on them. Even, even the FBI is like, yeah,

they were using the Proud Boys as informants, like on against anarchists. Like, yeah. So yeah, like they're not, they're not, they're not like.

I, I have an appreciation. What I will say is I have an appreciation for the fact that by the time biden was in office it may have been an unsolvable problem which doesn't let him off the hook for things that were objectively bad decisions like not doing shit for stimulus um like pushing to open the schools like you know a number of other things that he's done but also like if he had done all of the right things, we still might be at exactly this death toll because there are cultural issues here that were very advanced by the time he took office. And I do think like it's whatever I'm not I'm not saying this to let Biden off the hook or support the Democratic Party.

I'm saying this because people need to have an accurate conception of the problem. And the problem is so much deeper than what a technocrat could have handled by making smart policy at break yay at break and we're back from outer space actual prediction republicans will win the senate yeah which seems pretty... I think there's a decent chance Democrats can keep the House, but I'm pretty sure the Senate's going to go back to the Republicans. I mean, they are damn near in control of the Senate as it is. Yeah.

I mean, yeah. Yeah. But I do believe that's going to happen. And let's see. Which, yeah, does not seem... That's not that far-fetched of a thing and i don't know there'll be some other kind of tech fuckery the the the space between elon musk peter teal silicon valley there's gonna be i think there's gonna be some worsening development of like tech like technocratic stuff possibly in

like possibly with like the mask of trying to like fix climate change or something but i think there'll be a decent growth of tech power and possibly they're like um cooperation with the state or the state like fun like giving more explicit like funding and permission to tech power to like do terraformingforming or some geoengineering. There's going to be something related to that sphere that's going to get a lot more visible than it currently is. My big tech prediction is that there is going to be a crime against humanity at some point this year, like on a massive scale, not like just a mass shooting, but like a state-level crime against humanity. like on a massive scale, not like just a mass shooting, but like a state level crime against humanity. And we're going to find out that for the last like eight months, Facebook had been

paying the perpetrators a significant amount of money as a result of like some ill thought out ad program that they had. Yeah. Like we're going to we're going to leap to Facebook actively funding an ethnic cleansing because some somebody thought up some sort of affiliate program that was not well-conceived. That's my fun tech industry prediction. My fun tech industry prediction is that Jeff Bezos will increasingly become the most cringiest man in the world. Yeah, it is very funny that the picture he posted him on New Year's, he's just wearing a Dan Flash's shirt. He's absolutely wearing a Dan Flash's shirt,

and that's incredibly funny. Robert, Robert, that shirt cost him $3,000. Because the pattern is so complicated. It's very complicated. Look at how much the lines crisscross. I just don't like you insisting that it's not as much money despite its complicatedness. That photo was my version of a holiday card

I sent to everyone I know. Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot more unions this year. Yeah, that does seem to be a positive trend that we're seeing, is a lot more unionization and some significant successes for and a lot more like like general acceptance of the concept of a union other prediction related to tech industry stuff i think one of the billionaire space ships things is gonna have a disastrous launch. So positive prediction. Spaceship's going to blow up with people inside it as it tries to take off. That's my positive prediction

that it could take some people with it. Sorry to the workers who are going to be probably harmed at that, but it could take so much people out, so it's going to be funny. That's a possibility. Also, there's going to be a disastrous effect uh

around uh austin uh is right that's where that's where a lot of the spaceship stuff's getting set up it's gonna no no no it's that's just where the offices are it's like chica it's like on the coast of texas oh god all right not close enough to austin some some piece of a spaceship's gonna fly through someone's house no one one's going to care about it. It's probably going to kill a family or something. No one's going to care. Nothing's going to happen. Yeah, it'll be fine.

Those are more of my tech industry predictions related to spaceship stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I also think on a more – I don't know how the current civil war in Myanmar is going to shake out, but I think there's a chance that it becomes the first place where there is a successful, or at least partially successful, revolutionary movement that is, to a significant extent extent armed via 3D printed weaponry. We've already seen a lot of that deployed by the rebels in Myanmar. I'm interested in watching that because it's kind of the first time we've seen that technology used on a meaningful scale by people that aren't like organized crime. And yeah, I think it's still too early to tell

like how much of an actual, like whether or not it's just kind of a distraction from the more meaningful aspects of the struggle or in the more meaningful like kind of deployments of weaponry and other tools in the struggle or whether or not it'll actually play a significant role in the armed struggle. But it's very much worth watching

if you're somebody who pays attention to insurgent movements and what is increasingly possible as a result of new technology. I have another really bad prediction. J.K. Rowling is going to release a book on gender. Oh, God.

Or she'll fund a YouTube channel. Yeah, something. Or she'll fund a YouTube channel. Yeah, something. I think there's a decent chance she has been writing a book about gender and she's going to release it in 2022. I think that is an actual serious prediction. Just go away.

And a whole bunch of liberal moms are going to buy it for each other and they're going to read it and it's going to be bad. And that is my horrible prediction. She could be so beloved if she had limited her comments after publishing

Harry Potter to just repeatedly telling people that wizards are constantly shitting their pants. If she just didn't use Twitter after anything at all and she could have been a different person. It's the Dave Chappelle thing. Just stay off. We all would have loved you forever. You could have just gone off

and counted your money and left us alone. Yeah, go be rich somewhere. It's fine to be done. It's fine to be done being famous and influential. You did great. You did great. You never needed to come back. Ever. She did. I'm not sure if she did great

she did she did she did look again it this is all colored by if she had never come back into the public eye all it would have been is like you remember that lady who got like 12 year olds to read 700 page books that one time like people would not be as critical of the actual content of the Harry Potter books if she just hadn't kept coming back and saying shit. Anyway, so that's my fair prediction. And then didn't stop and then did not stop and then was told bad, really, really bad and then kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it. doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it. You know what people should be? Look, if you're if you're listening to this and you're a millionaire who is like hugely popular for some cultural reason in the late 90s and early 2000s, think about Bill

Watterson. Bill Watterson, 1995, ends the most popular comic strip in the history of comics and spends the rest of his life in fucking Iowa painting landscapes and never talks to anybody with a platform again. And everybody loves Bill Watterson. Not a single person has a criticism of Bill Watterson. Just do that. Just

do what he did. Just go paint landscapes in Iowa and don't talk to journalists or get on Twitter. It's fine. Does Bill Watterson believe regressive things about gender? Nobody knows because he doesn't say anything. I think another prediction that is actually decently possible, I think we will get more and more cities and or states to decriminalize hard drugs in certain possession amounts. in certain possession amounts.

I think there's a number of bills going around California and a lot of other states, and I believe that'll start to become more and more common, which will be great. It would be nice if they get legalized, but get what you can for now. Yeah. Speaking of drugs, here's CBD oil sponsored by heroin by by big drug here we go have fun stay safe we're back and I just want to let everybody know that if if everything gets

legalized uh we will be sponsored by methamphetamine so fucking quickly it will make your head spin. I will never turn down a drug sponsor. Except for like superfoods. We don't do superfoods. We don't do brain pills. No. But heroin? I would advertise the shit out of heroin. We don't do that.

I'm already ready to advertise heroin. We don't do the hair loss drugs. We don't do the... But heroin? Mm-hmm. Hey, is life depressing and difficult? Don't do it. Don't do it. You know what will make life easier?

I take it back. Heroin. I hated that I helped that bit. Chris, you were saying something before break. My one serious prediction is I don't think we've... I think we're going to get one more big Latin American uprising, and it will not be in Argentina. I have been eating shit for three goddamn years predicting it's going to be

Argentina. Cause it's like, Oh, they're getting an IMF bailout. Like, Oh, it just never Argentina. It won't be Argentina.

It will be somewhere else. But someone is, someone is going to spend like two months doing a bunch of stuff. That's extremely cool. Outside of Argentina. I, I kind of think, um,

I don't know. I'll be interested to see what happens in Brazil because, um, it's hard to get a sense for the exact numbers but yeah there's potential there there is potential there with what's happened in bolivia and what's happened in chile there's there's momentum in it is exciting broad area there's some exciting i wasn't like i mean like the osis but there's shoot there's like enormous protests in brazil like all the time oh yeah sure yeah there's like massive it just hasn't sort of like like it hasn't turned into like everyone fighting the cops and like yeah and i may i don't know if it will because like i don't know i mean this is this is this is my vibes based interpretation of it but it feels

like the the workers party has enough of a handle on the protests that they're not gonna sort of like explode because the pte just wants to win its election and get out of bolsonaro but well yeah and i mean the the possibility of any kind of like actual revolutionary insurrection or anything relies heavily on like that path not working for people yeah like they're not that they're not being that kind of safety well i mean i say this if they arrest lula again like yeah i i don't think bolsonaro like i think there will be bolsonaro will die in his own shit like yeah that might happen even if his party stays in power i mean

that's true he's actively dying as we record this episode, which is very funny. I got, as a result of one of our ad campaigns, several Aura picture frames this year. And right now we're loading one up that's just pictures of sick Bolsonaro to keep in my living room. I love that. So anytime I walk past, I can look at Jair Bolsonaro hacking up a lung or having shit sucked out of his nose from a tube. hacking up a lung or having shit sucked out of his nose from a tube um i will say oh by my one more like very fast prediction about this is that kissinger is gonna live he's not gonna die oh damn it chris god damn next year i don't know fuck you fuck you i allowed myself to hope for one for about i allowed myself to hope for about eight hours and i think he's gonna live sad but maybe i'll be wrong.

I don't know. It would have been pretty cool if Betty White's last action had been some sort of anti-Kissinger jihad. Take out Kissinger? Yeah, she becomes the most loved American in human history. Like goes out just like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah, she parachutes into Kissinger's house with a flinting knife. I'm going to say in Colorado, Oregon, or Washington, we're going to get our first safe drug injection site opened. I think there's a pretty good shot of that, yeah. They've been very successful inside different parts of Canada, specifically Vancouver, BC.

And I believe one of those three states is going to get the first one. I hope it's all of them. If you want to support some of those people up in Canada, go to Heroin Mart and buy a shoot dope, fuck the cops hoodie. Yeah, but safe drug injection and ingestion sites have been very good at preventing deaths in Vancouver, BC. And there's just a good idea in general. And I'll be excited at the prospect. They're an incredibly good idea.

And they also, if you're trying to, again, talk about this to conservatives in your life, they're cheaper than just letting people be addicted to drugs on the street because people don't steal stuff when they're heroines free. Also, they won't have ridiculous medical bills that get paid by the state. And they're more likely to seek treatment, even if you don't mandate that, especially if you don't mandate that, because as a rule, people don't like having problematic addictions to drugs. And if they can deal with their immediate needs and also know that there's help available, they will often choose to get help.

So, and I think I have one more actual prediction, is that a new Matrix video game will be announced. And that is all of my predictions. Oh, we should probably talk about Matrix 4 briefly. That's what the people want, Garrison. It is. It is what the people want. And for the record, this is going to be controversial, because some people have have no taste but we both think it fucking ruled it is dope

possibly the best matrix film it was really fun it's it's very good if you think about it for any amount of time it gets very good in the way it addresses um the system's power to incorporate revolt as a part of the system which which was already teased inside Matrix. As a monetized aesthetic, yeah. Reloaded. But yeah, the Matrix using the weapon that wants to find you against you and the Matrix weaponizing all of your ideas against you is very good. I know Lana put a lot of thought into this, particularly around who she is, how she's developed, and how her work has been turned against her and what she believes. Both by the people and also corporately, in terms of achieving the correct amount of meta that it's not useless drivel, while still actually being aware of what it is, I think was done well.

being aware of what it is I think was done well. I know there's some people in the post-modern thing who think it doesn't go meta enough, and I think that's nonsense, because if you point out that pointing out revolting against the system is part of the system,

then you've lost everybody. No one cares, because you can add on those layers endlessly, and it's just drivel. So I think they got the correct amount of meta while then abandoning that idea, but moving it on. You know what's more important than being meta is making friends and finding human connections because going through the world like this, isolated, like Thomas Anderson is when he's in the Matrix as a game designer. A big part of that problem is that he's very isolated. As a game designer, a big part of that problem is that he's very isolated. And the whole point is like, no, you need to find friends, find connections, have people around you to build a network and actually start loving other people is really one of the only ways out of this looping cycle and layering of matrixes that we always live in.

It's a wonderful film. I could talk about it for hours, but I will not. Yeah, we could do a whole podcast about why we enjoyed Matrix 4. But it's pretty fun, and my only, the only thing I'll add to that is a lot of people, fools is what I

call them, are angry at the fact that it ended with the brass against cover of uh rage against the machine it was so good it was so good it was so good and and it it the the cover of that song opens an exact so the the singer the lead singer of brass against became briefly famous uh mid late last year um when, while playing that exact song on stage, she urinated into a fan's mouth. And the song that, the cover that ends the matrix starts at exactly the moment where she peed in

that guy's mouth during the live show. And I am certain that Lana Wachowski was planning to use the original rage against the machine version of that song. And then that news dropped and was like, well, let's get these brass against people. I want the piss song. That's my theory. One other thing I want to mention is reflecting on the analyst as a character

and how he relates to kind of the meat space argument and how digital systems and algorithms and social media operates he if you listen to him talk um and within the whole context within the whole context of the film he um you know they think there's actually some more insightful points of what you might originally suspect around like social media um and digitalness versus realness um just always you know always a factor in in matrix films but the way the way they handle it in this film i think is a lot more mature than all the topics they handle in their previous films and i mean there's just so many like really good like single lines that offer like really good like oh wow like that's just like a very good point and then they

just move past them so effortlessly. You could focus on any one of those really good lines, and they just offer up so many at many points. And I like that they turned the Merovingian into Ted Kaczynski. It's just fun. At the end of the day, it's just actually really fun, and it doesn't feel exactly like the other movies in the series which is what i want i don't like reboots i wasn't a fan of the star wars reboot because it was like

i've seen this again yeah yeah i i like i like that it i like that a lot of the action in this movie right up until kind of the end feels perfunctory and like i like lana like kind of saying like i don't care about this part anymore Like I've done the guys fighting agents in bullet time that, you know, at the end, there's some more some more loving action set pieces. But like from the beginning, it's very much it's much more like a really fun commentary on how Hollywood works and how the video game industry works. There's a fucking Mass Effect joke in there. Hollywood works and how the video game industry works.

There's a fucking mass effect joke in there. There's a joke about like the 1999 or 2000 matrix video game that happened before Garrison was born. It's so fun. It's, it's just a lot of fun as a movie. It's rad. Well, um,

any, any other final, final predictions, uh, before we wrap up this, this extremely well thought through episode that we poured our hearts and minds into? We really did. Dr. Oz is going to go down in flames.

Oh, I hope so. Oh, man. I really have no idea what to expect from him. I have no idea. I'm not making any prediction on that because I, too, I have no idea. I have no idea. The only thing that I'll say is that one way or the other, it's going to be a bellwether. If it goes great for him and he wins easily, we're going to see a lot more. A lot of Oz.

Dr. Phil is absolutely rolling into Congress if that works for Oz. And other people who are kind of occupy similar cultural spaces will do the same thing and then we'll have congressional inquiries about whether or not this simple trick will burn belly fat it's gonna be really good if it's like like if that's what happens like the thing the thing trump's gonna be remembered for like is is being like well the thing the thing reagan's gonna be remembered for is being just like like 50 years ahead of his time before we're literally all entirely ruled by just reality TV stars. Whose wives are great at giving head. Did everyone already forget the Nancy Reagan throat goat discourse? Yes, I understand that she wrote throat goat discourse.

Everyone was so exhausted that we forgot. If you didn't catch this, it's a very well-known secret, and has been for like 50 years, that back before they got married, and probably after, Nancy was famous for giving the best blowjobs in Hollywood.

As Garrison tosses the cat every single episode so i disdain this discourse now yeah 2022 it's a year we're in it okay my last prediction is i actually do think this year is gonna suck slightly less 2021 did yeah mediocre now i this is probably the big one i'm going to eat shit on but like hopefully something you don't eat is gonna happen hopefully you're right about it so yeah i'm hoping um no yeah i think that there's a decent chance that we're that it's better um i it's at least in some ways the climate stuff as it nearly always will for the foreseeable future will keep getting worse but yeah i think there's actually a chance that COVID will get better, not because of any policy decision,

but because Omicron, literally 90% of human beings in the world get it, and those that survive, COVID stops passing on as much, which is kind of, vaguely speaking, what happened with the influenza and other epidemics. I will be probably foolish in making one more prediction that is like, around the fall, we will not see spikes as big as we saw this last year. I do think there will probably still be some, but I do think the numbers are going to be generally trending down after Omicron hits its peak. Just because how many people will get infected, how many antibodies plus vaccines will be circulating, and how many people who don't take the vaccine will already have died off. We're not saying that to be flippant or to be like, it's good.

No, but that's just what's happening. That's just what the world is that you have. It's fucked. Yeah. It's the world that we live in. I hate it. But I do hope and some slightly predict that we'll have less spiking numbers

around this next fall and winter as we did this current fall and winter season. I wouldn't mind ending on a note of appreciation for the fucking booster because we got it. You and I both garrisoned as did most of our friends and had just a shitload of COVID flying around us this whole season. COVID was everywhere.

I love my booster. A lot of infections and we were fine. Fine. That's great. One of my friends got COVID and her mom who they live in the same house did not like has not gotten COVID because they're wearing masks and they got the booster. So and for all my friends that did get COVID that had that were boosted. The booster, the vaccine did its job. You're not in the hospital. Double test positive on a rapid test and then test negative on a PCR, probably because by the time he got to the PCR, like the next day, his viral load was just so fucking low.

Get that third vax. The vaccine works. Who could have predicted? Who could have predicted that the things that are literally the entire basis of our modern concept of the value of human life continue to be very effective. All right. Well, that does it for us. Unplug, go spend time outside, touch grass, touch your mirror, like trying to go through it because you don, try to go through your mirror. What's real and what's not. See if maybe you were the digital messiah and you have been trapped in a simulation where you work at a food lion and you can break free of it.

But not fly anymore? Because now your girlfriend does the flying. He does fly with Trinity at the end. He does fly with Trinity, sure. Yeah. Just as we all can only fly with... With Carrie-Anne Moss. Well, with Carrie-Anne Moss. Yeah.

Specifically, who has gotten so much hotter as they've aged? All right. Well, that's the episode. Well, that's where we end. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories

inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, welcome to It Could Happen Here.

I am Robert Evans, and this is the show where we talk about how everything's kind of falling apart and how we might put it back together again in a way that works better than it did before. Or do something different that is even... anyway, whatever. It's a show about the future and about the messed up present. And as a result of that, one of the things we talk about a lot is self-sufficiency. We've had a number of episodes kind of covering the values of like replacing your lawn with food, guerrilla gardening, that sort of stuff. And one of the critiques we get is people saying, well, you know, that's never going to work on a large scale. It's never going to replace industrial agriculture or whatever. And that's perfectly true. But the point we're going for here and why we encourage these kind of resilience-building activities is because they do improve the ability of communities to resist when they need to resist and also provide opportunities by which people can reimagine their relationship to, for example,

the food supply chain or reimagine their relationship to their community and the kind of things that communities provide for each other rather than having them shipped in by Amazon. And when we start talking about that, when we start talking about improving community resiliency for things like a general strike or even potentially more radical stuff, things like, you know, a general strike or even potentially more radical stuff. One of the big issues that any community has to confront is not just food, but medicine. I do, and I'm sure a lot of other people have friends who cannot survive without medications that are very, like, reliant upon existing supply chains. And to some extent, even the stability of the government, you know, getting your insulin,

getting your medication for whatever kind of disease you have that needs constant medication. There's a bunch of different reasons why people are reliant upon the medical supply lines and upon the kind of pharmaceutical industry. And that's one of the big, when we talk about building more resilient communities, one of the big hurdles to jump. Well, today, my guest is someone who is working on bridging some of these problems. His name is Michael Laufer, and he is the founder of an organization called the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective. working on cracking certain pharmaceutical medications to allow individuals with resources that are generally available to people who are not rich or pharmaceutical companies to produce lifesaving medications. The number one thing you would have heard of from Four Thieves is the EpiPencil, which we'll talk about in a bit.

But first, Michael, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's exciting to be able to chat and talk with you and all the people surrounding you who are trying to just unfuck things a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And most of the conversation I want to have today is on the unfucking of things variety. But I do think we should start with a little bit of technical talk first can you give people an idea of what kind of medications you and other people in the collective have figured out how to produce um and what kind of resources and individual needs to be able to do some of this stuff sure so from a technical perspective, most of the things that we focus on are what's called small molecule chemistry.

And to kind of describe that blanketly, if you can draw the molecule on a cocktail napkin, it probably qualifies as a small molecule. If it's one of these things that like, you know, if you look at the diagram for the molecule, it's a protein, it's got big ribbons that are colored and stuff. That's a, that's a biochem thing. And it's a whole different set of problems. Now, the main foci that we've had have been surrounding access to abortion, access to abortion, access to HIV medications, access to hepatitis C medications, and access to reversal of drug overdose medications. So that's been sort of our main focus, but there have been a handful of others. The things that we tend to look for are, where are there things that there's a great need and there's a huge barrier?

And so you see those in those places a lot because the three main barriers that tend to pop up between somebody and access to the medication they need are either price or legality or lack of infrastructure. or lack of infrastructure. And typically the weirdness that comes up mostly surrounds price because of intellectual property laws and marginalization of people who suffer from particular ailments or seem to suffer predominantly from particular ailments. or seem to suffer predominantly from particular ailments. And so if you're poor and you're in a class of people that is seen as something not to be cared about because they're not a strong voter base, then the ability to move access away from those people and put in more barriers and raise prices

becomes easier to defend. So the first drug that we focused on was an anti-parasitic. Toxoplasmosis is a parasite that's pretty innocuous for most people. Yeah, it's the one you get from cats, right? Or is this not Gandhi? No, it is the one you get from cats. And it's a really fascinating parasite, too. It is, yeah.

If you ever dig into the behavioral biology of it, it's a really, really fascinating parasite. I probably have it. Yeah, I have three cats. i probably have it yeah i have three cats i definitely have it right and so and so it's not a big deal for those people but if you have a massively compromised immune system especially with people with hiv or advanced stages of cancer and that's why it was labeled sort of a you know hiv drug it's not it's a it's an anti-parasitic but it's used almost exclusively by people who are in advanced stages of cancer, uh, people with fairly compromised immune systems from HIV or

something else, and then pregnant women. Um, and it's not that big a deal though. If you have access to the medication, you can merely take it and eradicate it from the body. The difference was that something that was a short course of treatment, you'd take, I think, four doses the first time around, and then one dose each day subsequently for something like 10 days. And that's not a big deal when each dose, each pill was about $13.50. And then Martin Giacrelli jacked up the price to $750 a pill. And so we're like, well, this is ridiculous. So that was the first one that we went after. Then of course, access to abortion drugs.

That's a big one that's pretty topical lately. We released a video, I don't know, maybe three months ago on how you can make your own abortion pills without too much fuss. This would be mifepristone, right? Mifepristone and misopristol. So you can do it with just misopristol or you can do it in combination. combination. And when you do it with just the one, with just the miso, you have about an 85% chance of it working. And if you have both, it bumps it up to about 95. And what is the, like, when you're doing this, and we'll talk a little bit about the hardware, but like, what is the reagent that you have for this? Because I know that's been a big part of

some of the discussions is like, how do you get the things you make the medicines from, which is easier for some than it is for others? Sure. There are a couple of different ways that you can go about that. The interesting, but more difficult way, of course, is to do the chemistry from scratch, where, like you say, you get access to reagents, you do do some chemistry and you end up with the active pharmaceutical ingredient which we lovingly refer to as the api and then you package it somehow into a tablet or a pill or or some other means of ingress into the body um the instructions that we distributed skip the difficult part because misoprostol is an ulcer medication. And so for instance, if you have access to Mexico or are

in Mexico, it's kind of not a big deal because as an ulcer medication, it's over the counter and you can just go in and say, oh, you know, my grandmother can't get out of bed. She needs this ulcer medication. I need just a little bit of it to get her through the weekend. And then no problem. Not so easy in places where it's a little more controlled like the U.S. However, one amazing trick when looking for medicines, access to medicines that are generally blocked from people that the existing power structure tries to disenfranchise from access is you look and see if it's similarly used for other classes of person or being that the infrastructure does care about. So interestingly, you look for ulcer medications, you say, well, like, well, who else has ulcers that you know people might

think are important people that doesn't really come up and there are other ulcer medications that are a little bit better however there are a lot of really wealthy people in the united states and really wealthy people tend to keep horses and horses interestingly, 95% or something, or maybe more, some ungodly percentage of domesticated horses have ulcers. Now, why that is, I'm not entirely clear about, but my own theory is that it has something to do with taking a gigantic wild animal and putting it into a very small box for most of its life yeah it doesn't seem like the thing that horses evolved to do yeah so so that said people who are horse owners typically have to treat them constantly for ulcers and the best thing for that is misoperstol. And so you can get misoperstol powder in a tub from places that. Yeah.

Feed store or something. Yeah. I go to a feed store every week. I'm sure I could buy a bucket of this shit. Probably. So it comes in tubs. And the other thing that's great about it coming in a tub is that it's already in with a buffer. the other thing that's great about it coming in a tub is that it's already in with a buffer.

Part of the thing about misoprostol is that the dosage is in micrograms and that's very hard to weigh unless you have a really high precision scale. Even your good drug dealers generally don't have a scale that can do that. Right. So, but the magic is this is in a tub with a bunch of inert powder, and it's already mixed up to be homogenous. And so what you can do is you can do a little bit of back-of-the-envelope arithmetic, and you can measure out much larger quantities and know how much active ingredient you have and then pack that into a tablet. Wow. Yeah. pack that into a tablet wow yeah um i mean that makes so much sense and is also like

like the uh you have kind of the dark side and light side version it's kind of the light side version of all of those people buying up ivermectin for for nonsense it's like well no there's reasons to buy you know like ag uh uh livestock medication especially especially – I mean I have a lot of friends who took fucking fish antibiotics back in the day. And this is kind of a much more – using it in a much more rigorous way to provide people with something that can – is getting – it will be getting increasingly difficult to access in a lot of parts of the country. It's just such a smart way of approaching it, I think. Yeah. And one of the things that becomes philosophically a bit sticky is when you end up talking about the importance of independent management of one's own health and decision-making not coming from above,

there's this difficult moment that I've had kind of having to cop to the reality that if you're building mechanisms to empower people to have access to make decisions about managing their own health. Part of that entails realizing that that will also lead to a lot of people making what I might think are bad decisions, but that the important thing is that it doesn't matter what I think that people should not be controlled by other people. And if they make bad decisions, that sucks. And hopefully we can help that, but not lamenting the importance of,

or not backtracking, not having some sort of retrograde regret about offering more access, even if people misuse that access to mismanage their own health. Mismanagement of health happens no matter what, right? It happens constantly and people will ignore things that seem like they're bigger problems and don't get them addressed. And so I have to sort of retreat into this idea that more access to more tools is better.

And that's just the way of it. And yeah, the problem. Yeah. I mean, the problem with ivermectin isn't the problem. The problem is not that people have access to ivermectin. And so they're taking it in a way that is harmful to them. The problem is that people have been have had have been blinded by disinformation and so are making a horrible health care decision. The fact that they have access to veterinary medication is fine.

Right, exactly. And it's interesting that you say that because I have a friend at Doctors Without Borders, and they are starting a couple of pretty strong programs to try and combat misinformation because just from a metric standpoint, they look for sort of like what's killing the greatest number of people at the greatest rate in the worst way. And currently, the thing that's killing the most people in the worst way at the greatest rate is misinformation.

Yeah. And so, yeah, that's really the great danger. And one of the things I find really interesting about kind of what y'all have been doing, because obviously the question of how to fight the misinformation in the medical sphere is a much larger conversation without simple answers. When it comes to a question like, oh, hey, this pharmaceutical company jacked up the price by, what, 750% for this necessary medication for people – a lot of people who have HIV, what do we – the solution to that is simple. You find a way for them to get it without paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars per dose.

The question – some of the work y'all have done is with very mass-needed products like mythopristone like the epi pencil um where there's large numbers of people who need it but a lot of what i think one of the things i think is really cool is y'all are also working on hacking medications that are very niche like very very few people have this particular disease and so the medication is is the cost as much as a fully loaded toyotaoma, you know, in order to, sometimes far worse than that, because of this orphan drug act that got passed in the U S and equivalents

that exist in other places, you have all of these allowances that are granted to people who invent, I put in air quotes because really they just purchase the rights to it. These orphan drugs where when you talk about controls, it's kind of the most tragic incidence of that entirely, because what's happening is you've got somebody who has a very rare disease and in many cases you have something that's the difference between somebody who just cannot function and they're dealing with their life kind of moment to moment they're mostly cared for and if they have access to a particular medication,

then they can go through life in a fairly normal sort of way where they, they don't need to be in assisted living where they can do sort of basic things for themselves. And that, that seems so much more predatory. I mean, it's important, of course, you know, to look at things with that macro lens as well and say, what can do a lot of good for a lot of people? But then the sort of micro ethical lens needs to come out from time to time and say, all right, well, here's something that only affects a few hundred thousand people across the world. But these are people who could just go through life normally. If only they had access to a little bit of medicine.

Yeah. And the only reason that they don't is because of misplaced avarice or all, all avarice is misplaced because of avarice. Yeah. And you're, you're, you're providing individuals or a way for people to, to help individuals who have this problem and who can't, couldn't possibly afford

this because they don't have healthcare or something, a way to deal with these illnesses. And oftentimes, like even, even people who are insured don't get the medication that they need or don't get it at an affordable rate because it's not seen as critical. It's like, oh, well, there's a solution that's not as good, but it's much less expensive. So that's the only thing we're going to cover. And so, yeah. Yeah. And you're saying, well, it should be your decision whether or not this is something

you want to treat this way. And this is a way if you have're, this is a way if you, you know, have access, or this is a way for you to kind of, as you've been saying, like take your healthcare and your ability to get medication into your own hands and produce the things that you need without needing to beg an

insurance company or go fund me $85,000 or whatever. Yeah. Those go fund me is break my heart so much. Yeah, it's bleak. Especially when people say, oh, look how great, somebody got the money that they needed. And I say, look, I am happy that people get healthcare, but this should be entirely unnecessary.

And the fact that this comes up is criminal. Yeah, we can as a species produce this shit for less than the cost of like a lamp you know like why why don't why isn't this available um now i i and that's what i think is kind of so powerful about what y'all are doing and is that so so often we kind of get stuck in this like like, the horror of how bad healthcare is, of how fucked up the pharmaceutical industry is. And then we get our relief from that in these stories of people like crowdfunding so they can get their medication. And what you're saying is, well, what's actually much more inspiring than that is people just making, finding ways to make what they need.

Again, kind of the most popular, popular is the wrong word, the most press y'all have received, I think, is for the EpiPencil, which is an EpiPen is a device that you take, that is used when people are going into anaphylactic shock, which is when they have an allergic reaction that will kill them if untreated, generally. And it, you inject it into your muscles, or generally, like an EpiPen does the injecting, you just kind of put it in place. And it is a life-saving medication. When people need it, it's the choice between that and death. And they are very expensive. There is a company that owns the patent because of how the EpiPen actually does the injecting. The actual medicine is very cheap and very easy to make, but it's unbelievably expensive. And people die as a result of lack to lack of access um and you've provided a way using both kind of this thing called a bio lab that

people you've developed plans that people can build it for themselves in order to make this and also using a 3d printer you can make um an epi pencil which is a little less kind of a more analog version i think i guess you'd say uh no it's it's it's equivalent it's equivalent it works the same way the things that are different about it that um are critical the first one that you mentioned of course is that you can you can build it for a little over 30 us and you can reload it for about three3. Unlike the EpiPen, which is, I think it's about $650. And that might be for a pair, but even so. Yeah, it's two.

But the other two critical differences are that EpiPens are single use. critical differences are that EpiPens are single use. So you can't test whether it's faulty or not until you use it. Yeah. And there have been a lot of failures. In fact, there was a big EpiPen recall a bunch of years ago and there were just these tragic, tragic stories. Some guy had to watch his little kid die he had had a pair of epi pens the kid went into shock he used it the thing failed

he brought the other one the other one failed and they're in the air and you can't land in 15 minutes and the little kid died which is just and i'm sure there are dozens of dozens of stories like that that just happens to be one of the ones I know. So one of the things that's great about the EpiPencil is because you're putting it together yourself, and it only takes four parts, you can test it. You can make sure that it works as many times as you need to. You can dry run it with saline and just double check that it does what it's supposed to. And so it's safer.

So the fact that you can control it yourself, you can reload it, and you can test it, all of these things fix a lot of these immediate problems that come with it. And it still has the benefit that everybody wants from the EpiPen, which is that it doesn't require, um, you know, measurement or like knowing how deep to press the needle before you depress the plunger. All of that happens automatically and it happens very quickly. Um, and yeah, we, as you say, we got a lot of press for that because essentially a good timing.

We released at the same time that Heather Bresch was lying to Congress about why they had raised the price on the EpiPens. And so it was in the public eye. Yeah. And, and that's, that's a huge one being able to that, because that is – I mean, there's a tremendous number of people who rely on EpiPens. And I think the potential of that project is staggering. you know, when we talk about kind of the different people who are working on similar problems to you, there's also a group of people who are working on cracking insulin, being able to produce insulin.

Yeah, the Open Insulin Project is an amazing group of people. Incredibly important. Yeah, they're working on probably the largest scale public health crisis. I mean, in terms of queries that we get, I think we get people asking about insulin more than anything else. And I always say, Oh yeah, they're very, very bright people who are already working on this. Go talk to the open insulin. Um, and, and they're just amazing.

I want to move on. Cause I want to talk about kind of the more, um, uh, philosophical dimensions of some of this. But before we get into that, I'd like to, so like, you know, one of the things you and I have been talking about a little bit behind the scenes is I am not a technically savvy person, but I want to try and I'd like to be able to like produce an epi pencil. I want to like understand this at kind of and potentially be able to contribute in a more direct sense, in part because I'm curious, like, how doable actually is this for, I consider myself a pretty normal person when it comes to,

like, technical understanding, right? Like, I'm reasonably handy, but I'm not a chemist, I'm not a, I haven't really, I have no prior experience 3D printing or anything like that. I have no prior experience 3D printing or anything like that. What is required in terms of financial investment and what is kind of your general estimate in terms of time to get up to the level where you can start learning how to do some of this stuff? I think the barrier to entry is pretty low depending on how you want to start. As I said, there are different avenues to doing it. You can, of course, one of the greatest hacks, if anybody listening to this doesn't pick up anything else, here's the best hack in terms of getting access to medication. You have a medication you don't have access to for whatever reason.

Assuming it comes in a capsule form, you can merely go to a chemical supplier, purchase the active pharmaceutical ingredient, weigh it out, put it into a capsule, and you've made your medication. That's a very simple thing. That takes nothing more than being able to read a scale and scooping powder into little, you know, capsules. The next step up, there are things that you can do that are a little more involved. If you want to build an EpiPencil, again, this is three or four parts, depending on how you count. You take a needle from one syringe needle set on, you put it onto a different syringe needle set, and then you put it into this auto-injector that's designed for needle phobic diabetics. You load it with the epinephrine and you close it up and you're done. Then if you want to step into this a little

bit further, if something is so barriered for whatever reason that you can't get the actual ingredient then you might start messing around with our micro lab the micro lab i would say probably takes around a hundred dollars us to build um it but it's not super technical our latest version doesn't require any soldering. Everything snaps together, which is really nice. You can plug everything in. All the wires are just screw terminals, which is really convenient. And it takes some time, and you do have to load some code. But we're looking to release a new set of documentation in the summer.

That'll be very, very stripped down of here's your bill of materials. You can order all of this stuff. Here's how you can put the disc image onto the SD card that you put in and you should start it and it'll wake up and work independently. in and you should start it and it'll wake up and work independently um we had a video of our head hardware guy actually building the micro lab from just parts that were sitting on laid out on a table and i think all told it took him about 45 minutes oh. Maybe a little bit longer. But again, like, granted, this guy's a hardware specialist and he, you know, designed it.

So for somebody who's not done before, it might take an afternoon, but it's not a prohibitively long or involved project that, you know, would take you weeks to put together or any specialized understanding of, you know, biomedical engineering or anything like that. Now, I kind of want to move at this point, because I think that gives people an idea

of what's actually necessary. And they can go to y'all's website or look up, you have plans on a GitHub, if they want to kind of look at what's involved. And it's, some of it seems a little daunting to me, like looking at the construction of the bio lab, but that's going to be a project that I'll be engaging in over the next couple of weeks. So I'll keep people updated on how I do there. I want to move on to talk, Michael, about what you see as kind of the potential from kind of a revolutionary perspective, from a perspective of actually building dual power of this project.

And obviously you are in I think what would be called the early stages of this idea of kind of democratizing and decentralizing the production of life-saving medications. and decentralizing the production of life-saving medications. Although I guess you could argue in some ways it's kind of a return to more traditional attitudes about healthcare in a lot of ways. Yeah, there's a cyclic nature there. And in the sort of Zen mind, beginner's mind, we like to think that revolution is always in its beginning stages, right? That to say, over the past decade, roughly, looking at trying to find ways to give people more independent access

that doesn't require infrastructure to medicines and medical technologies. in medicines and medical technologies, the hope really is to create a certain amount of cultural shift. I remember at one point, a friend of mine who was a business school graduate asked me a very sort of like a business school type question where he said, how would you measure success of your project? And I said, well, we cease to exist as an organization. And he kind of had this moment of like, what do you mean? We shouldn't be pushing this, right? The idea is that eventually the concept of managing your own health is sufficiently normalized that it's not something that has to be explained between people, but somebody says, oh, yeah, I just did that up in my micro lab. did that up in my micro lab in the same way that when you look at the shift that happened between oh you know the the mid 80s and the mid 90s where computers were this strange scary thing that was you know were only accessible or usable by people who were very specialized something that

you know everybody knew about and everybody kind of had and everybody sort of used and the same sort of thing that happened between the period of time i don't know maybe 10 12 years ago and now with uh with 3d printing where like stereolithography and rapid prototyping was, again, the specialized thing that a bunch of people who were essentially out of the machine tool industry had started to spearhead. And now you say 3D printing, everybody knows what it means. In the same sort of way, I'd very much like to see a cultural shift where when somebody is unwell, that when discussions between people happen,

that instead of the, have you had that looked at, or you might instead hear from somebody saying, well, have you read up on that? To see people actually engaged in their own health and not going through this very typical process of outsourcing responsibility. Now, that's not to say that experts aren't good people with whom to consult, right? Experts aren't good people with whom to consult, right?

Yeah, we're not talking about replacing the idea of medical professionals who can help you understand what your health and diagnose and stuff. There is, again, this drastic difference between going to a doctor and essentially just throwing the problem on their desk and saying, fix it, call me when it's over, versus going to a doctor and saying, hey, I'd like to talk about this. I'd like to know more about what's wrong here. And I'd like to discuss what the options are and what seems best. what seems best, that would be great on a lot of levels. And then these questions of access to medication then become even more relevant. Because when you're talking with a doctor and the doctor says, okay, well, we could try this therapy, but your insurance won't pay for it. It's $300,000. You can say, all right, well, let's just do a little thought experiment. And if that fell from

a truck, what would I do with it? And then maybe you can go home and say, I'll call you and let you know how it goes. That's really my grand hope. And there are so many different ways that can play out. In fact, I'll tell you a hilarious story in regards to this, which was in 2016, I guess it was, when we presented at Hope. uh to try and ask him what he thought about what we were doing given that i was handing his drug out for free um and showing people how to make it and he didn't answer the phone when i called him then but he called me back a few hours later which was really hilarious we actually chatted for a while and the guy's i mean a little detached from reality, but he's no dummy. And when I sort of described what we were trying to do with the micro lab, he had some interesting insights. And he said, yeah, you know, one way I can imagine that working really well is if somebody with a little more knowledge of pharmaceutical medicine were to maybe build one of these and serve a small community i think that could be very efficient and i was like that's a good thought

you you chiseling bastard um yeah i mean that there's a degree which that's that's kind of how i see the most realistic potential this This is not every individual making all of their medicine but kind of like we had during the fires last year when our local and state governments during the heat wave this year like completely shat the bed. things like we are providing people with like, oh, it's a blizzard. We're providing people with firewood. We are providing people with cooling stations because of the heat. We are providing people with, they've just fled their houses. We have kits that have food and basic necessities so they can get through. Mutual aid collectives that are like, well, we are making, we specialize and we can produce this and this and this medication, like these three. And we have, and here's the information you can find online about our process so you know that we know what we're doing. And if you need these things, you let us know and we get them to you. And here's the information you can find online about our process so you know that we know what we're doing. And if you need these things, you let us know and we get them to you.

And here's different ways in which people can volunteer if you want to help engage in this mutual aid process, even if you're not someone who's going to be doing a lot of the technical stuff. Well, we need people to go pick up parts or we need people to do this and you can help us here. You know, I see a lot of potential for that. All of that. And I think – yeah. Yeah, and I think in a similar way right a lot of that sort of thing is already happening in other realms right where it's the sort of thing where you might be building something or you you see some project on github or whatever and some there are these stl files and you go oh gosh well i don't know how to do that but oh right xyz down

the street has a 3d printer i'll go ask her she's really good at making these things and you say hey look i have this thing would this be difficult to print and with their experience they can kind of look at it and be like uh no that that shouldn't be too hard um you know i i have some time this weekend maybe i can make that for you and in the same way you say hey it looks like i i seem to have this rare infection from whatever, whatever, or I have this odd condition. I wanted to try this medication because it might be really helpful, but it's not legal in this country. Do you think you could put this together? Again, you know, you call somebody and whoever's on the other line says, oh, yeah, I have a micro lab.

I can try and put a program together for that and see if I can make it for you. That sort of thing, I think, is a potentially really positive avenue for that sort of thing to proliferate. a cultural shift where the idea of medicine and medical technology not being something that is comes down from above from some authority but instead is something that's managed by people who are part of your community who you already trust mean, that's why going to a doctor is so scary. They seem to be the arbiter of your fate. They're going to tell you whether you're well or not. And that is just the truth. And much better to have it where people are making up their own mind

based on learning about their own health and consulting with people who can give them perspective. are making up their own mind based on learning about their own health and consulting with people who can give them perspective. And if there's more of that, and if it's closer to the person who's actually suffering, that I think will be on the whole much better. Yeah. It's this, the, and this gets tangled up in a lot of the more toxic things we've seen this year, but it's this understanding that with any given problem, if individuals trying to solve that problem have more autonomy and part of autonomy is knowledge, that's nearly always better.

better um the problem of course is that like we we get into this situation we are now where some people take i'm taking some people some people use i want to uh take control of my health care to you know do stuff that's nonsense and and that brings us back to the question of like yeah you need in for the quality of the information that you're getting is very important right because if if you're if you if the your research is some youtube video that has convinced you that you need to take this horse paste or something, then yeah, that's not good. But that doesn't change the fact that like with food, like with everything, that you need to survive. The more of a role you have in understanding that, deciding what to do with that, understanding where it comes from and how it is produced um not just like not only is that i think more satisfying as a human but it's it's also critical to to your well-being um it's critical to like on two levels right yeah on two levels, right? Yeah. On two levels, because not only...

When your health is taken from you, it doesn't deprive you of life, but it deprives you of participating in any of the acts that make life meaningful. Yeah. And part of that key thing that makes life meaningful is having a participatory role in the things that decide the trajectory of your life. And so when you go to the lengths of managing your own health, two things happen. First off, your health improves, assuming you've made good decisions and get lucky.

But second, you're also having a participatory role in your life, and that makes life more meaningful. And beyond just kind of the self-actualization benefits, from a perspective of actually enabling people to participate in the move for radical change in our society, one necessary element of that to any of the kind of things that we need is a belief in your own agency and power, and also a freedom from the kind of fear that comes from feeling helpless. And there is, I think, probably no feeling worse in the world than feeling completely helpless about a treatable medical problem. I mean, it's one thing.

I just went through this with my mom. When you get a disease where there's just nothing that science can do, right? Where like, yeah, you've got this cancer and there ain't shit anybody has for you, you know? That's one kind of horrible. But I think it's a lot less terrible than you. That's one kind of horrible, but I think it's a lot less terrible than you. I have this thing that we can deal with, but I either can't afford it or I don't know that I'll be able to afford it. I had a horrible, I lost my job and my healthcare in 2017, and so did a person who was

on my healthcare with me that I love very much. And I got know hired here in health care a couple of years later and it happened that a month before the the i started my health care at this new job this person who was on my health care with me um got diagnosed with a brain tumor and thankfully not a cancerous one but one that they had to take medication for that would have been, would have bankrupted us, you know, without the, without insurance. And thankfully it worked out fine. The timing worked out okay, but there's not a week that goes by that I don't. And it, it, it's, it's, it is something that makes you less willing to take risks, less willing to participate in, in things that, because you have in the back of your head, well, I have to, I have to keep this job. I have to keep this insurance. I have to.

Oh yes. Yeah. That, that is. That's another thing that I find so heartbreaking. There are so many people that I've, I've met totally outside of my activism who lament about working a job that they hate. And I say, gosh, well, you know, I mean, you consider just bailing on it and looking for something else and trying something else. And they have this total paralysis of saying,

but if I quit my job, I won't have healthcare. And, and, And mind you, these were people who were incredibly healthy. These were not people who had any regular visits to healthcare. They're just scared that if something comes up, they won't be able to handle it. And it's a perfectly well-grounded fear. But as you point out, what this does is it works as this sort of shadow oppressive mechanism to keep people from exploring, trying things, as you say, taking risks or just doing things that don't involve an optimization toward a stable state of maybe just like, yeah, maybe I'll start a small business and yeah, it probably will fail, but that will be a cool adventure.

And most people, so many people, maybe not most, but many, many people get just terrified into this state of inertial paralysis. Yeah, and it contributes to people being afraid to take to the street to protest the police because maybe they get arrested and maybe they get fired. And then, you know, maybe their kid can't afford their – like there's a thousand ways. ways, I think honestly, the fear of losing your healthcare is in some ways as great, a greater counter-revolutionary force than any law enforcement agency could hope to be because the fear is so much more immediate to so many people. Nobody talks about that. Yeah. And thank you so much for mentioning it because it's something that like, oftentimes I try

to bring up when I'm discussing things in public fora and and oftentimes people kind of raise an eyebrow at me and be like what's what's the big deal and i'm like no no like if you look two layers deep there's something that's really working against people being able to exercise protest and it's uh it's it's it's this really silent terrifying force that seems to underlie everything yeah and if you could alleviate that if it could get to the point where people are like yeah the hell with it you know i don't need a job to take care of me yeah then all of a sudden so many possibilities just blossom in the mind. Yeah. If you have, like, say if you're a parent who has a child with, you know,

who's insulin dependent, there's not a lot of difference in my mind between the fact that between someone holding a gun to your head and your boss being able to fire you and take away your kid's access to that insulin. There's not a tremendous moral difference to me. Oh, there's not a moral difference. I'd say getting a gun to your head is actually more likely to survive that.

You know, it's a lot safer. It's less inevitable. You could talk your way out of that. And yeah, I mean, there's whatever, but there are any number of things that might go wrong there,

but if somebody takes away your insulin, that's the end of the story. Yeah, I guess the more salient point than the comparison is just they're both acts of violence in every way that's meaningful, I think. They're both acts of violence. And one way that when I rail against intellectual property as a concept and intellectual property law, the example that i give is i say if somebody were dying and you knew how to save them would you ever not tell them how and just let them die say yeah oh no that idea belongs to me and i'm not going to share unless

you pay me like no human being that i think i've ever heard of would do that yeah and yet this happens every day because we've sort of carried these questions of copyright into patent and despite the fact they're hundreds of years old not applicable anymore, assuming they were ever applicable. And people just die because people say, oh, well, we can make more money if we do it this way. There's a fascinating thing going on there when you really drill into that idea, because I suspect there are a lot of people who are integral in propping up this system, both of kind of medical intellectual property and of just like the pharmaceutical industry, the way that it works, people in politics, huge numbers of people who are integral in some facet of keeping that going, who also, were they to see an individual in immediate medical distress, would never think of like getting their debit card number or whatever, like asking them without thinking attempt,

because that's what people do. And it's, I mean, this is where we get into kind of some of these more philosophical anarchist ideas about what hierarchy does and what these structures do, because structures enable people to participate in evil that they never would as an individual. Yeah. There's this easy route that many easy routes that pop up that allow people or force, I should say, force people to be displaced from their humanity in that sort of way where, yes, of course, you help somebody up off of subway tracks if they've fallen yes of course if somebody were drowning you drag them out

and save them and and yet just because it's a degree removed and it's mediated by an agency suddenly it's so easy to forget and ignore and be sort of complicit in yeah and i i just to go back around to what four thieves is doing and what y'all are doing it's one of the few projects going on right now that fits what my idealistic 19 year old brain thought the internet would be 16 15 like when i when it was when things were newer and a little less like oh this is like one of these days well this kind of shit's gonna happen um yeah and that is i think i mean that's that's not without value from again a revolutionary perspective the fact that it is pretty rad you know well i mean i i will not deny the fact that

it feels good you know there i i think that uh i think that we all grew up with that sort of think that uh i think that we all grew up with that sort of hope and belief that we were gonna open these new doors and there were gonna be these new possibilities and things that we had been reading about in science fiction were going to become real and and there's there's a great satisfaction in not just witnessing your childhood dreams become realities, but actually, you know, having a hand in it. It's, there's, there's something quite satisfying about that. I will. Yeah. I will admit. Well, I think that's a pretty good point to close out on today. I don't need to take up too much more of your time right now, Michael, but,

but as I told people, I'm going to be, I'm going to be trying to get into some of this because I find it just both fascinating and incredibly hopeful in a world where it seems like there are constantly forces conspiring to strip people of their ability to take control of critical aspects of their lives. You and your colleagues in this are trying to give people opportunities to take some power back for themselves. And I just think that's, I think it's pretty dope. Thank you so much. Yeah. And to your listeners, if there are people out there who like what we're doing and you want to support the project,

please go find somebody who needs your help but doesn't deserve it, and then go help them anyway. Yeah, yeah, that's always a good thing to do. Michael, anything else, anything else you want to kind of put? This is normally the section where people plug websites or projects or anything. You've got anything in particular you want to throw out there right now? Sure.

We're hoping to do a bunch of big releases in the summer. So look for those. In the meantime, we're always looking for help. So if you're out there and you'd like to be assisted in the project, please get in touch. There's the Contact Us page and the website. And by the way, this do not have to be a technical person. We're looking for, currently we're looking for writers. We have a lot of documentation that we need to do. So if you're out there and you have, you know, background

in language, then that would be great. If you're somebody who feels that you're entirely without skills, please get in touch. We have any number of endless small tasks that just need to be taken care of because we don't have enough people. So if you'd like to participate, we'd love to have you. Please get in touch. And in the meantime, keep each other healthy, keep each other safe. Thank you so much, Michael. Thanks so much for having me. 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. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Brass. Thanks for listening. Inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.