It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 19

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propaganda, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or whenever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives.

I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking.

It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you,

but you can make your own decisions. What's meta? My verse. This is, it could happen here, a podcast entirely dedicated to the metaverse, This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast entirely dedicated to the metaverse, which is the promise of the human future. On with me, as always, is my co-host, Mark Zuckerberg.

Hello. I don't know how Mark Zuckerberg talks. I'm not sure how. Yeah, I don't know whose voice you were doing. You could just do a data voice, I guess. But who knows? He sounds like nothing. Like no one. Like could just do a data voice, I guess. He sounds like nothing. Like no one.

Like the absence of a soul. He sounds like the noise when it's dial up. That's his voice. Yeah. That's what's going on inside his head at any moment. When he's not actively making the internet worse, it's just a dial tone in there. Awesome.

Garrison, what are we talking about today well yeah we're gonna be talking about the metaverse and how how it's different from what people talk about it as and yeah it's it's gonna be it's gonna it's gonna touch on a variety of things split up into two parts. But first, I would like to paint you a picture with words, a word picture. So you're... A wicture. A wicture, yeah. You will.

You're walking through your favorite grocery store. There's, you know, carts passing by, horrible music playing. The lighting is white and, like, overexposed and underexposed at the same time it's it's it's hard it's hard to see and this uh this like a person who looks like an employee keeps keeps popping up and trying to take you to different sections of the store you're trying to just ignore her it's very annoying all you need to get is the stuff you have on a little list, and it's awful. Eventually, you get so fed up with this whole experience that you go to where the wine bottles are,

you take them out, and you arrange them into a giant penis on the floor, because that's the only thing you can do, because you're not actually in a store. You're in your living room, and you have a horrible headset on, and you're trying to do shopping in a virtual grocery store. And that's the actual kind of scope of what we're going to be talking about today is virtual marketplaces and how they interact with seemingly real marketplaces. Yeah, I'm sure this is inspired by there were a couple of videos that dropped recently, one of them from, I think, Walmart. It was not recent. We're going to be

talking about it so yeah so a couple a couple days after the 2020 new year a video went viral across the social medias ranking up over like 11 million views on twitter um and it was titled how walmart envisions shopping in the mult in in the metaverse now so what followed was like two minutes of an embarrassing like vr jank including like throwing around virtual gallons of milk from your cart into a virtual fridge. Many dunks were made, fun was had, but what few people probably realized is that this wasn't a Walmart Metaverse test store. This was actually a five-year-old tech demo from before non-Neil Stevenson fans even knew what the term metaverse meant. So a few years back, a tech company called Mutual Mobile partnered with Walmart for a

project set to, quote, reimagine retail with virtual reality. Now, that sounds very fancy and important, but considering this was five years ago and you're not hearing about it until now shows how impactful this thing actually was. The first stated goal of the tech demo, according to the Mutual Mobile website, was to impress influencers at South by Southwest 2017. So just like the so-called metaverse is now, this was largely a promotional project and a way to attract investors. This was never actually a serious thing. I'm going to say it right now

south by southwest was always one of the stupidest things in the world um and when it comes back it will be still because it's stupid it's a stupid place for the most insufferable people in the world to come and talk about technology some people also listen to music that's fine so yeah for for the for the experience itself they used an original oculus uh rift and programmed roughly like four minute linear um expedition into a barren hellish digital walmart where you pick up and throw it did it did sound exactly my favorite thing about this video is they were clearly using the audio of some sort of like shooter game because it was awful like things would change it would sound like you were in fucking Doom going through a portal.

It was extremely funny. It was bad. It sounded like hell. You'll pick up and throw fake wine bottles into your blue digital cart, and the whole thing ends with a fake drone delivering an $800 TV that you fake purchased. It's not great. What Mutual Mobile and Walmart were trying to do, they have a statement on their website back from 2017.

They said that Walmart envisioned unveiling a fully virtual shopping experience that puts shoppers inside the store without ever leaving their homes. To attract customers and dispel the misconception that they're not as advanced as their more digital counterparts, brick-and-mortar establishments are not only accelerating investments in areas like web and mobile, they're also exploring the very edge of emerging technology. Walmart to virtual reality is a case in point. Potential shoppers can virtually pick up products, read labels, talk to virtual associates, and fill their shopping carts. But the goal wasn't just to

create something interactive. Walmart needed something that showed the potential of VR in retail while putting them ahead of the competition. So, I mean, this was, like, this was 2017, so this was kind of ahead in some ways, but also ahead in the ways that it's kind of showing how not useful this example is. So, obviously, like, this five-year-old video resurfaced now due to Zuckerberg and Epic Games, you know, forcing an astroturfed metaverse into the cultural zeitgeist, coupled with their, you know, conflation of anything VR to the legendary metaverse, right? Because VR does not equal metaverse, nor is it necessarily vice versa. But now these terms are getting used so interchangeably that someone can stumble across this video and be like, oh, look at this Metaverse store when it's not. It's just a VR tech demo. Yeah, the Metaverse, in order to be

like the thing that people have been imagining through cyberpunk since the 90s, it needs to be persistent and interact directly with the real world in a number of ways. We'll get into what Metaverse could be in the future in terms of like the it could happen here idea.

And then not just a metaverse, but a series of metaverse is what they could be and how that kind of negates the original idea of it in the first place. But when asked by Vice News about the resurgence of their Walmart project, Mutual Mobile replied, of their Walmart project. Mutual Mobile replied, the vision of a virtual shopping experience we helped Walmart realize back in 2017 stands validated in the metaverse era of today. This whole experience has only encouraged us to keep experimenting, innovating,

and leading the charge with cutting-edge tech. So, I mean, considering most of the virality of this was people joking about it, I, yeah, sure. Okay. Okay, Mutual Mobile. Good luck with that. So a few days after the Walmart video went viral,

rumors of another big box store going metaverse started to circulate. Again, accompanied by a video of a possible 3D metaverse storefront. Reports emerged starting in india claiming that h&m had announced that it would offer its customers a three-dimensional shopping experience in its virtual store inside the metaverse via something called now i don't know if it's kik city or seek city um i'm not really comfortable saying either of those things because they sound weird but i'm gonna going to go with Seek City. That's a little bit better.

It sounds like it's a slur. I know it's not, but it sounds like it's a slur. It sounds like it's a slur. So I'm going to say Seek, but it's S-E-E-K. Yeah. So this account on Twitter called SeekVR shared the following from its official Twitter account. Shopping in the metaverse with SeekCoin, concept VR store presented to H&M by Seek, creates mainstream use cases for SeekCoin and scaling virtual reality beyond games.

So, I'll get into what Seek is in a bit, but the report said that customers would be able to walk through the store, choose the apparel they wanted to purchase in the Zeek City universe, although the clothes could only be worn in the digital environment. A payment would be made with a Zeek coin, and customers could have the opportunity to order the same apparel from H&M's physical stores later. But you're buying two separate things. One of it's the digital skin, One of it's an actual real thing. So what is Seek?

Seek was launched in 2018. It's a metaverse coin project built on the Ethereum blockchain. And their goal is to connect artists, athletes, and other digital content creators directly with their fans in virtual worlds. Seek's NFT marketplace is designed to enable real ownership of digital items. The only way in which I would actually want that is if it's me having a very sexual Zoom

chat with Pit. You know what? We don't need to. Garrison, please continue. Okay. Quoting from Seek's website, Seek currently offers a range of immersive VR experiences within Seek City, including theater, concert arenas, sports complex, hangout lounge, and more. Wow, it's all the things you can do in your real home, but weird and on the internet. I really hate it.

This is horrible. I see a potential appeal for people who are like out in the sticks or in parts of the world where they're not. They feel like they're very politically or whatever disconnected, which is the same thing the Internet already does. I'll talk about it being in VR will make it better. I don't know. I lived in the middle of nowhere and relied on the Internet to be social. And I don't think I would have wanted to change the Internet in for this because it sounds. Yeah. Anyway, I'll talk. I'll talk about use cases in a sec. But yeah. I would have wanted to change the internet in for this because it sounds... Yeah, anyway.

It sounds gross and weird. I'll talk about use cases in a sec. But yeah, so end users will be able to use Seek Token to make purchases, vote for content, control programming much more after token launch. Seek VR in partnership with Universal Music can realize live performances of world-famous artists such as Bon Jovi, Lady Gaga, U2, Sting, and many more can take place on this platform. So Seek is like, it's kind of this

startup, but it's been around for a while. It's trying to do like, you know, virtual venues inside the metaverse. They do have contracts with Universal. So it's a mix of this coin. So it's a mix of this cryptocurrency also trying to use this cryptocurrency in this world they're trying to build up. Their roadmap to Metaverse right now, first thing is like payment integration. So using SeekCoin.

They want SeekCoin to be the coin for everything in the Metaverse. They want all of Metaverse to be based off this thing that they invented called SeekCoin. They want SeekCoin to be the coin for everything in the metaverse. They want all of the metaverse to be based off this thing that they invented called SeekCoin, because it'll make them money. Next thing they want to do is create a creator-enabled ecosystem. So, kind of copy the content creator thing we have right now,

port that into the metaverse, but again, have everything you can invest in your creators so you can vote on what they do using Seacoins and all of, we talked about like personal ownership in the previous episode, but then a lot of it, you know, they have like an NFT marketplace, avatar marketplaces, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of the stuff is built around like concerts, you know, venues, you know, a lounge,

movie theaters where you can do stuff in VR. That is, like, that is the main thing that Seek is trying to do. They do have this one quote somewhere. Oh, yeah, the future milestones, so after they achieve this Seek metaverse, where everything is ran through Seek, all of, like through Seek. Whether you're on Oculus, whether you're on Vive, all of it gets run through Seek. It's one metaverse. Their future milestones are

quote, a VR space academy. They do not say what that means. Keek Studios, again, kind of unclear. I'm guessing original content. And then the last one is a Blockchain Metaverse Alliance. Those are their three big future milestones after they get their... Wait, what was that last one?

Blockchain Metaverse Alliance. I mean, this was like in the Facebook thing too, right? The idea that we're going to integrate NFTs. But it was also clearly just like they tossed that in there on the Facebook one. There was no evidence they'd thought seriously about NFTs or blockchain. It was just had gotten big while they were preparing the thing. So they tossed them in there. I get the idea, right? Like the thing that they keep pitching with this is that you'll be able to have an item in one game that is yours. The company doesn't own it.

You can take it to other games, which anyone who makes games will tell you is fucking nonsense. Something like that might be vaguely possible in a metaverse where everything was forced to use the same engine and everyone was also forced to abide by a bunch of strict rules by Facebook. That's probably violating antitrust laws. And also, it seems like a ridiculously Sisyphean task with no real benefit.

I don't think anyone's going to do it. But I'm guessing that's what they're referring to when they want to jam the blockchain up in the fucking metaverse. Like, what else could it be? The blockchain metaverse alliance. All of the blockchains in the metaverse is going to line into...

Yeah, they want to put all of the metaverse stuff into one blockchain. Only you can wear this shirt in the metaverse. yeah all of the blockchains and metaverse is gonna line into yeah like they want to put all of the metaverse stuff into one you can wear this shirt in the metaverse yeah so just like the real world the freedom the freedom of the internet can't you feel it the ever-expanding possibilities i do love because they keep talking about within the context of metaverse games like you'll get to unlock a character that's just yours and nobody else can play it and he'll have special abilities that means he wins all the time it's like why would people play that game like there's a fucking i think it was business insider someone's article talking about what how neat it would be for games to work this way and like think of all the money you'd make people wanting to watch your character win it's like people don't want to just like watch a guy who's structurally unable to lose

because he he bought the right character in a racing game win every race that's not no one's going to pay to watch that do you understand what people watch races for like no yeah anyway it's all nonsense let's hear from our good friends at our products and services before we come back and talk more about Seek Coins, I guess. I don't know. Yay! All right. We are back. So, yeah.

Seek Coins virtual reality spaces run on smart contracts through the Byance smart chain, and they they run through the Ethereum blockchain. So there's about 744 million Seek coins in supply. The maximum supply capacity is capped at 1 billion coins. Seek coins peaked at $1.16 a year ago after launching at around $0.04. They're after launching it at around $0.04. They're currently being traded for around $0.60. So that's what actual Seek coins are doing. Like, people do use this.

It's not many people. They do have these contracts with Universal Music. But before this H&M thing, I never heard of Seek coins. So two days after the rumors began circulating that H&M was partnering with Seek, H&M said, nope, we are not doing this. But they did not close the door on future possibilities. They said, we'd like to confirm that H&M is not opening a store in the metaverse at this time.

We're also not collaborating with Seek. So the official Twitter account for Seek subsequently clarified later on that the store that they were doing was just a concept that was presented to H&M and not a launching virtual store yet. But they do say that they're in discussions with H&M to make this a reality, but it's not a reality as of now. So this kind of begs the question, like, what about a 3D digital space is superior to a 2D digital space for simple tasks like shopping online? So once you start, you know, unfolding questions like this about the Internet, metaverse, AR, VR, there are more the internal sides to this than you would have initially estimated um but first off before we kind of have this discussion we should split this

into two categories one for shopping for like real physical items that you plan on like receiving in person and then digital items that don't physically exist and are just just on your computer and monitor so obviously like there's no clear advantage in most cases to traversing an isolated virtual environment in order to order food, as opposed to just scrolling through a web page. But once you expand out of the confines of VR's sensory deprivation, 3D technology in AR, so augmented reality, does actually have some useful prospects, including some that are already in use. Amazon and Ikea, for example, have options on their prospective websites and apps that can project furniture options into your living space. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that has some future, I think.

Yeah, so currently this is being done on your phone screen, but an AR glasses application of this would actually serve its purpose quite well. Sure. That seems like a thing people would want. Yeah, the phone screen version is pretty mediocre. And that's kind of the thing. The place we're at, we make fun of this stuff a lot because most of it's nonsense. There's a lot of potential in some of these ideas, but there's potential for like on, and the same level that the air fryer has potential where it's like a thing, a bunch of people will buy,

but it's not, none of this yet is stuff that's going to completely change. Like, yeah, you might get a few million people to, to get these glasses and, or this app made this glasses for a couple of reasons, but who would use this,

this app to like help plan out how they're setting up their houses. You might get a few million people who do that. It's not going to be like an iPod or an iPhone or like Facebook. No one's had figured that out yet. There's some neat products that are going to be valuable, but we're still in the stage where nobody's figured out fundamentally what people want from this, as opposed to tiny specific needs. In the same way that there was a number of futurists who quite accurately figured out with a smartphone, like, oh, people want a thing that will give them access to all of the knowledge and ideas in the world and also let them yell at anybody

anytime they want. That's something that is going to be incredibly successful, and it has, and it's changed the entire world. Zuckerberg was like, people want to be able to be racist faster. And by God, we wanted it. And that was huge. I don't like these are, it's a good idea. Like, yeah, let people scope out how their room is going to look when they're shopping or whatever through AR. But we haven't yet hit that. This is going to change the world. Because being slightly at using Ikea will not change the world. Yeah, I think as an avid air fryer hater, I do think comparing Metaverse to the air fryer is actually a very apt comparison.

I love my air fryer, which I love to say to Garrison. I know, Garrison hates it when I use the air fryer. I love my air fryer. Anti-air fryer action is my new tattoo. They screech like the person at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They do.

But my goodness, do they cook my food faster. They air fry it. Fry it with the air. Wow. Almost like it's impossible anyway um mutual mobiles uh digital marketing strategists uh talked with vice after the walmart video went viral and he explained that like the demo was made to show the potential virtual reality

and shopping experiences that they can have for you know different people um including its including its ability to connect, like, elderly people or people with disabilities to a shopping experience from the comfort of their own home, something that he thinks might even be, you know, attractive to people who have been through several rounds of COVID quarantine. And I can kind of understand this last argument. You know, during early quarantine, I definitely used my VR headset more often than I had before. And with our alienated capitalist world, I can see the use of walking around a digital store if you're stuck at home due to

something like a plague or if you have a physical or mental reason that makes going to a store difficult. Yes, this can help that, but also this is always very reliant on how these types of stores are set up and how these stores like affect your brain it's like a big part of going to the grocery store what it's designed to do is make it so that we're not just following a

shopping list there's like a structured joy of discovery everything about the design of the store is to get you to buy things you didn't think you needed before you walked in and were trained from birth to like to find this process pleasurable so in that way walking around a vr like walmart or h&m might actually make some people happy despite that being sad and dystopian if you stop and think about it right like because that's that's actually like it's a it's a very capitalist thing but it does make us happy because that's that's what we've been trained to do since we were babies. So there is that side of it in terms of like, yeah, I can see if I really don't want to leave the house, but I want to get the experience

of walking through a place, maybe I will walk through a Target to get groceries. I don't know. Some people maybe might do that, but otherwise, you know, it's much it is much simpler and easier to just scroll through a 2D thing on a Web page and do the things you need. That's the thing.

Like, it's like, yeah, I mean, absolutely. Because I when I was making fun of one of these videos, somebody like called it out as being ableist and was like, yeah, this is this as for a disabled person. If they can use this, they can use Amazon. And like as a person who sometimes I don't shop for groceries on Amazon, but I've shopped for groceries online, it's fine. It's everything it needs to be. You can get your groceries online and the metaverse is just going to make it weird and off-putting and unnecessarily complicated. Because at the moment, I can get groceries with my phone while I'm jogging or as I'm sitting in traffic or as I'm like sitting in traffic

or like while I'm on a Zoom call listening to Garrison talk about the metaverse as opposed to putting on a headset and like doing the same thing basically as driving there, but more expensively. Anyway, it's dumb. Are you grocery shopping right now? I am ordering 1,700 cans of Zevia and 40 pounds of raw beef. Love your best life. That's a normal week's worth of food for me. That's a lot of Zevia.

And that's literally like two days for him. See, but Robert, you could be doing this while wearing a bucket on your head and walking around a fake store. I could wear a bucket on my head to the real store. They can't stop me. I usually wear a bathrobe. This is the first half where it's like, you know,

buying actual physical items that you plan to receive in stores. You know, furniture, this actually kind of makes sense. Food, it's a little bit iffy. The only kind of consideration there is if people want the mental effect of walking around a store, if they find that pleasurable, then it's a thing. But, you know, it's way more efficient to just scroll through your phone.

As for the other side, buying virtual items, whether they be, you know, NFTs, video game skins, or super special exclusive VR hangout rooms, I don't give a fuck how this works. If you want to walk around a VR mall to buy your VR art and your VR clothes, knock yourself out.

I buy Sonic the the hedgehog games we all have our weird things we do that don't make any sense yeah if that's if and that's you these grocery stores are just gonna be like the 700 weirdest people in the country masturbating as they buy wine and milk i that's the thing robert i was when i was when i was doing the digital picture in the beginning i i had two scenarios one where you align the bottles into a dick the other one i was gonna say you'd take off your pants and start masturbating and i decided not to do that one so i'm happy that you brought it up because that was the right call because yeah that is the actual use case for this is that someone's people are gonna be walking around these fake walmarts

just all jerking off that's what's gonna happen they're gonna have this animation of a real real female employee of theirs who like pops up when you do something you're not supposed to do and explain something to you and it's gonna be impossible to remove initially and people are going to turn it into a whole weird horny thing and like they will appear in all these circumstances it's gonna go it's going to be the only thing that goes viral like it's gonna be the only thing people remember five years later about the first of these. I'm going to circle back to this towards the end of part two, but this is the actual way to handle the

metaverse, because we're going to, this thing is going to be forced on us one way or another. We're going to have a form of it. And honestly, the best thing we can do with it is either ignore it or, maybe more attractively, is to fuck with it like that's gonna be the thing that's gonna be the thing to do there was um an article a few days ago

that uh the headline is final fantasy porn interrupts italian senate zoom event so someone someone joined in and started playing porn from final fantasy 7 yes i. And like, this is the thing to do. This is the way that we need to do it. If there's going to be dumbass meetings on the Zuckerberg metaverse, people need to go in and make it weirdly horny. Yeah, Garrison, I could not agree more. That's the, what you need to do,

citizens of the internet, is look up something awful, Habbo, H-A-B-B-O, hotel. That's the kind of shit that we need to be doing in fucking, in the, there was basically a children's video game. It was an early kids MMO and a bunch of weird adults in something awful decided to create an unsettling cult of people who all looked identical and marched around doing all of these weird unsettling things in a children's game it was very fun um like or or like uh in uh in second life

when it was the new big sexy thing there was this was very self-important tech writer investor type person who was doing a q a and people just like animated thousands of floating penises going around this is this is going to be the thing This is what we're going to have to do because if it's going to be this horrible corporate hell, the only way to deal with that is to make it unusable for everybody so that

it doesn't get used. And the way to do that is by putting dicks everywhere. Dicks and boobs everywhere. If Joe Biden ever decides to do a multiverse presentation or if one party Biden ever decides to do a multiverse presentation, or if one party or another has, decides to do a multiverse debate, it is everyone's moral responsibility. Civic,

civic. Yeah, it is your duty. This goes beyond civic. This is as a citizen of the human race, you know, as a member of this species, you have to try to find a way to fuck it up for them.

So, nothing could be more important. So, yeah. So if so if you're buying digital items that you never plan to receive in person, I do not care how you do it. Knock yourself out. We all have our weird things. I buy Sonic DLCs.

People do World of Warcraft. If you want to get an art piece you can only hang in your digital room, that sounds miserable, but have fun. Yeah, I used the internet to order very off-putting danish cheese product oh yeah that did happen that was off-putting it was weird it was like you you tried to trick yourself into liking it when you were eating it though i i don't remember

not liking it because i ate a good amount but i've had the second cube sitting around and i've had no desire to open no desire yeah anyway so i didn Anyway. So I did not like it. I just, I don't know that I ever want to eat it again. I love that for you. Quality audio content. So here's the thing. I have not actually been talking about the metaverse. Nothing I've mentioned thus far actually is the metaverse and doesn't have really anything to do with the metaverse besides the technology of VR and AR.

You know, it turns out companies like Facebook, Epic, Microsoft, and Valve, the way they talk about the metaverse is kind of all a big lie. It's not metaverse. It's an astro-turfed, top-down marketing scheme to turn more of you into data and to create viral marketing. Instead of an interconnected

solution to the alienated bubbles of Web 2, it's just a social media network that encompasses all of your vision and encourages even more digital alienation and less in-person socialization hey kids you know the worst stuff about the internet what if it was the only thing about the internet what if it was accompanying everything you see instead of just a computer screen it's like all of the the gaming ceos who are talking about the promise of nfts and like there i think it was the um one of the guys who runs reddit i think it might have been alexis

ohanian or whatever their name is uh who said that like in five years 90 of games will be nft based because people don't like wasting their time and not getting compensated for it they're like do you know what a game is that's not why people people play games. Do you know what a game is? So I'm going to talk more about Metaverse as big tech or just bigger tech in part two. But this will be wrapping up part one of the digital storefronts. And then we'll get into some more kind of applications of this and how we're actually seeing it in the second half. So, Robert, do you want to go buy a virtual block of Danish cheese? No. I did when I was hanging out on top of a mountain the other day.

I ran into a guy flying some drones, which I normally don't like, but this guy had a VR control rig for his very nice drones. Oh, yeah. Those are fun. That seemed kind of dope. I might get into that shit. Sure. But no, I have no desire to shop.

I like going to the grocery store. Yeah. I do as much of my shopping that way as possible because it's soothing and nice and I think very human to go be around other people to get food. Yeah, and things like the pandemic where that becomes harder,

I think that is where the use cases for the digital stores actually come in, like theoretically. If it could deliver that feeling, that soothing, which it all just looks deeply off-putting. The problem is that it's stuck in the uncanny valley, so it's not pleasurable to be in those digital spaces. not pleasurable to be in those digital spaces yeah uh because you're even though it's being marketed as a solution to alienation it's just more alienating uh because it's because it's it's like very clearly exposing the alienation that we try to avoid um so it falls right in the middle of the uncanny valley and it's not pleasant yeah but we we we will talk more about that in part two if you want to follow the show on the social medias that is CoolZoneMedia and HappenHerePod

you can keep up with my tweets I don't know what I do on Twitter anymore but that's HungryBowTie and you can harass Robert Evans at IWriteOK that's the show do it or I'll kill you no welcome i'm daniel thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

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as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture. Música, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories,

struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme, laughs, and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real

people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

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

Hi, I'm Mark Zuckerberg. Welcome to the podcast where we talk about the metaverse. I enjoy barbecue sauce. And that was my Mark Zuckerberg. That was pretty good. That is SNL worthy. Thank you, Garrison. Because it's so bad.

All right. That was my only goal. This is part two of the metaverse that never was here at It Could Happen Here. And we're actually going to be talking about the It Could Happen Here portions of this. I can't wait until we launch a metaverse show and pretend we never said all this shit. It's going to be the best garrison. You know, Robert, remember when I was talking about Seek City and all the virtual venues?

Yeah. I just got a message from our beloved parent company, iHeartMedia. Oh, good. They plan to extend shows into the metaverse. Oh, great. Which was announced a few weeks ago. Well, you know, Garrison,

I've always thought that the metaverse was a pretty good idea. I think we will talk about how the metaverse could be cool later in this episode, but then we'll explain why it won't be. But yeah, iHeartMedia did announce Web3 in the metaverse are the newest consumer platforms for iHeartMedia. So, sorry, I was just working in a Matrix 4 reference there. Oh, yes, I see what you're doing there, Garrison.

Thank you. Anyway, so I'm guessing for non-Neil Stevenson fans, many of you probably had not heard of the metaverse before last year. VR, sure, you've heard of VR. AR, maybe. But probably just as niche gaming technology. Not like a massive successor to the internet. Primarily three companies,

Facebook, Epic Games, and Valve, the later two being mostly gaming and software companies, kind of all decided the best way to push their niche VR and software technology into the zeitgeist was with this flashy new marketing.

And it kind of worked. Metaverse is now in many more people's personal lexicon. But it's not really the metaverse. Like the Walmart thing, it's a way to attract investors and drum up free press, but it's still the same old VR and AR applications of the technology. None of these companies are trying to make metaverse

a thing that we actually want or working towards an interconnected, immersive, 3D, open-source successor to the internet. Yeah. media online gaming and all of like the you know ease of life apps all accessible through the same digital space under the same digital economy that that thing isn't happening people like that's not what people with money are actually pushing towards even though they're still using the metaverse term yeah um there was a great piece in wired that came out last month as a part of their Matrix VR issue. It was called The Metaverse is Simply Big Tech But Bigger. It was by Cecilia D'Antazio. It's a wonderful piece, and I'm going to say a quote from it right here. By the mid-2000s, it became clear that money wasn't in building individual websites that we could access on the open web.

It was making information sorters, channels, aggregators, and publishers open enough to scale with user-generated content, but closed enough to reap enormous profits. This was the evolution from Web 1 to Web 2. For nearly 30 years, the gravity of the consolidation has pulled the cyberspace together under the auspice of fewer and fewer corporate titans. The freaky little planets get drawn together, collide, and make bigger planets collide again, and make stars or even black holes. Facebook eats Instagram and WhatsApp. Amazon swallows two dozen e-commerce sites, and you're left with these few supermassive

players controlling and appropriating the celestial motion of billions of users this is how big tech got big end quote so yeah like now we have all of our isolated toolboxes and they really fight against any inter-platform integration you have you know microsoft office and they're they're like and their Office suite. You have Google Workspace. You have Apple's own AirDrop, Apple Pages, and Final Cut Pro, plus the nightmare that is Adobe's subscription tools. Google wants you to spend all day checking your Gmail, traveling with Google Maps, watching videos on YouTube, and browsing on Chrome. Meanwhile, your friend texts you via iMessage, uses Apple Maps, and calls his mom on FaceTime. Not a single person

in the world uses Microsoft Edge. That is true, but this form of the internet is the one that the metaverse is growing out of. Metaverse is just a way for tech companies to add VR and AR and the accompanying extra surveillance and data collection to

their own portfolio of proprietary products. But in order for that to happen, they need to convince us that we need headsets for the next evolution of the internet. So it's not surprising that Facebook and Zuckerberg were the first ones to crack this thing wide open. They own not only four of the top six social media platforms, but also Oculus, which is the most popular manufacturer of VR hardware.

VR has been relegated to niche gaming technology for like basically two decades, and Zuckerberg decided the best way to sell more of his headsets and software was to give the tech a fresh new paint job and call it Metaverse. And like, it's sort of working. There were approximately 9.4 million shipments of VR headsets in 2021, 3.6 million of which were done during the holiday season, after Facebook's big Metaverse event. It's suspected that the Quest 2, which is made by Oculus, aka Facebook,

makes up for more than three quarters of all those headsets sold. So the demographics data isn't explicitly available, but probably a lot of kids received these things as holiday gifts. Oculus Meta Facebook does not release its VR headset sales figures, but the Oculus app that you need to have to make the headset work shot to the top spot in Apple's App Store on Christmas Day. That was the first time it's ever been the number one app on the App Store. So, indicating a spike in headsets received as holiday gifts. They're selling a lot of headsets. Oculus is selling

a lot of their things. I got one a few years ago, but now there's more and more of them circulating. But, you know, it's still all relegated to VR. It's not actually metaverse, arguably the closest thing we have to the actual metaverse

is stuff like Roblox and Minecraft now that is still not, that's not immersive 3D, you're still looking at it through a 2D screen but it is software that gives users development tools to create their own projects within this shared

3D space. What separates these things, and basically all attempts for making the metaverse, from being the ideal metaverse is still the proprietary aspect. Everything is isolated islands. You can't take your Roblox game into Minecraft, right? It still is isolated to their specific things. But, you know, nevertheless, Roblox's CEO described the company as the shepherds of the metaverse in early

2021, and he is kind of right. That's not totally inaccurate. I'm going to quote again from the Wired piece by Cecilia D'Antazio. If Big Tech's unchecked growth continues,

there will be multiple metaverses, if there are any at all. Each will be interoperable under one tech giant's giant umbrella, the same way Apple is both a walled garden and a convenient habitable terrarium for its dedicated consumers. Users love the

seamlessness of Apple's proprietary operating system, the ambiguity of iMessage, and Apple presumably loves the 30% commission it can charge on developers who sell apps in their app store. So Epic Games is the other big Metaverse proponent right now. You know, they were, they were actually making announcements about Metaverse a few months before Facebook did. Um, and the, the CEO of Epic Games, Games, Tim Sweenley, has been outspoken

against a metaverse ran by a big tech giant like Apple. But that's not really genuine, because his version of the metaverse entails a cyberspace made accessible through Fortnite and Unreal Engine, two things owned by Epic Games. So like, it's not like he's not actually sincere about creating an open source thing. He just wants to be the one to control it. He's just upset that he thinks someone else might. He tried to sue Apple

last year and failed. And the California judge told him that Epic Games seeks a systematic change which would result in a tremendous monetary gain and wealth. The lawsuit is a mechanism to challenge the policies and practices of Apple and Google So it's not actually about him being against big tech giants and being against a big tech giant-ran metaverse. It's just that he doesn't like that he won't be able to make as much money with it if multiple tech companies work together to make

it. That's really what he's concerned about. He would rather be in control of this thing. Because, yeah, it would be really interesting to see if multiple tech giants work together to create an actual successor to the internet. Like, you know how the internet

is just when you open up your computer and you have access to the net? It's not like running a specific program. You get to go on all the things. It would be interesting if people actually worked towards creating that, but no, it's all about creating very isolated operating systems

with a very isolated tool, like, tool chest. Like, you can't access Steam games via the Oculus store. These things don't work. Now you can use the Oculus on Steam games, but not vice versa. They're making things the way they're making things because they're not trying to design a new internet. Because for one thing, the internet wasn't designed. It was like the result of a bunch of people who were doing things that interested them all kind of intersecting and building upon each other.

And second, like they're making individual profit tunnels. They're not actually trying to create, they're not actually trying to think about what people might want next or what people might want beyond the internet. They're thinking, what can we sell that we're not currently selling? And that's never going to be the thing that figures out.

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, on that point, I'm going to be the thing that figures out. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, on that point, I'm going to do one final quote from the Wired piece. If these companies dominating cyberspace did decide to collaborate simultaneously, piecing together opposite sides of the quilt to create a digital textile, that would be very polite. But is there a world in which Microsoft, Facebook, Epic Games, Apple, NVIDIA, etc. combine all of their valuable products, Captain Planet style, into an architect of the metaverse under open source standards nobody in particular reaps billions from? That's sort of a tall task.

To overhaul your code and collaborate with your competitors? Why would three or four tech giants partner to make a metaverse when they already spent decades and billions constructing one of their own? So, yeah, it's never going to happen. The way society is made, the way Internet works, that's not ever going to be a thing. Speaking of companies and things that you can buy online and advertising, here are some ads. Woo! And we're back and we're gonna talk about possibly the most successful

version of ar of vr technology we're gonna talk about the actual use cases that are generating actual profit so there is a there was a tweet a few days ago that... I'm just going to read the tweet, and then we'll talk about the implications. This went very, very viral. I caught this very early on, though. I started writing about it, and then a whole bunch of articles dropped on the topic. A farmer in Turkey has fitted his cows with virtual reality goggles

to make them think they are outside in summer pastures. The farmer found out that these pleasant scenes make the cows happier and produce more milk. Future is metaverse! So, we're going to talk about the cow matrix. We're going to talk about... Yeah, it is time. It's amazing to go back in time and tell people, hey, you know, that hit movie, The Matrix in the future. We're going to do that.

But for more milk to get. Yeah. So the thing that went viral about it that kind of broke the story for a lot of people was this farmer in Turkey with the pictures of the cows with VR goggles on them. Pretty, pretty, pretty fucked up. But the idea and the actual technology used came from Russia. Farmers worked together with developers,

veterinarians, and consultants at the... Here's a Russian town name, or I guess a farm name. Kragsgarnovka. I don't know. Yeah, that sounds right. I think we can... I think you nailed it. It's this farm near Moscow, and they teamed up,

so all these farmers, developers, and vets, and consultants teamed up to make this cow matrix project. There was an official statement from the Moscow Ministry of Food and Agriculture, reads, The global trend towards universal computerization significantly simplifies work processes in many areas and allows you to achieve unprecedented results. Russian milk producers keep up with the world's standards

and are even ready to offer the market new and unexpected solutions. On a farm in the Moscow region, a prototype of virtual reality glasses were tested to improve the conditions for keeping cows. Employees of one of the largest farms in the Moscow region, together with IT specialists, decided to conduct an experiment studying the influence of virtual reality and developed a layout of VR glasses. So the herd donned these VR systems adapted for the heads of cows. And they also had to make the imagery work. They needed to tweak the color palette in the software

to make it suitable for the cow's vision because cows can't see red or green. So there's just shades of yellow and blue. So in order to replicate what grass looks like to them, they had to change the stuff. But yeah, and they programmed a unique summer field simulation program

and subjected it onto these cows. The Russian Ministry of Agriculture concluded that the cow matrix does work. In a statement from 2019, this was a few years ago, officials said environmental conditions have significant

have a significant impact on cow health and as a consequence the quality and quantity of milk produced so you know like this is the thing i i talk with um someone i know about this and they're like well if it makes the cow like actually happier and healthier, then what's the problem? And the problem is that you're gaslighting an entire creature's reality. You're not consensually gaslighting their reality. And I don't like that. Everything we do to cows is without their consent. So it's one of those things where it's like... But we're also not gaslighting their reality.

We're not depriving their senses of what the world is no this seems like an escalation in our war on the cow yeah so you know this other farmer in turkey heard about this and decided to try it out on his cows um and yeah the fucked up cow matrix or the cow tricks uh does seem to do its job extracting more milk from the cow to increase profitability. A quote from the farmer said, we get an average of 22 liters of milk per day from the cows in our farm. The milk average of the two cows that wore the VR glasses went up to 27 liters. So yeah, when the story first broke, the most popular article was from a site called Futurism, which made me very depressed about Futurism. Yeah, you should be depressed about Futurism, Garrison.

Yeah, it made me mad enough that I'm going to read some of it to you. Oh good, thank God. I haven't been angry in seconds. I haven't been angry in seconds that cows produce more milk when VR makes them think they're in beautiful green pastures proves that keeping them in agriculture environments isn't healthy nor does it make them happy putting them in a cow matrix

does sound a little grim yes but you can't argue with the results oh my god I can I say you actually can also all this has shown is that like potentially if you put cows in this thing during the winter when it's not sunny and bright outside then they are happier this has not shown that for example taking all cows out of pastures and sticking them in matrix boxes would make them yeah because the

thing is they're not they're not in pastures they're in little jail cells with vr goggles on their head so like it's that was that was the use case and like the quote from the farmer is like they're watching green pasture and it gives them an emotional boost they are less stressed um and the farmer says he plans to he plans to buy 10 more so like you can spend thousands of dollars on specialized cow vr headsets um or you can you know like use that money to buy more land for the cows to spread out and if we're at that point in society that in order to make in order in order to make enough cow milk we need to gaslight cows by overruling their senses with a clunky vr headset on their little fussy faces maybe we should stop having milk. Maybe we should, like,

maybe that's it. Like, if we require this to have milk in our cereal, then nope. No more. I'm not gonna do that. I refuse. That's not, like, it's already an iffy practice if you don't buy milk, like, locally from a farm you know.

So, if we're doing this, that just, like like immediately checks me out of every like no i'm just fully fully not yeah i think that's kind of evil i think that's kind of evil like the whole industry way by which we produce meat at scale is pretty evil but that's an escalation that's an escalation it's it's the specific thing of like of of overruling their reality and senses um of another living creature like that is yeah for some reason for some reason that just that that upsets me into a way in or for you to get like meat and not just like turning them into food but like making their living conditions really shitty and then making trying to trick them to

thinking they're not yeah it's even worse than just having them live in shitty conditions i think from an ethical standpoint and maybe it's more pleasant for the animal but from like our standpoint it's worse to me yep so speaking of uh uh i don't know don't do this to cows is there some segue that we can work this in you know what does essentially force you to live in an alternate reality that allows you to be more productive for the people who make money based on your existence? Buying these products and services that support this podcast? Oh, I was just going to say podcasts in general do that, but yes. Oh, yeah, sure. Cool.

All right, we are back and i my my last my last big section here is titled we are the cows so this is that's gonna that's gonna give give you a sense of how of how we're gonna talk about what don't like it don't like it so what what what the cow tricks really demonstrates though is that the end goal of all this is to make us the cow, right? And we already are to some degree with, like, the internet and smartphones. But this is more. This is an escalation, right? want a world where we are forced to don hardware rigs that block out our body's senses and replace the input with digital coded counterfeit. That's an internet that tries to convince you that you're

inside of it and it is inside of you. That is what they want, really. Even if we get the metaverse that I would prefer, the mythical, the mythical open-source, interconnected successor to the internet with all its different websites, tools, and games that I like, all together, and intuitively accessible through a shared digital space, even if we get that, which we won't, and if there's safeguards to protect digital privacy that are built in, which there wouldn't be,

that doesn't actually make the real world much better. Like, in my opinion, AR technology specifically could be really cool. But redesigning the world to require headsets, goggles, or AR glasses would suck.

Not only for people who can't get that technology, if we redesign the world to be like the only way to interact with systems is through this digital lens, that's gonna suck. Now, we already have that to some degree with smartphones and the internet, but this is another escalation of it. And again, like the cow, it's just going to be a way to paint over our late capitalist climate disaster of a world. Metaverse is a tech capitalist solution to our current and pressing political and ontological problems. And I have used the bathroom really badly.

Well, I'll talk for a little while. I think a big part of what Garrison is saying is that instead of relying on these tech industry ghouls to build the future for you, which is a future in which they sell you a way to hide from the hell that they have made of the world and others like them have made of the world, instead of doing that, you could just spend the rest of your life listening to podcasts.

Put blinders on over your eyes. Cover up all of your senses but your ears and just exist forever in a cocoon made entirely of my voice and occasionally Garrison and Chris's and Sophie's voice, but mainly my voice. So you're saying not listen to just any podcast, but podcasts that you benefit from. I don't think people should listen to any podcast that I don't do. That doesn't seem right, Sophie. Where's my angle on that, huh?

I don't know. I don't know how long we should vamp while Garrison just leaves in the middle of us. I really need it i really needed to be well it's okay i just told everybody that we're the metaverse now garrison our content i drank so much coffee this morning it was a problem okay in similar to all this you know remember the john karmack interview from 2020 yes oh that's such a bummer the doom co-creator and former cTO of Oculus.

Yes, these bodies are a curse, John. Yeah. On the Joe Rogan show, he openly said, The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted. It is not possible on Earth to give everyone what they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson private islands. People react negatively to any talk of economics, but it's a resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go.

Economically, you can deliver a lot more value to a lot more people in the virtual sense. We can have virtual devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will be able to have these. Not everyone can have a mansion. Not everyone can have a home theater. These are things we can simulate, though, to some degree in virtual reality. Now, the simulation's not as good as the real thing. If you're rich, you probably have your own home theater or mansion in Private Island. Good for you.

You're probably not the people who's going to benefit the most from this thing. Most of the people in the world live in cramped quarters, and that's not what they would choose to be in if they had unlimited resources. There's this piece of art that goes around the internet. It's this dystopian kid in a corner,oling with goggles on with like rainbow pictures, but it's a terrible looking place. And people say, this is the world you're trying to build. People plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them. And Carmack's response is encouraging. He says, but is his life really better off if he takes the goggles off and he's in the horrible place?

but is his life really better off if he takes the goggles off and he's in the horrible place so i i i think harmack really has convinced himself that virtual reality is a path to making the world a better place in in the interview he compares vr to the invention of like air conditioning he says like i live in dallas it's 100 degrees here we change the world around us in all that we do we live in air conditioning people don People don't generally go, oh, you're not experiencing the world around you because of air conditioning. This is what human beings do. We bend the world to our will.

And this is how things get better. By building technology and distributing them to people so that they have something better than what they would have if they didn't exist. Now, if you dig into what he's saying here,

there's actually a few interesting things. Because for one, yeah, air conditioning is actually kind of bad. Like the way we're using it and what it represents, it is a band-aid solution to our continual problem of heating up the earth and it's making the problem worse every single day yeah and honestly it's it's yeah it's like it's like a band-aid that also makes the problem worse because ac contributes to a lot of energy and emissions made out of human shit but you know air conditioning

is also an actual material change, right? Like, it can actually help people not die due to heat. The metaverse in VR, as talked about, does not improve a middle to lower class person's material conditions. And to say so demonstrates how disconnected these tech bros are

from a regular person's reality. The metaverse in VR, in like virtual worlds, are going to be built based on the perception of reality held by those who create them. That's why we're getting shitty digital private movie theaters, fake mansions, and metaverse concerts, and H&M

NFT stores. They're giving us a simulated version of the world that they actually get to live in for real. But we can refuse this. We don't need to take them up on this offer. If we're going to be stuck with multiple proprietary branded metaverses that are made by rich tech bros

to mirror a world that the rich tech bro gets to live in, the best thing we can do is fuck with it. We could sabotage it from the inside. We need to spam floating dicks at a metaverse concert. This is the actual thing that needs to happen because, like... Look, we all know terrorism is fun, right? To spam floating dicks at a metaverse concert. This is the actual thing that needs to happen because like. We all know terrorism is fun, right? Everybody loves terrorism, but there's horrible consequences for doing it in the real world.

In the metaverse, there's no laws against terrorism yet. You can terrorize however you want in the metaverse and it's just trolling and that's fine. So do as much of it as possible until they make it illegal. The concept that would go really well with this type of thing is the poetic terrorism concept of yes this applies like perfectly to this idea of how we need to fuck with these digital spaces that are trying to be created because yeah like they're like they're pretty bad during 2021 bitcoin consumed all the electrical energy um by equivalent to a country like Argentina. In 2021, the Bitcoin network handled like 97 million transactions. So this is roughly 0.012% of the worldwide volume of non-cash transactions.

of the worldwide volume of non-cash transactions. But Bitcoin was responsible for 0.54% of global electricity consumption on total, which is astronomical. Like, it is ridiculous. On average, that's like 1,300 kilowatt hours per Bitcoin transaction, which is so much energy. The power consumed by a single Bitcoin transaction on average could power an average US household for one and a half months. It is ridiculous how much it's getting used. And they're trying to build, like the SeekCity thing, they're trying

to build this metaverse off of crypto, which I'm sad because similar to the metaverse off of crypto, which they're, like, I'm sad, because, like, crypto could be really, similar to the metaverse, crypto could be really rad, like, crypto could be an actually super rad thing, but the way it's being used right now is really environmentally damaging, and this, this linking of Web3, you know, the mythical Web3 and the metaverse to crypto is showing, like, yeah, it's, it is kind of like the band-aid solution where it's not it's not actually fixing the problem and it's kind of making the problem worse

because they're so set on linking it to crypto right now that it sucks like it's gonna happen it's gonna suck what you can do is you can spam Final Fantasy 7 porn you can spam Sonic the Hedgehog feet pics this is this is the only tool we have but save for actual terrorism which we're not gonna talk about on this podcast you

can but we can talk about poetic terrorism that is something that you can do you can fuck with these systems from the inside and make them unusable and that's that's really the only thing and that's what i'm gonna do in my spare time because it's fun. Yeah. Do poetic terrorism in the metaverse. Go fuck it up for them. And maybe in the process, here's my dream, Garrison, that perhaps in the process of fucking it up for them, we build something that we actually like. That's the thing, right?

Yeah. That is similar to how the internet kind of got originally created. Of course, now it's turned into this hellscape. But that'll probably happen anyway. It'll take 10 years or more for the metaverse. But we can get a little bit of fun out of it. And we can have some fun with it like we did on the internet for a couple of years. Uh-huh.

Before it all got real bad. So that is the metaverse that doesn't exist. And yeah, so fight against the cow matrix as best as you can do your best pull them out build a city for the cows in the center of the world make a cow zion

yeah it's up to us god this is depressing alright that's the episode. 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. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of

tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles and successes. You know it's going to be filled

with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral.

Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

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

you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart and how to maybe put them back together a little bit better than they were before. I am Robert Evans, and with me this week is a guest I'm very excited about, Chris Begley, author of The Next Apocalypse, The Art and Science of Survival. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you, Robert. Chris, before we get into the meat of our discussion, I have to talk about what you do for a living, because for years and years, it was my job to go around the world.

I talk to people on pretty much every continent about their different interesting jobs. So I've talked – interviewed everybody from like brothel workers in Nevada to Iraqi counterterrorism special forces in Iraq. And you have probably the coolest job title of anybody I've met. You're an underwater archaeologist. That's right. How did you, I mean, was it just kind of like, were you kind of laser focused on that goal? Or was it more you were interested in archaeology and you loved diving and so the two just kind of made sense together? I started out as what I now call a terrestrial archaeologist, working on land as most people do and worked for years in Central America. Honduras was my focus, as you saw in the book, but other places nearby as well.

And really, it was about, I would say, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 years ago. I wanted to just branch out a little bit from that. And one of the things that all archaeologists have seen is that, you know, there are certain things that really just aren't as explored as other things. And one was all of the archaeological resources underwater. I mean, we hear about underwater archaeology or maritime archaeology in the Mediterranean, right? You know, Roman shipwrecks and all that. But there are big chunks of the world where we've done very little to see what's out there, you know. And one other interesting thing about that is there are many different things you could look at underwater, but often we look at shipwrecks. And shipwrecks are different from regular archaeological sites because, you know, a shipwreck is a moment in time. That all happened in one instance.

And so when we're looking at that kind of archaeological site, we see this snapshot that we don't see when we look at a place that was occupied over hundreds of years. that we don't see when we look at a place that was occupied over hundreds of years. So, you know, so yeah, so that wasn't my focus, but it became sort of somewhere I wanted to go as I learned more about it. And one of the things I find really interesting, the basic thrust of your book is that the way in which we think about civilizations falling or collapsing or however you – the ways in which folks tend to discuss that when we're talking about the Maya or the Romans is very different from what archaeologists who tend to study these cultures, how they tend to perceive of what you might more accurately call a decline or a decentralization or whatever.

I think there's a number of terms that we could use. But these ideas that like you have these civilizations and then they suddenly fall apart are not really based in rigorous historical analysis usually. There's some cases as you go into the book. And I'm interested in that because you're kind of coming at from a very rigorous historical standpoint in this book a lot of the stuff that we talk about on this show in a more contemporary sense. And I'm kind of wondering how the idea to write this sort of came together because you started it before the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously, that had an impact on the book. It's all over there.

Yeah. Yeah. that had an impact on the book it's it's all over there yeah yeah um well i've i was um one of the things that i do is teach wilderness survival courses and um and i don't do that as frequently as some people that sort of dedicate themselves to that do, but I do it fairly frequently. And it became obvious to me over time that people were taking these courses not just to learn how to deal with being lost out in the wilderness, which is sort of was my vision. What do you do if you unexpectedly have to spend a night out in the woods or two or three? They were really thinking about what do I do when things fall apart? How do I take care of myself?

How do I take care of my family using these skills that you could use in a situation where things had fallen apart? And that sort of oriented me towards the fact that, you know, people were worrying about the future. I mean, I could see it. I could see it in my students at the university. I could see it, you think, was the focus initially for me writing this. Because what I saw was, you know, sort of the prepper community and survivalist community looking at things that really seemed to be short term and didn't at all focus on what we really

saw historically. So I think that my initial motivation to write this was really just seeing this concern that was growing among people about what the future is going to look like. And then, of course, COVID hit and that really brought all this to the forefront. And are there any specific ways in your mind that you kind of think on how COVID altered what you were writing or how you conceived of what you were writing? Like once you have this kind of vision that's inspired by the things that you're seeing and hearing, particularly in these wilderness survival courses. And then as you get started, we have this horrible, horrible plague hit and a number of

things start to happen very quickly. How does that kind of alter the trajectory of what you're writing? Yeah, I guess there were some just sort of practical logistical things, obviously, right? Some things that I intended to do or ways that I'd hoped to interact with folks in the course of interviewing people for the book or writing it, you know, wasn't going to be possible. But in terms of thinking about how things happen, the big thing for me was how it became politicized so quickly. You know, that was, you know, in the, You know, that was, you know, in the, you know, well, now you see all of the memes, you know, talking about the zombie movies where half the population doesn't believe they're zombies or something. You know, that was never really on the radar, at least not on my radar before. before. And so now, you know, it is because clearly not only do these things happen and then you have a group of people that are dealing with it, you have obviously the dynamics within

the group, which of course we knew, but to see it play out in this way, in this sort of dramatic way that really altered the course of history. I mean, the pandemic could have turned out differently, but it didn't. And part of the reason it didn't was because of the way folks reacted to it. And I'm wondering, because a chunk of your career and a big chunk of this book is kind of looking at in places like Honduras where these civilizations entered decline. And in some cases, it was very sharp, like within a fairly short period of time, 90% of the population leaves or is deceased. And you see like the crumbling of a lot of these

governmental institutions and whatnot that had organized life for a while. You see the pretty significant migrations. Is there any ways in which kind of the last two years as an archaeologist has changed or informed how you were thinking about these places that you'd been studying and these moments in history that you'd been studying for so long? Yeah, in some ways, it brings some of it into a little sharper focus. For instance, you know, one of the things that archaeologists had long talked about was that during these declines or these collapses, that it's uneven. It's not equal for everybody. It's not equal over space and time. And certainly, depending on your position in society, there's different ways in which it plays out for you. You know, and that's something that we see. We see it from, you know, access to vaccines to, well, I mean, even things like, you know, if we think about folks that are unvaccinated now, there's a chunk of those people that are doing it for sort of political reasons or other ideological reasons.

But there's also a big group of those folks that are doing it because history shows that they should be wary of anything that society tries to do to them. And so you have these things playing out for different ways for people from different regions of the country or political orientations or race or ethnicity or a whole variety of things. And so seeing how uneven it was, the pandemic, makes me think that, you know, it certainly was that way then. The other thing that we see when we look archaeologically is that it's these big structures or systems that collapse that really is the collapse and the things that cause it initially, whether it's, I don't know, deforestation or drought or warfare or even a natural disaster of some sort, that really it's the way people respond to those and the way these systems deal with those changes that really creates the problems that you see later on. And we can see that now, for instance, one of the things that we're talking a lot now

about is supply chain issues, right? And this is a result of COVID, but it's not a direct result. I mean, it's not because the crews on the ships or at the ports or truck drivers are sick. It's because of the ways in which all of this disrupted things. And especially when we get these really efficient but inflexible systems, like a lot of our shipping system was, these disruptions result in really big changes. So, you know, you have these huge ships that can only dock at a few ports. Once that gets backed up, you can't really shift and adjust. backed up, you can't really shift and adjust. And so that's, I think for me, just a lot of it is seeing it play out where we see the fact that we have something that sets it all off, but then we have the response of the system or the structure that really creates the day-to-day impact.

structure that really creates the the day-to-day impact i suspect a big part of kind of why we conceive popularly of of quote-unquote collapses in the past is based on as you talk about extensively in your book the way in which we look at it kind of in fiction and in fiction it's nearly always like the societal equivalent of a bullet in the head right you the zombie plague is out and then a couple of days everything's fallen apart and the point that you make in this is that it's probably i mean this isn't exactly a phrase but it's probably better to look at it kind of like it's like a tumor or something where the the the things are set in motion that are going to lead to to things falling apart much much um at a point before a lot of people probably would have noticed it. You know, the problem can be too far gone before it's really obvious.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good point. And that's really something that, you know, even with COVID, it shows that, right? You know, the problems are not only the existence or the appearance of this virus, but, you know, first of all, how did it appear? And that has to do with, you know, decreasing habitat for wild animals and the proximity of human populations to animals. And then we have increased sort of communication and travel, which, you know,

is not a bad thing, obviously. But it is going to change the way in which these things spread. But then we have the way that we divide ourselves up into nation states and the way in which we have, you know, economic systems that are working in certain ways. So, you know, the vaccine gets here, but not there and so forth. But yeah, that's, you know, that I think is at the heart of it. You have these things that have been set in place. You have these parameters in which you're going to have to react. And they really set the stage for what's going to happen. You know, you have, it's like looking backwards four or

five moves in chess to see how did we get in this situation? It's not just because of that last move. It's because of the last 10 moves. Yeah. And one of the things you bring up that I like is that if you're looking for kind of a historical example of a collapse that most mirrors the way we tend to look at it in fiction, it would probably be what happened to the indigenous population of particularly like North America after the arrival of colonizers, which was by a lot of accounts like 90% of the population dead within a fairly short span of time, primarily from disease. This, this really rapid and cataclysmic shock, but also at the same time, as much as it does seem to mirror some of our,

you know, kind of fictional depictions of viral outbreaks or other sort of, of, of societal calamities. The ways in which people survived don't really in any meaningful way mirror the our our kind of popular fictional depiction of like who makes it out of that sort of a situation you know the the the strapping military veteran with a rifle and a stockpile of food or whatever you know yeah yeah that that you know, I would say that certainly having these skills to keep yourself alive is important.

And it is true that if you don't make it through the first 30 days, you're not going to make it through the next 30 years. But, yeah, the way people survive outside of a few days, perhaps, when they're dealing with some of these, what we would think of as survival situations, is as a community. I mean, we see that with, you know, when we look at the Native American history in North America, you know, even as populations and entire groups were being decimated by these diseases. Sometimes 75% of a village in a single winter from a wave or waves of disease. Even in the face of that, they reconstituted themselves as communities. Sometimes multi-ethnic or multicultural communities. I mean, there was a whole variety of ways in which people regrouped.

And I think that that, you know, that was the message. And, you know, part of this image of, you know, grabbing your bug out bag and heading out to the hills is, it just doesn't work, you know, and the stockpiling, you know, as well. And so, yeah, when we look archaeologically, you know, we always see communications. Yeah, that's something we really try to encourage people to do on this show, where obviously some amount of disaster preparation is not just helpful, but is I think kind of morally necessary if it's at all financially feasible for you. It is absolutely the right thing to do to try to have two, three weeks of relatively

storable food, some water, some other emergency supplies. But kind of beyond that, as you said, that first like 30 days, if you actually want not just to live, but to have, you know, life have any kind of meaning, you have to be thinking in a community oriented situation. Yeah. I mean, because ultimately, you know, what's the difference between two weeks or two months worth of food, you know, it's going to be gone and, you know, Right. You know, it's going to be gone. And, you know, you have to come back. You know, one of the things in researching for this for this book, one of the things I looked at was the history last time that humans lived where a significant portion of the population was hunters and gatherers, that is not farmers, there was like one-fifteenth of the current population, less than 500 million people in the world. So even a catastrophic disaster that, you know, reduced us to 85% of, you know, 15% of the current population, we're still going to have more people in the world than ever lived without agriculture. And so we're going to have to recreate some of these systems.

And, you know, agriculture by and large is going to be a community-based system. It's, I mean, you can garden on your own, but the way that it needs to work is going to be a collective. Yeah. And I think, yeah, this is, we talk a lot about, I actually live with a couple of wilderness survival instructors and we have about an acre of land and we do a decent amount of gardening, animal husbandry and that sort of thing. And it is – I've spent a lot of my life on farms. So I've kind of always had an appreciation for how much work it is. things we try to talk about on this show regularly is the value of even just having a garden of

things like guerrilla gardening, not because I'm not one of those people who thinks that like, oh, we need to replace industrial agriculture with like individuals tending small gardens. That's not going to work. But because the more you kind of interface directly with the concept of growing food and with working with other people in order to do that, the more prepared you are for any number of things that could go wrong. Like even if those things don't involve a crunch in the food supply lines, the connections you make with people doing that sort of work will be more valuable than an extra two months of stockpiles, you know, when you're in your food buckets or whatever, your Alex Jones dried food buckets. Yeah, well, that's absolutely right. And, you know,

one of the things that occurred to me looking into the past at some of these, you know, collapses or declines that had happened in the past was that a huge percent of the population was engaged directly in agriculture. And, you know, here in the, well, in the industrialized world, it's typically less than 5%, less than that, even in the United States. Most people like me don't engage in it. And, you know, I know something about gardening, perhaps like everybody else, but I'm not a farmer. I don't really have that collective wisdom. And if I had to do that, you know, probably it's like a lot of other things. When everything's easy, it's not so bad. Yeah. sooner or later. And so, you know, that's, that kind of thing is very important, you know, and I think also there could certainly local systems and some flexible scale would be really important, you know, so I'm also like you, a proponent of this sort of thing, if we can get everybody to participate in ways that we aren't now, that'll give us some flexibility.

What if we do have supply chain problems? Well, we have a number of people in the community that are already doing some of this stuff that could maybe be expanded or get us through this period. So, yeah. or get us through this period. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, even if you're not like dealing with everyone's caloric needs, it could be as simple as because of where you're located, you know, when the oranges and other kinds of fruits

aren't able to come in from a supply line thing, there's a shortage of vitamin C and then knowing how to make tea out of pine needles or whatever, or what kind of plants have a lot of vitamin C, you know, even though you're not focused on meeting everyone's, you know, entire caloric needs through small scale farming, but you can deal with a nutrient deficiency or something because you understand your environment a little bit

better. Yeah. And, and, you know, probably quality of life issues too. I mean, you know, for, you know, kids and, you know, there's, there's lots of, there's lots of ways you can survive that are pretty miserable. So you want to try to direct it towards those that are desirable. And I think part of that's having this flexibility, having this knowledge, having a lot of people involved in things. And, you know, one of the things I talk about in my book are ideas of, you know, diversity and inclusion, which we talk about in certain ways now. And often,

I think, unfortunately, it's talked about as if it's done to benefit the people that are marginalized and left out only. And while it is partly that, it benefits everybody, of course. I mean, anyone in a business knows, anybody in a university knows the benefits of diversity. In the same way, anybody that's trying to do something understands the benefit of a diverse range of experiences. You know, that's why we make these multidisciplinary teams that go out and do things. You know, it's so that you have this wide variety that can help you keep going. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I really found fascinating in your book, and that kind of made me feel a little bit bad, is I, you know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what happened, what was done to, and what also

just kind of happened as a result of the way diseases spread when colonizers reached North America. I had never really devoted that much thought to the actual actions that different indigenous groups took consciously to protect themselves from the spread of diseases. You mentioned the Cherokee in particular in your book. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Because that's something, as soon as I read it, I marked that page because I'm like, I need to look up what the studies he's referencing because I don't know anything about this. Yeah, that, you know, a lot of that stems from the research of some other archaeologists.

And they, you know, you're exactly right. We don't think about that. We're not taught about it that way. You know, we sort of have this contradictory and sort of doubly problematic way of talking about this. First, for a long time, we denied sort of how traumatic and how much of a genocide it was when Europeans arrived. And then after denying that, we sort of say, well, Native Americans are gone and no longer relevant, so we can cease to talk about them.

Of course, that's not true. And one of the things that we see when we look more in detail at the histories or we listen to the oral histories or we look at the archaeology is that there are a number of things that people did and do to create the outcomes that they want. And that was no different for the Native American groups. You know, I mean, they had ways of dealing with disease, and some of them will be able to understand it via our sort of our system, right? Isolating people, cleanliness, minimizing contact, especially with sort of problematic groups like the colonizers. You know, but in

other ways, there are things that are going to be unfamiliar to us, and we're not going to see the effectiveness or the value in it. But one of the things that all of these things did that these groups were doing was created or maintained group identity and cohesion and allowed the perseverance of community. And so there are, you know, it's easy to think about people as sort of passive victims of something, especially when it serves your purpose to think about it in these ways. And we just see that it's not the case. Yeah, there was a remarkable moment in the book. And I think it was from when you were in Honduras where you talk about you're finding pottery sherds and they have these specific kind of markings on them from, I don't know, like

a thousand years ago or so. And you also know a local woman who's a potter and she's putting the same markings on and you ask her why. And her answer is like, well, because because the the pottery shirts that we find from our ancestors have those on them and my initial thought was like oh what what a shame that she doesn't know what those originally meant but then i thought like well but is that any different from like all of the different things that that i do because they're traditions because like they're things that like people a thousand years ago and in in my line did like no it's not like it's it's

just what people do and it is a continuation and it's a very there's um that's a that's that's survival you know that's that's conscious survival yeah yeah and in that case of course whatever it meant initially it now means that to her right so? So there's the meaning, you know? And so it's interesting. You know, one of the things, you know, I'm from and I live in Kentucky. And one of the things, especially when people come to, say, Appalachians, they're looking for sort of authentic Appalachian Kentucky. Sure.

You know, and they already have an idea of what that is. And if you don't see it because that's not really what people do, then the response is never, oh, my ideas about what is authentic might be erroneous. It's, I wonder why I didn't see authentic appalachians you know yeah it's like well you did but you know there's gonna be more hip-hop and punk groups than there are bluegrass groups because you know these are 18 20 year that's, you know, they're doing this as much as this other stuff and, you know, more probably. And so that is something that I think of often as an archaeologist. You know, my focus is in the past. But if I'm going to understand things, of course, you also have to understand how are people thinking about it in the present and how am I thinking about it in the present? Because, you know, everything, all the stories I tell about the past are coming out of,

are coming out of my experience in the present too. And it's hard to, it's hard to separate those. And really the best we can do is try to, you know, reflect on that and see how is it that I might be limiting my understanding because of my particular experience. And one of the things I really like about your book that I also found fascinating. So, you know, I for a while did conflict journalism. And before when that was just an ambition of mine, before I started to do it, I would see the articles that were being written by all these war correspondents. And I would just be in awe of like, how did they get that story? How did they get that access? How did they, they must have put so much work in. And then when I actually got there, I realized like,

oh no, they met, they made a contact with a local who was good at it. And that person showed them around and made all these connections. And like, actually none of this work happens without these local fixers. And you make the point that in archeology, you're not generally discovering things. Like even when you're finding shipwrecks, it's because these sailors who lived nearby were like, well, yeah, a bunch of shipwrecks over there. This is where you're going to go find them. You know,

It's always the way it is. You know, there in the example you're talking about, I was part of this project in Forney in Greece, which, you, which made the news because we found so many shipwrecks there, something ultimately like 50 shipwrecks around this island. And almost all of them were shown to us by local folks that sponge divers or people that were fishers, you know, people that were out on the water all the time. And the few that we found by ourselves, I'm sure people knew about them. We just stumbled on them before somebody had a chance to show us. It's the same way in Honduras where we would be walking through the rainforest.

And, you know, maybe we'd been walking for a week. So we're way out in the middle of this place. People were constantly telling me, the guys that I was with would say, okay, if we go up this creek, you know, for about six hours, and we go over here, here's what we'd find. Here's what we'd find over here. Here's what we'd find over here. They knew where everything was. And that's, you know, one of the things that you learn is how reliant you are on people that live in a place. I mean, they just know it. Yeah, there's no – when you get right down to it, as obsessed as we are kind of in the Western canon with the idea of lost cities, that's not really a thing that tends to happen. Yeah.

No, no, no, it's not. And in fact, most of the archaeological sites that people didn't know about, it was just because they were so small and ephemeral that no one really paid attention. Anything. Yeah, there's no lost city. They're always known to somebody. Well, Chris, I think that's most of what i wanted to get into in this conversation i'm wondering before we kind of close out because you you are

both the author of this book the next apocalypse which is i think a fascinating way of looking at the idea of things falling apart and a wilderness survival instructor if you're going to suggest people, you know, a practical kit bag to prepare for short and kind of long-term problems, what are you putting in your bag? Well, you know, the two main things that you're always going to want is a knife because that allows you to make a lot of other things and a way to start fire, you know, and we've all seen in the movies, rubbing sticks together and, you know, friction methods and that works. Yeah. And you can do that, but it is incredibly difficult to do. Pain in the butt, you know, and for most of us that don't do it all the time,

you're just not going to be able to do it when it's 40 degrees and raining and you really need a fire. You know, you'll be able to do it when it's 100 degrees and dry, you know, because everything's about to catch on fire anyway. But, you know, so, and what would that look like? Well, you need something that will catch on fire pretty quickly. And the thing I always take is cotton balls. If you take cotton balls and a disposable lighter or one of those fire starter sticks that'll make sparks, those cotton balls will catch fire instantly. And if you take one and you coat half of it with petroleum jelly, then not only will it catch fire, it'll burn, you know, for, you know, a minute or so long enough to catch other stuff on fire. So, you know, making fire and having some sort of cutting tool are the very basic things. But, you know, beyond that, I would say, you know, clothing or some sort of shelter is the other thing.

You know, exposure to elements will kill you quicker than anything. And so having some way to protect yourself, and that's usually going to be, you know, first line of defense is going to be your clothes. first line of defense is going to be your clothes. And one of the things that you'll know, anybody that deals with sort of survival situations, is that most people that really get in trouble with things like hypothermia, you know, it's not when it's 30 degrees below and they're out doing something. It's when it's 50 degrees and sunny and they're out in a t-shirt during the day and then at night it drops to 30 degrees and uh you know they're stuck out somewhere uh with without proper clothing that's that is when things get really dangerous so you know i would say you know if you can have some way to start fire some sort of knife and appropriate clothes for spending the night out,

you know, then you're probably in pretty good shape for most situations. Well, Chris, thank you so much for talking with us today. Chris Begley, underwater archaeologist, author of The Next Apocalypse, The Art of Science and Survival. Chris, is there anything else you'd like to say or kind of get into before we close out for the day? No, just thank you very much for reading the book and for reaching out to talk with me because I think that, you know, especially now as we go into sort of an uncertain future,

I mean, the future is always uncertain, I suppose, into sort of an uncertain future. I mean, future is always uncertain, I suppose. But as, you know, we're really recognizing some of these challenges, you know, I really am hoping that this sort of community-based idea becomes the way we think about things. You know, it doesn't mean it's easy or that we're going to like it. It doesn't mean that that's what I want. I mean, tell you the truth. I would love it if it was just me out in the woods with my family. You know, I can do that. It's much harder to be part of a community and make things work for a big group of people, but that's just the way it's going to be. Yeah. And that's ultimately the way in which you have a lot more

real security. Cause I, I think, um, uh, I think people, I don't know, the, the, the, the world seems so complex and messy that it's easy to imagine that, that safety comes from getting away from the world. But historically that's just not how it works. No, the world finds you. You know, it's the best. Being part of a group is always best. And your little group can never defend against the big group. I mean, if we want to put it in those terms, you know, you can't just hoard everything and just just doesn't work. It might work for a little while. But yeah, so for me, that's the message I'm hoping people take from it.

Well, thank you very much, Chris. For those of you listening at home, again, please do check out The Next Apocalypse, The Art and Science of Survival by Chris Begley. That's going to do it for us all today. Chris, thank you again and have a wonderful day. You too. Thank you. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum.

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digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

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

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

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, boy. It could happen here. That's the name of the podcast.

And I'm Robert Evans, the guy hosting the podcast. Who else is with me? Is it Garrison? Hello, good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever. Garrison Davis? Yep. Not yet a Dr. Garrison Davis? Not yet.

Soon to be Dr. Garrison Davis. We'll see. But that's a story for another time. I don't know if you're going to pass the exam that I know you're going to have to pass in order to get through this class. Yeah, sure. It's a little teaser for the future. Speaking of the future, this is a podcast about the ways in which the future is going to be real fucked up and ways in which maybe we could try to make it less fucked up. try to make it less fucked up. And today we have on a guest, Mr. Calvin Norman, who posted a thread on our subreddit with the very simple, very unsettling title, The Woods Are Bad. And Calvin,

you want to introduce yourself, your credentials, and what you were trying to get across in that thread? Because I found it very affecting. Yeah, thanks, Robert. So my name's, like you said, Calvin Norman. I work in forestry. I've worked in forestry for a while now. I used to be an industrial forester in the Great Lakes region, so like Wisconsin, Michigan. Then I worked in the southeast. I did my master's down there. And now I'm in the Mid-Atlantic. So I've kind of been around the eastern United States. I haven't gotten out west yet. And I'm a certified forester forest or Canada certified forest. I got like a year left on that. So been around. I also do wildlife stuff. It's pretty fun. And yeah, your, your thread, what I found interesting about, I have a good friend who is in forestry or was in forestry at least, and got their degree in that.

And we were, we were out hunting in the Cascades a little earlier or a little later last year. And there was this wonderful moment. We'd been following a game trail up like this steep hillside um and there's this wonderful moment we've been following a game trail up like this steep hillside and there's kind of a clearing where we were a clear cut but there's deep brush all around and we get to the top of this thing we look out and we just see you know these these rolling mountains of the cascades all covered in this the most the this lush beautiful greenery all these these pine trees and everything and my friend says to me it's going to be totally different in 20 years.

It's already a different forest than the one I grew up with. And that is kind of the Cliff's Notes of what you're getting into a lot of detail here. And I'm wondering if you could just kind of like, yeah, start on that. Explain kind of what's actually happening in our woods, or at least the woods that you're comfortable talking about here. It's a big continent. Yeah, yeah, it is a big continent. You have a pretty good international base. I can't speak for the Europeans or the Canadians. There's a whole different ballgame over there.

Tropical stuff is just wild. Really cool but wild stuff. Mainly talk about the US. Mainly eastern United States. If you look at the eastern United States, this is a forest that has never existed before in the history of the United States. So if you look at the Eastern United States, this is a forest that has never existed before in the history of the United States. Um, previ, you know, prior to like 1920, our forest was like, I, depending on the source you read between 20 and 50% chestnut, uh, with other

species mixed in there. And now we have a mainly oak dominated forest. We lost all of our chestnut dude, chestnut blight. Out west you've got a couple of other things going on, but fire suppression has just changed the forest there. Same here on the east coast and in the midwest. You used to see a lot more fires going through. I mean, some of that was lightning strikes, but no doubt a lot of it was intentionally set by the First Nations and people before the people that we think of as the First Nations.

And that has mainly disappeared except for the southeast where virus never really stopped being in the ground, which is really cool. But even their species composition has changed dramatically. A lot of what we're seeing is, you know, changes in human management, but there's also a number of invasive species that have changed things, you know, like chestnut blight, emerald ash borer, Asian longhorn beetle is coming in. You know, those are just the pests, the understory and, you know, plants is a whole different ballgame. It's all not great. It's all not great. I was talking with some colleagues at an agricultural show right before I posted that and we were

talking about how the woods were bad. And we very easily laid out a scenario where we lost most of our remaining dominant tree species. It was not at all hard to do. It took about two minutes. So not great. And then the West Coast, things aren't great either. And when you're talking about losing these species and stuff like the chestnut blight, where is that coming from? How much of that is sort of as a result of, you know, climate change, like we're having a lot of tree species have trouble here in the West because of how much hotter the summers are and how much drier things

have gotten. So how much how much of what you're seeing where you are is because there's been changes to the climate and how much of it is, you know, I guess kind of like globalism, like people bringing in pests and bringing in blights and stuff from other areas and it spreads like wildfire. Well, I think that we're just starting to see the beginning of climate change, like driving species, you know, up the mountain, off the mountain, out west and here, you know, out of certain regions. You know, as things are getting hotter and drier or as, you know, climates are becoming more extreme. You know, here in the Mid-Atlantic, we had one of the wettest years on record i think it was like five or seven whereas in the midwest they had droughts but before that we had two years of drought so you know it's it's more extreme and that's that's just starting to take part but the extinctions and near extinctions have been mainly due to

non-native pests um and that's just most of it right there um just because we haven't really seen the start of climate change yeah yeah just because we haven't really seen the start of climate change yeah yeah impacting diseases so like out west with the mountain pine beetle you're seeing more generations of mountain pine beetle come through i was just doing a presentation for some folks in south dakota and something like a third of their total forest was impacted by mountain pine beetle geez and. And what is that, like when you actually talk about these beetles coming in,

that's the kind of thing that, even as we've gotten more comfortable talking about sort of the different kind of collapses spawned by climate change, I think that we tend to imagine more spectacular things, these giant sweeping fires

that burn through huge chunks of states and these huge like environmental calamities. What is this, like what happens when one of these beetles hits a forest, one of these beetle species, obviously not like a singular beetle, like what is actually, like how quick is the effect and what kind of comes after that? Like I know there's sort of a shockwave, it's kind of like a bomb going off. I'm interested in kind of tracing the root of that explosion, if that makes sense. Yeah, so it depends species to species.

Chestnut plate was really fast, and it just seems to have torn through the chestnut-sensitive range. So chestnut went from Florida to Maine and out west, like Tennessee kind of area there. And it just, you know, in something like 15 years, the entire species is gone. Emerald ash borer is taking a little bit longer got here in the 80s started kind of going off in the mid 2000s and it's killed a couple of billion trees so when that hits a small forest you know if it's a if it's a pretty you know beetle that kills pretty fast like emerald ash borer it gets into your trees it starts with one or two and then within four or five years it's it's in most of them in a forest and then with emerald

ash borer they're dead in five. Hemlock woolly adelgid is pretty similar. It'll just show up one day in a stand. And then the hemlocks are dead within five, seven years. And, you know, sometimes you know what's going on, you know, because emerald ash borer is very clear science. And other times you don't know what's going on because the tree can't be so tall. And all of a sudden trees are getting thinner and thinner and then they're dead or you have pests like um oak wilt and that in that trees are dead you know in two months and then it spreads out like a circle you know it

kind of exactly when you see like a bacteria like growth medium with the bacteria spreading out that's how oak wilt spreads and it's just like trees are dead you know two months and they spread out and out and out it's scary sometimes is there anything that can be i mean it sounds like with with most of these cases like with what's happened to kind of like the chestnuts and it's it's too late for a lot of that is there anything that can actually be done to stop this like i know we have all these structures in place to try to stop the spread of invasive species but like once they're in there it kind of seems like usually we're fucked yeah yep that okay yeah once you get past it there's what's called the invasive species establishment curve so it's an s curve and once you get like right like once it starts to take it up it's like oh

well we're done here so uh let's let's start thinking about the future and as you lose more species like oh what do we do here or if you're like you know as you lose more species it's like what do we do here or if you're like in the case of ash it's like this ash is going in a swamp I have nothing else that's going to grow here so now I just have an open wetland like I can't grow any native trees here we're done

so the biggest thing is prevention don't bring invasive species in or non-native species in I was talking to a lady a couple of weeks ago and she uh hasn't rolled or not she has hemlock woolly adelgina property and she brought in a biocontrol or would she assume was a biocontrol from japan it's a beetle and oh no yeah in this case it was one that had been tested and failed because it doesn't make it through the winter but you know stuff like that's like just just don't do that you know i appreciate the thought there but don't with some of these species we have you know you know like hemlock willia delge we have pesticides that work

really well and you apply them only to the tree and so it's like all right i treated this tree this tree's good for seven years some of them like emerald ash borer you're done there's just nothing you can do so yeah it's uh prevention prevention and then you can quarantine but then you know it's like we're this county's done so we're gonna just try to make sure that only this county dies oh geez you mentioned a bit earlier like thinking about the future what does that actually look like when when we hit a situation as we have with a lot of these species we're like all right well this shit's we ain't we ain't stopping this what is what like what do people like you do next like what is the next kind of step for the forests or is it just sort of a smoke them while you got them kind of thing uh sometimes it's smoking while

you got them so like beach bark disease is going through just roasting beach in the east coast it's going it's going to the midwest and so there it's kind of like well you know if it's in there and you beat your diet take them out and if they're not don't there's it's 99 fatal but there's one percent that can make it so you know like maybe we find that one percent emerald ash borer is 99 fatal but i've seen you know in the past couple years i've seen two that made it so like if we don't cut them all maybe some will survive yeah theoretically we could then like clone or breed or whatever the trees that live and and a few generations have more of them um yeah if other shit doesn't happen yeah the chestnut project's been going on for the last hundred years and it looks like it'll take another 40 more it's that's a controversial

opinion some people say it's faster than 40 but you know tell me about that years oh the chestnut foundation really it's a really neat thing so there were some chestnuts that were found resistant in some planet outside the range of chestnut blight and so the ideas were they slowly started back breeding so they crossed in chinese chestnut which is resistant to the blight which is native to china and east asia and so they crossed them in with the remaining chestnut with the hopes of, you know, kind of eventually breeding out the Chinese, but just maintaining the American chestnut and just getting that gene in there. And so they started that back in like the 30s

and 40s when they realized what was happening. Well, you know, today is 2022 and we are still without, you know, American chestnut in in the forest there are some backbred versions that are more resistant but they will still get infected i've been to a couple chestnut nurseries where they're doing experiments and it's it's sad because they'll get up and then they'll die they'll get up and they'll die and it's like oh there's two look there are two over there in the corner that made it and those get you know on to the next one but there is some work out of uh new york suny in new york where they um altered a chestnut and they put in um they they just they just changed the gene so the you know version that the gene that makes chestnut blight resistant is in that and

that's getting approved by the epa fda and usda hopefully that USDA. Hopefully that gets approved. If that gets approved, we get real further along because the resistant trees are not the same as the American chestnut. The resistant trees are shorter and more shrubby and they don't fulfill the overstory canopy role that chestnut used to play. That's best case scenario. Worst case scenario is your but like um butternut which was

you know driven to functional extinction at the same time and we're just nowhere on that purdue's working on some stuff but it's nowhere they're not in the woods now how how much of like because i i tend to roll my eyes pretty hard when we're talking particularly about climate change and people are like well i think that science is going to save our asses from this one. We're going to develop some like miraculous carbon capture method and like at the last minute we'll be able to reverse everything and it'll be fine. I tend to roll my eyes at that. you do. Is this kind of a thing where if there's hope for a lot of these species and a lot of these biomes, it's going to be in stuff like we figure out how to hack these trees to keep them alive? And like, is that really kind of where we are? I know some very good tree geneticists and tree breeders, but I don't think that they have the capabilities of, you know, coming up with trees

that are resistant to all of the various fungi and bugs that are out there. And even if they do, it's, you know, you have to get them out into the woods. You have to plant, we have like 740 million acres of forest. You got to get them out into the woods. You have to have the nurseries to get them out.

There's, you know, even if you were able to create trees that were resistant to all of these pests, it would be impossible. So no, the only, the only answer is don't,

don't do climate change and to the the carbon capture perspective um the only machine that's going to capture the amount of carbon we need are trees yeah i do i do forest carbon stuff which is a whole different episode i want to i mean i'm very i'm extremely interested in that because obviously like we've we've been supported by a couple of of companies who like one of the things they do to try to be nice is they'll plant trees and stuff, which is not useless. But also a lot of people think that that's what rebuilding a forest is. And like, no, forests are a huge part of the problem with why the West is so flammable is we chop down all these trees and we grew back just the trees to chop them down again. And that turns out to not be resilient at all to anything because trees do not live on their own ever.

Yeah, that's why it's a forest. It's not just, yeah, you're exactly right. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, that's, yeah, planting, there's not the infrastructure to plant our way out of climate change. There's not the land. It's just impossible. And even if there were the infrastructure in the land we don't have the time because you know trees take time to grow they work on a different time

scale than humans do even your your shortest lived tree is 60 80 years yeah and it is one of those things where i mean we we have this is what we taught we kind of started this new season which is forever with which is that like there's no there's nothing we can do that will stop us from continuing to face worse and worse consequences of climate change because the carbon has already been emitted, right? You can't just pull it out. Warming is going – even if we were to like make very revolutionary changes tomorrow, there's still some degree to which it's going to get worse. some degree to which it's going to get worse. But when it comes to like within your field, what like carbon capture using trees and stuff,

can you talk to us about like what that actually looks like as opposed to sort of the, we'll plant a tree for every dollar you spend kind of thing. So yeah, I actually, I actually can. I do a lot of my work about carbon, forest carbon stuff. So yeah, basically the idea is to make sure you have the the best way to get carbon sequestration of the forest is to have a healthy functioning forest and that's you know kind of where these pests and climate change are interfering with that and so you know to maintain a healthy functioning forest on the east coast you know some of these you need to have fire some of

them not some of them are too wet to burn uh and then you know harvesting needs to take place in some of these some of these don't need to be harvested again we're talking you know millions of acres of you know forest here so we're going to be incredibly broad and we got to keep invasives out you need to keep forest pests to a minimum and then make sure that you're managing the forest you know as best as it can be managed and i I say managed. This is not something new. Humans have been on the East Coast since, you know, it depends on the artifacts you want to look at and what archaeologists you want to trust. But like 25 to 20,000 years ago and the last glaciers left the East Coast 18,000 years ago. So we had people here before the glaciers were gone.

So these forests have never not had humans hands on them and never not been touched and managed by humans. And, you know, we've got to make sure we're doing the best we can. You know, some of that means that we're managing forests with what's best for the, you know, that means managing forests for what's best with the forest in mind, not what's best for the end of the quarter, what's best for your, you know, bank account. That's hard to do because forests are getting more and more expensive to manage and to you know manage this thing but here in the east coast we got to do a lot of fencing we got to keep deer out of forests because their populations are so high it's just ridiculously high and they're never going to come back down you know we have to spray invasive species we have to pull invasive species you got to go through and you got to make sure you know you're you're preventing all those kinds of stuff and so it could take you know you can if you do a

good shelter wood you can like make forty thousand dollars out of it and then you could put all that money back into growing your next generation of forests so forestry is really going from a profit making venture in a lot of cases to like you're barely making money or you're you're like breaking even or losing money it's it's no longer you know if you really want to do it great you're not always making money which is hard for people to get their head around yeah i mean it's the kind of thing that in a reasonable world huge amounts of money would be diverted to from other things like i don't know f35s um i feel like you guys could do a lot with one f35 worth of cash i feel like that would solve almost all of our problems.

The problems that you see in forestry don't cost a lot to fix, but it costs a lot for a forest owner, be that an agency or a person. It costs a lot. All of the issues around climate change all circle around growth-based economics.

Nothing has a shared root cause but they all have this similar aspect to them where yeah every every part of them gets worse by the extreme focus on economic growth at all costs and that suffers that that makes everything and everyone suffer so you know it would be nice if since we have a government it would be nice if they would you know give more funding towards stuff like this type of forest management, which I know they do some, but a fraction of it compared to what they give to

the Pentagon, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, even big forestries, technically agriculture, but even corn and row agriculture gets a lot more money. Yeah, corn has massive subsidies compared to everything else. Yeah, the NRCS, the Natural Resources Conservation Service,

they do a lot with farm agriculture. It's very difficult for forest owners to get that kind of money into forests. If we could get that money, it would be a game changer, but we're not there. There is some change being made in the administration, but that's like 2022, 2024 stuff, and that doesn't help today. It doesn't slow down pests today. You can't unkill trees. Yeah.

I guess, is there anything that you're optimistic about within your field right now? Like if you I think that would be handy both in terms of like. Is there any sort of. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Because I'll admit, like when I think about not having the forests, that's pretty much the most black pilling thing i can imagine like for myself like that's the that's the thing that i have trouble coping with emotionally more than anything else there's lots of horrible things about what's coming but that's the one that like really scares me the most yeah i don't think we're gonna lose forest as a thing they're just going to become you know if without things being done they're going to become less they're going to be fewer of them and they're going to become much less diverse and functioning

you know for a lot of these you know invasive species be they plants you know especially invasive plants we have a lot of we know how to control them i was just writing a thing about controlling wavy basket grass wavy leaf basket grass it's a new invasive species to my area it's highly controllable and we know how to do it it's just again a question of people you know getting out there and money to do it you know if we have the people and the money we can solve that problem oh also if we stop you know bringing that in that'd be even better we you know actually took you know ipm is right now ipm but um quarantine and pest management seriously and you know people like stop throwing you know their local like plant out into the park just because like i don't want to

kill it like let's let it be free don't do that goldfish don't don't throw them in the lake that's why you have huge goldfish coming out of like florida don't don't just cut pets loose and stuff like that and if we can get a lot of that under control would be in a lot better place again i don't think they're forced to disappear in in the future unmanaged i think they just become fewer less diverse and less fun yeah and then you lose species species based on them like birds you know wildlife all that kind of stuff and also i mean one of the things that also they have to become less accessible both because there will be less of the manned um more fragile. Like, how else do you keep some of these invasive species out, but keeping people out, which is, I think, a bad move for a lot of reasons.

But I don't know. I also don't know, like, is it possible to have a global society where there is not just trade, but the movement of people on a wide scale and not have this kind of shit crossing right like that's when i think about as someone who's more or less an anarchist when i think about the only things that a border should exist to do it's it's keep stuff like that out but i just i don't know how possible that is like a lot of this stuff is i mean is this the kind of thing that's just spread by carelessness? Because it kind of seems like it can be spread to by people who think they're taking care.

Yeah, both is the answer. There's some very good research out there about the, you know, relativeness between global trade and, you know, invasive species. But that also you look at like colonialism and colonial societies. There were these things called introductory societies. Oh, I'm getting the name wrong. But basically they're clubs. It's like I would like clubs of people like I would like to see this new place that I live in, like the old place.

Like the European starling was introduced in New York because, you know, one guy wanted to see all the birds of Shakespeare in America. Jesus Christ. Oh, I get an even better one for you. in America. Oh, I got an even better one for you. The moth formerly known as Gypsy Moth, that's the only time I'm going to say that word, is now found in America because of this one guy.

I'll put the name in the chat for you so you can say it because I know how much you love saying French names. Oh, ha ha! This guy is one of the most French names ever. Leopold Rivelo! Here comes a wave of comments about our anti-French racism. Oh, no, no. This guy is one of the most French names ever. Pierre-Leopold Rivelo. Here comes a wave of comments about our anti-French racism. Oh, no, no.

This guy deserves it. Yeah. Oh, I know. It doesn't matter. We still get the... Okay, well, this guy... Which nobody does about my Italian accent. No, it's just the French.

It's just the French. Once again, the Italians deserve it as well. Yeah. Please tell us about Etienne. Yeah, so this guy, he's a French scientist who left France. He came to the U.S. for a little while. He now got to Massachusetts. He was

also an amateur entomologist. Oh, boy. And he was like, oh, you know what I think America needs? I think they need a silk industry. Now, they have a native silk cloth that doesn't produce good silk and it doesn't breed fast so he brought in the uh lematra i gotta do the scientific name because we changed the name on it because the common name is a slur so we're not doing yeah so lematra disparo uh so so he brought this this moth in from europe uh and he he started trying to breed these two moths

which are not related at all it didn't work obviously and then he just kind of you know he went he went off to be an astronomer and he just let these moths go in his backyard and he didn't tell anyone they were there and then all of a sudden these things escaped and now they're killing trees you know across the eastern united states and they're in washington oregon i think they're in bc a little bit too great yeah so it yeah that's that's that's that's such a good parable like a parallel to the invasive species that is french people that really really does just tie up all all aspects of that yeah amazing i uh it makes me think a lot everything you're saying about kudzu which which is in the i i've heard some people say they're getting a handle on it i don't know

how to evaluate that at the moment but but when I was last living down there, it was just like devouring the entire Southeast. Yeah, you can handle it again if you want to spray it. You could get what's called a chew groove, so a bunch of goats. You can get a handle on it, but again, that's money and effort. So it's just a question of-

Although you do get delicious, delicious goat meat. Oh my gosh. I tell you what, the people who do goat invasive management, they have it made. They rent goats out to people. They get paid for the goats. And they also get their goats fed. So when they slaughter them, they didn't even pay.

That's a good business model. As someone with a couple of goats, that does sound like the dream. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. They don't work on all the invasive species. I do. There are folks. No, they probably don't eat those beetles, huh. Yeah. Oh, God. They don't work on all the invasive species. I do. There are folks.

No, they probably don't eat those beetles, huh? No, no. They also don't like plants with thorns on them either. No. And it's very few goats can handle an entire French person either. So, yeah, we can't we can't trust the goats to solve all these problems for us. It is nice that they're helping. I don't know.

all these problems for us it is nice that they're helping um i don't know so i i try to are there things either in terms of like it acts people can take or probably more more realistically organizations people could support that you think are actually helping try to stop as much of the woods from going bad as fast or reverse the the some of the stuff we've been talking about today. We try to have some room for people to do something if there is anything people can do other than check your fucking shoes for beetles when you come back from wherever. Burn all of your clothing

anytime you leave the state. That's a good start. That's a really good start. Not even the state, sometimes it's the county. When you go on a road trip, to say sometimes it's the county. Stop. When you go on a road trip, you stop your car at the county line and you roll it off of a cliff. Fill it with Tannerite and just let it burn. But don't push that into the woods.

We've seen how that works. Not into the woods. That's real bad. No, into the ocean where everything's fine. Yeah. That's what they say about the ocean. Going great. I tell people I work between the farm field and the stream.

I don't do stream or water stuff because there's chemistry in there, so I don't know what happens over there. That's fine. I assume everything is great there. It does seem to be going fine. I think the best thing that you could do as an individual is don't cut random stuff loose. Learn the plants of your area.

Yeah. Learn what's around you and what should be there. And when you see something that shouldn't be there and you know it's an evasive, remove it where legally possible. Obviously, don't go into someone's arboretum and start pulling plants out. No.

That'd be real bad. Burn down small farms, wherever you find them. Oh, man. The egg people would not be happy about that. But yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say anything. So I think, you know, learn plants, trees is neat. And then if you, you know, think of, if you're thinking about like, you know,

how can you help manage forests? You know, if you, lots of people either own forests or know people who own forests and, you know, encourage them to get a forest management plan or land management plan and get that and then also if you got a lawn rip your lawn out again where possible and use native plants i do i do some ant you know some lawn change stuff and it's just frustrating the amount of lawns out there it's like you know one of these people one of these reasons we're losing so many you know birds and we have fewer birds and birds pieces because like they they can't eat grass.

These things eat fruits and insects and seeds, which you don't get in grass. So, you know, if you don't own a forest, that's fine. And I'm a huge advocate of that. I try to be on the show. And, again, we always get this thing where there are people who will critique when we talk about some of these small-scale solutions.

It's like, oh, you know, turning your lawn into a permaculture garden with local species isn't going to like produce enough food to feed your families. Like, no, it's not about that. If you could get a couple of thousand people to do it and they convince another couple and like so on and so on and so on, then suddenly if you're increasing significantly the amount of carbon sequestered by that lawn and you're also making a better habitat for birds and whatnot that that scales that is a thing that scales if we got a significant number of people with lawns to replace them with something like we're talking about fucking kill kill that grass that almost certainly isn't fucking native to your area plant

stuff that is and and and try to reintegrate at least your lawn back into the local ecology, if you got a million Americans to do a version of that, that's not an insignificant thing. Yeah. Yeah. And it is something that you can do. In a lot of states, there's programs to support it. In my state, there's a program specifically for changing lawns over. And that program is backed up.

They are out of money until 2024 they spent it all already there's definitely interest there um again give them an f35 let them sell it to whoever whoever anyone gets it if they want it it just goes up on craigslist all right yeah put it on craigslist cash yeah give it to the highest bidder yeah um the other thing you can do is go outside like like, support your local land management agency. Most of these, like, forest service and park service, they depend on money spent by users. So go spend money at the forest. The other thing people can do is you don't have to hunt.

Wash your fucking boots first, though. Oh, yeah, definitely that. And don't bring shit in. Don't bring your, like, weird thing in, like, your weird plant, because you don't want to kill it. Yeah, your entirely seed-based diet yeah if you don't if you hunt great that supports conservation if you don't want to hunt you can still buy duck stamps and these other things that support wildlife management in the u.s wildlife is is funded by the users so those people who buy guns and ammo and you buy archery equipment and you

buy hunting licenses. So if you want to support wildlife, the best thing you can do is buy a hunting license. Even if you don't hunt, that's, it's kind of counterintuitive, but it's the core of the North American model of wildlife. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a really good point. And it is one of the, it's also one of those areas when we talk about ways in which theoretically there's room to build re in roads between left and right in this country conservation and hunting should be one right and there are hunters on the right who are actually talking a pretty good like reasonably about conservation like it is an area of shared interest everybody likes wild places so to quote

unquote wild we just talked about how none of them are actually wild they've all existed with human beings for forever but like yeah we like we like the outdoors yes the outdoors yeah well and what you know people ask me like so i hunt i have my crossbows right over there oh sweet crossbow yeah get in your home one second yeah you don't have to get a gun i have been wanting to get crossbow pilled for a while now oh yeah I wouldn't mind getting crossbow pilled myself get a shoulder holster for a crossbow there we go oh yeah that's

great oh that's dope yeah no this is not a super expensive one but it's pretty much a rifle yeah I mean ballistically at the ranges you use them, there's not any meaningful difference, really. Yeah. And if you're a person who doesn't like guns and doesn't trust yourself around them, they're very safe. So, yeah, get you one of those if you want.

It's a fun time. I also like it a lot more than my guns because it doesn't recoil. But that's enough about that well that's great um is there anything else you wanted to get into calvin before we kind of roll out today uh you touched on forest carbon stuff that's a whole man yeah a bunch of stuff on that that's a whole other world i am interested in talking more about that but perhaps we should do a have a dedicate an entire thing i mean we should definitely dedicate an entire thing to that. It's an incredibly important subject.

Yeah. And I think there's a lot to say about how different indigenous groups have been like up in the northwest in particular. We have a lot of kind of tribal efforts at stuff like – not just with the forest but also with like the coastline and whatnot and rebuilding certain populations along the coast. In the Midwest, Manami does a great job with forest management i'm actually doing a webinar thing about one of our forest pests and we're having them come talk about their management well we invited them i'm not actually sure if they're going to do it yet but the practice we use is based on what they use out there so yeah it's it's really cool what various first nations do super great yeah i just want to plug trees yeah neat learn your trees dope

my favorite type of tree probably the redwood used to live in arcada go running in them every day um i know that's kind of a cliche answer what's your what's your favorite tree uh this is one behind me here no one can see my background uh it's white oak you can't make white oak so yeah yeah that is an important. Forest products are like one of the only things that supports forest management. So it supports forest. So you don't be afraid to use, you know, sustainably managed wood and wood products. Find a good bourbon company. It's a diverse system and it's capitalism.

And drink a shitload of bourbon. Always a good call. Really. All right. Well, Calvin Norman, any last pluggable to plug? Plants. If you want to learn plants, that's great. If you want to learn about what's going on in your native,

your areas around you, there's lots of groups that do that. Your local extension service helps you out with a lot of that. Most of their stuff's free, so plug that. Yeah, go outside and plug that. I don't do Twitter. Good. Yeah. All right. Well, go outside and plug that. I don't do Twitter. Good. Yeah. All right.

Well, go outside. Hug a tree. Calvin Norman, thank you again so much for coming on. If you want to see Calvin's original thread, just type in The Woods Are Bad and It Could Happen Here Reddit or just go to the It Could Happen Here Reddit and scroll down a bit. You'll find it. That's going to do it for us today. Until tomorrow, go out into the woods. Go out into the woods.

But wash your fucking boots first. 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. I'm Jenny German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars,

from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how TexElite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love

keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

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

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

trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It could happen here is the podcast you're listening to with your ears or perhaps other parts of your body. If you have, I don't know, some bizarre form of synesthesia that causes you to taste sound, maybe you're tasting us right now. In which case, I'm going to open up the flavor bouquet by introducing my co-host Garrison and our guest for today. Why don't you take over now, Garrison? I've done my job. Great. That sounds lovely. Yeah. Hey, Garrison here. It could happen here is the podcast. We have a special guest today, journalist and researcher W.F. Thomas. Hello.

Hello. It's so good to be here on Behind the Woman's Revolution, the Police Insurrection Daily. Thank you. Lovely to have you. A lot of people say Garrison's voice tastes like sorbet, by the way. It's a comment we get a lot. Yeah. A lot. A lot. A lot. A lot of those DMs. You should probably stop that. So we're going gonna be talking about something i've wanted to actually bring up myself for a while now but i just have not put the work in and now luckily someone else did the actual work so we now we could just talk about it uh we're talking about something called a disclosed tv um which is a broad range of things it's not not just one thing. And I guess I'll hand it over to the person who did the actual work in terms of, like, how would you describe what Disclosed TV is?

Before we get into, like, the journey of the platform and thing, like, what is it? Yeah, let me start this off by saying I've already, before the publication of the article, been publicly threatened vaguely with legal action from Disclosed TV. So that will be largely informing what I say today, but we do have a lot of receipts. And we have very scary lawyers here, so I'm excited whatever happens. So feel free to say whatever you want to say.

But Disclosed TV markets itself and presents itself as a news aggregator operating Twitter, Telegram, Gab, Getter. They have a Facebook as well, as well as a main site where they host what one could describe as articles as well. Yeah, and I think Disclosed TV, for our purposes, they have a very large Facebook presence, but the way that we usually interact with them, specifically like me and Robert, and then other people who are journalists or just anti-fascist researchers, usually we interact with Disclosed TV on Telegram or through Twitter.

Twitter, it's how they break a lot of current events where a lot of political figures talk about them, is Twitter. And then Telegram is where they really disseminate these out into more obscure groups. Maybe they change their wording because they know the audience is a little bit different and they've been a vector of information for a while really really with the 2020 protests they kind of picked up a lot of there was yeah they they were everywhere in terms of saying specific things, not doing sourcing, and just having – basically, they are a events, which appeals to people across the

spectrum. They don't just market towards the far-right wing. Sometimes they frame things to attract a variety of people under the extremist banner, let's say. So you don't just see them in far-right circles. You see Disclosed pop up in a lot of places because of the way they frame news and breaking events. But they didn't always start out like this. This isn't what they always were. They weren't always this kind of content aggregator that creates their version of news. And Thomas did more research into what they were before, which I actually had not done that research yet. So, yeah, let's talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, so I'm going to start off with talking about how I first heard about Disclose. So I was living in Germany when the pandemic hit and got COVID first wave in Germany in the middle of March. Luckily, I was totally asymptomatic, but I was kind of stranded in Germany for a couple weeks and had to isolate in a vacation rental. And the Bavarian man who owned it just kept coming and talking to me, and I would tell him, hey, it's probably not the best idea for you to be coming by

and chatting with me all the time. And he got into talking, and we're talking in german he got we got into talking about you know the pandemic what he thought about it and he started talking about how he thought oh the government's making this seem way worse than it is you know the deep state if you know anything about that and he and he said deep state in english um and i was familiar with german far-right right currents at that time. But I had never encountered a pilled German dude. And that's when I realized this is going to be a fucking problem.

Yeah. Yeah. And and it lo and behold, it has continued to be a problem. So as I got back to the US and the other thing when i was in germany the first time i encountered i encountered telegram um when a german i knew said uh hey i i just don't trust whatsapp because it's owned by facebook why don't you download telegram in 2019 i think um and and it was pretty innocuous to me at the time i didn't realize this would become a problem yeah um yeah fast forward um i was working on my master's project which um you can talk about more later on because it's kind of besides the point um if you don't want to hear about it but looking at telegram as the cultic milieu um using colin campbell's framework of the cultic milieu to understand specifically how QAnon spread in Germany

and how QAnon interacted with these native underlying conspiracy narratives within Germany because Telegram is already massively popular in Germany before, after J6, I think of the band wave came down and there was much more migration to the platform so you know I did the social network analysis looking at the German conspiracies seen on telegram and one of the biggest notes that came up and I was looking at number of times shared into other groups or channels was discl TV. And that's the first time I came into it.

I looked through it and realized, okay, there is an editorial stance within this, and that editorial stance largely attracts conspiracists and far-right extremists to this coverage and to, you know, this is widely shared among conspiracists and far-right extremists yeah um fast forward um i i'm on twitter as many of us are unfortunately um and i saw disclosed tv just popping up everywhere um even from people who who i would think should know better yeah yeah

absolutely are you know big extremism researchers and journalists um shared it i remember there one specific one that really came across my feed um disclosed had had taken a video from like the blaze glenn beck's whatever empire whatever yeah um about the firefighters who were quitting over vaccine mandate or something and had all of their boots or whatever and i saw yeah lots of people sharing that as well um and eventually i got tired of saying hey this shit is suspect don't share it um and decided to write an article about it so i could just send my article to people and it's really interesting what i found um disclosed tv started off um in the mid-2000s as just this forum for ufos paranormal stuff cryptids bigfoot sightings and existed in largely the same format until 2021.

There were some shifts in the way the site presented itself. It started off as a member login where members could write articles that were largely long form forum posts and then have people comment on them and reply. forum posts and then have people comment on them and reply um and at one point disclose made the jump to functioning as a news aggregator while including an editorial spin on that yes and including some of their own articles you want me to get more into that now yeah because yeah because like the the shift was... It wasn't immediate as well, right? They were starting to present themselves

in more of a news-gathering way around the late 20-teens. Of course, during 2020, this became a big thing in terms of their social media presence. They were trying to present themselves as a news aggregator, right? But they still operated the forum on their site throughout most of that time and it's only until recently where they shut that forum

down um which was you know full of full of all kinds of conspiratorial nonsense that's very easy to see past for most people uh secret you know secret arctic shit, which is always a red flag. Yeah, that's usually a red flag. Yeah. Even getting to get stuff like, watch this SJW get wrecked, which is not a quotation, but just that kind of vibe. That style of content, yeah.

Going from the forum operating, then with their social media accounts, to the shift to this more of presenting as a news website. Talk about that and the potential effects that we see this having on both the social media sites and just the overall trend of news aggregation in general, I guess. Yeah, so the first big shift that I found was the creation of their Telegram channel,

which is in January of 2021, actually. So this is relatively a yeah shift that happened um and they operated their telegram as a um as more in this traditional news aggregator sense and so that's how they really blew up on telegram at some point they deleted all of their old tweets um and started operating their twitter in a similar manner it was after they created this telegram channel um in september actually overnight on september 20th of 2021 they completely rebranded the site they took out all the user forums um they included backdated articles to a year prior. And looking through archives of it, there was a note saying something along the lines of, we have found so much growth on our social media, our growing Telegram channel,

our growing Twitter account, and something to the effect of we we are changing our strategy and going about this a different way um and you can if you were into the forum you can join our discord um which is yeah funct and i'll get i'll get into that later um and yeah looking it was really interesting too because looking at these backdated articles um they included very obviously plagiarized content um they had i believe it's it's all in the article but they had four journalists um names attached with the article using um ai generated images for their pictures yeah yeah um and as the especially the articles that they themselves published um were very focused on ufos paranormal paranormal phenomenon um as well as content that could cause skepticism within an

audience um about vaccines and lockdowns and I do not know the intent of uh their editorial board and so I cannot speak on that but of course not it generated this effect yes that is they found a way of creating content which develops a very specific audience which grew their numbers which made them you know what one could assume would make them want to make more of that content because it makes more numbers and they can um use that to grow their platform um yeah specifically leading up like after after january 2021, ramping up when the vaccines were becoming more and more common in the States and then across the world, they have seen a pretty significant growth and have changed their platform accordingly.

Exactly. So we began looking into who the fuck owns this? What's going on with this? Like all German companies, and it is based in Germany, there's a requirement by law to include an imprint or an impressum that includes an address, contact information for the site and the company that that owns it a company

called future bites operates disclosed TV which describes itself as a private equity firm and media group and looking into the ownership behind future bites is a man by the name of Uwe Brown, who has a pretty interesting backstory. He's hosted, he's made numerous web hosting sites. I believe he created some dating sites as well, but my research was not conclusive, so that's a maybe. But eventually he sold, he had his most success when he sold one of his web hosting sites to uh godaddy for a lot of money and along the way in his own as he described uh booked a flight on virgin to go into space and see for himself if the earth if the earth was flat my god awesome cool Cool. This is great. Thank you. Yeah. So this is who we're dealing with.

Sweet. And the thing about Disclose being based in Germany that becomes an issue is that Germany has a very different look at free speech than in the U.S. different uh look at free speech than in the u.s um for example even online displaying swastikas and denying the holocaust is illegal and is a prosecutable crime that can get you jail time so as we explored uh as i mostly and there's additional reporting from ernie piper and i'll talk a bit more about that later uh explored their Discord and their Telegram. And we realized, huh, seems to be a lot of Nazis here. And by which, when I say seems to be a lot of Nazis, I mean people with swastikas in their profile builds. Yeah.

With, you know, names referencing the Holocaust with the whispers parentheses. And saying, denying referencing the Holocaust with the whispers parentheses, um, and saying, denying that the Holocaust happened, um, and also sharing the neo-Nazi, famous neo-Nazi, infamous neo-Nazi propaganda film, uh, Europa, The Last Battle, um, which was shared by prominent QAnon influencer ghost Ezra. Yeah, I know. Oh, man. This came up a few days ago. One of the channels that me and someone else have been watching forwarded me that film being shared. It was at the Free Oregon Telegram channel

was sharing links to that. And I wonder, I would like to track back where that link came from. Yeah, not great seeing that film circulate more and more, especially among the Free Oregon Telegram channels, like anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-lockdown channel, and seeing the proliferation of that type of content yeah so in preparing for this article um with the help of the logically editorial team i'm a freelancer um their current head of content ernie piper um sent an email basically asking hey what's going on

y'all seem to have a Nazi problem that's kind of borderline illegal in Germany to which for a while for about 24 hours this post just went totally quiet and didn't post and then

came out with a post specifically targeting Ernie by name and with a picture of him and linking to some of his old reporting work as well, saying, yes, Uwe Brown owns this. He got his money from GoDaddy. You know, we value free speech and we condemn hatred, whatnot and and saying oh our telegram we have a tell there's a telegram group but we have these rules in it and uh okay yeah we we had to shut down the discord that got a little bit out of hand we admit that you know they had people denying the holocaust with swastika icons in their discord that they didn't seem to care too much about until someone pointed it out um and you know there's there was additionally very explicit neo-nazi content uh in their telegram

channel as well with the excuse oh well we're a glowing growing platform uh we we can't moderate everything as well they have they just crossed 400 000 in their telegram channel and i think about 30 000 in their telegram group um which is frankly bullshit yeah that is if if my personal opinion is that if you cannot don't have the resources to moderate this space you probably shouldn't then you shouldn't have the space yeah the space um and and additionally confirming oh okay we we when we made our new version of the site yes we backdated some articles from previous user generated content that we you know didn't vet properly we're trying to fix that now uh they removed some of those articles um and that yeah we none of the people who who are the authors of our articles are real people and they're all pen names um you know they also have or at least had a tab on their website

that said write for us and and looking for people to send them things and saying you know we we will disclose your bio and link to all your social media if you write a story for us. And there was zero of that happening as well. So do you think that, I know like on the rules for their telegram, they have the no Nazi stuff rule. Do you think they're actually trying to discourage that because they're scared of legal stuff? Or is that just presentory? And they, I guess, you know, this is just going into speculation. So I think this might be more a question for even Robert

in terms of yeah like is the anti-nazi stuff presentory because it does seem to be a lot of their user base is fostering that type of thing or is you know being moved over from other similar channels because yeah like a lot of

the amount that we see disclosed like you know intercept with channels like, you know, the Rise Above Movement channel, um, and a whole bunch know like you can look at all their stuff saying i mean like yeah on their rule page saying no nazi bullshit um but that if you spend any amount of time looking at where their posts are forwarded it's almost primarily people who self-describe themselves as fascists um so i mean yeah it's hard or Or Donald J. Trump Jr. Yes, yes. It expands out into a lot of, you know, just like, you know, American journalists who study extremism can also share disclosed stuff on Twitter, right? That is part of their thing is making that, and, you know, that does strengthen them because it gives them that legitimacy. So then when people point out that they have a Nazi problem, like, no, that's not us.

That's just some of our users who are trolling or you know whatever whatever bullshit they they want to say um so i guess like how i guess the the real way to frame this is like how often have you seen nazi stuff associated with the disco with the disclosed tv brand because that's the one thing we actually can measure right we can't measure their intentions but we can measure how often this stuff happens yeah i mean that's always like the best way to measure that kind of thing rather than just sort of like making the allegation listing like we find it in this many channels we see it shared in these areas it's being discussed by these people and like the like that that's i think always kind of how you actually build these these sort of networks is by looking at what is actually spreading where like that's

it is thankfully something that you can measure pretty objectively and like they are fostering it with the amount of stuff they talk about like george soros and you know the amount of stuff that they like the way they frame breaking news is is has that editorial bent where it's very clear that it's getting pushed in a specific direction. Like there is that is that is a thing that you can observe by reading the type of narratives they're weaving via how they report information. information um yeah the the the topics that they choose to cover um are topics that resonate very deeply with conspiracists and with far-right extremist communities um if i had to speculate um i will say at least since the article has come out um they've done a better job of moderating their telegram channel at least for now so good job disclose tv no one you can't find links to europa the last battle there anymore you can still find you can still find uh very rampant homophobia slurs um because you know they didn't they clearly

auto-blocked some words but people can shorten them or use different spellings for those words to still be used in the channel. There's still anti-Semitic coded anti-Semitic references as well, responding to something

saying oy vey for example which is something that tends to be used by a lot of neo-nazis and antisemites yeah I mean even and if you do any amount of research on telegram you will you will find forward

forwarded links to this channel all everywhere like it is so forwarded links to this channel everywhere. It is so massive, the footprint that they have currently in the cycle of forwarding

posts, specifically on Telegram. And yeah, they're getting a lot of traction on it because they have stuff framed in a way that's really easy for them to have those stuff line up with the communities that promote those types of worldviews and promote the narratives that they want to foster. So let's see. Let's have another quick break and then let's maybe talk about your big masters project which is really interesting can I do it?

yeah you know what isn't telegram? literally these ads unless we get an ad by telegram we are primarily sponsored by the Durov brothers but that's for a separate project my favorite ad is the one where it's the kid playing and they find a gun sponsored by the Durov brothers. But that's for a separate project.

Great. My favorite ad is the one where it's the kid playing and they find a gun. Oh, yeah. That's my favorite. We're back. Well, thanks. Great job. Great work.

I hope everybody enjoyed that kid finding a gun again. And firing it. And firing it. Yeah. One of my favorite tweets recently was like somebody, it was somebody like clipped a screen grab a news article that was like a toddler has shot someone every day in the United States for the last three years. And somebody quote tweeted and said, somebody fucking stop him. It's very good. It's very good. The last thing I want to talk about is just kind of why news aggregators are bad in the first place and examples of which we've seen the past few years

and how they contribute to disinformation specifically and how they don't do sourcing for any claims and they try to make themselves a primary source even though they're not. And then also I would love to talk about um your uh very fancy project so yeah we saw a lot of news aggregators in 2020 that like during the protest specifically that that spawned and killed many a news aggregator account um which did not help things very much um yeah and this is an issue that strikes across the political spectrum. Yes.

I mean, one of the biggest instances of that would be an account called Anoncat, right? That was what they're called. That's what I was thinking of. Yeah. Who, you know, marketed themselves towards the left wing. And again, I don't know what their intentionality was. They may have had their heart in the right place.

I have no idea. And I'm not going to speculate on that right now. But the effect that they caused was damaging to how information is disseminated, specifically in high-stress events. You know, like, for instance, the Rittenhouse shooting, you know, stuff like that. The protests, the demos around that, before that. Yeah, before that. Yes.

Yeah. Like in fostering that very fast paced, unverified information circulation that gets, you know, a lot of retweets. It gets a lot of eyeballs on it, but it's hard. It makes it very hard to backtrack claims because they do not want to link to other accounts because they're mostly interested in growing their own account um so and i and i will say this disclose has gotten better about linking to the sources even if the title and the tweet don't necessarily match what is in the story they link to yeah at least someone could take a different interpretation from the two yes so just like you

know news aggregation and the way it intersects with disinformation and misinformation not just a problem for the far right not just a problem for the right wing not just a problem for liberals not just problem for leftists this is the thing that anyone anyone can really grasp onto um and some of it's accidental some of it's intentional right there's some some people might just do this kind of mindlessly and some people may you know do this aggregation with a very specific intent in mind so just be very careful whenever you have an account that always leads with all caps like breaking like news like if if you have an account that always does that maybe maybe maybe don't take that account super seriously all the time maybe Maybe you should find other sources of info

that don't always start the tweets with breaking news in all caps. Or my advice to people, if they do want something like that, find an actual news source. Yeah. There is plenty of valid criticism to be made against these mainstream media MSM centrist centrist stuff from, you know, even from the left, there's criticism. But you have to find some way

of finding your own meaning and understanding of what is going on in the world around you. I think... AP, CNN, Reuters. Yeah, and on that point, I think that is part of why I think Disclose can succeed or, what they did can succeed, even when I see stuff shared on the left, even by anarchists. Because it is a not-mainstream-media-news source, the way they can frame things sometimes rarely will match up with an actual anarchist's views, and they'll be like, yeah, I'm going to share it from this thing because it does feel like an underground you know source it it doesn't it's not you're not sharing a cnn article so you feel better because instead you're sharing something that is not in the mainstream so like

i i get that i i get that pull to not something that is a disingenuous reading of a cnn article instead yeah but instead of your you know it's not actually better it's just marketing they're just tricking you via aesthetics and branding and that's all that it is right so maybe you should learn learn to see past the marketing and branding of those types of things and look at the actual content of what's being shared what is the university project thing that uh has been taking up a lot of your time yeah and um so i got back in the u.s and i got interested um especially in looking at the spread of cuban on in germany and that you know led me down this research path um and brought me especially to telegram um again before it was largely used in in right-wing circles in the U.S.,

although the Nazis have pretty regularly in the U.S. been on Telegram as well. But this led me to look at this, and especially to look at Telegram in the context of, as I mentioned, Colin Campbell's concept of the cultic milieu, which I don't know if y'all have talked about that on this. We have on behind the bastards a couple of times. Okay. But yeah,

to, to give a quick summary is, is the concept that there is the space. And when Colin Campbell wrote that it was in, I believe the seventies. So it was a physical space where people go to find these rejected narratives you know reject the idea of rejected knowledge um and they go to seek this kind of knowledge and and and these things um so he's talking about things like ufo conferences or or

meetups uh or or alternative bookstores or perhaps maybe signing up at an institute to get a degree in metaphysics. Yeah. What a weirdly specific example, Garrison. Yeah, sorry. I just read the random thought. Yeah, anyway. How's that going, by the way, Garrison?

It's going good. Good. Yeah, and what you find is people can very easily move between ideologies. And as they move between ideologies, concepts, specific schools, they cross-pollinate these schools. And this is how you get these kind of highly syncretic movements like QAnon, like the modern conspiracy movement, which is incredibly syncretic movements like q anon um like the modern conspiracy movement um which is incredibly syncretic and um some of the other really bad ones that are out there as well that combine these different views um specifically when you start when you start combining this type of like cultural mysticism with politics often you can have very volatile results yes exactly um can you think of any

examples i'm not i mean in some ways the modern eco-fascist movement is built on a lot of this type of stuff so that that would be the easiest that'd be the easiest one the the i think that the syncretism of because i think a lot of people have been surprised to see like kind of like natural medicine and whatnot subcultures and like alien subcultures kind of colliding with QAnon increasingly pulled into this sort of weather system of conspiratorial thinking has been surprising to a lot of people who don't understand this stuff. But it makes total sense if you have been paying attention to the scholarship on what is actually, like how cults sort of form. It's like a weather pattern that's been building for quite a while. There's a gravity to it that sucks everything in together and it all kind of – it's, as you said, syncretic. It's interesting because – not to get into horseshoe theory, but this is even how you get some of that crossover, right?

Yes. just going to mention is that even a lot of like the left-wing authors or you know post left-wing authors who got into this like cultural mysticism um you see their texts now getting shared by like like open fascists even though these authors were anti-fascist um they are able to still pick and choose what parts they're writing to appropriate because some of it can kind of synchronize um despite them coming at it from opposite ends a very long time like if you we talked about in our gabrielle denunzio episodes fume which was this kind of like where a large chunk of like the the fascist intellectual movement got started um in the post-world war one period but also there were like a ton of anarchists and a lot of like left-wing um like thought leaders and whatnot were kind of all it was again there was this kind of like left wing um like thought leaders and whatnot were kind of all it was again kind of

there was this kind of like gravity center that pulled everything in and it all started churning together and um yeah we're we're we're seeing that happen now um and yeah it sucks and that's great yeah to jump back to camp that's one of those examples of those physical spaces that Colin Campbell was talking about, right? Where it's any place that ideas that are rejected by, you know, the orthodox kind of the establishment, there is overlap. There is not necessarily ideological overlap. There is an interplay between them as people move between them and as these ideas come into collision with one another. people move between them and as these ideas come into collision with one another um and with the internet right a whole different fucking ball game um yeah because that space is now everywhere yeah exactly yeah and and telegram specifically has these specific affordances that make it ideal for having this soup of bullshit on it as well um it's it's

additionally one of and this may be changing there's a lot of discussion going on about this especially within the german government who who could actually they already have a law that they could use to say hey you can't have nazis on you can't have this nazi shit in telegram um but telegram is one of these last places where where things are largely allowed to spread without any kind of interruption right um which i do think you know you look at telegram is used in in um the hong kong uprising as well it was used for it was used in the george floyd uprising yeah the ge the George Floyd uprising as well. And it's the same things that attracted people to it.

Time is fake. Abolish linear time. Shoot your clock. Shoot the fucking clock. Okay, let's get back to the topic. Yeah, but jumping back into this, Telegram markets itself is this very secure platform. It's probably not right it does have it's certainly not no yeah absolutely not it does have it does have encrypted chats but that's only for one-to-one messaging um between people and

even then you need to go and make sure that security settings are right and and again i i don't fully trust that um yeah i don't fully trust i. Yeah, I don't fully trust. I mean, Signal is about as good as it gets. We barely trust Signal. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I trust conversations when everyone has put their phone inside a Faraday bag in a house. And then we walked two miles into the woods.

We walked two miles into the woods. Then you can have a conversation. Yeah. But Telegram Markets itself is this very secure app, right? Which is largely marketing. Its appeal is that it's not WhatsApp. It's not owned by Facebook. It's probably worth acknowledging that for because it's also very popular with a lot of people in parts of the global south and countries with authoritarian governments and it is has been used for a lot of organizing it can be more secure and all more secure but also more accessible um than what than any other

tool people have access to i mean in syria it's like it's again extremely common for like neighbor like neighborhoods and towns will have like telegram groups for this little village where they a lot of stuff gets done over Telegram and places like that. And Telegram sits in this interesting space between social media. It's not a full on social media site, but it's also not just a messaging app. Yeah. Telegram is a little space. It's kind of hard to categorize.

It is an interesting sort of like in between type thing. Yeah. Because you can have essentially unlimited. Yeah, because you can have essentially unlimited. I think the number is in the hundreds of thousands for how many people can join a group message on Telegram. And you also have these one-way messaging thing called channels where one person or group of people can send out messages that appear alongside everyone else's message feed as well. And you can also enable comments on that, which I'll get into in a second. But but it's a great way to share information as well. And what I was specifically looking at is the forwarding of messages because you you can forward a message from this one channel

into whatever group chat you're in, and it links back to that channel. And I was interested in seeing how far you know what connections can we make from this what kind of yes zigzagging can we find um and the answer is fucking a lot where where someone may may use telegram for for example a neighborhood group message right and then someone forwards a message a message for this channel channel or for this other group message where they talk about, oh, here's kind of health practices to use. And then you get into the pseudoscience of things crossing into further messages from what's forwarded, forward groups and channels from what's forwarded into that group and channel and so on, so on until you get to the neo-Nazis eventually. you get to the neo-nazis eventually um and it's also it is it is a concerted effort on the part of people pushing their ideology um who will go in the comments of of these giant channels and say hey check out my channel um what's not a real one you know arian cooking which is probably a channel

but probably is yeah great job check sorry but but check out check out check out check out this Aryan Cooking, which is probably a channel. Probably is, yeah. Great job. Sorry. Check out this or whatever. Especially when QAnon moved on, a lot of promoters moved on to Telegram. There was organized groups of internet neo-Nazis going on and trying to pill boomers into neo-Nazism. Yeah. And there still are.

Because of the mesh-like network of Telegram, they try to make those meshes connect via dissemination, right? You can, you know, people who are dedicated to these more esoteric groups can join more regular, like, MAGA groups or QAnon groups and start slowly bringing links to the... start doing links and forwarding to the

more extreme channels. And eventually, yeah, that does work. It can be a slow, careful process or it can be very fast and bombastic. And it'll, depending on the person, one of them will latch on to one, one will latch on to the other.

Yeah, and before the article came out, what i did see was the specific thing of of accounts that i would associate or or believe to be neo-nazi um encouraging people to join their groups and channels um in the in the telegram group message as well and i cannot speak to what that looks like right now after the article has come out for legal purposes and i've been trying to take a break from telegram for my day-to-day life um and focus on reading actual books so but yeah that is yeah i can always tell when one of us has been spending time on telegram because the the things we consider jokes get much worse. Yeah. You remember when I found that playlist of Blink-182 Nazi covers?

Nazi covers? It was what? There was like a hundred of them. Blink-1488 or some bullshit. Blink-1488. God damn it. Yeah. Me and Nazis.

You can find the most fucked up stuff. Don't. Don't do it. Don't scroll on Telegram. Absolutely do not do it. You're not going to get... This isn't like coveting the sacred knowledge or anything. You don't need to be on Twitter, let alone fucking Telegram.

It's not worth it. There's no sacred knowledge that we're hiding. It just kind of sucks. It just sucks. It makes you feel bad. Yeah, it just makes you feel worse about life and yourself and the people around you so the scope for your master's project what is kind of the what's the what's the deal with like tying these things together i guess yeah yeah so so

using this social network analysis to argue that the telegram does function as this cultic milieu um which yeah i have i have my which seems to be the case yeah um you know and the question gets into what is the responsibility of the platform right um because i fully believe there should be something at least similar to this it it has been used for you know purposes aligned with my politics in which i would call good uh and needed um however they've also allowed this fucking awful ecosystem to spread it's it's interesting to see when telegram has had to step in and they you know they have pulled down some isis accounts and channels um and, they have pulled down some ISIS accounts and channels. And they have pulled down.

When I was in Al-Hol, which is the camp where all the ISIS prisoners were in Syria, like while Jake and I were in the camp, we could see on Telegram, like ISIS supporters in Al-Hol talking about stabbing guards, like in real time. It uh particularly uh it they've done like a lot there's less of it than there used to be but it is still not hard to find isis on telegram yeah and they they've taken down a few amount of neo-nazi channels um it's it's funny because oh god maybe cut this but they've taken on some of the neo-Nazis channels when they've shared ISIS shit for example yeah yeah I think we're we've we're familiar with that line of thing that's something we've mentioned before okay cool there has been pressure from from the play store and google as well or the play store from google and and the app store and app store yeah apple's app store from apple to say we we aren't going to carry the app if you don't do just a tiny bit better, essentially. Which also, it exists as a web client, both as a web client and as a desktop app as well.

But that would limit some of it. So this has become largely discussed in the German parliament because there's a new government in Germany, and there is this history of Germany kind of is the lead for doing things about this digital content, especially within the EU. And as I mentioned, there's already a law called the Network Enforcement Act that requires platforms to take down content in Germany

that could be implemented on Telegram as well. There's already a law. Yeah, I mean, this is... The thing why I watch happen lots is, you know, these channels will get shut down and they'll make a new one and they'll shut down that one and make a new one, right? It's this, you see this with like Discord servers, Telegram channels, it is kind of this endless cycle.

And seeking an end to the cycle is always not as easy as what one would hope because of the cyclical nature of building these platforms and connections and how the people who run these, you know, intersect. And specifically with Telegram, it's really easy because if a channel gets shut down, you're still part of 12 other channels, and odds are one of those channels is going to forward you the link

to the new channel that was lost. Yeah, and this is a thing you see where they send lists of channels. Yeah. Within extremist groups and channels, they will send out lists of here's other groups and channels to check out as well. Yeah, but I mean, I would... So that's something that's hard for regular people to actually do. But something I think that people who do not own these platforms

nor are lawmakers can think about is particularly the cultic milieu that does go past regular left-right divisions in terms of politics, and how, you know, symbol, like, symbology and stuff that was, you know, initially, you know, perhaps more anarchist or left-wing is being used by people on the right, and some people are really confused by that, and there is ways to, there is ways to understand it like it is it is i i am very frustrated when i look at you know people online who don't understand why nazis can use ted k and right it's like yeah like it's it's not it's not it's not not what it's not not really about what ted k actually wrote it's more the symbolic meme of ted k and trying to you know

get that get that, get that line of thinking across is not the easiest thing. Cause sometimes it'll go in the other direction and be like, Oh, Ted K is a Nazi, which isn't accurate either. Like that's, that's not also the most accurate thing to say.

So it's, it's the cultic milieu framework of being, yeah, sometimes these symbols can cross over from one thing to another. And sometimes the action can be the same, you know, both anarchists and like insurrectionary fascists both want to like attack like industrialization and attack points of industry, right? But maybe their ideologies are slightly different sometimes in

specific ways. So it's always a tricky thing to kind of navigate. So I think in terms of, you know, people should think about what symbols they promote publicly and stuff is a good thing and think about news aggregation and how to maybe not just share something because it's counter-cultural try to figure out what other types of narratives this source is

spreading Follow real journalists, support the work of real journalists because there's a bunch of kick-ass people out there who are doing awesome research and work. So, I think that kind of wraps up the scope of what I want to talk about around Disclose specifically. Because, I mean,

Disclose is a thing, but it's also, like, it's good as just, like, an example to, like, this broader, like, phenomenon, I think. Because, like, Disclose won't be here forever. Hopefully. Like like you know hopefully in a few years it's something that we can just like look back on and laugh about um but it's you know it's still a good signifier for a phenomenon that happens and the phenomenon

even even if disclose goes away the phenomenon is still going to stay uh and it's important to point it out when you see whatever the next version of this is. I'll also say that the cultic milieu isn't necessarily a bad thing, right? This is where stuff that is rejected by the Orthodox goes, and completely eliminating any kind of cultic milieu just means everything is exactly

the fucking same and falls in line with Orthodox belief, which I strongly disagree with as well. No, there is a way to be counter-cultural without being a conspiratorial fascist i would say it takes vigilance and responsibility in which you were consuming and sharing yes and i would say like most people who are actually counterculture are yeah like actual punk is is is that you know once you're enforcing traditional hierarchical viewpoints, that ain't punk.

That's playing into what the status quo was. That isn't revolutionary. Like the living members of the Sex Pistols would disagree with you, aren't they all? Yeah. But I think we can all agree that having living members of the Sex Pistols was a mistake.

And I prefer Lana Wachowski's version of punk to theirs anyway. So, hey, who cares? So thank you for your work, Thomas. I would recommend people read your article, which you can do by Googling Disclosed TV now. It will be, for me, it's the second result that pops up. So that's cool.

Send it to all your friends and mutuals who are sharing Disclosed TV. You can find it on logically.ai is the website, and the full title of the article is Disclosed TV Conspiracy Forum Turned Disinformation Factory. Thank you. Thank you for that. Do you want to direct people to your Twitter account, or do you want to be a ghost that fades away in their memory?

Just don't be fucking weird. You can find me on Twitter at W underscore F underscore Thomas. God fucking damn it. Jesus Christ. Be weird. Alright, I guess I'm keeping my account locked for a few more weeks. Yeah, I also want to shout

out one of the local mutual aid groups in the town where aid groups uh in the town where i live or in the area where i live is the atlanta justice alliance their cash app is cash symbol atl mutual fund or their venmo is atl mutual fund they're helping out um they they've done uh weekly um weekly provided food and uh resources for people unhoused people living in downtown atlanta um and are a great group uh and then also people want to give more money to things shout out atlanta solidarity fund who have helped many of my friends get out of jail after they were

arrested at protests um and also you can hire me yes if you uh Researchers, yes, you can hire Thomas if you want. I mean, I've known Thomas for a bit. They do really good work. Yeah, in my experience, they're a very careful researcher. They will not say things without thinking about them a lot first, which is always great in a researcher. Or at least not publicly. So please send them money and off-putting comments,

an even mix of money and really off-putting Twitter comments. Oh, and one more shout-out to my friends at Terrorism Bad Pod, which you should listen to, and is on Twitter at Terrorism Bad Pod. Well, that does it for us today. If you, for some reason, are on social media and you want to follow us you can follow us at cool zone media um or absolutely don't do or happen here pod um you can follow robert evans at i write okay send him weird definitely do not do that and you can send

me weird messages at creepo time all right send garrison pictures of salads that you make. And keep doing that for like five or six years to the point that it actually becomes funny. Because it's going to take a while. I'm just happy that people have stopped sending me eel porn. So that's honestly, that's a win. That one's on you though.

I remember distinctly. Goodbye everybody. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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