It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 89

Episode Date: July 1, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody.

Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. happy monday and we have a very special monday episode we're we're doing a return of our shitty mayor monday episodes for this monday june the whatever the date is 26th 26th uh during the the sixth week of action in Atlanta to stop Cop City. So that is ongoing.

We're recording this slightly ahead of time so we can release it during the week. So we don't know what exactly, how exactly things are going to go. And I'm pleased to report nobody's been arrested so far. Everything's gone great. Yeah, sure. So yeah, we don't quite know what the first kickoff rally is going to be quite yet.

But we do want to talk a little bit about a certain mayor, uh, for this shitty mayor Monday. And I have, I have, uh, uh, convinced,

uh, Matt from the Atlantic community press collective to do my work for me this episode, um, by writing probably too many words about mayor Andre Dickens. It was only a little over what you told me to write. That's good. That's good.

That's good. So, yeah, let's let's hear about let's hear about Mr. Dickens, Matt. Take it away. All right. So Andre Deshaun Dickens was born June 17th, 1974, the younger of two children. His mother divorced Dickens' birth father before he was born, but a stepfather adopted him and his sister when Dickens was seven. Working as an airline mechanic, Dickens' stepfather taught him how to take things apart and put them back together,

creating an early interest in engineering for young Andre. He grew up in Adamsville neighborhood, and went to Benjamin E. Mays High School, which is in southwest Atlanta. Dickens says the neighborhood kids were rough around the edges, as he told Atlanta magazine, quote, We fought often. But when the fighting escalated to bats and brass knuckles, he changed course and turned to baseball and books instead. At age 16, Dickens decided that he wanted to be mayor after watching then Mayor Andrew Young. This is about the time he also met Shirley Franklin, whose son he played baseball with. Dickens decided that he wanted to be mayor after watching then Mayor Andrew Young. This is about the time he also met Shirley Franklin, whose son he played baseball with. Franklin was Mayor Young's chief administrative officer at the time and spent time mentoring Dickens as a teenager. She would also go on to become mayor herself.

OK, so Andrew Young, I know that name because that's the street where the Hard Rock Cafe is. This is the street where the Hard Rock Cafe is. This is the street where the Hard Rock Cafe is. He went on to become an ambassador. Ambassador to the Hard Rock Country. To the Hard Rock Cafe. That's also where the SWAT vehicle hung out in front of the Hard Rock Cafe. Yes, across from the Hooters. Exactly.

Yeah. It's a very notable street in Atlanta. Yeah. After a week-long minorities interested in technology and engineering program at Georgia Tech the summer before his senior year, someone from the program handed him an application to Georgia Tech, which he filled out while waiting on his mom to pick him up. Tech was the only college that Dickens applied to. Huh. I mostly know Georgia Tech as the place that like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin go to recruit a whole bunch of their employees. Yeah, you know, it's the tech engineering school of the South

and all the good weapons manufacturers need to get their good Southern engineering. Yeah. He did not go that route, but it is kind of rare for black politicians in general to come from schools outside of the HBCUs. We've got that like big HBCU district here in Atlanta. Can you explain what that is briefly?

Yes, historically black college and universities. There are a group of them in kind of just off downtown Atlanta in an area called the Atlanta University Center. So they're all kind of together in that area. And that is where most of our elected officials who become mayor come from. Dickens is only the second mayor since 1974 not to graduate from one of those HBCUs. But Dickens did join Kappa Alpha Psi, a historically black fraternity, when he went to Tech and was a member of the student government, kind of keeping his dream of being mayor alive. Got it. After graduations, he briefly left the state before returning home in 2002 to take care of his ill mother. This is around the time that he started his public service career and he joined NPUD. NPUs are neighborhood planning units. Atlanta is broken

up into 25 of these neighborhood units and they're each given a letter of the alphabet. So they're advisory boards that give input to the city, but they can issue zoning variances. And some NPUs have built up considerable power over their neighborhood. So this is where a lot of people first plug into Atlanta government. Okay, so is this related to the zoning board process? Yeah, if you need to get approval to have a bigger awning than you're supposed to have, you've got to go through the MPU to get it. Got it, okay. I'll consider that for when I want to expand my awning.

Yes, your awning,ning yes your awning or build your awning okay yeah yeah at this point dickens and his sister also founded a business called city living home furnishings and the company was exactly what what it's a furniture store it's a furniture store he founded a furniture store in an interview with georgia state university later in his life dickens reflected that this is where he determined that he needed to act rightly to ensure his good reputation how does owning a furniture store teach him this lesson oh well he said imagine i'm on tv saying trust me and all the people would have to do is call the Atlanta Journal Constitution or radio and say your furniture is trash.

Your history to somebody who are all these places that, you know, you've really got to be consistent is what he said. And, you know, turns out the furniture trash. Now I have to know. Well, spoiler. He goes bankrupt. It turns out the AJC wouldn't be much of a problem for Dickens as, as we've learned years later, the paper would be on his side, bobbing those easy questions and helping him build support for cop city. So like I said,

the family business failed in 2010. You can't actually blame Dickens for it. It was a product of the, of the great recession. Okay. So I wonder if we can still find any of his furniture lying around. So there's, there's actually a store called city living home for furnishing.

And I don't know if it's like somebody just... It's related at all? Yeah, I tried to look it up, and I couldn't figure out if it was just somebody using the same name or not. But there is one that exists in West Midtown. Okay. Oh, boy. Sorry.

I'm going to get a lot of comments from people in Atlanta now because you said West Midtown. Oh, boy. I'm sorry. West Side or whatever you want to call it. lot of comments from people in atlanta now because you said a west midtown oh boy i'm sorry west side or whatever you want to call it it's uh it's a southwest piedmont i don't know there's there's also sono like south of north uh yeah we have all these these fun uh little little street or neighborhood names but uh so after the failing business he changed course and went to GSU for a master's

of public administration in economic development. So this was after 2010? Yeah. After 2010, in 2011, he started attending his master's program at Georgia State University. And then he graduated in 2013, just in time for the municipal election season. So Atlanta City Council, as we've learned now, is comprised of 12 district seats and three citywide seats, or what we call at-large seats. And so Dickens ran for post three against an incumbent named H. Lamar Willis. Dickens, kind of historically, when he has these campaigns, either has really good fortune or good insight in choosing his opponent or opponents. A month prior to the election, Willis was disbarred after the Georgia Supreme Court

found that he violated numerous professional conduct rules, including in 2009, placing a settlement money from a child injury case into his personal bank account instead of giving it to the parents. Wait, really? Yes. And this guy guy this guy is now back in uh georgia government he uh is he's part of like the beltline um that that makes sense management program so like i this happened earlier this year stealing money from injured children i think he gave it to the child eventually but you're supposed to put these in like escrow accounts and not in your own account not Not your personal account? No. So former Mayor Shirley Franklin endorsed Dickens in the 2013 race, which drew ire and

attacks by both Willis, who called Dickens out for his bankruptcy of the furniture business, and what Willis alleged was, quote quote unlawful use of georgia tech government property so on the bankruptcy dickens went to about a million dollars in debt and had some tax liens against him which he's now discharged through both bankruptcy and settling the tax liens okay but but the unlawful use of georgia tech government property what is what is that i have no idea i don't know what. I searched pretty hard to try to find it. And I can't, like, other than Willis making the claim, I found no evidence. Could it be like computers?

Like, what is it? I'm assuming, like, you know, probably something like he went to a computer lab and used it off hours for some personal business. But yeah, I found nothing that actually really backs up the claim against him. So he won the election in November with 53% of the vote, which is a surprisingly strong victory for like a relatively unknown candidate like Dickens was at the time. During his first term, 2013 to 2017, Dickens worked pretty quietly.

But towards the end of his term he started to introduce legislation make a name for himself so he created a 40 million dollar affordable housing bond as well as a study to raise the minimum wage for city employees to 15 an hour which ultimately led to the city enacting that wage dickens ran for his second term unopposed. So naturally he won. So that's 2017. Now we're at 2017 to 2021. And this is where the story starts to get interesting. We'll see the themes that will play out in this first, you know, couple of years as mayor. Well, and we will learn about that story after these messages from our lovely sponsors.

Or if you're subscribed to the new Apple Premium plus the cooler zone media you just hear us do the ad breaks without any ads at all so in lieu of that um buy gold gold plate buy gold plated guitars guitars thank you buy gold plated guitars all right we are back i'm strumming away on my on my electric gold plated bass this doesn't sound good it doesn't sound like it's supposed to yeah dan i'll cut cut out all of the all of the bad bass actually i can go get my accordion and play that instead if you want let's not all right well continue so uh we're in 2018 now um So in 20... Normal year. Completely normal year for Atlanta. Nothing happened anywhere else in the world.

One of the biggest conversations that was going around in Atlanta in 2018 revolved around an area of downtown called the Gulch. So this is the area that's surrounded by most of our sport team venues, kind of like where Centennial Olympic Park is. And the streets are all elevated in that area around above ground level and at the bottom of the ground level it's like these early 20th century like railway lines uh but it's mostly parking lots for those those for the stadiums yeah for the stadiums and it's known as the gulch because you know kind of which is a break in the ground yeah it's like it's like a gulch kind of

uh so back in it's like a gulch back in 2020 uh 2012 then mayor kasim reid presented an idea to give a los angeles-based firm a million dollars to build the gulch into a mixed-use high-rise area the legislation finally passed in 2018, but Andre Dickens voted against it, saying correctly that there wasn't enough focus in the development plans on housing affordability. And this helped cement Dickens' reputation

as a housing affordability advocate. Yeah, because he also did that $40 million package. Yeah, he just did that $40 million bond, and we'll have some more affordable housing stuff later. But I should say we're like five years on now and the Gulch hasn't begun, but they're trying to get it done before the world cup comes in. Yeah. They're also, it seems like they've been preoccupied with another construction project

that's getting much more of the mayor's attention, which oddly does not have anything to do with affordable housing. No, it does not. Dickens also introduced legislation that led to the creation of the Atlanta Department of Transportation, which, if I'm being fair, was a good idea and pretty necessary to help address Atlanta's decaying road infrastructure and improve...

No, the roads here are fine. Yeah, so you drove on... You complained when we had this last week of action about DeKalb Avenue and all of the potholes. Yeah. And that is now repaved. Oh, it is. That got repaved a couple weeks ago. You complained when we had this last week of action about DeKalb Avenue and all the potholes. Yeah. And that is now repaved. Oh, it is. That got repaved a couple weeks ago.

They're in the process of repaving it. So if we drive that. I'd love to see infrastructure working. My new favorite part is that usually around Moreland Drive, there's an area where you're trying to get to the Wani Forest that just is always constantly flooded no matter what. And that's my favorite area of Atlanta. And I hear that if you get rid of a forest that will improve flooding.

That helps the flooding because there's more space for the dirt to soak in water. Exactly. That is how that works. It is science. So in 2019, Dickens introduced legislation to create a task force to decide how to repurpose the Atlanta City Detention Center or ACDC, which is really weird. Every time I hear ACDC, I think of this thing, this jail, and everybody else is talking about something entirely different.

So it was built in 1990s leading up to the Olympics and replaced an older jail that now serves as our primary homeless shelter. So that's what ACDC is now? It's called the Gateway Center now. That was old jail acdc is the the current jail okay okay uh so in a press release uh after uh bottom signed this legislation to create the task force who's bought sorry first who's bottoms so uh from 2017 to 2021 uh atl Atlanta had a mayor named Lance Bottoms. And she was great and did not approve legislation about cop city at all. She did not. She did.

She did. So that was a lot. You just lied to me. I lied. I'm sorry. You purposely spread misinformation on my news podcast. Okay. So Michael Smith was Bottoms, bottoms, uh, press

secretary and also currently serving as Dickens press secretary. Okay. So he wrote that this legislation that authorized the task force actually authorized bottoms to close the jail, but the ordinance did not, uh, create that authorization only authorized this task force to recommend future uses of the site should it close and this is going to be important uh the task force met for about a year before turning in options which brings us to june 2020 we're going to skip straight over there uh with all of this going on so what was happening in june 2020 in atlanta there were some protests uh going on which we're gonna key in just after the jail fight but the task force offered four options and the city indicated that was going to go with

the second cheapest of the four, which was redoing the facade of the jail and turning the interior into a center for diversions. So instead of having a city jail, we would have this multi-story diversion center, you know, to stop people from going into the criminal justice system. OK. And in the middle of the summer of 2020, this was... How is that not just a jail? It's, you don't enter the criminal legal system.

Okay. Yeah. So you don't talk to, you're not in front of a judge. You are not technically arrested. You are given resources and you are given options to attend courses or counseling or whatever you need instead of entering um like the criminal justice yeah and so we have a diversion program here called uh policing's alternatives and diversions or pad uh which operates in every zone of the city and is

is a you know if somebody uh gets arrested like stealing basic substance stuff, they are supposed to contact pad and enter them into a diversion program where they get help instead of going to jail. Okay. And it works to the extent that the city of it, or it works to the extent that APD actually does contact pad. And it depends on kind of the zone, effective it is but basically at this point everyone agreed that the jail uh was going to end its time as a carceral space and become this diversion center to help people avoid entering the uh the criminal legal system so put up in that that is the plan

okay it is during june of 2020 during june of When the entire nation is in an uproar. Because of course, the bigger news of the summer of 2020 was the George Floyd uprising. And at that point in Atlanta, the killing of Rayshard Brooks by Garrett Rolfe at the Wendy's in Southeast Atlanta. Yeah. So after the killing of Brooks, Dickens posted on Instagram saying, quote, I am saddened to start this day with news of another black person killed by police and especially dismayed to see it happen in our city. Police must deescalate situations like these before they turn deadly. Once the suspect fled unarmed and intoxicated through a parking lot

of bystanders, this could have become an investigation rather than a shooting. So undoubtedly spurred by the fervor and uproar of that summer, Dickens also co-sponsored legislation with fellow council members Antonio Brown and Michael Julian Bond that would prohibit APD from using crowd control munitions in military style vehicles against protesters. Okay. This legislation, though, unsurprisingly went nowhere and we were hit with tear gas and shot by pepper balls for the rest of the summer. Yeah. And they still are using them. To this day. Yeah. hit with tear gas and shot by pepper balls for you know the rest of the summer yeah and they still are using them to this day yeah uh but this is also happening at the tail end of budget season

so our budget season goes from like march to or april to june of every year and the biggest debate in council that summer was about withholding 73 million dollars or about a quarter of the atlanta police department's funding And so we were actually positioned to defund the police. And while the legislation was under debate in City Council, thousands of residents called in for public comment. This is the only time that I've

the only time estimate I've seen for this public comment was about 17 hours according to Mainline Zine. I seem to recall it being longer but around that which is around 17 hours comparable to the last public comment session related to cop city yeah and and comparable even to the the first public comment session which is also 17 hours yeah yeah yeah so the actual vote uh happened on a specially called saturday session of city council at the

time like all other municipalities council was meeting remotely through Zoom. So the actual vote happened on a specially called Saturday session of city council. At the time, like all other municipalities, council was meeting remotely through Zoom because of COVID. And we're going to play a clip of one of the few things that Dickens said during that debate. And to set the scene, council member Dustin Hillis, one of the very pro-cop members of council, Dustin Hillis, one of the very pro-cop members of council, proposed a much smaller cut to the budget in the amount of like a few million dollars to remove just quote unquote non-essential expenditures from ABD's budget without risking cutting into actual pay for police or the raises to police salary that council and the mayor's office previously promised. Because this was a special session on Saturday, Dickens was driving around his mother, so

there's going to be a bit of background noise and the quality is not super outstanding. And now, as much as I'm trying to figure out a way to support it, if it comes down to being two million dollars or three million dollars or five million dollars, it just is so short of reimagining. You can't reimagine something that's almost 300 million and only take two to five million to reimagine it, right? And to kind of think through what all needs to be done and to send a strong signal that we want reform and we want change. What we hear in this clip is Dickens really doing what he's going to continue to do for the rest of his career, make overtures to the public while still ensuring that at the end of the day, the police are taken care of. He really wanted APD to know that their personal salaries were not only safe,

but they were going to grow and he would always be a champion of that. So we're going to skip here over the Copsity vote in 2021. At this point, I think it's been... If you're listening to this show, you're also probably somewhat familiar. There are several episodes that you can pause here and go back and listen to to kind of catch up on how that happened in 2021. So suffice it to say that Dickens did not fight against the legislation in its council phase and was one of the 10 votes to approve the Copsity lease in September of 2021. If anything, Dickens was one of the quieter members of council when it came

to debating the Copsity lease. He didn't really say much while the debates were happening. So the last few months, of course, of the Copsity fight happened during election season. And instead of running for a third term as council member, Dickens threw his hat in the last few months, of course, of the cop city fight happened during election season. And instead of running for a third term as council member, Dickens threw his hat in the ring for mayor, which was an open race with mayor bottoms, withdrawing her candidacy, uh, all the way back on, on May 6th amid rumors that she was on the short list to be Biden's nod for VP, which did, which did not happen, which did not happen. Uh, So to understand how Dickens won this election, because spoiler, we're talking about Mayor Dickens. Yes, we're talking about shitty Mayor Monday. Mayor Dickens.

We've got to talk about how Atlanta runs its municipal elections and how Georgia election law plays out in effect. And who the presumed front runners of the race were. First, municipal elections are run on a nonpartisan basis. There are no party primaries to weed out weaker candidates. To run, all you need to do is get the required number of signatures, pay the fee, and file on time. So this leads to a pretty wide field of candidates than you see in most elections. Second is that quirk in Georgia election law that everyone is probably familiar with by this point in time from the last few national election cycles in order to win georgia uh outright you need 50 of the vote plus one if no candidate hits that number then the top two candidates go to a runoff election the state law also applies

to any municipal elections for cities with a population higher than 100 000 people like atlanta like atlanta which has 600 000 just uh around 500 000 i think it's like 490 000 at this point but then but the greater metro area is like the greater metro area is something like six or seven million yeah uh so the two front runners of the race were not exactly popular figures uh i would go so far as to say like in many cases votes were cast against them like kind of like with trump uh instead of in support of instead of voting for biden you're voting against trump yeah so uh former mayor cassim reed was one of those candidates he left office in 2017 after a second term uh atlanta has this two consecutive term limit which reed had reached uh however you can

run for a third term if it's not consecutive. Okay. So during Reed's second term, lawsuits and scandal propagated heavily. Amongst the things that came out both during and after Reed's administration was that Reed made nearly $900,000 in illegal bonus payments to staff, had a bribery scandal in his office that resulted in an FBI investigation, and ensured that airport contracts went to his friends and associates. Based a legalist. A legalist mayor. And to make matters worse for Reid, a month after he announced his candidacy, the AJC released that it believed Reid was under investigation

for allegations of wire fraud for, quote, using campaign funds to make purchases of jewelry, resort travel, lingerie, and furniture. I mean, that would make sense considering everything else you just said. That's not really surprising. Then on the other side was Felicia Moore, who accurately or not was seen by opponents as the face of cop city after Joyce Shepard, who introduced the legislation authorizing the lease for cop city and lost her seat on council for that reason. While never forced to do so

since city council presidents only vote in tiebreakers, Moore did say that she would vote in favor of Cop City if it was needed. Then a week before the election, Felicia Moore's campaign Instagram account posted a video with Lee Clevenger, a white Republican donor and supporter of Moore's campaign. Clevenger can be heard saying,

all of Atlantalanta mayor since 1979 were quote not interested in anything except lining their own pockets i should know there's here i feel like there's gonna be some uh since 1974 a black person has been mayor every single time yeah that yeah that's that's what i was thinking yeah so that sounds like he's just a racist over so well yeah uh more removed the post and returned the campaign contribution uh from clevenger and said later quote it was an unfortunate statement by that constituent and i should have corrected him or walked away unfortunate statement not just like fortunate if someone's saying something incredibly racist uh so this was the setting that led to election night that tuesday to everyone's surprise dickens eked out

a second place victory above reed with just under 600 votes uh for a total of 22 153 votes for dickens more had a much better showing with 39 202 But neither of them was over 50%. But neither of them broke the 50%. So we went to a runoff. So during the runoff, more really courted conservative Buckhead. Buckhead's like the northern, more conservative, not suburb, but neighborhood of Atlanta.

Neighborhood. It's the one that wanted to turn it into its own city. Yes, wanted to do the Buckhead succession, which is built on a whole bunch of legacies of redlining and segregation and blah, oh we'll talk about that okay good um so more also earned the endorsement of reed the the guy who just said the racist thing the guy who no uh the former mayor who lost to dickens for second place by about 600 votes okay i'm trying to keep all these names straight here because there's a lot of a lot of names coming into my head now uh in a situation that led many progressives in advantage

to look at the guy who while he voted for cop city still supported closing the jail was willing to cut 73 million dollars from apd and had a been a pretty consistent advocate for affordable housing on council uh on council so it was between moreore and and that guy yeah so progressives made a decision and and went for uh for dickens and in the runoff dickens won by a landslide with 63 percent of the votes okay so 44 655 votes um moore actually lost 13 000 votes from her general election total interesting thus mayor andre dickens becomes our next leader uh turnout for the runoff was in line with what we saw four years earlier when keisha lance bottom faced off against garrison's candidate of choice mary norwood get get wait

don't don't put what do you mean you're gonna back if she runs for mayor again right no oh i misunderstood everything that has happened she's a scary woman i'm not gonna so the norwood bottoms runoff only had uh 4 000 more voters than we did in 2021's runoff that was the 2017 election 2018 election okay no the norwood that was the 2017 bottoms one i i i'm gonna act like i know atlanta history yeah i'll just correct you on some of this atlanta history here as i feign ignorance to have you explain concepts for the audience making me sound more ignorant than i am but actually then explain to you anyway i continue sorry i was going off in a ramble

we should say that 2017 uh runoff was actually much more evenly matched bottoms only won by 800 votes. And that's scary. Yeah, that's scary. Because Mary Norwood cannot be the mayor. So Dickens has said that he won with consent to govern. And it's not really stretching it when he says that Atlanta supported him in this particular election with this particular opponent. We largely did.

Sure. In the interim period, Dickens does the usual things. He appoints a transition team. This included your usual cast of characters, but it is also worth noting that it included Dave Wilkinson, president and CEO of the Atlanta Police Foundation. I've heard of them. The Atlanta Police Foundation. It's like a charity for police or something, right? Yeah, it's a non-profit.

You know, your standard non-profit. Okay. They do cool things. Tax deductible. Yeah, you can donate to them tax deductibly. Just like the streamer Destiny. That's the second Destiny reference in as many episodes. So as soon as Dickens is sworn in, he faces the Buckhead secession crisis.

And, you know, we explained a little bit earlier what Buckhead is. But Atlanta is a very large metropolitan area. And much of Fulton County itself was at one point part of unincorporated Atlanta. And then in 2005, an unincorporated area just to the north of Buckhead called Sandy Springs was the first to become its own city. to the north of Buckhead called Sandy Springs was the first to become its own city. The initial breakaway cities that happened after that were predominantly white and racism played a heavy role in their formation. But starting in 2016, newly formed black majority cities also started cropping up around the metro area, like the city of South Fulton and Stonecrest. So Buckhead wanted to do the same thing thing they wanted to become their own city and uh by no

means was that like popular sentiment in buckhead but it's more complicated because the cityhood drives uh were not like part of incorporated atlanta the previous ones okay it is yeah incorporated it is it is atlanta it's part of the atlanta public school system it's also an apd zone it has its own parks roadways and water system that are all like city of Atlanta property. Yep. So to have the best chance of actually seceding, Buckhead needs a state congressional vote. Otherwise, it would require a citywide vote, which it would obviously lose. Yeah.

So in 2022, it found that Buckhead's secession bill started working its way through the legislature. The bill didn't make it very far this first time around. It dies on February 11th, so just a couple weeks into the session. But in order to kill it, Dickens reached out to Governor Kemp and other Republican leaders and developed a working relationship early on in his term as mayor. kind of to quell this, this bucket secession played into the race of crime narrative, uh, that bucket secessionists were claiming was the reason that they wanted to succeed.

Uh, Dickens in partnership with, local law enforcement agencies and the Atlanta police foundation created the repeat offender tracking unit. They claimed that most of the crime problem in Atlanta comes from repeat offenders. And by sharing information about so-called criminals between agencies, crime would drop. Of course, this is very problematic from an abolitionist perspective when

someone enters the criminal legal system you're basically marked it haunts you the task force only serves to reinforce that uh and in response to the formation of the unit southern center for human rights said quote if apd is planning to double down on the very strategies that they themselves admitted do not work in pursuit of a solution that keeps people behind bars, the effort is doomed to fail. You know, else is doomed to fail. Our audience is actually buying these products that are advertising on our show for some reason, probably.

But who knows? I've heard the Blue've heard the blue apron uh cooking boxes are really convenient if you live an active and busy lifestyle like matt from the from the atlantic community press collective i actually use uh hello fresh okay good because i think they're the ones that actually are advertising on our show so thank you thank you for that great great work you are you already got it all right we are we are back all right so kicking back in with the buckhead session movement um in order to mollify buckhead there is also an opening of a police precinct in zone two in which

buckhead sits this is the third precinct in buckhead which is made up of just 28 square miles that's wild because like portland only has like three or four precincts in total yeah so we have six zones has like more people in like portland proper than like atlanta does i think our territory is more expansive yes yes but like population wise there's actually more people in portland proper just pretty funny i i should say that the the third precinct in zone two was was uh planned before dickens took office but he made sure to talk about it a lot early on yeah i bet i bet uh so and then in what would fit perfectly as a scene in the wire dickens

spent both this year and last year talking about how crime and buckhead dropped more in both years than any other zones what's the wire but well there's a podcast about the wire oh really a podcast yes huh i forget the name of what's the wire. It's a, it's a TV show about, Oh, police. Is it like one of those like millennial shows?

Are we doing a bit? Is this like one of those millennial shows? Um, it did come out in the early. Oh, so this is like succession for old people. Got it. This is the session for old people.

Yes. Uh, highly recommend watching it and check out the podcast that I can't remember the name of. Yeah. Plug someone else's podcast. Great. Great job. As the Buckhead secession issue wound down, a Southeast Atlanta apartment complex started

to draw increasing attention from the press due to rampant issues in the complex. A lack of care by the owners. So this massive apartment complex operator called Millennia. The company had a reputation across the country as terrible, and it is deservedly so. At Forest Cove, the complex was unfit for human habitation. Oh, really? And we have to acknowledge that Dickens here had an out just to blame Millennia. But in February, he told the approximately 700 residents that the city would be moving them to safer housing while the complex was either fixed or rebuilt. The rollout of this wasn't perfect. On April 13th of this year,

Sean Keenan, a local reporter, released... Friend of the show, New York Times reporter, Sean Keenan makes another appearance. So Keenan released a new story of this year, April 13th, 2023, showing that the first, that a quarter of Forest Cove residents were relocated to complexes identified as dangerous dwellings on the AJC's residential watchdog list. That's pretty funny. So I

have learned a little bit about Atlanta's rental situation here, and it seems like it kind of sucks to be a renter in Georgia. It seems like you have almost no rights. No protection. I didn't have air conditioning for a little while. And it turns out that you are not guaranteed air conditioning in any rental.

Which is hard being like in Atlanta. Because I never had AC in Portland. But that's Portland. We're not dealing with the Atlanta humidity and Atlanta heat. No, it's pretty miserable. Thankfully, my air conditioning did get fixed eventually. But yeah, there's no recourse for things like that. So until that report by Keenan, it appeared that the city was doing diligent work taking care of displaced residents and ensuring that they retained access to care and services with as little disruption as possible.

And by and large that, that happened, but you know, for a quarter of residents, not so much at this point, more questions are cropping up. So the story is likely going to continue to develop, but we don't really know where it's going to go.

Cause this is like current events. Yeah. Yeah. So another forest Cove issue that will probably come up later in Dickens term was that he made a promise to residents that there'll be able to return to the apartment complex eventually. But Millennia was denied HUD assistance to fix the property, and it's unlikely that they'll do so on their own. So the fate of the complex is pretty up in the air. The city does own approximately 80 acres in the neighborhood, which could and should go to building low income housing.

But it's prime real estate for further gentrification. So we'll see how that plays out. One of the first things that I noticed when I was visiting Atlanta last year was that most of the Section 8 housing has been converted into luxury condos or new five-story apartment complexes. And the speed of the gentrification was was kind of surprising to me like coming coming from portland like where there's still gentrification in portland absolutely but did the the expansiveness of it here and the speed of which

it's accelerating was was surprising to me yeah and we're not building like low-income housing complexes what's happening here is that they're they're adding a certain percentage of new like if you're building a massive complex a certain percentage of your uh off like your dwellings have to go at at a certain point of the uh average monthly income yeah but that's not really addressing this like large scale issue that is going because you still have hundreds of them that it costs like $3,000 and you have like a dozen that are low income and you just, you do the barest amount to skirt by while still filling up most of the available real estate with very expensive apartments.

And I should plug here. There's a fantastic book called Red Hot City by a GSU professor named Dan Immerglock. If you want to learn more about gentrification in Atlanta. Okay, great. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a vital reading. So towards the end of Dickens' first 100 days in office, APD chief Rodney Bryant announced that he was going to retire. Bryant was not very well liked by city leadership. Felicia Moore had made a campaign promise to get rid of Bryant on her first day in office, but Dickens said he'd give him 100 days to improve public safety

and kind of see where things were at before firing him. And what happened after those 100 days? Bryant stepped down, and Dickens tapped then-Deputy Chief Darren Shearbaum as interim replacement. I've heard of this guy before. This is the guy who made that weird confession about having sex in the woods with all those police officers.

I heard that in a podcast recently. That's so crazy. Shearbaum, who may or may not have said those things uh his prior role was overseeing the cop city development and he was also pretty well liked by apd officers so dick officially hired him in october of 2022 but if you're a leftist or even just against cop city this is actually like kind of a loss sheer bomb is incredibly pr savvy as you saw in that city council meeting. And he does pretty well when he's talking to them. No, when I was first doing stuff on cop city,

I remember when he was just like the spokesperson for it. He wasn't actually like the chief yet. And then he became the chief in like last fall and they've gotten better at their propaganda since then. A lot better. And you know, I watch this like every week. He does a pretty good job. Yeah. This brings us to budget season 2022.

In April, Dickens tells the AGC that he wants to hire 250 APD officers a year for three years, hoping that the total of 750 new hires will net a 450 increase in officers for the department. OK, so hiring a lot. Some of them might not stay on. Other people might not stay on. But you're trying to net to get another 400 or so officers. Yep. So Dickens also approved $4,000 bonuses for APD paid using American Rescue Plan Act money. Great use of funds.

Initially in June, Dickens promised police a raise of 3.5%. But in November, it became apparent that the city would have a budget surplus. So Dickens and Council raised that to nine percent, bringing APD to a total of a 27 percent raise over the course of three years. Funny how much money they're just getting pumped this past year. And I don't know what happened like three years ago, but it seems like something shouldn't. years ago but it seems like something shouldn't no i mean like you were talking about how like how how how dickens was like previously working to get like a 70 like a 70 million reduction in police budget you know probably but like in some ways probably just like for pr rates and strict because during 2020 that was the popular thing to do and now he's just like funneling millions and millions

dollars towards the police foundation towards individual officers towards raises bonuses you know standard mayor stuff oh and we're not done in november it was an early christmas for apd dickens also debuted 40 new scad and so scad is the savannah college of art and design uh it's an arts college a big art college in georgia yeah uh so they designed these police ford explorer vehicles uh for an officer take home program. They look like shit. Each vehicle cost $60,000. So the total price tag of this was $2.4 million to improve officer morale. Oh, yeah.

Let's let's get them, you know, $2 million with the cars just to make them happy. 70 additional take home vehicles are in the pipeline once equipment becomes available to out cool so yeah this this program is just continuing to grow fuck whatever scad designer was paid to fucking design those shitty cars so one of the things that was missing during this budget season uh back back in spring was the very thing that helped dickens solidifies his image as a progressive council member, affordable housing. In his initial budget, Dickens put no increase in affordable housing for his alleged focus. You had a budget surplus.

And you're like, no, let's give all the money to the police who are already getting a $90 million training facility. Let's give them even more money. Sure. Great. So Dan Emmergluck, the GSU professor i just mentioned um he was he's an affordable housing advocate and he was part of uh dickens transition team and he told capital b after the prospective budget was released quote for this to be his first budget to make a step backwards

is extremely disappointing and that's basically how all the progressives felt yeah uh so he dickens did cave to housing uh advocate pressure and he added an additional $7 million in, in the affordable housing budget before the budget was passed in June. Cool. Cool. Cool. Remember back in 2019 and 2021,

everyone is, was in agreement that the jail was going to close. Yeah. The, the, the AC, they were going to convert it to the other, to that other thing.

Yeah. It was going to be a center for diversion equity. It was, it was going to be great. And by this point, it actually was going to be a Center for Diversion and Equity. It was going to be great. And by this point, it actually had a name, the John Lewis Center for Diversion and Equity. Great. But in June of 2022, city council voted down legislation authorizing the mayor to close the jail. Then plans came out in early August that instead of closing ACDC, Fulton County and Atlanta were in talks to rent 700 beds from the facility to Fulton County to address the overcrowding problem at Rice Street, Fulton County's main jail.

Maybe they should just keep less people in jail. Activists warned that the lease would not alleviate these issues and that city councils needed to instead focus on decarceration. And then there was an ACLU report that came out later in the year that found 45% of the overall jail population in Fulton County is unindicted. Yeah. They're just holding people that actually have not been indicted for any crime. Great. Remember, it was Dickens who introduced the legislation to find a way to repurpose this jail. He said in a statement when the lease to Fulton County was coming up, quote, as I've continually supported since my time on Atlanta City Council, I remain committed to fully repurposing the ACDC facility

for non-incarceration purposes. But we are also confronted by a real and immediate crisis of overcrowding at the Fulton County Jail. Many of these detainees are Atlanta residents, and our conscience calls us to act. This is a temporary lease agreement and will allow the city of Atlanta to play a role in alleviating this humanitarian crisis and to provide the necessary time for Fulton County to develop and implement a long term solution. Humanitarian. Because we always know adding more prison beds really reduces the problem. So the temporary solution that we're talking about is a four-year agreement. And Fulton County is paying the city of Atlanta $50 per bed per night. So when the full 700 beds are taking,

Atlanta will be making $12.7 million a year. Remember when we had to release all those people from prison and jail in 2020 due to overcrowding and then violent crime dropped? Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. So the $12.7 million sounds like a lot of money, but before the lease went into effect, ACDC's average population was under 50 individuals per night.

The city's department of corrections budget is $16.1 million a year. So the city is still going to lose money running this jail, even with Fulton County paying for their detainees to stay there. Then on April 14th of this year, the news came out that LaShawn Thompson died in Rice Street Jail, having been neglected and ignored by Fulton County deputies. When they finally checked on Thompson, they found that he had been eaten alive by bugs as he lay dying. And this was in September of 2022, just after Atlanta approved this lease. The cell Thompson was in was so disgusting that a jail employee refused to enter without putting

on a hazmat suit first. Oh, imagine what it was like to live in there. That's crazy. And this death isn't the result of overcrowding. Thompson was in jail on simple battery charges and being held on a twenty five hundred dollar bond. He was also unindicted. There was no reason for Thompson to be in jail at the time of his death. If he had the money, he probably would have been alive today. Yeah, it's just blocking up poor people. Yeah. So this is the sort of thing that Dickinson Council have enabled with this new jail lease. Before we get into Dickinson Cop City in 2023, we need to talk briefly about some more American Rescue Plan Act chicanery Dickinson Council pulled off this year. At the end of January, Atlanta announced that it was returning $10 million in ARPA funds earmarked for rental assistance that the city never used. Why don't you just use it for rental assistance?

So this naturally upset a lot of people. Public comment was quite feisty that day. Atlanta is, of course, increasingly pricing out its legacy residents, as we just talked about. And $10 million would go a long way to helping combat that. And then to add insult to injury, a few weeks later, council passed and Dickens signed legislation that gave $500,000 in ARPA funds to the Atlanta police foundation to provide additional police and

first responder housing. So really reinforcing the city is going to take care of police before everyone else. Yeah. Oh boy. so really reinforcing the city is going to take care of police before everyone else yeah oh boy so let's move on to how dickens uh handled cop city uh since january 18th i think it's probably a good place to start sure the the killing of tortuguita by georgia state patrol officers the day that everything happened dickens wished uh the trooper a speedy recovery i can find nowhere in which dickens made any comment other than it's unfortunate that Tortugita was killed.

Not surprising. He never accepts any level of responsibility for Tort's death, insisting instead that that responsibility lies with Georgia State Patrol or DeKalb County. He refuses to acknowledge the fact that the city's insistence on trying to build Cop City both ensured Tort and the officer's presence in the woods. And NAPD's involvement in the raid like yeah uh so this moment also kind of changed how dickens uh approaches cop city before he was relatively quiet uh but he begins this like full court media press after january 18th and we don't know the exact details, but it does seem like DeKalb County, Atlanta officials and APF came to an agreement in January to pass this land disturbance permit. opposed construction of cop city and express solidarity with protesters dickens announced that he would hold a forum with the president of morehouse college david a thomas who is a vocal cop city supporter this was a big problem for dickens as the colleges that make up the auc and

we didn't talk about which one those were earlier it's morehouse spelman clark university morehouse college of medicine all of them carry with them an incredible amount of historical and political power in the city of Atlanta. So keeping AUC support is pretty vital if you want to continue to run for elections. The attendance at the forum was limited to only AUC students and faculty, but a stream was duped and broadcast on Instagram Live. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a complete copy, but there are definitely highlights that have made it out uh overall dickens was pretty patronizing and sarcastic to students several times students called the mayor out for his behavior but he continued to show disdain the rest of the night one student called him out for his lack of prior acknowledgement of torts death and dickens as usual sidestepped responsibility again saying that it was

unfortunate tort died but insisting he was the wrong person to blame because it didn't happen in the city of Atlanta and the officer was not from APD. At one point, Dickens went on a tirade after a student called him a sellout. This we do have audio for. Hey, let me just share this with you. I ain't never been no sellout.

You can't, you can't, you, you, you gotta check, you got the wrong resume that you're looking at. I know we, I know we like to yell and shout out things just to be heard. You've been heard. You've been heard. But guess what? You picked the wrong resume to pull on a race car.

Whatever Dickens was hoping to accomplish that night, he failed. Several memes and audio remixes of Dickens' performance went viral in the Atlanta Twitter sphere and continue to crop up this day. Like the I am not a sellout one, I don't know if you've seen it. Is that the...

I'm still ruined by the Dr. Han good doctor memes that just reminded me of the I am a surgeon meme so great job great job yeah great work uh so dickens has of course continued to try or to build or manufacture support for cop city over the next two months um in march he was visiting the neighborhoods around cop city to

hear feedback from residents and he of course started in the wealthier neighborhoods and he only went to the less affluent neighborhood, which like Cop City is actually in. After a member of the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee called him out for only favoring the wealthy communities. Local residents have told ACPC that Dickens skips over the houses with DTF signs out front. That makes sense. Yeah, checks out. He's done several interviews now on cop city with both the ajc and wabe a local public radio station uh the ajc interview was particularly interesting because

one of the interviewers asked dickens what would happen if cop city ended in a cost overrun dickens told her that any large overruns would be paid for by philanthropic dollars from the foundation he said this he said this but a member of his cabinet had already confirmed that apf uh to apf city was willing to pay 32 million dollars at that point and of course we've now learned that that number is 67 million dollars uh do you follow the city of the land of twitter account no I don't want to see that shit. But I know they have turned it into just a cop city propaganda channel. It's a nonstop propaganda channel, which is like really fun to watch because every cop city post is like bombarded with negative replies and quote tweets.

I've seen these posts. I know I know I have talked about how they launched their own website, trying to combat all of the top cop city websites. And yeah, they've really accelerated their propaganda the past few months. And yeah, just turned the actual City of Atlanta account into a Cop City propaganda platform, which is funny because they also often advocate and say, this isn't the City of Atlanta's project. This is the APF's project, which they'll often like use that, use that refrain.

And yet we have the city of Atlanta account being turned into a, into a megaphone to promote this project. Yeah. The Atlanta police foundation doesn't actually give interviews to like news anymore. They filter everything through the city of Atlanta, which. Normal charity organization.

It's completely normal for them never to show up at city council to talk about anything and to hide from the public. It's fine. So meanwhile, Dickens is, of course, like dogged by opposition to cop city at every turn. On April 13th, three Georgia State University students, with the support of this keynote speaker, interrupted a global symposium studies that Dickens was giving opening remarks. Dickens grows increasingly frustrated as the disruptors will not leave. And eventually Dickens and his retinue like just walk out. On April 11th, Dickens had hired a new senior policy advisor named Karen Rogers. Dickens brought Rogers over from the Atlanta Police Foundation, where she'd spent seven years working in community engagement. And he brought her on, of course, to advise about Cop City.

On April 18th, DeKalb County Medical Examiner released the autopsy on Tort's death. And that same day, just before the article came out that the autopsy was released, Dickens held a press conference on the steps of City Hall. was released, Dickens held a press conference on the steps of City Hall. He was surrounded by a group of nearly 100 all older black leaders, including former Mayor Bill Campbell and Andrew Young. This appears to have been a hastily thrown together event, and only a few media outlets were even aware that it was happening. Like we didn't get an update that it was going on. I didn't know that was happening.

Yeah, it just it kind of cropped up and seemed to take everyone by surprise. And of course, it looks like the press conference was held to counteract the autopsy report coming out that day. Yeah, but that failed. And the autopsy report was the bigger story.

Notably, the AJC did not print the autopsy report on the first day, but it was pretty well covered elsewhere on the landscape. And the autopsy caused a second city councilor to speak out against Cop City. And a growing number of state representatives have started to speak out as that happened and as the rest of the Solidarity Fund. But Dickens is, of course, unmoved and preparing for this fight to last a while. Then, of course, there was the city council vote on June 5th.

And there had been some work done behind the scenes to try to get this set back to committee. Apparently, Dickens had peeled off, so he called the maybe votes into his office early that morning and peeled off the votes to ensure that Cops City continued on. I wrote this, of course, I think two months ago at this point. So yeah, a couple of quick highlights. Again, the affordable housing. So with our affordable housing, it is supposed to get a certain percentage of our general operating budget.

And it started out at 1.5%, and then it was supposed to go up to 2%, and 2.5% is where it's going to cap out. So this year it was supposed to go to 2%. He kept it at 1.5%. But he did announce a public-private partnership to offer $100 million in affordable housing bonds. Really?

Yes. So we love our public-private partnership, Atlanta Way, to get things done. Yeah, that seems what I'm excited about for the extra $30 million bond to APF. That'll certainly get paid back in a reasonable time period. In a completely reasonable time period. That'll get paid back, I'm sure, and we're not going to continue to pay anything, and APF is not going to make any money off of this.

No, this is... Don't know the goodness of their heart. Surely this project is not a massive taxpayer sinkhole. So that's it. That's the mayor. That's the mayor. That's where we are. And then when's the next mayoral election?

So 2025. And of course, Dickens has to move the needle. There were some calls for a recall campaign around Dickens, especially amongst the movement. I personally don't think that it would have any chance of succeeding. There's a perception that he's doing okay. And when you have somebody that was probed by the FBI for corruption just a few years ago, your standards of what a good mayor is kind of changes.

People seem to be putting lots of their dedicated, some of their dedicated efforts in terms of like electoral signup stuff is being put towards the referendum, which got approved a few days ago to continue. They need to collect like what, 75,000 signatures from people who were residents of Atlanta and registered to vote in 2021. Yes.

Which seems like a pretty high bar. That's a lot of signatures. It's a lot of signatures. And because the organizers say this municipal clerk was like playing games and withholding approving the signature. So they don't have approving the referendum. And so they don't have the full like 60 days. It's now like two weeks. No, it's 57 days.

So I think it's like, they have to have them by August 15th. Which is a lot of signatures. And August 15th is around when construction was supposed to start for Cop City. So yeah. And then for other mayoral candidates, I've heard rumor that friend of the show, ontologically evil evil Mary Norwood, may be interested in trying to run again.

So this is like her kind of move is she does, she runs for mayor. Well, first she does a term of city council and then she runs for mayor and then she doesn't get the mayoral spot. So she takes four years off. She comes back, runs for city council, runs for mayor, takes four years off. So we're now in for city council, runs for mayor, takes four years off. We're now in her city council term. If she's going to do this for a third time, then she will run for mayor in 2025.

Which would suck. She came close last time. She did. Depending on how progress in the Cup City construction goes, she has a way to frame this being like, like I was the one who was actually in support of this popular proposal the

whole time. And look, we succeeded only because of me. Yeah, she can do that. And there is, so then as demographics are changing, we're no longer a majority black city. The population is down to like 48 black people so they're dickens is being called possibly the last black mayor of atlanta and you know that will be a shock to our systems and mary norwood would be like just a way to quickly kill that yeah and like like i said the only way to accurately describe her is just ontologically evil.

Like she is, she, she is just that bad. Um, she's like, she's, she, yeah,

it's not great. Would not be fun, but she, she, she's not the mayor. It is, it is mayor Dickens, who is the shitty mayor of this episode.

And based on how much power he has to change things and what he's decided to do with that power, when instead of actually supporting all the affordable housing things, he's funneled millions of dollars to Cop City, to the Atlanta Police Foundation, has refused any measure to revoke the land lease ordinance, and even if not to cancel the project,

even just to move it somewhere else, he's refused every step of the way. And yeah, we'll see how that does him in the next election cycle. Yeah, I'm really interested to see how he plays the referendum. I'm interested to see if the referendum will even be a threat at all,

because if it fails to get a significant portion of signatures, then he may just ignore it, because why would he bother to talk about it? Yeah. They're definitely not going to devote any resources to it until they're sure that it is a threat. But once, once it,

you know, potentially becomes a threat, they will, they've got to start doing something. Yeah. Well, we are, we are like what two or three days into the week of action at this point.

I don't know what, what things are like, but there's still some days left. So yeah, if, if, if you're, if you're in Atlanta,

try to stay safe and stay as dangerous as you feel comfortable. Say hey to us when you see us. Sure. Do you have any, do you have any things you would like to plug Matt from the Atlantic community press collective? Yes. So I am Matt and I work for the Atlanta Community Press Collective.

If you want to check out our work, our website is atlpresscollective.com. We also do a lot on Twitter. Our handle is at Atlanta underscore press. And our Instagram, where we post a lot of our videos, is ATL Press Collective. And then you can also donate to Solidarity Fund, not at the regular Solidarity Fund website still. I believe it's still the National Bail Fund one, right? I believe it is still the National Bail Fund, probably until that court case is settled. Got it. All right. So, yeah, make sure you go to the right site for the ActBlue National Bail Fund towards the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.

Anyway, so that was the shitty mayor of today, Mayor Andre Dickens. I'll make the joke again. I think it's funny that the previous mayor was named Bottoms. The current mayor is named Dickens. It's Dickens, Dickens Bottoms. Anyway, no comment. That's the joke that I made before. I'm going to keep making it until he's until he's no longer mayor. Unless someone else runs for...

We could do Norwood Dickens bottom... No. I'm not even going to bother joking about that because that would be so bad. Don't put it into the universe. Exactly, exactly. That doesn't need to manifest. I don't need to do that.

Anyway, yeah. See you on the other side. Stay safe, stay dangerous during the week of action. Ta-ta. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire

and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America from ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures I know you take a trip 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 podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. 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, musica, 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. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. It could happen here. It's me, James, today, and I am joined for a rare example of Daniel being on the podcast. Yes. Welcome, Daniel. James, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here to talk with you on the podcast that I edit every single day.

Yeah. Yeah. Normally you just hear me, but this time you get like the Dan, it's like the Sir Bolton speaks, but it's Daniel. I couldn't fucking, I couldn't really go anywhere with that. So I just, I just left the two halves of the joke out there. Neither of them with a partner. Very sad. Yeah. So Daniel, we're here today to talk about first aid kits. And the reason we're talking about first aid kits is because it is pride month at the time of recording. That of course, in the United States means that people are worried about being murdered by homophobic psychopaths. Unfortunately so.

That is the world that we live in. It shouldn't be. It's fucked up. And it hopefully won't be this way forever because, you know, all these people are wrong and will die eventually. And that will make the world better. Fingers crossed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can hope, I guess.

Maybe they're raising a new generation of TERFs or whatever. I don't think... Yeah, hopefully not. Let's not pick up the big... Hopefully not, indeed. Yeah. So I just wanted to talk because I've seen a bunch of people online, like a lot of people who are in the LGBTQIA community

or who are going to Pride, uh, just being like, oh fuck. Like it genuinely, I can see why people are very afraid, right? Because violence against queer people is at least seemingly increasing. Um, I'm not going to give you training because this is a podcast and you can't learn first aid on a podcast and you can't learn it on YouTube either really um I wanted to talk briefly about like supplies and then places to get training because um that is very important uh I have bought my first aid kit that I use for work I have quite a few that I use for work actually I don't like to repack them and I I know that you have bought one that Jeffrey Bezos kindly sent you.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, at the height of the George Floyd protests, et cetera, I was out there in the streets and kind of after observing what was happening in Portland and after listening to and editing It Could Happen Year episodes and what Gare and robert were covering it felt if not necessary but very prudent to invest in something like this so that should there be a need to help people in the streets i was there unable to do so um and whether or not this was a good first aid kit i think we're gonna find out today yeah that's the aim of the game um i should point out that like

my medical training is pretty basic right i'm not that kind of doctor um but uh i do have a wilderness first responder and a wilderness first aid and it's unstop the bleed training and i've done cpr training and i've done hostile environment first aid training uh so a bunch of stuff which is focused around very very very basic first aid right in all of those cases it's like uh make sure the person doesn't die immediately and then get them to someone who is better trained than you so that they can help them more amen which is like listen if you are learning about medical stuff on a podcast hosted by a guy who has a phd in modern european history then that that that is what you are doing too right like yes and we're going to talk about that

because you can for sure fuck someone up if you uh if you go sort of outside of your scope of knowledge and that um it's i understand the desire to help uh but we we have to help in the way that is most helpful i guess not do any harm amen so um yeah let's go over let's let's go over i guess my first aid kit and then we can we can open yours and see what's the same and what's different. So this is one. I like it because it's small and it fits in the small of my back. And if I really needed to, I could just wear a kind of baggy shirt and it wouldn't be too obvious.

I also have one that fits around my ankle for times when I really don't want people to know I have it, but I also want to have it. And then you can wear some sick flare jeans or something and people just think you're a trendy kind of guy exactly yeah they'll know um so yeah in mine it sort of goes on the front of your back and then you you can pull it away right has a big old red handle you just pull it like that and it comes away that's smart yeah it's nice that's one thing i

will say right off the bat it's like I've seen a number of people get hurt in a number of different situations. I've seen a number of people render first aid, including myself, sometimes successfully, sometimes sadly not successfully. And if you have a big bag of shit and then you open your bag of shit and you're just throwing stuff everywhere,

stuff's falling on the ground, that's not helpful, right? Like the things that will kill people stuff everywhere stuff's falling on the ground right it you're that's not helpful right like the things that will kill people that are preventable um for the most part in and like trauma injuries right like the stuff that we might see if we're going to a pride if we're attending a protest uh if we fucking work in a school in america right um it's it's largely like um like attention pneumothorax and a whole uh sucking chest wound and losing blood um and losing blood is is i believe that the sort of most common preventable cause of death in trauma injuries so most of this is going to focus around losing blood and that's where type

of training called stop the bleed comes in right i? I believe it's stop the bleed.org. You can Google free stop the bleed classes near me. I have previously posted a link to where you can put in your postcode zip code, uh, and find free stop the bleed training near you. Uh, and again, that, that will cost you no money at all. It costs you about half a day of your time. Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a great thing actually. Like it's one of the few things that, that, uh, you know, the municipal governments have day of your time. Oh, great. Yeah, it's a great thing, actually.

Like, it's one of the few things that, you know, the municipal governments and various things put on well. If there isn't one near you, I've heard of people hitting up fire departments and getting them to put one on if they can demonstrate some interest. Cool. Because it is very basic. Most fire departments will have paramedics, right,

which is a sort of step up from an EMT. Sure. So those folks can help teach those things very well um very cool so what is in here for stopping the bleed and i'm not going to teach you how to use it because that's what someone else does okay someone else's job yeah so before i open it up this is a tourniquet um some people will pronounce it incorrectly they will say that those people are wrong. Hit that hard T, little tourniquet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the American way.

There you go. Yeah, so what this guy is, it's for like bleeding your limbs, arterial bleeding your limbs, right? It just goes around, cinch it down, and I'm not telling you how to fucking use it, and then you tighten it up, right? Great. The things I want to emphasize about this are, one one the type of tourniquet that is so this is

um called a combat application tourniquet it's made by a company called north american rescue um there are a few other ones that i would use um the other one i have i think is the softy wide um and i have some of the rev x med Ratcheting tourniquets as well. They use like a boa. If people have used ski boots or cycling shoes, they'll be familiar with a boa. Cool. The one to buy is the one that you use when you do your training, right?

And it's going to be a Sam as another one. These are all the tourniquets you want to buy if you're sort of um if you're confused about which one you used the ones that are proved by the t triple c it's a committee on tactical casualty care uh cool tactical casualty commit something like that um those guys have tested them extensively right to see which ones work which ones don't it it is this is not somewhere to save money. They're about 23, 25 bucks.

You find them on sale. It's not, yeah. I mean, if that's a big expense for you, then I understand. And it's okay not to have one if that's a big expense or to save up and wait. Like that's okay. It's better than using an improvised tourniquet, right? There are not very many very good studies,

at least that I could find, on improvised tourniquets. Some places still teach an improvised tourniquet. Like I've taken a wilderness first responder where they taught it. I've also seen one not work. And I will tell you that's not an experience that I want to ever have again in my life um and i don't think it's one i'd like you all to share with me so um i would suggest if you're going to be using a 20k then buying a cat is kind of the standard i wouldn't buy it

from jeffrey bezos because um it's amazon.com is a website that he owns um believe it yeah uh space cowboy jeffrey um yeah so the reason why is that all of these different there are knockoffs right there are fakes of this sure um they go in different they go in the same bin from what i'm told and then the person who's the picker just maybe grabs one and sometimes you can end up with a fake what can happen with a fake is is the strap can break or the windlass so the windlass is the guy that tightens it can break ah okay either of those things is going to lead to the tourniquet failing right it's not going to apply enough pressure and that's going to it could do a number of things right it could just fail to stop the bleeding uh depending on if you've misidentified

the bleeding you could give someone a compartment syndrome or something um it's it's going to be very painful it's going to be very painful anyway right and you'll learn that in your course which you're going to take you're not gonna not gonna just listen to me on the podcast um no i will not thank you uh and and so you do want a real one and so the easiest way to obtain a real one is to buy one from a reliable source rescue essentials chinook medical and north american rescue are all people who i've worked with um i've said at rescue essential sent me a bunch of shit before i went on a work trip uh and they it was lots of it was outdated or the open box or something and i was able to donate that to uh fixers and journalists i was working with i thought that was very cool of them cool

um they offer a stop the bleed month discount i think stop the bleed month is may so we might be out of that now but um those are all places where you can buy these tourniquets and know that you're not getting a fake one right um so we'll provide links to that in the description of the episode we will yep yeah yeah i'll make sure that those are there for you to click um so that's there are different generations uh like i think generation seven is what i have generation six is also fine. You probably won't find one sold before that. On the off chance you do, I would just stick to a Generation 7 or 6. It does have a little timestamp, so you'll want a little sharpie as well

to write the time on. That's more important. It's possible that you might put this on somebody, say you're at a Pride event and there is something terrible happening, like a mass shooter, and you might be there for a while uh let's say you're in texas and all your cops are fucking cowards and then unfortunately uh if you're able to render aid to someone and then you both of you were able to not get hurt any further you could be there for a while and then it would be relevant what time the tourniquet is applied normally you know in

the us we would hope that you would have medical attention pretty quickly because, you know, that threat would have been stopped and then EMS would be able to provide help. But so that's where the time thing comes in. Right. And so you want to have a tiny Sharpie when you have a tourniquet. And you can get North American Rescue HD sell little tiny half size Sharpies and I shove them in the pouch with the tourniquet. And then there they are. And then you always have a Sharpie. So we go inside. There it is. Look at that. Okay.

Hey. The little guy. Oh, that's a cute little Sharpie right there. Yeah, isn't he gorgeous? Yeah, we love a little guy. It's a credit card size Sharpie. It's perfect. Yeah, yeah.

For those who are not Danil. Exactly. It's a pinky Sharpie. I will do the part of contextualizing for the non-video audience. Thank you, Danil. Yeah. Of course. Paint a picture with words, if you will.

So we're going through this now. If we focus on bleeding again, right? There's a couple of different dressings that you have. So again, I'm not going to tell you what to use for where, but you would use like the tourniquet on one part of your body. The other things you're going to use would be a pressure dressing. So you can get a ton of different pressure dressings i like the olays ones o-l-a-e-s um it doesn't hugely matter that those ones just have a little bit of gauze you can pull out so you can pack a wound too and i've got it um sometimes if you do a if you get like a nice

training they might let you practice packing some wounds. They might have like a little fake wound that you can pack. And yeah, so that you'll learn a lot about like how to do that there. And so those allow you to pack the wound. Some of the other ones don't, but honestly, like sometimes they're called Israeli bandages. They will not like colonize Palestine.

If you, you know, put them in your first gate kit but that that's what this guy is right and sometimes they have a lot of packaging on okay so you want to take them down to kind of the last layer of packaging none of this shit is sterile right um none of this stuff is is again it's not supposed to be in for a long time right um so so it's okay to have that, like either just bare or in its first layer of packaging. I want to contextualize one thing from a video perspective,

just for everybody listening. As James is showing me his first aid kit, it looks like every item that he's talking about, other than the tourniquet, is individually wrapped and also strapped down. It looks like, I would say, about seven or eight individual items within there. And they all have their own pocket

and they're all strapped down. And that's something that immediately looking at mine, I basically have, you know, small plastic baggies that I will hold up to James right now. Small plastic baggies of just like a lot of loose shit. And it's just way too much stuff in here. I would say of what i see in james's bag versus mine i think i mean first of all there's stuff missing like there's no tourniquet

in here there's a lot of different gauze things and there's but there's you know in mine i have like 700 different bandages and like there's aspirin in here and like some things that feel like they're more for like a camping trip than they are really like handling a first aid scenario in which you need to save someone's life. So one piece of advice that I'm getting from James as he shares this is that, you know, what's important to carry around is the stuff that is going to give you immediate access to the ability to save someone's life. So think about that as you are like packing your bag. What I have here that I bought online

that I'm still glad that I have is basically a collection of a bunch of different miscellaneous first aid stuff rather than a very stripped down specific list of items that I can use to save someone's life in an emergency scenario.

Yes, I think it's an excellent point. And you can see them all right when you open this guy this guy is also like size such that i can pull it off pop it on the floor open it up have my workspace in front of me if there's anything i'm not confident doing if like when horrible things happen and people are bleeding you you do not in that time gain skills right at that moment speaking from like more experience than i would like to have um if people are in a really bad way in front of you it's not a fun time and you get scared and you might panic that's okay that happens to everyone you know people aren't supposed to see that shit and if it's certainly if it's your first time seeing it's

not unreasonable at all to freak out and not know what to do you can just hold any of this shit up say hey i have a tourniquet hey i have a pressure dressing and someone who who's at that time is able to help can take that i know what they're doing if they can help and so it's totally fine just to have this shit and and and if you don't know how to use it you know don't go beyond your scope of knowledge but just you have that shit and you can provide it someone else that's fine so yeah everything's in little elastic bands i've got this stuff which is called quick clot and we've talked a lot on the podcast recently about indigenous medical technologies this is an example of one right nice um so it's using i think kaolin there's some that use kaolin some that use something that came from crab shells but this is this is an indigenous medical technology that now is um sort of it's it's been refined over time this just contains a thing that

stops um it helps blood to clot it's a hemostatic agent right so when you're packing a wound uh you could use this first this this would help with blood clotting right um it's also the type i have is detectable on x-rays which helps a lot um there are some older types which are powders um those those are probably best avoided and you want the gauze that is impregnated with the hemostatic agent if you can this stuff got really pricey recently like i think the best price i've seen for this is 35 bucks oh wow so yeah this guy is going to cost you the most um do you have any idea why that is? I think a lot of people probably bought it in 2020,

might be part of it. Got it. Maybe it's some kind of supply chain thing. I don't know where they get the ingredients from, but they just went up in price a lot, Link. Like a lot of people were sort of reaching out about, hey, why is this shit so expensive? Sure.

I don't know, but it's not like 100 necessary but it is a very helpful thing and and it can make a difference in some cases right um so that's your hemostatic gauze um what else i've got in here is a pair of trauma shears and that's just if you need to remove someone's clothing to access a wound that is kind of important so um for instance i was doing a training once uh and i prefer to like speak about those things so like uh where a guy was presented to us with gunshot wound uh and like if you don't rip off his trousers and like this you know if someone's been shot and you're there helping them again like if you're not comfortable doing this you haven't done the training and don't be just ripping off strangers clothes that's weird um in general don't be ripping off strangers yeah yeah there

comes a time area yes yeah um so like and they had this cool kind of thing around his leg that bled like he had like two wounds that were pumping out blood it's like a cool kind of bleeding simulator so um but like yeah bullets will do crazy shit um they'll go in one part of your leg and hit the bone and bounce around and go out and fight the other but they don't always travel in straight lines they're not laser beams um so by exposing that wound you can sometimes see the exit wound um and so you'll know that there are two wounds right yeah depending on how you're going to treat it you know if you're going to pack it you're going to put a tourniquet on it, but that's what these are for.

You can also get things which are called, I think it's called a clothing knife. I actually keep one. Here we are. I tuck it into the belt of my plate carrier that I use for work just so that it's like right here. It's the same place I keep my diving knife so then i know it's there um and what it does is these are handy things to have in your truck too uh it's a content yes you've yeah you've seen it so it's a contained

blade right um i like this little chap because um in addition to the contained blade it has a little um glass breaker yes i was gonna say we have one in the car so it's like a seat some people might know it as a seat belt cutter yes yeah yeah cutter and and usually on the other side like you said they have a glass breaker so but that is a much more contained one and that looks nice the one in my car is like the size of a small hammer because it's like meant to be like you know give you the force to hold it in the window but also to cut a thing that is super useful i think everybody should have one in their car yeah you can put on your keyring even right this is the size of uh like a uh like a matchbox or like a key fob it's like the size

of a key fob yeah yeah yeah if you have a newer vehicle than i do then you will have sorry i didn't mean to be i didn't mean to be car classist here yeah yeah uh it's okay mine's approaching classic status uh but yeah we'll we'll put a link on the on the website for this little chap as well um great we're not like we're not fucking uh getting affiliate revenue from no we're not guys we're just trying to help you out um yeah the nice thing about this is like it's quite hard to stab someone with trauma shears because they've got this little nub on the bottom but like it can be quite a lot of chopping and things like this guy you can like whoop um so these are probably also cheaper um and you won't end up using them as

scissors and getting them blunt um so that is that is my little getting people's clothes off and then the last one um i have a couple of burn dressings in here that's just because so many people got burned um in 2020 uh and a pro tip from me though yeah yeah it would be to if someone shoots something at you don't pick that shit up don't make it up just don't like i in my prepping i got fire resistant gloves i got like i got gloves that were treated for like i don't remember it's like 500 degrees or something like that in the event that i needed to throw back a gas canister but i think i was thinking i mean i was way too rambo about the whole thing because i still have not encountered a gas grenade once

yet so you know yeah i shouldn't say fingers crossed but i mean i don't know i'm down yeah maybe i'm ready let's get him yeah yeah yeah i love that for you it's great um yeah so you can instead of having the gloves, just avoid picking it up. But people do get burned from that, from other stuff, right? So a burned dressing, not really necessary, because it's unlikely. If someone is burned to the extent that it's threatening to their life,

you aren't helping them with your little box of stuff. So that's fine. And then these guys are vented chest seals. Ideally, you do want vented chest seals ideally you do want vented chest seals I was reading a study the other day it suggested

this sort of greater survivability and what you are doing with those is that this is for a sucking chest wound it's not named that because it sucks

but it does but it does yeah yeah but it is this is for like yeah

I guess penetrating chest trauma. And these guys I bought in a pack of two. Hyphen are a good brand. I think Halo are another brand. There are some knockoffs on Amazon.com that I wouldn't buy. Again, it's probably worth spending a little bit extra. These are the ones that have gone through extensive testing, that are issued to lots of militaries around the world uh they're very flat right if you wanted to you could distribute the shit about

your person it's just going to be harder to get it you're not going to remember which back pocket maybe you shove what in um sure these are very flat and uh very easy they're they're giant stickers um and you again when you do your training we'll learn how to use them but um yeah i would avoid like the rhino i think rhino is one of the brands i've seen on amazon and stuff just like get a hyphen is kind of the standard um there's an older type as well um but if these hyphens are more compact and they're preferred um cool and when you're searching hyphen if you happen to be searching it's h-y-f-i-n we're going to put it in the chat but just you know for a word that is phonetically very similar

to another common word hyphen is h-y-f-i-n ah yes yeah yeah so well said dental that is a um that is a that's a chest seal right so um here is the other type just for uh your viewing that's a chest seal, right? Chest seal. So here is the other type, just for your viewing. That's an Asherman chest seal. So not preferred, so stick with the hyphen. These are kind of bigger and don't pack as well. And yeah, I would stick with the hyphens. The other thing I have in here is like a space blanket. Oh, cool. Oh, survival wrap interesting yeah so when you are losing a lot of blood you'll get very cold uh and so you do want to keep that trash uh you do want to keep

that casualty warm and this isn't going to really be enough on its own quite honestly um like you need to probably actively heat someone but it's better than nothing and it's again it's very small um again i've given tons of these out in various different situations that weren't um like a casualty situation so that they've been a nice thing to have you don't generally want to be packing shit just because it's a nice thing to have and we'll get on to that um but this again is very small there's almost always space for it so i include that um i also have a little source of light, like a little torch. Yeah. Flashlight for American listeners. Nice.

A-S-H. And that is there for being able to see things, which is very handy, actually, when you're trying to help somebody who is bleeding. Totally. Another thing to include would be gloves. I have my gloves somewhere else on this belt, so they're not here, but medical gloves, right?

And again, you'll probably learn this in your course, but a lot of people like to buy black ones. I don't know why. Cops wear black ones all the time, right? Just makes it a little more difficult if you are doing a blood sweep, which is a thing you'll learn about in your class, so that it's

actually quite hard to see like blood on black especially in perfect lighting conditions yeah yeah so blue tan yeah uh something like that is kind of preferable um i do have those in the in the first aid kit thank goodness yeah if you want to have those somewhere ready to go i think they're on the front of this bag just you can slap those on nice um just you know uh you don't know where other people have been what they've been up to uh and it doesn't matter right you still want to help them so you just want to just want to take care of yourself there um so those are honestly the main things i have in there what i don't have in here is equally important right i do not have tampons in here the reason i do not have tampons in here is well it's too far i'm not a person who menstruates and uh even if i was i wouldn't have my first aid kit uh and secondly because they are not very good

at but they're terrible at dealing with like massive bleeding right massive hemorrhage that's not what they're for um if people are familiar with uh what they are designed for like the volume of blood is is not the same as the volume of blood you will see from arterial bleed yeah it's not even close yeah uh yeah believe me again like i've i had the misfortune to see people die from blood loss and like right that is a lot of blood um yeah more and it's coming out fast and you ain't stopping it with a tampon right it just kind of stopping someone who is better equipped from helping um So if you want to carry tampons and you want to have them available in case someone needs them, that is great.

That's very kind of you. Put them in your car, put them in your bag that you go around with, please. But don't confuse them with a trauma dressing. No, correct. Because they are different things. Don't plan to improvise anything more broadly right like it it's just it when we have excellent tools available the design for this job just use them and it's fine not to be able to get all this stuff at once right you could spring for the chest seals first and then save a bit of money

get the tourniquet that's fine um but like yes can you can you improvise a chest seal with some duct tape and a credit card or a crisp packet in theory sure but like these are like 12 bucks right so let's just let's just let's just get them if we can and have people improvised tourniquet successfully with cravats yes have those failed and resulted in loss of life you know yes like in some cases um your belt isn't a tourniquet right it doesn't have a windlass it's not going to get tight enough um right it might snap have people use successfully yes is there a 23 dollar thing which works much more effectively yes um and and it's a serious thing it's it's it's fucking it's very real like again speaking from experience like this shit will uh

affect you deeply and you want to know that you did the best you could so and if you can't afford any of this stuff that's totally fine like just take your time and acquire it i i think an important thing to add at this point is to you know listeners of our show are, I think overly familiar with the way that we have kind of introduced the idea of mutual aid, like the point of mutual aid. And what I mean by that is that you are not a one person revolutionary. Like the whole idea is community effort.

And so, especially with something like this, this is like a kind of a two part point, especially with something like this, consider that you are part of a community that can help people overall. Maybe it is not you, the individual listening to this episode right now that is like, I'm going to go invest in all of these things because I will be the first aid person. Maybe there's someone you know who's already interested in this, and this is information that you can pass on to them should they be wanting to invest in equipment like this. And another thing to think about

in terms of why James is offering specific items is because think about a hobby that you like doing. Think about anything that you like doing a lot. You know, you don't usually buy the cheapest version of the thing. And now this is not me, you know, necessarily advocating for overspending or buying expensive things. You just want to buy stuff that lasts and that works well and that does the job because, you know, overall, that stuff will last longer than

anything that is cheaper in the immediate moment. I think people can say the same thing about things like work boots, about tools, about anything that to you is worth investing your time in. So if this is something that you value, if being a first responder or being that person who's there, if taking a stop the bleed course is something that's important to you, consider that these things are more than just like,

you know, good things to have on hand. They're an investment on your future and your interests. So just something to consider that like, while some of these things may, I mean, nothing sounds outrageously expensive that you've said so far. I think the most expensive thing that you talked about was $35, something in that range.

Yeah, you can spend a lot on the pouch, but I mean, you shouldn't. Sure. Like don't buy some fancy hypebeast Instagram gun guy pouch and right exactly fine um yeah that i think yeah the sea lock scores is probably the most expensive thing i've spoken about um on the point of durability i do want to say i've seen people practicing with their tourniquets and i would suggest getting another one to practice with and totally makes sense so north american rescue breaks a blue one it's exactly the same it works just the same if you

need to use it you can but over time those things fatigue and they're not designed for multiple uses um have they been used multiple times yes do people wash them and wash the blood off them and use them again yes it's again like we shouldn't plan for a suboptimal setting and what's already going to be a pretty fucking suboptimal moment and talking of suboptimal stuff daniel uh we have to stop yeah to uh to talk about ronald reagan so that's my bad i should have been the one being like james when you take an ad break yeah but here i am a seasoned professional we're back uh we've returned from my ad break so i wanted to talk about resources for training because i think those are very important right and that is where you're going

to learn stuff i am not telling you how to do this um i would suggest hitting up stop the bleed i think it's stop the bleed.org um stop the training in my area there's a website that will link in the description there's part of that website where you can put in your zip code and find trainings There's a website that we'll link in the description. There's part of that website where you can put in your zip code and find trainings. And then if I think about where I've got my training, it's through an organization called NOLS, National Outdoor Leadership School. So once you get past Stop the Bleed, you got a couple of like,

most community colleges will have an EMTB course, EMT basic. That's quite a commitment of your time, but you can learn a lot of very important things. It can be a career for you if you want it to be. Certainly it can be an adjunct to other careers you want to do. If you want to work in the outdoors, if you can do an EMTB and then do a wilderness EMT, that opens up a whole range of expeditions to you.

So a community college should be free. Most of those courses are free or very affordable depending on where you are. Knowles courses are not free, nor are they very affordable. They are very expensive, but they are very good. Your local REI probably puts them on. Knowles does have scholarships for people who are more marginalized from the outdoors,

or they did last time I spoke to them. So those might be worth checking out. And then there are apps which will give you resources. Resources are not the same as training, right? Like training is knowing what to do. It's not, sometimes it's knowing where to look, but in situations like this, like you don't want to be on your phone.

For more advanced stuff, for stuff where, you know, you're doing care in the field right if you're doing or you know wilderness first responder if you're uh i'm trying to think times that i've done stuff with that uh one time i was climbing up a mountain and a big old rock fell on me i had to um split my leg and oh my god what i was bleeding a lot yeah yeah it's good times uh yeah don't um, don't, don't, watch out for rock fall. Audience, I just want to throw something out there.

Every single time James tells us any story about his life, it is just this, this wonderfully vivid, like colorful story about something that has happened to him or an experience that he's had or a profession that he's had that just adds to the tome of interesting facts about james so if you

i don't i don't know i highly recommend you listen to every single episode that james is on because you have lived a fascinating life and that is merely a split second of it that's wild i'm glad you're okay yeah i'm fine uh but yeah you know clearly here we are with that right like especially in wilderness medicine there's an emphasis on using what you already have and because you can't bring everything into the wilderness right so that's where i'm saying knowledge doesn't wear anything it doesn't take up any space in your pack um so you can use an air mattress pretty well to splint a leg injury uh you can use one of those foam so air mattress is the guy that you sleep on yeah um yeah yeah so you can kind of fan dangle those up around a leg

you can use a thermo rest or similar other products are available foam sleeping mattress um you can use a hiking pole right uh tent pole tent poles are kind of nice because you can break them down into sections to get the right length and then all you're using from your first aid kit is your um it's your tape right or if i like ski straps i attach everything in my life it's important to me with ski straps so i love the ski strap and i had some ski straps and you can just splint that bad boy with a couple of ski straps a couple of tent poles back of the net uh you're not having a great day at that point like it's not this is not the kind of medical care you'd hope for in a professional setting but uh you know if you've got that and you've got a crutch you can you can get yourself to a higher degree of care um so when

we're doing stuff like that i believe knolls has a wilderness medicine app there's deployed medicine which is a u.s military resource for field care which can help to remind you of stuff that you've already trained on it's not going to teach you to do stuff you shouldn't just read about it on there and use it and there's a new one called goes g-o-e-s which literally launched like this week and goes health which uh it's offline so it gives an offline database of wilderness medicine um and it helps you kind of with diagnostic cues of stuff um so when you do your wilderness first responder at least when i did it someone must have had an ectopic pregnancy and had a very bad outcome because they'll ask you with all these questions like what could this be what could this be and like they they want you to be able to know what an ectopic pregnancy is so like but there's a

there's like a sort of flow chart that you can follow right to help you be like what is this is it appendicitis what's going on here um so when because you probably won't remember every certainly if you take a woofer course and then two years later you know you have before you're recertified like something happens a lot could happen in two years you won't have remembered everything that you learned in your course right so right some of those apps are useful um but the most important thing the thing where you will learn to use all of the items in this ifact is stop the bleed and it is free um and that is where everyone should start and they're not going to teach you how to use all the things so if we bust open the the bag that you got daniel quickly um it's overstuffed it does a lot of things in there

yeah a lot of items many things i mean literally like aspirin there is a there is a pouch of emergency drinking water oh yeah there is there is a uh which i'm gonna call it a a bright stick like a little uh light stick um there is about a hundred different kinds of uh what you might call it like look at this literal just like pile of band-aids just like hundreds of band-aids yeah and alcohol wipes and oh there's a whistle yeah a whistle should you get lost in the wilderness this is a very handy in uh urban or rural uh disasters but not for not for first aid not for this i don't think any of this stuff is necessarily bad it's just there's just way too much there's gauze pads there is this abd pad sterile extra absorbent pad yep that you know i don't think

is going to do what it needs to do but there's a shit ton of gauze in here and there are look at and you want to talk about things to cut open you're talking about um clothing scissors yeah these little guys are i don't think are going to do that no they're for trimming your tape and stuff exactly trimming tape there's also tweezers in here really this feels like for people who are in the wilderness and they get a splinter yeah yeah and that stuff's super handy to have in your truck or your car or your bike. Motorcycle guys are normally pretty good at having eye effects. This is a kind of first aid kit. Yes.

Yeah. It's not going to immediately stop you from dying from loss of blood, which is what we're concerned with here. If you do ride a motorcycle, you really want to fucking have one. Totally. I ride a bicycle and I have seen some motor vehicle accidents and i'm just going to say motorcycle folks ought to have that someone else can grab it off your motorbike and use it if you've hurt yourself but sure um nick i've seen that happen before um so yeah that

stuff is all very handy it's all very nice it can make you feel better right like there's i imagine there's a ton of ibuprofen and paracetamol and benadryl uh all that stuff it's great that stuff's super handy right and another thing i would add is some of that stuff can be life-saving um if you have an allergy right and you need sure to to take something for that yeah put that in your first aid kit because that's particular to you right and if that's gonna if you need an epi pen then have your epi pen uh of course right you know i'm sure you do anyway if you have diabetes have your glucagon and some sugar um all of that stuff is of course important but in terms of like dealing with what we perceive to be an increased

risk of like uh homophobic violence which normally manifests itself as people getting shot in this country then the the little scissors and the abd pad the band-aids aren't what we need and they're just going to get in the way so even if you have those great keep them in the car um i gave tons of people band-aids because they got blisters in 2020 right because the people are not familiar with walking that far their boots sucked people decided to wear heavy boots because they were worried. All understandable things. It's a lot of band-aids,

a lot of horseshoe plasters, a lot of second skin. Great. I'm happy to give you one of those things. I'll keep it in a different pocket though, right? So I'm not sorting past a list of plasters if someone's been shot. And that's a good tip,

regardless of what you're doing. Even if you're bringing more stuff for more people and that's a good tip uh regardless of what you're doing what you even if you're doing you know you're bringing more stuff for more people that's great aspirin i bet people need that sometimes or ibuprofen if their knees hurting from walking a lot great uh pound that shit but like don't um that's not what we want we don't want to be administering medicines really certainly if we're not trained to do so after a trauma thing because some of the pain medicines we might be taking might might inhibit blood clotting right so we don't want to be doing that before that person goes on to a higher standard of care it's going to fucking suck for them but like you're the best you can do is stop that person dying or help someone else

who's qualified to do that by just saying hey Hey, I have this stuff. And, and it's all pretty compact, you know, like it's, it's, um, it's, it's, you know, the size of a paperback book, decent size paperback book, something like that. And it, and having it may or may not be hopefully, right. You just buy this thing and it sits around for a while. And eventually if you've been having the tourniquet in the sun for years and years you want to replace it the uv can cause them to decay um you can just put them inside a pouch i've made all kinds of pouches for them you can buy an expensive one on the internet or you can just use a piece sew a piece of nylon which is what i do and the two rubber bands and put it inside your

waistband of your thing um many many such solutions exist but yeah i would encourage everyone i think i've said this about 28 times to get training uh and not just to just go and do this um if you if you can't access that training straight away and you want to get the stuff where you look for training that's fine just don't be doing stuff you don't know how to do uh because you know someone might confuse that for someone who is qualified and is helping and then if you don't know what you're doing and you make a mistake and that that could be worse than someone's if someone comes in and they're doing triage right they're saying who do we need to treat now who do we need to treat later who can't we help then right uh and

they see you doing that okay that person's covered then you want to be sure that you're covering what you're doing so um yeah just make sure you get the training we're not trying to scare you into not going to things please don't feel afraid i know it's very easy to feel afraid that's of course the goal of you know most of these people uh their ass is welded to their gaming chair and they will never actually come into the streets and hurt you they just say stuff stay stuff on twitter.com and like you're fine um but it's very reasonable to be prudent uh and certainly this is stuff i have in my truck i have it in my bag i have it in most places i go and you know you get used to it it's fine and take it across when i'm on work trips and i try and leave lots of it with my colleagues who can't access it so easily in in other countries so yeah uh i hope that's helpful it's peace of mind it's peace of mind

yeah yeah it is it's it's and look i guess just to wrap up like you are not uh i don't watch television really uh hugh laurie what's. What's Hugh Laurie's deal? House. Oh, house? Yeah. Or like some other super doctor, right? Like you can't heal everyone. Bad things happen. But there's just peace of mind and trying to do your best to help everyone.

And that's relatively accessible and not too expensive. I think there's an IFAC fund which gives these away for free as well. Oh, cool. That's worth looking into. If someone can find that, they can send it to me and I will post it.

But yeah, it's peace of mind. And it's not too hard to get that training. So go out there and do that. Wonderful. Do it with someone you love. Do it for fun. Do it with your friend. Make a, do it on a date.

Yeah. Find someone on Tinder. Make it a first date. Yeah, do it. Let us know how that goes hey what's your favorite color so what are you doing this weekend want to do a stop the bleed course

I think that's very sexy I'd 100% be into that exactly please don't DM me with potential stop the bleed no do not DM James don't do it but yeah hopefully that helps people wonderful uh well james thank you so much for this awesome information it's been an absolute pleasure being on the show with you yeah and uh we'll post links in the chat or post

sorry post the chat that we have with all of our listeners. Oh my gosh, exactly. That's my Twitch shit coming through. We'll post links in the description of the episode. And yeah, I look forward to doing this again with you. Yeah, Danil, talking of your Twitch shit, where can people find your Twitch shit? They don't need to find me anywhere. But if you want to find me, you can find me at twitch.tv slash dj underscore Danil.

D-A-N-I-L. And if you want to come ask me what Robert smells like, I will not ban you, but I will time you out for 10 minutes. So, you know, just, you know, know that I'm happy to have whoever wants to come watch the, watch the Twitch stream, but I'm not going to answer any weird questions about my coworkers. As it should be. Thank you, Danil.

Thank you, James. should be thank you Daniel thank you James welcome I'm Danny Threl won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales 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. 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 As part of Michael Duda 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. 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, 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. Or, Govna, it could happen here. A podcast where my attempt to do a British accent's been overwritten by Robert's Boston accent because I can't get it out of my head. This is the podcast where we treat Britain with the level of respect that it deserves. You're getting this shit right now because the entire rest of this episode is going to be unbelievably depressing.

Oh, wow, Mia. That's such a good accent. I believe you're one of my authentic countrymen. Wow, it's so good to chat to another fellow Brit. With me is Sophie from Mars, who does many things, including... Things? Wow, damn. Including impressions of Americans doing impressions of British people.

One of my favorite impressions to do. Oh, God. You know, this is being recorded at like a Geneva Convention crime time for podcasts. So it's going great. It's going great. I have consumed so much caffeine that I have seen the face of God. Yeah. But Sophie, welcome to the

show and back yeah i wish it was for something that was not this bullshit but yeah this is yeah pretty grim yeah so okay so what what what specifically is this bullshit um right yeah the government of the united kingdom despite its reputation as turf island has been kind of falling behind the US in terms of actual ability to use the state to discriminate and get trans people killed. And having seen this,

Rishi Sunak was like, oh shit, hold on. And has now compelled the British state to take a series of steps that would include doing mandatory outing of trans kids to their parents in schools. Yeah. Well, it's still quite tough island-y, right?

Because it's like... Yeah. This has always been the comparison between British transphobia and American transphobia. Your guys are all like, you're going to hell and I'm going to make sure you personally get there with my shotgun. And our guys are like, bloody hell, that's not right. Do you have a license for that gender? You really shouldn't be walking

around in public without proper registration for all of your genders you're carrying there, ma'am. And that's, you know, like, so in that regard we're still very much Turf Island. You've got bills coming through that, like, invalidate other existing. No, I mean, I'm talking myself in circles already because even this legislation also invalidates existing legislation because bigots can't write laws that make any sense whatsoever. But yeah, I think, I mean, this is still using, using like mind-numbing bureaucracy to enforce horrible bigotry uh so in that in that sense it's still very on brand for the british government yeah so okay do you can we can we walk through a little bit of like what

specifically it does because this is one of the this is my one of the canners that i've been on is that most like 99 of the people who cover this stuff are really, really bad at actually, like, saying what a law says. Because, oh, God. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. So the first thing is about changing names, uniforms, and what pronouns are used for a student. They, they're making it so that this can't be done without parental consent. It should also be said that all of this is guidance. They're putting out guidance to schools.

So when I said earlier that this is in conflict with existing legislation, we have the Equalities Act, which should actually protect against basically everything that they've said here. They don't care. If the government puts out guidance, it's as ever with fascism like it's they're deploying stochastic methods they want to embolden people who would already be looking for any excuse to be shit to trans kids to be able to do it even though it would actually break the law um so yeah that's that's one thing my my so my understanding of this is it's it's it's closer to the kind of thing you get in the u.s where like sometimes you have a

state attorney general will just like issue an interpretation of a ruling so it's it's like that is my my understanding of it okay yeah yeah yeah so it's guidance uh all the guidance that they've given out would actually break the equalalities Act. They don't care. So, point one, no pronoun or uniform change without parental consent. Point two, no hiding any changes from parents. So, if a kid is like, hey, you, singular member of staff that I trust, the only adult that I know who I feel could possibly keep me safe. My parents are violently queerphobic, and I think that if I come out to them, I might be in danger. Please help me.

The guidance is telling them, no, you should definitely tell those horrible parents. No matter how dangerous, how much of a danger the child is telling you that they're in. Head can say no to protect other kids. Now, this is a really interesting point that we'll have to come back to because headmasters in the UK, there's a whole class thing going on there that we should talk about.

But yeah, so the head teacher of the school can say no to protect other kids. So explicitly the justification is that kids being out, it's not even the justification that a kid coming out as trans would be dangerous to them because they might get bullied. It's that it could be dangerous to other kids. So it's to protect them from, I guess, the social contagion of transing your gender. Jesus Christ. And any kids gender questioning or just generally, like any kid trans in any way, basically is just being kicked out of competitive sports in schools. Yeah, which is interesting because it's a kind of like smorgasbord

of a bunch of the different, well, okay. The preventing kids from coming out because it might cause other kids to come out thing is like, I think that's genuinely new.'ve never seen that one before but the rest of it i think is like like you know there there's there's there's been you know we've talked about this on this show like there's been legislation in the u.s that has forced um that has forced schools to out kids yeah um yeah and you know obviously the the like sports bands are you know it's sort of like a pretty kind of like er like er transphobic panic thing yeah absolutely all the biological advantage and all of this nonsense which is like you know uh uh uh you could argue as one thing when you're talking about like a

bodybuilder who has been uh who has been a bodybuilder for like 20 years and is now just starting to take estrogen and blah, blah, blah about biological advantage. But when you're talking about like two 12 year olds, it's like, where's the bio? Who?

I don't, I don't know which one I'm betting on. You know, this is the thing. Like, I think, I think there's a kind of like specific, like,

like I think, I think part of the reason this worked in the U S was like, there's a very specific kind of sports brain that americans have sure where like like like there are like people people are really obsessed with high school sports and also college sports yeah and i i think i think that played a role in part of like how how this played out because people were like you know people are people are like very very concerned about this like why why on earth they care about college football is right well i mean not sorry not in contract but like like high school football it's like this is like

yeah but why wait sure okay whatever we've built like a national cult around watching like 17 year olds destroy each other's brains but gym really like yeah you eat yeah no it's wild like what what like and it's like the only the only sports we really we really care about a rugby and football you know our football and like i just i it should be said there's also a kind of creepy uh uh cult of youth thing going on with our football it's like we don't we don't uh have the you know grown men screaming and crying watching um watching high schoolers and and um university level uh athletes uh uh go against each other but like there are you know it's seen as um you know equivalent to the draft as like an opportunity for

working class kids to get out of their out of their situation is like maybe you'll be a football star so there's like opportunities to yeah exactly like opportunities to prove that you're the next ronaldo or whatever um all through our society but yeah like um i don't know it would be like a lot of a lot of english people suddenly very invested in lots of sports. They never cared about before when like football has been the only one they cared about their entire lives. And they're like,

what about the biological differences? And I'm like, my guy, the place that this would impact you is in, is in, is in professional football. And even supposing a trans woman were to get up into like the professional competitive level of women's football,

you don't watch the women's football but even if you did like there are already constantly like in the analyses of games people are constantly like you know this player is uh really fast or whatever so we know that the the opposing team is going to make a concerted effort to try and block them off specifically i'm just waiting for when like um a women's football team at the professional level like brings a trans woman on as a deliberate like deliberate distraction so that so that she can like look like she's going to try and get the ball half of the opposing team try to block her off and then and then the rest of the team just go and score a goal um no i i um i i want to take um like take it back to to say something i've been meaning to

say which is quite serious like um you and i are both uh like trans but not like we went out as as trans as kids and i do think it's really important to acknowledge that when we're having conversations about trans kids because um in my exposure to trans kids and also like chatting with trans people I know who were out as kids, like there's just a repeated frustration over and over again of just like even the most well-meaning adults who are trying to talk about this,

like, and I'm saying that may well be us, are still like still talking for these kids. And so it's like like it's an incredibly uh dispossessing and paralyzing position and like obviously children are like one of the groups in our society with absolutely the least agency and constantly talked over and had decisions made for them um and you can make arguments about how just that is but like we all recognize that like there are plenty of cases where kids should be able to tell adults like what's going on with them and adults ignore them and then this is

a really clear case of that um and so i have been talking to in in preparation for coming on to do this interview i've been talking to people i know who were kids who were out and also talking to people i know who work with uh with trans kids just trans kids, just so that what I'm presenting is not just my broad feelings about how it might be. But yeah, I wanted to talk about the headteachers thing. Headteachers can say no to protect other kids is a really fascinating part of this. Sorry, can we back up?

What actually is a head teacher? Because we don't have this in the US. That is exactly what I'm trying to, yeah. Yeah, okay, sorry. So how, well, let me ask this. How does someone become a principal in your system? Actually, that's a good question. I think they get hired by the school, but it's i don't know if they're

that that actually is a good question i feel like i should know this okay and i don't can a teacher become a principal because here like again in the in the framework of youth liberation in the same way as we might say aAB, you know, you might point out that, like, you know, teachers are people put in a systemic position to often, like, deny kids agency. But it's not quite as, like, clear-cut as ACAB, right? Like, teachers are fucking great. And, like, big-up teachers unions and, like, tons of teachers are both, like, massively underpaid and feeling the cost of living crisis really hard and also pretty based people. Head teachers, on the other hand, a different school of fish entirely. Like they have a they have different unions.

They have a different social life. They have a different class characteristic because like head teachers are paid so much more than teachers. And yeah, they're also like administrative. much more than teachers. And yeah, they're also like administrative. I don't know if like head teachers need to have even ever actually taught, but they're generally like really comfortable, very well paid. And they are there to, to yeah, do a lot of administrative stuff. And often like they're quite political.

So specifically giving the power to say no to whether a kid comes out or not to the head teacher is like it that feels very very deliberate on the part of the tory government right because like that's not it's not like your your your form tutor or you know your whichever preferred teacher that you have lots of classes with your english teacher or whatever like someone who sees you maybe most days, it's this, it's this person who's like a figurehead to the school, um,

who has no personal relationship to you whatsoever, uh, is being given this, this, uh, yeah, this ability to just deny your transition. And that's utterly,

utterly fucked. And like I'm saying, it's a very conscious, like class move, uh, class-based move on the, on, in,

in this guidance, think yeah i mean it really seems like they had to you know it it it seems like a thing where the tory government realized they couldn't rely just on regular teachers to act as gender bureaucrats they had to they had to find someone who is like even like who has just no social attachment or social relations to like the actual kid who's trying to transition yeah totally you know like it it is genuinely like i don't know but most like as as like as shit as teachers can be like generally speaking like your teacher does not want to torture their kids right that's like that's not it that's not that's that's usually not a thing that they want to do and i and i and

i don't want to leave it unsaid like i've been through the the uk education system i've encountered some teachers who definitely just want to torture their kids yeah but like but like again most teachers are actually pretty good um and like like, genuinely concerned with not only, like, what the safeguarding, like, rules say and what the protocols are, but, like, actually the moral duty of taking care of kids and making sure they're actually safe. Now, that still can have uh problems so like one person that i talked to one of my friends who was out um uh when she was um really quite young um she had like a um a teaching assistant so when when kids are um are like struggling in school and they need extra help with uh with their schoolwork um sometimes like some lessons or topics are deemed as kind of like less necessary for them. Let's say maybe it's like their religious education lessons or whatever.

Right. So they get to skip those ones and then they go and do like, I think you might call them remedial classes or whatever. Like they're doing extra kind of extra stuff to make sure that they, they can get the basic. Yeah. But it's still, it's within the school hours.

Oh, that's interesting. So like, yeah, yeah. So it's like, they'll, they'll sort of say, you don't need to bother with this one we'll go and do these classes instead to

make sure that you can get like a passing grade in english um and so that's a person like uh a kid like that will have like the most developed relationship to because firstly they are in every class that they sit through and they also do special classes that is just one on one between the kid and that teaching assistant. So my friend said that she had like she she'd come out to this teaching assistant and the TA made it really clear that like she would have to try like sort of escalate this, like she would have to try to talk to more people about this situation and probably talk to her parents. try to talk to more people about this situation and probably talk to her parents and because of that um she sort of took it back stopped talking about it wouldn't wouldn't go any further with it and didn't come out to more people for a really long like for years after that point and so you know like you can already see that's an impact that like that this will have more directly because that's like that that situation is being um described as

the ideal outcome basically um in some of this guidance but i think also like it's important to acknowledge that we can imagine a best case scenario in my friend's story like from from however long ago uh that maybe that ta talks to other teachers who understand and those teachers automatically think like are her parents going to be understanding can we approach this in a way that gives her space can we get her in touch with maybe like people who do youth work with queer kids to like give her a venue to discuss this stuff uh without having to alert her parents um now so and we can imagine that best case scenario i mean like the impact immediately uh like i say was that she didn't come out for a long time but um but like that best case scenario is effectively eliminated

if like the guidance is just like no you have to tell the parents the parents absolutely definitely must know um and i think that the the thing as well about like no keeping like not keeping anything secret from parents let me just say what is it no hiding changes from parents is i think that like that's a guidance that's pointing not just towards like the administrative part like you're saying with um what seems more in the jurisdiction of a gender bureaucrat like if a kid says i'd like to change my name on the class register but like if a teacher knows that the kids are using a different name and pronouns with their friends, right? Anyway, besides all of that, like, again, if we're imagining that best case scenario, like this thing about the head teacher can decide that their transition would be a danger to other kids, like, that's, that's, that's so above and beyond like that's that's the that's the bit of this guidance that i find to be like probably the most the most utterly morally reprehensible is because because i think that

a lot of trans kids are already familiar with how the the pre-existing safeguarding systems could cause them all these problems but this is a new thing that's just like on top of all of that stuff even if you do have uh even if you do have support and like things are relatively okay for you apparently yeah the head teacher can just decide that you're not allowed to and that's that's utterly utterly insane to me um i have another friend who was out when he was younger um he knew from a very young age he actually was lucky enough to have supportive parents and so like he was able to come out to people and come out to his parents um but but even with supportive parents like he um like there was still massive pushback from the school which is like you know again like it seems utterly ridiculous

if you've got both um the kid saying very clearly i know for sure this is what my deal is and like we we have additional hindsight here that he's very happy with himself now and and has been you know living his authentic life for you know however many years but like um but you know all the support around him at the time and the and the school still says no um they're just yeah the head teacher thing is actively pushing that even harder, and I just find that, yeah, just awful. Yeah. You know what else is awful? Living under capitalism and being bombarded with adverts for products and services.

But the products and services themselves, they're great. Isn't that right, Mia? Yeah, yeah. I am legally contractually required to not disparage the products and services that support this podcast. This podcast brought to you by OpenGate. Wow. We're back. Hopefully several more billionaires have been pancaked at the bottom of the sea.

Yeah. pancake at the bottom of the sea uh yeah i'm i'm so glad so many so many billionaires listened to it could happen here and took that that juicy limited time offer to only pay uh two hundred thousand dollars for a ticket on the next submersible um yeah um i like following on from what i was just saying about my friend who was out when he was a kid and had supportive parents, he also highlighted to me how, um, how it impacted his medical transition at the time as well, because a lot of medical systems for transition, and this is true in the UK, um, use some degree of like social transition as a requirement to prescribe any kind of medical transition. And so if you're a kid and you uh you know for sure this is your deal and you want to avoid the traumas of going through the wrong puberty which obviously is just

like absolutely horrifying um then you need to be out and have the support of everyone around you right and that means like not only you need to to be able to evidence like yeah it's going well at school i'm not being bullied for being trans at all which okay yeah like hopefully not uh and i have supportive parents my my uh all my grandparents know as well and they're all on board or whatever like um but like if if a school can just say no to a kid coming out that's like that denies such a huge part of the social transition, um, which will then stop them from being able to medically transition. And like, I'm just, you know, uh, maybe cis people need the spelling out. So I'll just say it like, if you can't

social, if you can't medically transition, you're less likely to be well accepted in your social transition. So there's a really deliberate like catch-22 of uh if you you know of stopping someone's social transition and therefore stopping their medical transition and therefore right it's just it's just trying to stop trans people existing altogether yeah and i mean i think it's sort of particularly grim in the uk system where you like it's way harder to well okay outside of the places where it's been made increasingly illegal in the u.s it is way way harder to get uh like to just to get gender care in the uk and it requires a lot of bullshit that like you don't have in the u.s and it's it's much it's much much more like pathologized

which is kind of insane because it's pretty it's pretty pathologized in the u.s too but the uk is like like has has cranked up the like gender bureaucracy level to like they they they found that they found the one that goes to 11 and we're like fuck this shit we just need these like 200 more dials yeah it's all it's looking at our looking at our country you might you might be led to the the the idea that we've been practicing uh bureaucracy-based fascism for uh hundreds of years already and gotten it down to a precise science and um well that's a that's a conclusion you could draw. Yeah, I was going to say as well, like, we talked last time I was on about, like, why is the UK like this in general? And I think that it's worth putting this puzzle piece into a broader picture, right? Right. Like we've just had a national story about a woman who is being prosecuted for having an abortion later than the allowed the allowed limits in British law, which is obviously the beginning of the right wing trying to push back on abortion.

At the same time, like a few weeks ago here, Americans probably haven't heard about it, but there was a place in London called the Autonomous Winter Shelter. So this was some anarchists who, some of whom I think we've interviewed on Red Planet before, who go kind of place to place and they squat on unoccupied buildings and they turn them into various things. But one thing they've repeatedly done is during winter periods, turn them into homeless shelters that they that they run as autonomous shelters. And basically it got to the spring and they still hadn't moved out of this place because, I mean, there were still homeless people that they wanted to help. And so the Metropolitan Police, London's finest, sent down, you know, like dozens of pigs in riot gear to uh forcibly like uh evict them and i i just think that like it's really it's just really important to see um the the premise that like states are aware that they are policing the collapse right we'll be we'll be very familiar to your audience but i think there's the the specific context of fortress europe going on with britain because like even though britain has

brexited itself out like we're still we still have a lot of the uh same concerns in right-wing politics that drive the thinking of fortress europe and so a lot of our like for instance immigration stuff uh is increasingly draconian and fashy um and i just think that like putting these three pieces together we can kind of see a bit of what's going on. The government actively trying to clamp down on people's bodily autonomy, trying to stop any other kind of gender expression being in place, and also trying to stop people from doing mutual aid and organizing that will lessen the impact of the collapse. Yeah, and I think it's a a very deliberate you know what one of the things that i think is very common you know like across the sort of like broad historical sweep of movements right is okay so well okay so the the the the the number one thing you do if that with when there's a massive social movement going on you need to stop it that the first the like

the the the sort of like most dramatic thing you do is you start a war so for example like you know the the american movements of the 60s are immediately followed by the massive intensification of vietnam i i think like the most blatant example that i could think of is in 2006 in mexico you have simultaneously this massive zapatista campaign you have omlo like basically declaring well there's a contested election and omlo like declares himself president even though he like technically lost the election and then simultaneously like the city of oaxaca like does an uprising and take control of the city wow and and like and like they they hold the city for like 100 days um and basically immediately after uh the like so the mexican army gets

deployed and like takes back the city and immediately after the like the the like the the the full-on like entrance of the mexican army into the war on drugs starts and this is like this is you know this is a sort of a very very common social pattern right of the way the the the the way the way you defeat you know i mean just literally like straight up uprisings is by doing like one is is by doing a war the second thing you can do is you start you you you you you pivot away from the social issues that are like that sort of your mass protests your uprisings are about and you go back into domestic politics and you go back into domestic politics and

you go back into social reproduction you attack them there so you know i mean like it like china has a good example of this of like all all of this sort of like discontent that had been boiling around the revolution and around you know like like things around like gender things about gender roles which was you know like actually genuinely happening at that time all of the sort of upheaval is capped off by the one-child policy. Yes. Or if, you know, we can go back to the U.S. for a second, right? We have 2020, we have this massive uprising.

Immediately after the uprising, we get all of the anti-trans shit intensifies so, like just unbelievably enormously, right? Yeah. And this is incredibly deliberate in a lot of ways. It's, you know, it's a very, very concrete attempt to reassert patriarchal and cisgender control over people, over families, over society writ large. point is that like is how we can see what the what the british state is up to very very clearly like they they are trying to create a more rigid control on their population and uh you know this is why i mean like calling it turf island but like a lot of turfs will pretend that they you know will

fight for abortion rights or whatever actually there was a a protest to do with the to do with that abortion case i mentioned the other day and a bunch of uh a bunch of like anarchists and and like uh trans people showed up and there was also some people from women's place who is a tough organization and like then um and so obviously like they were trying to like box them out and be like piss off you don't belong here um and then like a uh a far-right like preacher showed up with like anti-abortion stuff and a megaphone and trying to like and so obviously like all of the all of the trans activists the the the authentic leftists like started uh it's like getting in that guy's

way and ruining his day and making it so he couldn't do any of his stuff and obviously the turfs don't care at all like they're not yeah they're not there to actually fight against uh anything um but you know especially so when you when you look at that bigger picture like i say it's just like um if you're looking at the bigger picture you can tell there is no there there is no divide between like the bodily autonomy of cis women uh and for that matter like uh trans masc and non-binary people with who are who are assigned female at birth and you know and and trans rights there's no conflict at all it's it's the the state is trying to crack down on bodily autonomy on gender expression as part of a bigger project of

you know implementing more authoritarianism um and i don't know i i guess like there's a feeling i keep on running up against recently which is just like waiting for the the waiting for disparate leftist causes to kind of realize and act like uh all of this stuff is is one side you know like it's very clear like because from the state's point of view as you're saying like starting a war uh uh tightening immigration policies uh restricting abortion cracking down on queer people. Like all of these are, from the state's point of view, methods within, methods in their toolbox to achieve one greater goal. And I think that like we need, well, I mean, to say we need class consciousness would be, you know,

just like seems too obvious to say even, but like we do we need we need a consciousness of the fact that like these issues affect everyone even if it seems like it doesn't affect you in your in your everyday life uh you know if you're a cishet white man uh who's a self-employed adult utterly libertarian steel man you don't depend on anyone like it is still going to affect you because it is the the state gaining more power over everybody by doing these things uh one thing i wanted to say also about like the kids who i'd gotten some feedback from was like there is a big mood among trans kids that like they had been told that things were going to be getting better um so like when i said that story about my friend who had the teaching assistant she said that for her um growing up it was absolutely nightmarish and the bullying was really intense and the support

with the support from adults was non-existent and um and then there was a little window where like people started to become more aware of trans people and uh and and from the liberal side and all of the like corporate pink washing andhing and whatever. And it seemed like a broad, like culture of acceptance is being brought in. And now it feels like that's being revoked. But like, you know, I mean, how she put it was like, she feels like it's just sort of back to normal, because like, that's what she already grew up with but like i do we have to think about it from the point of view of kids who are you know trying to exist as trans kids right now like they have been told by by liberals that like things are getting better we're aware of trans people now we're going to fight for trans rights and it's very clear that like they're not uh they're not getting better you know i just want to say like to uh trans kids who might like might hear this might get any of this sentiment that like i completely i completely feel it myself like having come out at the tail end of liberals being like yeah we love trannies um sorry daniel um

like having come out right at the tail end of that now shit's getting unbelievably bleak like i also feel that and um i i guess it's the the the saying about like don't let this let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair because i um from where i'm looking around myself uh as an adult uh you know a politically active and engaged adult, there aren't any answers in the left liberal, ooh, we're so multicultural and accepting kind of space. That's entirely dependent on profit, and Target is emptying all the Pride stuff out of their stores now. Capital does not care for the queers,

but we can care for each other. I think it's really important to say that finding queer know finding queer community is really important um but that's you know and that's obviously true but also like um queer community being uh like class conscious and radical and organized are also really really important and you know i am seeing that like i do want to say like in covering this like obviously really grim uh situation that's being enforced like that uh we're not just sitting by and letting it happen it's just that we are like as leftists we're always this just like tiny radical fringe uh for the time being uh and so like we're doing what we can um i don't, I just don't want trans kids to feel like there are absolutely no adults,

uh, who, um, who are in the Venn diagram of like, uh, uh, understanding how fucked this is and actually having a proportional idea of the,

the solutions that are necessary. Now we're not also in, unfortunately, like none of us are currently in the third, the third Venn diagram circle of having the power to stop it yet. But we're doing everything that we can for the time being, right? Yeah, well, I think there's something that's important to think about with this, too. The reason this is happening is because there was actually a period of time when we were winning

right sure and this is i think particularly true in the u.s but i mean i think it's still also true in the uk right like it like the the the reason there had to be a backlash like this was because like things were you know for a brief amount of time getting better but but like even with how bad it is now even with how bad it's getting it's it's always like you know like being a leftist it is always hard to sort of make like these kind of like liberal teleological like the the moral arc of the universe like ben's story justice arguments but we are going to beat them yeah it will it will take time it will take an enormous amount of struggle but we are going to and absolutely you know and like and i i think that's something that's something that is very

very very important like this is not hopeless like it is not it is simply not we we have already achieved and won things that like our forefathers fucking only dreamed of right yeah absolutely and we are going to our full mothers and sisters yeah that too yeah no i mean i i think i i completely agree and i i want to like double down on what i'm saying about the liberals that like i the liberal promise that you've been given of of of acceptance within like their framework that like hillary clinton will stand up and say she loves trans rights. Yes, that one was a lie. That was fucked. That was bullshit. Liberals lie. I hope that you have already figured this out, because I believe kids are smart enough to figure this out. Because liberals love to lie. But like,

in terms of it getting better, like, it will, even if the way that it gets better is that like is that like we break free like is is only in breaking free of these systems like it's it's um i i am not going to make any promises that like the society that we live in as it is now is going to uh is going to come back around and like will have trans people treated the way that the the gay people were treated in in the year 2000 uh it's it's you know that one maybe but like i'm not holding my breath for it but like it will get better one way or another and it may well be that the way that it gets better is that we have like stronger and more radical communities of mutual aid and care and those those are the spaces where it's like you know safe and and uh good for trans people and and possible for us to strive and thrive

yeah and and i i think you know i i i think this is something that like you know if you look back at sort of how the history of like like if you look if you look at just like the history of sort of like gay rights right like a big part of what that looked like that has been sort of you know just like wiped from the sort of public memory right like the the stuff people remember is you know the sort of like really flashy activist stuff but a huge part of what that looked like was just you know i have a couch right you can you can sleep here like we will take care of you we will like we will feed you we will take care of you emotionally and yeah you know as as bad as that

shit was they were you know and as many people as we lost like there are so so many people who are you know like alive and thriving and you know living authentic with themselves and are you know like like genuinely like just like having like having a good time. Yeah, sure. That's my live reality right now. I have so many friends in the Quake community who are housing insecure or who don't have jobs or whatever

and we have each other. I think I got a this butch I've been dating went to an event for working class butchers the other day. she came back with some pins and she was like do you want any of these and I picked out this one that says we are dykes and all we have is each other because like that is like

in the like dyke community that I'm in like that's so incredibly true and we have each other's backs and like yeah it will continue to be true that we're taking care of each other I guess it's like it's Like, yeah, like, it will continue to be true that we're taking care of each other. I guess it's, like, it's been already for me for years now, the thing to get angry about is how many people we will lose in the meantime.

Because, like, if I, if you were, if you were gay in 1979 or whatever, right, and you were about to go into the AIDS epidemic, like like it just you may you may even then have had a sense like i i think a lot of people didn't but like you know you we we have hindsight to know that like things turned out quote unquote okay in the end but like so many people were lost in the meantime and for me that's the thing i'm angry about is just like um how tedious this liberal bullshit is uh of enacting this like staged farce of like uh uh scapegoating bigotry um in order to like control the population you know in order to divide the working class uh with with this bigotry and then like at some point we will we will move past it and things will be more chill and like trans people will not be the ones with the with the crosshairs on us um uh either be either because we have abolished and smashed the crosshairs or simply because they've moved on uh and i'm i'm just angry about how many people will be lost

yeah time yeah which and i think that's something we should circle back to in terms of sort of the immediate school regulations is like you know okay so the people who are making these laws know this but like a lot of the trans people who are killed are killed by their parents that is a that is a very very common way for trans people to die yes you come out to your parents and your parents kill you um and that is fucking bleak as shit and you know and again like like these these these people know this like there's there is there's recently a recording of rishi sunak just like like just you know okay so the the the the thing about sort of you know this has been changing in the u.s now because we've gotten to a point where like right-wing people can just like say slurs

and it's you know publicly publicly acceptable but for like for like a long time you but i say slurs and daniel bleeps them that's fucking crazy to me you know i'm look at the censorship i'm dealing with is what i'm saying you know i i say tranny i say faggot i say dyke and daniel's there just ruling with an iron fist what's what's up with that it would be very funny if it just none of this was censored at all just like no yeah but like but like you know there there's a recording of rishi sunak like just like actually saying the shit like like i like i actually just saying like the the the really sort of overt anti-trans shit that he believes exactly in private yeah and like yeah like that that that's like these people like want to hurt us like that is that is that there's something that's incredibly clear based on both their sort of what they say in private and what

they do in public yeah and you know fuck them uh yeah bury rishi sunak in the submarine uh get in the fucking contraption. Godspeed submarine and critical support to Comrade Orca. We will deal with Sunak. I'm speaking on behalf of the ocean. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what to say about it

because, again, I was not out as trans as a kid. I don't know. I don't, I don't know what to say about it because again, like I was not out as, as trans as a kid. I don't want to give like, um, empty assurances to people who are going through something that I did not go through that we didn't, did not go through. But I do want to say that like,

um, as for, and it gets better, like, um, we care for each other and, and we, like we,

we will continue to have each other's backs. I've been reading a lot of, um, I've been reading homo seca by georgio agamben for a little while now uh about the like the the the class of people like whichever in whatever society you're talking about like class of people who are treated as the exception from the model of the state like the people who know who are treated like it wouldn't matter if someone killed them um and you know it's it's obviously hitting close to home because that's that's the the point of the book right um and i don't know it's it's given me a lot of a lot of pause for thought over this kind of stuff that like we have we have each other it does it does immediately give you a perspective

that invalidates all of the all of the apparatus of the state because it's all like wow that's a nice world you got over there uh i'm i'm just not part of it i'm just not um a welcome in it um but it's a but the the bit where i can say it's okay is we have our own world um and like yeah and it fucking rips by the way it's it does it rules it whips incredibly fucking hard uh it it it it might be like irresponsible to discuss in too much detail but it does whip actually um um but like yeah like as much as like um kind of explicitly uh intentionally like separatist arguments are frowned upon and i i think for good reason like um uh having each other's backs when when the rest of society doesn't is is necessary and it

is what we because it's necessary it is what we're doing yeah well and i i will say too like you know as as much as there are a lot of cis people who suck there are a lot of cis people who will have your back and who will fight for you and yep yeah and like and that and that and i i think i think part of like i i think i think part of the what what this stuff is about too right like is like part part part of the culture of fear and the culture of terror that all of this stuff is supposed to like is is supposed to sort of bring into being is to make it harder for you know like like there's a sort of obvious one of like okay you want to you want to force trans people like back into the closet you want to wipe away their

existence but simultaneously like it is also trying to isolate trans people from cis people who will support them sure and it's effective at that. Right. But simultaneously, like actually working together, we are unstoppable. And that's the reason they're doing all of this shit. Yes. Because they have, because they have to make sure that doesn't happen.

Yeah. And I, I think as well, like it might be, um, this is one, one side of it would might feel like the uniquely queer side of the divide and conquer experience because like when

we say there are so many more of us than there are of them we're talking about the working class or we're talking about human beings around the planet as opposed to the ruling class or we're talking about like uh people of color as opposed to white people or whatever but like the but for queer people it's like we're very conscious that we're actually yeah factually a minority of the population but like but yeah me is right like there are there are cis people who care there there are cis people who authentically care and and authentically like at the very least want to offer support and uh one thing that i'd say we're working on is like showing cis people the avenues because um the channels of support that they can go through because uh when yeah

because like yeah that that is the thing about the cis ally is they they may they may they may care with their entire bleeding heart but they they they're not gonna come up with they're usually not gonna come up with the way to help themselves and they they so they often need to be pointed like big neon flashing sign here's how you help here's how you yeah to that you have to guide them you have to guide the missile of the power of the proletariat in the right direction yeah yeah yeah to to that effect uh in lieu of just telling your audience to uh uh you know uh form bonds of solidarity and mutual aid with the queer community in the uk which like guys please um you can check out

the good law project in the uk they do a lot of really important legal work um have already been doing a lot of important like legal battles to try to turn back this tide of anti-trans uh legislation and court rulings and so on and um they uh they accept donations to to like specifically to their fund that relates to trans cases so like you can if you're a cis ally and listening to this and you have some spare cash you can go look up the good law project and donate to uh help the legal fight at least because again like this guidance is is actually against the law as it stands so i don't know that the good law project has announced a um a fight to stop it yet,

but I imagine that they will do something of some kind sometime soon. And yeah, I mean, more support to them will only help. Yeah, and speaking of more support, where can people find you? Well, I'm Sophie from Mars. I have a video essay channel on YouTube. That's my main gig i have just now nearly finished my project the world is not ending which is about go figure the climate collapse uh and what was going to happen to us over the next hundred years as a planet uh surprise

uh not just total extinction uh spoiler warning uh warning, uh, working class revolt. Um, and, uh, great. So it's a, so it's a, oh,

thanks babe. Uh, so it's a great time to join my Patreon because this, this project I've been working on for such a, such a long time is nearly done. Um, I also stream on Twitch at Sophie underscore FRM underscore Mars. But speaking of Twitch,

I think the thing that appeals to your audience the most besides that project will be my show Red Planet, which I do every Sunday, 8pm to 11pm UK time on twitch.tv slash redplanetlive. It's a commie roundtable where we have four very based hosts, usually, but not always, talking to some based guests who are organizers and activists doing cool stuff to make the world a better place. who are organizers and activists doing cool stuff to make the world a better place. For example, this week, and I don't know when this episode's coming out, but this week, as we're recording it, we're going to have Michael Laufer on, who teaches people how to make

Mifepristone and Misoprostol, the at-home abortion medications for people in places where it's illegal. So that's the kind of stuff you can expect on Red Planet. Check out Red Planet. It's cool. yeah um i think this will be out next like wednesday or something cool but then yeah then that episode will be up on spotify and youtube archive yeah yeah this has been naked happen here you can find us on twitter and instagram at happen here pod uh i guess you can find me on twitter while i'm still around at it me chr3 or just find the ice must be destroyed person uh yeah god go go go go go into the world and make life hell for

transphobes and the british and american governments just support support working class engaging mutual aid blah blah pipeline don't like it there's the door 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 Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the 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,

musica, películiculas, 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 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. It could happen here. It's the show where we hate McDonald's. I'm your host, Mia Wong, a professional McDonald's hater. And with me to talk about hating McDonald's is Mira, who's a freelance journalist and union organizer. Mira, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so, okay, so specifically, there are lots of...

Hating McDonald's is like an ancient anarchist tradition. I think, I'm actually not sure how well it is known today, but I'm about 80% sure that the tradition of breaking Starbucks windows was actually originally like a... It was actually originally a thing about breaking... Like it came from like a bunch of campaigns. I think in, definitely in France, I think also in Mexico, that like anytime a Starbucks... Starbucks, Jesus Christ. anytime mcdonald's would open up everyone would immediately

start breaking the windows that's the only proper way to handle a mcdonald's and my formerly professional opinion but the the reason we're talking about mcdonald's is that yeah you tried to organize a mcdonald's union which is i guess the other thing you could do with the McDonald's other than lighting it on fire, which is maybe too kind to it. You could. Oh, I guess I guess there are those people in France who took it over and turned it into like a food co-op or something. But a third thing you can do with it. Discovered a third a third thing to do with the McDonald's is hit the towers. Yeah, but yeah, I wanted to talk about, I guess, what, you know,itty gritty aspect of like what it's like to organize a union. And also just about McDonald's, because Jesus Christ, good Lord.

Oh, no. I have so much to talk about. So more than happy to. Yeah. So I guess. OK, I think we should start with just the sort of mcdonald'sness of it all i wanted to start with just talking a bit about what it's actually like to work at a mcdonald's because i well okay a i feel like it's not actually universal experience anymore for like people to have worked at a fast food restaurant and b i think people who it's it's a thing you blot out of your collective memory very quickly because it sucked

but yeah what is it actually like when you show up to your shift so McDonald's was my first job and it was a hell of an introduction the moment you would come in you would be

most days bombarded with constant orders on screen because they have these little screens both in the front and back grill areas that like showed all the orders they had. And like a good 60, 70% of the time I came in, people would just be swamped with orders. They'd be running around being like, oh, thank God you're here. We need someone to get on right now. And it's like, you don't even get a moment to breathe. As you're standing there waiting to clock in on their punching machine,

you're just like, oh dear God, I'm going to have a fucking terrible time. And as you're running around, cooking everything after you clock in, you're getting screamed at by your bosses right by you because they're like, oh no, a customer complained because there was too many pickles on their sandwich. And then you'll hear someone yelling from the drive-through window on top of that. And then you might have people at the front counter.

This was before COVID, so McDonald's still had front counters when people would come in. I don't know if every McDonald's does, but everyone I've been to since has just closed down internally. And I envy that. But you would have people yelling from there. And if you were one of the unfortunate souls who ended up working directly facing the customers and not just cooking, you would be the one getting screamed at by all parties involved. I later worked at a Wendy's where I got a taste of that and I walked out three days into.

Yeah. Stuff sucks. Yeah. And I think that, you know, I, I think like one of the things that I think like compounds this is, you know, okay, I will do a theory, which is that I think people have a really weird understanding of what it means to have a job on a sort of theoretical level that dates back to a genuinely very weird period in the the 20th century where people actually had like stable hours and that's just not how any of this

works right like you you know you like there there is no actual stable amount of hours you just get you get some number of hours like a week that you're assigned to but then you know but this leads to a thing that we've all got, like, like literally every single field we've talked about. You need icing has this problem, which is just understaffing because why the fuck would you have enough people to do a job when you could have less than enough people to do a

job and pay them less. That, that was my experience. I'm McDonald's and fast food in general, you would get such inconsistent numbers of hours that you wouldn't know how much money you'd be making in the month. Because for all you know, this month you could be working every regular day, every business day of the week. You could be working only weekends. Or you could be like I was after the union got busted,

like I was after the union got busted, spoiler alert, working three hours on Sundays in the mornings, and that's it, if they really wanted to. And there's nothing that outside of a union you can do to prevent them from, and outside of niche legal areas where you can maybe push back, you can't really do much if they decide just not to staff you. And there was people working there who they had full-blown kids, families relying on them

in that job. They weren't making much. Pennsylvania minimum wage was $7.25 and you know they were paying us that. And so what little they could could get they would maybe get like at best 100 bucks a week with their hours unless they were able to get into like a managerial position where it's the only one where you'd be kind of guaranteed hours in the sense that they desperately need you so they'll throw you on whatever beyond that it's you also don't know the days you're going to work. Yeah.

Yeah. I was going to ask is like what, like how, how much time do you have between finding out you're going to be on a shift and then like being on the shift? You can have anywhere from several days notice to under 12 hours notice. And there is no way to predict what's going to happen the next week because it all depends on when you're going to get staffed.

There are points I found out day of when I was going to be working. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. And like this, I mean, this is a thing that like is becoming this is the way that labor used to work in like the 1800s and then you know it was sort of like phased out because it turns out this is actually a stunningly inefficient way to actually like like run a business but you know we've we've reached the the thing that happened

at the end of history is it's not the history ended it's that like capital needing to be efficient ended and now they just like do this shit and it's like well okay so it doesn't matter if this is like a terribly inefficient way to run things it's you just like it's it's it's a mechanism designed to just like absolutely destroy like the the sort of psyches and lives of the people who are doing the thing yeah that is completely accurate they do not give a rat's ass about anyone working there for a second everyone working there is completely expendable even if they're a manager. There's been points people have worked there for like three, four months and got promoted to a manager.

Everyone is expendable and they make sure you know that too and how they treat you. You're not treated with any dignity, with any respect. You're just You're not treated with any dignity, with any respect. You're just completely thrown around first job or they're down on their luck and need to get something to pay the bills. I've even hitting hard times trying to reapply at McDonald's since working there because I needed to pay the bill. I was in that exact position again and fairly recently. And so it's not a fun place to be in, to put it mildly. it's not a fun place to be in to put it mildly yeah of course they didn't let me work there again because uh i'm i believe i'm banned from ever working at a mcdonald's again yeah that's a that that's another thing that i think is not that well understood like lots of companies just have basically not even like there are there are people that i know who are blacklisted like from shit they did

dream occupy like people yeah like like they're these these things these things suck and if you like you know this is i guess one of the sort of issues of doing any kind of organizing is that like if you lose like stuff can go like very badly for you, which sucks, but also simultaneously, if you don't organize things, it will go very badly for you. So it's, you know. It's a double-edged sword, yeah. Yeah. I guess there's one other thing I wanted to ask, which I don't know if you know. Do you know if your McDonald's was a franchise, if it was actually owned by the company?

So, yes, it was a franchise it wasn't owned by like the official company in any major sense um i actually met the franchise owner during the course of the union which was a fun time when we were in the process of getting busted. Oh boy. Yeah. So do you want to explain what a franchise is and I guess like how that sort of model works? Yeah. So most McDonald's out there are franchises, which basically means McDonald's will kind of

let independent people buy out their stores and own and manage them in a certain region for a portion of the profits uh in the scranton area which was where i did the union um they were all owned by one single family who was ultra rich in part because of the McDonald's and in part because of family inheritances. And these folks, they would be treated as the head honchos the same way that ceos get talked about at most companies they weren't the ceos of course but like as far as in terms of managing great restaurant area mcdonald's went they were the main ones in charge now of course mcdonald's corporate always had the final say over everything but they manage tens of thousands of restaurants across the world so they don't really get involved in any of the nitty gritty, which is why they kind of let people own these franchises. Yeah, which I think is really interesting.

It's like they've managed to somehow combine the worst aspects of working for a major corporation with the worst aspects of working for a small business tyrant. Which is interesting, too, because it's like, don't know because this is like one of the weird things about mcdonald's right it's like mcdonald's mcdonald's corporate doesn't make money from hamburgers they're basically a real estate company that like sells franchises to people but but simultaneously but that means that like they can do things like they can force their franchises to do things that are like unprofitable because it doesn't matter to them. Like there's,

they're still getting paid. Like they're still getting paid. They're like licensing, like franchising fees or whatever, like no matter what sort of like shit is happening there. Yeah. And that's, I don't know.

I, it's, it's, it strikes me as like a really interesting, it strikes me as like the exact arrangement. That's like the most likely to create a fascist, which is like because like, you know, you have a group of people capitalist but is also getting squeezed from the top down like by a by larger corporations and then also is facing bottom-up pressure from workers and so their solution to this is just like ruthlessly like you know just just like ruthlessly do a fascism against like everyone who's working for them. Yeah, you scratch a liberal and a fascist leads. Yeah. More true than McDonald's and

fast food, really, than anywhere. Yeah. The McFascists reign supreme. Ah. So, speaking of McFascists, the products and services, these are two distinct sentences. They are not

related. FCC, please. Actually, no, products and services these are two these are two distinct sentences they are not related uh fcc please actually no you fuck you the fcc doesn't well no no the fcc the fcc does not regulate us i think we're actually regulated by the ftc so fuck the fcc uh that's why i can swear on this podcast because they don't regulate us and we're back okay so having having returned to more mcfascism yeah okay so i guess we should start talking about how the union organizing started and how i guess the sort of immediate mistake that y'all made attempting to get this off the ground? Yeah. So it started with me. I was the first one there to bring up the concept of a union because then I was like only 17.

I was new to anarchism still. And so I was young, green, and eager to get shit done. I still am, I'll eager to get shit done. I still am all the above. So that wasn't shit. Yeah. But I had a few contacts to local IWW people through just the very, very faint activist networks that were up there and by faint i mean

a total of like five people so i got in contact with the iww guy uh i believe i used the name mark yes i used the name mark in the article to protect his anonymity, so I'll just keep consistency. And Mark was the one who convinced me to take more major steps. He was the one who I talked to and got consultation about it. And he was the one who gave all that initial guidance. And there was a few friends of mine I had there. They're also not really anarchists. Most of them were just like your social demands, but they were they were eager to get something done and help out.

So, you know, can't complain there. And it was like a small core group of us who all wanted to get involved and get this done and we had never done anything like this before Northeast Pennsylvania does have a strong history of unions there but we were not part of that history initially and so it ended up going south unfortunately pretty

it went well at first but I think some of the main issues we had in hindsight doing things, especially now having more experience union organizing under my belt, in hindsight, we rushed things way too much. things way too much. We were trying to get everyone on board. We didn't do sufficient one-on-one conversations with people. We didn't do sufficient intel gathering and we didn't we relied too much on our technical tools and left too much incriminating evidence that we trusted too many people with. We didn't really have a strong way of going about it that would have been better for what we were doing. Yeah, and I guess this comes to one of the main things that you're talking about here, and I think it's one of the main things about union organizing. Pretty much no matter who you talk to politically, the things that are important to get a union to work are kind of similar.

Which is that, yeah, it's usually a very slow process. it's a process of building relationships and it's a process of figuring out who in your work well who in your workplace people sort of trust and respect and like make friends with and figuring out how to sort of how to get them involved and how to get i don't know how how unions are not just sort of like abstract things like they're they're they're built of actual like social relationships that you have with another person and another and other groups and the relationships that they have with other people etc etc um yeah yeah i i wanted to ask about how how okay when when you were sort of starting to do this right how how were you sort of identifying the people you needed to talk to and what kinds of things were you doing to try to get

them involved and try to like map out how the workplace functioned so the first people I identified were people that I thought I could trust and the core group of people I had were folk that in regards to the union I in hindsight was to trust. We all agreed on the same issues and we all had kind of similar, more gung-ho attitude. I think me definitely the most out of everyone. We fell into a pitfall where I was kind of pushing the union by myself for a bit, which is definitely easy to fall into. But we, in terms of identifying the workplace leaders the natural leaders found there

we mostly relied on conversations with mark to do that we talked with him about who worked there we gave a brief list of everyone who worked there and we kind of just pinpointed them, the specific people we saw as leaders and left it at that. And I mean, as far as basic charting goes, it wasn't terrible, but there is definitely a lot to be desired and it could have been far more fleshed out. What do you think that would have looked like? Or, you know, what does that look like in sort of like other campaigns that you've run that were like the first one you ever tried to do at 17?

Charting as I would do it now, it should be done from the start, before even approaching the first person. Unless you extremely trust the person, you are just bonded for

life. You can't go without them. Unless you have really deep trust with the person you know you can't go without them unless you have like really deep trust with the person initially you shouldn't approach anyone about the union going into it you should start off with um if you can reaching out to an iww rep but if you can't make a detailed chart of who's in your workplace what positions they're at what team they on, like in terms of if they're on one person's managed area or another person's managed area, you should figure out who they're close to, who they listen to, relevant demographic information because you want your unions to be intersectional and you want to be able to figure out above all else whether or not you've had a

away from work one-on-one with them and whether or not you've had any talks with them prior about unions and where they might stand on unions you want to document all that and it doesn't have to be the most detail you can just do a spreadsheet with it but it can definitely be a lot to document and it's it's no joke it's not something that should be rushed it's not fun i've you know there's there's nothing really that's a blast about trying to sit there and be like ah yes let me fill out paperwork about my workplace employees but it will come back and save you so many times and give help you formulate strategies for going forward and we we rush things and talked did things like talking

to people on the workplace floor and just said hey do you want to do a union yeah and called that a day and said that was a one-on-one and it it wasn't yeah should we explain what a one-on-one like is supposed to be yeah so one-on-one is it doesn't necessarily have to be on one-on-one like is supposed to be yeah so one-on-one is it doesn't necessarily have to be on one-on-one but it should be between at least a union organizer and another person it could be potentially be another more seasoned organizer helping the more novice one along with during the one-on-one that can be a thing but ideally they are just one or two organizers talking to one workplace employee about initially anyway just a non-committal discussion on what their issues are in the workplace, what grievances they might have, and what their current stance is on workplace organizing.

Yeah, okay. Another thing I wanted to sort of get into is the role of having a way to talk to people outside of work and having just sort of a collaborative space where people talk about and i think this is something that like i don't know i think this this you know this is one of the big things i think that that this is one of the big things that's changed in the past you know maybe like decade and a half or so uh is that how like the the the actual space in which people talk about a union like tends not to be a physical space anymore it tends to be sort of either like a signal chat or like a facebook

chat like a i guess whatsapp technically is owned by facebook but yeah and so yeah i want to talk a bit about that and also i guess get into the sort of security problems that you can have with this because, yeah. Yeah, there's, so that's what we did. We had a group chat on Facebook Messenger to talk to everyone about the union and everything like that. And there's a lot of pros to having a centralized group chat, don't get me wrong. It makes an easy way to communicate when you're trying to take actions to other people. It can be helpful to do any last minute coordination needed. It can be useful to make sure everyone's on the same page.

But there's also major drawbacks to it. One, as you mentioned, there's big privacy concerns, and we ran into that during the campaign. If with anything organizing, you're only as secure as your weakest link. And if you have people you do not completely 100% trust in your group chat, someone could leak everything, either wittingly or unwittingly. In our case, it was wittingly. But you very well could have someone who isn't being careful and might show the group chat to someone else who they shouldn't on accident. And unless everyone's on the same page about best security practices, unless everyone's on the same page about best security practices,

you're not going to get very far with having that. And for another, doing any form of organizing over text in a major capacity is really hard. There's so many issues with making sure people are understanding their tone, and communicating properly, and just meeting each other on the same level that you really can't do over text like you can do in person. A text medium should, in my view, only be there to facilitate interactions that are later done, best in person but if not they can be done through like video calls yeah like as much as zoom can be really annoying like

it is way more productive than trying to do things through text like yeah just like having just like just like having a weekly zoom meeting you know like, like, there's a lot of, like, cases where you, like, you know, you literally physically can't, like, be in the same place. Yeah. You know, and if that's the thing you're dealing with, like, yeah, doing video calls and stuff like that makes it way, way easier. For sure. It is a way better medium to do anything union related with. And it's also much easier to bond with people over video chat too. connecting with your other your fellow workers and meeting each other on that same level and bonded over your shared interests over your share what you desire from a union what you desire from your workplace it you can't really do that easily anyway over text i'm

sure someone somewhere has done it but it's not recommended for me anyway okay unfortunately we need to do another thing that's not text which is ads you can tell by we're doing great on the ad pivots here it's fine i was i was watching uh what's his name uh the guy the the right wing shithead guy who like had a thing with Samantha Bee for a little bit. Glenn Beck, that's the one. I was watching Glenn Beck and I was like, oh, no, this guy, this guy's this guy's ad pivot was just racism. So, you know, we could do it. It could happen here. Our second slogan, better ad pivots than Glenn Beck.

And we are back, hopefully hopefully i don't know maybe we'll get extremely unlucky and everything will be broken and this will immediately cut to a third ad but assuming that it doesn't um i i wanted to talk a bit also about sort of the the kinds of things that are necessary to get people to believe that a union can work because that's you know like or organization isn't just sort of a purely like it isn't just sort of a purely mechanical thing it's also about morale you know as like as much as it's about social relations it's about sort sort of morale and about people believing in the thing. So I wanted to ask, yeah, I guess talk a little bit about what that process is sort of like and what can happen to it.

Yeah, so that's something, an issue we ran into at the MEC Union fairly early on was keeping people motivated for the union and getting people wanting to be involved. Because one of the most common things you'll hear when trying to organize a union is people like, oh, I can't afford to lose this job. I have a family to feed. I have bills to pay. You'll see people saying they don't want to risk their careers if you're in a more professional environment. You'll see people just not wanting to take the risks that could jeopardize them. And it's important when you're kind of trying to address those concerns to meet them where they're at. You can't make those concerns go away because they're at. You're not going to, you can't make those concerns go away because they're real. When you're organizing a union, there is a risk you could get fired

and get punished for it. It happened to me. It comes with the territory. But if you do things safely and you do things right, it's a much safer option than not doing anything. And that's the main thing you kind of want to talk to people about is detailing their grievances and talking about how nothing's going to change without a U-Bin. You can't butter up to your bosses and expect them to suddenly turn around on you. The most they'll do is play pretend for a little bit until things go right back to normal and you kind of want to talk to people

about also why it's more beneficial to them to just stick with the union because their strength is in numbers. And that's something that a lot of regular folk can kind of lose is that they're not going to be in it alone. When someone's viewing getting involved, a lot of the time they're thinking, oh, if I get involved, I'm going to get fired. They're not thinking about the strength in numbers. get involved i'm going to get fired they're not thinking about the strength and numbers sure you just you yourself as the only one pushing for change in a workplace yeah there's a decent chance you'll get fired but if you have a whole crew of 10 people all who are essential running the operations pushing for change suddenly you're going to see things shifting a much different way in a much different way and so building that solidarity among people is important and i think is the i don't want to say the absolute best way because there isn't an absolute best way to

handle those concerns but it's definitely a way that can be effective if done right yeah and i guess okay um i guess i guess we should go into uh how it sort of came apart yeah because unfortunately you know and this i think is a thing that is depressing but true which is that a lot of union like just statistic well actually i don't have the numbers i'm not gonna i'm not gonna actually say that but a lot of union campaigns don't work and you know sometimes it's because like something bad happens sometimes because it's just you know stuff happens it's out of your control sometimes it's i don't know like a pandemic starts but yeah we should talk about what happened here and how to sort of avoid that because it sucks so there's a lot of things that can be a downfall in a union in the case of mcdonald's our main downfall there was a lot of you know little things we did wrong that didn't help at all that definitely just made matters worse in the end but

the straw that broke the camel's back was not being careful with who we trusted and dan as i referred to in the article he was the one that caused the penultimate destruction of it. COVID contributed heavily but I feel like if it weren't for Dan the Union could have had still a fighting chance in spite of COVID. Now if it weren't for COVID I think the Union also could have stuck around but the mixture of external factors and internal did the downfall but in terms of things we could have actively prevented Dan was the main thing that we could have done approached way differently

we could have approached handling new people in a much better light we should have had a centralized group being the ones with all the communications to everything and let people prove their trust to the union over time by doing tasks for it and just by building relationships with people and fostering stuff that's already there because dan was two-faced we all thought he was our friend which is why we thought we could trust him but he was in it just to try and get some benefits for him which is why he snitched he thought maybe he would get you know some type of promotion or something he didn't which side note it doesn't help you to snitch on your union. If anyone out there is thinking of doing it, you're just going to screw yourself and everyone else over.

And nobody likes to snitch. Yeah. But we should have been a lot more cautious with how we approach people and shouldn't have just been doing things for the sake of doing them. We shouldn't have been approaching people inside the workplace. We shouldn't have been inviting everyone and everyone to all our confidential group chats. We should have been cautious of who we were around and what we were saying around people and how we were going about it that's the core of it i mean yeah it's recklessness yeah and i mean i think like you know

obviously it is not good if the existence is like if if the existence of your union a bunch of your stuff gets leaked like this is not necessarily fatal like i've i've been involved in campaigns where like that's happened and we won anyways but it could definitely be is like you know especially like especially early on in the process and especially like the more precarious stuff is uh it yeah it's not great um I can get pretty bad pretty quickly. You know, I guess the thing that I wanted to sort of ask about was like, okay, so historically up until the last, I mean, I think, was Burgerville the first like modern fast food union?

I think it might have been. It was either Burgerville or Jimmy John's. Yeah, it was one of the two. Up until really the last, I think post-2015, 2016, fast food has been really, really difficult to organize. And a lot of unions either just didn't try or did these kind of weird PR stunt stunt campaigns that were you know like fight 15 attached things where it's like well we're not actually really trying to get a union we're trying

to like get pr stuff for fight 15 but this is i don't know this is the thing i think is interesting about the idw about the id this is the thing that's interesting about the industrial workers of the world specifically is that they've actually like gone in and seriously attempted to do it and they sort of finally broke through to a couple places and you know this this mcdonald's campaign didn't work but what was kind of interesting to me about it is like i don't know like how kind of i don't know if normal is the right word of a campaign it was but it's it looks a lot like i don't know it it like it looks a lot like campaigns that i've been involved in that were like not in the fast food industry and i guess i was wondering a bit about like to what extent were the sort of tactics shaped by like the very specific weird conditions of fast food?

And to what extent it was just sort of like the stuff you'd use in any workplace? So a lot of our base model was just stuff you'd use in any workplace. Because at the time we were doing this, I think the only fast food unions that were around were like jimmy john's and burger grill i think those are the only two that had any publicity as this was before all the like major starbucks campaigns yeah that's all pretty decent yeah and so we didn't have much of a playbook for how to approach things in a fast food environment specifically. A lot of what we actually emulated the model on was factory environments and things like that, because there is somewhat of a similarity of having worked in both between fast food and factories with factories and both fast food you have a kind of assembly line model you know crank out work crank out work crank out

work get things out at a rapid pace and stick to your job maybe do a little bit of cleanup now and then but you stick to what you're doing and you're kind of isolated from other stations a bit. You have some overlap, but only in so far as your job will allow, but you might be able to talk to each other. You share break areas. That kind of structure informed how we approached it by us. What we tried to do was talk to people we didn't have external contacts with in areas that were away from cameras, in areas that were away from other people who might be able to hear.

But there is better ways of doing it. And I think other campaigns benefited out there, likely benefited from having more seasoned organizers at the core of it, because that's also, at least for me and my experience with it, something that didn't help us was having someone who was no real experience doing something at the forefront of that. I'm not to say that someone with no experience can't do amazing things. There's countless examples of unions that were ran by people with no experience at all who just jumped right into it and did amazing jobs. But it's important to get a diversity of people with different walks of life at the core of it.

People with different perspectives. Just so many different people involved at the core as a kind of central organizing committee can do you wonders with a union because we had just a few young left-leaning people a few young left-leaning white people most of which were male presenting um i wasn't out as trans there so i was presenting as masculine the other people i was with they were all cis men and the other people I was with, they were all cis men, with one exception. Two exceptions, sorry. My memory's a little on the fritz. But we needed more people with different perspectives in there. And there was plenty to be found in the workplace,

but we just neglected to include them in the core organizing committee and i think that's something that could really benefit unions and probably is a major strength of a lot of the successful ones is having a diverse main primary group of central organizers. I don't want to say central organizers more like core organizers because the solidarity union model isn't hierarchical, but just a central group of people involved that seek to do

the main legwork. Yeah, and this has been, I think, one of the things that made the Starbucks campaigns work was like they well with the starbucks campaign specifically it was a lot of like find the queerest person in the workplace and start talking to them but having the core group of people working on things being as diverse as possible is good both in like an immediate practical sense

and in a sort of like long-term strategic sense and the like faster that happens the better yeah okay do you have anything else that you from this that you think people should know about I would say if you can get external help from a union if you've never done it before and even if you have having someone to bounce ideas

off of can yeah wonders there's a lot of folk with the IWW that are more than willing to offer a helping hand to people trying to get started on a union campaign. All you gotta do is reach out and ask. And I'm sure there will be someone in your local

who's willing to help. But even if there's not, you can probably get someone to help you more remotely too. And even just a little bit of guidance can go a long way yeah union good mcdonald's bad i be careful while you're organizing and yeah be strategic and smart about it well okay do you want people to find you first and if so where uh yeah i can be found over unfortunately for now on twitter at my magazine also on mastodon much more preferably um and those are the main places i'm at um

if you want to reach me too i my email is found on my twitter and mastodon my real estate at gmail.com it's the best way to get ahold of me yeah we'll put a link to the strange matter article uh in the in the description so you can read that too because it's great um yeah murad i thank you so much for joining but was going to say us but I guess thank you so much for joining me yeah it was great talking to you fuck McDonald's this place sucks ass thank you so much for having me

it was really great being out here been a huge fan of this podcast for a while so I was like when I first heard about potentially being out here I was stoked and also yeah fuck McDonald's. Yeah. Yeah, I guess, yeah,

this has been the podcast that you're listening to. You can find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram. You can find us, the rest of the stuff that people do at Cool Zone Media. I guess, I guess I actually, I have not plugged the Dew show that's been happening. There'll be a couple of episodes out by the time we do this but uh cool zone has done a show with jake anahan called sad oligarchs that's about the russian oligarchs who've been mysteriously dying

over the past like since the start of the war in ukraine uh yeah uh probably only getting more relevant as whatever fucking bullshit is happening there right now plays out I don't know but by the time this goes up you'll probably have a better idea of what happened or didn't happen but yeah go listen to that um yeah and go start a union in your workplace or alternately

light something on fire legally not the place something campfires, sworries, we can make those we have the technology on fire. Legally not the place. Something. Campfires. S'mores. We can make those. We have the technology. Union s'mores. Best kind. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo.

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

Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it, it being bad things happening here. Here being, you know, wherever you are. We're talking specifically about wherever you are.

I'm Robert Evans, one of the hosts of this podcast. of this podcast. And with me today is a guy I have a lot of admiration for, probably my favorite YouTube documentarian, which I guess would be the fastest way to sum up who you are and what you do. Dan Olson from the channel Folding Ideas. Dan, hi. Hi. How you doing? How you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah. Now, Dan, you and I have like a topic of shared interest to discuss. But the first thing I wanted to talk about is your name on the internet is Foldable Human. I don't feel like I could fold you very well. I don't feel like I could fold you very well.

No. Okay. So back in high school, I used to be like, I was a really small guy. Like I was a really skinny guy. And do you remember all the ads from the 90s for exercise equipment? I do remember some of that. Yeah. So the tagline that they always used for like the as seen-on-TV exercise equipment was that it folds for easy storage.

Ah. And being dumbass kids, it's like one person in our friend group has a car, but there's like seven of us. And so someone's got to ride in the trunk. And it's like, well, Dan gets to ride in the trunk. We're going to stick Dan in the trunk because he folds for easy storage because i was a small guy and so it i so i don't know why when i was like busy air like trying to brand the channel like you know a decade ago uh i was like i had this phrase that i was using with students that i was interacting with was like well well, let's unfold that idea, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like that was kind of like on my mind.

So I was like, ah, well, we'll like call the channel like unfolding ideas. Unfolding didn't really like just sound good. So I was like, well, folding ideas. And then, well, aesthetic parallel to that, you know, foldable human, I don't know. It just, it came to me and it sounded good. And it was nowhere on the internet. There was like no overlap. So I'm like, all right.

Interesting. We're good to go. SEO locked in. That's an example of a thing that I, you know, we're talking, we're going to be talking a lot about stuff that's unsettling about our modern era and how the internet has sort of altered human dynamics. One of the things that I think is kind of neat about it is its ability to kind of preserve and amber aspects of, of you from the deep past. Like I have one of my emails, like my personal email is a Gmail that I got back when you had to get an invite to get a Gmail,

right? Like right when Gmail first became a thing. And it's like, I'm not going to say it on here because then my email will get bombarded with shit. But like, it's a, it's like a stupid joke.

Right. It doesn't really make any sense. And every time I give it to someone, they're like, why is that your email? Because I was like 12. Like, I don't, I don't even remember why I set this thing. It's just this like moment of something I thought was funny when I was prepubescent, frozen in amber forever, because

that's the internet does that in little ways for each of us. I definitely abandoned my original something awful account because I'm like, you know what, maybe not that username anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So you are. So, Dan, if people are not familiar with you, and I'm going to guess a significant chunk of our listenership is kind of one of the biggest touchstones for you recently, which you put out a video about the NFT craze that a lot of people have credited with helping to kill it. Me among them. It's a wonderful, wonderful video. Line Go Up was the actual title.

Line Goes Up, yeah. Yeah, Line Goes Up. Very good breakdown of how they work, why it was a con. And you've been doing, you know, I think kind of the first really – the first time I became aware of you was you did a Flat Earth documentary, which is very good. I did an article recently on AI kids books that was partly inspired by an investigation you did into these kind of audible slash Kindle grifters, the Mickelson twins. So you do that kind of thing, right? Like you, you, you, you kind of run across things that are troubling or confusing to you and then you investigate them, um, to a pretty impressive extent and put together very clear, uh, uh, video investigations, you know, that's, that's, uh, I think in a nutshell,

probably pretty accurate. Yeah. That's kind of where the, where the channels ended up. Uh, yeah, it's, it's been a few different things over uh over the years but that's kind of the the phase that it's in right now is this kind of like i don't know like yeah documentarian place yeah and you know a lot of your stuff seems to focus on basically like the topic of kind of online grifter culture um culture and sort of its intersection with like different weird cultic milieus. Like there's kind of a cross, especially like with NFTs, a real big crossover betwixt the two, right? Like it's kind of, I think a lot of crypto culture was kind of this intersection between old school cons and kind of internet cult dynamics. So I wanted to talk today about the problem of scam culture in the United States,

because by any sort of like objective reckoning, I've been looking into this, there are more scams and more fraud right now in the United States than at any point previously. And basically from all sides, like phone scams are at the highest rate they've ever been. People are getting like like I think the statistic I've got is that in March 2021, I think is kind of when that peaked at like 4.9 billion robocall scams, which is like just kind of an outrageous increase over where it was a few years ago. The rate of like fraud against elderly people seems to be at an all-time high, at least in terms of dollar amount. One of kind of the unsettling quotes that I came across when I was looking into the degree to which old people are being scammed. And it's often through various email scams that are kind of based on getting trust or frightening them that like someone else is trying to scam them. And so they need to give

in from it anyway. The thing that the quote that I came across was a regulator talking about this and being like, yeah, it's not, it's no longer like small or even medium dollar cons. People are stealing generational wealth, which was really interesting to me. And then there's kind of like phishing attacks are at pretty close to an all-time high. I mean, there's a – I'll send you – there's a graph that I came across in a – what was the source on this? In a Comparatech article that – I mean, it's just a straight line up from January 2029 to like the end of 2022. And so I'm kind of looking at all this, and there's a couple of different causes, right? Like some of the stuff the SEC did under Ajit Pai gets blamed for why it's gotten even worse with phone scams, although that's not the whole story. AI-powered tools have been a big part of, like, why phishing attacks have increased so much.

But then, like, you've got, like, the degree to which the elderly are being conned, which is, like, kind of at this intersection of a few different things. How much more online old people are today than they were, you know, 10, 15 years ago for population bubbles, you know, multivalent dynamics. Yeah. But kind of the commonality is that like scams are all around, like people, we're all kind of being assaulted by scams. I mean, my last, I just, I just grabbed my phone and of my last 15 text messages, maybe it's like, your pickup is available, four with actual friends, and then Interac, you just received an e-Interac transfer. Hi, long time no talk, just got just got your money okay we'll send soon 389 can now be routed to your institution submit why the canada revenue agency has sent you money uh your verification code for visa transfer is and it's like it's like just constant constant i hadn't even because like i'm not going to be shocked at all if I get a phishing text message during this conversation.

Yeah. Like between my email and like my text messages or just phone calls, right? I get every day I get two or three calls from scam likely, you know? Yeah. My good friend scam likely. Yeah. My old buddy. He's always got to always got something cooking.

But yeah, it's, and I, this kind of like, I started focusing on this more a couple of months ago because, you know, I had vaguely noticed, boy, it's just like nothing but fucking scams coming into me through my phone these days. And then a couple of months ago, I got a phone call from my bank and it was one of those things, like everyone else, my cell phone lets me. And then a couple of months ago, I got a phone call from my bank. And it was one of those things like everyone else, my cell phone lets me know when like a call is from scam

likely or when it's from like, you know, and it had the name of my bank on there. It was the right number, you know. So I pick it up. And a human being is on the line. And they're like, is this, you know, Robert Evans? And I'm like, yeah. And then they're like, we've seen some like, fraudulent activity on your account. Can we ask you a couple of questions? And that is, I've gotten that call before legitimately, you know, it's not a weird thing for your bank to be like, Hey, let's talk about these charges. Are you in the country right now? It's like, no, I'm in, I'm in New York. It's like, okay. So we're seeing activity out in New York. That's yeah. Did you just buy something in Florida? No, I never go to Florida.

But so, yeah. So and I didn't actually get to see where they were going with this. Nothing suspicious had happened. But like after they say that, I'm like, OK, yeah, like what's what's the charge? And then my phone disconnects. Right. Like it's, you know, again, my where I live, you know, Oregon is the middle of nowhere. So like sometimes connectivity is not great. So I call them back, you know, and I get, Oregon is the middle of nowhere, so sometimes connectivity is not great.

So I call them back, and I get on the phone with a person, and they're like, yeah, what seems to be up? And I'm like, well, you guys called me saying that there was some possibly fraudulent activity that we needed to talk about. And the lady on the other end is like, no one here called you. I'm looking at your record. I can tell when someone's getting a call. We don't have any record of that and i explained what happened and she like goes back talks to a supervisor and is like so that was a scam um they've this is something we've seen more and more lately they've they're able now to actually just spoof our our banks and this is my bank is

a significant sized institution um they're able to spoof our phone number now. And so you can't tell through the caller ID. And like it was this whole thing where like, obviously, I know don't give certain things over the phone, even if they're pretending to be your bank. We never got to that point where anything was actually compromised. But it was just like, well, shit, like, what are you like? Well, shit, like what are you like? That's this is now well beyond the thing where like you're getting called and someone's offering you, you know, to make a bunch of money, you know, holding a Nigerian prince's wealth or something. If you send them your bank account, this is your bank calls you and your phone tells you that it's your bank and a human being who sounds just like the bank teller. Like it's it's gotten so.

bank teller like it's it's gotten so and i i think kind of the broad obviously each of these individual vectors by which scamming has increased is is a worthy story and a separate story in a lot of ways but they also come together in this like well you know it's not uh it's not like weird at this point to note that everybody seems angrier and everybody seems paranoid and you hear more stories about shit like people opening fire on folks, pulling into their driveway to turn around. And there's, you know, that story,

obviously there's guns and stuff that's also connected to that. But I wonder how much of the paranoia and anger is at least exacerbated by the fact that everyone is fighting off a million scammers at all times. Yeah. I think that's a good observation. Like that just, we're seeing this erosion of public trust in, in reality.

Yeah. And, and some of that is like deliberate and political. Uh, and a lot of it is just coming from like the fact that technology has enabled spam in in unprecedented new vectors and the fact that you can like that you can automate bombarding people with noise uh is is just kind of it's it's eaten away at all of us because it's like how do i how do i trust anything i mean so like and this is the thing is it's like okay so i've been i've been keyed into

this and thus paranoid for like a decade now so if i get a message that's like you know like that from my bank if it comes in text, then it's like, I don't interact with the original thing that it came from. I then go like on the website, it's like, all right, I like call my bank to, uh, to, to inquire about it. Like never, you know, it's like, ah, never communicate through the channel that you're first contacted in. Yeah. If you're, if you're dealing with your bank and it's like, and it's like, but is that level of paranoia healthy? And it's like, that takes, that also takes effort. That means you have to have the foresight to be like, do not panic, see the thing, process it, consciously go somewhere else and like, you know, uh, activate a different channel.

You know, if they contact you through text you know go through like email or uh or like live chat if they contact you through email call them on the phone not with the phone number that was at the bottom of the email go to the website and it's like that's effort that's effort i i don't even have that much energy in me sometime and a lot of other people just like absolutely don't and and that leads to like just exhaustion vulnerability you know all of the things that that feed into like paranoia distrust etc etc etc etc and it's it's relentless like uh online advertising is basically useless at this point oh yeah because like you if if you ran if you ran a legitimate ad you know unless you have the money to run like a real proper you know basically tv commercial

uh like banner ads i haven't i i've seen like i't know, one legitimate banner ad for like a car company in the last year. Everything else is like a hearing aid scam or, you know, liquefy your belly fat using the metaverse. Yeah. And it's, it's this constant, like, number one, it's led me to the situation where when I see an ad on social media in particular, but with any sort of print online ad, my assumption is it's probably a con, right? Even if it's like, oh, wow, that shirt looks nice.

Well, that company is probably not going to ship me that shirt, right? Or it won't be right. Yeah, it'll be fucked up in some way. That photo is absolutely not from the company that is running this ad. Yeah, you assume you distrust as a first measure. You see a banner ad, you see the aesthetics of advertising and the assumption is that it's like,

ah, that's gonna, you know, that's gonna get me to sign up for some subscription that's gonna be buried in like recurring payments that I will never be able to cancel. And it's interesting, because I mean, I'm not sure if this has been your experience, but like I can acknowledge, I think I morally have to acknowledge like part of my success financially as a creator has been as a result of that.

Because one of the things that we've seen in the ad market is that text ads, ads for print and shit do not work, do not function in any way, shape or form. And a lot of like random intersettled ads don't work well, but creator ads work well. And so there's money in it, right? Because people listen to like, people have a degree of like, okay, well, this is like, number one, it's just like the process of consuming a YouTube video or a podcast is different from an article. just like the the process of consuming a youtube video or a podcast is different from an article but like the ads work better because it doesn't feel the same as like the scrum of shit that like is getting pushed into every conversation you have on twitter

yeah um a human that i can confirm exists yeah has at least taken a look at this like this is not at least like not a complete con or whatever right yeah um or if it is then like then the the host has also has also been kind of like conned by that or whatever like it ends up yeah we're in this together like it ends up being at least like a little bit sort of sort of distant distanced from that um you know like the the freaking you know uh buy buy a square foot of land in scotland and and become a lord and that whole thing is like a scam being run out of china yeah um yeah i mean one of the one of the kind of like weird ironies for me is it's like okay so line goes up came out well the crypto ecosystem was in its like biggest ad blitz ever you know

they had the super bowl ads coming up just like a month later actually like weeks like weeks afterwards and so um you know like the vast majority of the like uh uh mid-roll ads that ran on that video were crypto.com were FTX were Binance. Yeah. Uh, and, and the ad rates that they were paying, like the CPM that they were paying to run on crypto relevant, uh,

videos was insane. Yeah. It was like, it was like 2011 all over again. 2011 was the only good time to be in digital content creation. There's like a lot that's unsettling about that. I think one of the things that is like most frustrating to me is the degree to which it's meant that we've gone backwards. backwards, like there was this – people who like study tech and kind of the way socialization around big tech works talk about this thing called the trow of disappointment, right?

Which is when you get a new technology, everybody – we're in like the hype phase for like AI right now, right? Yeah. And then at a certain point, it becomes clear which aspects of the hype were right, you know, the degree to which the technology is capable of doing things that kind of the evangelists were claiming, and to which extent the hype was wrong, right? And what areas is the tech always going to fall short? And that's called like the trial of disappointment when people start to realize, and then, you know, things kind of are supposed to level after that. Pets.com is not in fact magic. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You can't just keep shoveling money

into this shit forever in the hopes of exponential returns. Or as a consumer, like at a certain point, I can remember the time when phones were exciting and I was, especially as a journalist, like really interested every new year

at like what new things they're capable of. And then after a couple of years, it was like, well, every phone is, like there's no difference now. There's no excitement in getting a new phone. It it was like, well, every phone is like, there's no difference now. There's no excitement in getting a new phone. It's just like, well, this, my old phone is broken. So I need a new phone.

But like, I'm not like, wow, the new capabilities of this device. But I feel like there's another, I don't even, I don't really know what to call it, but there's also this kind of thing where we, the internet helps to create, or is the method through which is disseminated a new labor saving device. And then the scams reach such a density that the amount of labor you're able to save is minimal.

Right. Like that's that's I feel like there's like that's at least one of the things that I've noticed, especially with like digital communication with just communication in general. Right. My smartphone made it easier to stay in touch all the time. And now my smartphone, like it, obviously I still carry the damn thing everywhere, but like my text messages are mostly scams and my emails are mostly scams. And most of the calls that I get are scams.

Like, yeah. Yeah. I've actually been finding myself drifting back towards email as a communication medium just because the spam filters are uh better you know mature and sophisticated and for the most part they work yeah like they're yeah that it's like i can actually people can actually reach me by email uh yeah that's pretty cool. And, you know, like there's there's a whole tech like really kind of the big thing is there's this whole technological element to it. And, you know, when you when you sort of pitched the the idea of this conversation, the first two places my brain went to were John Romulus Brinkley, the goat testicle doctor. Yes, yes, yes. And pioneer of new media radio. Yeah.

And of course, and Marshall McLuhan. Yeah. You know, like those were the two things that my brain immediately was like, this is sort of like relevant to it because like Brinkley was, he was a pioneer of radio. He, he absolutely, uh, advanced sort of the format of like what radio could be and how you could use radio to not just extract money from people, but get them onto your side such that after they have given you their money, like they're, they're not just, they're not just your, your victims. You're, they're not just your victims.

You're not just rolling into town and selling them some snake oil and then, like, skedaddling as fast as possible. You have made them into your fans, into your followers, and, you know, the way that he did that by connecting his

scam to, like, a sense of identity, you know, that he wasn't just this fake doctor he was also effectively a pastor yeah yeah people who would defend it after there was no longer any chance of them like after it had been sort of proven that the thing that he was promising was not real right yeah like once there Like once there was no more, it's almost like, you know, that play the music man. Yeah.

Yeah. If you're, if you, if you at home or not, like, I'm not a huge musical theater guy. This is a pretty famous play, but like the basic idea is this guy tells everyone comes, this con man comes to town,

tells everyone he's going to make like a big band and raises money for it. And his plan is to like take the money and run. It's kind of what the monorail sketch in the Simpsons is based on to a significant extent. And if I'm remembering correctly, I shouldn't have brought this up maybe because I'm actually not that knowledgeable about musical theater. But my recollection of the way it goes is that like he falls in love or some shit and feels bad and, you know, they wind up, he winds up becoming not a con man. But like, I think the modern version of that is he just, he gets people to like adopt as

a religion, the idea that these fucking trombones and uniforms and tubas and shit are on the way. And like, you know, then they attack the local newspaper and string a journalist up in the center of town for telling them that we're 10 years into this and he hasn't started a band. Anyway, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And so the other one, McLuhan, you know, his famous postulate, the medium is the message, which remains a radical observation to this day, is just it's this assertion that the medium itself is more important than any given message on it or even the like the the combined weight of the individual messages now i i think in some regards mccluhan kind of went like overboard with that because he said that it's like content doesn't matter at all and it's like ah i think content matters but the point still stands that like the medium itself, the, like the invention of radio, the invention of television, the invention of the internet, the invention of social media had a bigger, like has had a bigger impact than any given thing on it, because that's the thing that ultimately we warp our lives around, that we restructure our homes around, we restructure our physical environment around,

we restructure how we spend our days, like our time usage gets warped around the medium itself. And thus, the medium becomes the portal for information to travel through. Absolutely. And it also, I mean, I think there's an extent to which that is true of kind of the way parasocial dynamics impact things like political belief. Yeah. I think there are a lot of people and I think there are a lot of things that people, a lot of, especially when it comes to like radical politics, that people adopt because somebody who they had come to already like expresses those politics, right? And so something that maybe never would have gotten any purchase with them suddenly is able to get purchased with them because like a dude that they, or a lady that they had a parasocial relationship express this kind of stuff.

And it just, it's not that it like hacks their brain. It's not that like people are, you know, little robots. It's that this is kind of the way influence works. It's the same reason why like your, you like people often wind up believing similar things to their parents or similar things to their friends group. You know, if your friends are all saying like, you know, on the positive end of things, if you're, if you grow up like, like I did, uh, I don't know about your high school, but if you're if you grow up like like i did uh i don't know about your high school but if you're like i was just thinking the same thing like my vocabulary

in high school was uh yeah the there was a there's a slur that starts with f that was like every third word out of not just my mouth but everyone i knew knows but the movie super bad captures this to a significant degree of fidelity to be honest yeah um that's just the way shit was in like the early aughts um and then you know the people i hung around with suddenly there were more people who were openly queer and suddenly people weren't talking that way and i stopped talking that way just how people are yeah just just from like somebody that i admired being like hey yeah i don't think that's cool oh. I don't think that's cool. Oh, I guess you're right. That is kind of fucked up.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, and it's not like, yeah, I can go to the subreddit for my show and see people being like, yeah, I started getting interested in like anarchist politics and history and stuff because of something Robert said. And I don't think that's bad because I think anarchist history and politics are useful, even if you're not an anarchist, right? It's valuable to understand that history. It's often undertold. But this is the same dynamic, this thing which has benefited me and to some extent benefited some of the ideas that I think should be more widely known. This is also why there's more Nazis, right? Like it cuts every which way. why there's more Nazis, right? Like it's, it's, it cuts every way, which way. And so you, so McLuhan, you get these new mediums, you get the internet, you get the subdivisions of the

internet, like you get social media, you get email, you get, you know, instant messaging and whatnot. And because those technologies have this gravitational effect around them that alters the trajectory of how we structure our lives. They become, because they are potent, because they are valuable communication vectors, they become prime targets for grift. And the thing is, is that all of these technologies that have accelerated communication, you know, people have long been pointing out like the negative impacts of social media and just like the effect on like self-esteem, self-perception of just being exposed to other people's curated, idealized version of themselves so constantly uh you know it's like this like that's already you know uh impactful in potentially negative ways uh and that's when you're dealing with like real people uh and but then you add on to that that it's like, oh, you go on Instagram and like, you can be following a bot and not even know it, you know, you're, you're getting, you know, and the algorithm is going to float this stuff. And so particularly if you're looking down these, like in these addictive infinite scroll feeds, uh, you know, you don't have the filter of pre interaction to, to gauge those things. So like, so like I follow you on Twitter and I know that if I see like, Oh, Robert Evans has retweeted this

thing that it's like, okay. So like he's taken a look at it. And, and it's been through like the filter, the filter of his brain. And so I can probably just like, you know, take my trust in that thing up like one notch. Right. But if I'm just like scrolling down the like the algorithmically curated like this is what our computer has determined is similar to things that you have already looked at. It's it's just it's so much more fraught. But there's it's, it's just, it's so much more fraught, but there's, it's really easy to be complacent and just be like, oh, I trust this thing. I trust this platform. And that's where we get into the trow of disappointment is this, like, I trust these algorithms, these algorithms do a really good job of like, oh, I watched Dan. And so the YouTube algorithm introduced me to a bunch of other really good creators.

Cool. Oops, I watched one video on Flat Earth, and now my recommends are full of COVID denialism and anti-maskers and the trucker movement and all of these other wedges to just sort of slowly rot my brain. Yeah, it's like it's it's like kind of the way our parents told us or dare or whatever told us drugs worked, you know, when we were little kids where someone's like, oh, you want some pot? Here's some straight up heroin, right?

Like you want some of this, too?, you want some pot? Here's some straight up heroin, right? Like you want some of this too? Like you want some crack cocaine? No, and I, it is, you know, you were talking about like, yeah, you see, you follow someone and you see them share something. And if they're a trusted source for you, you know, it bumps it up a notch. And even that, you know, that's the way it,

like it works for me as well. But there's a degree to which i find it like problematic especially because like we all fuck around on the internet too i i had a thing go crazy viral recently where like someone someone posted an obviously photoshopped image of like a control like a logitech controller at the bottom of the of the sea and was like look the controller survived and i like i shared it to make a joke right make a joke, right? And the joke was that like, well, the joke was that like, well, the controller we're going to find out was one of the more functional things about that terrible sub. And that was, and I even posted underneath it. This obviously this is not a real image guys, but like, then I saw like, I wound up finding, it went, the posts that I did of it went so viral that like, it wound up like screen capped and in some different Reddit communities for people to talk about. And they, it was only the first post, not the one where I was

like, obviously this is fake. And like, it was a joke. I, you know, it was, it was a, it was a, it was a shit post. We were, we were banting online. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But also I'm like, I wonder how many people now think that literally there's a Logitech controller that they found at the bottom of the sea because of that. What is, what are the ethics now of like making a, making a, a jibe, a jape as like somebody who's got like a following, like where does that come into? And like, I don't know. And I don't, I'm certainly not like clear on it because I seem to be incapable of not shit posting. Um, I spent too much time on something awful as well, posting. I spent too much time on something awful as well.

It's so hard to give up. I miss it. I miss the days when I could just make tasteless jokes on Twitter and a couple hundred people would see them and go like, that's funny. Now it's like, ah, if

I'm a little too ironic, someone's going to be like, oh crap, are you serious? That happened? It's like, ah, if I'm a little too ironic, someone's going to be like, oh, crap, are you serious? Like, that happened? And it's like, no, no, that did not happen. That did not happen. This is fake. I am telling lies for comedy purposes. It was a bit.

I was doing a bit. No, and that's like, you know, something awful, which is kind of the, it's like, um, oh crap. Now I've forgotten a very basic science. You know, the big, uh, the big puddle of boiling goop that life came out of, uh, the primordial primordial,

uh, it's the primordial primordial of digital culture. That's what something awful was. It was a forum website that gave birth in various ways, some direct and some indirect to 4chan, to Reddit, um, to Twitter culture, you know, to indirect to 4chan, to Reddit, to Twitter culture, you know, to all of these different, to anonymous, to all of these different like things,

you can trace a lineage back to something awful. And the motto of that website as written by the terrible person who founded it was the internet makes you stupid. And at the time, what that kind of meant was, and if you're younger or if you just weren't very online in the late 90s, early 2000s, you may not remember this long period, but there was a fairly long period where the default assumption in regular society was whatever happens online doesn't matter, right?

Yeah, it's fake. It's probably fraudulent. It's almost certainly like made up. You can't trust anything online. And real people are not on the internet, right? Like it's kids, it's nerds, but like, you know, guys who run banks aren't online, you know, like the idea that the richest man in the world

would spend all of his time shit posting was was absurd um like so he really should be busier than he observably is he certainly it seems like and although i guess so should i um if i'm if i'm being fair um But yeah, it's there's this. This degree to which digital culture is still very much a huge chunk of it, like we all want it to not matter. We all want a place where we can just shitpost and bullshit because shitposting and bullshitting comes out of like the very same impulses that like determine a lot of how we interact with like our friends. Right. You know, we all need some times where you can just sit down, have a couple of beers or whatever, and like say shit with your,

with your buds, you know? And it's not, it's not being recorded. It's not going up any everywhere forever. You can just kind of like talk. This is the, it's,

it's a field almost social experimentation is a huge part of maturity of growing up, of becoming a person. And I think we all get kind of there's a degree of like the accessibility of the Internet that makes that impossible to entirely get over, even though it is demonstrably untrue. What happens on the Internet matters quite a lot. what happens on the internet matters quite a lot and you can have a real significant you can influence your own life in very negative ways by saying the wrong thing on the internet at the wrong time

yeah I mean lots of people have observed just this fact that it's like on reddit you can't you're not on reddit I mean on reddit too but you know on twitter like once you know once a month twitter elects some 10 follower anime profile pic with who with with a single tasteless joke and makes it the fulcrum of reality. Yeah.

And it's like that's a and the thing I don't think this is actually that far off topic just because like it's it's this warping of reality, this warping of like what is real, what is trustworthy, what are the like impacts of things and the fact that like, you know, 10 follower account can become can become international news. uh can become international news yeah has to sit alongside uh the endless bombardment of dick pills and uh global leaders like i i had this joke that i was trying to formulate over the weekend of like world war ii with twitter where it's like you know just a joke hinging on the idea that some like follower bot would observe this like ah it's like you know two posts in a row like it's like, you know, just a joke hinging on the idea that some like follower bot would observe this like, ah, it's like, you know, two posts in a row. Like, it's like the USSR has rolled into Berlin. Stalin has unfriended the president. I hope this doesn't mean anything. You know, that it's like that you have like, you have international politics happening in the same space as fake international politics, as the same space as fake international politics,

as the same space as just like this endless bombardment of curated reality, fictionalized reality, unreality, and spam. And no one knows what's real anymore. No one knows what to trust. And the instinct in a lot of people is to just give up trying to parse the difference. And that makes us like increasingly vulnerable. Yeah. And I think a big part of what's kind of at the core of the problem here is what you've said here. It makes us vulnerable. The degree to which this can be weaponized is really significant. Like, you know, one of the things

that we saw that I think is kind of low key, a significant moment in sort of info conflict shit is this last, this weekend, last weekend from, you know, what we're talking now, there was a mutiny by the Wagner mercenary forces in Ukraine and southern Russia against the Russian government, or at least that's what it appears to have been now, right? This is Russia. A lot of this is really weird. So I'm not going to say we know we don't we certainly don't know entirely like what happened there, like what's going on there.

But what a couple of things happened very quickly for one uh folks on the right and there were also a lot of kind of like shithead left people who adopted this too decided that liberals were cheering on the head of wagner um evgeny prigogin because like they believed he was a reformer and that like they'd all fought this guy who was like objectively a piece of shit and a fascist is like they're cheering him on because they hate Putin so much and they've convinced themselves that he's you know going to fix Russia and he's like no no I didn't see that like look I I love calling people out when they have shitty takes specifically on this specific war because I've been covering it since 2014 but like I didn't see that and none of the people talking about how

liberals were doing this provided any evidence of it. And it happens all the time, right? Sometimes people will like take a post that has like 30 likes and be like, this is what the left is saying. But like with this, there was even less. Like I didn't see a single post where someone was like, Prokosian's going to like fix, you know, corruption in Russia or whatever. No one was saying that. They just invented that this was going on. And part of it is that, like, you know, the way Twitter works now made it a lot easier for disinfo to spread from this thing.

Like, there was very famously a guy who is absolutely a con artist, just started sharing a bunch of videos from there with, like, bad commentary that was inaccurate. And Elon Musk was like, this is the guy I've come to trust about. We can say Elon Musk. Yeah, we can say Elon Musk. I don't know. It's a problem, Dan. Ah, see, you beat me to Elon Musk because I was going to say this, like the con artist was, but then it turns out that he was just retweeting that guy. It's like he got, of course he got involved anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the, I don think this the solution was not because we lived,

you know, our parents and grandparents lived to the day where most people would be like, well, you know, folks who are in politics maybe need to care about this. I might want to get the broad strokes of it. But like random people, you know, shouldn't be influencing what's going on with these international relations. And that's how you get shit like the Dulles brothers carrying out coups all over the world on behalf of the U S government, where most Americans are like, what did we do in Guatemala? I didn't know we had guys in Guatemala and that wasn't great,

but also this new thing where if you are a personality, if you are in media, then you are obliged to be a part of every big thing that happens everywhere, even if you are demonstrably incompetent at that. And everyone is demonstrably incompetent at that past a certain point, you know? Yeah. And that's been, oh boy, has that, that's been a lot to deal with. And it, it, it go, going back to the original thing that started this conversation, that's part of how so many of these cons perpetuate. Is that like people are only competent, including famous people, including people with followings in limited areas.

And once you get out of your area of competence, it's easy to get fooled. And if there's a bunch of people who trust you because of the things you were right about, then they can very easily get fooled when you get fooled. One of the big hazards there is that, and this is a long-standing observation, is that hucksters, con artists, are going to be more willing than anyone else to pretend to be up to date on it. They have no compunction about being like, oh yeah, I'm an expert on submarines and Ukraine and Russia and Belarus? Yeah, why not?

The reason it's a con man is because it's a confidence man because they get your confidence because they act confidently and give you reason to trust them and they have no moral compunction about lying to you. And they are always going to be faster with the take, faster with the confidence statement, faster with the solution, faster with a call to action to buy their book or dick pills. with a call to action to buy their book or dick pills. Yeah, and often I think one of the things that's made this all so much harder to catch and so much more durable is that it used to be as obvious.

You used to be able to see like, okay, well, this guy's a con man, but I'm not a person who can be conned by someone selling diet pills. That's not my vulnerability. So I immediately recognize this guy as a con man or I am not a person who can be conned by Christianity stuff because I'm not a Christian. So I'm not vulnerable to this con man. And now so much the cons are downstream of the following

and of the fame. And so a lot of people are getting taken in by con men. And maybe, you know, the fact that person's putting in a link for their their supplements, you know, on every viral post, you don't buy their supplements, but they'll come up with something else for you. Once they get you in, once you're in the funnel, or even if they never convince you to buy anything, if you're sharing their content, that's bringing more people into the funnel, you know, and that really wasn't the case. content, that's bringing more people into the funnel, you know, and that really wasn't the case. That wasn't the case with, you know, you go back 10 years, talk about like Young Living, right, or some other like multi-level marketing company where they're selling, you know, essential oils with fraudulent health claims. They weren't getting random people to spread their business without paying for shit. And now you can do that. If you're a con man, and you've already got followers because you bought a bunch and you're on the Ukraine shit, you just grab whatever videos and say whatever about them,

you know, frame them in whatever way is likely to get people to share them the most. Then suddenly you gain 200,000, 300,000 followers in the space of a night or two, and your ability to scam people and get money out of them has increased several times. people and get money out of them has increased several times. You know, the con is downstream of the platform, right? So, you know, you get this guy and maybe he's shilling thing X or thing Y, he's got a couple, you know, whatever different con he has. But regular people can be in the business of spreading his platform, of increasing his profitability, even if they're not vulnerable to the con. Maybe they're not the kind of person who's ever going to buy weight loss pills or supplements or whatever kind of thing. But if this guy starts, you know, sharing all of these videos on the fighting in Ukraine, you know, at a moment when it happens

to be the opportune moment to do that and they go crazy viral well then that guy is able to triple his following and you know and have people who are not interested in his con spread his shit which gets him followers which brings more traffic to whatever the money generating part of the con is yeah it's it's all a sales funnel our yeah are just our daily lives. We have built our society into just like a giant nested series of sales funnels. Yeah. I don't know, Dan. That's bound to be a solid foundation.

I don't see where to go wrong. It seems like that'll go well for us. How do we, you got any ideas on how to fix it? Or should we just state a problem and then run away? I mean, the easy thing to do would be to uh restore trust in our public institutions um you know uh if we could uh uh have sort of like i i don't even want to say like a unifying cause but just a a sense of common of like shared commonality and, and trust in like our local, uh, our local society, you know, strong, like not necessarily strong families, but like strong family units

constructed or natural or however you want to like define or construct those, but like local with like good infrastructure around us so that our physical spaces are, you know, appealing and comfortable to live in and, and provide us a sense of like enrichment and, and fulfillment, you know, the easy stuff, uh, just, just fix infrastructure, fix society, fix media. And, uh, and then I think we're good. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's good. So if we fix everything, then we won't have any more problems. That's great. We're on the same page.

Now, I mean, it is really like, and this is, there's also this kind of like problematic element of when you're like, well, we want to, like, a problem is that there's zero trust in institutions. Objectively a problem, because it means that when, say, the CDC is like, hey, guys, there's a plague. We should probably do this and this and this. It immediately becomes a culture war thing. And so you can't actually confront serious problems the way that you need to be able to confront them.

It's just not possible anymore. Likewise, but the other issue is that, like, well, for significant chunks of the population, there's never been any good reason to trust the institutions because they're marginalized groups and whatever. When the institutional trust was higher, the government was fucking them in this way and that way. Yeah. That's also – so I wonder – I think there's a significant extent to which we need new concepts of what an institution is and should be. It's such a ground floor problem because, I don't know, we're never getting back to a point where Americans trust the CDC. That's just not going to happen.

Whatever the way forward is on us overcoming the anti-vax, anti-science shit around medicine. It's not getting everyone to love the CDC, you know, that's just not ever going to happen again. Yeah. And part of the complexity here is that it's really easy to sort of say that, you know, it's like, okay, well, the solution is like strong central institutions. And it's like, that's not, that's not correct at all either. Because like, I mean, the, my go-to example for that would be that it's like, look at, look at the LDS church, look at Mormons. They have a very, very strong central institution that provides this like social anchoring point for a lot of their lives. yet mormon communities are incredibly vulnerable to affinity fraud and uh and mlms you know like utah salt lake is like the the the locus of mlm culture and so like

it's not the the sort of like strong man like ah this is why we need strong like you know strong leaders is is not isn't the answer in its own way, even if it's a very tempting sort of like answer to gravitate towards. Yeah. That's, that's, I don't know. I don't actually know. Part of the problem is that like, there are little solutions, right right there are little things that you can do stuff like advocating for um you know a more functional idea of like a more a more functional legal definition of like what an auto dialer is and what counts as like illegally sort of like flooding phone lines with with with cons and stuff or restricting you know the ability of people like bill collectors and stuff um to utilize you know, the phone system in some

of the ways that they do like, and that can make stuff better. Just like, you know, at a certain point, we will develop tools that mitigate some of the harm AI is doing in the con space. Some of its ability to automate and push it to people at scale will get reduced. At a certain point, that will happen, right? Because it happens with everything. You know, AI is not unique. This is, it's, you've heard the Red Queen hypothesis, right?

Yeah. It's kind of a way of like, it's kind of like a way of looking at evolutionary theory. There's this point in Alice in Wonderland where, you know, the Red Queen kind of like traps Alice in this situation where like she's got to keep running as fast as she can, but it's like a conveyor belt sort of situation. So no matter how hard she runs, she never gets ahead, right? And that's kind of the way that the evolutionary arms race works, right? Like one animal develops a defense against a predator and the predator develops a way around it and like the the the like that's kind of the best case scenario for how we adapt to cons i think actually like technology just moves too fast now for us to to be able to keep up right like

we're not we're not just standing in place we're consistently falling behind and i don't know i don't know what we do here uh i mean yeah so like there will there will be technical technological solutions to specific manifestations i mean a big one like in there like to not to not bant is that you know the uh uh at a the legal system the governments like governments need to do something about the robocalling and the text messages because they're rendering a vital piece of like civic infrastructure unusable yeah people don't trust their phones anymore and that's that's bad um because it means they stop using it you know it's like there there's yeah there there's very real like consequences uh and we we need to be able to trust that we're talking to to people who aren't just

trying to get our money yeah yep well dan you got anything you want to plug at the end of this here your youtube channel folding ideas everyone should check out if you have not already. Yeah, the YouTube channel, that's going to be the big one. I'm still on, I'm on socials at Foldable Human, though I'm trying to wean myself off of them because they're broken and being broken on purpose and they're bad for my soul. So I still, I'm addicted, so I still keep coming back, but I'm a lot less active than I used to be. Oh, sorry. I didn't hear you.

I was too busy getting anxious because of a thing on Twitter. No, yeah. Dan, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate your thoughts on all of this. I'm looking forward to your next video, your next investigation, whatever that happens to be. Folks should check out, if you haven't, Line Goes Up, your documentary on NFTs. You should check out Contrapreneurs. It's, I think, what you called your Mickelson twins documentary.

Yeah. Check out everything Dan has done. Thank you, Dan. And that is the episode. You can all go home now and deal with the fact that your bank information just got stolen by somebody in Macedonia. 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. 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 iHeart Radio 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. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron,

host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.