It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 94

Episode Date: August 5, 2023

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Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

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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. Hi, this is Mia. So before we get to today's episode, last Friday, the rank and file of the Burgerville Workers' Union, which is the country's first successful fast food union, went on strike against a campaign of disciplinings and firings of primarily trans and POC workers by the bosses, who are once again trying to crush the union. The strike has worked so far, but they need support from the community to help pay workers and, you know, help these people feed their families so they can continue fighting the boss's capitalism and building democracy in the workplace. You can go to bit.ly slash burger defense to donate to their funds. We will have linked to that in description.

And yeah, thank you all so much. And now on to the show. and welcome to it could happen sheer part of wool zone media i am one of your hosts dj daniel and i am joined by three wonderful people one of which is actually going to lead us to the problem i didn't press record on my own device that is you have to do that all over amateur hour i cannot believe that i was just telling everybody to press record should we all You have to do that all over. Amateur hour. I cannot believe that. Should we all make a new file? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm so fucking stupid. It's okay. We're going to do it again. It's going to be just as good. But you know what? I'm keeping all of this in. No, you're not. Yes, I am.

Bah! And welcome to It Could Happen Sheer, part of the Wool Zone Media Network. I am one of your hosts, DJ Danil, but really I'm just going to be listening as someone else walks us through. I am joined by three wonderful co-hosts, and I'm going to let them introduce themselves. How about we start with the person leading this conversation. James, how are you doing? I'm wonderful, Danil. I'm very excited.

And who are we joined by? Shireen, do you want to say hi? Do I want to say hi? This is what I sound like today, everybody. I apologize. Not part of the plan, but hopefully this is a fun episode to listen to me sound like this. This is Shireen. Yeah, I'm here. Shireen is doing her plague cosplay right now and we are joined by one other wonderful person would you like to introduce yourself hi dad mia mia also here yay knows nothing about sheep very excited to learn i'm very excited even though i sound like this i need to be here because i i learned so much about chickens last time now it's sheep yeah we're so proud that you fought through the pain by the way bah sheer and wool is the full extent of my sheep knowledge so you know we got it

all out of the way right there great all right buddy well let's get going because i've got four pages of bullet points yes oh god it's obviously it could be a week of sheep content wonderful all right yeah so talking about sheep uh the reason we're talking about sheep uh is a because it's a passion of mine uh and b because uh someone on the subreddit uh who's i'm just gonna get their username quickly i can't say the cative cative uh yeah one of those um uh they posted sheep every day until until they guessed a breed of sheep that i had in my mind and when they guessed that baby sheep i said i would do a sheep episode uh that was two months ago uh i think they did it while i was away in the desert uh it was like day four they got it

they got it quick too no they they got to like day i just searched sheep on the subreddit uh one of my friends like they were like oh i looked at the subreddit for your work stuff the other day and it's just a lot of sheep man like what do you do it's just a lot of sheep yeah um but yeah they did very well they eventually picked the sheep which was a scotch blackface and famous for being justin trudeau's favorite sheep uh and you gotta get him in while you can well done strike a blow against the Canadians

I was wondering if you were gonna make a joke about that I think it's impossible to say that on a podcast and not not try

I think but yeah hopefully hopefully we've sailed through that one so when we're talking about sheep right

when you're thinking of getting sheep the first thing I think you have to ask yourself is why and that is a good question because obviously they're a lot of work When we're talking about sheep, right, when you're thinking of getting sheep, the first thing I think you have to ask yourself is why. And that is a good question, because obviously there are a lot of work.

They are like born ready to die. And at every point in the sheep owning process, you are- You can't just say that. You can't just say that. Tureen, we are all born ready to die. We're just here temporarily postponing the inevitable because they're covered in wool and we dye the wall smart incredible i'm adding i'm adding air horns and bombs right there yeah i was going to say

if you could give yourself like a big old cymbal that would be great um okay so yeah so when you're looking at sheep right um it's a lot of work and um but they're also very lovely i enjoy sheep a lot they can be very friendly they're a nice animal they're not like uh like cattle i don't sheep seem more personable to me and you know they're soft which is nice uh so when you think about getting sheep you've got to think do i want've got to think, do I want these sheep for meat? Do I want these sheep for wool? Or do I want these sheep for milk? Those are the three main reasons.

There are also a thing called park sheep. When we're talking about parks here, we're not talking about that they live in Central Park. We're talking about it's a big field in front of a rich person's house. I think this is probably a specifically British thing. Yeah, people are looking at me like it's a British thing. Okay, so big stately homes for rich people in rural England will have a big field in front of the home

with a long driveway on it. And that driveway is generally planted with big trees leading up to the house and it's like you've watched down to now yeah yeah so if you can yes a country estate exactly um so like in that country estate uh my dad both my parents in agriculture my dad worked for someone who had a large country estate one point in my childhood. They would have sheep in that park, but those sheep aren't really there to make money. They're there to just look fancy.

So that's where you get some really crazy sheep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, park sheep. So yeah, if you want to go and have a look at Jacob's sheep, there's some audience participation. So if you guys could open up a tab and Google a Jacob's sheep, that's a classic. It's called Jacob J-A-C-O-B? Yep, yep.

Whoa! Yeah. Oh, my God. Hoo, hoo. It's called a polycerate sheep because it has multiple horns. I don't know if the ones you're seeing have four horns, but that's a classic Jacob sheep. And they're piebald, right?

Wow. Multiple colors. I didn't know horns can look like that on a sheep. Oh, yeah. There are quite a few polysert sheep, Hebridean sheep, sometimes Navajo churro sheep, if you're in the United States, are like that too. So, yeah, that's an option for sheep.

You know, just to paint a picture for anybody who's not also actively Googling this right now, say you're driving in your car going for a walk with your dog and you can't, can't Google something. This is honestly, this is the sheep image that I think was thought of when people think of like a devil sheep or something like that. Like these have sheep,

like two long horns out the top and horns out the sides. I may just be playing a lot of Diablo four right now, but I immediately was like, ah, demon sheep. If you check out a Hebridean sheep, they look like a, like, ah, demon sheep. If you check out Hebridean sheep, they look like a very death metal sheep. They're all black.

Wait, what's that one? Hebridean. Hebridean. H-E-B-R-I-D-E-A-N sheep. Whoa. Oh yeah, same thing. Oh, they do look like devil sheep. A real Baphomet looking sheep. Hell yeah.

They're terrifying and cute at the same time. Yeah, that's what you want to strive for in life. That's what I go for every time I get dressed in the morning. Me too. Yeah, good. So you're looking at three different types of sheep, right? Basically, you're meat breeds, so they're going to grow quickly. They're going to be bigger, which is going to be something

you have to take into consideration when you're handling the sheep, right? And they're going to grow quickly they're going to be bigger which is going to be something you have to take in consideration when you're handling the sheep right and they're going to have more lambs and you got your wool breed so they might be a smaller they may need shearing twice a year though so that's something you're either going to have to do or find someone to do and they'll give a more desirable wool right and there are different types of wool for different things so that's something you might want to look into. Like if you're considering spinning or, you know, you're getting these sheep primarily, so you can go from like a farm to jumper, then you need to look into that.

And I don't actually know how you sell wool in the US and the UK. It was kind of a centralized sale. It's not, it's not worth fuck all for the most part, at least unless you've got something like merino sheep so like don't be getting wool sheep and thinking like oh hell yeah i'm gonna make my fortune in the wool market um that that ship that ship has sailed uh centuries ago so kind of the classic sheep uh you're looking at for like a lot of the sheep that you're going to see

at least in the uk are very often mules so that's a cross breed of sheep uh it's a blue face or border lester ram over a hill breed you so hill breed sheeps are um sheep are they're more hardy right they're the ones that live out on the um yorkshire dales or up in the lake district right when you see sheep up there there's going to be hill breed sheep one of the advantages of hill breeds is they can often be hefted are we familiar with hefting no never okay hefting is when a sheep knows where its home is so it doesn't have to necessarily be fenced in it will come back there um okay so for hefting yeah yeah it's but it's so it's an animal that lives out on the hills but like it knows where to come back to.

It's not just going to go mincing off to try and explore somewhere new. It will come back. That is not a characteristic of all breeds of sheep. You will talk about fencing. Most sheep need to be fenced in or they will just get out. Some of them are very acrobatic. But yeah, these guys, they can be hefted hill breeds some hill breeds can be hefted so um well that means it's passed down the maternal line so you're going to

have to to to retain that maternal line right so as you're breeding your sheep gonna have to keep the you to the you lamb and you're going to have to keep that line because they will teach their lambs to where to come back to basically right can i ask a really dumb question please shireen i recognize it's dumb and i can google it later but i need to know okay i don't as someone that doesn't eat a lot of meat okay do we only eat lamb meat does anyone eat sheep meat i've never heard of sheep meat yeah that's called mutton i've never thought of it mutton i have heard of mutton that's sheep yeah have you heard that from have you heard the phrase mutton dressed as lamb no no i think it's rather

that seems like a british one yeah it's definitely probably british one i think it's rather sexist uh it's used in a condescending way for people who you think are dressing too young for their age i guess uh so you might be familiar with that i I thought it might be a good, but no, I thought I had a way to explain it to you. But no, mutton, yeah, mutton is the oldest sheep. So there are some breeds that you get for mutton. It's not very popular. Like Americans don't eat as much lamb

as British people do. And I think New Zealanders eat a lot of it too, but it's not as common here. It's relatively common in the UK. Like if you went to a supermarket, you'll see it. Mut it mutton not so much you have to cook it for longer and such the middle east loves lamb yes they do yeah yeah yeah there's parts of china that eat a lot of sheep too interesting yeah yeah um yeah there are lots of it's it's it's a very hardy like you can have sheep in a lot of places where you can't have cattle they're much tougher animals like and they don't need as much grazing right there's just not

as much biomass on a sheep uh so like that's why when you go to hillier parts of the uk you're going to see sheep uh and not cattle because that that's the place where sheep can live they don't need as quality of grazing for the most part either um so uh let me go through a few breeds of sheep then i'm going to go for what what to look for when you're buying a sheep right um so just just some breeds that i've sort of uh gone off the top of my head here um texels uh and you guys can look these up as we go i think that will add add to the entertainment factor for the listeners at home uh so texels um they are big units and not as big as some of the other such we're going to talk about they're thick they're they're mostly like a meat pretty lean meat yeah ugly uh they're kind

of wide face and kind of the big sort of dominating eyebrows uh they kind of look like someone stuck a stuck like a sheep pen on a dog yes yeah yeah yeah they're um they're actually nice sheep they're not like we had texels growing up um there is mostly a meat sheep with a bit of wool uh your next one might be a border leicester uh sometimes called a blue leicester they're very recognizable like the blue speckling on their face and then a big roman nose i suppose suppose, like a domed nose. Yeah, they've got a big round one. Yeah, a big schnoot on them.

So that's a very recognizable sheep. They, again, like a meat and wool sheep with slightly probably more desirable wool than texels. They're also very good mothers, so that's something you're looking at with sheep, right? Is it going to raise its young? Is it going to stick around and look after them? A border leicester is good for that, which is why they're used in those mules that I spoke about. It's one of the reasons that you crossbreed them with a hill sheep to make them more hardy. This one is a clean, L-L-E-Y-N, because you probably

wouldn't have got that spelling organically. That's a Welsh word and I'm probably mispronouncing it. But it's, that's a, it's a meat sheep. It's also got desirable wool. It's also a good mother. They are big, they're like, they're big units. My mum had those. And so one of the things you're going to have to do when you have your sheep is you're going to have to clip their little feet.

Otherwise they grow too long. Just like you have to clip your own fingernails, right? Otherwise you need to do that. And there's a way to do it by sort of grabbing the front leg and sort of dropping your knee a little bit. You're not just suplexing the sheep. It's a light suplex.

When you were originally talking about heftingfting i assumed it was something to do with picking the sheep up for some reason the newer term is rkoing your sheep okay yeah also this lean sheep looks like to me to me the lean sheet is it lean clean Yeah, that double L sound in Welsh, it comes at you hard. Interesting. Clean. Well, either way, this sheep, to me, looks like standard sheep.

You're like run-of-the-mill sheep. When I Google sheep, this is what I think of. Yeah, that's what once I was sending you some pictures of yesterday. Sometimes I'll send pictures of sheep to the group chat just for the increase of the general sense of well-being. That's the only time I like the group chat.

Don't tell me. I'm kidding. It's true. I'll keep it up for you, just for you, Shireen. I'll keep the sheep content coming. You got the Jacob sheep we've spoken about, right? So that's more of a park sheep. It's a rare breed. So if're interested in like a rare breed it's a good thing to do right if you're just a person who's like yeah it'd be cool to have some sheep i have some pasture maybe

you want them on on a horse field because horses will mess up the grass on their own and horses will will uh shit in an area and that will kind of sour the grass and horses will then not eat that grass and so horses are not really you know on a great they don't shit what they eat yeah yeah yeah sheep on the other hand well yeah the horse knows the sheep doesn't so sometimes you have a few sheep with horses they can be companions as well they can be nice companions you know that's where the nice companions. You know the phrase, get to your goat? Something gets your goat? Oh, yeah.

That's where it comes from. Keeping a goat with a horse to keep it company. Nice. Wait, is a sheep a goat? No, different animals. Oh, crap. You're about to blow my mind. Similar.

I'm sure there's some kind of genus species thing i don't understand there maybe a different species they're probably somewhere yeah in the same tree yeah they're there yeah they're not a million miles apart um uh so you've got daupers uh i think that's a cross between a dorset and a persian uh they're raised for mutton so that's if you're looking for your mutton shirin that's where you that's where you get that um they have multiple lambs a year so some of these sheep will have can lamb more than once a year uh herdwick is a good hill breed they're very hardy um a lot of those are up around my dad where my dad lives um like i said there are some rare breeds um which if you're interested in like having rare breed sheep just to preserve a type of sheep,

because obviously the more heritage breeds are not as commercially viable, so sometimes they get lost, right? Because they don't give you a better, a same return on investment. So if you're interested in having sheep just because it's cool and it looks funky, the Rare Breed Survival Trust is a place to look.

I used to enjoy going there as a kid and seeing different sheep and, uh, learning about, but that's not a good reason to get a sheep. If you, if you decide you want to have sheep anyway, right.

Let's say you're, um, like, I didn't want to cough dispersion. So I was going to say a horsey person, uh, a person who owns horses, um,

you know, like if that is your thing and you enjoy yeah yeah a horse person yeah like a centaur if you're a centaur precisely yeah if you are half horse then um you know you want to you want to have sheep maybe to to check to to improve your pasture or to not let the horses sour up all the grass then why not right like why not um because like if you get a if you get a meat sheep it's going to be bigger it's going to be more work if you get a a very a sheep that produces a lot of wool you're going to have to shear that a lot so maybe you just want a sheep that can kind of cruise uh and be by itself then you know why not

um yeah so uh we're going to talk very very briefly about what to do when you buy a sheep and then we're going to pivot to some other things that you can buy, which are not as rewarding as sheep. Yeah. Which is, which is, that's an ad break that we'll do after that, Daniel. Thanks buddy. Understood. Sorry. I missed, I missed that part afterwards. I was like, wait, no, James, don't move on quite yet. I understand now. Very well done. Thank you, Daniel. So when you're buying sheep, I think probably what you want to do is buy some ewes that have already been bred

or a couple of ewes with twins. They're a flock animal, right? Sheep, they don't want to be on their own. So you don't just go and buy like one sheep and be like, yeah, I've got a sheep now. That's not very nice. They'll be insecure and anxious. So they like to be with other sheep.

So I think the way we used to do it when I was a kid was to get orphan lambs. And so like the mother either rejects the lamb or she dies giving birth, right? Wow. Which can happen. And we used to then bottle feed those lambs uh and like you know when they're very little if you go out on the hill do people have argus in

america sorry you're looking at no okay uh like it's a type of oven that like it's always on it's a range cooker oh no people have people no okay yeah i can remember like i don't know what sheep are if they're goats or not you want me to know whatever the fuck you're talking about no yeah it's good it's so much learning it's it's type of oven that uh like is in old houses and also rich people's houses now it's become like a trendy thing uh but like way back in the day i can can remember like putting lambs in the bottom oven, which is like warm, but like not cooking warm, just like warm, warm when they were very little

and they needed to warm up. So with orphan lambs, right, you're going to bottle feed them. You're going to do the stuff that their mother does for them. So that's a lot of work, but you know, it's a way to get going, but they are more fragile when they're young so what i would suggest is buying a couple of ewes that have been bred um and then you just want to uh either like if you go locally to somewhere then you'll you'll know that this is a type of sheep that can survive and the type of

pasture that's near you this is a type of sheep that can survive in the climate that you have with the food sort of available where you are um so that's probably a good thing and then you just want to check that the sheep has some weight on it right and you want to check its teeth of course like any livestock you want to be checking their teeth when you're buying them um and then a thing i've run into what are you sorry what are you looking for on the teeth if they're all fucked up like that sheep is not healthy, right? Like receding gums or if it's much older, you can normally age an animal by looking at its teeth, right?

Like if you find the remains of an animal, it's one way to see the age of it. So yeah, you go to the auction, right? And you do want to check the vaccine status as well. I've only really come across this in the United of it. So yeah, you, you go to the auction, right. And you, and you do want to check the vaccine status as well. I've only really come across this in the United States. Recently, some people were rage posting on the, the place I go to,

to buy chickens because I didn't want to buy vaccinated chickens, which is just, Oh yeah. Yeah. Fucking the animal. Oh wow. Yeah. Because Bill Gates wants to know what your chicken is thinking,

right. Which is why he microchips it absolute pricks if you don't want to buy a vaccine if you're listening to the show this is not a concern of ours check the vaccine status in case you've got some wahoo trying to sell you some sheep

which are more likely to get sick so yeah if you I can't fucking come up with an ad i don't know if you want to buy something that's no use to you and won't give you joy instead of sheep here are some adverts okay so we're back and we're still talking about sheep and we probably will be for quite some time so on page one um so sheep are actually they're quite clever um sheep can recognize human faces they'll know who you are

um they've definitely definitely know that um like especially the sheep that we bottle fed from when they were babies right they definitely knew who we were um and they can be very friendly yeah it's nice it's nice they'll come up to you and they'll sort of nuzzle you and you can rub them our sheep were polled that's another thing to think about when you're getting a sheep right a polled sheep doesn't have horns, whereas some people have horns, some people have more horns. So, yeah, they can recognize your faces. They can learn names.

If they have a name, they can learn the name. They also know that they're sheep. So I know my mom would just go out and go like, sheep, and then she'd feed them and they'd come. So they got a positive reinforcement mechanism. out and go like sheep and then she'd feed them and they'd come um so they're thinking uh you know they've got a positive reinforcement mechanism um you can train sheep to go on a lead um so another reason you might want to get sheep is you're getting into into showing right a nice thing to do if you if you you know a strange like me i suppose is go to like an agricultural show and

look at different types of sheep i I like to do that. Um, it's, it's, they can be really expensive now because it's also the County fair. And so like people are going into eat like deep fried stuff. Um, which it doesn't interest me as much, but, uh,

if, if you want to go and see, yeah, yeah, we could go together down. I'll get a, get a super safe. Perfect.

We'll like split up and then meet back at the end and be like, how was your day? I'm going to be like, it was bad. It was bad. You won't be saddled with regret. if you look at sheep and indigestion. So yeah, consider. But it's nice to go, right?

See the breeds that are popular in your area, see different types of sheep. And what people will do at least, I've never been to an actual sort of showing sheep. I'll just go to the San Diego County Fair and look at the animals but I've not been to a show where you walk around with them in the US but I used to do that when I was a kid

I think of you know go to the village show or whatever and take the sheep and walk it around and then they'll judge your sheep right if it's up to the breed

standards or what have you so yeah they can go on a lead they like more of like a halter like around the nose so not like a collar. So that's the thing that you can do.

If that interests you, if you want to get into sheep showing. If that's the case, you're going to want to get like a pedigree sheep, right? And really get into it. You're going to drop some money. It's not really like, I was never a very serious sheep show, to be clear. It's just a thing for your child to do when you grew up in a rural area. They, like I said, they like to be together in groups. They're pretty docile.

Like sheep aren't going to fight you. Definitely, like when I was at university and stuff, friends would come home and they'd be very scared of the sheep. There's no reason to be scared of sheep. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone being hurt by a sheep. What about a ram? Yeah, I mean, what mean what they're gonna come at you a bit sometimes they're angry or whatever but like it's a sheep like it's fine uh you know like i would back you shireen if it came to it okay yeah like uh yes and their horns are mostly like not pointed towards you like i have been gored by a bull right

like i i've experienced uh like livestock related injury sheep is definitely on the list of animals i'm pretty sure i could take yeah pretty sure this next fact is fascinating to me can we get to this fact yeah sure so definitely if you're thinking of breeding and getting rams, about like 8% are going to be gay. It's just a thing that's going to happen, right? Sure. Gay sheep, gay sheep.

Yeah. Yeah, you wait till we get to the next one. It's just a thing, right? You're going to get a sheep that's gay. It's a natural part of the diversity

of any species. I kind of definitely know people who've spent a lot of money on pedigree rams and they've turned out to be gay. It's what it is, right? I love that. It gets me about this weird, stupid American...

It's not just an American thing, but this like, oh, it's not natural or whatever. Anyone who's worked with livestock in their life for a number of years will tell you that they've come across a gay sheep uh or cow or what have you um some you're also going to get sometimes um some sheep are called free martins uh it's a trans mask sheep uh for the most part it actually has some biological differences um so like yeah what it is is there's a female that's been accompanied, so like they're twins or triplets or quads sometimes,

that has been accompanied by a male fetus in utero. So they behave in a masculine way and they might lack functioning ovaries. Yeah, you're going to get those too, right? So they're going to be a bit more aggro, like a ram, a bunion stuff. But it's just a thing. It's part of natural diversity in species.

You're going to see it. You know, you's part of natural diversity and species you're gonna see it you know you might have a gay sheep lucky you right uh you know cherish it uh take it you know be nice to it so white fleeces right generally we think of sheep but daniel was saying you're gonna think of a white fleece that's uh that wild sheep are often brown right it's being white it's not a great camouflage trait so when we see a uh when we see a white sheep that's because it's generally been selected right so when you looked at the jacob sheep they were piebald right they had bits of brown on them on the white fleece being white however appears to be a dominant trait so it's very very quickly um and then if you're looking at the wool of a sheep you want to consider if you want fine medium

or coarse wool long wool sheep right if you look up sheep the wool of a sheep, you want to consider if you want fine, medium, or coarse wool, long wool sheep, right? If you look up sheep with long wool, there's some amazing breeds out there. Those are mostly for breeding to get more desirable wool characteristics. Like long wool sheep, it's going to be quite hard to look after that sheep, right? Stop its wool getting matted and stuff.

So now we're going to get into fencing. It's an important topic. So you want your fencing to be about chest high obviously that depends on your height like if you're a smaller person a bit higher whatever uh but like we would generally use post and rail fencing and you don't see that as much in in the u.s but uh the name's pretty self-explanatory right bang in a post rail across the middle bang in post, rail across the middle. And then you're going to want some netting. You don't have to use, like with chickens, we talked about using construction netting, right? Like very thin wire, just so that things like snakes and rats don't get in. With sheep, you don't need that. You

can go with a wider mesh, maybe four or five inches across, and that's going to be cheaper for you as you're building the fence. You can also use electric fences and you can use those to rotate the pasture, which is a good idea. So the sheep kind of graze one area, then you move them across to another area. That area recovers. You move the sheep to the next area.

They graze that area while the other areas recover. Okay. You learned about this in school, surely, right? Yeah. Yeah, surely. I'm curious, how does the electric fencing do that? Are you constantly moving

it and is that just like when the sheep touch it they're like oh not that way and go back like what is it okay well they're not thick they'll touch it once and then they won't go maybe twice and oh yeah no i've been precisely um but so how is it doing that it's the electric fences are like plastic posts that you stick in the ground and then it has a metal spike on the end. And then it's about that wide, about an inch wide. It's a ribbon with little metal bits in it. And the post has a way of securing that ribbon to it, so you can move that fencing around.

Okay, cool. So the reason, I mean, it being electrified is kind of like secondary. It's mostly that it's a movable fence post. That's why you're using it for the grazing purposes. Yeah. It doesn't have the same structure as a normal fence. So it has gaps which a sheep probably could slip through if it was just wired. Because it's electric, it's not going to try and nuzzle its way through because it's going to get shot. So if you're using electric fence, just like the classic way to tell if it's on, right, is you pick up a piece of grass and then you just touch the fence with the grass. Because the grass is a poor conductor,

you're going to feel a little bit of a shock. Are you trolling right now? No, no, no, for real. This is what you do. Yeah, no, you touch it with a piece of grass and you're going to get like a slight tingle, but you're not going to get a full whack. Growing up, we had electric fences all over the place, right? I've run into them when I was a kid and taken a whack or like, but you're not going to get a full whack. Growing up, we had electric fences all over the place.

I've run into them when I was a kid and taken a whack. The posts have a big spike on the end, so that's very fun to throw at your friends if you cause lasting injury. But yeah, electric fencing is handy. You just hook it up to a car battery, basically. Perfect.

Yeah, no, it's a good way to segment your field if you have one field if you're not rotating the sheep did you really not learn about field rotation? sorry I'm constantly amazed by the things that I didn't score that Americans don't do in school agriculture in any capacity there was no agriculture training

the only farm I saw was on like the tub of butter that's literally what the mic so i drove past farms i think i think i grew up closer than you two do which i had a corn for my backyard and they were okay i we didn't have agricultural education at like my school but like there were schools so like i went to to do like play chess just glass i was i was a nerd but like there there were lots of schools that did stuff like that because they were in more rural parts of Illinois.

So that is a thing here. I think it's just we didn't grow up in the agricultural relations. I think I learned it in the context of the enclosure of the commons and the four-field rotation and using legumes to fix nitrogen in the soil. What? Blank. I learned all of soil. What? Again, blank. You learned all of that? Blank faces, yeah.

I think I learned that in college. Okay, well, different strokes for different folks. That's wild. On Twitter.com if you learned about legumes in school. To be clear, I would have preferred to learn about that, just to be clear. Like algebra 2, forget it. I would much rather learn about lagoons.

Whenever you use algebra, not Don. Someone else is using it, but you know, think of what you could be doing with nitrogen right now if you were growing some peas. What if? Incredible things, yeah. So with your sheep, depending on the breed breed you're going to need shelter right so that shelter could be something like a copse uh a little copse of trees um that's a small it's big smaller than a wood uh it's a copse uh so you're going to need a decent amount

of trees for them to shelter some will need need more shelter than others, right? Depending on how hardy they are. Some of them will want to lamb inside and some of them are able to lamb outside. They all will need some shelter in foul weather, right? You'll see that they're very good at knowing where to shelter, but you can't just leave them out. When I'm in agricultural states in America where these giant prairies, you don't have hedgerows in the same way that we did where i

grew up um then you if you are there and you're trying to have some sheep you're going to need to build a little shelter for them um is it a question about the shelter yeah yeah is it what's what's the shape of the shelter is it kind of like is it like a house is it more like barn like it's depending on the breed no not like barn you have a barn to bring them in like so we used to lamb inside right and then you just use pallets to divide it up and the pallets you put each of you in there with her lands um okay and we'll get on to that all cops are barns joke is not gonna happen okay sorry daniel no that's okay i've let you down again that's okay it's not on

you but yeah you'll see all kinds of things you'll see thanks you'll see it like people just put a little stone shelters um you know if you have a if you have a prevailing wind that's like rips through and it's cold wind then you know you might want to build something just to shelter them from that prevailing wind but they just you know if it's like a big, undifferentiated prairie, and especially lambs, right? They're more fragile because they're younger. And sometimes you'll see the lambs wearing the little coats, little jackets that they can wear.

Love that. Yeah. You can Google that. Just Google lambs, orange jacket. You can get these little plastic jackets for them. But you do need to be cautious with lambs when they're young sometimes like i say you'll have them inside um thing with sheep uh regarding feeding is that they are ruminants and do we know what ruminant animals are no no yes absolutely massively failed by your educations and it's a a ruminant it chews the cud um so when when it eats

the food right it goes to the rumen and then uh it holds the food the food is regurgitated what are you saying what are these it's like a cow it has like multiple stomachs yes yeah yeah it's like the first stomach yeah uh so the rumen like the first stomach? Yeah. So the rumen's the big stomach, right? And it's in there, it's like a storage space, really. So the food goes in there, chills for a bit, and then it's regurgitated, chewed back up, and then re-swallowed. And that is the cud.

That process is called chewing the cud. Chewing the cud. Now, is the, right, so is that entire process chewing the cud, like it going into the ruminant and then being regurgitated? Or is it strictly just the chewing that happened before they eat it again? It's a chewing that happens when they eat it again, right? So like the first eating, it's just eating. The second eating, it's Shireen's having a physical reaction.

It's fucking gnarly. It is gnarly. It's extremely gnarly. It is gnarly. It's extremely gnarly. That's how they get the most out of this relatively lean pasture, right? It's a very clever adaption. Yeah. So yeah, that's how sheep eat. So that means that they need to have access to pasture.

They also need lots of water. So again, if you're in a desert place, I should ask Navajo folks. I know Navajo folks. I should ask them how they do with their churro sheep because it's not a densely watered place there. But generally, they need access to water. I'm sure they have places where they have good access to water. And then, like I said, you do want to rotate them around, right?

You can feed them. You can supplement with hay or haylage or silage stuff like that but you shouldn't rely like you can't keep your feet sheep in a place where there's no pasture really you don't want to be feeding them all year they need varied pasture right with different things you know clovers and and grasses and um the stuff that's poisonous for them so that there are different weeds that are poisonous for them you're just going to want to it depends where you live right you're listening to this in the UK, it's different to North America, probably different to South America. So you'll want to check that out. Again, when you're buying

a sheep, you could ask these kinds of questions and go ahead and pull those out. So you can feed them grain, but you really only want to do that during or just before lambing. It can lead to overfeedingfeeding it's too rich for them right like they're designed with this ruminant system to you know have these green leafy things um people can use uh bagged feeds too uh you know again you don't want to rely on those the whole time they're expensive don't use cow food uh like bagged cattle food it's not going to work for sheep um and they need a like a mineral lick too um so you like i'm sure you're all familiar with salt licks uh yeah that's yeah

that's it's a similar thing right hell yeah they'll just come up and lick that they know when they need the salt or the minerals so they just they they know so they'll just come come and lick it um so you just put that out in the field. It's pretty chill. So a big problem we had was like, we had some sheep in the field next to our house. They were our sheep. They were someone else's sheep, but like forever getting into the garden,

mainly because I'm terrible at closing gates and doors. And so they would get into the garden. You do want to be careful. They will go ham. Like it is the time of their lives when they get in your garden and they can eat all your plants. But you do want to watch careful they will go ham like it is the time of their lives when they get in your garden and they can eat all your plants but um you do want to watch out for things like rhododendron which can be dangerous to them and they can be poisonous so if you've got stuff in your garden either don't have stuff that's poisonous to sheep or or be aware um you

know if they're getting in there head to the rhododendron, so I'm heading off at the pass. Shireen, would you like to insert your magazine? Well, just as... You're just the shepherd, and we are the herd following you. And so, to everyone that wants to be a sheep, listen to these ads. We're back, my sheeple. We're back. We're back. We're back uh my sheeple we're back unparalleled yeah we need daniel more podcast this kind of energy is magical

um so yeah shearing right shearing sheep a very important part of having sheep um so this can be hard to master if you're trying to get the wool off in like a full fleece, which is ideally how you want to do it, right? You don't, you're not just like, it's not like when you go to the barbers, you know, and they just go at you and there's hair on the floor, you're looking to take it off as a complete fleece. And there's a technique to that. It's, you're just not going to fucking get it straight away. Like you're going to have to learn, or you're going to have to pay someone to do it. I don't really know how that works in Americaica again because like there's not such a density

of sheep so maybe there's not someone who does it and lots of this stuff like getting your ewes ultrasounded when they're pregnant not sure how you go about that um in an affordable manner in the united states like if you have a large animal vet you can ask them but you do want to do that right to check that how many lambs you've got and stuff um but but uh yeah so if i guess you're just gonna have to learn or give it a try like as long as you're not hurting the sheep if you're taking it off in clumps i suppose it's not that bad just you know but you don't want to be nipping and hurting the sheep itself when you're shearing right um and that's just like if you uh if you're a person who shaves or cuts their own hair or what have you. It's not pleasant if you nick the skin.

Do sheep need to get rid of the hair? Yes. But then how, if we didn't exist, how would they do that? Well, we wouldn't have bred them selectively to have such dense and long fleeces if we didn't exist. So there are hair sheep, which have hair instead of wool and and those sheep don't need to um don't need to be shorn but because for centuries we've bred them to be woolier because we like the wool then now we have we've made our bed and we

have to lie in it right like we uh the sheep depend on us and we depend on the sheep it's it's like the yin and yang and you know of sheep husbandry the yin and yang that we created without their permission yeah yeah yes yeah the sheep sheep that has been forced upon them yeah yeah maybe it's a it's not a uh not a uh consensual relationship um right so yeah what will happen shireen if you don't share them and some some you'll need to do twice a year some once a year some you won't at all

if they're hair sheep but they'll get like matted wool so like the poo and other things will like

just if you don't wash your hair for a long time it gets kind of knotted and matted got it got it yeah

and also they can get overheated say no more say no more I understand you want me to go further? No, that makes sense though. That makes sense.

Yeah, I don't know how you sell wool in the USA. You know, just get on Etsy and do something with it if you want to sell it, I suppose. Learn to spin. Get a spinning wheel. Learn to card. Card the wool and then spin it and then knit it and then sell it i suppose or keep

things for yourself it'd be fun you know if you have free time what is carding yeah it's when you're like like taking the wool and like like combing it uh-huh uh like pulling it um i'm not super familiar with stuff i remember again, again, see, it's just a different world, isn't it? See, we would go to the Black Country Museum when I was a kid in school. Not a racial thing. It's a part of Britain where there was a lot of industry.

And one of the things they would do was like, oh, this is how people used to do wool. You know, like the spinning Jenny. And like before that, like in cottage industry, when people would make it at home. Okay. Or like when you go to the Red Breed Survival Trust, I bet they'll let you do some spinning or carding

when you're going there. I got a quick explanation for you. Got a quick explanation for you. So for those folks at home who have hairy animals, you know those kind of like brushes that have fine little metal bristles on them and you're brushing, you just take off like a huge clump of hair? Now imagine that you

take a fresh piece of wool straight off of the sheep and you put it on there and then you just kind of tease it out to form it into what looks more like like raw wool that you're used to as opposed to looking like it was just taken off a sheep you're turning into the raw wool that will then be spun um i'm looking at it right now and uh it

looks absolutely exhausting yes fun sorry yes fun yeah. Good thing to do. Once Twitter inevitably collapses, we can return with a V to tradition and do this sort of stuff instead. There you go. Yeah. I'm sure Elon Musk and all the other alpha male return to tradition. People already do it.

It's nice for your hands. It's very nice for your hands, just generally handling, because they have lanolin, right? Lanolin, this kind of natural, I think it's like a soap thing like it makes lathering but it's very good for softening your skin so you'll see you'll notice it's nice for your hands when you're handling the sheep right um you'll notice that's nice hand feeling um it's not expensive like hand cream uh you're gonna have to make sure that you trim your sheep's hooves

so depending on your size and the sheep size and your sort of skill um handling sheep uh you might want to get a sheep flipper uh we got one for my mum a couple of years ago it's just it's just a device that helps you turn the sheep so that you can clip its hooves instead of just getting in there with the knee and there's a way to do it and a lot of this stuff you can clip its hooves instead of just getting in there with the knee and there's a way to do it and a lot of this stuff you can learn on youtube like i've i checked before this and there's definitely videos on how to turn them over and um clip the hooves so um yeah you can give it a try that doesn't work you can get a sheep flipper um you you sort of yeah you sort of drop your knee into it and turn it over um i'm so happy

that there is an advice that exists called the sheep flipper i think this has made my day measurably better oh yeah yeah i'll send you some videos um there's some good videos of me uh trying to turn my mom's sheep like so we can clip their hooves and it was like wet and slippery and me just fetching myself on my ass instead and the sheep just like making a bid for freedom um so yeah you watch a couple of videos you can work it out and if that doesn't work for you you can get a sheep flipper you're gonna have to do things like dipping and deworming your sheep too right so you're um the wormer you just put in their mouth it's like it goes in the mouth and you squeeze um it looks a bit like a gun i suppose or like a it's like a little tiny pipe like maybe a quarter

of an inch size your pinky and it goes in and you press the thing and it dispenses a dose it's kind of just gets it behind their tongue so then spit it out dispenses a bit of wormer gun was the uh perfect word to use for my americanized brain i I'm totally with you on that. Yeah, I thought, yeah, yeah. I was kind of, you know, I was thinking gun, hot dog, bald eagle, what reference would you understand? Right. So, you know, you're going to also have to dip your sheep to prevent things like scab.

And so that's literally when the sheep dipped in this stuff that sort of cleans them, right? So there are mobile sheep dips or you can just go to a sheep dip take take your sheep to a sheep dip and do it there again i'm not i've never seen one in the us i'm sure there are some um but i'm not sure how you do this i think you can also spray them for this um and you'll want to check obviously what kind of dips are legal legal um and you don't want to obviously what kind of dips are legal legal um and you don't want to be dipping them with cuts so like if you have just been through your shearing

and you've cut them up that's not a good time to do it and you don't want to dip thirsty sheep either uh for obvious reasons right because what they're going into is not something you want to be drinking um so predation predation is an interesting topic uh sheep are not really great at defending themselves and they just kind of big floofs they can sort of butt a little bit with their heads and then they do do that um and they'll defend their their uh their little lambs and when we were little and we had dogs if the dog when it was a puppy would chase sheep you could put the dog in a little pen with a you and her lambs and the you would be like okay get away get away get away leave my lambs alone and that

then the dog would would be less likely to chase sheep again because it's had this probably not great to give the dog a traumatic experience and the you i suppose but they'll defend their their lambs like that but you know when you've got especially if you're in north america right you've got like mountain lions you've got coyotes you've got bobcats all kinds of bigger stuff than i'm used to um so a couple of options there um you've got guardian animals right so something like a llama a donkey uh or like a livestock guardian dog um me is enjoying the idea of a guardian donkey um but you know a couple of different benefits to each one of it llama llama can be pretty mean and i'm sure you guys have seen them like i've been spat on by a few llama and they'll kick yeah then they're bitey and it's just really sort of obnoxious um creatures but uh that yeah that they

don't mess about so those are decent uh you know it looks like one of the sheep has just wildly deformed if it's running around with the sheep um you can get donkey donkeys also quite defensive and very loud so you know if your sheep are in in a field near your house and you have a donkey it's going to kick off at night if something happens, making its characteristic donkey noises, and that will give you a chance to respond. And then you've got your livestock guardian breeds, right? Like Pyrenees is a great example.

People will probably have seen my pictures of the Staceous Unicorn Ranch. They have Pyrenees dogs, very helpful actually when you're being attacked by bigots because dogs will bark but guardian dogs are like inherently they want to guide your sheep so they'll just go out there and they'll move among the flock and they'll

bark and run off any attackers and they're very it's entirely in their breeding to do it. It's very funny, actually, because chuds have this like I'm a sheep dog

thing, you know, when they walk around with like five knives and two guns and a pepper spray. And then they always have a picture of

Border Collie. That is not what a Border Collie dogs. A Border Collie is like a dog with extreme anxiety that it's obsessed with collective security

and will just just like border collies naturally heard things right so i'm sure like you've seen uh people seen like one man his dog the tv program no again uh used to be on a sunday night when i was little uh it's it's a competition a sheep herding with dogs competition they don't rules yeah perhaps one of the more I've met American people who do this

competitively but I think it's more of a hobby than a way of life but yeah so you can google one man and his dog and watch different competitions obviously it's not gendered and it can be a person and their dog. But yeah, that's what Border Collies do, right? They herd the sheep.

And when they're little, you can start them out with herding chickens or ducks. And if you have a farmyard, they'll go out there and herd ducks just by themselves. They want to do it just in their breeding. But a guardian dog does not do that. It just protects. But I think this is one of the things that we spoke about with chickens, right? Like, if you want to have sheep,

you're probably going to have to either, like, well, if you're not willing to defend them from predators, you probably shouldn't have them because it's a bit mean to just put them out there as, like, coyote bait or lion bait or whatever. uh like you might have to shoot something that looks like a dog if you don't want your sheep to die and like it's just how it's going to go down you know like uh it's uh like not everyone has to have livestock i'm not a person who eats animals so like it's i mean i think similar to chickens most people shouldn't have

chickens or sheep you know what i mean the vast majority of people in my opinion are better off not doing that just because like i don't think people realize the responsibility even with all this information i think some people get too um they jump the gun for lack of a better fucking term. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, totally. Like, don't be rushing into getting livestock. Like, it's very, like, I've seen people do that before.

I've seen people do the whole, like, you know, I'll quit my job as a banker and come and live on a farm thing. And like, I don't know, just don't, go work on someone's farm, right? If you want to do that, you'll learn. If you didn't grow up in this, there are a million things that I'm not telling you and I'm forgetting to tell you that I take for granted. And, like, it just takes time and it's complicated. And sometimes it's very sad, right?

Like I said, sheep get sick and they die and that's sad. And they get predated and that's very sad. Lambs get predated. It's really sad. lambs get predated it's really sad so like i don't know it's not for everyone uh it's certainly having a flock of sheep is quite big and you can't like you know you can't just be like oh well i'm off to um well you need to right i don't think a lot of people have the land even necessary for that so i don't know yeah anyway a few acres i'm so passionate about this that i actually have to go now um okay i'm kidding believe it yes okay i have to record something else with this voice so yeah uh until next time yeah keep on podcasting bye shereen talk soon bye thanks bye okay we're gonna briefly cover

lambing and then we're uh we can be done uh so uh like i said you can you can pick up orphan lambs good way to add to your flock um the thing with uh little baby lambs is when when they're first born right if the mother is either won't if the mother either won't feed them, sometimes she won't feed them, or she dies, they're going to need what's called colostrum. Are you familiar with colostrum? That name sounds more familiar. I feel like I've read that.

Briefly, it was like an athletic performance supplement tread. It's the milk that comes in the first 24 hours. It's extra rich. Oh. So then these... Yeah, from whatever animal, right? Any mammal, I would imagine. Milk produced by the mammary glands of humans and other mammals

immediately following delivery of the newborn. Yeah, that's a better summary than I made. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Wikipedia. Yeah, that's a better summary than I made. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Wikipedia. Yeah, always. So they're going to need about 500 mils on the first day. I think that's about a pint. You want it to be warm, so you can buy frozen colostrum.

You can buy powdered colostrum, but you don't want to microwave it. The colostrum has some antibodies in it, um help the little sheep's uh like stomach i suppose get ready for the world um so that's why you don't want to microwave it um so generally they're pretty easy to bottle feed like if you stick your finger in the lamb will just like start sucking on that and it's a good sign that it's you know it's ready to bottle feed it's easy to bottle feed uh so you can sometimes do that it's kind of a way to lure them in and then start bottle feeding them sometimes you have to sort of rub them a bit to get them to feed um and then uh they they like to have their milk powder if you're doing powdered milk right with these orphan lambs

about every four hours um you're just going to gradually increase the amount you feed them uh and you know they'll need things like a heat lamp right uh to keep them warm because they don't have that big heat sink of their mom embedding in water and um you know a bit later you can it's a bit easier right you can get a bucket with teats so you just you're literally screwing the teats that go on a milk bottle onto the onto the bucket instead so they can drink out of that um but um it's a lot of work getting orphan lambs they go they'll want to eat about every four hours it doesn't matter if you're sleeping they still want to eat so like i can remember doing that a lot when it's little um and uh you can get uh like once the lamb gets a bit older,

you're going to want to do things like you might want to castrate it, depending, you might want to dock its tail, depending. You might want to vaccinate it, or you do want to vaccinate it. But also, like, they need time to be social with other sheep. So, like, you can't just get one orphan lamb and raise it, like, some kind of sheep person. They need to play with other sheep. They need time to run around um uh they can be quite fun they'll follow you around often but they'll orphan sheep like you

can sort of run around and they'll follow you around so that's kind of fun um and then you do eventually like if you especially if you're raising a lot of orphan lambs you're going to have ram lambs right and and so you're either going to have orphan lambs, you're going to have ram lambs, right? And so you're either going to have to castrate those or sell them because you're going to create an issue of inbreeding within your flock otherwise. If you just keep all the lambs, right? And so that's the thing to think about.

If you're going to have sheep, at some point you're either going to need to buy more or breed them. And if you're going to breed them, what are point, you're either going to need to buy more or breed them. And if you're going to breed them, what are you going to do with the ram lambs? So you can castrate them. They become weathers, and that's generally where meat comes from that people eat.

You don't want to participate in that. You're just going to pass it on to someone else, right? Unfortunately, this is commercial agriculture. Even if you don't eat meat, it's about killing animals, which is why I don't like to do that. With lambs, when you've got pregnant ewes, you'll want to scan them, see how many lambs there are. That helps you make feeding decisions for the pregnant ewe. That's sort of when you can look at how many lambs are coming, right? How much does she need to eat?

And then once you've done this, you want to get your barn ready for lambing. We used to use pallets. Pallets things come on when you buy a lot of sheep food, for instance. It comes on a pallet that a forklift can get under. You can just use those to separate out little stalls for to lamb in put some straw in there um and then when they lamb just because again they've been bred selectively for so long they can sometimes struggle struggle

deliver um and if you're of the means to do so having a vet of course is lovely right like a large animal vet um but, people who are farming commercially don't have the resources to do that. It just doesn't fit with the cost of doing that. So you mostly do it yourself. I've done it a lot. You'll want to get yourself a full-arm glove, like a full plastic glove, I guess like a sleeve glove.

And then you can do a lot in terms of turning the lamb around if it's coming out the wrong way or helping the livery. I'll leave you to Google that on your own time. I think I'm not going to Google that one. No, I think, yeah, it's a miracle of life, Daniel. Beautiful in its own ways. Yeah, it's really sweet when you get the lamb out and you're like, oh yeah, I turned it around and it pops up and it does a little shake

and it stands on its little feet. It's very sweet. It's kind of amazing compared to human babies. Human babies come out and I've seen a few human babies and they're just not particularly useful or capable in their early life. But lambs come out and they get up and they can run around and they can suckle

and within 24 hours, they're like a functional tiny sheep and so that's kind of nice so you do want to when they're when they're uh when they're born right you just sort of get into their little little nose and mouth area and just clear that from anything that might be blocking it just so they can breathe um you can use a bit of straw to get into their little nostrils just to sort of get any mucus or whatever out. And then you cut the umbilical cord up and disinfect that just with some iodine. I think you can see actually, though I sent you one picture of a lamb last night where you can see where it's been disinfected and its umbilical cord. Sometimes you just want to strip a couple of, like, you just want to strip a couple of like you just want to check that you can give milk sometimes the teats can get plugged up when they're pregnant you just give it a little

little squeeze yeah so then within a week you're going to want to do things like docking tails and castrating some breeds can lamb outside but some can't so again this is all stuff to consider when you're trying to buy your sheep right um the last thing i've got about lambing is sometimes the use will reject the lamb you can either try and like hold the you in place so the lamb can suckle uh or if she's really hurting them then you take them away and then you have to look after them yourself and then they become your little friends and you can give them names yeah it's very sweet like I said a little sad but then also sweet

yeah yeah right this is a thing with commercial agriculture right like it's the nature of the thing like if you have cattle what are you going to do with the any male offspring of any species right even if you just had the sheep

and you want to have them for milk, cool. But they're not going to continue lactating for their whole life. So they're going to have to have lambs. And if they're going to have to have lambs, you're going to have to decide what you want to do with the ram lambs. And so it is a difficult thing.

It's not for everyone. But yeah, sheep, wonderful creatures, very friendly. You know, if you're walking past, you could see if someone's trained them to come to the word sheep just by shouting sheep at them. And if not, you know, passersby will think you've correctly identified the species.

Big dub for you either way. Yeah, the sheep is a wonderful animal. They're very friendly. Of all the farm animals, I think they're my favorite. Just growing up around them if you're small like you know only do it if you're a very little human probably not old enough to listen to some of the content we broadcast uh if you're aged want to be in like single digits but you can ride them um you can sort of sit on them fall on their shoulders

and ride them around wow really um it? It's not a controlled experience. It's just going to run because it doesn't want you on its back. And it might not be very nice for the sheep thinking about it. But yeah, there are many, many wonderful things you can do with sheep. They're very rewarding to have, I will say. But yeah, it's sad. It's also a difficult thing. So yeah, it's something to consider.

If you do milk them, they make good cheese. I think that's the primary reason that people dairy sheep is for cheese. I don't think many people are drinking sheep milk. And you know, please don't let me know if you are. It's fine. I'm happy for you. There's no need to share.

No. Yeah, sheep. Every wool pair of socks, every wool jumper that you have, there's no need to share no yeah sheep every wool pair of socks every wool jumper that you have every sheep's cheese that you eat comes from these wonderful animals that now you know a little more about and you can get sheep soap too

that's my last plug for this sheep soap looks like a sheep but in the middle of it it's soap yeah it's very good for washing your hands and maybe one day we will have cool zone media sheep soap for you to buy yeah I saw pictures

of it and it was that's a pass for me but you know what there's a lot of people out there who love merch so more power more power to them yeah disappointing Daniel anti-sheep action yeah post pictures of your sheep and tag me on various social media

someone some people already do uh but yeah that's about all i got on sheep and any sheep questions before we go i mean you know i will say each new sheep fact brought up another sheep question but uh i think you did a great job of explaining uh owning sheep taking care of sheep rearing sheep lambing uh i mean i've i've come away uh with a with a with a whole bale full of knowledge about sheepies me what about you yeah i've i've learned i've there's the sheep flippers i can't get over yeah rkoing your sheep to shoot them is great yeah we can do one where you teach me what an RKO is Daniel

I will teach you by showing you as opposed to performing it but yes I will definitely teach you yeah that's our next live show but yeah enjoy the stuff that you now know about sheep everyone yeah and uh this has been it could happen here uh find us on the internet at cool zone media or it could happen here pod right i never do this happen here pod but i know it needs to happen happened here pod that's what

it is thank you yeah yeah put it put it into the search engine of your choice it'll come up uh do you guys want to plug anything before we leave me you go first oh i got nothing that uh i got i got uh elon musk got me so i don't have social media anymore there you go uh yeah yeah i guess if you're in the u.s check out navajoro Sheep they're very cool Navajo Churro Sheep Association you know it's good to support indigenous folks the rest of us will be sheep farming

on stolen land so facts it's all stolen everything we're doing is all stolen land you can check me out on Twitch

twitch.tv slash DJ underscore Danil that's it magic thank you Danil cool alright

let's end it. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a

great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by I Heart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories

inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. It's a Solo Mia episode of It Could Happen Here, the podcast where things fall apart, and sometimes we put them back together. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to be talking about why the rent is so high. Now, okay, there's a lot of sort of ways that you could, in theory, approach this question. And I decided that I think one of the most useful approaches to it is you take a sort of a more a more sort of historical and theoretical approach. And I think the start of any kind of sort of theoretical approach to rent is by asking what

rent actually is. And the answer to this, and this is something that is that is relatively consistent across most of sort of classical political economy and and you see this in some of sort of neoclassical economics is that the thing that's special about rent is that rent unlike you know anything else is money that you get because you own something, not because you, you know, have produced anything. And this means that, you know, the landlord does not produce anything of value at all. All they do is extract value from other sectors of the economy. Now, this has a wide, wide variety of sort of political and social effects. Marx saw the landowning class as an obstacle to

the development of capitalism. And this is an idea, the idea that, again, landowners specifically as a class that is different from the sort of capitalist class or the working class hinders the growth of capitalism is an idea that a lot of different people across the, basically the entirety of the political spectrum have shared at various times. And this causes some very, very strange alliances, particularly in places like Latin America, where you still have economies that are, you know, not entirely based, but economies that have enormous landowners who drive sort of vast portions of both the economy and of the sort of political process. And in Latin America, and this is true in a lot of other places,

it was not uncommon for you to get what's known as developmentalism, which is an ideology based on using essentially protectionist measures, things like tariffs, sometimes capital controls, restrictions on kinds of investment that foreign companies can do, sometimes, I mean, just straight up the nationalization of natural resources, in order to develop an industrial economy. Now, developmentalism, as are most sort of alliances against the landed elite, are politically messy. It draws on a range of ideologies from, you know, like pretty right-wing nationalists, some very, very, very

scary people are technically developmentalists, to liberal and also centrist factions whose sort of productive and social base is in a specific kind of sort of domestic capitalist who's interested in sort of producing stuff locally. And also to people like Bolivia's Evo Morales, who is, you know, broadly considered a socialist, although I think his commitment to people like Bolivia's Eva Morales, who is, you know, broadly considered a socialist, although I think his commitment to anything like socialist politics is tenuous at best. But all of these sort of political groups can and do and have at various times worked together. This is actually one of the bases of Morales' – well, I guess it's not really Morales' party anymore, but Eva Morales' MAS, which was a very sort of explicit alliance between

sort of left-wing social movements and then more sort of moderate centrist factions who were effectively developmentalist. This is a sort of a representation of a very common, like, kind of developmentalist politics, which is, again, this alliance between sort of left and capitalist factions who ally against, like, large landowners on the basis that feudist politics, which is, again, this alliance between sort of left and capitalist factions who ally against like large landowners on the basis that feudalism, which is usually the way that like the sort of the power of large landowners is conceived, is an enemy to both of them. Now, this isn't how sort of like states that use developmentalist strategies have to work. Germany, for example, uses a lot of developmentalist techniques to industrialize in the late 1800s. But, you know, the old landowning class, the old

sort of like German aristocracy is allied with the capitalists in Germany. And the two, you know, the two classes, the sort of German aristocracy and the capitalist class effectively merge. On the other hand, landowning classes are often implacably hostile to industrialization, and countries that essentially annihilated their landowning classes by carrying differences, all carried out land reform in the 20th century were rewarded with, eventually, like, very, very powerful and large-scale industrial economies. But, you know, you might be saying, Mia, you've kind of put the cart in front of the horse here. You've talked about, you know, you've gone into some of the sort of political effects of rent first, but you haven't actually, you know, explained how rent actually works.

And so that, that is what I'm going to do next. And to explain how rent works, I'm going to turn to an unusual source. The work of the great Venezuelan anthropologist, Fernando Coronel. Coronel's a fascinating character. He studied anthropology at my alma mater, the University of Chicago, under Terence Turner, a guy who I think

99% of people have never heard of before, but is probably most famous now for being also, you know, for also teaching David Graeber and being a sort of major influence on his work. Now, unlike David Graeber, while Coron while Cornel was at the university of Chicago, he tried to get permission from the Cuban government to go do field work in Cuba. And, you know, so he gets to Cuba and he's like negotiating with the government and the government tells him to fuck off. So, okay. He tries to go back to the U S but immigration and nationalization services, the INS, which is basically the predecessor of like immigration services ice and the border patrol ins was sort of dissolved in 2003 when the sort of like i i i don't know exactly what the

technical term for it is but with the consolidation information of the department of homeland security which is really truly a thing that i think we tend to think of as omnipresent but is actually about 20 years old and I am older than. There's also, you know, this sort of outside the scope. This episode is like an enormously fascist institution that centralized an enormous amount of sort of political power in these like terrifying surveillance and police bureaucracies. But, you know, OK, so they're back, back back back to the fernando cornell story so he got to go back to the u.s but ins which is the predecessor to all the stuff like arrest him immediately and they deport him and ban him from the u.s on the grounds that i he he was that they suspected him of being a quote subversive Now, and again, I cannot emphasize this enough.

The sequence of events here is that he tries to go to Cuba and the Cuban government tells him to fuck off. And so he goes back to the U.S. and the U.S. government is like, oh, yeah, no, this guy who the Cuban government just refused to let to do field work. This this this guy is definitely a Cuban agent. So his entire sort of like life gets derailed by this. He winds up, I think, back in Venezuela for a while. I think he, it takes like almost like 20 years for him to be able to get back to the U.S. and finish his Ph.D. But, you know, when he does, and sort of in the process of this, he becomes a very, very famous and well-respected anthropologist. Now, when I was at UChicago, all of the people who sort of trained Cornel, that whole generation, and really the whole sort of school of anthropology that he came from, which is a very, very interesting school.

If you want to read about this kind of stuff, I read David Graeber's Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. I might do an episode on it at some point later, but all of that stuff is gone. But, but I ran into a professor who knew him back in the day, and he told us that Cordial was, you know, on the one hand, very respected academic, like very sort of like upstanding like member of the academic community, also incredibly popular as like a partier who just get absolutely wasted and start dancing on tables. This guy absolutely rips,

you know, and I think a very few people outside of anthropology have ever heard of him, but in anthropology, Cornel is important enough to like, if you write about the state, you at least have to like mention him. And you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that like most of the people who say the words The Magical State, which is the name of his sort of famous book, actually have read it.

But I did read this book. I've read this book multiple times. And it's really, really interesting. Now, The Magical State, Nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela is probably most famous as a history of the Venezuelan state, but that doesn't mean that it's sort of exclusively about that history. And in fact, you know, it really can't be. In order to think about the Venezuelan state, you have to think about oil. think about the venezuelan state you have to think about oil but you also can't think about oil in the way that most histories of oil think about it which is a story about sort of like high

geopolitics right if you look at the histories of oil right it's about like high geopolitics and like prospecting and like tracking oil prices over time. And, you know, the sort of most famous book in this genre is Daniel Juergens' The Prize, which is a fine book, but it shares in this sort of tendency to, you know, kind of, you know, unless they're writing about like a guy going prospecting, right? There's this tendency to sort of ignore the sort of material characteristics of oil and the sort of political effects of the extraction process and a sort of material characteristics of oil and the sort of political effects of the extraction process and a lot of other aspects of oil that are very, very important. And what Corineal realizes is that oil is intricately tied to sort of the political

conception of nature, to systems of land ownership, and also to Venezuelan statecraft. conception of nature to systems of land ownership and also to Venezuelan statecraft. Now, this may seem a bit far afield, but in order to understand oil, you have to think about rent and rent extraction. And that's what Coroneal does in ways that are both sort of profoundly interesting, and I think in a lot of ways profoundly ahead of his time. corneal like us asked the question what actually is rent now for for you know corneal goes through rent in a lot you know in it like goes goes through what you could i guess call the economic history of concessions of rent right starting with the classical economists i we're not that interested in the classical economists because quite frankly if you're if i don't know if you're running into a neo-ricardian analysis of what rent

is like i don't know you're you're already a specialist like stuff is stuff stuff is happening for you that is quite interesting quite odd but we're mostly going to ignore them because the original classical economists work has it's it's largely not the way people think about this now and to the extent that people sort of claim to be derivatives of like these people like people claiming the lineage of adam smith like that's kind of sketchy instead we're going to turn to Corineal's analysis of the way that neoclassical economics thinks about rent. Now, Corineal is someone who has spent a lot of time in the sort of literature of like oil pricing and sort of theories of sort of price formation and the state of the markets or the effect of political actors on it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he argues that there's basically two ways of thinking about

rent in terms of a commodity like oil there's a macroeconomics view in which the rent someone who owns oil extracts when people have to buy it from them you know okay so like like if you're a landowner right you get rent because you own the thing and then people have to take it. People need it. You have it, so you get to extract rent from it just by virtue of having it. In the microeconomics view, when someone pays the rent, what that is is they're paying for what's called natural capital or capital that's, you know, provided by nature that someone now owns through like the miracle of private property. And so for these people, rent isn't something that's extracted at all, right? It's just someone getting paid for their capital because the way that they think about, you know, about something like oil is that they think oil is just sort of natural capital. like oil is that they think oil is just sort of natural capital. Now, okay, it's like this is,

this is in some sense, you know, it's like, okay, what, what, like, who cares about this? This is a kind of like, this, this seems very obvious, but there's also a macroeconomics perspective, which is very different. And the macroeconomics perspective holds that, you know, rent isn't a payment for capital at all. It's something paid to landowners by capitalists. And the rent that these landowners get is basically the difference between, you know, what it costs you to get the oil out of the, you sort of the landowner to get the oil out of the ground and what it costs the person who has the highest price of production to get the oil out of the ground. Now, okay. Now, okay, for reasons that are very complicated that I can't get into here, basically, the person who is like the worst at getting oil out of the

ground is the person who sets what the price of oil is. So, you know, the sort of like highest possible extraction price tends to be the price. And then, you know, the sort of macroeconomic analysis of what rent is, right, is that it's a thing that capitalists pay to landowners who own natural resources. And the amount of money they get is based on how much cheaper it is for that landlord to get their oil out of the ground than it is for the landlord who's the worst at this. And this is a real question, right? like the landlord who's like the worst at this. And this is a real question, right? The question is, is someone who's getting rent paid to them, is that rent payment for capital that they own? Or is it money from capitalists that capitalists have to pay to a non-capitalist class? And Corneal's answer is like, well, obviously rent is extracted from surplus value because landowners don't produce value. But there's two

different sort of places that they can get this value from. And this is where we have to get into something that's kind of weird. And that is the two different kinds of rents. But okay, before we get into the two kinds of different rents, do you know what else there's two different kinds of? Yeah, that's right. It is the products and services that support this show. And we're back. I hope you have enjoyed both of the different kinds of products and services that support the show. And, okay, I promised you two kinds of rent, and I'm now going to give you two kinds of rent.

So the two kinds of rent, there is something called differential rent. And differential rent is kind of close to the sort of macro perspective we talked about earlier. So differential rent is rent that's set by the price of production on the market, right? Now, as we sort of mentioned, prices tend towards the highest price of production. It's set by the people who are worst at producing it. And differential rent is the rent that the rest of the market gets by costing it – by it costing less for them to extract oil than it does for someone who's like the worst at extracting oil. So Cornel explains this in terms of for a long time, the US was sort of the price leader of oil and it was the price leader of oil because the American like property rights system is so absolutely bonkers that it makes it really, really hard. You have to like you have to like individually negotiate with like every person who owns a cow pasture in Nebraska in order to sort of like extract oil from them. And this this makes the production process like very expensive.

And so everyone else in the world is getting this differential rent because they have like a less completely like just wild system of property. So the product of this is that everyone else is getting differential rent because it's way cheaper for them to produce oil than it is for the U.S. to produce oil. So differential rent is a product of your efficiency right it's how it's an amount of money that's based on sort of the price of oil it's based on how much better you know because you're still selling the oil at like the same price right but the amount that you get you know the amount of rent that you get is is the difference between how much it costs you to get

this oil out of the ground and how much it costs like some sort of American dipshit who has to spend all this time negotiating with like 30,000 individual landowners in the US to do it. So that's differential rent. But there's also something called absolute rent. Now, absolute rent is very, very, very different from differential rent because absolute rent is not really determined by sort of production prices or like the market or supply and demand at all. Absolute rent is determined by the social power of the landowner. And this has really interesting effects, right? Because again, absolute rent isn't based on the production process and is instead based on, you know, the social, it's a social product of power. Land, and this, you know, this means that landlords and rent extractors can do something

that capitalists aren't supposed to be able to do. They can get profits that are larger than the general rate of profit, and they could do it just by virtue of being powerful and owning land. And this has a bunch of very, very weird knock-on effects, right? If you've ever seen landlords talk about rent, right? You've seen the consequences of this. These people genuinely believe that they have a sort of moral right to returns with no risk all of the time, and that all of society should be structured in such a way as to guarantee that they have this free income that they do fucking nothing to do other than own buildings and it should be guaranteed you know it should be structured

to guarantee this by forcing tenants to pay rent no literally no matter what is happening you know like regardless of shit, like, I don't know, a pandemic. Now, the other sort of important difference is that absolute rent does not obey the laws of supply and demand. It is a product of social power. You know, it's the power of land ownership itself. And it's also sort of the power, you know, the social power is not just purely the product of land ownership. It's also a product of the organization of the landowning class and the extent to which they're backed by the state and militaries and its polices. And this causes economists who are attempting to use supply and demand to explain rent to get very, very important events very wrong. One of the things that Corneal points out is that

Morris Edelman, who was a very, very famous oil economist, predicts in 1972 that the price of oil is going to collapse based on oversupply and competition. Instead, the price of oil between 1973 and 1974 increases by 400% because oil producers banded together to exercise their power, and this organization, known as OPEC, becomes a genuine world power. Here's how Corineo puts it. The sharp increase of 1973 and 1974 in oil prices did not result from a world shortage of oil. oil prices did not result from a world shortage of oil. It was, rather, the outcome of a long historical process by which OPEC nations, acting as landowners, developed the means to extract a rent on the basis of their ownership of the oil fields, an absolute rent, in addition to the differential rents they had collected in the past. In 1973, a set of converging political and economic conditions helped

establish their collective ability to restrict the world's supply of oil. With this power, OPEC felt entitled to set market prices of oil, thus freeing the level of rent from the previous constraint of the market price. Now, rent itself, absolute and differential, would come to determine the market price of oil. Now, you may be asking yourself, Mia, this is all well and good for describing how the price of oil changes, but what does this have to do with me? And the answer is that while Coronil is specifically focused on resource rents for obvious reasons, he is doing a study of the state of Venezuela, you can apply his analysis to the kind of rent that we all pay. If you follow Corineo's conclusions about absolute rent through to the American rental market, it produces startlingly different conclusions about the source and nature of the so-called housing crisis that are traditionally presented. If rent levels are a product of the social power of the landlord class,

the behavior that's otherwise inexplicable, like landlords sitting on empty properties instead of renting them out at lower rates, suddenly become clear. Armed with the backing of the state's secure social power by carrying out evictions, and with the state's implicit backing to carry out technically illegal evictions, landlords can extract both differential and absolute rent, allowing them to tell the market to take a hike, and setting ever-increasing rents that renters have no choice but to pay or be swept aside in brutal anti-homeless raids. This has massive consequences on any potential strategy to reduce rent. OPEC, remember, was able to use its social power to increase the price of oil by 400% even in a period when the actual supply of oil was enormous,

by pure virtue of organization and the power of their land ownership. While American landlords are certainly weaker and less organized than OPEC, their social power is still such that increasing supply is not guaranteed to drive down prices because in a situation governed by the extraction of absolute rent, rent is not determined by prices, prices are determined by rent. On the other hand, this means that you can reduce rent by breaking the social power of the landlord. And indeed, even in very hot housing markets like Toronto and Los Angeles, this strategy can and has worked. Tenants unions, which deploy the power of collective bargaining and the social solidarity of renters to combat the power of landlords,

have succeeded in reducing rents, and can and will continue to do so. But these efforts are only the beginning of a process that finally answers the question, why are rents so high? If rents are high because of the social power of landlords, the way to bring rents down is to crush the bastards completely and expropriate them, to seize every last building and plot of land from every landlord in the country, and drive them as a class from the political mainstream into the pages of history. And then, and this is crucial, not to replace them with another landowning class or, you know, as the Leninists proposed that it actually did, replace them with the state. Only by destroying the category of landlord,

not by regulating it or nationalizing it, can we finally escape the long nightmare of rent and enter a world where people's ability to live is determined not by the sort of capricious and arbitrary will of a small class of landowners, but on their human need for housing. This has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us in the usual places. And yes, go into the world and make the world without rent a reality. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes,

entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout?

Well, that's when the real magic happens so if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people you know follow and admire join me every week for post run high it's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all it's light-hearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show.

I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hello everyone, it's me James today and I'm talking to Dermot Cosgrove about Wagner, the Russian mercenary group, and their actions in Africa.

This is something that I've kind of tried to pitch for several years with not much success in the United States media. And I'm sure lots of other people have too. I'm by no means unique in that. And suddenly, obviously, everyone in the corporate media has become something of an expert in their actions when things started happening in Ukraine.

And so what we wanted to do here was kind of paint a picture of how they have a long record of human rights abuse. And Dermot's more expert in Africa, so that's what we're talking about, but also in Syria, of course. And I just wanted to give some more information. So we recorded this on last Friday. Today is Tuesday, the 1st of August. And we talked a little bit about the coup in nigeria and which has continued and uh since we recorded evgeny pregozhin who of course is the like head of wagner the founder of wagner the oligarch who's in charge of that private military contracting group um made a statement sort of not exactly saying like oh yeah we did this coup but more

like saying uh oh cool i see you've had a coup. What you could use is a group of mercenary Russians who are prepared to do incredible and horrific violence on your behalf. And let us know. We'll roll up. And also since then, ECOWAS, which is the Economic Community of West African States, it's a West African bloc there, has threatened intervention in Niger if they if they don't sort of return to a democratic process uh and then mali and burkina faso to other countries that are run by military governments military more or less hunters uh have threat have said they'll like stand with nigeria stand with the niger coup so it threatens to destabilize again the whole region right you'll see lots of misinformation about this on twitter i've seen a ton of stuff from like just tanky accounts who don't fully have a grasp on what's happening in this part of the world and and i think it's quite dismissive to

just use africa to further your whatever your political agenda is rather than treating this as a tragedy that will impact people living in these countries right especially in this year and where people are already often struggling to get by really struggling to make ends meet like sanctions on this country will hurt them sanctions on this country will hurt the poorest people in this country a military dictatorship rarely delivers a better quality of life for people and i would like to see people focusing on that and not on some stupid argument about decolonization like it's uh that's not what's happening here what's happening is that the powerful people have wanted more power and they've taken that at the expense of the quality of life and often the lives of other people obviously with with mali and burkina faso saying that they would like

support niger those are both governments that struggle to support themselves and defend their own people and capitals from islamist insurgencies and and other like our movement so it's you know not not a hugely i guess serious threat but still very destabilizing and again like this will have negative impacts for everyone living there, which is the thing I'd like to focus on. So I'm going to start here with Dermot introducing himself, and then we'll go from there. My name is Dermot Cosgrove.

I'm a French Foreign Legion veteran. I was six years French Foreign Legion. And since 1996, I've worked across Africa and the Middle East and a little bit of South Asia as a security consultant and field security advisor. Mainly with oil and gas companies, infrastructure companies, but also some work with the media. Nice. Yeah. So I've've been a journalist been covering that field for not quite as long but one of the things that i remember seeing in a pre-pandemic is this rise of this this russian mercenary group wagner group in africa it was just not an area of interest to any u.s publication generally stories in africa are very

hard to sell but i know that you were obviously on the ground looking at this so can you maybe just start with when you sort of first became aware of them and what you were seeing well i first became aware of them with their activities in the central African Republic when the mayhem broke up there a few years ago and the EU started sending in troops. There was quite a lot of heavy fighting. Then it stabilized

a little bit, but there was still quite a lot of fighting going on. Next thing, these Russians showed up. And it was just a little bit... I'd heard about them in operating in syria but you know next thing they were in of all places the central african republic which you know is a is kind is you know a little bit of a backwater in the middle of africa it's it's squashed in between chad rwanda burundi the congo

places like that and it's um historically it's it's been there's always been a french uh french presence there but it's always been a place where there's been quite a bit of conflict around it yeah yeah not like a consolidated uh like nation state really yeah yeah a lot of a lot of different people um it's not an identity that like fits with with identities on the ground and necessarily so yeah what was their role there what were they they doing as like a sort of mercenary or private military contracting group well they they were really operating a bit in the shadows. They had come in. Apparently, they were supposedly there to train

the governments, the Republican Guard of the Presidential Guard. But there was also word that was starting to leak out where they were involved in the diamond mines. And they were moving all over the country. They were heavily involved in the diamond mines and they you know they were they were moving all over the country

they were heavily involved in militias then words started coming out about you know there was murders on checkpoints that were joint checkpoints between government militias and Wagner group operatives and next thing this story broke where three journalists, three Russian journalists disappeared. They'd been following the activities of Wagner in Central Africa and I think the last thing that was seen of them was that they

were stopped at a checkpoint and then gone. They disappeared in the bush. And that was kind of the first peak that these are a nasty bunch of operators and there had been a company in russia years ago who were the alpha group and they had basically they were basically the afghan veterans but they operated kind of in the shady oligarch section of royal security in russia itself but vagrant group were

a completely different animal you could tell from the right from the start these were they had a different model yeah very much so and like a different model to even like like there are various like i guess like national perspectives to private military contracting like there was a time when you like you could sit down in a hotel bar in lots of places in africa and be assured that someone with a south african accent or someone who would claim to be from rhodesia would like come and talk to you and that was their industry and they would say some racist shit like it's hard for me to not like hear a south african accent and be like fucking, I don't want to have anything to do with this.

But obviously that doesn't define everyone from South Africa by any means. But yeah, there was that, there was, there were a lot of Colombian people in that industry as sort of the civil war in Colombia became, but these guys are kind of different, right?

Like they seem to be operating more like on behalf of governments or people who would be in government who would like to be in government yeah and yeah explain how they do just differently well they they seem to have taken the uh well you'll be familiar with Executive Outcomes, the South African mercenary organization. And Executive Outcomes' business model was when they operated, they went to the client and said, right, okay, we'll sort out your problem, but we want a percentage. It wasn't a paycheck or a contract, kind of a great dollar sum for a contract. It was they wanted the percentage. So they would clear, like Executive Outcomes cleared out some of the diamond fields in Angola,

and I think their going rate was something like 15%. Wagner Group seemed to have done that, taken that model, but at the same time, they've rolled in a little bit of the Blackwater type idea in Iraq, where they were operating as an arm of, you know, Blackwater were operating as an arm of the US government. They were, you know, Paul Brander's personal guard. Wagner seemed to have combined the two along with making Hollywood movies because they've made, um, they've made a couple of movies, um,

one about central Africa and they're, you know, these Rambo S kind of, um, movies. And it's, it's just, it's like,

what the hell is going on here? It's very strange. It's like, I think we maybe can't divorce it from that kind of uh like global war on terror for want of a better phrase like era yeah kind of cult that developed around the u.s special forces and and they're like it's why you can buy navy seal soap right and like they've they tried to do a thing, but with a private military contractor. Do you know, like, what's the composition of these?

Like, most, like, PMCs from, I guess, Western nations will be ex-military people. Is that the case with Wagner, or where are they getting people from? Yeah, it's... From what I've seen up there, the people they brought in is that you've got a core group of Russians who come from the more elite units. Now, they've been really assigned to the money-making contracts in Africa.

So they've operated alongside Malian troops. Malian troops. And the whole idea there is that if they do take control of zones in the Malian government, there's actually a percentage of mineral extraction and whatever in the region. There's also been

talk of their blatant intimidation and protection rackets of other Western companies working in the Sahel. So they'll rock up and kind of go, we'll look after you. ISIS or Al-Qaeda won't get you if you pay as a fee. And then if the company go, well, that's crazy.

Then suddenly attacks start happening. But they seem to be a core in Africa, at least. And in Libya, where they were heavily heavily involved there was a core group of of Russians who were there and then surrounding them there was kind of lesser specialized lesser specialized troops lesser elite troops and then in Libya especially during the during the fighting there when they fought for Haftar, they brought in Syrians. They were known to have brought in a few other different nationalities of basically guys they'd gathered in other countries and offered jobs.

Yeah. So you had, I think there was about 1,500, 2,000 Syrians at one point. Because there's these huge numbers of Wagner kind of being bandied about on maps and stuff like that on the internet. And it's smoke and mirrors. Actual proper Wagner personnel wouldn't be massive numbers. But they've got, you know, they bring in these almost auxiliaries from the likes of Syria or other places that they've got you know they bring in these almost auxiliaries from the likes

of syria or other places that they've been in right yeah and they another thing i guess that was unique about them was like with that they were obsessed with posting on telegram like i've never seen uh yeah just incredibly online uh in to include like evidence of their war crimes right which or i guess sometimes not at war at all human rights abuses would probably be more accurate yeah yeah we should probably talk about some of those just so people can get a sense of i think what i'd like people to take from this just to like uh be explicit about it i suppose is that like all this stuff was happening in africa there was no lack of evidence or people trying to say

it and it was not paid attention to by the government or media really especially in the us but also elsewhere and then every body suddenly got sad when it happened in ukraine because it was happening to people who were more valued and i think we can we'll keep fucking up like that if we keep ignoring especially Africa. I mean, I'm shocked in a way that there hasn't been heavier sanctions put on, because there's been two UN investigations into their activities. They were complicit in the murder or actively

participated in the murder of over 300 millions in a village only a few months ago. There's been a UN investigation. They've been found to have been there, been participants in it, and there's nothing. And you're not seeing any UN sanctions. You're not seeing anything going on. The world seems to be turning a blind eye to it. going on. The world seems to be turning a blind eye to it.

In Libya, the BBC had a report, a special report, where they'd actually found the iPad of one of the Wagner operators with tons and tons and tons of evidence as to what they were doing, numerous human rights abuses, and again, it's just like, yeah, that's fine uh we won't really worry about it oops ukraine yeah and it's it seems shocking to people i think if you're just a consumer of you know the new york times or something wow where did these guys come from they're terrible but they've been there for years decade maybe and uh and because our news is very focused on certain

countries and certain things it came as a shock to people and maybe you could explain like obviously the human rights abuses began in syria um i don't think i need to detail there are videos that people can find on their own time if they want to. Some brutal executions and such. But yeah, could you at least sort of enumerate some instances where they've done that in Africa? I can think of three or four countries off the top of my head. Well, there's Mali as the instant one. There's the big one, which I think was 300 civilians were murdered.

They basically were locked up in a village. I think it's Muna or Munia is the name of the village in Mali. They rocked up with Malian troops and proceeded to hunt for terrorists and murdered 300 people, including beheadings and whatnot. And that was, there was absolutely 100% guaranteed there was Wagner operators did murder and behead local villagers. Six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, there was an attack against a convoy which

included Wagner personnel and their response was to rock into a village and execute 10 people. So that's two cases that, again, unless you're kind of aware of the certain sources that are available and looking at local journalists who are in these countries, it's not popping up anywhere. It's just not coming to light. You know, there's Central Africa, there's been rapes, murders, there's been mass rapes, there's, you know, there's been executions, torture, you know, it's just off the charts.

In Mali, there is actually a known, and it's becoming famous in Mali, there is the torture house inside one of their bases in Mali. And it's widely known it's there. The multinational organizations, the UN, the EU, all know about its presence. They all have the evidence. And yet there's still nothing being done. Yeah. And I think it's easy.

A thing that happened, if you remember when there were riots in france uh was that people would be like oh well like you know france is in all these countries in africa which obviously comes from a legacy of colonialism which was violent and terrible but uh there are other forces like i remember someone positing that like mali had been liberated from french control uh france left but like that these guys came like it wasn't as if uh you know there was a you know a democratic transition of power or you know like a desirable outcome and i think yeah well i mean i mean i mean even this morning they with the with the coup in Niger,

there was a tweet put up by one of the Russian Twitter accounts claiming that the coup had been orchestrated and managed by Wagner, who were liberating Niger from the colonialists. It's just like... Yeah. They actually believe their own... Do they actually believe their own stuff? It's just like yeah they actually think they're all you just do they actually believe their own stuff it's just amazing well it's very well it i don't know if they believe it but it seems to be very well targeted to get people to believe it online right like there's this whole yeah yeah

sort of hammer and sickle in bio community that thinks that what russia is doing in ukraine is denazifying and when you couple with a lack of media coverage of africa and a lack of knowledge of what's happened there it's very understandable that people sort of don't quite grasp it i mean i think that's that's that's an education thing and a media thing yeah but it's i think a thing people may not be aware of is the one thing that has been reported a lot is the heavy heavy losses have taken in ukraine right often in like they're almost penal battalions that they have like um they'll have convicts and things like that yeah can you explain like i think this might lead people to believe that they're not capable of doing what they've done in Africa for a long time. But that's, that's not correct, right?

They're still sending, I guess, operators to Africa, they're still doing that terrible shit in Africa. Yeah, there's been even recently, there was a lot of flights being being picked up, Even recently, there was a lot of flights being picked up, moving in and out of Africa, which were Wagner-associated aircraft. And at first, this happened around the time that they made the move back into Russia towards Putin. And there was a lot of questions as to, is this a pullout of personnel to support what's going on in Russia? And then it stopped and the flights started coming back in. It looks like there's been a ramp up again in a lot of African countries.

So it looks like they're upping the personnel. Now, whether it's they've cut some kind of deal where they're now just going to be a moneymaker. I'm not quite sure, but that will remain to be seen. If they have orchestrated Niger, which is possible, then it's clearly kind of a ramp up of operations. They're very, very skilled in whipping up local populations because they whipped up anti-French sentiment in both Mali and in Burkina Faso. And even though the French did bomb and carry out drone strikes,

which did kill civilians and stuff, but the massive reaction to these incidents was definitely by Wagner at the time. It is a very lucrative, almost informal empire for Russia, right? It's a very lucrative way for them to continue this process of extractive colonialism and violent subjugation of African people, often in ways that are not that distinct from the colonialism that we saw you know 150 200 years ago and the real like you've detailed brutal uh human rights abuses and all extends all to just extract wealth and resources from africa in a very similar way

to what we've seen before but in a less formal way, I guess, than with French and British colonialism. Yeah, it is. It's very much a corporate imperialism as opposed to a nationalistic imperialism in a way. And the money is flowing into the pockets of the oligarchs and stuff in Russia. the oligarchs and stuff in Russia. I mean, I was in a bit of a discussion this morning about Niger, and someone made a comment about there being, oh, there's not the, if you look at them, the Sahel map and the mineral wealth, that, oh, there's

more attractive kind of mineral kind of extraction further south into the Congo. But the thing is, and I've worked in Mauritania, you know, you have Mauritania, which is three times the size of France with a population of 4 million. And yet only 1% of the country has actually been serrated for its mineral wealth. And it already has massive gold, iron and iron ore deposits and copper deposits if you take that if you go over into burkina faso it has huge gold deposits which are under explored it's relatively the vast majority would be artisanal mining the same with mali

and if you go across into niger you've got the huge uranium mine, which is a keystone of the French nuclear industry at Arlette, which would be worth a fortune to whoever would control the territory. colonialist, I suppose, manual to what Wagner are doing. But it's very much a corporate model, as opposed to coming in and establishing governance. They're quite happy to leave administration and governments and stuff like that to local governments. But they want the mineral wealth. And they will manipulate and and embed themselves with the local military um who you know if you you know you've got mali it's it's governed now by a military military junta niger is likely to be the same and you can have brooklyn ofasso it's not quite far off that either and you know so they're if you don't in these countries

if you don't have the backing of the military you've got nothing you're not going to be in power so yeah and if they control the military and then they control those in power right and as long as that's amenable like you say to their desire to extract wealth and they don't care and yeah and it's and you know the the other part of it is they're they're bringing in all the toys for the for these go for these governments as well they're importing drones they're importing weaponry helicopters you know yeah let's talk about that a little bit because that is something they seem to have like eric prince tried to get himself a plane, right, and he didn't really do very well. But their access to military hardware is unprecedented. So where are they able to obtain all that?

Oh, they're definitely in collusion with... I mean, whatever tensions there are in Ukraine between the Russian military and Wagner, there's definitely not any tensions between Wagner and the Russian military when it comes to securing hardware for Africa. Yeah. I mean, there was brand new Mi-24s unloaded in Mali only last year. And they made a very, very big show of the French leaving and these helicopters arriving.

So, you know, there's been Turkish-built drones are starting to, are coming in left, right and center across all with the aid and shipment by Wagner. So they're, they have incredible, with Russian-produced equipment, they have incredible access to it. And it can only come from one place. It can only come from the military. And we've seen Russian troops arrive in Ukraine with weapons that are 50 years old because there's nothing on their bases. Well, kind of, it's very clear that there's nothing on their basis because these weapons are showing are being transported for use in africa yeah they've done the same in myanmar right they're still selling planes they're still selling munitions there and it's yeah yeah

like it's it's almost like a uh i don't know there's like a corporate and a state structure and sometimes it seems like especially well we see that in the u.s too i guess but they're competing they're competing desires they're parallel one doesn't one doesn't have sort of oversight of the other one thing i do want to get into is this culture that exists within wagner that is it's an extreme glorification of violence, right? And a glorification of sometimes of Nazism, of other sort of related kind of things that I guess they see as like warrior societies. You can see a lot in the telegram.

Can you speak a little bit to that? Yeah, there's definitely been an element that these guys have been recruited from right wing in the Russian military and we already know that some of these units were heavily involved

with the Russian football hooligans who had a very hard right leaning anyhow and we've seen it's been hugely in evidence across some of the towns where there's been fighting in Libya, where Wagner have left graffiti of the Sonnenrand and a lot of these other Nazi symbols.

from the top down. I mean, the executions, beatings, the torture of local non-white people that come in contact with. We've seen it in Syria, brutal executions. It's very much a white supremacist far right. It's not even undertones because it's so blatant. It's right in your face. I mean, they just don't hide it on their telegram channels they don't hide it where they go you know we've seen military patches that they're wearing which are you know extreme right uh

graffiti they leave behind which is extreme right you know even i haven't seen the the movies they've but i believe they're they there are actually, there's a lot of imagery there as well which would be right up the street of neo-fascist organisations as well. Yeah, it certainly seems that they're pretty explicit about it and no one's, they don't

care. I mean, Gregorzian supposedly called it Wagner because it was Hitler's favourite composer, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, like some of the, there's crossover between some of the other Russian far right organizations and some of these units, these farright units who are in Ukraine and Wagner. There is a cross-pollination of personnel as well.

Yeah, yeah, it certainly seems. They sort of go back and forth with the military. I think people would say it's more of a distinct entity than it perhaps is. Yeah, they're not a... There's guys from Wagner will show up with other organizations from time to time,

but then they seem to kind of drift back to Wagner. And seeing that especially in Ukraine, we saw this

as well in Libya, there was guys that were identified who were operating with Wagner in Libya

who definitely had operated with other organisations as well. I think there was a number of them that had been photographed that had actually been ID'd during some of the football violence in Marseille during the European Cup a few years ago.

So they're in this circle and they are moving over and back between different organizations but again it's it's a massive far-right entity and yeah it's yeah it's part of this giant cluster of the sort of armed extreme right yeah has been yeah sort of festering in for a long time unnoticed by a lot of people i wonder like yeah yeah yeah you've mentioned like if people aren't paying attention they won't see things which i think is right because it's not you know it's not on primetime tv or tv at all where would you like

where would you go for coverage especially if let's's say, parts of Africa where you're working? I would use Twitter quite a lot to look at what local journalists are doing in places like Mali and Niger. I think I started off using Twitter in Yemen when I was working there because I was 50 kilometers from a town that was entirely controlled by Al-Qaeda. And one of them was on Twitter. They were all posting on Twitter. And there were some fantastic local journalists who were posting on Twitter as well. So you got to see in almost real time what was happening in these places. And when there was no other media, really.

And I carried on using Twitter. And then because I do write a security report, digging around, and there's a couple of online analysts and OS people who are on who cover kind of global conflict but they do cover quite a lot in the sahel okay yeah so you would have like the likes of war noir and people like that were very good on the art side of things yeah he's very good at uh he keeps an eye on myanmar as well yeah um yeah there's a few useful accounts I think you do share them on your own account sometimes as well I've seen I do yeah from time to time I'll share them on my own yeah um what is yours if people want to follow along see pictures of your

feet it's it's uh dermot and cosgrove all right so d-e-r-m-o-t-n and then cost of c-o-s-g-o-r-o-b yeah wonderful it is one of those things that like we talk about you know like in many ways you're where people spend too much time on twitter and you know when it dies it'll be nice but like it is something i was talking to colleagues in rwanda uh you know a while ago but i remember when we're going to rwanda a while ago. I remember when going to Rwanda, one of the things that they ask you is, are you verified on Twitter? This was before you could buy a verification for $7 or whatever. It actually allows

a lot of people to work, especially in parts of Africa. It gives them sort of, especially in places where the government is hostile to journalism, it gives them an outside audience that will one hopes, you know, make them a little bit safer and also to be able to share these things yeah yeah yeah and losing that like there's no other platform that does that no there isn't and it's a pity that it's that it's actually gone down the road it's gone down i mean i would be

i work a month on month off so i would be would be a big Twitter user when I'm at work because I'm gathering information from my reports and stuff. And at home, I'm not on it so much. But for local journalists and activists, it's fantastic. The whole idea is fantastic because they are able to get that message out they are more visible um in countries where they've got repressive regimes and it keeps an eye on them and you know the more visibility they have it wouldn't be 100 safe but they are a little bit safer yeah like i've seen it with colleagues in

myanmar as well just sort of it's only out out yeah to the world you know the irrawaddy and all these other publications which are um yeah able to get things out and lots of those people are in hiding you know like they can't operate in cities and they're able to get things out to the world so like for that alone it's valuable and and yet it's a shame that it seems to valuable and and yeah it's a shame that it seems to be going the way it's going yeah i think i think there was even the you know during the well even currently there's still some um still some people in afghanistan who are it's their only outlet to get information out about what's happening under the taliban regime yeah

yeah i have uh in touch with a few people in afghanistan yeah that it's you know that would all be lost i wouldn't have ever found them otherwise um or some of them know through friends yeah um i want to finish up by asking like this the stuff that wagner has done in africa is repulsive stuff it's done in syria is disgusting like what if you had your your like if you had your way like how can people or how can governments or what can we do to stop this kind of you know human rights abuse um i think there's as much pressure should we can that can be put on um in states obviously with congressmen and senators that if people go to them there in the uk government you know i'm irish you know we have a long history of peacekeeping and stuff

like that and you know investigations of human rights abuses so you know it's putting pressure on your politicians that action needs to be taken. And the UN, I'm not a massive fan of the UN because they have been so ineffectual in places. My brother was in Lebanon on three separate occasions with the UNIFIL force and came home and described

it as one-hand clapping because they even hamstrung their own people. But there isn't outside outside of the EU, which can enforce sanctions on them, there needs to be massive sanctions on anyone associated with Wagner. Yeah.

And there needs to be more... I mean, the EU has pretty much been kicked out of the Sahel. There needs to be more... a better relationship built up with these governments. As repulsive as some of these governments are, there is no real other choice. But there has to be a way

where Wagner has to be highlighted. If you know journalists, get to journalists. Ask them, why aren't these questions being asked? Why is it only being the focus? And I'm a big supporter of Ukraine, but why is it only since Ukraine that we're seeing Wagner on televisions?

Yeah. You know, they've been murdering people. They were putting, you know, they were booby-trapping kids' toys in Libya as they retreated out of uh out of uh western Libya yet none of that appeared you know the the one BBC report and it came out and it died afterwards which you know is you know horrendous you know this needs to be they need to be hammered left right and center yeah and I think a lot you're right a lot of that comes from if you find

editors you can ask them why they haven't covered this when it was happening in Africa. They were putting human beings in holes in the ground. Yeah, I mean, if you're on Twitter, jump on Twitter, follow the editors' news organisations and tweet at them.

Why aren't you covering this? Yeah, make them say or make people explain why this doesn't matter as much. And the same with your politicians. I know sometimes writing to politicians can seem ineffectual, but I can't put sanctions on them. And I can't...

I don't have the ability to project force. Yeah. And there's nothing that Wagner produced that you can kind of go, well, I'm not going to buy this product because it impacts Wagner. They don't care. They're not selling to the consumer. They're stealing to put in their own pockets.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, I think that was wonderful, David. Is there anything else you want to plug or anywhere else people can find you, learn more about the stuff? Well, I'm on Twitter is probably the best place. I have kind of promised myself to do a little bit more kind of on the highlighting the conflict in because I work in North Africa. And even though I'm not in the Sahel itself

the Sahel has been it's always been a massive area of interest for me so I've kind of I probably will kind of flip my Twitter around a bit more to reflect what's going on across the Sahel

so I'm on there I've got an instagram account but that's only really if you like pictures of dogs yeah that's uh that's what it's good for yeah well thank you very much for your time we appreciate it and uh yeah hopefully people learn a bit more about this Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes,

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It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world

as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head

and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here. Yes, this is what I sound like today. This is Shereen. Just go with it. If you listen to the sheep episode, I sounded much worse. So this is, I sound great today, IMO. But yeah, thank you for listening today. I'm excited to talk about what I want to talk about for the next two days because it's something that I've always wanted to kind of just like open up as more of a conversation. And I'm so grateful to have an author and amazing person. They've just

written a book called To the Ghosts Who Are Still Living and it's out now. You can go get it. Ami Weintraub, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to talk to you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk to you too. There's a particular reason why I asked you to come on the show. I specifically wanted to talk to a Jewish anti-Zionist. So I want to approach the conversation as if people are really unfamiliar with Zionism, because I think most people are. Can you maybe just start by telling me, like, what is Zionism? Yeah, definitely.

telling me like what is Zionism? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I said to Shireen before as well, like I am not particularly like an expert on Zionism or Israel-Palestine. So also just want to recommend that listeners also go out and find the experts, find the materials that you're interested in if this conversation sparks your interest. Yeah. And take my thoughts as just one thought in the mix of all the thoughts um so yeah when I was

thinking about like defining Zionism I was thinking about sort of like the origins of Zionism and like how did we even get to that place yeah um and Zionionism for me reflects um and i think is like this political desire to have a jewish state and to have that jewish state like on the land of israel is how um is how zionism has materialized in its formation. And prior to like the actual political movement of Zionism, there has been like a connection of the Jewish people to that specific land. It just hadn't materialized into like an actual movement to establish a state on that land um so there's like there's been like a yearning and like a memory and like a collective sense of um connection to like jerusalem to that

piece of land um but it was only in like the 1800s when there was nation state building occurring in general in Europe specifically, in Eastern Europe, that the movement for Zionism started to develop in the form that we have today. And a lot of that was because one reason like Jews were saying, oh, wow, like German people are creating a wow like german people are creating a state or french people are creating a state like we are people we should have a state um and at the same time jews were also being excluded from citizenship in a lot of the actual like newly formed countries that they were living in um so there was like this dispossession also from place where they were and matched with a general like rise of anti-semitism as well so i think all of those things kind of crystallized into creating a actual political movement around that kind of nascent like more like religious spiritual yearning yeah um and then that formed into like

many different types of zionism like more militaristic zionism more socialist zionism religious zionism etc um and that's all kind of yeah made its way to become Israel yeah yeah how how would you differentiate all of those like the cultural versus religious versus political like how would you personally differentiate them I know you're not an expert but just like speaking from experience yeah I have to think on that it's complicated I would say because it feels like to me from just reading about the history of zionism it it did kind of start in a religious like origin but it became more political am i reading that right or yeah yeah i think like yeah that's how it can be pretty confusing i think about understanding like zionism in general is just like where did this even come from like how did these like

especially zionism like originating more from like Ashkenazi, like European Jews, how did this even come to be? And seeing it as something that like the longing and the connection to the land being part of Jewish culture and religion, but that only turning into a desire for a nation state like at that certain moment um so the like different categories of like religious zionism versus political versus militaristic versus socialists were kind of like the ways that zionism was there was like different movements of Zionism in Europe and Eastern Europe at the time of its origins. So it's kind of like referring to more of its historical relationship.

And then that still influences the politics today in contemporary, like I'll just say state of Israel and also many like Israel, Palestine, but speaking about Zionism, that feels more relevant. so many like israel palestine but speaking about zionism that feels more relevant um so you still have like socialist zionists who are more on the left then you have like more like right-wing religious zionists who probably have more historical origins in like more militaristic zionism um and religious zionists who maybe are like we are here for the religious reasons of being jews on this land versus like a socialist scientist like their framework was more like we want to create this more socialist utopia sort of vision um versus a more political militaristic scientist their original vision was like we want to dominate this land and have right yeah political power yeah it feels like in recent times it's kind of leaned more in that direction only because of uh i don't know the state of the

world but when you look up when you look up zionism it's defined i'm just going to read what i found and please interrupt me if you're like actually no um when you look up zionism it was defined as an organized nationalist movement generally considered to have been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. However, the history of Zionism began earlier and is intertwined with the Jewish history and Judaism as a whole. The organizations of, I'm going to probably mispronounce this, but Hoveve Zion, the Lovers of Zion. How would you say? Hoveve Zion? Yeah.

Yeah. This organization was held as like the forerunner of the modern Zionist ideals. And they were responsible for 20 Jewish towns in Palestine between 1870 and 1897. This is from just online history. And at the core of the Zionist ideology was this traditional aspiration for a Jewish national home through the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. And this was to be facilitated by the Jewish diaspora. Herzl apparently sought an independent Jewish state, usually defined as a secular state with a Jewish majority population,

and he wrote a 1896 pamphlet to describe exactly what he wanted. and though he did not live to witness it israel was established and so what he wanted did come to fruition even though in my opinion it was not done in a just way uh but um that's history for you but yeah i think the actual core of it is really understandable and and true you know like of course every marginalized community wants a safe haven and a place where they can all go to I think my biggest what I what I really dislike about the where it is now where Zionism is now is just how much it erases everyone else that's already there. It's almost as if Palestine was like an empty field, you know? And I think a lot of Zionists today kind of erase that history and erase that, like, they massacred hundreds of

people and they displaced over 750,000 people. It's called the Nekeba. It's called the catastrophe. That's what Palestinians refer to it as. And I feel like Zionists tend to not, I mean, from what I understand, it's as if that isn't like real history. And from what I've read or like what I've heard from people

that have grown up in Israel, the history that they learn is also a little bit selective in what they learn. But, yeah, that's—I've just been—I've been reading a lot about Zionism for a long time. Yeah. But it's nice to have someone actually, like, with experience in it because I can only learn so much from the internet and from like secondhand stuff. I feel like that like, like when we look at like the early Zionists and it's like, oh yeah, like these desires to like have sovereignty and have autonomy and agency for your people who are being marginalized in your country like are in these lands that they live reasonable like that totally makes sense and that and that it has to like you said be also seen through the lens of like the actual history that occurred which is materially trying

to like build a nation-state as like part of your people's liberation is going to involve lots of oppression and violence um and that's kind of where I ended up like um yeah like understanding the history of Zionism like being able to have empathy for that original um message and then just really being like that's what led me into like anarchism ultimately was saying that this desire for a nation-state to be like a liberatory project um is kind of always going to be flawed in a way so actually like i don't kind of said like you know Jewish like agency sovereignty and like liberation like we actually deserve better than that you know we deserve to not actually be like held within the confines of like what is possible in a nation state as I think like all people

deserve yeah totally so that's kind of how I've come to this point now. No, and I really want to talk to you more about how you've landed where you are with your beliefs. But yeah, I think what also gets forgotten is that pre-1948, there were Jewish people in Palestine, you know, and Christian people, everyone got along. I'm from Syria, but even in Syria,

everyone like in all, in most Middle Eastern eastern countries there was a mix of all these religions and they all got along and i think that's what really angers me when it comes to like basically like the news saying it's like this ancient religious conflict because that's just simply not true and i think that's a huge defense that a lot of like militant zionists have where it's like this eternal cultural religious war and it's simply just false i think that's something that always bothers me um i just want to give a little bit more history just to bring us to like current day just i think this stuff is a little bit interesting so in 1975 the un general assembly they passed resolution 3379 which designated zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination however this resolution was repealed in 1991 by replacing Resolution 3379 with Resolution 46-86. And this new resolution, it was adopted on December 16th of 1991.

It revoked the determination in the previous Resolution 3379, determining Zionism as racist. And Israel had made this revocation of this resolution a condition of its participation in the madrid peace conference which was a conference that was held at the end of 1991 and it was also raised under pressure of the administration of president bush papa i just find that funny no hw bush i'm sorry this is not funny stuff i just this is how I cope. But basically the revocation was simply this one sentence. The General Assembly decides to revoke the determination contained in its Resolution 3379 of 10th of December 1975.

And this motion was supported by 111 nations, including the 90 nations who had sponsored it in the first place. And it was opposed by 25 nations and abstained by 13 nations. And I just thought that was incredibly fascinating. It also just like illustrates the power that Israel has always kind of like held, like as far as like a political state in like world affairs and if you've listened to my previous episodes then you know that at the current state and time is in like for decades leading up to this the government in Israel is extremely far right and Zionist to the point where it's extremely racist and they've built an apartheid state based around their Zionism.

Basically, Zionist values serve as the ideological foundation of Israel. I think that's kind of a big part of why Israel was created in the first place, was this hope for a place where everyone was safe. Obviously, they kind of became twisted and they went about it in a terrible way. But I do understand what you mean also by having empathy for the original feeling of it, because I feel the same. I think every marginalized community wants what the original idea of Zionism had. I think Zionist today is defined so differently. And I think that's really unfortunate because it didn't have to become a racist ideology but it did i've been rambling too much and we're going to take our first break when we come back i want to talk to you about you so brb and we're back ami take it away what

you had a response for the the thing i said about how zionist values they serve as the ideological foundation of israel yeah and i think one of the things i try to like make a point of kind of as like a jewish anarchist specifically like what i was saying prior is that that's again like kind of just the inevitable well in my mind like the inevitable outcome of like a state is that there is going to be some amount of like division of population like oppression of a certain class of people or certain group of people a consolidation of power in the hands of a few so again for me like that's where this like the original idea of like let's have a place where jews can have like safety and sovereignty and cultural like flourishing

like attaching that to a state was like kind of always bound to fail but not inherently not exactly like not necessarily because that desire is like a wrong desire yeah and then when we pile in kind of like like other people's interests in terms of like the west having like an interest in having like israel being like a friendly like i consider like a proxy state for the west like in the middle east where um they can you know like we've seen like send their police officers to be trained in these ways but also the west is benefiting from that exchange they have a little hold in the middle east like they always wanted to exactly so their interest is to like maintain israel like as something that they can have influence in and have

this kind of control over and like to make it creepier like the Christian um like evangelical Zionism like Christian Zionism is also like a huge influence in the U.S. there was just a really interesting documentary I can't remember the name now but that was released like a year or two ago about this and christian zionists actually make up like a larger lobbying body than like jewish zionists in the u.s just so backwards because they there's just so many more um evangelicals and their interest in the state of Israel is that Jews will return there and then the rapture will happen. Wait, can you, yeah, I actually want to talk to you about this

because I 100% think you know more about this than I do because I do, I have heard that there are a lot of evangelical Christians that are huge supporters of Zionism. Yeah. One, can you speak to like, if you know how that even like where that uh i don't know not solid i guess like solidarity with zionism came about and also uh what they

believe like the whole rapture thing please i would love to know more um yeah again like i highly recommend people like watch whatever this documentary is just google like Christian Zionism because I've mostly learned from that and from my own like internet wormholes um I've just looked it up and I think it's till kingdom come 2020 film right yeah cool and so what I understand is there is this like somewhere in the Christian world but like it has roots at least in the evangelical world right now this idea in the rapture which i don't know that much about but apparently the rapture will involve jews returning to the land of israel and jesus returning and

killing all of the jews oh my god yeah that's why they support zionism that is why they support zionism um so they want up yeah so they want jews to go back to the land the state of israel in order for them to ultimately like be killed and go to hell be all in one place and be conveniently killed yeah and so that and that is one of the major lobbying arms like when we're talking about like the us like sending money to um to israel and like i just saw recently like like most of the republicans are like supporting um this yeah the aid going to israel and it's like why are they doing that when generally they don't really support jews you know like republicans are not like bffs with jews like

they don't really i mean inherently that way of seeing zionism is 100 racist like it's yeah like people are or not not even just that anti-semitic you know how anti-semitic yeah that's really the defense a lot of the time when you have like a Palestinian politician talk about Israel or anything. Not even Zionism, they just mentioned Israel and they get labeled anti-Semitic. But that is 100% anti-Semitic. It's actually anti-Semitic. Like that is, wow. And it's like, it doesn't get noticed because like, I feel like so much that like white Christians do in this country just like gets very overlooked as like something that actually has something that's actually worth like noticing and something that's actually worth like critiquing. So I am trying to understand, like, how did we get to this place? Like, how did we get to this point where like, yeah, Israel is being supported and doing what it is doing right now, and it's people who actually just want us to die.

It becomes very convoluted and it again motivates my anti-Zionism in a lot of ways too. Yeah. Can you tell me as little and as many details as you want, but how did you come to identify as an anti-Zionist? How did you embrace that definition for yourself? I guess there's a lot of like aspects to that answer. One thing is like, I do really care about like Jewish people being safe and Jewish people having our culture, like Jewish people being able to express our culture and be able to express who we are and I think yeah like being two or three generations from like the holocaust and just like feeling like the intensity of that loss of life and land and place has just like given me that feeling of like this is really important and then also like living at a time right now in the U.S. where like anti-Semitism is violent and I've experienced that violence and it is like a threat to like my sense of safety

and my ability to express my culture I've just been like very obsessed with like what does actually achieving those goals look like and when I look at the state of Israel and I see all 18 year olds are conscripted into the army, which is like literally like my great grandfather left Russia because he didn't want to be conscripted into the Russian army. And a lot of Jews, Ashkenazi Jews in the US like have that story. Like that's not liberation. When I see that like a lot of Jews in Israel have the choice of either being like very secular or being extremely religious when even like a lot of more diverse um like Jewish cultures have been assimilated into like

this one monolithic culture languages have been lost like practices have been lost like that's not like our culture being able to flourish and also the violence done to Palestinians like in the name of this state in the name of this liberation like nothing nothing is worth that violence ever so all of those things have kind of coalesced into my Jewish anarchism of also analyzing that through the state apparatus itself and being like oh yeah states will do this we need to think more creatively we need to think in a way that builds actual solidarity between jewish community and palestinian community and other marginalized people and all of that has kind of just coalesced into yeah jewish anti-zionism like just making sense on all of those levels yeah no I thank you for saying all of that

I it's true I think nothing is worth all that violence and also I think unfortunately like when you have any kind of desire no matter how pure it is because I think the the basis of Zionism has a pure desire of safety and sovereignty. But when you have a desire and you add politics to it, or you add, I don't know, any kind of like country war, when you add like modern day limitations and structures, that's when it becomes something else. It devolves into something that it really shouldn't be like i think what disturbs me the most um is how many young people are like rallying in the

streets like a lot of like far-right uh groups in israel will be like death to all arabs or like they'll say the most heinous things as well as do the most heinous things but i think it's unfortunate because i think even they kind of lost what zionism was supposed to be about it's not supposed to be about being only there just you and killing everybody else or or seeing someone else a second as second citizens or anything but no i yeah thank you for saying that. The army thing is a really good thing to bring up as well, just because Palestine has no army. So it's a little bit silly to demand everyone even join the army

for this fake imaginary bad guy. Not that there is not, there's definitely terrorist-like activity on both sides, I would say. But the vast majority is like this imaginary big bad wolf that does not exist and is like powered by US and western media totally and that's where I start to think like I don't know if this is like conspiracy or if this is real but I start to think like who is this actually serving you know like who is it serving to like literally yeah put young people into a war every and every generation that comes through this country and like is it mostly serving like U.S. and other like western interests

to be able to yeah have that land be their proxy state um and i don't have enough research to like back that claim up in a way that i would like to that's that's like my next like research yeah wormhole is to try and yeah just understand like that dynamic because i think something else that i have a lot of questions about too and like the formation of the state of israel is like yeah understanding that like england did or like I don't know Great Britain England I think England they they were the ones who like partitioned that land and like they were the ones who ultimately signed it over yeah the British are responsible for 99% of the atrocities of the world no no thank you no and sometimes like forgetting that part of the story kind of

almost like contributes to this kind of like anti-semitic rhetoric of like oh the jews are this like all-powerful people who were just able to conquer this land on their own it's like a conspiracy theory fuel yeah when it's like no like actually like the jews at that time did not have like global power in that way like england britain was like here you go here's this land in the same way that they did like so much of the other yeah um colonized places in that world in in the world um yeah i mean the british are responsible for every bad thing and like for me like that bigger lens feels harder to talk about sometimes because i also like am also holding that like jewish american support for the state of israel like fuels also the atrocities happening against palestinians jewish support for the idf in israel etc like

obviously are responsible and like i worry that if we don't look at these broader influences that we're not actually going to understand like how to systemically stop this you know yeah you have to understand how you got somewhere to like determine how to get out of where you are right yeah not to be too morbid or like to make this connection but like Britain doing that it's almost what the evangelical Christians want to do right yeah exactly all you guys stay here let's just shove them on this place that we don't really care about and here you go like it doesn't even feel like genuine support you know what I mean like I think in an alternate universe Jewish people were welcomed into nations and Britain

was like opening their doors to immigrants I think that that is a much more kind notion in my opinion. But what I do understand the desire to do otherwise, but it is interesting to connect those two now that we've talked about both of them and how similar that is. And on that too, like the most disturbing thing that I've figured out in a while in relation to this origin history of Zionism. So in the beginning of the Nazi power in Germany,

in Germany specifically, before they wanted to kill the Jews, they just wanted the Jews to leave. So they were like, just go and i saw this i was in berlin last summer and i saw this um picture of nazis creating like a travel agency isn't the right word but like a travel depot that was specifically said like go to palestine and was like directing jews to go to palestine so like in that context like the state of israel then has like a totally different like um frame of like origin story almost yeah of being the place where like the world could send their jews yeah when they didn't want them in

their home countries and and for me that's also like a place that I've really fixated on is like wait you can't just like say you're in solidarity with Jews because you created this country and we all have to go there like you actually have to stop being anti-semitic you know you actually have to like you should work on that first yeah like let us like live in your countries and be safe and and it relates back to the evangelicals too right it's like they're all about like being christian zionist and like supporting israel but they're also like very anti-semitic in this country so it's like it feels like a similar sort of dynamic of like, yeah, yeah, we support you because we want you to go there. We want you to leave this country and go

there and we're not going to actually make it better for you in the place where you want to be, which is your family's home here, you know? So like, that's another frame that I've been working in, which makes me just kind of have a bigger question of like global responsibility for what's happening in Israel-Palestine right now and how does like this global resistance to actually addressing anti-Semitism like play into the continued violence against Palestinians. Yeah. And just to be clear, being an anti-Zionist is not anti-Semitic. However, it is important to remember that just because someone is an anti-Zionist doesn't mean they're not anti-Semitic. It's an important reminder for those engaging in anti-Zionist organizing to also be doing work around anti-Semitism, both internally

and the world at large, because both solidarity with Palestinians, as well as ensuring that we're interrogating the anti-Semitism in our lives and the world, is vitally important in this moment. Now, I was trying to divide these two episodes up. You already know this, I've told you, but just for the audience, like I wanted this first episode to be a little bit more about the history and about how we got here. And tomorrow's episode, you'll hear about what I really want to talk to you about.

It's like your work in ancestral healing and how that's a huge part of your work and also the community that you've built in certain organizations. I think that is so critical when it comes to anti-Zionism or having solidarity with Palestinians because that's what you need to even make change happen, right? So on that note, I'm going to wrap it up here for now.

Ami, can you plug, like, if people want to know more about you and your work, where they can find you? Yeah, so again, I'm Ami, can you plug like if people want to know more about you and your work, where they can find you? Yeah. So again, I'm Ami Weintraub and I just came out with this book, To the Ghosts Who Are Still Living. You can buy it through my publisher, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Or you can also look up my website, AmiWeintraub.com. website amiweintra.com um and the book touches on like not zionism specifically but kind of the themes of like place and land and um where do jews belong in the world yeah and uh their website also has a list of their other works which i highly recommend you seek out i think voices like ami's like yours are really important when it comes to

talking about, I don't know, changing the world for the better in general, not even about anti-Zionism, but like even just trying to assess something in a more critical way, in a more personal way, even thinking about it being ancestral healing, I think is so critical. So thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. I'll talk to you tomorrow for you guys. I'm going to keep talking to them right now for me. But yeah, tune in tomorrow for a continuation of this lovely conversation. Bye. and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High

is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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. with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. Yes, I still sound like this. It was the same day for me. But thank you

for joining me again. Today is part two of a conversation I'm having with Ami Weintraub about anti-Zionism and why it's important. And today I want to talk about their work and how much of anti-Zionism is actually based in ancestral healing and yeah I want to just tell you guys a bunch of good stuff because Ami's work I think is really important so welcome back hi thanks for having me hello of course I think when we first started talking about wanting to record together you mentioned that talking about ancestral healing was really integral in even your definition of anti-Zionism. Can you kind of explain why?

Sure. Yeah, I feel like maybe it's also like the other way around. Like my coming into like anti-Zionism led me into a path of ancestral healing because I think something that we talked about like in the last episode is that a lot of the motivation for at least like the early origins of Zionism was the desire for safety and the desire to like have cultural expression like Jewish cultural expression be possible and so I started to think like why were those the desires at the time and sort of moving back into my family's history which so much of it has been like silenced because of like the pain of the history and also in some ways because we've been told you know like you have a place you have

the home you live in now and you have the state of Israel and you don't have to think about where you came from you know and so a lot of my work has been kind of like opening up that conversation of no like but where where did my great-grandparents like actually come from like What was that place? Why did they leave? What is the longing that we have for safety, the longing we have for home? And what does it look like to actually turn that longing back to, yeah, for my family, our homes in Eastern Europe? And that's kind of where I've been positioning a lot of my work these days. Yeah, I think you bring up a good point about how even having Israel there almost erases the history of a lot of Jewish people, right? Because it kind of just like, yeah, it's almost as if like,

oh, this is where we all come from and this is where we all end up. And it's just simply not true. Can you tell me, well, well first could you define ancestral healing to me and like what that means to you I feel like for me ancestral healing has been the process of opening up to the voices of my ancestors and allowing them to really speak to me and starting to see that like the pain and the grief and yeah, just the sorrow that I was carrying in my own body wasn't just my own. Yeah. Sometimes looks like learning a ton about like a specific Jewish practice that perhaps someone in my family at some point did and we've now forgotten.

Or sometimes it looks like researching on Wikipedia, like the flowers that grew in my family's like shuttle in eastern europe um and sometimes it looks like just crying and being sad about like the things that we've lost um and sometimes it looks like talking to my ancestors like in meditation or trance states um and offering them back the healing that I'm doing in this generation. Yeah, I love that. I love especially the flowers, I think, really got me. Those little details are so important and really define a place. I mean, I think ancestral healing is so important for most people in general. I mean, I think ancestral healing is so important for like most people in general. I think it's kind of taken, maybe not taken too seriously by some normies.

I don't know. But even for me, I mean, our histories are very different. But I think what you said about like recognizing that like your pain is not just your own, like you're carrying a of a burden generation from generation to generation and I think acknowledging that and learning more about yourself anyone can do that you don't it doesn't have to be a certain I don't know I think that's what I always kind of want to get across that like even for me I found ancestral healing to be really important I define it in a different way, but it's still, like, I don't know a lot about my family's history. So that's been a little bit like a huge origin of that is because like, there's a lot of confusion there, but I love that you are

taking it as like an internal journey and also like recognizing that there's a connection there. I think people don't look at it as much as I want them to, I guess. I think it's a little bit too petty for people and it really isn't. It's just about like evolving and knowing yourself better. Like when you really, when it really comes down to it. Totally. Yeah. And, and for me too, like, so like a lot of, in my book, I talk a lot about like birch trees and the flowers that grow in this places of my where my ancestors were in like the lakes and the frogs and a big reason for that too is because like

my ancestors aren't there anymore like there are no more like Jewish people in those places necessarily to like tell the story so So when I think about like, how do I really learn about who my ancestors were or what their practices and their culture was, it's like, oh, at least I can see what they saw. You know, I can see the trees, I can see the frogs and the land is holding that story for me if I can just open up and listen to it so that's also been like part of it for me as well as like opening up like opportunity for like connection and joy even in the face of a lot of destruction um and again also like you're saying I like really think this is something that like most people can do and is really enriching and would help us all kind of metabolize so much of what has happened in the 20th century, before the 20th century.

There's been so much disruption and violence that's happened for so many people and still happening, obviously. like that's happened for so many people yeah and still happening obviously and in America in like the dominant American culture I think there's like a really big emphasis on like forgetting and just kind of being in this like present moment and not realizing that we've come from somewhere and I just really resist that that like urge to forget and I for me that's also part of ancestral healing is like how do we learn to remember yeah that's beautiful I love that so much um no I think the thing that really made me realize that ancestral healing is extremely real and necessary was maybe like I don't know how long ago it was, maybe like 10 years ago. I learned something about a family member that really put into context something

that I was going through and that I have always felt and I'm just part of who I am. And I'm being vague about it because it's just personal, but we could talk off mic if you want. But for audience purposes, the point that I'm trying to get across is I learned something and I learned more about myself and I was almost more at peace with how much I was struggling with what it was and I let myself be okay with how much I was struggling and

the pain I was carrying because I recognized it wasn't just mine. It was hers. So yeah, I think if you ask me what the whole point of life is, it's self, maybe not improvement's the right word, but like self-discovery and like, I don't know, nature and leaving a place better than you found it. I think it's as simple as that. I think it gets really convoluted with other things but but yeah as you said I think anyone could benefit from learning more because I agree I think what you said about forgetting really resonated with me so yeah I really like that and like

America is built on forgetting like we're supposed to forget like the genocide of indigenous peoples on this land. We're supposed to forget like the horrors of slavery. We're supposed to just forget like even what's happening right now in our country. So I think the act of remembering is like has so much power to shake like the current moment and to bring us to a new place it's ironic that like the biggest slogan of one of america's most tragic events is don't forget when you think about it yeah totally it's like oh this is the one thing you're gonna say yeah don't forget let's forget about everything else though totally yeah and that's such a like that's our memory like yeah and um in germany they do have a lot about like memory culture that's like a really like specific term that they have and like

we don't even have that yeah we're gonna have that term here in the u.s wait can you explain that to me a little bit if you know if you know about it so Germany does have like a big like culture around like remembering the atrocities of the holocaust right and and they call it like memory culture um so that's like monuments or um museums just like how is like world war ii discussed how is the holocaust remembered and yeah like they remember a lot more than we do which is ironic and also not in some ways um but yeah we don't even have that concept here in the same way um of like memory culture like what is our cultural of remembering um and and i think obviously there has been some amount of that around like yeah like indigenous history and like black history in relation to like monuments and

thanksgiving and like all of those things but we don't have like really like memory culture like integrated into like a day-to-day existence and in fact it's obviously being even fought against like in florida and other places like that oh i just love that that idea of memory culture in general i've never heard of that i love that so much and i mean just even thinking about it just as we're talking uh germany has they refuse to forget an atrocity that they did right i think it's it's a little bit interesting that in america they've forgotten about the atrocities they did and they want to not forget about an atrocity that was done to them so it's almost like very victim-y of america if you ask me um because it's really easy not to forget when someone wronged you but I think it's really convenient to forget when you um you know destroy the entire civilization

you know what I mean to put it lightly yeah exactly and I'm not trying to say to take 9-11 lightly at all. I think what happened was atrocious and terrible. But when you think about memory culture and what Germany is so committed to remembering versus America, just a little interesting to me now that I think about it. And who committed who, or who committed what, rather. Yeah.

Before I get too rambly, let's take our first break. And we'll be right back. And we're back with Ami. Ami, when we were talking about recording together, in addition to ancestral healing, you talked about the importance of building a diasporous Jewish community that is committed to solidarity with Palestinians and other marginalized people,

generally through an anarchist lens, and also building a safe community for Jews outside of Israel to counter the rhetoric that the only place that's safe for Jews is Israel. And as you said, it generally leads to a large focus on anti-fascism and cultural reclamation. So can you talk to me a little bit about that? And then there's certain communities that you're a part of that I really want to get into, but let's start there. Yeah. So kind of in this journey, I would say of saying, okay, like if we're going to be Jewish anti-Zionist, if we're going to be Jewish anarchist, what does that materially look like? How do we put that into practice? And so yeah, kind of honed in on those two aspects again of safety and culture. And so a lot of my work now is around thinking about how do we create safety for Jews in the places where they

How do we create safety for Jews in the places where they are living in diaspora development? Going into this Jewish anti-Zionism and Jewish anarchism, trying to understand what does it mean to actually put this into practice. And when I was thinking of that, I was trying to think of how do we create safety for Jews in the places where they want to live in diaspora and also create the environment where Jewish culture is able to flourish and that's led me like you said to developing and supporting and working with a lot of Jewish communities that are like committed to like anti-fascism committed to solidarity with other marginalized peoples and also really committed to um like reclamation of Jewish traditions um specifically by like more marginalized people within the Jewish community as well um and I really see like those projects as like part of my like solidarity work even though it is supporting like Jewish peoples in the day-to-day but ultimately it's creating a spaciousness where Jews don't feel like they

have to like cling on to Zionism in the ways that they were before um and I'm really curious also of like how to sort of make that praxis more visible to the general left, because I do like a big part of like the book I'm writing, like there's a whole section of me talking about what it's like to have lived in Pittsburgh, like before and after the Tree of Life shooting, where I was a teacher at the synagogue at the time that it happened. So my life was very impacted by this really horrible act of violence, like anti-Semitic violence. And the most shocking part was that anti-Semitism was occurring

before that happened. And it still continued after like in Pittsburgh specifically. So like the question left me with is like, are we actually addressing like the rise of anti-Semitism in America today? And that's why I want to like really talk about this praxis of like addressing anti-semitism and allowing and creating space where Jewish culture can flourish like as a praxis that I'm curious for more people on the left to um understand as like vitally important like for Jewish people and also for solidarity with Palestinians too.

So that's, that's my topic that I'm very interested in right now. No, I love that. I think it's so important what you're saying. And so necessary to build a community where Jewish people feel safe that, so yeah, they don't have to cling on to zionism as a way to feel accepted or safe or belong or have belonging anywhere and in that way it's it's really simple to see how that is intertwined with solidarity of palestinians because it ultimately is saying like israel is not the end all be all like we're at the end of the day people going through shit have we have

our cultures and we have to stick by each other maybe that's a little bit elementary but I think what I'm trying to say is I really appreciate that you have built this community and uh are so committed to to continuing to to enrich it it and develop it because I think that's so essential, especially just considering like the idea of Zionism in the first place, like that really pure intention that was there. I think it's okay to still live on in certain areas because it was pure. It wasn't about Israel at all israel as it is today rather yeah so can you tell me about this organization rage yeah so rage is this small collective called um that acronym stands for rebellious anarchist young jews in the most basic sense we formed this as like a sort of response to like the

zionism that we were experiencing around us and a lot of it like the word rage being like anger of like wow i can't believe like this is what's being sold to us as like our liberation and what it formed into was like after the tree of life shooting my sibling pretty much texted me and was like let's make this thing happen again and we um started to create like more like political like jewish anarchist like art and writing um and putting it on facebook and people started responding to it and it really felt like a piece of like the rising of like a Jewish anarchist movement um in this country right now a piece of many but something that kind of um was like a a light or like a what's the phrase like

uh like a bat signal is the only way I can put it of like hey like all of you out there who are thinking about like what Jewish anarchism might mean are thinking about like what like organizing um could look like when it's based on our culture and our practices and has like deep reverence for that instead of like um an embarrassment around our practices all of you who are like creative and artistic and that's your mode of engagement of engaging like we can come together and we can like create something new and that has just like that desire has just grown since then and is being reflected in so much organizing right now and rage itself is like not we're not really doing as much as a collective anymore but definitely that spirit is like living

on in a lot of um like in the book i'm writing and like the work that my siblings doing and a lot of like the um artistic creation that's happening around jewish anarchism i love that that's happening around Jewish anarchism. I love that. That's so cool. I'm really grateful that out of something so horrific that you went through, you were able to come together with your sibling and almost use that as fuel to really come together. I think it's really beautiful. Yeah. And I think that's like,

that felt like the challenge in that moment was like, are we going to use this as a moment to like support the police who killed the shooter? We're going to use this as a moment to like buddy up with the politicians who are trying to like befriend the Jewish community now all of a sudden? Or are we going to use this as a moment, like a big phrase that was being thrown around in pittsburgh was like safety and solidarity are we going to use this moment to like really affirm that message and to really like speak to the danger that we are feeling as jews in this country and the resilience that we have and um and i'm really grateful yeah that my sibling and others around me were able to like create that path through a more revolutionary mode yeah oh it's important especially yeah you don't want to see your community used as a tool for politics i think having having that

be a product of such a tragedy is shameful and so fighting against that i think is really necessary to maintain a sense of like reality to be honest like and not get caught up in like what ever reality i don't know politicians or the media or whatever the shit wants you to believe in yeah yeah so a few years after rage kind of continued to grow I was able to found this community center called Rutzon Center for Healing and Resistance in Pittsburgh and it's a queer Jewish anarchist community center the only one believe it or not in the U.S. um maybe in the world that's cool and also sad you know what I mean like I love it but I also am disappointed in us yes and it was like obviously a lot of community support like like I'd say like I founded it but it was like, obviously a lot of community support. Like, like I'd say, like I founded it, but it was more like I had the ability to like, kind of pull people together, pull together a space, get grant money, like do that type of work.

like when we are like um in political struggle we need to resist but we also need to heal and i think i was also feeling like a lot in and this was like in 2019 ish so the like integration of like healing and more like therapeutic techniques. I felt like into like political frameworks, like wasn't happening as much at the time as I think it is now even. And just really claiming like we can't do political work without like our like healing work. And again, like that creating a space where we could engage in like anti-fascist organizing,

we could engage in solidarity with other like marginalized people. And we could also really honor Jewish tradition and let that be like a foundation for us. And yeah, I ended up leaving the community this time last year to like pursue other things but it still is existing in pittsburgh and it's still like very much like a hub for um not just jewish people too but like a lot of people who are engaging in alien resistance work yeah it's just i love that it exists uh and also just i was thinking actually i'm to hold that thought and I want to take our second break. I'm going to have to cut back

and see what I was going to say. So enjoy these ads. Okay, we're back. I had a coffee, and now I'm back. I was going to say that I love that all those things can be true at the same time, like Jewish solidarity and palestinian solidarity and and remembering and practicing like traditional rituals and cultural traditions

and practices and all this stuff i think it's nice to remember that all of those can be true at the same time because i think especially now people identify anti-zionism with anti-semitism and i think it's really important to see a community of Jewish people like embracing their religion and culture and loving it. And at the same time, supporting Palestine because it's just the clearest example of how Zionism is not a factor

in your love of your culture and your religion. I think it's a really good example of just i don't know demonstrating how much of a falsity that is in the first place to equate those two together when really zionism itself is anti-semitic as we as we mentioned in the last episode um i also want to give us plenty of time to talk about your work and as much as you want to tell us about your new book, To the Ghosts Who Are Still Living, it's out now, everybody. Go get it. It's a book of essays. And yeah, can you, if you want to, tell me how you came about even starting to write these essays and like what motivated you to to embark on this journey yeah so I just came out today with this book to the ghost who are still living and it's my first book that I've written and it's pretty much a collection of essays that is broken up into three sections the first section is like stories of my ancestors in Eastern Europe and their lives and them coming to America and like that process. The second section is my stories

of living in Pittsburgh during the rise of antisemitism. And the third section is returning back to my ancestors' shuttle, which is a village in Lithuania, last summer with my sister and kind of grappling with these questions of like, do I belong here? Like, what is this land? Where am I from? Like, where do I, where can I be in the world? So I guess like the clearest moment of when I felt like I needed to write this was during the summer of 2020 and there was an incident that I write about in the book of Nazis coming to like the anarchist bookstore in Pittsburgh which was like a few blocks from my house at the time and they were I don't even remember like exactly what their poster said but they were handing out these like um anti-anarchist posters

that like probably had something antisemitic on them also or just like that vibe was there and they were just flyering and the cops came up and shook hands with these nazis and let them stay wow and me not surprised but still, well. Exactly. And then the Nazis actually ended up pulling a gun on some of the anti-fascist protesters who were there. And didn't actually end up, like, shooting anyone. But that was the scene of what had happened. But still, the fact that whoever that was was able to do that.

And the cops were like, hey, buddy. Yeah, exactly. Just to make it more clear how shit the cops are. Totally. And so, yeah, I just witnessed that all happen. And it just kind of felt like the last straw, I guess, the last straw I guess the last thing and I just felt like kind of ripped open inside um realizing that the anti-semitism that I had been researching like in my own family's history was like happening right now like to me in this moment and I just had this feeling that like I was like I don't

know if people on the left or people in general are like really seeing what's happening. You know, really like understanding like the fear that I have, like as a Jewish person right now. And I'm not sure if people are like understanding that connection to like the contemporary fascism that's happening in the U.S. to the fascism that my ancestors experienced and it made me really sad and it made me like really feel so much pain because I just didn't want my family stories to be like forgotten or not to be remembered in this moment when I think we're trying to understand what's happening in this country. And like my family has already gone through a lot of what's happened, you know? And we're being attacked now in that way.

I mean, as far as our history books go, anti-Semitism ended when the Holocaust ended, right? Exactly. And the U.S. like saved the day. And now the Jews are fine. Exactly.

I think that's literally the narrative that a lot of people believe in this country, which is so unfortunate because it just, yeah. So when incidents like this happen, it's not just like out of the blue. It's because there's this lingering hatred and fascism that's been there and just growing and evolving and going undetected even though it's so obvious it's just become I don't know maybe I was gonna say more subtle but at this point it's not subtle at all they're very outright about it but I think it's like almost become like normalized or something exactly exactly um but no I I thank you for sharing that and I mean I could imagine that potentially this book was like maybe healthy process or like heal a little bit yourself did that happen? Definitely yeah like at a certain point I was writing these essays and I was like I don't even

need to do anything with this like this has been like the most healing project that I've already done um and so like also my hope with this book is that the healing that it's offered me like perhaps it can offer to others and I've kind of been thinking of it as like um in Jewish myth there's like this idea of like a golem or a golem um that's like this monster created from the mud um with like the word emmet written on its forehead which means truth and this monster is like raised from the mud to protect the jewish community of prague against anti-semitism um yeah it's a really cool story that's cool that's so cool yeah so I've kind of been like oh I wonder if like this book can I kind of be like a golem you know like this kind of

anti-fascist monster mud creature made from words yeah that can like offer healing and maybe um offer some like protection in this moment um so that's that's my greatest hope for this book right now that's first of all sick about the mud monster love that love that for you love that for me love it for everybody um and second i think that's a beautiful intent and i think it 100 will help others heal and even if the person reading it is not jewish i think it's important to remember and to realize that you still have very real fear being a jewish person living in america or anywhere else you know because anti-Semitism didn't get solved when Hitler shot himself. I'm sorry, guys. And so I think this book can help a lot of people and I really encourage everyone to go buy it now. We're recording today on August 1st

and today is when it was released. So by the time you hear it, it'll be out and ready to be read I just highly encourage you to really dive into Ami's work because it's just so important and so healing for everybody of course I really appreciate you taking the time to open yourself up and I because I know a lot of these things have really painful origins and so I appreciate that you're willing to talk about them yeah thank you yeah and I also hope that like yeah like this book also can sort of be like a window for like leftists who want to like integrate more like Jewish history into their anti-fascism that it can be like a window for that and I do hope like also that it can like also build bridges with like

other peoples who have experienced genocide experienced displacement from lands experienced like experience ongoing like fear for their safety where they are in the world. And I hope that also by sharing like my family stories that like those bridges can start to like be built and we can start to create more community around that shared history as well. To really build strong allyship with the Jewish community, actually understanding what that means and actually understanding what the Jewish community is going through and the fears they have. I think that is where you have to start.

So, yeah, I just am so glad to have had this conversation. And I know people will benefit from it. And I 100% know people will benefit from your book your book again that is to the ghosts who are still living um you can buy it now through your publisher which is strangers in a tangled wilderness nice um i'll put all the links in the description of the episodes on these website and all the good stuff but yeah thank you again for joining me today I'm gonna probably drag you back at some point just to continue talking to you because you've been lovely awesome thank you yeah I'd be happy to be back on hell yeah I did a good job if you

said that I'm kidding um do you have any kind of social media you want people to follow you at or just the book I do yes let me look at this I don't get it wrong I'm really bad at social media no same same I'm trying to be better okay you can also follow me on instagram amyweintraub3 that's a-m-i-w-e-i-n-t-r-a-u-b and the number three and I'm like I said like the work I'm doing I hope is like conversation starters is like ways to build connections so also this was interesting to you feel free to like reach out and say hey and yeah and my voice is just like one of many on this topic and I hope that yeah people continue to study and learn and explore the nuances of of what I've shared today thank you and a big reason why I wanted to have these

conversations and have them as conversations is to also illustrate that it's possible to talk about things these like Zionism in particular which is this very taboo almost like weird word to say out loud to a lot of people. It's really helpful to talk about it casually and openly because that's how we're going to understand it. That's how we're going to understand anti-Zionism and why Zionism isn't great right now and all this other stuff. So I hope that someone took that away and will continue to have these conversations in their personal lives because this is just a fucking podcast you know but real life is what matters um so yeah that's

all i have to say um thank you again you are the best uh and go buy ami's book to the ghost who are still living. Go buy it. Now! Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

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