It Could Happen Here - Tiananmen Remastered, Part 2

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Mia revisits her episodes situating the Tiananmen Square Massacre in the context of the century long battle over democracy in the workplace. Sources:https://lausancollective.com/2021/communists-crushed-international-workers-movement/ https://chuangcn.org/journal/two/red-dust/sinosphere/ http://www.tsquare.tv/links/Walder.html https://chuangcn.org/2019/06/tiananmen-square-the-march-into-the-institutions/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/ https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4 https://libcom.org/article/utopia-rules-technology-stupidity-and-secret-joys-bureaucracy-david-graeberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world live from the underground you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more. All real completely uncensored listen to the away days podcast reporting from the underbelly on the

iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war this year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We met them at their homes,

we met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the war on drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time. Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But

there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Kid Appin' Here, I'm your host, Mia Wong. When we last left the story of Tiananmen, one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had, in theory, crushed the last remnants of the faction of the workers' movement that actually

wanted democracy to extend into the factories. Unfortunately for the Leninists, no matter how many workers they killed, the demand for democracy in the factory simply refused to die. For over a hundred years, the development of the mass factory system and the logistical infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly coal mines and the railroads used to transport that coal, generated an especially militant working class that saw democratic control over the workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation. Ideologically, as the journal Endnotes pointed out, this manifested in a

series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of the working class and class society, all of which were necessary for the instinctive formation of workers' councils to manifest themselves in moments of revolutionary crisis. In the midst of the rapid technological expansions of the second and third industrial revolutions, workers came to see themselves as the creators of the New World. This produced the second belief that drove the classical workers movement, the producers of this New World should also be its inheritors. Thus, the goal of the workers movement was to take control of production in itself

and manage it for the common benefit of workers themselves. These two beliefs, in and of themselves, were not unique to the democratic wing of the workers' movement. They broadly comprised the ideology of the movement as a whole. And by this point, the workers' movement was extremely broad, stretching from social democratic trade unionists to the intellectual heads of the Leninist vanguard parties. What made the democratic wing unique was its concern with the fundamental alienation of

factory life, with the condition of being reduced to an object by bosses who simply used workers as human tools. For the Leninists and social democrats, alienation was simply a product of ownership or distribution. The liberation of the working class would be found in its productive capacity, not in its innate humanity and creativity. But for the democratic wing of the workers' movement, this solved nothing. As long as the fundamental reduction from human to object that characterized one-man rule in the factory persisted, changes in ownership, structure, and health benefits

missed the entire point. That degradation could only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class by giving the class itself control over the production process that for so long had controlled them. In 1936, Spanish workers decided to take matters into their own hands and seize control over their workplaces en masse. The Spanish Revolution, as it later became known, would become the largest and most extensive experiment in democratic workers' self-management before or since. Everything from public utilities to bakeries to hospitals to shoe factories fell under

the control of the direct democratic unions. And once their former bosses had been chased from the premises, the workers set about transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines, pulling their resources collectively and allocating them democratically for the benefit of everyone. For a brief moment, the triumphant experiment in democratic self-management delivered on its promises. Output increased dramatically, social services were expanded, and the workers of Spain, by their own self-organization, developed a universal health care system that

dramatically expanded service into rural areas where care was previously inaccessible. But the revolution had begun amidst a violent civil war in Spain, and under the guise of an anti-fascist alliance, liberal, socialist, and Stalinist forces brutally stamped out any attempt at democratic self-management and returned the factories to their owners before losing the war to the fascist armies of Francisco Franco. Undeterred by the mounting casualty tolls of pro-managerial massacres, revolutionary workers formed workers councils and mass factory assemblies once again in Hungary in 1956 and then again in Italy, France and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Hungary in particular is an interesting revolution, because over the years it has been subjected to so much of the same liberal mythologization you get with Tienanmen, but this time even worse. The Hungarian Revolution is remembered as a Liberal Democratic Revolution. But if you talk to the actual people who did the revolution, they were saying things like, and this is a direct quote from a member of a Hungarian Workers' Council, quote, the time when the boss decided our fate is over. In reality, far from simply instituting Liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized control

of their factories and workplaces, formed workers councils, and overthrew the government before Russian tanks slaughtered them. This was not a liberal democratic revolution at all. Almost identical revolts broke out across the capitalist world as well. In Italy, in France, in Chile, communes broke out and colonized Vietnam, they spread everywhere. And to the dismay of capitalists and communists alike, the development and implementation of the democratic solution to alienation these revolts provided was largely instinctual, and it often emerged in places without established workers' movements

and their political education effects. Typical of such movements was the course of the revolution in Algeria. The political education Algerian workers had received was from the nationalist, vanguardist National Liberation Front, FLN, which had prosecuted the war against the French colonizers. The FLN's ideology emphasized the decisive role of the state in national development. Upon taking power, however, Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria's first president, discovered the question of the economic structure of Algeria had already been answered for him. Production would be managed by democratic workers' councils built on the properties

seized by Algerian workers after the mass exodus of French settlers who fled the country following independence, left much of their property uninhabited. Benbella's administration took a page out of Lenin's book and publicly supported the councils while privately undermining them, but the whole dispute was made irrelevant by a military coup two years later that dismantled the councils completely and reimposed one-man rule in the factory. Still even by the late 70s it was by no means clear that one-man rule in the factory would triumph as a political system.

Workers and students almost took Italy in 1977 and the CNT, the anarchist union that had led so much of the Spanish revolution, reappeared after the death of Franco. For a brief fleeting moment in the late 1970s, it really looked like they were going to do it. The persistence of these revolts in the face of pure military repression caused capitalist managerial elites to look for ways to dismantle the systemic structures that produced the democratic revolts without giving up their power. As author and friend of the show Vicky Ostewild points out, the instinctive embrace of democracy

in the factory was only possible so long as the factory remained a point of encounter. A kind of dark agora that at once both exploited workers and facilitated the interactions that allowed them to identify with each other as a class and find and produce collective meaning. Thus, the fundamental thrust of the attack against democratic self-management would take the form of an attack on the shop floor as a site of collective identity formation and as a space that could be seen in any way as liberatory. This assault took a number of forms, most famously deindustrialization itself, as well as the spatial relocation of factories from urban centers into the suburbs, where workers could be isolated from each other and turned into homeowners, bought off with the combination

of cheap credit and the promise that the new homes would also function as assets. The quote-unquote democratization of finance replaced the democratization of the factory as the capitalist class funneled union pensions into the stock market, thus tying what remained of organized labor to the fate of capitalism itself. Corporations began to turn the workplace into an immense propaganda apparatus, replete with mass ideological programming designed to promote identification with the corporation itself and not the working class as a whole. Worst of all, the mobility of capital and the immobility of workers combined with the new logistics networks and technological advances in containerized shipping to create a world

where if workers ever began to get the upper hand, capitalists could simply move elsewhere. As the total size of the industrial working class contracted, capitalists increasingly took that option and left, spitting vast populations out of the traditional workforce entirely. These developments would eventually destroy the classical workers movement, but in order for the anti-democratic counterrevolution to succeed, it needed somewhere to move their production too, somewhere with a large, exploitable labour supply. The capitalist class found that answer in China. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society

all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. This is Unique Access with access with straightforward underground reporting. We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. A way that showcases what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses.

For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the your way days podcast reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be. An aberration. A symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job.

I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glodd. And this is Season Two of the We're on Drugs Podcast on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John

Osborne for Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug band. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouche. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real.

It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcast. In the wake of the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Chinese factory system was extremely different from the system that existed anywhere else

in the world. Chinese state-owned firms virtually lacked the ability to fire workers. People's entire social sphere was built around their work units, which provided everything from their healthcare to their retirement, to their food, to often their entertainment. The CCP also eliminated the piece-rate system, a system in which people were paid per unit they produced, which is, for example, how the USSR worked. This meant that in order to get people to work, bosses had very little leverage. They were thus forced to allow a degree of participation in the labor process and the

ability to criticize bosses, because otherwise it was virtually impossible to get anyone to do anything. Chinese bosses solved this problem through a combination of mass ideological work and a parentalistic, semi-democratic system for determining the heads of work teams that, while rigged by the party, ensured that managers would at least be somewhat popular. Though the process was strictly managed, workers had the ability to criticize the cadre who governed them and combine the work unit's system of folding home and social life into the factory system.

The product of this system was that because there was already a greater degree of workers participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere, and because of some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands for democracy became delinked from the workplace. And it meant that the system, at least in the cities, worked sort of okay until the Cultural Revolution. This means that it is time for me to do the Cultural Revolution rant. Everyone gets the Cultural Revolution completely wrong. The initial targets of the Cultural Revolution were kids with quote unquote black blood, the children of people kids with quote-unquote black blood, the children of people who had quote bad class backgrounds.

These people were heavily persecuted. And you can make arguments about what you do with, you know, a Shanghai oligarch who collaborates with the Japanese imperialists. But this extends to the children of people from quote unquote bad class backgrounds. And that term is extremely loose. I know people whose families were declared of black class background who had quote unquote black blood and weren't allowed to hold government positions because her family had made bird feeders before the revolution.

It was, as a system, absolutely nonsense. So what the early phases of the Cultural Revolution amounted to was a bunch of privileged kids from red class backgrounds in a new system attacking a bunch of kids who were being persecuted for stuff that was literally not their fault at all. They had no way to control who their parents were. Now, the initial stages of the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by Mao attempting to play power games inside the party. But as things became more and more chaotic, and the attacks on CCP bureaucrats and cadre escalated, it spiraled nearly out of Mao's control entirely and produced what's called

the January Storm, where rebel workers seized control of Shanghai and drove out the CCP. And this caused what I would describe as a oh fuck moment for Mao, because now, despite all his rhetoric about bombarding the headquarters, he had to actually deal with a worker-controlled city. And I found this incredible line from Zhou Enlai in a meeting with Mao where they were attempting to figure out what to do with, you know, this new revolutionary Shanghai. Quote, you know, this new revolutionary Shanghai. Quote, when asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the bottom up, Zhou

and Lai bluntly replied that, quote, anarchism is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct election of the Paris Commune style. And this was obviously a problem for Mao because there was no way for the party to maintain its long-term control if you actually implemented the direct elections in the style of the Paris Commium. And so instead, we saw a full-on counterrevolution. By about 1968, rebel workers and students were getting slaughtered everywhere. The initial uprisings, the stuff that everyone remembers with the dunce caps and the placards, was, staggeringly, by far the least violent part of the Cultural Revolution.

Here's from Walder, an academic who spent a significant amount of time studying the actual death records city by city and province by province in the Chinese archives. Quote, more than three- fourths of all documented deaths in local annals are due to the actions of authorities in this third phase. In more than 90% of those persecuted for alleged political crimes. This third phase, 1968 onward is where most of the people in the Cultural Revolution gets killed. And this is the opposite of the way that the Cultural Revolution is understood. Most of the killing wasn't the product of student radicalism gone out of control. It

was the state slaughtering its way through various rebel factions that did most of the killing and the political persecution. And this has enormous effects on subsequent Chinese history. It creates a ruling class that's incredibly paranoid about anything that even smells like organizing happening outside the party, and the most radical students and workers were simply butchered by the state. And by the late 1970s, radical politics in China that could have produced anything even remotely like democratic control of the workplace had collapsed almost entirely in the face of state repression. In their wake, politics moved towards more intellectual-driven liberal democratic politics that broadly ignored the collapsed almost entirely in the face of state repression. In their wake, politics moved

towards more intellectual-driven liberal-democratic politics that broadly ignored the working class entirely, as Deng Xiaoping unleashed the horrific one-child policy in a draconian and ultimately successful attempt to re-establish the state's patriarchal control over the household and strip hundreds of millions of women of even the limited autonomy they had clawed out of the Cultural Revolution. But the beginning of marketisation, the gradual dismantling of the socialist welfare state, and a wave of inflation produced a series of economic changes that turned Chinese society into a powder keg. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Await A's is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society

all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, resilient favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. This is unique access with straight forward on the ground reporting. We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. A way they showcase what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses.

For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the your way days podcast reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be an aberration, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeart radio really bad. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott.

And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes sir, we are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves.

Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug thing. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette, MMA fighter Liz Caramouche.

What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcast.

By 1989, the classical workers movement globally was on its last legs. Unable to spark its own uprisings, it latched onto a series of other social and political movements, most notably the pro-democracy movement in China. But democratic self-management and its critique of one-man rule in the factory was utterly alien to the pro-democracy movement, which meant that its development by the workers of Tiananmen was a spontaneous product of the application of the principles of democracy to their own situation. This led to formulations that would have been unfamiliar to previous incarnations of the

workers' movement. One worker interviewed by Walder said this about democracy in the factory, Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom? In the workshop, does what the workers say count? Or what the leader says? We later talked about it. In the factory, the director is a dictator. What one man says goes. If you view the state through the factory, it's about the same. One man rule. Our objective was not very high. We just wanted workers to have their own independent organization. In work units, it's personal rule. For example,

if I want to change jobs, the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought to go home at five, but he tells me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't, he'll cut my bonuses. This is personal rule. A factory should have a system. If a worker wants to change jobs, they ought to have a system of rules to decide how to do it. Also, these rules should be decided upon by everyone, and then afterwards anyone who violates them will be punished according to the rules. This is rule by law. Now we don't have this kind of legal system. Now, this is obviously an extremely conservative framing of the classical critique of one-man rule in the factory, couched in the dominant political rhetoric of the rule of law. But any attempt to actually implement a system by which workers controlled the factories

they work in, how long they work, and what the bonus rate was democratically to an independent organization could only end in democratic self-managed workplaces. As Waldron and Zhang have pointed out, the workers of the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation were uniformly uneducated and had little or no connection to any of the various liberal intellectual circles. This was as pure a worker as we've been as any in Chinese history. And for one final time, the instinct of that working class was to demand democracy in the factory. This demand, above all others, was politically unacceptable. When the army marched on Beijing, it was the Chinese working class they wiped out. Even the memory of the demand for democracy in the factory would be scrubbed from the

records of the CCP and the pro-democracy movements alike, thus ensuring the meaning of the events would be lost. What then was Tiananmen? In some sense, it was the transition point between two different Chinese working classes. The protests were the high watermark of the political mobilization of the old industrial working class, who, in the streets surrounding Tiananmen, mounted the final attack of the classical workers' movement. Their defeat ended the old working class as a political force, and they were annihilated altogether in the economic restructuring of the 1990s, which crushed the last vestiges

of workers' autonomy in the factory and destroyed what remained of the Chinese welfare state. They were replaced by a new working class, drawn from the rural and semi-urban underclasses of the old socialist system, who were dragged into the cities to fill the ranks of the 277 million migrant workers that today comprise the background of China's working class. This new working class, with rural household registration in no way into the remaining state-owned factories, would have none of the benefits of the previous one. It would instead face a full raft of capitalist ideology, baked into every aspect of workplace

culture and a massive attempt to encourage home ownership. While the previous working class could at least posit a democratic form of the factory through which life could be improved, this new working class's greatest desire was to leave the factory entirely and become a business owner. In this sense, it considers itself to be a temporarily embarrassed petit-pochoisie. Such ideological self-conceptions are inimical to the formation of the classical workers' movement and indeed, the new Chinese working class has largely failed to find the collective identity in the workplace. The situation is not unique.

The death of the classical workers' movement has seen the collapse of their demands for democratic self-management everywhere in the face of a working class that refuses to cohere itself in the factory. China was just late to the game. The fact remains, however, that the global economic system has lured from crisis to crisis for the better part of my lifetime. Setting off in its wake an increasing number of revolutions even as the dark agor of the factory ceased to function as a place to form identities. For this new working class, if a collective identity could not be forged in the factory,

it would be forged in the street instead. Lacking a positive identity to cohere itself around, workers were only able to mobilize on a mass basis in direct opposition to a force that threatens it on a cross-sectoral basis. The state, with its ability to increase the price of basic commodities and slash welfare benefits, became the only available enemy, and the constant fights against the police became the sole basis for new collective identity formation. Contemporary revolts have thus taken the form of mass street movements and almost continuous

confrontations with the states. Factory occupations were replaced with square occupations, and as the squares were revealed to be indefensible, they too were replaced by running fights with the police. But this placed the new revolutionaries in a dangerous bind. Without the leverage against the state the classical workers' movements control over the workplace provided, they lacked the ability to bring down a government firmly committed to fighting it out. Even the attempts over the last five or six years to carry out general strikes in Peru,

in France, Hong Kong, and Sudan were, as Melitesta predicted in the early 20s, easily defeated without the accompanying factory occupations. But with current labor conditions exceedingly unlikely to produce another wave of factory occupations, the way forward for any political movement that seeks to reintroduce democracy into the economic sphere is unclear. Perhaps that is the greatest legacy of Tiananmen. The workers who assembled outside Tiananmen Square had already abandoned their factories. For all that they spoke the language of the old workers' movement, they stood and fought

and died like we do. In the streets. They were the bridge between the world of the workers' movement and the world we live in today, and thus face the same revolutionary crisis we face today. The crisis of Papua and Palestine, of Colombia and Iran, of Myanmar and Hong Kong, of victory just beyond the horizon that nevertheless cannot yet be grasped. The workers of Tiananmen, I suspect, have no answers to give us now, but expecting answers from the dead is demanding too much of those, past and present, who died fighting for liberation.

All we can do now is find our own way, and with the names of the dead on our lips, build the world they died fighting for. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. OpenAI is a financial abomination.

A thing that should not be. An aberration. A symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry. Where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining

the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, resilient favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly,

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs by Greg. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man.

We met them at their homes, We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's bad.