Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 309: Appalachian Creation Museum

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

This week we're talking about once again about y'all etiquette, Boebert, class distinctions, the Appalachian creation myth, and the UAW strike Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Now that we've got the problematic portion of our show out of the way Now we can Now we can Now we can talk about the The Budweiser cold hard facts That's right We'll be public facing and not get in trouble Hey

I was like thinking about the other day like Remember how when we were growing up in school they would always say like uh the vowels the vowels are a e i o u and sometimes y remember they would say that i've had can you find an example of when y was a vowel see dude this is exactly what my point is like okay correct me if i'm wrong but like they never told you what the sometimes why cases were there it's like they'd always treat it like no that's really advanced stuff like we can't get it into we can't get it this is this is outside the scope of second grade sorry like they treated it like you wouldn't understand it. But then they never circled back to it.

So it's like, I feel like that's been an open tab for me for, like, 30-something years. You know? I want to go back to Mahala Craft, and I want to say, you know what I think, Mahala? I think you don't know when Y's are a vowel. I don't think they ever knew. I don't think you know yourself, do you? No, no, I know. I know she'd be like, no, I know.

I just don't want to say it right now. It's like they revert back to kid tactics when you challenge them on when Y is a vowel. No, I know. Yeah. Actually, what if it's like a fountain of youth thing? Like, actually, son, when you find out the application which wise avowal, then you'll know the meaning of life and the reason for existence. When you can die.

Like, you find it out and you immediately start withering away. Like, you've served your purpose on Earth. It's like... Don't go wondering one wise vow, because that's when things... Yeah. What if there was, like, a 21 Jump Street thing, and, like, you went undercover back to school, but it was just to find out what sometimes why cases what the sometimes why cases

were yeah but you have to do school all over again like when do they teach bro i'm after the hidden knowledge and then out on your deathbed somebody's just like ayahuasca you know what do you mean ayahuasca and then they're like no that's when wise avow like in the word ayahuasca yeah what do you mean ayahuasca and then they're like no that's when wise of al like in the word ayahuasca actually that's what you've been looking for your whole life i think in that case it actually is a consonant in ayahuasca i mean i know what i'm just saying oh oh you know are you sure i know i was just yeah yeah i know oh, I know. Now, there's a fraternity of us guys that no one lies about. We just don't tell anybody. It's secret knowledge.

It's like the sacred mathematics of the nations of gods and earths, you know. Uh-huh. I was waiting for them to come back around to that. Every year, like going to the next grade every summer. I was like, is this the year we get to find out when sometimes why? Yeah, you're getting your elementary school diploma getting ready to go to middle school some things are changing like your life's crazy and you just go to check so before i go i gotta know i gotta know when sometimes why that's the chance that you'll figure it out when you need to know and that'll shoot you on oh yeah no she like looks around she's like

she shushes you like the all of a sudden like all the lights go out and like sirens start going off and like spotlights come on and like barbed wire goes up around all the things she's like you run run you gotta get out of here save yourself

save yourself she thrusts a scroll into your chest, and before she can get out, dogs just descend upon her and start tearing her to shreds. Yeah, she just gets mangled on some kind of jigsaw from Sawtrap, and you're sitting there with a diploma and running from dogs.

They just bite the seat of your pants out like on the cartoons. The dogs always just bite the seat of your pants out like in the cartoons. The dogs always just bite the seat of your pants out, but they don't really get you. That's right. They just bite the seat of your pants out, and then you don't have to take your pants off to poop anymore. And then you catch your breath, and then you start to scroll it, and you realize it just all falls to dust because the dog's got it. Because the dog's got it. Oh, fuck. Well, on that scroll,

it's like where all the cases of sometimes Y are. You know? In the band Yes, is Y a consonant or a vowel? In the case of the band Yes, not the word, but the band. Yes. Uh, yes. Not the word, but the band. Yes. Hmm.

You know, I've not stopped to interrogate that question. What differentiates a consonant from a vowel? I've not actually thought about the craft in a long time. Let's go back to fundamentals. Let's go back to fundamentals. Let's go back to the building blocks and language. Oh, man. Oh, man. Speaking of...

Oh, here's one. In the word y'all is why about? Oh, yeah. Damn. Also the most dangerous word in the world right now. Honestly, it is like handling C4 nitroglycerin explosive. In the wrong hands. You might as well be giving it to damn Murdoch from MacGyver, you know?

Like, what are we going to do if ISIS gets a hold on y'all? Like, could you imagine them like taking responsibility for terrorist acts like listen y'all we dropped the bomb on y'all listen we dropped the bomb we put the dog on y'all they're like no they finally figured out a way to not only terrorize this physically, but emotionally and mentally, intellectually. No. Yeah,

dude. If I asked this, I asked this would be way better off beheading me than to just bombard me with y'all. Like given the choice between the two, I'll take the, I'll take the beheading. I'll let them remove my head from my body rather than sit there and hit me with a bunch of y'all talk

just like how in the 2000s after 9-11 Bush was like they hate us for our freedoms and Osama Bin Laden shoots back he's like y'all got it twisted y'all need to take several seats y'all need to take this war on terror stuff you know like how it's said that uh you know after world war ii sort of the united states adopted this sort of you know posture of the nazis and like the you know the uh sort of the enemy quote unquote well not know the sort of the enemy quote-unquote well not

I mean they were the enemy I mean us being the heroes is the sort of quote-unquote part right we sort of adopted their you know sort of morphed into the baddies right not that we weren't already the baddies I don't know what I'm saying basically what I'm saying is we adopted a lot of the same qualities of the nazis like y'all they used y'all is that what you're going with here's where i'm trying to get with this and and i keep stepping on rakes is isis all those all of uh america's foes uh across the world adopt our traits. And that is like they start watching college football. They only eat Duke's mayonnaise now.

They drink whiskey and only go to see acts that play at Red Rocks. ISIS becomes a bunch of y'all dads. That would be so tight. Yeah. Like you just uh you know something bad happens in the world and they send out a video to take credit for it and they're just wearing like uh wrangler jeans and pearl snap button downs and a dirty cap that says make cornbread and uh some guy named uh you know uh ala wiki or something what's that guy's name that obama killed all and we're all lucky all the walk yeah yeah so anyway somebody just gets on there and says

y'all lucky and you and where y'all lucky and where y'all lucky y'all Anwar Yalawaki. Anwar Yalawaki. Yalawaki. That's it. There we go. I like how we got our episode title out of the way. Anwar Yalawaki. Anwar Yalawaki pops up and says, I just want to let y'all know, kill Anwar Yalawaki.

And then he pops this, no, y'all didn't. Y'all are going to have to try harder than that. And then you just see in the back, it's just like a bunch of guys wearing like Mississippi State jerseys, just shooting like rifles into the air. I saw a shirt the other day. Oh, man.

I wanted to take a picture of it so bad. I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt the other day that said, y'all need to use the force. Mm-mm. Mm-mm. I did. Mm-mm. I did, dude.

It's like... No, you didn't. No, you didn't. Really? This is like this is this is gonna be my undoing if you say if you answer in the apartment you're gonna see a man come unglued in real time i wish i was kidding my friend but i i stopped dead in my tracks i almost i almost shook him i almost like grabbed him by the shoulders shook him like get a hold of yourself man have some self-respect a grown man wearing a shirt y'all need to use the forays oh man there was a tweet the other day let me pull it up real quick this is fucking there's nothing I hate worse than a gratuitous

y'all just because it's like a lot of people like to say it now for some reason but it was this guy and he said Nome Blum said,

The way Romney was treated 100% set the stage for Republicans to want someone like Trump, and y'all better come to terms with it. According to his bio, this is a commentator from Washington District of Columbia. I mean, this is the ontological question like am i y'all when people say y'all am i am i y'all because this is the thing like this really does this really is what separates the wheat from the chaff if we're talking about linguistic terrorism like you can just drop an umbrella net over an entire group of people and say, y'all.

And then it fucks with me because then I'm like, oh man, am I y'all? Do I need to use the force? Am I? Do I? Y'all need to use the force or do I? Who makes that shirt? I just got to know the the sort of backstory of this shirt well it's obviously a play on y'all need jesus but it's like y'all need to

use the force it's like um it's like epic atheist bacon spaghetti monster flying spaghetti monster stuff oh yeah it's like epic. Y'all need the force. Yeah. Good one. I'm just going right in. Somebody saw that shirt and y'all need to use the force. You see it?

It's pretty good. I like it. I think it's good. I think generally that's pretty good. I like it. I think it's good. I think generally that's good stuff. Generally? Oh, man, that's good. I love that. That's good stuff. Generally, that's good stuff.

I'm going to say something. It's going to be controversial, and a lot of people are going to come from my head top on this. And you know what? I don't care because I'm tired of living in the shadows. Speak your truth, brother. If you are from the state of Kentucky, you are a you all, not a y'all. Uh-huh. That's an inconvenient truth people want to cling on to

because they want to believe, they want to sort of erase any distance Kentucky has from the south writ large because they want to be they want to sort of erase any distance kentucky has from the south writ large because they want to be in that club for some reason because we're the only deranged state that said you know what i think we should adopt the characteristics and identities of the losers of the war between the states kentucky staked out the most insane position Post Civil War It is true It's like They stayed neutral And then went with the losing side

The loser After the war We actually like the sort of character And aesthetics of the losers In this The most cowardly position Possible Truly literally the most cowardly position possible. Like, truly, literally

the most cowardly position possible. Yeah, really. So, I'm just going to say this. When I start... I'm starting doing this with a little self-crit, because I have done a lot of y'all. I have.

But if I'm flowing from within, if I'm like Lou Rawls, I'm flowing from within. I'm living my truth. I'm a you all. I'm y'all. I am a you all. And chances are, y'all are too. Yeah, see, I'm y'all, bro. God, you're still staying with y'all?

That's my people, yeah, I'm staying with them. Are you riding it out? I'm riding'all, bro. God. You're still staying with y'all? That's my people. Yeah, I'm staying with them. Are you riding it out? I'm riding it down. I put some spicy chili crisp on my hummus sandwich for lunch. I didn't wash my hands and I'm just sitting here rubbing it in my eyes. Touched my cock with it. I'm in bad shape over here.

Oh, man. I'm inflamed oh man do you think that uh do they use y'all in colorado let's see let's just go to the tape um was lauren bobert uh being was she y'all ended up let's see who's it you all versus y'all? I was laughing about the Lauren Boebert thing. It's already out of the news, obviously. But, like, obviously, like, every teenage boy knows the old, the classic trick where you get a tub of popcorn, right,

and you cut a hole in the bottom. And you put your wiener in there. And then you put the popcorn on your wiener inside the tub. Like the opening skit on the Lil' Kim Hardcore album. Yeah. It's like, I need a large popcorn with

extra butter and a lot of napkins. Uh-huh. Then you just hear her fucking jerking him off. Yeah, dude. dude Well what if Presumably in a theater No you just go Like in your living room Like watching TV

Just in the privacy of your home Like that's the thing you have to have Like hot butter And popcorn kernels That would be such a good date Hey come over to my house I'm gonna make some popcorn Popcorn kernel. That would be such a good date. Hey, come over to my house. I want to make some popcorn.

And here's what I want. That dude was like really going to town on her boobs, though. He was like totally rubbing her boobs. Like rubbing her boobs. The insane part about that is that like the distance between the people in front of them behind them was like on one of those like budget airline flights where your knees are in your chest the whole time. I know. So like four or five people around them were also getting hard.

Yeah. Probably. Like I was thinking like though that she's got pretty big boobs, right? Why couldn't you take two popcorn tubs and then cut holes in the bottom of those and then put them on your boobs? And then your date can reach over and fill your titties inside the bar. Jesus Christ. The most insane measure to take in the world.

Like, why didn't they think of that? I don't understand. I wonder who the first degenerate to do the popcorn trick was. Can you imagine walking down there with fucking movie butter all over your crotch? Just because you were trying to get a handy well what if they were actually created for that purpose

specifically and then one day some guy had just got a handy in a movie and he was like well this actually this would work great as a popcorn container too though you know what I mean they started out He's like, well, this actually, this would work great as a popcorn container too, though. You know what I mean? Like they started out. Oh, okay.

Yeah, it started out as like a way to shield your public fetish. Yeah. And then he's like, you know what? Hey, to be honest with you, this holds about 32 ounces of standard movie butter popcorn. ounces of standard movie butter popcorn. I love just like using it to do every single like nasty

like degenerate thing in a movie theater. You like put it on your date's lap and you start trying to eat her out. Like you put your head in the popcorn tub. And you just can't reach it. Like just every single thing. Yeah, you think it's just providing cover.

Like, you're just sitting there having sex in the row. But since you got the popcorn tub over it, you're like, nah, nobody can see. Nobody can see. No one knows what we're doing. It's like an invisibility cloak. No one knows what we're doing. It's like an invisibility cloak. No one knows what we're doing right now. I'm just here.

The other thing is like, I've never wanted like a hand job so bad that I couldn't wait two hours for one. I'm serious about my movies, yeah i'm i'm i'm i'm a film buff yeah i'm not multitasking i can't yeah so like yeah so my date's like trying to put a popcorn like hey let me jerk you off no thanks lady no thanks this is cinema it's cinema time 100% yeah if you want to jerk somebody off go ask one of these guys

right now I'm watching uh uh Killers of the Flower Moon I'm watching the Baywatch reboot you're just hard as fuck watching the Baywatch reboot and she sees you and she's like oh yeah you're like no

this is part of the movie experience this is how I experience it yeah I'm just letting all these feelings wash over me while Dwayne Johnson saves the saves the Baywatch saves the Bay he's watching the Bay I wonder if there is a guy

that got jerked off in a popcorn tub while Black Adam was playing. Remember the Rocks foray into the comic book universe, the DC cinematic universe. Right. I bet he would be mad about that

if he learned about it. We need to keep advanced stats like that. You know, like, to be honest with you, ticket sales only tell one story. You're right. You're exactly right. If you're getting jerked off

in your movie a lot, even if the box office is good, that's probably a bigger indictment on how much your movie sucks than the box office. I've spent money on some bad movies, you know? 100%. Like, in our capitalist economy, bro, like, there are other metrics for determining success. It doesn't have to just be the box office number. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. You know? Yeah. For example, I got my first hand job at the movie Bats, and I also fingered my first girl at the movie Bats. What I can tell you about Bats is very little. And see, that tells the tale, even though it may have done okay at the box office. For me, it was two thumbs well two thumbs working back and forth how bad's doing the box office can we get a number crunch on that we can yes

the budget was five it did it did 10 million 10.2 million dollars off of a budget of 5.25 i seem to remember was jeff goldblum in that, or did I dream that? It doubled its money. Jeff Goldblum was apparently not in it. Is Lou Diamond Phillips? Lou Diamond Phillips, yeah. That's right. Were they trying to do like a Hitchcock birds thing, but it's bats?

I think so. Yeah, I think that's what it is. Like I said, I don't know. I think so. Yeah, I think that's what it is. Like I said, I don't know. A hostile swarm of genetically mutated bats terrorize a local Texas town, and it is up to zoologist Sheila Casper,

who teams up with town sheriff Emmett Kimsey to exterminate the creatures before they take more lives. Yeah. the creatures before they take more lives yeah um i was a guest at a friend of the show steve slagowski's in-laws house the other night and invariably the dinner table conversation turned to bats and rabies as it often does with us yeah and uh i wanted to tell that I wanted to break that out, but one, I didn't think it was appropriate dinner table conversation. Yeah. Especially on the first time meeting some people. Oh, yeah.

But, yeah. My history with bats cuts a little further. So many different ways. So many different ways. I don't remember the first movie that i don't think i've ever even gotten i remember one of the first times i went on a date with somebody well that's not true i do remember seeing the movie hitch in movie theaters with a date. But that was like 2005.

That was a long time ago. That was a movie that energized a whole generation of wayward boys to try to date women that were way out of their league. Well, it was like a pickup artist thing. The premise was like, what if a pickup artist finds love? Yeah, what if a PUA finds true love? What if a pickup artist finds true love, right?

Yeah. What if he means a baddie Latina who teaches him how to soften his heart? Yeah, teaches him how to open his heart to be receptive to love. Was it Eva Mendez? Was that who was? Yeah. Wow. Teaches him how to open his heart to love and close his heart to poonstang.

And in the meantime, he's going to get his zany buddy, Kevin James, laid. Oh, yeah. You're right. By somebody completely out of his league. Uh-huh. Yeah. Man. What have we got going on in the world today?

The United Auto Workers is overplaying its hand, risking our economy and the election. No! The guy who wrote that was the counselor to the treasury secretary in the obama administration oh my god oh man uh it's all over the opinion pages of the washington post and the new york times It's like, these are audacious. These are audacious demands. Someone tell these goddamn strikers to cut it out.

To freaking cut it out. Tell these strikers they need to take several seats real quick. Mm-hmm. You got... Auto worker is overplaying their hand.

Paul Krugman says, inflation is down, disinflation denial is soaring. He's kind of taking the Will Stantzl stance on that. Uh-huh. He's taking the Will Stantzl. He's taking the Will Stantzl. He's taking Will Stantel stance on that. He's taking the Will Stancel. He's taking the Will Stancel. He's taking Will Stancel.

Mm-hmm. And then what else do we got? I'd say Mr. Krugman's never bought oatmeal in bulk, but I guess keep doing what you're doing, PK. What are we supposed to say about this? Like, I really feel like this is really getting out of hand. Is it like what we were talking about earlier before we recorded? Like, every time you've got a dim Democrat in the white house,

a democratic administration, like a certain segment of the liberal left peels off and think, and they have to take a defensive position. And so they, they then start like casting reality. Okay. Like, okay,

I'll agree. Inflation is going down a little bit uh damn you've seen that you've you've felt the effects in your pocketbook i've felt the effects of my pocketbook yeah you're saving money because of biden's uh attempts to bring it down yeah oh yeah okay oh yeah um i mean it's it's not really gone down that much it has gone down a little bit but like but they've still got interest rates high as fuck yeah you can't buy shit right now yeah you can't get loan you can't get cheap loans which like hey man i'm not a startup tech operation and uh i'm also not a homeowner so those things don't really matter to me i'm basically a vagabond but

i'm a landless artisan. I have no land. I'm not proletariat necessarily. I've been increasingly obsessed with economic classifications and with the whole idea of class in general. I'm a landless artisan with lump and pearl rising. That's my chart. It's a hard thing to look in the eye as you're near 40.

It is, man. It really is. Nah, whatever. Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, I've known my fate for years i'm i know exactly you check in with this old boy in about 20 years i'll be painting houses and i'll have grown a ponytail after i've lost what's on top and i'll just be listening to the bellamy brothers all day and uh-huh i uh you know

roofing and smoking a little dope changed my attitude. That's right. Lump and rising. Honestly, we are all lump and rising. We're all being lumpinized. Yeah. I have been really digging in to the finer details of the feudal class structure of late medieval Norman

France. Not really. In England. That's big news. Yeah. Big news for me. Well, you find it in this survey. Okay, so the whole idea of let me just say this.

The whole idea of, let me just say this. The whole concept of class seems straightforward, right? It's like we got like bourgeois, proletariat, lumpen, petty bouge, whatever. But like the, how you actually classify those things, Marx never settled it. He like starts talking about it in Capital Volume 3 and then just never gets around to it. It's kind of like sometimes why. He's like A-E-I-O-U, sometimes why, but then never circles back. So his sometimes why was these classifications. Yeah.

That he just kind of lets you take that adventure for yourself for yourself it's just take your own adventure and how many volumes of capital are there three there's three he didn't finish him either so it's kind of like uh chinese democracy by guns and roses yeah it's very similar to that he was like nah like this is coming out and then he just died before it did actually did uh-huh or like what was that dr dre album was it like rehab did he ever oh uh detox and detox still didn't come out yeah detox did detox ever come out i don't think it did i don't think detox ever came out it's it oh he yeah he released that one uh what was it he released that one that was like uh uh it was called something like california

or compton yeah compton came out and he was like new album coming out and everybody thought it was gonna be detox and it was just like called compton the album and it was okay but it kind of came and went fairly quietly was that remember when everyone was doing that oh no that's not it compton yeah that's funny i was thinking about that album on my walk yesterday or this morning actually we were talking about hip-hop producers of the golden age. Mm-hmm. And just, you know, some light boys chat banter for... Wait, this album came out in 2015.

Prior to its release, there was heavy anticipation on whether Compton or Luke Bryan's Kill the Lights would debut. Luke Bryan, is that the guy that almost got's Kill the Lights would debut. Luke Bryan? Is that the guy that almost got in a fight? Or is that Zach Bryan? That's Zach Bryan. Oh, it's like Luke Zach. Yeah, it's hard to keep

him straight. Oh, dear. Zach is good. Luke is less than. Okay, let me just say that the uh that the class designation is a very important one for understanding early america so this book that i was that i'm reading that I've been telling you about, Wilma Dunaway. The First American Frontier.

It's right here. Okay. Wilma A. Yeah. You were telling me she's sort of been spurned by the app study set to some degree. Yeah, they just completely ignore her, and I don't understand why. It's like you're completely overlooked.

Did she come out against y'all, too, in this seminal text? I believe she did. She did. Man, that'll do it. Every time. She kind of actually does literally, because every few paragraphs, she's like, every few paragraphs, she's like, the myth of the self-sufficient family farmer is completely made up.

It's completely fiction. We made it up, folks. Everything from every outfit from App Harvest to whatever the sort of VC fundraising scheme du jour to save the beleaguered coal miner is predicated on. It turns out in itself a myth. It's all a myth. We made it up, folks.

Folks, turns out we tortured some folks. Folks, turns out we didn't grow turnips here. Folks, turns out. we didn't grow turnips here folks turns out there it turns out did you see that they are having you can get ramps and pawpaws many other places this week they're like having to sell off all their assets the judge a judge ordered them to sell off their assets we can get some bros they were a jar the door is a jar for app harvest the door is a jar let's get some let's get some harvesters it would be tight if we acquired that facility in an auction for pennies on the dollar i want a harvester i want one of those big plowing machines like an international harvester. I don't know. Whatever the thing is.

International harvester. With the tractor and the thing that goes in front that's real wide. But, like, I want to put machine guns and rocket launchers on it. And then I'm going to go to Ukraine. And then I'm going to be like, oh, I'm just a Ukrainian wheat farmer. And then be like, gotcha, bitch, and then shoot a bunch of rockets, I guess, at the Russians.

I mean, I'm not trying to be controversial today. Terrence is not picking a side in that conflict. He's just a chaos agent. I'm just an agent of chaos. Like, oh, who is this farmer? Who is this farmer who's got y'all painted on the side of his tractor, but he's, like, shooting and killing everybody?

Yeah. You know how, like, Chris Kyle was called the Devil of Ramadi or whatever? Yeah. And they call you the, well, I don't know. What's another word? The yeoman of death or something? The thorn. Yeah. The yeoman of death. something the thorn yeah the the yeoman of death yeah yeah

he comes to us he comes to us in the form of a of a simple peasant farmer that really is anwar yallaki yeah it really is the yeoman of death uh okay her argument is that in early colonial america before america was america in the early colonies the uh she's a world system theorist okay so her argument is that in the 17th and 18th centuries, the world system was in a transition state. And we talked about this on the Origi episode. We actually mentioned Origi on the episode this weekend with Christina Heatherton on the Patreon.

Go check that out, folks, if you haven't done so yet. Give us your money. Go check that out. For a little less than an hour's wage in these United States, you can get that and more. Yeah, unless it's being inflated, in which case you're not actually experiencing inflation.

Anyways, so the 16th and 17th centuries, this is a transition period Anyways So The 16th and 17th century This is a transition period where like The Dutch hegemony You know the Dutch had Global hegemon status Over the world system

Kind of interesting to think about Those bastards really kind of running Running trade I know They had their global entrepos yeah you think about a place that's underwater running things it just don't make no damn sense it's got a place called the hague that has a town with a definite article in it the hague the whole town's called the hague it's's like The Ohio State University. Yeah. In a way, you know?

Yeah. Except for baddies. For baddies. Yeah. But during this time, the French and the English were jockeying for world hegemon positions over the world system. Who was? The French and the English. Classic conflict.

Classic conflict. the French and the English classic conflict classic conflict and so Southern Appalachia which she defines as the northern part of it is West Virginia going all the way down into Georgia

and Alabama so she defines all of that as Southern Appalachia that becomes the theater upon which this global struggle plays out, actually. And so it happens in several stages. The first is that the people who lived here during that time were indigenous. So mostly a Cherokee nation, but there's also the Creek.

So the Scots-Irish. The Scots-Irish aren't here yet. You said the indigenous peoples of Appalachia. No, they won't here yet. You said the indigenous peoples of Appalachia. No. They won't arrive later. The British basically did like a divide and conquer thing. They chose the Cherokee. It's extraordinarily fucked up, man. It's insane.

It's very depressing to read about. They basically chose the Cherokee as their sort of prioritized indigenous nation to play off of like the choctaw and the creek and the yazoo and everything um is this connected to in some way to everybody claiming cherokee ancestry well it's actually it's interesting i'll get to that. Put a pin in that. So like the colonies at this time, like the 13 colonies or whatever, the northern ones, the northeastern ones and the middle ones, so basically Maine all the way down to Virginia, were like semi-peripheral. So in world systems theory, you've got a core, a periphery, and a semi-periphery.

Semi-periphery kind of mediates between the core and the periphery. And these dynamics occur all over the world, between nations, inside nations, between regions, inside regions, et cetera. So the northern states all the way down to the middle colonies were semi-peripheral the southern colonies were peripheral and the Appalachian mountains were like a

peripheral fringe attached to this and they had to be articulated into the world economy in some way and so how that happened was that in europe at this time there was a shortage of fur of leather making fur and so i don't know why something i want to say about this. This is connected to my own childhood. In the mid-'90s, anybody from Widesburg will remember that the park where we played basketball down by the middle school was sort of a site of recreation. And one day, the basketball courts were defaced with some interesting slurs. What did they say? On one goal goal it was written cock handler but on the stop sign going to right beside the basketball courts somebody wrote fur trades and i've spent most much of my adult life trying to figure out where why is a vow but also what that what that vandal was getting that with by riding just it's almost like when they wrote uh

what was it they wrote on the tree at the lost colony of rona like krakatoa or something like that something like that lemuria that's where we went peace out we went to atlantis yeah yeah so i'm trying they just wrote fur trades and i just hey i made me think of that when you're talking about the fur shortage i was like oh dude that was on somebody's mind in the 90s when they defaced the basketball court i mean maybe they were ahead of their time. Maybe they read this book. It came out in the 90s.

This is a little tight tangent. You mentioned the word vandal. So, like, vandal, obviously, we get the word vandal from the invading vandals who briefly had a kingdom in North Africa in, like, the 5th century. Do you know where the word... It's Carthaginians, basically. Yeah, they where the It's Carthaginians basically. Yeah they basically occupied

the old Carthaginian area. Okay. Do you know where we get the term villain from though? I don't know where we get the term villain. Villain used to be a designation of serfdom in the

early middle ages. But villains villains were i can't remember why i can't remember what happened but for some reason through some like sort of shift in like class composition they're basically removed from their lands and they became outlaws and so that's how we get the term villain it's basically means like an outlaw basically someone who has no obligations they have no rights but they also have no obligations baby so a desperado in espanol a desperado but that also brings up an interesting question the phrase that's answered entered the cultural lexicon chilling like a villain kind of a miss no mar there and seems like that would be the opposite of a chill life it would not yeah maybe the no obligations part would be chill but the constant reno running from authorities would probably not be chill

that's the double bind of feudal life my friend it's like you'll you have some rights as a serf you also have a lot of obligations. Unfortunately. It's not fun. But if you're a villain. Anyways. If you wonder why I'm writhing in pain over here, this is, everybody was saying the Christina Heatherton episode was your flu game. I got a flu game too.

I dislocated my shoulder and I'm in immense mind fog. What happened? I have no idea I think maybe I slipped on it I'm sorry dude I just didn't want you to think I had the palsy over here I was like Mick Jagger You're doing great

Okay where was I? Where was I? What was I explaining? Oh, the fur trade. The fur trade. Europe at the time had a short... It's funny to say when you just say fur trade. It is funny to say.

It's hilarious. But you don't really know why. It could mean anything. I think it was sexual. I think it was some kind of joke. It's gotta be. Like, you know, bush or something like that right it was the funniest way ever pelts yeah yeah oh that's what they were going for it was just

they weren't concerned about a middle century uh fur shortage they were being dirty and we put that one to bed uh-huh mystery solved 30 year mystery solved yep uh oh wait okay so there's a fur shortage in europe oh okay so the like the factory system in england this is like industrial you know industrialism is getting started and like leather making is a industry that is taking off in England at the time, but there's a shortage of, what is it? I was gonna say husbands because of husbandry, but. It's one that practices husbandry, a husband.

Is a husband, right. Good question. Well, they had to source these first. Husbandry as in like a murder of crows. Now, what do you call that? Wait, what? I always hear the phrase animal husbandry. Animal husbandry is like domestication of animals.

What are those groups in that, you know, like an alliance of dolphins? Veneri groups. Uh-huh. Yeah. Venerhuh. Yeah. Venery? Yeah. So like a group of husbands is a Kiwanis club? A podcast.

A Freemasons group? Yeah, yeah. Odd fellows? I'll tell you what a group of husbands is, is the damn Kiwanis club. So, okay, the way that the Southern Appalachian region gets articulated into the world system is through furs, specifically deer skins. And what happened was the British came in and they basically turned all of the cherokee society into like a sort of almost

sort of like a factory system like an export colony they they first of all they completely destroyed its political and civic and economic structures like previous to this they had like almost a kind of like bicameral political system it was like democratic but they had like a red organization and a white organization and these two organizations like handled like diplomacy and war decisions and uh peacetime redistribution of goods and lands and all this other stuff. But Britain came in and they basically said

no, you have to appoint one person as your chief. Listen, don't you scum know you have to have a viceroy? That's what they did, basically. And then... Don't you tossers know that you need a vicer and then and then they

basically made them dependent on british goods so they like gradually wore down their ability to like have social reproduction basically they made them entirely dependent on markets uh i'm simplifying extremely here but what a grim fate to have to like fucking uh live off uh what what's in a full english fucking baked beans and untoasted toast and a sliver of tomato it's so bad it's like extraordinarily depressing but as soon as this process is complete But as soon as this process is complete, so at the time there's three metropoles of Cherokee society. One of them's in northern Georgia, one's in east Tennessee,

and I think one is in western North Carolina. And then as they gradually sort of like, you know, just completely destroy this society, a bunch of like Tidewater elites, one of whom is George Washington and like Wilma Dunaway. You can tell she has an extreme distaste towards George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but they're the people who buy up all this land. So you've got people like George Washington hiring people like Daniel Boone and Uriah Brown to go into East Kentucky, East Tennessee, or whatever, survey the lands,

and then basically set up tenants on those lands to develop them and keep watch over them to make sure that squatters don't get on it and so like over the course of like the 19th 18th and 19th century you basically get the development of like a semi-proletariat here so it's like you've got agrarian capitalism you've got these large absentee landowners like george washington and stuff they own large portions of land but they basically turn it into a kind of like factory system where you've either got tenants or sharecroppers or uh like they call them like cottage tenants um and then you've got a bunch of like non landless workers who are wage workers but they're like out of work five or six months out of the year um basically what i'm trying what i'm saying here is we got a situation where like no one

owns the land the only people who own the land so it wasn't a situation where you had a bunch of like poor settler colonialists coming in and you have basically like tenant farming i guess yes you had sharecropping which is kind of futile in a way like there are there are definitely like futile aspects of it you're not a serf in the sense that you can leave like serfs were tied to the land like they couldn't leave but you are it is futile in the sense that like you're working the land for someone else and they get part of the crop, part of the production. So like part of your, you are abstracted from your labor in a way. Right, right. You get, you do all of the work and get a part of the thing.

Yeah, a part of it. Part of the deal. But even that was a small portion. Most people were, like, semi-proletariat wage earners who just, like, were drifters who came through the region and just needed work. It wasn't like out west where, like, the Homestead Act basically sent, basically, squatters into the west and, like, allowed them to just sit down and, like, you build your house with, like,

cow chip, like, you build your house with like cow chip, like manure or whatever. It's like, like conquista, Della West state, baby, how the West was one cow shit houses. It wasn't like that here.

Here it was like a bunch of elites bought up all the land and then parceled it out. And then there was also a lot of slaves, a lot of slavery, uh, not so much in East Kentucky and West Virginia, although there certainly was, but there was, like, in, like, Western South Carolina, like, and Appalachian Virginia. But then there was also squatters, and a lot of those squatters were Cherokeeokee who refused to be removed because, you know, you had Andrew Jackson and Indian removal in the 1830s.

They refused to leave. So a lot of them stayed and became basically like semi-proletariat, like they became like in this system of agrarian capitalism. they became like in this system of agrarian capitalism basically the point i'm making and the point that she's making is that there was never any there was never any region that was like a region of like you know sort of romanticized self-sufficient farmers who like tilled the land themselves and like owned the land and passed it from generation to generation and then the coal industry came in and destroyed all that. It's like no, they were doing agrarian capitalism in like the most ruthless forms of

natural. Very early on. In fact, there were feudal forms of land ownership here before like the 1800s. So the people in this sort of

weird nativist myth okay what was their okay so you have the cherokee who this was their land and they were basically yeah like you said like were like refused to leave we like refused to that like during the indian removal act you said yeah like andrew jackson yes so you had that class people that kind of became a proletariat so the people that are the subject of these myths now like the poor scots irish frontiersman that just found a log cabin out there and you know whatever whatever that the coal companies took all of this shit who were they the the descendants of in this story but the people that washington and those type of people came like became these like semi-feudal positions too?

Well, so you know the term primitive accumulation? Right. A lot of these people who bought up all this land, they did several things with it that like them buying up all this land became the basis for like primitive accumulation of early capitalist united states a lot of that money then went out to like factories and textiles and everything in like the northeast and middle states um but gradually what they would do is they

would like portion off parts of the land and then sell it for extraordinarily marked up prices and like there's even there's even passages where george washington is talking about this he's like talking about how like the land although he does not because he he owned land in like the canal valley in west virginia what's now west virginia and he's talking about like how although he does not live on the land and does not use it in any way, he fully intends to like survey it, parcel it up and sell it

for extraordinarily high amounts of money. This is all Virginia at this time, right? Correct. Yeah. West Virginia and even Kentucky. Yeah. Up until, when was Kentucky created? Like late, the 1790s?

Yeah, 1790, 17 yeah 1790 i forget now right so it's like that so that process by which people become landowners a lot of those people who are then landowners when the broad forum deed rolls around. They're probably the descendants of those wealthier land owners throughout the 19th century. So there's, well, I mean, probably not the case universally, but there probably is to some degree some obscured class thing where like the beleaguered person cheated out of their land may have been descended from like these sort of affluent piedmont english yeah why i mean it's not

universal you're right because there were instances in which landless like tenants and stuff were able to work enough to be able to buy their own land like that's a thing that did happen but for the most part it started out as an extraordinarily like small group of people who owned the vast majority of the land and over time that like gets winnowed down and sold to other enterprising people, entrepreneurs who came, who had enough money to buy it, but mostly their descendants. And so just because you're the descendant of one of the wealthy,

like tidewater elites, doesn't necessarily mean you know how to read a broad form deed when a coal company comes around there's you know what i mean there's no reason necessarily that says that like you would be able to sort of shield yourself against like the maneuverings of the coal industry yeah it's a very complicated story but it's not like a straightforward like it is an interesting thing because that often gets obscured in this, too, is like in the whole Appalachia thing.

It's like, oh, but these people owned land to have it stolen from them. Uh-huh. Quote, unquote. You know what I mean? Well, not quote, unquote. I mean, that did happen. They did fleece, like, illiterate landowner.

Yeah. But to be able to own land in the first place like suggest some level of affluence maybe not like pure like university learned people but maybe descended from people that had done well under some of these arrangements or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And it's like a hesitation. It's interesting. Yeah, land ownership is king.

You have to kind of... Well, I think we can at least say this authoritatively. The vast majority of people at the turn of the 20th century when they were doing a lot of that broad form deeds coal companies were stealing people's land and everything the vast majority of people were landless like semi-proletariat people

who were engaged in an economy of agrarian capitalism that was exporting some goods out but I think a lot of those goods were it depends on where you're at uh this makes so much fucking sense to me now because the reason that it's easy for affluent liberals to get invested in appalachia is because the myth is because well the myth but also it's because it's the same.

It's literally the same thing as gusanos in South Florida. Yeah. Formerly affluent landed people sort of became proletarianized vis-a-vis the, you know, 27th of June revolution. 27th of June Revolution. Now, it's not a one-to-one, obviously, but basically, yeah, there is sort of a feeling of having power by owning land, having it removed from you, either by a coal company,

or in the case of that, a revolution, whatever it was, and then getting mad and wanting it back. So it kind of makes sense that a lot of like affluent liberals can get behind sort of the Appalachian creation myth because it is mostly formerly landed white people being wronged exactly and what it says about the current moment because if it's if it is as they say then that means that the bad the villains are the coal industry which means that it's an example of capitalism gone wrong

i want to say too before we get too far away from this i am in no way comparing fidel castro to the coal company i just want to say that i'm just saying that you know there was something that happened that you got you know i think gotta... Basically what you're saying is that you can be downwardly mobile. You can be in one historical context sort of

at the top of the system and then under a certain transformation, yes, you become downwardly mobile. You become downwardly mobile, yeah. Which is rare when you're wealthy, but it does happen. Right, but it does happen, and especially in places like here where there are a lot of minerals and resources. And that's why those Tidewater elites bought up all that land in the first place, because of all the resources.

Copper, timber, coal. Cobbalt cobalt they even thought there was gold cobalt mines in jenkins kentucky before coal was ever even thought of there yeah so i i mean like you know i i uh i don't want to simplify it i'm not trying to simplify her argument and i'm not trying to like vulgarize it I'm not trying to, like, vulgarize it. But I think that, like, the basic point I'm trying to make about, like, its current application is that it dispels, like, I don't know. I think it's dangerous to, like, have this creation myth in mind that there is, like, a... We're playing fast and loose right now. Yeah, we are. We yeah we are we are a lot

of people's minds we are uh but i it's just like i was reading that like john gavinta book the power and powerlessness book and like how he's like in that book like why don't people rise up why don't people rise up? Why don't they rise up? Rise up, you ignorant wretches. And then it's like, you go to like the, you know, 50 pages in, and he's like, this area was like self-sufficient farmers,

and then the coal industry came in, and it's like, dude. This is fucked up. This is fucked up. This is fucked up. This is fucked up. I mean, it's like dude this is fucked up this is fucked up this is fucked up i mean it's just it's bad history it's it's also you you aren't gonna change anything if you have a bad understanding of history and uh but i honestly i thought the fascinating thing was that there were feudal land practices here before like capitalism because you got to understand that like capitalism was not like yes like where and how capitalism started is a huge debate right it's like very fun to go down

those rabbit holes but america in the 17th century and 18th century wasn't entirely capitalist yet and so you had feudal land practices here like quit rent and shit like that like the s cheat system or whatever like that's a feudal arrangement and that's like really weird to think about obviously like you know by the time you get to like the 19th century they've fully sort of capitalized the whole thing land becomes commercialized labor becomes commodified like the hallmarks of capitalism like you see those things but like early on it's kind of interesting to think about it's just like i don't know we've been had yeah do you know what i've been had. Yeah.

Do you know what I've been thinking about lately? What's that? What is very fascinating to me is that, like, capitalism did not start, no mode of production has ever started just because some people sat down and said, let's do it that way like it is it has been there was not like a there was not like a chamber of commerce meeting where they said okay here's what we're gonna do yeah they didn't press a red button that says all right let's switch the mode of production yeah like not even not even with like bourgeois revolutions in

like england france the united states did that it was instead like a long-term like secular process of like sort of organic uh appearances of like changes in the social relations over a long amount of time so it kind of like does that make sense so it rose organically does that make sense yeah that's grown organic non-gmo it's non-gmo that's weird to think about because that means well it makes you ask the question like can you intentionally create a mode of production like communism or does it have to like grow organically have to yeah yeah i don't know what did marx have to grow organically? Does it organically have to, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. What did Marx have to say on this subject? Or is this part of Chinese democracy?

It might be part of Chinese democracy, man. This is what's left unsaid. I think, honestly, I think that's why he never really wanted to talk about communism. he realized that the transformations in social relations throughout the 15th 16th 17th centuries are what gave rise to capitalism it wasn't just like one group of people in one place it was like several different places and there was this like dialectical process where like the new mode of production gets crafted and created in the shell of the old one and then kind of like grows out of that and so i kind of think that he probably realized like you can't do it intentionally perhaps but maybe you can i don't know maybe then that's fast and loose too that That's worth, it's worth pondering.

Man, we went far filled. Let's go back to the beginning of this episode when it was funny. We were doing, uh, popcorn humor.

Let's do popcorn humor. I don't want to talk about serious stuff. I don't want to talk, someone called us deeply unserious the other day. did i don't know but this is the thing in my mind i'm like do i want to be serious or no who called us deeply unserious i don't know some asshole you want to go find some future magistrate and nobleman yeah i love that kind of snobbery yeah undisciplined and deeply unserious

motherfucker i was raised by chicken fighters suck my dick charlie bit me can we do that can we do charlie bit me you ever got the charlie utter humor you remember charlie bit me or charlie utter yeah there's that too you remember that too. You remember that viral video? It was that viral video of that kid who had a dentist thing. He was like, Charlie Bit Me. Oh. Charlie, why did you bite me? You don't remember that?

I don't think I do. I thought you were going for Can I pet that dog That one First Do you want to talk about Hasan Minhaj Yeah let's talk about What was the show called Do you want to talk about Hasan Minhaj

Or do you want to talk about Paul Krugman why inflation is Happening You don you want to talk about Paul Krugman and why inflation is happening? Nah, Hasan Minhaj. You don't want to talk about the United Workers are overplaying their hand, risking our economy in the election? God,

it's tempting. Krugman does just give you some dumbass morsels to chew on. Here's a dumbass morsel. Hey listen up hot shot it's time for your fucking dumb ass morsel do i want to do uh the uaw is going to cost biden re-election and that and let me tell you why that's bad for democracy or i made up a story about my daughter getting splashed with anthrax to bolster my Netflix special. Uh-huh. Let's do the guy that wrote The Auto Workers.

Okay. He's a counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration. The United Auto Workers has taken to the picket lines in a particularly acrimonious strike targeting for the first time no this is a guy named steven ratner i wonder if he's related to brett ratner the hollywood uh rapist allegedly i thought that was the guy used to be married it wasn't i thought he used to be married to serena williams no brian singer You're getting Brett Ratner and Bryan Singer mixed up. No, no, no. Brett Ratner also did bad things. He did me two things.

Oh, okay, okay, okay. I didn't want to besmirch somebody unnecessarily, but if he... Trust me, dude. I know my Me Too lore. Okay, you're the Hollywood reporter. I got it. I'm the Hollywood reporter.

I know. Yeah. Popular opinion. That's right. to lore okay you're the hollywood reporter i got it i'm the hollywood reporter i know yeah popular opinion that's right popular terrence hollywood ray that's my popular opinion appears to lie firmly on the union side and i'm all for the auto workers getting paid more they have legitimate concerns But this increasingly militant UAW is overplaying its hand with an overly lengthy and overly ambitious list of demands. I don't think there's any way the automakers will be able to meet these conditions, and I worry about the implications for our economy and for President Biden. The stakes are high. A prolonged strike, which could lead to far more widespread shutdowns of auto facilities,

could jeopardize the economic recovery. Our nearly $800 billion audio industry accounts for 3% of economic output, with a particular concentration in the Midwest, where states like Michigan are critical to President Biden's reelection. Okay, let me just say something right off the top. He's already starting from the assumption that we give one fuck about President Biden's aspirations and goals. Uh-huh. Also, anything that you raise in this scenario could easily just be fixed

by the auto industry, by the bosses just... Taking a little less. The demands, making less money. Yeah. It's like, why do the auto workers have to be the ones to sacrifice for Biden's economy? Yeah, why do we talk about it in those terms?

Why, like, with the rider's track, why are we not just pointing out that, like, Reed Hastings could just stand to, you know, make about $40 million less to meet these demands or whatever it is you know what i mean right like but instead it's it's always no the workers are jeopardizing this and it's never like eight fucking assholes are jeopardizing everybody's livelihood it is a fascinating thing because basically what it's doing, because just this sentence,

nearly $800 billion auto industry accounts for 3% of economic output with a particular concentration in the Midwest where states like Michigan are critical to President Biden's reelection. What it's doing is it's pitting workers against the sacred, hallowed norms of democracy that is you know what it's saying it's saying that uh when the workers strike democracy dies in the dark yeah like did you see that the uaw gave us trump is what it's going to be if biden loseselection or whatever. It 100% will. Did you see Amy McGrath is back? Yeah, I saw a deleted tweet. Somebody said she's back,

but it said this post has since been deleted. Yeah. She said, tonight I announced my mission for 2024. I'm teaming up with an unprecedented group of leaders in the national security community to launch a new project. Wow. unprecedented group of leaders in the national security community to launch a new project a new project called operation saving democracy and our mission is singular stop trumpism at the ballot box and like the commercial has a bunch of like uh war criminals basically saying that like

i've stayed out of politics my whole life but this is the biggest threat to democracy I've ever seen. They had Slobodan Milosevic saying that. Slobodan Milosevic just saying, listen, I've done my fair share of crimes, but I've never seen anything like this. We really are going to have a military coup to put down the striking workers and to put down the trump like maga morons that's how this is all shaping up it makes total sense it's the same shit that said that like oh bernie voters are just maga voters it's it's all shaping up to be the same thing

like when this inevitably fucks biden up when he croaks in october 2024 when terrence's october surprise prediction comes to pass they're gonna say the stress was too much i hope the second half of your life you become like a like a um like a noted psychic yeah you just go you just go all over the tv news circuit making like bold projections and like one out of 20 come true and like everybody's like this man is the oracle of hobbes well that's that's what you that's what i've learned about prophecies you never want to be right like the minute you're right about a prophecy you slot you start sliding into irrelevance and decadence

it sets the bar too huh it's like your first album being your best album you know exactly exactly uh for much of american economic history workers incomes tracked closely blah blah blah uh the uaw i can so i can understand why auto workers want and deserve a big raise. The problem is that in their zeal, they're asking for too much. In addition to pay raises of 36% over four years, the list includes a 32-hour work week with 40 hours of pay,

a new version of the pre-recession jobs bank, which continued to pay laid-off workers most of their usual wages in a return to defined benefit pensions. I want to say something, too, though. Like, this is also, like, the auto companies aren't coming to the table, either. Right. I mean, like, they're saying, like, oh, they have all these insane demands.

Well, of course, in a negotiation, you're going to start way higher so you can right have some room you know what i mean like quit you can't paint people as like unreasonable because yeah they're just trying to start a negotiation smartly yeah and then he basically says that they're short-sighted because the auto industries are just going to relocate their production to Mexico or the South. That's like, listen, we're either going to Puebla or getting some 12-year-olds to build these Nissan Versas, okay?

And fucking Jasper, Alabama. Yes, profits at the Detroit 3 are at record levels, $37 billion last year. But the auto industry usually operates at thin margins, and even though labor costs are a relatively small fraction of the company's overall expenses, these profits can evaporate quickly. Gee, I wonder where they go.

Yeah, these profits can evaporate quickly. Yeah, and right into the other CEO's pockets. Yeah. I really and truly hope that the people that are responsible for being our country's watchdog and keeping an eye on things are truly not this goddamn stupid. Yeah, no, it's important to keep in mind this guy worked in the Obama administration. Oh, okay. I mean, it's astonishing it's astonishing that like it's exactly like we were talking about on the phone before we recorded

every time that there is a republican in administration in the white house Republican in administration in the White House all these people turn into fucking like all these people like might as well be fucking like linen like you know what I mean like let's fucking we have to take back democracy by

any means necessary and then as soon as like a Democrat gets in the White House they're just like uh uh then they switch to like the sort of Rad lib position yeah where it's like you can they keep talking all radical but it but it instead of like uh yeah storming the bastille it's like we're gonna get them in november right where it hurts at the fucking ballot box uh the fucking ballot box uh-huh um but well and my point of point about that is that like a lot of

leftists or people on the liberal left like buy it hook line and sinker and the reasoning their rationale is like oh well we at least know people in these administrations now, and we can work to bend their ear. And then they start grandstanding. If you've got concerns about that approach, they start grandstanding about how you're just unreasonable and you're never going to change anything with your stubbornness about these things. And it's like, just look at this op-ed.

These are the people you would potentially be lobbying. The people who don't give a fuck about the workers they just care about getting re-elected and like i don't want to diminish i'm not trying to like diminish the threat to democracy trump represents yes if he wins probably not going to be good it's not going to be good no matter what republican wins it's not going to be good no matter what Republican wins. It's not going to be good no matter what liberal wins. The whole goddamn thing is coming apart at the seams. When things are this febrile, you know what I'm saying? When things are this tenuous, when the whole thing rests on an 82-year- guy somehow managing to die next month a year from

next month it's it's way it's way too tenuous i'm just saying like it's you built a system you built a system that's like it's not built to last it's not built for tough. This system, folks, not built for tough. Not built like a rock. Financial markets are acutely aware of the large-scale challenges facing the Detroit companies. General Motors stock prices. Are they going to bring in Bob Seger to break the strap. Cross the picket line.

I'd be so sad. I love Bob Seger. He's going to look at the UAW and say, you know what? You're not built for tough. General Motors stock price has been essentially flat since the company went public 13 years ago, while the overall equity market has appreciated 276%. That's in part because of the competitive challenges public 13 years ago, while the overall equity market is appreciated 276%.

That's in part because of the competitive challenges that Detroit companies face, not only from traditional non-union players like Toyota or Honda, but also from new entrants into the industry like Tesla, which also has no unions. The proliferation of EVs disproportionately produced by non-unionized companies

will only heighten these pressures. This is why we need to be particularly careful about limiting the flexibility of the companies to manage efficiently. The companies are limited by contract, for example, in their ability to move workers from one factory line to another. I don't think Bob Seger made this track.

I'm sorry, Bob. Don't bring Slater up, Bob. I wouldn't want to live in a world where Bob Seger was a scab. was, I'm sorry, Bob. Don't break Slander and Bob. I love Bob Seger. I wouldn't want to live in a world where Bob Seger was a scab. He might be though, dude. We don't know. We don't know his political views.

And like, honestly, I'm kind of afraid to look it up. Yeah, all I really know about him is his night moves. He's still working. He's working on his night moves. Dude, I love working on my night moves.

Working on a night move. God, it working. He's working on his night moves. I do. I love working on my night moves. Working on a night move. God, it's such a fucking banger. Sometimes when I have to take a dump, I like ask your 6 p.m., I like sing that song, but it's like, working on a night poop.

That's good. It doesn't say what his... Politically, Seeger has characterized himself as a centrist. I'm right down the middle, he remarked. Oh, no. No. Oh, no.

No. Oh, no. Oh, he is going to break the strike, isn't he? He's going to try. He tackled anti-establishment themes in early songs, such as 2 plus 2 equals question mark and umc upper middle class uh and then the check started counting who sings that song i find authority authority always wins what is that song about like what like the message of that song is like, I'm constantly getting my ass kicked by the man.

I fight authority, authority always wins. You know which one I'm talking about? Is that John Cougar? I fought the law and the law won. No, no, it's the clash. I'm talking about John Cougar Mellencamp. You're talking about the Coug who was on Club Random with Bill Maher this week debating about who can say the N-word and who can't. He was.

That was a meeting of the mind. Finding some answers. Uh-huh. The UAW and its allies argue with considerable justification that the gap between workers' pay and that of senior execs has widened to appalling levels. That, however, has much to industry's average pay at the time, the compensation... Audio, audio. I think you said the audio industry. Do I say audio?. The compensation... I keep saying the audio industry.

Do I say audio? Yeah, I think you said it. The compensation package of the CEO of General Motors rose to $29 million last year, more than 400 times the average auto worker's annual pay. Why are we having this argument then? It's pretty fucking obvious.

Unions have an important role to play in redressing imbalances between owners and workers. That said, we need to be careful about killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Suck my fucking dick. Suck my fucking cock. Listen, have you never fucking heard Jack and the

Beanstalk? The worker steals the golden goose, and when the giant comes after it, guess what we do we kill the fucking giant that's what that's how it goes that's the story of history motherfucker also i love the concept as you pointed out earlier of starting a negotiation from the place of like oh i i i'm just here to ask for a little more more money but I don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. I don't want to kill the goose. I want about a nickel

on the hour. That sounds good. Like, who starts the negotiation? Yeah, you're in a good position if you have a fucking union leader that's not too conciliatory to his fucking company. Right. Yeah.

Okay. I also like that Sean Fane kind of sounds like you're saying i know i thought that too the first time i heard people saying his name i was like that's yeah that goes hard dog damn damn all right working on the night poops. Eating prunes during the working day. Said we're working on the night poops. Oh, the summertime. Cheating me out of two hours of sleep because I got to poop before 8. Oh, man. Oh, man.

Oh, man. Okay. Let's call it. It's Mountain Heritage. I'm going to go right here. You're going to tell everybody about this new history you've been written about. Listen, everything you know about yourself is a lie. Is that writing fur trades on the wall?

Everywhere. Oh, man. Okay. was a lie yeah i was there writing fur trades on the wall everywhere oh man okay um go to the patreon we got an episode on uh sunday with our friend christina heatherton talking about the about global radicalism in the era of the mexican revolution please go check that out i think it's a good episode um that's from this past sunday uh five dollars that's all you got to pay and then you get like 200 something other episodes what a deal hey what a deal help out a landless artisan like help out out a couple of landless artisans with lump and pearl rising in their charts. Yeah. You know, I'd challenge you if you've been given $5 a month.

See, you know, these boys are all right. We'll give them an hourly wage. Yeah. Bump that up to seven and a quarter or you know on up the chain whatever how many hours are in a week let's see there's 24 hours in a day so 24 times seven so 168 hours in a week uh how would you, if you gave us $5 a month, how would that work out per hour? How do you do that math? If there's 168 hours in a week, how do you do it?

168 times 4.3, there's 722.4 hours in a month in a 30-day month. A little more in a 31-day month, a little less in a 24-day month, obviously. Right. Do you divide that by five? Wait a second. I messed that up. No, that's not working. Do you divide it by, like,.5?

How do you do this? I think it's.5, yeah. Basically, I think it comes out to, like, you're paying us, like, five cents an hour, right? Divide by, carry the two oh god oh man i'm bad yeah i keep coming back to you would need to pay us 1444 dollars that's the list of that's not what we're asking for well i'm, perspective-wise, if you think about it as if you give us $5 a month, that's like giving us a penny every hour, right? And that is not much. If you knew me in life, real life, wouldn't you want to give me a penny every hour?

Huh? Five. I mean, it kind of makes sense because there's like 700 hours in a month. And so a penny every hour is like $7 a month, right? Yeah. So therefore, ergo, it's a little less than a penny every hour. Send us some money so we can take math on that seven at the community college. This works.

Basically, I'm trying to break it down into Spotify numbers. If you pay for Spotify, you get more out of your buck by giving us $5 a month. Oh, that's right. How's that sound? How's that sound? Right? 30 divided by 5. Wait a second.

30. I think you do 700-something divided by point. Brother. Wait a second. Math sucks ass. I can't do this i refuse to do this i'm a social scientist bitch yeah that's i prefer the social sciences i prefer the i prefer the soft sciences i always have that's right i think in my mind i've worked it out to a little it's a little less than a penny every hour if you give us $5 a month. So, like, you're giving me a little less than a penny every hour.

That's hardly anything. I remember when you showed up at Doorstep saying, I need my pennies. I need my less than a penny. Take a penny, break it in half, and that's what you're giving me every hour. Yeah. A little something for me, and then you give the other half a penny back and say, a little something for you're giving me every hour. Yeah. A little something for me

and then you give the other half of the penny back and say a little something for you. That's exactly right. That doesn't sound like much that doesn't sound like much money does it? Exactly. So then go sign up for Patreon.

Five dollars a month. Yeah. Or more. The sky's the limit. That's not much. Yeah. This is great math. Great reason

rationale. Alright. Thanks for listening this week, Chris. Also, if you point out that motherfucker that said I'm deeply unserious, just send him my way. Or them. Whatever.

I think they meant it as a compliment. Retraction. I think they meant it as a compliment. Retraction. I think. I don't know. If you meant it as a slide, then I'll take it. Then we're going to kick your fucking ass. Yeah. If you meant it as a compliment, then.

Thanks. I'll make you a ham sandwich. We'll engage your fur trade We'll take you to the movie theater Yeah We'll jack you off We'll go trade beaver pelt Okay

Thanks for listening this week everybody We'll see you next time Peace out