It Could Happen Here Weekly 16

Could Happening a podcast. My name is Saint Andrew and I'll be a host as we talk about politics stuff with me. Today is Garrison Hello, and Christopher Hello, and Sufi Hi. And today we will be tackling or rather, we'll be taking a trip to the anarchist activism in Latin America with a specifies more. But first we need

to get into some context here. The first organization to promote the concept of a SPECIFISEMO was the Federation Anarchista Uruguaya or the FAU, which is founded in nineteen fifty six by anarchist Milton's who embraced the idea of an organization there was specifically anarchist, but those who don't know. Not long after rather two decades after six UM, the US install a dictatorship in Uruguay, the last from nineteen the f A you survived that dictatorship and went on

to establish connections with other South American anarchist revolutionaries. So they helped to support the founding of the Federa Shao Anarchista Gaocha or f a G. I don't know if I'm pronounced that correctly, the Federal ANARCHISTAKABOA and the Fedshaw and Arkista the Rio de Janero or f the r G in their respective regions for so and they also helped to found the Argentinean organization nas Alka, which means rebel while when you coming onto stage in Latin America

in the last few decades, the ideas that really make up A specifies more Sasha, a historic threat that's really run through the anarchist movement internationally since the beginning. UM. It may as we get into like what is and stuff, it may sound very similar to platform is UM. Are

you all familiar with that current? Yeah, I'm from familiar with platforms a little bit, but we can probably I don't know, explain it for the people at at at home who are not as who do not spend as much time thinking about old, old, old anarchist terms, right right right, so they're generic listener or viewer or whatever. UM. Platform is UM began with a document that was written in nine by the former Peasant Army leader Nestor macne either Met and other militants of the Yellow Truder or

Workers Cause group. They published a document called Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, and it was written in response to well being exiled from the Russian Revolution UM and having to struggle really to find their foot in after the Bolsheviks turned the work of Soviets into instruments of one party rule. UM, so the Power Space group, the Yello Truder, they really criticized the anarchist movement for a

lack of organization. So they proposed an alternative that is controversial to some anarchists, but it's just actually a general union of anarchists based on anarchist communism that would strive for theoretical and tactical unity and I focus on class struggle and labor unions. Obviously, platform is UM, like all political ideas, it's not a static you know, the world has progressed. Sickness significantly in a century. So um, while

there is an emphasis and workers struggle and class struggle. UM, when you speak to most platforms today, I would say, Um, obviously I don't have stats on that. I would say most platforms can recognize that, you know, the no war with the class war is a bit reductive. Um. I've also noticed, actually that platformism has been getting a bit more popularity lately. I don't know if it's just me and my perception, but I don't know if you'all seen that I have. I've not seen tons of it here.

A lot of the type of anarchist of my it around, or at least see is is not is not in this vein. But most most of the stuff I see is like around um, like the kind of like live anarchy type kind of strings um and more individualists. Right. But that's just I think a very like Pacific Northwest specific thing that the anarchists here just kind of generally trend in that direction. So I'm not sure what it's literally like across like this country in other places around

the world. Yeah, I know, I know, I know, I've definitely seen it especially I think I think it's it's I don't know almost. I think it's bigger a few years ago, but back like there is a big spike of black Rose, um serious group for a while, and yeah, people who like called themselves like anarcho communists or anarcho syndicalists kind of generally swam in this general ocean. Yeah, I definitely saw that as a bigger thing in than now,

at least like locally from my area. And I think I will say, yeah, the blacks people, a lot of them, like very very specifically were specifi based on a lot of it was based on like people who had like experiences with a specific various ways, right right, Yeah, Because I was actually just about to say, I think that black Rose is more a specificity than Platform is. But of course there is you know, a lot of overlap

between these two currents, right. Um. As for my experience with like platform and some and stuff, have seen um discussions of it happening more. I mean that's all I can really see that I've seen. Um I have you ever read once? But at least if discussions are happening, the likelihood of things coming out of it might be a bit. In Greece, I guess another current that m has been part of the anarchist milieu, psycheist wave whatever is organizational dualism, which came out to the nineteen twenties

Italian anarchist movement. So they used the tomb to describe involvements of anarchists both as members of anarchists specific political organizations and also as militants in the labor movement. In Spain, the Friends of Druti group emerged to oppose the Gradual Reviews of the Spanish Revolution, and they also ended up emulating some of the ideas of the Platform by criticizing you know, cnt F phase, c ant f AIS, gradual reformism and collaboration with republican government. Um, So the sparks

of war and stuff. You know, there's a lot of forces that play and we're gonna get into it now, but it is, I would say, as a side note, important to recognize that there is no model it when it comes to like these sort of civil wars and historical events. Um, you really have to look at things in context, and you know, it's not trying to strip them away from the goings on at the time. Also, the Chinese anarchist movement of the nineteen tens um advocated

for similar ideas. I'm going to try to pronounce the name of the group, hopefully don't get castled. But it's them who Shuang Fu Kongshan Jui Tong. She's a way, I think, which is the Society of Anarchists Communist Comrades. And yeah, they advocated for a lot of similar ideas. So there's a lot of different currents around the world,

influenced by you know, the historic conditions. But the general thread that you know, anarchists need to get together and work as a unit is you know what's thrust in it right and specifies more is just a fresh continuation of this threat of this trend. So what is what is the specificies more exactly, the three key concepts um that I see emphasized again and again. One the need for specifically anarchist organization built around a unity of ideas

and practice. Two, the use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and develop strategic political and organizing work. And three active involvement in and building of autonomous and popular social movements, which is described as the process of social insertion. So kind of core to the whole specificity current is which is rather anti tectical some of the trends that

I've seen in the past couple of years. It's sort of a rejection of this left unity idea, right, this idea that there can be these this sort of big tent organization that can somehow establish all these different visions simultaneously. Right. So, I specificity reject the idea of just unity for unity's sake because they feel it boils down to sort of

Louis common denominate to kind of wishy washy politics. They feel that when unity is preferred at all costs, it leaves very little room for unified action or develop political discussion. In fact, in my experience, when you have like a lot of political heterogene um, there tends to be a lot of unproduct to drama lack of better word. Obviously, people of different political stripes should work together, um, and

there's no like harm in that. But at the same time, when it comes to certain types of organizations, having a sense of ideological unity is I would say pretty important, as you know, you don't want to have all these different groups constantly butting heads for all these different visions. You know, you want to have at least some sense

that we're moving in sync. Right, So you're not going to have some people who are trying to establish social democracy and some people who are trying to get like this workers State code and code, or you know, people who just want I don't know, like a higher minimum reach. Right. I mean, everyone's on a different stage of their political journey.

But what a specificity trys emphasize is that while we can work within these larger social movements, um, it's important that anartists specifically come together to try to shape those movements in an organized way. And I'll explain because it kind of sounds a bit like vanguardism for some people, this idea that you know, these this cabal of like

revolutionaries are trying to manipulate things behind the scenes. But um, really, what a Specificitts argue is that anarchists needed space, the near space for like common strategy and reflection and collective responsibility and you know, a place to discuss plans and build trust and share analysis and you know, put together

short and long term goals all that jazz. Um. So, while the specificitys do reach out too and work with social movements regardless of whether they fit this code and code, anarchist purity test um, and I see that with my tongue planted filmily and cheek. Of course, Um, they want to make sure that they can sue still as an

active minority, so that these movements aren't diluted. And so I noticed IM like throwing out a lot of different woods and freezers and ideas, um, you know, things like ideological unity and the need for sort of a consensus within the group. Um. And speaking of I've spoken about consensus on my channel before, so I have a breakdown on it people to check out if they like. Um, I was spoke of unified strategy, right, so you're not just joking around. You actually have mapped out sort of strategy,

like for example, black socialists in America. They aren't like a specifically a specificity or to my knowledge, but you can see um that they have unified like clearly leader of strategy, and they're making moves to make it to achieve it, and they're very public about those moves, right. Um. I also want to emphasize, of course, and the specifies

more the whole idea of this active minority. You know, it's not just a bunch of like it sounds like a passive book club, right, and a specificity group is a group of people who are passionate about you know this cause, um, And obviously passionate people have this habit of for they can more than they can chew. Right.

So what I would advise like a specificity and a specificity judgment, adjacent groups, and really just organizations in general, is that keep your size in mind, keep achievable goals within sight, because if you don't, you know, it's very easy to burn out very quickly. Yeah. Um. With the specificity groups, it's important that they understand their responsibility, but also that they understand their limits. Lastly, and very importantly, social institution I think is one of the most important

parts for specifiesmo. And I think even if you don't take anything away from like a specificity specifies more, you at the very least like implement social institution or at least concepts within social institution into organizing, right Because obviously

um and I guess a kind of fewer number. But what social institution tries to point out, I guess, or tries to develop within a movement, it's just awareness that the people who are making these moves from organizing and whatnot, that they don't relinquish their power to like other figures

or forces or parties or whatever the case may be. Right, um, social institutions times in the belief that the oppressed of the most revolutionary sector of society and the seed of future revolutionary transformation of society lies already in these classes and social groupings. So it doesn't mean socialization doesn't mean like acting within single issue advocacy campaigns or you know,

like trying to take over people's existing struggles. It means getting involved in daily fights and daily struggles for people to better their own conditions. It means, you know, connecting with workers, connecting with immigrants, connecting across neighborhoods, um working towards racial liberation, working within students struggles and tenant struggles. As people are like part of these uncles, they become conscious of their place in society. Right, And part of

our rule is to try to develop their consciousness. So as people are tempered and tested and recreated, they see their position in the what's what we're looking for in the pecking order? Right, They see that there are forces that play that are keeping them down, their structures play that are keeping them down, and they change from just being like social classes to being active social forces. So they're brought together by organic methods and by self organized cohesion.

What you notice of the popular movements, like, for example, Black Lives Matter, is that, unlike what some conservatives might assume, the Black Lives Matter organization wasn't the one like pulling the strings, you know, like the official group wasn't there, you know, telling people okay, march here, burned that right here, move that. You know. It's like the people themselves came together and you know, really expressed the desire for change.

And so really, as they become self conscious actors, aware of their power, of their voice, of their nemesis, which is the ruling elites that control their social order, a specificitys try to keep that thrust right. What a specificity argue is that essentially there's an anarchist on the current two popular social movements that should be preserved and maintained and cultivated. Right with popular movements, um, they're very quickly co opted by in positions of leadership or by you know,

academically eats, or by political parties. But specificity aren't there to try to make groups identify as anarchists, right, They're there to just maintain that thrust to be self organized and to fight for their own interests, because ultimately that's our natural impulse as humans, you know, it's really the propaganda that tells us, you know, um, like you have to go through these proper channels. You know, you have to vote with your dollar or you know, food for

these politicians or whatever the case may be. Converse and all these different things call up your representatives. The natural thrust of a person is not to like relinquished control of themselves, you know, is to try to maintain that um and so a specifics trying to push against the propaganda that keeps us from maintaining that, push against the co optation that ships that from us. So, yeah, do any sort of automatic critiques of a specifies move come

to mind? We all, I'm not sure about like critiques per se. We need to think about it more. But a few things that come to mind around so, like you talked a bit about like the difference between like left unity and creating like an anarchist unity, um, and for people at home, I would like to maybe extrapolate

why those are different things. I know you have a good video on left unity already, but like in terms of trying to like, you know, if if one of the goals being creating like an anarchist organization that kind of unifies different anarchists, how that is a different type of unity than just left unity in general. Um. I

think that might be a point of clarification. And then the other thing I was wondering about is like, how does this intersect in terms of like individual goals versus like group goals or like organizational goals and so like, because like there's a there's a back and forth between like personal autonomy and then you know these type of social movements that kind of almost gained their own thrust right right, Yes, to the point about the difference between

left unity and anarchist unity, um well, obviously artists, oh soon fairly heterogeneous. Um. I think our general thrust for self determination and autonomy and that kind of thing is it brings us together. You know. The difference between like say anarchist unity where they defferently some I would say key disagreements within the milieu and left unity is that I feel there are some extremely incompatible factors that prevent left unity from being viable. Yeah, when there's a thrust

among significant segments. I mean really every non libertarian segment of you know, they couldn't get left two fun known our popular energy towards state institutions, whether it be through insurrectionary social democracy or reformist social democracy in a case of amounts and stock damage respectively. Um, I think that that really keeps us from really working together on anything

more than small goals and small projects. I mean, we've really seen the whole left unity idea of fall apart, you know, through wars and through even just like what should be discussions between people, you know, like the First International literally split because of the differences between you know, the so called left currents, you know, between the anarchists and the other socialists. So lat unity is not something that I even to achieve. I think most people know

that about me by now, um. But regard to like anarchist unity, and of course the differences between artists, I think the general rusted to maintain the autonomy and self termination of the people and of the social movements via inserting ourselves in is what really clues us together. And of course that alone, I don't know if that's enough to maintaining a specificity organization, because you know, like I noted a specificitys try to um develop deeper level you know,

strategies and theoretical discussion and that kind of thing. And so with those sort of discussions, you know, you're gonna see a lot more of the distinctions bearing out. But at the very least, um, I think anarchists generally could benefit from a degree of at least unity in the sense of maintaining as aularity in the sense of maintaining

the libertarian thrust of popular movements. Actually, other thing that you had noted about the sort of friction between individual goals and organizational goals, between autonomy and sort of how social movements end up taking on like an energy of their own. Um. To be quite honest, I don't think

I have like a fully developed answer for that. Yeah, um, Because, on the one hand, a social movement that forgets that it is about, you know, deliberation of individuals is you know, in my view of social movement that's quickly going to and obtaining against the people who are you know, fueling it.

At the same time, I've interacted with like a lot of people what pretty selfish or pretty egotistical or just argumentative for the sake of it sorry, So if you're gonna say something, yeah, I was just like the thing that keeps popping up into my head is, you know, one of the things that gets misconstrued all the time

is who's calling the shots. And I kind of feel like what you're saying is everybody in a way, right, Yeah, Yeah, I think that like, which is good sometimes but not good other times obviously exactly, Yeah, because I think it's it's very easy to fall into this sort of um almost reactionary I like island mentality not island mentality is in Caribean is mentality is in personessn't as an island around like autonomy and you know personal freedom, you know,

like this rendering idea that you know on step map property, you know that kind of thing just let people do whatever. It's kind of like more so alchocalyst conception of what like freedom and autonomy is I think an important part of autonomy and you know freedom and yeah, like this project is you know, accountability and is you know, like consequences like social consequences and how your actions affect others.

You know, like what ant say he was to recognize is that we are not in fact island you know, our actions or behavioral words affect other people. And so I think it's going to be a constant projects of balance um individual personalities and goals. But I mean, yeah, it's it's tricky, right, Like you know, we're you're talking about like some kind of you know, group organization to work together to kind of you know, think of achievable

goals and create steps to get there um. And I feel among a lot of people who proudly declare themselves anarchists and at least like and they're extremely vocal. Like these are like people both like online and in person organizing that are very are very like vocal and try

to very much like make their place known. We've seen trends away from this direction in terms of like rejecting the idea of goals and demands and just you know, like this this more insurrectionary kind of tendency of just making total destroy for the sake of it and if a simple committee, yeah, and and and and that. I mean, like I know that like platform is m is kind of like it's not like Antiens instructionary, but it's like

it's it definitely critiques that type of instructionary trend. UM. So I'm thinking about like, you know, this idea and like, how with with with this kind of general you know, decentralized, no no demands, no goals kind of general kind of direction that like capital a anarchists are are doing. How like what's what's maybe some parts of specifics that we can actually take into account to be like, hey, maybe there's you know, like I I don't like I don't

like being called like any adjective anarchist. I think it's silly. I like I like the um I think earlier this year or yeah, they last year, Like I just got to the point for I'm anarchist, you know that's yeah, Yeah, I like the part in Desert. It's like, I'm an anarchist of many adjectives. I'm not, I'm not I'm not always an insurrectionary, I'm not always a syndicalist. I'm not always you know, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah um.

And I feel like that's would be really useful kind of thing for people to focus on more in terms of, yeah, it can be fun to make total destroying that it's a very base instinct, but it also would be great to like improve people's lives a little bit um and yeah, and there's like to to to kind of like dueling things, um and in terms, that's why I do really like the part of like this type of stuff that it's really appealing to me just because I kind of already

work on this myself, so I'm like, oh, I'm I'm already doing this. But it's like the it is it is like the social the social insertion side of things, I think is something that would be a much a much better way of thinking about. Like everyone hates talking about optics because yeah, it's frustrating, but I think the social insertion method is a better framework for kind of dealing with some of those same problems, um and yeah.

And then like you know, there is even among insurrectionaries and all those you know, all those types, there still is like a decent amount of like group projects and stuff, and that is I think a really good thing to focus on because but yeah, there's not many anarchists and it would be cool if there was more. And if we just focus on the parts that make people go, oh that's kind of silly and pointless, then we're not

really going to grow anarchism that much. Um. So highlighting the parts they're like, oh, yeah, you're actually helping people. That's gonna convince a lot more people who are kind of already trending in that general general direction, and then hey, maybe in a few years they can also be doing

silly destruction for fun because it is it is fun sometimes. Um, Yeah, like this, as you mentioned, optics reminded it is kind of pet peeve I have with some you know, instant people where they try to treat like ideologies or specifically anarchism as like a pr project that we have to like constantly be trying to shift the optics and micromanaged

like every aspect. Like No, I think the best remedy for like, because you're not going to match the power of mass media, what you can do to push back against the sort of propaganda is help people, and help people and identify as anarchists as you're helping people, right, Like, that's the easiest and quickest way to dispel people's notions

and like conceptions of what an anarchist is. If we were to take like socialization right and sort of, I would say, there's still it's a bit and individualize it a bit. Um. I would say that as a practice you know, just even if you don't know any any other anarchists in your area, right, just being there, being in these movements helping people and you know, saying you know, this is what I believe. Um, just talking to people about what you believe as a police and as you're

helping them. You know, that goes a long way, much longer than any you know, poster um campaign or like wheat pasting initiative or artwork, um you know wall arts or whatever. You know, like actively helping people. Of course wall lot has its place and double atle bit myself, but you know there's um, it's not it's ultimately like talking to people and helping people and being their people and being honest about your intentions that I think, you know,

we should working towards. And I think those types of projects are something that the specific model like excels that in terms of like creating like a unlitay anarchists who get like who have like a goal in mind and

then go out to achieve the goal. Helping people like doing like doing like like like direct directly helping people is something that that type of organization model is kind of the best at UM because you can yeah, really like organize things much better with a small group like that, and create goals that are actually very achievable, whether it be you know, building a community kitchen or building you know, heating centers for like for the winter, like under under

bridges or whatever. You know, all those types of starting comming to the gardens, all those kinds of things are I think what this type of model really excels at. And yeah, you don't need to change your ideology to this one word because that's that's silly. But you can pick up different parts of it be like, yeah, that actually seems like a useful way of the world you want, you know, politicians just ruling hand co opt our project, you know, like just basic things like that, you know.

And then from there, you know, as you are talking with people and meeting people who are passionate about issues in these social movements, you know, no need to say keep you from developing this sort of um partumilarly online um in group kind of mentality. It also opens up opportunities you to develop your and this is on the topic of like the individualist social institution. It prints or presents opportunities for you to develop your own I had no like book club, and then from that book club

could come and a specificity organization. You know, as you begin to develop your politics and your shared politics, more can come out of it. So don't underestimate, you know the potential of just putting in the work and talking to people. Yeah, you know, just being there on the ground.

One of the best things you can do to help stay alive in the well things are heading in the direction that they're heading societally, is like making friends and forming a friend group and then yeah, like a doing stuff together that makes dealing with everything else that's happening so so much better. And hey, remember our old friends less remark started with a book club, so hey, you know, you never know where book clubs can lead exactly exactly.

It's actually really interesting. Um video clip of Marie book Gin talking about book clubs and like the power and potential of book clubs. Um. I don't know if we could probably link that in the show notes, but it's like a really interesting make sure drink. So ultimately, a specificity believe that social movements we reached their own logic of creating revolution, not when they all just decide to

identify as anarchists and weave the black flag. But when the majority reach a consensus and a consciousness of their power and the ability to exercise their power and their daily lives. So even if they do not adopt anarchism,

they still consciously adopt the ideas embedded within it. They are multiple political currents will exist within any movement, and so it's important that we as anarchists and I guess specifically as a specificity, are there to actively combat the opportunism that come from you know, these forces from this whether electoral or find goddess within these social movements as well, we can also help to push them further through um,

you know, pushing for more direct democracy and consensus, through federalism, and confederating with other social movements through you know, building up the mutual aid within these movements. Like if you are, for example, part of a mutual aid group in one neighborhood, you can push them to start reaching out with mutually groups and other neighborhoods and creating a network of mutual aid groups that can build into something bigger, you know,

combining resources and manpower to really push the revolution. You know. Lastly, we'll say that for those who are trying to like get into the whole specifies more thing. Um, I mean, you could start a new organization from scratch. But again, like the easiest thing to do is suggest getting there

to people and be honest with the people. And I keep saying the people, even though I have my critiques of this amorphous conception of the people, but the point remains that our goal is to spread our ideas, not to get people on any particular ideology, but to get a liberatory consciousness underground and to generalize that consciousness. And for those who are curious about the specifies more in

action and social institutions, specifically the Federal Show. Anarchista GAUSA in Brazil has worked with neighborhood committees and urban villages and slums. They've built alliances with the rank and file members of the rural land as workers movement the must and they've also worked with trash and recyclables collectors UM Brazil. For those who don't know, as a lot of high levels of temporary uh and contingent employment, unde employment and unemployment.

So the working class isn't how will you traditionally conceive it as like just surviving primarily off of wage labor, but it's more so this is sort of subsistence work informal economy, gig economy can deal. So being able to connect with these when char collectors, for example, who are part of this sort of economy, the EFIG has built a strong relationship with them and help them to form their own national organization to you know, push for their

interests and to collective eyes their recycling operations. Specifies More is also um worked with the has also worked in the efforts of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front in South Africa, as they also are strong opponents of social institution and you know, really being embedded in these social movements in Argentina, in Brazil, in South Africa, and in the US in the case of Black Rose Anarchist Federation, specifies More has

been building as a key point reference. And so I'll leave us off with a code from the use of Front Collective an anarchist group online. If libertarian socialists the organized with libertarian socialists, then they will lose contact with

the broader population they need to be reaching. If libertarian socialists merely joined social movements without advocating various libertarian socialist practices that can be used, then social movements can easily drift into being susceptible to reformist and strategic liberal and Lendinis tendencies and opportunists. If libertarian socialists merely joined social movements and try to spread ideas and practices in mere individual ways, they will be far less successful than a

well thought out, coordinated effort. And if theoretically specific libertarian socialist groups try to control social movements and popular organizations from the top down, then such specific groups sacrifice their own principles and would reproduce hierarchical organizing. In contrast to authoritarian fine goddess conceptions, specifies more groups and a specificity

put their activity towards a self organization of movements and organizations. Ultimately, as I honestly love this court from Shanty Alston, power to the people, where it stays with the people. Peace. Yes, Andrew, please please plug your plugables because they are good and people should in fact listen to them, right, thank you. Safety. First, of course, I will say that you could follow me on Twitter at underscore st Drew and on YouTube at St Andrew's um and you can find me here apparently

twice a month, which is pretty great shout out. It could happen here. Take care everyone, peace again he's again. What's new? My shit? Yeah, new year, same ship. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the we retired. We retired this bit? Who where is this time for a new bit? This is it could happen here the podcast about how things sometimes feel like they're falling apart sometimes and maybe

we can do things about that. You know what's falling apart is me because I, during my break woke up at like one thirty every day and now it's someone speakable hour in the morning. I hate this the time you packed the time. So for for for one of our first episodes of the new year, we have decided to subject ourselves to your para social whims um and we are going to be doing maybe one, maybe two Q and A episodes um uh, giving as to your cues.

And I've been in the queue. It's okay. I've been told that our producer Sophie has a list of questions already prepared so that I can stop talking and she can. Now you've been told you're the one who posted the thread. Sophie said that she would read them. I did volunteers tribute, but I might I might I might take that back, it's so how much attack. Uh, let's let's let's start

with let's start with a a simply a good one. Uh. What has been your favorite episode slash topic to research in this past season so since we started season two? Oh god, Um, I enjoyed the metaverse Facebook episodes because there's a part of me that really likes shipping on bad tech industry stuff. Um. It fills a deep part of me just just really comprehensively thinking about how how terrible the vision of the future these people have it. So that was probably my favorite. I liked the Climate

Leviathan stuff. Um, the Climate Leviathan, Climate Behemoth, Climate Now, Climate X kind of four quadrants. I I liked learning about that, like, jeez, almost a year ago actually by the time I started researching for the show. Um, And I'm decently happy with the way that those topics were presented and how they keep popping back every once in

a while. I think in terms of just the favorite episode I recorded, it was probably the interview with the Common Humanity Collective people, just because like listening to a bunch of people who have very sophisticated and well developed mutual aid project and then listening to you know, them talking about their political development and how they've been sort of solving their problems was really reassuring and cheerful in

a lot of ways. And then research wise, it was definitely the Spooky A fifty one episode where I was like, oh, I'm gonna do a fun episode about uh, the government and aliens and it was like, oh no, here's every war crime ever and like sixteen people almost killing everyone on earth. This is This is probably probably the most fun I had was with the Chaos, Magic and Esotericism episode How Silly It Is? Um? Yeah, that one. That

one also was just just a pleasure to record. I also loved having Corey doctor owen um totally because that was cool. That was cool. That was that was very cool. How cool of us. I've enjoyed our our fiction episodes with Margaret and with Rebecca those those have been great. And I've loved having sat Andrew. Yeah, that has been also very cool, fantastic. What were you gonna say, Robert, nothing?

Oh great, this person says. I think I've got my head wrapped around mutual aid, community resilience and all the stuff you talk about. Any tips on how to effectively communicate it to people who might not be at least initially open to it. H Um. I mean it kind of depends on why they're not open to it, right.

So it's it's a matter of are they just somebody who has a lot of faith in in systems as they exist, or they someone who's kind of coming at it from more of a traditional like liberal um status perspective where they think the option is to get in line with you know, the Democratic Party and support that

and that will make things better. Um. Like basically, are they a top down er um, or there's somebody who rejects it because it's like communism um, and they don't they don't think that people have any kind of fundamental responsibility to themselves. Um. Because you are going to have kind of a different approach to trying to reach either of those people, um if they're coming at it from kind of more of a right wing standpoint, but they're not,

you know, uh talking about shooting vaccine doctors. Um, they're just kind of conservative. I think the way to do it is to sort of hearken back to some of these very traditional ideas of like, um, American homesteaders and and independent you know, communities on the frontier and self reliance and how mutual aid is people taking responsibility UM for their communities rather than you know, this idea I think a lot of conservatives have of like people um

just kind of lazily taking charity. How it's it's different from charity, and that it's a community UM seeing its own needs and becoming independent as much as is possible on the state from the state UM by trying to meet its own needs, and how that UM is better for people than just sort of um boging like being

dependent upon government programs. I think that's kind of the way in which to reach out to those people with that idea if they're coming at it from more of a liberal top down approach, UM, I think you can get more into the weeds and may argue about kind

of inefficiencies within the system, problems within the system. I think one thing to really point out that will probably still be fresh to a lot of people of that persuasion is how frightening the first couple of weeks of quarantine were and all of the supply line issues and kind of the early breakdown to be like, look, um, that didn't go away, like right, you can see that that we're still dealing with a lot of this and we're still having supply line disruptions and the state really

has not kind of even under Biden sailed and to clear the gap. And so we need these community resiliency

programs UM. And you can you know, depending on the kind of person there, you can also sort of point out, um, the degree to which there is our attempts at kind of sabotage of any sort of of of of top down government programs by the right and how UM that's part of why you need community resilient and see programs because you can't guarantee who's going to be in the White House, you can't guarantee what's going to continue to

get funded. Um. And outside of kind of any of the the structural issues um that make that stuff difficult. So I think, UM, that's kind of broadly speaking, the two different ways you you can broach those conversations with people, depending on the tendencies they're they're looking at it from, uh, let's let's let's get into an unpleasant one. What's the gang's outlook on this year's election and how do you think it might position us for do we see more

violence letting up to the next presidential election. I know we'll be doing a prediction z Is episode later. Um. But as for this election, I have I've not looked at anything about it. I think the Steelers are going to take it all. What what will what's border? Are the Steelers? Um one of them? That's great? Uh uh? I mean yeah, I mean I feel like if Democrats want to keep the power that they currently have, they will probably need to do some type of symbolic action

that makes people think they actually do things. They've managed to have control of every and done absolutely nothing that they So I'm guessing if they want to keep that, they should probably do something really soon um or else. I don't see people being super eager to vote in

two for the Democrats. Yeah. Yeah, I mean one of the issues they've got is this this thing that you know, kind of the Technocrats always have where you know, as we as Corey pointed out when we had them on there have been some really positive moves by the Biden administration in terms of like appointments and how different kind of agencies are being handled. Um, But when it comes to the things that he actually campaigned on, like it

just hasn't It hasn't happened, should it ain't been done? Um, Like the closest we've gotten recently is yet another kick the can down the street a little bit for student loan repayments, And I agree, I think they need to do. There's like two big things they could do that might have a significant shifting effect. One of them would be student debt forgiveness, and one of them would be fucking

de schedule marijuana. Even without Congress, Biden could could not factively make marijuana not and like that would be number one politically, the easiest fucking win in the world because the vast majority of Republicans don't give a shit about that anymore. Um, it will piss off cops, which is probably why you won't do it. But like, those two things could have an impact on mid terms. That's certainly a thing that would like you can campaign on more, but I don't. I don't know that I think he'll

do that. And of obviously I guess another big old payment to stay home, but I think that shipped un sailed. Like I honestly like, I don't think they want to win, so they can sit there and then and go, oh yeah, we can't do anything because Republicans control the House, and you guys need to like, you guys need to like save us in four this is the most important election

of our lifetime. It's like, and they will keep doing this over and over and over again until literally the seize boil and everyone, you know, everyone is being heard into concentration camps, like they will just keep doing this and and like I think that's that's the thing that's actually important about the two cycle is that like the Democrats have you know what you know what what the rejection of Bernie Sanders sort of is is the Democrats

essentially going, we are not a popular party, right, like we we are not a party that is going to like like we will not even give the pretense of like having a base that we represent and we do things for like we're just we're just in it for ourselves.

We're in it's just like, you know, give all of our weird like black Rock friends positions in the government, and we don't, you know, and it's you know, it's it's we we don't have a policy agenda, and we don't care if we lose, because if we lose, all you people just have to go put us back into

office because the alternative is just more death camps. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a broad belief within kind of the Democratic Party that things are still business as usual, and that the Republican Party is still a political party, and so kind of the handing off and switching of power is fine. That's seen as business as usual, rather than the Democrats are the Republicans are continually ratcheting away from there being any chance of a switch of power,

um at least through legal means. Like that's the whole thing they're doing. And the failures to pass any kind of voting rights and the failures to see like a voting right reform as an existential issue for not just the party, but like the concept of of uh democracy in this country is is I think evidence that however, you kind of try to rationalize in your head why it's happening. There's a real disconnect between the party leadership and understandings of the new nature of reality. Yeah, well

that's the other thing. I mean, they'll be fine, right like outside of like another January six killing them all, Like they'll be fine. It doesn't like for them, it basically doesn't matter if Republicans take power. Maybe maybe some of them will get impeached, they'll be like a show trial for like two people or something, but like they're gonna be fine, and you know, that's that's the thing that motivates all of their thinking, is that they can

survive another public administration. Like we're you know, we're dying under both of them, and you know, like I mean, this is this is partially you know, if we want to talk about sort of the COVID response for a second and the relation that has to the election, it's like, yeah, the Democrats are just like completely given up even the pretense of doing literally anything about COVID literally because literally anything, yeah, go out and die, like so we can talk about that.

That's a separate Yeah, yeah, that's a separate issue, I think, just in terms of like how how to interpret what they're doing with COVID and the degree to which I think they even have a chance of uh whatever. Um. But yeah, I was like, like, they don't care if we live or die, Like we care if we live or die, and we're gonna have to do stuff on our own outside of this because they're just gonna kill us. All yep. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's hard for me to tell where the elections are going to

go precisely. Uh Biden's polling certainly isn't great. It's also not like wildly out of step with how where presidents often are kind of at this point UM in in their cycle. So and also it's pretty normal for the party that just won the presidential election to lose at

the midterms. That's more normal than not UM, I think. So, I think the big questions are number one, like the degree to which it's a wide sweep, which is going to depend on the actual impact a lot of these UM efforts to kind of restrict voting and jerrymander, Like what the actual on the ground impact is UM, and the degree to which we've seen an actual shift, because one of the things that the polls don't often tell

us is like, yeah, Democrats are not popular. Most people seem to be aware that a lot of promises have gone unfulfilled, But it doesn't also mean that they like the Republicans UM, who as the party of Trump, are still kind of widely disliked by people. So it's kind of unclear to me what precisely is going to go down by which I mean whether or not it's going to be a pretty normal midterm, whether Republicans pick up

some seats or like a nightmare blowout. Um. And I do think that has a lot to do with whether or not Biden and like does a couple of the things that a president can do unilaterally that would be

really easy for other people to campaign on. Um. Like he they have to, like if they actually do want to win, they have to they have to make a couple of big hail mary's they have to do again, Biden has to do a couple of the big things that a president can do and then say, okay, see I did a thing, put more Democrats in, and we can do this other big thing that a president can't do on its own or something like that. Like I I just don't see, Um. I mean, you know, anything

could happen. Still, it's fucking January. I think there's a positive if you want to be in terms of things that are making me kind of optimistic, um And and in terms of things that are better about when the Democrats are in powder and then the Republicans. You can bully the Biden administration to taking broadly positive action, which is what happened with student loan repayments. Right, that's why that did get kicked down the can a couple of

kick down the road a couple of months. Um. And so I do think there's potential in um harassing the Biden administration to taking actions that can make Democrats more popular. Um. That would not be the reason to do it. The reason to do it is so that people don't starve trying to pay back student loans. Um. But it does point to, I think in an avenue of hope. UM, if we're trying not to be complete dooomers in January two. Yeah,

and speaking of avenues of hope, it's time for an advert. Ah. The only thing that gives me hope is the products and services that support this podcast. And we are back back, we are, we are, i've i've I have a question. I would like us to talk about. UM new year book list? Oh yeah, that's so, what's what's some I think we could answer this like and then they also someone else followed up with saying a recommend some books that maybe not just left left this theory of climate change.

Also some like fiction stuff as well. And I'm just gonna say the books that i'm reading or is on my reading list. Not. I'm not gonna recommend books I've already read. I'm just gonna say the ones i'm currently reading. UM.

I'm still making it through hyper objects for an upcoming episode. UM. I picked up a really a book I wanted to get for a long time called Islands of Abandonment, which is about um people, Well, no, it's it's it's about places that have kind of been forgotten and regrown or taken have been kind of reclaimed by the area that they were, that they were built on. And then I also have a random few books on alchemy that I'm going through as well. That's most of my books. Horrible. UM.

I read. The last book I finished in was in the Garden of Beasts, which is by what is his name? I think it's Eric larson Um. He's a guy who's written He wrote like Devil in the White City and a couple of other books that people have probably read Eric larson Um, And it's about the first US ambassador

to Nazi Germany or what becomes Nazi Journey. He gets sent there right before, like like months before Hitler takes power, and the book largely traces he and his family's journey in Nazi Germany from like kind of didn't really care about German politics and were often broadly sympathetic towards the Nazis. They melt met like his daughter kind of is very much like on board with Nazi revolution for like the

first half year that she's there. She's also like simultaneously dating the head of the Gestapo and the Soviet um like assistant ambassador, which is fascinating. Like, it's a very interesting book, um, And the story, like the journey this kind of family goes on realizing like what the Nazis are in the perspective of that. It's it's very well written. Um,

it's very detailed. I really enjoyed it. The thing that I liked the most was the detail it goes into about the kind of the fates of because it's it's a more you know, obviously as much of a nerd on the history of fascism as I am, I've read a lot about the Night of Long Knives. This did the best job of kind of going into detail about the kind of dudes who the dudes who were purged

in the Night of Long Knives. So these guys who were Nazis, and that they wore swastikas and they were part of the party and whatnot, but also weren't Nazis enough to not get purged and in a lot of cases were like starting to fall out of love with the party when the Night Long Knives had And so it's these it's really interesting, UM and I recommend it

to people. And the last book I started in the first book I finished in two was called Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, who is UM an interesting science fiction author, in part because Ministry of the Future is about climate change. UM. It is a a science fiction look at about like a thousand different potential solutions to climate change. And Kim Stanley Robinson is actually like an expert UM. He works for the Sierra Center.

I think it's called UM. He's won a bunch of awards for his work on like trying to like posit different solutions to climate change. He's he he understand he's not like coming at this from the perspective of an even even a well researched author. He's he's writing from the perspective of someone who is an actual scientific expert in what happens and how the different solutions might work. And the thing that's really interesting about Ministry of the

Future is it's this fascinating melange of UM. Like a number of the character the Ministry of the Future is this kind of hypothetical new u N agency that's put in place after a horrible wet bulb heat event kills twenty million people in India UM, and they're they're kind

of trying to push for very technocratic solutions to climate change. So, like one of the big things the book focuses on a lot is this idea of a climate coin, which is a kind of UM international backed by banks cryptocurrency that that pays as a kind of long term bond for sequestering carbon, so that like countries like Saudi Arabia that have huge oil reserves actually make more money by refusing to pump out oil and thus get paid in

these coins. So it's really technocratic solutions like that. And then also terrorist groups that may be funded by this UN agency building fleets of drones to murder people on commercial air flights UM in mass in order to cripple the entire air travel industry and stop carbon emission and carrying out mass assassinations on like CEOs of of oil

companies living in their private island. So it's this really interesting mix of like kind of liberal politicians and like bankers like working out these very wonky solutions to things, and like terrorists who have lost people in climate emergencies mass murdering um billionaires uh and and so it's it's a very it's the widest possible ranging look at kind of different solutions to climate change and how they might work.

And it's a very optimistic book. Um. And there's there's elements of it that I kind of the optimism I kind of disagree with. I think oddly enough Kim doesn't give enough weight to the dangers of authoritarian populism and and the threat I think they present to any of

these kind of potential solutions. But it's still a very well thought out look at climate change and I think really worth reading um if you want something that will both bring up different because he also goes into a lot of like very scientific solutions like pumping up water from underneath glaciers in order to stop glaciers from sliding, and like slow the rate of melt and all these these other kind of like very much like, technical, here's a thing that we can do that will reduce the

effect of this specific um kind of climate change. It's really a very good book. Um and it's apparently was Barack Obama's favorite book of the year, which, considering the degree which it talks about murdering politicians and business leaders, is interesting to me. I think he was maybe more paying attention to the carbon coins stuff than the shooting

oil industry executives in their face while they're sleeping. Well, he was also a fan of parasite, so he may just have been told this is a book you should say you like, but it is. It is a very good book. It is really worth reading. Um and it's it's it is a work of science fiction. But honestly it's like it's also it's well again, Kim really understands his from a technical level, so I think it's pretty unimpeachable from that point of view. There are some kind

of sociological areas where I don't think the book. I think there's some ship missing, particularly as regards the problems authoritarianism is going to cause in reaching for these solutions. But I think it's still really really valuable. And Chris, we're going to hear your responses. But first capitalism, Chris reading reading a few things, Um reading more Chuang, which is a theoretical journal about China that writes a lot

of very very good stuff. They have probably the best account I've ever seen of just what was going on during the socialist period and then also the sort of transition to capitalism. Those are those are Those are issues one and two, And they just published an issue about basically how the pandemic response happens in China. It's it's

absolutely fascinating. Um. It's also about sort of is this something that yeah, I've I've talked about a lot of their stuff on the show, sort of obliquely or directly, but like, you know, one of one of the big things is about how, in a lot of ways, the pandemic reveals the sort of weakness of the Chinese state and in a way that you know it is you don't see really because both both you know, both the Chinese state and the sort of like American media have

this vested interest in showing like China's is sort of like all powerful authoritarian police state or whatever, like the miliar image of it is like this isn't but you know what, what you really see is that like this, the state has a very strong ability to intervene in like one province at a time, and they can you know when when when they focus, when they focus all of the sort of administrative power on like one area, right, they're extremely effective. They can't really do it in you know,

multiplayers at the same time. And this means that you're dealing with all these sort of regional government stuff and it's it's very interesting. The the other thing that I have, well, okay, so do do we want to talk like a little bit about dawn of everything or do you want to save that for just like yeah, I I'm down to talk about that at any point. Yeah, Yeah, that's definitely

on my list. That is a long one that's less of a read I think where most people are going to be less of a read in one sweep than like maybe for over the course of the year, like gradually. Yeah. It's very very dense and very long, but very readable. Like not to say that it's like dense in the I gotta like slog through this textbook. It's extremely readable. It's just like there's a lot in there, and you're

gonna want to pause and think about ship. Yeah, so so they don't have everything is this is the last book David Graeber ever wrote, and it's David wen Grow also they wrote it together, and it's it's this basically an attempt to reassemble I guess, early human history. And but the thing that they're doing that that's that's really unique is that so they they're David one Grows as archaeologist David Graeber's and an apologists and they're they're going there,

you know. So they spent a whole bunch of time going through the sort of early archaeological records, and what they find basically is that none of the things that you see make any sense at all unless you're willing to unless you're willing to accept that people you know, years ago, and then even you know, people like four hive thousand years ago, we're as smart as we are and have the have the capacity to recreate and redesign

their own political arrangements selfconsciously, which is something that doesn't sound that weird, except everyone assumes that they can't, and that you know, everyone that's you know, one of the other things that they're they're really sort of heavily doing here is trying to break this idea that you know, human society sort of evolves in these this linear progression. You know, you start out with like these small hunter gatherer bands and they get more complex quote on quote,

eventually the developed farming, and farming developed the state. And the answer is just, you know, when you look through the actual archaeological record, none of this is true. You have, you know, they have a lot of very interesting sort of historical examples of this, looking at like what looked like incredibly democratic and egalitarian cities, and then you know, on the outskirts of those cities you have the emergence of the states among the things that look like states

among barbarian groups. And they have and what I think is maybe the most interesting part of it is that they're they're very concerned with the question of human freedom, but freedom in a way that like we don't like freedom on a level fundamental enough that like we can

barely imagine it. So they have these things called the Three freedoms, which is one of them is so the first one is the freedom just move to leave and to it's it's the freedom to to you know, be in a place and then leave and know that you

will be cared for when you get to wherever you're going. Yeah, these kind of networks that were set up so that people could travel that have like the descendant of those ideas is sort of the way if you ever if you've ever spent time in the Middle East, not in like hotels and ship like it's that same idea that kind of deeper than religious belief about the importance of that has gotten added to like Islam and into a

number of other faiths in the area. Like, but this idea that like there's nothing more sacred than taking care of a of a guest um like and and how that that that existed to enable kind of a sort of cross cultural contract and contact and like recreational travel in a way that I think it would be deeply surprising to people who just sort of assumed everyone before a certain age died within five miles of their house or was you know, yeah, part of a band of

wandering hunters. Yeah. And it's interesting in that like, like, like we we in a lot of ways travel less than early people did, because you know, people would just leave and people, you know, people just didn't like their families and so they'd walk like five miles and they they'd come to a place and they'd be accepted. And yeah, and you know, and like the second one that I think is the one that is the one we have the least capacity, I think to understand, which is just

the ability to disobey orders. Just like anyone tells you do something, you could just tell them know at any time. And it's not only can you just tell them no, Like the social expectation is that you is that you don't act, is that it's it's it's it's not just that you have the ability to do it. It's that someone giving you an order is treated as weird. And this is a thing that you know, like like this,

this is the thing. This is a freedom that used to exist and no longer does and what sort of destroying various ways along with sort of the the third freedom to talk about, which is about how people have the right to sort of just shift and recreate their

their social political arrangements. And yeah, and people used to do this sort of I mean people, you know, a lot of the what their early part of the book is about is about how societies you there's a lot of societies that would you know, flip seasonally, right, so what like one half of the year you have this just like absolutelytatorship. The other half of the year it's like,

well it's looks hippie commune. And you know, the fact that we do not like the fact that like we we we just don't like it, cannot conceive of completely shifting our political arrangements like that is It's also there's this fascinating discussion of like the fact that and this is kind of counter to what I I had always kind of thought that like once as a group groups of people when they when they made the decision to like move to agriculture um and like set founded cities,

that it was kind of a one way street, you know, you you just keep going along that road. And there's actually multiple examples of people's like this is what what happened to the British Aisles, or at least in what is currently Great Britain. People's like developing agriculture, settling down and then being like oh, you know what, fuck this and like going back like that that should should happen

all the time. And and one of the things that's really kind of optimistic about the vision of of the sweep of human history in the dawn of everything is the idea that like, no, we don't have to keep like it's not inevitable that we just keep doing more of what we're doing now. All throughout history, large groups of people have been like, it's time to let's do something else, let's make a radical change, like it happens, um And it's probably more normal to do that than

it is to do what we've been doing. And when you I think one of the things that kind of one of the things that leads to the sense of inevitability of development along the lines that we have is is the fact that we only really have about ten thousand years of even vaguely reliable like data um or vaguely comprehensive data on human history. But people have been around for tens of thousands of years longer than that, and for most of it we've been a lot more

experimental than we are now. And it's it's always possible for people to try different things in a way that um maybe seems impossible to us now but but necessarily won't for our kids. Oh yeah, The last thing I would tell people to listen to if they're looking for a fictional optimistic thing is Corey Doctors walk Away. Um, give it a read. And if you're if you're looking for like a like a beautiful like not to get your head out of the One of the things I'm

really passionate about is plants. And I have this beautiful book called the Planet Pedia and it's really helpful for caring for your house plants. And it's just like aesthetically just so. The photographs are beautiful and it's one of my favorite things to give friends and family. To check that one out as well. Another another plant book that I just got for somebody that I really like. I

think it's called Wicked Plants. It's about all the poises plants that you can get, um and the ones all the like the poison plants you can cultivate in your own garden. And that's been a lovely read. Um, And I do hope to set up a decent poison garden here in the spring. So yeah, me too. It's going to be great. Well, let's get to another question. Um, do you guys want like a fluff question or like a real question? Uh, let's do a fluff one and we can start the next episode with a real juicy

fluff me daddy. All right, Okay, that's a little gift to all of you at home. On the topic of hobbies, so so I just Garrison likes poisonous plants. I like non poisonous plants. Uh, what hobbies are you into that we may not know about? Um? I guess I can only say one thing here. Really, well, I don't know. Yeah, you should be really careful about how you answer this one. I know what your hobbies are. Let's have everyone else go first. UM. I just got into three D printing.

I'm currently trying to figure out how to get a BS to act adhere properly. Yeah, that was the problem I had with my printer is that it would I would get like a decent way through the first part of the print, and then part of it would cut curl off, so then it wouldn't print the next layer on correctly. Then it must up the print. And yeah, I was between mental health stuff and that at the time. I was s today on my printer. This is when I just gave up because it was too much. So

I'll be excited to see how you get past this turtle. Well, I've I've got a glass bed coming in so I'm gonna have Yeah, and I've I've got the enclosure. One of the issues I'm having is just that I'm having a heating issue with the bed. It won't heat up. It stops before it gets to one tin, which is what it should be able to go up that high. But it's just, yeah, can you manually heat it up hotter? It doesn't seem to matter. It doesn't seem to matter if I if I said it, like I can't obviously,

like you can. You can set it up to heat, but it just keeps I keep getting that like loud error beep. So there's like there's this is going to be it's going to be a process of jiggering to to to figure it out. Um, but you can come pretty fun. Yeah, I have, I have, I've I have a similar problem with my setup right now that I've been trying to troubleshoot for the half a year. Um, I can manually control the heat bed and it does get that hot. But still I think it may just

be a leveling issue. I may need to like clean the bed. I also should have talked to someone who has done more three D printing than me. Um, But yeah, yeah, but it's it's it's fun. I I enjoy it. It's very it's radically different from the stuff that I like do for a living um, which is always my favorite thing for like a a task to engage in in order to be relaxing, because it's it's not at all like reading and writing. No, it's very different. It's very different.

So so far, I'm enjoying it. And I already I printed the thing I need to do to make the the bio um, the bio lab for like the Four Thieves stuff. If you want to check out our episode with Michael from the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective. I've three D printed that part, so I'm ready to get the other parts and put that thing together. Um, I'm just trying to figure out how to print other stuff with better plastics and whatnot. But yeah, it's it's fun. So far,

I'm I'm enjoying it a lot. Um. Maybe I'll get bored, Maybe I'll wind up spending way too much money on different three D printers, like the ones that lift the goo out of the resin printers are there. They's so they're much like this is what this is what Corey Doctor was talking about. Like, like they are much better at the filament printers in a lot of ways, but

a lot of like a lot of the stuff. A lot of the really useful machines that you can make with three printers require you to use filaments right now, um, but the resin ones are like so much more elegant. They're beautiful. Um. I also am really interested in the idea of printing would which I did not realize until recently, you could do but it's absolutely possible with certain kinds of printers. Um, And that seems pretty dope. So I

don't know. We'll see how. Maybe I'll be tired of it in a month because my mental health will take a dive, But so far I'm pretty excited. Cool Chris,

what do I do? Well? Okay, so before the pandemic, I was getting into rock climbing, but unfortunately, like like I like rock climbing, I'm not like, oh, it's like the best thing you can do for it's a lot of fun, but unfortunately, I mean it's not like the worst pandemic thing you could possibly do, but like it's no if you get up high enough on the rocks, COVID can't get up there. It's like the opposite of a bear. It's really bad at climbing. Yes, so I guess the other what do I even do? Is okay?

So my other thing? Okay, so it's so deep, like deep Twitter lure. People will probably know this about me, But I am I have been for a very very long time, like an inveterate fan of competitive StarCraft two. Okay, I am awful at it, Like I am terrible at

that game. But I have watched so much StarCraft two, like I I StarCraft two has become enough of my life that like like the game was part of my radicalization process, like so, yeah, I wake up extremely early or stay up extremely late and watched Korean StarCraft two and non Korean StarCraft two, and yeah, it's it's a

good time. It's I My favorite thing about StarCraft in general is thinking about the fact that Blizzard was initially trying to make a Warhammer for video game and games Workshop was as always too paranoid of their I p to let it happen, and thus lost how many god knows how many. They would be worth more money than most countries like that been printing an impossible amount of money, like Indie Chambers would have been able to buy a mountain of cocaine to live inside. But but no, instead

we got all of the infrastructure of modern esports. Mm hm, which it seems fine, like it's whatever, I don't care, but it is very funny to me that they were like, nah, this doesn't seem like a good financial decision for games Workshop, this StarCraft thing, Like I wonder like that. That's the kind of thing where it's like, if they made that

much money, would they all just retire? Like well, I mean it's a publicly traded company, like the stock the shareholders would have made a fortune and the but yeah, I I don't know. It's very it's very funny that they didn't think that was going to be worth it. Let's see in terms of how these people may not know. I do really like cooking. I take cooking classes for a long time. Um that's been the main cook in my family since I was a very little kid, so

I definitely definitely enjoy that. Um. I did go to film school for a few years. I want to get back into making short video projects. Have been writing some random kind of new weird esque stuff that I would love to like rent a studio space and actually shoot some silly things in the next year and throw them up online just for kind of my own fun. Um. And then I also been still doing random occultism stuff. Um, that's kind of how I feel my time. Yeah, it's fun. Yeah.

I think that's an answer. That is an answer. We did it. That's an answer, and more importantly, that's an episode. That is an episode, that is an answer, that is a single content. You all got a content out of us, and will be proud of yourselves, replicate and reproduce another content tomorrow that's more eased to your cues. So a content every day except for the weekends, because that's the

problem that we make in some holidays. Welcome back to it could happen here the podcast where Jay your Boltonaro was once again in the hospital getting all of the feats sucked out of his in the hospital. The most consistently dying man in the world. You know what, this man in history, you know actually literally full of ship again. You know what? You know what this means. It approximately three four weeks Stephen Crowder is going to get some

horrible illness. And if we said to the hospitals, well, this cycle, this is the only like the cycle. My hope for both of them is that they find out that each has an obscure disease that can only be cured by piping ship from the other into them, and so they just hook m via a tube and they're just sucking poop out of each of them and putting it into the other person. That would be very funny hot,

All right, what's our first question? Our first question? So this was specifically addressed to Chris, so Chris, you can answer first, But I think this is a question for for everyone. Really, what is your favorite piece of history that you haven't been able to talk about yet on the show that isn't deserving of a whole episode? Favorite piece of I mean, we ain't talked about the Zapatista as yet because I don't I don't yet feel comfortable,

uh with with my level of knowledge there. But it's definitely history that's extremely relevant to the kind of ship we talked about on the show. Have I talked about the water and gas Wars o Bolivia on the show?

We've talked about that at all? Either? Yeah? I mean, I thought, I mean that that probably is deserving of its own episode, but absolutely a bunch of people just literally like blocking every road in an entire country and starving out the ruling class because they can't like import food into the city because they've blocked every single road. Extremely cool, I guess in terms of like really short,

not deserving of its own episode. I don't know either, because I've I've been able to elongate all my periods into episodes. Yeah, I don't know that there's anything we wouldn't cover. There's certainly things we haven't covered yet for a variety of reasons, often just like I don't feel like we've had the time to work. There's a lot of work. Yeah, it's like why why haven't why haven't we done a MAO episodes? Like do you know how

much ship that motherfucker got in his life? I have been like mentally, like psychologically preparing myself to start working on MAOT like this is a ah, that's that? Actually, No, it's the Mango Colts. It's definitely the Mango Colts. Did you did you did you know about this? No? The Mango Colts. Yeah, okay, So so MAO got like I forget who was I want to say it was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Some some like dignitary like gave him a man. This is this is like this is

the beginning of the cultural revolution. Somebody gives him a mango and he like hands this mango off to like a red mango and like they like like this this turns into like a cult. Like people like they take this mango, they like preserve it. It's it's like they have they have like a shrine to the mango and like like there's this whole cult apparatus like builds up around just people getting mangoes as like tokens of Mao's favor. Is this this like this this massive things that is

this This this spreads like wildfire. It's like people are doing this in like the far western reaches of China where like like in places where like there's like like like there there are places in China where like civil wars breakout and it takes people like a week to like send representatives like across China to go like talk to the Central Committee to argue their case. And like even in those places they have mango cults and it is it is wild The culture revolution is a is

a it is a time. It is well I know what I'm getting everyone for Christmas this year. They're my favorite fruit. Like, we'll see, we'll see if the species survives this next summer. Oh we will. Yeah, we'll just be growing, just be growing in Siberia. Mangoes sprouting from the corpses of fucking antelope. That is beautiful. Um. I can't think of anything. Next question, okay, uh speaking of history, I like this one. If you could fight anyone in history,

wait for it and lose, who would you fight? And why? Who would I fight and lose and lose? Like you'd still get like a few good hits in or something, but you'd lose David Bowie because it would be hot. Next question other people can answer. I guess no, I think that's a good that's the perfect answer. Yeah. I would happily be hit by David Bowie, so sure, why not there? Yeah? And I know that David Bowie really loved to hit teenagers. I would be totally hitting in

the other sense, scared. I would be fine with anything. I don't care when it comes to Bowie. Wow, that's problematic. Problematic. Uh huh. We got a few questions about the ethics of leaving the United States as things get worse, Okay, that's yeah. And this is something that I know we've talked about. You've got that get out of America and I see. That's the thing is that, like I already have my Canadian passport, so that is something that I

can do at any time. And that's something that I probably will do at some point because one I can see myself in my theorties and forties, living in Canada will be a lot easier in a lot of ways in terms of like how much money it will cost for me to live and pay certain things, Like living in Canada at a certain point will just make a lot more sense for me. So yeah, I probably will move up. Um. And I also know that getting past Canadian border patrol not that hard in terms of other

people wanting to go legally or illegally. That's it is actually pretty easy to get to get up there. Um, if you want to do it legally, that's definitely a lot a lot more work, but also not impossible. Um. Yeah, I think. I mean, like it's important to know that like moving to somewhere else is not escaping the effects, because the effects are going to reach everywhere, but it

can have a lot of advantages. Um, especially kids. Yeah, so I I say moving up is or moving away from the States is a decent thing for a lot of people. I don't feel the need to stay and fight for something that I don't really care about what's in the first place that anyway, UM, so sure do what makes you happy in the time that you have alive. I feel like that's a that says as ethical as you need to get Yeah, I don't think anyone has a responsibility to like stay in uh fight to the

death uh in in a collapsing country. UM. As as a general rule, I'm very sympathetic towards refugees. And that's kind of what you would be if you're talking about fleeing the United States because you're it's in the process of falling apart and things are you suspect a lot about to get a lot more violent, especially if you

have again like a family kids. Um. I I had options to do that that I've I've chosen at this point not to um not to pursue UM but uh, I get white people would and as a general rule, like I spent I spent once when I was um in ah in Bosnia and Serbia talking to survivors of the genocide there in the nineties, UM, I took a train ride um from Sarajevo to like a little town near Strabernitza, and Uh, during the train ride, I wound up like hanging out with this dude who had been

born and raised in Yugoslavia and had been living in Canada since the Civil War. And he, like very through in his kind of broken English, explained like, yeah, when the war broke out, all of my friends, all of these other young guys I knew, were like, well, you know we're gonna fight, We're gonna fight. And I said, no, no, no, no, no to Canada And this is the first time I've

been back, and that was the smart thing to do. UM. So I'm not I mean, if you can get the if you can get out and find a place that's safer, as Garrison said, like, there's there's nothing I think that inherently behooves you to spend your uh limited time on this planet struggling, And especially if you've got a family, like doing what you can to put them in a

safer position is great. That's none of it's a permanent or even necessarily a long term solution, like the idea of moving to Canada has a lot of appeal, But like, if you think that Canada is going to keep being what would a lot of Americans see it as as the United States collapses into like fascism. I don't know how realistic a proposition that really is. And it's the

same for a lot of places. Like all of these problems are global problems, and moving geographically unless you're wealthy enough to move to like some fortified compound protected by contractors in a place that is actually insulated from climate change to a significant extent, um is not the does not bring the degree of security you might expect. Um. I do think there is. I do think it is, generally speaking, a noble and positive thing, uh to to to stay and try to make things better where you are.

But um, you know, I think everybody. I think everyone. I think every single person, whether they admit it or not, would leave at a certain point if they possibly could. Um. And I don't think anyone is. I don't think anyone owes it to the world to like, uh, die in a place that they hate just because, um that's where they were born. And we're back. Okay, Oh, this is a good one. What tool besides bolt cutters. Should we

all own in a collapse situation? First of all, bolt cutters That should not be your first picture to for a tool. No, No, it should be an angle grinder with a diamond blade. No. Even like water filters gotten me out of a number of types water filtration systems. There's starters, like, there's a lot of there's a lot

of stuff. If not evens not water filtration, you can get tablets or honestly, like you can have a little hand pump filter and water purification tablets along with a little you know, there's a number of things that are that should be in a go bag. A way to get some amount of of already clean water and a way to get more clean water. Are enough food to at least deal with three to five days. UM, some

rope UM. A good knife multi tool is even better in most situations if you have if you don't mind the weight, a belt knife and a multi tool would be great, or a multi tool in a little hand axe, which, depending on where you live, might be more useful in splitting wood. A good fire starter, UM, some amount of rubbing alcohol, which is always a handy thing to have on hand. UM. Either maps or you know, batteries for an electronic device that might be able to act as

a map. Um. Yeah, that that's all useful stuff. Um I do I I do keep in the boot of my car generally an angle grinder. Um. I have come into, especially living out in the middle of nowhere, a couple of situations like sometimes somebody has a health emergency and there is a fence in the way, um, and it's it has been something that is and is I think going to be easier form. Old cutters are good at what they do, they also require a lot of forearm and upper body strength that is not going to be

as much of an option for people. So angle grinder not a bad thing to have in any sort of like. It's especially if you like if you're if you're planning a kid, like I want to keep ship in my car because the wildfires are coming right. Um, well, you're

probably don't want a battery powered saw. Um because depending on the capable even if you have a very capable off roading vehicle, everyone I know who does serious overlanding is like, well you keep a fucking chainsaw in there, because sometimes you need to cut wood out of the way and you're just not going to get your car

over it. Um. So it really depends on what you're doing and like what the what the the kind of potential threats you're worried about are um, But yeah, I think the basics are way to get water, some amount of food, ability to start a fire. Something like a space blanket is useful. If you live in a place where it actually gets cold, you should have a space blanket and a wool blanket or a couple of wool

blankets because those will retain heat much better. Wool keeps like eight of its insulating capacity even when wet, and like layering wool and survival blankets um can be a really effective way to keep yourself from dying in in

in bad weather situations. UM. That said, depending on where you are, there may be no realistic way to protect yourself in the like if you are in certain parts of the Midwest at certain parts of the winter, it may not matter so much, like what blankets you have at access to frustrating the will there's and there's no like structures around you, then yeah, it's negative, there's only so much. Yeah, I do love collecting a lock bypass tools. It's one of my favorite things is just to have

these practice using them. Um. Something I got for when I went to the Earth First Gathering that worked out pretty well was a foldable solar panel that connects to USB. That's enough to keep my phone allow. I've always so in terms of always wanting a map, this little foldable thing is enough to keep my phone able to have a map assuming I have cell service. So I was skeptical of how much this thing could work. Um, and

it it did a decent enough job. It even kept it even kept like my iPad pro um uh powered as well, so it had had had a decent amount of square footage once you unroll it. So that was very useful. But yeah, I mean I I really like luck Bypass stuff. Um, it's one of one of one

of my other hobbies. So this is you know a variety of tools in that type that it's nice to get like a decent collection of also, like especially now, but probably in general, like have masks like just I mean just in general, like have masks, have lots of them,

make sure you can change them. Yeah, I have a gas mask if that's at all physically like respond like fiscally possible for you mirror is the one I think Garrison and I would both recommend to the really good gas wonderful again all of these kids, there's the kid are like, okay, what is the what is what's necessary? And then there's like, all right, if you have money or if you have time that you want to learn

extra skills? What are other things like lock picks? If you're just a random Joe and you've never like, don't throw lock picks in your kid, if you've never done any lock picks ship, they're not going to help you. Um, but if that that is a skill that is worth picking up and that will make you like more resilient. Um yeah um oh. And a fourteen point nine millimeter anti material rifle. Um, you're always gonna need one of those. They're they stay supersonic. It up to three and a

half miles UM, which is really useful. So definitely, definitely, And they're only you probably aren't going to spend more than dollars getting one set up, So it's it's really for the price of a of a fairly new Toyota Prius, you could have um an anti materi, a real rifle that con pierce armored vehicles. At at several miles distance, and really what is more pragmatic a survival tool than that? And we for it. It's only like thirty around. That's

just a moderately expensive meal per bullet. Christopher, Uh, do you think that corporations like Walmart or Amazon could become more militarystic? Yeah? I mean yeah, I think I think absolutely. The trend that worries me is Amazon's increasing um collaborations with and deeper connections with like the FBI and other kind of law enforcement agencies. Um. The degree to which target has also like with the FBI and like with other agencies, because they're they're anti shrink Department and whatnot.

They're like, they're the surveillance they've built to stop theft is so advanced. They have one of the best crime

labs in the whole United States. Yeah. UM, organizations like Tiger Swan, which is a mercenary group that the Dakota Pipeline people, the Dapple folks like hired to crack down on the Standing Rock protests and have have worked in other There's other organizations like that that we're active during the BLM protests and kind of the I I do think we're seeing a pair of militarization of a lot of these corporation, a lot of these corporations in order

to protect their what they see is their financial interests UM and that that is that is proceeding rapidly, And it's not the thing that I'm not most I'm not most worried about them, like do like having armed forces,

although there will be some degree of that. There's already that's already happen, Like in Portland and downtown Portland there are armed effectively like mercenaries guarding certain businesses in certain areas, like as a result of like you know, to deal with quote unquote the gun crime or whatever property crime

that's raised. But the thing that I think is most concerning is the degree to which they are professionalizing a paramilitary surveillance apparatus UM and Amazon has done it to do stuff like crackdown on union organizing and whatnot, like, So yeah, I'm very concerned with that. I'm I I think that the the dimension of it that's most frightening is not necessarily like the shadow run corporations buying armies,

but rather corporations buying like intelligence agencies. UM. Is kind of the thing that I think will actually be the biggest threat um because in a lot of cases, generally speaking, if I have to deal with an armed security guard or a cop, that security guard is going to be less of a pain in the ass than the cop. Um. Not always, but as a general rule, I'm less worried about security guards than cops, even armed ones. I think another thing that's important to keep in mind is that, yeah,

I mean, it's like, I don't, I don't. I really don't think there's a danger that we're going to go back to like East India company style, like people with mass armies, because it's it's literally too expensive, Like you can't, it's it's too expensive. And the armies that exist already

do that. Yeah, yeah, you don't need them. But but I mean, I think that the thing the thing that's like scary outside of the intelligence stuff, which is terrifying, but it's the stuff they do down like acus you call it down the supply chain, which is like you know, the cocol and murder and union organizers with paramilitaries, right, they tend to work through like like you know, the corporations will back rebel groups, right, corporations will back like

you know, in Colombia, you see a lot of this is like you have these sort of like these I mean something about some of the back just directly by landholding holding corporations. Some of them are backed by just

individual large landholders. But you get these like you know, you get basically these paramilitaries that are sort of the third wave after the army goes in, and that stuff is very scary or probably we're probably gonna see more of that, and yeah, but but but but I think it's it's kind of important that there's there there's an extent to which again you'll see them having their own mercenaries.

But a lot of the time it's there's some kind of thing when when when companies really need to kill someone, they tend to outsource that to aid like another sort of paramilitary organization that's like not directly in their supply chain. It's like that it's not directly under their training command. Mhm. So yeah, that's that's a good and fun time that

we'll probably just get worse mhm. Speaking of corporate uh funkori or whatever, a Coca Cola ad I hope, I hope we do get a Coca Cola add because nothing soothes my quench like a cherry vanilla Coca cola. Nothing soothes your quench. That's what I said. Those are words that came out of a Now we're back, okay, Robert. Somebody had a question about an article you wrote back when you worked at Crack about a woman who was

hiding from their family. The end an article. Yeah, you mentioned that you haven't heard from her in a couple of weeks leading up to and they want to know if you've ever heard from her again. So yeah, that's a bummer. The pseudonym I'm I'm not going to use her real name in this, but the pseudonym I used

for her in the article was as Ame. She was a woman who lived in Um the EU, and Uh was under threat of honor killing from her family, who were from Pakistan in origin Um because she was an atheist, was not Um religious hardliner UM and didn't want to be.

And for years she had kind of hidden that from her family, Like she'd moved out on her own, but she'd hidden the fact that, like she had a boyfriend, she'd hidden the fact that she'd liked played dungeons all of this stuff, like she played D and D and was like scared that like that was like her dad would literally kill her. And this is a thing that happens. This is a thing that happens in the United States

and the EU. UM it's a problem with like fundamentalist um Islam, and that's not the only religion there's honor killings as a result on. But that was her specific situation. One of the things she was frightened about is her family go back to Pakistan regularly, and she was concerned.

She wanted to go because it was the only way to see her grandparents, but she was also concerned that if her parents found out when they went back, they would basically imprison her somewhere where she would not be able to get out and get back to her home and she would be forced to be married off or something.

So she was working with an organization um in the country in the EU where she lived that helped people extricate themselves and and the kind of one of the last things she told me is that, like, well, the things she was looking at doing because she was so

worried about her dad was a total break. Was like one day, with the help of this organization, she would just be gone and in another part of the EU and would have a complete break from her life and would completely stop living as the identity UM she had had her entire life. UM. And I never heard from her again after that, after like three or four different

interview sessions, and I still have not uh. And my hope is that she did the thing she said she was going to do, and she just completely burned that email and every their way people had of getting in touch with her. UM. And she's doing great now. But I really have no idea. UM, I have absolutely no idea what happened to her? Oh uh, So we would people want an update on the quest for eel horse. Uh Still no, still no horse. Still have not found

an entire horse carcass um. But but one day it'll happen. You know, it will happen. Okay, it's gonna be good, Garson. That gator that I shoved a turkey or a duck inside and a turkey next too, was pretty good. It was great. After I took it out of the pit as you were wrestling people screaming, Well, that's the only way to properly cook it the right amount of time is to get drunk enough that people have to fight you to remove it from the fire gear. That's how

cooking works. I don't know, if you've done much of it in your life, you'll you'll understand one day. This This is a question that I find interest doing because I feel like it really must understand, not to like insult the first asking it, but at think that that's not That's not what I'm trying to do. Um. The question is, um, what population can the post capitalist world sustain and thrive on with our ideas and concepts? A billion?

Like we currently have six billion to a billion less than ability, Like, how how do people are you willing to lose to achieve sustainability? Because I forget the community and are optimistic with proper technology and ecosustainability techniques, we can maintain a population close to what we have now. And Yeah, I feel like just the framing of this question kind of approaches our current problems and the solutions we have in a weird way, because I don't think

we're not trying to reach a peak population. We're trying to make sure the people that we have have enough stuff to live well. And we have that right now. We we we overproduce everything. We make about one and a half times as much food as we need to to feed everybody, yet there are billions and millions of people who go hungry. So it's not a so like

it's approaching this issue. Yeah, so approaching this question in terms of like how could the post capitalist world thrive on our ideas, and like, I we're not trying to like reach a certain population number, where I think going it from that way is kind of a little silly because I feel like it should be the opposite is. But yeah, I I don't know why we don't think we need to start with population and then go down. The point is is look what we have, here's the people.

Let's distribute this like a network instead of a top down kind of system. Yeah. I I think that one of the things you have to if you're taught, if you're trying to talk about social ecology, one of the things you have to resist, um is this idea that like they're overpopulation is any part of the problem. It is not. Consumption is a problem, um, But there's plenty

of resources. The problem is again one of allocation, and if you were to actually develop a much more equitable society where people were getting enough, one of the things that we have seen demographically all over the world when um the level of kind of um when the the sort of resources available per capita and a population increases, is people have less kids um and and like I think that, Yeah, it's certainly good to say that, like, in a world that is more equitable, the human population

will naturally level off and decrease somewhat. But that the thing that's not the same as saying that, like we need to decrease the population, we need to increase um equity um and and make sure that people have access to the resources that they need um and also that people who are massively over consuming aren't allowed to do that anymore. You know, that will solve the problems and scale back all of the resources being put towards useless

growth and predict towards better distribution. Thus, actually, like the Questionnaer used the term like post capitalist. I don't think we're gonna get to a post capitalist world ever, Like, at least at least not when I'm allowed. I don't think like a world no. Will there be post capitalist areas, probably, but we're never gonna get there. There's never gonna be

a post capitalist world. I don't. I don't. I don't think that I also think it's entirely possible that we will reach points that people in the time will not necessarily consider post capitalist because it will be the same states and a lot of the same institutions organizations that were there as a kid. But people who were, you know, looking at it from a perspective today might consider post

capitalist because that's generally how change happens. You know. Yeah, about like how democracy increased in in the UK, but they still had like a king. It's like when did they They're not, they never really reached post monarchy. But it's also not the same system that they were run

by in like fourteen hundred. You know, it's wildly different, and there's much more representation for more people, but it it's that is not you know that there's also you also have your your Soviet unions and you're you're killing csars and which are very which which is fine, and and and and I I like killings ours. But change happens in a variety of ways, and change can be

revolutionary in its effect without being a clear break. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of like how we're talking about like the capitalist world thriving, Like I don't I

don't view eight billion people thriving right now. Even with that like a lot of a lot, Like it's not like it's that's not what's happening right now, and we need to change the way like distribution of resources works drastically, and doing that will make everyone's lives a whole lot better and it will also maybe limit some of the endless growth. And those things aren't opposites, um, And I just I don't know how like we can say those things, but the path to getting there is certainly a lot

more ambiguous. Yeah, I think that that's I think one of the ways in which the Left goes wrong often is kind of looking at things that have been tried before and and didn't didn't didn't do the trick and saying like, what we need is we need us another Bolshevik revolution, you know, we need to bring us back that you hammer and sickle. And it's like, well, you know, they gave it the old College try and they did

not win. Um, And you can be angry at that or whatever, or you can be like, Okay, it's the same, and hey, it's it's every tendency. I can look at the fucking maknos and be like, well, that was based as hell, and you know what, it didn't do the

fucking trick UM. So I think there's a degree of humility that needs to be had in terms of like what actual, what actual change that makes a more livable world will look like in the way in which That's one of the reasons I did enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future is a lot of it is about the end of capitalism in a way that is not UM. It's it's it. It doesn't look like a lot of ends of capitalism have have kind of been

posited by UM. There's a lot of uh strong arming bankers into like forcing high level economic changes that put insto like really extractive systems and whatnot. UM, And it's it's it's interesting. It was kind of an imagining of how the transition could begin UM in a way that that isn't commonly talked about UM, at least on the left.

And I thought it was valuable for that, and I think people should be I think there's I think that UM UM people can be more creative in how they envisioned the way that might look than they they often are. And I feel like this question actually relates to like stuff like dual power really well, because our our goal

as individuals is not feeding eight billion people. Our goal is to get a garden enough so that we can feed most of our friends off of stuff that we grew for like the summer, right, Like that's like, that's what our goal is to is to fild it from that way, instead of saying, like, how how can we

feed New York in a climate sustainable way? That is a very different question than being like if we want to integrate solar punk and like ecosustainability stuff into our lives now, because if we don't do it, no one really else is really going to. Let's start with the people you actually already have connections with, because a lot of it is is about building like horizontal connections as opposed to defaulting to this top down system of who

has what, who needs what? And this is when we when we venture, when we dare to venture into the subreddit. One of the things I see people like critiquing a lot is like, well, you're you know, they keep talking about like all of these little like home gardening and like canning and and and kind of these community level solutions, but that's not going to deal with like this massive systemic problem. It's like, it's not all about that. There's

there's one. One of the methods in which you can ensure change is keeping you and yours alive and committed

on change. And part of that is ex hyper local solutions UM that also involve increasing your own idea of your autonomy and your own and your own understanding of things like the food cycle, which have an impact on what you like, vote for and what you support pushing for on like a societal level, the things that you come to better understand in your daily life, and and so getting involved in all of these things guerilla gardening

and whatnot UM has an impact on that. All. I do think people underestimate, Like the largest crop by acreage in the United States by a long shot is fucking lawns and replacing lawns with either zero escaping just to increase carbon capture and reduce water usage, or with some sort of food growth. Doing a mix of that for the vast majority of like lawn area in the United States actually would be a significant thing on a global level.

Recommend everyone the Book of Food not lawns. Yeah, there's it's that that would not be a meaningless change, and it is something that people can have an impact on because it is the kind of thing that if we were to get popular enough, there's a Pokemon point, you know, where it where it becomes a trend um and and like Pokemon, if it gets popular enough, it will never die. That's what we say about all of our stuff on

our show. If it if it becomes like Pokemon or or n f T point, if that's But I don't think in FT Pokemon is so much better than any n f T. Although the day that this drops, that will probably announce the Pokemon n FT game, which will be the final coffin in the biosphere. All of all of all of my Pokemons are gone. I've been had all my apes gone. That was my favorite post of the holiday season. Oh, Robert, do you want to give an update on After the Revolution? That was asked a

couple of times. Yeah, I'm three chapters in UM so it'll be done hopefully at some point this year. Garrison Garrison has a question on that. Are you gonna pay someone else to code the book? No, no, we pay you, Garrison, I don't want to code this. Yeah, well, I have to work on the Daily Show. Now I cannot code this game. We all have things to do we don't want to do. Oh gosh, alright, I'm so sorry, Garrison, so sorry. Well have you code some other people's books

just to get stuff? No more coding. I will not allow it. There are there, there are experts who can do this a lot prettier than I can with my I think, Garrison, I consider you an expert. Now Ope, no, in in in E pub coding. I'll put that on my resume. Well, I think that does it for us today. Folks. If you want to follow us on social media so you can watch us promote our own shows again, you can go to Cool's own media on Twitter, Instagram and happen here pod And wouldn't that be level? We get

so much more connections through online. That's wow? That really? Do? I love online? Yeah? And uh we're doing it behind the Bastards live stream digital show with prop on. That doesn't sound right, doesn't This bit is so not funny everything time, it's not a bit. I'm just dreading it. I'm dreading it to but we're doing it. February moment House dot Com tickets still available. They are a moment how come slash behind the bastards. Can I scalpel them to the fans? I to get in there. Scarcity is

the key. Well do that if you have disposable income and want to watch Roberts talk. Yeah, yeah, more than we already do. I guarantee you it'll be worth it. Well, that's the episode. Thank you for listening. I hope everyone has uh better that would be not And I hope everyone has an identical two down to the day and until in May you realize that you're actually in like a groundhog Day style loop. Um, and then you would achieve nirvana if I'm remembering how the movie groundhog Day

went properly. Sure, Uh yeah, that sounds that sounds great. Have a good year, make some changes, make connections with people around you. There there, you just just define them. Talk to people who look like they have cool politics or or start doing cool things, you know, and started

starting start doing cool things. Yeah. We should address one last thing, which is the question people ask that gets asked a lot, but we probably can't address enough, which is like, there's no one around me doing any of this mutual aid stuff. There's nobody around me engaging any of the stuff that I want to get how do how do I get organized and get involved? Number one, there are people around you doing that kind of ship. It may just be hard to find because of where

you are. UM. But if you start doing ship, if you like, the simplest thing I can say is try and figure out where there's a need and start filling it UM. Often you will start meeting other people who are engaged in adjacent projects or even the same thing UM. And that's a way to get into it. If you are trying to start. If you actually get so far as to start serving a need in your area in a mutual aid capacity UM and trying to start organizing and whatnot, and you're doing shit, feel free to hit

us up on email reach out. We are happy to signal, boost and signpost people who are have actually started doing shit UM. It's one of those things. Please don't come to I think this might be a cool idea. But if you start doing shit UM, and you can provide some evidence that you're you're doing something in your community that's not currently being done that is a mutual aid

type thing, or even even a charitable type thing. If it's if you're doing it, we will try to help signal boost and and can be very useful in that capacity. So so it's not easy necessarily, especially depending on where you live. But like you do, it's always possible to find a need and fill it, you know. Yeah, I found that uh uh definitely was easier before the pandemic.

But a way that I've met people that are a little bit more open minded to the same things that I'm open minded too is going to like local comedy shows or things things that comedy shows I'm guessing like farmers markets, farmers you know, wherever kind of weird not not in the normal culture people will go to. You'll probably find someone there with radical politics, and yeah, that's problem all those types of like like you know, countercultural

subcultural spaces. You'll probably find someone there who's wearing a back patch that is something like smashed or something. You know, So like just like you you have to you know, you're not going to find them by staying at your in your house and scrolling on Twitter. They probably not. You have to kind of go into the real world, um as scary as the meat space maybe, yeah, And I would say another thing to keep in mind if

you are in kind of a more conservative area. And even if you do identify as an anarchist, you don't have to frame it that way. You can always call yourself a libertarian municipal list and none of the people who might be offended by anarchists will listen past libertarian and they'll decide you're fine. And that's a great way to to start that. Uh, ironic means the same thing,

more or less. I mean, there's other kinds of anarchists who are But like most people who say they're anarchists, if you were to call them libertarian municipalists would be like, all right, whatever, yeah, not me, don't call me that. But I call call Chris that constantly. That's that's that's that's, that's it. We'll be back tomorrow or maybe not. I don't know, probably tomorrow maybe Yep. That's what I'm saying.

And it's been said, say so, this is gonna be ship, this is gonna suck, this is gonna be trash, because no one knows what's gonna happen. I have not actually come up with a prediction yet. I don't know this one. Have I hoped one that I came up with before the show. Have we have we opened it. Yeah, we've already started. Um, we were supposed to. This is it happen here? Everybody podcast things falling apart? How to maybe

make them fall apart less? Um, Sophie pitched the great idea of why don't we do an episode that is our predictions? It's really not my idea when people ask, so this is Sophie's idea that she's been Sophie's idea alone. It's sprang fully formed from the side of her head, like Athena from Zeuss skull um. And we all agreed it was a good idea for an episode. And then I did not come up with the prediction. Did you get that's a bit of time thinking about not a second,

not even absolutely love the Athena Zeus reference. That's how I tell people I got Anderson. Yeah, Well, my prediction for the year is that I'm going to keep making references to Athena whenever I do something that pisses Sophie off, so that she' I will it will absolutely work. Yeah, that's my prediction for prediction. Uh, okay, okay, okay, wait before we go into the to the to the big, Bigger thing, I want everybody to give one word prediction

for how you would describe this coming here. One word prediction borning an f t H. I was just gonna say fucked. But I don't think because it's gonna be hot too, I don't think it's going to be that fun. Actually, I think I was gonna say mediocre. Yeah, I'm I'm foreseeing a lot of blandness, a lot of blandness. My here,

here's a prediction I'll make. I think that one of the things that we were seeing last year, especially in the streets, with like the far right being so much more uh active um than the left in a lot of places and in a lot of ways, is UM really tired. A lot of people on the left out, a lot of organizers, a lot of street level people. UM. Not just like oh I'm tired, but like I was injured, Um, I'm fighting charges. My funds were depleted. I had to I couldn't keep going out because I have a family

and I had to deal with that sort of ship. UM. And I think I don't think that energy is back yet, but it always ebbs and flows, and it does on both sides, because at the end of the day, whether you're a fascist or a progressive people have X amount of energy, you know, um, and I think we are. I believe we are kind of at the beginning process of folks on the left starting to recover some of that energy. Um. And I think that that is a process we're going to see building throughout the year. UM.

I don't agree with that. Yeah, yeah, And it will be a multi year process. And I'm I'm kind of hoping folks are ready to throw down again. But but we'll see like where that goes. We might have like a few days of people throwing down in the streets for some reason, like something bad may happen, like like late summer. I I can I can definitely see like a few days in July or all gust where it's like, oh is the thing starting again, and it goes on for a bit and then it kind of peters out.

I kind of I definitely see that being a decent possibility, um, because yeah, I think there will be more energy for that this year and more mental like like like ability to to do to do that this year than yeah. But overall, I don't see anything super eventful, and I hopefully just doesn't like drink anything and then we get no. I mean, my my big eventful prediction is that, and I will explain what this is based on in a bit.

I think we are going to see a significant sized urban metropolitan area be rendered uninhabitable, either permanently or for a significant period of time in the United States due to climate change. And part of what this is based on is the December wildfires that just destroyed a significant

chunk of Boulder, Colorado. Right not talking about like New York City gets swallowed by the waves, but like a place where there's a couple hundred thousand people living, they're not able to be for either ever or an extended period of time because a climate based disaster hits. Um. Maybe it'll be a heat dome type thing. Maybe it'll be like a wet bulb event, maybe be um fires.

Obviously always possible, hurricane tornado. You know, we we saw enough just in the last couple of months in terms of those, like record hurricanes that killed like a hundred people in um in the South, or the fires sweeping Boulder right now and again fucking December. UM. But but I do think there's a pretty good chance we see something like that this year. I think my big one is that I mean, okay, so the the the obvious freebe is that we're gonna cross a million COVID deaths

or like the the the official count. We were like we we've had ward US count hit. That's that's the free b. The not free b is that like it's not even a prediction. If that's that's that's that's what. I think. It's going to be warm in the summertime. Yeah, like you know, and the warm in the summertime is probably like a bigger gamble at this point than very

very warm, but the summer st yeah. But but but I think the real thing is that like there there is never going to be never locked down the U S never, like you of the United States could die and there would be no lockdown, like and this is you know, and I think this this is the result of I don't know, I wonder what you do do this. My thesis for what was going on was that like I actually think the like the like Liberate Wisconsin stuff,

I think that actually worked. Like those number they were all those giant like like a mount of people show up with guns to captain absolutely it worked. Yeah, yeah, it worked, and it was like and but but they did they did works. It's a very effective way to get things done well. But I think there's an important lesson here though, which is that, like, so the state will never like very very rarely will the state ever like directly like they they won't immediately back down. Right.

What they'll do is like they'll make an enormous show about how they didn't grant any concessions, and then they will grant concessions. Like this is the thing with the riots rights, Like people are talking about, why do we not there's not gonna any more stimulus checks, right, And the reason there's not going the more simular checks because nobody's writing and you know, like what kind of stimulus checks you get if a couple of targets get redacted. Yeah, like you know if if if if you burn down

another police station, we will get more stimulus checks. It's just that you have to you know, there has to

be another police station burned down. Right, But like this is and this is the this is the you know, the right was extremely effective at this, right, and in a way that people just don't really talk about, which is that it is now politically impossible in the US, Like no, no one, no one will ever do anover lockdown because people will show up with guns and they don't want to do that, and they've decided that just

just just kill, just kill. Look, you know we we've already killed the entire population of Seattle, like they're dead. Like we'll just keep killing more people, more people, and just never. I think people often are going I think people on the left attack the Biden's COVID response for

a lot of the wrong things. Like the thing that I I would go after him for is like, yeah, we didn't he didn't just say here's a bunch of money, don't go to work, We're not going back to school, Like stay at home is a pile of cash, which might have worked, it was worth a shot, But past that, a lot of this was beyond. By the time he came into office, the the armed militant cultural movement against the idea of COVID precautions was so advanced that like

what do you what? What? What more could have been realistically done other than trying to give people enough money again to actually stay home, which again is the thing I think it's most fair to attack him on. Like okay, I mean like ships beyond Biden and a lot but like like I don't, like, okay, it was like, well,

what could have been done? I don't know, like if you're looking from the perspection of the state, they could actually have deployed the intelligence services against them instead of doing like one dumb and trapment plot, right, Like well sure, but that's that's also that starts before Biden and by again by the time, I mean it's like you know, but like like yeah, I called her bluff, right, have wht people show up to the capital and then it's like, okay,

here's the FBI, like like that that that's a thing that like if if you're a liberal status you could do and they just don't want to because like partially I don't want the conflict of partially because it would actually it would look like it would look really bad for them heading into the midterms. It would look so they're bad. And and also I think this is less the FBI is kind of much more centrist in terms

of their politics as an agency. But like there were a lot of state Yeah, well, I mean the most federal and state, Like I don't know that they can rely on them like they do that they can even even the FBI, it's like, yeah, they're using the proud ways informants like on against synarchists, Like yeah, so yeah, like they're not they're not, They're not like the I

have an appreciation. What I will say is I have an appreciation for the fact that by the time Biden was in office it may have been an unsolvable problem, which doesn't let him off the hook for things that were objectively bad decisions like not doing ship for stimulus, um, like pushing to open the schools, like you know a number of other things that he's done, but also like if he had done all of the right things, we still might be at exactly this death toll because there

are cultural issues here that we're very advanced by the time he took office. Um. And I do think like it's whatever. I'm not I'm not saying this to let Biden off the hook or support the Democratic Party. I'm saying this because people need to have an accurate conception of the problem. Um. And the problem is so much deeper than what a technocrat could have handled by making smart policy. At break a break and we're back. Actual prediction Republicans will win the Senate. Yeah, which seems pretty

I think there's a decent chance Democrats can keep the House. Um, but I'm pretty sure, and it's going to go back to the Republicans. I mean, they are damn near in control of the Senate as it is, but they Yeah, but I I do believe that's gonna happen. Um, And let's see other which yeah, it does does not seem

that's not that far fetched of a thing. And I don't know, there'll be some other kind of tech factory the space between Elon Musk Peter Teel Silicon Valley, there's gonna be I think there's gonna be some worsening development of like tech like technocratic stuff, possibly in like possibly with like the mask of trying to like fix climate

change or something. But I think they'll be a decent growth of tech power and possibly there like um cooperation with the state or the state like fund giving more explicit like funding and permission to tech power to like do terraforming or like some geongineering. Like there's there's gonna be something related to that sphere that is a it's going to get a lot more visible than it is.

My big tech prediction is that there is going to be a crime against humanity at some point this year, like on a massive scale, not like just a mass shooting, but like a state level crime against humanity. And we're going to find out that for the last like eight months, Facebook had been paying the perpetrators asignificant amount of money as a result of like some ill thought out ad

program that they had. Yeah, like we're going to we're going to leave to Facebook actively funding and ethnic cleansing. Um because some somebody thought up some sort of affiliate program that was not well conceived. Um. That's my fun tech industry prediction. My fun tech industry prediction is that, uh, Jeff Bezos will increasingly become the most cringe eest man in the world. Yeah, it is very funny that the picture him on New Year's he's just wearing a Dan

Flash his shirt. He's he's absolutely wearing a Dan Flash his shirt. And that's incredibly fine. Robert, Robert, that shirt costs him three thousand dollars because the pattern is so very complicated and how much the lines crisscross. I I just I just don't like you insisting that it's not as much money. But despite its complicatedness, that that photo was my version of a holiday. Carnes said to for one, I know, um yeah, I think I think we're going

to see a lot more unions this year. Yeah, that does seem to be a positive trend that we're seeing is a lot more unionization and some significant successes for and and a lot more like like general acceptance of the concept of a union. Other prediction related to to tech industry stuff, I think one of the billionaire space ships things is going to have a disastrous launch. Positive prediction of spaceship is gonna blow up with people inside it as it tries to take off. That's that's my

positive prediction that it can take some people with it. Um, sorry to the people, Sorry to the workers who are going to be probably harmed at that, but it can take some people out. So it's gonna be funny. Um that is that's possibility. Also, uh, there's gonna be a there's gonna be a disastrous effect around Austin, is right, and that's where that's where a lot of the spacehip stuff is getting set up. There's no, no, no, no,

it's that's just where the offices are. It's like Chica, it's like on the coast of Texas, not close enough to Austin. Some some piece of a spaceship is gonna fly through someone's house. No one's gonna care about it. Um, there gets brought, gonna kill a family or something, No one's gonna care. Nothing's gonna happen. It'll be fine that Those are my more my tech industry predictions related to

spaceship stuff. Yeah, um yeah. I I also think on on a more I don't know how the current civil war in Myanmar is going to shake out, but I think there's a chance that it becomes the first kay place where there is a successful or at least partially successful revolutionary movement that is to a significant extent armed via three D printed weaponry. Um. They've all we've already seen a lot of that deployed by um, the the

rebels in Myanmar. Um. I'm interested in watching that because it's kind of the first time we've seen that technology used on a meaningful scale by people that aren't like organized crime. UM. And yeah, I think it's still too early to tell, like how much of an actual like whether or not it's just kind of a distraction from the more meaningful aspects of the struggle or the more meaningful like kind of deployments of weaponry and other tools in the struggle, or whether or not it will actually

play a significant role in the armed struggle. But it's it's very much worth watching if you're somebody who pays attention to insurgent movements and what is increasingly possible as a result of new technology. I have another really bad prediction. J K. Rowling is going to release a book on gender orcial fund to YouTube channel, yeah something. I think.

I think there's a decent chance she has been writing a book about gender and she's going to release in two I think that as an actual, actual series prediction. Just go away and a whole bunch of liberal moms are gonna buy it for each other and they're gonna read it, and it's gonna be bad. And that is

that is my that's my that's my horrible prediction. She could be so beloved if she had limited her comments after publishing Harry Potter, if she repeatedly telling people that are constantly shifting their pants, if she just didn't use Twitter after anything at all, and she could have been a different person. It's it's the Dave Chappelle thing. Just stay off. We all we all would have loved you. Forever. If you just just gone off and counted your money

and left us alone. Yeah, go be rich somewhere. It's fine to be done. It's fine to be done being famous and influential. You you had, you did great, You did great. You never needed to come back. She I don't she did. I'm not sure if she did great? She did? She did, she did. Look again, this is

all colored. But if she had never come back into the public eye, all it would have been as like you remember that lady who got like twelve year olds to read seven d page books that one time, Like, people would not be as critical of the actual content of the Harry Potter books if she just hadn't kept coming back and saying ship so that and and and and then like didn't stop and then did not stop, and then was told bad, really really bad, and then kept doing it and kept doing it, and kept doing

it and kept doing it. You know what people should beat. Look, if you're if you're listening to this and you're a millionaire who was like hugely popular for some cultural reason in the late nineties and early two thousand's, think about Bill Waterson. Bill Waterson ends the most popular comic strip in the history of comics and spends the rest of his life and fucking Iowa painting landscapes and never talks to anybody with a platform again, and I everybody loves

Bill Waterson. Like not a single person has a criticism of Bill Waterson. Um, just do that, Just do what he did. Just go paint landscapes in Iowa and don't talk to journalists or get on Twitter. It's fine. Does Bill Waterson believe regressive things about gender? Nobody knows because he doesn't say anything. I think another prediction that is actually decently possible. I think we will get more and more cities and or states to decriminalize hard drugs in

in certain possession amounts. Um. I think there is a there's a number of bills going around California, UM and a lot of other states, and I believe that will be start to become more and more common, which will be great. It would be nice if they get legalized. But you know, get get get what you can for now. Um. Yeah, speaking of drugs, Uh, here's CDD oil sponsored by heroin, by by big drug. Here we go have fun to

stay safe. We're back, and I just want to let everybody know that if if everything gets legalized, we will be sponsored by meth amphetamines so fucking quickly it will make your head spin. I will never turn down a drug sponsor, um, except for like super foods. We don't do super foods, we don't do brain pills. But heroin. I would advertise the ship out of heroin. I'm already ready to advertise hair the hair lost. Drugs we don't do, but heroin. H Hey, is life depressing? You know it?

He hated that I helped that bit. Uh, Chris, you were you were saying something before break My My one serious prediction is I don't think we've I think we're gonna get one more big like Latin American uprising, and it will not be in Argentina. I have been eating ship for three goddamn years predicting it's gonna be Argentina. It's like, oh, they're getting an IMF bailout, Like, oh, it's never Argentina. It won't be Argentina. It will be

somewhere else. But someone is someone is going to spend like two months doing a bunch of stuff that's extremely cool outside of Argentina. I kind of think, Um, I don't know I'll be interested to see what happens in Brazil because um, it's hard to get a sense for the exact numbers, but there's potential there. There is potential there with what's happened in Bolivia and what's happened in Chile.

There's there's momentum in its exciting broad area. Like I mean, like the os there's shoot, there's like enormous protests in Brazil like all the time. Yeah, yeah, there's like massive, it just hasn't sort of like like it hasn't turned into like everyone fighting the cops and like yeah, and maybe I don't know if it will because like I don't know. I mean, this is this is This is

my vibes based interpretation of it. But it feels like the Workers Party has enough of a handle on the protests that they're not gonna sort of like explore load because the PC just wants to win its election and get out of bulson Aro. Well yeah, and I mean the possibility of any kind of like actual revolutionary insurrection anything relies heavily on like that path not working for people, Like they're not that they're not being that kind of safety.

But well, I mean I say this if they arrest Lula again, Like yeah, I don't think Bolson like I think there will die in his own ship, Like yeah, that might happen even if his party stays in power. I mean that he was actively dying as we record this episode, which is very funny. Um, I got as a result of one of our ad campaigns, several or a picture frames uh this year, and right now we're loading one up. That's just pictures of sick Bulson narrow to keep in my living room. So anytime I walk past,

I can look at JayR. Bolson naro and hacking up a lung or having ships sucked out of his nose from a tube. Um, I will say, oh, by my one more. Like very fast prediction about this is that Kissinger is gonna live. He's not gonna die. Damnit, Chris. You allow myself to hope for one for about I allow myself to hope for about eight hours, and I think it's gonna live, but immediately wrong. I don't know. It would have been pretty cool if Betty White's last

action had been some sort of anti takeout Kissinger. She becomes the most loved American and human history, like goes out just like jumping out of an airplane, like she parachutes Kissinger's house with a Flansing knife. I'm gonna say, in Colorado, Oregon, or Washington, we're going to get our first safe uh drug injections side opened. I know they've been very pretty good. They've been They've been very successful

inside different parts of Canada, specifically Vancouver, BC. And I believe one of those three states is going to get the first one. Um. I hope it's all of them. If you want to support some of those people up in Canada, go to heroin Martin by a shoot dope fu the cops hoodie. Yeah, but say like safe safe drug injection and ingestion sites are have been have been very good at preventing deaths in Vancouver, BC. And there's just a good idea in general, and I will be

excited at the prospect. They're an incredibly good idea. And they also if you're trying to again talk about this to conservatives in your life, they're cheaper than just letting people be addicted to drugs on the street because people don't steal stuff. Also, their heroin is free. Also, they

won't have ridiculous medical bills. They get paid by the state, and they're more likely to seek treatment even if you don't mandate that, especially if you don't mandate that, because as a rule, people don't like having problematic addictions to drugs, and if they can deal with their immediate needs and also know that there's help available, they will often choose to get help. So and I think I have I have one more actual prediction is that a new Matrix

video game what will be announced? And that is that is all of my predictions. Oh, we should probably talk about Matrix for briefly. That's what the people want. Garrison it and and for the record, this is going to be controversial because some people have no taste, but we both think it fucking ruled. It is possibly the best Matrix film. It was really fun. It's it's very good.

If you think about it for any amount of time, it gets very good in the way it addresses um the system's power to incorporate Revolt as a part of the system, which was already teased inside me monti asthetic, Yeah, reloaded, but yeah, like the Matrix using the weapon that wants to find you against you, and the Matrix weaponizing all of your ideas against you, Um is very good. Um. I know Lana put a lot of thought into this, particularly around who she is, how she's developed, and how

her work has been turned against her and what she believes. UM, both by like the people and also like corporately in terms of like achieving the correct amount of meta that it's not useless drivel while still actually being aware of what it is. Um. I think was done. Well. I know there's there's some people and like the postmodern thing, who think it don't, who think it doesn't go meta enough.

And I think that's nonsense because if you go any if you if you point out that pointing out, that pointing out revolt against the system is part of the system, then you've lost everybody. Like no one cares because you can add on those layers endlessly and it's just dribble. Um.

So I think they got the correct amount of meta. Well, then a band not not abandoned that idea but moving it on mean, like you know, you know, it's more important than being meta is making friends and finding human connections because going through the world like this isolated, like Thomas Anderson is when he's in the Matrix, as like as as games that are A big part of that problem is that he's very isolated, and the whole point is like, no, you need to find friends, find connections,

get like like be have people around you to build a network of and they actually start like like loving other people is really one of the only ways out of this looping cycle and layering of Matrix is that we always live in um. It was. It's a wonderful film.

I can talk about I could, I could talk about it for hours, but we could do a whole podcast about why we enjoyed Matrix four UM, but it's it's pretty fun and my only the only thing I'll add to that is a lot of people fools is what I call them, are angry at the fact that it ended with the Brass Against cover of It was so good it was, and it the cover of that song opens an exactly so that the singer, the lead singer of Brass Against, became briefly famous mid late last year

UM when during while playing that exact song on stage into a fan's mouth and the song that the cover that ends the Matrix starts at exactly the moment where she pete in that guy's mouth during the live show, and I am certain that Lana Wachowski was planning to use the original Rage against the Machine version of that song, and then that news dropped and was like, well, let's get these brass against people I I want, I want

the Piste song, the other thing I wanted. They is reflecting on the analyst as a character and how he relates to kind of the meat space argument and how digital systems and algorithms and social media operates. He if you listen to him talk um and within the whole context,

within the whole context of the film, he um. They think there's actually some more insightful points than what you might originally suspect around like social media um and digital nous versus realness um just always you know, always a factor in in matrix films. But the way, the way they into it and this so much thing is a lot more mature than all the topics they handle in

their previous films. And I mean there's just so many like really good like single lines that offer like really good like oh wow, like that's just like a very good point, and then they just move past them so like so effortlessly, like you could focus on any one of those really good lines, and they just offer up so many and at many points, and I like that they turned the Mayor of Engian into Ted Kaczynski. Um,

it's just fun. Like at the end of the day, it's just actually really fun and it doesn't feel exactly like the other movies in the series, which is what I want. I don't like reboots. I wasn't a fan of the Star Wars reboot because it was like I've seen this again, Yeah, yeah, I I like I like that it. I like that a lot of the action in this movie, right up until kind of the end feels perfunctory and like I like like kind of saying like I don't care about this part anymore. Like I've

done the guy's fighting agents and bullet time. Um that you know, at the end, there's some more some more loving action set pieces, but like from the beginning, it's very much it's much more like a really fun commentary on how Hollywood works and how the video game industry works. There's a fucking mass effect joke in there. There's a joke about like the nineteen nine or two thousand Matrix video game that happened before Garrison was born. It's so fun. It's it's just a lot of fun as a movie.

It's frad m well um any any other final final predictions before we wrap up this, this extremely well thought through episode that we've poured our hearts and minds into. We really did. Dr oz is going to go down in flames. Oh I hope so, oh man. I really have no idea what to expect from I have no idea. I'm not making I'm not making any prediction on that because I too have no idea. The only thing that I'll say is that one way or the other, it's

going to be a bell weather. If it like goes great for him and he wins easily, we're going to see a lot more like Dr phil is absolutely rolling into Congress. If that works for oz Um and other other people who are kind of occupy similar cultural spaces will do the same thing, and then we'll have congressional inquiries about whether or not this simple trick will burn

belly fat. It's if it's like like, if that's what happens, Like the think the thing Trump is going to be remembered for like is being like, well, the thing the thing Reagan is going to be remembered for is being just like like fifty years ahead of his time. Before we're literally all entirely ruled by just reality TV stars. Mm hmm. Whose wives are great at giving a head? Should I? Did anyone? Did? Everyone already forget that Nancy

Reagan throat goat discourse? Everyone was so exhausted. Yeah, if you didn't catch this, it's a very well known secret and has been for like fifty years. That back before they got married and probably after. Nancy was famous for giving the best blow jobs in Hollywood, as as as Garrison tosses the cat every single episode. So I disdained this discourse. Now, yeah, twy two, it's a year. We're in it. Okay. My last prediction is I actually do think this year is gonna suck slightly less. Did Now

this is probably the big one. I'm gonna eat it on, but like, hopefully happen. Hopefully you're right about it. So I'm hoping. Um No, Yeah, I think that there's a decent chance that we're that it's better. Um, it's at least in some ways. The climate stuff, as it nearly always will for the foreseeable future, we'll keep getting worse.

But yeah, I think there's actually a chance that COVID will get better, not because of any policy decision, because macron literally nine of human beings and in the world get it, and those that survive COVID stops passing on as much, which is kind of vaguely speaking what happened with you know, the influenza. I will be probably foolish in making one more prediction. That is, like around the fall, we will not see spikes as big as we saw

this last year. Um. I I do think there will probably still be some, but I do think the numbers are going to be generally trending down. Um. Yeah, after O Macron hits its peak, just because how many people will get infected, how many antibodies plus vaccines will be circulating, um, and how many people have already been who don't take the vaccine have will already have like died off. It's I do not say that to be like flip into to be like, but it's like that. It's the world

that we live in it um. But I do hope and I do hope and some slightly predict that we'll have less less spiking numbers around this next fall and winter as we did of this current you know falling winter season. I wouldn't mind ending on a note of appreciation for the fucking booster, because we got it. You and I both garrison, as did most of our friends, and had just a shipload of COVID flying around us everywhere. I love a lot of infections, and we were fine. Fine.

I have one of my friends got COVID and her mom, who they lived in the same house did not has not gotten COVID because they're wearing masks and they got the booster. And for for all my friends that that did get COVID that had that were boosted, the vaccine didn't shop there. You're not in the hospital. You're double test positive on a rapid test and then test negative on a PCR, probably because by the time he got to the PCR like the next his viral load was

just so fucking low. UM, get the third vacs the vaccine works. Who could have predicted? Who could have predicted? The things that are literally the entire basis of our modern concept of the value of human life continue to

be very effective. All right? Well, that that does it for us, UM unplugged, Go spend time outside, touch grass, touch your mirror like trying to go through it because trying to go through what's real what's not see if see if Maybe you were the digital Messiah and you have been trapped in a simulation where you work at a food lion, um and and you can break free of it, um, but not fly anymore because now your girlfriends he does he does fly with Trinity at the end,

he does fly with Trinity. Sure, just as we all can only fly with of our love well with Carrie Admosson's Yeah, specifically, who has gotten so much hotter as they've made all right, Well, that's that's where we are. Hey, everybody,

welcome to it could happen here. I am Robert Evans, and this is the show where we talk about how everything is kind of falling apart and how we might put it back together again in a way that works better than it did before, um, or do something different that is even anyway, whatever, It's a show about the future and about the messed up present um And as a result of that, one of the things we talked

about a lot is self sufficiency. We've had a number of episodes kind of covering the values of like replacing your lawn with food, guerilla gardening, that sort of stuff. And one of the critiques we get is people saying, well, you know, that's never gonna work on a large scale, it's never going to replace industrial agriculture or whatever. And

that's perfectly true. But the point we're going for here, and why we encourage these kind of resilience building activities is because they do improve the ability of communities to resist when they need to resist, and also provide opportunities by which people can reimagine their relationship to, for example, the food supply chain, or reimagine the relationship to their community and the kind of things that communities provide for

each other rather than having them shipped in by Amazon. Um. And when we start talking about that, and we start talking about improving community resiliency for things like, you know, a general strike or even potentially more radical stuff, one of the big issues that any community has to con

front is not just food but medicine. I'm I do, and I'm sure a lot of other people have friends who cannot survive without medications that are very like reliant upon existing supply chains um, and to some extent, even the stability of the government, you know, um, getting your insulin, getting your medication for whatever, kind of disease you have that needs constant medication. There's a bunch of different reasons why people are reliant upon the medical um supply lines

and upon the kind of pharmaceutical industry. And that's one of the big when we talk about building more resilient communities, one of the big hurdles to jump. Well. Today, my guest is someone who is working on bridging some of these problems. UM. His name is Michael Lawfer, and he is the founder of an organization called the Four Thieves

Vinegar Collective. They are bio hackers, UM, and they are working on cracking certain pharmaceutical medications to allow individuals with resources that are generally available to people who are not rich or pharmaceutical companies UM, to produce life saving medications. UM. The number one thing you would have heard of from Four Thieves is the EPI pencil, which we'll talk about in a bit. But first, Michael, thank you for coming

on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's exciting to be able to shot and talk with you and all the people surrounding you who are trying to just unfunned things a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, and I most of the conversation I want to have today is on the unfucking of things variety. But I do think we should start with a little bit of technical talk first.

Can you give people an idea of what kind of medications you and other people in the collective have figured out how to produce um and what kind of resources and individual needs to be able to do some of

this stuff. Sure, so from a technical perspective, most of the things that we focus on are what's called small molecule chemistry, And to kind of describe that blanketly, if you can draw the molecule on a cocktail napkin, it probably qualifies as a small molecule if it's one of these things that like, you know, if you look at the diagram for the molecules approaching, it's got being ribbons that are colored and stuff that's a that's a biochem thing,

and it's a whole different set of problems. Now, the mean focide that we've had have been surrounding access to abortion, access to HIV medications, access to hepatitis C medications, and access to reversal of drug overdose medications. So that's been sort of our main focus, but there's been a handful

of others. The things that we tend to look for our where are there things that there's a great need and there's a huge barrier, And so you see those in those places a lot, because the three main barriers that tend to pop up between somebody and access to the medication they need are either price or legality, or

lack of infrastructure. And typically the weirdness that comes up mostly surrounds price because of intellectual property laws and marginalization of people who suffer from particular ailments or seem to suffer predominantly from particular ailments. And so if you're if you're poor, and you're in a class of people that is seen as something not to be cared about because they're not a strong voter base, then the ability to move access away from those people and put in more

barriers and raise prices becomes easier to defend um. So the first drug that we focused on was a an anti parasitic um. Toxoplasmosis is a parasite that's pretty innocuous for most people. Anbody when you get from cats, right or is this not Gandhi? It is? It is the one you get from cats, and it's a really fascinating parasite too, if if if you ever dig into the behavioral biology of it, it's really really fascinating parasite. Um,

I probably have it. Yeah, I have three cats. I definitely have it, right, So and so it's not a big deal for those people. But if you have a massively compromised immune system, especially with people with HIV or advanced stages of cancer, and that's why it was labeled sort of you know, HIV drug, it's not it's a it's an anti parasitic, but it's used almost exclusively by people who are an advanced stages of cancer. Uh, people with fairly compromised immune systems from HIV or something else,

and then pregnant women. Um. And it's not that big deal. If you have access to the medication, you can merely take it and eradicates from body. The difference was, is that something that was a short course of treatment. You take I think four um, yeah, four doses the first time around, and then one dose each day subsequently for something like ten days. Um And that's not a big deal when each dose, each pill was about thirteen and

a half dollars. And then Martin cruently jacked up the price to seven fifty a pill, and so we're like, well, this is ridiculous. So that was the first one that we went after. Then of course access to abortion drugs, um, that's a big one. That's pretty topical. Lately we released a video I don't know, maybe three months ago on how you can make your own abortion pills without too much fuss. This would be Preston right, uh, Mytho, pristone

and Mr Cristall. So you can do it with just Mr Purstall, or you can do it in combination, and when you do it with just the one with just Miso, you have about an eighty five percent chance of it wor king and if you have both the bumps it up to about and what is the like what when you're doing this? And we'll talk a little bit with the hardware, but like what is the re agent that

you have for this? Because I know that's been a big part of some of the discussions is like how do you get the things you make the medicines from? Which is easier for some than it is for others. Sure, there are a couple different ways that you google about that.

The the interesting but more difficult way, of course, is to do the chemistry from scratch, where like you say, you get access to the agents, you do some chemistry, and you end up with the active pharmaceutical ingredient, which we lovingly referred to as the A p I, and then you package it somehow into a tablet or a

pill or or some other means of ingress into the body. Um. The instructions that we distributed skip the difficult part because mr Pristal is an ulcer medication, and so, for instance, if you have access to Mexico or are in Mexico, it's kind of not a big deal because as an ulcer medication, it's over the counter and you can just go in and say, oh, you know, my grandmother can't get out of bed, she needs this ulcer medication. I need just a little bit of it to get her

through the weekend. Um, and then no problem. Uh. Not so easy in places where it's a little more controlled like the US. However, one amazing trick when looking for medicines access to medicines that are generally blocked from people that the existing power structure tries to disenfranchise from access is you look and see if it's similarly used for other classes of person or being that the infrastructure does

care about. So interestingly, you look for ulcer medications, you say, well, like, well, who else has ulcers that you know, people might think are important people. That doesn't really come up, And there are other ulcer medications are a little bit better. However, there are a lot of really wealthy people in the United States, and really wealthy people tend to keep horses, and horses interestingly um nine or something or maybe more,

some ungodly percentage of domesticated horses have ulcers. Um. Now why that is, I'm not entirely clear about. But my own theory is that it has something to do with taking a gigantic wild animal and putting it into a very small box for most of its life. Yeah, it doesn't seem like the thing that horses evolved to do. Yeah. So, so that said, people who are horse owners typically have

to treat them constantly for ulcers. And the best thing for that is Mr Cristall And so you can get Mr Crystal powder in a tub from places that, yeah, feedstore or something. Yeah, I go to a feed store every week. I'm sure I could buy a bucket of this ship probably, so it comes in tubs and the other thing that's great about it coming in a tub

is that it's already in with a buffer. Part of the thing about Mr. Crystall is that the dosages in micrograms, and that's very hard to weigh unless you have a really high precision scale. Even your good drug dealers generally don't have a scale that can do that. Right. So, but the magic is this isn't a tub with a bunch of inert powder, and it's it's already mixed up

to be homogeneous. And so what you can do is you can do a bit of back of the envelope arithmetic and you can measure out much larger quantities and know how much active ingredients you have and then pack that into a tablet. Now yeah, um, I mean that makes so much sense. And it's also like like the you have kind of the dark side and light side version. It's kind of the light side version of all of those people buying up ivermectin for for nonsense. It's like, well, no,

there's reasons to buy you know, like uh, livestock medication especially. Um. I mean, I have a lot of friends who took fishing antibiotics back in the day, and this is kind of a much more um using it in a much more rigorous way to provide people with something that can is getting it will be getting increasingly difficult to access in a lot of parts of the country. Yeah, it's just such a smart way of approaching it, I think. Yeah.

And one of the things that becomes philosophic quickly a bit sticky is when you end up talking about the importance of independent management of one's own health and decision making not coming from above. There's this difficult moment that I've had kind of having to cop to the reality that if you're building mechanisms to empower people to have

access to make decisions about managing their own health. H part of that entails realizing that that will also lead to a lot of people making what I might think are bad decisions, but that the important thing is that it doesn't matter what I think. That people should not be controlled by other people, and if they make bad decisions,

that sucks, and hopefully we can help that. But not not lamenting the importance of or not not backtracking, not having some sort of retrograde Yeah, about offering more access even if people misuse that access to the miss manage their own health. Mismanagement of health happens no matter what right. It happens constantly, and people will ignore things that seem

like they're bigger problems and don't get them addressed. And so I have to sort of retreat into this idea that more access to more tools is better and that's just the way of it. And yeah, the problem, yeah, I mean, the problem with ivermectin isn't the problem. The problem is that that people have access to ivermectin and so they're taking it in a way that is harmful to them. The problem is that people have been have have been blinded by disinformation and so are making a

horrible health care decision. And the fact that they have

it's possessed to veterinary medication is fine, right, exactly. And and it's and it's interesting that you say that because I have a friend of Doctors Without Borders and they are starting a couple of pretty strong programs to try and combat misinformation because just from a metric standpoint, they look for sort of like what's killing the greatest number of people at the greatest rate in the worst way, and currently the thing that's killing the most people in

the worst way at the greatest rate is a misinformation and so yeah, that's that's really the great danger. And one of the things I found really interesting about kind of what you all have been doing because obviously the question of how to fight the misinformation in the medical

sphere is a much larger conversation without simple answers. When it comes to a question like, oh, hey, this pharmaceutical company jacked up the price by what set for this necessary medication for people a lot of people who have HIV um. What are we The solution to that is simple, you find a way for them to get it without paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars per dose um. The question.

Some of the work you all have done is with very uh mass needed products like the methopristone, like the epipencil um, where there's large numbers of people who need it. But a lot of what I think, one of the things I think is really cool is y'all are also working on hacking medications that are very niche like, very very few people have this particular disease, and so the medication is costs as much as the fully loaded Toyota tacoma, you know, in order to sometimes far worse than that.

Because of this Orphan Drug Act that got past in the US and equivalence that exists in other places. You have all of these allowances that are granted to people who invent I put in air quotes because really they

just purchase the rights to it. Uh, these these orphan drugs where when you talk about controls, it's kind of the most tragic incidents of that entirely because what's happening is you've got somebody who has a very rare disease, and in many cases you have something that's the difference between somebody who just cannot function and they're dealing with

their life kind of moment to moment. They're they're mostly cared for, and if they have access to a particular medication, then they can go through life in a fairly normal sort of way where they don't need to be an assisted living, where they can do sort of basic things for themselves, and that that seems so much more predatory.

I mean, it's important, of course, you know, to look at things with that macro lens as well and say what can what can do a lot good for a lot of people, But then the sort of micro ethical lens needs to come out from time to time and say, all right, well, here's something that only affects a few hundred thousand people across the world. But these are people who could just go through life normally if only they

had access to a little bit of medicine. And the only reason they don't is because of misplaced average or all averice is misplaced because yeah, and you're you're you're providing individuals or a way for people to help individuals who have this problem and who can't couldn't possibly afford this because they don't have health care or something a

way to deal with these illnesses. Um and often times, like even even people who are ensured get the medication that they need or don't get an affordable rate because it's not seen as critical. It's like, oh, well there's a there's a solution that's not as good, but it's much less expensive. So that's the only thing we're going

to cover. And so yeah, and you're saying, well, it should be your decision whether or not this is something you want to treat this way, and we're this is a way if you you know, have access, this is a way for you to kind of as you've been saying, like take your health care and your ability to get medication into your own hands and produce the things that you need without needing to beg an insurance company or go fund me eight dollars or whatever. Yeah. Those go

fund me break my heart so much. Yeah. It's especially when people say, oh, look, how great somebody got the money that they needed, and I say, look, I am happy that people get healthcare, but this should be entirely unnecessary, and the fact that this comes up is criminal. Yeah we can. We can as a species produce this ship for less than the cost of like a lamp, you know, Like why why don't why isn't this available? Um now?

I And that's what I think is kind of so powerful about what y'all are doing, And is that so so often we kind of get stuck in this like the horror of how bad health care is, of how fund up the pharmaceutical industry is, and then we get our relief from that in these stories of people like crowdfunding so they can get their medication. And what you're saying is, well, what's actually much more inspiring than that

is people just making finding ways to make what they need. Um. Again, kind of the most popular popular is the wrong word. The most press y'all have received, I think is for the epipencil, which is an EpiPen is a device that you take that is used when people are going into anaphylactic shock, which is when they have an allergic reaction

that will kill them if untreated. Generally, UM and it you injected into your muscles or generally, like an EpiPen does the injecting, you just kind of put it in place. Um and it. It is a life saving medication when people need it. It's the true between that and death. UM and they are very expensive. There is a company that owns the patent because of how the EpiPen actually does the injecting. The actual medicine is very cheap and very easy to make, but it's unbelievably expensive, and people

die as a result of lack lack of access. UM and you've provided a way using both kinds of this thing called a bio lab that people You've developed plans that people can build it for themselves in order to make this and also using a three D printer, you can make UM an epipencil, which is a little less kind of a more analog version. I think I guess you'd say, uh, no, it's it's it's equivalent. It's equivalent. It works the same way. The things that are different

about it that are critical. The first one that you mentioned, of course, is that you can you can build it for all over thirty dollars US, and you can reload it for about three dollars, unlike the EpiPen, which is I think it's about fifty dollars for yeah. Um, and that might be for a pair, but even so. Um. But the other two critical differences are that EpiPens are single use, so you can't test whether it's faulty or not until you use it. Yeah. And there have been

a lot of failures. In fact, there was a big EpiPen recall a bunch of years ago, and there were just these tragic, tragic stories. Some guy had to watch his little kid die. He had had a pair of EpiPens. The kid went into shock, he used it, the thing failed,

he brought the other one. The other one failed, and they're in the air and you can't land in fifteen minutes and the little kid died, which just and I'm sure there are dozens of dozens of stories like that that just happens to be one of the ones I know. So one of the things that's great about the epipencils because you're putting it together yourself and it only takes four parts, you can test it. You can make sure that it works as many times as you need to.

You can dry run it with saline and just double check that it does what it's supposed to. Um. And so it's safer. So the fact that it's you can control yourself, you can reload it, and you can test it. All these things fix a lot of these immediate problems that come with and it still has the benefit that everybody wants from the EpiPen which is that it doesn't require um, you know, measurement or like knowing how deep to press the needle before you depress the plunger. All

of that happens automatically, and it happens very quickly. UM. And Yeah, we as you say, we've got a lot of press for that because essentially a good timing. We've released the same time that Heather Brush was lying to Congress about why they hit raised the price on the

epi pens and then so it was in the public eye. Yeah, and and that's that's a huge one, being able to produce that because that is I mean, there's a tremendous number of people who rely on uh EpiPens um and and I think the potential of that project is staggering. UM And there's some there's some you know, when we talk about kind of the different people who are who are working on similar problems to you, there's also a group of people who are working on UM cracking insulin,

being able to produce insulin um. And Yeah, the open Insulin project is an amazing group of people, incredibly important. They're yeah, they're working on mm hmm, probably the largest scale public health crisis. I mean in terms of queries that we get, I think we get people asking about insulin more than anything else. And I always say, oh, yeah, they're very, very bright people already working on this. Go talk to the opening so um and and they're just amazing.

I I want to move on because I want to talk about kind of the more um philosophical dimensions of some of this. But before we get into that, i'd like to so, like, you know, one of the things you and I've been talking about a little bit behind the scenes is I am not a technically savvy person, but I'm I want to try and I'd like to

be able to like produce an epipensil. I want to like understand this it kind of and and potentially be able to contribute UM in a more direct sense, in part because I'm curious, like how how doable actually is this? For I consider myself a pretty normal person when it comes to like technical understanding, right, Like, I'm reasonably handy, but I'm not. I'm not a chemist, I'm not a I'm not a I haven't really I have no I have no prior experience three D printing or anything like that.

What is what is required in terms of financial investment and what is kind of your general estimate in terms of time to get up to you know, a kind of the level where you can start learning how to do some of this stuff. I think the barrier to entry is pretty low, depending on how you want to start. As I said, there are different avenues to doing it. You can, of course, one of the one of the greatest hacks. If if anybody listening this doesn't pick up

anything else, here's the best hack. In terms of getting access to medication. You have a medication, you don't have access to for whatever reason. Assuming it comes in a capsule form, you can nearly go to a chemical supplier, purchase the active pharmaceutical ingredient, wait out, put it into a capsule, and you've made your medication. That's a very simple thing, you know. That takes nothing more than being able to read a scale and scooping powder into a

little you know, capsules. The next step up, there are things that you can do. They are a little more involved. If you want to build an epy pencil, again, this is three or four parts, depending on how you count. You take the needle from one syringe needle set on, you put it onto a different syringe needle set, and then you put it into this auto injector this design for needle phobic diabetics. You load it with the up

and ring and you close it up and you're done. Then, if you want to step into this a little bit further, if something is so barriered for whatever reason that you can't get the actual ingredient, then you might start messing around with our micro lab. The micro lab, I would say probably takes around a hundred dollars US to build um it, but it's not super technical Our latest version doesn't require any soldering. Everything snaps together, which is really nice.

You can plug everything in. All the ours are just screw terminals, which is really convenient. UM. And it takes some time and you do have to load some code, but we're looking to release a a new set of documentation in the summer that will be very very stripped down of here's your bill of materials. You can order all of this stuff. Here's how you can put the disk image onto the SD card that you put in, and you should start it and it will wake up

and work independently. UM. We had a video of our head hardware guy actually building the micro lab from just parts that we're sitting on lay out on a table, and I think all told it took him about forty five minutes. Will be a little bit longer, but again, like granted, this guy's a hardware specialist and he you know, designed it, so for somebody who's not done before, it

might take an afternoon, but it's not. It's not prohibitively long or involved project that you know, would take you weeks to put together, or any specialized understanding of you know, biomedical engineering or anything like that. Now, Um, I kind of want to move at this point because I think that gives people an idea of what's actually necessary and they can go to y'all's website or look up you have plans on a ge hub if they want to kind of look at what's what's involved and it's um.

Some of it seems a little daunting to me, Like look looking at the construction of the bio lab, but I'm that that's going to be a project that I'll be engaging in over the next couple of weeks, so we'll keep people updated on how I do there. UM. I want to move on to talk Michael about what you see as kind of the I don't know, the the the potential from kind of a revolutionary perspective, from a perspe active of actually building dual power of this project.

And obviously you are and I think what would would be called the early stages of this idea of kind of democratizing and decentralizing the production of life saving medications. Um. Although I guess you could argue in some ways it's kind of a return to more traditional attitudes about health care in a lot of ways. Yeah, there's a cyclic nature there and in the sort of zend mind, beginner's mind. We'd like to think that the revolution is always in

its beginning stages, right. UM. That to say, over the past decade, roughly looking at trying to find ways to give people more independent access that doesn't require infrastructure, to medicines and medical technologies. The the hope really is to create a certain amount of cultural shift. I remember at one point a friend of mine, who as a business school graduate, asked me a very sort of like business school type question where he said, how would you measure

success of your project? UM? And I said, well, we cease to exist as an organization, and he kind of had this moment of like, what do you mean. We shouldn't be pushing this right, The ideas that eventually the concept of managing your own health is sufficiently normalized that it's not something that has to be explained between people. But somebody says, oh, yeah, I just I just did

that up in my micro lab. UM. In the same way that when you look at the shift that happened between oh, you know, the mid eighties in the mid nineties, where computers were this strange, scary thing that was, you know, we're only accessible or usable by people who were very specialized is something that you know, everybody knew about and everybody kind of had and everybody sort of used, And the same sort of thing that happened between the period of time I don't know, maybe ten twelve years ago

and now with with three D printing, where like stereo lithography and rapid prototyping was again the specialized thing that a bunch of people who were essentially at the machine tool industry had started to spearhead, and now you say three printing, everybody knows what it means in the same

sort of way. I'd very much like to see a cultural shift where when somebody is unwell, that when discussions between people happened, that instead of the have you had that looked at, or you might instead hear from somebody saying, well have you read up on that? You know, to see people actually engaged in their own health and not

going through this very typical process of outsourcing responsibility. Now it's not to say that like experts aren't good people with whom to consult, right, Yeah, we're not talking about replacing the idea of medical professionals who can help you understand what your health and diagnose and stuff like yeah, well, there is again this drastic difference between going to a doctor and essentially just like throwing the problem on their desk and saying fixed it, call me when it's over,

versus going to a doctor and saying, hey, I'd like to talk about this. I'd like to know more about what's wrong here, and I'd like to discuss what the options are and what seems best. Um that would be

great on a lot of levels. And and then these questions of access to medication then become even more relevant because when you're talking with a doctor and the doctor says, okay, well we could try this therapy, but your insurance won't pay for it this three hundred thou dollars, you can say, all right, well let's just do a little thought experiment and if that fell from a truck, what would I do with it? And then maybe you can go home and say, you know, I'll call you and let you

know how it goes. I that's that's really my my grant hope, And there are so many different ways that that can play out. In fact, I'll tell you a hilarious story in regards to this, which was in I guess it was when we presented it hope. UM. I called Martin Shakraley's cell phone from stage UH to try and ask him what he thought about what we were doing, given that I was handing his drug out for free

UM and showing people how to make it. And he didn't answer the phone when I called him then, but he called me back a few hours later, which was really hilarious. We actually chatted for a while and the guys, I mean a little detached from reality, but he's he's

no dummy um. And when I sort of described what we were trying to do with the micro lab, he had some interesting insights and he said, yeah, you know, one way I can imagine that working really well is if somebody with a little more knowledge of pharmaceutical medicine were too, maybe build one of these and serve a small community. I think that could be very efficient. And I was like, that's a good thought, you Chiseling bastard. Um. Yeah, I mean that there's a degree which that's that's kind

of how I see the most realistic potential. This is not every individual making all of their medicine, but kind of like you know we had during the fires last year, when when our local and state governments during the heatwave this year, like completely shat the bed. We had different mutual aid collectives do things like we are providing people with like oh, it's a blizzard, We're providing people with firewood. We are providing people with cooling stations because of the heat.

You know, we are providing people with they've just fled their houses. We have kits that have food and basic necessities so they can get through mutual aid collectives that are like, well, we are making we specialize and we can produce this and this and this medication like these three and we have and here's the information you can find online about our process. You know that we know what we're doing. And if you need these things, you let us know and we we get them to you.

And here's different ways in which people can volunteer if you want to help engage in this mutual aid process, even if you're not someone who's going to be doing a lot of the technical stuff. But we need people to go pick up parts, so we need people to do this, and you can help us here. You know, I see a lot of and I think, yeah, yeah, and I think in a similar way, right, A lot of that sort of thing is already happening in other

realms right where. It's the sort of thing where you might be building something, or you you see some project on GitHub or whatever, and some there are these STL files and you go, oh, gosh, well I don't know how to do that. Oh right, x y Z down the street as a three D printer. I'll go ask her. She's really good at making these things. And you say, hey, look, I have this thing. Would this be difficult to print? And with their experience they can kind of look at

and be like, I know that that shouldn't be too hard. Um, you know, I have some time this weekend, maybe I can make that for you. And in the same way, you say, hey, it looks like I seem to have this rare infection from whatever whatever, or I have this odd condition. Um, I wanted to try this medication because it might be really helpful, but it's not legal in this country. Do you think you can put this together? Again? You know, you call somebody and whoever's on the other

line says, oh, yeah, I have a micro lab. I can try and put a program together for that and see if I can make it for you. That sort of thing I think is a potentially really positive avenue for that sort of thing to proliferate and again eventually to have a cultural shift where the idea of medicine and medical technology not being something that is comes down from above, from some authority, but instead is something that's managed by people who are part of your community, who

you already trust. I mean, that's why going to a doctor is so scary. They seem to be the arbiter of your fate. They're going to tell you whether you're well or not. And that is just the truth and much better to have it where people are making up their own mind based on learning about their own health and consulting with people who can give them perspective. Um. And if there's more of that, and if it's closer to the person who's actually suffering, that I think will

be on the whole much better. Yeah. It's this the and this gets tangled up in a lot of the more toxic things we've seen this year, But it's this this understanding that with any given problem, if individuals trying to solve that problem have more autonomy, and part of

autonomy is knowledge, that's nearly always better. Um. The problem, of course is that like we we get into this situation we are now where some people take I'm take some people some people use I want to take control of my health care to you know, do stuff that's nonsense.

And that brings us back to the question of like, yeah, you need in for the quality of the information that you're getting is very important, right because if if you're if you if your research is some YouTube video that has convinced you that you need to you know, take this this horse paste or something, then yeah, that's not good.

But that doesn't change the fact that, like with food, like with with everything that you need to survive, the more of a role you have in understanding that deciding what to do with that, understanding where it comes from and how it is produced. Um. Not just like not only is that I think more satisfying as a human, but it's it's also critical to to your well being.

Um it's critical to like on two levels, right on two levels, because not only when your health is taken from you, it doesn't deprive you of life, but it deprives you participating in any of the acts that make life meaningful. And part of that key thing that makes life meaningful is having a participatory role in the things that decide the trajectory of your life. And so when you go to the lengths of managing your own health, two things happen. First off, your health improves, assuming you've

made good decisions and get lucky. But second, you're also having a participatory role in your life, and that makes life more meaningful. And it beyond just kind of the self actualization benefits from from a perspective of actually enabling people to participate in the move for radical change in our society. One necessary element of to any of the kind of things that we need is a belief in

your own agency and power. Um. And also and a freedom from the kind of fear that comes from feeling helpless. And there is I think probably no feeling worse in the world than feeling completely helpless about a treatable medical problem. Um. I mean, it's one thing I just went through to my mom. When you get a disease where there's just nothing that science can do right, where like, yeah, you've got this cancer and there there ain't ship anybody has

for you. You know, that's one kind of horrible, but I think it's a lot less terrible than you. I have this thing that we can deal with, but I either can't afford it or I don't know that I'll be able to afford it. I had a horrible I lost my job in my healthcare in seventeen and so did a person who was on my healthcare with me that I love very much. And I got this, you know,

hired here in healthcare a couple of years later. And it happened that a month before the the I started my health care at this new job, this person who was on my healthcare with me um got diagnosed with a brain tumor, and thankfully not a cancerous one, but the one that they had to take medication for that would have been would have bankrupted us, you know, without the without insurance, and thankfully it worked out fine. The

timing worked out okay. But there's not a week that goes by that I don't and it it it's it's it is something that makes you less willing to take risks, less willing to participate in in things that because you have in the back of your head, well, I have to I have to keep this job, I have to keep this insurance, I have to y yeah. That and

that's another thing that I find so heartbreaking. There's so many people that I've I've met totally outside of my activism who lament about working a job that they hate, and I say, gosh, for you know, I mean, you consider just bailing on it and looking for something else and trying something else. And they have this total paralysis of saying, but if I quit my job, I won't have healthcare mhm and and and mind you like, these were people who were incredibly healthy. These were not people

who had any regular visits to healthcare. They're just scared that if something comes up, they want people to handle it.

And it's it's a perfectly well grounded fear. But as you point out, what this does is it works as this sort of shadow oppressive mechanism to keep people from exploring, trying things, as you say, taking risks, or or just doing things that that don't involve a an optimization toward a stable state of maybe just like yeah, maybe it'll start a small business, and yeah it probably will fail,

but that will be a cool adventure. And most people, you know, so many people, maybe not most, but many many people, um get just terrified into this state of inertial paralysis. Yeah, and it contributes to people being afraid to take to the street to protest the police because maybe they get arrested, and maybe they get fired, and then you know, maybe their kid can't afford their Like

there's a thousand ways. I think, honestly, the fear of losing your health care is in some ways as great a greater counter revolutionary force than any law enforcement agency could hope to be, because the fear is so much more immediate to so many people. Nobody talks about that, And thank you so much for mentioning it, because it's something that like, oftentimes I try to bring up when I'm discussing things in public for and and oftentimes people kind of raise an eyebrow and me and be like,

that's what's the big deal, And I'm like, I don't know. Like, if you look two layers deep, there's something that's really working against people being able to exercise protests, and it's, uh, it's it's it's this really silent, terrifying force that seems to underlie everything. And if you could alleviate that, if you could get to the point where people are like, yeah, the hell with it, you know, I don't need a job to take care of me, then all of a

sudden so many possibilities just blossom in the mind. Yeah, if you have, like it, say, if you're a parent who has a child with you know who, who's insolent dependent. Uh, there's not a lot of difference in my mind between the fact that between someone holding a gun to your head and your boss being able to fire you and take away your your kids access to that insulent there's not a tremendous moral difference to me, Um, there's not. I'd say getting a gun to your head is actually

more likely to survive that it's less inevitable. You could talk your way out of that, and yeah, whatever, but there are any number of things that might go wrong there. But if somebody takes takes away your insulin, that's the end of this story. Yeah, I guess the more salient point than the comparison issues. They're both acts of violence, and in every way that's meaningful, I think they're both

acts of violence. Well, and one way that when I rail against intellectual property as a concept and intellectual property law, the example that I give is they say, if somebody were dying and you knew how to save them, would you ever not tell them how and just watch them die say oh no, that idea belongs to me, and I'm not going to share unless you pay me. Like no human being that I think I've ever heard of

would do that. And yet this happens day because we've sort of carried these questions of copyright into patents and despite the fact that they're hundreds of years old and not applicable anymore, assuming they were ever applicable, and people just die because people say, oh, well, we can make

more money if we do it this way. There's a fascinating thing going on there when you when you really drill into that idea, because I suspect there are a lot of people who have who are are integral in propping up this system, both of kind of medical intellectual property and of just like the pharmaceutical industry, the way that it works people in politics, huge numbers of people who are integral in some facet of keeping that going, who also, were they to see an individual and immediate

medical distress, would never think of like try getting their debit card number or whatever, like asking them, would would without thinking attempt because that's what people do, and it's I mean, this is where we get into kind of some of these more philosophical anarchist ideas about what hierarchy does and what these structures do, because structures enable people

to participate in evil that they never would as an individual. Um, yeah, there's this easy route that, but many easy routes that pop up that allow people or force, I should say force people to be displaced from their humanity in that sort of way where, yes, of course, you you help somebody up off of subway tracks if they've fallen. Yes, of course, if somebody were drowning, you drag them out

and save them. And yet just because it's a degree removed and it's mediated by an agency, suddenly it's so easy to forget and ignore and be sort of complicit. And yeah, and I just to go back around to what four Thieves is doing and what y'all are doing. It's one of the few projects going on right now that fits what my idealistic nineteen year old brain thought the Internet would be sixteen fifteen, Like when I when it was, when things were newer and a little less.

We're like, oh, this is like one of these days, well this kind of ship is going to happen. Um, And that is I think, I mean, that's that's not without value from again a revolutionary perspective, the fact that it is pretty rad you know. Well, I mean I will not deny the fact that it feels good, you know there. I think that I think that we all grew up with that sort of hope and belief that we were gonna open these new doors and there were going to be these new possibilities and things that we

have been reading about in science fiction. We're going to become real and and there's there's a great satisfaction in not just witnessing your childhood dreams become realities, but actually, you know, having a hand in it. Uh, It's there's there's something quite satisfying about that. I will yeah, I will admit, well, I think that's a pretty good point to close out on today. I don't need to take up too much more of your time right now, Michael.

But but as I told people, I'm gonna be I'm gonna be trying to get into some of this because I find it just both fascinating and incredibly hopeful. Um, in a world where it seems like, uh, there are constantly forces conspiring to strip people of their ability to take control of critical aspects of their lives. You and your your colleagues in this are trying to give people opportunities to take some some power back for themselves, and I just think that's it's pretty dope. Thank you so much. Yeah,

and see your listeners. If there are people out there who like what we're doing, you want to support the project, please go find somebody who needs your help but doesn't deserve it, and then go help them anyway. Yeah, Yeah, that's always a good thing to do. Um, Michael, anything else, any like a thing else you want to kind of put this is normally this section where people plug websites or projects or anything. You've got anything in particularly you

want to throw out there right now. Uh. Sure. We're hoping to do a bunch of big releases in the summer um, so look for those. In the meantime, we're always looking for help, So if you're out there and you'd like to be assisted in the project, uh, please get in touch. There's the contact us page on the website. And by the way, this do not have to be a technical person. We're looking for currently, we're looking for writers. We have a lot of documentation that we need to do.

So if you're out there and you have, you know, background in in language, then that would be great. If if you're somebody who feels that you're entirely without skills, please get in touch. We have any number of endless small tasks that just need to be taken care of because we don't have enough people. So if you'd like to participate, we'd love to have you. Please get in touch and in the meantime, keep each other healthy, keep each other. Thank you so much, Michael, thanks so much

for having me. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.