It Could Happen Here Weekly 19

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Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the AD Council. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make

your own decisions. What's meta my verse? This is it could happen here, a podcast entirely dedicated to the metaverse um, which is the promise of the human future. Um On with me as always is my co host Mark Zuckerberg. I don't I don't know how talks. I'm not sure how. I don't know who the voice you were doing? I guess he sounds like nothing like no one but the absence of a soul when it's dial up. Yeah, that's what's going on inside his head in any moment when

he's not actively making the Internet worse. It's just a dial tone in there. Awesome. Garrison what are we talking about today? Well, yeah, we're gonna be talking about the metaverse and how how it's different from what people talk about it as. And yeah, it's it's gonna be, it's, it's gonna it's gonna touch on a variety of things, split up into two parts. Um. But first I would like to paint you a picture with words, A word picture. So you're a wickture. Yeah, you're walking walking through your

favorite grocery store. There's you know, cards passing by, horrible, horrible music playing. It's the lighting is white and and like overexposed and under exposed at the same time. It's it's it's hard, it's hard to see. And this, uh, this like a person who looks like an employee keeps keeps popping up and trying to take you to different sections of the store. You're trying to just ignore her. It's a very annoying. All you need to get is the stuff you have on a little list, and it's

it's awful. Um. Eventually you get so fed up with this whole experience that you take out, You go to where the wine bottles are, You take them out, and you arrange them into a giant penis on the floor because that's the only thing you can do because you're not actually in a store. You're in your living room and you have a horrible headset on, and you're trying

to do shopping in a virtual in a virtual grocery store. Um. And that's that's the actual kind of scope of what we're gonna be talking about today is virtual marketplaces and how they interact with seemingly real marketplaces. Yeah, I'm sure this is inspired by There were a couple of videos that dropped recently, one of them from I Think Walmart. We're gonna be talk We're gonna be We're gonna be

talking about it. So yeah, So a couple a couple of days after New Year, a video went viral across the social media's ranking up over like eleven million views on Twitter um and it was titled how Walmart envisions shopping in the mold in the metaverse. Now, So what followed was like two minutes of an embarrassing like VR jank, including like throwing around virtual gallons of milk from your

cart into a virtual fridge. Many many dunks were made, fun was had, but what a few people probably realized is that like this actually this This wasn't a Walmart metaverse test store. This was actually a five year old tech demo from before non Neil Stevenson fans even knew what the term metaverse meant. So a few years back, a tech company called a Mutual Mobile partnered with Walmart

for a project set to quote reimagine retails virtual reality. Now, that sounds very fancy and important, but considering this was five years ago and you're not hearing about it until now, shows how impactful this thing actually was. The first stated goal of the tech demo, according to the Mutual Mobile website, was to impress influencers at south By Southwest. So you know, just like the so called metaverse is now, this is largely a promotional project, um and a way to attract investors.

This was this was never actually a serious thing. It's I'm gonna say it right now. South By Southwest was always one of the stupidest things in the world. Um, and when it comes back it will be still because it's stupid. It's a stupid place for the most insufferable people in the world to come and talk about technology.

Some people also listen to music. That's fine, so yeah, for for the for the experience itself that you an original Oculus rift and programmed roughly like four minute linear um expedition into a barren, hellish digital Walmart where you pick up and throw it did it did sound exactly.

My favorite thing about this video is they were clearly using the audio of some sort of like shooter game, because it was often like things would it would sound like you were in like fucking doom going through a portal, and it was extremely funny. It was bad, sound like hell you'll you'll pick up and throw fake wine bottles into your blue digital cart, and the whole thing ends with a fake drone delivering an eight hundred dollar TV that you fake purchased. It's it's not great. What Mutual

Mobile and Walmart were trying to do. They have a constatement on their website back from it was they said that Walmart envisioned unvailing a fully virtual shopping experience that puts shoppers inside the store without ever leaving their homes. To attract customers and to spell the misconception that they're

not as advanced as their more digital counterparts. Brick and mortar establishments are not the accelerating investments in areas like web and mobile, they're also exploring the very edge of emerging technology. Walmart of virtual reality is a case some point potential shoppers can virtually pick up products, read labels, talk to virtual associates, and fill their shopping carts. But

the goal wasn't just to create something interactive. Walmart needed something that showed the potential of VR in retail while putting them ahead of the competition. So I mean this was like this was this was kind of ahead in some ways, but also ahead in the ways that it's

kind of showing how not useful. This example is so obviously like this five year old video resurface now due to Zuckerberg and Epic Games, you know, forcing an astroturfed metaverse into the cultural zeitgeist, coupled with their you know, conflation of anything VR to the legendary metaverse, right, because VR does not equal metaverse, nor is it nor is

it necessarily vice versa. But now these terms are getting used so interchangeably that someone can stumble across this video and be like, oh, look at this metaverse store, when like it's it's not it's just a it's just a VR tech type of the metaverse in order to be like the thing that people have been imagining through cyberpunk since like the nineties, it needs to be persistent and interact directly with the real world in a number of ways, like it It's It's it's well, we'll get into we'll

get into kind of what metaverse could be in the future in terms of like the it could happen here idea, and then not just a metaverse but a series of metaverse is what they could be, and how that kind of can negates the original idea of it in the first place. But um, when asked by Vice News about the resurgence of their Walmart project, Mutual Mobile replied, the vision of a virtual shopping experience we helped Walmart realize back in seventeen stands validated in the metaverse era of today.

This whole experience has only encouraged us to keep experimenting, innovating, and leading the charge with cutting edge tech. So, I mean, considering most of the virality of this was people joking about it, I yeah, sure, okay, okay, Mutual good good luck with that. So a few days after the Walmart video went viral, rumors of another big box store going Metaverse started to circulate again, accompanied by a video of

a possible like three D metaverse storefront. Reports emerged, starting in India, claiming that H and M had announced that it would offer its customers a three dimensional shopping experience in its a virtual store inside the metaverse via something called Now. I don't know if it's Keik City or seek City. Um, I'm not really comfortable saying either of those things because they sound weird, but I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go with Seek City. That's it's a little

bit better. I know, I know it sound, but it sounds like it's a slur. So I'm gonna say Seek but it's it's s e e k um. So this This account on on Twitter called us seek vr shared the following from it's a show Twitter account shopping in the Metaverse with seek coin concept VR store presented to H and M by Seek creates mainstream use cases for seek coin and scaling virtual reality beyond games. So I'll

get into what seek is in a bit. But the report said that customers will be able to walk through the store choose the apparel they wanted to purchase in the Sikh City universe. Um. Although the clothes could only be worn in the digital environment, payment would be made with seek coin and customers could have the opportunity to order the same apparel from H and m's physical stores later. But that you're buying two separate things. One of us the digital skin, one of it's an actual, you know,

real thing. Um so what a seek? Seek was launched in It's a metaverse coin pop project built on the Ethereum blockchain and their their Their goal is to connect artists, athletes, and other digital content creators directly with their fans and virtual worlds. Seeks n f T marketplaces is designed to enable real ownership in which I would actually want. That is, if it's me having a very sexual zoom chat with you know what, we don't need to Garrison, please continue, okay,

quoting from subside. Seek currently offers a range of immersive VR experiences within Seek City, including theater, concert arenas, sports complex, hang out lounge, and more. There's all the things you can do in your real home, but weird and on the internet. This is horrible, and I see a potential appeal for people who are like out in the sticks or in parts of the world where they're not they feel not like they're very politically or whatever disconnected, which

is the same thing the Internet already does. I'll talk about it being in VR will make it better. I don't know. I've lived in the middle of nowhere and relied on the Internet to be social, and I don't think I would have wanted to change the Internet in for this because it sounds yeah, anyway, it's I'll talk.

I'll talk about use cases in a sec. But yeah, so end users will be able to use seek token to make purchases, vote for content control programming a much more after token launch, seek VR, in partnership with Universal Music, can realize live performances of world famous artists such as bon Jovi, Lady Gaga, you Tube, Sting, and many more can take place on this platform. So seek is like it's it's kind of the startup, but it's been around for a while. It's trying to do like you know,

virtual venues inside the metaverse. They they do have contracts with Universal, so it's it's it's a mix of trying it's it's a mix of this coin, so it's a mix of this like cryptocurrency, also trying to use this cryptocurrency in this world they're trying to build up. Um. There their their their roadmap to metaverse right now. First thing is like payment integration, so using seek coin. They want seek coin to be the coin for everything in

the metaverse. They want all metaverse be based off this thing that they invented called sea Coin because it will make them money. Um. Next thing they want to do is create a creator enabled ecosystem, so kind of copy the content creator thing we have right now, poured that into the metaverse. But again have everything you know, you can invest in your creators so you can vote on what they do using sea coins and all of we talked about like the personal ownership in the previous episode.

But then a lot of it, you know, they have like an n FT marketplace, Avatar marketplaces, etcetera, etcetera. But a lot of this stuff is built around like concerts, you know, venues, you know, a lounge, movie theaters where you can do stuff in VR. That is like that is the main the main thing that Seek is trying to do. They do have this one one quote somewhere,

oh yeah, the future milestone. So after they achieve this Seek metaverse where everything is ran through Seek, all of like you know what, whether you're on Oculus, whether you're on Vibe, all of it gets run through seeks. It's one one multiverse, sorry, one metaverse. Their their future milestones are quote a VR Space Academy. They do not do not say what that means, Keek Studios again kind of unclear. I'm guessing like original content. And then the last one

is a blockchain metaverse alliance. Those are their those are their three big future milestones after they get there there. What was that last one? Blockchain metaverse Alliance? I mean, this was like in the Facebook thing to write the idea that we're going to integrate in f t S. But it was also clearly just like they tossed that in there on the Facebook one, there was no evidence they thought seriously about n f t S or blockchain. It was just had gotten big while they were preparing

the things, so they tossed them in there. Um, I I get the idea, right, Like the thing that they keep pitching with this is that you'll be able to have an item in one game that is yours. The company doesn't own it, you can take it to other games, which anyone who makes games will tell you was fucking nonsense, it's something like that might be vaguely possible in a metaverse where everything was forced to use the same engine, um and all. Everyone was also forced to abide by

a bunch of strict rules by Facebook. Um that Also, that's probably violating antitrust laws. Um and also it seems like a ridiculously Sisiphisian task with no real benefit. I don't think anyone's going to do it, but I'm guessing that's what they're referring to when they want to jam the blockchain up in the fucking metaverse. Like what else could it be? The blockchain Metaverse Alliance, all of the blockchains the metaverse is gonna aligned into. Yeah, like they

don't want to put all of the metaverse stuff. You want to wear this shirt in the metaverse. So, just like the real world, the freedom, the freedom of the internet catch you feel. It's the ever expecting possibilities. I do love because they keep talking about within the context of metaverse games like you'll get to unlock a character that's just yours and nobody else can play it, and they'll have special abilities that means he wins all the time.

It's like, why would people play that game? I think it was Business Insiders, someone's article talking about how need it would be for games to work this way, and like, think of all the money you'd make people wanting to watch your character wins. People don't want to just like watch a guy who's structurally unable to lose because he he bought the right character in a racing game win every race. That's not no one's going to pay to watch that. Do you understand what people watch races for?

Like now, anyway, let's hear from our good friends at our products and services before we come back and talk more about seek coins. I guess I don't know. All right, we are back, So yeah, zee coins virtual reality spaces run on smart contracts through the through the Bayan's smart chain and there there there run the run through the Ethereum blockchain. UM. So the the there's about seven and seven forty four millions seek coins and supply. The maximum

supply capacity is capped at one billion coins. Uh. Sea coins peaked at one one dollar and sixteen cents a year ago after launching, and around four cents um. They're currently being traded for around sixty cents. So that's that's what actual sea coins doing. Like like like people do use this, there's not many people like they. They do have these contracts with with with Universal Music. Um but before this H and M thing, I I never heard

of Seek coins. Um. So, two days after the rumors began circulating that H and M was, you know, partnering with Seek, H and M said, Nope, we did not, We are we are not doing this, but they did not close the door in future possibilities. They said, uh, we we we like to we'd like to confirm that H and M is not is not opening a store in the metaverse at this time. We're also not collaborating

with Seek. So the official Twitter account for Seek subsequently clarified later on that the store that they were doing was just a concept that was presented to H and M and not a not a launching virtual store yet. Um but they do. They do say that they're in discussions with H and M to make this a reality, but it's not a reality as of now. So this this kind of begs the question, like, what about a three D digital space is superior to a two D

digital space for simple tasks like shopping online. So once you start, you know, unfolding questions like this about the Internet metaverse a r VR, you there are more the conternal sides to this than you would have initially estimated. Um But, first off, before we kind of have this discussion,

we should split this into two categories. One for shopping for like real physical items that you plan on like receiving in person, and then digital items that don't physically exist and are just just on your computer and monitor. So obviously, like there's no clear advantage in most cases to traversing an isolated virtual environment in order to order food as opposed to just scrolling through a web page.

Um But once you expand out of the confines of VRS sensory deprivation three three D technology in a r SO, augmented reality does actually have some useful prospects, including some that are already in use. Amazon and Ikea, for example, have options on their perspective websites and apps that can like project furniture options into your living space. So you can see that's the kind of thing that has some future.

I think, yeah, yeah, so this is currently this is being done on your phone screen, but in a r glasses application of this actually serve its purpose quite well because something something that want yeah, pretty mediocre and these are.

And that's kind of the thing the place where at I we make fun of this stuff a lot because most of its nonsense there are there are really there's a lot of potential in some of these ideas, but there's their potential for like and the same level that the air fryer has potential where it's like a thing a bunch of people will buy, but it's not. None

of this yet is stuff that's going to completely change. Like, yeah, you might get a few million people to to get these glasses and or this app made this classes for a couple of reasons, but who would use this this app to like help plan out how they're setting up their houses. You might get a few million people who do that. It's not going to be like an iPod or an iPhone or or like Facebook that no one's

had figured that out yet. There's there's some neat products that are going to be valuable, but we're still on the stage where nobody's under nobody's figured out fundamentally what people want from this as opposed through like tiny specific needs. In the same way that like there was a number of futurists who quite add accurately figured out with a smartphone, Like, Oh, people want a thing that will give them access to all of the knowledge and ideas in the world and

also let them yell at anybody anytime they want. Like, that's something that is going to be incredibly successful, and it has and it's changed the entire world. Zuckerberg was like, people want to be able to be racist faster, and

by god, we wanted it and and that was huge. Um, I don't like these are It's a good idea, like, yeah, let people scope out how their room is going to look when they're shopping or whatever through a r But we haven't yet hit that this is going to change the world, because being slightly better at using Ikea will not change the world. Yeah. I think as an avid air fryer hater, I do think comparing metaverse to the air fryer is actually which I love to say to Garrison.

I know Garrison hates it when I use the air fryer. Fer mhm anti air frier action is my new tattoo. They screech like the person at the end of Invasion of the Body. But my goodness, do they cook my food faster the fry it with the air Wow? Almost

like it's impossible anyway. UM. Mutual Mobiles digital marketing strategists talked with Vice after the Walrut video went viral, and he explained that like, the demo was made to show the potential of virtual reality and shopping experiences that they can have for you know, different people, UM, including its ability to connect like elderly people or people with disabilities to a shopping experience from the comfort of their own home, something that he thinks might even be you know, attractive

to people who have been through several rounds of COVID quarantine. And I can kind of understand this last argument. You know, during early quarantine, I definitely used my VR headset more often than I had before. UM, and with our alienated capitalist world, I can see the use of walking around a digital store if you're stuck at home, UM, due to something like a plague, or if you know, if you have a physical or mental reason that makes you know,

going to a story difficult. Because but like it's yes, this this can help that. But also this is always very engine how these types of stores are set up and how these stories like affect your brain. It's like a big part of going to the grocery store. What it's designed to do. Let's make it so that we're not just following a shopping list. There's like a structured

joy of discovery. Everything about the design to the store is to get you to buy things you didn't think you needed before you walked in, and we're trained from birth to like to find this process pleasurable. So in that way, walking around a VR like wal Mart or H and M might actually make some people happy despite that being sad and dystopian if you stop and think about it, right, like, because that's that's actually like it's

a it's a very capitalist thing. But it does make us happy because that's that's what we've been trained to do since we're babies. So that there's there is that side of it for in terms of like, yeah, I can see if I really don't want to leave the house, but I want to get the experience of walking through a place, maybe I will walk through a Target to

get groceries. I don't know as some people maybe it might do that, but otherwise, you know, it's much It is much simpler and easier to just scroll through a two dy thing on a web page and and and

and do the things you need. That's the thing. Like it's like, yeah, I mean absolutely because I I when I was making fun of one of these videos, somebody like called it out as being able list and was like thinking, all the use as this as for a disabled person, if they can use this, they can use Amazon, and like as a person who sometimes I don't shop for groceries at Amazon, but I've shop for groceries online. It's fine. The it's it's it's everything it needs to be.

You can get your groceries online, and the metaverse is just going to make it like weird and off putting and unnecessarily complicated because at the moment, I can get groceries with my phone while I'm like jogging um or as I'm like sitting in traffic, or like while I'm on a zoom call listening to Garrison talk about the metaverse as opposed to putting on a headset and like doing the same thing basically as driving there, but more expensively. Anyway,

are you grow for shopping? Right now? I am ordering seventred cans of ZeVA and forty pounds of raw beef. I you're it's a normal week's worth of food for me and that's literally like two days for him. See but Robert, you could be doing this while wearing a bucket on your head and walking around a fake store. I could wear a bucket on my head to the

real store. They can't stop me. I usually wear a bath rob This is the first half where it's like, you know, buying actual physical items you plan to receive in stores, you know, furniture. It's actually kind of makes sense. Uh food, It's a little bit iffy. The only kind of consideration there is if people want the mental effect of walking around a store, if they find that pleasurable, then it's a thing. But you know, it's way more

efficient to just scroll through your phone. Um As for the other side, buying virtual items, whether they be you know, n f t S, video game skins or super special exclusive VR hangout rooms, I don't give a funk how this works. If you want to walk around a VR vault about your VR art and your VR clothes, knock yourself out. I buy Sonic the hedgehot games. We all

have our weird things we do that don't make any sense. Yeah, if that's if you these parcery stores are just gonna be like the seven weirdest people in the country masturbanting as they buy wine and milk. That's the thing, Robert I was when I was when I was doing the digital picture. In the beginning, I had two scenarios, one where you align the bottles into a deck. The other one I was gonna say, you take off your pants and start masturbating, and I decided not to do that one.

So I'm happy that because, Yeah, that is the actual use case for this, is that someone's people are gonna be walking around these fake walmarts just all cherking off. That's what's gonna happen there. They're gonna have this animation of a real, real female employee of theirs who like pops up when you do something you're not supposed to do and explain something to you. And it's going to be impossible to remove initially, and people are going to turn it into a whole weird, horny thing, and like

they will appear in all these circumstances. It's gonna go it's going to be the only thing that goes viral, Like it's gonna be the only thing people remember five years later about the first of these This is I'm I'm gonna start. Go back to this towards the end of part two. But this is the actual way to handle the metaverse, because we're gonna this this thing is going to be forced on us one way or another.

We're gonna have a form of it, and honestly, the best thing we can do with it is either ignore it, ignore it, or maybe more attractively, is to funk with it. Like that's gonna be the thing, that's gonna be the thing to do. There was an article a few days ago that the headline is Final Fantasy porn interrupts Italian Senate zoom event someone someone joined in and started playing poured from Final Fantasy seven, Like this is this is to do. This is the way that we need to

do it. If there's gonna be dumbass like meetings on the Zuckerberg metaverse, people need to go in and make it weirdly horny. Yeah, Garrison, I could not agree more that that's the what you need to do, citizens of the Internet is look up something awful, have h A

B B O hotel. That's the kind of ship that we need to be doing in fucking um In in the there was basically a children's video game was an early kids MMO and a bunch of weird adults and something awful decided to create an unsettling cult of people who all looked identical and marched around doing all of these weird, unsettling things in a children's game. It was very fun um like or or like in a in second life when it was the new big sexy thing

there was. This was very self important tech writer, investor type person who was doing a Q and A and people just like animated thousands of floating penises going around. This is this is gonna be the thing. This is what you're gonna have to do because in order because if it's gonna be this horrible corporate hell, the only way to do it. The only way to deal with that is to make it unusable for everybody so that so that it doesn't get used. And the way to

do that is by putting dicks everywhere. Dicks andwhere ever decides to do a multiverse pre sentation or if one party or another has had decides to a multiverse debate, it is everyone's moral responsibility, civic duty. This goes beyond civic This is as a citizen of the human race, you know, as a member of this species. You have to try to find a way to suck it up

for them. Something could be more important. So yeah, So if if you're buying digital items, do you never plan everyth even person, I don't care how you do it. Knock yourself out. We all have our weird things. I I bsonic DLCs, people do World of Warcraft. If you want to get of art piece, you can only hang in your digital room. That sounds miserable, but have fun. I I used the internet to order very off putting Danish cheese product. Oh yeah, that did happen. That was

off putting. It was weird. It was like you tried to trick yourself into liking it when you were eating it, though I we I don't remember not liking it because I hate a good amount. But I've had the second Cube sitting around and I've had no desired to desired. Yeah, anyway, so I did not like it. I just I don't know that I ever want to eat it again. Quality quality audio content. So here's the thing. I have not

actually been talking about the metaverse. Nothing I've mentioned thus far actually is the metaverse and doesn't have really anything to do with the metaverse. Besides the technology of a VR and a R. You know, it turns out companies like Facebook, Epic, Microsoft involved, the way they talk about

the metaverse is kind of all a big lie. Like if it's not metaverse, it's a it's an astros turf to top down marketing scheme to turn more of you into data and to create and to create vinyl marketing, like that's instant instead of an interconnected solution to the alienedd bubbles of Web two, it's just a social media network that encompasses all of your vision and encourages even more digital alienation and less in person socialization. Kids, you

know the worst stuff about the internet. What if it was the only thing about the Internet. What if it was encompanying everything you see instead of just a computer screen.

So all of the gaming CEOs who are talking about the promise of n f T s and like, I think it was the one of the guys who runs red and I think it might have been Alexis so haney In or whatever their name is who said that like in five years of games will be n f T base because people don't like wasting their time and not getting compensated for it, Like, do you know what a game is. That's not what people. So I'm gonna I'm gonna talk more about metaverse as big tech or

just bigger tech in part two. But this this, this, this will be wrapping up part one of the digital storefronts, and then we'll get into some more kind of applications of this and how we're actually seeing it in the second half. So, Robert, do you wanna Do you want to go buy a virtual uh block of Danish cheese? Um? No? I did. When I was hanging out on top of the mountain the other day, I ran into a guy

flying some drones, which I normally don't like. But this guy had a VR control rig for his very nice drones. That's those are dope. I might I might get into that yet, uh, But no, I have no desire to shop. I like going to the grocery store. Ums. I do as much of my shopping that way as possible because it's soothing and uh nice and I think very human to go be around other people to get food. But yeah, that's the thing, you know, and things like the pandemic

where that it comes harder. I think that is where the use cases for the digital stores actually come in like theoretically, but we've never you've never seen them that feeling that's soothing, which it all just looks deeply off putting. It all. It's the problem is that it's it's stuck.

It's stuck in the uncanny valley. So it's not pleasurable to be in those digital spaces because you're even though it's being marketed as a solution to alienation, it's just more alienating because it's because it's it's like very clearly exposing the alienation that we try to avoid. Um. So it falls right in the middle of the uncanny valley and it's not pleasant. But we we we we We We will talk more about that in part two. Um. If you want to follow the show on the social media's

that is Cools on media and happen here pod. It can keep up with my tweets when I I don't know, I don't know what I do on Twitter anymore. But that's hungry about tie and you can harass Robert Evers at I read Okay, that's the show, do it? Do it? Are all kill? This episode is brought to you by Wicks. Are you ready to take your business online? You need Wicks. The leading website creation platform that's got all the tools

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and create your website today. That's w i X dot com. Hi. I'm Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the science podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind, where every week we get to explore some of the weirdest questions in the universe, like if sci fi teleportation was possible. How would it square with the multitudes of organisms that inhabit our human bodies. Can we find evidence of emotions in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish? How

would it interplanetary civilization function just free will exist. Stuff to Blow Your Mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and the unders of techno history. Basically, this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If anybody ever told you you asked the weirdest questions, it is time to come join us in the place where

you belong. The Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast new episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday, with bonus episodes on Saturdays. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever felt depressed about work only to have your dad be like, why you're so down? So you told him you hate your job and he said, well, you better talk yourself out of it, and then you thought, hmm,

I love to talk. I could host a podcast. And then you went to Speaker from my Heart and started a podcast and got good at it. Then monetized it, then quit your boring job and told your dad thanks for the advice. And he was like, well, that's not what I meant, and I don't understand what a podcast is. But you seem happy. So that's great, kiddo. You ever do that? Well, you could at speaker dot com. That's spr e A k E R ask your dad. You

actually don't time. Mark Zuckerberg, Welcome to the podcast where we talk about the metaverse. I enjoy barbecue sauce And that was Mark Zuckerberg. That was pretty good. That that is That is SNL worthy. Thank you, Garrison, because it's because it's so bad. Alright, um now part that that was my own big goal. This is this is part two of the metaverse that never was um here at it could happen here and we're actually gonna be talking

about like that. It couldn't wait until we launched portions of the show and pretend we never said all this ship it's going to be the best Garrison, you know, Robert, remember remember when I was talking about um seek City and all of the virtual venues. I just I just I just got a message from our beloved parent company. I heart Media. We planned to extend UM shows into the Metaverse, which was that which was announced a few weeks ago. But I thought that the Metaverse was a

pretty good idea. I think we will talk about how the metaverse could be cool later in this episode, but then we'll explain why it won't be. But yeah, I heard Media did announce the web three in the Metaverse and the newest consumer platforms for I heart media. So sorry, I'm I was just working. It's it's working in a

matrix for reference there, so yes, I see what. Thank you. UM. Anyway, so I'm guessing for non Neil Stevenson fans, many of you probably had not heard of the metaverse before last year. UM VR. Sure you've heard of VR A R maybe, UM, but probably just as like niche gaming technology, you know, not not this massive, not not like a massive successor

to the Internet. UM. Primarily three companies, Facebook, Epic Games, and Valve uh, the later two being mostly gaming and of our companies, UM kind of all decided the best way to push their niche VR and software technology into the zeitgeist was with this flashy new marketing, and it kind of worked. Metavers is now and many more people's like personal lexicon. But it's not really the metaverse, you know,

like the Walmart thing. It's a way to attract investors and drum up free press, but it's still the same old VR and a R applications of the technology. None of these companies are trying to make metaverse a thing that we actually want or you know, working towards an interconnected, immersive, three D open source successor to the Internet. All of the different websites and services we use united under one digital roof, like a super platform that you know, is

made up of all of these sub platforms. You you have social media, online gaming, and all of like the you know, ease of life apps, all accessible through the same digital space under the same digital economy. That that thing isn't happening. People like that, that's not what but with money are actually pushing towards, even though they're still using the metaverse term. Yeah. There was a great piece in Wired that came out last month as a part of their Matrix VR issue. Um. It was called the

metaverse is simply big tech but bigger. It was by Cecilia di'antazio. It was so it's it's a wonderful piece and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say a quote from it right here. Um. By the mid two thousands, it became clear that money wasn't in building individual websites that we could access on the open web. It was making information sorders, channels, aggregators, and publishers open enough to scale with user generated content, but closed enough to reap

enormous profits. This was the evolution from Web one to Web two. For nearly thirty years, the gravity of the consolidation has pulled the cyberspace together under the auspice of fewer and fewer corporate titans. The freaky little planets get drawn together, collide and make bigger planets clade again and make stars or even black holes. Facebook eats, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Amazon swallows two dozen e commerce sites, and you're left with these few supermassive players controlling and appropriating the celestial motion of billions of users. This is how big tech got big end. Quote. So yeah, like, now we have all of our isolated toolboxes, and they really fight against any inter platform integration. You have you know, Microsoft Office,

and they're they're like off their office suite. You have like Google Workspace, you have Apple's own like Air, drop Apple Pages, and finally cut pro plus the the nightmare that is Adobe's subscription tools. Like Google wants you to spend all day checking your Gmail, traveling with Google Maps, watching videos on YouTube, and browsing on Chrome. Meanwhile, your friend texts you via I message, uses Apple Maps, and calls his mom on FaceTime. This is the single person

in the world uses Microsoft Edge. That is true, But like this, this of the Internet is the one that the metaverse is growing out of. Metaverse is just a way for tech companies to add VR and a R and the accompanying extra surveillance and data collection to this poor foot to like their own portfolio of proprietary products. In order for that to happened, they need to convince us that we need headsets for the next evolution of

the Internet. So it's not surprising that Facebook and Zuckerberg were the first ones to crack this thing right open. It's they own not only four of the top six social media platforms, but also Oculus, which is the most

popular manufacturer of VR hardware. VR has been relegated to niche gaming technology for like basically two decades, and Zuckerberg decided the best way to sell more of its headsets and software was to give the tech a fresh new paint job and call it Metaverse and like it's sort of working that there were approximately nine point four million ship min severe headsets in two thousand one, three point six million of which were done during the holiday season

after Facebook's big Metaverse event. It's the affected at the quest to which is made by Oculus. A Facebook um makes up for more than three quarters of all those headsets sold. So the Democrat demographics data isn't explicitly available, but probably a lot of kids received these things as

holiday gifts um Oculus Meta. Facebook does not release its via headset sales figures, but the Oculus app that that you need to have to make the headset work shot to the top spot in Apple's App Store on Christmas Day. That was the first time it's ever been in the number one app on the App Store, so indicating a spike and headsets received as holiday gifts. So they're selling a lot of headsets, like Oculus is is selling a

lot of their things. Like you know, I I got one a few years ago, but you know, now there's there's there's more and more of them circulating. Um. But you know this, it's still all relegated to VR because I'm not actually metaverse. You know, arguably the closest thing we have to the actual metaverse is stuff like Roadblocks and Minecraft. Now that is still not it's I that's not immersive three D. It's you're still looking at it

through a two D screen. But it is software that gives users development tools to create their own projects within this shared three D space. What separates these things and basically all attempts from making the metaverse from being the ideal metaverse is still the proprietary aspect. Everything is isolated islands. You can't take your Roadblocks game into Minecraft, right, It

still is isolated to their specific things. But you know, nevertheless, robox Is CEO described the company as the shepherds of the metaverse in early and he is kind of right, and like, that's not that's not totally inaccurate. Um. I'm

gonna quote again from the Wired piece by Cecilia di'antasio. Um, if Big Text unchecked growth continues, there will be multiple metaversees, if there are any at all, Each will be interoperable under one Tech Giants giant umbrella the same a Apple is both a walled garden and a convenient, habitable terrarium

for its dedicated consumers. Users love the seamlessness of Apple's proprietary off porting system, the ambiguity of my message, and Apple presumably loves the commission it can charge on developers who sell apps in their app store. So Epic Games is the other big metaverse proponent right now, you know they were. They were actually making announcements about metaverse a few months before Facebook did UM and the c a

l Epic Games. Tim sween Ley has been outspoken against the metaverse ran by a big tech giant like Apple. But that's not that's not really genuine because his version of the metaverse entails of cyberspace made accessible through Fortnite and Unreal Engine, two things owned by Epic Games. So like, it's not like he's not actually sincere about creating an open source thing. He just wants to be the one to control it. He's just upset that he thinks someone

else might. Um. He tried to to Apple last year and and failed. UM, and the College Fornia judge told him that Epic Games seeks a systematic change which would result in a tremendous monetary gain and wealth. The lawsuit is a mechanism to challenge the policies and practices of Apple and Google, which are an impediment to Mr. Sweeney's vision of the oncoming metaverse. So it's not actually about like him being against big tech giants and being against

a big tech giant wren metaverse. It's just that he doesn't like that he won't be able to make as much money with it if multiple tech companies work together to make it. Like that's that's that's really what he's

concerned about. He would rather be in control of this thing um because like, yeah, it would be really interesting to see if multiple tech giants work together to create an actual successor to the Internet, like an actual like you know how the Internet is just when you open up your computer and you have access to the net. It's not it's it's not like running a specific program you get to go on all the things. It would be interesting if people actually work to it's creating that.

But no, it's all about creating very isolated operating systems with a very isolated tool like tool chest, Like you can't access Steam games via the Oculus store. These things don't. These things don't work. Now you can oculus. You can use the oculus on Steam games, but not vice versa. They're making things the way they're making things because they're not trying to design a new Internet because, for one thing,

the Internet wasn't designed. It was like the result of a bunch of people who were doing things that interested them, all kind of intersecting and building upon each other. And second, like the they're they're not they're making individual profit tunnels. They're not actually trying to create. Um, they're not trying to like actually trying to think about what people might want next, or what people might might want beyond the Internet. They're thinking, how what can we sell that we're not

currently selling? And that's never going to be the thing that figures out. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. On on that point, I'm gonna do one final quote from the Wired piece. Um, if if these companies dominating cyberspace did decide to collaborate simultaneously, piecing together opposite sides of the quilt to create a digital tech style, that would be

very polite. But is there a world in which Microsoft, Facebook, Epic Games, Apple, uh Navidia, etcetera combine all of their valuable products captain Planet style into an architect of the metaverse under open source standards. Nobody in particular roops billions from That's sort of a tall task to overhaul your code and collaborate with your competitors. Why would three or four tech giants partner to make a metaverse when they already spent decades and billions constructing one of their own.

So yeah, it's it's never gonna happen. The way the way society is made, the way internetworks, that's not ever going to be a thing. Speaking of companies and things that you can buy online and advertising, here's some ads and we're back, and we're gonna talk about possibly the most successful version of air of of their techno aology. We're gonna talk about the actual use cases that are generating actual profit. So there is a there was a tweet a few days ago that I'm just gonna read

the tweet and then then we'll talk about the implications. Um. This one very very viral. UM. I caught this very early on, though, and I started writing about it, and then a whole bunch of articles dropped on the topic. A farmer in Turkey has fitted his cows with the virtual reality goggles to make them think they're outside in summer pastures. The farmer found out that these pleasant scenes

make the cows happier and produce more milk. Futures metaverse, So we're gonna talk We're gonna talk about the cow Matrix. We're gonna talk about Yeah, yeah, it is to go back in time and tell people, hey, you know that hit movie The Matrix in the future, We're going to do that, but for more milk to get k. So the thing that went viral about it that kind of broke the story for a lot of people was this farmer in Turkey with the pictures of the cows with

VR goggles on them. Pretty pretty pretty fucked up. UM. But the idea and the actual technology used came from came from Russia. UM. Farmers worked together with developers of veterinarians and consultants at the Oh boy, here, here's a Russian town name, or I guess a farm name, Kragskernof. I don't know ye that, it's I think we can we can were we? I think you nailed it. It's

it's it's this farm near Moscow. UM. And they teamed up so all these you know farmers, developers and vets and consultants teamed up to make this cow matrix project um and there was an official statement from the Moscow Ministry of Food and Agriculture reads the global trend towards universal computerization. The significant significantly simplifies work processes in many

areas that and allows you to achieve unprecedented results. Russian milk producers keep up with the world standards and are even ready to offer the market new and unexpected solutions. On a farm in the Moscow region, a prototype of virtual reality glasses were tested to improve the conditions for keeping cows. Employees of one of the largest farms in the Moscow region, together with i T specialists, decided to conduct an experiment studying the influence of virtual reality and

developed a layout of VR glasses. So the herd donned these VR systems adapted for the heads of cows. Um so and they also had to they had to to to make the imagery work. They need to tweak the color palette in the software to make it suitable for the cow's vision because cows can't see rudder green, so there's just shades of yellow and blue. So in order to replicate what grass click to them, they have to

you know, change the stuff. Um. But yeah, and then they programmed a unique summer field simulation program and subjected it onto these cows. Uh. The ministry, the Russian Ministry of Out Your Culture concluded that the cow matrix does work UM. In a statement from t A a few years ago, officials said environmental conditions have significant have a significant impact on cow health and as a consequence, the equality and quantity of milk produced. So you know, like

this is the thing. I I talked with, um, someone I know about this, and they're like, well, if it makes the cow like actually happier and healthier than like, what's the problem. And like the problem is is that like you're gas lighting and entire creature's reality. Like you're like you're you're you're like not consentually cass lighting their reality. And I that is I don't like that. I don't eat.

Everything we do to cows is without their consent. So I it's one of those things where it's like, but we're also not gaslighting their reality and this like we're not depriving their senses of what the world is. No, this seems like an escalation in our war on the cow. Yeah, so you know this other farmer in Turkey heard about this and decided to try it out on his cows. Um And yeah, the fund up cow matrix or the cow tricks does seem to do its job extracting more

milk from the cow to increase profitability. Quote from quote from the farmer said, uh, we get an average twenty two liters of milk per day from the cows in our farm. The milk average of the two cows that wore the VR glasses went up to twenty seven liters. So yeah, when when When the story first broke there was the most popular article was from a site called Futurism, which made made me made me very depressive about this

about futurismism Garrison. Yeah, and it made me mad enough that I'm going to read some of its to you. Thank god, I haven't been angry in seconds. That cows produced more milk when VR makes them think they're in beautiful green pastures. Proves that keeping them in agriculture environments isn't healthy nor does it make them happy. Putting them in a cow matrix does sound a little grim, yes, but you can't argue with the results. Oh my god,

I can I say you actually can. If all this has shown is that like potentially, if you put cows in this thing during the winter, when it's not sunny and bright outside, then they are happier. This is not shown that, for example, taking all cows out of pastures and sticking them in matrix boxes would make them because the thing is they're not they're on pastors. They're in little jail cells with VR goggles on their head. So like it's that that was that was the use case.

And like the quote from the farmers, like they're watching green pasture and it gives them an emotional boost. They are less stressed. Um. And the farmers that he plans to be plans to buy ten more It's like you can spend thousands of dollars on specialized cal VR headsets, Um, or you can you know, like use that money to

buy more land for the cows to spread out. And if we're at that point in society that in order to make in order to in order to make enough cow milk, we need to gaslight cows by overruling their senses with a clunky of your headset on their little fuzzy faces. Maybe we should start having milk, Maybe we should like maybe that's it, Like if we require this to have milk in our cereal, then nope, no more, not not gonna. I'm not gonna do that. I refuse.

That's not like it's already And if you practice, if you don't buy milk like like locally from a farm, you know, so if we're doing this, that just like immediately checks me out of every like, no, I'm just fully fully not. Yeah, I think that's kind of evil. I think that's kind of evil. Like the whole industry way by which we produce meat at scale is pretty evil.

But that's an escalation. It's it's the specific thing of like of of of overruling their reality and senses um of another living creature like that is for some reason, for some reason, that that send them into a way in order for you to get like meat, And that's just like turning them into food, but like making their living really shitty and then making trying to trick them

to thinking they're not. Yeah, it's even worse than just having them live in shitty conditions, I think from an as standpoint, And maybe it's more pleasant for the animal, but from like our standpoint, it's worse to me. Yep. So speaking of uh, I don't know, don't cows? Is there some segway that we can work this in? You know what does essentially force you to live in an alternate reality that allows you to be more productive for the people who make money based on your existence buying

these products and services that supporting this podcast. I was just gonna say podcasts in general do that. But yes, cool, al Right, we are back and my last, my last big section here is titled we are the Cows. So this is that's gonna that's gonna give you a sense of how of how we're going to talk about what so what what? What the cow Tricks really demonstrates, though, is that the end goal of all this is to

make us the cow? Right? You know we we and we already are to some degree with like the Internet and smart and smartphones. But this is more. This is an escalation, right like the people, the ghoules, that Silicon Valley and you know, the whole tech world want they want a world where we are forced to don hardware rigs that block out our body's senses and replace the input with digital coded counterfeit. That's that's an Internet that tries to convince you that you're inside of it and

it is inside of you. That that's that's that's that is what they want. Really, Like, even if we get the metaverse that I would prefer, you know, like the mythical open source, interconnected successor to the Internet with all these different websites, tools and games that I like all

together and intuitively accessible through a share digital space. Even if we get that, like, which we won't, And if there's safeguards to protect digital privacy that are built in, which there wouldn't be, that doesn't actually make the real world much better. Like in my opinion, air technology specifically could be really cool, um, but but redesigning the world to require headsets, goggles or air glasses would suck, Like now, not only for people who can't get the technology right.

If if we redesign the world to be like the only way to interact with systems is through this digital lens, that's gonna suck. We we now we already had that does some degree with smartphones on the Internet, but this is another escalation of it. And again, like like the cow, it's just gonna be a way to paint over our late capitalist climate disaster of a world. Uh. Metaverse is a tech capitalist solution to our current and pressing political

and ontological problems. And I have to used the bathroom really badly. Well, I'll talk for a little while. I think a big part of what Garrison is saying is that instead of relying on these tech industry goougles to build the future for you, which is a future in which they sell you away to hide from the hell that they have made of the world and others like them have made of the world. Instead of doing that, you've just spend the rest of your life listening to podcasts.

Put put blinders on over your eyes, cover up all of your senses but your ears, and just exist forever in a concoon made entirely of my voice and occasionally Garrison and Chris's and Sophie's voice, but mainly my voice. And they're saying, not listen to just any podcast but podcasts that you benefit from. I don't think people should listen to any podcasts that I don't do. That doesn't seem right. So where's my angle on that? Huh? I don't know. Um, I don't know how long we should

vamp while Garrison just leaves in the middle. I really need to I really needed to see. Well, it's okay. I just told everybody that we're the metaverse. Now, Garrison our contact. I drink so much coffee this morning. It was a problem. Okay. In similar to all this, you know, remember the John Carmike interview from Yes That's such a bumber, the Doom co creator and former CTO of Ovoculus, Yes these bodies are a curse job on the journoun Show. He openly said the promise of yr is to make

the world you wanted. It is not possible on Earth to give everyone what they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson private islands. People react negatively to any talk of economics, but it's a resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot more value to a lot more people. In the virtual sense, we can have virtual devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will be able to have these. Not everyone can have

a mention, Not everyone can have a home theater. These are things we can simulate, though to some degree in virtual reality, the simulation is not as good as the as the real thing. If you're rich, you probably have your own home theater or mentioned in private island. Good for you. You're probably not the people who's going to benefit the most from this thing. Most of the people in a world lived in cramped quarters and are not, and they wouldn't and that's not what they would choose

to be and if they had a limited resources. There's this piece of art that goes around the internet. It's this dystopian kid in a corner drooling with goggles on, with like rainbow pictures. But it's a terrible looking place, and people say, this is the world you're trying to build, people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them, And Carmacs responses and encouraging. He says, but is his life really better off if he takes the goggles off

and he's in the horrible place? So I I think Carmack really has convinced himself that virtual reality is a path to making the world a better place. In the interview, he compares VR to the invention of like air conditioning. He says, like I live in Dallas, it's a hundred degrees here. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air conditioning. People don't generally go, oh, you're not experiencing the world around you because of air conditioning. This is what human beings do.

We bend the world to our will, and this is how things get better by building, by building techn oology and distributing them to people so that they have something better than what we would they would have if they didn't exist. Now, if you dig into what he's saying, here's actually a few interesting things. Because for one, yeah, air conditioning is actually kind of bad, like the way we're using it and whatever presents it is a band aid solution to our continual problem of heating up the earth,

and it's making the problem worse every single day. Yeah, And honestly it's it's yeah, it's like it's like a band aid that also makes the problem worse because a C contributes to a lot of energy. Shit. But you know, air conditioning is also an actual material change, right, like it can it can actually help people not die due to heat. The metaverseon VR has talked about does not improve a middle to lower class person's material conditions, and

to say so demonstrates how disconnected these tech bros. Are from a regular person's reality. The metaphors and VR and like virtual worlds are going to be built based on the perception of reality held by those who create them. That's why we're getting shitty digital private movie theaters, make mentions and metaverse concerts and h and M n F T stores. They're giving us a simulated version of the world that they actually get to live in for real. But we can refuse this. We we don't need to

take them up on this offer. If we're gonna be stuck with with multiple proprietary branded meta verses that are made by rich tech bros To mirror a world that the that the rich tech bro gets to live in, the best thing we can do is funk with it. We can sabotage it from the inside. We need to spam floating dicks at a metaverse concert. This is the actual thing that needs to happen, because look, we all know terrorism is fun, right, everybody loves terrorism, but there's

horrible consequences for doing it in the real world. In the metaverse, there's no laws against terrorism. Yet you can terrorize however you want in the metaverse, and it's just trolling. And that's fine, so do that much of it as

possible until they make it illegal. The concept that would go really well with this type of thing is the poet terrorism concept of this applies like perfectly to this idea of how we need to funk with these digital spaces that are trying to be created, because yeah, like

they're like they're pretty bad. During one Bitcoin consumed all of the electrical energy um by equivalent to a country like Argentina um in the Bitcoin network handled like nineties seven million transactions, so this is roughly zero point zero one two per cent of the worldwide volume of non

cash transactions. But bitcoin was responsible for zero point five four of global electricity consumption on total, which is astronomical, Like that's all like that's it's either it's ridiculate on average, that's like uh like thirteen hundred kill about hours poor per bitcoin transaction, which is so much energy. The power consumed by a single Bitcoin transaction on average could power an average US household for one and a half months. It's it is ridiculous how much and how much it's

getting used. And they're trying to build, you know, like the Sek City thing. They're trying to build this metaverse off of Crypto, which they're like, I'm sad because like, crypto could be really similar to the metaverse. Crypto could be really rad, Like crypto could be an actually super red thing, but the way it's being used right now

is really environmentally damaging. UM and this this linking of Web three, you know, the mythical Web three and the metaverse to crypto is showing like, yeah, it's it's is kind of like the band aid solution, where it's not it's it's, it's not it's not actually fixing the problem, and it's kind of making the problem worse because they're so set on linking it to crypto right now that it's it sucks, like it it's it's, it's it's gonna happen,

It's gonna suck. What you can do is you can spam Final Fantasy seven porn, you can spam Sonic, the Hedgehog feet picks. This is this is the only tool we have. But save for actual terrorism, which we're not gonna talk about on this podcast, you can, but we can't got a poetic terrorism. That is something that you can do. You can funk with these systems from the inside and make them unusable and that's that's really the only thing. And that's what I'm gonna do in my

spare time because it's fine. Yeah, um, do do poetic terrorism in the metaverse. Um, go funk it up for them. Um and maybe in the process, here's my dream, garrison that perhaps in the process of sucking it up for them, we build something that we actually like. That's the thing, right, Yeah, that is similar to how the Internet kind of got

originally created. Of course, now it's turned into this hellscape, but that'll probably that will probably happen anyway ten years or more for the meta but we can get a little bit of fun out of it and we can have some fun with it like we did on the Internet for a couple of years or it all got real bad. So that is that is the metaverse that doesn't exist. Um and yeah, So fight against the cow matrix as best as you can. Do your best out go the city for the house at the top the world.

Make a cowsy on. It's up to us. This is depressing, alright, that's the episode. Look for your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree, They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasure and pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure, and they see you. They're fearless. Guide. Is this fascinating world? Find a forest

near you and start exploring and discover the forest. Dot Org brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council. Hello, Hello, Hey. I don't know if you hurt, but my podcast Checking It has been nominated for the d a CP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Lifestyle and Self Help Podcast. I'm grateful for the nomination. I I almost didn't even do a podcast because I was just wandering. There are thousands of

podcasts out there and why is my voice needed. But a nomination from the end of a CP lets me know that I made the right choice, and I encourage you to do. Don't worry if there are thousands of something else that you want to do. No nobody has your sauce, so listen. You can still vote. Go to vote dot in double a CP Image Awards dot net. You have until February five, um nine pm Eastern Standard time,

and please Listen to my podcast. We're part of the Black Effect podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. Thank you for checking in. Conquer your new year's resolution to be more productive with the Before Breakfast podcast. In each bite sized daily episode, time Management and Productivity at Expert Laura Vanderkam teaches you how to make the most of your time, both at work and at home. These are the practical suggestions you

need to get more done with your day. Just as lifting weights keeps our body strong as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart and how to maybe put them back together a little bit better than they were before. I am Robert Evans, and with me this week is I guess I'm very excited about Chris Begley, author of the Next Apocalypse, The

Art and Science of Survival. Chris. Welcome to the show. Thank you now, Chris. Before we get into the meat of our discussion, I have to talk about what you do for a living, because for years and years it was my job to go around the world. I talked to people and pretty much very continent about their different interesting jobs. So I've I've talked interviewed everybody from like Bravo workers in Nevada to Iraqi counter terrorism special forces in Iraq. And you have probably the coolest job title

if anybody I've met. You're an underwater archaeologist. That's right. How did you? Um? How did you? I mean? Was that was it just kind of like were you kind of laser focused on that goal or was it more you were interested in archaeology and you loved diving, and so the two just kind of made sense together. Yeah. Well, I started out as ah what now called a terrestrial archaeologist, you know, working on the land as most people do,

and worked for years in Central America. Honduras was my focus, as you saw in the book, but other other places uh nearby as well, And really it was about I would say, I don't know, twelve thirteen, fourteen years ago. I wanted to just branch out and little bit from that. And one of the things that that all archaeologists have seen is that you know, there are certain things that really just aren't as explored as other things, and one

was all of the archaeological resources underwater. I mean, we hear about underwater archaeology or maritime archaeology in the Mediterranean, right, you know, a Roman shipwrecks and all that, But there are big chunks of the world where we've done very little to see what's out there, you know. And one other interesting thing about that is there are many different things you could look at underwater, but often we look

at shipwrecks. And shipwrecks are different from regular archaeological sites because you know, shipwreck is a moment in time that all happened in in one instance, and so when we're looking at that kind of archaeological site, we see this snapshot that we don't see when we look at a place that was occupied over hundreds of years. So you know.

So yeah, so that wasn't my focus, but it became, uh, sort of somewhere I wanted to go as I learn more about And one of the things I find really interesting, the basic thrust of your book is that the way in which we think about civilizations falling or collapsing or how however you you know, the ways in which folks tend to discuss that when we're talking about the Maya

or the Romans. Um is very different from what archaeologists who tend to study these cultures how they tend to perceive of of what you might more accurately call a decline or or you know, a decentralization or whatever. I think there's a number of terms that we could use. But these ideas that like you have these civilizations and then they suddenly fall apart um are not really based

in rigorous historical analysis usually. UM. There's some cases as as you go into the book, UM, and I'm I'm I'm interested in that because you're kind of coming at from a very rigorous historical standpoint in this book, UM, a lot of the stuff that we talked about on on this show in a more contemporary sense. And I'm kind of wondering how the idea to write this sort of came together because you started it before the COVID nineteen pandemic. Obviously that had an impact on the book.

It's it's it's all over there, yeah yeah, UM, well, I've I was. One of the things that I do is teach the wilderness survival courses and UM, and I don't do that as frequently as some people that that sort of dedicate themselves to that do but but but I do it fairly frequently. And um, it became obvious to me over time that people were taking these courses not just to learn how to deal with being lost out in the wilderness, which is sort of was my vision.

What do you do if you unexpectedly have to spend a night out in the woods or or two or three. Um, they were really thinking about what about do when things fall apart? How do I take care of myself? How do I take care of my family using these skills that you could use in a situation where things had fallen apart? And that sort of oriented me towards the fact that you know, people were worrying about the future. I mean I could see it. I could see it

in my students at university. I could see it you know, in the people's faces at the supermarket. You know, there was something going on there that was um uh, there was concerning people, and a lot of it had to do with climate change, and that I think was was the focus initially for me writing this um because what I saw was you know, sort of the prepper community and survivalist community looking at things that really seemed to be short term and didn't at all focus on what

we really saw historically. So I think that my um my initial motive to motivation to write this was really just seeing this concern that was that was growing among people about what the future is going to look like. And then of course COVID hit and that that that really brought all this to the to the forefront. And are there any specific ways in your mind that you can you kind of think on how COVID altered what you were what you were writing, or how you conceived

of what you were writing. Like once you you know, you you have this kind of vision that's inspired by the things that you're seeing and hearing, particularly in these wilderness survival courses, and then as you get started, we have this horrible, horrible plague hit and a number of of of things start to happen very quickly. How does

that kind of alter the trajectory of what you're writing? Yeah, I guess the you know, the there were some just sort of practical logistical things obviously, right, Uh, some things that I intended to do or ways that I had hoped to interact with folks in the course of interviewing people for the book or writing it, you know, wasn't going to be possible. But in terms of thinking about how things happened, the big thing for me was, um,

how it became politicized so quickly. You know, that was you know in the um you know you know, well, now you see all of the memes you know, uh talking about the zombie movies where half the population doesn't believe their zombies or something. You know, that was never really on the radar, at least not on my radar before.

And so now um, um, you know it is because clearly, not only do these things happen and then you have a group of people that are dealing with it, you have obviously the dynamics within the group, which which of course we knew, but to see it play out in this way, in this sort of dramatic way, that really altered the course of history. I mean, the pandemic could have turned out, uh, you know differently, but it didn't. And part of the reason that didn't was because of

the way folks reacted to it. And I'm wondering because a part a chunk of your career, in a big chunk of this book is kind of looking at in places like Honduras where these these civilizations entered decline, and in some cases it was very sharp, like within a fairly short period of time, ninety percent of the population leaves or you know, UH is deceased. UM. And you you see like the crumbling of a lot of these governmental institutions and whatnot that had had organized life for

a while. You see the pretty significant migrations. UM. Is there any ways in which kind of the last two years as an archaeologist has changed or informed how you were thinking about um, these places that you've been you've been studying, in these moments in history that you've been studying for so long. Yeah, in some ways it brings

some of it into a little sharper focus. For instance, you know, one of the things it that archaeologists had long talked about was that during these declines or these collapses, that it's uneven. It's not equal for everybody. It's not equal over space and time, and certainly depending on your position in society. UM, there's different ways in which it it plays out for you, UM. You know, and that's something that we see. We see it from UM. You know,

access to vaccines to UM. Well, I mean, even things like you know, if we think about folks that are unvaccinated, Now there's a you know, a chunk of those people that are doing it for a sort of political reasons or other ideological reason. But there's also a big, uh, a big group of those folks that are doing it because history shows that they should be wary of anything

that UH society he tries to do to them. And so, you know, you have these these things playing out for different ways for um, you know, people from different regions of the country or political orientations or race or ethnicity or um, you know, a whole variety of things. And so seeing how uneven it was the pandemic UH makes

me think that, you know, it certainly was that way then. UH. The other thing that we see when we look archaeologically is that it's these big structures or systems that collapse.

That really is the collapse and the things that cause it initially, whether it's I don't know, deforestation or drought or warfare or even a natural disaster of some sort um that really it's the way people respond to those and the way these uh systems deal with those changes that really creates the problems that you see later on. And we can see that now. For instance, one of the things that we're talking a lot now about his supply chain issues, right, And this is a result of COVID,

But it's not a direct result. I mean, it's not because the crews on the ships are at the ports or truck drivers have uh are sick. It's because of the ways in which all of this disrupted things, and especially when we get these really efficient but inflexible systems, like a lot of our shipping system was um, these disruptions result in really big changes. So you know, you have these huge ships that can only dock a few ports. Once that gets backed up, you can't really shift and adjust.

And so that's I think for me, just a lot of it is seeing it play out where we see the fact that we have something that sets it all off, but then we have the response of the system or the structure that really creates the day to day impact. I suspect a big part of kind of why we conceive popularly of of quote unquote collapses in the past is based on, as you talk about extensively in your book, the way in which we look at it kind of in fiction, and in fiction it's nearly always like the

societal equivalent of a bullet in the head. Right you the zombie plague is out, and then a couple of days everything's fallen apart. And the point that you make in this is that it's probably I mean, this isn't exactly the phrase, but it's probably better to look at it kind of like it's like a tumor or something where the things are set in motion that are going to lead to things falling apart much much, um, at a point before a lot of people probably would have

noticed it. You know, the problem can be too are gone um before it's really obvious. Um. Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's a good point. And that's the that's really something that you know, even with COVID, it shows that, right Um. You know, the problems are not only the existence or the appearance of this virus, but first of all, how did it appear? And that has to do with um, you know, decreasing habitat for wild animals and the proximity

of human populations to animals. And then we have increased sort of uh communication and travel, which you know is not a bad thing obviously, but it is going to change the way in which these things spread. But then we have the way that we divide ourselves up into nation states, and the way in which we have you know, economic systems that are working in certain ways. So you know, the vaccine get here but not there, and and and so forth. Um. But yeah, that's a you know that

I think is at the heart of it. You have these things that have been set in place. You have these parameters in which you're going to have to react, and they really set um the stage for what's going to happen. You know, you have it's like looking backwards four or five moves in chest to see how did we get in this situation. It's not just because of that last move, it's because of the last ten. Yeah.

And one of the things that you bring up that I like is that if you're looking for kind of a historical example of a collapse that that most mirrors the way we tend to look at it in fiction, it would probably be what happened to the indigenous population of particularly like North America um after the arrival of colonizers, which was by a lot of accounts like ninety of the population dead within a fairly short span of time, primarily from disease. This this rely rapid and cataclysmic um

um shock. But also at the same time, as much as it does seem to mirror some of our you know, kind of fictional depictions of of viral outbreaks or other sort of of of societal calamities, um, the ways in which people survived don't really in any meaningful way mirror the are are kind of popular fictional depiction of like who makes it out of that sort of a situation, you know, the the strapping military veteran with a rifle and a stockpile of food or whatever. You know. Yeah, yeah,

that that. You know, I would say that certainly having these skills to keep yourself alive is important, and it is true that if you don't make it through the first thirty days, you're not gonna make it through the next thirty years. But um yeah, the way people survive outside of a few days, perhaps when they're dealing with some of these what we would think of a serve Bible situations, this is a community. I mean, we see that with uh, you know, when we look at the

Native American history in North America. You know, even as populations and entire groups were being decimated by these diseases, sometimes a village in a single winner from a wave or waves of disease. Even in the in the face of that, they reconstituted themselves as communities, sometimes um, multi ethnic or multicultural communities. I mean, there was a whole

variety of ways in which people regrouped. And I think that that, you know, that was the message and you know, part of the uh, this image of you know, grabbing your bugout bag and heading out to the hills is um, it just doesn't work, you know. And and the is the stockpiling you know as well. Um, And so yeah,

when we look archaeologically, you know, we always see communitions. Yeah, and that's something we really try to encourage people do on this show, where obviously some amount of disaster preparation is is not just helpful, but is I think kind of morally necessary if it's at all financially feasible for you, you know it is you are it is absolutely the right thing to do to try to have two three weeks of of relatively storable food, some water, um, you know,

some other emergency supplies. But kind of beyond that, as you said that first, like thirty days if you actually want not just to live, but to have you know, life have any kind of meaning, Um, you have to be thinking in a community oriented situation. Yeah, I mean, because ultimately, you know, what's the difference between two weeks or two months worth of food? Right, you know it's gonna be gone and you know you have to come back.

You know. One of the things in researching for this for this book, one of the things I looked at was the history of how we made a living, uh and the history of agriculture. And one of the things that you know that that I found was that the last time that humans lived where a significant portion of the population was hunters and gatherers that is, not farmers, there was like one of the current population, you know,

less than five million people in the world. So even a catastrophic disaster that you know, reduced us to ofcent of current population, we're still going to have more people in the world than ever lived without agriculture. And so we're gonna have to uh recreate some of these systems. And you know, agriculture buying just going to be a community based, yeah system it's uh, I mean, you can garden on your own, but but the way that it

needs to work is is going to be a collective. Yeah, and I think, um, yeah, this is we talk a lot about. I actually live with a couple of wilderness survival instructors and we have about an acre of land and we do a decent amount of of of you know gardening, you know, animal husbandry and that sort of thing, and it it is. Um I've I've spent a lot of my life on farm, so I've kind of always

had an appreciation for how much work it is. And one of the things we try to talk about on this show regularly is the value of even just having a garden of things like guerrilla gardening. Not because I'm not one of those people who thinks that, like, oh, we need to replace industrial agriculture with like individuals tending

small gardens. That's not going to work, but because the more you kind of interface directly with the concept of growing food and with working with other people in order to do that, the more prepared you are for any number of things that could go wrong, Like even if those things don't involve the crunching the food supply lines, the connections you make with people doing that sort of work will be more valuable than an extra two months of stockpiles you know, when you're in your food buckets

or whatever, you're Alex Jones dried food buckets. Yeah, well, that's that's absolutely right. And you know, one of the things that occurred to me looking into the past at some of these uh, you know, collapses or declines that had happened in the past, was that a huge percent of the population um um was engaged directly in agriculture, and you know here in the well in the industrialized world is typically less than five percent less than that even in the United States. Most people like me don't

uh don't engage in it. And you know, I know something about gardening, perhaps like everybody else, but I'm not a farmer. I don't really have that collected wisdom. And if I had to do that, um, you know, probably it's like a lot of other things. When everything is easy, it's not so bad. When you know when it goes bad, it really helps to know what you're doing. Um. And of course everything goes bad sooner or later, and so um. You know, that's that kind of things very important, you know.

And I think also there could certainly local systems and some flexible scale would be really important, you know. So I'm also like you a proponent of of this sort of thing. You know, if we can get everybody to participate in ways that we aren't now, that will give us some flexibility. What if what if we do have supply chain problems, Well, we have a number of people in the community that are already doing some of this stuff that could maybe be expanded or get us through

this period. So yeah, yeah, I mean, even if you're not like dealing with everyone's caloric needs, it could be

as simple as because of where you're located. You know, when when the oranges and other kind of fruits aren't able to come in from a supply line thing, there's a shortage of vitamin C and then knowing how to make teata pine needles or whatever, or what kind of plants have a lot of vitamin C. You know, even though you're not you're not focused on meeting everyone's you know, entire caloric needs through small scale farming, but you can deal with the a nutrient deficiency or something because you

understand your environment a little bit better. Yeah, and you know, probably quality of life isxues to I mean, you know, for uh, you know, kids and u you know, there's there's lots of lots of ways you can survive that are pretty miserable, So you want to you want to try to uh direct it towards those that are desirable. And I think part of that is having this flexibility, having this knowledge, having a lot of people involved in things.

And you know, one of the things I talked about in my book or ideas of you know, diversity and inclusion, which we talk about in certain ways now and often I think unfortunately it's talked about, is if it's done to benefit the people that are marginalized and left out only and while it is partly that it benefits everybody, of course, I mean, anyone in a business knows, anybody in the university knows the benefits of of diversity. In the same way anybody that's trying to do something understands

the benefit of a diverse range of experiences. You know. That's why we make these multidisciplinary teams that go out and do things. Uh, you know, it's so that you have this this wide variety that can help you keep going. Yeah.

And one of the things that I really found fascinating in your book and that that kind of made me feel a little bit um bad, as I you know, I've I've spent a lot of time thinking about the what happened, what was done to what also just kind of happened as a result of the way diseases spread when when colonizers reached North America. I had never really devoted that much thought to the actual actions that in different indigenous groups took consciously to prevent to protect themselves

from the spread of diseases. You mentioned the Cherokee in particular, UM in your book. Could you talk a little bit more about that, because that's something as soon as I read it, I marked that page because I'm like, I need to look up what the studies he is referencing, because I I don't know anything about this. Yeah, that, UM, you know, a lot of that stems from the research of of some other archaeologists and they, you know what, You're exactly right. We don't think about that. We're not

taught about it that way. You know, we sort of have this this contradictory and sort of u uh, doubly problematic way of talking about this. First, for a long time, we denied sort of the how traumatic and how much of a genocide it was when Europeans arrived UM. And then after denying that, we sort of say, well, Native Americans are gone and no longer relevant, so we can cease to talk about them. Of course that's not true.

And one of the things that we see when we look more in detail at the histories, or we listen to the oral histories, or we look at the archaeology, is that there are a number of things that that that people did and do to um uh uh to

create the outcomes that they want. And that was no different for the Native American groups, you know, I mean, they had ways of dealing with disease, and some of them will be will be able to understand it via our sort of our system right isolating people cleanliness of minimizing contact expect especially with sort of problematic groups like

the colonizer's um you know. But in other ways, there are things that are gonna be unfamiliar to us and we're not gonna see the effectiveness or of the value in it. But one of the things that that all of these things did that these groups were doing was created or maintained um group identity and cohesion and allowed

the perseverance of of community. And so there are um you know, it's it's easy to think about people as sort of passive victims of something, especially when it serves your purpose to to think about it in these ways,

and we just see that it's it's not the case. Yeah, there was a remarkable moment in the book, and I think it was from when you were in Honduras where you you talk about you're finding pottery shirts and they have these specific kind of markings on them from I don't like a thousand years ago or so, and you also know a local woman who's a potter and she's putting the same markings on and you ask her why and her answer is like, well, because the pottery shirts

that we find from our ancestors have those on them. And my initial thought was like, oh, what what a shame that she doesn't know what those originally meant. But then I thought like, well, but is that any different from like all of the different things that that I do because their traditions, because like there are things that like people a thousand years ago in in in my line did like, no, it's not like it's it's just what people do and it is a continuation, and it's

a very there's um that's a that's that's survival. You know that's that's conscious survival. Yeah, you know, and in that case, of course, whatever it meant initially, it now means that to her, right, So there's the meaning, you know. Um, And so it's it's interesting, you know, one of the things, you know, I'm from and I live in Kentucky, and one of the things, especially when people come to say Appalachians, they're looking for sort of authentic Appalachian Kentucky, you know, um,

and they already have an idea what that is. And if you don't see it, because that's not really what people do, then the response is never, oh my idea is about what is authentic? Might be erroneous. It's I wonder why I didn't see authentic Appalachians. You know. It's like, well you did. But you know, there's gonna be more hip hop and punk groups than there are bluegrass groups

because you know, these are twenty year old kids. That's you know, they're doing this as much as this other stuff, and uh, you know, more problem and so that that is something hum that that I think of often as an archaeologist. You know, my focus is in the past.

But if I'm going to understand things, of course you also have to understand how are people thinking about in the present and how am I thinking about it in the present, because you know, everything, all the stories I tell about the past are coming out of or coming out of my experience in the present too, and it's hard to uh, it's hard to separate those and that really the best we can do is try to, um, you know, reflect on that and see how is it

that I might be limiting my understanding because of my particular experience. And one of the things I really like about your book that I also found fascinating, So it's I you know, I I for a while did um conflict journalism. And before when when that was just an ambition of mine, before I started to do it, I would see the articles that were being written by all these war correspondents, and I would just be in awe of like how did they get that story? How did

they get that says? How did they must have put

so much work in? And then when I actually got there, I realized, like, oh no, they met they made a contact with the local who was good at it, and that person showed them around and made all these connections, and like, actually, none of this work happens without these local fixers, and you make the point that in archaeology you're not generally discovering things like even when you're finding shipwrecks, it's because these sailors who lived nearby were like, well, yeah,

a bunch of shipwrecks over there, Like this is where you're gonna go find them. You know, It's always the way it is, you know, there um um. In the example you're talking about, I was part of this project in Forney in Greece, which you know, made the news because we found so many shipwrecks there something ultimately like fifty shipwrecks around this island, um and almost all of them were shown to us by local folks, uh that sponge divers or people that were fishers, you know, people

that were out on the water all the time. And the few that we found by ourselves was I'm sure people knew about him, We just stumbled on him before somebody had a chance to show us. It's the same way in in the Honduras would we would be walking through the rainforest and you know, maybe we've been walking for a week, so we're way out in the middle of this place. People were constantly telling me the guys that I was with, would say, Okay, if we go up this creek, you know, for about six hours, and

we go over here, here's what we'd find. Here's what we'd find over here. Here's what we find over here. They knew where everything was. Um. And that's you know, one of the things that you uh uh uh, that that you learned is you know how reliant you are on people that live in a place. I mean, they just know it. Yeah, there's no Um, when you get right down to it, is as obsessed as we are kind of in the Western Cannon with the idea of lost cities. Um, that's not really a thing that tends

to happen. Um. Yeah, no, no, no, it's not. And and in fact, most of the archaeological sites that people didn't know about it was just because they were so small and ephemeral that no one really paid attention anything. Yeah, there's no lost city. They're they're always known for somebody. Well, Chris, I think that's that's most of what I wanted to

get into in this conversation. I'm wondering before we kind of close out, because you are both the author of this book, The Next Apocalypse, which is I think a fascinating way of looking at the idea of things falling apart and a wilderness survival instructor. If you're going to suggest people, you know, a practical kit bag to prepare for short and kind of long term problems, what are

you what are you putting in your bag? Well, you know, there's the two main things, uh, that you're always gonna want is is a knife because that allows you to

make a lot of other things. And a way to start fire, you know, and we've all seen in the movies sticks together and you know, friction methods and that works, and you can do that, but it is incredibly difficult to do in the butt, you know, and for most of us that don't do it all the time, Uh, you're just not gonna be able to do it when it's forty degrees in raining and you really need a fire. You know, you'll be able to do it when it's a hundred degrees and dry, you know, uh, because everything

is about to catch on fire anyway. But uh, you know so, um and what would what would that look like? Well, uh, you need something that will catch on fire pretty quickly. And the thing I always takes cotton balls, you know, if you take cotton balls and a disposable lighter or one of those uh fire starter sticks, it will make sparks.

Um that those cotton balls will catch fire instantly. And if you take one and you coat half of it with petroleum jelly, then not only will catch fire, it will burn you know, for you know, a minute or so, long enough to catch other stuff on fire. So you know, making fire and having some sort of cutting tool are the very basic things. But um, you know, the beyond that, I would say, uh, you know, clothing or some sort

of shelter is is the other thing. You know, Exposure to elements will kill you quicker than anything, and so having some way to uh to protect yourself and that's usually gonna be you know, first line of defense is going to be your clothes. And one of the things that that you'll know anybody that that deals with sort of survival situations is that most people that really get in trouble with things like hypothermia, you know, it's not when it's thirty degrees below and they're out doing something.

It's when it's fifty degrees and sunny and they're out in a T shirt during the day and then at night it drops to thirty degrees and you know they're stuck out somewhere with without proper clothing. That's that is when things get really dangerous. So you know, I would say, you know, if you can have some way to start fire, some sort of knife, and appropriate clothes for spending the night out, you know, then then uh, and you're probably in pretty good shape for most situations. Well, Chris, thank

you so much for talking with with us today. Chris Begley, underwater archaeologist, author of the Next Apocalypse, The Art of Science and Survival. Chris, is there anything you'd like else you'd like to say or kind of get into before we close out for the day. No, just thank you very much for for reading the book and for reaching out to talk with me, because I think that, you know, especially now as we go into sort of an uncertain future.

I mean, future is always uncertain, I suppose, but um as you know, we're really recognizing some of these challenges. You know, I really am hoping that this sort of um uh, community based idea becomes the way we think about things. Uh. You know, it doesn't mean it's easy or that we're gonna like it. It doesn't mean that that's what I want. I mean, tell you the truth, I would love it if it was just me out in the woods with my family. You know, I can

do that. It's much harder to be part of a community and make things work for a big group of people. But that's just the way it's going to be. Yeah, And that's that's ultimately the way in which you have a lot more real security because I think, um uh, I think people I don't know. The world seems so complex and messy that it's easy to imagine that that safety comes from getting away from the world. But historically that's just not how it works. Now the world finds you.

You know, it's a being part of a group is always best and your your little group can never defend against the big group. I mean, if we want to put it in those terms, you know, you can't just hoard everything and uh, it just doesn't work. Might work for a little while, but yeah, so that you know that for me, that's the message I'm hoping, Yeah, people

take from it. Well, Thank you very much, Chris. For those of you listening at home again, please do check out The Next Apocalypse The Art and Science of Survival by Chris Begley. That's going to do it for us all today. Chris, thank you again and have a wonderful day here you too, Thank you. Wrote Hello and welcome to our show. I'm Zoie de Channel and I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and cast mates Hannah Simone and Lamar and Morris to recap our hit

television series New Girl. Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast, where we'll share behind the scenes stories of your favorite New Girl episodes, reveal the truth behind the legendary game True American, and discuss how this show got made with the writer's, guest stars, and directors who made the show so special. Fans have been begging us to do a New Girl recap for years, and we finally made a podcast where we answer all your burning questions like is there really a bear in

every episode of New Girl? Plus each week you'll hear hilarious stories like this at the end when he says you got some schmid on your face. I feel like I pitched that joke. I believe that I feel like I did. I'm not on a thousand percent I want to say that was I tossed that one out listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh boy, Prop, You know what's fun is is live shows,

live podcast shows, live podcasts are incredible. You know what isn't incredible is the plague, which is why we've decided to find a way to give you all a live show that won't spread the plague, a virtual live show. We had to pivot, and one can say you could really watch it from anywhere. You could watch it from anywhere. You could watch it. If you're on the I S S in space right now, you could watch it. If you're if you're in a trench in in eastern Ukraine,

you could watch it. Uh, if you're driving and and don't care about paying attention to the road, you could watch it. All of these are options. With a version totally eliminated the problems of living in a three dimensional plane we have. It's it's groundbreaking. You could call it the metaverse. Anyway. It's gonna be February at six pm PST.

Prop is going to be the guest. Sophie's gonna be there too, and you can buy tickets at moment House dot com slash Behind the Bastards, Slash Behind the Bastards, moment House dot com slash behind the Bastards. Watch it later. You don't have to watch it. It's so bad. You guys, we gotta do this are talking about it was good. I thought everybody was going to bed. We're all just saying the same ship over each other, all at once. That's so that they notice it. It's called chemistry. This

was really bad. Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about, and we're here to change that. I'm April Din't, the host of the new podcast Navigating Adoption, presented by adopt us Kids. Each episode brings you compelling, real life adoption stories told by

the families that lived them, with commentary from experts. Visit adopt us Kids dot org slash podcast or subscribe to Navigating Adoption presented by adopt Us Kids, brought to you by the U. S. Department of Health, the Human Services Administration for Children and Families, and the Act Council. Oh boy, it could happen here. That's the name of the podcast, And I'm Robert Evans, the guy hose sing the podcast. Who else is with me, is it is it? Garrison? Hello,

good morning, afternoon evening, Garrison Davis. Ye, not yet a doctor Garrison Davis, not yet, soon soon to be Dr Garrison Davis. I don't know if you're going to pass the exam that I know you're gonna have to pass in order to get through this class. But yeah, a little teaser for the future. Speaking of the future, this is a podcast about the ways in which the future is going to be real fucked up and ways in

which maybe we could try to make it less sucked up. Um. And today we have on a guest, Mr Calvin Norman, who posted a thread on our subbredit with the very simple, very unsettling title the woods are Bad um And Calvin, you want to introduce your yourself, your credentials and what you were trying to get across in that threat, because I found it very affecting. Yeah, thanks for rovert. So my name is, like you said, Calvin Norman. I work in forestry. I've worked in forestry for a while now.

I used to be an industrial forester in the Great Lakes region, so Wisconsin, Michigan. Then I worked in the Southeast. I did my masters down there, and now I'm in the mid Atlantic, so I've I've kind of been around the eastern United States. I haven't gotten that west yet. But and I'm a certified forest or candidate certified forest I got like a year left on that, so I been around. I also do wildlife stuff. It's pretty fun.

And yeah, your your thread. What I found interesting that I have a good friend who is in forestry or was in't forestry at least and got their degree and that, and we were we were out hunting in the Cascades a little earlier or a little later last year. Um, and there's this wonderful moment. We've been following a game trail up like this Steve hill side and it was kind of a clearing where we were a clear cut,

but there's deep brush all around. And we get to the top of this thing, we look out and we just see, you know, these these rolling mountains of the Cascades, all covered in this the most this lush, beautiful greenery, all these these pine trees and everything. And my friend says to me, it's going to be totally different in twenty years. Um, it's already a different force than the one I grew up with. And and that that is.

That is kind of the cliffs note. So what what you're You're getting into a lot of detail here, and I'm wondering if you could just kind of like, yeah, start on that explain kind of what's actually happening in our woods, or at least the woods that that you're comfortable talking about here. It's a big yeah. Yeah. This is a big continent and you have a pretty good international base. And I can't speak for the Europeans or the Canadians. There's a whole different ball game over there.

And tropical stuff is just wild, really cool about wild stuff. So mainly talked about the US, mainly Eastern United States. So if you look at the eastern United States, this is a forest that has never existed before in the history of the United States. Um previous you know, prior to like nineteen twenty, our forest was like depending on the source of read, between twenty and chestnut with other species mixed in there. And now we have a mainly

oak dominated forest. We lost all of our chest into the chestnut white um out Western You've got a couple of other things going on, but fire suppression just just changed the forest there. The same here in the East coast and into the Midwest. You know, you used to see a lot more fires going through. I mean, so that was lightning strikes, but no doubt a lot of it was you know, intentionally set by the first nations and people before the people that we think of as

the first nations. And um, you know that has mainly disappeared, except for the southeast, where virus never really stopped being at the ground, which is really cool. But even their species composition has changed dramatically. Um. A lot of what we're seeing, as you know, changes in human management. But there's also a number of invasive species that have changed things, you know, like chestnut blight, emerald ashbore, Asia longhorn beetle is coming in. You know, those are just the past

the understory. And you know, plants is a whole different ballgame. Um, it's it's it's all not great. It's all not great. I was talking with some colleagues and Agricultural Show right before I posted that more talking about how the woods were bad, and we very easily laid out a scenario where we lost the most of our remaining dominantory species. It was not at all hard to do. It took about two minutes, so not great. And then the West

coast things aren't great either. And when you're talking about when you're talking about losing these species and stuff like the chestnut light, where is that coming from? How much of that is sort of as a result of climate change, Like we're having a lot of tree species have trouble here in the West because of how much hotter the

summers are and how much drier things have gotten. So how much how much of what you're saying where you are is because there's been changes to the climate, and how much of it is you know, I guess kind of like globalism, like people bringing in pests and bringing in lights and stuff from other areas and it spreads

like wildfire. Well, I think that we're just starting to see the beginning of climate change, like driving species you know up the mountain, off the mountain out west and here, you know, out of certain regions, you know, as things are getting hotter and drier or is you know, climbates

are becoming more extreme. You know, here in the ne Atlantic we had one of the wettest years on record, I think it's like five or seven, whereas in the Midwest they had droughts but before that we had two years of drought, so you know, it's it's more extreme, and that's that's just starting to take part. But the extinctions and near extinctions have been mainly due to non

native pest um. And that's just most of it right there. Um, just because we haven't really seen the start of climate change, yeah, impacting diseases. So like out west with the mountain piebele, you're seeing more generations of mountain piebele comes through. I was just doing a presentation for some folks in South Dakota, and something like a third of their total forest was impacted by mountain pine people. Jeez. And and what is that like when you actually talk about this, these beetles

coming in. That's the kind of thing that even as we've gotten more comfortable talking about sort of of of the different kind of collapses spawned by climate change, I think that they we tend to imagine more spectacular things, these giants sweeping fires that burned through huge chunks of states, and these huge like environmental calamities. What is this like? What happens when one of these beetles hits a forest?

One of these beetles specs obviously not like a singular beetle, Like what what is actually like how quick is the effect and what kind of comes after that? Like I I know there's sort of a shock wight. It's kind of like a bomb going off. I'm interested in kind of tracing the root of that explosion, if that makes sense. Yeah, So it depends species, its specs. Chest. That plate was really fast and it just seems to have torn through

the chest instative range. So chest that went from Florida to Maine and out west like Tennessee kind of area there um, and it just you know, in like something like fifteen years, the entire species gone. Emerald ashboard has taken a little bit longer. Got here in the eighties, started kind of going off in the mid two thousands, and it's killed a couple of billion trees. So when that hits a small forest, you know, if it's a if it's a pretty you know, beatle that kills pretty fast.

Like Emerald dashboard, it gets into your trees. It starts with one or two, and then within four or five years it's it's in most of them in a forest. And then with Emoral dashboard they're dead and five Hemlock William Delgit is pretty similar. It'll just show up one day in a stand and then the hemlocks are dead within five seven years. Uh. And you know, sometimes you know what's going on, you know, because embal dashboard is

very clear signs. And other times you don't know what's going on because the tree can't be so tall and all of a sudden trees are getting thinner and thinner and then they're dead. Or you have pests like um oak will and that in that trees are dead, you know, in two months, and then it spreads out like a circle.

You know it kind of exactly when you see like a bacteria like growth medium with the bacteria spreading out, that's oak spreads and it's just like trees are dead, you know, two months and they spread out and out and out and scary sometimes. Is there anything that can be I mean it sounds like with with most of these cases, like with what's happened to kind of like the chestnuts, and it's it's too late for a lot of that. Is there anything that can actually be done

to stop this? Like I know we have all these structures in place to try to stop the spread of invasive species, but like once they're in there, it kind of seems like usually we're fucked. Yeah that that okay, Yeah, once you get past, like there's what's called the invasive species establishment curve, so it's an escar and once you get like right, like once it starts take it up, it's like, oh, well, we're done here. So let's let's start thinking about the future. And as you lose more species,

like what do we do here? Or if you're like you know, in the case of the case of actions, like this action is going in a swamp, I have nothing else that's going to grow here, So now I just have an open wetland, like I keep grow any native trees here were done. So the biggest thing is preventioned like don't don't bring invasive species in or non native species in. I was talking to a lady couple

of weeks ago and she hasn't roll or not. She has hemlock William Delgi on a property and she brought in a bio control or she assumed was a bio control from the Japan. It's a beetle and yeah, in this case, it was one that had been tested and failed because it doesn't make it through the winter. But you know, stuff like that, like just just don't do that, you know, I shaped the thought there, but don't with some of these species we have, you know, you know,

like hemlock, the indulgent. We have pesticides that worked really well and that you apply them ordered the tree and so it's like, all right, I treated this tree. This tree is good for seven years. Some of them, like emerald lashboard, you're done. There's just nothing you can do. So yeah, it's a prevention, prevention, and then then you can quarantine. But then you know, it's like where this county is done, so we're gonna just try to make

sure that only this county dies. Jeez, you mentioned a bit earlier like thinking about the future, what does that actually look like when when we hit a situation as we have with a lot of these species, were like, all right, well this ship's we ain't we ain't stopping this. What is what like, what do people like you do next? Like what is the next kind of step for the forests or is it just sort of a smoke them ale you got them kind of thing. Uh, Sometimes it's

smoke them while you got them. So like beach Park disease is going through just roasting beach in the East coast, it's going it's going to the Midwest, and so there it's kind of like, well, you know, if it's in there and your beach or dyeing and take them out, and if they're not, don't there's it's fat. But there's one percent that can make it. So you know, like maybe we find that one percent and last words, nine failed. But I've seen you know, in the past couple of years,

I've seen two that made it. So like if we don't cut them all, maybe someone survive. Theoretically we could then like clone or breed or whatever the trees that live and and a few generations have more of them. Um, if other ship doesn't happen. Yeah, the chestnut project has been going on for the last hundred years, and it looks like I'll take about forty more. It's that's a controversial opinion. Some people say it's a fashioned forty but you know years oh the chestnut foundation. Really it's a

really neat thing. So there were some chestnuts that were found resistant in some planet outside the range of chestnut light, and so the ideas where they slowly started back breeding. So they crossed in Chinese chestnut which is resistant to the blight, which is native to China and East Asia, and so they crossed them in with the remaining chestnut with the hopes of you know, kind of eventually breeding out the Chinese but just maintaining the American chest snut

and just getting that gene in there. And so they started that back in like the thirties and forties when they realized what was happening. Well, you know, today is two and we are still without American chestnut in the forest. There are some backbread versions that are more resistant, but they will still get infected. I've been to a couple of chestnut nurseries where they're doing experiments and it's it's sad because they'll they'll get up and then they'll die.

They'll get up and they'll die, and it's like, oh, there's two, but there are two over there in the corner that made it, and those get you know, onto the next one. But there is some work out of New York Sunny in New York where they altered a chestnut and they put in um. They just they just change the genes. So the version of the genus makes chestnut flight resistant is in that and that's getting approved by the E p A, f d A and U

s d A. Hopefully that gets approved. If that gets approved, we get real, we get real further along because the resistant trees are not the same aim as the American just the resistant trees are more they're shorter and more shrubby, and they don't fulfill the overstory cannot be rolled chest. I used to playing, um, that's that's best case scenario.

Worst case scenarios. You're like, um, butternut which was driven to functional extension at the same time, and we're just nowhere on that produce, working on some stuff, but it's nowhere. They're not in the woods now. How how much of like because I tend to roll my eyes pretty hard when we're talking particular climate change and people are like, well, I think that science is going to save our asses

from this one. We're gonna we're gonna develop some like miraculous carbon capture method and like at the last minute, we'll we'll we'll be able to reverse everything and it'll be fine. I tend to roll my eyes at that.

But this, and maybe I'm not obviously I don't understand this in nearly the level you do is this kind of a thing where if there's hope for a lot of these species and a lot of these biomas, it's going to be and stuff like we figure out how to hack these trees to keep them alive, and like, is that really kind of where we are? I know some very good tree genesis and tree breeders, but I don't think that they have the capabilities of, you know, coming up with trees that are resistant to all of

the various fungi and bugs that are out there. And even if they do, it's you know, you have to get them out into the woods. You have to plant. We have billion makers of forest. You've got to get them out into the woods. You have to have the nurseries to get them out. There's you know, even if you were able to create trees that resistant to all of these pests, it would be impossible. So no, the only the only answer is, uh, don't don't do climate change.

And to the carbon captured perspective, um, the only machine that's going to capture the amount of carbon we need our trees. I do. I do forest carbon stuff, which is a whole different episode. I want to I mean, I'm there, I'm extremely interested in that because obviously, like we've we've been supported by a couple of companies who like one of the things they do to try to be nice is they'll they'll plant trees and stuff, which

is not useless. But also a lot of people think that that's what building a forest is, and like, no, forests are a huge part of the problem with why the West is so flammable. As we chopped down all these trees and we grew back just the trees um to chop them down again, and that turns out to not be resilient at all to anything, because trees do not live on their own ever. Yeah, that's why it's a forest. It's not just exactly right, Yeah, no, it's yeah,

that's that's a planting. There's not the infrastructure to plant our way of climate change. There's not the land. It's just impossible. And so even even if even if they're worthy infrastructure in the lane, that we don't have the time because you know, trees take time to grow. They work on a different time scale than humans do, even

your your shortest lived trees sixty eight years. Yeah, and it is one of those things where I mean, we we had this is what we taught we kind of started this new season which is forever with which is that like there's no there's nothing we can do that will stop us from continuing to face worse and worse because because consequences of climate change, because the carbon is already been admitted, right, you can't just pull it out.

Warming is even if we were to like make very revolutionary changes tomorrow, there's still some degree to which it's going to get worse. Um. But when it comes to like within your field, what like carbon capture using trees and stuff, can you talk to us about like what that actually looks like as opposed to sort of the will plant a tree for every dollar you spend kind of thing. Um, So yeah, I actually I actually can. It's I do a lot of my work about forest

carbon stuff. So yeah, Basically, the idea is to make sure you have the best way to get carbon cy equestration of the force is to have a healthy functioning forest. And that's you know kind of where these pests and climate change are interfering with that. And so you know, to maintain a healthy functioning force in the East Coast, you know, some of these you need to have fire, some of them not. Some of them are too wet

to burn. Uh. And then you know, harvesting needs to take place in some of these some of these don't need to be harvested. Again, we're talking, you know, no means makers of forest here. So we're gonna be incredibly broad and we got to keep invasives out. You need to keep force pest to a minimum, and then make sure that you're managing the forest, you know, as best as it can be managed. And I say managed, this is not something new. Humans have been on the East

Coast since. You know, it depends on the artifacts you want to look at and what archaeologists you want to trust. But like twenty five to twenty thousand years ago, and the last glaciers left the East Coast eighteen thousand years ago, so we had people here before the glaciers were gone. So these forests have never not had humans hands on them and never not been touched and manage by humans. Um. And you know, we gotta make sure we're doing the

best we can. You know, some of that means that we're managing force with what's best for you know, that means managing for us for what's best with the force of mind, nut with best what's best for the end of the quarter, what's best for your bank account. That's hard to do because forces are getting more and more expensive to manage and to you know, manage just an able here in the East Coast, we got to do a lot of fencing. We've got to keep deer out

of force because their populations are so high. It's just ridiculously high, and they've never got to come back down. You know, we have to spray invasive species, we have to pull invasive species. You gotta go through and you've gotta make sure you know you're you're preventing all those kinds of stuff. And so we can take you know, you can if you do a good shelter, would you can like make four dollars out of it, and then you can put all that money back into growing your

next generation of force. So forces is really going from a profit making venture in a lot of cases to like you're barely making money or you're you're like breaking even or losing money. It's it's no longer you know, if you really want to do it great, You're not always making money, which is hard for people to get

their head around. I mean, it's the kind of thing that in a reasonable world, huge amounts of money would be adverted to from other things, like I don't know, thirty five, Um, I feel like you guys could do a lot with one f thirty five worth of cash. I feel like that would solve almost all of our problems. Yeah, because the problems that you see in force we don't cost a lot to fix, but it it costs a lot for a four stonner be that you know, an

agency or person, it costs a lot. Yeah. It's like all of the issues around climate change kind of all circle around, like growth based economics and a lot of the like nothing has a shared cause, but they all have this similar aspect to them where yeah, every every part of them gets worse by the extreme focus on economic growth at all costs and that suffers that that

that makes everything and everyone suffer. So, you know, it would be nice if since we have a government, it would be nice if they do, you know, give more funding towards uh stuff like this type of force management, which I know they do some, but you know, a fraction of it compared to what they give to like

the Pentagon or you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I mean even big you know forestries technically agriculture, but even like you know, like corn and like grow agriculture's yeah, they have the corn as massive subsidies compared to compared to everything else. Yeah, like the NRCS to the Natural Resource this Conservation Service, they do a lot with you know, farm agriculture, and you know, they it's very difficult for forest ollers to get that kind of money into forests.

If we could get you know, that money, it would be a game changer. But we're not there. Uh, there is some change being made in the administration. But yeah, that's like stuff and that doesn't help, doesn't help today, that doesn't still unpassed today. Yeah, you can't unkill trees. Yeah, I guess is there anything that you're optimistic about within your field right now? Like if you I think that would be handy both in terms of like is there any sort of is there a light at the end

of the tunnel? Um, because I'll admit, like, when I think about not having the forests, that's pretty much the most blackpilling thing I can imagine, like for myself, like that's the that's the thing that I have trouble coping with emotionally more than anything else. There's lots of horror all things about what's coming, but that's the one that like really scares me the most. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna lose forests as a thing. They're just were

to become. You know, if without things being done, they become less, they're gonna be fewer of them, and they're gonna become much less diverse and functioning. You know, for a lot of these you know, invasive species, be they plants, you know, especially in basive plants, we have a lot of we know how to control them. I was just writing a thing about controlling wavy basket grasp, wavy leaf basket grass. It's a new invasive species to my area. It's highly controllable, and we know how to do it.

It's just again a question of people, you know, getting out there and money to do it. You know, if we have the people and the money, we can solve that problem. Oh also we stop you know bringing that in the be even better. We you know, actually took you know i PM, right, not i PM, but quarantine and pest management seriously, and you know, people like stopped throwing you know, they look like plant out of the park just because like I don't want to kill it, Like,

let's let it be free. Don't do that. Goldfish, don't don't throw them in the lake. That's why you have huge goldfish coming out of Lake Florida. Don't. Don't just cut pets loose and stuff like that. And if we can get a lot of that under control, would be in a lot better place. Again, I don't think they force of disappearing in the future unmanaged. I think they just become fewer and less diverse and less flunky, and then you lose spaces species based on them, like birds,

you know, wildlife, all that kind of stuff. And also I mean one of the things that also they have to become less accessible, both because there will be less of the man um as things get more fragile, Like how else do you keep some of these invasive species out but keeping people out, which is I think a bad move for a lot of reasons. But I I

don't know. I also don't know, like is it possible to have a global society where there is not just trade but the movement of people on a wide scale and not have this kind of ship crossing right, Like that's when I think about as as someone who's more US and anarchists. When I think about the only things that a border should exist to do, it's it's keep stuff like that out. But I just I don't know how possible that is. Like a lot of this stuff is. I mean, is this the kind of thing that's just

spread by carelessness? Because it kind of seems like it can be spread to by people who think they're taking care Yeah, and both is the answer. There's some very good research out there about the relativeness between global trade and you know, invasive species. But that also you look at like colonialism and colonial societies. There were these things called introductory societies who loung get the name wrong, but

basically they are clubs. It's like, all right, I would like clubs of people like I would like to see this new place that I live in, like the old place. Like the European starling was introduced in New York because you know, one guy, I wanted to see all of the birds of Shakespeare in Christ. Oh, I get even better for one for you. The moth, formerly known as gypsy moths as see as I'm gonna say that word um is now found in America because of this one guy.

I'll put the name in the chat for you so you can say it, because I know how much you love saying French names. This guy is one of the most. Here comes the wave of comme it's a better anti French racism. Oh no, no, yeah, oh, I don't know. It doesn't matter. We still get well. Nobody does about my Italian accent. It's just the French. It's once again, the Italians deserve it as well. Tell us about at end. Yeah. So so this guy, he was a French scientist who who left France. He came to the US for a

little while. He got Massachusetts. He was also also an amateur entomologist, and he was like, oh, you know what I think American needs is I think they need a silk industry. Now they have a nagtive silk off. It doesn't produce good silk. It doesn't breed fast. So he brought in the the matic I gotta do the scientific name because we changed the name on it because the common name is a slur. So we're not doing so la matria disparo. So he brought this this moth in

from Europe. Uh, and he started trying to breathe these two moths which are not related at all. It didn't work, obviously, and then he just kind of, you know, he went he went off to being an astronomer, and he just let these moths go in his backyard and he didn't tell anyone they were there. And then all of a sudden these things escaped, and now they're killing trees, you know, across the eastern United States, and they're in Washington, Oregon. I think they're in DC a little bit too great.

So yeah, that's that's that's that's such a good parable, like a parallel to the invasive species that is French people. That really does just tie up all all aspects of that amazing. It makes me think a lot everything you're saying about cut Zoo, which which is in the I've heard some people say they're getting a handle on it. I don't know how to evaluate that at the moment, but when I was last living down there, it was

just like devouring the entire southeast. Yeah, you can handle it again, if you want to spread it, you can. You can get what's called it chew groove, so a bunch of goats. You can get a handle on it. But again that's money and effort. So it's just a question. So you do get delicious, delicious goat made. Oh my gosh, I tell you what. The people who do goat invasive management,

they haven't made. Would they do goats out to people they get paid for the goats and they also get their goats fence, or would they slaughter them they even pay? You know, that's a good business model as someone with a couple of goats. That does sound like the dream. Yeah. God, they don't work on all the invasive species I do. There are folks, so they probably don't eat those beetles. Huh No. No. They also don't like plants with thorns on them either, and it's very few goats can handle

an entire French person either. So yeah, we can't. We can't trust the goats to solve all these problems for us.

It is nice that they're helping. Um, I don't know, so I try to Are there things either in terms of like it acts people gonna take, or probably more more realistically, organizations people could support that you think are actually helping try to stop as much of the woods from going bad as fast or reverse the some of the stuff we've been talking about today, like how can we try to have some some room for people to do something, if if there is anything people can do

other than check your fucking shoes for beatles when you come back from wherever, burn all of your clothing anytime you leave the state. Okay, that's that's a good start. That's a really good start. Not even to say sometimes it's the county to stop. When you go on a road trip, you stop your car at the county line and you roll it off of a cliff with tanner righte and just let it burn. But don't don't push out of the woods. We've seen that. How not into

the woods? Now into the ocean where everything's fine? Yeah, they say, that's what they say about the ocean great. I don't think I work between the farfield and the stream. I don't do stream or water stuffers's chemistry in there, So I don't know what happens over there. That's fine. I assume everything is great there. It does seem to

be going fine. Yah um. I think the best thing that you could do is in individuals, is don't cut random stuff loose, learn the plants of your area, learn what's around you and what should be there, and like when you see something that shouldn't be there and you know it's in invasive, remove it. We're legally possible. Obviously, don't go into like someone's like arboretum and it's like slight pulling plants out. That'd be real bad, burned down small farms wherever you find. Yeah, oh man, the egg

people will not be happy about that. But yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna say anything. Um So I think, you know, learned plants trees is neat um. And then if you, um, you know, think of if you're thinking about, like, you know, how can you help manage force? You know, if you lots of people either own forces or people who own force and you know, encourage them to get a force management plan or land management plan and get that. And then also if you got a lawn, rip your lawn

out again where possible and use native plants. I do. I do some you know some lawn change stuff. And it's just frustrating the amount of lawns out there. It's like, you know, one of these people. One of these reasons we're losing so many you know, birds and we have fewer birds and bird species because like they can't eat grass. These things eat fruits and insects and seeds which you don't get in grass. So you know, if you don't own a force, that's fine, And I'm I'm a huge

advocate of that. I try to be on the show and people, again, we always get this thing where there are people who will critique when we talk about some of these small scale solutions. Is like, oh, you know, turning your turning your lawn into a hermac culture garden with local species isn't going to like produce enough food to feed your families. Like, no, it's not about that.

If you could get a couple of thousand people to do it, and they convince another couple and like so on and so on and so on, then suddenly, if you're increasing significantly the amount of carbon sequestered by that lawn and you're also making a better habitat for birds and whatnot, that that scales. That is a thing that scales if we got a single nificant number of people with lawns to replace them with something like we're talking about kill kill that grass that almost certainly isn't fucking

native to your area. Plant stuff that is and and and try to reintegrate at least your lawn back into the local ecology. If you got a million Americans to do a version of that, you that's not an insignificant thing. Um. Yeah, And it is something that you can do in a lot of states, there's programs to support it. In my state, there's a program specifically for like changing lawns over and that program is backed up there out of money until

they spent it all already. There's definitely interest there them a thirty five. Let you sell it to whoever, whoever, anyone gets it if they want it, it just goes up on Craigslist, all right, Yeah, put it on Craigslist. Yeah, give it to the highest bidder. Yeah. Um. The other thing you can do is go outside, like support your local land management agency. Most of these, like forest Service and park Service, they depend on money spent by users to go spend money at the forest. The other thing

people can do your fucking boots first though. Oh yeah, definitely that. And don't don't bring shit in. Don't don't bring your like weird thing in, like your weird plant, because you don't want to kill it. Your entirely seed based diet. Yeah, if you don't, If you hunt, great, that supports conservation. If you don't want to hunt, you can still buy duck stamps and these other things that

support wildlife management. In the US, wildlife is funded by the users, So those people who buy guns and AMMO, you buy arch your equipment, and who buy hunting licenses. So if you want to support wildlife, the best thing you can do is buy a hunting license, even if you don't hunt. That's it's kind of countertuitive, but it's

the core of the North American mode of wildlife. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point, and it is one of the It's also one of those areas when we talk about ways in which theoretically there's room to build in roads between left and right in this country, conservation and hunting should be one right. And there are hunters on the right who are actually talking a pretty good, like reasonably about conservation, Like it is an area of shared interest.

Everybody likes wild places, so quote unquote wild We just talked about how none of them are actually wild. They've all existed with human beings for forever. But like, yeah, we like we like the outdoors, yes, the outdoors. Yeah, well, and what you know, people have been like, so I hunt, I have my cross blows right over there. Crossbow. Yeah, you don't have to get a gun. I have been wanting to get a crossbow pilled for a while now.

Oh yeah, I wouldn't mind getting crossbow pilled myself. Shoulder holster for a crossbow. There we go. Oh yeah, that's great. Yeah. No, this is not a super expensive one, but it's pretty much a rifle. Yeah, I mean ballistically at the ranges who use them, there's not any meaningful difference really. Yeah. And if you're a person who you know doesn't like it, doesn't trust yourself around him, uh, they're very safe. So yeah, get get you one of those if you want. It's

a fun time across. I also like it a lot more than my uh my guns because it doesn't yet recoil. But that's enough about that. Well that's great. Um, is there anything else you wanted to get into Calvin before we kind of roll out today? Uh? You touched on forest carbon stuff. That's a whole man a bunch of stuff on that. That's a whole other world. I am interested in talking more about that. But perhaps we should

do have a dedicated entire thing. I mean, we should definitely dedicate an entire thing that it's an incredibly important subject UM and I think there's a lot to say about how different Um indigenous groups have been. Like up in the Northwest in particular, we have a lot of um kind of tribal efforts at stuff like not just with the with the forest, but also with like the coastline and whatnot in rebuilding certain populations along the coast.

In the Midwest, Phenombera does a great job with forest management. I'm actually doing a webinar thing about one of our forest passing we're having done come talk about their management. Well, we invited them. I'm not actually sure if they're gonna do it yet, but the practice we use is based on what they use it there. So yeah, it's it's really cool what various first nations do. Yeah, I just want to plug trees. Yeah, my favorite type of tree probably the redwood. Used to live in Arcade to go

running in them every day. Um, I know that's kind of a cliche answer, what's your what's your favorite tree? This is one behind me here, no one can see my background. It's white oak. You can't make white oaks. So yeah, yeah, that is an impolittant tree. Forest products are like one of the only things that supports supports forest management. So it supports forest so it don't be afraid to use, you know, sustainably managed wood and wood products.

Finding capitalism and drink a shipload of bourbon always a good call. Really, Um, alright, well, Calvin Norman, any any less pluggable to plug? Um? Plants? Uh? If you want to learn plants, that's great. You want to learn about what's going on your native you know your areas around you. There's lots of groups that do that. Your local extension service helps you out with a lot that most of their stuff free. So plug that. Yeah, go outside and

plug that. I don't do twitter good. Yeah, all right, well, go outside, hugg a tree. Calvin Norman, thank you again so much for coming on. Um. If you want to see Calvin's original thread, just type in the woods are bad, uh, and it could happen here read it, or just go to the it could happen here, read it and scroll down a bit you'll find it. Um. That's gonna do it for us today until tomorrow. Go out into the woods. Who out into the woods, wash your fucking boots first.

What grows in the forest trees. Sure you know what else grows in the forest. Our imagination, our sense of wonder, and our family bonds grow too, because when we disconnect from this and connect with this, we reconnect with each other. The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest near you and start exploring. I Discover the Forest dot Org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and

the AD Council. It could happen. Here is the podcast you're listening to with your ears or perhaps other parts of your body if you have, I don't know, some bizarre form of synesthesia that causes you to taste sound. Um, maybe you're tasting us right now. In which case, UM, I'm gonna open up the flavor bouquet by introducing my co host Garrison UM and our guest for today. Why don't you take over now, Garrison, I've done my job great.

That sounds lovely. Yeah, hey, Garrison, here could happen. Here is the podcast. We have a special guest today. UH journalist and researcher W. F. Thomas. Hello, Hello, it's so good to be here on Behind the Woman's Revolution, The Police Insurrection Daily. Thank thank you lovely to have you. UM. A lot of people say Garrison's voice tastes like sorbet by the way, so comment we get a lot, a lot, lot of a lot of a lot of those d M.

S Um, you surprised off that. Um, So we're gonna be talking about something I've wanted to actually bring up myself for a while now, but I just have not put it the work in And now luckily someone else did the actual work, so we know we could just talk about it. We're talking about something called a disclosed TV, um, which is a broad range of things. It's not it's

not just one thing. Uh, And I guess I'll hand it over to the person who did the actual work in terms of like how how would you describe what disclosed TV is? But but like before we get into like the journey of the platform and thing like what like what is it? Yeah? Um, let me start this off by saying it already before the publication of the article been publicly threatened vaguely with legal action from disclosed TV. So that will be largely informing what I say today.

But we do have a lot of receipts Um. You have very scary lawyers here, So I'm I'm I'm excited whatever happens, So feel free to say whatever you want to say. But UM, Disclosed TV markets itself and presents itself as a news aggregator UM operating Twitter, UM, Telegram, gab getter. They have a Facebook as well as well as the main site where they host what one could describe as articles as well. Yeah, and I think Disclosed TV for our purposes despite like they have a very

large Facebook presence UM. But the way that we usually interact with them, and specifically like me and Robert and then other people who are like journalists orge to anti fascist researchers, usually we interact with Disclosed TV on Telegram or through Twitter, um, Twitter, through like it's how they like break a lot of current events in like a where like you know, a lot of like political figures talk about them is is Twitter, UM, and then Telegram

is where they really disseminate these out into more obscure groups. And maybe they change their wording because they know the audience is a little bit different and they've been a

vector of information for a while. Really really with the protests, they kind of picked up a lot of there was they were everywhere in terms of like saying specific things, not doing sourcing UM and just having like basically they are a place where they kind of create what then they try to create what the news is because of how isolated they are from the sources that they actually pull info from, and they're very they're very interested in kind of crafting their own version of events UM, which

appeals to people across the spectrum. Like, they don't just market towards the far right wing. Sometimes they frame things to kind of attract of a variety of people on like the under the extremist banner, let's say. Um, So, you know, you don't just see them in far right circles. You see Disclose pop up in a lot of places because of the way they frame news and breaking events. UM. But they didn't always start out like this. This isn't what they always were. They weren't always this kind of

content aggregator that creates their version of news. UM and Thomas did more research into what they were before, which I actually had not done that research yet. UM. So yeah, let's uh, let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah. So I'm gonna start off with talking about how I first heard about Disclose. UM. So I was living in Germany when the pandemic hit um and got COVID first wave in Germany in the moor march Um. Luckily I

was totally asymptomatic. But I was kind of stranded in Germany for a couple of weeks, um and how to isolate in a vacation rental. And the Bavarian man who owned it just kept coming and talking to me. And I would tell him, Hey, it's probably not the best idea for you to be coming by and chatting with me all the time. And no, he got into talking,

and we're talking in German. He got we got into talking about the pandemic, what he thought about it, and he started talking about how he thought, oh, the government's making this seem way worse than it is. You know, the deep state, if you know anything about that, and he and he said deep state in English. Um. And I was familiar with German farright currents at that time, UM, but I had never encountered a pilled German dude. And that's when I realized this is gonna be a fucking problem.

Yeah yeah, And and it lo and behold, it has continued to be a problem. So as I got back to the U S and and the other thing when I was in Germany is the first time I taught I encountered telegram. UM when a German I knew said, hey, I I just don't trust WhatsApp because it's own by Facebook. Why don't you download Telegram In Q thousand nineteen, I think, um, and and it was pretty innocuous to me at the time. I didn't realize this would become a problem. Yeah, fast forward, UM.

I was working on my master's project, which UM you can talk about more later on because it's kind of besides the point, UM if you don't want to hear about it, but looking at Telegram as the cultic milieu UM, using Colin Campbell's framework of the cultic milieu UM to understand specifically how Q and on spread in Germany and how Q and on interacted with these native underlying conspiracy

narratives within Germany. UM. Because Telegram is already massively popular in Germany before after j six, I think of the band wave came down and there was much more migration to the platform. So you know, I did the social network analysis looking at the conspirat German conspiracy is seen on Telegram, and one of the biggest notes that came up and I was looking at a number of times shared into other groups or channels was disclosed TV. UM.

And that's the first time I came into it. I look through it and realized, okay, they there is an editorial stance within this, UM, and that editorial stance largely attracts conspiracists and far right extremists to this coverage into you know, this is widely shared among conspiracists and far right extremists. UM. Fast forward. UM. I'm on Twitter, as many of us are, unfortunately, UM, and I saw disclosed TV just popping up everywhere, UM, even from people who

who I would think should know better. Yeah, absolutely, are you know, big extremism researchers and journalists UM shared it. I remember there one specific one that really came across my feed UM. Disclosed had had taken a video from like the Blaze, Glennbex whatever about the firefighters who were quitting over vaccine mandate or something and had all of their boots or whatever. And I saw, yeah, lots of

people sharing that as well. UM. And eventually I got tired of saying, hey, they should have suspect, don't share it, UM, and decided to write an article about it, so I could just send my article to people and it's really interesting what I found. Um. Disclosed tv started off in the mid two thousand's as just this forum for UFOs, paranormal stuff, cryptids, big Foot sightings, and existed in largely

the same format until two thousand and twenty one. Um, there were some shifts in in the way the site presented itself. UM it was. It started off as a member loggin where members could write articles that were largely long forum forum posts and then have people comment on them and reply. Um. And at one point, Disclosed made the jump to functioning as a news aggregator while including an editorial spin on that and including some of their own articles. Do you want me to get more into

that now? Yeah? Because yeah, because like the shift was was it wasn't like immediate as well, right, Like they were starting to kind of present themselves in more of a news gathering way, you know, around the late s of course, during this became a big thing in terms

of their social media presence. Um, they were trying to present themselves as like a news aggregator, right, but they still operated that, but they still operated the forum on their site throughout most of that time, and it's only until recently where they shut that forum down UM, which was you know, full of full of all kinds of conspiratorial nonsense. It's very easy to see past for most people.

Uh you know, secret Arctic Ship, which is yeah, it's always that's usually yeah, even in to get stuff like watch this s j W get wrecked, which which is not a quotation, but just that kind of vibe, that style of content. Yeah, going from the forum operating then with they you know, their social media accounts, to the shift this more of like presenting as a news website. Talk about that and the potential effects that we see this having on both like the social media sites and

just the overall trend of news aggregation in general. I guess. Yeah. So the first big shift that I found UM was the creation of their telegram channel, which is in January one actually, so this is relatively more recently shift that happened UM, and they operated their telegram as a UM as more in this traditional news aggregator since and so that's how they really blew up on Telegram. At some point they deleted all of their old tweets UM and

started operating their Twitter in a similar manner. It was after they created this telegram channel UM in September. Actually overnight on septemb they completely re rebranded the site. They took out all the user forums UM. They included backdated articles to a year prior UM and looking looking through archives of it, there was a note saying something along the lines of we have found so much growth on

social media. Are growing Telegram channel, are growing Twitter account UM, and something to the effect of we we are changing our strategy and going about this a different way UM. And you can if you were into the forum, you can join our discord UM which is funked and I'll get I'll get into that later UM. And yeah, looking it was really interesting too because looking at these backdated

articles UM, they included very obviously plagiarized content. UM. They had I believe it's it's all in the article, but they had four journalists UM names attached with the article using um AI generated images for their pictures. UM. And the especially the articles that they themselves pulp wished. UM. We're very focused on UFOs, paranormal paranormal phenomenon UM, as well as content that could cause skepticism within an audience

UM about vaccines, and lockdowns. And I do not know the intent of U their editorial board, and so I cannot speak on that, but of course it generated this effect. Yes, that is they found a way of creating content which develops a very specific audience, which grew their numbers, which made them, you know what one could assume would make them want to make more of that content, because that makes more numbers than they can UM use that to

grow their platform. UM. Yeah, specifically leading up like after after January UM ramping up when of the vaccines were coming more and more common in the States and that across the world. UM, they have seen a pretty significant growth and have changed their platform accordingly exactly. UM. So we began looking into who the who the fun owns this,

what's going on with this UM. Like all German companies UM, and it is based in Germany, there's a requirement by law to include an imprint or an impress them that includes an address UM contact information for the site UM there in the company that owns it UM, a company called Future Bites operates disclosed tv UM, which describes itself as a private equity firm and media group. UM and looking into the ownership behind Future Bites is a man by the name of Uva Brown who has a pretty

interesting backstory. He's hosted, He's made numerous web hosting sites. UM. I believe he created some dating sites as well, but but my research was not conclusive, so that's a maybe. UM. But eventually he sold. He had his most success when he sold one of his web hosting sites to go Daddy for a lot of money. And along the way, in his own as he described, booked a flight on virgin to go into space and see for himself if the earth, if the Earth was flat. Oh my god,

awesome cool that that, this is great, thank you. So this this is who we're dealing with. Um. Sweet. And the thing about Disclosed being based in Germany, UM, that that becomes an issue, UM, is that Germany has a very different h look at free speech than in the US. UM. For example, even online displaying swastikas UM and denying the Holocaust is legal and is a prosecutable crime that can

get you jail time. UM. So as we explored as I mostly and UM, there's additional reporting from Berny Piper and I'll talk a bit more about that later explored the discord and their Telegram. We realized, Hum, it seems to be a lot of Nazis here, and by which when I say seems to be a lot of Nazis, I mean people with swastikas in their profile builds UM with you know names, referencing the Holocaust with the whispers

parentheses um and saying denying that the hologast happened. Um. And also sharing the neo Nazi, famous neo Nazi, infamous neo Nazi propaganda film Europa The Last Battle UM, which was shared by prominent q and on influencer ghost Ezra. Yeah. I know. Um. Oh man, this this came up a

few days ago. One of the one of the channels that me and someone else have been watching, uh forwarded me being that that that film being shared at the it was it was, it was that the the Free Oregon Telegram channel was sharing links to that and I wonder I would I would like to track back where that link came from. Um. Yeah. Not not great seeing that film circulate more and more, especially among like you know, the Free Oregan Telegram channels, you know, like anti mask,

Anti backs, Anti lockdown channel. Yeah, and seeing the percoloration of that type of content. Yeah, so in preparing for this article, UM, with the help of of the Logically editorial team, I'm a freelancer UM. Their current head of content, Ernie piper Um, sent an email basically asking, hey, what's going on. You all seem to have a Nazi problem

that's kind of borderline illegal in Germany. UM, to which for a while, this for for about twenty four hours as closed, just went totally quiet and didn't post UM and then came out with a post specifically targeting Ernie Um by name and with a picture of him and linking to some of his old reporting work as well, UM saying yes, Uva Brown owns this. He got his

money from go daddy. You know, we value free speech and we condemn hatred whatnot, and and saying, oh, our telegram we have a tell there's a telegram group, but we have these rules in it and h okay, yeah, we we had to shut down the discord that got a little bit out of hand. We admit that, you know, they had people denying the Holocaust with swastika icons in their discord that they didn't seem to care too much

about until someone pointed it out. UM. And you know there's there was additionally very explicit neo Nazi content in their telegram channel as well, with the excuse oh well we're glowing growing form. We we can't moderate everything. Is well they have. They just crossed four hundred thousand in their telegram channel and I think about thirty thousand and

their telegram group, um, which is frankly bullshit. Yeah that is if if my personal opinion is that if you cannot don't have the resources to moderate this space, you probably shouldn't space the space. Um. And and additionally confirming oh, okay, we we when we made our new version of the site. Yes, we backdated some articles from previous user generated content that we you know, didn't vet properly. We're trying to fix

that now. They removed some of those articles, um. And that yeah, we none of the people who who are the authors of our articles are real people and they're all pen names. Um. You know. They also have or at least had a tab on their website that said right for us and looking for people to send them things and saying you know, well we will disclose your bio and link to all your social media if you write a story for us. And they're there was zero

of that happening as well. So do you think that, I know, like on the rules for their telegram they have the no Nazi stuff rule. Um. Do you think they're actually trying to discourage that because they're scared of legal stuff or is that just presentorary? And they I guess you know, this is just going into speculations. So I think this might be more a question for even Robert Um in terms of, yeah, like is the anti

Nazi stuff presentorary? And because it does seem to be a lot of their user base is fostering that type of thing or is you know being moved over from other similar channels, um? Because yeah, like a lot of like the amount that we see disclose, like you know, intercept with channels like you know, the Rise above Him channel UM, and a whole bunch of like eco fascist channels, and a whole bunch of channels you know, on a like a broad range of like actual like fascist topics,

like people who are like into fascist theory. Um. It's quite high that like the amount that disclosed shows up. UM. And I don't know, like you could look at all their stuff saying I mean like yeah, on their rule page saying no Nazi bullshit. Um but then if you spend any amount of time looking at where they're posts are forwarded, it's almost primarily people who are self describe

themselves as fascists. Um So I mean, yeah, it's hard to or Donald J. Trump Jr. Yes, yes, it expands out into a lot of you know, just like you know, American journalists suits study extremism could also share discloses stuff on Twitter, right, that is part of their thing is making that and you know that that does strengthen them

because it gives them that legitimacy. So then when people point out that they have Nazi problem, like, no, that's not us, that's just some of our users who are trolling or you know whatever whatever bullshit they want to say. Um So, I guess, like how I guess the real way to frame this is like how often have you seen Nazi stuff associated with the disclose with the disclosed

TV brand? Because that's the one thing we actually can measure, right, we can't measure their intentions, but we can measure how often this stuff happens. Yeah, I mean that's always like the best way to measure that kind of thing, rather than just sort of like making the allegation listing like we find it in this many channels, we see it

shared in these areas. It's being discussed by these people and like like that that's I think always kind of how you actually build these these sort of networks is by looking at what is actually spreading where like that's that it is thankfully something that you can measure pretty objectively, and like they are fostering it with the amount of stuff they talk about like George Soros and you know,

the amount of stuff that they like. The way they frame breaking news is has that editorial bent where it's very clear that it's getting pushed in a specific direction, like there's that is that is a thing that you can observe by reading the type of narrow of their weaving via how they report information. Yeah, the the topics that they choose to cover, our topics that resonate very

deeply with conspiracist and with far extremist communities. Um. If I had to speculate, UM, I will say at least since the article has come out, Um, they've done a better job of moderating their telegram channel at least for now.

So good job disclosed TV. No one you can't find links to Europe with the last battle there anymore, you can still find you can still find very rampant homophobia slurs um because you know they didn't they clearly auto blocked some words, but people can shorten them or use different spellings for those words to still be used in

the channel. Um. There's still anti semitic um coded anti Semitic references as well, UM responding to something saying oive a for example, which is something that tends to be used by a lot of neo Nazis and anti Semites. Yeah, I mean even and if you do any amount of research on Telegram, you will you will find forward links, forwarded links to this channel all everywhere, like if it's it is, it is so massive, the footprint that they have currently in the in like the the cycle of

of forwarding posts specifically on telegram. UM. And yeah, and they're they're getting a lot of traction on it because they have stuff framed in a way that's really easy for them to have those stuff like line up with the communities that promote those types of worldviews um and promote the you know, the narratives that they want to foster. So let's see, let's have another quick break, and then let's maybe talk about your big master's project, which is

really interesting. Yeah, can I can? I? Can? I do it? Yeah? I do this. You know. You know what isn't telegram? Uh? Literally these ads unless we get an ad by telegram, which we are primarily sponsored by the duo Brothers. Um, but that's for a separate project. My favorite ad is the is the one where it's the kid playing and they find a gun. Oh yeah, that's my favorite. And well we are thanks to great job. Great We hope everybody enjoyed that kid finding a gun of kid firing it. Yeah.

So there's one of my favorite tweets recently was like somebody, it was somebody like clipped a screen grab a news article that was like a toddler has shot someone every day in the United States for the last three years, and somebody quote tweeted and said, somebody fucking stop him.

It's very good. Um. The last thing I want to talk about is just kind of why news aggregators are bad in the first place, and examples of which we've seen the past few years, and how they contribute to dis information specifically, and how they don't do sourcing for any claims and they try to make themselves a primary source even though they're not. UM and then also would

love to talk about your very fancy project. So yeah, we saw a lot of news aggregators that like during the protest, specifically that that spawned and killed many a news aggregator account um, which did not help things very much. UM. And this is this is an issue that strikes across the political spectrum. Yes, I mean one of the biggest instances of that would be an account called and on cat right. That was the yeah um who you know marketed themselves towards the left wing. UM. And again I

don't know what their intentionality was. They may have had their heart in the right place. I have no idea, UM, and I'm not going to speculate on that right now. But the effect that they caused was damaging to how information is disseminated, specifically in high stress events UM. You know, like for instance, the written house shooting, you know, like

stuff like that. Uh, like the big accounts, the demos around that before that, yeah, before that, yes, yeah, like and the in fostering that very fast paced unverified information circulation UM that gets you know a lot of retweets it gets it gets a lot of eyeballs on it, but but it's hard. It makes it very hard to backtrack claims because they do not want to link to other accounts, because they're mostly interested in growing their own account.

Um so, and I will say disclose has gotten better about linking to the sources, even if the title and the tweet don't necessarily match what is in the story they link to. Yeah, at least someone could take a

different interpretation from the two. Yes. So, just like you know, news aggregation and the way intersects with disinformation and misinformation not just a problem for the far right, not just a problem for the right wing, not just a problem for liberals, not just problem for leftist This is the thing that anyone, anyone can really grasp on to um And some of it's accidental, some of it's intentional, Right, there's some some people might just do this kind of mindlessly,

and some people may, you know, do this aggregation with a very specific intent in mind. So just be very careful whenever you have an account that always leads with all caps like breaking like news. Like if if you have an account that always does that, maybe maybe maybe don't take that account super seriously all the time. Maybe you should uh find other sources of info that don't always start the tweets with breaking news and all caps or advice to people if they do want something like that,

find an actual news source. Yeah, there's plenty of valid criticism them to be made against, you know, these mainstream media M s M. Centrist stuff from from you know, even from the left. There's there's criticism. Um, but you have to find some way of finding your own meaning and understanding of what is going on in the world

around you. I think a CNN Reuters. Yeah, And on that point, I think that is part of why I think Disclosed can succeed and or like what they did can succeed, even like when I see stuff shared on the left, even by like anarchists, because it is a not mainstream media news source, the way they can frame things of sometimes rarely will match up with like an actual anarchists views and they're like, yeah, I'm gonna share it from this thing because it does feel like an

underground you know source. It doesn't. It doesn't. It's not you're not sharing a CNN article, so you feel better because instead you're sharing something that is not in the mainstream. So like I get that, I get that pull to not something that is ingenuous reading of a CNN article instead, Yeah, but instead of you're you know, it's not actually better. It's just marketing. They're just tricking you via esthetics and branding,

and that's all that it is. Right, So maybe you should learn learn to see past the marketing and branding of those types of things and look at the actual content of what's being shared. What is the university project

thing that has been taking up a lot of your time? Yeah, and um, so you're back in the US, and I got interested, um, especially in looking at the spread of Q and on in Germany, and that you led me down this research path, um, and brought me especially to telegram um again before it was largely used in in right wing circles in the US. Will the Nazis have

have pretty regularly in the US and on telegram as well. Um. But this led me to look at this and and um especially to to look at program the context of as I mentioned, Colin Campbell's concept of the cultic bilieu, um, which I don't know if y'all have talked about that on this we have one behind the Okay, but yeah, to give a quick summary, is is the concept that there is this space and when Colin Campbell wrote that,

it was in I believe the seventies. So it was a physical space where people go to find these rejected narratives, you know, reject the idea of rejected knowledge, and they go to seek this kind of knowledge and and and these things. UM. So he's talking about things like UFO conferences or or meet ups, or or alternative bookstores, or perhaps maybe signing up at an institute to get a degree in metaphysics. Yeah, as what a weirdly specific example gears. Yeah, sorry,

does red the red of thought? Yeah? Anyway, how's that going, by the way, Garrison, it's going good, good. Yeah. And and what you find is is people can very easily move between ideologies UM. And as they move between ideologies, concepts,

specific schools, they cross pollinate these schools UM. And this is how you get these kind of highly syncretic movements like Q and on UM, like the modern conspiracy movement, which is incredibly syncretic, and UM some of the other really bad ones that are out there as well that combine these different views. UM. Specifically, when you start, when you start combining this type of like cultural mysticism with politics often you can have very volatile results. Yes, exactly,

can you think of any examples? I mean, in some ways the modern eco fascist movement is built on a lot of this type of stuff, so that that would

be the easiest, That would be the easiest. The I think that the syncretism of because I think a lot of people have been surprised to see like you know, kind of like natural medicine and and what not subcultures and eight like alien subcultures kind of colliding with Q and on and and these like more like far right neo Nazi type groups, and the fact that there are all of these things that were associated for years kind of more with the left have been increasingly um pulled

into this this sort of um weather system of conspiratorial thinking has been surprising to a lot of people who don't understand this stuff. But it makes total sense if you if you have been paying attention to the scholarship on on what is actually like how cults sort of form like it's it's it's um. It's like a weather pattern that's been building for quite a while. There's a gravity to it that sucks um everything in together and at all kind of it's as you said, syncretic um.

It's not to get into horseshoe through, but this is even how you get some of that cross over, right. Yes, yeah, that was that was That was what I was just going to mention. Is that even a lot of like the left wing authors or you know, post left wing authors who got into this like cultural mysticism. Um. You see their texts now getting shared by like like open fascists.

Even though these authors were anti fascist, um, they are able to still pick and choose what parts they're writing to appropriate because some of it can kind of synchronize

them at from opposite ends a very long time. Like if you we've we talked about in our Gabriel the Nunzio episodes Fume, which was this kind of like we're a large chunk of like the fascist intellectual movement got started um in the post World War One period, but also there were like a ton of anarchists and a lot of like left wing um like thought leaders and whatnot.

We're kind of all it was again kind of there there was this kind of like gravity center that pulled everything in and it all started churning together and um yeah, we're we're we're we're seeing that happen now. Um, and it sucks. That's that's that's great. To jump back to Cample. That's one of those examples of those physical space of the call and that call Campbell was talking about, right, Um, where it's it's any place that ideas that are rejected

by you know, the orthodox kind of the establishment. There is overlap. There is not necessarily ideological overlap, but there is an interplay between them as people move between them and as these ideas come into collision with one another. Um and with the Internet, right, whole different fucking ball game. Um yeah, because that space is now everywhere exactly and and telegram specifically has these specific affordances that make it

ideal for having this soup of bullshit on it as well. Um, it's it's additionally one of and this may be changing. There's a lot of discussion going on about this, especially within the German government, who could actually they already have a law that they could use to say, hey, you can't have Nazis on you can't have this Nazi ship

in telegram. Um. But telegram is one of these last places where where things are largely allowed to spread without any kind of interruption, right, um, which I do think you know you look at Telegram is used in in um, the Hong Kong uprising as well, it was used for it was used in the George Yeah, that George Floyd uprising as well. Um, and it's the same things that people too at time is fake, um, bolish line of your time. Um, but shooting your clock, shoot the fucking clock.

But okay, let's get back to the topic. Yeah, but but but but drumming back into this Telegram markets itself, is this very secure platform. It's probably not right. It does have it's certainly not absolutely not. It does have it does have encrypted chats, but that's only for one to one messaging between people. And even then you need to go and make you sure that security settings right. And again I I don't fully trust that. Yeah, I

don't fully try. I mean signal is about barely trust signal. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I trust conversations. When everyone has put their phone inside a Faraday bag in a house and then we walked two miles into we walked two miles into the woods, then you can have a conversation. Yeah, um, but tell grand market itself is a very secure app, right UM, which is which is largely marketing. You know, it's it's appeal is that it's not what's app, it's not owned

by Facebook. It's probably worth acknowledging that for because it's also very popular with a lot of people in UM you know, parts of the Global South and countries with authoritarian governments, and it is has been used for a lot of organizing. It can be more secure and all more secure but also more able than what than any

other tool people have access to. I mean in Syria it's like it's again extremely and for like neighbors, like neighborhoods and towns will have like Telegram groups for this little village where they a lot of stuff gets done over Telegram in places like that, and telegram sits in this interesting space between social media. UM. It's not a full on social media site, but it's also not just a messaging Applegram. It's kind of to categorize. It is

an interesting sort of like in between type thing. Yeah, because you can have essentially unlimited I think the number is in the hundreds of thousands for how many people can join a group message UM on Telegram. And you also have these one way messaging thing called channels where where one person or group of people can send out messages that appear alongside everyone else's message feed as well. UM, and that can you can also enable comments on that UM,

which I'll get into and a second UM. But but it's a great way to share information as well. What I was specifically looking at is the forwarding of messages, because you you can forward a message from this one channel into whatever group chat you're in, and it links back to that channel. And I was interested in saying, how far you know, what connections can we make from this?

What kind of zigzagging can we find? UM enhancer is sucking a lot UM where where someone may may use telegram for for example, a neighborhood group message right, and then someone forwards a messages a message for this channel UM or for this other group message UM where they talk about, oh, here's kind of help practices to use, and then you get into the pseudo science of things crossing into further messages from what's forward forward groups and

channels from what's forwarded into that group and channel, and so on so on until you get to the neo nazis. Eventually, UM and it's also it is it is a concerted effort on the part of people pushing their ideology, who will go in the comments of these giant channels and say, hey, check out my channel. Um, what's not a real one? You know Ariyan cooking, which is probably a channel, but it probably is. Yeah, great job checking. Sorry, but check out check out, check out, check out this or whatever.

And and especially when q and on moved on, a lot of promoters. Um, there there was organized groups of of Internet neo Nazis going on and trying to pill boomers into neo Nazism. And there because of the because of the mesh like network of Telegram, they try to make those meshes connect via dissemination. Right you can. You know, people who are dedicated to these more esoteric groups can join more regular like Marga groups or qut on groups and start slowly bringing links to the start doing links

and forwarding to the more extreme channels. Um and eventually yeah, that does that does work. It can be a slow, careful process um or it can be very fast and like bombastic. And it'll depending on the person. One of them will latch onto one one to watch onto the other. Yeah. And and before the article came out. UM, what I did see was the specific thing of accounts that I would associate or or believe to be neo Nazi UM encouraging people to join their groups and channels UM in

the in the telegram group message as well. And I cannot speak to what that looks like right now after the article has come out, and I've been trying to take a break from Telegram for my day to day life, UM and focus on reading actual books. So but yeah, that is I can always tell when one of us has been spending time on Telegram, because the things we consider jokes get much worse. Yeah, you remember when I found that playlist of Blinks covers. It was what there

was like a hundred of them something. Yeah, you always find you could, you could find the most fucked up stuff. A. Don't don't do it. Don't don't scroll untilolutely do not. You're not going to get this isn't like coveting the state. You don't even like it's it's not even it's not worth it, like there's no sacred novit like knowledge that we're hiding. It's just it's it's just kind of sucks, like it just like it just to feel bad. Yeah, it just makes you feel worse about life and yourself

and the people around you. So the scope for your master's project what it's kind of the what's the what's the deal with like tying these things together? I guess yeah. Yeah. So so using this social network analysis to argue that the telegram does function as this cultake milieu, um, which yeah, it seems seems to be, which seems to be the case. Yeah, um, you know, and the question gets into what is the responsibility the platform? Right? Um? Because I fully believe there

should be something at least similar to this. It has been used for you know, purposes the line with all politics in which I would call good and needed. Um. However, they've also allowed this fucking awful ecosystem to spread. It's it's interesting to see when Telegram has had to step in and they you know, they have pulled down some ices, accounts and channels. Um. And and they have down when I was in um Al Hall, which is that the

camp where all the ISIS prisoners were in Syria. Like while Jake and I were in the camp, we could see on telegram like ISIS supporters and al hole talking about stabbing guards like in real time. It was not particularly Uh, they've done like a lot. There's less of it than there used to be, but it is still not hard to find iss on telegram. Yeah, and they they've taken down a few amounts of neo Nazi channels. Um.

It's it's funny because oh God, maybe cut this. But they've taken on some of the new channels when they've shared ice as ship for example. Yeah, yeah, I think we're we've we're familiar with that line of thing. That's

something we've mentioned before. Okay. There has been pressure from from the play store and Google as well, or the play store from Google and and the app store Apples, app store from Apple to say we we aren't going to carry the app if you don't do just a tiny bit better essentially um which which which also it exists as a web client, um both as as a web client and as a desktop app as well. UM.

But that would you know, limits some of it. Um. So. So this has become largely discussed in the German in the German Parliament because there's a new um, there's a new government in Germany, and and there is this history of Germany kind of is the lead for doing things about this digital content, especially within the EU. And and as I mentioned, there's already law call Adopt Enforcement Act that requires platforms to take down content in Germany. Um,

they could be implemented on telegram as well. There's already a law. Yeah. I mean, this is like the thing why you know what I watch happen lots is you know, these channels will get shut down and they'll make a new one, and it will shut down that one and make a new one. Right. It's this You see this with like discord servers, telegram channels. It is kind of this endless cycle, um. And seeking an end to the cycle.

It's always not as easy as what one would hope, um, because of the cyclical nature of building these platforms and connections and how the people who run these you know, intersect and specifically with with telegrams really easy because the channel gets shut down, you're still part of twelve of the channels, and odds are one of those channels is going to afford you the link to the new channel

that was that was lost. Uh. Yeah, And this is the thing you see where they send lists of channels within within extremest groups and channels they will send out lists of here's other groups and channels to check out as well. Yeah, but I mean I would. So that's something that's you know, hard for regular people to actually do.

But something I think that people who do not own these platforms nor lawmakers can't think about is particularly the the the cultic milieu that does you know, go past regular left right divisions in terms of politics and how you know, symbol like symbology, um and stuff that was you know initially you know, perhaps more anarchist or or left wing is being used by people on the right, and some people are really confused by that, and there is ways to there is ways to understand it like

it is. It does. I am very frustrated when I look at you know, people online who don't understand why Nazis can use ted K and right, it's like, yeah, like it's it's not it's it's not it's not not not what it's not not really about Ted K actually wrote it's more than the symbolic meme of ted K. And trying to you know, get that, get that line of thinking across is not the easiest thing, because sometimes it will go in the other direction and be like, oh ted K is a Nazi, which isn't accurate either,

Like that's that's not also the most accurate thing to say, So it's it's the cultivalu framework of being. Yeah, sometimes these symbols can cross over from one thing to another, and sometimes the action can be the same. You know, both anarchists and like insurrectionary fascists both want to like attack like industrialization and attack points of industry, right, but maybe their ideologies are slightly different, sometimes in specific ways.

So it's always a tricky thing to kind of navigate. Um. So I think in terms of you know, people should think about what symbols they promote, uh like publicly and stuff is a good thing, and think about news aggregation and how to maybe not not just share something because it's countercultural, trying to figure out what other what other types of narrative the sources spreading UMO journalist support the work of real journalist because a bunch of kick asks

people out there, um who are doing awesome research and work. So I think that kind of wraps up the scope of what I want to talk about around disclose specifically because I mean discloses a thing, but it's also like it's good as just like an example to like this overly this broader like phenomenon. I think, um, because like Disclose won't be here forever, hopefully, like you know, hopefully in a few years. It's something that we can just

like look back on and laugh about. Um. But it's you know, it's still a good signifier for a phenomenon that happens. And the phenomenon even even if Disclose goes away, the phenomenon is still going to stay, um, And it's important to point it out when you see whatever the next version of this is. So. And I'll also say

that the culticnalu isn't necessarily a bad thing. Right. This is you know, where where the stuff that is rejected by the Orthodox goes and clearly eliminating right, any kind of culticnal you just means everything is exactly the fucking same and falls in line with or thoughts belief which I strongly disagree with as well. No, there's there is a way to be countercultural without being a conspiratorial fascist.

I would say that most responsibility in which you were consuming and sharing, Yes, And I would say like most people who are actually counterculture are yeah, like actual punk is is that you know, once you're enforcing traditional hierarchical viewpoints that that ain't punk. That is uh, that's playing into what the status quo was. That isn't that isn't revolutionary.

Pistols would disagree with you, aren't they all? Yeah? But I think we can all agree that having living members of the sex Pistols was a mistake, and I would I prefer Alana Wachowski's version of punk to theirs anyway. So hey, who cares? UM? So thank you for your work, Thomas Um. I recommend people reach your article, UM, which you can do by googling disclosed TV. Now it will be for me. It's the second result that pops up. So that's gool um. Send it to all your friends

and mutuals who are sharing disclosed TV. UM. You can find it on logically dot Ai is the website and the full title of the article is Disclosed TV Conspiracy Forum turned disinformation Factory. Thank you, Thank you for that. UM. Do you want to direct people to your Twitter account or do you want to be a ghost that fades away in their memory? Uh? Just don't be fucking weird. You can find me on Twitter at w underscore Underscore Thomas god Damna christ be weird. All right, I guess

I'm keeping my account Lockford. Um. Yeah. I also want to shout out UM some of the local mutual aid or one of the local mutual A groups in the town where I live or in the area where I lives. The Atlanta Justice Alliance. Their cash app is cash symbol a t L mutual fund and their VENMO is a t L mutual fund. They're helping out UM they've done weekly UM weekly provided food and resources for people on the house, people living in downtown Atlanta. UM and are

a great group. And then also people want to give more money to things, shout out Atlanta Solidary Fund who have helped many of my friends get out of jail after they were arrested in protests. And also you can hire me, yes if you researchers, Yes you can. You can't. You can't hire Thomas if you want. I mean, I've I've I've I've known Thomas for a bit. UM. They do really good work. UM Yeah, they're very They're very

They're in my experience, they're very careful researcher. They will not say things without thinking about them a lot first, which is always great in the researcher, or at least not publicly send them money and off putting comments. An even mix of money and really off putting Twitter comments. One more shout out to my one more shout out to my friends at Terrorism Bad Pod, which you should listen too, is on Twitter. Terrorism Bad Pod. Well, that

doesn't for us today. If you, for some reason are on social media and you want to follow us, you can follow us that cool Zoned Media or hassolutely don't do or happen here pod um. You can follow Robert Evans at I write okay, send him weird do not do that, and you can send me weird messages at creepo time all right, se Garrison pictures of salads that you make and keep keep doing that for like five or six years to the point that it actually becomes funny.

Because it's going to take a while. I'm just happy that people will stop sending meal porn. So that's honestly, that's a wind that one's on you though. Alright, good finde for funny. Hey, we'll be 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 or 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

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