It Could Happen Here Weekly 42

I love I love that really, thank you. You're Robert Evans. We also have Christopher Long, Garrison Davis, and we have Andrew here with us. We'll be leading this episode. Hi Andrew, Hello, Hello everyone. Hell is the with in Portland? It is cold. Everywhere else in the continentally United States, it is a boiling hell storm. Actually today today, today it's only eighty four. But yeah, we we have three days where it's merely in the eighties and then it goes back to being

like again. It's very very excited your temperature measurements. But angeles, it's lovely today. We're lovely for the next couple of days and then we'll be burning sixty six. It's gonna be perfect here forever. Climate change is over in Northern Oregon. I have declared it, Well have you declared it? It must be true exactly. So today, once I have a bit of a discussion, an open discussion about my favorite

kind of discourse, and that is dead discourse. I wanted to talk about discussion code that people have been having a couple of weeks ago about restaurants, a restaurant discourse, this whole idea that people heard about five minutes ago and got super rare lap over and sparked to a bunch of like drama, because that's what social media and centervizes.

But I figured, you know, we could have a nice roundtable discussionaire about code and code restaurant abolition, and show our thoughts on the ideas presented in the zine that inspired it for those those who read it, Abolish Restaurants by prola in Food. But first of all, I wanted to share it about my experience in the food industry.

It was quite brief, and by brief, I mean like four days I started working at this this winery slash cafe that was UM owned and run by this trust fund baby, and it was very clear that she had failed up for most of her life. Um. It was very disorganized and very stressful experience. I quit like a few days after I got it because instead of you know, making coffees and preparing wines and stuff, I got a job pushing paper in an office, which is only marginally better.

And I mean everyone want to speak over like food to his people or anything, because like my experience is very limited, but in my own limited experience, it sucked. I mean my blood too into water trying to keep up with everything. It was one of those kind of under the table jobs, so you don't have a contract or a specific job description. It's just like you're doing everything.

So you're sorting and taking off recycling, and you're organized and stock, you're making coffee, busing tables and cashion products. You're handling accounting for some reason, like lady, I just got here, but I'm already doing accounting, um, and so on and so forth. I didn't have an official break either, and I wasn't allowed to sit at all. Um. I mean my boss said that I could stop for lunch what I needed to, But because of this, these constant responsibility.

Shue was piling onto me. We never got a chance to take a breath. The one time I did take a lunch break, she rushed me out to lunch break because I was taken too long and she was busy taking care of her other real estate. I only consistent customers with her friends. And yet somehow, you know, she kept the doors opening, the lights on because you know, trust fund baby. But yeah, to reiterate, it was a

very sucky experience I had. Any Yeah, I worked at a restaurant for starting when I was in high school, I was fifteen and a half for three or four years part of college, the baby learn a lot about how awful people are. But it was like you did learn how to work in a team and things like that. Helpful goals there, But management was terrible. Ah, not exactly

easy work, not exactly fun work. Um. Yeah, it was like, I honestly feel like a lot of people should have to do some type of job like that so that they learn, you know, how how to treat people who work in that in that kind of position. Um, because mostly my memories of it is terrible, horrible customers who

just treated people like scum. Yeah, but I needed the job, so yeah, yeah, my only experience in food service was working at a sonic not for a crazy long time, but it was terrible, um, and it left me with an abiding like respect for people who have to do that.

And I you know, we can talk, we'll talk more about the restaurant thing, but I certainly don't think fast food restaurant or a thing that exists in my ideal future, because I don't know how you could possibly operate those without a tremendous amount of human suffering and wasted potential, because they're just they're bad things. Now that said, any utopian society will have a way to acquire Popeyes, but perhaps not at like midnight in every city of the

country whenever you wanted. My utopian society is a wool in which KFC has been abolished and everything else to like exist. Yes, yes, well again this is it could happen here sponsored by I'm perfectly okay with imperialism, but like, yeah, and what kind of like can I ask, like, what kind of restaurant I know? Robert said his was fast food, Mine was very like casual food. What what kind of restaurant did you work at? Right? It wasn't. It was like a winery slash caffee and it also served food.

It was like a touch to a hotel. Oh yeah, and the whole the hotel part of it probably made it appearance. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, Yeah, kurs, scare either of you rather work in the food fruit food service industry at all? Yeah. I worked at a bakery for like a year and a half, mostly back of the house. Um. But I mean I would you know, would end up washing washing dishes and taking out recycling and all that

kind of stuff. But most of my work was designing recipes because I was more on like the food science angle. I don't know, Yeah, I mean it's I have a complicated uh feelings on like cafes specifically. I mean I I love anarchist cafes and like the idea of anarchist cafe. I would love to love to like have one at some point. It's like operated by the workers quote quote owned by the workers, um, with a shooting range out back. But obviously the guns and buns. We call it guns

and buns. You can the croissan and you can shoot fard by cafe by all me inside your right. Guns and buns is a breakfast cafe, gun range, strip club and apparently as long as as long as you fund it, you can have whatever you want. But the people will funded Garrison. Obviously, the food service industry has just make it a cooperative that makes everything. Sorry, please continue. Yeah, like the food service industry has a lot of problems.

But if if I were if I were able to go into a bakery like maybe like two or three times a week to just bake food for people and that helps me live the rest of the week, I would totally do that, right, So, like it depends on a lot of factors, but it's like there's ideas around, like an anarchist cafe, work around cafe that would be like totally chilled to work to like be there a few days of the week making food because I enjoy

making food, I enjoy baking, and I like food science. Um. But you know, when you would start we start tying that into labor and exploited the labor practices and the notion of like having to serve other people, then it gets a little bit more tricky. Um, and you know, less less less good, less cash money in a sign, Yeah exactly, you know it was was was kind of funny about it. Um I would say it is like

kind of lost guada. Let me just think for a second. Well, so, I mean one of the things that I have noticed over the years, because I've had a lot of friends work as bartenders, as waiters and waitresses, there are there's a chunk of people who really like the work. They usually don't like their employer, they often have issues with like their manager or whatever, but like they like their co workers and they enjoy the the act of like

doing restaurants stuff. Um I and I know that. Like, so one of the things that I did recreationally for years, as I was going to I would go to these regional burning Man events and one of the rules there's like everyone pays the same thing to get in. There's no like get there's no like talent, so there's nobody who's like paid to be there as an act, and there's no like exchange of currency lab But there are restaurants. There are people who like bake food and and and

give out and like make and give out coffee. There's there's multiple bars and a number of the people I knew who were like the most who would spend the most of their time which is again totally their own. At these events volunteering as bartenders were people who worked as bartenders, and we're like, look, I like serving drinks. I hate a lot of what goes along with being in a bar, but I enjoy making and serving drinks.

There was this one really cool dude out in the middle of he was out because it's a spread out over acres of woodlands. There's just this guy I found one night alone in the woods at like a podium sized, little booth lit up bar he'd made, and he was like, look, I am a very good bartender. What I do not like is making the same things every night for drunk people who don't know anything about a good mixed drink.

So you and I are gonna have like a five minute conversation and then I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna make you. Yeah. Yeah, it was really cool like that. More stuff like that, more like restaurant pop ups that are like those types of things are are just are divorced from like this notion of like, you know, being served by a lower class member of society. Instead it's people like sharing actual interests that they have and they're not obligated to be there or else they get you know,

or else they're not able to pay their rent. Right, there's lots of things like a utopian society or be like, yeah, I would totally be down with doing some some kind of you know, some kind of thing related to giving food to other people are preparing food or you know, drink like mixed strengths. Uh. I like making coffee a lot like espressove and the ship. Um it's like I can totally see that, but right now, you know, it's

just a totally different field. Um, by and large for most people in you know, the food service industry, and it sucks work. By and large, it really sucks to work in the foods service industry. Yeah, the food service industry is one of the most explicitve industries in the country. That said, the idea of gathering in public to consume food and beverages is fundamental to human beings and we're never not going to have that as society's so there has to be ways in which to have versions of that.

And again, probably not the every ten minutes you get the same three fast food restaurants that are open all night. That probably that definitely does not exist in an ideal society, but in any any better society, human beings will gather to eat and drink around each other because it's something we've done in every civilization that has ever existed. So, Andrew do you do? Do you want to talk a bit more about the actual zine, because I feel like a lot of people's course around the zine is not

about the zine itself. It's about what the title of the zene is, because people should read the actual zene. If you read it makes very reasonable arguments. Um. The titles just intentionally provocative. Um. Yeah. And what I've realized about intentionally provocative slogans is that the people who who want to get it, you know, they tend to be drawn into those kinds of things. And then there's some people who see something provocative and it kind of shuts

them down. Yes, some people see it, see something so provocative and see it's like I want to learn more. And other people see it and they have that kind of a gut reaction to It's like it's like the backfire affect type thing. Yeah. So I mean to get into the kind of the history of it and just the idea of restaurants as as the Zene Explorers. According to the discourse, a restaurant is just a place to eat. If you sit down in the middle of a desert with a table and a chair and you eat something

that's apparently a restaurant, that's not a restaurant. That it's not a restaurant. But okay, the definition of a restaurant is a place where people pay to sit and eat meals that are cooked and served on the premises. Commerce is a part of the definition of a restaurant. Why do we universalize and naturalize things that are neither That is my question. It's like what people do with the state, or with capitalism, with police or agender. I mean, just

like those things. The restaurant is an invention, but it's been crystallized and induced into our mind as something that is you know, that is natural, it is universal. You know when when Kronk brought his buddy Brock a piece of chicken, that was a restaurant. You know, it's like, we take we take these things that come from very specific modern capitalist context and we stretch them out over

the entire human experience. If you look into the history restaurants, the first restaurants began to appear in Paris in the seventeen sixties, un as leaders in the eighteen fifties. Majority the restaurants that will be located in Paris, and I mean, for those who know a little bit about his three, Paris is kind of an interesting place where a lot of things happen, especially during that rough time period, a lot of stuff going on there exactly, I mean elsewhere

on the world, communal meals were quite common. People cooked community and the eight community, and they were new restaurants, specifically before the invention of restaurants, and in Paris around Europe at least where people had servants who cooked for them. Travelers had ins where their meal was included with the price of the room and they ate for the innkeeper and his family, and peasants they ate their meals at home, and of course they were also caterers free events and

special occasions. And there were taverns and wineries and coffees and bakeries for certain foods and drinks. Of course, later on all of those things, the taverns, the wineries, the cake the caffes, and the bakeries. After restaurants came about, those other institutions to shape and bend into this sort of the mold of the restaurants was established. Restaurant based on the name of it. Um comes from this this idea that they were meant to restore health to sick people.

Restaurant restaurant, all right, and they used to sue these small meat stews. So by by that, by that metric, Taco Bell cannot be a restaurant. I I would argue that it is the only restaurant. It's, well, it's going to restore bowel movement if you have any kind of blockage that that that it will restore that. But besides that, I cannot, I can do not think it's going to restore Yeah, Taco Bell, It's probably something like a laxatant. I don't know. But yeah, So why France, Why Paris?

Why restaurants? It kind of occurred after the food craft kills were abolished by the Revolution. It was like this attempt to kind of democratize the food industry. You know, Liberty got a home all that jazz, so restaurants and it began spree enough because all these former cooks of the now be headed king and aristocrats, they wanted to work somewhere. Sure, so you know, in a restaurant, if you get a meal at any time the businesses open,

anyone with money could get a meal. The customers would come and they would eat an individual tables, eat individual plates and bowls of food. They get to choose from another option, a number of options, and they grew in size and complexity as they went on. They got a fixed menu and eventually all day. We invented the bacon eator. Yes, yeah, that's the end fact. The Bacon was the first book I had when I went to the US. I would apologize, but this country has done so much worse than that

of fun facts about Andrew. Yeah, you know, it's a thing to tune in and you get a litt new fact that you could. I don't know adds my Wikia page or something, but yeah, yeah, it was. It was. It was mid. Honestly, my brother makes better bogas. But that's besides the plane. Yeah, nearly every burger that you can get at a fast food restaurant is is mid. Yeah,

t g I Friday's had some good Friday. That is the place when you're in a town you've never been before, that's where you want to just show up and get absolutely ship house drunk until two am with like a bunch of strangers at the t g I Friday's Bar, which is the boulevard of broken dreams, Like it's only people who can't hack it in a regular bar and weirdos traveling through town. I love a t g I A Friday's Bark. I was not aware of that sertiod type.

I mean there's aid t g I here in Trinidad and me last time I knew they had like some kind of karaoke thing going on. Yeah, it's probably the vibe. I haven't been too many times anyway, I think this is enough product place month for for one episode, like out a lot of different here's ads. Sure, why not? So the growth of the restaurant came the growth of the market. With the growth of the restaurant came the

growth of the market. Needs that will you know fulfilled either through a direct relationship with domination like between a lord or a king and his silvants, or a private relationship like within the family. They were all being fulfilled on the open market. It was once a direct oppressive relationship, now became the relationship between buyer and seller now came in.

Didn't direct oppressive exactly, a diffused oppressive relationship foremost because no one person, I would say it could really carry the blame. A similar expansion the market took place over a century later with the rise of fast food because as the nineteen fifties housewife was on her way out, you know, being undermined, and as you women started to move into the open labor market, many of the tasks that were done by women traditionally were being transferred onto

the market. Not to say that women still don't do the majority of care work in modern society, but as women started moving into the office into the workplace, things started to shift with regard to eating and eating patterns. An important point to notice that, of course, you know, the whole woman moving into the workplace thing is kind of a white woman phenomenon, because you know, people of color,

women of color were inward places before then in large numbers. Yeah, And and there's there's a thing I think it's important to note here too, which is like part part of what's happening here, is that like some of the care labor that white women were doing gets transferred on to non white women. And this this is this has been one of the things that, Like, I think we talked about this a long time ago in an interview I

did with it with a nurse. But like, like, for example, you see this with healthcare a lot where like a lot of like union workers get these goods, you know, they get really good healthcare plans from the unions, but those healthcare plans are basically subsidized by not paying women of color like ship. And there's this whole sort of like trend around this is sort of like like you can, you know, if if you're witching, if you're rich enough,

you can escape housework. But you escape housework by essentially thrusting it on somewhere, on someone else who's like further down the social ladder venue. Yeah, it's kind of like a form of that um that phenomenon. People have been talking about the the idea of choice feminism, as in any choice that woman to sneak that a woman makes part of the feminist sort of movement. So I saw

some discourse happened recently. People are talking about, um, how oh one should have a right if she's a housewife, that she should still be able to you know, pursue her interests, which is of course agreed and the solution being proposed, so that was that the man, the breadwinner, would pay for a domestic servants to come and work for the woman so that she can pursue her other responsibilities,

her other interests and desires. And so it's just kind of this perfect what a close to license exactly because then this woman is working away from her family, and then you know, it's just like this is a the messed up system. But yes, so as fast food restaurants began to grow rapidly, people began being paid weed is for what used to be hostwork. And of course, as we know, capitalism could not exist without the billions of dollars of unpaid labor that women perform on a yearly basis.

Modern restaurants emerged in the nineteenth century under specific conditions. They had to be businessmen with capital to invest in restaurants. They had to be customers who are expected to satisfy their need for food in the open market by buying it. And they had to be workers with no way to live but by working for someone else. As these conditions developed, as capitalism developed, sorted restaurants and so at the root of this whole abolished restaurants discourse needs to be an

understanding of where restaurants came from their historical development. You cannot take them in isolation and project them, like I said, across all of humanity, because it's only through understanding, through its specific circumstances that we can transform it as we transform society as a whole. As we were saying, you know, there's a lot of things that are hell about restaurants. The way that work comes in like waves and rushes, a lot of slow time in between. We either really

stressed out, the really bored. Remember working they had the winery and like for mostly day, I just have to be like shifting around bottles on the shelves. I couldn't sit down and chill or be on my phone or anything. I just had to busy myself until a customer came. I guess it was never came because it was a

failed business propped up only by her parents money. But did you ever get told the phrase if you can lean, you can clean, not in not in those exactly words, Yes, in those exact words, God, and every fucking manager who says it to you think that like it's their cool line was anyway? Yep? Yeah, So you have to just you have this this constant thing of trying to look busy while having got nothing to do, while you're trying

not to fall behind because they have tendings to do. Yeah, everyone's always working harder and faster, and of course the boss wants to squeeze as much workout in the same number of people out as possible, you know, like you pushing people to these ridiculous extremes, which is why it's a kind of stereotype now of like restaurant workers all being on drugs. You know, there's also this whole in humanity to like employees being paid in tips. Now, as far as I know nowhere is that as severe as

it is in the US um. But of course around

the world there are tipping cultures of varying degrees. And so when you have that sort of work where you sure you're living your subsistence is so directly tied to like tips, Not only do you have this sort of divide being created between the workers between like, for example, the waiters who make the tips and the cooks who don't make any tips, And it's just the sort of had to compete against each other because the way it's trying to get as much done as possible so they

can make their tips quickly so they could have their you know, quick service. Where as the cooks they have no interesting motivation to push themselves harder and just becomes stressful. I never got tips from baking in the back of the house unless some of the people in front of the house would like share the tips at the end

of the day by their own like. Yeah, and I know folks who worked in places where all tips were shared with the way the kitchen staff, and it seemed to be a fifty fifty breakdown of this is really good and everyone gets paid fairly, and this is actually some scam by man management to deny people a bunch of tips by like pulling them and a certain factory that gets done so like It's like any formulation of

this inherently winds up being pretty abusive. Yeah, and dividing you know another interesting and I mean, as you guys mentioned stressful components about you know, this line of workers. Of course, the customers, which customer service for in general, tend to you know, whether you're working at a bar or you're working at a you know, a restaurant, even working in like sales and some sort of like retail.

Still their whole subread is dedicated to how terrible customers are two workers, and so that that's sort of dynamic of service. It it really changes people. I mean, customers can just as easily be working class as the people working in the restaurant. It there's still that dynamic that's created when you are the one being seated and soothed on the other police and on their feet soothing you.

Some of the worst customers in America at least are working class and poorer folks who it's like their chance to be above somebody like when they go out to a restaurant, so they can be extra shitty. Yeah, that is a thing that happens. Surprisingly that even like restaurant weekers who treat restaurant workers batly when they go to a restaurant. Yeah, yeah, yes, it's like someone gets the opportunity to be to exert the power and they're like do it in the short, short, short, short amount of time.

But although I will say I'm sure those are also the restaurant workers who treat people badly at the restaurant they work at, including like some of the some of the things that have ever been said to beered by customers at the restaurant job. I had, yeah, not surprising, and I was like no, I was like I was like in high school, I was a kid and these

are like grown ups being horreendous. So like I think, I think it's like I don't know, like when people talk about this, like when people talk about restaurants, like in the discourses, it's it's in a way that's like it's incredibly abstract and doesn't like it don't it doesn't think about the fact that like the relationship between the customer and the people who have to interact with the customers, host, etcetera,

like that that is a social relation. It's a social relation that like that, like like the the power dynamic inherent to it abscribes sort of different kind It describes different kinds of behavior to the people who are like who are like on either side of it, like it it controls like what you have to do as a server, like what the performances you have to give to like the smile you have to put on, which is actually like that's the original thing of what emotional he is, right,

is like the labor you have to do to make the person who you're serving, like I think that you're like happy and enjoying it, like having a good time. But then you know on the customer's en too, it's like you get this sort of you know, I was like, oh, this is your one chance to to be on top of a sort of power relation and like that like that like that specific thing is so fucking evil. It's like that there there, there's there's a story I think

about a lot from Run and Schwang. Originally was it was about um like one one of the last emperors of the Tang dynasty, like his his concubine like loved legia and like, okay, I get it as lesia that gets really good, but like leeches grown leaches only grown in this in the south of China. You can't really grow in the north. It doesn't like it's too cold,

too arid. And so in order to get her leash, like every morning, they would send like the fastest writers like in China would like be sent by horse like to southern China and then back so that you get the lechia there in time like for for it still to be like ripe and like edible, and you know that that's the kind of that's the kind of power that you to only literally the Emperor of China had this ability, right, like the like the Emperor of fucking

China could get this commodity and like force everyone in a change to go do something for them. And now like everyone has that Like literally everyone has that power. Like every time you use Amazon, you have that power. Every time you go to a rusturant, you have the power to do this, and it it turns people into monsters because like that's you know, the Chinese emperors are

like these are some of the worst people who've ever lived. Now, like everyone everyone like just like like the fundamental basis of the society is there was a place where you can go and you can become the emperor of fucking China. The problem with the idea of instant gratification being reliant

on the exploitation of other people. Yeah, and and like that, yeah, and that doesn't seem right Garrison, Oh yeah, don't worry now, watch me as I order next day delivery on a dollar drone just to just to funk around in my backyard. Like yes, it's it's everything is fine in America. I I do. I am like of the opinion that the grocery store is like the primary artistic achievement of capitalism

as a system. Um. They are objectively marvels, um. And they're they're built on a river of blood deeper and wider than is. It's like it's a hyper object, right, It's like impossible to comprehend the full scale of cruelty that goes into being able to like, well, it is November. I'm gonna go get a fresh bag of grapes that have been genetically modified to taste like cotton candy, picked by people making sense an hour in Yes, in the country that's on the other side of the world. Yeah, yes,

whose relatives are shot for attempting to scramble over the border. Yeah. That the grapes passed through easily. Yes. And I think like like that that points to another Like I think part of the dynamic safely with restaurants that happens, which is that like, okay, like cooking takes time, right, and the less and less time that you have, the more like the more reliant you become, um on like on

these services. And so you see this with like you know, like China has like a like a particularly horrible like delivery culture, like you can like you can have someone deliver food to you, like to the train, like like a sub Like a train will stop at a stop and you can have someone run a bag of food to you and then like leave and you just like you go to the next stop and you get off. And that happens because everyone's working nine nine six, and

it's like, Okay, you're working. You're working nine am the nine pm, six six days a week, and you know you don't you literally do not have time to cook because you're working. You're working twelve hours a day. And like an example of this is like restaurant wrap. People who work restaurants, like line cooks and chefs hardly ever cook for themselves. They always get food from other restaurants because they're cooking eight to ten hours a day. They're

not going to go home then cook for themselves. They it's like, yeah, it's this system almost it makes it makes the things that prop it up come necessary to keep the whole thing going. It's all like balancings super like precariously on its own weight. It's it's equivalent to like if you're in a criminal syndicate, making somebody you're working with tangentially shoot a man in the back of the head so that you both have blood on your hands. Like everyone is everyone just by by virtue of existing

under it. Like if you're working sixty hours a week is a fucking nurse during COVID or as a fucking line cook dealing with this surge of delivery ship and then on your way home, you just want to pick up some like sushi from a fucking grocery store that requires ingredients from all around the world and is made by people who are not getting enough money to make it and is horrible for the environments and the fisheries and all that kind of ship um, And but like

what are you supposed to do? Like you you just you just finished like a ten hour shift, Like do you not deserve like one one nice thing at the end of the like Like Like so it's if you people can't like either you becomeing like a complete aesthetic right and and reject and go kind of ted k and live in a shack in Montana and reject all of these these kind of modern conveniences, or you accept that, like you're going to spend some time waiting into the

river of blood because otherwise the things you have to do to stay alive in this society are completely emotionally unsustainable. Yeah, this was this was the original, like before it kind of became this cop out for like just doing whatever you want. Like this was the original. There's no ethnical consumption under capitalism is about this was about like this specific problem that everything in the society, Like even even if you're living in the woods and Montana, it's like yeah,

like where where where did where? Like where where did your cabin come from? Like where did your nails come from? Who made the hammers? Like everyone's like completely dependent for everything on the exploitation of other people. And it it is. It is a mean. The one thing that gives me a little to hope is when Andrew was explaining how like restaurants came arise because of people who used to work for Kings and ship who then started working at

restaurants because they still want to make food. It's like that evolution. Taking it to the next step is people who work at restaurants now no longer having to work under capitalist exploitation and realizing, hey, I know how to cook, well, I'll just set up like ways to feed the community

outside of this system of commerce. Right, that is the next evolution if you start with people cooking for the king people, then cooking in places where you pay to eat in this exploitative system, and then people cooking for people so that there's food around into like a community setting. Right, if you if you follow that trajectory, that's actually kind of hopeful. It's almost like we've come full circle. I

mean in some ways. Yeah, Like right, it's if if you just go back to like beings, Yeah, like communicating. If there's places around different communities, different towns, different like urban centers that have have the capacity to feed people who are not able to cook, cook, cook for themselves that night or that day, that's something that if if it's there is ways of setting that up which I can see being so much better than how restaurants work.

You know, maybe maybe people wash their own dishes afterwards,

maybe people do something to help with like prep or something. Right, like there's there's there's ways to make this that gives you the parts of restaurants that are actually really convenient, um without the exploitation, and so that that type of like community cooking is something I mean, you know that's even similar to like how like a good dinner party operates um just that kind of extended out across you know, more of like a pop up setting and say, hey, yeah,

this this month, we're using all of these ingredients that are grown in our general local area. Right, We're not getting shipped. We're not getting like strawberries in December shipped from halfway around the world. Will make stuff that is available, um as it you know, as it's grown, or we can pick, we can store food, right and yeah, and maybe we we've we've turned the old defunct Walmart into

a grows shelter. So once or twice during the winter there are some strawberries and everybody comes together and shares this marvel that the community came like worked as a team to ensure would be available. But you can't just go and buy four pounds of strawberries that are produced with their like twice the weight of the strawberries and pesticide in order to keep them alive in fields that were never meant to grow straw Like maybe that's not

available all year round. Like yeah, just give back to the point being raised to vote um about like the wethical consumption of the capitalism, because that's a really important point the whole poopas of that seeing has been lastidized. But it really is crucial to have a duance and the signing of it. What frustrates me is that it's been taken and it's been tuned into this justification and that it's okay that I buy from Sheen. It's okay that I buy a three thousand the whole from Sheen

because no ethical consumption on the couple is on. Was like with where somebody goes on, they engage in something that is not is Andrew, you're talking around my two and a half pound a day veal habit and I don't appreciate. Yeah, that sounds like a problem. That's like something Joe Roken dot sets like, I eat two and to a half pads of veal every day and that keeps my brain running smoothly. The cavemen, so I mean exactly,

it did work for Georgie Peterson, he's doing great. Christ at the mirror notion of Antifa, I would do an impression middle of hood my throat, so that's I would see.

I would say that as we were saying, you know that there really is is potential we see even under these conditions that people find ways to survive, you know, they create like these informal work groups that are not only able to come together and push back against management, were able to work together to create trust within each other. You know, you have like for example, waiters who would try to hand in the kitchen on a slow day, or a cleaner or who might pick up a thing

or two a dishwasher. We're trying to move up to become like a align cook. All these different workers, they they do things certainly to try to undermine the unnatural divisions and hierarchies and between the skill and unskilled um in the restaurants. Certain of course it doesn't always work because there are you know settings were in the manager

successfully created divisions. You know, whether it be the manager creating a division between um teen different nationalities of immigrants, so you know, playing upon someone's queer phobia against like queer staff, or someone's biases against I don't know, I can't think of a third example. But there are ways a managers try to like sew these divisions between workers,

and they always at workers try to push back. They're alsoways ad managers trying to do the opposite to create a community within the restaurant and includes themselves, so instead of fostering isolation and prejudice, they create a community that especially in small restaurants, that involves them that talk about that's you know, the boss might share with them how difficult it is working and organizing for the business of the restaurant. And or they might create like a special

kind of restaurant focused on their identity. So they might create a restaurant for for queer youth with all the staff a queer, you know, you have a restaurant for you know, a black owned restaurant world workers and black and try to create community based on this identity. But it kind of erases the unavoidable class interests between workers

and management. Its smooths over that dimension. So it becomes more difficult to organize and to speak up for your rights because you're you're aware that the managers are human and they too are struggling, Which kind of brings me to the idea of restaurants with no managers and the idea of cooperative The assume cooperative restaurants is that they basically have to collectively take on the rule of managers

managing themselves, creating those pressures and pushing those pressures upon themselves. They enforced the work on each other, and they have to work longer in some cases and work harder in some cases. Because the structure of a restaurant is designed to make money, and if it is not making money, then everybody loses their jobs. So, due to this pressure, bosses in a position where they have to pushed workers to get as much out of the workers as possible.

You raise the boss on the occasion from the equation, but you keep the rest of the concept of a restaurant, and line between work and boss becomes blue to the extent where it's almost like image of a person with a boot on their hand pulling a boot on their head. Where this oppression there was one external becomes internalized because that is how a restaurant survives through pressure, through exploitation. It's kind of like with how self employed people are

on the capitalism. Yes, you're working for yourself and you have some freedom that regard, but you're still restricted by the broader system. You haven't escaped it, You've just had to navigate it. And I have to make quarterly payments to the I R S. Yeah, I mean what I say, I think work for ourselves in some capacity a certain level of freedom, and it um you still have those pressures, and it's just you have to inflict them on yourself.

You know. You don't have like a break that has been mandated, and so at least in my case, I don't take breaks because that's just how I am. You know.

You work longer hours, you push yourself harder and harder, you work on days when you should be resting, and it's just it illustrates the fact that liberation is not to be found under this system, and it's something totally new with a totally different metric of success, a totally different metric of sustenance, totally different bare minimum and totally different motivation needs to be foundation upon which society is built,

because there's profiting a worken. Yeah, And I think there's a like I think the reason this debate happens like this, this whole discourse happened in the first place, is just that like like just like a lot of it really was just a complete inability to imagine like literally any other way of like even just like like any other way of getting food that has not involved you going to a place and telling someone to make it for

you and like that. I don't know, Like, yeah, it's like the fact that there have already been sort of seismic shifts in the way that like food production happens, right, I think is evidence of like, no, we don't have to do it like that, like we just we just do not It wasn't like this for most of human history. We could do something better than whatever they were doing before it. Yeah, a lot of people might you know, wish for like in this. So it's a shift over

into the abolition section of it, the restaurant abolition. A lot of people look to, for example, a union as a path by which a short too, you know, we make certain gains and belong to where we can take over and radically transforming. The difficulty comes in how unions have traditionally operated in the restaurants fair they tend to be significantly less successful. I mean, restaurants usually have very high turnover people in the last couple of months um.

They often employed like a lot of young people who are just looking for part time or temporary employment. Well, people do work, they are constantly looking to move on to better things, and so it makes it difficult to create a stable union with a stable membership that can buckle down and really negotiate and push for the interests of the people working. Because people working and constantly changing.

I think one of the like one of the really great things has led you is that like like especially when fast food took over, like the major unions that even do exist, which is like that we don't like we're just not gonna bother even trying to organize these people because they just assumed it was impossible, and so like there are there are very very few fast food unions. I mean, like I think one of the only like even sort of functional ones is the ww like organized Burgerville.

But that's that's been like it like the like the big unions when they've done campaigns for fast food workers, it's like it will was clean like five or fifteen, but it's like they're not actually trying to like form unions of the freshmand workers, Like they don't they're not even trying. They're just trying to They're they're using them

for sort of like a lot being an advocacy. Yeah, and difficulty also commins when un it's established itself, you know, because a union structurally it's not always by all the Lucas. You know, there's still sort of a hierarchy bureaucracy that may establish itself and try to maintain itself, even if

it starts off benignly. No, just for all of the radical history that unions do have, quite a few unions in the particularly the United States, have also been conservative bastions and bastions of different attitudes about like stuff like white supremacy. You know, there's there's a lot of the union movement is as much Blair Mountain as it is trying to stop black people from being able to work on trains. You know, like all of those things are

part of the history. Yeah, I mean, I'll speak briefly on like the union situation in the Caribbean, particularly in turned out the trade union movement was intrinsically inextricably tied with the anti colonial movements in the movement for independence. Yours to became that the unions became tied up with the political parties that are rules after independence and well during the process of independence. But I know, happening with the UNI and so was that they end up being

tied to deeply with the political parties. So that ended up being that the established unions. You know, the higher ups in those established unions, they have these relationships of favors and obligations with the politicians. A lot of politicians come out of these union movements and end up establishing

their own political careers. And because it's also tied up when you workers get into these industries that do have union, that have been unionized, there's a very clear separation between the union and the workers because while the union is able to you know, push for the workers rights, and you know, they're still separate from the workers. The unions still exists as a new negotiator between the workers and the management. And so you have the workers which to

go beyond just negotiating. The union exists almost as a release five for any sort of class antagonists. So any kind of pressure, any kind of real pressure against the start at school. I mean, it's not just unique to to turn that outlet to the Caribean I means it's globally cross history. You've seen union struggles kind of go

over the same sort of dynamic. You know, new generations of workers, they build up the movements, they build up the unions, and the unions begin to change and perhaps new union leaders spring up to replace the old union leaders, one put on the same position and the same pressure as the reacting the same way as the bureaucracy and being rejuvenated. Unions are reformed and they end up going back to the same abay as that they had been before.

And in some cases, the fight to reform the union takes the place of the fight against the boss because of all the bureaucracy and system of obligations and just deeply rooted ideas about the place of the union. Because well, unionizing is a difficult process. Union leaders to tend to enjoy certain benefits from their position, and as we are aware of, you know, certain hierarchies self justifying those are

the top tend to want to perpetuated. It's kind of like and so this idea that this is kind of an unsettled thought of mind, but it's kind of like the idea of you know, using the state to establish workers power and then abolishing it afterwards, you know, using the union to get some shift workers po But then it's expecting this union of a certain structure that exists towards negotiating, ends to somehow pushing these sort of more

radical directions. There's a saying that that um, but the zine um the rights of the zine says, it's like restaurant unions needed to be restaurants and we don't. I think that sort of applies more broadly because when we get into the whole idea of like work apbulation, it's just concept of workers are people outside of work, but a workers union exists within the confines of work as we understand it. So I think that's where the difficulty lies.

The zine goes on to say later on that every time we attack the system, but we don't destroy it, it changes and in turn changes us, and the train of the next fight gains are tuned against us, and we are stuck back in the same situation at work. The boss to try to keep us looking for individual solutions or solutions within an individual workplace or an individual trade. But the only way that we can free ourselves is to broaden and deepen our fight. We involve worcause from

other workplaces, other industries, and other regions. We attack more and more fundamental things. The desire to destroy restaurants becomes a desire to destroy the conditions that create restaurants. We aren't just fighting for representation in or control over the production process or fighters and against the act of chopping vegetables and washing dishes, or poor and bear or even serving foods other people. Is with the way all of these acts are brought together in a restaurant, separated from

other acts, become part of the economy. And I used to expand capital. The starting and ending point to this process is a society of capitalists and people forced to work for them. We want an enter this. We want to destroy the production process or something outside and against us. We're fighting for a world of productive activity, fulfills. The need is an expression of our lives, not forced on us in exchange for a wage. A world were produce for each other directly, and I don't know where to

sell to each other. The struggle of restaurant workers is ultimately for a world without restaurants or workers. And I mean so, I think people are still going to call small degensives restaurants restaurants anyway, probably, But I hope this discussion as cause equals kind of deepen approach to this. Welcome to it could happen here. I am Robert d uh and this is a podcast about things falling apart

and sometimes how to put them all together. And you know, today we're actually going to be talking more about the ladder, which I know is revolutionary for us. We're usually just kind of like getting way more into the doom er stuff.

But I think there's been more than enough of that, particularly in the wake of several horrific Supreme Court rulings that I don't really need feel the need to go into detail on, but one of the things that has happened in the wake of these rulings this this like kind of liberal reaction to the fact that to the fact and they're right to be angry about the fact that they're being essentially governed by a small minority of people who are very densely geographically located in the South,

that is where like the bulk of the support for the the hard rights policies comes from. Um and it's led to this like fuck Texas, Fuck Florida, Fuck uh, these these quote unquote like red states, these regressive states, which is this deeply problematic for a number of reasons, including the fact that you know, if you just want to look at it in terms of party politics, there were more people who voted for a Democrat in Texas in the election than live in either the state of

Oregon or Washington. UM. These are densely populated places with a tremendous amount of people who are people of color, who are trans who are you know, in some way threatened by this weird Cristo fascist bullshit that is increasingly

clamping down on the country. And so today I wanted to talk with some folks who will live in and around the Dallas, Texas what we call the DFW areat Dallas Fort Worth, UM, and who have lately been organizing to kind of both confront this, uh, this rising Cristo fascist like the street aggression portion of it, and to provide support in defense um for people who are are being victimized by it. So I'd like to welcome some representatives of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club to

the show. Hey, y'all, boy, Yeah, do you want to kind of introduce yourselves to to start? However you'd like to be known on the show? I'm Satan, I'm bubble Satan and bubble um And how long have y'all been like doing Because there's there's two specific things that kind of I don't know, I became aware of y'all, and and we had some brief interactions, right, It's a brief interaction that some of your folks during the the snow thing that that destroyed everything, um. And so I've been

kind of watching y'all socials ever since. And there were a couple of things recently that struck me as very uh worth discussion actions that you y'all were a part of. One of them was there's a neighborhood in Dallas called Oak Lawn that is kind of colloquially known as the gighborhood.

It is like the um the gay neighborhood in Dallas obviously, and so it's a place that you know, even before kind of things got a little easier after twenty um, it was kind of a safe place and a little bit like of a of a of a fortress for like people who are not you know, straight and this gender which is and kind of are you know, for for an idea of how aspects of the df W

area can be. The town I grew up in, Plano, had a condoms to go move in, and within like two nights of setting up shop and Plano, somebody fired a nine millimeter handgun through the window like it's not a it's a place where it could be difficult. UM. And so obviously repression and kind of violence and fears of vigilante violence um from folks who are queer has is understandably amped up in the wake of everything that's been happening. And y'all carried out an action where a

sizeable group of leftists marched armed through the gaghborhood. Um. The one of the there were a couple of different chants that that I was hearing. One of them was, um about bashing back something like that. You want to talk a little bit about like that action and what actually went down. Um. Sure. So at the beginning of Pride Month, we had a large group of fascists come

to the gighborhood. Um, you know, they were shouting groomer, they were telling us the fist of Christ is coming down on you soon and um, you know, making really out their threats. So we discussed, um, you know, what we could do to be proactive to make sure that doesn't happen again. Um. And we ended up getting together some groups who were interested in an armed demonstration, which even here in Texas is not something you see too often. UM.

And we decided to march through the gabhborhood. You know, Um, I would say a majority of the people that we know are LGBT and h it's our neighborhood. So you know, we put on this demonstration there and it was, you know, kind of incredible. We got some looks, but we also got a lot of support. Um, we had a lot of great chance. Um. You know, bottoms tops we all hate cops. There we go. Yeah, yeah, that was the

that was the one that was in the video. Um. And so what was the I'm interested in kind of because I think this is the kind of thing that

is potentially very useful. We we have seen. One of the things that I have personally observed and that has been observed by a number of folks, is that when these kind of right wing mobs who primarily want people who cannot defend themselves, who don't have the numbers to defend themselves, they want to like beat the ship out of people in a gang, right Like, that's that's the proud boy thing, that's the Patriot prayer thing. That's all these weird little groups. Primarily what they want to do.

They don't want a fair fight. And when they are confronted with organized people on the left who are armed, that tends to scare the ship out of them. And if I'm not mistaken, during that day where you had those Christian fascists kind of coming after um that Queer family event, like one of the one of the live streams that one of the right wingers had, people were some of them were like commenting on the fact that there were people leftist open carrying and like how unsettling

they found that. Um So I'm interested in kind of how the idea too, we're going to do this, have this kind of a march, you know, through this neighborhood, we're going to make sort of a show beforce. How that idea kind of came together? And then what logistically did y'all like feel the need to set up, Like I'm gonna guess it wasn't as simple as like hey, everybody with a gun, like come come meet here and

we're gonna have us a walk. Um So I'm interested in kind of what the logistics are because I think this is the kind of thing that people other people are going to want, like find useful to do, like statements of we are here, we have the tools to defend ourselves and we're not going to just passively let

you run through our neighborhoods fucking with us. I think logistically, one of the big things was just making sure that, you know, everyone who was carrying was carrying properly, and then also to protect our own selves, making sure that whoever was carrying was also protecting our identity by wearing essentially full black walk UM, which that in itself sends

a message. You know, a bunch of queer people marching through the streets of Dallas and full black block with guns UM sends a message like we're not going to take your ship. We're done. You know, you're not gonna mess with our bodily autonomy. UM. That march happened, We had planned it to be on that day originally, and that happened to be the day that Robie Wade was overturned UM, and it essentially just evolved that morning to

a more intersectional body bodily autonomy march. But really logistically it was mostly about protecting ourselves and making sure that people who weren't carrying the firearms were also so protected from our firearms. Yeah, I want to dive into that a little bit, because that's so an important aspect of

it is the ensuring saying. I have seen a lot of marches, and I will be honest, I've seen a lot of people being armed on on both sides politically, who have done things with guns that I would consider reckless. Probably the top moment in my mind is during a big march in Portland somebody leaned over and a glock fell out of the front pouch of their hoodie that they were just head loose in there. Um yeah, UM, So obviously it is not as it should not be as simple as like, you know, load up on guns

and bring your friends, so to speak. How do you attempt to ensure like how like how do you actually go about handling the safety aspect? Is it? Like? Are you appointing essentially kind of like range officers. Before the march, we were keeping an eye on ship, like what does that actually look like? Um? I want to I want to give two examples for the march we did in

the gighborhood. Um, it was different in that it wasn't publicly announced wearing um it was going to be, so it was kind of a by invitation only demonstration, so we knew pretty much everybody that was coming, except for people in the neighborhood who kind of joined ad hawc UM. So that's one way that we've done things. When we do more of like uh protest security for other actions. UM. You know, there are different people who will feel motivated to bring UM arms and usually they know what they're

doing pretty well. In a couple of instances where someone is being unsafe, UM, you know, one of us will just go over there and talk to them, you know, like hey, you you you really need a sling uh for this, or you know, don't don't be uh pointing it in any way at a building. UM. Just little

tips like that too, you know, resolve the behavior. So when it actually comes to like uh because because one of the things like whenever you have sort of a gathering like this is is de escalation and even within people within the march potentially like dispute resolution and that sort of thing. What was the how how did you kind of organize for that? Like what was the planning on that? And like, um, I think that's a really

important question. One of the first things that we decided pretty early on is that we are not there to police any protesters. So you know if someone is is doing something illegal. Uh, And no, at no point where we you know, tell them to stop or try to make them stop. We may move away from the area or something like that, but we're not there too police our people at all. When it comes to like counters coming up in antagonizing, the main thing we do is

try to put ourselves between them and any people they're targeting. Um. And you know, we have cameras, we have less than lethal,

we have different tools to try to de escalate that. Yeah, And so when it comes to like, uh, I guess training on that end, did you kind did you have any sort of like um um infrastructure, human infrastructure whatnot set up prior to this to like make sure people who were like doing de escalation were folks that you knew, you know, had some level of understanding of it, or

folks that you could trust. Like how was the actual how do you actually because I mean, it strikes me that there is a great deal of like trust that's necessary to put together something like this, To be able to meet up with folks and and like march armed together requires probably a little bit more in in the way of of of trust than you know, just showing

up at a protest. UM, that's kind of more conventional. Um. Was there sort of some in any kind of like I don't know, system or or like yeah, training or whatnot that y'all had for specifically like how to behave how to de escalate all that kind of stuff. Or was it just like folks that kind of you knew from from prior events were good at that sort of thing. I mean, as far as our group goes, UM, I can speak to myself personally and say that I trust

one of our people with my life. UM. And I think because of that, and because we were really the ones putting it on, like we knew that if something were to go down, one of us would get in the middle of it, and we all trust each other. I think that in any sort of organizing environment, trusting trusting the people that you're working with is one of the most vital things that you can do because they're going to be the ones beside you when a proud boy rolls up and you want the person decide you

to be someone that you can trust. UM, And we do that. We do have you know, we we do practice, and we do train together, and UM, we also have fun together and having that certain level of trust means the world when you're putting yourself out there in that way. And how long of the folks that are kind of like you're, we're most affiliated with like making this happen. How long have you all been sort of organizing and

and doing stuff together. I would say most of us met, since all of us met in organizing different facilities during after the FOD protests and then just to boom in mutual aid that happened in DFW after that, Whether it was through Homeless Outreach or um, you know, bell bonds or however we met each other, it was mostly through that mutual aid community and getting out in the our communities and organizing ourselves and trying to find like minded

people who wanted to see the same change happened. Now. UM, I think one of the uh, one of the things that's been on my mind a lot lately, and that that y'all particularly bring up, is the challenges of organizing in parts of the country where not just you know, the police who are always pretty regressive, but the entire legal structure is set up to as Florida has increasing,

thevential number states have done like punished protests. Penalized activism make things more dangerous for for for people who are like going out there in public in addition to doing things to try and criminalize you know, people who are

are are not uh straight, you know, white Christians. UM. So when you look at like kind of the challenges of organizing in a place where it's more dangerous, and obviously it's it's not particularly safe to be organizing against you know, the l A p D. But the court

system in California is broadly speaking less stacked against you. UM. So if you had advice to give to people who had don't have this group of friends and people they've been organizing with for a couple of years already, but they want to have that, they want to build that in their community, where would you suggest they start? UM. I always tell people that it starts by showing up um to all kinds of events, you know, supporting a

broad range of groups. And you know, you're at the protests, if you are at the feedings, the distributions, UM, You're gonna meet people and you're gonna build trust um, mutual trust there UM So that you know, when you want to start a project, you want to start a group, you'll have those people that know you. Um, it is very dangerous. Uh. I think it's always important to tell

people to watch your op set. You know, don't be re sharing all kinds of activist stuff with your personal profile that has your name and your birthday and all of that. But yeah, it really goes to meeting people

in person, I think. Yeah, And um, I mean that's such a difficult part of it because I think for a lot of people, particularly who maybe are living in rural areas, who are living, um, kind of outside of places that have well formed protest communities, social media and the internet is is a lifeline for them and often in a lot of cases like how they came to a lot of the political beliefs in a desire to

do something. Um, but you're like, you can't. You have to actually get like face to face on the ground with people to actually build the kind of relationships that can lead to the sort of activism that y'all are doing. And that's that is a tough needle for a lot of people to threat I think, and you know, in those more rural communities, if there's not already those systems in place, you know, set up a monthly mail distribution

with the local homeless shelter, the local homeless camp. And if you you know, can get a few friends, more people will show up and you can build that community yourself, even where it's not existing already. UM. It's more about just finding those like minded individuals that are already existing in your community and getting to know your neighbors. Yeah, to trust your neighbors. I think that's a great as far as the plan of action goes as good as

you can get for at least starting down that road. UM. Before we kind of move on from this specific action, I did want to talk a little bit about the conversations you had both with like people who lived in Oaklawn and also with um, you know, passers by. I'm wondering, like, UM, did you have any that particularly surprised you or that

particularly stick out to you right now? I personally was a little bit more surprised with the amount of support that we received, um, just because while Oaklawn is the gighborhood is generally more blue liberal, yes, park Town very anti gun typically yea, very yea. And to see you know, people sitting on the patios of the bars carrying for us while we were walking by. Especially as someone who has been you know, grown up in that area, it

meant a lot. You know. It really shows almost like the cultural shift that we're going as far as left this politics go. If people are going to be supportive of us. Yeah, that's really interesting to hear. And now I were there, did you have any kind of interactions with out of I don't know people who were who were more conservative or more on the on the center right side of things. I think we had a couple

of people who were kind of filming and frowning. It's always hard to tell, yeah, in that case, but no one really said anything to us. That's interesting. Yeah, And now that was that what that kind of brings me to the next topic, which is how how how did Dallas how to DPD handle this? Un hardly out of our cars and multiple police cars surrounding us while we

were just unloading um. They were constantly trying to guess where we were going with the mark um by cutting off streets and trying to like escort us and like you know, blocking traffic and things like that. But but we were there less than five minutes before I would say at least four police cars were surrounding us, asking us questions. They were pulling out their guns like we were a threat. Geez. Um, Well, I mean yeah, that's

that doesn't surprise me. Um. Did you have any kind of like direct is did they send like the p I O s up to try and you know, talk with organizers or whatever? Um? So they did right at the beginning, and I think that interaction went really well, um because they approached us as we were getting ready, and they said, you know, what group is this, Who's in charge, who's who's leading? What are your plans? And you know, every single person who was there was disciplined

enough to either say nothing or say no plans. There's no group, there's no leaders. And you know after that, they kept their distance. They did not really interfere more. Yeah, I mean that that is one of those things um,

that police know. I've always found it useful too when you are having when you have to have an interaction with a police officer and um, sometimes it is unavoidable, like you need to kind of focus on like what are the things that they need to hear for this interaction to like end, um and end you know, not in them getting violent. Um. And I think it sounds like, yeah, you you you'll handled it perfectly like that that was the right way for everyone to react, like you were.

It is Texas, Like it's not like it is at all illegal to walk around with guns. Um, so yeah,

I mean that's that sounds that sounds again. I'm impressed by kind of both the boldness of the action but also the discipline that that was required to actually that was required like from the ground up right, not not because like the there was some sort of like vanguard leadership exerting force downward in order to actually make this work safely and in a way that that left hopefully and it seems like this is the case people who live in the area feeling broadly speaking pretty good about it.

I would say that, you know, since the march, in particular, just in DFW in its entirety, the support that we have received has been almost overwhelming. Um. You know, people now recognize the people in black Walk as being safe and they're going to help us. If I need something, I can go to them. And that's the whole purpose of community defenses. Having Michael would be to have everyone

be that person. Uh. Now, the other thing I would wonder, because it's I you know, I've spent a lot of time at black block protests, but generally in Portland, Oregon, where a hot day is like eighty degrees, UM, y'all are in fucking DFW UM. Those those summers are no joke. And wearing the gear that y'all are wearing is is UM a potentially dangerous thing? Right? Like? Was there was there?

Was it kind of individual or left up to infinity groups to like figure out hydration and stuff, or did you have people who are kind of watching folks and reminding them and like trying to ensure that like that part of it was handled. Because that does strike me

as a specific risk in this case. Most of us do have UM at least minor street medic training UM, as well as our own hydration kits, and we all carry extra electrolytes and things like that for people who may not be part of our group who may also need assistance. UM. That's a big part of it here in Texas is that's that's the main risk with protesting in the summer is dehydration, heat exhaustion, he stroke. You know, we do recommend that the people who are in black

blog where moisture within loose layers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Marino is your friend if you can get it, Yeah, exactly. But you know, we all of us are you know, at least trained enough to recognize those symptoms. We make scenes that we can pass out to people, UM about how to protest safely in the summer, in the heat specifically.

That's great, much more dangerous. Now. One of the things I've been seeing recently, and this is I'm guessing from a more recent march, was that the photo going around that's kind of kind of viral on right wing social media of UM. It's a black and white photo. There's uh an individual UM with a plate carrier and an a r UM and another individual with UM like a chest rig and what I think is a baretta um carbine um and uh, both of them are at a

reproductive rights march UM. And there's a mix of really interesting reactions from the right like on this UM and I'm interested in kind of yeah your thoughts there. Yeah, so it's it's been really weird. UM. We try to track whatever is being posted about us UM. Sometimes they can give us intel on people who might want to target us UM. But we've been noticing, you know, it's like a solid third of right wing comments are kind of broadly supportive. I think it really throws them for

a loop. Um, you know, we we've even seen people saying, actually, bodily autonomy is a lot like gun rights and things like that, and it's been really weird. I think, um, being armed might kind of humanize us for some of those people in a way. It's been a weird thing. I have thought a couple of times that, I mean a number of times. I talked about this on the

first season of It could Happen here. I think that there is some potential to bridge some divides there with kind of the existence of of a of an increasingly prominent left wing gun culture. You know. One of the comments I saw was somebody like going through the gear display and be like, actually, no, they're they're reasonably well set up, and like everything seems like this is this is exactly how you'd you know, want to have it done,

and just people being like actually appreciative. And I guess maybe there's a degree to which, like if you're if you're in that community from a right wing side but not like a straight up fascist side, maybe there's a potential for like more commonality and like you said, the idea that like, oh maybe some of them will actually broaden their support for reproductive rights, um, you know, or

at least consider it. You know, I don't know that that doesn't strike me as like a negative move and it it um, particularly in a place like Texas, you have to try to at least um have some sort of common ground with people who are are more on the right wing side of things, because they're so damn many of them. Yeah, so I think, um, it's one of those cases where when ideological where when ideology gets atomized to just like guns good, you know, that is

like a core belief for some people. Um, that can draw them to being supportive of pro choice marches in a in a weird way. It's it's kind of a pretty specific kind of brain worms. But seeing it a lot, Yeah, I wouldn't like call it necessarily a positive like it's a it's an aspect of things that are negative, but it's something that also can be like useful and and

potentially positive. Like even though if you get into what's leading someone to like, oh, I really I re examined my beliefs on reproductive rights because I saw some people marching with guns. That's not like a sign of of a series of thought process that I think is like wildly positive. But at least somebody maybe came around on something better than going the other way. You know, we've been talking about the effects of getting all this right wing attention and uh, you know, in a way, that's

what we want. We want to advertise that we have strong community defense, and on the flip side, you get all these supportive comments and hopefully those people don't want to kill me anymore. So it's it's just positive. We think, Yeah, you're I mean, one of the ways in which these kind of protests can increase security for a community, Like one way is that maybe there are people who will get scared off because they don't want to risk getting shot.

And the other is that maybe some people will re examine their opinions on that community because it's now more familiar to them because there probably way too into guns. But yeah, absolutely, so let's talk about um. There there was a specific action um that kind of the thing that was going around on Twitter was these proud boys trying to get into it, believe it was a library, and like a line of parents squaring off with them to like stop them. Um. Can we talk a little

bit about that. Yeah, that was in McKinney. Um. It was the day after through V. Wade got overturned, And we honestly didn't know what to expect when we got there because of McKinny. We were like, are we going to be very much so outnumbered in this? And when we arrived there was already about thirty to forty people who were either parents or friends of the library there in support and maybe only the teen or twenty people in opposition. Um. So it was, you know, a pretty

good welcoming, supportive environment. Um. And about thirty minutes after we got there is when the Proud Boys arrived, and we just really only had to tell two people, hey, they're Proud Boys. And before I before we couldn't even get over there to like block them off ourselves. There were like eight to ten soccer moms in their flip flops, Nike shorts and handmade signs standing in front of them

and blocking them from coming any closer. Um. And of course they did get closer as people were leaving the library and the event was ending and things like that. But it was one of those things where it just organically happened, and it was it was beautiful, like in in a place like McKinney of all places, like I gw up in North Texas, like place I would expect to find, like a soccer mom in Nike shorts asked like, thanking me for bringing my gun to the library. Yeah,

that's that's wonderful to hear. I mean, and I people who are not in the d F w U area won't understand this, but like, yeah, I spent a significant chunk of my early life in McKinney, and I would not have expected that reaction there. Um, yeah, that's really really good to hear. And it also is you know, I'm I'm. I obviously have been supportive of a number of tactics to confront fascism, including people showing up in block and stuff and and protesting or or or confronting

them physically. But I don't think there's any more durable kind of community self defense than than that, than than a than a group of people who are just kind of live in an area and around and curious, realizing there's a threat and immediately acting against it. Like that's such a that's such a powerful thing. Yeah, saying no, not in my neighborhood. And you know, again, like we didn't expect to have that reaction, which made it that

much better when we saw it. And you know, having those people for the first time in their life maybe even can face to face correctly with fascists probably has a lasting impact on them as well. Like I hope that they keep going to more events like that and keep going and protecting their community from these people. Now, let me ask you, when you have these kind of interactions with folks, and when you had these specific interactions with those specific folks, is there kind of is there

sort of an information spreading thing afterwards? Is they're like, hey, here's who we are, and like where you can find out more about us? Um, like kind of attempts to like let people know who you are and what you're doing and how they can you know, follow you and whatnot. Like is that a is that is that a part of the activism or was it more just like we're showing up to kind of provide a barrier for these people and like that's not this is not the time

or place for that. It's a little bit of both. Um. A lot of these actions we are invited to. We have kind of made it a point to be known as we are here to help UM. So a lot of times we will get invited or people will send us an event and we will We do usually try to get in touch with you ever's organizing the event to make sure that they are comfortable with us, either open carrying or what they prefers to can still carry and things like that, UM, because it is still necessary

to be polite UM. But then also when we do, we always meet people at these actions who are wanting to get more involved than just that one time, and we do have ways for them to get involved in their community and learn from us. Obviously, Dallas is um It's nickname for a long time has been the City of Hate UM, and it is a place that is I mean the city itself is fairly blue, but there is I mean, even within the Dallas area proper a

tremendous amount of people who are like extremely conservative. Obviously, I mean we I don't want to be harping on this too much, but is there a degree to which you are concerned about like attempts at at infiltration and whatnot or attempts to yeah, like kind of like you know, to do sort of the the fascist equivalent of what a lot of anti fascists do with right wing groups. There is a lot of concern about that. UM. We

just you know, we do the best we can. We think we've done a pretty good job already, clearly very careful with um, you know, who were who were in contact with, who were working with UM. We've had to you know, stop working with abusers a few times. That is a tough one. We don't expand nearly as much as we could given all the people who want to be part of this particular group. We believe more in you know, many strong groups and uh try to help

people do that. Um. But yeah, it's a tough struggle. Yeah, I mean that's a that's an interesting because I think maybe a better question for me to ask is is not like, how do you avoid that? But how do you avoid like? Because because the if you look back at the actual history of co Intel pro right and the ship that like Hoover and his his goons were saying to each other, like, the goal was not to

infiltrate every left wing movement. The goal was to make people be so afraid of infiltration that they weren't able to effectively organize, and so that that is I guess kind of the real trick is this. Obviously there's a degree to which you want to be on your guard. You need to be careful. It's it's it's important to be not just ethical, but but like responsible in your op set. But you also can't let like fear of that sort of thing happening just because you're you know,

kind of surrounded in a place like North Texas. You can't let that fear stop you from from trying, right. I think a big part of that is it goes back to the trust thing. You know, we don't really let people into the close folds until they've come to a few actions with us and they've you know, proven that they're not you know, spilling the beans all over Twitter and yeah that you know, um, we know who they are and know what they're about, and then we

involved them a little bit more. Um. It's all about building that trust with the people you're working with. It just goes right back to that is you know, trust is built over time, um, And the longer we all know each other, the more we trust each other, and then you know, we are able to have those conversations about welcoming more people in and um, you know, setting up the processes for that now has just on a logistical standpoint, that kind of notoriety i'll have have gained

because of some of these actions. Has it sort of led to like difficulty in terms of we were dealing with like so many much interest, so many people reaching out to us, like how do you how do you actually like organize kind of that, like how you how you respond to people when ship goes viral? You know, I I know how overwhelming that can be. Yeah, that's been pretty new to us. Um. We've been more used to being kind of your local crew that does things

no one ever talks about. And uh, having a larger profile now is a challenge because we do know, you know, attracting a lot more attention you know, put some constraints on us. Um, but I think that goes back to why it's important to have a lot of different groups doing a lot of different stuff. Um. You know, you can't just have one uh group, uh doing all the organizing that needs to be done in an area. It's

just a bad idea. You know, if a group gets taken out for a variety of reasons you don't want

everything to fall apart. Yeah, so I guess kind of as we come to probably close to the end of this where there were there are things that I didn't get into that you wanted to talk to about what y'all are doing and kind of what you want other people know, particularly folks who I don't know we're in in Louisville or and you know, fucking Idabelle, Oklahoma, and UM kind of want to feel want to build UM or at least help to help to protect their community

in a place that UM, there's additional challenges in doing so. Yeah, I've seen that recurring events no matter what it is, you know, book club distribution, if there's a place that people can find you regularly, that's a great way to have the kind of people you want to meet, you know, just just walk up and talk to you, UM for me what you know, watching your ops set and also compartmentalizing your information, like if I don't need to know something, I don't want to know it, UM, And that's a

good way to stay safe while also you know, being able to organize and take action because like you said earlier, the most important thing is the will to do something. If you're just you know, the safest thing you can do is stay in your basement, but then no one will do anything. Yeah, exactly right. Um, was there anything else either of you all wanted to get into. I

guess I also want to plug passing on training. So whatever skills you have, we've taught, um medical stuff, how to do an oil change, um, how to fire gun stuff, martial arts you know, unarmed fighting is also important. Um, share knowledge with each other, you know, make each other more powerful in that way. Yeah, that is a I think a great line to end on. Um, thank you

everybody else and um yeah, um you can check out. Actually, you guys want to plug your your your socials, you could follow me at bubble break on Twitter and um it's kind of out now, but you can follow Anarco air softest we have trained on there excellent, and then of course, uh Domeport John Brown Gun Club on pretty much all platforms currently. Yeah. I never got into TikTok either one of these days. All right, everybody, that's the episode.

What uh inspiring networks of violent accelerationism my nihilistic loss of faith in the possibility of human progress, And I don't I don't. I don't know. That's probably not a good way to Yeah, I'd be like that sometimes, Garrison, what are we What are we talking about today? This is it could happen here podcast, Bad Things, World falling apart. There's just been a big shooting in Boston. You probably about Chicago, not Boston. Boston, not Boston, not this. I

was thinking about the Boston bombing. Oh, there we go. It's also not really in Chicago. We should know. It's like thirty right, Yeah, yeah, it's like it's it's it's it's a it's a northern suburb. Yeah, it's like it's and yeah, because I've heard a bunch of people say it's like a super rich neighborhood, and then I've heard other Chicago folks say that, like, no, it's like an

upper middle class neighborhood that used to be richer. And anyway, whatever, it's not like Chicago that and yeah, we'll be talking about it because it's It is an incident that fits within a pattern of behavior that very few people understand nor really prepared to think about. And it's part of why is because if you actually understand what's going on with this shooting, there is no political utility in what happened.

Um And I mean that the number of ways there is no if you are someone who is supportive of more stringent gun control, there is not political utility in the shooting for a number of reasons, including the fact that Illinois has strict gun laws, and while a lot of Illinois gun crime has to do with weapons that coming from other states, he bought his legally in the

state of Illinois. Um. And even though like this guy was on police radar, he had made threats before they had confiscated all of his knives, and he's still allowed to buy guns, even though Illinois has a red flag law that very easily if you can confiscate demands knives they could have confiscated, has stopped him from buying guns or whatever. Plenty of laws on the books to have stopped this. And it's useless in a left right political sense of the word, because there are this guy does

not graph onto any of that I have. I think it is there's a value and kind of putting out some of the Trump imagery he's put on only because the right has immediately left on calling him a transgender anti for shooter. And I guess in terms of a social media thing, sharing him draped in a Trump flag is the quickest way to like rebut that, but that doesn't mean he's not it's it's not not for actually

understanding what's going on. Yeah, there's very this is it's it's in a pattern of shootings that are becoming more common the past few years. We saw it at the UH there's a school shooting last like October or November

that the shooter had a very similar profile. Um, and it's a it's a part of this growing online trend using imagery related to mental illness too encourage and justify mass acts of violence in some rebellion from how our regular society is structured and how people usually think of reality. So it's it's something that we generally people who spent a lot of time researching this, myself included trying to be very careful about how we talk about this, right

because we we don't want the wrong things boosted. But also everyone just being in the dark isn't great either, Right, That's that's frustrating. Right, if people are curious, they want us start to look stuff up, and it's better that they have someone who knows what they're talking about explaining to them then then just have them being the wild West of the Internet on site image boards or forms learning about these nonsense propaganda styles. There's there's a few

things that are unique about this guy. I mean, he was not only making the propaganda, but he also did he also did a violet act that is actually more unique than usual. Usually the people who are involved in making this type of propaganda that he was making, he made YouTube videos, music, he he was he was very prolific in what he was putting out content wise into

the Internet. And usually the people who put stuff out in this style of propaganda and this style of like of a very very like meme driven violent mental illness fetishization subcultures, they don't generally the people who make the stuff don't go and do the stuff. This is what instance where this this did happen. So that's actually unique for a few reasons. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that and this is something that has not been discussed nearly as

much as I think it ought to have. In the wake of the shooting, this guy basically released an a r G at the same time as he carried out his shooting, Like we're basically we're going to get to that. I mean because in some ways this is a really good explanation, not explanation. This is really an example of the post manifesto, like post manifesto terrorism UM, where there's not there's not a written manifesto. It's someone's entire all line presence and their entire online documentation is is that

that serves as their manifesto. The whole image of them online, everything they've put out, it represents the thing that they want spread. It's people these types of people are are less likely to write, you know, like a ten page thing about how about why they hate X minority. Instead, they're gonna leave piles and piles of clues and puzzle pieces, music videos and content that lead people into what they

want to project as their mental state to be. UM. So it's like everything is and everything is part of what they want to put out. Yeah, and I think both. You can see the act itself, the shooting itself as an attempt to spread the art that he was making and to spread this like profile that he had built. There's a reason why that logo that he had for himself, UM was all over everything there's a reason why unique logo,

very unique. Ago. He put out some of the videos, one from ten months ago showed the location he's believed to have started shooting from. It looks like, um, so he was planning this for a while, and he I think this was this was meant both as almost as like an advertising campaign for this guy's EP, if you want to look at it that way, but in a broader sense, like like like it's it's it's it's more

circular than that. Right. He wasn't just trying to spread his stuff, but he was trying to spread his stuff in this this imagery and branding that he had created for himself and in order to put other people in that same mind state. It was. It was also very personal to him. Um, he's I've spent the past few hours watching watching hours of the stuff that he's put out. Um, and I mean he's there's there's videos that he's animated of him doing a suicide by cop. Um, there's there's

music videos he's made about doing a school shooting. Um. These are these are d as and Pot has been grappling with for a long time and he finally did the thing. I'm I'm unsure currently if he always knew that he was going to do this or if he was actually trying to fight it now that's that's honestly not even worth debating because it's not useful to what's going on because he did it, because because he didn't.

But we've had you can see the types of stuff he's been putting out, Like yes, the string that he did the shooting on, he has a long, along zooming clip of that same street in videos that was posted like over a year ago. Um, he's been he's been thinking in this way for a long time. This isn't like a fast radicalization. This is someone who has been heavily steeped in very very small niche online some cultures

for a long time. Like the guy is twenty two years old, he's he's had his Twitter account since two thousand eleven. He's been online so much. Um, it's deeply online person, deeply alienated, uh, socially isolated, uh, deeply like disassociative. And this is this is by the way, can assistant with what his friends have said, consistent with what people who knew him and worked with him and put music

and albums together with him have have repeatedly. A number of them at this point come out and said variations of like, yeah, man, he he got like really weird, like it was it not not like and not in the way that like, oh he got super into que or like he became a Nazi, but like he got weird in a way I didn't understand and I stopped associating with he got he got detached from parts of of like modern reality in ways that are really hard

for people to understand. Um, and I think it's it is important to emphasize just that the deeply online nature of this he he had. He made a whole music video titled I Rely on the Internet, um that you can't find anywhere, so that don't even try to love of God. You don't need to. You don't need to. But like, but it opens, but it opens by him saying I get mad when other people are more popular

than me on the internet. And the mass shooting is in line with this, With this style of thinking, right, he's he is he is trying to reify himself into a into a memetic image to spread around the same way many mass shooters try to do this same thing that he is doing this extremely intentionally Um, he wants to be the thing that represents a very specific idea, and I'm it's again we are always trying to be carey careful, but like how much we get into this

because you don't want to boost the wrong thing. But it's no one of the important to talk about because it's costing a lot of people in their lives, and no one really knows how to deal with this problem right now. One of the beautiful things about our current age is that if you are someone like if you are someone who researches terrorism, extremism, violence, particularly in the American context, although certainly not exclusively christ Church and the

whole Germany, I don't need to go into it. But if you are someone who focuses on this stuff, um, you will repeatedly have the experience of encountering a new subculture online or a new trend, a new like species of meme and find yourself wondering, like when the shooting is going to be? Um. I made a significant chunk of my career because I was paying attention to one particular group of folks online when they did their shooting.

And I am not primarily I've not been in the you know, We've talked a little bit about schizo wave, which is kind of broadly speaking, the thing that this guy most embodied. Um that is that is the propaganda style which has a bad name. Yes it's obviously we're not endorsing its name. This is the style that people who are involved in this only community use. It's about fetishizing parts, or fetishizing media driven aspects of mental illness

to encourage violence. It's about obviously mental illness, yes, the aesthetics and mental illness. Right, People who are who actually you know, deal with mental illnesses are much less likely to commit violent acts. They're actually more likely to be

the recipient of of of violent acts not documented. So like this is this is like I think it portant to actually get people to like understand because this is one of the things that if you look at like Tucker Carlson for example, like how Alex Jones bind to all these shooters, the thing they pivoted, one of the things they pivoted to is, oh, it's because all these

people are on antidepressants. And it's like, no, I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about So there was there was this tweet, but I mean, I hate talking about Marjorie Taylor Greens. I think it's useless to talk about her, and it only gives her inflates the thing that she represents. But but but uh, she had this tweet about a picture of of him that that that that he that he posted, and she's asking is he in jail or a rehab center or a psychiatric center in this photo that's on

his bedroom? What drugs are psychiatric drugs or both? Does he use? And the image here is of an image very clearly photoshopped of this person sitting in like of it, sitting in like a mental institution, holding a Bible. And it's part of this thing that is like a fetishizing the aesthetics of mental illness. Right, It's like, look at me, I'm I am so detached from reality, I be I belong inside a mental institution and the aesthetics of Christian fascism,

which is also a weird part of it. There's a photo one of the like images he posted in four chan. I think it was fortunately I may be mistaken about the exact location, but it was like it was a Catholic saint with like the sacred heart like in her hands, with the head replaced by like some anime girl. I've i've,

I have not seen that yet. But yeah, this image that he made of of inside this this mental hospital, that that is, that is part of the joke to him, right, the joke, Like I don't think he would actually assume that someone would think this is an unphotoshopped image. I think he would he hilarious obvious, like like Margine Taylor Grey is just like just like unable to determine the most basic photoshop that you can see the edge marks

very clearly. So but but this, but like this is part of the joke, right, And everything getting into what he actually believes about reality and stuff isn't important because everything about this is has to do with like post to ironic violence and post ironic like comedy, post ironic like ideas of reality. It's the difference between this what is sincere and what is real and what is ironic and what is fake don't matter. They as long as

they're happening, that's what's happening. So it's all as real as anything else. So getting into specific ideas about what he personally believes doesn't actually matter because one we don't know if that's genuine at all. He's he's putting everything out intentionally. And two it doesn't matter on the actual material circumstances. What are producing effects inside our world right now, like these types of like acts of violence, but it's it's everything is put out, should be but it'll seem

like contradictory, it'll seem confusing. Right. He opened a video of his that he was like doing a live stream like like I think, like over like a year ago, and he he calls everyone who's watching his live stream like he calls them communists. He's like, hey, communists, um. And it's not because they're actually communists, not because he

likes communism. It's not because he's necessarily fascist either. It's that all these things are so blurred and you use them interchangeably to produce this sense of meaninglessness and the reaction to this meaningless world that he's constructed for himself and these types of online subcultures try to construct. The only sensible reaction to this meaningless world is for them to do these types of acts of violence. That is,

that is the point. So the actual details what they're saying aren't important, because it's all about constructing this world that is utterly meaningless and self contradictory and confusing and nothing makes sense and the only way to respond to that is to get out of it. And that's part of what they're they're trying to do. And there are I mean, and again part of the frustrating things that there are all of these things that people try to

kind of simply affix to this our pieces of it. Yeah, American gun culture, the fetishization of violence as the way to achieve positive ends in our culture is a part of this. It's why, it's part of why the natural response to everything is meaningless and confusing is going a

galling spray exactly. Um. And likewise, the fact that politics is where it is where you have like this one party that's the Republican Party that is almost entirely dedicated to like owning the Libs and just purely attacking people rather than trying to do anything because their policies have been unmitigated disasters for the country, and the other side just kind of blindly tells people to vote like that hopelessness that like that, that kind of nihilistic aggression on

the right all feeds into this. And you could say that like a great deal of right wing media, particularly right wing ault media, is kind of firms a heavy component of like the milieu that this guy was radicalized in. But it's more like that kind of stuff provided a language for him than it is that that kind of stuff was specifically like his motivating things. The same thing with Trumpism, right, Like he he engaged with Trumpism only in a way that it helps kind of destabilize things.

And is this like orbit of chaos, right, That's that's why it that that that's why it's into it. Right, He was deeply into stuff run conspiracy theories, paranormal deep nihilism, um, getting cut off from consensus reality, getting awakened to some like greater truth. Everything that he's actually into is all just to serve to serve those types of means. Politics aren't the core part of that, but it's a reaction to politics. And then he's going to use it as

just as just another tool. It's because yeah, many of them are racist. Maybe they can share racist memes, but that's not actually the the the center point of of

what's going on um. And you know, in some ways to be easier if it would be, because that gives you something actually easy to target otherwise right now, you know, when you're trying to address this whole propaganda style that is encouraging these things to happen, it's a harder thing to climb down on because it's it's an like an endless game of whack a mole trying to find out, you know, who's the big people pushing content like this right now and like these weird niche communities, how can

we get them taken down? And they just always pop back up, right It's always it's it's this end this game. So it's hard to target, and that leaves you with the feeling of like hopelessness on how this situation will be solved, which is like also part of the point of why these attacks happen is to is to get that reaction. Um, but it sucks, like it's it's it's it's always bad to just have the like the only thing you think about is like, oh wow, I don't

see a way to solve this. It's just terrible. But that's part of the intention here, and man, it's it's not good because you know, you this this isn't the first shooting that has happened from this skits awave aesthetic. There there. There has been other ones, but these things are norms are gonna start hearing more and more about this, and that sucks. Um, It's gonna become more of a of a thing that people are going to be aware of.

Right as soon as as soon as MPR starts talking about it, you're like, Okay, this is this is fully this is this is fully escaped the box. It's it's it's one of those things when um, because I was just I was saying earlier, like what it's like when you finally when you find yourself staring at it something that is going to blow up in a violent way and just not knowing when you are one of a number of folks who I've known who are kind of

particularly dealing with this space. And it's been like two years that folks have been saying like there is there will have it like and the thing that is most

almost as frightening as like anything else is that. And then fucking Brett Bear is going to be talking about Schizo wave on the news like we're gonna have to We're gonna have to deal with like Joe Rogan trying to parse this ship out while stoned um, while stoned and well, talking about the Cally Yuka and we're talking about the fucking calli Uga, which does lead us into the board Apiacht Club Gas. So are we gonna are we gonna set? So we'renna talk about one thing dealing

with skits. We were finished talking about one thing dealing with skits away and then when I enter into other thing that the only accurate way I can describe describe this is that my my dives into this, into this theory are the equivalent of what it feels like to have a psychotic episode. And that's not that's not disparaging at all. It's about the actual thing is your brain does when that happens. How you take one meaningless piece of information and project meaning onto it to make it

super important. Um, and how that kind of cascades down. Oh boy, So the board the board a fiacht club a k A. Now, I guess the board ape Nazi Club because people online have decided that they're really good at researching Nazis. I guess somebody hopp into the fucking subreddit and tell us that we we needed to be all right, we needed to be dealing with this. Yeah, So I was like, like, randomly, I like visited some of my friends in Chicago who are like normies and

like they were telling me about this video. Yeah, it's it is. It is again. It has fully escaped the box now and that's part of the problem. So there is this YouTuber who made a video in partnership with a quote unquote internet artist um about how the Board Apiacht Club friends of the pod are secretly this Nazi op to troll everyone into spreading esoteric Nazism. That's that's

the claim. Now, first I'm gonna say that the guy who made this video was in partnership with this internet artist who at the same time launched a rival ape based n f T project, and this video served as an ad for his rival ape n f T project.

And to be clear, his Ape n f T project was taking the art that the Board Apiacht Club used for their apes, making no changes to it, and just selling it to people on a different platform, which is like intellectual property theft right, right, Like, I never want to be the guy saying the board apes are leading on the right. I can't believe, like we are not defending Board Ape Yacht Club and I want them to

be hit with a brick. But we're talking about this because people are appropriating the term, appropriating the almost like the aesthetics of anti fascist research that he started selling their own products. They are appropriating the aesthetics of anti of scholarship focused on extremism, um, in order to sell n f T s. That's what's happening with this. The board Ape Yacht Club or Nazis video so agains. So all the inporation comes from this from this guy who's

a rival arrival n f T internet art. What's his name, hig writer Rips? I think, yeah, writer Rips. Yeah, because he's being sued now by the Board Apes or whatever, and like, good god, I and I mean everything, I I'm not gonna if you watch the video that we're referring to, I'm not disparaging you in case you thought it was convincing, because I mean that was part of the editing, because he was trying to make it seem convincing. But every every single thing is like cherry pick and

squished together to resemble meaning. But once you actually open it up, you're like, oh, this is actually nothing. Um. The whole thirty minute section on the cipher is about them doing cipher's badly to get a result out of the clues that they were given. They're looking for specific results to match whatever they want to see um. And everything else is the connections are so tangential um and

it's it's like synchronicity gone bad. Right. It's people who take these things and protect meaning onto them, when in reality that's just how everything in the world works, and it's not actually meaningful or important. It's just because you're

focusing on it, so you're gonna see it everywhere. It is the same thing we were talking about in our food factories, conspiracy videos, a podcast sorry, and and it's basically one of the things that has made this, I think spread so viral e is that there's a germ of not truth. But there's there's a single convincing point that it all starts from. And the single convincing point is that the board Apiat club logo was from that

other Nazi logo. Absolutely, yeah, very is very much patterned off of like the the old s s Death's Head because you shouldn't, yeah, because the number of things going on there, because the Nazis were really good at graphic design, and because also that's not originally a Nazi thing. It has its origins and a Prussian military unit, and there's a reason why the death's head went so far. And it is generally like, for example, when you see a death's head on in the Ukrainian soldier in like Ukraine,

that dude's probably got some pretty Nazi fucking beliefs. It's not a it's it's not a again, So the fact that you see something that looks like it may have an inspiration in that um but like is a worthwhile point to start looking at stuff. Absolutely, But once you go at it with a conclusion in mind, then find

things just to back up your own conclusion. That's not how you do good research because man, like one of the founders is Jewish, not saying Jewish people can't be fascist or whatever, but like half the people who started it are ethnic minorities. They're really bad writers, and they put together this thing that's complete nonsense, and people are now assuming it's this, yeah, make a conspiracy, and it's not. It's just because it's so And I think part of

why people are so so. I think part of why a chunk of the people who hate it want there to be a conspiracy is because this thing has made so much money, and it is utterly banal and an idiotic, and it is utterly been all in idiotic and part of the thing A lot of this comes out of and a lot of the strength that kind of this individual, this thing has, this this video has comes out of the fact that years ago a number of folks, some of whom our present company here, started warning people about

the ways in which fascists would hide things like fourteen and eight and all of dog whistles, hidden imagory, all that kind of stuff here is and and so people started to get primed to the fact that that happens, that the Nazis hide ship, and that that that you should be on the lookout for it. But one of the things that has been forgotten, I think, in kind of the rush to do that for ship like this, is that it's not just the fact that there hiding like and in the in the specific case of people

are putting fourteens and eighty eights and ship. When I was discussing that was nearly always in the context of like members of Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys and affiliated groups who were beating people in the streets. Right, So you're not you don't just have the imagery you have someone going out and doing things that like they are claiming I have nothing to do with fashions, but

like no, you can see like you haven't and there. Yeah, if you have an ape that's numbered one eight, which is a video, it's because there's like ten thous these apes and they're all numbered in numerical order. Yeah, it's like the fact that in a group of a set of ten thousand apes, one of them is a number of four eight is not Nazi dog whistling even anymore than it would be Satanic dog whistling that there's gonna

be a six six six in there. You know. It's just like there's one that's six nine six nine, just like there's one that's two three four seven. Whatever. Yeah, it's it's like that thing people used to do were like I don't know if people still do this, but like they were when I was like kid. People would like you get someone who'd like pull out a grid of a city and they start drawing pentagrams on it. Yeah, exactly, and it's like, well, yeah, there's a bunch of random

lines if you can. But the other thing that's that's a really problem. That's a big problem about this. It's not only it's passing off bad extremism research to sell their own n f T product, which is bad and of itself. It's also saying the stuff that doesn't need to be said out loudly to a huge audience, all while using the fast wave image style, and that sucks

because it's talking about things like traditionalism. It's talking about types of esoteric Nazism that usually we don't want to put a giant megaphone on because when people get really into this, you get stuff like the shooting that happened

a few days ago. That's that's Those are the same Internet communities that this stuff is really fostered in, So we don't like to amplify it because the more people who are in these communities, the more their brains slowly get chipped away at by these people making this making

these types of like hypnotic propaganda. So when we have a tuber that has a video with millions of views talking about the Caluga, talking about Julius A. Vola talking about a whole bunch of stuff around like extremely niche occult Nazism, that's not great, especially when they're using the fastave style. Of video editing to make it seem really cool and scary, and when they're doing it ultimately to make money in an n f T scheme, right, It's it's it's more than just this is not just somebody

did research that was like bad um. This is somebody crafted a viral thing using the aesthetics of research um and dropping some really dangerous shit into the consciousness in an irresponsible way to sell the same ape drawings they

were attacking. Extremely frustrating because even the whole cipher section of the video I'll still reel against because it's about people using a bad jillion cipher methodologies to get specific results out of it that they want, and all the results they get out of it also are like not problematic and kind of explainable, Like all of them refer to something about monkeys anyways, even if they are true, it's not. It's it doesn't necessarily need to be referencing

this obscure thing in traditionalism. It's like, oh no, that's because it's the name of a fucking monkey. And I don't again, I don't. I don't have any actual opinion on whether the Bourne Apiat Club has someone working for it that is hiding in secret references because honestly, I don't care, because all because what it's viewed publicly as is a stupid n f T thing. I mean, it's not. It's not viewed publicly with people who use it as a Secretnacy conspiracy because if it is, what's the impact,

What's what's the impact that it's had? Like, how how would it matter if it's a secret Nazi conspiracy theory? What's it? What's it doing? It's it's selling bad pictures of monkeys. When when we talk about the first wave of this and like they need to explain, you know, the symbols that people were hiding in these like right wing street movements of a bunch of whom wound up feeding into Jam six, It's easy to say, well, what the harm was? They were going out, they were beating people,

they were planning terrorists a tax, right like that. Yeah, it's doing terrorists to I have I again, I fucking hate these Board eight motherfucker's. I think this is the stupidest fucking I don't know trend I've seen in my entire goddamn life. I cannot point to anything even vaguely Nazi. They have supported or done like and among other things.

If you want to know if something is a dangerous conspiracy or a stupid grift, one question you should ask yourself and this isn't always relevant, but one question you should ask yourself is is Jimmy Fallon involved? Because if Jimmy Fallon is involved, it's probably just a dumb grift. Because I mean, the whole, the whole, the watching this guy break down how you get secret messages out of these ciphers is it's it's the same. It's the same

thing as like to and on ship. It's people wanting to get an answer out of numbers and things and then pushing that answer as truth even if it's like not not based in any form of reality. Yeah, it's it's so it's it's really frustrating to watch people basically start using Q and ON style research tactics to justify their hatred of an n f T project, which is like, no, you can just dislike it from being an n f T thing. You don't need to rapid in a in

this package that is just really bad extremism research. Part of one of the things that scares me about this attack and about like what's going to happen kind of in the media after it is that. Um, I think kind of inevitably these aesthetics are just going to get co opted on a wider and wider basis. That's what's happening on TikTok right now, is that these these types of fast, waven, schizweve aesthetics are just becoming a core

part of the zoomer online aesthetic. And that sucks. The The other point I wanted to mention about the Highland Park thing is like this, this guy that did this is such a perfect profile of this type of de attached like gen Z like almost I like like post politics terrorism, um that Like he is such a perfect example of someone who has been online since he was

a very very little kid trying to make content online. Right, everyone in gen Z needs to be performing all of the time, right, Your whole life is a performance for the internet. Um. He was doing that same thing. He's been making them, making music and videos and ships since he was he was like younger than me. Like he's been doing this for a long long time. Um. And the types of like you know, like nested communities that

you get like that you like fall into. It's such it's such like a clear example of the very types of things that you know, me and others have been talking about and warning about for a while. Um. And it's the whole like muddled nous of reality that we even get with this like board a Nazi clip video. Right, They're all part of this same problem with the Internet, Like our brains weren't designed for this much information coming at us at the same time, we cannot sort it

all out. Um. And it's not ideal. Um, I was, it's not It's not great. I would rather it not be like this. I don't know how to like comment people with a solution to this, because this is an unsolved problem. It's like, come up with a solution for the fucking um the fact that emissions like are not going to be reduced, you know, because the world, because the world does suck. But the very be very cognizant of video propaganda styles and anyone that uses flashing like

classic or catholic um like imagery. Be very very careful, be very careful of people who fetishize these tetics of mental illness. Be very careful about about people that that you wrap these aesthetics of of mental mental illness and like a very violent package because like that that's what we get with with with the shooter. He was like doing doing videos about about, you know, these types of mental illness that end with him just like a picture

of like a drawing of him holding a gun. Um. You know, way before he bought a gun, he was making art about about this. UM. I think the one that's stuck out to me most was him repeatedly referring to himself as a sleepwalker, UM, which which I don't know, like obviously that is very much in line with the Skitzawave aesthetic stuff that like you have been talking about. It also kind of makes me think, I mean it.

It brought me to thinking about Barbara Tuckman, who is a historian who wrote a book called The Guns of August that's a history of World War One. UM that that describes kind of the machinery that got set up

and marched everybody into that situation exploding like sleep sleepwalkers, right. Um, Like this system has been set up and the people are kind of so unwilling to see where it's leading that, Uh, everything is just kind of marching with a with a sense of an inevitability towards a worse and a worse end point. And that's that's what scares me most about this. I've I've listened to many of his horrible songs and there's nerric and there's lyrics very similar to that idea.

UM about that kind of inevitable, like faked driven nature of our current situation and how reality has become so muddled with the internet. Um, and like we there's been uh an intentional, top down effort to destroy any nature of consensus reality and make everything up for debate of there's there is, there is Facts no longer are a thing, like they just don't exist. And this is the world

that results from that happening. When there's people in power who put are pushing for this, like you know, like Steve Bannon is among you know, one of many people who are pushing for this type of world. Um, this is the result that we get, and this is the that they kind of want us to get. It's it's it's yeah, I mean because if everything is true and that's fine fun mentally, like what they're going for is

this idea that like everything is true and nothing is everything? Yeah, and if every like and if you hit that state, you can do anything right, like to to steal a quote. Who was that? Was that fucking Crowley? Um? The but but like that's very much nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Yeah, I mean that goes all the way back to the assassins. Yes, sure, sure, sure, um but no, but it is like that is that is the thing, right if you mean even the even

the shooter guy had numerous Discordian references in in his ship. Yeah. Yeah, it's all about the same stuff. It's all it's all dealing with these same problems. And you're right, obviously, if if you know, if you deal with dissociation as I sometimes do, if you you know like parts about the Discordian aesthetics and like like the kind of ideas they play with, that does not make you an inherently dangerous person.

That's that's not the problem here, um the right, Like you get like, I'm you know in some ways, but I I think about a lot of a lot of these same topics because I look at all of this I'm I look at all of this research all the time. So it is my brains in a similar is isn't a isn't a similar place? That's that's that doesn't make

you a bad person. That doesn't make you dangerous. Um, but I think it's important to be cognizant of the type of propaganda that people are pushing, the types of propaganda, trends and styles that are producing material effects in the world, like these types of shootings. Yeah, and so I don't know what else to say, honestly, because it's bad. Yeah, it's it's a problem. I would say, if anyone ever tells you about something they saw on the internet, hit

them and runaway screaming. That's a good that's a good way to move forward. Um, and please don't don't start the other things like you know, we're gonna, we're gonna the right is going to have two possible reactions to stuff like this, Right, They're gonna one do a satanic panic. They be like, oh, look at these people doing a cult shit. Um, let's do another. Let's do another satanic panic,

which would suck. There, there's there's there's there's that option obviously that would tie you into like transphobia, that would tie into a whole bunch of whole much of bullshit. Um. The other option is that people start, you know, using mentally ill people as a scapegoat that start of saying we should lock up people who deal with mental illness is also not that would suck, wouldn't solve the problem either,

wouldn't do it. Yeah, Like that's the thing I've I've actually been seeing this in the last really like probably three months, is there's been a bunch of people who have been calling for like bringing like bringing sort of old school asylums back. That's that's exactly what the people, the people who make this propaganda, that's exactly what they want. That's that they want you to have that reaction that

would make things so much worse. If you put people like this in an asylum for ten days then they get out there, they are so much more likely to to do these types of things. Not because they're actually like not because like not nothing to do with their actual whatever like mental things they have going on. It's because of the set. The aesthetic styling is right. They

want to be a character in a story. If they feel like their life is going in a direction that they are a character in a story, they're getting put in these situations that they've memed about. Right, this guy's pictures, he's photostrapher of himself inside mental institutions, right, It's it's a character in a story. If you do that, you're playing right into their hands. It is that is not what that that should not be the focused of what

we are doing. Um and like carsonal problems are not the solution to these types of things, especially for people who are who are like just making music online, Like what are you gonna do? Fucking arrest people for the like for the music they make like, that is not the solution. Don't let people turn this into targeting people who have actual like mental like mental things that they

deal with. Don't make them the scapegoat of this. Um and be very careful if anyone tries to do any kind of satanic panic nonsense about secret occultists who are trying to alter your kids reality or whatever, or very careful because anyone who uses that type of framing for this problem is not genuine. They do not actually care. They are pushing something that they want. Yeah, I mean.

And I think one of the reasons why the idea that these people are kind of seeing themselves as part of a narrative is important is because it represents a discontinuity with the way mass shootings have worked for most of the time that people listening to this has been alive in the United States prior to a couple of years ago. Really twenty nineteen was the big break year for this. The vast majority of mass shooters were also committing suicide. That was part of the goal. That was

what happened. UM. And if you are an individual with a gun who has just committed a series of murders, it is very easy to make sure you die in that attack. It's extremely easy. Um. That is why so many of them did it. That has that has stopped being given in the way that it used to be. The change I think was christ Church was the main inflection point for this. But a lot of these guys go down alive. The Buffalo shooter taken alive, the last the last skitz Awave shooter from a few months ago,

I was taken in alive. UM. Just intriguing because if I was to watch all this video propaganda beforehand, I would have assumed that this guy wanted to die within the act. A lot of the stuff was written about him doing this to kind of end his life and

escape into whatever is next. That that's the kind of feeling I get a lot of his writing, and yet he didn't of the imagery he was putting out, particularly the ship with him in in the asylum, as kind of evidence of where like part of it was part of why I suspected like he had he intended to get taken alive. That is, that is that is very possible. I mean like because in some ways, yeah, I'm not going to speculate, not necessarily the most useful. I'm not

gonna I'm not gonna speculate further. But there's a lot of a lot of possible things to to think about there, which I will do so because I have all the stuff. Don't know what else, Please, it's you don't don't look at this stuff because it's like forbidden, right, don't don't don't seek it out because it's like, oh, it's forbidden knowledge that they don't want you to see. It's dangerous. Oh that's that's not the point. The point is it's bad.

And now it's also hard to find. So like, just like, don't not watching like it's not it's not even it's not worth watching. It's not like stuff like like in the immediate wake of it, and like, my what happened to me? Was I got a fucking headache. You get a headache, you feel bad. It's it waste. It wastes

your time. Like if you if you want to get this, like the experience of this without having to like do this ship like fucking eat a bunch of like eat a ship ton of candy, watch watching Watch, watch Pink Floyd's The Wall Jesus Christ, except except if you're eating a bunch of candier watching the Wall like it's actually before every good, whereas this is just like it's it's only the bad parts of that. But I only look at this because it's my fucking job and it sucks.

H Yeah, all right, well, um you know I'm gonna I'm gonna say we're probably done here. Um, so I don't know until next time. Again, if anyone tries to tell you about something that happened on the internet, strike them and flee. Remember run hide, fight from people trying to tell you about things happening on social media. These are this is this is the good strategy going forward.

All right, podcast it could happen here. It's a podcast about the terrible things that are happening going around the world and the wonderful people who are trying to fix them. What it is today is a podcast with Harek Lubani of Glia. And what really inspired me about the story and maybe want to share it with you, is that

it came out of a really dark place. Terek was on the ground in Gaza treating gunshot wound victims, and a lot of gunshot wound victims, Like I remember reading his field testing of the device and just being appalled by the number of people who have been shot, a lots of them children, and some of the reporting he was doing right like, oh, I had this this torniquet and we were reusing them and they don't work very well on the pediatric application because kids shouldn't be shot, right.

But instead of getting down, he was able to make a solution. And I think that's really important. And I really like that even through like this dark and terrible stuff that we've all had to experience and he experienced in Gaza, he was able to see a positive solution away to look after people, to move forward in this case,

to prevent death and preserve life. And I think it's easy to focus on the dark stuff, that's enough of it happening, but I think it's important to focus on the great people who are doing great things to protect and care for other people as well. So that's a little bit of what we got today and I hope you enjoy it. So I'm here with Tarak Lubani. He's from Glia. Their company came across when I was writing

about three D printed tournic case. Would you like to introduce yourself to us a little bit about GLEA and what you do there. Thank you so much for having me. My name is terrickle Banny. As you had mentioned, I'm an emergency physician. I work in Canada in a city in Canada called London, and I also work in the

Gaza strip as an emergency physician as well. Glia was really an answer to a problem, the problem being that when I see patients in Gaza they don't get the same quality of service that I can give to my nations. Of course, that's multi factorial, but a big part of that has to do with the way in which we as uh that the medical profession have medical devices we don't release that we don't give access to other people

to use. And so Glia's purpose was to take the most medical devices that doctors use and to make sure that they were accessible and available to doctors all over the world. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's very cool. And you make a number of devices, right, Like I know that I first called to you about the torn Q, but you make also a stethoscope. Is that right? The stethoscope is the calling card of medicine. And so it was the first project that we started working on to test

out the theory. I mean, we started with the theory that hey, we can probably make a device that's just as good as a three D device, but the costs let's say three dollars or even thirty dollars. And that was the stuf scope. We tested it, we published the results, We proved it was as as good as the Gold Standards the Litman Cardiology three at the time, and often using it both in our own practices, also making it

available other people to make for theirs. Okay, yeah, And so that's what's really interesting about your company as opposed to other companies, right, you're not necessarily like manufacturing and distributing. You are providing the designs that allow other people to make them, right, And so can you talk about some of their like, uh, I know that you use three

D printing, and I want to talk about that. But also, like I remember seeing that the tubing and the setoscope comes from the a Coca Cola machine, right, for some of those considerations, Yeah, absolutely, the purposes to make these devices available to other people for the lowest as possible, but also like actually be available. It's no good if you can make it for twenty cents, but parts that

required are nowhere. So that's why we much with a basket of items that are more or less earsily available, and we made the stuffoscopes out of that. For example, you can probably get the very specific kind of earpieces that most stuffoscopes have, but they are naturally going to be less available and less abundant than if you were to use regular earbuds the contact phones. There are way

more headphones out there than there are stuffoscopes. Therefore, those parts are more available, even if, of course there they are less expensive. But even if they were slightly more expensive, it would be worth it. What we really take away is the monopoly and the profit motive. And so by doing that, or rather let's say the exorbitant profit that medical device companies are making, and by doing that, we're

really able to to realize the promise of patents. All of the devices that we make were patented at one point. The promise of patents is that when the patent is over, you'll get a chief device. But that promise is not realized. The stutoscope is a three hundred year old device basically, and the fact that it is not available at the

highest quality except for three kind of nuts. So that's why we started there, and of course moved on to more and more complicated devices, much more complicated even than the turniket. By now, okay, yeah, can you I remember

reading because you you you kept a blog. I remember on medium where you talked about testing the tourniquate when when you were in Gaza and it just a like, you know, if you read medical literature then did this was just the shocking I remember being absolutely shocked by the number of casualties you were in counting and countering, and then also like you were saying, like the the

lack of available tools. So perhaps you could explain like a little bit of what you saw there and then how these tournicates have been able to help you address

that like massive disparity and access to care. The tourniquet project really started in Gaza because we noticed that after one of the wars, the war in two thousand fourteen, that we had a particularly high casualty rate, of course, but of that there were many deaths that we would classify as preventable death's where we felt that had tourniquets been available, those patients likely wouldn't have died. Um When we started working on it, of course, we knew at

some point there'd be another war. It is it is very common in Gaza for there to be attacked by the Israelis. We didn't anticipate for it to happen so fast, and for it to happen in a way where the tourniquet was so necessary. That, of course, was what what's called the Great March of Return, where Palestinians protested on mass and one of the Israeli responses was to shoot live fire at the protesters, often targeting About eight percent of the hits were targeting the arms and the likes,

which is where turnickets are the most effective. So the high number really is going to the way in which the Israeli has decided to deal with this protests, and the fact that it was a protest rather than a specific war, and that meant also that we could predict with the relative degree of accuracy where the injuries would be, which meant that it was even more important to have the right equipment of the right training. It was part of an overall strategy. So of course it's not like

turnickets were the thing that saved lives. Turnickets were part of a campaign to train paramedics and to train doctors and how to stop bleeding in these kinds of injuries, and they were one of the most important tools in that campaign, but only part of that campaign. Yeah, of course, of course you need ed tools and obviously the education, and you can't just slap it on and in the person's fine, right, Obviously there's a lot of care afterwards

which is important too. And can you maybe talk us through and you talked about like the promise of patents, right, and I think this is important in in exactly what we're talking about in torniicates because it's a little different to like medic medicines, right, It's a little different with medical devices. And so there are existing TORNI kits on the market, right, and I think that sort of market leading one is it's the cat. Can you explain like why and those not getting to people who need them

desperately in these areas. The problem with the turnickets that are available right now kind of falls into a few different categories. North American Rescue. The makers of CAT have two key patents on the Cat, and as far as we can tell, just based on the posture of the company, if anybody else were to make exact Cat replicas, they

will be suited. The people who are willing to then make exact Cat replicas tend to be people who are unaccountable and largely have not much to lease, and so that's why we saw a gla initially um for example, with the Ukraine campaign of tourniquets that that were relatively low quality, and so you can't just make the device. You also have to know that the device will work, because you don't want to discover that when you put

it on armor like and then it fails. Gaza is an acid test of all of these things, because not only our devices generally not available or expensive, it's kind of at the bottom of any purchase list, for example, but also in Gaza there's a complete international blockade Israeli led, of course, but there are other countries that are that are contributory, and that blockade means that equipment can't get in so long as the Israelis deem it to be of military value. Um. This is where things like dual

use devices and so on come into play. The tourniquet is a medical device. It is it can only be a medical device. There is no second use, and so it should be exempt. However, even if the Palestinians could afford fifty U S dollars per unit, which should be the cost to get one in, the Israelis won't let them in. So de facto, even though they shouldn't be banned, they are de facto banned, and that means that not

only can we depend on cheap Chinese retailers. Let's say, to give us replica turniquets, we actually have to manufacture them ourselves. When we open sourced our designs, it was with an eye to two things. One making it available so that the replica makers can make higher quality replicas. They're already making replicas. We may as well give them a legal replica rather than a patent break busting replica.

Not that I think there's anything wrong with that in these cases where there's emergencies, but just the same Glia's tourniquet doesn't break any patents. And at the same time, in addition to think them the ability to make high quality turnikets, we can also make high quality turnkets locally and domestically. Because of course, national liberation, as it were in the medical device space can't come if you can't

make your own devices. We discovered that during COVID. The Palestines have known that for decades now, and we're kind of rediscovering it in Ukraine where there just aren't enough turniates and so they are forced to improvise or except tourniquets that they don't want to accept, right, Yeah, Like I think I think COVID was this great example that we can't continue to rely on the sort of winds of global capital to provide things that we need to survive.

I think you're manufacturing is fascinating because you're using essentially commonly available materials in the three D printer, Is that right? Yeah, that's correct. I mean, we're not against using other things, they just have to be very simple. For example, are electronics use PCBs. You can't three D print electronic circuits just yeah, so we use PCBs. But when we design our PCBs. There are a couple of ways to design it.

You can design an eight layer board that can only be manufactured in one or two places in the world, or you can design a board that's three times the size but can be manufactured anywhere in the world. And when you're talking about credit card sized devices, if it's notebook size instead of credit card size, it doesn't really

matter that much. For example, the example I'm thinking of here as an electric cardiogram, where we took a device that had failed UM in the sort of market that they the makers open source and they had intended it to be a fitness device, and then it didn't work. Their company went bankrupt and so they open sourced it. So we looked at their schematics all of the problems

that they had already solved. We said, okay, the problem we're going to solve is to make it so that this can be manufactured in a high school electronics lab. And we were able to achieve that it was bigger. It was twice as big, but who cares. The old one was half the size of a credit card. You know, who cares? You make get a little bit bigger. But at the same time, UM you make it much more accessible, twice as big, twenty times more accessible. And if some

of your staff like your tourniquets, it's really um. There's not much or any really of a performance trade off from what you've seen, right. Indeed, they might be better for some pediatric applications if I remember correctly that that's right. So when you think of the way in which corporate devices are made, they are made to the specifications of particular buyers, and the buyers are the people who have

the money. Who's the buyer for tourniquets? When you think about who needs tourniquets consistently, who do you who has money to give you turnickets? Who should you market too? There's only one sane answer, and that is First world militaries, especially occupation militaries or militaries that are engaged in UH ground level warfare, who are expected to take small arms or i e. D s. And so there are not many children who you have to sell to in that

particular market. There aren't many small women, or even women at all they have to sell to in that market. So I don't think that North American rescues engineers would have any trouble making sure that their TURNI gets worked amazingly well for children, But why why would they spend one to million dollars doing that work and research when that's not their audience and that's not their buyer. For us, the normal person, the civilian is the in quotation marks buire.

They're not the ones buying, but they're the ones who are the main consumer, and so they're the ones who we target. In Gaza, specifically, of the population is under the age of fourteen. You'd have to be crazy to go out there and put a tourniquet out that only works on big, burly men. So that's that's why we were we were driven to do that. And as for the performance trade offs, yeah, you're right. The the what we learned about spec sheets on lots of these devices

is that they're made up. There isn't really a great way to know how well elternic it works. Unfortunately, there isn't a really great way to know how well stetoscope works. And so some of the first work we did was actually designing some tests so that we can say, okay, well, here's how you prove that the stutoscope works as well as that stutoscope, or here's how you prove that you know this works as well as that, and those testing protocols we made them open source and easily available too.

For example, if you want to test the stethoscope, you can do that with a pair of headphones, a microphone, and the Hello Kitty balloon. That's how we did it originally. Could we have spent ten dollars making that test right, Yeah, we could have, but that wouldn't have helped us in terms of helping other people make stuftoscopes wherever they are. Yeah,

that's very cool. And then by open sourcing that test, you allow for other people who have ideas or sort of models for their own improvements or different designs, that they can then use that test right and continue to improve and share their improvements with others. I do not want to work on stethoscopes anymore. I want to people to take it up. And it doesn't mean that I won't, of course I will. But my favorite thing is when somebody sends a message and says, hey, I like what

you've done. Here's how I think it could be better. I love those messages. I love them, and you know what, nine out of ton of those ideas don't work out. They don't pan out. But like our stethoscope since two thousands seventeen, all of the improvements have been from other people because we haven't had the time and money to work on it. But we have been open minded, have incorporated lots of design changes that other people in the

community have suggested. That's a good thing. It's good for everybody. Yeah, and I think it does an excellent job at getting it. They like the fundamental conceit of a Dragon device development model, right, which is uh, which isn't true. Actually, that there's massive R and D costs and those R and D costs have to be recouped by charging a massive amount for a period of time and making access to that medicinal device a privilege, not right, and then eventually the cost

will come down. They often don't, and then everyone will have activities thing And it's like, it's been my experience that it doesn't work that way. But what you've shown is an alternative right that people want to help and that that they don't that there's not a need for this like price gouging to facilitate the improvement in this technology. Is that fair? We're not taking a purely altruistic model here.

People are generally improving the stethoscope for their own uses, so there is a self interested aspect, if you want to present it that way. What we realized is that actually the most useful way to develop a device is to make it as good as possible and release it and then have other people who want to improve it

have a capacity to share back to you. So as much as I I believe in altruism and I do think every time that I've seen people collaborate, I've seen a tremendous amount of it, this more resembles the open source software model, where which is actually the world I came from. I came from the free software model, where yes, you do things just for the fun of it, but

also very large corporations are involved. For example, some of the stuffoscope's improvements happened because the lab needed to use it for some experiments on animals, and so they made modifications and they fed them back. Amazing, that's fantastic, And but that that was totally self interested. That they knew that it would cost them significantly less to build on our work and it would cost them nothing to share

back their their contributions. So it's you know, we're not going out there trying to to prove that everybody is good at heart, even though I do actually think that's fundamentally true. What what we're doing is showing through this model the devices can advance with relatively little upfront costs and with the contribution of many, many members. Yeah, yeah,

that's a view phrase it really well. I think that people have this self interest which also serves out of people's interests, and and it's like, yeah, I've seen it in all kinds of open source communities, like we've reported before on three D printed guns, which is obviously it's kind of a different end of the spectrum. But it's fascinating to see this global exchange. And I'm sure you have people. You've mentioned that there are people in Myanma

who are who are printing your tornic case. Right. We were amazed when people from Myanmar had reached out and said that we've senior tourniquet and we want to implement that. We have situation that's very similar to Gaza. We thought

that's exactly what we want. What they did was two things. One, they took our instructions and they used them, but then they also fed back to us how those instructions were incomplete, how they could be better, and some design changes that made their lives better again amazing by them using it, by them taking, they also gave. And that's the sort

of relationship, the kind of solidarity that we've seen. Whatever other people have used our devices, we've noticed that they take, and it's it's not a problem if people in and me and mar had just taken and not given anything back, that's fine too, because it doesn't take anything away from us to share. This is this is a kind of sharing where the more you share, the more there's potential for benefit, but there's never a loss. You never lose

by sharing in that sense. We're not also trying to present it as though we need people to share for us to feel that this model works. We don't. But we're already may king it anyway. We're already using it anyway. We're sharing, and some people help out by contributing black and some people don't. It's it seems to me to be the most effective way to develop devices for low costs and make sure that they get out to where they need to be. Yeah, because they can century and

people who need them can find them. As you found out right like people across the world, do you have a sense of where else they're being used? The turnickets right now are being used in Gaza, in Ukraine and in me and mar if they're being used in other places. Were not really aware of it, but people aren't compelled to make us aware of it. Um and and all three of those locations have moved forward the project tremendously.

For example, for Ukraine, Uh, the Ukrainian support people weren't really able to contribute so much their own ability to construct and make, but they were able to contribute really important research, financial and testing capabilit lidaes and so of course a project like this costs money. They're like, hey, look, you know, we don't have farms print farms, but we do have some cash that we want to put into it.

And we were able to use that money very very effectively, more effectively than if they would have bought the pieces to then create the capacity for them to go and make their own turn accounts. Okay, so yeah, let's talk

about that. That's fascinating and uh, and we could maybe contrasted to a sort of another model, right like if UM because you you understand you're able to go to Ukraine and help them set up as opposed to Yeah, it would have taken months, I imagine to do that with I don't know how they make the cats, but they like they molded or something. But with with a non sort of with a non open source, non printed model, like to set up a tournicate factory in Ukraine or

Poland would take months. Right, yes, absolutely, but you're not going to. There's two reasons why Northern I can rescue. I'll just call them now from here on out, won't do that. One of them is that that conflict at some point will end. It's very expensive to set up production lines. And the other thing is the more tourniquets you put into the market, the cheaper tourniquets get, you know, supply and demand. Like we learned that one pretty well

from capitalism. And so they have an inherent disincentive, whether they recognize it or not, whether it's conscious or not. North American Rescue and all these companies have an inherent disincentive in flooding the market with tourniquets, whereas we do not.

For us, it's the opposite. The more people we lose, pretty much, GLIA loses about ten to twenty dollars per tourniquet that we manufacture, we have no incentive to keep doing it, and we want other people to do it because we want as many tourniquets to be provided as possible. What we do then is we heavily subsidize the tourniquets using our own internal funds and and fundraising. That that we do with the goal of getting them out there so that deaths can be prevented. And so we want

other people producing. When I go there, every tourniquet somebody else makes instead of me is less headache for me, is less pain for me, and is less financial loss for me and for glee. Of course, so our incentives are different. They want a shortage, consciously you're not, and we want an abundance. We want everybody to turnique in their pocket. Now, that's that's our goal. Can you talk a little bit about your experiences in Ukraine? Give with

that pretty recently? Right, Ukraine is a very very complicated subject when it comes to tourniquets, because the tourniquet wasn't this h I'm gonna mind my words very carefully. I'm not Ukrainian, I'm not a Ukrainian doctor, and my experience, there is very limited. I am in solidarity with the medical community in Ukraine, and part of being in solidarity with a medical community is recognizing that even when there are weaknesses, it is not my place to insert myself

into their processes. And so the way that the Ukrainians have approached tourniquets is at the outset to ban all three D printed tourniquets and two basically make it so that only what they considered to be high quality tournike its, mainly the CAT and another another one or two models were available in there. This unfortunately created a tremendous shortage, and the other thing that functionally happened was a disconnect between the policy makers within the medical community and the

people on the ground. The people on the ground, of course, are doing whatever they can to provide care wherever they can, and the policymakers are a little bit more disconnected from that and so have different considerations. The shortage then creates

this um difficulty. You know, there are of course three D printed turnikeates aren't accepted officially in Ukraine, but there are an abundance of three D printed tourniquets in Ukraine because the people on the ground are accepting them um, and what we see is a kind of grassroots experimentation with how it is that we can prevent deaths. The other difficulty is that tourniquets are a tool, and in bad hands, this tool isn't going to work, even if

it's a great tool. And so one of the things that I realized, and I think everybody at this point, I'm not saying anything that's new or unknown to the community, we all realize that without appropriate training and how to use a tourniquet, they're not going to work. Um. And so even high quality tourniquets out there in the field are failing because they're being used improperly. It's causing unnecessary deaths.

So I don't know how deep you want to get into that experience in Ukraine, but I think what we can say is that it's important to be in solidarity with that community, and as such, we're providing them all of the experience that we have and all of the capability that we have to produce tourniquets that the Ukrainians themselves, both officially and on the UH in the front lines, are able to use and and feel are actually safe for their patients. Yeah. Yeah, that's a difficult situation. I think.

Obviously a lot of what's happening in Ukraine has been necessarily like like rushed, and it's somewhat graps chaotic is in it's their own word, but it took a while for people to fully sort of understand that the necessities of the scale and the scale of the conflict, or perhaps understand this is still the wrong word, but yet to come up with the most of the way to do the least harm. I guess that's such a great

way of to frame it. And I think even from your experience as you see that very often in these situations that's the name of the game. It's not even doing what you know is best, but rather figuring out

what the least horst scenario was. Yeah, yeah, so often, I think, and it's very easier I think, to to like backseat drive these things right from from our positions of safety and sort of plenty, you know, to say, oh, what should them, they should do that, which I think you did very well to explain that the first and most important thing is to be instolid arity with the people there and to hopefully allow their experience to guide us in how we can best help them to to

prevent death, prevent harm, and so can you talk about what you were able to do there, what sort of interventions could you make to hopefully help prevent more dying. The main thing that that we did in terms of so I I kind of was there in with two hats on. One of them was the tourniquet manufacturing hat and the other one was as an emergency doctor. Because remember, fundamentally what brought me to medical devices in the first place was that I was an emergency doctor having problems

actually uh caring for my patients. As a tourniquet manufacturer basically was about engaging with other people who are making and using tourniquets to understand some of the roadblocks and problems. One of the biggest ones is that there isn't a great way to test units of tournikets. So traditionally tourniquets are tested by design. Uh Nar says, here's our design and here's how we tested it, and then we accept that this particular company will make this particular device to

this particular standard. But in the Ukraine, especially with the presence of replicas and three D to tourniquets, there became a new problem how do you test each unit rather than a specific line, and working on that, I don't know how into the leads you want me to get, but working on that is still a problem that is unsolved, but has been one of the biggest issues that we've

been dealing with on the emergency medicine side. Of course, when I provide direct care to patients, I was in a hospital on one of the communities, on the front line, on one of the fronts, and so providing direct care

became important. And working with the doctors, many of whom didn't really experience that much have that much experience with trauma patients, so working with them to share our experiences from GAZA in low resource trauma medicine, and also to gain from them their experiences because of course their scenarios and situations are different. It's more artillery based rather than small arms fire or um sort of bombing based, so they're they're different scenarios. I had a ought to learn

from them. I did, and um I tried to contribute some of our experiences as well. The training I think is probably the number one problem right now, but that's

my personal opinion. Is one doctor who was there for a limited period of time so that that individual unit tests that you're you're working towards is um because I know in theory, at least a CAT is a single use device, right and so in theory, if you if you just slapped it on something that could measure pressure, and Titan did that, devices and being used and shouldn't

be used again to provide care. Is that the bottom that you're running up against or is it sort of making a way to test things it's replicable and cheap and accessible. Reusability was the number one problem that we tried to tackle in Gaza because we couldn't print turniquets as fast as they're being used, and so we use them up to ten times. And when I was in the hospital, I walked by this I V poll with a bunch of tourniquets hanging from it. To night instantly

recognized what I was looking at. That was a tourniquet rewashed station in which tourniquets that came off of patients who are being rewashed, dried, and then sent back out into the field. Whatever you think the standards are for a tourniquet. When there's this level of of shortage, that's what's going to happen. That's what happened in Gaza, and that's what happened in the Ukraine. That's what I saw in my own eyes. Of course, we don't need to

stretch that far anymore to recognize this. What were people doing with the ninety five masks two years ago in my hospital. We were holding them, storing them, washing them,

reusing them. So this is something that we see whenever there's a shortage, and it makes the unit testing that much more important because if you could take an already used tourniquet and assure that it will succeed the next time it's being used, that is so valuable, so valuable, and it cuts down every tourniquet you can reuse as a tourniquet. You don't have to import, you don't have to buy, you don't have to package, you don't have

to ship over all of these lines. Yeah, yeah, of course, And I think it's probably we should probably address like the the ways in which they can fail because I think, uh, look, just people in the United to date, if in an extremely like resource rich setting, right, we'll probably have knownly are unknowingly acquired trying to get on Amazon or somewhere else eBay that that might not be a real one, and so I want it's real, but we might not

be a reliable one. Can you explain like like how they fail and what the consequences of that failure are. There are two kinds of failures when we talk about turnick outs. One of them is what we would call a technical failure, and the other one is a clinical failure. A technical failure is the easiest one for most people

to spot. The tourniquet literally breaks in your hand. And that said, you hear a crack, you see something crack, you see a break, things fall apart the end, and so one of the things that we we want is to minimize these by over engineering. So, for example, the first GLIA tourniquet was engineered to spec you're supposed to be able to turn it three times, and so we

made it so you can turn it three times. And then what I realized is that even I, who is like super well trained, I would be in the field running while my eyes were full of tear gas while people are shooting, and I didn't I'd forget did I turn it two times? Three times? So we over we started over engineering the tourniquets at a certain point. Of course, every turnikid is going to break. You turn it enough times,

every turniquet is going to break. But that's not necessarily going to be the case if you have even a moderate amount of training. I'm going to turn it for five times, but I'm not going to turn it twenty times. So the technical failures are one kind of failure. The

other one is clinical failure. Now here's something that I wonder if you knew about tourniquets from the gold Standard Company fail They fail on application, and that number goes up to if you were to check sixty seconds after application.

So what does this tell us? What this tells us is a clinical failure is actually the important marker here, because we know turniquets break, and we know turniquets fail in general, especially turnickets that have been in some g i's pocket in Afghanistan for six months, those ones that their failure rate can go even higher. And so what we train people to do is to recognize clinical success. Put on a tourniquet, did the blood stop? No? Put

on a second turniquet, did the blood stop No? Try a third one if you have them, obviously, And so the routine training involves applying a second turniket, and one of the like happiest moments for me. I mean, this is obviously better sweet, but it was when I saw a patient who was brought in by a medic who I had I had been in the training four and he had applied to turnickets to a guy who certainly would have died had he had he not had the

turniquet applied to him. You know, I was exaguinating so much, injury so severe that he needed a couple of turnickets to really get it under control. So it's it's where we have to recognize that there is no magic tool.

This is part of an overall program. There's no three D printer that's going to train people just gonna make you stuff and then you have to do the rest of it, right, Yeah, Yeah, So I think if we, uh, we should look maybe at the fact that like I live in the United States and you're in Canada, and I think there were like three mass shooting is yesterday, right, that they that the threat of violence is certainly at a high for recent times in h for why a

more diverse range of people. Right, There's always been violence in this country. There's always been violence against certain groups of people disproportion in this country, but people are probably more concerned with treating down to your wounds, and they would have been ten years ago. So if someone was looking to make one of your devices, how can they do that? And they ensure or do their best to ensure that they are doing so in a way which

gives them the best chance of success. At the moment, I would say to the individual maker, don't do it, not for a life threatening situation. If then, do individual makers want to make turnikuts, then they're going to have to be proficient at three big things. One of them is plastics three D printing, ensuring that the quality of the plastic is good. The other one is sewing, that is to say, assembling sod stuff. And the third one is is quality assurance, because even done perfectly, a certain

number of tourniquets aren't going to make it. And that quality assurance is both at the moment of manufacture and then over time, because of course all devices deteriorate over time, but tourniquets have such an important role that you have to check them periodically to make sure everything is okay. So I would say to the individual maker, don't or if you do do it as an exercise rather than

as an actual tool. If somebody is in an emergency situation, there's nothing they can do except to do it then be in touch with us. So, for example, there are makers in in countries that have been in touch and have said, okay, look, I have to do this because the situation here is bad. We support them as best as we can. We try to send people out to them, or we try to have them ship units to us. We try to get them up and going. Glia is

not a medical device manufacturer. GLIA is a access to medicines and access to medical devices company, and part of that is making sure that people who are making medical devices are doing them to the highest possible quality. So if you are forced to make them be in touch with us, we will help in any way that we can. However, there's another category of people, and that is manufacturers who already know how to make medical devices. To those people,

we say, take our stuff, please use it. Please. It is there for the taking, and it is high quality, it works really well, and if it's missing something, tell us we'll make it better for you and for us. Yeah,

that's great. I think that's really excellent. Advice. Uh, perhaps a good note for us to finish on where can people find you they want to get in touch, if they if they want to look at some of the devices like making a stethoscope, I imagine could be like a fun project and put a lot less potential risk there. So where can they find that stuff? Absolutely, the stethoscope is such a fun project. It's fun because any everybody has a heart in general, and um, you can listen

to your family and friends and loved ones. And it's one of my favorite things when I'm in practice and I listen for sometimes patient will be there with their son or daughter or child, and I'll tell the kid, you want to listen to mommy's heart, your daddy's heart. It's one of the best things. So the stethoscope is a great fun, low risk project. Please go ahead and do it. Make it. You can find our stuff anywhere

you can find principle stuff. It's on thinking versuss, on printiples, it's basically everywhere or through our geth hub or on the Glia site. So that's clia dot org. And if people want to participe paid, they're very welcome to. We always want need and love, help and of course, it's a community. You can never have too many friends, so we're always looking for more friends and love to see more people. We have a matter most obviously, it's not

just our devices that are open source. We try to make our tire stack open source so people can join and chat with us and you know, hang out with people who are doing really, really cool and super impressive stuff. At this point, I love to recognize the fact that I'm one of the least productive, least impressive people at clear Really the work that's happening is amazing, and it's led by lots of smart, dedicated, visionary people. Yeah, that's

great to hear that. It's really cool that you can we can work with people as well, So hopefully people do get in touch. I'm sure there'll be someone who's interested in what you're doing but has something to contribute in some fashion. Yeah, thank you so much for giving us some of your evening. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we finish up. I think the most important thing to say is that there's this mystique that people develop. You alluded to it earlier. There's a

mystique people develop around medical devices. Medical devices are solutions to problems and they were made by people like me who don't know what the hell they're doing sometimes, and so let's not you know, aggrandize or like separate ourselves from the people who are doing this work. Yes we have to be cautious, Yes we have to be vigorous, but at the same time we can all contribute to be a part of us. Very cool. And can people find you personally anyway? Do you have social media that

that people could follow. Yeah, if people look at my name Terrik Labanny, I'm on all the all the socials, as is Glia as well, so you can contact me or Glia and participate in anything that you want. And like I said, we we always welcome friends. Great, wonderful, Thanks so much man, Thank you so much. That was such a pleasure. Hey, exackday with more episode this every week from now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here. Updated monthly at cool Zone media dot com slash Sources thanks for listening.