It Could Happen Here Weekly 66

being the future and here being to you. Um this well, last week when you hear this, but this week when we're recording this, because we're recording this in the past for you. Garrison Davis, intrepid correspondent and myself, Garrison Davis's boss, went to c e S, the Consumer Electronics Show in in order to explore the future, uh and and in keeping with our guide both to the future which we

cover here and collapse because the tech industry is falling apart. Um. I think this was a pretty interesting time to be at c E S. I did an episode last week where I kind of talked preliminary about some preliminaries, you know. I went to an event called CS Unveiled where some of the more prominent products were there. But we've we've since spent three days walking around the convention floor, probably around thirty miles on foot something like that. My legs

and back are falling apart. Yeah, we've turned you into an old man. Um, but we have we have learned what the future is going to be. Uh and I am I'm boy howdy. I'm excited to tell the folks what they can expect. Garrison, where do you? Where do

you think we should start? Let's start with some of the more COLLAPSEI type things revolving around crypto, because crypto was kind of Crypto was kind of like the white elephant in the c e s because this is happening right after the FTX fiasco, so it's it's kind of it's kind of weird. It was we saw it printed the word crypto and web three point oh printed on more stuff than I heard people talk about. Yeah, people are People were not talking about it the way I

think they would have been. Definitely definitely last even even like a few months ago. M hm. And that was really interesting. Um. We did sit in at one crypto industry event where it was a group of like French regulators, UM and French crypto business people talking about what they felt like regulations were basically in the in the wake of the FTX collapse, what kind of regulations did they

think would make crypto work? And you might have got more than I did, Garrison, because they couldn't get their microphones to work. Their microphone stopped working, then they're backup microphone stopped working, and then they got a third backup mike, which is a little tiny lav mike that they had to finish the speaking into a tiny little lava lier mike. And you were amplifying it and sending hain ful feedback into everyone's ears. And look, they're gonna be defending the

traditional financial system. But I will bet you when a bunch of Goldman Sachs bankers get up on stage, microphones work. Yeah. I mean that was just the one thing in a long line of crypto and metaverse kind of fiascos that we ran into at ces WE the first night we got here, we were going to be going to a crypto happy hour UM that was supposed to be held at a bar called The Nerd on Fremont Street. You've never been to Fremont Street Fremont Street is old Las Vegas,

so it's the worst part of town. Um, there's a gigantic, fucking football field, long l c D screen above you that plays animated versions of God Bless America. How do you feel about Fremont Street? Here? Nightmare? Horrible, the cigar chy, The smell walking back to the car was something. I don't think I'll ever forget that smell. By the way, folks, one of the things you're going to get from this is a travelogue of young Garrison's first trip to Las Vegas. Yeah, um,

it's been a real one. So we get to Freemont Street. Nobody is in the nerd. Um No, the nerd is completely empty. It's a it's a bowling alley bar, which sounds like a great idea, but it was completely deserted. There was there was not a single soul and I poked my head in. It was all under harsh purple light and completely empty. And this is this is like off off a Freemont Street, so like there's there were plenty of people around on street and the music music

was blaring both inside and outside. Completely dead. Um. So once this so we we saw this being empty, so we checked the email for the crypto party again and they said there there there was another location list, which there's obviously just to clarify, there was the party invitation thing that you would click in the list of c S parties, and it had one invitation, one location, and then there was also what you got emailed, which was a secon separate location. There was zero indication as to

which was accurate. So we decided to go to the other location listed because no one was at this one, which was which was called the go to bar. Yes, immediately immediately upon pulling up, we got great impressions. Uh yeah, it was the hole in the wall, a little box, uh window list box, windows box. All of the letters were coming off of the science. It was impossible to tell what they had, and they were descending in an almost artful manner. It's like there's a photo on my Twitter.

We'll probably use it to headline this episode. It's beautiful. It's like, I don't know if someone could have intentionally intentionally placed those as well as they were. It was. It was a perfect microcosm of this entire thing. Um, we went inside, very nice people. The person there said that the party wasn't happening here anymore, but that this bar is the Crypto guys the usual hang out spot, which was a glorious sentence to here, not a big

money location. And look, I I've drink, I've drinking a lot of dive bars. I have both been poor and in need of alcohol for much of my life. This is, um, this is a classic dive bar. This is really really And by that I mean not the kind of like like trying to play it being a dive bar so that people feel like they're getting the dive bar. I mean like you will get tetanus from the bathroom dive bar.

It was great. Just the fact that that the person like running the bar referred to this as their regular hangouts, referred to this as the Crypto guys regular hangout spot, is just warm into my heart. My biggest regret from this trip is that we didn't stay for karaoke, but yeah, we had other plans. Yeah, so that probably leads us into meta There's not a lot else to say about Christ was the which is the other kind of like but both like Crypto n f T s a metaverse.

We're all kind of trying to piggyback off each other. And I think metaverse has survived the best out of those three US. It's doing better than Crypto and n f t S, which isn't saying much UM but but even still, I think there was a slight It was weird some people were trying to emphasize that the metaverse aspects. Some people were trying to empasize just the VR aspect. Yeah,

the UM there. I saw metaverse and meta around, but when I would go to the company's advertising various VR products, they would usually were focused more often on other applications for VR tech technology, Like I kind of get the feeling again, a lot of them ordered stuff with Meta on it before it became clear what a disaster it was, and there's some backing for this. So for one week we went and we saw UM Magic Leap, which is

a company that makes VR headsets and VR programs. Um They have had pretty disastrous sales to the consumer market, even though they's a very good product because it's really high end and people aren't willing to spend hours on a headset, and kind of prior to CE S sort of reoriented themselves trying to sell to enterprise and and trying to like move units uh, in like an industrial capacity for people doing like training, and it's one of those things one of the things you can do with

VR as you can sit a guy down, um and have someone remotely explained to him how to fix or repair something if he's less anyway, So they were showcasing a lot of that as opposed to games. And certainly no one tried to make me hop and do a

fucking Horizon Worlds or even VR chat. There wasn't much in terms of like trying to advertise their their their software hardware for building like virtual concerts I probably have a lot of It was way more enterprise and like you know, workplace training, and a lot a lot more very like practical applications were gaming or gaming, but like in terms of like what the like the high end

you know, expensive, big big VR producers were. Therefore, they were definitely pivoting or at least at least showcasing the applications that were more for enterprise. Yeah, and that that's what I found really interesting because I probably had a dozen different VR headsets on my head at some point. Uh And and not once was I dropped into like the kind of metaverse type thing that Facebook is and again none of their products were on display. Um. Meta

Facebook was not here at all. There was another company called Meta that I think that's some kind of machining, which was funny because the Meta booth was just some completely different company. Yeah. Um. But in terms of circling back to the collapse aspect of the Metaverse, so Night one was this failed crypto party where we went to two locations and they were at neither one of them. They weren't Night too. We signed up for an invite to a metaverse party, and I can't tell you how

excited we were for this Metaverse. We were actually very well. For one thing, legs are now in the Metaverse, and Garrison's never experienced legs, so I was really cited for them to see that. Yeah, I only had the quest one which did which did not include legs. I was also psyched to maybe make a big red robot friend, like in that horrible video that Mark Zuckerberg made where

his friends are playing poker on a spaceship. So the party on the invite that we request, like, you couldn't just show up, you need you need to request an invite and like get a ticket, and we got four tickets.

We got four tickets to this Metaverse party. It was first for it first said it was at the Palazzo um about Polazzo being part of the Venetian And about two hours before the party they said it was no longer at the Polazzo and instead where we were supposed to meet them at the uh at that at the fountain at the fountains outside of the Blaggio, which one of the big famous Vegas landmarks and quite far away from the Venetian. Yeah, because um the Venetians where half

of CS was taking. The other half was in the Las Vegas Convention Center. So we make our our jaunty walk over to to Blaggio. We get there and we realized that we have to do we have to use this application on our phones for the for the Metaverse party thing to work. It's like this a R application that and they did tell you if you have a VR headset you should bring it. Yeah, I think one person did at least, and bringing a charged phone, bring

a charge phone, bring your headphones. So we all, you know, open up this QR code or whatever or link to try to get this software working. And around twenty people there are all are all met with perpetual loading screens. Now a few people did have I saw one or two people that this was working for. Mine loaded just the VR avatars of people, but it was on like a gray background. But it didn't look any of the background or any of the the way it was supposed

to look. Because one guy had it more or less working. I think it was basically it was a video like a live feed of the Bellagio Fountain in front of us because as his like camera scanned over it, it's using the phone camera all of the different like a bunch of different awkwardly jerking avatars kind of crudely dancing. Yeah, in front of it. They did have legs ringing endorsement. Yeah, it was. It was It was supposed to be that

it was supposed to be. This this a r animated experience thing sinc to the Blagio Fountain and to Viva las Vegas, and that was what it was supposed to be. The thing is only one or two people it was working for. Everyone else had these loading screens or had just the just had the avatars popped in with none of the other features working um as before the Pelagio founded. Like just like the guy the guy who was Reviva before the final Viva, the guy running this party left.

He was gone quite rapidly. He exited the premises. He took advantage of the pact fact that people were confused and trying to figure out what was happening, and he escaped. So we have all like twenty people not sure what to do, and then we get we get an email like ten minutes later saying that thank you for coming to the show of I hope you enjoy your time at beer Park, which is across the street. Your Park

is a place, by the way. I know it's it seems like a joke name, but it's quite large business. So we were told that the party had a reservation at beer Park and that we were all going to go over to beer Park and you know, by the way, the people heading up there. It's not just like pieces of ship like us. There's like some serious industry people, like people who are including like the CEO of arguably the most prominent virtual reality game company. Yeah there was

the CEO or whatever, the CEO. Yeah, you like, there was people who who have been involved in very popular VR games, who are industry industry entrepreneurs, engineers. Yeah, and other other other like VR enthusiasts and then also people like us, I assume who just wanted to watch it crash and burn, which it did. It was just there to be the sickos in the window laughing. Yes, So we're told they have that. They were told that they have the reservation for beer Park. Like, okay, well, the

a R technology didn't work. That's that's a bummer. You know, it would not happen. It's not the first failed demo I've seen. It's stuff happens. Maybe they didn't test it for how many people was there? They thought too many? Yeah, like who like actually who knows? Um, but at least we can hang out with people. But so but the guy, the guy running the party laughs, so he's just gone, uh.

But everyone else makes make you know, like you know, like a dozen or a dozens of people make our way over to beer Park and we're told that there is in fact no reservation for this party. But he has called them. They don't know what we're talking about.

Could we please get out of the way. So we start our way to have this staircase and that we then we that we stop halfway down because someone at beer Park says, there is like there's a bar in the very back of of of and they're not selling alcohol there, but you guys can stand around and buy from other places. We can stand there. As they figured out what's going on, we later learn that the that the guy who's who's running the party, who's who did not show up, uh, did have a did have a

reservation for six people at one table. Yeah, Garrison, that man hung himself at Circus Circus within thirty minutes of the show. I do know. He actually made his way over to beer Park at some point, but he did not go to where everyone else was going. He was at the other side of the bar, but he was not talking to anyone else from the party. So that was. That was the second party we went to, which was of a similar level of competency. So that is that is the crypto and people did show up for the

second part. So I'm gonna have to give it to the metaverse. I mean, they change locations three times from the Plaza to the Blagia Fountain to be a park um with you know, variety of issues along the way. In terms of the VR stuff, we actually got to try, so Robert tried like I think three or four different haptic feedbacks. I tried every haptic product I could find, and haptic again, for the folks who don't know this, whenever you like touch your phone and it like buzzes

like let you know that you're you're typing or whatever. Um, that's haptic feedback, And that's kind of the crudest form of it. But the idea and the hope of the people kind of playing with the technologies that you can find ways to basically like simulate a keyboard so that you would be able to touch type in a keyboard that's not really there because you know, you would be wearing a glove or something that would simulate the feeling

so well. And so this is a key part of when you think about, like what would it take to go from where VR is now, which is a pretty visually immersive and can be a pretty auditorially immersive experience, but that leaves the rest of your body isn't there, yeah, um to something that is kind of more like a holidack where you feel and and like can you know even people have talked about like smell eVision and stuff, which um is a little further behind, but like it's

something that's actually engaging the entirety of your of your physical person at the very at least not being able to like walk through walls, or at least more of your physical person than just your head and eyes and ears. UM. So that's that's the goal. So the first one I tried was the tax suit, which basically feels like and I wrote this was in the last episode. It feels like having much of in sixty four bumble packs on your body. It does not mimic the feeling of hugging

or touching a human being. Another one that we tried, I tried one that was just gloves that did a pretty good job of and and the tax suit gloves did a pretty good job of mimicking keyboards UM, which is kind of interesting. I don't think it would allow me to touch type, but it was it was neat to see that kind of developing a little bit. UM. Then we tried one by O W O. It's like big capital O S little W We're just going to

call it oh oh oh um. And that was like a full body um suit, where it's basically it's like a skin tight like a workout shirt UM with a bunch of e G pads underneath it, so the e G pads make direct connection to your skin. And then if you have ever engaged in the kind of kinky sex play that involves like a violet wand, which is a device that erotically electrocutes you or your partner, you

can also like drawing each other with it. Or if you've ever used like any of those fake sex cattle prods they used to sell them at the kink dot Com arena in that old Castle in San Francisco, if you ever used any of those, it's like that, So you're just like getting zapped a bunch all over your body. And on the low settings it's kind of like a nicer massage gun thing, and on the higher settings it's actually really cruciating. It's actually I tried this one today.

I put on the little skin tight and jumper thing, and even just during the calibration settings, it was really fascinating because it's even though the electrodes are only on like a few of your muscle sections that the current runs through, and it doesn't really it doesn't necessarily have like you know, like a taser shocky feeling. It just it just is like muscle pain it's involuntarily contracting your muscle. Yeah, so it's it's it's not just like static e shocky stuff.

Um there was you know, get you know. The cool thing about this is that it can simulate you know, an entry round and an exit wound. So Robert was playing the popular VR game Pistol Whip where you get shot by dudes and you do like a John Wick thing basically, and you can feel you know, like bullet goes in, bullet goes out. Yeah and yeah. So it's not just like a rumbull pack type things actually depth

to the feeling. And one of the things they simulated it was really cool is getting stabbed and then having the knife twist was the worst with the worst feeling for me is like honestly like getting shot in like the Chester shoulders. It was. It was painful, but it wasn't necessary. It wasn't like painful on like a bad way. He was like, Oh, I'm playing a game and this is this, this is a published and it's it hurts, but it's kind of fun. The stabbing was awful. I

would seek to avoid it. It was very painful because all the all the stuff like below my chest was way more uncomfortable and painful versus like chest and arms was kind of was kind of fun. Yeah, And I don't know again whether or not you find this appealing will have to do with the way that you like

to do your video games. But what I will say is that from a perspective of just like enjoying a an FPS type game, it it is the first time I've been playing a game that's had some sort of feedback when you're hit that actually is negative reinforcement, like you do not want to get hit um and you actually kind of dread getting hit. It. Actually it makes

the game a lot more immersive. Yeah, and like this that's that's that that's like a bullshit phrase people use for like this is immersive, Like no, this actually like this actually introducing consequence thought. I think that they put into something like how do we simulate a knife wound? How do we actually do like a through and through gunshot? And and it all so makes your makes your VR body feel more connected to your actual body, yeah, which

is something that usually doesn't happen. Yeah, you feel a sense of like defensiveness towards your person um and it like when I was trying to like dodge the bullets and ship like I actually felt it didn't just kind of feel like I was playing a game, Like my body felt more on the line, which was Which is interesting because this is purely we're talking about this kind of in the context of stuff that matters, and the stuff that matters here, not that gaming doesn't matter, but

the stuff that actually matters here is the ability of people to simulate accurately life in a digital form. Because if that can be done, then a lot of other weird things are possible, many of which you're good, some of what you're bad, many of what you're bad. Um, I mean, I think the next the next day we're talking about has a bit more packed complication. And because that's what I want to say, all the only application

I saw for this was in gaming. This does not I didn't see like a metaverse application of this, Like this is not going to help in Zuckerberg, Like you don't want to unless you can get mugged in the metaverse and some some asshole ten you're will lock up to you with a knife and stab you. Well, you know, that's a good point when we're talking about is it possible that people will be living increasing quantity like portions

of their life in persistent digital environments. One thing I would not want to have as a suit like this because people will find ways to access it well. And we've talked to we've talked to some people who program for these things, who are like other versions of them, but the metaverse actually at the Metaverse party, they funk up and it's like getting electrocuted. You can't take it

off yourself. It's a serious problem. There is a competing model to the Obo suit called the Tesla Suit, not not made by Elon Musk's Tesla, different company, but similar similar degrees of care towards safety. Maybe I mean it is this is the most high end haptic suit that

does this electro shock thing. Um And he said that he has watched demos where people have been in the suit and the suit like glitches and all of the things turn on and like at full capacity, which means you're you you're get You're not only in extruciating pain, you also you also just like can't move your body, like you're stuck frozen in horrible pain until someone turns the suit off. So like there is there is this type of like logistical problems with with these sort of

things as well, and it's one of those. Like the first that I had when using that thing was like, this is kind of neat, uh, this what makes this actually would make certain video games better. And the second thought I had was, I would only ever want to have this on if I was playing a video game that was not connected to the Internet, because the instant I would never want to invocage in a multiplayer game where I could be that it would be horrible constantly. Bet.

I mean obviously, like you you can have lower settings on these things to make it not painful at all, and you do get to pick that. But I I tried to go as far as I could. But in terms of practical applications beyond just gaming, the next haptic suit that we tried, this company is working with governments. Haptics is the is the is the company. We know that they do the thing where they like remove our

um and they have they have military contracts. We we we saw we saw army people testing it out, two employees of the United States Army, but they already are working with law enforcement UM well and you know industrial government training video of Jeff Bezos us with their products to like wirelessly control a robot that's like based off of human hands in order to do that. But they

work with governments, they work with businesses, corporations. This is this isn't really a consumer thing at this point because the full suit, I think they said the next it's going to be like eighty thou dollars. No, No, the the gloves are four thousand, the gloves and battery pack. The next full suit that they're doing, it's gonna be eighty thou dollars or four months subscription. But that's for their suit that's not even released yet. That is their

next model. Yeah, not a consumer Like theoretically, if you're willing to pay the monthly fee, you could have this thing, um,

but that's not the intent. But I think what's interesting about it is this is kind of where all of the technology is going and and the main difference is that the haptics that we had used on us in the lower end gaming products, where again they're basically just kind of like shocking you a bunch in specific ways or just like vibrating, yeah, or just like vibrating, whereas this suit used air prect is like pneumatic, so it was basically you have these gloves on, and the gloves

are much more cumbersome than the other gloves. Um. You have these gloves on and they're like blowing air onto you parts of your hand. It's it's it's compressed air that that that feeds into these little sensor things that actually go in they they make contact with your again and so you're the feeling is is real um in a way that the other haptic stuff isn't UM. And it doesn't. First off, it does not actually it does not feel like you're getting pots of air blown on

your hands. No, it does not. M One of the things that they did in there is they simulated holding your hand under a leak with drops of I think it was oil in that, but like drops of a liquid coming down on your hand, and it felt like having water cup pour onto your hands without wetness, which is an odd feeling. UM. But the they had like a bonzaiet tree which kind of felt like it felt like a prickly almost yeah, it felt it felt like it felt like a prickly plant. Running your hands through

both plants. If you'd closed your eyes and you'd run your hands through both plants, they would feel like different plants um, And one thing you could do is you could grab the vine with leaves on it and pull your hand down. The leaves would come off the way they would in a real vine and felt it. You can feel it. And then you're hand is full of leaves at the end and you feel them too as they like slide off of your hand, which is a kind of fidelity I didn't really realize was possible at

the moment um. There was other stuff that really there was some stuff that worked better than like the turning wheels and stuff was kind of like whatever. Um, the knobs and buttons weren't great. I actually thought that the weak point was turning knobs. It just felt kind of

shocky um. But the straw. There was one where the rope. Yeah, there was a rope hanging from the ceiling, so you could like pull it to like it was kind of like attached to you were on basically like a fake airship in this guy, so it's kind of like attached to a horn. So you could pull the rope and then you could the way you can grab a rope

and pull it down hand over hand. You could pull it and it felt like it felt just like pulling a rope through your hand like it was like if if I was if I had no near perfect fidelity, if I had no like visual sensory perception, I would think I am pulling a rope through my hand. It

felt perfect. And there there were there was a moment where I was at a desk and I had to open it, and so I like, I pull like and normally in VR, if you're like opening a desk or something, you just kind of like grab and pull in the right area and it opens the drawer. This I I felt like there was a big metal kind of like hook thing that glast that you get your hand up into pull. So I pull it out and I feel

my hand inside that thing as I pull it. And then at a certain point I stuck my hand into the drawer to push it open the rest of the way, which I do on real drawers when they get stuck. And it worked the same way that it does in a real drawer, and it it felt like one I mean.

And the other thing that was impressive about that is that even just I I instinctually picked up a mug by putting like half my hand inside the mug and holding onto the other side, which you can't really you can't do that if you're using VR controllers, and you can't even do that if you're doing like hand tracking,

It just it just doesn't work. But that you you put your hand in pinch both sides of the mug and picked it up and like just that by itself, like as you're like feeling the mug in your hands, like extremely impressive right now, which kind of sounds silly because you're talking about like the mechanics of grabbing a mug, but it's it's actually also talking the capacity for mimicking reality with close to perfect fidelity, which um I would not have guessed walking into the show you could do

the things that we're doing. Yeah, and and we talked. We talked to one of the products managers they're they're talking where they were speaking about how how they're using this for workplace training, but also even even talking about how you don't want to just use this tech for workplace training because then people will get too used to doing it in VR and then when they actually go into the real world will actually be completely lost because

it's not close enough to to the VR. So they actually talked about how you know VR it can only do so much you want to you want to use you know, VR training as a supplemental thing for also in person training and kind of go back and forth so that you actually stay grounded in what you're gonna

be actually doing. But then you can also use the VR as an assistant, so you can you know, train it on, you can train on your own, but also you get to apply it to the real world so you don't get stuck just doing the stuff in the in the digital world, which I thought was an interesting comment from the person who's like trying to sell the technology. Yeah, yeah, which, yeah,

And that was kind of the thing. One of the neat things about c E S. So most of the people you encounter and and CS for those of you have never been to a trade show, it's rooms that

are bigger than you ever thought. Rooms could be filled with thousands of booths, and some of the booths contain earth movers by the company CAT that are like the size of a mansion in terms of their actual like mass, and some of the booths are crazy person sitting with his homemade air conditioner and his cut open gloves explaining to you the new way he's figured out how to

make air condition your coils. Um, and so you get this mix of At the big corporate booths, a lot of the time, like p are people who are hired to sell a line and don't know what they're talking about and they're just trying to hype a product. And then inventors uh and people who like have are actually have actually made the thing in front of you and are very excited about it and are kind of incapable of bullshitting you. Sometimes they believe irrationally in their products,

but they don't they're not pr people. UM. And yeah, I got that that feeling from the from the haptic people. We should move on from metaverse, so I want to talk about some of the other since we're doing the good. The other products we saw or things that we saw in mentions. We saw that that I made me kind of hopeful about aspects of the future. So we we saw some a R glasses and again VR is immersive. A R is just kind of putting an overlay from

the digital world on the regular ship. You're wearing glasses and you're seeing something that a computer is showing you. Um. One of the things that we saw that I was most impressed by was by a company called zis v U z I x UM, and it was there Zander glasses, Zander with an X, like the guy from Buffy. UM. And these are glasses that are designed to provide real

time captioning those with hearing loss. So you are wearing them and you are conversing with people all around you, and you see every word that's being set around you, including the words you say on screen in front of you live caption ing. UM. And it worked extremely I didn't see it miss or funk up any words. It's not like punctuated or anything. But it was perfectly easy to follow. And it works for all of the voices around you. UM to the extent that I could tell.

And I'm not hard of hearing in a way that I need captioning glasses, but I think that if you are, this is kind of a miracle product. It worked incredibly well as far as I could tell. And UM, I think a good amount of thought from what they said, at least it seems like a good amount of thought went into the fact that if you are acting as someone's ears, you have a responsibility to take care of their privacy. UM. Because all of it was local. None of it was going into the cloud. There's no appar

ap it doesn't touch your fucking phone. It's just it's just the glasses. It's that's all it is. There's no Internet, there's no apps, just the glasses. So that was one of the coolest things that I think we saw there and was just also a fairly rare, legitimate example of a need being met through fascinating technology that I think could really improve people's lives. Yeah. One of the pair of air glasses I tried was by ant Reality Optics. They had a few different models. They're the ones that

make the actual lenses. They had models that were that you could switch between A R and VR. It was actually pretty impressive how there. They look pretty much like regular glasses. Um, the specific A R and VR ones look a little bit funky, but they're not. They're not completely ridiculous. But you could with a button you could switch between having like the A our path through mode too. It's like you can see you see the A R screen and then but you also see the world around you.

Then you can hit to the VR mode and it blacks out the real world and you just see the VR stuff and that that was. That was pretty impressive. They also had a full frame A R glasses that again looked look look relatively normal in terms of like, you know, this is the regular pair of glasses. And but this was the only pair of air glasses I saw at the show that had the A R going

over the course of like the entire lens. All the other ones had like a little box that they operated in in some cases up your vision when you didn't have yeah, and it's like hard to it's hard for your eye. Yeah, and it's hard it's hard for your eye to know what to focus on. Um. But this the A R was was over. There was was across the entirety of the lens, and that one was was

very nice to uh to test out. Now. I think one of the things that we're kind of talking around here is the fact that if you've paid attention to this, you'll note that none of the really cool stuff we're talking about is made by a giant tech Companacebook, Yeah, Facebook, Matter or like Samsung, Panasonic, um LG. We went to those booths. Those are the largest boosts at the show. They're fucking massively million dollar booths. God knows how much money.

UM Panasonic spent had one of the largest boosts at the show, which had probably was tens of millions of dollars. It is not cheap to get the list state in the LBCC. They had like the third largest booth in the entire show. Massive. They didn't really have any of the problem. They didn't have any products Panasonic makes things. No, they had like they had like two cameras and like maybe like ten lenses, but like not not multiple ones of those, just those the only two cameras and like

ten lenses. That that's all they had for this massive, massive booths, some fucking TVs and the displays and like like not not not displaces for sale. It was like just like like projected displays of people using their stuff. Like they didn't they didn't have anything to show at all. But they did have They did have a breakdancing stage and they brought up DJ Funky and his Breakdancing Crew, which I swear were pulled right out of Times Square in two thousand and three um and just thrust into

into into our reality. It was deeply awk because it's these very like clearly people who spend most of their time doing breakdancing shows out in public in streets and crowded cities, and a bunch of confused Japanese businessmen just like staring back at them, and they're being like, come on, come on, make some noise. And the Japanese businessmen are continuing to do not want to make any noise. Don't understand why this is being asked of them. Um. It

was extremely funny. Um, but uh yeah. And and that was one of kind of the takeaways for me was the lack of ideas from big tech. Most of what the big companies were showing was like either a million different cars and you know, our technologies, this car technology, and I'm sure they're all great cars. Cars were very popular. That that was one of the bigger trends we saw was how much people were pushing their EV cars, which is I think if you want to read something about that,

it's bad news for Tesla. I also don't think it's good news for the rest of us, because just replacing all of the cars on the road with e V cars does not solve many of the fundamental problems that we have, including even emissions because even yeah, it's not easy to make that a lot of that electricities generated

and like yeah, some of them look neat. There were a lot of e bikes, a lot of a lot of e bikes which all look neat, And of course that's going to be a huge thing, a big, a big imputu for the e bikes right now is that Ukrainians have been using them very effectively in combination with drones to murder Russian soldiers, and the U. S Military is actually put in large orders for e bikes as a result of that, So I suspect you're going to see a lot more ebikes geared towards military applications too

in the near future. But like what most of the big companies had were like TVs, like like they fucking Samsung, like Samsung and LG mostly big TVs, and like LG had one that it was like stored in a little box where it was all rolled up and it was like when you press a button, kind of like the you ever had a hotel that has automatic blackout curtains that kind of works that way, um, but which is like conceptually like, oh, neat, you've developed a TV that

can fold and put itself away, But also is this really better than my current TV in a way that's going to alter my life? Is this Like yeah, there isn't. There's not much in terms of actual new innovation. Like they were trying to make their transparent TVs seem really cool and new, but like that's not new tech either. It's just that people don't really like using them outside of like the corporate space. Yeah, transparent TVs are neat for if you're decorating a space, if you're doing like

a lobby. Likes room because it's a worse experience. But but like so like I I think out of all the big companies, LG had the best booth experience. Um I walked through Samsung after waiting in a massive line and all it looked half like a hospital and half like an Ikea where you're walking through and they're kind of showing you all their different like smart appliance products, but nothing is like actually new or innovative. It's all it's all the same ship you can find it at

like the best Buy. It's not it's not cool or interesting. You're just waiting in line to walk through these little Ikea homes that that, and they show you how you can now use you can now use like Microsoft teams from your television and you're like, oh, a lot of people bragging about their Microsoft Teams integration. Look, you and I both have to use Teams for work sometimes always the worst part of my day. But but now, but now, Robert, with with your new rollable TV, you too can use

Microsoft Teams. Finally, a rollable TV that automatically takes me into my team's room. So would you bootop Microsoft Teams? And you and you don't want to be there? When I first when I first on Firefox and it says this browser is not supported, You're going to have to use another browser? Does start Microsoft Teams. You probably wouldn't run into that issue. If you had your rollerble TV that was a smart TV, they could connect it directly to Microsoft Teams. Yeah. Um, I hate it. The Samsung

booth was horrible. Sony mostly had PlayStations, which is fine, that's their people love them stations, and Masonic was a

complete bust. LG at least had some interesting stuff, like they had this one projection powered TV extension room where you have you have an image or a three D a three D like a three D video file of the of the thing on the television that then projects out into the entirety of the room at least that was cool and new, So there was there was no stated release date for this, no stated price point complication because honestly, what what movies are going to work in that? Now?

The answer is that what you want to do is you wanna combine that kind of drawing AI and use it so you can run a movie through it and it will finish the rest of the scenes. So, for example, you could put on Boogie Nights that opening scene where it's that one long shot as they go through it's just all around you, but everyone looks a little wrong and their hands are tweaked and fucked up, and we have mid Journey continuing up the movie to fill the

Lord of the Rings. When you look to your right, one of the elves has hands that just curl up in himself and then you just take a shipload of acid and permanently damage your brain. I think the funniest thing at the l G Booth though all the despite being corny, was still miles miles better than anything else in Panasonic or inside Samsung was the Home of the

Future was. They had three different Home of the Futures, which was mostly talking about how do you smart appliances and how to integrate them with your phone or whatever. That that was most of what they were talking about. But they had three actors in each of the home, actual ass human being who are kind of kind of doing like a kind of doing a presentation, kind of

doing a fourth wall breaking performance. It's a it was a weird it was a weird mix of the mom kept emphasizing that she was almost criminally incompetent at cooking and thus had to be taught by a robot how to make pasta. But like they're talking about like their kids and my husband, and it's like it's a weird

performance art thing. But honestly, that way of presenting their products was much more enjoyable to watch than walking through the Samsung booth who didn't have any of that you were just walking through like it's despite being silly, it

was still much much more enjoyable. Yeah, and so I have been attending c e s since two thousand ten, not every year, but all and I try to hit it every couple of years just to kind of keep abreast of what's not just like what's possible, because you always see some exciting new stuff that you wouldn't have guessed was a thing, but also to just kind of get an eye for how the tech industry is talking

about itself to itself. Um. And the thing that struck me most was how completely out of the driver's seat the big tech companies were, um and not even really even not even trying. Google's big Box was not in the main convention center their main booth. They had it outside the convention center. And it does not seem to be a focus of much coverage, right people, people are not do not care. It's just more phones and it's like Razors. They're right, the company makes gaming laptops, and

they make perfectly fine gaming laptops. But it's also just like, well, now I can see what the new sixteen inch Razor looks like. It looks like a Razor laptop. Um, you know, I can go to Lenovo and see what they had actually a couple of cool laptop Leniva. I was bummed because they took away the laptop clit. They did take the clitter iss off of the laptop, which is a shame. Although they have a semi clitterest button on the side

of the phone. It's red like the old Anyway, whatever, um, look up Lenovo clitter iss or just type clitterus into red tube. Um don't, well, I don't know, whatever, it's your life. Uh So the Lenovo has like I mean, there's some like, oh, here's a laptop with two screens

that doesn't completely suck. Um, you know, here's a laptop that is in a slightly better form factor, but it's there's kind of they've given up the idea that like, um, there's anything kind of but iterative, Like here's TVs that are slightly better than your current TV, but not in

a way that you can notice. And that's most of like the products there, which is like, well, on paper, this is slightly better than the thing I have, but I don't think I would actually notice a difference in And when you're seeing that from the companies that are put spinning thirty million twenty, you have a many fucking millions of dollars to be at C E S and have god knows how many billions that they put into R and D when that's what they're bringing to the table.

And there's just like three nerds in a tiny booth in a corner of a room that have a device that like is capable of reading all of the speech

around you and translating and like captioning it live. Or there's those I mean that little not a massive company, although not you know, clearly a decent amount of backing doing that kind of ship with happticks like that's all of the that's the I think that the main takeaway to me is like there's big tech um seems to have entirely given up driving the conversation about what the future is going to look like. Even I don't take

as a bad thing. Actually, even we went to the John Dear booth and they had this, They had this u AI assisted way to scan your crops and locate where weeds are, and another kind of Amazon like one of those gigantic um uh irrigation to drive it around. It's like a hundred yards long, and it waters and sprays pesticide. But it's it's the AI power thing that recognizes things that are not crops and tries to remove them.

The case and point being like trying to spray pesticides just on the weeds and not on the rest of the crops. And it can it can go. It can do this while operating at twelve hours an hour. This this the person we talked to, They just started working for John Deer because this technology was developed at a different company that John Deer just bought. Like John Deere didn't make this, other companies did, and then they just

bought it. I think that's just another interesting these case of like that was just another small, random company who was doing you know, innovative farming technology that then you know, another big company with money just decided to buy and be like, hey, this is our thing now, And I think I want to We'll do another part where we talk about the dark side. We'll talk about Palinteer, who was there and who we got to chat with. We'll talk about Valence, We'll talk more about John Deer, because

there's some some bleak ship in the John Deer stuff too. Um. But I think this is the stuff that I found broadly optimistic, even the ship that didn't work, because what didn't work is like big tech, and I kind of like the fact that big tech it seems stumbling and

crypto those particulars that didn't work. What I like is the fact I like to see big tech stumbling out the gate and a bunch of weirdos um putting some cool shit out there, and that actually makes me more hopeful of like a future where technology makes things more accessible. And uh, I get to wear motorized Exo skeletons. Oh, let's end on the Exo skeleton. So we got to finally try the motorized Exo skeleton, which is supposed to

basically increase your lifting capacity by sixty or seventy pounds. Um. It's like a backpack you were in your back with a chest piece and hooks around your hips and stuff. Uh, and it works when you're like carrying loads and moving and squatting. You don't have to move the way you normal due to protect your lower back, which is kind of harder on your knees. If you've ever liked done cattle bell spots or dead lifts, um, when you when you first put it on and they had you bend

over and then stand back up. The first thing we did that, it was you kind of felt like you're getting launched in there. Yeah yeah, because it's pushing up with you, it's assisting you. Yeah, but you can move like springs in your step as you're running. It worked

really well. It was very cool. I want to and I was kind of shocked at how this is from a German biotics German German biotics um, which is the name of the company, and it was a really awesome first off shout out the folks were fans, so that was nice um, but it was really cool product for like, the price point was surprisingly like we're not talking Toyota

factories can afford them. We're talking like if you are if you work in like a mid like a small automotive company or whatever, like you could afford one of these suits. They're not they're sub tin k so they're not cheap, but they're not like the kind of thing that only a multi billion dollar corporation could have access

and it will actually improve the lives of workers. You can rent them for two fifty bucks a month, which is again very because it would allow you to work lifting and hauling ship all day or do stuff like on a farm like bail hay and huck hey up without straining your knees and back, which you know, we talk a lot about like the kind of devices oftentimes, the kind of devices that make work more that are like marketed to companies in this may make work more efficient,

but they don't try to they try to trying to increase productivity, Yeah, by just doing more numbers, but not actually improving the experience for the worker. Like. The human side of this is that, well, maybe a bunch of people who ruin their backs and knees working in factories every day won't and that would be nice to uh and and it seems like it works really well. Um. So if you are currently working a job or run a company and your employees are destroying their backs and knees,

maybe reach out to the German biotics guys. Um. Also, it does seem like I could rent or purchase one and then combine my plate carrier with the chest rig purchased extra thigh and shoulder armor and have what is effectively powered armor without straining my body. I can't say any reason why that wouldn't work Garrison. Um, So come back next week where I will have recreated space marine

power armor. Um, and soon after that gone mad with power and take over Circus Circus finally finally take over Garrison. Why don't we end this by so Circus Circus most beautiful place in the Las Vegas Strip if you've never been, if you've ever read the book Feared Loathing, in Las Vegas. You're watched the movie it's where Hunter Thompson starts hallucinating. Um. Now, the thing about Circus Circus is that it's a clown them to casino and it's supposed to be a circus

themed casino. There's a lot of clouds, but there is a lot of cleans in their branding and that it was. It's like one of the oldest casinos on the strip, so everything is faded. They have not repainted it in a very long time. It is the outside as a shade of like move that you only get when the sun has deeply damaged your building. You cannot purposely produce set color. No man cannot create it, even with all

of our talents. Um. And it's it's just I perfectly put Garrison up there because it's where I used to stay on the strip and it's one of the worst places in the world. I love it very much. UM. Tell the people how you found Circus Circus gear. I mean, initially I wanted I wanted more theming on the inside. I think it's it's a bummer that clowns have gotten such a bad rap in the past twenty years that I feel like they've kind of taken a back pedal

off the clown theming. Yeah, it's cowardice because with without the clown, without the clown theming, it's just kind of dingy and depressing, where instead could be surreal and uncomfortable. And I would prefer it to be surreal and uncomfortable. That just did you depressing? See, this is why I wanted to support you in your dream of sitting in dark corners of Circus Surcus wearing your clown costume. I brought a clown costume you could give. I mean, you

might get stabbed. I still I still have one more night. That's right. Yesterday, yesterday, after I said to my hotel, there was a Las Vegas police officer what time of day am? A Las Vegas Plue officer was walking the hallway in the very top floor where I'm staying. And then then I go downstairs and there's a whole team of police sweeping the ground at seven am. Probably just a murder um. So this has been it could happen here.

Reporting from C E. S. We'll be back probably tomorrow to talk about the dark, horrifying things that we saw that made us deeply uncomfortable. And then we'll probably have like in an audio documentary on the way as well, using audio that we recorded at CES so that will be integrated at some point in the future. Will continue to inform you of the future that is mercilessly rushing towards you and cannot be stopped and will inevitably crush you and everything and everyone you love. But in this

episode in a good way, so true, So be happy. Ah, welcome back to it could happen me All that's horrible. You didn't like that, Garrison, Well, they can all be winners. Uh. This is part I Guess three of our coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show and what the tech industry has

in store for all of us in the future. UM. Last episode we talked about the stuff we saw at c e S that was both cool and optimistic and spoke to some some potentially positive trends in tech, and today we're going to get back to what we do best, which is making you feel bad. But first I want to open this up a little bit with Garrison. You're

a Canadian. You're you're you're You're a very young Canadian twenty years old, grew up in a cult and now you have just seen Las Vegas, Nevada for the first time. Did it change your life? Um, I mean I guess so, I guess. I guess it did change my life in in my perception of what Las Vegas is and my desire to never return of But yeah, I mean we we've been able to spend probably around half our time at CES, the other half just uh so soaking in

the impeccable vibes of Las Vegas, Nevada. Yeah, I've been. I've been tour guiding you around, uh soberly and safely. We went to the Venetian and the Palaza. We took a very expensive gondola, right, that was an expensive gondola. Right, got to see the beautiful blue skies of Venice and all their four corners. Your reaction to seeing inside the Vinea if you've never been the Venetian, the interior of it,

it's this massive casino, as they all are. They're all like small towns inside buildings massive, and the Venetian is like a replica of the city of Venice with a fake sky. And that is one giant mall. I believe it's the second largest hotel in the world. Yeah, it is. Unbelievably large, uh, incredibly expensive, and the fidelity of like the fakeness of all of these things that are based on real stuff is is quite high to it's it's

a whole thing. Yeah, it's it's really interesting because some of the most impactful stuff is all of like the fake storefronts inside because in many ways they're kind of just all glorified malls, um and glorified our aids, all slot machines. And it's funny because, like, you know, they make all of these facades on the inside, they have they have the ceiling painted to look like the sky, but it's it's it's just it's so dark in there, like it's so like it's you see blue skies above you,

but there's like no light anywhere, no light anywhere. There's no clocks in the rooms. No, you never know what time it is. You never see the outdoors. You're all isolated in these little corridors leading from one shop to another with slot machines all along the way. You're flying back soon, are you looking forward to not being in a maze of lights designed to bewilder and and slowly damage you enough that you sit down at a craps table, very excited to see a real tree it's not a

palm tree. Very excited to like touch grass because there's no grass in Las Vegas. No, it's actually I think illegal in a lot of parts of the city to have like a grass lawn, which is so one of the things. So obviously Vegas is in an objective sense, incredibly wasteful. A huge amount of resources get poured into

what is effectively just for gaming. But um, the other thing, like another thing that you have to hold in your mind when you recognize that, is that of all of the states in the Southwest utilizing the very limited water resources there. If I'm not mistaken, because it was just reading an article about this, Nevada is the one state that has reduced its water usage while it's grown by like three quarters of a million people. Um, so it contains multitudes. And also Nevada, like Vegas, is where the

I'm spacing on the name right now. But basically you have all of these different states in the Southwest that are all kind of coming together to try to figure out how to deal with the fact that uh lake meat water levels are getting lower in the Colorado River is disappearing in some areas, and it is the only thing that makes life out here possible on the scale that it currently exists on um And a couple of months before c e S they had their big meeting in Las Vegas in order to talk about how to

try and deal with the calamitous water situation. So it is very much this city that is like filled with simulacra of the past um which it uses to try to hack your brain to get you to stay up for four days in a row, gambling and spending tens of thousands of dollars. And it also because it's the best place to hold a convention, and in a very technical sense, like it is the most prepared for a

large convention. They they this city can handle a hundred and fifty two hundred thousand people coming in overnight and needing places to stay and needing infrastructure in order. So it's also where a lot of things about the future get decided, which is when you spend enough time walking. It's kind of horrified the fact that important decisions get made in this in this realm of in this place that's designed to be mind altering. Yeah, it is, it is.

It is crafted. We're not like joking about this. There are no clocks in the hotel rooms, like the casinos are crafted to damage your perception of time. Um so I don't know that somebody should maybe look into that. It's I do like when you're talking about like meat. Just a great example of the overall vibes of Las Vegas is as as lake meat is drying up, we keep finding bodies inside the lake like bodies have been there a long time, bodies of people who had alternate

ideas about how Vegas should look. I mean a lot of them were probably yeah, well, walk walk to the Venetian, walked through Caesar's Palace. Uh, they had they had some nice vapor wave lieds displays outside. Briefly went into the Paris one, which was honestly, I think they Paris handled the handled the fake sky the worst, because not only was this the sky painted ceiling so low, the the bottom part of the Eiffel Tower just stops where the ceiling stops. That they didn't even try. They don't even

try to continue the illusion. It's just just as a is a hard stop. Um. We wrote a roller coaster. We we went to New York. We we went to the Little blurry for me because you were so drunk. But I just bought. I dumped the the attempt at like buying drinks from places and just got a handle of Woodford Reserve, which allegedly you can mix into one of the th HC Pina coladas that they have, and allegedly it's pretty good time. We we went to Rainforest Cafe.

I unfortunately bought. You got sicker than I did eating Rainforest Cafe. The I I bought, I bought this volcano cake and it was quite regrettable. Um. And then we walked over to the New York themed casino inside Las Vegas. So if you want a city themed casino inside the city that you're in, you can go there. Just pretty different city creating microcostums within microcostums. You're just like the nesting, nesting all the way down. And I, in an effort to make both me and Robert vomit, we went on

a roller coaster we've barely survived. That did feel like a very dangerous roller that was we were so close to vomiting everywhere. Just yeah, it was a good time. That was pretty fun. I felt great so that I just felt people would enjoy your your your first Vegas experience, and of course you stayed at Circus Circus, which we just walked through earlier today, one last time, one final, one final debt to see a family of four with

thirty eight thousand dollars. I mentioned losing that Circus Circus, unbelieve, the worst casino in the world. I think, in order to segue into our next topic. It's pretty I think Las Vegas is probably one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the United States. It would be hard to find one with more, especially when you're on the Strip. Obviously there's a lot of lots of I have family who live here and they can go years without visiting

the fucking strip because it's terrible. Um. But another another and so kind of in a similar sense. At CES, there was a lot of stuff about surveillance, a lot of stuff about, uh, you know, collect different new innovative ways to collect data on you and your and your appliances and what's in your home. Um, do we want to stalk start by talking about the the almdipure of of surveillance tech. Yeah. Um, there was actually just an article in the Washington Post about this about how unsafe

quite a bit of it is. And one of the things that you may have caught in some of your news, because this was probably one of the more viral stories, is that there was a lot of piss based technology, a lot of p analyzation. Vivu had a thing there was there was at least three different p test kits that were on the show floor. I think some of them won't some some of the CS Innovation Awards where

basically you can analyze what's in your urine. Yeah, and these are always framed as like it can let you give you confirmation if you have a U t I, it can help people who have all these different illnesses, it can help diabetics UM. And I'm sure there's a degree to which that's true. But I asked the Vivu lady and I didn't speak with the There was another called um you scan by with things and and you

you scans urine sensor analyzes hormone levels in urine. That's interesting, Yeah, which is is why it won some awards and also why a bunch of folks, including Consumer Reports UM put out like a warning about it, saying like we shouldn't

be celebrating this. This is an incredibly dangerous product because it all is going to your phone, the data is being collected digitally, and if, for example, you are in a state that heavily restricts women's access to reproductive healthcare, uh, there is literally nothing stopping the law enforcement or the government of those states from demanding all of that data be handed over, potentially even in real time. There's absolutely nothing stopping that. And the company has already said they'll

comply with law enforcement with government requests, um. And there's they don't have any kind of plan for the fact that they are creating a way to surveile people's bodies um for the government. Um. And when I talked to the one of the representatives of Vivu, which is another one of these urine companies that I don't believe detect your hormone levels, but but does is generating a lot of data about your body, a lot of biometric data.

And the most she would give me is that the data is encrypted, which great, that that's a fancy word for saying, yeah, we have it. We are. We are sitting here right after one of the most damaging data hacks of all time, which has h it was was last pass it was one of the massive password collecting apps where you basically like centralize all your passwords behind

one and remember and like it. A lot of people are exposed as a result of that, And um, I just think that, like the this show, such a massive part of it was we have we are debuting devices that will allow you to monitor front parts of your body at all times and get real time biometric data your body in your house and centralizing all this data about you were talking about ring in one place, because that's the same thing with like smart homes and smart

appliances were very popular. Smart cars were a very big thing. Um We're talking about like smart cities were another big thing for just other ways to centralize all of the data about what you own, where it is, um and how to effectively provide advertising to get you to buy more. There's an attempt being made by Republicans in Oklahoma right now to make it criminal two do gender transition if

you are under twenty six years of age. There's no reason why a product like this couldn't be used to determine whether or not somebody is illegally taking hormones in a state where they are attempting to restrict trans people like it's this is all We're not just being like fuddy duddies. These are all very serious implications and there's zero thought, zero evidence of thought being given to it

with any of the biometric companies. Now, one of the reasons we talked about that those smart glass um that are for people who are hearing impaired that caption conversations live around them. One of the reasons I was impressed by that is that it's all a closed loop. None of it goes to your smartphone, none of it's broadcast wirely, wirelessly. Um. It is all on device and none of it is

stored anywhere. And when they said that, that was part of what convinced me these people understand the responsibility they have delivering a healthcare product. We should move on to the other part of the Panopticon that we saw and talk about Ring. Yeah, the ring booth was one of the more terrifyingly dystopian bits. And it's you know, and it's describe it for our listeners, well, I mean it's

they basically made like a white Pickett house. Um. And you know, again cs these are massive, massive buildings, and so they do people can construct a full house in there and you did, so like you know, there's fake fake green grass, a nice little fence, this perfect little ideal at home. And the massive, massive sign above was like you know, ring keeping, like keeping keeping your neighborhood. Say if you know like all of all of all

of that that type of messaging. UM. The in the model home they had there was like a dozen cameras on you know, every all all around the sides, and multiple cameras on the doors. There's a doorbell camera, peephole camera, camera on the fence, and one door with three cameras on the door itself. And I mean ring zoned by Amazon, there was you know, Alexa Alexa assisted ring cameras um all of the day that gets gets used by law enforcement. A ring partners like directly with law enforcement to make

data like immediately available and make feeds immediately available. And the probably the still least thing we saw at the ring booth was this home security tiny little drone ye so basically they've built and it's weird because the so the box it comes in looks like a fucking um de humidifier that I used to have or humidifier that I used to have in my house it's almost identical. Um, but it's like this little plastic box and a drone

can take off and fly out of it. Uh. And the drone trains itself on your house, so it knows how to get around and if somebody it thinks somebody's breaking in, a person who is effectively like works for Ring, like an actual human beings sitting in a call center somewhere, takes control of the drone and can confront someone in

your house. Which I guess there's a potential security benefit there, But also, you are signing up to allow Amazon to have a random person travel around your home at any hour of the night in a in a thing they control, in a little flying machine that they control, and that I cannot put myself in. That I get, obviously, I get wanting to have cameras. I don't think it's unreasonable

to have security cameras on your home. I even understand how some people who are not as privacy conscious as I am could be like, yeah, I don't care if it's connected to the internet. Um, even though that's not a thing I like, I can't put myself in the head of somebody who would want that thing in their house. Yeah, It's bizarre because obviously there's niche. Like again, they're like health related. Maybe if you've got like an illness or something,

you might want something like that. Like I can understand how very specific purpose driven needs, but like as a normal person wanting an Amazon employee to be able to wander around your home, it seems weird to me. I mean that's obviously can also all that data getting used to Amazon can scan your entire house, figera what what products you buy, you know, what what non Amazon things are inside your home, what types of trends that you're using, and all that can get used to help get you

to buy more things. That the the one of the morin Cities parts of like all of the marketing and some of like the some of like the video commercials for Ring that we saw, you know, playing on these giant, giant screens inside is they're they're really trying to also push the they're trying to push in a normalize using Ring as a part of your everyday life, but for non security means, like you know, when you're leaving your grandma's house, you say goodbye to her in her little

ring camera. You know, when you when you're getting to your friend's house, you do a little funny pranks in front of their ring camera. It's like it's all these different ways to make rings seem like this fun and normal thing to like play with your friends and your family social, when in reality, look again, security cameras are inherently anti social. It doesn't mean that there aren't good

reasons to have one. And as someone who's been burglarized, I do understand that, Um it's not bad, but it's anti social because you are surveilling people because you're worried about what they might do. That is that is a fundamentally anti social thing. And so the attempt to like turn that, the attempt to kind of like merge that into normal family life and to make it like friendly,

is really bad. Yeah. I think that we briefly stopped by the A d T Booth and this is kind of this This is kind of similar to the little drone that we just talked about, but a little bit more ridiculous. Um, they have at the A d T booth this home security robot, like six six ft tall robot with uh with like a like like an like a lc D little face with this big smile on

it and and it's powered or not powered. It is controlled by you, the owner, by wearing an Oculus headset, and it has it has rolling feet so it can move around by rolling. But it's like six ft tall. It has two arms, massive smiling face. And if if you have you know, your headset with you and you think someone's breaking into your home, you can put this on and control this robot to like chase them out. And I was overhearing that a d T guys talking

about it, and they're like, yeah, this is even. This is even just like a great deterrence. Like imagine you're if someone's breaking into your home and then they see a massive smile like robot rolling towards you. I would run away very quickly, like like like what this This thing has to cost like tens of tens of thousands of dollars, and like this is what you're doing to feel like you're really just spend that much money to to create this sense of safety. Really really, this is

this is what you're doing. You're you're you're getting a robot that gets powered by a Facebook headset so you can walk around your house in a rolling robot to make sure no one's gonna come you know, take random shipped from your house. Yeah, when like number one, Um, anyone who would do that is the kind of person that needs to be have things taken from them. Um. But number two like if you're actually concerned for your

actual safety, and again I think that's perfectly valid. Um. None of these drones, this robot of security theater, it's not theater. It's easy to to like damage, it's easy. You can knockna it's it's a three wheels you knock it over. It can't get up, put on block so that you're completely covered, knock it over, and then proceed to rob the house. It's not useful. It's it's it's just a security alarm at that point. It's it's it's wild and like and people will find ways to hack

them and stuff. You know, you can't hack a well trained guard dog, which also will cost you tens of thousands of dollars less, and we'll love you like a Doberman pincher will kill your enemies if they break into your home, and loves you like the same way. You know, there was people getting into Alexa machines. A few years ago there was Alexa Alexa machines listening and sending info

when they weren't supposed to do. There was a mass there was a pretty big incident actually in Portland a few years ago of of Alexa listening in too when it was wasn't supposed to and and and like listening

to different conversations and trying trying to finish conversational cues. Um. You know, it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to control, how to remotely control one of these A D T robots and you have something like rolling around in your house that you don't control anymore. Like it's yeah, there are it's there are always vulnerabilities

in these things and they always get hacked. Um. And more to the point, like well, if you have some sort of security drone like your ring drone, there's no way like again, Amazon would comply with law enforcement requests. There's nothing that says law enforcement, if it was part of an investigation, could not use this technology to surveil you in real time. UM. So I don't like that. UM, not my favorite. And while we're when we're talking about surveillance, Uh,

we can't ignore our good friends at palent here. Now, if you haven't been paying attention to the surveillance industry. Palent Here is a company that exists to collect data and build machine solutions and machine learning solutions UM to surveil people and to help equipment like drones, targeting and whatnot work better. They're an intelligence company. There's like lots of systems. They do systems. It's not like they make

a single product. They help build systems to collect data and enable governments and militaries to make decisions off of that data. That is like the thing that they do primarily systems analysts tracking. I mean, like what one of the one of the things we saw was them you know,

analyzing homes to data around like water conservation. Right there, they're trying to put a variety of their usage not just kill brown people, but but they do a lot of the primary the center of their booth was this massive military truck with a huge armored box on the back that was filled with computers specifically to collect data and to um like do command and control for drone fleets in theater um And one of the things you know when you see a vehicle of that size and

it was very massive, is that well, this is not this is intended either to be very far back from the front, which which mitigates some of the uses of it, or it is intended to be used in an area in which the enemy does not have air power. Um. But so again the kind of places where you're just bombing them, right, like theaters like Yemen where the rebels have minimal ability to do something like bomb a gigantic

truck that's a target. Um, but you have kind of unrestricted ability to do stuff like drone strike school buses, which has happened repeatedly there. Um. We had a couple of conversations with the good people at Palanteer. Uh they were I don't I think we kind of figured out they were primarily they're looking for talent, because they were looking for people to recruit, looking for different things to integrate into their systems. Yeah, they would not show much

of what they had. Everything inside the van itself was uh classified. Here would you hear me my phone? Find that person's name? But everything in there was was classified whenever we started talking, especially the first time we were there, because I started asking some pretty specific questions about what was actually in that and how it worked and how it was different from current drone command and control solutions.

And there was a very specific woman with Palenteer who, no matter who I was talking to, would come up behind me and kind of direct conversation. And I think also was there to listen to the answers that were being provided to me and stop people from saying things on her team if they weren't supposed to say them. Um. There were a couple of occasions in which I asked, Hey, can we check this thing out on the inside, and we were told no, it was classified. No one else

could get in. You have to you have to gain permission from the army. Yeah. I definitely saw some individuals exited, but they were Palenteer people. But then the next day we came back UM, and I watched a woman exit the vehicle UM and a man from Palenteer with her, but the woman was not from Palenteer. Now, people wear badges at c e s, so their names are on display and what they do was on display. Although it's easy to look this person up, and I saw she had a badge as a speaker. Her name was Mary

or sorry, her name was Melody Hildebrand. UM, So I I googled Melody Hildebrand because I wanted to know she does not work for Palenteer. What is she doing inside Palentteer's giant class classified robot murder box? Uh Melody is the president of Blockchain Creative Labs and the chief information security officer for the Fox company, for the you know

that Fox corporation. So it looked like by the way her her Twitter says, uh c I s O Fox Web three Engineering, cybersecurity, former war gamer, lover of farm animals, so that's cool. Um. And yeah, over here we've got her retweeting a post about and a rill, which is UM. One of the Peter Teel companies, like Palenteer, is raising

one point four eight billion in their Series E funding. UM. This new funding will enable us to accelerate R and DED and bring new cutting edge autonomous defense capabilities to market. Now I don't know, I wonder what they mean by the word defense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's also pro n f T. So that's good. I'm gonna I'm gonna tweet

to her in a little bit. Um. But no, it was it was very clear that there was you know, there was pr people on the ground to make sure that the line of questioning if they were too if people were asking questions about their surveillance tech, about this big Titan truck, which is what it's called Titan um that there's only very very specific answers, and like they were not there to talk to journalists. They were not

there to talk to media. They were there to recruit people to you know, become more capable at their surveillance tech. That's that was very clear. Uh. They were also right across the street, right across the hall from the Fantastic Robos and Transformers robots. So on the on one side you have a fun optimist Prime robot that transforms, the other side you have the rolling metal deathcage. So that

was that was that was most of Palentteer. They had this um sky box, which was this box that had like encrypted communications technology, uh, drones and drone drone piloting technology and like um, you know, a military computer that all in this little tiny box that they can drop into people who are you know, basically drop into people who are in trouble. Yeah, they were, they were. They were building it as basically number one. It would be

for it could be for special forces teams. It has like a laptop in there, it has potentially several drones in there, um and it has like a bunch of specially modified field cameras you could set up surveillance on an area um and and those cameras kind of work with a machine learning algorithm to do stuff like try and identify where landmines are. And again like these are

the stuff that's problematic primarily about palanteers. It's it's data collecting, its surveillance, and the fact that we know that drone warfare is generally pretty fucked up and has an extremely high civilian casualty rate and is used in a lot of theaters obviously, not in a lot of theaters where they are primarily just massacring people either fighting for their

freedom or trying to survive. This is the problem with it. Obviously, all of this tech will also be used in generally positive things, like, for example, dropping a box like this into the hands of some Ukrainian special forces guys to to integrate them into a more advanced command and control networks so they have better access to tactical data like is not a thing. I don't specifically have a problem with that application. The problem is more broadly palent heer Um.

Do you want to do do you want to briefly explain in case people are not Lord of the Rings fans. So again, these are all companies owned by Peter Thiel, who is a self described fascist, believes in ending democracy, believes that democracy and freedom are not compatible because freedom he defined mind specifically as the ability of people with lots of money to not have any kind of restrictions on their behavior or what they can compel other people

to do. Peter Teal owns Palenteer and andy rill Um. The Palanteer Palenteer both of those are names from Lord of the Rings, and in Lord of the Rings, the Palenteer was an orb given by the Big Bad Guy Sawon to one of his lackeys, a wizard named Saramon, so that he could surveil any part of Middle Earth he wanted in order to send his armies to crush the free peoples of the world. Like that is that

is literally what this company is named after. It is the bad guy surveillance tech to use the Orokai against the free people of Middle Earth. It is it is specifically something that only evil people use. Um, It's it's pretty cool that the whole company is named after. And there were all these very nice, polite people in uh Patagonia style vests with Palenteer logos stick on them, standing around. UM.

Happy to answer any of your questions. Uh. Anyway, I'm I'm curious as to why Melody Hildebrandt was inside there. What the chief information security officer of Fox would want to do with one of those vans. That is curious. That is curious, she's on Twitter. I did reach out to her, but we that We also saw a few of the robot dogs. We saw the Boston the Dynamics one,

which was very impressive and how it moves. Um. Then we saw one much more cheaper um uh model of of a robot dog that had not as great mobility, but it seemed to be more more suited towards the types of the types of style of dogs that were that we've seen law enforcements start to buy. Um, the cheaper ones with less flexibility, more mounts to attach you know, things to the top of the robot which you don't really see you with the Boston Dynamics ones. They do

not like mounting extra things on. But the the other robot dog we saw had this little arm that it was that it was that that had attached to the top that was in the robotics section, pretty close to Palentteer. That one was much less impressive than because we saw both robot dogs and these are if you've see video of a robot dog that people are freaking about out about online, these are those robot dogs. UM. The one we saw with the arm on, it did not move.

It was number one, controlled directly by a guy with a controller. It was not autonomous and it didn't move very smoothly. The sitting in front of the Boston Dynamic Spot spot and watching it move was really surre It was number one. We both talked about this Garrison. It's like watching c g I in real life because it's it's so fine tuned. Yeah, it moves like a living thing, but clearly is not UM and it moves like a living thing enough that it is not it's not an

uncanny valley. That's not the right way to describe it now, because the movements are kind of perfect. It's just not it's alive. It's almost it's it's not uncanny valley. It's almost like instead, it's like too perfect. Yeah, it's it's just so fine tuned. It's it was pretty it was pretty impressive to watch. It was very impressive, and it it's become obvious to me that like, one of the things that absolutely is going on at Boston Dynamics is that they feel there is there is an it is

important to them as a business. Some of this may just be that they this is a personal challenge for a lot of these engineering guys, but I suspect they also see this as valuable to their business to replicate physical emotionality. And when I talk about that, when you like, watch a dog, right, you can tell a dog's emotions from the way that the dog moves, because that's how

dogs work. Um, the robot dog expresses physical emotion and obviously it doesn't feel emotion, but it physically expresses emotion in a similar way to a dog, like curiosity. They're very good at mimicking a curious dog in the way it's body language works, which is really wild. Yeah, that would be one of the things I did not like. Um. I mean, it's impressive. A lot of this stuff is objectively impressive. Most of the other robotics we saw there

was not that impressive. Like I saw this this robot bartender that was making boba but it but it didn't know it didn't know how, or it wasn't able to actually deliver the boba onto the secondary robot that delivers the boba. So this this this one robot with arms made made the drink, a human picked it up, inspected it, then put it on a secondary robot which then delivered

the trick. And I and this technology, I mean I I was eating at a at a at a Burmese place in Portland a few months ago where they were using this same food delivery robot system. It's not it's not brand new, it's just becoming cheaper and more people are trying to like make it a thing. And there was so there was a lot of those types of things, a lot of like R two D two on Jabba's sale barge, like delivering drinks style style robots that are autonomous,

like they do move themselves around. They they don't need a remote controller, but they're not that impressive. But that that that was like the majority of stuff in the robotics section was that there was a few other kind of smaller rolling robots that were there assist like elderly people, like if if someone falls down, this kind of goes around and will help you. And yeah, I don't feel well that specific stuff. I don't feel like well suited to describe, like to guess as to how well it

would work. UM. But I think more broadly talking about autonomous tech because that was one of the biggest product categories at SEA as it was all over the place. Um, there were a lot of cars and a lot of companies doing autonomous software and light our solutions for cars. I consider that all to be vaporware. There's a great deal of evidence here, but fully autonomous vehicles UM in the way that some of these companies are advertising is simply not They simply do do not exist, do not exist,

and will not exist. And we did talk to a couple of people. So again for the stuff that's very real about autonomous tech, there's things like driver assistance, so for like truck drivers, to allow them to strain and stress themselves less while driving and to help um make certain things like backing up and parking that can be very difficult in certain environments safer by having more cameras

and machine assistance. That makes sense. And one of the people who worked at one of those companies said to us, UM, yeah, there's no such thing as autonomous trucks or cars, like, they don't exist outside of very tightly controlled conditions. All we are trying to do is make truck driving safer

and less stressful in the driver, which sounds great. Um. I mean, obviously there's problems with the way the trucking industry exists outside of that, but that sounds again like one of those products meant to actually mitigate worker fatigue and discomfort and potentially makes it safer. So I'm on board with that kind of stuff. But um, other like an autonomous and smart tech that we like, like like smart cars, um e V like electronic vehicles and auto

of stuff. There was some stuff at the John Deer booth which it was pushing towards automation like we talked about in the last episode. And then also they're they're evy tractor just launched, which so John Deer, if you're not aware, has had a series of long running legal battles, particularly with farmers in Ukraine, over the fact that they do not want it to be possible or legal for

you to repair your tractor if you're a farmer. Farmers have previously in history often repaired and fixed and modified their vehicles. Um, this is both necessary if a thing breaks, you can't always get it back to a manufacturing facility in time. And a lot of farmers in the middle of nowhere. A lot of farms are in the middle of nowhere, which is where food comes from. And you also like, you can't wait, you can't just be like, well, let's just put harvesting off for a week or two.

That that is a problem. Um. John Deere sees that as a severe threat to their profits, and they have fought viciously in courts UH to make it, to try to make it illegal to repair your own devices. Um. They have lost a lot of those fights in the United States, and to its credit, the Biden administration has taken a strong stance in favor of the right to repair.

And what we saw from John Deere at this CS was a bunch of very impressive autonomous products that just coincidentally will also make it completely impossible to repair your tractors, like specifically with the new EV tractor that launched. So much of it is a computer that it is impossible to repair unless you work for John Deere. Like we when we asked them, like, hey, you know, if if

this thing breaks down. How how would a farmer go about trying to fix this since it is a lot of it is like not it's it's it's not like motors and stuff from like a classic car. It is it is like it is computer driven. Um, and they're like they just can't. It's just it's just so complicated that an average person cannot repair this like at all. It's just it just it's impossible. So that's the way they are gonna try to it around this, uh, this

right to repair issue. Yeah, we will just and the and it's being done under the guys of well you you know, by having this much more advanced we can use a lot less pesticide, which is better for the soil, better for everything, um, using less carbonius and less carbon the farmer will have more time because the vehicle can

handle this autonomously. So that's eight hours the farmer you know, gets to to spend doing something else and um, all of this stuff that's kind of meant to distract from like well, I guess yeah, maybe he'll have more time, but also substantially less autonomy and be completely dependent upon the John Deer Corporation in order to produce the food

that human beings need to survive. UM. I'm also gonna point it out there and say I started this by saying that, like, one of the major lawsuits was between John Deer and a lot of a group of Ukrainian farmers. Um, the same farmers presumably who were towing a lot of Russian ordinance away with the John Deer tractors. UM. I don't know that it's that kind of stuff. And one of the things that I think looking at a lot of this autonomous tech, some of it's great, some of

it could will save lives. Some of it Rather than like reducing the need for humans to do work that it would be good if they didn't have to do, we'll do just what you recognize, create an even less human job for a human, like taking drinks from a robot that makes drinks to a robot that carries them to people. Because we we just couldn't figure out that

interstitial step. So your job as a human being, as a as a member of of of a species that spent millions of years evolving to be capable of creating nearly anything, your job will be to take a drink from one robot and set it down at another I mean we we The thing is like that we already had that same idea in factories, Like as as factories have gone towards being more made by machines, they're still as factory workers who need to do all this little

in between steps. So we're taking this factory model and now just applying it to customer service doing the same thing, trying to automize as much as pop simile and then only rely on humans for all of these little in between steps that for some reason the robots and all of the autonomous texts isn't very good at yet or

you know, isn't really focused on completing. And that's that's the main thing that that humans are going to be are going to be doing in the in the autonomous Boba store that's gonna come to your neighborhood in like ten years. Speaking of bad things about the future or at least the present, let's talk about Elon Musk's celebrity

death tunnel. So, if you're not aware Elon, one of the companies, actually the company he started that is based on his own legitimate ideas is the boring company UM, which makes big tubes underground, uh so that people can drive their individual cars through them and avoid traffic. Now. Elon Musk is a man who takes his private jet between airports in the same city in order to avoid traffic.

There is nothing he hates more than the idea of being a normal person or being at all connected to the lives of regular people, which is why you get a private jet UM when you could just like fly first class or something, because even if you're flying for first class, you're still going to an airport and through security around like the poor the poors. UM. Elon has been vociferous about his hatred of of traffic um transit, but also he hates public transit because you might sit

next to a serial killer. UM. So his solution is dig holes underground and let people drive there. And Uh. Most of the cities that have attempted to have bording tunnels completed have been ghosted by the company. It is kind of a con um. But they did build one in Las Vegas and Garrison and I used it, uh and it took us from one side of the convention

center to the other. Um. We potentially, if we had made the most use of this service, we we might have gotten at a five to seven minutes that we didn't have to walk just just you and me alone inside the tesla, not having to be around other people in in the in the RGB tunnel if you're in One of the things Lama has literally said is like, well, if you take public transit, you might sit next to

some serial killer. The way this tunnel thing works is you tell them whether you're going east or west, and they put you in a tesla that some dude is driving that you don't know, and then they fill the tesla with other other people that you also don't know. You're still sitting next to stranger and you're in this this tube that is lit up the same way a pair of like Razor gaming headphones are lit up um and you just slowly stuck in this tunnel with two

random people who you don't know. I horrible, like one thing I feel like, obviously if you're in like New York or something or Berlin. I've been in a lot of cities where I've traveled on the underground, and I don't feel scared traveling in the underground because those have existed for a very long time, and so we know what happens when there's floods and when there's fires, and there's a lot of systems built, which is why you don't generally hear about a shipload of people dying in

sub way. I used an extremely safe way to travel. This tunnel is filled with vehicles that take we know about fifty five gallons of water to put out a fire when the battery catches fire, and the batteries on Tesla's we also know, catch fire with some regularity. And you are trapped in a tunnel. Uh, there is sometimes traffic.

Near the end of our ride, we wound up in a line of like twenty Tesla's and that did not feel good because you just you can see nothing but Tesla's ahead of you and behind you, and you're surrounded entirely by this tight claustrophobic wall with absolutely no emergency exit's visible. So in fire suppression systems visible, I don't know what they have installed, but you can't see anything. You cannot see a thing. All you see is the

Razor r GB gaming mouse. And then as as so, as soon as we got off this this thing that was supposed to take us to like the central area, it just took us to the other side of the convention center in order to actually get to where we needed to go, we just use the monorail, the thing that's been there for a long time, and it's fine. And mono rails are also not great ideas for a lot of reasons. But it got us right to the other end of the strip very quickly, conveniently, cleanly. It

took cost five dollars um. So good work, Ellen. I love the tunnel. I hope you're proud, ringing, ringing indoors. I can't wait for there to be tunnels like that in every city. Don't worry, they want the boring company is not a real company. Um yeah, anything else care? I mean we already talked about the digital health stuff, which was a very big part of the ES. UM. Yeah, that's I think that's most of what we want to

touch on for now. Okay, well that's gonna just about do it for all of us here at whatever show this is. UM we will at some point have some stuff based on Oh yeah, actually, let's let's in by I went in by talking about Um, I guess another good thing, but it's a good thing that relates to

the bad things. Um. We ran across a booth on our way out that on the first day I had seen and I had thought was just UM like a I had assumed it was like a GPS solution or something because the company was called off grid UM, and it's the off grid phone. We talked to the founder of the company, Ben Wilson, who was just a guy who,

as he put it, does not like that. Uh. We consistently seated more and more control over our data and over our communications to large companies and governments and whoever the funk else gets access to these massive and or massive not anonymous data sets, and wanted to build a thing for himself that could eventually replace his smartphone. UM. So he and the company he started have produced these their dumb phones at this moment that context and can

call and do encrypted end to end communication. They also, if you are off grid, like in the middle of nowhere, and you and your friends have these, you can communicate through text through your phone to each other even if there is no network. Right. The phones themselves do like make a network. They communicate just just to each other, just to each other. You can do don't connect to the why their internet? Yeah, which is really cool and potentially extremely useful. This is this is UM there's a

number of applications that this could have. Garrison you mentioned that the Atlanta Forest Defense people could benefit from something like this because it will effectively they're about two hundred bucks apiece. Anyone who can afford a few of these, you can set up your own secure comms network for wherever you are and whatever you're doing, and and the other.

The other feature of this is that you can set it onto something called sheep mode, where basically, if if if you suspect that that someone who you don't want to look at your phone, whether that's law enforcement, whether that's other random random other people, you can set it to this mode that when they when they either seize or gain gain possession of this device, all of the the the data is immediately wiped before they can actually

open up the phone. Um and they will open it up, they will see this fake profile that called the called not fake profile, but like this, this alternate profile called it called the sheep profile, which shows not not the stuff that not the stuff that you were using the food for. You can then just be blank or you

could like stick other numbers in there. You could have like a series of fake text but and then and but if you ever regain possession of the phone, you're able to put in UM a special a special password that will it will send the data. It'll it'll it'll send the data through encryption back onto this device. So you still have the things that you would have lost.

And obviously there's a degree of like you would have to have some trust for the company, yes, which says like and Ben says, like, we are attempting to do this. He was very open about the fact that that they have the phones, we saw them, like some of this stuff is still getting built out. It is it is

is still in development. They're still figuring out but for ways to keep the servers secure, to protect the servers from subpoenas from the American government and from other from other governments, like there's this this is still something that is being worked on. Uh. It was just one of the you know, we we see a lot of like like a lot of lofty promises and very very little

thing to show for this. This is one of the things that had actually you know, just this one guy that had you know, some pretty some pretty relatable promises UM and and it's very open about what they have done and what they haven't done. And what they're trying to do now. He he he was, he was, He was not bullshitting. He wasn't trying to over emphasize what it can do UM or what I can do at

the moment, like it's it's still being worked on. But this is one of the one of the one of the few, one of the future things that we will be that we will want to follow up on. And I think we're going to try to have been on the show in the near future because they're going to be doing a Kickstarter to fund one of the next phases of production of this UM. But you can you can look them up yourself. You can buy the version one of their product, which is on sale and functional

now at off grid phone own dot com. Spelled the way you would expect UM. So yeah, check out off grid phone dot com. We found it interesting, will be following up on that. Um. Ben gave me very strong

the good kind of libertarian vibes. Reminded me of a couple of people I've I used to hang out with in my youth, and it's very much is that kind of like product of just a cranky guy who knows tech and is angry at all of the data being sucked up and all of the data that we just kind of agree together we're going to give away two unsavory characters because life in the modern world is kind

of impossible if you don't do that. No, I'm like one of one of the things on his signs was something along the lines of don't let the pope po look at your phone. So like it's yeah, it is somebody who gets it. Yeah, yeah, we liked we liked ben Um. So yeah, that is that is the dark side of the future of tech, as this year's CES has unveiled it to us. Um. You know, this is the also the conclusion of our reporting directly on the

convention itself. We will have some reporting in the future that will be influenced by things we found here that we're going to continue to look up. But um and and we should have we should have some of the audio that we pulled from inside the convention center that should be edited together sometime in the near future. Talk to Paler. That'll be fine. Yes, As as a little kind of documentary, little daily diary of of of what we were actually doing on the ground. So that's being

worked on. But this is this is as we're recording right now. This is the final day of CES. We are almost done. We have we are both very sore. Is surprisingly hard on your body. We have to enter Eureka Park one more time, but then we will be finished, and then we'll have to upload this and and edit edit the rest of the stuff we've made into into a little piece for you. So that is that that is still coming, you say, we, which was very generous. You're going to be doing that. Me and Daniels I

will not be editing anything. Um. I don't know how to anyway. Go to Hell. I love you. Hagel remarks somewhere that all great world historical facts and personages appear, so to speak twice you forgot to add the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Welcome to Nick. It happened here the podcast where when we last left Jayerree Bolsonaro, he had locked himself in the presidential mansion, turned off the lights, and refused to leave or talk

to anyone. Now, Bolsonaro has returned to his ancestral home hospital in Orlando, where he's been admitted for abdominal pain, joining me to discuss maybe the first man in history to be his own Napoleon. The third is James. Hi, man, this is I'm very much looking forward to this. Oh god. I okay, So for for those of you who I don't know somehow have missed this. I I woke up on Sunday and ten minutes later this was happening, and I was like, well, okay, I guess I'm canceling my

dinner plans were doing this instead. Yeah, I think Marx could have added to that quote and then as fast again and then for a third time as fast. Yeah. We really, we really, we really have sort of left the tragedy cycle and on now just in the forest over and over and over again. Yeah, we kind of need a new word for what keeps happening because it's not it's not really a coup and it's certainly not

a revolution. It's just like an extreme reactionary tantrum. Yeah, I mean, I kind of like storming the capital because it is what they do. But then yeah, I don't know, like I'm upset that everyone calls it insurrectionism or insurrectionist because it's like they're not like insurrectionary reactionary is like a power. Yeah, It's like, like I think like auto who is closer. But the problem with COO is that coop implies that the military is actually cooperating, which it isn't. Yeah,

and that's why they always failed. Yeah, we're going to get into that more in a bit, but yeah, okay, So, so the thing that has actually happened is on Sunday, supporters of of UH former former Brazilian president Jay Bilsonaro, who I fled the country to Orlando. I sacked the Plaza of the Three Powers in Brazil, which is the home of the basically the buildings are the three branches of governments, and unlike in the US, they sacked all

of them. They stored their presidential mansion, they stormed Congress, they stormed the Supreme Court, and then having seized control of the buildings, as cops either sat around joking with him, which is actively walked them into the building. Like there is a video of a procession of Bolsonaro supporters with just like they're they're all walking in a line towards the plaza and there's just like two cop cars like in the middle of the thing driving with them like

it's wild. There are cups taking selfies of them, taking selfies yeah, like I that that one that was the one in particular that was like, I feel like that goes slightly above and beyond even what was happening with with the American cops. Like that was some Yeah, yeah, it's okay. So they get there, they do that, they do the thing where they grab metal stuff and they break the windows and then they break in and you know, they they do classic January six stuff. Um, they take pictures.

There's one picture that I found that's I think it's in the Supreme Court. That's a picture of someone like you can't see their face. It's just them squatting on a like facing backwards, squatting on it on a filing cabinet like fully butt out about take a dump. It's wild. Yeah, it's just what democracy lived like yeah, and shifting on a finding cabinet and government office. Yeah. Okay, so like they this this. They don't have a great plan here. Um. The thing that they do is that so they all

do this. They break in, they like break stuff, they like take random stuff. Um, and then they a whole bunch of people sit down on the ground and sing the national anthem, uh, waiting for the army to show up. Because they think that when the army shows up, the army is going to join them, and said, the army shows up and arrest them all. There's some people who

try to fight the police. Uh they beat up a horse cop, which I think is funny because apparently this is just every single one of these Now someone beats up a horse cop. Um. But you know, by bye bye bye. By the end of Sunday, like it's all over the government forces. We take the plaza. People try to fight the police, but they lose really badly, and you know, okay, so obviously there's a reason why I

read that versus strategy a second time. Was first line to start this, like, okay, the January six comparisons start fast and get harder, which is this happened literally on January eight, like two days after the American I mean they stowed the Capitol buildings. But this is something I think it's kind of important to understand. This is an

even worse plan than the January six plan. So the January six plan, if people remember this, so crucially, January six happens while Trump is technically still in office, and what's going on when when they're showing me the capital in January six, is that Congress is trying to basically pass power to Joe Biden, right, like they're they're they're doing the vote to proof the ballot totals from the

the electoral College. Blah blah blah blah blah. But okay, so this means that you know, when when when when when? On Jay's on January six, right, Congress was actually in session, so the people who were there actually had a thing they were trying to do to overturn their results, and there was like there were people they could have harmed. There was like they had they had like a goal kind of it was like seth Abramson. But on the

other side, think it was like constitutional fantasy. Yeah, but lest yeah, but like I can't believe, you know, like this is the thing about about about what's happening Brazil's like I genuinely cannot believe that I am being made to defend the planning capacity of the January six crowd, like genuinely stunning. But the plan for the plan for January eighth in Brazil was even worse because Okay, the day they do this on right, Congress is not in session.

The Supreme Court is on holiday and Lulu, the actual president of Brazil has a already taken power and b is ins apollo. Yeah, no money is there. Literally, they stored three abandoned buildings. There was nothing there could they could tried. It's in milligration was like three days before, right.

It's funny. Louva talked about it in this in his speech where part of like in this speech after after this happens, is he he has this line about how like all of these people were already in Brazilia, but they were too cowardly to face the people who were there for the inauguration, so instead they waited for everyone to leave, which is true. It's really funny, And this is kind of what they always do, right, They always kind of take the easy thing and then grandstand like

like it's a big brave thing that they've done. Like we see this constantly on the right. Yeah, and you know, I like, I I think I think it's reasonable to ask what were they actually trying to do? Um? And I'm I'm gonna read from the Washington Post. The Washington Post is talking about um some of the previous attempts

to do the same thing. Quote one radicalized Bilsonarista named George Washington Day Olivaria was what, Yeah, all of the people involved with this are named like George Washington Olivaria. It's incredible. Do wow did they did they change their names or is the whole thing just being a lame

part of American conservatives. Well, I mean that's that is like, like it really like there is a lot of truth to the analysis that like, like Brazilian fascist culture is just like the fourth time of Facebook meme isn't passed around, but this time on what'sapp Like it's it's some it's it's somehow more cringe than than the American stuff. Like

it's port of incredible. But here he was, okay, he was, Yeah, this guy named George Washington Lavaria was arrested and accused of planting a bomb beneath a bus at the Brazilia airport. In a statement to police, he said he wanted to quote begin chaos that would lead to military intervention. So she's trying to do the strategy of tension, right, which

is which is this thing from Italy? Where? Okay, so you you you have the government running a bunch of sort of like no, I mean, I don't know, calling them fake fascist groups is technically correct, but you have that, you have them running a bunch of terrorist groups and you know, okay, so they they this is this happening in like the sixty seventies and yeah, I guess a

little bit into the eighties. Is that they're they're doing all these bombings and stuff, and they're doing all these terrorist attacks and the goal is to get people to like sort of trust the government and like allow like sort of further state of military intervention. But the thing about that was that crucially the strategy of tension was

a strategy that was done by the government. It doesn't really work if you're not the government and you are, in fact that people causing the chaos, and where do you get to military to sort of join you. So this is a crucial problem for Brazilian fascism because as much as the sort of the modern fascist movement is a cultiple scenario, it's really a cult of the military. Bulsonaro is sort of just the person who embodies the

sort of desire the fascist masses from military rule. But this means that if the military just refused to do a coup, they have no idea what to do. Yeah, but they could deploy Baltonara himself. Have you seen that video of him trying to do press ups to prove that he's kind of super solidate. Don't worry, you know, but this is this is sort of this is a

real issue for them. And Okay, so if I am pretty confident that if the military had actually decided to do a coup, this would have worked, like and I think they would have pretty trivially just like smashed sort of the rest of the forces of the state. Lulu would be in prison. But and this is the thing that's been the key to everything that's been going on

in Resolve from the beginning. The army does not have the green light from Washington to do a coup because once again Biden just absolutely hates Baillsonaro, which is like, yeah, you know this this this is this is a coup that was planned from Orlando and not Langley. Now we're on like number four in the last few years that was planned from Florida, and notably three of the four of them have failed. And this is on the Carstralia

that was much fun. Yeah, well, I mean, I like to be fair, this is a better plant coup attempt than the venezuela one that's not hot. That's an extremely bar. Yeah, the kind of bar that you can get over by tripping. But you know, we're sold the very early process of figuring out how exactly who was involved in this and that like to what extent everyone was coordinating with each other and like you know, i'm actual extent like literally governors were involved seen to have been involved in this,

but we don't. We don't exactly know yet. Um. What we do know in terms of it's being planned from Orlando is that Bolsonaro for literally years has been saying ship like quote, the patience of the people has run out. I want to tell those who will make me unelectable in Brazil, only God removes me from power. There are three options for me jail, death, or victory. And I'm telling the scandal rules. I will never be imprisoned, evening literally years and years and years just saying sing like that,

like just over and over and over again. And you know, Okay, So the other thing that we know right now and this this this is being recorded on what day is it is the ninth, Yeah, but it's being recorded on Monday to night. So this is this is the next day. Uh. If by the time this goes out there's more information, there will be more information is going on what we

have right now. One of the things that we know is that the guy who was in charge of security for the Federal District, which is like the Federal District is basically like what if washing d C Was a state, but like a tiny one. So the guy who was in charge of security for that, uh, was a Bulsonaro supporter who just so happened to be on vacation in Orlando, where Bulsonaro was staying with an mm A fighter whose mansion has a Minion Stein room. Uh, he's just coincidentally

on afication in Orlando with Paulsonara. Well this is happening, so you know, Okay, the Brazilian state seems to be being a lot faster to sort of crack down on everything that's happening than the American state was. Um that the guys who was in charge of security, I who was in who's in Orlando? That the Brazilian federal defender has already asked the Supreme Court to arrest him. Um. A Supreme Court justice like deposed the governor of the

Federal District for allowing this to happen. So, yeah, it's wild. The Brazilian Minister of Justice as they've already entedified people in ten states who helped plan or fund the operation. They've arrested like well, the Totalsome yesterday said that they arrested four hundred people. I saw somewhere that arrested twelve. I don't know about that. I could be wrong, but yeah, there was at least four hundred of people. Um, there's a huge like there's a huge track down on people

involved in this Lula. It's much better than the January six response, and like, like part part of what's happening right is like like Lula literally like basically declared a state of emergency in the federal zone and like God basically like I guess you called, like he basically sent in the FEDS and like has like his people now have direct control over security in the capital because because because the police there were so unreliable and you know,

and like he's been yeah, theresil states moving very very fast to sort of stuff better than the US charge and that probably yeah, and and also like Lula, Lula, unlike Biden, Lula, Lula has like like literally like three hours like as this was happening, he's making a speech about like that him vowing to go after everyone who's involved in this, including Bullsonaro and Um. A Brazilian member of Congress has formally asked to Foreign Ministry to extradite

Bulsonaro to the US. Who knows what's going to happen there, Uh, there have been there has actually there's been like a surprising amount of sort of support for that in the US.

And you know, I mean that's everything that's been kind of interesting for this, like before we take the ad break, is that like he's gotten Lula is getting support from like everyone, like this is this is one of the rare we we we we have the great capitalist Triumvirate of Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and and Macron have all said that they're backing him, which is wild real international Lincoln Project vibes. Yeah, it's I mean that that that

that that that is. I guess like Hulula is drabroad extent, right, Like you know, if you go back to a Lula episodes, like he was close with the Bush administration but also like close with the World Social Forum people. So he's he's always kind of like been the guy who straddles a divide between like, yeah, he's not and he's the guy he straddles a divide between the sort of like

international imperialists and what was the left. Yeah, yeah, So all right, we're we're gonna we're we're gonna go to ads, and then when we come back, we're gonna talk more about how everything is actually sort of gone. All right,

we're back. So one of the things I think is very interesting about this whole thing is that for all of the sort of planning and organizational capacity that's gone into building the sort of like transnational fascist movement, the American right like that that the American Party has been setting up, uh, the American Right has just actively been

making their allies worse here like their ideas. It's it's sort of incredible, I mean, And this is something I think that that's genuinely very scary about the Brazilian right is that their regular combination of tactics are really effective. Um that you know that they've been able to successfully wild this combination of sort of electoralism of lawfare sort of like using the legal system against their political enemies of the road blockades, mass marches and you know, just

straight up paramilitary death squads of various kinds. You know, you have you have your sort of urban desk squads, you have these like genocidal logger death squads, and that's been very effective. And you know, Okay, so like they lost this one election, but you know, their their position inside resil in politics is still really strong. They control a bunch of like governorships, they like Bolsonoo's party and his coalition like control control the Brazilian parliament. Okay, so

you know, like they're in a very strong position. But then they talked to the Americans and they imputed January six and stormed the capital, and at least right now, it looks like it's going really badly for them. Like even even the sort of like right wing Ali Great Process turned on them. Globo, which is like it's Brazil's biggest newspaper, well is the biggest new paper. It could be second biggest, I'm pretty sure's the biggest. It's funded

by like right wing ship at billionaires um. But you know, their entire front page right now is just them yelling about the coup and like gleefully reporting them like like that they had a frit page thing for an individual sociology professor who stepped off a bus coming back from Brazilian immediately got arrested. Like this is this is the kind of sort of jubilation that it's really it's kind of it's kind of amazing too, because like kind of

sociologist is also a bosonarist insurrection rate. Yeah, well okay, I feel like that. If you're a sociologist, there were exactly two you have. You have three paths. One has you become a cop? Two is you is you do the Italian thing and you become the Red Brigades. Yeah, that was that. That was That was Italy's first sociology department, by the way, I turned out the Red Brigades or three you become a Nazi. Those are your three options. Yeah,

there are. Yeah. I've never been unfortunate enough to run into any of the chad sociologies, to be very right, they are there. Yeah, we we we stayed away from them. In the anthro department, we're like nope, no, Yeah, I've taught in sociology before and you definitely do get a lot of students who are there to be a cop. I've forgotten about that. Yeah, it sucks. I will say Brazil has had at least one. I feel like they've

had at least a couple of sociologist presidents. For Fernando Henrique Cardoso was what yeah, what was the sociologist was presid it for a while and then he got replaced by Lula Um. This is this has been This has been a tangent about what happens when you put sociology professor's lefted out of their cages. Uh so okay, And you know, I would say this is going back to global for a second, Like some of the stuff that

they're saying is not exactly true. Like they're they're they're trying to sort of make a separation between the like extremist Wilsonario eastas and then like the people in Parliament, and it's like okay, so like yeah, they have this whole thing about these are streamists with no support in Parliament and it's like okay, buddy, Like there are literally people like in Congress who are in Congress because they were elected because they filmed themselves doing right wing trucker borodblocks,

Like you know, okay, like well if one of these other things, one of the other stories, was them talking, was them talking about I Brazilian politicians frantically deleting the social media posts in support of the protests. So okay, you know it is it is actually true that like a lot of like even both people in both to know his own party like denounced it. But you know, yeah, I mean we saw the same ship, right, and then they'll gradually reimagine it over the next two or three

years to where like that they're they're not denounced again. Well, well, we'll see what happens, because there is also a chance here that like everyone who was even intitentially like everyone was like, we'll back out of this. I'm not a big pro prison guy, but the video of them arriving in a coach at the jail was pretty immediate. That was pretty funny. Yeah, So okay, so right now it looks like this has gone pretty badly for them. Again, this is this is this is being recorded one day

after it happens. So I don't know if if the army has actually done the coup tomorrow. It's not my fault, it wasn't out yet. But you know, I think we should we should ask shoud take a step back and ask why is this happening, And I think we should we should ask why did this happen in the same way in both the US em Brazil and why did it not work? And the answer to this is that the capital is a trap. What what what the American and Brazilian right has ran into, sort of ironically, is

the crisis of the century revolutionary movement. So to explain what I mean here, I'm gonna I'm gonna read a bit of to our Friends, which is a work produced in late by the Invisible Committee, which is the pen name of some French anarchists who are most famous of

writing The Coming Insurrection. Um. I'm not normally a huge fan of their work, but they got they got one thing very very right, and that's this occupation of the Kaspa and Tunis, and of the Stagma Square and Athens, siege of Westminster and London during the student movement of two thousand and eleven, encirclement of the Parliament in Madrid and September twelve, or in Barcelona on June five, thousand eleven, riots all around the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, December

four attempt on October fifteenth, thousand eleven, in Lisbon to invade the Assembly at the REPUBLICA birding of the Bosnian presidential residents in February. The places of institutional power exert in magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents managed to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin, it's only to discover empty places that is empty of power and

furnished without any taste. It's not to prevent the people from taking power that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets, real traps revolutionaries. The popular impulse to rush onto the stage to find out what is happening in the wings is

down to be disappointed. If they got inside, even the most ferbrent conspiracy freaks would find nothing ur cane there. The truth is that power is simply no longer that

theatrical reality to which maternity accustomed us. Yeah, and gets very prescient and like, and it's we're raised on these myths right, both on the left and right, Like on the on the right, like there are these myths of these American institutions which took great and unique and shining cities on the hill and on the left, like we're raised with the storming of the Bastille and stuff like that. As he's the Winter Palace, right, these moments have kind

of revolutionary change. But yeah, and I want to I want to specifically, I want to take a second talk about the Winter Palace because this is actually something that I think sort of worryingly this is uh Nick what is actually talked about this in one of his podcasts, which is that like and he's right about this, which is that like the like there there there are like you can't actually just store with Winter Palace and take

power right, doesn't work anymore. And but but but I think it's actually worth like taking like two minutes to layout why that's true. And it's because the Winter Palace was like a once in like a like like a once in a century historical moment, and it only worked because and this is something that I think people forget. The storming of the Winter Palace was not the thing that overthrew the Czar that was later. That was that was the February Revolution. That is a completely given revolution,

the Stormy of the Winter Palace. And the reason why that worked was that the government that that that the Polsheviks were overthrowing was Kerensky's government, which is just like really dipshit like interim interim governments that was only supposed to be their own town election happened and had like

the most fig leaf legitimacy of any government ever. Everyone hated them, they had no supporters with but and any of this is why it worked, right because when they had no power at all, and so when the bull shwiks rolled in on them, everyone else just stayed home. And that is not going to work in any modern context unless like I don't know, you're like you're you two were also like two years in a revolution and there's like three years into a war. Yeah, there's like

an incredibly fig leave government. Maybe you can pull this off, but like that that that that is not that is a absolutely terrible, god awful model for attempting to seize like any kind of power or bring down any governments.

But you know, it's it's become because that because that became the sort of like mythology of of the Soviet Union that you know, that was sort of burned, the sort of false image of that was burned into the certain memory of of collective memory of the left to the point where, like, most people don't even remember that Kerensky was also technically a socialist and that like and

that that's how revolution was a socialist. Like a group of socialists overthrowing another group of socialists, and both of them have a very tenuous sort of like it's tenuous and whether they're either of them are socialists at all? Yeah, and then going on to take power and kill a bunt too bad of the socialists. Yeah, yeah, okay, so that aside, you know, this this crisis I was talking about, like this is the reason why we're here in the

first place. Right, it's in large part because of the failure to overcome the movement of power out of the sort of palace where people expected to be that in the two thousand eleven revolutions failed like that that that that's why we're here in hell world because people people were sort of unable to figure out a way to actually bring down our government instead of sort of being

like drawn magnetically into these traps. But those problems sort of like magnetic draw the Capitol building to will be revolutionaries. This is just as much a problem to the right as it is the left. And for right now, this has saved us. It's caused the Brazilian right to abandon things they were doing that actually, like are genuinely terrifying and you know, could could have been and have been effective.

Like for example, one of one of the cleanup operations that was happening today was the Brazilian army cleared a bunch of these people who were trying to do blockades to state oil facilities, and you know that actually could have worked, right like that, Yeah, and you know, and and yeah, we've talked about this before and then the other and the other sort of bose in our episodes.

But like that, those kind of like trucker blockade things, blocking highways, blockades like those are tactics that the Brazilian rights sort of natively uses. And there's a world where the Brazilian fascist sticks to their instincts and instead of doing this doomed attempt to s from the capital, they put these same numbers of people into trucks with roadblocks and burning tires and they try to shut down their

Brazilian economy. You know, in essence, there's a world where instead of doing it October an impossible like January sixth revolution, where they do an invisible committee one where they realize the powers and logistics and attempting to shut shut down its flow is how you do a revolution. And that is a world that is a lot scarier than the one that we're in. But and you know, I think

we'll see how this ultimate plays out. But I actually think the fact that this was planned for Orlando is like you know, with the help of sort of the usual American generay seth crowd, I think this actually really really fucked them, like it it really deeply hurt sort

of the Brazilian fascist provement, which is good. Um It always like when I see the I think about this recently with like um me and mar and everything else, Like I always come back like marcusa where he talks about the false choice of masters by slaves and like how the solution is not this like one big sort of like like big I didn't want to call it, like symbolic kind of active violence, but like the great refusal to participate in these things, which is something that

lots of people have power to do as opposed to doing this stupid ship which centralizes them in one place to get some all arrested. Well, I mean it's also likes there's another sort of part of this, which is that like both in the US and in Brazil, the right is not very good at fighting the cops. Like they got that one horse cup pretty good. There's a couple that like don't get a cold people, but like they're only they only do well when they're really like

when they outnumber the cops like a hundred or one. Yeah, that is different in Europe. That is a thing that like like if you look at Whereasov comes from, Asov comes from right wing football hooligans who like the front line in the minda and beat the ship into the cops. Yeah. But but but in the in the US, it's like, I don't know, everyone's just like this doesn't fight the

busy shooting people. Yeah, but there isn't that history of like like that's not I'm not don't just want to pick on like where I come from, but like like crowd violence, like like football hood against like that that doesn't exist in a meaningful sense in the US, it's not as commonplace, and there isn't that like institutional memory

of fighting riot police that exists all over Europe. Yeah, well, I think I think the thing is that, like, okay, American sports fans do fight the cops, but they only do it once a year, if that like the super Bowl. Yeah, well, you know, they'll do with the NHL, but things like it's only it's only like maybe like three cities a year that do it, right, Yeah, and everyone series too.

It's harder because the World Series has this whole sort of like like that they have the parade, they have this whole stage managing to people, they get people stop from writing. So really there's only like two or three events per year where you can get riots, whereas like in Europe, any time, yeah, any given Saturday, he could be throwing down with a cop on a horse. But like it's outside of it. It's gone long beyond that.

Like I remember in like just before this two thousand eleven moment, like the two the earlier two thousands antig eight movement, like the institutional knowledge on how to deal with large volumes of police and still get your point across, just as we saw in twenty did not exist here and had to be imported from Hong Kong and other places, badly imported in Yeah, but infographic from Hong Kong. Yeah, So okay. Having said all of this, this is not to say that everything is fine. Um, it's not. Uh,

you know. I think something that's that's very important that I have not seen anyone talk about either in either sort of generosic of January eight, is that the the reaction to the coup on the left, and this is as true of the Brazilian left as it was with the American left. In fact, I think the American lifted

American lefted way worse. In January six was paralysis, right, even in Brazil, which has these sort of one body social movements kind of mobilizations took almost a full day and materialized by the type, you know, by which point the threat already dissipated. So you know, for a for a full day, the only thing standing between the fascist

and power was their own stupidity. And you know, as boundless as their stupidity seems like, watching these people like taking a dump on a cabinet, like with a camera in front of them, like it's not actually a shield against fascism, Like every every fascism after Bussolini and even Napoleon.

The third who's like the sort of modern prototype of fascism, has at least one and usually two or three comically stupid like uprisings and coups that just fail, and they failed when everyone lasted them, and then number four, they're suddenly in power and it's like, wow, you can't you can't actually write these things off because they're funny, because

again they're always funny for the first like two. Then on number three, like all your friends are being bars into a camp and shot, and it's like wow, yeah, and like we don't want to be in a place where like one growing up in the room is all that's between us and fascism, right like and adult making a plan, And I think there's there's a specific like I actually I think social media actually plays a really big role in this because you know, I can I

remember this January six, like there was this kind of like the way that just turns everyone into a spectator. Everyone was just like, you know, I think it was Vicky Ouster, while I think was the first person who said this was like Twitter twit. Twitter is a machine that turns action into discourse. Yeah, and so you know what, while it was going on, right like everyone turned the action of the thing into discourse. Everyone was sort of

like sitting there paralyzed watching it. And that is fatal like like that if you look at the actual stress test of the sort of machinery of power, right, like, it's actually I think it's actually much less of a big deal that the cops were on their side of the cops in Responder, because the cops eventually did clear them out right, it took it took a long time.

The cons eventually did it. But I think I think the thing is actually more dangerous is that like there was there like there wasn't a response to the left at all. There's nothing right like there there were there were rallies in Seal Pollo. Like the next day was actually funny because both both both the rallies, both like the people sacking the capital and the people in sal Polo were both were both singing the national anthem, which is some real fun politics moments. It's another thing to

talk about. Yeah, but yeah, you compare that to Spain, which somebviously where I'm most familiar with well, like people immediately got guns Scott in the street and started killing soldiers when they had much more effective and organized coup, right, and that coup would have failed where not for fascist intervention from abroad. But yeah, Brazil has powerful unions who

did shit. Yeah, well, and partially I think that's that's like that has to do with the hollowing out of the unions and there's there's sort of long story here, but like you know, and even if you look at like I think this is this is a sign really of sort of how actually dynamic the left is because you know, if if if you want to look at like like a dynamic Latin American left, like they you know, there there was there was there was a very very

well organized US backed coup against Hugo Chavez. She doesn't one. I was just one. It was it was just before I moved there, so I think it would. Ah, there were other coup attempts in Venezuela two that were less well organized. Yeah, she doesn't too. Yeah, he doesn't too.

And yeah, that one't got far enough that like the New York Times was like had an article out about how democracy had been restored to the Cuba to Venezuela and then you know the thing, the thing that happened after that, and then there's there's a very famous movie of this from from a filmmaker who was just there.

Is that over over over the next forty seven hours, like the left mobilized and they put so many people in the street that like the Coop Water has had to back down, and Hugo Travis has got to be president and you know that that's the thing that that's the thing that a strong left can do, right, they can actually defeat the military. And yeah, but you know, but this didn't the US just we fell down on the job. Like there wasn't much of that in Brazil.

Like I like like it, Like it is true, as Lulu was saying, that they picked a day when everyone was gone. But it's still, I think really alarming that just by just by sort of acting first, they have so much of a sort of time advantage, sort of an advantage of reaction over US. Yeah, that film, by the way, people want to watch is called The Revolution Will Not be Televised, which is kind of a great title to the spectative thing that you were talking about.

And yeah, I watched that bat boy and VHS back in the day in Caracas. Wow, yeah, good times. So okay, finally, in a broad sense, I want to ask, like, what are we doing here right? Um, the sort of dominant mode of quote unquote anti fascism, and this is the model that's being adopted by Lula and the rest of the sort of liberal and even sort of moderate conservative ruling class in Brazil. It's what's been adopted by the Democrats is their anti fascism is posing their opposition to

fascism as a defensive democracy, the rule of law. Mhm. But yeah, okay, let's look at what's actually happening. These coups aren't working. That's the sort of actual power. Military attempts to take power. They're losing every time. But do you know how the fascists are taking power by democracy? Their greatest success has been in taking power but just

winning elections. Like look look at what happened in India, right, That is a country that has been like very nearly totally consumed by fascism, and it was done by just

elections over and over and over again. Hungry. Yeah, even here on a fundamental level, like what we're seeing right now out of the sort of broad swath of social sort of liberalism, conservatism and social democracy is an unsustainable strategy, anti fashion, anti fascism as a pure defensive democracy is just preserving the machine that will hand the power of the state over to the fascist of the silver platter. And you know that like this, this defensive democracy in

the abstract is a death march. Right. You know, if if you can, you can you can look at the sort of course of of the late nineties, the late century, Right, why did the bombs fall over Bagdad? Well, protect democracy? When when the Mexican government was shooting the Zapatistas, they're protecting democracy. When the cops rated the when the cops rated the Forest Defenders in Atlanta, Oh, it's because they

were domestic terrorists who are threatening democracy. But what's happened here is that the threat of fascism has sort of press ganged armies of people who otherwise would be enemies of sort of capitalist quote unquote democracy into protecting the very institutions that are inevitably going to bring these people

back into power. And that's really grim because it means that something has to change or we're just gonna come back here again and again and again, until eventually enough of the ruling class flips to back into fascists that they seiz power once and for all. So, you know, something, we have to do something else that's not just this that sort of desperate treading water. Yeah, like like fighting to stand still in this terrible place where people can't

pay their heating bills and feed their families. Yeah, it's it's pretty dire sucking outlook for us, isn't it. Yeah? But I mean, you know, I would say this like that there was a vision inw of what that something else could be, right, Like, it's it's it's not it's it's it's not like we're in the depths of like the two thousands where no one has ever seen like

anything that's taking possible, right. Yeah, Like there are a lot of people probably listening because they saw that vision and it changed who they want to be and how

they want the world to be. And I think that's really good and uh for me at least, I think once people around in the streets, which people weren't able to do in time in Brazil, like, they will tend to find that salute shann Outside of institutions, that the response has been almost entirely institutional, at least in here in this country to a fascist coup because people didn't and people were tired from your industry and they've all been fucking arrested and half of them have been shot.

And but part of the problem also is just like there's there's like the US just has a sort of geographical problem then, and Brazil has this to to some extent, which is that like, yeah, this is not like Belgium you can very quickly get people to the capital, like

you can't. You can't actually like it is actually genuinely very hard to get a bunch of people to a place quickly here, right, which you know is a thing where we're lucky that yeah, like that the capital kind of like holding the capital, doesn't you know, it's it's it's not a thing that actually allows you to sort of take power. But it's also a real sort of concern about politics in the US because it can't work the same way it works in a lot of places

that are smaller. Yeah yeah, yeah, like Bolivia for example, yeah yeah, or even Venet's wait, right, like so much of the institution almost everything is in Caracas, even though it's a big country. Yeah, that's that's that's pretty much all I got. Um, well, we'll see, we'll see if Bolstaro when when he gets out of the hospital, if he gets out of the hospital, he's returned to his social home. Yeah, yeah, it's it's always good to see people with with takes on situation in Brazil who also

think the capital is Rio. That's always a fun thing that I can see on Twitter Dot. It's okay not to post you know, this is my okay, I have what what are my rules of thumb about talking about a place is if if you can't name five cities in a country, don't talk about it. Yeah, this is the thing that like so many like people, people people who get paid to write articles about places like just fail.

People who get this is like like, frankly, you should be able to like like if if I was doing due diligence, I would I would be learning, I would be actually learning Portuguese right now instead of like relying on my Spanish to sort of like power through it. But you know, like the lowest bar is you should go the capitol and you should be able to name five cities in it. And if you can't do that, like maybe don't post. Yeah, it's fine not to post.

In fact, when dealing with coups, maybe consider options that are not posting. Yeah, and and yeah, go go out and stop them. M hmm, make friends. Yeah. So this this is when it could happen. Here. You can find us in the places on social media. We live in a period of increasing class conflict. During the Trump years, strike action reached the seventeen year high. Strike surged, increasing almost over as workers fought back against rising inflation and

the cost of living. Fights over unionization hit sectors previously thought to be un organizable, as workers declared victory across fast food chains, Starbucks, and Amazon. And this increased strike activity is taking place against the rising course of revolt. Tenants are farming unions and launching rent strikes. Riots kick off in the face of police murdering on average over three people per day, and kids walk out of school demanding everything from access to ppe to an end too

attacks on queer and trans youth. It's not just that strikes are increasing, but the logic of the strike to strike a blow against one's class enemies, to enact a cost and generalized collective refusal is spreading. As two comes to a close. The largest strike by education workers across the University of California system has seen barricades, occupied buildings, and strikers even liberal eating dining halls to feed themselves. Members of the United Mine Workers have been on the

picket lines for almost two years. In this holiday season, over one thousand rail workers stunned the brink of crippling the US economy and an effort to win sickly as the government rushed to enforce a contract and break the strike. With so many people on the verge of striking, it's easy to wonder what would happen if a strike across industries could be organized, a general strike. It's this very

subject that we tackle in today's show. And speaking of strikes, the producers of it could happen here have walked off the job and it's going down. It's taken over. Excited to be here, that's right. I g D will be occupying the means of this production for five shows throughout the month of January as we address some of the major issues of today while looking back at recent examples in history about how the exploiting excluded have attempted to

meet the conditions which miserate our lives head on. Each episode, of course is going to have special guests and he die from us. Launching the summer of two thousands fifteen, it's going down as a media platform, radio show, and podcast. It covers a ton of a social movements from an anarchist perspective. As a group, we represent folks from across the US. Tom and myself have been involved in covering

and participating in social struggles for over twenty years. Sophie's a long time educator and community organizer across multiple continents. Marcella is a writer and comedian. This is Mike Andrews. Happy to be here. I'm Sophie Marcella and I'm Tom. Yeah, this is really cool. Thanks to all that it could happen here people. It's awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to be here and talk about strikes. It's gonna be a fun time. Yeah,

I'm excited about today's topic very much. So, just to start off, it's interesting, it seems like every few weeks on social media, every couple of months, whenever there's like a big issue that comes up or something's going on in the news cycle, the idea of a general strike will trend or sort of kind of get out in the ether as this zeit guys that becomes really popular and you know, we live in this time and increasing

protests and strikes and riots. But it also seems like the possibility of a general strike seems like very far off, or the idea of it even being this like trending thing on social media is sort of like passe are silly. And also it happens so often and we don't see it materialized, it can be easy to sort of write

it off. Or on the other hand, a lot of people will say, well, if you want that to happen instead of just like wishing it to be on social media, you should just join a union and get involved that way.

It seems that this drive to constantly declared general strikes, though ambitious, sometimes to the point of, you know, people being able to sort of make fun of it, the reality is is that the repeated sort of call for that has normalized that idea and what we're seeing a lot in specifically in the US, but we're seeing a lot of people at the workplaces recognized that the business

unions have failed. Right, It's how we got here. I live in the rest Belt I live in the midst of the failure of business unions every single day in my life, and that they've also come to understand something that the autonomous in Italy we're talking about the seventies, which is that workers already control the means of production. They're already there. They already run the coffee shop, run the restaurant, run the warehouse, run the tech company, whatever.

And if they just stop, nobody makes any money. And you don't need a union in a formal sense to do that. And so I think a lot of workers that traditionally fell outside of unions are starting to understand their powers workers outside of that structure, and that is incredibly important for us going forward. Yeah, I mean, I think you're totally right. I mean, I don't think quiet quitting came out of nowhere. And I know it's just like an idea. I like loud quitting more like I

prefer that. But um, I do think this culture, we're creating a culture where it is okay to be anti work. It is okay for you to say I hate my job and I actually don't do anything and I steal from my boss, and we should normalize that, right, Like I don't think striking is just this whole thing. And I do want to say this before I move into that. Every single time I posted TikTok video, somebody's always like general strike July. So it's like, yeah, it's definitely on

the internet a lot. But I do think even people saying that I'm not doing it has an impact because it's like, what is that? Martin Soustri said, you have to fight the culture, and the culture that we live in now is a culture that's like obsessed with work for works sake, and so like maybe part of it is like, yeah, workers already owns the means of production. Yeah, I just don't work as hard on your job, you know, and if your work steal from your boss, it doesn't

have to be like this organizational thing. Because one thing is that, like you have to realize is that sometimes union work unions work with management. So it's like even if you're like, yeah, like I want to wait for my union, it's like what if your union is like the fertile a union that will go behind your back and like make decisions. Um. I guess all this to say is that I think changing the culture is important. Um.

And I think that's happening now. I think I, like you said at the end of that, just like how something that I think we'll get into a lot more in this episode is looking at how this life claims to join the union being the practical thing to do towards a general strike just isn't accurate at all. And that when you look back in history at kind of any of the exciting moments of UM general strikes are uprising and stuff, it doesn't come from those official channels UM.

And so I'm excited to get into that more. And I think, Yeah, I like with saying like this thing where it's just become this thing that people will like say and talk about even if there's not that cultural memory of like exactly what a general strike means or what what what's going to happen, there's this idea of like refusal and of solidarity that is captured just in the world and just in saying it. But I think it's really like sewing that energy up and speaking of

cultural memory. Fact, you're dynamite in your pitchforks because it's

time for a trip down memory lane. In the early dred of the United States Group site the Industrial Workers of the world of the IWW, which advocated for the abortion of the wage system and capitalism, rejected racist exclusions of non white workers in the labor movement, and even engage in shootouts with the KKK popularized the idea of the general strike in the United States on a large scale, but the idea itself and its application in US history

is much older. Throughout the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, anarchists, socialists, and everyday members of the working class all promoted and carried out multiple general strikes as a means to win political and economic concessions. For some, the general strike was also a launchpad for revolution, in which workers could, in theory, seize the means of existence out of the hands of the capital's class and run

society on its own terms. And it's this battle that thrust millions of everyday working class people directly into conflict with the American state and its military. In US history, the first large scale example of a general strike occurred in the midst of the American Civil War and W. E. B. Dwo Boys famous book Black Reconstruction, he explains how it was the general strike of the enslaved black proletariat that brought down the plantation system, not President Lincoln. Er Union bullets.

The Boys argues that just like the black lead insurrections of today and ferguson him in the Apple, this strike took bourgeois white society by total surprise, he writes it in the South newspapers, and ied the very idea that slaves could ever free themselves, and even claim that they quote did not want to be free, he writes, of white society in the North. The North shrank at the very thought of encouraging servile insurrection against the whites. Above all,

it did not propose to interfere with property. Black people on the whole were considered cowards and inferior beings whose very presence in America was unfortunate. Only John Brown knew that revolt would come, and he was dead. So the Boys really painted this picture of this mass care and society in which slavery is seen as very sad. More terrifying is the idea of mass black insurrection, which of course mirrors today's situation. I mean, that's what the suburbs are.

I mean right like that suburbs aren't. It's like for you to like pretend like all the things that you have are not built on blood. It's for you to like segment yourself away from the people in society than give you everything you have, yet you've denied them everything. See you going you a little home and like drinking a little tea and like watch your little movies and just like ignore the fact that you're an asphalt, you know what I mean, Like just like and even not

even more more than an apple. I was going as far as saying, I used to say that they're not good or bad people, but like you're acting like a bad person, Like you don't care about other people because you've been tricked to think that, like you're getting a good deal. And it's an interesting point that the Boys makes about just like. It was only kind of the radical wing of the abolishnist movement that was talking about open revolt. There's this early anarchist A lot of people

don't reference a lot, but wis under Spooner. He conspired with John Brown in various plots, and he later became a member of the First International and a contributor to early anarchist publications like Liberty. He produced this really early text which is just fantastic. It's called a Plan for the Abolish of Slavery, published in eighteen fifty eight. It's

a couple of years before the Civil War. He writes, Our plan then is to make our war openly or secretly a circumstances may dictate upon the property of the slaveholders. Burn the master's buildings, kill their cattle and horses, conceal or destroy farming utensils, abandoned labor in seed time and harvest, and let the crops perish. Make slavery unprofitable. I love the line conceal or destroyed that you can destroy them,

you can also hide them. This is like a parallel that we can drawn out to like if you want to like have solidarity with like like other wage slaves, is that like do accommodate them and help them steal from their I mean from their jobs. I mean it's like these things happened in the past, but these are

tactics that we can still use in the present. There's echoes of this quote later with Lucy Parsons, right, and you see this during the structure in Our Work at Chicago, where she gives a speech where she's talking about grabbing knives and going to the doors of the rich as a way to make it very very very clear that they weren't going to be able to live off the backs of the working class anymore. Right, um, And it's the sort of idea of direct action, which now, I mean,

if we think about, now, what are politicians doing. They're trying to pass laws to make it a felony to have home demonstrations, right to like do exactly these kinds of things, but in much more passive ways. So if we can really think back, I mean, this is a tried and true technique that people used in the United States for a very very long time, and we can

see still how much that terrifies people with power. There's another awesome quote from Spooner I just want to read as well, and this I find this one really interesting because he's speaking actually to white people in the South, especially people that work in the slave patrols. He says, white rascals of the South, willing tools of the slaveholders. You who drive slaves to do their labor, hunt them with dogs, and flogged them for pay without asking any questions.

You are the main pillars of the slave system. That is the most eloquent way to say exactly that's exactly what I was thinking. I think it's interesting to point out, as do Boys Rights, and as Frederick Douglas said of the Civil War, it was started quote in the interests of slavery on both sides. The South was fighting to take slavery out of the and the North was fighting to keep it in. And the mass black exodus did

not kick off at the start of the war. He makes the really important point that Union leaders made it clear that they did not want to disrupt the plantation system. At times, generals even offered to put down slave rebellions, and he says that they even forbade at least in some instances, union soldiers from singing the song John Brown's Body. But as the North pushed into the South, the flood of former slaves escaping into Union hands grew and grew.

By eighteen sixty two is the Boys Rights. This was the beginning of the swarming of increasing numbers no longer to work on Confederate plantations, a movement that became a general strike against the slave system. This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end, perhaps half a million people. They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left

the plantations. It's interest into and the Boys makes this point. The general strike also encouraged and took place alongside many poor whites deserting the Confederate army. One thing that's interesting about the Confederate side of the Civil War. You could get out of fighting if you own slaves, and a lot of poor whites deserted the Confederate army, which further crippled it. As the Boys noted, the poor white not only began to desert and run away, but thousands followed

black people into the northern camps. And just some key takeaways to like launch into discussion side of this, It's interesting that the wider society, as the Boys notes, before the Civil War disparaged the possibility of mass collective action.

And I think this really mirrors contemporary conspiracy theories and narratives around black rebellion today that happened often either in the midst of the George Flight uprising or afterwards, and also the mass strike and refusal that happened during the Civil War, which disrupted the economy and made things like the slave patrols, the policing of the plantation system and possible that helped bring down the Confederacy obviously, and I

think it's important to ask, as our contemporary society remains structured around racial capitalism, what might be done in the current system in terms of mass refusal and desertion that would cause a similar effect. The idea of the widest society and disparaging mass collective action is because that the fear is letting us know that we do have mass power,

you know what I mean. It's like it's not a surprise that people always say that Lincoln freed the slaves, and Lincoln literally said, if I have had to end slavery to save the Union, I would have ended slavery. And if I have to keep slavery to save the Union, I would have kept a slavery, you know what I mean. So just like this whole idea of like letting black people know you can't do ship, don't even bother is because they know that we can't do ship, and we

are doing ship because black people are always rebelling. Um if you come to flop push you see it in full color. They realize the governments them and give a funk about them, and they've created their own institutions to support them. So um yeah, So it's like this whole idea to let us tell us don't even bother and and and like criminalizing like the informal sector because it's like that's a way for us like gain power outside of like the formal sector, you know what I mean,

and things like that. So I just think it's like it's like when they tell us don't bother, trying to fight back, like everybody has to suffer, Like that's what they always say. Everybody suffered, and we all just suffer. And it's like, no, we don't want to suffering. We're actually doing things to ease our suffering. And um, I think this is just like all this is to say that people who are out there doing stuff keep doing stuff. And like, if you want to do stuff, do it.

You don't have to be brought of reunion. You don't have to put your job and be an activist. By the way, paid activists not really activists. You can do regular ship and your hold that you can do a free store on the corner of your streets. So people can have clothes. It's like you could striking from the economy means like divesting your time and resources, and you

can do it. We can all do it in some shape or form well, and I think it becomes a lot more possible today to think about that than it did, say before. Right, So, we had this kind of collapse of the legitimacy of the American political projects sort of with the Iraq War, right, we all kind of saw how badly that can turn out. But what was left in America to uphold the entire edifice was the idea that even though things politically were kind of screwed up,

at least there's economic success. And then that failed to right. And so this sort of idea that built up after World War Two, this kind of concept of, you know, the labor corporate compromise, the loyal worker that's going to get provided for for the rest of their life. Not only did our parents generation find out that that was a lie, but younger generations don't really buy it at all. And so what you're really seeing is, I think this kind of breakdown socially of the legitimacy of the idea

of the American dream. Because of all of its problematic elements and it's impossibility and its absurdity, and kind of this revival of an idea which existed prior to World War Two, which was an idea of social revolt, right, and it was something we saw manifest during the Great Depression, and it's part of the reason why the New Deal exists.

Was a way to put that down, was a way to prevent workers from feeling like the only thing that they had in front of them was to take over their factories and chow up at the doors of the rich and so on, so and so on. Right. But that whole idea of the New Deal, that concept that the government was going to take care of you and the company was going to take care of you, um, collapsed in the nineties seventies, but the idea that it existed still holds on in some sectors of the of

America today. I Mean, you see this with the magacrat out really heavily, the idea that like nothing systematically needs to change, really we just need better outcomes, and we just need, you know, in their case, Donald Trump, to pay attention to us and give us the things that we want. But really, outside of that almost comical patriotism. Um, you don't really see a out of adherence to that

vision any further. And that makes the idea of mass refusal not only a lot more possible, but something that's actively happening currently. Yeah. And the other parts who I want to bring in is that when the New Deal is caused, it excluded like black people, right, And so that's one way. It's like it's like this constants like how white people are like tricked into like submitting to the system, and it happens so many times, and they

still keep saying, trick us again, trick us again. It's like, yeah, they're gonna give you ship so you're not upset, and then they're going to exclude black people because at the end of the day, black people do all the work that we need to survive as a society. Do we not remember who the essential workers were? Like who does the jobs that we need to like live? Like you

know what I mean? So yeah, you could like be out of work and get your little thing, But as long as we keep inslating and treating the people who make the society run, it's fine. Um. And now that's happening to white people too, and they're like Oh no, it's not cute, Like it's not fun and quiet quitting, you know what I mean, because like they're we are like the way black people have been treated is starting

to happen to white people. And it's just like, I, well, this is what I was going to ask you, how do we prevent another New Deal situation from happening where white workers are tricked again? Like because I feel it's coming. I feel like they're going to find a way out of this, and like how do we know what if it's like bullshit? And like how do we call it out?

And how do we call it out? That's what Student unforgiveness was, right, I mean, like, if we really think about it, the democratic parties been built recently since the Obama era on this idea of reinstituting elements of the New Deal without threatening the existence of capitalism. Um very intentionally right. We saw that the Affordable Care Act as

version of that. Right, So, I mean they are doing this and I think what's fascinating about this And this is something that radicals in the late sixties pointed out often about Lyndon Johnson is they said, you know, liberals voted for Lyndon Johnson, and they put all their hopes in him, so when he failed them, it didn't have anything left to do except hit the streets, right, like

there was no other option. And I think what we've really seen since the Obama era is the collapse of the idea that the way that the Democrats do socialists, this is in any way going to solve anything. Um, that's just going to continue to perpetuate the situation of which we need social assistance, right, as opposed to fundamentally ending that, which is, you know, the language that they put forward when they talk about things like justice, which

we all know that they don't really have much adherence to. Right. But I think until the until the Democratic Party gains legitimacy again, if they ever do, which hopefully they don't, but if they ever do, yeah, we might be able to see this kind of use of reformism, this counterinsurgency again, right, which is really what the New Deal was. But really

until that, I mean we saw in twenty twenty. You know, when the legitimacy of the group of people who often relies on that technique falls apart, you get uprisings in the streets, right, And so we're at kind of a different point I think than than maybe just before the new Deal kind of came into effect something I want to go back to that. I think it's what it was. This is the piece where the quote um it's been is talking about concealing or like in secret or in

public or whatever. How there's like a of power in terms of like things like general strikes in that sort of like invisibility or whatever, in the unpredictability in like not going for like building movements based on like visibility or public perception or like the media or whatever, but actually building them in these ways that can't be seen

as much and might be concealed. Um. And also this thing where people are underestimated, Like it makes me think about the revolution in Haiti in the late seventeen hundreds, which is you know, a long time ago but still very relevant um. And just thinking about how the kind of like colonizes in Paris, like couldn't believe the reports that were coming out of uprising in Haiti at the time because they were so racist basically that they didn't believe that black people there who were say could rise

up and could have that like awareness, gumption or whatever. Um. And that gave them a lot of room. You know, that was like a position of power for them that like, um, they were being underestimated like that much. And I think that's something we see with like even though like the idea that's gone on from that time really of like outside agitator and stuff like in any uprising that we see, Um, yeah, that both part people, is that there's something in that

that is also powerful and it gives possibility. Well, speaking of outside agitators, We're going to take a break and hear from some of our sponsors right now. In eighteen sixty five, on paper, the Civil War ended and the Union was saved. A decade later, the North began pulling out of the South, marking the end to reconstruction efforts in the beginning of both jem Crow and a reign of terror and white vigilanism in the form of the

Ku Klux Klan. The eighteen seventies was also a period of increasing poverty, declining wages, rising homelessness, economic depression, and exploding class conflict, as the stage was said for the Great Upheaval of eighteen seventy seven, a general strike that rocked multiple states as workers across lines of color, gender, professional an age threatened the very core of the capitalist state.

As the decades were on, multiple general strikes followed, as did a heavy handed government response that evolved to police and repress the broader population. Wanting to know more about this history of these general strikes in their importance, we caught up with labor historian and author Robert O. Vetts, author of One Workers Shot Back and We the Elites.

Ovetts argues that the often violent general strikes of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds showcase the ability of working people it's not only confront the state and capitalism, but also organized society on their own terms. Well, general strikes have been a rare occurrence, but a very powerful example of the way that organized workers and communities can

transform society and hopefully transcend capitalism. I think we have, in the examples of general strikes in US history, an example of the potential for getting on capitalism, and so that's what makes them really exciting to to study and to write about. At A general strike doesn't just happen, and we don't actually know exactly why general strikes happen, but we know that they don't just happen they're not spontaneous.

There has to be a groundwork of organizing and engaged activists and organizers who are working quietly, sometimes for months or years, to to work and organizing their fellow workers and to build community connections to support their strike actions. And there also has to be a good communication of what what the strike is, about what their demands are, and the ability to communicate and spread information about that strike.

Probably the two most important general strikes in US history where the one in eighteen seventy seven and the one in nine in Seattle. And the one in eighteen seventy seven was a general, real strike throughout the railroad industry, but it also had this extraordinary um microcosmic, if you will, a general strike that was happening in St. Louis and

East St. Louis. But what was fascinating about that was that the groundwork had been late in eighteen seventy seven, not by a union actually because the workers had tried to form a union, but it was sabotaged, it was infiltrated, and they tried to the the organizers tried to call off the set date to start the general strike and the railroad industry, but the workers wan't on strike anyways, and they built their own organization across dozens of different

railroad companies on their own. In St. Louis, however, there was a new left wing party called the Workingmen's Party that was formed by various socialists and communists and anarchists who had taken over the city and for a few days tried to run it. And that was that was probably closer to what happened in Seattle in nine where over a hundred local unions actually pressured the Labor Council to call a general strike, and so that was kind

of built up from below through formal unions. But then it went far beyond anything that those AFL affiliated unions were willing to really do. The St. Louis General strike in eighteen seventy seven that I was just mentioning. Uh, there was a multi racial coalition of worker organizers who

literally took charge of the strike. There had been a strike committee form and those that strike committee was dominated by the Workingmen's Party activists, but the workers themselves started to organize outside the confines of the strike coordinating committee and it was very multiracial. They started marching on one

workplace and another. UH. There was some evidence that there were some women that were involved in it, so there were strong ties to the community and various households and neighborhoods. But they marched on one workplace to another and spread the strike, and within a couple of days much of

the city had been shut down. And the irony of this was that the strike coordinating Council actually freaked out about how multi racial of the crowds were that were shutting down these workplaces and leaving and leaving work um and internally they became very divided based on their their racism, and there were some members of the coordinating committee that were extreme racial supremacists and didn't want the strike to continue, and they debated how to stop the strike, how to

call it off, and but the reality was that they had lost control of it to the workers outside of the committee, And when it became clear that the militias were being called into St. Louis to attack the city, the workers marched on the meeting hall where the strike coordinating Council was and demanded that they appropriate money to acquire arms to defend the city. But they refused to

do that, and they eventually tried to call off the strike. UH. So that lasted a few days, and race was a huge factor in why the strikes spread and how the workers took over the city, but it was also a factor in how it was actually killed by those who were supposedly quote unquote running the actual general stripe. In the case of Seattle, we don't know as much about the racial composition of the workers, UM, but we do

know that it was very generalized throughout the entire city. UM. And the reason we know this is because the the General Strike Committee, which was formed by the Labor Council, had representatives of every union, and they took care of many of the reproductive needs of the population. For example, they kept the hospital running. Uh. They set up free kitchens where people could eat UM. They as well as setting up and publishing a newspaper that came out every

day during the five days of the strike. So they took care of also of public safety. UM. So what was extraordinary about the Seattle General Strike is how it incorporated many of these issues that we would say is about gender and reproductive needs of the population. They didn't just shut down the workplace. They actually took over the city and reorganized society to meet the needs of humanity.

The seventy seven strike actually resulted in what I show in a lot of detail in my first book, when workers shot back, how the state and capital reorganized themselves in order to um be able to respond a lot quicker to self organized workers and strikes, and especially general strikes. For example, the modern police came into being in many cities as a result of the eighteen seventy seven strike, because up until that point, the police were um, if

you will, they were kind of like give workers. They worked on quote unquote tips or bribes. Uh. There were very few cities that had any municipal police, and if they did, they had very small forces. And so that was one reason why the strikes spread so quickly around the country over that that ten day or so period in July of eighteen seventy seven. Uh So, modern policing really came into being. Also, as you mentioned, the militias

were transformed into what became the National Guard. The militias also proved to be undependable because they were mostly composed of working men, and if they were called out locally, they knew the strikers, and in fact, some of them were strikers and didn't even show up for their militia duty. So militias were essentially de emphasized and they were replaced by a state controlled National Guard UM. As a result of the passage of a new federal law UH, the

military was also funded on a permanent basis. One reason why the military was so slow to be UH to be deployed to put down the strike in eighteen seventy seven was most of the soldiers were out in the West fighting essentially a genocidal war against the Plans native peoples, and so there weren't enough military around. And also Congress hadn't funded the military that you believe it or not,

and so the military was unfunded and undersized. Another consequence of this was that many corporations started to work together to create their own you could say, mutual aid to protect one another. They started forming employer groups in order to be able to respond at a more coordinated method UM. So you started to see corporations cooperati as a result of this. In fact, many of the technologies that we take for granted today were a result of the eighteen

seventy seven railroad strike. For example, UH, the telegraph was installed in many rich people's homes as a way to be able to contact the police directly. Those lines went directly to the police UH. The so called patty wagon UH was also invented as a result of the seven strike as a weapon against large crowds UM. So there were a number of m of new technologies that were implemented UH and became more widespread as results of that strike.

In Seattle also UH, the workers were prepared. They had known their history, and they formed a self defense group composed primarily of War War one veterans who had just come back from More one UM and they patrolled the city and they did things like shutdown bars because they didn't want UH people to get drunk and start fighting and that would be a justification for the National Guard

to be called in. But the police started to essentially line up outside the boundaries of the city and they waited for reinforcements threatenings essentially to invade Seattle before the general strike was called off. But the workers were prepared. They did carry out and organized self defense against that eventuality. The Oakland General Strike was part of an extraordinary wave of post War two strikes that were happening just like after World War One and Actually, during World War One,

there was a wave of strikes. UH. The same thing happened when a lot of soldiers started coming back from War two. Unemployment shot up, women were sent as sent packing. UH, prices exploded, there was a shortage of housing UH, and workers started to organize and U. During that few year period, UH, there was a general strike in the steel sector and Truman threatened to take over some of the larger companies,

and he was repelled by the Supreme Court. But as a consequence of this UH, this upsurge of class struggle UH, the Congress passed a Staff Hardly Act, which still governs US today. For workers who started organized in the private sector, where they're under the National Labor Relations Act. That Taff

Hartley Act was an amendment to that law. One of the most important things it did was a banned so called secondary strikes, which means that if workers go on strikes somewhere, workers can't strike in solidarity UM, and particularly if they have a union contract with their employer, would be illegal. Now, there are some workers that are exempted from that, for example, transport workers because they're under a

different federal law. They're under the Railway Labor Act. Which is part of the reason why we almost just saw rail railroad general strike before the Democrats killed it a few weeks ago. But the Taffed Hartley Act continues to serve as a means of suppressing and repressing the ability not only of workers but organized unions in their local workplaces,

but to actually engage in a general strike. So again, we've been listening to Robert Ovette's author of One Workers Shot Back and We the Elites just a few key takeaways from that discussion. We see various examples in these general strikes of tensions developing between more radical elements and reformist ones that want to contain revolutionary expressions and also

stop workers from really taking over society. We also see positive examples of these strikes spilling out across lines of race, gender, and age and profession. One thing we see, of course, again and again is the state responding to these strikes with the combination of militia's police and of course the

National Guard. And finally, many of these strikes lead to the passing of legislation, which is interesting because far from this sort of progressive arc towards justice, instead we see constantly, again and again the state either reforming itself to become more oppressive, engage in surveillance, reconstitute the police in a certain way, reconstitute the military, or sometimes bring the workers into the superstructure of the state and rogers the better man. Yeah,

I totally agree. It's not getting better. They're just being smart about it. They're like like little like slimy balls. They're just like reshaping as they need to shape and form to like get workers. So like when you were reading that, it felt like a writer's were It felt like a movie of like how do we control these people? You know what I mean? It felt like it was like this like checker where they're like, oh, they make

their move, we make their move. And it's like it's like the state as a tool, and like you see that because it's like it's a tool of the elite, and you see that people laws that are passed, and like when they're passed, like because when black and white people form them, there's violence, like a lot of state violence, like extreme state violence, because it's like they want to remind us like that's bad, you don't do that, and then they'll do stuff to play get workers like white

workers too, Like with a Wagner Act, like with unionization, like a lot of black people were excluded from that. Maybe just maybe things aren't getting better like they're telling

you they are, things are just reshaping. That's something else I'm thinking about as he was talking, and just like from from that history that it is like we hear that like the creativity of the state with their oppression or whatever it's going on, but also how people keep coming back with like new and different things, you know, like actually takes a lot of repression to stop these things.

Like if you look at what happened STUBBN or whatever, it's like they kill quite a lot of people to stop that strike wave and stuff, you know, like it's really heavy handed. And then but still a lot of strikes happen after that, and it leads up to Haymarket in a six or whatever. And I just think, again, again we seem like repression, but then we see it flowering again. And I think that what we're seeing like right now maybe is like a sort of creative non union.

That when we're talking at the beginning about people just saying general strike, general strike, it's like whatever happens next will be something different. What we're seeing is we're seeing over this time the mechanism of counterinsurgency get a lot more complex. Right, So in the eighteen seventies, it's let's get some guns and force everyone to go back to work. But now it's why don't we get nonprofits to fund these,

you know, public programs. Why don't we have community policing and copy with cops and and so you saw during the Georgia a uprising, as you saw a lot of this like, well, I know that y'all want to cut funding from police departments, but really what you should do is you should come to our budget meeting and we could put it in the city budget and we should talk about it that way. And that was the way to force the resistance in the streets back into a

mechanism that's able to be more easily controlled. Um. But we see in like rust belt cities, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, places like this, the way that the wealthy at this period of time, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we're already talking about trying to change entire environments. Right, So like surveillance, nonprofit activity like that changes the whole environments.

It's not just about a single individual objective but it shapes an entire reality in these rust belt cities during that period of time. I mean, you have a lot of like free art museums and stuff like this that are world class institutions. But if you look at their charters and actually look at them closely, the reason those

institutions exist was to quote inculturate the working class. And it was all about like Rockefeller very specifically Cleveland money to these institutions so working class wouldn't kill them, like wouldn't murder them. And it was in the middle of really intense anti capitalist activity in those cities, right and so we can watch the development of those techniques right now. It takes the form of defunding the police campaigns and

things like that as opposed abolitionism. Um it takes the form of trying to find softer means of policing, like surveillance as opposed to just having clubs and guns and stuff um. Or in the case of the Democratic Party of the Smart Border, when they talked about the smart Border, which is essentially putting a bunch of sensors and cameras in the desert to try and catch people crossing the border, that somehow less repressive by shaping the entire space around

surveillance that's somehow less repressive than just having police. And they use that idea that if they're not in a uniform and they don't have a weapon right in front of them or aren't human, that somehow there's some benefit that emerges and somehow the stage is retreating a little bit when in actuality thinks like body cameras, stuff like that just increase the ability of the state to have visibility, just increases the number of cameras on the street, and

increases the ability of the state to control information and decide what information gets out. Um. These are all things which have reinforced the power of the state, but they get portrayed as you know, forms of as reforms that are supposed to solve these huge social problems that people keep raising up. Well, speaking of things rich people give us so we won't kill them. We're going to now here for some from some of our sponsors. So far, we've talked about general strikes that are largely over a

hundred years old. But now we're going to turn and look at two examples of general strikes that took place within the last twenty years. In December of two thousand five. Republicans passed in the House of Representatives. HR four four three seven, also known as the Border Protection, Anti Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of two thousand five, a

proposed piece of legislation that's as jaconian as it sounds. Bill, as the A. C. L. You wrote, pushed to quote, militarize the border, give extraordinary powers to low level immigration officials, allowing law enforcement to expel without hearing anyone believed to be undocumented and detained non citizens and definitely without meaningful review.

The bill also sought to levy criminal penalties against anyone that engage in assisting someone that was undocumented, which threatened both employers of undocumented workers, as well as union organizers, teachers, clergy, and beyond, Foreshadowing the Trump presidency. It also called for hundreds of miles of border fence and authorized state and

local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. As George Campas wrote in the See Say Poty Insurrection, the bill would transform almost every person in the United States into either undocumented violators, police enforcers, or classify them as criminally complicit. The authoritarian nature of the legislation and the existential threat and represented pushed many a document of workers to take

action and organized on a mass scale. As Kemphus wrote, starting in March of two thousand, six marches and more than half a million people overwhelmed the centers of major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Dallas halteing business, while there were literally hundreds of smaller gatherings and many

other smaller cities. There were dozens of student walkouts and high schools around the country, as well as a nationwide immigrant general strike called for on Maybee that was heated by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of workers, including truck drivers, who shut down the port of Los Angeles. Despite a series of large scale immigration raids aimed at derailing the movement, millions took the streets and carried out strikes, all outside

of the direction of Union in Democratic Party leadership. The mass protests and strikes helped revive May Day as a day of labor and worker action in the United States. Installed for over a decade. Right wing attacks on immigrants are four four, three seven failed to pass, in large part due to the mass opposition and faced on the streets. In the spring of two thousand six direct action, as

they say, gets the goods. And what's fascinating about the two thousand six strike is that it was organized outside of established unions and political parties, especially Democratic Party, had a key youth wing to it. We saw lots of student walkouts. It was able to seriously push back against this draconian wave of anti immigrant legislation, and that worked for around ten years. And it seems like we don't reference this strike enough and talk about how important it was.

I was in a junior in high school when kids were walking out, but this is how I sleep. I was. I didn't walk out, and I just remember thinking, oh my god, those kids are so courageous and they're such badasses, and it's so cool that they're doing that, and I wish that I could. Well that law was like he should have slave Law Act, like straight up. They were just trying to like re install slavery among people who were not out here documented like you know what I mean.

They were trying to create a situation where people were still working dest bread, they were going to work for slave wages. And I'll say this about New York City, there's a huge like immigrant population, a huge undocumented work of population that we didn't even I mean, I didn't know about until COVID hit. Like, there's a lot of people who are keeping the economy alive that are not even counted, and they pay for our existence. As we're talking about those, two things that always come up for

me from talking about these strikes. First is, you know, the entire concept of quote immigration reform as it was being talked about by Republicans at the time and then later accelerated under Trump. This idea of border walls started with the American Nazi Party, right, Like, this was an American Nazi Party policy proposal in the nineteen fifties and sixties that got picked up through white supremacist movements, through people like George Wallace and sort of imported into the

Republican Party. Yeah, because it's Nazis. I think the other thing that was really inspiring about that movement I was, you know, out of college at that point watching this happen.

It was one of the first times I saw mass decentralized action happened across the entire country at that scale that sort of hit and apex like during these days, right, the sort of period of time in which people kind of took it upon themselves to shut the whole country down, And it just shows what can happen when community is organized as communities of people and not as spectators in some sort of removed symbolic political action, but actually become

immediate protagonists and what's going on in front of them. Another thing I think is really interesting about this is that it was such a massive response and that part of what the Act was saying was that you could be like prosecutor for assisting someone who's undocumented. That I think it like goes back to what we've be talking about with the other strikes stuff, is like the government is very aware that like solidarity between people is dangerous

basically and tries to letisate it. And we see, you know, after that strike in you know, the strike way of in eighteen seventy seven, you start to get all those anti conspiracy laws and stuff because that's a threat. And I love it in the sense it's like they put out and it gets like, um, such a massive response against it that people really like win basically and that

last for like a decade. Yeah. I think that goes back to the idea of white supremacy historically in the United States being this system of how people described it, of carrots and sticks, of offering incentives to be included in this bracket of whiteness, but then also saying, oh, and if you help that kid at school, we're gonna throw you in jail along with them, which again is a good reason to celebrate these strikes because they were

effective in beating back this legislation, but also pointing out that everyone should have been taking part in these actions. Well, hey, thanks for tuning in. That's going to wrap up the first episode. We encourage you to follow us going down on masses on at I g D Underscore News and we hope you enjoyed us taking over It could happen here. We're gonna be back tomorrow. We're going to continue to

look at general strikes. We're gonna do a deep dive into Occupy Oakland that kicked off in two thousand eleven, and we're gonna look at how a citywide general strike grew out of the Oakland Commune after the police nearly murdered in Iraq War veteran and thanks for tuning in. Welcome back once again, you're listening to It could happen here with the crew from It's Going Down Taking Over. This is our second show and we'll be doing a

total of five episodes throughout the month of January. So if you like what you here, please let the amazing folks at cool Zone Media know. Yesterday we began by looking at general strikes in US history, starting with the

mass plantation strike during the American Civil War. We spoke with labor historian Robert Ovetts about the revolutionary and bloody history of general strikes in the United States, and we also looked at the immigrant general strike in two thousand six that successfully beat back drew Conian legislation that sought to further militarize the border and attack and documented people. On today's show, we're going to be looking at a general strike that was called for by Occupy Oakland, which

took place on November two. Occupy Oakland was part of the much larger occupy movement that beginning New York with the occupation of Zukkati Park, but was seen as the radical focal point for the growing struggle, starting as an occupation on October tent in front of Oakland City Hall named Oscar Grant Plaza. On October twenty Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen was nearly killed after being shot with a police projectile during clashes between police and demonstrators as law

enforcement attempted to evict the growing Oakland commune. Following the Olsen shooting, thousands were occupied Oscar Grant Plaza and the general strike was called for a week later. Upwards of one hundred thousand people took part in the strike's associated actions, which included mass marches, a large anti capitalist black block which broke bank windows, and the shutting down of the Port of Oakland, with upwards of one thousand people participating.

Well before we hear from our guests on the subject, I wanted to talk a little bit about the occupy movement and Occupy Oakland and why it was so important. The occupy movement itself grew amidst this growing anger over the economic crisis, but also this fading belief and the hope and change promised by Obama. While naturally it seemed to kind of sort of come out of nowhere, there

were certainly things that really helped influence it. Naturally, there was the occupation by Chicago workers at the Republic Windows and Doors Factory, which signaled a real turning point, as well as the occupation of the Wisconsin State capital in two thousand eleven against anti union legislation, and all this was happened against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, and then in the Bay Area the Oscar Grant rebellion and riots in two thousand and nine and two thousand ten

kicked off and had a massive impact, centering discussions around police race and supremacy, as well as the role of rioting and social movements. At the same time, students and graduate workers occupied college campus buildings in New York and across California, which really spread the concept of occupying across the social terrain, as well as slogans like strike, occupied, takeover,

and occupy everything. Now, the explosion of the occupy movement in the fall of two thousand eleven cannot be overstated. Occupying camments became a focal point for people angry at the general state of the world to gather discuss an act and they became a real focal point for encounter.

While some cities saw these encampments come and go pretty quickly, when he saw concrete projects and organizing come out of them, people were fighting to resist foreclosures, for instance, in a lot of cities, and for many people this was where they were introduced to anarchist concepts such as direct action, horizontal organizing, and consensus decision making, which really brought these ideas front and center to hundreds of thousands of people

in a real and tangible way. And while a lot of people on the left from a variety of backgrounds took part, the real backbone of those involved and occupy were just everyday people who were new to social movements and became activated by material conditions and just the zeitgeist of what was happening at the time. Occupy was fascinating for me, like I was in the Rust Belt at the time. Still at the occupy, I was part of

the first march of five thousand people there. There may be like two or three d people at the general Assembly the night before, So most of the people that showed up were not people currently connected at that point to any kind of political organizing. They were just people that showed up because they heard about it on the

internet and they showed up to do the thing. And that camp alot lasted nine months, but we can start to see the impacts of that kind of breakdown of that division between people who declared themselves political and quote

everybody else. When we start to move forward past Occupy, we start to see that manifest during the ground Uprising Ferguson, We start to see that manifest during the George Floyd Rebellion, where this kind of division between those that declare themselves to be iCal agents and those that have not declared themselves to be so just ceases to really exist. And it's in those moments where we really actually see uprisings occur.

Occupied pointed out an important thing which is a fallacy in the way that we think, and that we think that radicals make revolts happen, when in reality, people make revolts happen, and our job is to antagonize circumstances. And it's only at the point in which that division breaks down between quote us and everybody else, that revolts actually occur.

And Occupy it was a really important point in a trajectory of I think a sector of the American anarchist movement and a sector of the American political scene starting to really internalize that understanding, starting to really grasp how different that is from the way that we have been taught to organize, and we're still seeing the ramifications of a lot of that work today, many many many years later, looking at like occupied, looking at any of these big moments.

When we look back, we can see all these things that like contribute to it, you know. And I think that this thing that you ASO can see tom of them, like the kind of losing that thing of like professor active act or like or actor in a situation is like so important, and I think that that is something that can really inspire in terms of what's happening in this moment too, or like how general strikes happen, or

how something that occupy happens. Is that things happen, like there are sort of moments that are kind of outside of our control. It's not something that can be like planned for, and if you do all the right things, then you get a general strike. But you can kind of like be relating to circumstances and to each other

and then different things happen. Um like thinking about the George Floyd uprising in twenty like none of us predicted COVID, you know, and like how that might have contributed to what happened in that or just like all these different circumstances that come together to make these moments um and I think that you know, something like what's going on now, we could look back and look at all these different things that are happening that then make something big happen,

and we never really know or can control that. A lot of the striking and occupy it serves the purpose of not us just coming together collectively, but it also serves as purpose of propaganda, and it just reminds me of this idea important idea of us occupying public spaces and the reason why we're not allowed to occupy public spaces because it's like sort of taking the power. And when there's lots of us occupied in public spaces, the media covers it and then it's like, well, what are

these people talking about? What are they doing? And that would then itself also serves as a propaganda mechanism to like spread, so like I like just like listening to that.

And I remember when again, like occupy was one of the moments that I was one of the people who viewed myself as not political, but I cared about what was happening in the movement because that was the first time I heard we are I think about moments of radicalization that I think of this one as being one of them as a person who's just like recently and as a five years ago recently awoke, Like these are moments that I remember, like had an impact on me

seeing people on the street taking public spaces, and I think that perhaps that's something that we should continue to do. And maybe it's not one of those things where it's like maybe not as large as occupy, maybe it's not consistently large, but like maybe we as civilians to just over public spaces all the time, just as a reminder to ourselves that we do have the power to do that. Like we can't have a free store here because we

want to. We don't have to ask the government for permission to do anything, like I think it's a huge first stop of becoming ungovernable and speaking of things that belong in a free store. We're now going to hear from our sponsors. For us to understand how the Oakland General Strike of took place, we first have to go back to what made Occupy Oakland so important to so many people just a few short weeks in October. In

the following interview, we speak with it's Going Down. Contributor, author and translator based in Mexico, Scott Campbell about his memories of occupy and what set the stage for a massive strike on November two. We didn't speak with Tova, who was involved in the Occupy Oakland Labor Solidarity Committee, about Bay Area labor unions becoming involved in the strike.

So to kick things off, Scott tell us about Occupy Oakland, what it looked like, how life and Oscar Grand Plaza was organized, and about this living, breathing thing many came to call the Oakland community. If you were to walk into Occupy Oakland, I think you'd be overwhelmed. Um. It was an amazing, vibrant, self managed, auto jestive community where you had folks living there in an Oscar Grant plaza.

You had food, childcare, medical care, libraries, UM, all sorts of projects UM in a self run sort of directly democratic assembly based, communally organized space. And it was open to anyone except for police and politicians who wanted to come and participate in this sort of radical experiment, this radical form of being with one another outside the constraints of how society normally constructs us to perform and interact

with one another. And I think what really stuck out to me the most during this time period was just the the welcoming atmosphere or the sense of potential that the camp um and the activities based around the camp held, the openness of people, and really the wide range of individuals who were participating in collectives who were participating, which certainly, of course led to differences of opinions at times that made that created some dynamics that were a struggle to

to work through and navigate, but at the same time really added to a sense of a space that went beyond a single project, that went beyond a single vision, but that was horizontal, communal and open in a way that I had never experienced before and that I have

yet to experience again. It definitely had an organic feel to it of of sort of people coming together, lending what skills they had, lending what resources they had across a variety of positions UM that may be broadly categorized on the left or or post left spectrum, a spectrum of folks with the spectrum of capacities of needs UM I mean a large number of unhoused neighbors who were there who brought their own life experiences and their own knowledge and their own skills to bear on the project,

which I think was a really, I guess, a powerful learning opportunity for a lot of people who hadn't really been in direct contact with unhoused folks um and who were unfamiliar with really perhaps the impetus beyond Occupy Oakland, and beyond occupy the impetus behind Occupy Oakland, and the impetus behind occupy Wall Street in general, which was of course the two thousand and eight financial crash and the Great Depression and the bailout of the banks while people

got fore clothes on their homes, especially people of color and black folks, which which hit particularly hard in Oakland. And so we see all these dynamics coming together and trying to work themselves out organically without being mediated by any one organization or any particular ideology. And it was

a powerful, confusing, messy, lively, beautiful experience. How to categorize as general assemb it is a great question, I think for me, how I interpreted it is it added a structural framework for how to navigate issues that would arise within the camp, within the sort of occupation. For lack of a better word of Oscar Grand Plaza, facilitating the day to day functionings of things. In a lot of ways,

was a decision making body. I wouldn't call it a government as such, because it tried to run on consensus or modified consensus, and anyone was free to bring proposals to the General Assembly that were free to bring their ideas for and promote their events and promote their actions

and activities. A lot of decisions were also being made by people who just showed up to do the work without necessarily consulting the General Assembly, So you almost had different tiers of activity and different tiers of organization occurring

in the same space. That seemed, again I go back to this word, that seemed to organically work itself out most of the time, and within the General Assembly that was the more formal structure where people came together at times nightly to discuss issues facing the camp, to discuss issues with in terms of um dealing with the police and the city government and eventually the state and federal government as they showed up to determine how to respond

to various acts of aggression and attacks on the camp and attacks on the space, to figure out how to better run the space. Even to figure out how to better run the General Assembly itself was a big question within the General Assembly. And these were general assemblies that anyone could participate and you didn't have to show qualifications or necessarily be living in the space. Anyone was free except for the police and politicians um to come and

speak to the General Assembly. I remember one time gene Quon, then mayor of Oakland, wanted to come and speak to the General Assembly, and she was told she could, but she had to wait her turn, and so she decided to leave because she didn't want to wait. She didn't feel like she had to wait. It was really a space of encounter for people to bring up different aspects that there were concerned in them, that they were working on,

that they wanted to see flourish in the space. The biggest general Assembly was happened around when to move forward with the general strike, but there were also general assemblies on on things like issues around smoking and people's health and well being in the space, issues around cleanliness, issues around safety, how to interact with the police, how to interact with the government, do we put forward demands? What should the name of it be? Is occupied Oakland? The

problematic name. Should we change it to occupied to colonize Oakland? These were all sorts of issues that were brought forward to the General Assembly, along with like how do we meet the material needs of the space, and how do we handle the supplies that are being brought in and make sure that they're equally equitably distributed. Who can do what for whom within the space? How do people skills get the most use out of them. It was a very much a lively atmosphere. It felt like, I don't know,

I I know the word democracy is contentious. It felt

like a directly democratic process um. But there were also you know, it's important to recognize that there were some people who were more skilled and more familiar with how consensus works, who are more familiar with the process that was behind the running of the General Assembly, which which has its roots and anarchist practice and anarchist forms of decision making, and so those folks definitely had a hand up when it came to making decisions, when it came

to presenting proposals, when it came to even administering and running the General Assembly itself, those tasks often fell into the lapse of anarchists who I think did a good job of making sure that these general assemblies ran smoothly and that they were inclusive and open to all who wanted to participate, and people could bring their ideas, and

sometimes they got approved, sometimes they got rejected. Even if they got rejected, some some folks decided they would implement them anyways, and and that also worked out as well as sometimes creating conflict. The city grew increasingly frustrated with the encampment as they were they found themselves unable to make any progress in trying to recuperate, in trying to gain favor sort of the encampment their own and extension

of the electoral body, right of the electoral body politic. Ultimately, that's what moved Kwan, the supposedly progressive mayor, more to the side of the police way of seeing things as force was the only option to deal with these people who are you know, being unrealistic, were being naive, who are being entranched in and transigent, and you know, at the same time, the police along with the city eventually started building up this narrative of the camp as a

violent and unsafe space where people are being harmed in a variety of ways. And it was necessary for for public safety's sake to move against the encampment. I was there the night the encampment was evicted. I think it was October or early morning October twenty five, around three am in the morning, three thirty four am, and I was actually arrested. I was one of I believe eighty eight plus people were arrested. UM. During the process of

the camps eviction, UM the police came in force. They massed up outside of Oracle Arena and the A Stadium. It was a massive operation. They came in from all sides. People upon hearing word that the camp was going to be evicted, UM set up barricades. They laced the entire area with string, trying to impede UM the possibility of

the police getting injured. Quickly, there were battles with the police as they tried to make their way into the encampment, and eventually UM they came in from all sides and until they took over the encampment and encircled the people

who remained in the camp. I was in jail when Scott Olsen was shot, but I do recall the prison guards or the Almeda County sheriffs who were making these comments as we were being released finally after about twenty four plus hours of being held, saying things like, oh, go have fun rioting and that sort of thing, and and we get out there and then hear about all the events that had happened over the course of the day that we had been locked up, of these people

of folks in the thousands, just like you said, coming out to try and retake the space of running battles in the streets. I have so many friends and comrades who were telling stories about getting tear gassed, geting shot at with pepper balls, of Scott Wilson's devastating injury of

getting shot in the head. It was violence that occurred outside the normal narrative of violence deployed by the police in Oakland, right, and so it made it exceptional, even though much more brutal violence occurs daily by the police in Oakland against primary the black black population in Oakland

and and other people of color um. But we see a huge upswelling of outrage at the rate of the camp Um, outrage at the injury against Scott Wilson, and this ultimately the attempt to use force to quash a movement tremendously backfired against both the police and the city government in terms in terms of it building up even

more support for Occupy Oakland and its efforts. I recall going to the General Assembly when the general strike was decided to be moved forward, when the proposal was made to have a general strike in a week, which was just seemed like a completely impossible notion and completely impractical, but also within the realm of the possible at the same time, because what had been going on, especially the response to people in terms of fighting against the police,

in terms of taking back namcmon of basically winning against the government, winning against the police forces, reclaiming this space, um taking injuries, supporting one another through that process, it seems possible that we could pull up a general strike within a week. When it came around, it was clear that the word had been spread, that that energy that brought on that impulse to move forward with the general strike was still there a week later, and I would

say that that day itself was a tremendous success. We had a hundred thousand people marching on the Port of Oakland, shutting it down. We had a day's worth of activities, everything that encapsulated Occupy Oakland. I feel like I found a home UM in particular on that day on November two. Again, we've been listening to Scott Campbell. Next we'll hear from Tova, who was involved in the Labor Solidarity Committee of Occupy Oakland, which worked to bring in labor unions into the organizing

of the general strike. There were just masses of people down there at Oscar Career, at Plaza. Some of them were working on maintaining or re re establishing the different services that they had set up. I had been involved in labor struggles in the past back in Detroit when I was in the u a w. SO UM volunteered to work on the Labor Solidarity Committee to do the outreach to get support and participation of various unions, teamsters who played a very big role in in support UM

for that general strike as well. And that I think it's the o e A, the Oakland Education Association as a teachers union, and they were very much involved in So was the s c IU, particularly the sci U, the City Workers, So the city workers were down there every day and saw what was going on. UM, and we're you know, very much involved and affected by it. You know, the teachers Union had, like you said, been involved with in support work before all the attacks by

the police happened. UH. There was a lot of involvement beforehand as well, UM one or two Teamsters locals that were you know, supporting officially. They you know, it wasn't just their rank and file members, which had been great also, but you know, the we had support from one or two Teamsters locals and the i LW is primarily Local ten. The longshoreman whole proposal was to march down to the port UH and shut down the Port of Oakland. We

had people involved from my LW. You although I'm pretty sure that the i LW Local ten officially was not involved in calling for that strike, but there were members who were involved in the i LW organization who were definitely involved in helping to plant and organize it as well. The Teamsters added some logistical support in terms of trucking and supplies and things like that. I think that the o e A the teachers also in addition to participation,

donated supplies and things like that. So there was a lot of donations from the locals as well. We've been listening to Tova from the Occupy Oakland Labor Solidarity Committee, We're now going to take a short break and be right back. As the Oakland Commune and the Occupy movement faded into history, it helped inspire and inform a new generation of activists. As under Obama, we saw continued explosions

in Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and later at Standing Rock. By the time that Trump took office, autonomous resistance movements were bubbling beneath every surface. As airports were shut down against the Musli band, r It's broke out against the ault right,

and thousands of teachers started striking across Appalachia. Donny Red, Ben Dennis and omage of the so called Redneck War of when striking coal miners engaged in grilla warfare with government troops and the Air Force dropped actual bombs on strikers.

With the current uptick and strikes under Biden continuing into and the economic conditions of porn working people continuing to worsen, we asked labor reporter and author A Fight Like Hell, Kim Kelly, just what are the possibilities of mass strike

action in the coming year? You know, I think we're in this really interesting moment where labor and workers and unions in general are getting a lot more attention than we're used to, and a lot of that attention is positive, and we have a lot of these big wins that we get to celebrate. We get to celebrate, you know, the workers at Staten Island, Amazon go on toe to toe of Jeff Bezos and the un election winning. We get to celebrate this ongoing wave of unionization efforts at

Starbucks across the country, hundreds of Starbucks and unionized. We get to celebrate a lot of big wins. And they are also a lot of struggles that have been kind of set to this side, or not gotten as much attention as they deserve, or kind of written off. I think that's always the dichotomy of the labor movement in general, right because it's so big almost everyone is a part of it, whether or not they like to think of themselves that way. You know, I've been covering this coal

minor strike in Alabama since April one. They're still out there. They have not gotten very much attention. They're kind of stuck in a stalemate at the bargaining table because the bosses want to starve them out. And this is Alabama, where workers in or outside the prison walls do not have very many rights, do not have any politicians on

their side. They're struggling and they're still out there. And that's kind of the flip side of these big, energetic, inspiring moments in labor right where we have these winds, and we also have folks that are being left a slog or being ignored entirely, like the folks that we're going to see very soon in Pennsylvania who are going to be launching a strike and side the Department of Corrections.

I hope that gets a lot of attention. I mean, we saw a similar effort by a carce rated workers in Alabama a couple of months ago, and that got a lot of attention. And I'm really hoping that this kind of renewed interest in labor and workers rights and then discussing even topics like prison slavery, in topics like forced labor, incarcerated work, and different types of work. I really hope that benefits these workers as they embark on

their action. But we'll see, you know, like I am very interested to see perhaps the limits of this public support for labor actions. Is it easier to support a barista than it is to support a coal miner and incarcerated worker. There's all these different pieces that go into this moment. And I love being possy. I love seeing workers win and workers organized and strike and protest, and I also like keeping an eye out for the folks who aren't getting as much intention and aren' getting as

much support and thinking about why that is. So it's kind of a long, rambly answer to say, I am cautiously optimistic, and I really hope that all of the people who have thankfully and you know, I'm I'm glad they're here, who have showed up in the past year in the media, the political class, whoever, regularly, regular people who have been paying attention to these these worker actions. I hope they keep that energy for this year, because

we're going to need it, you know. Started we we've had a pretty good We're in a decent spot, and I really don't want to see a squander that. See. I think this moment with the Wildroad workers, I think that is something that's going to continue to resonate and reverberate out and I think that's going to have an impact the next time the Democratic part he says, hey, where the workers party like, you need to come vote for us and keep us in power, because well, we're

the only ones who will protect you. Well will you did you? Were you there for us when we needed

you or when we needed your help? No? You know, it just makes one wonder how much of the pro union uh sloganeering that that this administration loves to do, how much of it is pure public relations, how much of it is actually attached to whatever personal beliefs that Biden has, or if they just think it's politically expedient to you know, act as though where the we're pro union, we're pro worker, we're not going to pass any laws, we're not going to investigate any worker death at Amazon

facilities are elsewhere, we're not going to use our power to help you. But we're not Republicans, So you know, it's um. I think it's going to be interesting to see how much the real words strike impacts people, because I think that the political calculus that the Biden administration did in choosing to crush the strike inside with the railroad bosses, I guess they figured, oh, well, it's not that big of a deal. Maybe not that many people are paying attention. We've got to make sure people get

their Christmas presents on time. But a lot of folks were watching that. A lot of regular workers were watching that and thinking, oh so, if we were in that position at my job, the government would help us either. I think, you know, a lot of the chatter I saw from railroad workers, from other workers, just from people in generals like, oh so, okay, this was the big moment where Biden could have proved he cared about us, and instead he threw us under the bus straight onto

the railroad tracks. And I don't think that's a surprise to people that are sort of paying more close attention to the way the state operates. But I think it was maybe a revelatory moment for folks who just sort of assumed, okay, like there's at least a little bit of benevolence at least, you know, democrats are in power. This guy says, hells unions, that should help us out

a little bit. But seeing what happened there, I think it's going to be a profoundly disillusioning moment for a lot of people that maybe had a little bit more faith in the state or at least assumed it was sort of looking out for us. And I think that's gonna have an impact when you know, the Democratic Party comes back knocking on our doors and mostly asking for a vote in our support, because I mean you, we had a classic which side are you on moment and

we saw which way they chose to go. We're gonna see more prolonged strikes, We're going to see more unfair labor practices, are going to see more organizing. I think that it is impossible to put this lightning back into a bottle. Right Like, activity and interest in unions and organizing is, if not skyrocketing, it's had a really nice little bump over the past few years, a noticeable improvement and a noticeable amount of new worker workplaces being organized

and going on strike and fighting for their rights. Like, I don't think that's going away. And two of the

aspects of this, this entire scenario that really interests me. First, the fact that we're seeing so many workers who some my categories as quote unquote white collar whatever, folks who work in nonprofits or at book publishers or journalism, other types of media kind of all of these other types of jobs that don't fit into that traditional manufacturing or extractive focused many more manual labor oriented jobs that I think a lot of people associate with the labor movement.

They've been going on strike and they've been making big waves, whether it's the forty eight thousand grad student workers at the University of California or harperk HarperCollins Publishing workers currently still on strike in New York City. I think there's been kind of the shift in understanding of oh, Okay, you don't need to be a certain type of worker, or certain type of person, or come from a specific

background in order to organize to join a union. Unions aren't just for the classic white guy in a hard hatch like my dad, right like, they're accessible to so many more of us than perhaps we thought, And I think that's going to be big because the work has shifted. Work looks different than it did thirty years ago. There's a lot of different ways to be exploited, and we know the employers have definitely looked into each and everyone and taken notes, So we have that happening. I think

that's gonna continue propelling the energy behind this movement. And secondly, I'm really intrigued by the rise, and that's it's a smaller phenomenon, but it is very much happening, and it is kind of increasing slowly the exist, this existence of independent unions, because we saw, of course the Amazon Labor Union. They're the big ones, They've gotten tons of attention, deservedly so. But there are also efforts Trader Joe's Trade Jo's United

as an independent union. Chipotle workers formed an independent union. There was an effort here in Philadelphia to form a Home Depot workers independent union, and that one wasn't successful, but I'm certain that the organizer has not given up and they're still going to keep working on that. Like and I think seeing these independent unions which are not affiliated with other internationals, are not part of the fl C oh there literally just d I Y you know.

Thence the fact that we're seeing this happen. I think it just shows the cracks in the current labor movements as it stands, and especially in the way that power is concentrated and the way that resources are organized, in the way that the movement's priorities in terms of public statements and political power are kind of dictated by folks who tend to be more conservative, and I mean that in like a Democrat way and not like you know, Republican chaos, but just more conservative compared to a lot

of the rank and file, like we see with the railroad workers that rejected rejected that deal that so many of their leaders agreed on. You know, I think there's more radicalism brewing in the rank and file and more militancy that and it's it's manifesting in different ways. It's manifesting and wildcatch strikes or an independent unions, or in organizing outside of the traditional organized labor structure in general, like what sex workers and incarcerated workers are doing and

have been doing. I think ultimately the bottom line is that a lot of workers, a lot of people have realized that they have options, and they're exercising their rights to organize and to work collectively and to stand with their fellow workers against the bosses and against capital in ways that you know, perhaps wouldn't have felt as available or seemed as possible a few years ago, but now

there's so many examples of other workers doing it. Of course have been there throughout history too, like I read about my book, but I think we're at this moment where people realize, Okay, there are a lot of different ways to do this. I have people with me, we have problems we need to address. Let's see what works.

You know, it's not just picking up the phone and calling a union organizer, though that works for some folks, too, is recognizing the problems we face in our workplace, in our experience, and deciding together what we want to do, how we want to go forward, and how we're going to win. Once again, that was Kim Kelly, author of

Philight Hell. Over the past two episodes, we've taken a deep dive into the history of general strikes in the United States, looking at everything from the mass strike of Enslave plantation workers during the Civil War all the way up to current examples during Occupy Oakland. I think one of the things history has to offer us as a guide for the present is that these upheavals are made possible not only by people responding to material conditions, but

also learning from struggle. In the instance of the Great Upheaval, that general strike came after a series of other smaller strikes. This fall, thousands of prisoners across Alabama organized a general strike of incarcerated workers, downing their tools and refusing to work their jobs, bringing the prisons to a grinding halt.

This historic strike comes on the heels of many other prisoner led strike actions in two thousand ten, two thousand sixteen, in two thousand eighteen, not to mention the fact that many Alabama prisoners saw themselves as acting in the spirit of the Great Plantation Strike during the Civil War, as epitomized by the strike slogan let the crops rought in the field in my final thoughts, instead of putting our hopes in a call for a general strike going viral,

as the same goes, we have to walk before we can run. So strengthening our ability to engage in collective direct action and active refusal, as well as building our capacity for community self defense and mobilizing against state violence and oppression and whatever form, will ultimately allow us to expand and grow our ability to do these things in the future. A lot of times we're told that like we're powerless and were these passive beings and creatures, and

we have to wait for somebody to order anizes. But every single day we wake up in the morning and we make capitalism happen like we do it like all of us, every single one of us, does it like this is not like, oh, like this is just something that's happening to us, we're doing to ourselves. We're doing it to each other. Like these are little things that

we can do, like little acts of resistance. And I'm all about petty resistance because I do realize that a lot of people don't have time for the large resistances. So this is for anybody who's like, yeah, I hate capitalism, but I just don't have the breath on the space and the time to necessarily like go out and do things. If you can't, please do it. You can't like walk the funk out do But if you can't, like there's

still stuff you can do. That's it for me. By you know which strikes me often about general strikes are two things. First is that general strikes actually function very differently than they do in leftist discourse. Like in leftist discourse it's workers do general strikes. But in reality, if

we really look at general strikes, there these moments of convergence. Right, there's these these sort of points in which distinctions break down, Right, the distinction between like organizers and everyone else, or the distinction between workers and non workers completely breakdown. Right, It's not just railroad workers don't strike in eighteen seventy seven, is also their families, their neighbors, their whole communities on strike.

And this the second thing that that raises often for me is again this kind of long term cultural implications of that sort of form of action. So growing up in a place where you know, strike culture is a thing, um still where there's still actual union density and people

do walk off the job. Um, you grow up with that as an idea, right that you don't just walk off the job, But like the restaurant around the corner also gives out free food, and people bring coffee down to the picket line, and you know, workers from other unions show up the block entrances because the judge said you can, you know, so on so on, and it becomes this huge community initiative of autonomy and self defense. And what that creates is a sense in which class

struggle is perpetual. Like you understand always when you grow up in a place like that, But when you go to work, you're making somebody else money because you've been told that your whole life right, and that if you get angry about that, that what you're supposed to do is organize and go on strike. And that's a very normal sort of narrative. That was because we all grew up in families where we were taught to do that. That if the wealthy we're taking advantage of you, you

just leave. Right. That is not a normal thing outside of the rest of the America, right, Like, people don't get brought up with that. But I think as we're starting to see this kind of rise of the idea of the general strike, and we're starting to understand that is something that's not just connected to employment, but we can start to think of general strikes as social strikes

and not just economic strikes. We can start to understand like, even if those may immediately not succeed, the long term impacts of those over time really create the conditions for them to succeed later. And if it hadn't been for that flame staying alive, I think in parts of America, this wave of worker action wouldn't be happening. There wouldn't be a foundation for it, there wouldn't be a way

on your standard right um. And that's what's so critical about this moment is I think in some ways we're almost reviving a thing that my grandparents lived in the midst of just as a very normal part of their lives. I think that's like a really important piece about the survival. And I think that something that feels really important about general strikes is the idea of like solidarity and that our liberation is collective, you know, that it involves each other.

And I think that, um, I feel like what happened between like what you're saying some about you, like your grandparents generation and now is like near liberalism in a lot of ways, and just like this really strong promotion of the idea of like individualism and that if you want to make your life better you have to do it yourself, and like it's down to you as an individual. But I think it was pretty effective at decimating a lot of ideas of like solidarity or the idea that

I like, freedom is with each other, um. And I think that that is starting to fall apart, Like people are realizing however much they hustle or like have side hustles or whatever, they're still fucked. And just like I think that we're seeing like there's sergeants of this idea of like solidarity and that we have to do together. That is going to do it for us this week.

Thank you so much for tuning in. Check us out on Macedon at I g D Underscore News, and be sure to tune in as the workers that It Could Happen Here into their two day strike and return to the job. But stay tuned. We'll be back next week for even more episodes. Until then, Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could Happen Here is

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