Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Happy Monday, and we have a very special Monday episode. We're doing a return of our Shitty Mayor Monday episodes for this Monday, June.
Whatever.
The date is, twenty sixth, during the sixth week of action in Atlanta to stop Cop City, so that is ongoing. We're recording this is lightly ahead of times so that we can release it during the week. So we don't know what exactly how exactly.
Things are going to get this report. Nobody's been arrested so far, everything's gone great.
Yeah, it's sure. So yeah, we don't quite know what the first kickoff rally is going to be quite yet, but we do want to talk a little bit about a certain mayor for this Shitty Mayor Monday, and I have convinced Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective to do my work for me this episode by writing probably too many words about may Or Andre Dickens.
It was only a little over what you told me to write.
That's good. That's good. That's good.
So yeah, let's hear about. Let's hear about mister Dickens. Matt to take take it away.
All right, So Andrea to Shawn. Dickens was born June seventeenth, nineteen seventy four, the younger of two children. His mother divorced Dickens's birth father before he was born, but stepfather adopted him and his sister when Dickens was seven. Working as an airline mechanic, Dickens' stepfather taught him how to take things apart and put them back together, creating an
early interest in engineering for young Andre. He grew up in Adamsville neighborhood, which went to Benjamin E. Mays High School, which is in southwest Atlanta. Dickens says the neighborhood kids were rough around the edges, as he told Atlanta Magazine and quote, we fought often, but when the fighting escalated to bats and brass knuckles, he changed course and turned to baseball in books instead. At age sixteen, Dickens decided that he wanted to be mayor after watching then Mayor
Andrew Young. This is about the time he also met Shirley Franklin, whose son he played baseball with. Franklin was Mayor Young's chief administrative officer at the time and spent time mentoring Dickens as a teenager. She would also go on to become mayor herself.
Okay, so Andrew Young, I know that name because that's the street where the hard Rock Cafe is.
Is the street where the hard Rock Cafe is. He went on to become an ambassador, ambassador to the hard Rock to the hard Rock Cafe. That's also where the Swat vehicle hung out across the Hooters exactly. Yeah, very notable street in Atlanta.
Yeah.
After a week long Minorities Interested in Technology and Engineering program at Georgia Tech this summer before his senior year, someone from the program handed him an application to Georgia Tech, which he filled out while waiting on his mom to pick him up. Tech was the only college that Dickens applied to.
Huh, I mostly know Georgia Tech as the place that like Raytheon and Lackey Martin go to recruit a whole bunch of their employees.
Yeah, you know, it's it's the tech engineering school of the South, and all the good weapons manufacturers need to get their good Southern engineering. Yeah, he did not go that route, But it is kind of rare for black politicians in general to come from schools outside of the HBCUs. We've got that like big HBCU district here in Atlanta.
Can explain what that is.
Perfect historically black college and universities. There are a group of them in kind of just off downtown Atlanta in an area called the Atlanta University Center, So they're all kind of together in that area and that is where most of are like elected officials who become mayor come from. Dickens is only the second mayor since nineteen seventy four
not to graduate from one of those HBCUs. But Dickens did join Kappa Alpha Psia, historically black fraternity when he went to Tech and was a member of the student government, kind of keeping his dream of being mayor alive. But after graduations, he briefly left the state before returning home in two thousand and two to take care of his ill mother. This is around the time that he started his public service career and he joined NPUD NPUs our
Neighborhood Planning Units. Atlanta is broken up into twenty five of these neighborhood units and they're each given a letter of the alphabet. So they are advisory boards that give input to the city, but they can issue like zoning variances and some MPUs have built up like considerable power over their neighborhood. So this is where a lot of people like first plug into Atlanta government.
Okay, So it's like, is this like really like the zoning board process?
And yeah, if you need to get approval to have a bigger awning than you're supposed to have, you got to go through vmp to get it.
Got it?
Okay, So I'll consider that for when I want to expand my awning.
Yes, you're onning or build your onning Okay, yeah.
Yeah.
At this point, Dickens and his sister also founded a business called City Living Home Furnishings, and the company is exactly what.
It's a It's a furniture store. You found furniture.
In an interview with Georgia State University later in his life. Dickens reflected that this is where he determined that he needed to act rightly to ensure his good reputation.
What furniture store teach him this lesson?
Oh well, he said, Imagine I'm on TV saying trust me, and all the people would have to do is call the Atlanta Journal, Constitution or radio and say your furniture was trash your history to somebody who are all these places that you know, You've really got to be consistent. It's what he said. And you know, it turns out.
I have to know.
Woh spoiler, he goes bankrupt. It turns out the AGAC wouldn't be much of a problem for Dickens, as we've learned years later, the paper would be on his side, bobbing those easy questions and helping him build support for cop City. So, like I said, the family business failed in twenty ten, you can't actually blame Dickens for it was a product of the of the Great Recession.
Okay, So I wonder if we can still find any of his furniture lying around.
So there's there's actually a store called City Living Home Furnish Furnishing, And I don't know if it's like.
Somebody delayed at or Yeah.
I tried to look it up and I couldn't like figure out if it was just somebody using the same name or not. But there's one that exists in like West Midtown.
Okay, oh boy, sorry, we're gonna I'm gonna get a lot of comments from people in Atlanta down because you said a West Midtown.
West Side or whatever you want to call it.
It's it's a Southwest Piedmont. I don't know.
There's there's also so no like south of North. Yeah, we have all of these these fun little street or neighborhood names. But so after the failing business, he changed course and went to GSU for a master's of Public Administration in economic Development. So this was after twenty ten, Yeah, after twenty ten. In twenty eleven he started attending his master's program at Georgia State University, and then he graduated in twenty thirteen, just in time for the municipal election season.
So Atlanta City Council, as we've learned now, is comprised of twelve district seats and three city wide seats or what we call at large seats, and so Dickens ran for post three against an incumbent named h Lamar Willis. Dickens kind of historically when he has these campaigns, either has really good fortune or good insight in choosing his
opponent or opponents. A month prior to the election, Willis was disbarred after the Georgia Supreme Court found that he violated numerous professional conduct rules, including it in two thousand and nine placing a settlement money from a child injury case into his personal bank account instead of giving it to the parents. Wait, really, yes, this guy, this guy is now back in Georgia government. He is he's part.
Of like the beltline that that makes.
Sense management program. So like this happened earlier this.
Year stealing money from injured children.
I think he gave it to the child eventually. But you're supposed to put these in like escrow accounts and not in your own account.
To your personal account.
No, So.
Former Mayor Sureley Franklin indoors Dickens in the twenty three race, or former Mayor Surely Franklin indors Dickens in the twenty thirteen race, which drew iron attacks by both Willis, who called Dickens out for his bankruptcy of the furniture business, and what Willis alleged was quote unlawful use of Georgia Tech government property. So on the bankruptcy, Dickens went to about a million dollars in debt and had some taxlinges against him, which he's now discharged through both bankrupts in
settling the tax leads. But the unlawful use of Georgia Tech Georgia government property, what is that? I have no idea. I don't know what they I searched pretty hard to try to find it, and I can't. Like other than Will willis making the claim, I found no evidence like.
A computers who like what is.
I'm assuming like, you know, probably something like he went to a computer lab and used it off hours for some personal, weird business. But yeah, I found nothing that actually really backs up the claim against him. So he won the election in November with fifty three percent of the vote, which is surprisingly strong victory for like a
relatively unknown candidate like Dickens was at the time. During his first term twenty thirteen to twenty seventeen, Dickens worked pretty quietly, but towards the end of his term he started to introduce legislation make a name for himself, so he created a forty million dollar affordable housing bond, as well as a study to raise the minimum wage for city employees to fifteen dollars an hour, which ultimately led
to the city enacting that wage. Diggins ran for his second term unopposed, so naturally he won.
So that's twenty seventeen.
Now we're a twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one, and this is where the story starts to get interesting. We'll see the themes that will play out in this first, you know, a couple of years as mayor.
Well and we will learn about that story after these messages from our lovely sponsors or if you're subscribed to the new f Well Premium Plows the Cooler Zone media, you just hear us do the ad breaks without the ads at all. So in lieu of that by gold gold play by gold, played played guitars, guitars, Thank you by gold plated guitars.
All right, we are back.
I'm strumming away on my on my electric gold plated bass.
Doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound like it's supposed to.
Yeah, Daniell cut cut out all of the all of the bad bass. Actually, I can go get my accordion and play that instead.
Do you want let's not all right?
Well continue, So we're in twenty eighteen now, so in twenty normal year, it completely normal year for Atlanta. Nothing happened anywhere else in the world. One of the biggest conversations that was going around in Atlanta in twenty eighteen
revolved around an area of downtown called the Gulch. So, this is the area that's surrounded by most of our sports team venues, kind of like where Centennial Olympic Park is, and the streets are all elevated in that area around above ground level and at the bottom of the ground level, it's like these early twentieth century like railway lines, but it's mostly parking lots for those those to the stadiums
for the stadiums. And it's known as the gulch because you know, kind of which is a break in the ground.
Yeah, it looks it looks it's like a gulch kind of. So back in it's like, ooh wow.
Back in twenty twenty twenty twelve, then Mayor cassim Re present in an idea to give a Los Angeles based firm a million dollars to build the Gulch into a mixed use high rise area. The legislation finally passed in twenty eighteen, but Andrea Dickens voted against it, saying correctly that there wasn't enough focus in the development plans on the housing affordability and this helped cement Dickens's reputation as a housing affordability advocate.
And yeah, because he also did that forty million dollars.
Yeah, he just did that forty million dollars bond. And we'll have some more affordable housing stuff later. But you know, I should say, we're like five years on now and the Gulch hasn't be gone, but they're they're trying to get it done. But before the World Cup comes in.
Yeah, they're also it seems like they've been preoccupied with another another construction construction project that's getting much more of the mayor's attention, which oddly does not have anything to do with affordable housing.
No, it just not. Dickens also introduced legislation that led to the creation of the Atlanta Department of Transportation, which, if I'm being fair, was a good idea and pretty necessary to help address bennis decaying road infrastructure. Proven no, the roads.
You're fine.
Yeah, so you drove on you complained when we had this last week of action about Decab Avenue and all of the potholes. Yeah, and that is now repaved. That got repavedy a couple of weeks ago. They're in the process of repaving it.
So the infrastructure working.
It's my favorite part. My new favorite part is Moreland is that usually around Moreland's Drive there's an area where you're where you're trying to get to the Wanti Forest that just is always constantly flooded no matter what. And that's that's my favorite area of Atlanta.
And I hear that if you get rid of a forest, that will improve flood helps it flooding because there's more space for the dirt to soak in water exactly.
Yea, that is how that works. It is science.
So in twenty nineteen, Dickens introduced legislation to create a task force to decide how to repurpose the Atlanta City Detention Center or a CDC, which is really weird. Every time I hear a CDC, I think of this thing, it's jail, and everybody else is talking about something entirely different.
Huh.
So it was built in ninety nine. He's leading up to the Olympics, and replaced an older jail that now serves as our primary homeless shelter.
So that's what ACDC is now.
It's called the Gateway Center. Now that was the old jail. ACDC is the current jail.
Okay, Okay.
So, in a press release, after Bottom signed this legislation to create the task force.
Who's bottom? Who's Bottoms?
So from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one, Atlanta had a mayor name Lance Bottoms, and she was great and did not approve legislation about cop City at all.
She did not. She did, she did, she did. So it was a lot. You just lied. I lied.
You already purposely spread misinformation on my news podcast.
Okay.
So Michael Smith was Bottoms press secretary and also currently serving as Dickens press secretary. So he wrote that this legislation that authorized the task force actually authorized Bottoms to close the jail, but the order and it did not create that authorization, only authorized this task force to recommend future uses of the site should it close, And this is going to be important. The task force met for about a year before turning into options which brings us
to June twenty twenty. We're going to skip straight over there with all of this going on.
So what was happening in June twenty twenty in Atlanta?
There were some protests going on, which we're going to key in just after the jail fight. But the task force offered four options, and the city indicated that was going to go with the second cheapest of the four, which was redoing the facade of the jail and turning the interior into a center for diversions. So instead of having a city jail, we would have this multi storied diversion center to stop people from going into the criminal
justice system. And in the middle of the summer of twenty twenty.
This was how is that not just a jail, it's you.
Don't enter the criminal legal system. Yeah, so you don't talk to you're not in front of a judge, you
are not techly arrested. You are given resources, and you are given options to you know, attend courses or counseling or whatever you need instead of entering like the criminal justice And so we have a diversion program here called Policing's Alternatives and Diversions or PAD, which operates in every zone of the city, and is is you know, if somebody gets arrested, like stealing basic substance stuff, they are supposed to contact PAD and enter them into a diversion
program where they get help instead of going to jail.
Okay.
And it works to the extent that the city of or it works to the extent that APD actually does contact PAD. And it depends on kind of the zone how effective it is. But basically, at this point everyone agreed that the jail was going to end its time as a carceral space and become this diversion center to help people avoid entering the criminal system. So put it in that that is the plan.
Okay. This is during June of twenty twenty.
During June of twenty two nation Okay, because of course, the bigger news of the summer of twenty twenty was the George Floyd uprising, and at that point in Atlanta, the killing of Rayshard Brooks by Garrett Rolf at the Wendy's in Southeast Atlanta.
Yeah.
So after the killing of Brooks, Dickens posted on an Instagram saying, quote, I am saddened to start this day with news of another black person killed by police and especially dismayed to see it happen in our city. Police must de escalate situations like these before they turned deadly. Once the suspect fled, unarmed and intoxicated through a parking lot of bystanders, this could have become an investigation rather
than a shooting. So, undoubtedly spurred by the fervor and uproar of that summer, Dickens also co sponsored legislation with fellow council members Antonio Brown and Michael Julian Bond that would prohibit APD from using crowd control munitions in military style vehicles against protesters. Okay, this legislation, though, unsurprisingly, went nowhere, and we were shop by ever balls for you know, the rest of the summer.
Yeah, and they still are using them.
To this day. Yeah.
But this is also happening at the tail end of budget season. So our budget season goes from like March to or April to June of every year. And the biggest debate in Council that summer was about withholding seventy three million dollars, or about a quarter of the Atlanta Police Department's funding, and so we were actually positioned police defund the police, and while the legislation was under debate in City Council, thousands of residents called in for public comment.
This is the only time that i've the only time estenment I've seen for this public comment was about seventeen hours according to mainline zine, I seem to recall it being longer, but around that, which is around seventeen.
Comparable to the last public comment session related to COP city.
Yeah, and comparable even to the first public comment.
Session also seventeen now, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the actual vot happened on the a's especially called Saturday session of City Council. At the time, like all other municipalities, Council was meeting remotely through zoom. So the actual vote happened on a especially called Saturday session of City Council at the time, like all of the municipalities, Council was meeting remotely through zoom because of COVID. And we're going to play a clip of one of the few things that Dickens said during that debate and to
set the scene. Council Member Dustin hillis one of the very pro COP members of council, proposed a much smaller cut to the budget in the amount of like a few million dollars to remove just quote unquote non essential expenditures from abd's budget, sure without risking cutting into actual pay for police or the raises to police stalary that
Council and the Mayor's office previously promised. Because this was a special session on Saturday, Dickens was driving around his mother, so there's going to be a bit of background noise and the quality is not super outstanding, and it has now.
As much as I'm trying to figure out a way to support it, if did come down to being two million dollars or three million dollars or each five million dollars, it just is so sort of reimagining. You can't reimagine something that's almost three hundred million and only take to the bombing and to reimagine it right and to kind of think through what all needs to be done at it send a strong signal that we want reform and we want change.
What we hear in this clip is Dickens really doing what he's going to continue to do for the rest of his career. Make overtures to the public while still ensuring that at the end of the day, the police are taken care of He really wanted APD to know that their personal salaries were not only safe, but they were going to grow, and he would always be a champion of that. So we're going to skip here over at the Copsity vote in twenty twenty one. At this point, I think it's been If.
You're listening to this show, you're also probably somewhat from there.
There are several episodes that you can pause here and go back and listen to it to kind of catch up yes on on how that happened in twenty twenty one. So suffice it to say that Dickens did not fight against the legislation in its council phase and what was one of the ten votes to approve the Cops City lease in September of twenty twenty one. If anything, Dickens was one of the quieter members of council when it came to debating Cops City lease. He didn't really say
much while the debates were happening. So the last few months, of course, of the Cops City fight happened during election season, and instead of running for a third term as council member, Dickens threw his hat in the ring for mayor which was an open race, with Mayor Bottoms withdrawing her candid seat. All the way back on May six a mid rumors that she was on the short list to be Biden's nod for VP.
Which did which did not happen, which did not happen.
So to understand how Dickens won this election, because spoiler, we're talking about.
Dickensity mayor Monday Mayor Dickens, We've got to talk about how Atlanta runs its municipal elections and how or election law plays out in effect, and who the presumed front runners of the race were.
First, municipal elections are run on a non partisan basis. There are no party primaries to eat out weaker candidates to run. All you need to do is get the required number of signatures, pay the fee, and file on time. So this leads to a pretty wide field of candidates than you see in most elections. Second is that quirk in Georgia election law that everyone is probably familiar with by this point in time from the last few national election cycles. In order to win Georgia outright, you need
fifty percent of the vote plus one. If no candidate hits that number, then the top two candidates go to a runoff election. The state law also applies to any municipal elections for cities with the population higher than one hundred thousand people, like Atlanta.
Look Atlanta, which has six hundred thousand.
So just around five hundred thousand, I think it's like four hundred and ninety thousand at this point. But the greater metro areas, like the greater Metro area is something like six or seven million.
Yeah.
So the two front runners of the race were not exactly popular figures. I would go so far as to say it like in many cases votes were cast against them, like kind of like with Trump, instead of in support of.
Instead of voting for Biden, you're voting against Trump. Yeah.
So former Mayor Cassim Reid was one of those candidates. He left office in twenty seventeen after a second term. And then it has this two consecutive term limit, which Reid had reached. However, you can run for a third term if it's not consecutive. Okay, So during Reid's second term,
lawsuits and scandaled propagated heavily. Amongst the things that came out during both during and after Reed's administration was that Reid made nearly nine hundred thousand dollars in illegal bonus payments to staff, had a bribery scandal in his office that resulted in an FBI investigation, and ensured that airport contracts went to his friends and associates based a legalist, a legalist vator and to make matters worse for Reid, a month after he announced his candid seat, the AJAC
release that it believed Reid was under investigation for allegations of wire fraud for quote using campaign funds to make purchases of jewelry, resort travel, lingerie, and furniture.
I mean that would make sense considering everything else you just said. That's not really surprising.
Then on the other side was Fleesha Moore, who accurately and not was seen by opponents as the face of COPSDY after Joyce Shepherd, who introduced the legislation authorizing the lease for COPSDY and lost her seat on council for that reason. While never forced to do so since city council presidents only vote in tiebreakers, More did say that
she would vote in favor of Copsidity if it was needed. Then, a week before the election, Felicia Moore's campaign Instagram account posted a video with Lee Clevinger, a white Republican donor and supporter of Moore's campaign. Clevinger can be heard saying all of Atlanta mayor since nineteen seventy nine were quote not interested in anything except lining their own pockets. I
should know. I feel like this could give me some uh since nineteen seventy four, a black person has been there every single time.
Yeah.
That Yeah, that's that's what I was thinking. Yeah, So that sounds like he's just didn't go racist over so well.
Yeah.
More removed the post and return the campaign contribution from Clevelander and said later, quote, it was an unfortunate statement by that constituent, and I should have corrected him or walked away.
Unfortunate statement not just like fortunate if someone saying something incredibly racist. So this was the setting that led to election night that Tuesday. To everyone's surprise, Dickens eked out a second place victory above Read with just under six hundred votes for a total of twenty two thousand, one hundred and fifty three votes for Dickens. More had a much better showing with thirty nine two hundred and two.
But neither of them was over fifty, but neither of them broke the fifty percent, so we went to a runoff. So during the runoff, More really courted conservative Buckhead.
And Buckheads like the northern more conservative like not suburb, but neighborhood of Atlanta, neighborhood.
It's the one that wanted to turn it into its own city.
Yes, which wanted to do to the kids succession, which is built on a whole bunch of legacies of red landing in segregation and blah blah blah.
Oh we'll talk about that. Okay.
So More also earned the endorsement of Reed, the.
Guy who just said the racist thing.
Guy who know, the former mayor who lost to Dickens for second place by about six hundred votes.
Okay, So I'm trying to keep all these names straight here because there's a lot a lot of names coming into my head now.
In a situation that led many progressives in Advantage to look at the guy who, well, he voted for copstate, he still supported closing the jail, was willing to cut seventy three million dollars from APD, and had a been a pretty consistent advocate for affordable housing on cancel on council. So it was between More and that guy. Yeah, so Progressives made a decision and went for Dickens in the runoff. Dickens won by a landside with sixty three percent of
the votes ok so and fifty five votes. More actually lost thirteen thousand votes from her general election total. Interesting, Thus Mayor Andre Dickens becomes our next leader. Turnout for the runoff was in line with what we saw four years earlier when Keisha lance Bottom faced off against Garrison's candidate of choice, Mary Norwood.
Get wait, don't put what do you mean.
If she runs for Merrigan right now? I misunderstood everything that has happened.
She's a scary woman. I'm not gonna so the Norway.
The Bottoms run off only had four thousand more voters than we did in twenty twenty one's run off.
So that was the twenty seventeen election. Twenty eighteen elections got okay, No, the Mayor Norwood, that was the twenty Bottoms one. I'm gonna act like I know Atlanta history at us correct you on some of this Atlanta history here as I feign ignorance to have you explained concepts for the audience, making me sound more ignorant than I am, but actually then explained to you and.
I continue, Sorry, we should say that twenty seventeen runoff was actually much more evenly matched. Bottoms only one by eight hundred votes.
So would that and that's scary. Yeah, that's scary because Mary Norwood cannot be the mayor.
So Dickens. It's Dickens has said that he won with you know, consent to govern, and it's not really stretching it when he says that Atlanta has supported him in this particular election. Yeah, this particular opponent, we largely did.
Sure.
In the interim period, Dickens does the usual things. He appoints a transition seam. This included your usual cast of characters, but it is also worth noting that it included Dave Wilkinson, president and CEO of the ADVANTA Police Found Police.
I've heard of them, the Atlanta Police Foundation. That's like a it's like a it's like a it's like a charity for police or something.
Right.
Yeah, it's a nonprofit, you know, your standard nonprofit. Okay, they do cool thing tax deductible tax Yet you can donate to them tax deductibly just like they.
Might advertise, just like the stream or does today.
That's the second destiny of reference as many episodes. So as soon as Dickens is sworn in, he faces the Buckhead secession crisis. And you know, we explained a little bit earlier what Bucket is, but Atlanta is a very large metropolitan area, and much of the Fulton County itself was at one point part of unincorporated Atlanta, and then in two thousand and five, an unincorporated area just to the north of Buckhead called Sandy Springs was the first
to become its own city. The initial breakaway cities that happened after that were predominantly white, and racism played a heavy role in their formation, But starting in twenty sixteen, newly formed black majority cities also started cropping up around the metro area, like the city of South Bolton and Stonecrest.
So Buckhead wanted to.
Do the same thing. They wanted to become their own city. And by no means was that like popular sentiment in Buckhead. But it's more complicated because the city hood drives were not like part of incorporated Atlanta the previous ones. Buckett is Incorporated Atlanta is Atlanta. It's part of the Atlanta Public School system. It's also an APD zone. It has its own parks, roadways, and water system that are all like City of Atlantic property.
Yep.
So to have the best chance of actually seceding, Buckhead needs a state congressional vote. Otherwise it would require a city wide vote, which it would buy with people. Yeah yeah, So in twenty twenty two, it found that Bucket secession bill started working its way through the legislature. The bill didn't make it very far this first time around. It dies on February eleventh, so just a couple of weeks
into the session. But in order to kill it, Dickens reached out to Governor Kemp and other Republican leaders and developed a working relationship. Early on in his term as mayor, Dickens also kind of to quell this Buckhead secession played into the race of crime narrative that Bucket secessionists were claiming was the reason that they wanted to seceed. Dickens, in partnership with local law enforcement agencies and the Atlanta
Police Foundation, created the Pete Offender Tracking Unit. They claimed most of the crime problem in Atlanta comes from repeat offenders and by sharing information about so called criminals between agencies, crime would drop. Of course, this is very problematic from an abolitionist perspective. When someone enters the criminal legal system, there is a criminal right. It haunts you. The task
force only serves to reinforce that. And in response to the formation of the units, Southern Center for Human Rights said quote, If APD is planning to double down on the very strategies that they themselves admitted do not work in pursuit of a solution that keeps people behind bars, the effort is doomed to fail. You know else is doomed to fail.
Our audience is actually buying these products that are advertising on our show for some reason, probably, but who knows. I've I've heard, I've heard the I've heard the blue apron. The cooking boxes are really convenient if you live an active and busy lifestyle. Like Matt from from the Atlantic Community Breast Collective.
I actually use Hello Fresh Okay good, because I think they're the.
Ones that I she were advertising on our show. So thank you, thank you for that great, great work. You already got it all right. We are back.
All right, So kicking back in with the buckhead session movement. In order to mollify Buckhead, there was also an opening of a police precinct in Zone two, in which Buckhead sits. This is the third precinct in Buckhead, which is made up of just twenty eight square miles.
That's wild because like Portland only has like three or four precincts in total.
Yeah, so we have six.
Jortland has like more people in like Portland proper than like Atlanta.
Does I think our territory is more expansive, Yeah, than like first population wise, there's actually more people in Portland proper.
Just pretty funny.
I should say that the third precinct in Zone two was planned before Dickens took office, but he made sure to talk about it a lot earlier. Yeah I bet I bet so. And then, in what would fit perfectly as a scene in The Wire, Dickens spent both this year and last year talking about how crime and Buckhead dropped more in both years than any other zones.
What's the Wire?
But well there's a podcast about the Wire?
Oh really a podcast? Yes, huh?
I forget the name of What's the Wire. It's a it's a TV show about Oh police?
Is is this one of like those like a millennial show.
We're doing a bit.
Is this like one of those millennial shows? It did come out in the early so this is this is like succession for old people.
Got a secession for old people? Yes, I highly recommend watching it and check out the podcast that I can't remember the name of.
Okay, yeah, plug someone else's podcast. Great, great job.
As the Buckhead secession issue wound down, a Southeast Atlanta apartment complex started to draw increasing attention from the press due to rampant issues in the complex a lack of care by the owners. This so this massive apartment complex operator called Millennia. The company had a reputation across the country is terrible and it is deservedly so. At Forest Cove, the complex was unfit for human habitation.
Oh really Uh?
And we have to acknowledge that dickens here hadden out just to blame Millennia. But in February he told the approximately seven hundred residents that the city would be moving them to safer housing while the complex was either fixed or rebuilt. The rollout of this wasn't perfect. On April thirteenth of this year, Sean Keenan, a local reporter.
Really of the friend of the show, New York Times repporter Sean Keenan makes another appearance.
So Keenan released a new story eight of this year April thirteen, twenty twenty three, showing that the first that a quarter of Forest Cove residents were relocated to complexes identified as dangerous dwellings on the ajac's residential watchdoglyphs.
That's pretty funny.
So I have learned a little bit about Atlanta's like rental situation here, and it seems like it kind of sucks to be a renter in Georgia. It seems like you have almost no rights, no protection.
I didn't have air conditioning for a little while, and it turns out that you are not guaranteed air conditioning in any real.
Which is hard being like in Atlanta. Like I never I never had a c in Portland. But that's that's Portland. It's not We're not dealing with the Atlanta humidity in Atlanta heat.
No, it's it's pretty miserable. Thankfully, my air conditioning did get fixed eventually, but yeah, there's no recourse for things like that. So until that report by Keenan, it it appeared that the city was doing diligent work taking care of displaced residents and ensuring that they retained access to care and services with as little disruption as possible, and by and large that that happened, but you know, for
a quarter of residents, not so much. At this point, more questions are cropping up, so the story is likely going to continue to develop, but we don't really know where the point going to go because this is like current events.
Yeah.
Yeah, So another force cove issue that will probably come up later in Diggins's term was that he made a promise to residence that they'll be able to return to the apartment complex eventually. But Millennia was denied hot assistance to fix the property, and it's unlikely that they'll do so on their own, so the fate of the complex is pretty up in the air. The city does own approximately eighty acres in the neighborhood, which could and should go to building low income housing, but it's prime real
estate for further gentrification. So yeah, we'll see how that plays out.
No.
One of the first things like that I noticed when I was visiting Atlanta like last year was that like all of like most of the Section eight housing has been the converted into like luxury condos or like new like like a like a five story apartment complexes, and no, like the speed of the gentrification was was kind of
surprising to me coming coming from Portland. Like there's still gentrification in Portland, absolutely, but did the expansiveness of it here and the speed of which it's accelerating was was surprising to me.
Yeah, and we're not building like low income housing complexes. But what's happening here is that they're they're adding a certain percentage of new like if you're building a massive complex, a certain percentage of your off like your dwellings have to go at at a certain point of the average monthly income. Yeah, but that's not really addressing this like large scale issue that is going because you still.
Have hundreds of them that it costs like three thousand dollars and you have like a dozen that are low income, and you just you do the barest amounts to script by while still filling up most of the available real estate with very expensive apartments.
And I should plug here. There is a fantastic book called Red Hot City by GSU professor named Dan Immerglock. If you want to learn more about gentrification in Atlanta. It's great, Yeah, absolutely and set vital reading. So towards the end of Dickens's first one hundred days in office, APD Chief Rodney Bryant announced that he was going to retire.
Bryant was not very well liked by city leadership. Felicia Moore had made a campaign promise to get rid of Bryant on her first day in office, but Dickens said he'd give him one hundred days to improve public safety and kind of see where things were at before firing him.
And what happened after those one hundred days.
Bryant stepped down and Dickens tapped then Deputy Chief Darren Sheerbaum as interim.
Replace heard of this guy before.
This is the guy who made that weird confession about having sex in the woods with all those police officers. I've heard that in a podcast recently. That's so crazy.
Cherbom, who may or may not have said those things. His prior role was overseeing the cop city development, and he was also pretty well liked by APD officers, so Dicks officially hired him in October of twenty twenty two. But if you're a leftist or even just against cop City. This is actually like kind of a lost Cheerbomb is incredibly pr savvy, as you saw in that City Council meeting, and he does pretty well when he's talking to them.
No, when I was first doing stuff on cop C, I remember when he was just like the spokesperson for he wasn't actually like the chief yet.
And then he became the chief in.
Like last fall, and they've gotten better at their propaganda since then, a lot better.
Yeah, and you know I watched this like every week. He does a pretty good job.
Yeah.
This brings us to budget season twenty twenty two. In April, Dickens tells the AGC that he wants to hire two hundred and fifty APD officers a year for three years, hoping that the total of seven hundred and fifty new hires will net a four hundred and fifty increase in officers for the department.
Okay, so hiring a lot some of them might nutrition rate, other people might not stay on, but you're trying to like net to get another like four hundred or so officers.
Yep.
So, Dickens also approved four thousand dollars bonuses for APD paid using American Rescue Plan Act money.
And great useful.
Initially, in June, Dickens promised police a raise of three and a half percent, but in November it became apparent that the city would have a budget surplus, so Dickens and council raised that to nine percent, bringing APD to a total of a twenty seven percent raise over the course of three years.
Funny how much money they're just getting pumped this past ten years.
And I don't know what happens like three years ago, but it seems like something shouldn't.
No.
I mean, like you were talking about how like how Dickens was like previously working to get like like a seventy million reduction in police budget. You know, probably probably in some ways, probably just like for pr ras because during twenty that was the popular thing to do. And now he's just like funneling millions and millions dollars towards the police Foundation, towards individual officers, towards raises, bonuses, you know, standard mayor stuff.
Oh and we're not done. In November, it was an early Christmas for APD. Dickens also debuted forty new SCAD and so SCAD is the Savannah College of Art, and design the Arts College.
The big Art college in Georgia.
Yeah, so they designed these police Ford Explorer vehicles for an officer take home program.
Via look like shit.
Each vehicle cost sixty thousand dollars. So the total price tag of this was two point four million dollars to improve officer morale.
Oh yeah, let's let's get them, get them, you know, two million dollars with the cars, just to make them happy.
Uh.
Seventy additional takeo vehicles are in the pipeline once equipment becomes available to out cool. So yeah, this this program is just continuing to grow.
Fuck whatever scad designer was paid to fucking design those shitty cars.
So one of the things that was missing during the budget season back back in spring was the very thing that helped Dickens solidifie his image as a Progressive Council member, affordable housing. In his initial budget, Dickens put no increase in affordable housing for his alleged you had.
A budget surplus, and you're like, no, let's give them a give all the money to the police who were already getting a ninety million dollar training facility.
Let's give even more money.
Sure, great, So Dan Immergluckt, the GSU professor I just mentioned he was. He's an affordable housing advocate and he was part of Dickens's transition team. And he told Capital B after the prospective budget was released, quote, for this to be his first budget to make a step backwards
is extremely disappointing. And that's basically how all the progressives felt. Yeah, so Dickens did cave to housing advocate pressure and he added an additional seven million dollars in the affordable housing budget before the budget.
Was passed in June. Cool cool, cool.
Remember back in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one, everyone was an agreement that the jail was going to close.
Yeah, the the A, they were going to convert it to that other thing.
That it was going to be a center for Diversion in Equity. Yeah, it was going to be great, and by this point it actually had a name, the John Lewis Center for Diversion in Equity.
Great.
But in June of twenty twenty two, city Council voted down legislation authorizing the mayor to close the jail. Then plans came out in early August that instead of closing ACDC, Fulton County in Atlanta were in talks to rent seven hundred beds from the facility to Fulton County to address the overcrowding problem at Rice Street, Fulton County's main jail.
Maybe they should just keep less people in jail.
Activists warned that the lease would not alleviate these issues and that City Council needed to instead focus on decarceration. And then there was an acl new report that came out later in the year that found forty five percent of the overall jail population in Fulden County is unindicted.
Yeah, there's holding people that actually have not been indicted.
Ferdy crime. Great.
Remember it was Dickens who introduced the legend to find a way to repurpose this jail, he said in a statement when the lease to Fulton County was coming up. Quote, as I've continually supported since my time on Atlanta City Council, I remain committed to fully repurposing the ACDC facility for non incarceration purposes. But we are also confronted by a real and immediate crisis of overcrowding at the Fulton County Jail. Many of these detainees are Atlanta residents. And our conscience
calls us to act. This is a temporary lease agreement and will allow the City of Atlanta to play a role in alleviating this humanitarian crisis and to provide the necessary time for Fulton County to develop and implement a long term solution humanitarians, because we always know adding more
prison beds really reduces the problem. Uh So, the temporary solution that we're talking about is a four year agreement, and Fulton County is paying the City of Atlanta fifty dollars per bed per night, So when the full seven hundred beds are taking Atlanta will be making twelve point seven million dollars a year.
Remember when we had to release all those people from prison and jail in twenty twenty to overcrowding and then violent crime dropped. Isn't that crazy?
That is crazy.
So the twelve point seven million dollars sounds like a lot of money, But before the lease went into effect, acdc's average population was under fifty individuals per night. The city's Department of Corrections budget is sixteen point one million dollars a year, so the city is still going to lose money running this jail. Even with Fulden County paying for their.
Retainties for their share date answer. Yeah.
Then on April fourteenth of this year, the news came out that Lashawan Thompson died in Rice Street Jail, having been neglected and ignored by Fulden County deputies. When they finally checked on Thompson, they found that he had been eaten alive by bugs as he lay dying. And this was in September of twenty twenty two, just after Atlanta approved this lease. The cell Thompson was in was so disgusting that a jail employee refused to enter without putting on a hazmat suit first.
Oh, imagine what it was like to live in there.
That's crazy.
And this death isn't the result of overcrowding. Thompson was in jail on simple battery charges and being held on a twenty five hundred dollars bond. He was also unindicted. There was no reason for Thompson to be in jail at the time of his death. If he had the money, he probably would have been it live today.
Yeah, it's just blocking up poor people.
And yeah, so this is the sort of thing that Dickenson Council have enabled with this new jail lease. Before we get into Dickenson copp City in twenty twenty three, we need to talk briefly about some more American Rescue Plan Act sheick Henry Dickinson Council pulled off this year. At the end of January, Atlanta announced that it was returning ten million dollars in ARPA funds earmarked for rental assistance that the city never used. What did just use
informental assistance? So this naturally upset a lot of people. Public comment was quite feisty that day. ADVANTA is of course increasingly pricing out its legacy residents, as we just talked about, and ten million dollars would go a long way to helping combat that. And then to add insult to injury. A few weeks later, Council passed and Dickens signed legislation that gave five hundred thousand dollars in arp OF funds to the Atlanta Police Foundation to provide additional
police and first responder housing. So really reinforcing the city's going to take care of police before everyone else.
Yeah, oh boy.
So let's move on to how Dickens handled cop City since January eighteenth. I think is probably a good place to start. The killing of Tortigito by Georgia State Patrol officers the day that everything happened, Dickens wished the trooper a speedy recovery. I can find nowhere in which Dickens made any comment other than it's unfortunate that Tortigito was killed.
Not surprising. He never accepts any level of responsibility for towards death, insisting instead that that responsibility lies with were just State Patrol or to Cab County. He refuses to acknowledge the fact that the city's insistence on trying to build cop City both ensured port and the officer's presence in the woods.
And napd's involvement to the raid.
Like, yeah, so this moment also kind of changed how Dickens approaches cop City. Before he was relatively quiet, but he begins this like full court media press after January eighteenth, and we don't know the exact details, but it does seem like to Cab County, Atlanta officials in APF came to an agreement in January to pass this land disturbance permit. In February, after a student protest at the Atlanta University Center and letters from AUC faculty that opposed construction of
cop City and expressed solidarity with protesters. Dickens announced that he would hold a forum with the president of Morehouse College, David A. Thomas, who is a vocal cop City supporter. This was a big problem for Dickens as the colleges that make up the AEC and we didn't talk about which once those were earlier. It's Morehouse, Spellman, Clark University,
Morehouse College of Medicine. All of them carry with them an incredible amount of historical and political power in the city of Atlanta, so keeping AUC support is pretty vital if you want to continue to run for elections. The attendance at the forum was limited to only AUC students and faculty, but a stream was duped and broadcast on Instagram Live. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a complete copy, but there are definitely highlights that have
made it out. Overall, Dickens was pretty patronizing and sarcastic to students. Several times students called the mayor out for his behavior, but he continued to show disdain the rest of the night. One student called him out for his lack of prior acknowledgment of towards death and Dickens's usual sidestep responsibility, again saying that it was unfortunate toward died, but insisting he was the wrong person to blame because it didn't happen in the city of Atlanta and the
officer was not from APD. At one point, Dickens went on a TI raid after a student called him a self out this we do have audio for Hey, let me.
Just check this, which I ain't never been a sell out.
You can't, you can't. You got to check. You got the wrong resume that you're looking at.
I know, I know.
We want to yell and yet shout out things.
Just be heard.
You've been heard, You've been heard.
I guess what you picked the wrong resume to pulling on a race car.
Whatever Dickens was hoping to accomplish that night, he failed. Several memes and audio remixes of Dickens's performance went viral in the Atlanta Twitter sphere and continue to crop up this day, like the I am not a sellout one I don't know if you've seen.
It, is that the I'm still ruined by the by the by the doctor Han Good good doctor memes. That just reminded me of the I am a surgeon memes.
So great job, great job. Yeah, great work.
So Dickens has of course continued to try it or to build or manufacture support for Copsody over the next two months. In March, she was visiting the neighborhoods around cop City to hear feedback from residents, and he of course started in the wealthier neighborhoods and he only went to the less affluent neighborhood, which, like cop City is actually in after a member of the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee called him out for only favoring the wealthy communities.
Local residents have told ACPC that Dickens skips over the houses with DTF signs outfront.
That makes sense, Yeah, checks out.
He's done several interviews now on cop City with both the AJAC and wab a local public radio station. The AGAC interview was particularly interesting because one of the interviewers asked Dickens what would happen if cop City ended in a cost overrun. Dickens told her that any large overruns would be paid for by philanthropic dollars from the foundation.
He said this out he said this, but a member of his cabinet had already confirmed that two APF City was willing to pay thirty two million dollars at that point, and of course we've now learned that that number is sixty seven million dollars.
Uh.
Did you follow the City of Atlanta's Twitter account?
No?
I don't want to see that shit, but I know they have turned it into just a cop city a propaganda chancel.
It's a NonStop propaganda channel, which is like really fun to watch because every cop city post is like bombarded with negative replies and quot tweets.
I've seen these posts, I know. I know.
I've talked about how they launched their own website trying to combat all of the top cop city websites. And yeah,
they've really accelerated their propaganda the past few months. And yeah, just turned the actual City of Atlanto account into a cop city propaganda uh like platform, which is funny because they oft they also will often advocate and say like this isn't the City of Atlanta's project, this is the APS project, which they'll often like use that use that refrain, and yet we have the City of Atlanto account being turned into a into a megaphone to promote to this project.
Yeah, the Atlanta Police Foundation doesn't actually give interviews to like news anymore. Yeah, they filtered and everything through the City of Atlanta, which.
Normal charity organization.
It's completely normal for them never to show up at City Council to talk about anything, and to hide from the public. It's fine. So meanwhile, Dickens is of course like dogged by opposition to cop City at every turn. On April thirteenth, three Georgia State University students, with the support of this keynote speaker, interrupted a global symposium Studies that Dickens was giving opening remarks. Dickens grows increasingly frustrated as the disruptors will not leave, and eventually Dickens and
his retinue like just walk out. On April eleventh, Dickens had hired a new senior policy advisor named Karen Rodgers. Dickens brought Rogers over from the Atlanta Police Foundation, where she'd spent seven years working in community engagement, and he brought her on, of course, to advise about cop City. On April eighteenth, Decab County Medicical Examiner released the autopsy on towards death and that same day, just before the article came out that the autopsity was released, Dickins tell
a press conference on the steps of city Hall. He was surrounded by a group of nearly one hundred all older black leaders, including former mayor Bill Campbell and Andrew Young. This appears to have been a hastily thrown together event and only a few media outlets were even aware that it was happening, Like, we didn't get an update that.
It was going. I didn't know that was happening.
Yeah, it just it kind of cropped up and seemed to take everyone by surprise. And of course it looks like the press conference was held to counteract the autopsy report coming out that day. Yeah, but that failed, and
the autopsy report was the bigger story. Notably, the AJAC did not print the autopsy report on the first day, but it was pretty well covered elsewhere on the landscape, and the autopsy caused a second city councilor to speak out against cop city and a growing number of state representatives have started to speak out, you know, as that happened, and as the rest of the solidarity fund. But Dickens is of course unmoved and preparing for this fight to
last a while. Then, of course, there was the city council vote on June fifth, and there had been some work done behind the scenes to try to get this set back to committee. Apparently Dickens like peeled off city. He called the maybe votes into his office early that morning and peeled off the votes to ensure that that copsity continued on. We should I wrote this, of course, I think months ago at this point. So, yeah, a
couple quick highlights again the affordable housing. So with our affordable housing, it is supposed to get a certain percentage of our general operating budget, and it started out at one and a half percent, and then it was supposed to go up to two percent and two and a half percents where it's going to cap out. So this year was supposed to go to two percent. He kept it one and a half percent, but he did announce a public private partnership to offer one hundred million dollars
in in affordable housing bonds. Really, so we we love our public private partnership Atlantaway things to get things done.
Yeah, that seems like the way.
That's I mean, that's what I'm excited about for for the the extra thirty million dollars bond to APF. That'll certainly get paid back in a reasonable time period.
Any completely reasonable time period, and you know that'll get paid back, I'm sure. And we're not going to continue to pay anything. And APF is not going to make any money.
Off No, this is none.
Surely this project is not a massive taxpayer sinkhole.
So that's it. That's the mayor.
That's the mayor.
That's where we are. And then when's the next mayoral election.
So twenty twenty five, and of course Dickens has to move the needle. There was there were like some calls for a recall campaign around Chickens, especially amongst the movement. Like I personally don't think that it would have any chance of succeeding. There's kind of there's a perception that that he's doing okay. And you know, when you have somebody that was probed by the FBI for corruption just a few years ago, your standards of what the area kind of changes.
People seem to be putting lots of their They dedicated some of their dedicated efforts in terms of like electoral sign up stuff as being put towards the referendum which got approved a few days ago. To continue, they need to colletch like what seventy five thousand signatures from people who were residents of Atlanta and registered to vote in twenty twenty one, which seems like a pretty high bar. That's a lot of signatures.
So it's a lot of signatures. And because the organizers say this municipal clerk was like playing games and withholding approving the signatures, so they don't have approving the referendum, and so they don't have the full like sixty days, like two weeks fifty No, it's fifty seven days. So I think it's like it's they have to have them by August fifteenth.
Which is a lot of signatures, and August fifting is around when construction was supposed to art for cop city, So yeah, and then for other mayor roal candidates. I've heard rumor that friend of the show ontologically evil Mary Nor would may be interested in trying to run again.
So this is like her her kind of move is she does she runs for mayor? All right, Well, first she does a term of city council and then she runs from mayor and then she doesn't get the mayorl spots, so she takes a you know, four years off, she comes back, runs for city council, runs from mayor, takes four years off. So we were now in her you know, mayor her city council term. And if she's going to do this for a third time, then she will run
for mayor in twenty twenty five, which would suck. I mean, she came close last time.
She did, and I think how depending on if, depending on how progress in the cop city construction goes.
She has a way to frame this being like.
Like I was the one who was actually in support of this popular proposal the whole time, and look we succeeded only because of me.
Yes, she can do that, And there is so Atlanta's demographics are changing. We're no longer a majority block city. The population is down to like forty eight percent black people. So there Dickens is being called possibly the last black mayor of Atlanta, and you know that will be a shock to our systems. And Mary Norwood would be like just a way to quickly kill that.
Yeah, And like I said, the only way to acurately describer is just ontologically evil like she is. She she is just that bad. She's like she's Yeah, it's not great, would not be fun. But she's not the mayor.
It is.
It is Mayor Dickens who is the shitty mayor of this episode, and based on how much power he has to change things and how much what he's decided to do with that power when instead of actually supporting all the affordable housing things, he's funneled millions of dollars to cop City, to the Atleanto Police Foundation, has refused any measure to revoke the land lease ordinance and even even even if not not to cancel the project, even just to move it somewhere else, He's refused every step of
the way. And yeah, well we'll see how that does him in the next election cycle.
Yeah, I'm really interested to see, uh how he plays the referendum.
I'm I'm I'm I'm interested to see if the referend them will even be a threat at all, because if it if it's, if it's, if it fails to get a significant abortion of signatures, then he may just ignore it because why would he bother to talk about it.
Yeah, they're definitely not going to devote any resources to it until they're sure that it is a threat. But once, once it you know, potentially becomes a threat, they will, They've got to start doing something.
Yeah, well we are we are like what two or three days into the week of Action at this point. I definitely I don't know what what things are like, but there's still is some days left. So yeah, if you if, if you're if you're in Atlanta, try to stay safe and stay as dangerous as you feel comfortable.
Say hey to us when you see us.
Sure, do you have any Do you have any things you would like to plug? Matt from the Atlanta Community Press Collective?
Yes, so I am Matt and I work for the Atlantic Community Press Collective. If you want to check out our work, our website is Atlpresscollective dot com. We also do a lot on Twitter. Our handle is at Atlanta Underscore Press, and our Instagram, where we post a lot of our videos, is atl Press Collective.
And then you can also donate a solidarity fund, not at the regular solidary fund website. Still I believe it's I believe it's still the National Bail Fund one right.
I believe it is still the National Bail Fund until probably until that court case is settled.
Got it all right?
So yeah, make sure you go to the right site for the for the Act Blue National bil bail fund towards the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. Anyway, So that was the shitty mayor of today, Mayor Andre Dickens. I'll make the joke again. I think it's funny that the previous mayor was named Bottoms, the current mayor is named Dickens. It's Dickens, Dickens Bottoms anyway, no comment. That's the joke that I've made before. I'm going to keep making it until he's
until he's no longer mayor. Unless someone else runs for we could do, nor would Dickens Bottom. No never, I'm not even gonna bother joking about that because that would be so, that'd be so.
Don't put it in exactly exactly.
That doesn't need anyway.
Yeah, see you on the other side, Stay safe, stayed interesting. The Week of Action TATA.
Hello everyone, Welcome to the podcast. It could happen here. It's me James today and I am joined for a rare example of Daniel Daniel being on the podcast.
Yes, well, I'm James, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here, uh to talk with you on the PODCAS cast that I edit every single day.
Yeah.
Yeah, normally you just hear me, but at this time you get they like the Dan. It's like the subaltant speaks, but it's Daniel. I couldn't fucking I couldn't really go anywhere with that, so I just I just left the two halves of the joke out there, either of them with a partner.
Very sad.
Yeah, So, Daniel, we're here today to talk about first day kits and the reason we're talking about first Ay kits is because it is Pride Month at the time of recording. That, of course, in the United States, means that people are worried about being murdered by homophobic psychopaths. Unfortunately, so mm hmm. That is uh, that is the world
that we live in, and it shouldn't be. It's fucked up, and it hopefully won't be this way forever because you know, all these people are wrong and will die eventually and that will make the world better. But fingers crossed, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can.
We can hope. I guess maybe they're raising a new generation of Turfs or whatever. I don't think hopefully not. Let's not.
Yeah, So I just wanted to talk because I've seen a bunch of people online, like a lot of people who are in the like lgbt QI a community, or who are going to pride just being like, oh fuck like it. Genuinely, I can see why people are very afraid right because violence against queer people is at least seemingly increasing. I'm not going to give you training because this is a podcast and you can't learn first AID
on a podcast, and you can't learn it on YouTube either. Really, I wanted to talk briefly about like supplies and then places to get training, because that is very important. I have bought my first ay it that I used for work. I have quite a few that I used for work. Actually I don't like to repack them. And I know that you have bought one that Jeffrey Bezos kindly sent you.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
At the height of the you know, the George Floyd protests, et cetera, I was out there in the streets and kind of after observing what was happening in Portland and after you know, listening into and editing it could happen to year episodes and you know what Gear and Robert
were covering. It felt, if not necessary, but very prudent to invest in something like this, so that should there be a need to help people in the streets, I was there unable to do so, and whether or not this was a good first aid kit, I think we're going to find out today.
Yeah, that's the aim of the game.
I should point out that, like my medical training is pretty basic, right, I'm not that kind of doctor, but I do have a wilderness first responder and a wilderness first aid and to start the bleed training, and I've done CPR training and I've done hostile environment first aid training, so a bunch of stuff which is focused around very very very basic first aid.
Right.
In all of those cases, it's like make sure the person doesn't die immediately, and then get them to someone who is better trained than you so that they can help them more men, which is like, listen, if you are learning about medical stuff on the podcast hosted by a guy who has a PhD in mon European history, then that that is what you are doing too, right, Like, yes, and we're going to talk about that, because you can for sure fuck someone up if you if you go
sort of outside of your scope of knowledge, and that it's I understand the desire to help, but we have to help in the way that it's most helpful.
I guess, not do any harm. So yeah, let's go over.
Let's let's go over I guess my first aid kit, and then we can we can open yours and see what's the same and what's different.
Right, So this is one.
I like it because it's small and it fits in the smaller my back, and if I really needed to, I could just like wear a kind of baggy shirt and it wouldn't be too obvious. I also have one that fits around my ankle for times when I really don't want people to know I have it, but that I also want to have it.
And then you can wear some sick flared jeans or.
Something and people just think you're a trendy kind of guy exactly.
Yeah, they'll know. So yeah, in mind, it sort of goes on.
It's one of your back and then you can pull it away, right, has a big old red handle. You just put it like that and it comes away. Yeah, it's nice. That's one thing I will say right off the bat is like, I've seen a number of people get hurt.
In a number of different situations.
I've seen a number of people render first date, including myself, sometimes successfully, sometimes sadly not successfully. And if you're if you have a big bag of shit and then you open your bag of shit and you're just throwing stuff everywhere, Stuff's falling on the ground, it you're that's not helpful, right, like the things that will kill people that are preventable
for the most part in and like trauma injuries. Right, Like the stuff that we might see if we're going to a pride, if we're attending a protest, and if we fucking work in a school in America, right is largely like like attention umothora, so a whole sucking chest wound and losing blood and losing blood is I believe that the sort of most common preventable cause of death in intrauma injuries.
So most of us is going to focus around losing blood.
And that's where tyber training called stop the bleed comes in, right, I believe it's stop the Bleed dot org. You can google free stop the Bleed classes near me. I've previously posted a link to where you can put in your postcode, zip code and find free stop the Bleed training near you. And again that will cost you no money at all
cost you about half a day of your time. Oh great, yeah, yeah, it's a great thing actually, Like it's one of the few things that you know, the municipal governments of various things put on, well if there isn't one near you. I've heard the people hitting up fire departments and then getting them to put one on if they can demonstrate some interest because it is very basic. And most fire departments will have paramedics, right, which is a sort of step up from an empty So those folks can help
teach those things very well. So what is in here for stopping the bleed? And I'm not going to teach you how to use it because that's what someone else.
Does, someone else's job.
Yeah, So before I open it up, this is a tornicue. Some people will pronounce it incorrectly. They will say that those people are with that hard t yeah yeah, yeah, the American way.
Yeah.
So it's what this guy is is is it? It's for like bleeding your limbs, arterial bleeding your limbs? Right, it just goes around since it down and I'm not telling you how to use it, and then you tighten it up, right. The things I want to emphasize about this are one the type of tornicae that is so this is called a combat application tornice. It's made by a company called North American Rescue. There are a few
other ones that I would use. The other one I have, I think is the Softy Wide and I have some of the REVX med ratcheting tornices as well. They use like a boa. If people have used ski boots cycling shoes, they'll be familiar with a bone call. The one to buy is the one that you use when you do your training right, and it's going to be a sam as another one.
There's another.
These are all the tonques you want to buy if you're sort of if you're confused about which one you used. The ones that are approved by the t trouble C. It's a Committee on Tactical Casualty Care, Tactical casualt com.
Something like that.
Those guys have tested them extensively right to see which wants work, which wants don't. It is this is not somewhere to save money. That they they are about twenty three twenty five bucks. You find them on sale, it's not. Yeah, I mean, if if that's a big expense for you, then I understand uh, and it's it's okay not to have one if that's a big expense, or to save up and wait, like, that's okay, it's better than using
an improvised tornic care. Right, there are not very many very good studies at least that I could find on improvised tornic k's. Someplaces still teaching improvises tornic K, like I've taken a Woman's First Responder where they taught it. I've also seen one not work, and I will tell you that's not an experience that I want to ever have again in my life, and I don't think it's
one i'd like you all to share with me. So I would suggest if you're going to be using a tornic K, then then buying a cat is kind of the standard. I wouldn't buy it from Jeffrey Bezos because this Amazon dot com is a website that he owns. Believe, yeah, space cowboy Jeffrey. And so the reason why is that all of these different there are knockoffs, right, there are fakes of this. They go in different they go in the same bin from what I'm told, and then the
person who's a picker just maybe grabs one. And sometimes you can end up with a fake. What can happen with a fake is the strap can break or the windless. So the windless is the guy that tightens it can break. Ah Okay, either of those things go to lead to the tornicue failing. Right, it's not going to apply enough pressure, and that's going to It could do a number of things right. It could just fail to start the bleeding, depending on if you've misidentified the bleeding. You could give
someone a compartment syndrome or something. It's going to be very painful. It's going to be very painful anyway, and you'll learn that in your course which you're going to take. You're not gonna not going to just listen to me on the podcast.
Thank you.
And so you do want a real one, and so the easiest way to obtain a real one is to buy one from a reliable source. Rescue Essentials, Chinook Medical and North American Rescuer or people who I've worked with. I've said at Rescue Essential sent me a bunch of shit before I went on a work trip. They it was lots of it was outdated or the open box or something. And I was able to donate that to fixes and journalists I was working with. I thought that was very cool of them. Cool they offer a stop
the Bleed month discount. I think stop the Bleed month is May, so we might be out of that now. But those are real places where you can buy these tonic caes and know that you're not getting a fake one, right, So.
You'll provide links to that in the description of the place.
We will yeap, yeah, yeah, I'll make sure that those are there for you to click. So's there are different generations, like I think generation seven is what I have. Generation six is also fine. You probably won't find one sold before that. On the off chance you do, I would just stick to a generation seven or six. And it does have a little timestamps, so you want little sharpie as well to write the time on. That's more important. It's possible that, like you might put this on somebody.
So you're at a Pride event and there is something terrible happening, like a mass shooter, and you might be there for a while. Let's say you're in Texas and all your cops are fucking cowards. Then unfortunately, if you were able to render aid someone and then you both of you were able to not get hurt any further. You could be there for a while. Then it would
be relevant what time the tornic ga is applied. Normally, you know, in the US, we would hope that you would have medical attention pretty quickly because you know, that threat would have been stopped and then EMS would be able to provide help. But that that's where the time thing comes in, right, And so you want to have a tiny sharpie when you have a tornic in and
you can get. North American Rescue actually sell little tiny, half sized sharpies and I shove them in the pouch with the torn ue and then there they are, and then you always have a sharpie. So we go inside there it is.
Look at that. Okay, Hey, the little guy's a cute. Yeah, isn't it gorgeous? Yeah? We love a little guy here, credit card size sharpie.
It's perfect.
Yeah, yeah, for those who are not danel exactly with a pinky sharpie.
And I will do I will do the part of contextualizing for the for the non video audience.
Thank you, Daniel.
Yeah, of course, paint a picture with words if you will. So we're going through this now, if we if we focus on bleeding again, right, there's a couple of different dressings that you have.
So again I'm not going to.
Tell you what to use for wear, but you would use like the tornique on one part of your body. The other things you're going to use would be a pressure dressing. So you can get a ton of different pressure dressings. I like the Olays ones. Oh well a ees, but it doesn't hugely matter that those ones just have a little bit of gorez that you can pull out so you can pack a wound too.
And that.
Sometimes if you do so, if you get like a nice training, they might let you practice packing some wounds, so they might have like a little fake wound that you can pack and yeah, so that you'll learn a lot about like how to do that there. And so those allowed. Some of the other ones don't. But honestly, like sometimes they're called Israeli bandages. They will not like colonize Palestine if you you know, put them in your.
First gate kit.
But that that's what this guy is, right, And sometimes they have a lot of packaging on, so you want to take them down to kind of the last layer of packaging. None of this ship is sterile, right, None of this stuff is. Again it's not supposed to be in for a long time, right, So it's so it's okay to have that like either just bear or in its first layer of packaging.
I want to get actualize one thing from a video perspective, just for everybody listening. As James is showing me his first aid kit, it looks like every item that he's talking about other than the tournique is individually wrapped and also strapped down. Yeah, it looks like I would say, about seven or eight individual items within there, and they all have their own pocket and they're all strapped down.
And that's something that immediately looking at mine, I basically have, you know, small plastic baggies that I will hold up to James right now, small plastic baggies of just like a lot of loose shits. And it's just way too much stuff in here, I would say, of what I see in James's bag versus mine, I think I mean, first of all, there's stuff missing, Like there's no turnique
in here. There's a lot of different gauze things, and there's but there's you know, in mind, I have like seven hundred different bandages, and like there's aspirin in here, and like some things that feel like they're more for like a camping trip than they are really like handling a first aid scenario in which you need to save
someone's life. So one piece of advice that I'm getting from James as he shares this, is that you know, what's important to carry around is the stuff that is going to give you immediate access to the ability to save someone's life. So think about that as you are
like packing your bag. What I have here that I bought online, that I'm still glad that I have is basically a collection of a bunch of different miscellaneous first aid stuff rather than a very stripped down specific list of items that I can use to save someone's life in an emergency scenario.
Yes, excellent point, and you can see them all right when you open this guy. This guy is also like sigh, such that I can pull it off, pop it on the floor, open it up, have my workspace in front of me. If there's anything I'm not confident doing, if like when horrible things happen and people are bleeding you, you do not in that time gain skills right at that moment, speaking from like more experience than I would like to have. If people are in a really bad
way in front of you. It's not a fun time, and you get scared and you might panic. That's okay, that happens to everyone. People aren't supposed to see their ship, and if it, certainly, if it's your first time seeing, it's not unreasonable at all to freak out and not know what to do. You can just hold any of this ship up, say hey I have a tornic uit. Hey I have a pressure dressing, and someone who who's at that time is able to help, can take that.
You know what they're doing, they can help. So it's totally fine just to have this ship. And if you don't know how to use it, you know, don't go beyond your scope of knowledge. But just you have that ship and you can provide it someone else, that's fine. So yeah, everything's in little elastic bands. I've got this stuff which is called quick clot And we've talked a lot of the podcasts recently about indigenous medical technologies.
This is an.
Example of one, right, So it's using I think kalin. There's some that use kalin, some that use something that came from crabshells, but this is this is an indigenous medical technology that now is sort of it's been refined over time. This just contains a thing that stops it helps blood to clotch. Hemostatic agent. Right, so when you're packing a wound, you could use this first. This would help with blood clotting.
Right.
It's also the type I have is detectable on X rays, which helps a lot. There are some older types which are powders. Those are probably best avoided. And you want the gauze that is impregnated with the hemostatic agent if you can. This stuff got really pricey recently, Like I think the best price I've seen for this is thirty five bucks. Oh wow, So yeah, this guy is going to cost you the most.
Do you have an idea why that is?
I think a lot of people probably bought it in twenty twenty. Might be part of it. Maybe it's some kind of supply chain thing. I don't know if you know where they get the ingredients from. But they just went up in price a lot link Like a lot of people were sort of reaching out about, hey, why is this shit so expensive?
Sure, I don't know, but.
It's not like one hundred percent necessary, but it is very helpful thing and it can make a difference in some cases. Right, So that's the hemostatic gauze. But else I've gotten here as a pair of trauma shares. That's just if you need to remove someone's clothing to access a wound, and that is kind of important. So for instance, I was doing a training once and I prefer to
speak about those things. So like where a guy was presented to us with gunshot wound, and like, if you don't rip off his browsers like this, you know, if someone's been shot and you're there helping them again, like if you're not comfortable doing this, you haven't done the training and don't be just ripping off of the strangers clothes. That's weird in general. Yeah, yeah, there comes a yes. Yeah. So like and they had this cool kind of thing around his leg that bled like he had like two wounds,
sort of pumping out blood. It's like a cool kind of bleeding simulator. So but yeah, bullets will do crazy ship and they'll go in one part of your leg and hit the bone abouts around and go out in fact the other. But they don't always travel in straight lines. They're not laser beams. So by exposing their wound, you can sometimes see the exit wound, and so you'll know that there are two wounds, right yeah, depending on how you're going to treat it. You know you're gonna pack it,
you're gonna put a torn key on it. But that that will that's what these are for. You can also get things which are called like I think it's called a clothing knife. I actually keep one into the belt of my my plate carrier that I used to work, just so that it's like right here, and it's the same place I keep my diving knife, so then I know it's there. And what it does is these are a handy thing to have in your truck to.
Yes, yeah, you've seen it.
So it's a contained blade, right. I like this little chat because in addition to the contained blade, it has a little glass breaker.
Yes, I say, we have one in the car, so it's like a scene. Some people might not as a sea belt cut yes, yeah, spell cutter, and usually on the other side, like you said, they have a glass breaker. So but that is a much more contained one and that looks nice. The one in my car is like the size of a small hammer because it's like meant to be like you know, give you the forest to hold it and snack of window, but also the kind
of thing that is super useful. I think everybody should have one in their car.
Yeah, you can put on your keyring even right.
This is the size of like a like a match box or it's like the size of the key fob.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you have a newer vehicle than I do, then I didn't mean to be car classes here.
Yeah, yeah, it's okay, Min's approaching classic status. But yeah, we'll we'll put a link on the on the website for this little chap as well. We're not like, we're not fucking getting affiliate revenue from that weirdness. Guys, We're just trying to.
Help you out.
Nice thing about this is like, it's quite hard to stab someone with trauma sheares because they've got this little up on the bottom. But it can be quite a lot of chopping and things. Right, this guy, you can whoop. So these probably also cheaper and you won't end up using them as scissors and getting them blunt. So that is that is my little getting people's clothes off. And then the last one. I have a couple of burned
dressings in here. That's just because so many people got burned in twenty twenty pro from me though, Yeah, it would be. So if someone shoots something out, you don't pick that shit up, don't make it up, just don't. Like in my prepping, I got fire resistant gloves. I got like, I got gloves that were treated for like I don't reme it's like five hundred degrees or something like that in the event that I needed to throw
back a gas canister. But I think I was. I mean, I was way too rambo about the whole thing because I still have not encountered a gas grenade once yet. So yeahs crossed, But I mean I don't know, I'm down.
Yeah, maybe I'm ready just get him. Yeah yeah, yeah, Dave, I love that for you. It's great.
Yeah, So you can't instead of having the gloves right to just avoid picking it up. But people do get burned from that from from other stuff, right, So burn dressing not really necessary because it's unlikely if someone is burned to the extent that it's threatening to their life. You aren't helping them with your little box of stuff. So that's fine. And then these guys are vented chess seals. Ideally you do want vented chess seals. I was reading a study the other day. It's yes, the sort of
greater survivability. And what you are doing with those is that this is for a sucking chess wounds. Not named that because it sucks, but it does. Yeah, but it is. This is for like, I guess, penetrating chest trauma. And what these these guys I bought in a pack of two. Hyphen are a good brand. I think Halo or another brand. There are some knockoffs on on Amazon dot Com. They wouldn't buy just like again, it's probably worth spending a
little bit extra. These These are the ones that have gone through extensive testing that are issued to lots of militaries around the world. They're very flat, right, if you wanted to, you could distribute the ship about your person and it's just going to be harder to get it, and you're not going to remember which back pocket maybe you shut what in Sure, these are very flat and very easy. Their their giant stickers and you, again, when you do your training, will learn how to use them.
But yeah, I would avoid like the Rhino. I think Rhino is one of the brands of Amazon and stuff. Just kind of like get a hyphen is kind of the standard. There's an older type as well, but these hyphens are more compact and they're preferred.
And when you're searching hyphen, if you happen to researching, it's h y f I n. We're going to put it in the chat. But just you know, for a word that is phonetically very similar to another common word, hyphen is h y f i.
N ah yes, p G Yeah, So well said Daniel, that is a. That is a that's a chess seal.
Right, so.
Here is the other type just for you're viewing this an Asherman chess seal, so that not preferred, So stick with the hyphen. These are kind of bigger and don't pack as well. And yeah, I would stick with the highphens. The other thing I have in here is a like a space blanket.
Just interesting.
Yeah, So when you are losing a lot of blood, you get very cold, and so you do want to keep that treasure, you do want to keep that casualty warm. This isn't going to really be enough on its own, quite honestly, like you need to probably actively heat someone, but it's better than nothing, and it's again.
It's very small.
Again, I've given tons of these out in various different situations that weren't like a casualty situation, so that a nice thing to have. You don't generally want to be packing ship just because it's a nice thing to have. And we'll get onto that. But this again is very small. There's almost always face for it, so I include that.
I also have a little source of light, like a little torch flashlight for American listeners nice a s h. And that is there for being able to see things, which is very handy actually when you're trying to help someone who is bleeding. Another thing to include would be gloves. I have my gloves somewhere else on this belt, so they're not here, but medical gloves, right, And again you'll
probably learn this in your course. But like a lot of people like to buy black ones, I don't know why cops wear black ones all the time, right, just makes it a little more difficult if you're doing a blood sweep, which is a thing you'll learn about in your class, so that it's actually quite hard to see, like blood on black, especially in perfect yeah, so blue tan something like that is kind of preferable.
I do have those in the first age. I think good.
Nice.
Yeah, if you want to have those somewhere ready to go, I think they're on the front of this bag. You could slap those on. Just you know, you don't know where other people have been, what they've been up to you, and it doesn't matter what, you still want to help them. So you just want to just want to take care of yourself there. And so though they're honestly the main things I have in there, what I don't have in here is equally important. Right, I do not have tampons
in here. The reason I do not have tampons in here as well, it's too far. I'm not a person who menitrates, and even if I was, I wouldn't have my first aid kit. And technically because they are not very good at but they're terrible at dealing with like massive bleeding, right, massive hemorrhage. That's not what they're for if people are familiar with what they are designed for. Like the volume of blood is not the same as
the volume you will see from terial bleed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, believe me again, Like I've had the misfortune to see people die from blood loss, and like that is a lot of blood more and it's coming out fast, and you ain't stopping it with a tampon. It just kind of stopping someone who is better equipped from helping. So if you want to carry tampons and you want to have them available in case someone needs them, that is great,
that's very kind. If you put them in your car, put them in your in your bag that you go around with, please, but don't confuse them with a trauma dressing because they are different things. Don't plan to improvise anything what broadly right, Like, it's just when we have excellent tools available that designed for this job, just use them.
And it's fine not to be able to get all this stuff at once, Right, you could spring for the chess seals first and then save with a bit of money get the tornic k. That's fine, But like, yes, can you can you improvise a chess seal with some duct tape and a credit card or a CRISP packet in theory? Sure, but like these are like twelve bucks, so let's just let's just let's just get them if
we can and have people improvised tornic k successfully with cravats? Yes, have those failed and resulted in loss of life?
You know?
Yes? Like in some cases. Your belt isn't a torny k right, it doesn't have a windless it's not going to get tight enough. It might snap.
Have people used successfully, Yes, Is there a twenty three dollar thing which works much more effectively?
Yes?
And it's a serious thing. It's fucking it's very real. Like again speaking from experience, like this shit will affect you deeply, and you want to know that you did the best you could. So and if you can't afford any of this stuff, that's totally fine, Like just take your time and acquire it.
I think an important thing to add at this point is to you know, listeners of our show are I think overly familiar with the way that we have kind of introduce the idea of mutual aid, like the point of mutual aid, And what I mean by that is that you are not a one person revolutionary Like the whole idea is community effort. And so especially with something like this, this is like a kind of a two
part point. Especially with something like this, consider that you are part of a community that can help people overall. Maybe it is not you the individual listening to this episode right now that is like I'm going to go invest in all of these things because I will be the first aid person. Maybe there's someone you know who's already interested in this, and this is information that you can pass on to them should they be wanting to
invest in equipment like this. And another thing to think about in terms of why James is offering specific items is because think about a hobby that you like doing, Think about anything that you like doing a lot. You know you don't usually buy the cheapest version of the thing. And now this is not me, you know, necessarily advocating
for overspending or buying expensive things. You just want to buy stuff that lasts and that works well and that does the job because you know overall that stuff will last longer than anything that is cheaper in the immediate moment. I think people can say the same thing about things like work boots, about tools, about anything that to you
is worth investing your time in. So if this is something that you value, if being a first responder or being that person who's there, if taking a stop the bleed course is something that's important to you, consider that these things are more than just like you know, good things to have on hand. They're an investment in your future and your interests. So just something to consider that, like, while some of these things may I mean, nothing sounds
outrageously expensive that you've said so far. I think the most expensive thing that you talked about was thirty five dollars in that range.
Yeah, you can spend a lot on the pouch, but be sure you shouldn't. Sure like, don't buy some fancy hype beasts Instagram gung Guy pouch and right exactly, Yeah, I think, Yeah, the Selock scores is probably much expensive. Think I've spoken about on the point of durability, I do want to say I've seen people practicing with their torny keys, and I would suggest getting another one to practice with.
Totally makes sense.
So North America, Mescu breaks a blue one. It's exactly the same. It works just the same. If you need to use it, you can over time those things fatigue, and that they're not designed for multiple uses. Have they been used multiple times?
Yes? Do people wash them and wash the blood of them and use them again? Yes? It is again like we shouldn't plan for a suboptimal setting and what's already going to be a pretty fucking suboptimal moment. And talking of suboptimal stuff, Daniel, we have to start, Yeah, to talk about Ronald Reagan. So that's my bad. I should have been the one being like Jason to take an AD break.
Yeah.
Here, I am a seasoned professional. We're back.
We've returned from my AD break. So I wanted to talk about resources for training because I think those are very important, right, and that is where you're going to learn stuff. I am not telling you how to do this. I would suggest hitting up Stop the Bleed. I think it's stopped bleed dot org and Stop the Bid training in my area. There's a website that will link in the description. Are's part of that website where you can
put in your zip code and find trainings. And then if I think about where I've got my training, it's through an organization called NOLS National Outdoor Leadership School. So once you get past Stop the Bleed, you've got a couple of Like most community colleges will have an EMTB course empt basic. That's quite a commitment of your time, but you can learn a lot of very important things. It can be a career for you if you want it to be. Certainly, it can be an adjunct to
other careers you want to do. If you want to work in the outdoors. If you can do an EMT B and then do a wilderness EMT, that opens up a whole range of expeditions to you. So community college should be free. Most of those courses are free or very affordable, depending on where you are. Knowles courses are not free, nor are they very affordable. They are very expensive, but they are very good you look or ARII probably
puts them on. Knowles does have scholarships for people who are more marginalized from the outdoors, or they did last time I spoke to them, so those might be worth checking out. And then there are apps which will give you resource since resources are not the same as training, right like training is knowing what to do, it's not.
Sometimes it's knowing where to look. But in situations like this, like you don't want to be on your phone for more advanced stuff, for stuff where you know you're you're you're doing care in the field right if you're doing or you know, wilderness first responder. If you're trying to think times that I've done stuff with that. One time I was climbing up a mountain and the big old rock fell on me. I had to split my leg, and oh, my god, what bleeding like, yeah, yeah, it's
good times. Uh don't, yeah, don't don't watch out for rock Fall audience.
And I just want to throw something out there. Every single time James tells us any story about his life, it is just this, this wonderfully vivid, like colorful story about something that has happened to him, or an experience that he's had, or a profession that he's had. That just adds to the tone of interesting facts about James.
So if you I don't know, I highly recommend used in every single episode that James isn't because you have lived a fascinating life and that is merely a split second of it.
That's wild.
I'm glad you're okay, Yeah, I'm fine, But yeah, you know, clearly here we are with that, right, Like, especially in wilderness meander, then there's an emphasis on using what you already have, and because you can't bring everything into the wilderness, right, So that's where I'm saying.
Knowledge doesn't wear anything. It doesn't take up any space in your pack. So you can use an air mattress pretty well to splint a leg injury. You can use one of those foam for air mattresses. A guy that you sleep on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So you can kind of fandangle those up around a leg. You can use a therm arrest or similar. Other products are available foam sleeping mattress. You can use a hiking pole, right, tent pole.
Tentpoles are kind of nice because you can break them down into sections to get the right length, and then all you're using from your first aid kit is your it's your tape, right or I like ski straps. I attach everything in my life. It's important to me with ski straps. So I love a ski strap and I had some ski straps, and you can just splin that bad boy with a couple of ski traps, a couple of tent poles back of the net. You're not having
a great day at that point. This is not the kind of medical care you'd hope for in a professional setting. But you know, if you've got that and you've got a crash, you you can get yourself to a higher degree of care. So when we're doing stuff like that, I believe NOLES has a Wilderness Medicine app. There's Deployed Medicine, which is a US military resource for field care, which can help to remind you of stuff that you've already trained on. It's not going to teach you to do
stuff you shouldn't. Just read about it on there and use it. And there's a new one called goes Ges which literally launched like this week goes Health, which it's offline to It gives an offline data base of wilderness medicine and it helps you kind of with diagnostic queues of stuff. So when you do your wilderness first responder, at least when I did it, someone must have had an ectopic pregnancy and had a very bad outcome, because they'll they'll ask you with all these questions like what
could this be? What could this be? And like they want you to be able to know what any topic pregnancy is so like. But there's like a sort of flow chart that you can follow right to help you be like what is this? Is it appendicitis? What's going on here?
So when?
Because you probably won't remember every certainly if you take a woof of course, and then two years later you know you have before you recertified, like something happens, a lot could happen in two years, you won't have remembered everything that you learned in your course right, So some of those apps are useful, but the most important thing this thing where you will learn to use all of the items in this I fact is stopped the bleed and it is free, and that is where everyone should start.
They're not going to teach you how to use all the things. So if we bust open the bag that you got Daniel quickly, it's overstuffed. There's a lot of things in there. Yeah, wait, too many things.
Mean literally, like as there is a there is a pouch of emergency drinking water. There is there is a which might call it a bright stick, like a little light stick. There is about one hundred different kinds of uh which MC call it. Like look at this literal just like pile of band aids, just lit like hundreds of band aids and alcohol wipes. And oh there's a whistle. A whistle is should you get lost in the wilderness.
This is a very handy in urban or rural dishausters. But for first at not for this.
I don't think any of this stuff is necessarily bad. It's just there's just way too much. There's gauze pads, there is this a b D pad, sterile extra absorbent pad, yep. That you know, I don't think is going to do what it needs to do. But there's a shit ton of gauze in here, and there are look at and you want to talk about things to cut open. You're talking about clothing scissors. Uh, these little guys I don't think are going to do that. No, they're for your
tape and stuff exactly, trimming tape. There's also tweezers in here. Really, this feels like for people who are in the wilderness and they get a splinter.
Yeah, yeah, and that stuff super handy to having your truck or your car or you're like, motorcycle guys are already pretty good.
Yes.
Yeah, it's not gonna immediately stop you from dying from loss of blood, which is what we're concerned with. That if you do ride a motorcycle, you really want to fucking have one. Like I ride a bicycle, and I have seen some motor vehicle accidents and I'm just gonna say, motorcycle folks want to have that. Someone else can grab it off your motobi. I can use it if you've hurt yourself, but sure, I've seen that happen before. So yeah, that stuff is all very handy. It's all very nice.
It can make you feel better, right, Like there's I imagine there's a ton of viberprofen and paracetamol and benadryl uh all that stuff is great. That stuffs super handy, right. And another thing I would add is some of that stuff can be life saving if you have an allergy, right, and you need to take something for that, Yeah, put that in your first aid kit because that's particular to you.
Right.
And that's if you need an EpiPen, then have your EpiPen of course, right, you know, I'm sure you do. Anyway, if you have diabetes, have your glucagarn and some sugar. All of that stuff is of course important. But in terms of like dealing with what we perceive to be an increased risk of like homophobic violence, which normally manifests itself as people getting shot in this country, then the little scissors and the ABD pad the band aids aren't what we need and they're just going to get in
the way. So even if you have those, great keep them in the car. I gave tons of people band aids because they got blisters in twenty twenty, right, Because people are not familiar with walking that far. Their boots sucked. People decided to wear heavy boots because they're worried. All understandable things. It's a lot of band aids, a load of horse you plasters or you know, like second skin. Great,
I'm happy to give you one of those things. I'll keep it in a different pocket though, right So, so I'm not you know, sorting past the blister plasters if someone's been shot. And that's a good tip regardless of what you're doing, what you're even if you're doing, you know, you're bringing more stuff and more people. It's great aspirin, I bet people need that sometimes, or iberprofione if their knees hurting from walking a lot, great, pound that shit.
But like, don't that's not what we want. We don't want to be administering medicines really, certainly if we're not trying to do so after a trauma thing, because some of they pay medicines we might be taking might inhibit blood clotting, right, So we don't want to be doing that before that person goes on too a higher standard care.
It's going to fucking suck for them. But like you're the best you can do is stop their person dying or help someone else who's qualified to do that by just saying, hey, I have this stuff and it's all pretty compact, you know, Like I said, it's it's you know, the size of a paperback, but decent sized paperback books and ththing like that, and having it may or may
not be hopefully right. You just buy this thing and it sits around for a while, and eventually, if you've been having the tornquair in the sun for years and years, you've want to replace it. The UV can cause them to decay. You can just put them inside a pouch. I've made all kinds of pouches for them. You can buy an expensive one on the internet, or you can just use a piece so a piece of nylon, which is what I do, two rubber bands and put it
inside your waistband of your thing. Many many such solutions exist. But yeah, I would encourage everyone. I think I've said it's about twenty eight times to get training and not just to just go and do this. If you can't access that training straight away and you want to get the stuff where you look for training, that's fine. Just don't be doing stuff you don't know how to do, because you know someone might confuse that for someone who
is qualified and is helping. And then if you don't know what you're doing and you make a mistake, and that that could be worse someone. If someone comes in and they're doing triage right, they're saying, who do we need to treat now? Who do we need to treat later? Who can't we help then? And they see you doing that, Okay, that person's covered that. You want to be sure that you're covering what you're doing. So yeah, just make sure you get the training. We're not trying to scare you
into not going to things. Please don't feel afraid. I know it's very easy to feel afraid. That's, of course the goal of you know, most of these people their ass is welded to their gaming chair and they will never actually come into the streets and hurt you. They just stay stuff on Twitter dot com and like, you're fine. But it's very reasonable to be prudent. And certainly this is stuff I have in my TK, I have it in my bag, I have it in most places I go,
and you know, you get used to it. It's fine, and take it a course. And I'm on work trips and I try and leave lots of it with my colleagues who can't access it so easily in other countries. So yeah, I hope that's helpful for people's peace. Yes, yeah, yeah, it is it. It's it's look, I guess just to wrap up, like you are not. I don't watch television really, Hugh Laurie, what's Hugh Lurry's deal house?
Oh house? Yeah?
Or like some other super doctor, right, Like you can't heal everyone. Bad things happen, but there's just peace of mind and trying to do your best to help everyone. And that's relative accessible and not too expensive. I think there's an IPAC fund which gives youse away for free as well, so cool. That's where I'm looking in too. If that's if someone can find that, they can send it to me and I will post it. But yeah, it's a peace of mind and it's it's not too
hard to get that training. So go out there and do that wonderful do it with someone you love, do it, do it for fun, do it with your friend, make a god a date.
Yeah, find someone on yeah, yeah, do it. Let us know how that goes.
Hey, what's your favorite color? So what are you doing this weekend? Wanted to a stop the bleed course. I think that's very.
Sexy into that exactly. Yeah, please don't DM me with potential still please no, no, do not m James, don't do it. But yeah, hopefully that helps people. Wonderful well, James, thank you so much for this awesome information. It's been an absolute pleasure being on the show with you. And we'll post links in the chat or post sorry, post link the chat that we have exactly that that's that's my twitch ship coming through. I will post links in the description of the episode, and yeah, I look forward
to doing this again with you. Yeah, Daniel, talking of your twitch ship, where can people find you?
Twitch?
Shit, They don't need to find me anywhere, but if you want to find me, you can TV slash Twitch dot tv slash DJ Underscore Daniel d A n L. And if you want to come ask me what Robert smells like. I will not ban you, but I will time you out for ten minutes, so you know, just you know, know that I'm happy to have whoever wants to come watch the watch the twitch stream, but I'm not going to answer any weird questions about my coworkers.
As you should be. Thank you Daniel, thank you James or Government. It's it could happen here a podcast where by attempt to do a British accent. It's been overwritten by Robert's Boston accent because I can't get it out of my head. This is the podcast where retreat Britain with the level of respect that it deserves. You're getting You're getting this ship right now, because the entire rest of this episode is going to be unbelievably depressing.
Oh wow, maah, that's such a good accent. I believe you're one of my authentic countrymen.
Wow.
So good to chat to another fellow brit.
With me. With Me is Sophie from Mars, who does many things, including.
Things impressions of Americans, doing impressions of British people, one of my favorite impressions to do.
Oh god, you know this is being recorded, and this is being recorded at like a Geneva convention, crime time for podcasts. So it's it's going great, it's going great. I have I've consumed so much caffeine that I have seen the face of God. Yeah, but Sophie, welcome to the show. And yeah, I wish it was for something that was not this bullshit.
But yeah, this is yeah pretty grim.
Yeah, so okay, so what what what specifically is this bullshit? Right? Yeah, the government of the United Kingdom, despite his reputation is turf Isoland, has been kind of falling behind us in terms of like actual ability to use the state to
discriminate and get trans people killed. And having seen this, reci Sunac was like, oh shit, hold on and has now compelled the British state to take a series of steps that we would include like doing mandatory outing of trans kids to their parents and schools.
Yeah. Well, it's still it's still quite tough islandy, right, because it's like, yeah, this has always been the comparison between British transphobia and American transphobia. Your your guys are all like, you're going to Hell and I'm gonna make sure you personally get there with my shotgun, and our guys are like, bloody hell, that's not right. Did you have a license for that gender? You really shouldn't be walking around in public without proper registration for all of
your genders. You're carrying their ma'am, and that's you know, like, so in that regard, we're still very much tough Island like that you've got you've got bills coming through that like invalidate other existing No, I mean I'm talking aboutself in suckles already, because even this legislation also invalidates existing legislation because bigots can't write laws that make any sense whatsoever. But yeah, I think, I mean, this is still using
like my numbing bureaucracy to enforce horrible bigotry. So in that, in that sense, it's still very on brand for the British government.
Yeah, so okay, do you do can we can we walk to a little bit of like what specifically it does, because this is one of the this is this is my one of the canones that I've been on is that most of like ninety nine percent of the people who cover this stuff are really really bad at actually like saying what a law says, because oh god, yeah sure, sure sure.
So the first thing is about changing names, uniforms, and what pronouns are used for a student. They they're making it so that this can't be done with without parental consent. It should also be said that all of this is guidance, like that they're putting out guidance to schools and so when I said earlier, this is in conflict with existing legislation, Like we have the Equalities Act, which should actually protect against basically everything that they've said here.
They don't care.
You know, if the government puts out guidance, it's it's as ever with fascism, Like it's they're deplaying stochastic methods. They want to embolden people who would already be looking for any excuse to be shipped to trans kids, to be able to do it, even though it would actually break the law. So yeah, that's so that's my thing.
So my understanding of this is it's it's it's closer to the kind of thing you get in the US, where like sometimes you have a state attorney general will just like issue an interpretation of a ruling. So it's it's like that is my my understanding of it.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, So it's guidance. All the guidance that they've gone out would actually break the Equalities Act.
They don't care.
So point one, no pronoun or uniform change without parental consent. Point two, no hiding any changes from parents. So if a kid is like, hey, you singular member of staff that I trust, the only adults that I know who I feel like could possibly keep me safe. My parents are violently queophobic, and I think that if I come out to them, I might be in danger. Please help me.
The guidance is telling them no. You should definitely tell those horrible parents no matter how dangerous, how much of a danger the child is telling you that they're in. Head can say no to protect other kids. Now, this is a really interesting point that we'll have to come back to because head masters in the UK there's a whole class thing going on there that we should talk about. But yeah, so the head teacher of the school can say no to protect other kids. So explicitly, the justification
is that kids being out. It's not it's not even the justification that a kid coming out as trans would be dangerous to them because they might get bullied. It's it's that it could be dangerous to other kids. So it's to protect them from I guess the social contagion of transit agenda Jesus Christ and any any kids uh gender questioning or just generally like any kid transit anyway basically is just being kicked out of competitive sports and schools.
Yeah, which is interesting because it's a kind of like smorgas Board of a bunch of the different Well, okay, the the preventing kids from coming out because it might cause other kids to come out thing is like a I think that's genuinely new. I've never seen that one before. But the rest of it, I think it's like like, you know, there, there's there's there's been you know, we've talked about this on the show, like there's been legislation in the US that has forced uh, that has forced
schools to out kids. Yeah. Yeah, and you know obviously the the like sports bands are you know, it's sort of like a pretty kind of like ERG like ERG transphobic panic thing. Yeah.
Absolutely, all the biological advantage and all of this nonsense, which is like, you know, you could argue as one thing when you're talking about like a bodybuilder who has been who has been a bodybuilder for like twenty years and is now just starting to take estrogen and blah blah blah about biological advantage, But when you're talking about like two twelve year olds, Yeah, it's like, where's the biolog who I don't I don't know which one I'm betting on.
You know, this is the thing, like I think I think there's a kind of like specific like like I think I think part of the reason it's worked in the US was like there's a very specific kind of sports brain that Americans have, where like like like there are like people people are really obsessed with high school
sports and also college sports. Yeah, and I think I think that played a role in part of like how how this played out, because people were like, you know, people are people are like very very concerned about this, Like why why on earth they care about college football? Is right? Well, I mean not inn conta, but like like high school football. It's like this is like yeah, why sure, okay, whatever, We've built like a national cult around watching like seventeen year olds deshoy each other's brains.
But gym really like you.
Like what wild like and it's like the only the only sports we really we really care about a rugby and football or you know, our football, and like, I just it should be said, there's also a kind of creepy,
uh cult of youth thing going on without football. It's like we don't we don't have the you know, grown men screaming and crying watching watching high schoolers and and university level athletes go against each other, but like there are you know, it's seen as you know, equivalent to the draft, as like opportunity for working class kids to
get out of out of their situation. Is like maybe you'll be a football star, like opportunities to yeah, exactly, like opportunities to prove that you're the next Ronaldo or whatever all through our society. But yeah, like I don't know, it would be like a lot of a lot of English people suddenly very invested in lots of sports they never cared about before, when like football has been the only one they care about their entire lives, and they're like, yeah,
what about the biological differences? And I'm like, my guy, the place that this would impact you is in is in professional football. And even supposing a trans woman were to get up into like the professional competitive level of
women's football. You don't watch the women's football, but even if you did, like there are already constantly, like in the analysis of games, people are constantly like, you know, this player is really fast or whatever, so we know that the the opposing team is going to make a
concerted effort to try and block them off. Specifically, I'm just waiting for when like a women's football team at the professional level, like brings a trans woman on as a deliberate, like deliberate distraction so that she can like look like she's going to try and get the ball, half of the opposing team try to block her off and then and then the rest of the team just go and score a goal.
No, I, I.
I want to take like take it back to say something I've been meaning to say, which is quite serious, Like you and I are both like trans, but not
like we want out as as trans as kids. And I do think it's really important to acknowledge that when we're having conversations about trans kids, because in my exposure to trans kids and also like chatting with trans people I know who were out as kids, like there's just a repeated frustration over and over again of just like even the most well meaning adults who are trying to talk about this, like and I'm saying that that may will be us, are still like still talking for these ds,
and so it's like it's an incredibly dispossessing and paralyzing position. And like, obviously children are like one of the groups in our society with absolutely the least agency and constantly talked over and had decisions made for them. And you can make arguments about how just that is, but like we all recognize that, like, there are plenty of cases where kids should be able to tell adults like what's going on with them, and adults ignore them. And then
this is a really clear case of that. And so I have been talking to in preparation for coming on to do this interview. I've been talking to people I know who were kids who are out and also talking to people I know who work with with trans kids, just so that like just so that what I'm presenting is not just like my kind of my broad feelings about how it might be, you know, yeah, but yeah,
I want to talk about that. The head teachers thing, head teachers can can say no to protect other kids is a really fascinating part of this.
Sorry, can we can we back what actually is? So what actually is a head teacher because we don't have this in.
That thing that is exactly what I'm trying to Yeah, yeah, okay, So, how well let me ask this, how does someone become a principle in your system?
I actually that's a good question. I think that they get hired by the school basically, but it's I don't know if they're that that actually is a good question. I feel like I shouldn't.
Can a teacher become a principle because here, like again in the in the framework of youth liberation, in the same way as we might say a cab, you know, you might point out that, like, you know, teachers people put in a systemic position to often like deny kids agency, but it's not quite as as like clear cut as a cab, right, Like, like teachers are fucking great, and like big up teachers unions, and like tons of teachers are both like massively underpaid and feeling the cost of
living crisis really hard, and also pretty based people. Head teachers, on the other hand, a different school of fish entirely, Like they have a they have different unions, they have a different social life, they have a different class characteristic because like head teachers are paid so much more than teachers,
and yeah, they're also like administrative. I don't know if like head teachers need to have even ever actually taught, but they're generally like really comfortable, very well paid, and they are there to to yeah, do a lot of administrative stuff and often like they're quite political, so specifically giving the power to say no to whether a kid
comes out or not to the head teacher. Is like that feels very very deliberate on the other part of the Tory government, right, because like that's not it's not like your your your form tutor or you know, your whichever preferred teacher that you have lots of classes with your English teacher or whatever, like someone who's sees you maybe most days.
It's this.
It's this person who's like a figure ahead to the school, who has no personal relationship to you whatsoever, is being given this this uh yeah, this ability to just deny your transition, and that's utterly, utterly fucked And like I'm saying, it's a very conscious like class move, class based move on the in this guidance, I.
Think, Yeah, I mean, it really seems like they had to, you know, it seems like a thing where the Tory government realized they couldn't rely just on regular teachers to act as gender bureaucrats. They had to they had to find someone who is like even like who has just no social attachment or social relations to like the actual
kid who's trying to transition. Yeah, totally, you know, like it it is genuinely, Like I don't know, most like as as like as shit as teachers can be, like generally speaking, like your teacher does not want to torture their kids. That's like, that's not that's not that's that's usually not a thing that they want to do.
And I and I and I don't want to leave it on said, Like I've been through the UK education system, I've encountered some teachers who definitely just want to torture their kids. Like but like again, most teachers are actually pretty good and like genuinely concerned with not only like what the safeguarding like rules say and what the protocols are, but like actually the moral duty of taking care of kids and making sure they're actually safe. Now that still
can can can have problems. So like one person that I talked to, one of my friends, who was out when she was really quite young, she had like a a teaching assistant. So when kids are are like struggling in school and they need extra help with with with with their school work, sometimes like some lessons or topics are deemed as kind of like less necessary for them.
Let's say maybe it's like their religious education lessons or whatever. Right, So they get to skip those ones, and then they go and do like I think you might call them remedial classes or whatever, like they're doing extra extra stuff to make sure that they supper classes they can get the basic Yeah, but it's within the school hours all I'm saying. So it's like they'll sort of say, you don't need to bother with this one. We'll go and do these classes instead to make sure that you can
get like a passing grade in English. And so that's a person like a kid like that will have like the most developed a relationship too, because firstly, they are in every class that they sit through, and they also do special classes that is just one and one between
the kid and that teaching assistant. So my friend said that she had like she'd come out to this teaching assistant, and the TA made it really clear that like she would have to try like sort of escalate this, like she would have to try to talk to more people about this situation and probably talk to her parents, And because of that, she sort of took it back, stopped talking about it, wouldn't go any further with it, and didn't come out to more people for a really long
like for years after that point, and so you know, like you can already see that's an impact like that this will have more directly because that's like that situation is being described as the ideal outcome basically in some
of this guidance. But I think also like it's important to acknowledge that we can imagine a best case scenario in my friend's story, like from however long ago, that maybe that Ta talks to other teachers who understand, and those teachers automatically think, like, are her parents going to be understanding? Can we approach this in a way that gives her space, Can we get her in touch with maybe like people who do youth work with queer kids, to like give her a venue to discuss this stuff
without having to alert her parents. Now, so and we can imagine that best case scenario. I mean, like the impact immediately, like I said, was that she didn't come out for a long time. But but like that best case scenario is effectively eliminated if like the guidance is just like no, you have to tell the parents. The parents absolutely definitely must know. And I think that the thing as well about like no keeping like not keeping anything secret from parents. Let me just say what I
say no hiding changes from parents. Is I think that, like that's a guidance that's pointing not just towards like the administrative part, like you're saying with what seems more in the jurisdiction of a gender bureaucrat, Like if a kid says, I'd like to change my name on the class register, but like if a teacher knows that the kids are using a different name and pronounce with their friends, right anyway, besides all of that, Like again, if we're
imagining that best case scenario, like this thing about the head teacher can decide that their transition would be a danger to other kids, Like that's that's that's so above and beyond, like that's that's the that's the bit of this guidance that I find to be like probably the most the most utterly morally reprehensible is because because I think that a lot of trans kids are already familiar with how the pre existing safeguarding systems could cause them
all these problems. But this is a new thing that's just like on top of all of that stuff. Even if you do have even if you do have support and like things are relatively okay for you, apparently, Yeah, the head teacher can just decide that you're not allowed to and that's that's utterly, utterly insane to me. Have
another friend who was out when he was younger. He knew from a very young age he actually was lucky enough to have supportive parents and so like he was able to come out to people and come out to
his parents. But even with supportive parents like he like that, there was still massive pushback from the school, which is like, you know, again, like it seems utterly ridiculous if you've got both the kids saying very clearly, I know for sure this sort of deal is, and like we have additional hindsight here that he's very happy with himself now and has been, you know, living his authentic life for
you know how many years. But like, but you know, all this support around him at the time, and the and the school still says no, they're just yeah, the head teacher thing is actively pushing that even harder. And I just find that, yeah, just awful. Yeah, you know what else is awful? Living under capitalism and being bombarded with adverts for products and services. But the products and services themselves they're great, Isn't that right?
Mayah.
Yeah. Yeah, I am legally contractually required to not disparage the products and services that support this podcast.
This brought this podcast brought to you by open Gate.
Wow, we're back. Hopefully several more billionaires have been pins take to the bottom of the sea.
Uh yeah, I'm so glad. So many, so many billionaires listened to it could happen here and took that juicy limited time offer to only pay two hundred thousand dollars
for a ticket on the next submersible. Yeah. Like, following up from what I was just saying about my friend who was out when he was a kid and had supportive parents, he also highlighted to me how it impacted his medical transition at the time as well, because a lot of medical systems for a transition, and this is true in the UK, use some degree of like social transition as a requirement to prescribe any kind of medical transition.
And so if you're a kid and you you know for sure this is your deal, and you want to avoid the traumas are going through the wrong puberty, which obviously is just like absolutely horrifying, then you need to be out and have the support of everyone around you, right, and that means like not only you need to be able to evidence like yeah, it's going well at school and not being bullied for being trans at all, which okay, yeah,
like hopefully not. And I have supportive parents, my all my grandparents know as well and they're all on board or whatever. Like, but like if a school can just say no to a kid coming out, that's like that denies such a huge part of the social transition, which will then stop them from being able to medically transition.
And like I'm you know, we.
Maybe sis people need the spelling out, so I'll just say it, like if you can't. So if you can't medically transition, you're less likely to be well accepted in your social transition. So there's a really deliberate like catch twenty two of if you you know, of stopping someone's social transition and therefore stopping their medical transition and therefore right, it's just it's just trying to stop trans people existing altogether.
Yeah, And I mean I think it's sort of particularly grim in the UK system, where you like, it's way harder. Two well, okay, outside of the places where it's been made increasingly legal. In the US, it is way way harder to get, like to just to get Jennifer mccare in the UK, and it requires a lot of bullshit that like you don't have in the US, and it's it's much it's much much more like pathologized, which is kind of insane because it's it's pretty pathologized in the
US too. But the UK is like like has has has cranked up the like gender bureaucracy level to like they they they they found that they found the one that goes to eleven and we're like, fuck this ship when this need this needs like two hundred more dials.
Yeah, it's all it's looking at out looking at our country, you might you might be led to the the the idea that we've been practicing uh, bureaucracy based fascism for hundreds of years already and gotten it down to the precise science. And well that's a that's a conclusion you could draw. Yeah. I was gonna say as well, Like we talked last time, I was on about like why
is the UK like this in general? And I think that it's worth putting this into this puzzle piece, into a broader picture, right, Like we've just had a national story about a woman who is being prosecuted for having an abortion later than the allowed the allowed limits in British law, which is obviously the beginning of the right wing trying to push back on abortion. At the same time, Like a few weeks ago here Americans probably haven't heard about it, but there was a place in London called
the Autonomous, a winter shelter. So this was some anarchists who some of whom I think we've interviewed on Red Planet before, who go kind of place to place and they squat on unoccupied buildings and they turned them into various things. But one thing they've repeatedly done is during winter periods turned them into homeless shelters that they run
as autonomous shelters. And basically it got to the spring and they still hadn't moved out of this place because I mean, there were still homeless people that they wanted to help, and so the Metropolitan Police, London's finest sent down, you know, like dozens of pigs in riot gear to forcibly like evict them. And I just think that like it's really it's just really important to see the premise that like states are aware that they are policing the collapse, right,
will be very familiar to your audience. But I think there's the specific context of Fortress Europe going on with Britain because like, even though Britain has brexited itself out, like we're still we still have a lot of the same concerns in right wing politics that drive the thinking of Fortress Europe, and so a lot of our like
for instance, immigration stuff is increasingly draconian and fascy. And I just think that like putting these three pieces together, we can kind of see a bit of what's going on, like the government actively trying to clamp down on people's bodily autonomy, trying to stop any other kind of gender expression being in place, and also trying to like stop people from doing mutual aid and organizing that will lessen the impact of of the collapse.
Yeah, and well, and I think this is a it's a very deliberate you know, one of the things that I think is very common you know, like across the sort of like broad historical sweep of movements, right is okay, so well, okay, so the the the number one thing you do if when there's a massive social rument going on, you need to stop it that the first the like the sort of like most dramatic thing you do is
you start a war. So for example, like you know, the the American movements of the sixties are immediately followed by the massive attenis ucation of Vietnam. I think, like the most blatant example that I could think of is in two thousand and six in Mexico, you have simultaneously this massive zapatista campaign. You have Omlo like basically declaring it well, there there's a contested election in Ombla like declares him self president even though like technically lost the election.
And then simultaneously, like the city of Wahaka like does an uprising and take control of the city. Wow, and and like and like they they they hold the city for like one hundred days. And basically immediately after the like so the Mexican Army gets deployed and like takes back the city. And immediately after the like the the like, the the the the full on like entrance of the Mexican army into the war on drug starts. And this is like this is you know, this is a sort
of very a very very common social pattern. Right of the way, the the way the way you defeat, you know, I mean just literally like straight up uprisings is by doing like one is, by doing a war. The second thing you can do is you start you you you you you pivot away from the social issues that are like that sort of your mass protesters, your uprisings are about, and you go back to domestic politics and you go
back into social reproduction. You attack them there. So you know, I mean like it like China has a good example of this of like all all of this sort of like discontent that had been boiling around the country revolution and around you know, like like things around like things about gender roles, which was you know, like actually genuinely happening at that time. All of the sort of upheaval
is capped off by the one child policy. Yes, or if you know, I mean we go back to the US for a second, right, we have twenty twenty, we have this massive uprising. Immediately after the uprising, we get all of the anti transhit intensifies, so like just unbelievably enormously right, yeah, and then this this is incredibly deliberate
in a lot of ways. It's it's you know, it's it's it's it's very very concrete attempt to like reassert sort of patriarchal and cist gender control over people over sort of families, over over sort of society writ large.
That was part of my point is that like is how we can see what the what the British state is up to, very very clearly, like they they are trying to create a more rigid control in their population. And you know this is why I mean like calling it turf Island, but like a lot of turfs will pretend that they you know, will fight for abortion rights
or whatever. Actually there was a protest to do with the to do with that abortion case I mentioned the other day, and a bunch of a bunch of like anarchists and like trans people showed up, and there was also some people from Women's Place, who is a tough organization, and like then and so obviously like they were trying to like box them out and be like kiss off,
you don't belong here. And then like a far right like preacher showed up with like anti abortion stuff and a megaphone and trying to like and so obviously like all of the all of the transactivists, the the authentic leftists like started it's like getting in that guy's way and ruining his day and making it so he couldn't do any of his stuff, and obviously the Turfs don't care at all. Like then yeah, they're not there to
actually fight against anything. But you know, especially so when you when you look at that bigger picture, like I say, it's just like if you're looking at the bigger picture, you can tell there is no there there is no divide between like the bodily autonomy of sis women and for that matter, like transmask and non binary people with who are who are as signed female at birth, you know,
and and trans rights. There's no conflict at all. It's it's the state is trying to crack down on bodily autonomy and on gender expression as part of a bigger
project of you know, implementing more authoritarianism. And I don't know, I guess like that there's a feeling I keep on running up against recently, which is just like waiting for the waiting for disparate leftist causes to kind of realize and act like all of this stuff is is one side, you know, Like it's very clear, like because from the state's point of view, as you're saying, like starting a war tightening immigration policies, starting abortion, cracking down on quick people,
Like all of these are, from the state's point of view, methods within methods in their toolbox to achieve one greater goal. And I think that like we need well, I mean to say we need class consciousness would be you know, just like it seems too obvious to say even but like we do, we need we need a consciousness of the fact that, like these issues affect everyone, even if it seems like it doesn't affect you in your everyday life.
You know, if you were a cisht white man who's a self employed adult, utterly libertarian steel man, you don't depend on anyone like, it is still going to affect you because it is the state gaining more power over everybody by doing these things. One thing I want to say also about like the kids who I'd gotten some feedback from, was like there is a big mood among trans kids that like they'd been told that things were
going to be getting better. So like when I said that that story with my friend who had the teaching assistant, she said that for her growing up, it was absolutely nightmarish and the bullying was really intense, and the support with the support from adults was non existent, and then there was a little window where like people started to become more aware of trans people and and from the liberal side and all of the like corporate pink washing and whatever, and it seemed like a broad like culture
of acceptance is being brought in. And now it feels like that's being revoked. But like, you know, I mean how she put it was like she feels like it's just sort of back to normal because like that's what she already grew up with. But like I do, we have to think about it from the point of view of kids who are you know, trying to exist as trans kids right now, Like they have been told by by liberals that like things are getting better, we're aware
of trans people. Now, we're going to fight for trans rites, and it's very clear that like they're not they're not getting better.
You know.
I just want to say, like two, uh, trans kids who might like might hear this, might get any of this sentiment that like I completely I completely feel it myself, Like having come out at the tail end of liberals being like, yeah, we love trannies, sorry, Daniel, Like having come out right at the tail end of that now ship's getting unbelievably bleak, Like I also feel that, and I I guess it's the the the saying about like don't let this, let this radicalize you rather than lead
you to despair, because I from where I'm looking around myself as an adult, you know, a politically active and engaged adult, like there there aren't any answers in the in the like left liberal ooh, we're so multicultural and accepting kind of space. It's that's that's entirely dependent on profit. And you know, Target is emptying all the pride stuff out of their stores. Now, Capital does not care for the queers, but we we can care for each other.
I think it's really important to say that, like, you know, finding queer community is really important, but that's you know, and that's obviously true. But also like queer community being like class conscious and radical and organized are also really really important. And you know, I am seeing that, Like I do want to say, like in covering this like obviously really grim situation that's being enforced like that, we're
not just sitting by and letting it happen. It's just that we are like as leftists, we're always this just like tiny radical fringe for the time being, and so like we're doing what we can. I don't want I just don't want trans kids to feel like there are absolutely no adults who who are in the Venn diagram of like understanding how fucked this is and actually having
a proportional idea of the solutions that are necessary. Now we're not also, unfortunately, like none of us are currently in the third the third ven diagram circle of like having the power to stop it yet, but we're doing everything that we can for the time being, right.
Yeah, Well, and I think there's only thing that's kind of it's important to think about with this too, is like like the reason this is happening it like is is because like there was actually a period of time when we were winning, right, And this is I think particularly true in the US, but I mean I think it's still also true in the UK, right, Like it like the the reason there had to be a backlash like this was because like things weren't you know, for
a brief amount of time getting better. But like even with how bad it is now, even with how bad it's getting, it's it's always like, you know, like being a leftist, it is always hard to sort of make like these kind of like liberal teleological like the moral arc of the universe, like Ben's sour justice arguments. But
we are going to beat them. Yeah, it will. It will take time, It will take an enormous amount of struggle, but we are going to and absolutely, you know, and like and I think something that is very very very important, like this is not hopeless, like it is not. It is simply not. We have already achieved in one things that like our forefathers fucking only dreamed of. Right, yeah, as well we are going out.
Yeah no, I mean I I think I I completely agree, and I want to like double down on what I'm saying about the liberals that, like I the liberal promise that you've been given, of of acceptance within like their framework that like Hillary Clinton will stand up and say she loves trans writes. Yes, that one was a lie, that was fucked. That was bullshit, liberals lie. I hope that you have already figured this out because I believe kids are smart enough to figure this out, because liberals
love to lie. But like, in terms of it getting better, like it will, even if the way that it gets better is that like is that like we break free like is only in breaking free of these systems. Like it's it's I I Am not going to make any promises that like the society that we live in as it is now is going to is going to come back around and like will have trans people treated the way that the gay people were treated in the year
two thousand. It's it's you know that one maybe, but like I'm not holding my breath for it, but like it will get better one way or another. And it may well be the way that get it gets better is that we have like stronger and more radical communities of mutual aid and care, and those those are the spaces where it's like, you know, safe and and good for trans people and possible for us to strive and thrive.
Yeah, And I think, you know, I think this is something that like, I mean, you know, if you look back at sort of how the history of like like if if you look if you look at just like the history of sort of like gay rights, right, like a big part of what that looked like that has been sort of you know, just like wiped from the sort of public memory, right, Like the stuff people remember is you know that the sort of like really flashy activist stuff, But a huge part of what that looked
like was just you know, I have a couch, right you can you can sleep here, Like we will take care of you. We will like we will feed you,
we will take care of you emotionally. And yeah, you know, as as bad as that shit was, they were, you know, as many people as we lost, Like, there are so so many people who are you know, like alive and thriving and you know, living authentic with themselves and are you know, like like genuinely like just like having like having a good time because that's because yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's my liver reality right now. I have so many friends in the quick community who are housing insecure or you know, who don't have jobs or whatever, and like we have each other. Like I think I got a this. This butcher I've been dating went to an event for like working class butchers the other day. She came back with some pins and she was like, do you want
any of these? And I picked up this one that says we are dykes and all we have is each other because like that is like in the like dyke community that I'm in, Like that's so incredibly true, and we have each other's backs. And like, yeah, like it will continue to be true that we're taking care of each other. I guess it's like it's been already for
me for years now. The thing to get angry about is how many people we will lose in the meantime, because like if I if you were if you were gay in nineteen seventy nine or whatever, right and you were about to go into the into the AIDS pandemic, like it just you may you may even then have had a sense, like I think a lot of people didn't, but like, you know, we we have hindsight to know that like things turned out quote unquote okay in the end, but like so many people were lost in the meantime.
And for me, that's the thing I'm angry about is just like how tedious this liberal bullshit is of enacting this like staged farce of like, uh, scapegoating bigotry in order to like control the population, you know, in order
to divide the working class with with this bigotry. And then like at some point we'll we'll will we will move past it and things will be more chill, and like trans people will not be the ones with the with the crosshairs on us either be either because we have abolished and smashed the crosshairs or simply because they've moved on. And I'm I'm just angry about how many people will be lost in the mean time.
Yeahs, And I think I Gues said something we should circle back two in terms of sort of the immediate school regulations is like, you know, okay, so the people who are making these laws know this, but like a lot of the trans people who are killed are killed by their parents. That is a that is a very very common way for trans people to die. You come out to your parents and your parents kill you, and
that is fucking bleak as ship. And you know, and again like like these these these these people know this, like there's there is a there's recently a recording of Rishi su Nak just like like just you know, okay. So the thing about sort of you know, this has been changing in the US now because we've gotten to a point where like right when people can just like say slurs and it's you know, public publicly acceptable.
But for like for like a long time, you like say slaws and Daniel bleeps them. That's fucking crazy to me, you know, I'm look at the censorship I'm dealing with is what I'm saying. You know, I I say Tranny, I say Fagot, I say Dike, and Daniel's there just ruling with an eye and fist.
What's that?
What's up with that?
It would be very funny if it just none, if this was censored at all, just like no. Yeah, but like like you know, there there there's a recording of like just like actually saying the ship like like I like actually just saying like the really sort of overt anti transship that he believes in private. Yeah, and like yeah, like that that that's like these people like want to hurt us? Like that is that is that there's something that's incredibly clear based on both their sort of what
they say in private and what they do in public. Yeah, and you know, fuck them. Yeah, Barry Hunk in the submarine, Uh, get it, get it, get in the fucking contraption.
God's be its number submarine and and critical support to Comrade Occa. We will we will deal with with sinec. I'm speaking on behalf of the ocean. Yeah, I don't know, I don't I I don't know what to say about it, because again, like I was not out as trans as a kid. I don't want to give like empty assurances to people who are going through something that I did not go through, that we didn't did not go through.
But I do want to say that like as for and it gets better, like we care for each other, and we like we we will continue to have each other's backs. I've been reading a lot of I've been reading Homo Sakea by Georgio Aganmbin for a little while now about the like the class of people like whichever in whatever society you're talking about, like class of people who are treated as the exception from the model of the state, like the people who know who are treated
like it wouldn't matter if someone killed them. And you know, it's it's obviously hitting close to home, because that's that's the point of the book, right And I don't know, it's it's given me a lot of a lot of pause for thought over this kind of stuff.
That like we have.
We have each other.
It does it does immediately give you a perspective that invalidates all of the all of the apparatus of the state, because it's all like, wow, that's the nice world you got over there. I'm just not part of it. I'm just not welcome in it. But it's a but the bit where I can say it's okay is we have our own world.
And like, and it fucking rips by the way it does.
It whips incredibly fucking hard. It might be like irresponsible to discuss in too much detail, but it does work. Actually, but like, yeah, like as much as like kind of explicitly intentionally like separatist arguments are frowned upon, and I think for good reason, like having each other's backs when when the rest of society doesn't, is is necessary and it is what we because it's necessary. It is what we're doing.
Yeah.
Well, and I will say too, like, you know, as as as much as there are a lot of SIS people who suck, there are a lot of SIS people who will have your back and who will fight for you.
And yep, yeah and like and that and that, and I think I think part of like, I think I think part of the what what this stuff is about to write like is like part part part of the culture of fear and the culture of terror that all of this stuff is supposed to like is supposed to sort of bring it to being, is to make it harder for you know of like like there's a sort of obvious one of like, Okay, you want to you want to force trans people like back into the closet,
you want to wipe away with the existence. But simultaneously, like it is also trying to isolate trans people from CIS people who will support them. Sure, and it's effective at that, right, but simultaneously like actually working together, we are unstoppable. And that's the reason they're doing all of this shit. Yes, yes, they have because they have to make sure it doesn't happen.
Yeah, and I think as well, like it might be this is on one side of it might feel like the uniquely queer side of the divide and conquer experience, because like when we say there are so many more of us than there are of them, we're talking about the working class, or we're talking about human beings around the planet as opposed to the ruling class, or we're talking about like people of color as opposed to white
people or whatever. But like the but for queer people, it's like we're very conscious that we're actually, yeah, factually a minority of the population. But like but yeah, me is right, Like there are there are sis people who care. There there are says people who authentically care and authentically
like the very least want to offer support. And one thing that I'd say we're working on is like showing SIS people the avenues because the channels of support that they can go through because when yeah, because like yeah that that is the thing about the CIS ally is they they may they may, they may care with their entire bleeding heart, but they they they're not gonna come up with They're usually not going to come up with
the way to help themselves. And they so they often need to be pointed like big neon flashing sign, here's how you help, Here's how you go to that.
You got to you have to guide them, You have to guide the missile of the book proletariat interaction.
Yeah yeah, yeah, to that effect in lieu of just telling your audience to uh, you know, form bonds of solidarity and mutual able with the quicker community in the UK, which like, guys, please you can check out the Good Law Project in the UK. They do a lot of really important legal work, have already been doing a lot of important like legal battles to try to turn back this tired of anti trans legislation and court rulings and so on, and they they accept donations to to like
specifically to their fund that relates to trans cases. So like you can, if you're a SIS ally and listening to this and you have some spare cash, you can go look up the Good Law Project and donate to help the legal fight at least, because again, like this guidance is actually against the law as it stands. So I don't know that the Good Law Project has announced a fight to stop it yet, but I imagine that
they will do something of some kind sometime soon. And yeah, I mean more support to them will only help.
Yeah, And speaking of more support, where can people find you?
Well, I'm Sophie from OZ. I have a video essay channel on YouTube. That's my main gig. I have just now nearly finished my project The World is Not Ending, which is about go figure the climate collapse and what is going to happen to us over the next hundred years as a planet surprise, not just total extinction, spoiler warning, working class revolt. And so it's a oh thanks bit. So it's a great time to join my Patreon because this project I've been working on for such a such
a long time is nearly done. I also stream on Twitch at Sophie Underscore, FRM Underscore Mars. But speaking of Twitch, I think the thing that appeals to your audience the most besides that project will be my show Red Planet, which I do every Sunday a pm two eleven pm UK time on twitch dot tv slash Red Planet Live. It's a commy round table where we have four very based hosts, usually but not always, talking to some based guests who are organizers and activists doing cool stuff to
make the world a better place. For example, this week and so I don't know when this episode's coming out, but this week, as we're recording it, we're going to have Michael laufer On who helps teaches people how to make myth of pristone and miss Aprostel, the at home abortion medications for people in places where it's illegal. So that's the kind of stuff you can expect on Red Planet. Check out Red Plant. It's it's cool.
Yeah, I think this will be out next like Wednesday or something cool.
But then yeah, then that episode will be up on Spotify and yeah youtubel, I've yeah.
Yeah, this has been it can happen here. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at happen here pod. I guess you can find me on Twitter while I'm still around at HR three, or just find the Ice Must be Destroyed person. Uh yeah, good, go go go go, go into the world and make life hell for transferbes and the British and American governments.
Just support support working class, engage in mutual I blah, pipeline.
Don't like it. There's the door could happen here. It's the show where we hate McDonald's. I'm your host, be a long professional McDonald's hater, and with me to talk about hating McDonald's is Mira, who's a freelance journalist, and you need an organizer. Mira, Welcome to the show.
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Yeah, so okay, So specifically, there are lots of the hating McDonald's is like an ancient anarchist tradition. I think I'm actually not sure how well it is known today, but I'm about eighty percent sure that the tradition of breaking Starbucks windows was actually originally like a it was actually originally a thing about breaking like it came from like a bunch of campaigns I think it definitely in France.
I think also in Mexico that like anytime a Starbucks, Starbucks, Jesus Christ, anytiving McDonald's would open up, everyone would immediately start breaking the windows.
That's the only proper way to handle on McDonald's.
And yeah, professional, but the reason we're talking about McDonald's is that, Yeah, you tried to organize in McDonald's union, which is I guess the other thing you could do with the McDonald's other than lighting it on fire, which is maybe you could, Oh, I guess, I guess there are those people in France who took it over and turned it into like a food co op or something. But a third thing you can do with it, discovered a third A third thing to do with the McDonald's.
Let's hit the towers. Yeah, but yeah, I wanted to talk about I guess what you know, Okay, I wanted to use Yeah, so you've written a very good piece about this in Strange Matters called by mcunion that is really good, and I wanted to talk about sort of the piece, the sort of nitty gritty aspect of like what it's like to organize a union, and also just about McDonald's because Jesus Christ, good.
Lord, No, I have so much to talk about, so more than happy too.
Yeah, so I guess, okay, I think I think we should start with just the sort of McDonald's miss of it all. I wanted to start with just talking a bit about what it's actually like to work on a McDonald's because I, well, okay, a, I feel like it's not actually universal experience anymore, for like people who have worked at a fast food restaurant, and b I think people who it's it's the thing you blought out of
your collective memory very quickly because it sucked. But yeah, yeah, so like, okay, so what what is it actually like when you you show up to your shift? So McDonald's was my first job, and it was a hell of
an introduction. Yes, the moment you would come in, you would be most days bombarded with constant orders on the screen because they had these little screens both in the front and back drill areas that like showed all the orders they had, and like a good sixty seventy percent at the time I came in, people would just be swamped with orders. They'd be running around being like, oh, thank god, you hear we need someone to get on right now, and it's like you don't even get a
moment to breathe. Like, as you're standing there waiting to clock in on their punching machine, you're just like, oh, dear God, I'm gonna have a fucking terrible time. And as you're running around, you know, cooking everything after you clock in, you're getting streamed at by your bosses right by you because they're like, oh, no, customer complained because there was too many pickles on their sandwich.
And then you'll hear someone yelling from the drive through window on top of that, and then you might have people at the front counter. This is before proven, so McDonald's still had front counters when people would come in. I don't know if every McDonald's does, but everyone i've been too since has just closed down internally, and I
envied that. But you would have people yelling from there, and if you were one of the unfortunate that souls who ended up working directly facing the customers and not just cooking, you would be the one getting screamed at by all parties involved. I later worked at a Windy's where I got a taste of that and I walked out three days into March.
Yeah. Stuff sucks. Yeah, And I think that, you know, I think like one of the things I think like compounds this is, you know, okay, I will I will, I will, I will do a theory which is that I think people have a really weird understanding of what it means to have a job on a sort of theoretical level that dates back to a genuinely, very weird period in the twentieth century where people actually had like
stable hours. Yeah, and that's just not how any of this works, right, Like you you know, you like, there is no actual stable amount of hours. You just get you get some number of hours like a week that you're assigned to. But then you know, but this the least to do a thing that we've oh god like, like literally every single field we've talked about unidizing has this problem, which is just understaffing, because why the fuck
would you have enough people to do a job. Would you could have less than enough people to do a job and pave them less.
That That was my experience a McDonald and fast food in general. You would get such inconsistent numbers of hours that you wouldn't know how much money you'd be making in the month, because for all you know, this month, you could be working you know, every regular day, every business day of the week. You could be working only weekends, or you could be like I was after the union got busted spoiler alert, uh, working three hours on Sundays in the mornings. And that's it if they really wanted to.
And there's nothing that outside of a union you can do to prevent them from and outside of you know, niche legal areas where you can maybe push back, you can't really do much if they decide just not to staff you. And there is people working there who they had like full blown kids, families relying on them in
that job. They weren't making much. Pennsylvania minimum wage was seven twenty five and you know they were paying us that, Yeah, and so from what little they could get, they would maybe get like at best a one hundred bucks a week with their hours, unless they were able to get into like a managerial position where it's the only one where you'd be kind of guaranteed ours in the sense that they desperately need you, so they throwing you on whatever.
Beyond that, it's you also don't know the days you're going to work too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This thing I was gonna ask is like, what, like how how much time do you have between finding out you're going to be on a shift and then like being on the shift.
You can have anywhere from several days notice to under twelve hours notice, and there is no way to predict what's going to happen the next week. Is it all depends on when you're going to get staffed. There were points I found out day out when I was going to be working.
Jesus Christ. Yeah yeah, and like this, I mean, this is the thing that like is becoming. This is the way that labor used to work in like the eighteen hundreds, and then you know, it was just sort of like phased out because it turns out this is actually a stunningly inefficient way to actually like like run a business. But you know, we've reached the thing that happened at the end of history. Is it's not the history ended. It's that like capital needing to be efficient ended, and
now they just like do this shit. And it's like, well, okay, so it doesn't matter if this is like a terribly a dificient way to run things. It's you just like it's it's it's it's a mechanism designed to just like absolutely destroyed like the sort of psyches and lives of the people who are doing the thing.
Yeah, that is completely accurate. They do not give a rat's ass about anyone working there. For a second, Everyone working there is completely expendable, even if they're a manager. There's been points people have worked there for like three four months and got promoted to a manager. There's everyone is expendable, and they they make sure you know that too. And how they treat you. You're not treated with any dignity,
with any respect. You're just completely thrown around at their whims and the whims of upper management, you know, the regional managers and the like. And it's it's awful because how they get away with that model is they know there's always going to be some people who are desperate to work at McDonald's, either because they're young and need to get a first job, or they're down on their luck and need to get something to pay the bills.
I've even hitting hard times trying to reapply at McDonald's since working there because I needed to pay the bill. I was in that exact position again, and fairly recently, and so it's it's not a fun place to be, to put it mildly. Yeah, of course they didn't let me work there again because I believe I'm banned from ever working at a McDonald's again.
Yeah, that's it. That's another thing that I think is not that well understood, like loss of companies have basically not even like there are there are people that I know who are blacklisted, like from ship they did dream Occupy, like people like yeah, like like that there these these things. These things suck and if you like, you know, this is I guess one of the sort of issues of doing any kind of organizing is that like if you lose, like stuff can go like very badly for you, which sucks.
But also simultaneously, if you don't organize things we go very badly for you. So it's you know, so it's a double Yeah, yeah, I guess the just one everything I wanted to ask, which I don't know if you know do you do you know if you're if you're uh, if you're McDonald's was a franchise if it was like actually owned by the company.
So yes, it was a franchise. It wasn't done by like the official company in any major sense. I actually met the franchise owner during the course of the union, which was a fun time when we were in the process of getting busted.
Oh boy, yeah, So do you want to explain what a franchise is? And I guess, like how that sort of model works.
Yeah, So most McDonald's out there are franchises, which basically means McDonald's will kind of let independent people buy out their stores and own and manage them in a certain region for a portion of the profits. In the Scranton area, which was where I did the union, they were all owned by one single family who was ultra rich, in part because of the McDonald's and in part because of family inheritances, and these folk they would be the kind of be treated as like the head Honchow's the same
way that CEOs get talked about at most companies. They weren't the CEOs, of course, but like as far as in terms of managing great distrant and area McDonald's went, they were the main ones in charge. Of course, McDonald's corporate always had the final say over everything, but they manage tens of thousands of restaurants across the world, so they don't really get involved in any of the nitty gritty, which is why they kind of let people own these franchises.
Yeah, which I think is really interesting. It's like they've managed to somehow combine like the worst aspects of working for a major corporation with the worst aspects of working for like a small business tyrant. Which it's interesting to you because it's like, I don't know, because this is like one of the weird things about McDonald because like McDonald's McDonald's corporate doesn't make money from Hamburger's. They're basically a real estate company that like sells franchises to people,
but but simultaneous. But that means that like they can do things, like they can force their franchises to do things that are like unprofitable because it doesn't matter to them, Like there's they're still getting paid, Like they're still getting paid their like licensing like franchising fees or whatever, like no matter what sort of like shit is happening there. Yeah, and that's I don't know, it's it strikes me as
like a really interesting. It strikes me as like the exact arrangement that's like the most likely to create a fascist just like because like like you know, you have a group of people like and I think I think it's a good agm with this. This is what like
quote unquote economic anxiety is. Is you have like a you have like you have a sort of middle level of like this, you know, the middle level of person who is a capitalist but is also getting squeezed from the top down like by a by larger corporations and then also is facing bought about pressure from workers. And so their solution to this is just like ruthlessly, like you know, just just like ruthlessly do a fashion them against like everyone who's working for them.
Yeah, you scratch a liberal and the fascist leads. Yeah, it's more true than McDonald's and fast food really than anywhere. Yeah, the mcfascists reign supreme.
So speaking of mcfascists, the products and services these are too. These are two distinct sentences. They are not related. FCC please, actually no, fuck you. The SCC doesn't well no, no, the SCC. The SEC does not regulate us. I think we're actually regulated by the FTC. So fuck the SEC. That's why I could swear on this podcast because they
don't recomplain us. And we're back Okay. So, having having returned to more mcfascism, Yeah, okay, So I guess we should start talking about how the union organizing started and how I guess the sort of immediate mistake that y'all made attempting to get this, to get this off the ground. Yeah, so it.
Started with me. I was the first one there to bring up the concept of reunion because then I was like only seventeen. I was new to anarchism still, and so I was young, green, and eager to get shit done. I still am all the above.
Yeah, but.
I had a few contacts to local IWW people through just the very very faint activist networks that were up there, and by faint, I mean a total of like five people. So I got cut in contact with the IWW guy. I believe. I used the name Mark. Yes, I used the name Mark in the article to protect his anonymity, so I'll just keep consistency. And Mark was the one
who convinced me to take more major steps. He was the one who I talked to and got consultation about it, and he was the one who gave all that initial guidance. And there was a few friends of mine I had there there also not really anarchists. Most of them were just like your soci Dems, but they were They were eager to get something done and help out, so you know,
I can't complain there. And it was like a small core group of us who all wanted to get involved and get this album done, and we had never done anything like this before. Northeast Pennsylvania does have a strong history of unions there, but we were not part of that history initially, and so it ended up going south unfortunately. Pretty it went well at first, but I think some of the main issues we had in hindsight doing things, especially now having more experience union organizing under my belt,
in hindsight, we rushed things way too much. We were trying to get everyone on board. We didn't do sufficient one on one conversations with people, we didn't do sufficient intel gather, and we didn't we relied too much on our technical tools and left too much incrimitating evidence that we trusted too many people with. We didn't really have a strong way of going about it that would have been better to what we were doing.
Yeah, and I guess this comes to one and I think of the main things that you're talking about here and I think is one of the main things about you know, union organizing that like like pretty much no matter who you talk to wright politically, the the things that are important to get a union to work are kind of similar, which is that, Yeah, like it's usually
a very slow process. It's a process of building relationships, and it's a process of figuring out who in your work, well, who in your work pays people sort of trust and respect and like make friends with and figuring out how to sort of how to get them involved in how to get I don't know how how unions are not just sort of like abstract things like they're they're they're they're built of actual like social relationships that you have with another person and another and other gifts and in
the relationships that they have with other people, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, Yeah, I wanted to ask about how, how, okay, when when when you were sort of starting to do this right, how, how were you sort of identifying the people you needed to talk to and what kinds of things were you doing to try to get them involved and try to like map out how the workplace functioned.
So the first people identify were people that I thought I could trust, and the core group of people I had were folk that in regards to the union, I in hindsight, was a trust. We all agreed on the same issues, and we all had the kind of similar more gung ho attitude. I think me definitely the most out of everyone. We fell into a pitfall where I was kind of pushing the union by myself for a bit,
which is definitely easy to fall into. Yeah, But we in terms of identifying the workplace leaders, the natural leaders found there, we mostly relied on conversations with Mark to do that. We talked with him about who worked there.
We gave a brief list of everyone who worked there, and we kind of just pinpointed them the specific people we saw as leaders and left spent that And I mean, as far as basic charting goes, it wasn't terrible, but there is definitely a lot to be desired and it could have been far more fleshed out.
What do you think that would have looked like? Or you know, what does that look like? In sort of like other campaigns that you've run that were like the first one you ever tried to do at.
Seventeen, so charting as I would do it now It should be done from the start before even approaching the first person unless you extremely trust the person and like you are just bonded for life, you know you can't go without them unless you have like really deep trust with the person. Initially, you shouldn't approach anyone of them going into it. You should start off with if you
can reaching out to an IWW REP. But if you can't make a detailed chart of who's in your workplace, what positions they're at, what team they're on, like in terms of if they're on one person's managed area or another person's managed area, you should should figure out who they're close to, who they listen to, relevant demographic information, because you want your unions to be intersectional, and you want to be able to figure out, above all else, whether or not you've had a away from work one
on one with them, and whether or not you've had any talks with them prior about unions and where they might stand on unions. Do you want to document all that? And it doesn't have to be the most detail. You can just do a spreadsheet with it, but it can definitely be a lot to document. And it's it's no joke, it's not something that should be rushed. It's not fun. I you know, there's there's nothing really that's a blast about trying to sit there and be like, ah, yes,
let me fill out paperwork about my workplace employees. But it will come back and save you so many times and give help you formulate strategies for going forward.
And we.
Rush things and talk did things like talking to people on the workplace floor and just said, hey, do you want to do a union? Yeah, and call that a day and said that was one on one and it wasn't.
Yeah, should we explain what one on one like is supposed to be?
Yeah, So one on one is. It doesn't necessarily have to be on one on one, but it should be between at least a union organizer and another person. It could potentially be another more seasoned organizer helping be a more noviced one along with during the one on one.
That could be a thing, But ideally they are just one or two organizers talking to one workplace employee about initially anyway, just a non committal discussion on where what their issues are in the workplace, what grievances they might have, and what their current stances on workplace organizing.
Yeah, Okay, And another think I want to sort of get into is the role of like having having a way to talk to people outside of work and having just sort of a collaborative space where people talk about and I think this is something that like, I don't know, I think this this is you know, this is one of the big things. I think that that this is one of the big things that's changed in the past, you know, maybe like decade and a half or so.
Is that how like the the the actual space in which people talk about a union like tends on to be a physical space anymore. It tends to be sort of either like a signal chat or like a Facebook chat, like a I guess what'sapp technically is owned by Facebook, but yeah, and so yeah, I want to talk a bit about that, and also I guess get into the sort of security problems that you can have with this, because yeah, yeah, there's so that's what we did.
We had a group chat on Facebook Messenger to talk to everyone about the union and everything like that. And there's a lot of pros to having a centralized group chat. Don't get me wrong. It makes an easy way to communicate when you're trying to take actions to other people. It can be helpful to do any last minute coordination needed, It can be useful to make sure everyone's on the same page, but there's also major drawbacks to it. One, as you mentioned, there's big privacy concerns, and we ran
into that during the campaign. If with anything organizing, you're only as secure as your weakest link, And if you have people you do not completely one hundred percent trust in your group chat, someone could leak everything, either wittingly
or unwittingly. In our case it was wittingly, but you very well could have someone who isn't being careful and might show the group chat to someone else who they shouldn't accident And unless everyone's on the same page about best security practices, you're not going to get very far with having that. And for another, doing any form of
organizing over texts and a major capacity is really hard. Yeah, there's so many issues with like making sure people are understanding their tone and undercommunicating properly and just meeting each other on the same level that you really can't do over text like you can do in person. If a text medium should, in my view, only be there to facilitate interactions that are later done at best in person, but if not, they can be done through like video calls.
Yeah, And like as much as zoom can be really annoying, like, it is way more productive than trying to do things two text. Like yeah, just like having just like just like having a weekly zoom meeting. You know, like like there there's there's a lot of like cases where you like, you know, you literally physically can't like be in the same place, and you know, and if if that's that's the thing you're dealing with, like, yeah, doing video calls and stuff like that makes it way way easier, for sure.
It It is a way better medium to do anything union related with. And it's also much easier to bond with people over video chat too, And that's a huge part of the union is connecting with your other your pillow workers and meeting each other on that same level and bonded over your shared interests, over your share what you desire from union, what you desire from your workplace.
You can't really do that easily anyway over text. I'm sure someone somewhere has done it, but it's not recommended for me anyway.
Okay, Unfortunately, we need to do another thing that's not text, which is ads. You can tell were doing great on the ad pivots here, it's fine. I was I was watching what's his name, the guy the right way shipthead guy who like had a thing with Samantha Bee for a little bit. Glenn Beck. That's the one I was watching Glenn Beck, and I was like, oh no, this guy, this guy is This guy's ad pivot was just racism.
So you know, we could do.
It could happen. Here are our second slogan, better ad pivots than Glenn Beck, and we are back, hopefully. I don't know. Maybe we'll get extremely unlucky and everything will be broken and this will immediately cut to a third ad. But assuming that it doesn't, I wanted to talk a bit awesome so about sort of the kinds of things that are necessary to get people to believe that a union can work, because that's you know, like or organization isn't just sort of a purely like it isn't just
sort of a purely mechanical thing. It's also about morale, you know, as like, as much as it's about social relationships, about sort of morale, about people believing in the thing. So I wanted to ask, yeah, I guess talk a little bit about what that process is sort of like and what can happen to it.
Yeah, so that's something an issue we ran into and make a union fairly early on, was keeping people motivated for the union and getting people wanting to be involved, because one of the most common things you'll hear when trying to organize the union is people like, oh, I can't afford to lose this job. I have a family to feed, I have built to pay. You'll see people saying they don't want to risk their careers. If you're in a more professional environment, you'll see people just not
wanting to take the risks that could jeopardize them. And it's important when you're kind of trying to address those concerns to meet them where they're at. You're not gonna you can't make those concerns go away because they're real. When you're organizing a union, there is a risk you could get fired and get punished for it. It happened
to me. It comes with the territory. But if you do things safely and you do things right, it's a much safer option than not doing any And that's the main thing you kind of want to talk to people about is detailing their grievances and talking about how nothing's going to change without you. You can't butter up to your bosses and expect them to suddenly turn around on you. The most they'll do is play pretend for a little
bit until things go right back to normal. And you kind of want to talk to people about also why it's more beneficial to them to just stick with the union because their strength is in numbers, and that's something that a lot of regular folk can kind of lose, is that they're not going to be an envelope. When someone's viewing getting involved, a lot of the time they're thinking, oh, if I get involved, I'm going to get fired. They're
not thinking about the strengthen numbers. Sure, you just you yourself as the only one pushing for change in a workplace, Yeah, there's a decent chance you'll get fired. But if you have a whole crew of ten people all who are essential running the operations pushing for change, suddenly you're going
to see things shifting a much different way. And so building that solidarity among people is important, and I think is the I want to say, the absolute best way, because there isn't an absolute best way to handle those concerns, but it's definitely a way that can be effective if done right.
Yeah, and I guess, okay, I guess I guess we should go into how it sort of came apart. Yeah, because unfortunately, you know, and this I think is the thing that is depressing but true, which is that a lot of union like statistic well, actually I don't have the numbers. I'm not gonna I'm not going to actually say that, but a lot of union campaigns don't work. And you know, sometimes it's because like something bad happens, Sometimes because it's just you know, stuff happens out of
your control. Sometimes it's I don't know, like a pande starts. But yeah, I was talked about what happened here and how to sort of avoid that because it sucks.
So there's a lot of things that can be a downfall in the union. In the case of McDonald's, our main downfall, there was a lot of you know, little things we did wrong that didn't help at all that definitely just made matters worse in the end. But the straw that broke the camel's back was not being careful with who we trusted and Dan, as I referred to in the article, he was the one that caused the
penultimate constructure of it. COVID contributed heavily, but I feel like if it weren't for Dan, the union could have had still a fighting chance in spite of COVID. Now, if it worked for COVID, I think the union also could have stuck around the mixture of external factors and internal did the downfall. But in terms of things we could have actively prevented, Dan was the main thing that we could have done. Approached way differently. We could have
approached handling new people in a much better light. We should have had a centralized group being the ones with all the communications everything, and let people prove their trust to the union over time by doing taxes for it and just by building relationships with people and fostering stuff that's already there. Because Dan was two faced, we all thought he was our friend, which is why we thought we could trust him. But he was in it just to try and get some benefits for him, which is
why he snitched. He thought maybe he would get, you know, some type of promotion or something he didn't, which side note, it doesn't help you to snitch on your union. If anyone out there is thinking of doing it, you're just going to screw yourself and everyone else over and nobody likes to snitch. Yeah, but we should have been a lot more cautious with how we approached people and shouldn't have just been doing things for the sake of doing them.
Like we shouldn't have been approaching people inside the workplace. We shouldn't have been inviting everyone and everyone to all our confidential group chats. We should have been cautious of who we were around and what we were saying around people, and how we were going about it. That's the core of it. I mean, it's.
Recklessness, yeah, And I mean I think, like you know, obviously it is not good if the exist, like if if the existence of your union a bunch of your stuff gets leaked, like this is not necessarily fatal, like I've I've been involved in campaigns where like that's happened and we want anyways, but it could definitely be. It's like, you know, especially like especially early on in the process, and especially like the more precarious stuff is uh it, Yeah,
it's not great. I can get yeah pretty bad pretty quickly.
You know.
I guess the thing that I wanted to sort of ask about was like, Okay, so historically up until the last I mean I think was was was Burgerville the first like modern fast food union. I think it might have been. It was either or yeah, it was one
of the two. Up up until like really the last like like I think, like post like twenty fifteen twenty sixteen, fast food has been really really difficult to organize, and a lot of a lot of unions either just didn't try or did these kind of like weird PR stunt campaigns that were you know, like Fight fifteen attached things where it's like, wow, we're not actually really trying to get a union, we're trying to like get PR stuff
for Fight fifteen. But this is I don't know, this is the thing I think it's interesting about the idew about the idea. This is the thing that's interesting about the industrial workers of the world specifically, is that they've actually like gone in and seriously attempted to do it, and they sort of finally broke through it a couple of places, and you know this this McDonald's campaign didn't work.
But what was kind of interesting to me about it is like I don't know, like how kind of I don't know if normal is the right word of a campaign it was, but it's it looks a lot like I don't know, it looked like it looks a lot like campaigns that I've been involved in that were like
not in the fast food industry. And now I guess I was wondering a bit about, like, to what extent were the sort of tactics shaped by like the very specific, weird conditions of fast food, and to what extent it was just sort of like the stuff you'd use in any workplace.
So a lot of our base model was just stuff you'd use in any workplace. Because at the time we're doing this, I think the only fast food unions that were around were like Jimmy John's and Burbertville. I think those are the only two that had any publicity. This was before all the major Starbucks campaigns.
Yeah, that's all pretty recent.
Yeah, And so we didn't have much of a playbook for how to approach things in a fast food environment. Specifically, a lot of what we were actually emulated the model on was factory environments and things like that, because there is somewhat of a similarity of having in both between fast food and factories. With factories and both fast food, you have a kind of assembly line model, you know, crank out or crank out work, crank out work, get things out at a rapid pace, and stick to your job.
Maybe do it a little bit of clean up now and then, but you stick to what you're doing, and you're kind of isolated from other stations a bit. You have some overlap, but only in so far as your job will allow, but you might be able to talk to each other and you shared break areas. That kind
of structure informed how we approached it. By us, what we tried to do was talk to people we didn't have external contacts with in areas that were away from cameras, in areas that were away from other people who might be able to hear. But there is better ways of doing it, and I think other campaigns benefited out. They're likely benefited from having more seasoned organizers at the core of it, because that's also at least for me and
my experience with it. Something that didn't help us was having someone who with no real experience doing something at the forefront of that. I'm not to say that someone of no experience can't do amazing things. There's countless examples of unions that were ran by people with no experience at all who's just jumped right into it and did amazing jobs. But it's important to get a diversity of people with different walks of life at the core of it,
people with different perspectives. So many different people involved at the core as a kind of central organizing committee can do you wonders with a union. Because we had just a few young left leaning people, a few young left leaning white people, most of which were male presenting. I wasn't out as trans there, so I was presenting as masculine. The other people I was with, they were all CIS men, with one exception, two exceptions. Sorry, my memory is a
little on the fits. But we needed more people with different perspectives in there. We needed more, and there was plenty to be found in the workplace, but we just we neglected to include them in the core organizing the committee. And I think that's something that could really benefit unions and probably is a major strength of a lot of the successful ones is having a diverse main primary group
of central organizers. I don't want to say central organizers, more like core organizers, because the solidarity union model isn't like hierarchical, but just a central group of people involved that seek to do the main leg work.
Yeah, and you know, I mean this has been I think like one of the things that made the like the Starbucks campaign's work was like they well with with Starbucks can tape specifically, it was a lot of like find the queerest person in the workplace to start talking to them. But having the core group of people working on things being as diverse as possible is good both in like an immediate practical sense and it is sort of like long term to chiefe sense and the like
faster that happens, the better. Yeah, Okay, do you do you have anything else that you from this that you think people should know about?
I would say, if you can get external help from a union, if you've never done it before, and even if you having someone to balance ideas off of can wonders. There's a lot of fun with the IWW that are more than willing to offer helping hand to people trying to get started on a union campaign. All you got to do is reach out and ask, and I'm sure there will be someone in your local who's willing to help.
But if even if there's not, you can probably get someone to help you more remotely too, And even just a little bit of guidance can go a long way.
Yeah, Union good, McDonald's bad. Be careful while you're organizing, and yeah, be strategic inspired about it. Well, okay, do you want people to find you first? And if so where? Yeah?
I can be found over unfortunately for now, on Twitter, at my magazine, also on Mastodon, much more preferably, and those are the main places I'm at. If you want to reach me to, my email is found on my Twitter and masked it on my relating at gmail dot com. It's the best way to get hold of me.
Yeah.
Well we'll put a link to the strange meta article in the in the description so you can read that to you because it's great. Yeah, Mirror, thank you so much for joining But I was gonna say us, but I guess thank you so much for joining me. Uh yeah, it was it was great talking to you. It was fuck McDonald's.
Thank you so much for having Yeah, it was really great being here. Been a huge fan of this podcast for a while, so I was like when when I first heard about potentially being on here. I was stoked and also yeah, fuck McDonald's.
Yeah, I guess, Yeah, this has been the podcast that you're listening to. You can find us that happen here pod on Twitter and Instagram. You can find us the rest of the stuff that people do at cools on media. I guess, I guess. I actually I have not plugged the do show that's been happening. There'll be a couple of episodes out by the time we do this. But Coolson has done a show with Jake Canahan called Sad Oligarchs that's about the Russian oligarchs who've been mysteriously dieinggue
over the past, like as the start of the Ukraine. Yeah, probably only getting more relevant as whatever fucking bullshit is happening there right now plays out. I don't know, but by the time this goes up, you'll probably have a better idea of what happened or didn't happen. But yeah, go listen to that. Yeah, and go start a union in your workplace or alternately, light light light something on fire legally not the place something campfires, Explorers, we could make this. We have the technology.
Union smores.
Best kind, welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about it. It being bad things happening here here being you know, wherever you are. We're talking specifically about wherever you are. I'm Robert Evans, one of the hosts of this podcast, and with me today is a guy I have a lot of admiration for probably my favorite YouTube documentarian, which I guess would be the fastest way to sum up who you are and what you do, Dan Olsen from the channel Folding Ideas.
Dan, Hi, Hi, keep doing, I'm doing well. Thanks for thanks for inviting me.
Yeah.
Now, Dan, you and I have like a topic of shared interest to discuss. But the first thing I wanted to talk about is your your name on the internet is a is foldable human?
Yeah.
I don't feel like I could fold you very well.
No, Okay, So back in high school, I used to be like I was a really small guy, Like I was a really skinny guy.
Huh.
And you remember the you remember all the ads from the nineties for exercise equipment.
I do remember some of that. Yeah.
So the tagline that they always used for like the as scene on TV exercise equipment was that it folds for easy storage.
Ah and being being dumb ass kids.
You know, it's like one person in our friend group like has a car, but there's like seven of us, and so someone's got to ride in the trunk. And it's like, well, Dan gets to ride in the trunk, Like we're going to stick Dan in the trunk because he folds for easy storage.
Because I was a small guy and so.
It so I don't know why. When I would like busy Eric like trying to brand the channel, like, you know, a decade ago, I was like, I had this phrase that I was using with students that I was interacting with, was.
Like, well, let's unfold that idea, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, but.
Like that was kind of like on my mind. So I was like, ah, well, we'll like call the channel like unfolding ideas. Unfolding didn't really like just sound good. So it's like, oh, folding ideas, uh and then well esthetic parallel to that, you know, foldable human. I don't know it, it just it it came to me and it sounded good, and it was nowhere on the internet. There was like no overlaps. So I'm like, all right, interesting, We're good to go. SEO locked in.
That's an example of a thing that I you know, we're talking, We're gonna be talking a lot about stuff that's unsettling about our modern era and how the Internet has sort of altered human dynamics. The things that I think is kind of neat about it is its ability to kind of preserve an amber aspects of you from
the deep past. Like I have one of my emails, like my personal email is a Gmail that I got back when you had to get an invite to get a Gmail, right like right when Gmail first became a thing. And it's like, I'm not going to say it on here because then my email will get bombarded with shit. But like it's it's like a stupid joke that doesn't really make any sense. And every time I give it to some of their like why is that your email? Because I was like twelve, Like don't I don't even
remember why I set this thing. It's just this like moment of something I thought was funny when I was pre pubescent, frozen in amber forever, because that's the Internet does that in little ways for each of us.
I definitely abandoned my original something Awful account because some likes like you know what, maybe not that user name anymore?
Yeah, yeah, so you are so Dan if people are not familiar with you, and I'm gonna guess a significant chunk of our listenership is kind of one of the biggest touchstones for you recently, was you put out a video about the NFT craze that a lot of people have credited with helping to kill it, me among them. It's a wonderful, wonderful video. Line go up was the
actual title line. Yeah, line goes up, very good breakdown of how they work, why it was a con And you've been doing you know, I think kind of the first really the first time I became aware of you was you did a Flat Earth documentary, which is is very good.
You know.
I did an article recently on like AI kids books that was partly inspired by an investigation you did into these kind of audible slash kindle grifters, the Mickelson Twins. So you do that kind of thing, right, like you Bay, You kind of run across things that are troubling or confusing to you, and then you investigate them to a pretty impressive extent and put together very clear, uh video investigations.
You know.
That's that's I think, in a nutshell, probably pretty accurate.
Yeah, that's kind of where the where the channels ended up. Yeah, it's it's been a few different things over over the years, but that's kind of the phase that it's in right now. Is this kind of like I don't know, like yeah, documentarian.
Place.
Yeah, and you know, a lot of your stuff seems to focus on basically like the topic of kind of online grifter culture and and sort of its intersection with like different weird cultic milieuse like there's kind of a cross especially like with NFT's a real big crossover betwixt the two, right, Like, it's kind of I think a lot of crypto culture was kind of this intersection between
old school cons and kind of internet cult dynamics. So I wanted to talk today about the problem of scam culture in the United States because I, by any sort of like objective reckoning, I've been looking into this. There are more scams and more fraud than right now in the United States than at any point previously, and basically from all sides, like phone scams are at the highest
rate they've ever been. People are getting like, like I think the statistic I've got is that in March twenty one, I think is kind of when that peaked at like four point nine billion robocall scams, which is like like just kind of an outrageous increase over where it was a few years ago. The rate of fraud against elderly people seems to be in an all time high, at
least in terms of dollar amount. One of kind of the unsettling quotes that I came across when I was looking into the degree to which old people are being scammed, and it's often through various email scams that are kind of based on getting trust or fright them that like someone else is trying to scam them and so they need to give in from it. Anyway, the thing that the quote that I came across was a regulator talking about this and being like, yeah, it's not it's no
longer like smaller even medium dollar cons. People are stealing generational wealth, which was really interesting to me. And then there's kind of like phishing attacks are at pretty close to an all time high. I mean, there's a I'll send you there's a graph that I came across in a what was the source on this? In a comparateech article that I mean, it's just a straight line up from January twenty twenty nine to like the end of
twenty twenty two. And so I'm I'm I'm kind of looking at all this, and there's a couple of different causes, right, Like some of the stuff the SEC did under ajit PI gets blamed for why it's gotten even worse with with phone scams, although that's not the whole story. AI powered tools have been a big part of like why f attacks have increased so much. But then like you've got like the degree to which the elderly are being conned, which is like this kind of at this intersection of
a few different things. How much more online old people are today than they were, you know, ten to fifteen years ago.
For population bubbles, yes, you know, multi valent dynamics.
Yeah, but kind of the commonality is that like scams are all around, like people, we're all kind of being assaulted by scams.
I mean the time I just I just grabbed my phone and like of my last like fifteen text messages.
Maybe uh it's like.
Your pickup is available a couple like three with you know, four with actual friends, and then uh interact you just received an e Interact transfer high long time no talk. Just got your money, Okay, we'll send soon. Three hundred and eighty nine can now be routed to your institutions. Submit why the Canada Revenue Agency has sent you money? Your verification code for visa transfer is. And it's like
it's like just constant, constant. I hadn't even because like, I'm not going to be shocked at all if I get a phishing text message during this conversation.
Yeah, like between my email and like my text messages or just phone calls, right, I get every day I get two or three calls from scam likely, you know, Yeah, my good friend scam Likely. Yeah, my old buddy, he's always got always got something cooking. But yeah, it's and I this kind of like I started focusing on this more a couple of months ago because you know, I had vaguely noticed. Boy, it's just like nothing but fucking
scams coming into me through my phone these days. And then a couple of months ago, I got a phone call from my bank and it was one of those things like everyone else my cell phone lets me know when like a call is from scam likely or when it's from like you know, and it had the name of my bank on there. It was the right number, you know, So I pick it up and a human being.
Is on the line and they're like, is this you know, Robert Evans And I'm like yeah, And then they're like, we've seen some like fraudulent activity on your account.
Can we ask you a couple questions? And that is I've gotten that call before. Legitimately, you know, it's not a weird thing for your bank to be like, hey, let's talk about these us.
Are you in the country right now? It's like no, I'm I'm in New York. It's like, okay, so we're seeing activity out in New York.
That's you.
Yeah, did you just buy something in Florida? No, I never go to Florida, but uh so yeah so And I didn't actually get to see where they were going with this. Nothing suspicious had happened. But like after they say that, I'm like okay, yeah, like what's what's the charge? And then my phone disconnects right like it's you know again, my where I live, you know, Oregon is the middle
of nowhere, so like sometimes connectivity is not great. So I call them back, you know, and I get on the phone with a person and they're like, yeah, what's what's in to be up? And I'm like, well, you guys called me saying that like that there was some possibly fraudulent activity that we needed to talk about. And the lady on the other end is like, no one here called you. Like I'm looking at your record. I can tell when someone's getting a call. We don't have
any record of that. And I explained what happened, and she like goes back, talks to a supervisor and is like, so that was a scam. They've this is something we've seen more and more lately. They've they're able now to actually just spoof our banks and this is my bank is a significant sized institution. They're able to spoof our phone number now and so you can't tell through the caller ID, and like it was this whole thing where like obviously I know, don't give certain things over the phone,
even if they're pretending to be your bank. We never got to that point where anything was actually compromised, but it was just like, well, shit, like what are you Like? That's this is now well beyond a thing where like you're getting called and someone's offering you, you know, to make a bunch of money. You know, holding a Nigerian
princess wealth or something. If you sit in your account, this is your bank calls you and your phone tells you that it's your bank, and a human being who sounds just like the bank teller like it's it's gotten so and I think kind of the broad Obviously, each of these individual vectors by which scamming has increased is a worthy story and a separate story in a lot of ways, but they also come together in this like, well, you know, it's not it's not like weird at this
point to note that everybody seems angrier, and everybody seems paranoid, and you hear more stories about like people opening fire on folks pulling into their driveway to turn around, and there's you know that story. Obviously there's guns and stuff that's also connected to that. But I wonder how much of the paranoia and anger is at least exacerbated by the fact that everyone is fighting off a million scammers at all times.
Yeah, I think that's a good observation, like that, just we're seeing this erosion of public trust in in reality.
Yeah, And and some of that is like.
Deliberate and political, uh, And a lot of it is just coming from like the fact that technology has enabled spam in in unprecedented new vectors and the fact that you can like that you can automate bombarding people with.
Noise. Uh is is just kind of it's eaten away at all of us.
Because it's like, how do I how do I trust anything? I mean so like and this is the thing is it's like, Okay, so I've been I've been keyed into this and thus paranoid for like a decade now. So if I get a message that's like, you know, like that from my bank, if it comes in text, then it's like I don't interact with the original thing that it came from. I then go like on the website. It's like all right, I like call my bank to to to inquire about it. Like never you know, it's
like never communicate through the channel that you're first contacted in. Yeah, if you're if you're dealing with your bank, And it's like and it's like, but is that level of paranoia healthy?
And it's like that takes that also takes effort.
That means you have to have the foresight to be like, do not panic see the thing process it consciously go somewhere else, and like, you know, activate a different channel. You know, if they contact you through text, you know, go through like email or or like live chat. If they contact you through email, call them on the phone, not with the phone number that was at the bottom of the email, go to the website.
And it's like, that's effort, that's effort.
I don't even have that much energy in me sometime, and a lot of other people just like absolutely don't. And and that leads to like just exhaustion, vulnerability, you know, all of the things that feed into like paranoia, distrust, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's it's relentless. Like online advertising is basically useless at this point. Oh yeah, because like if you ran, if you ran a legitimate ad, you know, unless you have the money
to run like a real proper you know, basically TV commercial. Yeah, like banner ads. I haven't I've seen like I don't know one legitimate banner ad for like a car company in the last year. Everything else is like a hearing aid scam or you know, liquefy your belly fat using the metaverse.
Yeah, and it's it's this constant, like number one. It's led me to the situation where when I see an ad on social media in particular, but with any sort of like print in online ad, my assumption is it's probably a con right. Yeah, even if it's like oh wow, that's looks nice, well, that company is probably not gonna ship me that shirt right like, or it won't be right like, yeah, it'll.
Be that photo is absolutely not from the company that is running this ad.
Yeah.
You just you assume you distrust as a as a first measure. You see, you see a banner ad, you see the aesthetics of advertising, and the assumption is that it's like, ah, that's gonna you know, that's gonna get me to sign up for some subscription that's going to be buried in like recurring payments that yeah, I will never be able to cancel.
And it's it's interesting because I, I mean, I'm not sure if this has been your experience, but like I can acknowledge I think I morally have to acknowledge like part of my success financially as a creator has been as a result of that.
Because one of the things that we've seen in the the ad market is that text ads ads for print and shit do not work, do not function in any way, shape or form, and a lot of like random inner citt ads don't work well, but creator ads work well, and so there's money in it, right because people listen to like people have a degree of like, Okay, well this is like number one. It's just like the process of consuming a YouTube video or a podcast is different
from an article. But like the ads work better because it doesn't feel the same as like the scrum of shit that like is getting pushed into every conversation you have on Twitter.
A human that I can confirm existence has at least taken a look at this, like this is not at least like not a complete con or whatever, right, yeah, or if it is, then like then the host has also has also been kind of like by whatever, Like it.
Ends up, yeah, we're in this together. Like it ends up being at least like a little.
Bit sort of sort of distant distanced from that, you know, like the freakin' you know, by by a square foot of land in Scotland and become a lord and that whole thing is like a scam being run out of China. Yeah, yeah, I mean one of the one of the kind of like weird ironies. For me is it's like, okay, so line goes up, came out, Well, the crypto ecosystem was
in its like biggest ad blitz ever. You know, they had the Super Bowl ads coming up just like a month later actually like weeks like weeks afterwards, and so you know, like the vast majority of the like uh mideral ads that ran on that video were crypto dot Com, were ftx, were binance, and and the ad rates that they were paying, like the CPM that they were paying to run on crypto relevant videos was insane. Yeah, it was like it was like twenty eleven all over again.
Twenty eleven was the only good time to be in digital content creation. There's like a lot that's unsettling about that. I think one of the things that is like most frustrated to me is the degree to which it's meant
that we've we've gone backwards. Like there was this people who like study tech and kind of the way socialization around big tech works talk about this thing called the trow of disappointment, right, which is when you get a new technology, everybody we're in like the hype phase for like AI right now, right yeah, and then at a certain point it becomes clear which aspects of the hype were right, you know, the degree to which the technology is capable of doing things that kind of the evangelists
were claiming, and to which extent the hype was wrong right in what areas is the tech always going to fall short? And that's called like the trow of disappointment when people start to reel and then you know things kind of are supposed to level after that's dot com
is not in fact magic, Yeah, exactly exactly. You can't just keep shoveling money into this shit forever and in the hopes of exponential returns, or as a consumer, like at a point, I can remember the time when phones were exciting and I was, as especially as a journalist, like really interested every new year at like what new things they're capable of. And then after a couple of years it was like, well, every phone is like there's no difference. Now there's no excitement in getting a new phone.
It's just like, well this my old phone is broken,
so I need a new phone. But like I'm not like Wow, the new capabilities of this device, but I feel like there's another I don't even I don't really know what to call it, but there's also this kind of thing where we the Internet helps to create, or is the method through which is disseminated a new labor saving device, and then the scams reach such a density that the amount of labor you're able to save is minimal, right, Like that's that's I feel like there's like a that's
at least one of the things that I've noticed, especially with like digital communication, with just communication in general. Right, my smartphone made it easier to stay in touch all the time, and now my smartphone it obviously I still carry the damn thing everywhere, but like my text messages are mostly scams, and my emails are mostly scams, and most of the calls that I get are scams.
Like yeah, yeah, I've actually been finding myself drifting back towards email as a communication medium just because the spam filters are better, you know, mature and sophisticated and for the most part they work. Yeah, like they're yeah, it's like I can actually people can actually reach me by email.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
And you know, like there's there's a whole tech like really kind of the big thing is there's this whole
technological element to it. And you know when you when you sort of pitched the idea of this conversation with the first two places, my brain went to where John Romulus Brinkley, the goat testicle doctor, yes, yes, yes, and pioneer of new media radio, and of course and Marshall mccluan, Yeah, you know, like those those were the those were the two things that my brain immediately was like, this is this is sort of like relevant to it, because like Brinkley was, he was a pioneer of radio.
He he absolutely.
Advanced sort of the format of like what radio could be and how you could use radio to not just extract money from people, but get them onto your side such that after they have given you their money, like they're they're not just they're not just your your victims, You're you're not just rolling into town and selling them some some snake oil and then like skid daddling as fast as possible, you have made them into your fans,
into your followers. And you know the way that he did that by connecting his scam to like a sense of identity. You know that he wasn't just this fake doctor. He was also effectively a pastor.
Yeah, yeah, people who had defend it after there was no longer any chance of them, like after it had been sort of proven that the thing that he was promising was not real, right like once there was no more. It's almost like you know that play The Music Man, Yeah yeah, if you if you at home or not, Like I'm not a huge musical theater guy, that's a
pretty famous play. But like the basic idea is this guy tells everyone come, this con man comes to town, tells everyone he's gonna make like a big band and raises money for it, and his plan is to like take the money and run. It's kind of what the Monoail Sketch and The Simpsons is based on to a significant extent. And if I'm remembering correctly, I shouldn't have brought this up, maybe because I'm actually not that knowledgeable
about musical theater. But my recollection of the way it goes is that like he falls in lover some shit and feels bad, and you know, they wind up he winds up becoming not a con man, but like I think the modern version of that is he just he gets people to like adopt as a religion. The idea that these fucking trombones and uniforms and tubes and shit
are on the way. He and like, you know, then they attack the local newspaper and string a journalist up in the center of town for telling them that there were ten years into this city, hasn't started a bay anyway, whatever, Yeah, yeah, and so so.
The other mccluan, you know, his famous postulate, the medium is the message, which remains a radical observation to this day, is just that it's this assertion that the medium itself is more important than any given message on it, or even the like the the combined weight of the individual messages. Now, I think in some regards mccluan kind of went like overboard with that because he said that it's like content doesn't matter at all, and it's like, ah, I think
content matters. But the point still stands that like the medium itself, the like the invention of radio, the invention of television, the invention of the Internet, the invention of social media had a bigger, like has had a bigger impact than any given thing on it, because that's the thing that ultimately we warp our lives around, that we restructure our homes around, we restructure our physical environment around we restructure how we spend our days like that our
time usage gets warped around the medium itself, and thus the medium becomes the portal for information to travel through.
Absolutely and it also I mean, I think there's an extent to which that is true of kind of the
way parasocial dynamics impact things like political belief. I think there are a lot of people, and I think there are a lot of things that people a lot of, especially when it comes to like radical politics, that people adopt because somebody who they had come to already like expresses those politics, right, and so something that maybe never would have gotten any purchase with them suddenly is able to get purchase with them because like a dude that
they or a lady that they had a parasocial relationship express this kind of stuff. And it just it's not that it like hacks their brain. It's not that like people are you know, little robots. It's that, uh, this is kind of the way influence works. It's the same reason why like your you like, people often wind up believing similar things to their parents, or similar things to their friends group. You know, if your friends are all saying, like you know, on the positive end of things. If
you're if you grow up like like I did. I don't know about your high school, but if.
You are like I like that. I was just thinking the same thing.
Like my vocabulary in high school was yeah, yeah, there is there's a slur that starts with F that was like every third word out of not just my mouth, but everyone I knew.
No.
The movie super Bad captures this to a significant degree of fidelity. To be honest, that's just the way shit was. And like the early aughts, and then you know, the people I hung around with, suddenly they were more people who were openly queer. And suddenly people weren't talking that way, and I stopped talking that way. It's just how people are.
Yeah, just from like somebody that I admired being like, hey, yeah, I don't say that. I don't think that's cool. Oh that is kind of fucked up.
Yeah, And then you know, and it's it's not an like yeah, I can I can go to my the subreddit for my show and see people being like yeah, I started getting interested in like anarchist politics and history and stuff because of something Robert said. And I don't think that's bad, because I think anarchist's history and politics are useful even if you're not an anarchist, right, it's valuable to understand that history. It's often undertold. But this
is the same dynamic. This thing which has benefited me and to some extent benefited some of the ideas that I think are are should be more widely known. This is also why there's more nazis, right, like it's it's it's that's every where, which way and so so mccluan.
You get these new mediums, you get the Internet, you get the subdivisions of the Internet, like you get social media, you get email, you get you know, instant messaging and whatnot. And because those technologies have this gravitational effect around them that alters the trajectory of how we structure our lives, they become because they are potent, because they are valuable
communication vectors. They become prime targets for grift. And the thing is is that all of these technologies that have accelerated communication, you know, people have long been pointing out like the negative impacts of social media and just like the the effect on like self esteem, self perception of just being exposed to other people's curated idealized version of
themselves so constantly. You know, it's like it's like that's already you know, impactful in potentially negative ways, and that's when you're dealing with like real people. And but then you add on to that that it's like, oh, you go on Instagram and like you can be following a bot and not even know it. You know, you're you're getting you know, and the algorithm is going to float
this stuff. And so particularly if you're looking down these like these addictive infinite scroll feeds, you know, you don't have the filter of pre interaction to to gauge those things.
So like so like I follow you on Twitter, and I know that if I see, like, oh, Robert Evans has retweeted this thing, that it's like okay, so like he's taken a look at it and and it's been through like the filter, the filter of his brain, and so I can probably just like, you know, take my trust in that thing up like one notch, right, But if I'm just like scrolling down the like the algorithmically he rated like this is what our computer has determined is similar to things that.
You have already looked at. It's it's just it's so much more fraught.
But there's it's really easy to be complacent and just be like, oh, I trust this thing, I trust this platform. And that's where we get into the trow of disappointment. Is ye this like I trust these algorithm. These algorithms do a really good job of like, oh, I watched Dan and so the YouTube algorithm introduced me to like a bunch.
Of other really good creators.
Cool.
Uh oops, I watched one video on flat Earth and now my my recommends are full of like COVID denihialism and anti maskers and you know, the Trucker movement and and all of these other like wedges to just sort of slowly rot my brain.
Yeah, it's like it it's it's like kind of the way our parents told us, or Dare or whatever told us drugs worked, you know when we were little kids, where someone's like, oh, you want some pot. Here's some straight up heroin, right, Like you want some of it
is too, like you want some crack cocaine? No, and I it is you know you were talking about, like, Yeah, you see you follow someone and you see them share something, and if they're a trusted source for you, you know, it bumps it up a notch and even that, you know, that's the way it like it works for me as well. But there's a degree to which I find it like problematic, especially because like we all fuck around on the internet too.
I had a thing go crazy viral recently where like someone someone posted an obviously photoshopped image of like a control, like a Logitech controller at the bottom of the of the sea and was like, look the controllers survive, and I, like, I shared it to make a joke, right, And the joke was that, like, well, the joke was that, like, well, the controller we're going to find out was one of the more functional things about that terrible sub and that
was and I posted underneath it this obviously this is not a real image, guys. But like then I saw like I wound up finding it went. The post that I did of it went so viral that like it wound up like screen captain in some different Reddit communities for people to talk about. And they it was only the first post, not the one where I was like, obviously this is fake, and like it was a joke, you know, it was it was a it was a it was a ship post.
We were Banton online.
Yeah yeah, yeah. But also I'm like, I wonder how many people now think that literally there's a Logitech controller that they found at the bottom of the sea because of that? What is what are the ethics now of like making a making a jib a jape as like somebody who's got like a following, like where does that come into? And like I don't know, and I don't I'm certainly not like clear on it because I seem to be incapable of not shit posting. I spent too
much time on something awful as well. But it's so it's so hard.
To give up. I miss it. I miss the days when I could just make like tasteless jokes on on on Twitter and you know, a couple hundred people would see them and go like that's funny. Uh.
And now it's like, ah, if if I'm a little too ironic, someone's gonna be like, oh crap, are are you like that happened?
It's like, no, no, that did not happen. Not happened. This is this is fake. I am. I am telling you lies. For it was a bit, but it was a bit.
I was doing a bit, but no, and that's like you know Something Awful, which is kind of the the the digit It's like the oh crap, now I've forgotten a very basic science team, you know, the big, the big puddle of boiling goop. That life came out of the primori. It's the primordial, primordial of digital culture. That's what Something Awful was.
It was a forum website that gave birth in various ways, some direct and some indirect, to four Chan, to Reddit, to Twitter culture, you know, to all of these different to anonymous, to all of these different like things have a you can trace a lineage back to Something Awful. And the motto of that website, as written by the terrible person who founded it, was the Internet makes you stupid.
And I.
At the time what that kind of meant was. And if you're younger, or if you just weren't very online in the late nineties early two thousands, you may not remember this long period, but there was a fairly long period where the default assumption in regular society was whatever happens online doesn't matter, right, like, it can't matter.
It's probably fraudulent, it's almost certainly like made up. You can't you can't trust anything online and real.
People are not on the internet, right, Like it's kids, it's nerds, but like, you know, guys who run banks aren't online. You know, Like the idea that the richest man in the world would spend all of his time shit posting was absurd, Like, so.
He really should be busier than he had surfably, is he?
Certainly it seems like it, although I guess so, shit, I I if I'm being fair, But yeah, it's there's this, uh, this degree to which digital culture is still very much a huge chunk of it. Like we all want it
to not matter. We all want a place where we can just shit post and bullshit because shit posting and bullshitting comes out of like the very same impulses that like determine a lot of how we interact with like our friends, right, you know, we all need some times where you can just sit down, have a couple of beers or whatever, and like say shit with your with your buds, you know, and it's not it's not being recorded, it's not going up any everywhere forever. You can just
kind of like talk. This is the it's a it's a field almost. Social experimentation is a huge part of maturity of growing up becoming a person. Uh, and I think we all get kind of there. There's a degree of like the accessibility of the Internet that makes that impossible to entirely get over, even though it is demonstrably untrue.
What happens on the Internet matters quite a lot, and you can have a real significant you can influence your own life in very negative ways by saying the wrong thing on the Internet at the wrong time.
Yeah.
I mean lots of people have observed just this fact that it's like on Reddit, you can you're not on Reddit, I mean on Reddit too, but you know, on Twitter, like once, you know, once a month, Twitter elects some ten follower anime profile pick with who with with a single tasteless joke and makes it the full crim of reality.
Yeah, And it's like that's a and the thing, I don't think.
This is actually that far off topic, just because like it's this warping of reality, this warping of like what is real, what is trustworthy, what are the like impacts of things, And the fact that like you know, ten follower account can become can become international news, Yeah, has to sit alongside the endless bombardment of dick pills and global leaders, Like I had this joke that I was trying to formulate over the weekend of like World War two with Twitter, where it's like, you know, just a
joke hinging on the idea that some like follower bought would observe this like, ah, it's like, you know, two posts in a row, Like it's like the USSR has
rolled into Berlin, Stalin has unfriended the president. I hope this doesn't mean anything, you know that it's like that you have, like you have international politics happening in the same space as fake international politics, as the same space as just like this endless bombardment of you know, of curated reality, fictionalized reality, unreality and spam, and no one knows what's real anymore, no one knows what to trust, and the instinct and a lot of people is to
just give up trying to parse the difference. And that makes us like increasingly vulnerable.
Yeah, And I think a big part of what's what's kind of at the core of the problem here is is what you've said here makes us vulnerable. The degree to which this can be weaponized is really significant. Like the you know, one of the things that we saw that I think is kind of low key a significant moment in sort of info conflict. Shit is this last
this weekend? Last weekend from you know what we're talking now, there was a mutiny by the Wagner mercenary forces in Ukraine and Southern Russia against the Russian government, or at least that's what it appears to have been now, right, this is Russia. A lot of this is really weird. So I'm not going to say we don't we certainly don't know entirely like what happened there, like what's going on there? But a couple of things happened very quickly.
For one, folks on the right, and there were also a lot of kind of like shit had left people who adopted this too, decided that liberals were cheering on the head of Wagner Evgeny Pregoshin because like they believed he was a reformer and that like they'd all thought this guy, who was like objectively a piece of shit and a fascist is like they're cheering him on because they hate Putin so much and they've convinced themselves that he's,
you know, going to fix Russia. And he's like, no, no, I didn't see that, Like look I love calling people out when they have shitty takes, specifically on this specific war, because I've been covering it since twenty fourteen. But like, I didn't see that, and none of the people talking about how liberals were doing this provided any evidence of it. And it happens all the time, right Sometimes people will like take a post that has like thirty likes and be like, this is what the left is saying. But
like with this, there was even less. Like I didn't see a single post where someone was like, Pregosion's gonna like fix you know, corruption in Russia or whatever. No one was saying that they just invented that this was going on. And it part of it is that, like, you know, the way Twitter works now made it a lot easier for dis info to spread from this thing.
Like there was very famously a guy who is an absolutely a con artist just started sharing a bunch of videos from there with like bad commentary that was inaccurate, and Elon Musk was like, this is the guy I've.
Come to trust about. You can say Elon Musk, Yeah, we can say Elon Musk. I don't know, it's a problem, Dan, So.
You beat me to Elon Musk because I was going to say this like the con artist was, but then it turns out that he was just retweeting that guy. It's like he got of course he got involved anyway.
Yeah, yeah, And it's the I don't think this the solution was not because we lived, you know, our parents and grandparents lived to the day where most people would be like, well, you know, folks who are in politics maybe need to care about this. I might want to get the broad strokes of it, but like random people, you know, shouldn't be influencing what's going on with these
international relations. And that's how you get shited, like the Dulles brothers carrying out coups all over the world on behalf of the US government, where most Americans are.
Like, what did we do in Guatemala? I didn't know we had guys in Guatemala and that wasn't great. But also this new thing where if you are a personality, if you are in media, then you are obliged to be a part of every big thing that happens everywhere, even if you are demonstrably incompetent at that and everyone is demonstrably incompetent at that.
Past a certain point you know. Yeah, and that's been Oh boy has that. That's been a lot to deal with.
And it going back to the original thing that started this conversation. That's part of how so many of these cons perpetuate is that, like, people are only competent, including famous people, including people with followings in limited areas, and once you get out of your area of competence, it's easy to get fooled. And if there's a bunch of people who trust you because of the things you were right about, then they can very easily get fooled when you get fooled.
One of the big hazards there is that, and this is a long standing observation, is that huckster's con artists are going to be more willing than anyone else to pretend to.
Be up to date on it.
They have no compunction about being It's like, oh, yeah, I know, I'm an expert on submarines and Ukraine and Russia and Belarus.
Yeah, you know.
So they're.
The reason it's a con man is because it's a confidence man. Because they get your confidence because they act confidently and give you reason to give you reason to trust them, and they have no moral compunction about lying to you. Uh, and and they are always going to be fast with the take, faster with the confidence statement, faster with the solution, faster with the with with a call to action to buy their book or dick pills.
Yeah, and it's it's the And often I think part one of the things that's made this all so much harder to catch and so much more durable is that it's it used to be as obvious. You used to be able to see like, Okay, well, this guy's a con man. But like, I'm not a person who can be conned by someone selling diet pills. That's not my vulnerability, so I immediately recognize this guy as a con man. Or I am not a person who can be conned by Christianity stuff because I'm not a Christian, So I'm
I'm not vulnerable to this con man. And now so much the cons are downstream of the following and of the fame, and so a lot of people are getting taken in by conman. And maybe you know the fact that person's putting in a link for their there's supplements,
you know, on every viral post. You don't buy their supplements, but they'll come up with something else for you once they get you in, once you're in the funnel, or even if they never convince you to buy anything, if you're sharing their content, that's bringing more people into the funnel,
you know, and that really wasn't the case. That wasn't the case with you know, you go back ten years talking about like Young Living right, or some other like multi level marketing company where they're selling you know, essential oils with fraudulent health claims. They weren't getting random people to spread their business without paying for shit.
And now you can do that.
If you're a con man and you've already got followers because you bought a bunch and you're you're on the Ukraine, shit, you just grab whatever videos and say whatever about them, you know, frame them in whatever way is likely to get people to share them the most. Then suddenly you gain two thousand, three hundred thousand followers in the space of a night or two, and your ability to scam people and get money out of them has increased several times.
You know, the con is downstream of the of the platform, right, so you know that's you get this guy, maybe he's shilling thing X or thing. Why he's got a couple you know, whatever different con he has, But regular people can be in the in the business of spreading his platform, of increasing his profitability, even if they're not vulnerable to the con. Maybe they're not the kind of person who's ever going to buy weight loss pills or supplements or
whatever kind of thing. But if this guy starts, you know, sharing all of these videos on the fighting in Ukraine, you know, at a moment when it happens to be the opportune moment to do that, and they go crazy viral, well, then that guy is able to triple his following and you know, and have people who are not interested in his con spread his shit, which gets him followers, which brings more traffic to whatever the money generating part of the con is.
Yeah, it's it's all a sales funnel or just anxiety. We have built our society into just like a giant nested series of sales funnels. Yeah, I don't know, Dan, that's bound to be a solid foundation. I don't see if you go wrong. That seems like that will go well for us. How do we get any ideas on how to fix it? Or should we just should we just state a problem and then run away? I mean the easy thing to do would be to restore trust in our public institutions.
You know, if we could.
Have sort of like I don't even want to say, like a unifying cause, but just a sense of common of like shared commonalty and and trust in like our local our local society, you know, strong like not necessarily strong families, but like strong family units constructed or natural or however you want to like define our constructors, but like local with like good infrastructure around us so that our physical spaces are you know, appealing and comfortable to live in and and provide us a sense of like
enrichment and fulfill you know, the easy stuff. Yeah, just just fix infrastructure, fix society, fix media, and uh and then I think we're good.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's that's good. So if we fix everything, then we won't have any more problems. That's great. We're on the same page now. I mean it is really like and this is there's it's also there's also this kind of like problematic element of when you're like, well, we want to like a problem is that there's zero trust in institutions objectively a problem because it means that when say the CDC is like, hey, guys, there's this, there's a plague, we should probably do this, and this
and this. It immediately becomes a culture war thing, and so you can't actually you can't actually confront serious problems the way that you need to be able to confront them. It's just not possible anymore. Likewise, Like, but the other issue is that, like, well, for a significant chunks of the population, there's never been any good reason to trust, you know, the institutions because you know, they're marginalized groups
and whatever. You know, when the institution trust was higher, like the government was fucking them in this way and that way, and yeah, you know that's also so I wonder, like I think there's a significant extent to which we need new concepts of like what an institution is and should be, Like we need It's it's such a ground floor problem because like I don't know, we're never getting
back to a point where Americans trust the CDC. Like that's just not going to happen, you know, Like whatever the way forward is on us having less the overcoming the anti vax anti science shit around medicine, it's not getting everyone to love the CDC. You know, that's just not ever going to happen again.
Yeah.
And part of the complexity here is that it's it's really easy to sort of say that, you know, it's like, Okay, well, the solution is like strong central institutions, and it's like that's not that's not correct at all either, because like I mean, the my go to example for that would be that it's like look at look at the LDS,
look at Mormons. They have a very very strong central institution that provides this like social anchoring point for a lot of their lives, and yet Mormon communities are incredibly vulnerable to affinity fraud and MLM's you know, like Utah Salt Lake is like the locus of MLM culture, and so like it's not the sort of like strong man like, ah, this is why we need strong like you know, strong.
Leaders is is not.
Isn't the answer in its own way, even if it's a very tempting sort of like answer to gravitate towards.
Yeah, that's that's I don't know. I don't actually know.
Part of the problem is that like there are little solutions, right, there are little things that you can do, stuff like advocating for you know, a more functional idea of like more a more functional legal definition of like what an auto dialer is and what counts as like illegally sort of like flooding phone lines with with with cons and stuff or restricting you know, the ability of people like bill collectors and stuff to utilize you know, the phone system in some of the ways that they do, like
the and that can make stuff better. Just like you know, at a certain point, we will develop tools that mitigate some of the harm AI is doing in the con space. Some of its ability to automate and push shit to people at scale will get reduced at a certain point. That will happen, right, because it happens with everything. You know, AI is not unique.
This is the It's it's a.
You've heard the you've heard the red Queen hypothesis, right, Yeah, it's kind of a way of like for it's kind of like a way of looking at evolutionary theory. There's this this point in Alice in Wonderland where you know, the Red Queen kind of like traps Alice in this situation where like she's got to keep running as fast as she can. But it's like a situation like a
conveyor belt sort of situations. No matter how hard she runs, she never gets ahead, right, And that's kind of the way that like the evolutionary arms race works, right, Like you know, one one animal develops a defense against a predator and the predator develops a way around it, and like the the the like, that's kind of the best case scenario for how we adapt to cons I think actually, like technology just moves too fast now for us to to be able to keep up, right, Like we're not
We're not just standing in place. We're consistently following behind and I don't know, I don't know what we do here, uh, I.
Mean yeah, so like there will there will be technol technological solutions to specific manifestations. I mean a big one like in there, like to not to not ban is that you know the uh uh at a, the legal system, the governments, Like governments need to do something about the robocalling and the text messages because they're rendering a vital piece of like synek infrastructure unusable. Yeah, people don't trust their phones anymore, and that's that's bad because it means they stop using it.
You know.
It's like there's yeah, there's very real like consequences and we need to be able to trust that we're talking to people who aren't just trying to get our money.
Yeah, yep, Well, Dan, you got anything you want to plug at the end of this. Here your YouTube channel, Folding Ideas everyone should check out if you have not already.
Yeah, the YouTube channel that's going to be the big one. I'm still on.
I'm on socials at Foldable Human, though I'm trying to wean myself off of them because they're broken and being broken on purpose and they're bad for my soul. So I still I'm addicted, So I still keep coming back, but I'm a lot less active than I used to be.
Oh sorry, I didn't hear you. I was too busy getting anxious because of a thing on Twitter.
No.
Yeah, Dan, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate your thoughts on all of this. I'm looking forward to your next video, your next investigation, whatever that happens to be. Folks should check out. If you haven't, Line goes up your documentary on NFTs. You should check out entrepreneurs is I think what you called your Mickelson
Twins documentary. Yeah, check out everything Dan has done. Thank you, Dan, And that is the episode you can all go home now and deal with the fact that your bank information just got stolen by somebody in Macedonia. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.