It Could Happen Here Weekly 206

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. - Caribbean Roundtable - The Campaign to Bust Chicago’s Only Bookstore Union - What’s Real in the Politics of Population with Andrew - Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #39 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources/Links: Caribbean Roundtable https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/the-caribbeans-zone-of-peace-under-threat-a-conversation-with-david-abdulah/ https://newsday.co.tt/2025/10/20/trinidad-and-tobago-stands-firm-with-us-on-regional-security/ The Campaign to Bust Chicago’s Only Bookstore Union https://www.instagram.com/semcoopbooksellersunion/ Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #39 https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-monitor-polls-24-states-compliance-federal-voting-rights-laws https://x.com/gavinnewsom/status/1981893887460544737?s=46&t=wjiWDhD7WaSqfSfZGiwlSw https://x.com/gavinnewsom/status/1981893887460544737?s=46&t=wjiWDhD7WaSqfSfZGiwlSw https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-asia-trip-japan-10-27-25?post-id=cmh8yni6000053b6nah0oh7ol https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-was-fatally-hit-vehicle-fleeing-ice-virginia-highway-officials-say https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-was-fatally-hit-vehicle-fleeing-ice-virginia-highway-officials-say-rcna239605?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma&taid=68fbe15695a498000159c60c&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/22/california-to-deploy-national-guard-to-support-food-banks-fast-track-funding-as-trumps-shutdown-strips-families-of-food-benefits/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/bay-area-food-banks-california-national-guard/3969875 https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/bay-area-food-banks-california-national-guard/3969875/ https://www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-agents-are-scanning-peoples-faces-on-the-street-to-verify-citizenship/ / https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/bay-area-food-banks-california-national-guard/3969875/ https://www.energy.senate.gov/2025/10/lee-bill-fights-back-against-biden-s-border-chaos-destroying-america-s-parks-and-public-lands https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/0DED04C4-18C7-4C1F-BCE4-DD5B79FB0264 https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/0DED04C4-18C7-4C1F-BCE4-DD5B79FB0264 https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1983273176907043070 https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487571/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487571.94.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487571/gov.uscourts.ilnd.487571.42.0_4.pdf https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/10/28/judge-blasts-border-patrol-boss-greg-bovino-for-violating-excessive-force-order/ https://apnews.com/article/chicago-illinois-bovino-ice-immigration-506c9c661ee75f3e955f346daeed5555 https://x.com/BillMelugin_/status/1982959806173581456 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/3864929/trump-administration-quietly-purges-ice-leaders-in-five-cities-sources/ https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-plans-install-border-patrol-officials-lead-aggressive-migrant-cr-rcna240102 https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/foreignaffairs/others/20251029/korea-welcomes-trump-with-top-level-protocol https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/30/business/fentanyl-tariffs https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5579438-live-updates-trump-xi-meeting-government-shutdown/ https://www.npr.org/2025/10/30/nx-s1-5590754/trump-china-xi-meeting-lowers-tariffs https://centralnews.co.za/trump-becomes-first-us-president-to-receive-south-koreas-highest-honour-golden-crown-and-grand-order-of-mugunghwa-presented-in-historic-ceremony/ https://write.ellipsus.com/edit/aef875a8-f460-429d-af2a-66e197b3000f https://archive.vn/0s7cS https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/29/kat-abughazaleh-conspiracy-indictment-broadview-protests-donald-trump-deportation-campaign See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:05Robert Evans?

  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.

• 2:30Speaker 11

  Hi everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's a very special roundtable podcast today where we're going to discuss the United States' ongoing campaign of bombing small boats in the Caribbean. I'm joined by Michael Palberg, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University and a Fellow at the Center for National Policy. Hi, Michael. Thanks for joining us. Hi, thanks for having me. And Andrew is also here. Listeners of the show will be familiar with Andrew's work. He joins us very often, but in this instance, Andrew is talking as someone who is from Trinidad and Tobago, which of course is very much being impacted by this. Hey, Andrew.

• 3:11Speaker 12

  Hey, what's going on?

• 3:13Speaker 11

  Not much. Well, let's talk about what's going on. Something quite substantial is going on. What's going on is that the United States is carrying out a campaign of drone strikes against small vessels in the Caribbean. As far as we know, there have been seven strikes, at least 32 people have been killed, two people have been detained and then repatriated, and a number of vessels have been struck. The US, it's bringing its war on terrorism logic to the Western Hemisphere, right? It's claiming that it's fighting narco-terrorism, and it's claiming that these boats are, for the most part, carrying Venezuelan nationals

• 3:55Speaker 11

  coming out of Venezuela. We've heard from Colombia that one Colombian national has been killed. The two people who were detained were Ecuadorian and Colombian. Two Trinidadian or Trinidad and Tobago nationals have been killed as well. And this has sparked something of a, well, it was a war of words. Now it seems to be a war of more than that, like tariffs and sanctions. And I believe Colombia has withdrawn their diplomats from DC as of today or yesterday. So it sparks significant political turmoil in the Western Hemisphere. I think we have a really good panel to talk about that. So to begin with, I guess we should

• 4:36Speaker 11

  start, Michael, can you explain the accusation here, right? It's that these people are members of Tren de Agua, or potentially that some other cartels that the Trump administration likes to talk about. We've talked about the prevalence of those groups, but can you explain very briefly what they are and I suppose the function that they have in Venezuela or what they're doing there versus what's being claimed that they're doing?

• 4:59Speaker 13

  Sure, I do research on organized crime in Latin America and Trade de Agua is a real organized criminal group in Venezuela and now all over Latin America. It is a street gang that started out as a prison gang. It does not primarily engage in international drug trafficking, moving large quantities of drugs across national borders or across oceans. It is primarily engaged in human trafficking and extortion rackets and it primarily follows the Venezuelan diaspora, people who have left Venezuela. And at this point, it's an incredible 20% of the population over the last 10 years of Maduro's presidency, so nearly 8 million people.

• 5:43Speaker 13

  Wherever they go and they take advantage of them, they extort them for money, they will also take money to move them across borders, but they're not a cartel in the way that we traditionally think about cartels like the Sinaloa cartel or some of the Colombian cartels that are engaged in international cocaine trafficking. And so it's highly unlikely that if the Trump administration is striking boats that they claim to be vessels transporting cocaine or fentanyl, which is not made in Venezuela, it's primarily made in Mexico using precursor chemicals from China and increasingly is

• 6:26Speaker 13

  actually made in the United States, even though it's a entirely synthetic drug, that's possible. And Venezuela, of course, is not one of the countries where coca is grown and therefore cocaine comes from. If they are indeed striking drug boats, then they probably wouldn't be Trade de Agua. And if they're striking boats with Trade de Agua, they would be most likely striking migrant smuggling vessels, in which case the death count would likely be much higher.

• 6:48Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. So we should talk about the other Caribbean nations now, I guess. Want to talk about Trinidad and Tobago, but we should probably cover Colombia first, right? Because we've seen significant pushback from Petro, President of Colombia. And then we've recently seen the President of the United States accuse Petro, who is again President of Colombia, of being a drug trafficker himself, which is a fairly ludicrous claim on the face of it. But let's talk about Petro because he has some background in opposition to organized crime and drug smuggling, actually, right? Like, he's been in this for a while. Can you explain a little bit of his career and then his recent stances?

• 7:29Speaker 13

  Yeah, so Petro is a mercurial figure in Colombian politics, has been for a long time.

• 7:35Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 13

  He is known for starting his career as a guerrilla with a minor anti-government guerrilla movement called the M19 Movement. Now, this is the movement which, I don't know, maybe Western audiences are familiar with from the Netflix series Narcos for having participated, carried out the Palace of Justice siege at the Colombian Supreme Court, which was a major disaster in which the Colombian military went in guns blazing to rescue hostages, Supreme Court justices and other people just employed in the Palace of Justice. And most everyone died in a fire as a result. Petro was not involved in that operation.

• 8:20Speaker 13

  As far as anyone knows, he was not involved in any violent confrontations. And this organization, unlike the FARC and the ELN, never really got on the cocaine money train and therefore didn't last as long as those other organizations did. They did demobilize, they did turn to peaceful politics. And Petro began his political career at the local level in Bogota and then eventually reached the presidency. So he is someone with a long political career and does have a constituency, does have a base, and he is the first. Truly left wing leader of Colombia, a country that has been famously both ruled by the right and also very closely allied to the US. It's really the US's top ally in Latin

• 9:03Speaker 13

  America, well, in South America at least, specifically on security, given Plan Colombia and the long history of the US giving as much as $10 billion over time to beef up Colombia's counterinsurgency and counter narcotics fights on our behalf.

• 9:22Speaker 11

  Yet to accuse the president of being a drug trafficker is fairly ludicrous. Like, he's been, like, even in his time as a senator, right? He was like, I think he was chairing some, some like investigations or committees that look to drug smuggling, if I remember correctly.

• 9:37Speaker 13

  Yeah. And so I would say Petro has been very critical of the war on drugs approach generally, but he does still inherit this longstanding, deep relationship with the United States. And he's not exactly a full on peace knick when it comes to his own internal security. He did come into office promising what he called total peace, a platform that was meant to put an end to all armed insurgencies in the country by making a deal with the remaining combatant groups, namely the ELN, the dissident far guerrillas, those who did not agree to

• 10:16Speaker 13

  the peace deal signed by Santos in 2016, and what's in different terms called the Clan del Golfo, or the AGC, the Gaetanist Self Defense Forces, but one of the, the largest national narco paramilitary group that descends from the old AUC. And he has failed in that. And talks have broken off with those other armed groups. Colombia has gone back to war against them. The ELN has engaged in some pretty horrific violence, including a suicide car bombing, police barracks, and the dissident FARC as well, taking down a helicopter and

• 10:57Speaker 13

  a drone attack. So there has been a return to fairly high level, you know, armed insurgency in, in Colombia, even if it's nowhere near the level it was from the late 90s and early 2000s.

• 11:08Speaker 11

  Right. Yeah. And all of this is happening in the Caribbean, which is not a, not a vast ocean, right? Like, it's not a, not a massive area of space. And Sandra and I were talking about before we recorded. This has impacted other Caribbean nations, nations which are not the target of the Trump administration's aggression, but nonetheless are being subjected to it. Do you want to talk, Andrew? Trinidad and Tobago is a particularly, I don't know if interesting is the right word. It's not a great situation, right? Because Trinidadian people are being killed, at least two.

• 11:45Speaker 12

  Indeed.

• 11:45Speaker 11

  And the government is apparently completely unconcerned with this.

• 11:51Speaker 12

  Yes. I suppose I should provide some context. So there have been seven strikes to date, and the fifth strike resulted in the deaths of two fishermen from the village of Las Cuevas in Trinidad and Tobago being claimed among the victims. The government in Trinidad and Tobago has not made a statement about it, and the families have not really been contacted or provided any sort of support. Now, for those who are listening, who may not know where Trinidad and Tobago is, it is an independent twin island republic in the Caribbean, and it's actually geographically an extension of South America. There's a gulf that separates it, but it's about 11 kilometers away from Venezuela itself.

• 12:35Speaker 12

  And our elections that took place this year led to the removal of the incumbent party and the return of the United National Congress, the political party led by Kamala Posada Sessa, claiming the government in a sweep landslide, really. But despite that landslide, it wasn't really the result of popular support for the United National Congress. It was more so the lack of support for the previous party, the People's National Movement, which lost, I believe, 200,000 or so of their usual voters, just didn't show up to vote for them this election. So the opposition party came into power.

• 13:18Speaker 12

  When the opposition party was in the opposition, they in many ways appeared to just oppose for opposing sake. Uh they were in power previously from twenty ten to twenty fifteen, but they were voted out due to, among other things, corruption. And since then, the party has further evolved into a sort of personality cult centered around the Campania possessor. And her politics have also evolved in that time to align further and further toward the United States position. She's become something of a Trump stan, you know, she was kind of toeing his line on a lot of issues. She supported Guaido, Juan Guaido, as the president of Venezuela.

• 14:02Speaker 12

  And actually went so far while she was an opposition leader to call on the United States to sanction Trinan Tobago. After the vice president of Venezuela had made a visit to the country to meet with the then prime minister Keith Rowley. So she has made her pro-Washington stance clear for a very long time. And as she's come into power, she has diverted our alignment with our regional bloc, the Caribbean Community, CARICOM. And their call for the Caribbean to remain a zone of peace and emphasized her continued endorsement for the US military's deployment outside of Venezuela's territorial waters, but

• 14:45Speaker 12

  still very much belligerent in her approach to this issue. You know, we have gone from a state that was respected as a non-aligned entity that was able to approach various diplomatic partners from the US to China to the EU to India to Venezuela as well. And we've gone from that sort of diplomatic approach to a very clear pro-West stance that has really alienated us from the rest of the region and really.

• 15:22Speaker 12

  Placed us almost in the position of being a satellite state for US policy. You know, she's been inviting the US military if they want to base their operations out of Trinidad. She has opened our doors to that. She has called for the US to kill them all violently, extraditionally, and stated that she is perfectly aligned with what the US is doing in the region, despite its flagrant violations of international law.

• 15:51Speaker 11

  Yeah, as you said earlier, the them in this instance includes at least at least two of her own citizens.

• 15:58Speaker 12

  Yeah, and I will say that this sort of zone of peace designation for the Caribbean, it is something that I would, this is my personal opinion, consider more of a hopeful ideal rather than a reality. You know, the trafficking that takes place in the region does visit a lot of violence upon people. Is, you know, by no means in reality a zone of peace, even before the US's actions in the region. However, though we may not fit that postcard perfect perception of, you know, tropical paradise, it is still necessary, I think, for us to stand in solidarity as a region,

• 16:41Speaker 12

  to speak with one voice when it comes to these issues, especially as our continued existence depends on the observation of international law, the respect for the UN Charter. As small islands, our safety is really in numbers. And for the Prime Minister to deviate from that solidarity in such a blatant way, it's it's really quite sad. But it shouldn't come as a surprise because there have been efforts by the US to divide CARICOM in the past. During his first term, Trump had pulled some CARICOM countries into the Lima Group,

• 17:21Speaker 12

  which was a US-promoted coalition of right-wing governments that was pushing for regime change in Venezuela. And he's now doing the same thing with trying to get some CARICOM governments to facilitate his actions toward Venezuela. They approached Grenada recently to try and get Grenada's assistance in basing a satellite.

• 17:46Speaker 12

  There on the island, and it's really ironic that they would approach Grenada, which is also quite close to Venezuela, because Grenada was famously one of the countries that the United States invaded in October of nineteen eighty-three.

• 18:00Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think, I know, I say this a lot, but if you've listened to the song Washington Bullets by The Clash, and then you go to the border, you can you can kind of join up all the people from all the countries mentioned there and the outcome of US policy and what that does to migration over time.

• 18:27Speaker 11

  We should talk about the Venezuelan opposition, I guess. Michael, would you give, I've done a pretty in-depth discussion of Venezuela, a place where I have spent a decent amount of time, like I wanted to see that revolution myself when I was like nineteen and I was studying political science, I wanted to see what this this like Pink Tide was about. And I have reported a lot on Venezuelan migrants, people who are new to the show. I guess the series I did for the Darian camp would be where I would point you for my discussion of Venezuela and Venezuelan people. I still speak to people of Venezuela almost every day. But I think people could do, Michael, with like a like a high level overview of the Venezuelan opposition.

• 19:12Speaker 11

  I guess we can talk about the Nobel Prize as well, which despite what Donald Trump is saying was not awarded to him this year.

• 19:18Speaker 13

  Yeah, so the big news is that Maria Corina Machado, who is the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, as we as we know today, was awarded the Nobel Prize, which was a bit of a surprise. And from a very US-centric analysis, one idea that has been floated is that the Nobel Committee didn't want to award Trump the prize, but thought that maybe awarding it to an ally of Trump would be a way to mollify Trump, also possibly to encourage him to take a more peaceful approach at a time that the US is threatening armed intervention in some way in Venezuela, whether that is a counter narcotics operation or more likely a regime

• 19:59Speaker 13

  change operation of some kind, even though it's very unclear how they would get to regime change from blowing up boats or even blowing up people.

• 20:09Speaker 11

  Maybe we should pause and talk about regime change, actually, because I like, it's such a problematic idea, right? We have attempted regime changes. My career for the last several years has been reporting on the United States failed attempts to facilitate regime change all over the world, right? Like, it's not something we're very good at. I don't think that the United States is going to invade Venezuela. Maybe you think differently, but I think we probably agree that the United States is unlikely to do like an Iraq-style invasion of Venezuela. Could you explain like why, I suppose, just for people who, you know, think that that's what's happening in the Caribbean at the moment with this concentration of forces?

• 20:52Speaker 13

  Well, it's unlikely to happen because Venezuela is a very large country and it would take a lot more troops than what are currently deployed, which is approaching 10,000 now, but that's actually, that includes all sorts of logistical support. The actual fighting force, the Marine Expeditionary Unit is actually much smaller. I lived in Panama as a kid and I was not old enough to be there for the invasion, but I lived there some years after that. That's probably the closest analog to this, at least the way that the Trump administration is promoting this, which is to say, a regime change operation that is disguised as a counter narcotics operation. Famously, Noriega was, it was

• 21:32Speaker 13

  not a war, it was an arrest of a foreign leader who was indeed involved in drug trafficking. And we knew that because he was literally a CIA asset whose drug trafficking was being protected as long as he was allied with the US against Cuban-backed rebel groups in Central America. But at some point later, he became too much of embarrassment for the US, was genuinely a brutal guy, pulled off the torture murder of Hugo Espada, all sorts of nasty things. But the big difference is, at that time and when I lived there, the US had multiple military bases in Panama. Panama was the headquarters of the US Southern Command, the Western Hemisphere headquarters of the Pentagon.

• 22:18Speaker 13

  Had thirteen thousand troops already there, ready to go. Uh, I think they doubled that for the invasion, which was officially termed, uh, Operation Just Cause, originally called Operation Bluespoon, but they had to come up with a sexier name. Um, and of course Panama is a tiny country, uh, and Venezuela is twenty times larger than Panama. Yeah, it's fast. So it's, it's very odd. It's obviously, they have deployed many more troops and a much larger fleet than is necessary for a counter narcotics operation. Incidentally, it's the US Coast Guard that carries out Yeah. counter narcotics interdictions and does it very effectively. Um, and incidentally, does it with the cooperation of other countries which

• 22:59Speaker 13

  coordinate intelligence or just simply surveillance of suspicious ships or boats, um, or planes and tip off the, the US Coast Guard. Even the Cuban government does that. In fact, it's the Coast Guard that is the US agency that has the, uh, the best relationships with Cuba. It's oftentimes diplomacy, uh, it's kind of starts with, uh, with the Coast Guard's ties, uh, with Cuba. But anyway, that aside, it doesn't make sense from a counter narcotics standpoint because look, if you actually wanted to break up a cartel, uh, what do you do? I mean, if you are a prosecutor investigator, right? You capture the smugglers, you seize the cargo, the contraband, which is evidence, then you try to flip them up for

• 23:43Speaker 13

  immunity for whoever your real targets are. Maybe your target is Maduro or someone else in the regime. But you can't do that when you kill everyone on the boat. Yeah. Right? And I think the fact that in, I think the latest boat strike, uh, they didn't manage to kill everyone and a couple of them got away. And then the US, rather than charged them with a crime, they just turned them back around. Yeah. And you would think that if the US is so certain that the people on those boats are drug trafficking terrorists, that they want to kill them, then you'd think they would have enough evidence to charge them, to prosecute them, but apparently not. Yeah. So this is all to say, the idea that this is a counter narcotics operation doesn't hold up. Clearly it is meant to be more of a regime change operation, but again, I don't

• 24:28Speaker 13

  See how the one leads to the other. I believe that Trump thinks that if he just saber rattles a little bit and possibly tries some decapitation strikes the way that the US did on Soleimani in Iran, that somehow the regime is going to collapse. And that does not make any sense. Maduro has surrounded himself with security, a lot of it including Cuban advisers. He keeps his whereabouts very secret. Even if somehow they were to drone strike him, it's not as if the regime as a whole would fall because it is an extremely militarized regime that is upheld by the armed forces,

• 25:09Speaker 13

  who are not going to break with him because they have a hand in every lucrative business, both legal and illegal in Venezuela. They're not going to be paid off or not be swayed by a bounty that is currently, what, something like fifty million dollars? I mean, there are people around Maduro that have made upwards of a billion dollars in oil rents. So it's not like you can pay off people to betray him either.

• 25:33Speaker 11

  Yeah, and it's not, nor is it like a cult of personality situation, like certainly not now. Chavez had something of a sort of charismatic leadership role, but Maduro is not that. So let's talk about the opposition in Venezuela in so much as like, I guess, if we go back to the election last year, right? That start with the election and explain to people what happened there and then the subsequent sort of avenues that are now open or the avenues that that opposition is now exploring, if that's okay.

• 26:04Speaker 13

  There was an election, quote unquote, that took place last year. It was brokered largely by the US. The US under the Biden administration was pushing for some kind of negotiations between the opposition and Venezuelan government. They convinced enough people in the opposition to stand for elections under what was called the Barbados Agreement in 2023. And this was meant to be an exchange of partial lifting of the sectoral sanctions that have been in place on Venezuela for a long time, in which the Trump administration, the first The Biden administration really tightened in exchange for the Maduro government agreeing to stand for elections. And those elections happened last year.

• 26:46Speaker 13

  It was pretty clear from pre electoral surveys and from exit polls and from the vote returns that were coming in at the time. That the opposition candidate was going to win by an enormous march, about a thirty five point margin. Uh, the candidate was officially a Maduro Gonzalez, but he was candidate mostly because Muria Correa Machado, the now Nobel Prize laureate. Uh, was barred from running. So she gave her blessing to Gonzalez to be basically her proxy and people were more or less voting for both of them. Uh, so to speak, but both he and her are much more popular Maduro, who by all accounts is an extremely unpopular leader.

• 27:29Speaker 13

  Especially in contrast to, as you said, Hugo Chavez, who, uh, for all his faults, was a genuinely charismatic. Yeah. Uh, leader and, you know, he did stand for elections and win them, you know, pretty convincingly. Incidentally, oil, the price of oil was about a hundred dollars a barrel when he was president and, uh, he was able to just spend a lot on social programs, but that aside. Yeah, that helps. Maduro is pretty, uh, pretty unpopular at this point. He is pretty widely seen as, uh, both a tyrant and also quite incompetent. Yeah. At, uh, managing basic state services. So he was going to lose, uh, unless he stole the election, which he did. The, uh, the C N E, the, uh, the Venezuelan election board announced that he had won with just fifty one percent of the vote, which is. I have to say, I give him credit for being subtle. I expected them to announce that he had won with like ninety nine percent of the vote.

• 28:13Speaker 13

  Yeah, and a sad margin. Yeah, yeah. No one believed it. And I have to say, uh, one of my critiques, uh, of the Biden administration is that I think the whole thing was rather naive. I think they calculated that somehow Maduro would let himself be voted out of office. Uh, Maduro is, we talked about under a bounty, has a bounty on his head. Many people in the U S, politicians in the U S, Republicans in particular, have promised that they're going to send him to jail. So why would someone in that position, you know, give up power? I think, you know, he saw what happened to Gaddafi and he's, you know, he doesn't want to be jailed or killed. Um, and at the same time, the, the stick part of the carrot and stick. Uh, mechanism was that they would simply go back to the sanctions that existed before, which was called a snapback. And these are sanctions that the Venezuelan government

• 28:56Speaker 13

  has weathered for, for many, many years. Uh, so it's not really that much of a disincentive. So anyway, everyone basically admits at this point that he stole the election, but what are you going to do about it? The opposition for its part has taken different approaches to how to confront him, um, and is famously very divided. Uh, the Venezuelan opposition has never really been on the same page. They've never really had an uncontested leader. Uh, Maria Corne Machado is about the closest they have had, but she herself really represents more one wing of the opposition, the more you might say hardline wing. Uh, for a long time, there was a hardline wing, uh, personified by Lopez, and there was a more, I don't know

• 29:39Speaker 13

  if you call it, uh, soft line or liberal or just more willing to talk to the regime wing, led by Capiles, who ran against Maduro in the, in the first election. And it's even within those factions, there are, there are competing personalities. A lot of it really is more personal than ideological. But Maria Corne Machado, she is on the right politically. Um, she, you know, styles herself after Margaret Thatcher. She is also, I, I will give her credit for this, a very good organizer. She has famously kind of gone into communities that have historically voted with the chavista, uh, left and convinced many people to, to leave that coalition. And also to her credit, you know, I would say she is a very brave

• 30:21Speaker 13

  person. Uh, she has remained in the country at a time that many, most opposition leaders, including Emilio Gonzalez, have fled the country. Yeah. And she's been in hiding. She knows that the regime would arrest, if not kill her at its soonest opportunity, yet she still shows up unannounced at, at events, at rallies and, uh, and make speeches. So she has achieved this kind of mythic figure. And this is something that obviously is only going to, to grow with the Nobel Prize. So then the question is, what will this Nobel do? I think that one calculation is that it'll simply keep her alive. You know, it'll be, uh, much harder for Maduro government to kill her um if you know if they would be killing a Nobel laureate. So that may buy her a little bit more time.

• 31:05Speaker 11

  The Hunter and me, I was trying to try to best them on the first one to kill a Nobel laureate, I guess.

• 31:09Speaker 13

  Right, right, yeah, but you know, will it bring peace? I'm not so sure because Mary Gordon Machado has also been very closely allied and supportive of the Trump administration. And her side of the opposition has been encouraging the military strikes uh backing sanctions, even though the sanctions both have done nothing to dislodge Maduro and also contribute to a great deal of suffering uh for the Venezuelan people. And I have to say, look, I'm not Venezuelan, I have no right to give it to Venezuelan opposition advice. I would say that if they have tried multiple elections, you know, at least two of which have been stolen. If they have tried, you know, you might say more democratic means and nothing has happened. I can understand why many people would think that a more radical approach is the only

• 31:54Speaker 13

  option left on the table. However, that approach hasn't done anything either. You know, sanctions have not to dislodge Maduro, blowing up boats of possible drug traffickers, maybe just fishermen, has not done anything. Um, I think that uh nothing appears likely to lead to a regime change, but I can understand the desperation of people living under what is broadly acknowledged to be an extremely repressive regime.

• 32:20Speaker 11

  Yeah, and just the grinding poverty of everyday life in Venezuela is is so like I've heard so many stories from so many people of such a difficult existence there. I can I can understand people's desperation.

• 32:44Speaker 11

  Andrew, you know, I'd spoken about like the the gulf between the government of Trinidad and Tobago and the people of Trinidad and Tobago right now. And obviously the same is true in Venezuela, right? Like it's not it's not the opposition figures living in Spain who suffer when we have these sanctions, right? It it's not opposition candidates who get blown up when they go fishing. It it's it's regular working class Venezuelan people.

• 33:07Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 11

  So do you want to talk about like? I'm not even sure what we can do in in in by way of solidarity with either of these nations, but maybe you have some thoughts on that.

• 33:17Speaker 12

  I'm honestly at something of a loss myself. Speaking from a small island, I think the US's superpower status is almost like into an eldritch horror. It feels like it's unfathomable how you could even go about approaching that at times. You know, I try to remind myself that people have fought and won, you know, people have resisted and won. You know, currently, there isn't that much going on. There are murmurs, there are murmurs of fear, of disdain, of disagreement, of distrust. In terms of grassroots efforts, there's a lot still to be done. The leader of the Move On for Social Justice,

• 34:00Speaker 12

  which is a small progressive political party in Toronto, Tobago, it's a guy named David Abdullah, and he has been part of this assembly of Caribbean people who have been signing and issuing a declaration, reasserting our desire for peace. And that has been signed by various progressive organizations, social movements, and figures across the Caribbean. And there was also an effort last week, Thursday, that's October 16th, to organize a region-wide day of action in defense of the Caribbean. And so different actions were taking place all

• 34:40Speaker 12

  over in 15 countries. We had press conferences, we had state months, and we had pickets at certain US embassies and public demonstrations. It was kind of in the middle of the day on a Thursday, so there wasn't that big of a turnout from what I saw when I had gone. But it shows that there is, and from the, at least anecdotal experience, there is a desire to keep the US out of the situation, you know, despite the issues with the Venezuelan government, despite the issues with our own governments, we don't want intervention, you know. And right now, all we can really levy is our voices, you know, our words. And all we can really do, I think,

• 35:21Speaker 12

  besides protest what is going on, is prepare for the worst to ensure that we have, you know, certain support systems in place in case, you know, push comes to shove.

• 35:34Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's pretty bleak. Michael, do you have anything to add on how people can can be in solidarity with the people of Venezuela currently?

• 35:42Speaker 13

  Well, I've been calling for people broadly throughout the world to have solidarity more with people than with states and certainly with the Venezuelan people as opposed to the Venezuelan state. I wrote something for the Center for International Policy about this and listen, you know, it's not my place to police the left, so to speak, but you know, as someone speaking personally who comes from the labor movement, you know, comes from the Bernie allied left, so to speak, you know, I do think it's been a little bit uncomfortable to observe how certain elements of the global left have have stood up for the Maduro regime, or the very least been

• 36:23Speaker 13

  the criticism of it has been taboo. And I think a lot of that is legacy of Chavez, Chavez having this strong personal charisma, but also that he was willing to confront the United States, the Bush administration at a time of the Iraq war, you know, especially low point in the US's global reputation. Also Venezuela's oil rents at the time, which were financing a lot of not just social programs in Venezuela, but a lot of financial largesse to allied states and movements around around the region. So a lot of left parties kind of reflexively defended Maduro, even as his repression and mismanagement just ramped up.

• 37:05Speaker 13

  I will say that's fading. You know, we were seeing this within Latin America. First of all, there's kind of a generational divide and some of the older generational Latin American left like Lula or like Petro have not been overwhelmingly anti-Maduro, but have expressed skepticism about the electoral results. But then there's a younger generation such as Boric in Chile, Chile and Arebalo in Guatemala, who have been openly very critical of Maduro and want to just not let him or his camp, so to speak, define what it means to be on the left. And really, the only countries that have unquestionably backed him at this point are Bolivia and Cuba, but also Outside of the region, Russia, Iran, China. So I think that

• 37:47Speaker 13

  we should ask ourselves, like, who do we think is a more credible arbiter of progressive values? Is it Borich in Chile, or is it Putin, you know? Um, even, wait, how, even the Communist Party Venezuela no longer That's one of my favorite facts. You know, like, he has, he has had their, their militants killed, you know, allegedly as well. Um, so it's just, it's not helpful to view the world in this campus lens, you know, I think that if people, whether they identify as on the left or uh, or whatever, want to show solidarity, I think it should be with the Venezuelan people, which means listening to voices within civil society in Venezuela. There are a lot of NGOs, there are a lot of labor unions, there are a lot of human rights advocates

• 38:28Speaker 13

  um, that are not opposition parties, that are not running for office, uh, they're not necessarily calling for regime change, many of them very critical of sanctions. Um, but they have tried to push for better changes, you know, quality of life, you know, reforms that might lead to less repression, open up more space for, uh, for civil society. And, you know, those things are necessary when people are really living day by day, you know, and I think that if people on the left want to play the long game and understand, care about their prospects for the future, they need to understand that the Maduro regime is the worst model for, for them to be associated with, you know, and this has already been uh, taking place with campaigns, electoral campaigns around Latin America where candidates on the right run against

• 39:13Speaker 13

  the boogeyman of, you know, Chavismo of like, of a, of a Maduro model, um, and it, it makes sense. And if a lot of people on the left are very skeptical of Maria Correia Machado, like I have skepticism about some of her her policy platforms of, you know, privatization and, uh, and other neoliberal uh, ideas, they also shouldn't be surprised if there's been a decade of people being told that this model of corruption, authoritarianism, state terror, criminal insecurity, that's what socialism is, then people are going to believe that. And then they're going to, then they'll vote against whatever that is. And this model has provoked, you know, the greatest refugee crisis, certainly in the

• 39:53Speaker 13

  Eight million people, they're all carrying with them stories about why they left, right? And so if there ever were to be democratic elections in Venezuela, it's pretty clear the country would turn to the right. And I don't think we should be surprised by that, you know? And I think we should also recognize that many of the things that Maduro embodies, these strong man politics, are things that are embodied by other strong men, not just on the left too. You know, I would just point out that, at least according to some, Trump has privately expressed a lot of admiration for Maduro. I read John Bolton's book, you know, he's a former national security advisor. You know, maybe he has a lot of reasons to lie, but you know, he did say that Trump privately

• 40:37Speaker 13

  expressed a lot of admiration for Maduro being, in his words, "too smart and too tough to be overthrown." You know, was was really happy to see him surrounded by what he called all these good-looking generals. He disparaged Juan Guaido, calling him "the Beto O'Rourke of Venezuela." That means, you know, so I think that there is, there's something to be said about strong men, recognizing strong men. And a lot of these authoritarian lessons are not limited to one side of the ideological spectrum.

• 41:06Speaker 11

  Yeah, definitely. I find that tendency on the American left, on the sort of internet left, to be massively frustrating, like as someone who went there to see the revolution, who like went there to understand it and who spent masses of time with Venezuelan people in the Darien Gap, at the border in Venezuela, like I'm very fond of Venezuelan people. And I think, yeah, our solidarity should be with them, not with some strong man state. We saw this in Syria as well, right? Like, it is heartbreaking, genuinely heartbreaking, to explain to people how someone who identifies as a leftist is also denying that their children were gassed by chemical weapons in Syria, right?

• 41:51Speaker 11

  This campus gray zone tendency on the American left specifically is incredibly toxic. And if anybody who seriously considers themselves to be a leftist is massively undermining any credibility they have when they associate themselves with regimes which willingly murder their own people. And I would like to see people stop doing that. Perhaps both of you could finish up by suggesting US coverage of this has not been great, right? Like, it tends to focus on the United States very much and Venezuela kind of appears as a monolithic entity, Trinidad and Tobago rarely gets any coverage in the US media. I did see, I think Reuters or AP had done a piece about how fishermen are reluctant to go out. I would like to see more of that kind of reporting.

• 42:36Speaker 11

  Perhaps both of you could suggest a couple of sources where people could read about this.

• 42:42Speaker 12

  Sure, at least on my end, I suggest looking into our local news. Now, it's not the best source in terms of actual interrogation of the issues and the ways in which the, some of the narratives just kind of get repeated uncritically. But you do get at least the occasional interview, the occasional quote from a non-US Department source. I would also suggest on Instagram, there are a couple of pages that bring a more radical progressive voice from the Caribbean. There's a page called Vintage Caribbean and there's another page called Trinidad and Tobago for Palestine and both of those have been doing a lot of coverage on this particular

• 43:27Speaker 12

  incident lately. So you can look to those as well if you want to get a sort of a grassroots take on the situation.

• 43:36Speaker 13

  Yeah, I don't really have any go-to sources on this. I would say that it's enough of an international incident that all the major news sources are covering it. So you can read really any news source in Latin America if you speak Spanish, Portuguese and see how that reporting is different. Also, incidentally, El País in Spain, you know, Coosnos on the side, they do pretty good reporting.

• 43:56Speaker 11

  Yeah, they do.

• 43:57Speaker 13

  And they've been doing pretty good reporting. And there's lots of blogs as well and newsletters that you can check out. I will say, just maybe this, I'm biased because I focus a lot on crime, the site Insight Crime is pretty good in terms of looking into specific criminal groups like Rendero Agua and calling question if, you know, if this really is a, you know, it's something that is controlled by the puppet master from Miraflores, you know, like Maduro and some of these, some of these narratives that are Justifying this. I'd also, just as a recommendation, I would say, you know, maybe we should be a little bit skeptical too about the timing and the the purposes of these things. I I did point out in a piece that I wrote for the Center for National Policy.

• 44:36Speaker 13

  Then the first boat strike happened on the same day the House Judiciary Committee was releasing a redacted number of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, you know, and I think that there are many reasons why this administration would would like to use this confrontation as a convenient distraction from from other things that they would rather not be talking about.

• 45:00Speaker 11

  Yeah, bleak. I think it's probably a reasonable conclusion, given where we're at. Where can people find both of you on if they want to follow you online on on social media or find more of your writing? We'll start with you, Andrew.

• 45:14Speaker 12

  Sure. Well, you can find me on my YouTube channel, youtube.com/AndrewSohn, or you could just go to my website for all my other links, andrewsage.org.

• 45:24Speaker 11

  How about you, Michael?

• 45:24Speaker 13

  I do have a website. You can look up my name and that should come up. I haven't updated it recently. I probably should. I'm also on Twitter X, Blue Sky, as my name, M.P.A.A.R.L.B.E.R.G., so you can look me up there.

• 45:41Speaker 11

  Great. Thank you very much, Beth.

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• 48:29Speaker 17

  Welcome to I Can Act Here, a podcast where union good and not everything that is called co-op is good. Sometimes they're not actually really co-ops. I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are joined by the people struggling under the tyrannical fist of a co-op, a thing that shouldn't be possible and yet somehow. Um, yeah. So we are talking today with Ez and Finley, who are booksellers at the Seminary Co-op in Chicago. And yeah, we are welcoming the union back to the show. And dear God, what a disaster.

• 49:14Speaker 17

  What a year it has been.

• 49:15Speaker 09

  Well, it's really great to be back. I wish we were back with slightly better news or more movements since we were last here, certainly.

• 49:24Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 09

  Because when we last spoke, we had just sort of theatrically announced to our management that we were in organized shop with the IWW and we were going to be bargaining with them for better wages and humane working conditions for us all. And they were like, yeah, you're a union. We so recognize that. And then they have sat on their hands ever since.

• 49:52Speaker 17

  Yeah. So let's roll back all the way to the beginning and explain a little bit about what the Seminary Co-op is for people who weren't here. How many years ago was that now? That must have been last year. Yeah. Yeah, it was a while ago. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

• 50:11Speaker 09

  Yeah. So the Seminary Co-op is a set of two bookstores in Hyde Park. The Seminary Co-op bookstore, which is a misnomer on two out of three counts. It's not a seminary anymore. It's not a co-op anymore. It is still a bookstore, although it is a not-for-profit bookstore, which is a mysterious category of business that doesn't exist anywhere else.

• 50:35Speaker 17

  Baffling.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, briefly, just to interject, I I do think when I would announce events and sort of give this exact breakdown for audiences, like I said, not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling, right? And when I was hired, like about three months before we announced we were unionizing, the way it was put to me was other not-for-profit bookstores, they do a lot with like family literacy or like specifically around women's issues. But that was just like acknowledgement of the reality that bookstores don't make a whole lot of money. And what what we are providing is a not-for-profit bookstore is just the browsing experience. We kept books on shelves for too long. It just it seemed like a like a really romantic idea of bookselling that didn't have like a whole lot of legs underneath it, so to speak.

• 51:21Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  So it is nonsense, I would say. But that's me.

• 51:25Speaker 17

  Just be a library. Like, I, we have, this is called libraries.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Say you're a really big bookstore. Just, I don't know. It's, it was vague. Yeah.

• 51:36Speaker 17

  Oh, baffling, baffling.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:40Speaker 17

  Yeah. And then I guess like the second part of it is like, when they say it's a co-op, what does that mean?

• 51:46Speaker 09

  It means truly, and as can speak to this more, that it was founded by Chicago Theological Seminary students. And there was a reason for that.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, like they did want to buy horse books at the at the prices that retailers got them wholesale. And so the thought was, I forget their names, but we have the pictures of them. It was like A. Kavanaugh or something. But these two guys, just, you know, if you were a student at Chicago Theological Seminary, or even like a student at one of the other divinity seminaries nearby, you just you put an amount of money and you were part of, like, you got your coursebook cheaper, you know, and under like a specific manager, who came like a couple decades after that, like, then it really became like, this is the neighborhood bookstore. This is part of like, as they say, like, the intellectual sort of cultural life of the university. But yeah, at one point, it was a cooperative

• 52:37Speaker 02

  because like you, you were a member and you got your coursebooks cheaper because you, you know, had a certain amount of shares in the books, but. Yeah, it was I think smarter not harder kind of scheme.

• 52:47Speaker 09

  And then when they dissolved the like ownership shares and stopped being a co-op, that was 2019 when they organized as this not-for-profit. It's not a 501(c)(3), they don't have nonprofit status. It's this slightly different thing. And so one of the one things that has happened in the past year is we had an interim director who got us like basically a nonprofit sponsor who lends its 501(c)(3) status to other organizations and allows you to take tax deductible donations. But like up to that point, we couldn't do that because we were not a legitimate nonprofit. We were this other thing.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:25Speaker 09

  Um, so since 2019, it's been that. And then since 2024, it's been that plus Chicago's standalone unionized bookstore. For now, we're hoping that others follow.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Inshallah, they will.

• 53:40Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 53:41Speaker 17

  I feel like it is not a great sign of your business being well-run when you are doing a thing that like rookie activist campaigns do where they're like, oh shit, we got a bunch of money. We need to borrow someone else's 501(c)(3) status. Like,

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 17

  Great, great job management, like incredible stuff.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  And like for me, part of what's been so like, just mind-boggling is like they the not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is book selling does sort of give this, you know, um, if we're like a 501(c)(3) who often doesn't, they don't turn a profit or they do, they reinvest it back into the operations they're doing. But like part of, and we can talk more about this as we get into like the bargaining, but like store financials have been so obscured. And I hate from like, truly, truly hate from a linguistic standpoint, just sort of the subtle like, oh, we must not be doing well. Cause to me, that feels like the rhetoric that really justifies the fact that I'm paid sixteen ninety an hour and I have a masters of divinity from the seminary of the seminary co-op.

• 54:46Speaker 17

  Yeah, well, and I think it's also worth noting that like even from the perspective of capital, like all of the giant Companies didn't make money for like decades and all those motherfuckers were walking off with like a hundred billion dollar payouts. You know, like they only ever started making money when they started like reeling in a bunch of government contracts for like web services and like defense contracts and shit. And it's like, I don't like this is, this is, I guess on topic, but it's just something that makes you really mad where people talk about like running the government like a business and then like, you know, you get like the post office where it's like, oh, the post office doesn't run a profit. It's like, do you know what doesn't run a fucking profit? Uber literally has never brought a profit ever, not once, not once, right?

• 55:31Speaker 17

  Like, it's like, no, like, like, I'm sorry, welcome, welcome to, welcome, welcome to fucking 2025 capitalism. Like, companies don't make profits. They either get contracts from the government or their entire existence is either conning some venture capitalist dipshits out of all of their money. Or it's like, uh, Peter Thiel has decided that you're like surveillance camera company is ideologically important to him taking over the world. So he's going to give you one billion dollars. And it's like, oh no, I'm sorry, like our financials aren't good enough for you to pay you. It's like, motherfucker, like, have you seen the rest of capitalism? Like, eat shit, pay your workers, like.

• 56:08Speaker 09

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 17

  God damn it.

• 56:10Speaker 09

  Well, we keep using that one meme over and over. That is like, we're trying to balance the budget. It's the drill, the candles. Drill, thank you.

• 56:19Speaker 17

  Oh, the candles.

• 56:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. Because our management is so infuriating and they also in the years since we've been bargaining, had an interim director and spent most of his tenure searching for an executive director to take over. That person is being paid a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year, to our knowledge.

• 56:43Speaker 17

  Jesus Christ.

• 56:44Speaker 09

  And that's the offer that we know of. We have yet to get his contract, even though we did make a formal information request for it. Yeah.

• 56:53Speaker 17

  Which is fucked. And it's also like, yeah, like every time these companies are like, oh, we don't have money. And it's like, okay, I, I, I can find like an unbelievable amount of money that you have given to someone to like, to give a random, non-specific example that has nothing to do with, with, with any company that is in any way related to this show.

• 57:17Speaker 09

  Alive or dead.

• 57:20Speaker 17

  Buy a bored ape yacht club NFT?

• 57:27Speaker 02

  This is like, they spent $300 on Google Home Speakers for 57th Street Books and I'm like, wow, my having that $300 would change my life. But also, like, you're paying that union busting lawyer thousands of dollars that you could be paying workers. Yep, but that's capitalism.

• 57:47Speaker 17

  Yeah, they have enough money to make your lives miserable, but they apparently never have enough money to, you know, like, make your lives not miserable because they have to spend that money on making your lives miserable.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:00Speaker 09

  And it's so intentional because making us miserable means that they are wearing down the number of people that they have to deal with and making the people who are left so tired and so frustrated and so much less capable of fighting them.

• 58:15Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  And that feels like, just, you know, Finn's leaving, we've also had a number of folks, like, our bargaining unit, like, last time y'all spoke last year was like 25 people? Now we're down to 11. And they've refused to hire anybody part-time or full-time. Yeah, of course, but they've been giving seasonal workers sort of like extra hours and that is, someone's got to start counting, they have, like, unless they work for 90 days, they don't have to and because they're seasonal, you know, yada, yada, they don't really join our union is kind of what I understand why they

• 58:49Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  are not considered eligible, but it's like, the booksellers are the heart of the store.

• 58:55Speaker 09

  The classification of seasonal workers and particularly of event runners has been a point of contention throughout negotiations this whole time because obviously, from our perspective, we want anyone who's working in the store in any capacity to be involved in the union. We want them to not have this random scab force that they can deploy at will.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 09

  And that has always been the point that gets revisited over and over again, just when we think we've gotten them locked into being union members, they'll come back with their latest counter that's like, actually, I think because of X, Y, and Z that we just changed, they're no longer eligible to join your union. Um, but they did just hire, I think, three people that they were training at Fifty Seventh Street last week, but they've made no formal announcements to anyone that these people have been hired.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:45Speaker 09

  I only know that they were like in the stores because one of them came to the co-op by mistake instead of Fifty Seventh Street and was like, oh, I'm one of the new hires.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 59:54Speaker 09

  And so it's unclear if those are the seasonal workers or if those are new hires.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  Those are, I'll say, the most recent member, like, part-time, full-time member of our staff, who's not me, none of us knew she was hired, and she just came up, took a book right off my cart, and I was like, bitch, what? But um, she, but those, those were event, those were the seasonal workers at the store the other day. Like, I worked

• 1:00:17Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  one of the Chicago Humanities events with them. And it is like, yeah, then they just changed the, the qualification of who can be in the union.

• 1:00:25Speaker 09

  Yeah. It's been very intentional and it's been Yeah. just like over and over. They revisit and

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:00:32Speaker 09

  reclassify.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:33Speaker 09

  And whittle us down.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. We've done, um, I think, too, since you last spoke, uh, like, a couple of work stoppages and then picketed outside of our store as well. Um, but that, I don't know, in terms of like, sort of regressive bargaining through attrition that we're seeing, and that, like, they refuse to hire other people, even though they're kind of shooting themselves in the foot, but just, like, our, our direct action has, I think, worked against what they're thinking, which is that we're tired and that we're not going to fight back and that we are overwhelmed, um, and we don't know what we're doing. Um, but there are a lot of folks who do have, you know, experience with these sort of direct actions, like a work stoppage. Um, I think it's, it's great that we're wobbly's, but also, like, I, I do kind of like, on

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  the work stoppage, how flustered and ups, not like upset, but just how flustered and, yeah, just awkward management feels. It's, it's empowering for me. Um,

• 1:01:27Speaker 09

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but very much on purpose.

• 1:01:30Speaker 09

  Well, and I think that's one of the, as I said, it's too. Just like a campaign in the broad sense of continuing direct actions during negotiations is it is that chance to connect with your coworkers and re-solidify that you're fighting for something intentional in the face of the fact that you will probably start being scheduled more sparsely. You will have fewer opportunities during the workday to talk to people. And like, that's just stuff that's gonna happen while negotiations go on. But like, making sure that you stay in touch with your union as best you can and like, show up for all of those direct things that you can helps you internally combat that, which is really helpful.

• 1:02:13Speaker 17

  Yeah, and it'd be like, you know, like, I sound like we ran into organizing here was we spent like, God, I think it was two years bargaining for our contract. And they didn't have the capacity to literally force half the workforce to quit, but like-

• 1:02:26Speaker 09

  Whoa, don't worry, they don't have the capacity to lose this many people. Things are falling apart on the seams and they are like, how few people they have.

• 1:02:35Speaker 17

  Yep. This whole thing is, it's just like a really, really common managerial tactic.

• 1:02:40Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Speaker 17

  Which is just like, we're gonna make everything unlivable and try to get as many people as we can to quit. And then just make everyone else's lives a living hell, which is like, this is, I think I've said this before, but it's, it's like, the extent to which the strategy is just the deliberate infliction of terror.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 1:03:02Speaker 09

  Well, and the strategy is just tank your business, which seems incredibly counterintuitive from their perspective.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  And like, there have been events where like, it's been a book about like Karl Marx, labor organizing, whether it's a history or like a sociology book. And folks are like, I waited to buy this book here because it's the union bookstore. And like, there is a way that us being a union bookstore could look, given like that folks on their board are really progressive people like Adam Gettichu, like State Senator Robert Peters, who's like running on a pretty pro-labor background. Like us being unionized could be, like, we are already a tourist bookstore. Like folks come from everywhere and are like, this is such a famous bookstore. But like, it does baffle me. It does make sense that it's a common tactic, but also there's so much that could

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  work in their favor if they were not just like so committed to busting this union.

• 1:03:57Speaker 17

  Wait, hold on sidebar. She was my professor.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I talked to her today.

• 1:04:03Speaker 17

  Wait, she's just part of the management team now?

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  No, no, no, there's, okay, so this is part of where-

• 1:04:07Speaker 17

  Or is this like a different thing? Okay, sorry, sorry, this is-

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Okay, no, no, no, this is, this is where like us being a not-for-profit bookstore, but not actually like having any legal standing as a not-for-profit, gets a little confusing and like Finn, you can probably speak more to how this has come up in the bargaining meeting, but when we, I don't know if this was around before the cooperative was dissolved and shares were basically like worthless at that point. Um, but there is a board of directors, one of whom like is very, very famous and at least among the folks I know for effectively union busting employees at Experimental Station on 61st and Blackstone, um, when they tried to unionize, right?

• 1:04:45Speaker 17

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  Um, and also there are so many like Hyde Park progressives like RJP, like A. Adam Gettichu, um, Eve Ewing as well. And these are people I really respect, but like because there's like this four cabinet, I think of folks who are, have been in and out of bargaining meetings. Um, when we've had employees at other labor unions who do have a connection to like, for example, Robert Peters, I, it does very clear that like this governing board, which does govern, they have terms, but we're also a retail outfit. You know, usually like a not-for-profit, the board of a not-for-profit would be helping with like an annual fundraising campaign. It's unclear entirely what the board does in a retail outfit,

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  other than at least in my experience, like giving advice, writing emails to try to bust this union, you know, before we unionized, albeit I had a very short tenure before we had unionized. I, none of these people, none of their names matter to me, but because like there's so much confusion about is management going to be representing folks in the bargaining meeting or is it going to be a board member representative? I've been just who is accountable to disclose what financial information and when, or just any information and when, like-

• 1:05:55Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  Adam Gettichew is not one of our, one of our bosses, but like there is just a lot of confusion that I feel about what the board is responsible for in bargaining and what the manag- and what management feels they're responsible for.

• 1:06:09Speaker 09

  And I, I can clear up a little bit of that.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Speaker 09

  Because what we were told when we first unionized and when the management team was kind of shifting and reorganizing itself around the board was the board is there primarily to advise and supervise and hire the executive director for the stores. And so there is a financial contribution, like they're all significant donors. That's part of the way that they secure their seats is making a large donation to the stores. But then, at least according to them, from that point forward, they have no managerial oversight over the operations of the store whatsoever. It is not their responsibility.

• 1:06:57Speaker 09

  They don't make any decisions about the budget. They don't get involved. They don't want to be involved. And they were embarrassed by having this attitude when previous management went off the rails and nearly drove the store into the ground by buying stock on credit cards.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Speaker 17

  What?

• 1:07:13Speaker 09

  Um, but then it's a whole thing that we do not have to share too. But that's even better.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  This is bonkers. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 09

  Then just to say that somehow that experience did not act as a wake up call for this board of directors. And they said, what we will do is hire the next white man we can find and take our hands back off the wheel.

• 1:07:38Speaker 17

  Jesus Christ. Is this an institution that people, like, it would be helpful to put pressure on or?

• 1:07:44Speaker 09

  That's what it's hard to say. Cause there's this, and I think I talked about it the last time we were on the podcast, but there's this responsibility carousel between management who will, in a bargaining session, because the other thing is because we can't tell how involved the board is because they tell us that they're not involved at all and then they make decisions and we hear about the decisions that they're making. We have asked repeatedly that they be involved in bargaining and that they send someone to represent them, or they like participate and have an opinion on the way that the stores are run. And they have repeatedly refused those invitations, requests, demands, et cetera.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:20Speaker 09

  It seems their involvement has been to recommend that our management hire Jenny Goltz to be their lawyer and that is about as much as they want to do.

• 1:08:28Speaker 17

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Like, two things, too, Finn. I think there was supposed to be a board member present at the next bargaining meeting, but because our meeting was contingent on having the full financial information that we requested literally a month ago. And when we requested that information, the next day, a board member, the president of the board said, okay, we'll get this to you. We got it. I think you might know more about the timing of this, Finn. Like, at the last possible minute.

• 1:08:55Speaker 09

  We got it the day before the meeting.

• 1:08:56Speaker 17

  Oh, God.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 09

  And it was half of what we asked for.

• 1:09:00Speaker 17

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 09

  And then we said, this is not what we requested and we cannot meet because we said we couldn't meet without this full information. They were like, we're disappointed that you can't do that. And we were like, yeah, shocking.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Speaker 17

  We are back. Let's get more formally into like, what the bargaining process has looked like. It sounds like it's been extremely chaotic. They've been not turning over information. It's deeply unclear who's making decisions, which all seem, and I can say this is my professional opinion, not good. It's a technical analysis.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Life assessment, yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 17

  This is why they pay me the mediocre bucks?

• 1:09:48Speaker 09

  Wow, I think you were just so well informed. Yes.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Journalistic insight.

• 1:09:54Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:09:57Speaker 09

  The way that we set it up on our end when we entered into negotiations was we had a core team of three people who were going to be our like core bargaining unit who would um attend every meeting. And then we had a small team of like three more people, including myself, that were like alternates in case something got scheduled on a day that one of the core team couldn't be there. And we made sure that we would always schedule one person who was not negotiating to be at the meeting and take notes so that like none of the people who were negotiating had to do that at the same time. And when we first started negotiating, the management team was sending Dan Meyer, the interim director, and Naeem Kano, who's our

• 1:10:37Speaker 09

  um deputy director, who is basically the like one person on the management team who is not, she's not supposed to be a direct supervisor. She has not actually let go of the people that she was supervising. But she's like in that middle space between like supervising management and like director management.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:10:56Speaker 09

  Um but she has since stepped down from negotiations because of the way that she's been involved in the rest of store operations. She was like, I can't come to the table anymore. And so the latest meeting that has been rescheduled is going to be with Kevin Bendel, who's the new executive director. And then one other name that I forget, who is either a board member as as things, or I'm not sure what she would be. Um but.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  It is it is a board member. I think it is Tiara Goldstein is her name. Tiara Goldston. Yeah.

• 1:11:29Speaker 09

  Yeah, every so often in negotiating sessions, Dan or Naeem would make some reference to like a financial decision that we were trying to bargain about being like not their choice and being something that would be up to the board. And we'd be like, so take it to the board. And they would be like, okay. And then we would never hear anything about it ever again.

• 1:11:50Speaker 17

  Incredible, incredible work. Seems like a great tactic to never address anything you're supposed to be addressing. Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 09

  And so the way that we were negotiating, we were trying to come to terms on things that didn't affect the finances of the store first, so that we could land some easy wins and like feel like we were making progress and then address the stuff that we expected to be thorny or later. But then what that ended up being as meetings went on and on was them asking us constantly like, but what is it that you guys really are like prioritizing? Like, what is the thing that matters the most to you that like you have the least give on? And we're like, it's wages. You know, it's wages. It's been wages this whole time.

• 1:12:36Speaker 17

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:36Speaker 09

  And they're like, but like, what if we were like asking you to give up all your benefits to get wages that you want? And we were like, okay, that's not how negotiating works.

• 1:12:46Speaker 17

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:48Speaker 09

  And then in an email that labeled it their best and final offer, which is language that they have yet to take back. They sent us a version of the contract bargaining agreement that we, A, let me just back up for a second. When we first started negotiating, they asked us to draft the entire first draft of the collective bargaining agreement ourselves.

• 1:13:10Speaker 17

  What?

• 1:13:11Speaker 09

  Which is incredibly non-standard. And we were like, that's fine, because that gives us a leg up in terms of like studying the initial terms. I guess we'll do it. But like, yeah, incredibly non-standard, super stupid, not a thing that we should have had to do.

• 1:13:25Speaker 17

  Yeah. I've never heard of that before.

• 1:13:28Speaker 09

  But so when we drafted it, we drafted a three-year term collective bargaining agreement with a bunch of stuff about procedure and wages and benefits that we wanted done. And so zooming back forward to that best and final offer, suddenly the draft that they've sent us back of the collective bargaining agreement is a two-year term.

• 1:13:48Speaker 17

  Hmm.

• 1:13:49Speaker 09

  And up to this point, all of the offers that had gotten anything close to our ask on wages were in year three. And everything in year one and two was still like 25 cents, 50 cents increases.

• 1:14:03Speaker 09

  And so suddenly, year three, which was always the only year that made any improvements for us, is gone. And you did not improve any other parts of the contract to make up for that unilateral decision.

• 1:14:17Speaker 17

  So that's just regressive bargaining?

• 1:14:19Speaker 09

  It is. It is.

• 1:14:22Speaker 17

  Which, by the way, okay, do you want to explain to our dear listeners what regressive bargaining is and why you're not allowed to do it?

• 1:14:29Speaker 09

  Yeah. Regressive bargaining is a dirty negotiation tactic where one side, without making any sort of give and take concessions, like they should to balance a big move, just unilaterally decides to change a term, especially a large term, like wages, contract term, et cetera. And so it is taking something that has been tentatively agreed upon and like, in good faith, taken as a part of the contract that will stand and axing it.

• 1:15:05Speaker 17

  Yeah, and you are not allowed to do this.

• 1:15:07Speaker 09

  No, you're not.

• 1:15:08Speaker 17

  This is, this is, under, under the terms, under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act, which, you know, who knows? But by the time this episode goes out, there is a small chance it won't exist anymore. A bunch of provisions of it are under attack right now. But like, that is.

• 1:15:25Speaker 09

  We have two unfair labor practices filed with the NLRB since the terms of negotiation have been in effect. And they are not, in fact, progressive bargaining charges, but issues of status quo, where they're trying to change the way that they do scheduling, change the way that they do, like, absence discipline, which are topics that are covered in bargaining and should only be changed in bargaining while bargaining is active. But they're trying to change them and then say that these have been the policies all along. And so.

• 1:16:00Speaker 17

  God, literally gaslighting.

• 1:16:02Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Speaker 17

  Like, actual, actual, straight up, you could pick up the gap, the psycho, the psychology textbook, point to it, like.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Just pick up that whole lamp.

• 1:16:11Speaker 09

  And we have their, their words in writing of every step of the way where you can see the language change and be like, no, you are the person who said before that it was this other thing. That was you.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Speaker 09

  So we filed unfair labor practice about those things and you can in fact not track them anymore because since the government shut down, you can find a little PDF that explains

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:37Speaker 09

  that all ULPs are going to be pending indefinitely and that is all you can find.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Speaker 17

  And it's also fun because Trump illegally fired one of the Democratic people on it. So you don't have a quorum any on the board of the National Labor Relations Board. They don't have a quorum anymore, which is a shit show. And making any NLRB like attempt to get anything done to the NLRB really annoying.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Speaker 02

  I think the the direct action has been helpful where like just that reality would just I think just it would drive me crazy. And it is it is gaslighting. This is traumatizing. If a boyfriend does it to you, it's a red flag. But when your boss does it to you, you know, it's like

• 1:17:17Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  the the public's fine with it.

• 1:17:19Speaker 09

  Business.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the cost of business.

• 1:17:21Speaker 17

  Um, yeah.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  It is just the continuous nonstop onslaught of regressive bargaining tactics that like from the minute we started, despite the fact that like I was sitting next to the director when we said we're unionizing. It was like a split second before she said, yep, we recognize it. And so our our direct action at the work stoppage, I remember our first work stoppage, you stop for half an hour. Management was very cool with that. The second time we did it, we did it for an hour. We should have done our homework better because we didn't know that you can't like distribute like leaflet on store property because you Chicago is our landlord and kind of like let's store property. Um, but I I put on my clerical collar. I put on a T shirt that had like give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and also like a little footnote about, you know, run me my money, you know.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Um, there's a more obvious instruction from Jesus out of Luke that's like pay the worker their wages. But um, I was wearing my clerical. I set up the PA and I and I was loud. There was a Hyde Park Herald reporter who, you know, took my comment, who I remember him walking over to Naeen and I think asking her for her comment. Um, I had a Bluetooth speaker that was Dan's, right? Um, playing Never Never Fight A Man With A Perm by Idles. And I will not forget, I will not forget. The way our, the deputy director approached me, she was like, okay, this is fine. This is all fine. I just wanted to let you know this is fine, but can you please turn the music off? Um, and it took me about twenty minutes to just turn the buttons down slowly, but um, like that, we, we were reprimanded.

• 1:18:50Speaker 09

  Yeah, we got a very, very angry email the next day illustrating what the consequences would be if we tried to do a similar action again in that manner.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  And so we picketed outside their store. That was the next direct action that we did, but like, I do think our most impactful direct actions have been the ones that have been noisy, that have been incredibly visible.

• 1:19:13Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  When we picketed last, it was on the first day of classes. We sell, um, like a lot of core, uh, core course books for the college at the university. And so there were students like that we, we were like, hey, do you have the bookseller who sold you that book to have a living wage? Um, and students like, nineteen year olds are so outraged by the amount of money I make as a grown person.

• 1:19:34Speaker 09

  Mm hmm. I heard so much eat the rich that day from millennials.

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  Hell yeah.

• 1:19:38Speaker 09

  Oh.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Hell yeah. Um, but it's, it is clear that when the public is made aware of what's happening at a store that a lot of people love just so much, like it is a part of the community. And I think so much a part of people's, even like my own before I worked there, our experience of being in this like, I mean, bizarre community.

• 1:19:58Speaker 09

  Um, yeah.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  And folks are upset, like they, and I think rightfully so. And that's just, I, I think really the beauty of direct action is not just that it empowers us, but it really just like in a sort of spectacle way says, this is what, this is what they're doing. You want a place that you love to run this way and to treat people like this.

• 1:20:18Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:20:19Speaker 09

  And I think they're really effective for that reason, especially because people are really like on our side when they talk to us, but they're also really surprised. Because like, yeah, part of the instant recognition thing, part of the being cool with us having union buttons on the register. Part of all of that is the fact that management is benefiting from the illusion that they're on good terms with us. And so like, one of the reasons that we held that picket was to be like, hey, just because they are not stopping us, does not mean they have done anything to improve the material conditions that we have been organizing around this whole time.

• 1:20:56Speaker 17

  Yeah. Well, and and and also to be incredibly clear about this, like, it it's so obvious it has to actually directly be stated, which is that all of the things they are doing are union busting tactics, because their their strategy here is to do a recognition and then go for the second place where unions most commonly collapse, which is, once you're recognized as a bargaining, the second place they fail is getting the first contract, and that that's what they're really obviously trying to do. Mm hmm. And, yeah, the fact that people don't understand that they're just running a thing that like, I'm trying to think of how to even describe, it was like, like, that bookstore was like, like, it was treated as like something that was, as an institution that was like part of the university.

• 1:21:41Speaker 17

  That's like the way it was like treated culturally, was this is like our thing. And these people are running it into the ground because they don't want to pay their workers, like, enough money to survive. It's just just hideous.

• 1:21:53Speaker 09

  And that's really all it comes down to when you look at what the facts on the ground are, is the decisions that they are making are directly tied to the fact that they feel like they have no money, which is directly to the fact that they are paying the executive director too much, which is directly tied to the fact that they want to have an excuse to not pay us anything.

• 1:22:14Speaker 17

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, wow, we don't have enough money because we're spending like $160,000 on an executive director. Have you considered you can simply eliminate this entire expense by turning this into an actual co-op? You could do it in like one day and you suddenly would not have the administration expenses because those people wouldn't be there. You could do this Yeah. really easily. Oh.

• 1:22:38Speaker 09

  Well, and as the like movement in and out of that position over the past year demonstrates, it has no effect on the operations

• 1:22:46Speaker 17

  No.

• 1:22:46Speaker 09

  bookstore. The thing that has any effect on the operations of the bookstore is the fact that seven people have left, not been replaced, and all of their work has been redistributed across like increasingly siloed positions to the people who are left so that you have no help on your particular assigned task that is now yours and yours alone. And you just feel terrible in your little hole by yourself.

• 1:23:10Speaker 17

  Yeah, which, which, this is something like, I know for a fact that like multiple people on that board know what a speed up is. Like, that's, that's a speed up. I, I know for a fact that you know what this is.

• 1:23:24Speaker 09

  And most of them who know what it is have written against them.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, just kind of like expanding a bit larger, the, um, the staff at the Museum of Science and Industry has also unionized, um, and they were outside of their store, you know, threatening to strike. Um, and so like, I loved on the picket line, like I had a sign that said, Fire Jenny. And I went to explain to the U. Yeah, I went to explain to the UE employee who Jenny was, um, the UE employee who worked with the Graduate Students United at U Chicago. And she went, oh, I know who Jenny is. Um, and that's, I don't know, just.

• 1:23:59Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  It, it's sick that like, somebody can make their living, um, making my life worse. But A, that's, that's capitalism. And also B, like I, she has been involved, that lawyer, and like a number of, like she busting you, trying to bust unions at U Chicago unsuccessfully. And also representing Northwestern, um, in a case where one of their employees accused them of sexual harassment and discrimination, you know, so it's like, you're, you're really, this, this is, this is the person that you're working with. This is the tool that you're using, you know?

• 1:24:33Speaker 09

  This is who you would rather pay.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:36Speaker 17

  Yeah. And it's also, it's like, that, that, that's the thing where this, this whole metaphor of like, the boss acting as an abusive partner is suddenly getting very literal in terms of who they're, who the people that they are employing do for their other shit, which is defending those people?

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54Speaker 17

  Yeah, it's almost like there's a structural connection between management and patriarchy. Wow, who could possibly, who could possibly have done this? Between systems of abuse. Yeah, like, who could possibly have written about this? Checks notes, looks at the books that were written by the members of the board.

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, yeah.

• 1:25:13Speaker 17

  I'm so mad about this, like, Will making After Empire was really good.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  It is, yeah, and I, like, I don't know how much I can, like, hold those individual board members responsible. When it seems like so many of them are, like, just now finding out about it.

• 1:25:28Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  That's some abuse 101 is to make sure that the person that you are exploiting, um, that you are, you know, taking advantage of, that they don't feel like they can say to people who could help them, this is what's happening to me. And that, like, the people who would be sympathetic could, you know, go and take the initiative to help folks. And I'm grateful that, um, we have a meeting with Robert Peters coming up soon. Um, it was supposed to happen, it has not yet, and I appreciate how dedicated he is and his staff is to making sure that our union sits down and talks with him, but it is also like.

• 1:26:03Speaker 09

  There's a deep irony for him accepting an award from another union and rescheduling a meeting with ours to do it.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, it's because we have Jacob, I always say it incorrectly, Ask Me.

• 1:26:13Speaker 17

  Ask Me, yeah.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, the big N, but that's also like part of the other great community support. Like I mentioned that UE employee, but, you know, there are other union employees who, just because they love the bookstore so much, will show up to every outreach event that we have. He was one of the first people to have a yard sign, and it's funny, he lives right next to, um, this guy from my church, who also has a window sign, and that's how I found out they were neighbors. Yeah, it's really cute, um, but like, I'm proud that we're wobbly's because

• 1:26:42Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  there is a really long tradition of, you know, being in Chicago, a lot of radical organizing that I think fits our spirit, and also like the seminary co-op spirit. It has been hard that we don't have a lot of resources towards bargaining.

• 1:26:55Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  But like, we're good at direct action, and we also have, I'll give the Ask Me award, I'll give it a pass, because Jacob's been so, and other community members have been so helpful in just giving their time and their skills and their expertise, so.

• 1:27:09Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, the MSI Union, the Grad Students Union in particular have been incredible allies to us and have been, they were huge like presences on our picket because like, because we did an open store running picket, we had only about half of our actual union members available because everyone else had to be on desks in the stores, keeping them running. And so the majority of the people who were like, collecting signatures to get Jenny Goltz fired and otherwise improve our awarding additions were people from other unions who were just out there being in wonderful, awesome solidarity with us.

• 1:27:43Speaker 17

  Yeah. So my, my first picket line, I mean, I think I mentioned this last episode, but my, my first picket line ever was the grad student picket line in 2019. That was the first time I was ever on a picket and it rocked.

• 1:27:54Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:54Speaker 17

  And yeah, it makes me really happy to see that the whole base of sort of union organizing from that has like, you know, it's, it's this thing that like, I remember when this was like, you know, like I was there and like one of the big pushes, everyone they finally won. And it's like, they're still around helping people because workers, workers fucking fight together and.

• 1:28:14Speaker 09

  Well, and then they'll always be like, hey, one thing that we know about Jenny Goltz is she likes to lose. And we're like, thank you.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  It's not that she likes to use, the quote is she's very good at losing, which that's true. Even better. Even better. Yeah. And like, what you were saying about GSU, I don't remember what, I think like 2008, 2007, was like when they said we're starting organizing for unionizing the graduate students. I had a roommate who was like a 12 year PhD student who was around when that shit started.

• 1:28:48Speaker 17

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:28:49Speaker 02

  You can just count hanging out with your wife in Australia as a field research, I guess.

• 1:28:55Speaker 17

  Love this. Love this.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  Well, she's just doing postdocs, she was hanging out, but. We had a baby yesterday. Anyway. Oh, good for them. Yeah, like I, I was around, he came back to finish his PhD. Um, like about the time, like when the, the contract was ratified and I just with, what is it, 16, 17 months of bargaining, no contract? In the name of my blessed Lord Jesus Christ, like Jesus Christ, GSU has had, like has such a wealth of knowledge because they've been through just like heaps of bullshit and it's years.

• 1:29:29Speaker 17

  It's like, okay, I, I, I would, I would like the, the, the fucking GSU thing. They, they had a whole thing. Wh- wh- when I was there, like in like 2019, the whole, the whole thing was that, and like genuinely, this is like one of the most admirable things I've ever seen a union do, which was, they refused to take their, their case because the, the, the university was refusing to recognize them. And they, they refused to take their case to the NLRB because they knew that if they did it, there was, there was a pretty good chance that the old Trump NLRB was going to like bust every single graduate school union in the country. So instead of trying to win for themselves, they fucking didn't do it and just like fought on picket lines instead. And it fucking rocked. It was like,

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  That's rad as hell.

• 1:30:11Speaker 17

  They're, they're, they, they rock. They're, they're great. Like,

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:15Speaker 17

  Yeah. Shout out, shout out, shout out to GSU.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Shout out to GSU.

• 1:30:18Speaker 09

  Well, and they are a great, great, great example to us all in terms of like how to persist on a fight through attrition because one of the things that like, you try so hard as a management team to do is just wait until everyone gets tired and leaves. And like, it seems like grad students would be the perfect population to just wait out because they rotate out constantly. But like, just the way that they have managed to maintain energy through generations and generations of organizers and get it over the line at long last is so encouraging.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Speaker 17

  There's a thing I remember from, I think the last place I read into it was like, one of Mike Duncan's things about the French Revolution. Like, one of the things he talked about was like, the ways in which part of what caused the French Revolution was that like, they spent a whole bunch of time teaching all of these kids these like, incredibly radical Enlightenment ideas and then they were like, wait, we live in like, the most absolute monarchy that has ever existed. What the fuck?

• 1:31:31Speaker 09

  We hate this.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:34Speaker 17

  Yeah, like, wait, hold on. And it's like, there is obviously always sort of contradictions between like, the number of people I have seen write books about labor resistance and then like, go bust unions is pretty large. But there's a reason why everyone from like, Pinochet through like, the Trump administration, let me back through like, the original Nazis. It's like, one of the first places, and you know, I mean, like, the Greek riot police had this thing where it was like, the first place you go when there's discontent is like, you must stop the workers from allying with the students. You must do this, or you're fucked.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Speaker 09

  But the workers and the students love each other. They're all kissing as healthy.

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  And we're the same person sometimes, you know?

• 1:32:22Speaker 09

  So often.

• 1:32:25Speaker 17

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  Tell my comrades to kiss on the forehead. Yeah.

• 1:32:29Speaker 09

  Aww.

• 1:32:30Speaker 17

  Yeah, and I think like, that is, I think like, the positive element of all of this is like, the way that one campaign winning can transform the lives of everyone else around you is so astonishing. And I've seen it happen in so many places where like, one shop wins and suddenly everyone else is like, it could be us, it could be us.

• 1:32:51Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  It's possible. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:54Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Speaker 09

  Well, and I think that we're trying to capitalize on that and trying to make sure that like, we can be the next person to like, capitalize on GSU's win and help MSI do the same.

• 1:33:06Speaker 09

  But like, as much as we have really suffered from the at the table bargaining, negotiating process and been really sort of beaten down in the past year on that battleground, I think we have learned so much about the allies that surround us and the people who like want to do more than just email our board members and we're like, we don't know what else you can do because we don't know who makes these decisions for you to yell at.

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:37Speaker 09

  But we have so many people who have like signed up for an email list with us, so many people who are like ready to go as soon as we figure out what we need them to do.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Speaker 09

  And that's been really encouraging and bolstering while management continues to like just not acknowledge us when they feel too cornered. Like they simply never spoke of the picket because it happened outside and so they couldn't be mad about it. So they didn't have to tell us off about it, but they also just didn't speak of it.

• 1:34:05Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah. This is, Chicago is a motherfucking union town. Um, and that's

• 1:34:13Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  But yeah, I I'll admit, I'm angry when I go into work. They don't care enough to get the mold and the dust remediated, you know, and the ducks.

• 1:34:21Speaker 09

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  And I can't really breathe when I go into work. Um, and I also don't have health insurance, right?

• 1:34:27Speaker 09

  Oh, my God.

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  Well, I do have health insurance, but I have to pay for like, you know, I have to pay for my own premiums for a marketplace thing.

• 1:34:34Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  Um, and that's, that's not really affordable. And, um,

• 1:34:37Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  Like, as, as, as frustrated as I am, like coming into work, it is, it's the people, you know? And I think that's for a lot of folks who have stayed at the bookstore. I don't know how much you relate to this, Finn. Like, it has been like other booksellers, the folks that we've gotten to know through the community, um, who like, who do make a difference, at least for me and whether or not I stay. Um,

• 1:34:58Speaker 09

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is a good fight.

• 1:35:02Speaker 09

  The union crew that we have is a incredibly worthwhile team to be on. It is a group of people that I feel very solid, standing shoulder to shoulder with. I think that is like, without question, one of the things that like, keeps the stores a place that you can work, even if it's not a good place to work right now.

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:23Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:35:24Speaker 09

  And honestly, I think that would have sustained me a lot longer if my commute were different, you know?

• 1:35:29Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:35:31Speaker 17

  Wait, okay, sorry. Ca- ca- ca- can we roll back to the part where you can't breathe because there's, I feel like, because there's mold? Because I feel like you just dropped that very quickly. It was like, oh yeah, that's like a normal part of the work. What the fuck?

• 1:35:44Speaker 09

  Well, so for a very long time, you've been allowed to request that you only work at the co-op because there is a known mold problem at 57th Street that they can't afford to or can't get the landlord to ameliorate. Um, but there is also, at least in our long experience, um, some sort of growth issue in the venting at the seminary come up.

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's very dusty at least. And like I, when I wear like a, like a KN95 for a little bit, like that Mm-hmm. helps a little. I take like five Benadryl usually and then that

• 1:36:20Speaker 17

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:36:21Speaker 02

  That kind of helps. Um, and that's more just, I think, like, I mean, not more. That is in part like my own health, but if I had the resources to

• 1:36:29Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Speaker 02

  be able to take care of my health and get what I need, maybe I could withstand the mold and the dust in the ducts a little bit easier, but like that.

• 1:36:37Speaker 17

  Well, but also like, like as an employer, it is your responsibility to not have your workplace poison your employees. Like, I'm sorry, like

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  That part. Yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 17

  And tha- and that also make them pay for the medical care to treat medical problems that they're having because you poisoned them with mold? Like, what? That's

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Speaker 17

  What? Jesus Christ. It's so evil.

• 1:36:59Speaker 09

  Well, and we had a couple of clauses in our first draft of the collective bargaining agreement that included, um, demands regarding mold remediation at 57th Street. And I do believe those cau- clauses have been struck in subsequent rounds.

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:17Speaker 17

  I mean, I guess that's a thing that you could ask people to do, which is go ask people to complain about the fucking mold. Like, it seems like a thing you could do.

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's that might be a worse another direct action. I also noticed like people in the store like they cough when they enter.

• 1:37:33Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  You know, and like, oh, God, this is where the like, the snake eats its own tail. The wheel turns inside the fucking wheel, right? Because like, maybe like if I'm giving them good faith benefit of the doubt, management would have if they weren't overloaded with so many tasks that they have to take on, you know, sort of more supervisory management. Um, if y'all didn't have to do all these tasks, maybe you would have time to, if there were people hired in the bargaining unit, perhaps you could yourself have more time to improve the conditions for the store, not just for your workers, but also for the people who enter the stores. But because you will hire new workers until there's a contract, you are just so overworked and you can't. And it's just like this, this turns until um, the boss decides that it doesn't. And it's like this, this is their responsibility to

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  to bargain in good faith and to treat their workers correctly. Like this is an active decision that they could make, that they are not making. So. Yeah.

• 1:38:29Speaker 17

  I gotta say, that that might be the single wildest thing I have ever heard like an hour into an interview is, oh, yeah, they're poisoning us. What?

• 1:38:38Speaker 09

  And the mold.

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  The mold, just the mold.

• 1:38:40Speaker 09

  There's just also this is like proof that this is the craziest place to work because like that doesn't even land on our radar anymore because we've been just like banging our head against walls for a year.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:53Speaker 17

  Yeah, you know, I, I, I keep going back to the abusive relationship metaphor, but like that is one of the big things about abusive relationships is that because of the information control and because of the way that your world gets condensed down into a a really, really tiny, narrow set of experiences where you're isolated and you're only interacting with like. One person who was controlling everything about your life. It becomes really difficult to see things that are very, very obviously wrong the moment you step out of it.

• 1:39:20Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:39:21Speaker 17

  And, you know, I don't know, maybe it turns out having absolute hierarchical relationships of control is an extremely bad way to run literally anything. Especially the thing that your livelihood depends on that you do most of your time.

• 1:39:33Speaker 02

  Just a thought. Wow.

• 1:39:35Speaker 09

  Well, and it also just like means that you are too busy to actually interface in any meaningful way with your workers. Like,

• 1:39:43Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:39:43Speaker 09

  If I tell you that it took me two thirds of the day to schedule a 15 minute conversation with any of four managers who were on site to quit, I would not be lying.

• 1:39:56Speaker 17

  Jesus Christ, they can't even take your resume bitch.

• 1:40:03Speaker 09

  They at one point tried to reschedule that conversation, which I was attempting to have on Friday to Monday. And I was like, I think you want to know this.

• 1:40:12Speaker 17

  Yeah, it's like managers, you, you two are getting, you two are getting screwed over by, by, by understaffing. Oh my God.

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  I, I do think that's starting to take a toll too on management, um, which is a little encouraging.

• 1:40:26Speaker 09

  They're losing it.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:29Speaker 09

  They are not feeling well.

• 1:40:31Speaker 02

  And because like for me, I don't know, I, I'm not going to trust a boss. Like I just stayed it for three months in the 1997 UAW strike. Like I, that's,

• 1:40:40Speaker 17

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:40Speaker 02

  Bosses are canceled. Yeah, you know, um, I know how that ended, but I remember one of the supervisors who, um, who at one point in her, like her previous career had been on a picket line for a very long time, um, had been on strike and she like immediately took one of our little sabo cat reed pins, put it on her backpack and is otherwise like, as far as I can tell, generally supportive of the union, but also man, lady, I wish you would make a stink.

• 1:41:08Speaker 17

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:09Speaker 09

  Cause here's the thing, I think she only talks to us. I feel like the other managers do not speak to her.

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  I, yeah.

• 1:41:15Speaker 09

  Am I crazy?

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. I could just talk about that for a very long time. And I don't think we have the time, so.

• 1:41:23Speaker 17

  Yeah, yeah. But before we get into what can people do to help, is there anything else that you want to make sure that you get to?

• 1:41:29Speaker 09

  I think the big thing that we should emphasize too is as much as we are complaining and frustrated about the process, we know that this is not impasse and that we are so sure that like there is still negotiating to be done, there is still conversation to be had and that like we have been emphasizing that at every opportunity to management as we have to. But like, just because we are tired and frustrated means nothing in terms of us giving up because this is a fight that is going to continue.

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And like to that point, Finn, we're doing this because we love the stores. Like I, the, the stores were a really important place for me, just putting down roots in the neighborhood. And I, I think when you love something a lot, like you gotta be brave enough to wrestle with it. Um, and that our, our unionizing is the right thing. Um, it is the thing that will like hopefully create an environment where the people who make that bookstore run, who, who sell the books, um, in the long run, it will make the institution healthier. I really do believe and just that we've been talking about like this metaphor, um, as the boss of like, you know, as, as an abusive partner, I think for so many folks when they are, um, whether it's something like domestic violence or it's in a union

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  campaign, or you're speaking out against, you know, your neighbors being abducted and shot and killed in the street, there is such an expectation that I, I have to sit by and be quiet while this happens. Um, and part of that, I think what does prevent, and at least in my experience as someone who survived, you know, particular kinds of violence that, yeah, I, I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing, but us, the unionizing is absolutely the right thing. It is the right thing for the stores. It is the right thing for the community and for the workers. And I just, as much as I'm frustrated, like, I, I know myself and my, my fellow booksellers are doing this out of love. Like it was absolutely love for the stores and the community we serve. So, um, yeah.

• 1:43:25Speaker 09

  We're never gonna feel bad for continuing to fight for what is the right thing to do.

• 1:43:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm too broke to feel bad. Yeah.

• 1:43:36Speaker 17

  Don't be poisoned by mold every time you go to the bookstore. Support the union.

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:42Speaker 09

  Wear your mask at Seminary Co-op.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Speaker 09

  Take a Sabo Cat pin.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Ask to talk to a manager. Make it a long talk.

• 1:43:50Speaker 09

  Yeah, honestly. See if you can get one on the floor. We'll help you.

• 1:43:54Speaker 17

  Yeah. So how can people help support y'all? And do you have places where people can find more information about the campaign and follow updates?

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  Uh, we have a change.org petition, um, that I think if you can link it somewhere in the description.

• 1:44:08Speaker 17

  Yep. Yeah, we will link it in the description.

• 1:44:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, so that, that does ask folks to, uh, sign off, uh, in support of the termination of Jenny Goltz, their, uh, union busting lawyer, as well as, uh, releasing like the full site of financial information too. Um, so there's a change.org petition. You can also follow us on Instagram at Suncoup Booksellers Union. Uh, we've got the little icon with the Sabo Cat.

• 1:44:31Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  Sign the petition. There are also some action items on some of the posts, such as emailing the board and management about, um, the release of financial information and also the termination of Jenny Goltz's employment. You can also email those emails on that post about the mold too, if you want me to breathe at work. Um.

• 1:44:49Speaker 17

  Yeah. I'm so mad about this. This is, I am going to leave the description with, they are poisoning you. Cause like, I'm so angry about this.

• 1:45:01Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm too tired to be angry about it.

• 1:45:04Speaker 09

  I'm so glad this, someone with a French perspective has remembered that the mold is totally bogus. Because I had forgotten.

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  It's, it's crazy. Yeah.

• 1:45:13Speaker 09

  It's so bogus.

• 1:45:14Speaker 02

  I, it's also like, it's in such plain sight. Like if you're in 57th Street Books and you look to the right of the air conditioning unit and room one, you would see that shit growing on the wall. It's wild. And it's like, but I also feel like if I talk to management, which I, I tried about this, it just is not a priority. My breathing is not a priority. Um, yeah, it is wild. Thank you for reminding me that.

• 1:45:39Speaker 17

  So someone, one day when you win, someone's going to write a paper about necropolitics and this or something like, good lord.

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  Jeez. Yeah, some shit. But yeah, um, sign the petition, follow us on Instagram, help us make a ruckus.

• 1:45:56Speaker 09

  And come talk to us and our managers at the bookstore, because we love to talk to people while we sell them books.

• 1:46:03Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. We'll take any goodwill we can get, so.

• 1:46:07Speaker 09

  Very much so.

• 1:46:09Speaker 17

  Hell, yeah. Well, thank you both so much for coming on and just for doing this in, I don't know, like a place that was really special to me when I was, yeah, when I was there for a long time.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  Thanks for your help.

• 1:46:22Speaker 09

  Thank you for following up with us.

• 1:46:24Speaker 17

  Of course.

• 1:46:25Speaker 09

  It's really nice to have this platform every so often.

• 1:46:28Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:46:30Speaker 17

  Hell, yeah. Well, hopefully we will have you back on when you fucking win and.

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:35Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 1:46:36Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:46:37Speaker 09

  Euphoria round.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm buying, I'm personally buying the Cool Zone Media team a round at Jimmy's when we win our contract.

• 1:46:48Speaker 17

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:46:50Speaker 09

  I will come back down to Hyde Park just for the celebration.

• 1:46:55Speaker 02

  Change everyone's oil while you're down too.

• 1:46:57Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, don't take that long. I won't be ready for a second.

• 1:47:03Speaker 17

  Yeah, this, this is a bit it could happen here and you two can resist both your abuser and your boss even when they're the same person.

• 1:47:11Speaker 09

  And you should.

• 1:47:13Speaker 02

  Amen. Get them.

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• 1:50:30Speaker 12

  Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage. I run Andrewism over on YouTube. But I'm here on this podcast with the one and only.

• 1:50:39Speaker 17

  Mia Wong, who does this podcast most of the time.

• 1:50:44Speaker 12

  Exactly, exactly. And I think you and I both have something in common, which is that we are people. And we are two people, but the world has a lot more than just two people. It's a really convoluted way of saying that for this episode, we're going to be talking about population. You know, how many of people there are and how many of them there will or will not be in the future. And all the different conversations that end up happening around that.

• 1:51:14Speaker 17

  Most of which suck. So it's, it's a time.

• 1:51:17Speaker 12

  True, true, true.

• 1:51:18Speaker 17

  Oh boy.

• 1:51:19Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, every single one of us humans is a product of billions of years of reproduction. But for most of that reproduction, population growth was pretty slow. You know, the world's population is estimated at around five million in the year 8000 B.C. So five million is like the population of New Zealand right now, or Costa Rica, or Ireland or Norway. But spread across the entire planet. Can you guess how many people were alive in the year 1 C.E. though?

• 1:51:56Speaker 17

  Thirty million?

• 1:51:58Speaker 12

  Oh, that's actually an underestimate. It's, it's a hundred and eighty-eight million.

• 1:52:02Speaker 17

  Jeez.

• 1:52:03Speaker 12

  Right? So that's between the current population of Bangladesh and the current population of Brazil, which are at a hundred and sixty-nine million and two hundred and thirty million respectively. But that's spread across the entire planet. So, I mean, imagine that, you know, a whole world of people so spread out. I mean, they were concentrated in certain areas, of course, but you had all this vast forest land and plains and entire continents that barely had people compared to today.

• 1:52:35Speaker 12

  And the reason the population grew so slowly was really because, I mean, humans have always been doing the do, you know, but death was kind of a very present phenomenon. You know, you had famines, you had plagues, you had the occasional war, and you especially had a lot of infant mortality.

• 1:52:57Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:52:58Speaker 12

  And that's what really kept populations in check. You know, I remember hearing, I don't even remember who it was, but this one person had like nineteen children and only eight of them survived to adulthood.

• 1:53:14Speaker 17

  Yeah, they honestly did pretty good, like by those metrics, like, yeah, the infant mortality rate was unbelievably high.

• 1:53:22Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. So families had a lot of children, but only a few of them made it to adulthood. And thanks to early industrialization, things were able to change a bit. You know, we improved our agriculture, we invented refrigeration, we got better fertilizer. And most importantly, we developed advancements in sanitation. You know, doctors were actually washing their hands.

• 1:53:46Speaker 17

  Mm hmm.

• 1:53:46Speaker 12

  You know, we developed vaccines so children weren't dying of measles and mumps. Hmm. Imagine that.

• 1:53:53Speaker 17

  Oh, good lord.

• 1:53:54Speaker 12

  And we also had an overall improvement in medicine. You know, one of the greatest inventions of humanity, I think, is the vaccine and it's

• 1:54:03Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:54:04Speaker 12

  such a wonderful thing that there's not this massive movement of people who challenge its very legitimacy in this day and age and threaten all of our lives as a result. You know, imagine being in that world.

• 1:54:18Speaker 17

  Oh, God.

• 1:54:20Speaker 12

  So we eventually hit one billion in the year eighteen oh four, which is just below the current population of China. And things really began to accelerate from there. We end up creating something called a J curve of exponential population growth, thanks to, like I said, the decline in infant mortality and improvements in fertility and food production. And the other billionaire milestone started rolling. By eighteen oh four, Haiti had just gained its independence. Napoleon the first was crowned emperor of France. And Lewis and Clark had begun their expedition across America. In nineteen twenty seven, that's a hundred and twenty three years later, we hit two billion people.

• 1:55:06Speaker 12

  You know, by then we had Trotsky being expelled from the USSR, which had just been founded. We had Charles Lindenberg completing the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. And then also in nineteen twenty seven, we had the release of the first feature length film to feature synchronized sound for dialogue. Quite the time to be alive. We fast forward to thirty three years later, nineteen sixty, and we hit three billion people. By then Nigeria had just gained its independence, JFK was in the White House, Ham the chimpanzee went to space, and the FDA approved the first ever birth control pill. But the birth control pill didn't really kick in in terms of, you know, hamper an our growth for some time.

• 1:55:52Speaker 12

  By nineteen seventy four, fourteen years later, we hit four billion people. By then Nixon had resigned, Turkey had invaded Cyprus, Portugal overthrew its dictatorship, The Godfather Part Two came out, and ABBA was still at the top of the charts. Nineteen eighty seven, thirteen years later, is when we got five billion people. That's when we had most of the major colonies around the world gaining their independence or having already had gained their independence. You know, Thatcher was beginning her third term. And The Simpsons, first appeared on TV. Twelve years later, in nineteen ninety nine, we had the Y two K panic, the Clinton impeachment, the SpongeBob premiere, the introduction of the Euro, and six billion people made their

• 1:56:37Speaker 12

  debut on Planet Earth. Twenty eleven, twelve years later, we hit seven billion people. And that was in the midst of the Arab Spring, a tsunami hit in Japan, the Occupy movement, the premiere of Game of Thrones, and really the beginning of smartphones and social media taking over the world. Finally, by twenty twenty-two, which is eleven years after twenty eleven, we hit eight billion people amidst Russia invading Ukraine, the growing popularity of TikTok, and Elon's purchase of Twitter. So from eighteen oh four to twenty twenty-two, we went from one billion people to eight billion people.

• 1:57:23Speaker 12

  And the UN expected to grow by about one point nine billion between now and twenty-one hundred. So we'll end up reaching from eight point two billion people to ten point two billion people. And population is projected to peak at ten point three billion in twenty eighty-four and then decline to ten point two billion through the end of the century. So with this rapid population growth, there has been a lot of fears surrounding overpopulation. Particularly in the late twentieth century and early two thousands, there was a lot of conversation around, you know, this population bomb, this worry that there were too many people.

• 1:58:04Speaker 12

  Now, at least early on in the population boom, I think it makes some sense to have concerns. You know, there had never been this many people on the earth at any point in time prior. You know, if you're watching the numbers climb and climb and climb, you might have thought we were headed straight for a planet covered in cities and some kind of collapse. But even before we even hit a billion people, the idea of overpopulation being a significant problem wasn't new. In late seventeen hundreds, Thomas Malthus argued that population would always outpace food supply. And his prediction was that there'd be too many people, not enough resources, and a decline into famine, disease, and mass death.

• 1:58:51Speaker 12

  Now, he was obviously proven wrong, but in nineteenth century Britain, Malthus's ideas helped justify the harsh welfare policies that that government ended up implementing, like the spread of workhouses around the country. Also, we speak about famine as if it's this natural phenomenon that can't be helped, that is just almost like a hurricane or a tornado. But famines are usually not actually the result of not having enough food. You know, Amartya Sen found that famines usually happen despite food surpluses. The issue is usually distribution and not scarcity.

• 1:59:33Speaker 12

  You know, a famous example being, you know, during the Irish famine, Ireland was still exporting tons of food to feed its colonial overlord. So we fast forward to nineteen sixty-eight and the biologist Paul Erlich publishes The Population Bomb. He describes visiting Delhi and feeling the crush of overpopulation, convinced that mass starvation was imminent in the nineteen seventies. Now, I think that book that he published was one of the main influences in the widespread panic around overpopulation. You know, governments started to scramble about it. A lot of policies were born likely from people reading that very book.

• 2:00:18Speaker 12

  You know, some of these policies were fairly benign, you know. You promote family planning, you improve access to contraceptives, you improve education for women especially. But other approaches were very harsh and brutal. You know, you had sterilization campaigns, forced sterilization campaigns taking place in India and Puerto Rico and in the United States. China's one-child policy also gets a lot of attention, but it was only one example of a widespread brutality around the impositions placed on women, especially in that time.

• 2:00:57Speaker 12

  The fear of too many people and that anxiety leading to the control of women and their bodies. And it's a scary prospect, especially if you were a minority in this time, if you were a cultural, racial or religious minority, because it made very ordinary human activity, things like moving around, having children, just existing, made it seem like an existential threat to civilization, to humanity, that needed to be dealt with by any means necessary.

• 2:01:38Speaker 12

  So they had some positive outcomes of, couldn't good positive outcomes of the population concern. You know, you had pushes for women's empowerment, you had the proposal of improved urbanization to reduce the sprawl of human activity. You also had people proposing things like extraterrestrial settlement, which, you know, is not really realistic as a solution for a multitude of valid reasons.

• 2:02:06Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 2:02:07Speaker 12

  I think it's really funny, you know, whenever people push that sort of, yeah, humans are destined for the stars kind of narrative. You know, it's a story, a really powerful story coming out of science fiction and it's good that it has inspired people to learn more about space and, you know, dedicate their lives to the study of the stars and that kind of thing. But this idea that we're going to be shipping off like millions of people off planet to settle on other planets, I think is pretty safely in the realm of science fiction.

• 2:02:41Speaker 17

  Yeah, that's a full like get back to me in a thousand years and we could maybe start talking about moving like thousands of people.

• 2:02:50Speaker 12

  Yeah, even thousands or hundreds of people. I mean, we don't have those massive generation ships. We can't even get those off the ground at this stage in our spacecraft. And we also have a lot of issues to resolve on Earth before we spread our problems across the galaxy, as far as I'm concerned. But beyond these solutions, the ideas and public discourses around overpopulation have also birthed a lot of conspiracy theories. You know, I'm sure you might have heard a few of them in your time.

• 2:03:21Speaker 17

  Oh, boy. Yep, this is one of the big Alex Jones things, for example. So he's convinced that there's like a giant plot by the globalists to kill off an enormous part of the human population to like stop overpopulation or something. It's

• 2:03:37Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:03:38Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 2:03:39Speaker 12

  Honestly, any combination of conspiracies can somehow be smushed together to fit that kind of narrative. And I could talk about all the vaccines sterilizing people, the chemtrails, the, the, the 5G towers, the Bill Gates microchips, the, even the food supply, all these things allegedly being used to sterilize people. And not to say that there isn't validity to any claims of the things that we consume contributing to lower fertility. The fact that we clothe ourselves in like polyester, you know, we still have a full idea of the impact of microplastics on our bodies.

• 2:04:22Speaker 12

  You know, there's valid concerns about some of the consequences of the ultra-processed foods that, you know, fill out grocery shelves. But that's the sad thing about conspiracy theories. You know, they, they have some kinnos of truth mixed in to bolster their validity, but then they mix it up with a bunch of garbage about, you know, utter nonsense.

• 2:04:49Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 2:04:50Speaker 12

  And then, of course, I mean, some of these conspiracy theories are kind of benign. You know, like if you think it's 5G towers, I guess you'd put a, I don't know, a tinfoil hat on your, on your junk. But

• 2:05:03Speaker 17

  I mean, to be fair, there was one of the 5G guys who did like blow himself up at a giant car bomb.

• 2:05:09Speaker 12

  I did not hear about that.

• 2:05:10Speaker 17

  A couple of years ago.

• 2:05:11Speaker 12

  Down.

• 2:05:12Speaker 17

  Oh, yeah. Luckily, he only killed himself, but giant, giant car bomb in the middle of, I want to say Memphis or something.

• 2:05:22Speaker 12

  Down, yeah.

• 2:05:23Speaker 17

  But, yeah, so like every once in a while, you get some real, oh, boy stuff from that.

• 2:05:30Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. I mean.

• 2:05:33Speaker 12

  Honestly, people could take even the simplest things and turn it into a threat to themselves and others. If they're not in the right headspace, so they haven't been given the right supports. Sadly, and obviously, like, not all the conspiracies are benign. I mean, if you have people rejecting vaccines. You know, it's almost like we're in the world that I alluded to earlier, you know? Where we have a resurgence in measles, for example.

• 2:06:00Speaker 17

  Yeah, Jim O'Neill, who's the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Acting Director for the CDC, literally on Monday called for splitting the MMR vaccine into multiple vaccines, like, which is basically, I mean, which is just straight up the Andrew Wakefield. I think I said this on seven podcasts on this show now, but this is literally just straight up the Andrew Wakefield anti-vaccine thing from the original giant anti-vaccine panic in the 90s.

• 2:06:28Speaker 12

  That was the autism vaccine thing?

• 2:06:31Speaker 17

  Yeah, yeah, like, and this is, this is, this is the guy who's currently running the CDC. It's just being like, no, yeah, you should do this thing that's.

• 2:06:38Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, you guys are cooked.

• 2:06:39Speaker 17

  Was, was, yeah, again, this thing that was developed specifically so that Andrew Wakefield could sell his own vaccine.

• 2:06:45Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, that's the thing. If I was conspiracy brain, I would say that actually the popularization of vaccine conspiracies on social media sites contributes to exactly that kind of population control that those same conspiracy theorists fear monger about. But that's if I was conspiracy brain, which I'm not.

• 2:07:09Speaker 17

  God, so, so someone, someone believes that somewhere. Absolutely, there is someone who's like, the anti-vaxxers are a conspiracy cult of global population or something like.

• 2:07:19Speaker 12

  No, because, I mean, we have this very straightforwardly effective human invention, one of the best in the history of humankind. And you're telling me that a couple of people on Facebook are now responsible for the entire government rejecting the effectiveness of vaccines? And, you know, jeopardizing the health of the entire population? Come on.

• 2:07:46Speaker 17

  Yeah, I mean,

• 2:07:50Speaker 17

  unfortunately, the true believers are in charge now.

• 2:07:54Speaker 12

  Indeed, indeed they are true believers and of course people who stand to profit from the dip in the sales of paracetamol and whatever else. So there are those conspiracies about population and then there's the typical far-right Nazi conspiracies about great replacement, right? The idea that shadowy elites are orchestrating falling birth rates among white populations while encouraging immigration from the population booming global south. I mean, of course, not all the global south is booming population-wise. A lot of places are also experiencing decline. It's a global problem, but we're gonna get to that. And connected, of course, to those great replacement types.

• 2:08:38Speaker 12

  You have the eco-fash with their worries about the environmental impact of population and their twisted belief that environmental collapse could be solved by reducing the number of people, which usually ends up targeting marginalized groups, which is exactly the kind of thinking that inspired real violence, like with the Christchurch shooter in 2019.

• 2:08:59Speaker 17

  Yep.

• 2:09:00Speaker 12

  And of course, the actual drivers of ecological collapse are not poor families in India or Africa having too many kids. It's the overconsumption of the global north. You know, if you actually wanted to reduce consumption, reduce the impact of population on the planet, are you gonna start with fewer people or are you gonna start with fewer billionaires flying private jets, you know?

• 2:09:23Speaker 17

  Hmm.

• 2:09:24Speaker 12

  It's not about the number of people, the head count. It's about the lifestyles and the systems that support those lifestyles. You know, blaming population is a very cheap, simplistic and cowardly get-out-of-jail-free card for the rich minority that drive this systemic crisis.

• 2:09:43Speaker 17

  Yep. The thing about this, obviously, is that if you believe that you need to reduce the human population, that it's your obligation to go first.

• 2:09:51Speaker 12

  Yeah, so we are gonna talk about those types of people in the next episode.

• 2:09:55Speaker 17

  Hmm.

• 2:09:56Speaker 12

  But you know, speaking of the population, I think there's nowadays at least an opposite concern that is dominating the headlines. You know, in wealthier, more developed countries, fertility tends to be lower. And that's tied to things like better education, more women working, urban living, greater choices, greater access to contraception, et cetera. But in less developed countries, fertility is usually higher because children are often seen as both helping hands and future caregivers and education and access to birth control are more limited. But the global fertility rate is now steadily dropping due to that increase in development, greater access to birth control, greater education of women's rights.

• 2:10:38Speaker 12

  And there's a fear nowadays that there won't be enough people to support the system as it has been built. Remember, capitalism is predicated on endless growth. When its population starts to decline, naturally everything that it's building towards in terms of the amount of consumers, the amount of infrastructure, the amount of workers, those are not going to be there anymore, especially as more and more people end up dipping out of the workforce as they age.

• 2:11:18Speaker 12

  So in 2023, the global average had dropped to just 2.3 children per woman, which is less than half of what it was 60 years ago. According to the United Nations, fertility will keep falling throughout the century. And by the year 2100, the global average is expected to dip below replacement level of 2.1 to about 1.8 children per woman. Now, some countries are already there. Japan sits at a 1.2 children per woman. Italy, Spain, and much of Eastern Europe are well below 1.5. South Korea is famously a demographic outlier at 0.7 children per woman, which is the lowest fertility rate in the world.

• 2:12:02Speaker 12

  And that means obviously that, on average, Korean women are having less than one child each. For very valid reasons, I might add, considering the economic and cultural conditions in that country. Now, I don't live in Eastern Europe, or Southern Europe, or East Asia. I live in the Caribbean, I live in Sri Lanka and Tobago. But speaking anecdotally at least, which obviously is not representative of the full picture, I can count, maybe on one hand, the number of people I know my age who think that they'll be able to bring children into the world, whether they want to or not. You know, very few people I know actually want children,

• 2:12:45Speaker 12

  or if they do want children, they don't think they'll be able to afford to have children. But maybe that's their selfishness. What do you think?

• 2:12:54Speaker 17

  I mean, I don't know, like, I am not interacting with a representative sample of the population. But, no, yeah, I mean, it's a lot of people who are like, no, and it's too expensive, it sucks, I don't want to deal with this. But again, like, not, not a representative sample here. Yeah.

• 2:13:23Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, you could just look at the economy. Things have been getting worse for my entire life. You know, there hasn't been any point in my life where anyone in my generation could look around, honestly, and say, yeah, you know, this is, we be cooking, you know, it's time to double, double it. You know, let's, let's have a child. Yeah, the housing situation has gotten worse, the cost of living as a whole has gotten worse. Childcare costs have gotten worse. And of course, outside of that economic stuff, there's also cultural attitude shifts. And people realizing, I don't need to have a child to be fulfilled, to find meaning. You know, people are able to pursue higher education. And also they're more educated about the process of childbearing in general,

• 2:14:09Speaker 12

  including the very valid medical concerns surrounding that whole process. I mean, if I were a woman, I would not want to have a child. You know, the the consequences on on their bodies, on their minds and their health, the risks to their very life. I'm not something that can be swept aside as it was previously. People are aware of it now. People are talking about it now and they are empowered to make decisions that feel right for them. You know, a lot of people are also very much focused on their careers, either by choice or because they don't have any other choice but to focus on putting food on the table. You know, people are also getting married later.

• 2:14:50Speaker 12

  And as a whole, we have shifted to what a more individual society. So, you know, in the past, you did have the extended families, the close knit communities that made raising children a bit more manageable. But today, it's a bit rarer to find. And you tend to see a lot more nuclear families, even just individuals, going out at a loon. You know, with less support and more isolation and so it makes it very difficult. And then there's the existential angst of it all. You know, I can't forget the fact that there are multiple wars waging around the world. You know, there's a lot of political instability in much of the world. And of course, the biggest issue of all, climate change, which makes it, honestly,

• 2:15:36Speaker 12

  it makes it feel irresponsible to even think about bringing a child into this mess. So a declining fertility, a decline in population, it has the governments panicking. You know, China went from having decades of a one child policy to now desperately trying to encourage people to have more babies. They're offering cash bonuses and housing books and extended parental leave, but it's not really working, you know? As populations are aging, there's a lot more elderly people to care for and fewer working people to support them. So that is, you know, a recipe for pension crises and labor shortages and spiraling healthcare costs.

• 2:16:18Speaker 12

  So some governments are even trying to raise the retirement age, which as France and their protests have shown, is not going to go over well with much of the population. Nobody wants to work an extra five years, an extra 10 years more, when they've already put so much of their lives to these dead end, pointless and, you know, mentally and physically dreaming tasks that really just line the pockets of their bosses.

• 2:16:46Speaker 17

  It is worth pointing out that last year, there was a pretty massive raise in the retirement age for people in China that's being phased in a way where it's going to take over the course of 15 years. It goes up gradually to sort of like spread out the anger over it, but yeah, it is worth noting that China's is like significantly increased or is going to significantly increase over the course of the next 15 years.

• 2:17:12Speaker 12

  Hmm, yeah. And then on the other side of things, they're raising the retirement age now, but the young people who are working today are more than likely not going to get any kind of pension.

• 2:17:25Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 2:17:26Speaker 12

  You know, I'd rather the world of my sixties don't look like the world of my twenties.

• 2:17:32Speaker 17

  Mm hmm.

• 2:17:33Speaker 12

  That would be my preference. So I would rather that we've reached a point as a society where pensions are not the necessary band-aid that they are right now, but until then, you know, there's quite the power to keg.

• 2:17:50Speaker 12

  We also have in Eastern Europe, you know, you have countries rolling out pro-natalist policies that tie financial support directly to family size. I'm going to get a bit more into pro-natalism in the next episode. But there's also the darker side of that pro-natalist push in terms of the policies meant to reverse the population decline. Some governments, instead of making life better for potential parents, are criminalizing. They're turning to anti-choice policies, they're restricting abortion, they're limiting reproductive rights, they're demonizing child-free lifestyles. Russia actually recently criminalized what they called child-free propaganda, you know?

• 2:18:35Speaker 18

  Yeah.

• 2:18:35Speaker 12

  And then this is also part of a broader conversation about population, where you have the immigration concerns as a political flashpoint. And because a lot of wealthy countries, because of their population decline, are starting to rely more on immigrants to keep their economies going. But as a flip side, that tends to fuel backlash from the far-right groups who are able to frame it as a threat to national identity. And because the system of the state and capitalism is not interested in actually taking care of people, those immigrants become a very useful scapegoat. You know, obviously, I'm in support of people moving and living wherever they want to move and live as they please. I don't believe in borders,

• 2:19:19Speaker 12

  especially as the climate consequences are hitting those of us in the global south first.

• 2:19:24Speaker 18

  Yeah.

• 2:19:25Speaker 12

  But I also am not a fan of the way that some progressives end up talking about immigration, where they act as if, you know, the global south is like a population bank that wealthy countries could tap into and, you know, pull population from regardless of the consequences on the home countries of these people. You know, it's like, let immigrants come, and I'm all for that. But then it's also like, your government is destabilizing their governments, your, your, your system, your economic system and the global economic system is making life in those countries unlivable. And I think the priority also needs to be on dealing with that issue

• 2:20:05Speaker 12

  and not just shrugging and saying, well, you know, at least immigrants are able to help our economies stay afloat, even as their countries languish and suffer.

• 2:20:16Speaker 12

  So to kind of wrap things up, where does this all leave us? You know, for centuries, we feared having too many people and now we're starting to fear having too few people. And both anxieties are shaping policy, fueling conspiracy theories and sparking culture wars. And whether the future holds overcrowded cities or ghost towns really depends on the direction of politics, economy, culture, and urban designs take. On the next episode, I'm going to be talking about the ideals around population, the pro-natalists and the anti-natalists. But until then, I've been Andrew Sage here with Mia Wong on It Could Happen Here. Peace.

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• 2:24:19Speaker 05

  Trick or treat her. I heard. Ah, hello. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the spooky special. I'm your host, Garrison Davis. Once again, there has been far too many important world events taking precedence that we here at the show are unable to provide listeners with an entire spooky week's worth of themed episodes. But I know how important Halloween is for many millennials. So I've taken it upon myself to produce two spooky episodes to bookend the holiday. This episode that you're listening to right now, as well as another that will release Monday morning or Sunday night.

• 2:25:01Speaker 05

  As the world is becoming an increasingly spooky scary place, I needed to up the ante to exceed the weird and eerie fright that comes from living in America and the world in general in 2025. So last week, I traveled from New York to Brussels, briefly caught up with my close personal friend and colleague Tintin, and then took the train to Germany. Very scary indeed. Once in Germany, I was confronted with seemingly occult words and symbols. People spoke in odd incantations. I came across a map that appeared via my black scrying mirror, the iPhone, which upon

• 2:25:43Speaker 05

  deciphering led me to an old power plant warehouse in East Berlin. I entered this dark looming building, and inside, the air was thick with smoke and incense. Figures dressed in all black emerged from the fog, witches, wizards, and magicians. I followed them into a candlelit room where hooded occultists conducted a ritual welcoming us to the 2025 Occulture Conference. Occulture is a bi-yearly conference, that's once every two years, focusing on the intersection of occultism and culture, pop or otherwise.

• 2:26:23Speaker 05

  This is arguably the most prestigious occultism conference in the world. I have been wanting to attend for years, and I was finally able to go this go around on the condition that I make four podcast episodes. The two that I'm releasing this week and next will cover some of the core magical and topical currents throughout the conference, mostly via a panel discussion between myself and three other attendees. And then before Christmas, I'll have two fully scripted episodes interrogating these concepts further and discussing the use of occult practice in 2025. So to start, let's meet our panelists.

• 2:27:06Speaker 05

  I should introduce my magical travel team for this conference. Let's start with Delta, a Belgian magician and artist which I recruited to join me in this wacky adventure. Delta, say hi.

• 2:27:24Speaker 18

  Hello.

• 2:27:25Speaker 05

  What do you do, Delta? What's your magical specialty, I suppose?

• 2:27:30Speaker 18

  Well, it's kind of a mix of-

• 2:27:31Speaker 05

  Into the microphone.

• 2:27:33Speaker 18

  It's kind of a mix of things where part of it is just-

• 2:27:37Speaker 05

  Into the microphone.

• 2:27:39Speaker 18

  I'm sorry.

• 2:27:40Speaker 05

  You can get pretty close to it.

• 2:27:43Speaker 18

  Okay. It's a kind of a mix of things, really, between conventional chaos magic and more theoretical, like weird theory stuff, like Mark Fisher and CCRU adjacent things.

• 2:27:57Speaker 05

  We talk a lot about Mark Fisher, some land stuff, metafiction, theory fiction, hyperstition. Delta and myself talk about magic through the internet quite a bit and how it combines with cultural theory, which is relevant to this conference. Let's move over to my left.

• 2:28:18Speaker 19

  I've been recruited along on this magical journey. I'm Ryan. I practice the Vajrayana, a Greco-Egyptian magical practice, and also am involved in a Haitian voodoo house. Prior to that, I was also an academic for a good period of time where I studied Renaissance rhetoric and political theory, philosophy, and economics. So my contributions are going to be wide and varied.

• 2:28:44Speaker 05

  We've been making a lot of Hegel jokes this weekend. So many Hegel jokes. Our last crew member, which people may have heard before on various shows.

• 2:28:54Speaker 20

  Hi, my name's Elaine and I make art and research, a lot of Renaissance scriptwork magic. And though most of the things I do are a lot of idiosyncratic practices and based on various folk magic and chaos magic and Balkan folk magic.

• 2:29:16Speaker 05

  Before we continue the conversation between myself and my three guests, let's start by discussing the word "a culture," the namesake of the conference. Obviously, this is a combination of the word occult and culture, and it describes how the two influence and possibly undermine one another. I'm gonna read a quote from the person who originated the term. Quote, "A culture is a word that was inevitable. During the hyperactive phase of the Temple of Psychic Youth in the 1980s, we were casting around for an all-embracing term to describe an approach to combining a unique, demystified spiritual philosophy

• 2:30:00Speaker 05

  with a fervent insistence that all life and art are indivisible. At any given moment, our sensory environment is whispering to us, telling us hidden stories, revealing subliminal connections. This concealed dialogue between every level of popular cultural forms and magical conclusions is what we named a culture." Unquote. That is from Genesis B. Puridge, a musician, magician, artist, occult leader, and hashtag slightly problematic queer icon. In the 70s, they started the band Throbbing Gristle, pioneered industrial music, and later started the chaos magic organization,

• 2:30:40Speaker 05

  The Temple of Psychic Youth, and its associated band Psychic TV. Though a culture did not just describe this sort of personal spiritual movement, it carried a strong offensive element targeted against society and perceived systems of control. Through their many projects, including Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and The Temple of Psychic Youth, Puridge utilized art and magical practice to conduct a quote-unquote "war on culture."

• 2:31:09Speaker 05

  Similar to another figure that we'll soon get to, William S. Burroughs. A culture describes a process of cultural osmosis. The occult bleeds into and morphs culture, affecting everything from pop culture to politics and philosophy. But as a part of this osmosis, the occult becomes increasingly commodified, knowable, safe territory, marketable. The hidden occult loses its very essence of being hidden. Despite its use as a tool of attack against mainstream culture, like most countercultural forms, the occult has been largely recuperated.

• 2:31:51Speaker 05

  Even creative works which are genuine explorations into the occult fall into this recuperation paradigm, they get turned into products, consumed by a mostly secular audience, like the works of dueling wizards Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Now, some occultists rejoice, knowing that this wide exposure will influence more people to become interested in or adopt occult practices of their own, while others bemoan this dilution and commodification of what to them is an important spiritual practice. As the modern occult revival, along with a heavy helping hand of scientific advancement,

• 2:32:33Speaker 05

  deterritorialized Christian hegemonic religion, now the occult itself has been re-territorialized, which is not to say that the occult is no longer a field of play, which is what this conference attempts to assert. Let's go back to the panel.

• 2:32:51Speaker 19

  In terms of the conference itself, as we'll get into later, the term occulture very specifically seems to be focused on the study of the interrelation of magical practice and the material aspects of occult culture and its influence and appropriation by wider society. So in terms of political projects or social projects, you can

• 2:33:19Speaker 19

  Probably relate this, I think that it would be fair to say that it's something like culture jamming. If we're looking for some familiar concepts for people to map onto. That is to say, a focus away from simply solitary practice in the ways in which occult elements influence broader aspects of our society or are appropriated, whether that's through consumerist forces or through various artistic practices, or even the production of, for example, film, television, movies. So I think that's a fair assessment of the impacts of a culture.

• 2:33:52Speaker 05

  And relevant to our discussion later, its influence in the tech sector and the emergence of AI, which the current manifestation of has some heavily occult origins. Regarding around a whole bunch of people in the 90s who were writing about AI as this occult project and then that influenced many AI engineer and coder who are now building this stuff. And it's becoming an ever-present part of our lives. And occultists now are trying to incorporate it into their own practice, which we will discuss in a sec. Any other notes on a culture as a concept? Or what this conference is doing with the concept?

• 2:34:30Speaker 20

  I think a culture as a concept is something that's basically been around as long as there's been magical practices. Just looking at so much of things like, you know, the concept of the British Empire being invented by John Dee because of conversations he was having with angels. So I think that naming it and calling it something is also very much felt like an attempt to sort of regain control over the ways that magical practice and greater society seem to influence each other as opposed to a more unintentional way that they have been going back and forth for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

• 2:35:16Speaker 19

  There may also be one other aspect that's important for our American audiences, given that we're recording this in Deutschland. This conference varies significantly from other American equivalents, or something that might be an American equivalent. Formerly Pantheicon in and around San Francisco and San Jose specifically, or Paganicon in the Twin Cities, which specifically has much more of a new age neo-pagan reconstructionist. And so, most academic discussion is viewed with some suspicion. And I'm hesitant to say that there's an anti-intellectual trend, because I don't necessarily think that's true. However, there is a resistance to the kind of academic styling

• 2:36:00Speaker 19

  that we saw very prevalent at this conference to talk about the occult more generally as an area of study in addition to just idiosyncratic practice, or part of a larger social neo-pagan movement, which is, again, very much the focus of most US-based conferences.

• 2:36:19Speaker 05

  As an editorial note, when we're talking about magic, to clarify, we're not talking about stage magicians. We're referring to "magic" with a K. That is, rituals and practices based on occult knowledge that seeks to cause change in accordance with will, whether that's change within yourself or in our consensus reality. Occult magical practice can also serve as a form of spirituality, mysticism, an alternative religious practice, or an alternative to religion, with its beliefs and praxis largely influenced by historical esoteric orders, mystery traditions, paganism, witchcraft, herbalism, astrology, hermetic philosophy, and alchemy.

• 2:37:04Speaker 05

  And all these things are influences. I'm not saying that the actual historic manifestations of these things are the same as the modern occult practices that are influenced by these things. Because often, these can be wildly varying, especially when you talk about things like witchcraft and alchemy, which have been misinterpreted or reconstructed into...

• 2:37:26Speaker 05

  Completely new forms than what the historical manifestation of them actually contained. But a lot of modern day occultism has manifested as an individually mediated spirituality, containing some of the group ritual or ritual aspects of something like Catholicism, but with the individuality of Protestantism. Many conferences have an opening ceremony, and as I previously mentioned, a culture had an opening ritual. This accomplishes a very similar goal to any opening ceremony, to get attendees in a certain headspace, prepare them for the rest of the conference, and set a certain mood in which the rest of the events will kind of follow suit.

• 2:38:09Speaker 05

  The occulture opening ritual called upon the attendees' demiurgic capacity, how they are part of creating the reality of what this conference is, and how it will continue for the next few days. Back to the panel. The framing of the ritual was a blindfolded woman holding the scales of balance, and each person put a intention for the week, or for the conference, or for themselves, into a stone, which was handed out to each person who entered the ritual. And at a certain point, these stones were placed on to the scales of balance to create an equilibrium between the two sides of the scale, along with chanting, meditation, and a lot of incense.

• 2:38:53Speaker 19

  A significant deal of incense, given that we were in a former German forge warehouse. The billowing smoke that existed throughout the conference, from fires to incense to various other inflammatory items, was rather impressive. But in terms of actual ritual design, it met several elements that I found to be rather impressive. One, it was encompassing of all of those elements that we would later expect to see in the actual body of the conference itself, in terms of the artistic performances, the musical metal goth music that was played, but also a very practical and open approach to ritual. It was highly inclusive.

• 2:39:37Speaker 19

  Everyone who was there participated. It did an exceptional job, I felt, of actually setting intention and adding to, I don't know, at risk of sounding too New Age, the vibrations that we all felt as we engaged and were present. The theatrical quality, I have to say, was also very much Dark and spooky. Dark and spooky, but something to be admired. They did a very good job.

• 2:40:01Speaker 05

  Definitely one of the more high effort rituals of the weekend in terms of the performative aspect with there being little less than a dozen hooded, cloaked figures stationed at different points, either holding specific positions in a meditative state for probably over half an hour, standing still in a position that would become uncomfortable and swinging incense or holding torches or lights. Setting intention specifically is usually, if you talk to these people, the first step of any kind of magical working is setting your intention for what the work is supposed to do or accomplish in you or out into the world. Mirroring the opening ritual, the A Culture 2025 little booklet has a few paragraphs on the concept

• 2:40:46Speaker 05

  for this conference, talking about the cosmic craftsman as the demiurge who shapes matter and spirit alike, who embodies creation and transformation, revealing both the light and the hidden, the shadowed face of the divine, as well as having cosmic balance and balancing destruction with creation and order and chaos and the hidden and the seen. The last paragraph in which I will read, I think, relates specifically to this show and the cultural, political aspects. Quote, "In the age of relentless acceleration, the craftsman becomes a figure of resistance. His patience and ritual discipline reclaim sacred time, restoring a rhythm beyond

• 2:41:29Speaker 05

  the acceleration of modern life. A Culture 2025 invites us to dwell in this threshold where creation, intuition, and the hidden divine converge." And with that, we converge on an ad break.

• 2:41:54Speaker 05

  Welcome back to the It Could Happen Here spooky special on the Occulture Conference. The figure name dropped the most throughout this conference might surprise some people because I'm assuming most do not consider him to be an occultist or really a serious occult figure. The most discussed individual, at least in my experience of the conference, was not Aleister Crowley, John Dee, someone like Helena Blavatsky, but in fact, William S. Burroughs. And now we'll return to the panel to discuss the Burroughsian Current.

• 2:42:36Speaker 05

  Let's talk about what I would argue was the strongest current throughout this conference, what I'm going to call the Burroughsian Current, relating to writer, beat poet, and mystic and occultist in his own right, William S. Burroughs, and the magical technology that he either invented or popularized in the second half of the 20th century, and played a significant role in influencing successor movements such as chaos magic, and even the work of the CCRU, and Land, and Fisher. The very first talk that we attended was specifically on Burroughs, and Burroughs

• 2:43:17Speaker 05

  ghost haunted the remainder of the conference thereafter, and introduced a few of the key tensions throughout the rest of the conference, which we will discuss, specifically technology and AI.

• 2:43:31Speaker 19

  So our first talk by Castor Obstrup, who I believe was Swedish?

• 2:43:37Speaker 18

  One of those.

• 2:43:38Speaker 19

  One of those.

• 2:43:39Speaker 18

  He was working at the University of Copenhagen.

• 2:43:41Speaker 19

  University of Copenhagen, certainly Scandinavian of some flavor of variety, focused on William S. Burroughs and Brian Geisler. I think that it's important, and I appreciated this claim at the outset, that they argued that both Geist and Burroughs are actually closer to the late surrealists rather than to the Beat poets generation, which we typically associate them with. Which, interestingly enough, I made both of these figures far more compelling to me. My understanding of them, I mean, despite my familiarity with the cut-up method and several of the things that Burroughs had written, I always considered them far more beaten, therefore less of interest to me specifically.

• 2:44:23Speaker 19

  But this proximity to the surrealists, especially the latter surrealists, I found particularly compelling. And I think that brings us to the real focus of this talk was Burroughs's cut-up method and another book that he published on the Third Mind, which gave way to the latter discussions on artificial intelligence and large language models.

• 2:44:45Speaker 05

  So Burroughs definitely popularized the cut-up method, which Geist originated, but Burroughs changed its different forms and manifestations to various mediums of art, like the tape recorder and his own writings, and just words and language. And I guess the reason why I think talking about this current is important to start is also revolves around this idea of magic as this form of resistance or this culture jamming practice, which Burroughs framed his own work and his work that we could describe as esoteric or inspired by esotericism or achieving esoteric goals, is specifically for this cultural infusion, to disrupt mainstream culture in some capacity,

• 2:45:27Speaker 05

  to go against the one-god universe, sometimes in an anarchic way, sometimes in a libertarian way. There's a mix of motivations at play here. Same thing with Robert Anton Wilson, which I'm sure you've heard Robert Evans talk about before. These were contemporaries, these guys were friends, and operating under similar goals of disrupting culture through these techniques, which they thought literally disrupted the linear flow of culture or mechanisms of control, such as language and linear time, which later gets developed on by Land and Fisher.

• 2:46:07Speaker 20

  Yeah, I think looking at some of my notes, some of the things that stuck out to me, especially in view of the fact that the other classes going on at the time began with Aleister Crowley, but were diving into a lot of more classical and historical magical traditions, was that language can shape reality, which is something that would also be held up by a lot of the classical magical ideas, that sound and image have occult power, which is very true in a lot of magical traditions dating back to the Pica-tricks and more ancient texts. And that tech available at the time can be a magical instrument, which

• 2:46:47Speaker 20

  the tech available currently and for William Burroughs is very different than classical tech, but is something that was, has been done for a very long time as well. What really changes is stepping out of the idea of a linear representation of it and into something that could be edited, cut and reprogrammed specifically using technology that allowed that, as opposed to something that you're trying to control solely through, say, more spiritual magical acts, it's something that you can do with a tape recorder.

• 2:47:22Speaker 05

  And this is like, you know, based on forms like social engineering and the manipulation of the reproduction of reality, which Burroughs believes that language plays a key role in, even though I might disagree with him on a few ways on like the nature of like a language as a, as a human concept versus this like alien concept, which is like infected the human. Delta, you should explain what the cut-up method is.

• 2:47:47Speaker 18

  Yes, well, the, the name itself kind of is self-explanatory. But the idea being essentially to take any form of texts or writing, cut up the words or pieces of sentences, jumble them up in a hat or a bucket or whatever. And then kind of like play a jigsaw puzzle with language, reshifting sentences into new ideas and new forms of poetry especially, which I'm just looking at my own cut-ups right in front of me.

• 2:48:21Speaker 05

  To force like randomized combinations of words that you would not choose to combine on your own volition and seeing what sort of thought that generates, what kind of meaning can be constructed through that combination?

• 2:48:34Speaker 18

  Exactly.

• 2:48:35Speaker 20

  We're at some of the first cut-ups done with books and just making holes, cutting out words and seeing the other words that would appear underneath and if new meaning would arise through the surprise combinations.

• 2:48:48Speaker 05

  Words from like the future or the past presenting themselves into a current present within the book.

• 2:48:53Speaker 18

  Yeah, I think one of the Burroughs quotes is, "When you cut into the present, the future leaks out."

• 2:48:58Speaker 19

  Which is related to the concept of time sorcery that was talked about towards the end of that discussion. I think another element to the cut-up method that's important, especially as it was framed in this occulture context, is as we quoted from the, or as I wrote this quote down from the actual lecture itself, "Reality is made of words, images, and vibrations. And sounds and images have occult power, and therefore, these sounds and images and words can be marshaled or used, edited, cut through, rearranged, for the purposes of reprogramming." It's fascinating because I think that this really is something that carries through to the whole conference.

• 2:49:42Speaker 19

  And not just the Burroughs method, but what this Burroughs method, or the Barrosoian current of the conference. It seems that there was a problematic, I mean, we started basically with Derrida and we ended with Derrida. With discussions of like critiques of the master narrative that we get from, you know, Deleuze and Leotard and Baudrillard and these people. But the goal of this cut-up method was to rewrite the master narrative. So again, back to that concept of culture jamming, as Gare said, this concept of the one god universe, this cut-up method is meant to interrupt the linearity of words, of language that is a process of control.

• 2:50:27Speaker 19

  So I take issue with this concept of language as a virus, because that implies that it's a foreign body. And I mean, as true post-structuralist, I guess that I am, there is no outside to language. And I think that that's actually something that shines through in this third mind concept.

• 2:50:44Speaker 05

  As two people work together on something, there's a composite mind that like emerges and affects the work is the concept there.

• 2:50:53Speaker 19

  So when two people collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you. Through the revelation of the new that was already present. And I think that that's really important to point out. Because it's not as though there's this this outside thing. The implication is from this method is that the new reveals itself through this process that's already present in language. Because this is a question that I had throughout is that if language is this foreign entity that dominates us through control and the method itself is language, then how are we not just re? I mean, I guess it's a kind of inoculation if we have a, you know, a theory of language that is based in, you know.

• 2:51:38Speaker 19

  What do we call this? What is it that we all just got during COVID?

• 2:51:41Speaker 05

  Cabin fever?

• 2:51:42Speaker 19

  No, no, the things that we inject into our body that created the entire.

• 2:51:45Speaker 05

  Vaccines.

• 2:51:45Speaker 19

  There we go. That's the ticket. Inoculations.

• 2:51:49Speaker 05

  Not all, not all of us got vaccines. Yeah. Okay, Gary.

• 2:51:54Speaker 19

  You heard it here first. Vaccine deny, no. Yeah, where was I going with this?

• 2:52:00Speaker 05

  Okay. Speaking of methods of, speaking of methods of control.

• 2:52:04Speaker 20

  I mean, a lot of it.

• 2:52:05Speaker 19

  Hey, the new just came out there. Wait, just one moment. Sorry, Elaine. I likened this to this process of dialectics, but that's because I couldn't shut up about Hegel the entire time we were there. Because I don't think enough occultists are talking about Hegel. Why is no one talking about Hegel? Everyone should be talking about Hegel.

• 2:52:27Speaker 05

  I mean, as fun as it is to think about this like third mind as like an egregore figure, which we've mentioned before, is like, is like a group thought form, like a being or a force that is generated through, through multiple people believing in it.

• 2:52:45Speaker 18

  You make up an imaginary friend in a way.

• 2:52:47Speaker 05

  That's more of a servitor.

• 2:52:49Speaker 18

  Okay, okay.

• 2:52:50Speaker 05

  But.

• 2:52:50Speaker 18

  True, okay.

• 2:52:51Speaker 05

  In, in egregore is this, as a, is yeah, like a, a form of thought that they gained its own, like a autonomy and becomes kind of, you know, like a, like a, like a little tiny god, I guess. Or they also combined the, the third mind idea to like network consciousness. The one last. Thing I will say on this before we get to like the AI aspect, I guess, on this culture jamming, non-linearity is the concept of the circuit jump, which was playing back words from politicians in different contexts as a sort of like a uno reverso psychic attack, which I don't know if that actually works, considering the current political situation. But this is certainly a tactic

• 2:53:34Speaker 05

  to which I have employed many such cases. And we see a lot of people attempt to do this. And I think there's certain figures who have their own very strong magical force field protecting them, which has been pretty evident through the past 10 years, including the President of the United States. But as a circuit jump, is it playing something from the wrong time in a different context as a form of attack? The most famous version of this, which isn't necessarily for political lenses, this was for personal lens, is the Burroughs Cafe incident, which I have been a fan of for years, in which he was slighted by a cafe. So then he started recording.

• 2:54:19Speaker 20

  All that happened was they changed their menu and he couldn't order the one food that he ordered every day.

• 2:54:25Speaker 05

  There's been some menus that have changed that I would continue using this tactic, where he recorded sounds from outside of like people talking or arguing or walking by or plates dropping, and then played them back outside of the cafe for a series of months until the cafe closed. And this is like the funniest, the funniest form of this sort of magical obsession, because this really is just a crazy guy playing loud sounds in front of a cafe until they close. I mean, it worked. Of yeah, playing back sounds of arguing, fighting, plates smashing, which would probably create a negative aura around this building. But that is the most funny Burroughs circuit

• 2:55:10Speaker 05

  jump moment, although Burroughs life is full of these humorous and sometimes worrying anecdotes.

• 2:55:17Speaker 20

  There's one other thing that stuck out to me, given what a lot of the other talks in that space ended up dealing with, along with AI and stuff, was really the speaker talking a lot about the fact that for Burroughs and Geisand, the reproduction of reality is how control occurs. And so the goal was to manipulate the reproduction of reality, because if you can manipulate the reproduction of reality, you are also manipulating reality itself, which I don't think anyone went into nearly as much, but is something that we're seeing with, say, even the Republican Party releasing deep fake videos of Democratic politicians.

• 2:55:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, and this is something our materialist friend Mia does talk about, is how there's a quote from some neocons about how Democrats just have to kind of like, you know, react to reality versus the Republicans who generate it. And they like decide what reality is. And you can see this with all of the sort of like moral panics which have spread across the United States and around the world the past few years, whether that's gender ideology, whether that's immigration, whether that's this non-existent crime wave, where it is a genuine like creation of reality. And this goes into, you know, Burroughs' ideas later get developed by a group of academics and occultists that formed the CCRU. This included,

• 2:56:42Speaker 05

  say, Plant, Nick Land, who then turned to the dark side, and the since passed Mark Fisher, who put a name to some of this sort of phenomenon called the hyperstition, which is, Robert has talked about before on the show, but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a fiction that becomes true through the creation of the fiction and the dissemination of this fiction. And this is part of how reality can get formed, is through these falsehoods that through repetition and dissemination become self-manifest.

• 2:57:16Speaker 18

  The thing about that, though, is that the hyperstitional model itself... Requires the acceptance of the idea that everything is a fiction.

• 2:57:25Speaker 05

  Yes. Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of, most things go through a process like this.

• 2:57:31Speaker 18

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:57:32Speaker 05

  But doing, doing such a thing like intentionally and like offensively, right? Which is, which is the idea that we're discussing here in like a political context is this, this, this offensive reality formation where you literally decide what is real and like what isn't. And, you know, if you have hundreds of millions of dollars in like a news company at your disposal, this can become easier.

• 2:57:55Speaker 20

  Are you saying that media companies are currently cutting up reality to shape it in the image of the people who fund them?

• 2:58:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they are, they are much, it's funny because like occultists, I think, are the people who are often-

• 2:58:10Speaker 20

  Sound clips are you going to use from the conference?

• 2:58:14Speaker 05

  I will later in my written work, but I think on that note, I think occultists are a class of people who are maybe the worst at doing magic.

• 2:58:27Speaker 05

  Because the people that are really good at this sort of thing are perhaps way better at the occult element of hiding their, their, you know, awareness of what they are doing. Because a lot of, a lot of them know what they're doing. They just actually keep it more occultic, whereas the magicians will not shut the fuck up because there's always a, there's always a new book to sell.

• 2:58:48Speaker 19

  That was an excellent segue to an ad break, Elaine. Thank you for that. And now a word from our sponsors.

• 2:59:03Speaker 19

  On this note, though, Gary, I agree with you completely. As a former academic and just a healthy level of skepticism going into any magical conference, I sat down, I listened, and I've been to enough conferences listening to magicians attempt to map on rather poorly magic onto a cultural figure. And I think Burroughs is really unique here, but my academic pretense was to sit here and to listen and think about, you know, language as a pharmacon, think about Derrida, de Luce, Baudrillard, Leotard, when they're discussing the master narrative or rewriting the master narrative. But what's unique about Burroughs and why I gave up that academic mapping of philosophy and asking myself, why are we having this conversation?

• 2:59:47Speaker 19

  We could just go read these texts. They talk about similar things, but the point is, is that those texts talk about similar things. And what's unique about Burroughs is that he's actually doing-

• 2:59:57Speaker 05

  He's a doer.

• 2:59:57Speaker 19

  He's a doer. This is fundamentally the difference between the Vita Activa and the Vita Contemplataiva. Like, I'm thinking in terms of philosophers, and it took me half of this talk to be like, no, he's actually doing shit. As soon as we get out to like, you know, him actually standing out in front of the café and doing this, he's not just developing a method, but by virtue of the fact that he's inviting other artists, like the slides upon slides that we saw of him, you know, working with new machines that he was creating and trying these things, he was actively involved in this practice, which again, makes him far more magical than most occultists. Don't come for me.

• 3:00:35Speaker 05

  Absolutely. AI, specifically discussing debates and uses of generative AI in this conference. Because the last A Culture conference was in 2023, as these large language models and image generation platforms were just, just starting to gain popularity. And now they have a stranglehold over the stock market and many people's imagination. The first, I guess, real debate around AI happened as the three of you stayed to listen to a panel after, after the Liam Asperos panel, as well as a Austin Osman Spare panel, a proto-chaos magician from the 20th century, who's a contemporary of Aleister Crowley.

• 3:01:18Speaker 05

  I left to go listen to a mathematical, telemmic ontology talk, which was probably less interesting than the panel. I'd like to hear you guys talk about the debates around AI and how they emerged in this panel, and then also juxtaposing that to the different forms of like AI, discussions around AI that dominated a large part of the rest of the conference.

• 3:01:41Speaker 20

  Well, actually, AI came up because the initial discussion question for the panel was, what does it mean to talk about art as magic in the digital era? So everyone was very specifically being asked to discuss the differences between-

• 3:01:55Speaker 20

  The creation process is magic when you can use AI, when you can use large language models to just generate things. And if the generative method using AI was at all related to, say, the cut-up method or other things. So that was the initial conversation that began, that whole panel.

• 3:02:15Speaker 19

  Well, and that was certainly a topic that was begged by the other two talks that we didn't really discuss. The Austin Osman Spare was about automatic drawing. So this conception and of, you know, this drawing that is coming from the outside, coming from the subconscious, coming from within. All within one line. All within one line. But more than that, it was a very traditional kind of European 1970s lecture. You know, you had a lovely Italian man who stood in the front that was ready to smoke a cigarette while trying to get through, you know, a very well-formulated, well-argued essay while a series of images presented to us behind him

• 3:02:58Speaker 19

  that covered an overview of artists that are doing very similar things, or he argued exist in a similar kind of vein. And the occurrences of not just magical tropes, but cultural influences that happen independently. So artists all over the world. The third talk by, I believe, Kate Lady. Yeah, the Ritual Transformation and Hybridity in Leonora Carrington's Judith, which was a stage production, which happened in Mexico City, I believe. So we had a few pictures of this, but Leonora Carrington's art very specifically has to do with this like hybrid of like animals and mythical figures and creatures. And the stage production was incredibly intense. I really appreciated this talk a lot.

• 3:03:43Speaker 19

  But the then focus on talking about, you know, generative artificial intelligence and these large language models and the role of art or what it means to do art in this era was related to this idea of the third mind, of automatic drawing, of this concept of hybridity, of this like transformative or this discovering of the new through a synthetic putting together of different elements or images, words, sounds, costumery, these kinds of things. So it was a natural question to lead, but the audience members took it in a very strange direction that I would like you all to talk about.

• 3:04:22Speaker 20

  I mean, the initial question was really that people started asking after the panel topic was proposed was, so what did the panelists think about AI art? Do the panelists think AI art is magic? Do the panelists think that AI art is channeling? Do the panelists think that, you know, putting a prompt in a language model is the same as doing some sort of trans-state automatic writing? There was a lot of variations on functionally that. All of the panelists' reaction was, no, it's not. And a lot of them did not immediately really want to even dive into that topic and were very annoyed at the question initially.

• 3:05:03Speaker 19

  That's actually not true because I got triggered almost immediately because it was our first speaker that responded, not to that first question, but to the second question. And the second question had to do with the role of technology and whether we see that there's a possibility for these tools, you know, as a technology, a technae in magical practice. And our first speaker's reaction was to sit back and give us a tentative yes.

• 3:05:30Speaker 20

  To the tech.

• 3:05:32Speaker 19

  To the tech. That's correct.

• 3:05:33Speaker 20

  To AI, they were like, their initial reaction was still also no, but.

• 3:05:38Speaker 19

  Yes, they indeed got there, but it was unclear at first. And I was a little raw about it, given that seemed completely contrary to the talk that, you know, that he had mentioned before. There was a question about NFTs. Do you remember this question?

• 3:05:53Speaker 20

  Oh, I tried to put it immediately out of my head.

• 3:05:58Speaker 19

  Yes, that was wise.

• 3:05:59Speaker 20

  Because of the fact that it started with like, well, NFTs failed because people like, weren't ready to embrace the blockchain as a generative idea for making art as opposed to the fact that. Why would I own an NFT if I can screenshot the picture?

• 3:06:16Speaker 19

  Yeah, well, it was this idea that like NFTs themselves were part of this breaking up of the control process, the linearity of money and financial systems, that somehow it was related to the cut up method. It was one of those questions that was a narrative before it finally got to your question that really just invited the readers to respond. There were others that talked about this too and related their own personal experience to the generative AI process that, you know, they approach AI not with the expectation that it will provide sense, but it'll almost have this oracular, again, this, they related it to the third mind. They, this idea that, again, you and the AI come together and somehow

• 3:07:00Speaker 19

  reveal the new, which I, at this point, was absolutely seething.

• 3:07:04Speaker 20

  Yeah, I think the closest, actually, that we had to some really, like, someone even trying to approach it was asking about if you're making this art, if you're generating these new things, does it matter that corporations are controlling the algorithm by which you're doing so, which started to touch on some of the problems, but still was definitely relying on the base assumption that using a large language model to produce stories or art, that you're interacting with something else that's actually capable of creating at all.

• 3:07:38Speaker 19

  And to her credit, my girl, Kate Lady, who was talking about Leonora Carrington, the one that seemed to be kind of tangentially separate from, from the other two, but the hybridity really made it, was the one that just gave us a great, straight Marxist answer of like, no, this is bullshit. Let's actually look at the material implications as to where this is coming from and the environmental costs of running these programs, of server farms, the destruction of space, of, of, you know, livable areas throughout the United States, that these are questions that we need to ask and are not separate from these questions of magic. So really, shout out to her. I appreciated that response because it was instant and it was, it was heated.

• 3:08:20Speaker 18

  It is also like, I mean, from my perspective, it's also a labor issue, right? Because these large language models and generative AI just scrape like so much data that, that's like writing from real artists and create, created by real like painters and whatever. And it is The appropriation of human labor to shit out some advertising, essentially. That is like my main, well, aside from all the ecological and the political issues with it, it's like very much that labor angle to it that frustrates me.

• 3:09:01Speaker 19

  Well, in the context of the talk, it was really important to then ground, and this is the comment that I made that the panel broadly seemed to agree with, although I didn't really leave them much opportunity to disagree with me.

• 3:09:13Speaker 18

  I mean, you're right.

• 3:09:15Speaker 19

  Thank you. Go on. So Burroughs' concept of the third mind, this book that he wrote, right? When two minds collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you. Again, not about creating the new, but about revealing itself in what was already present.

• 3:09:37Speaker 18

  Yes.

• 3:09:38Speaker 19

  But the idea is that you have to have two minds in order to get to this dialectical third mind that was inherent in the conditions, the situation, the language of the two. When one interacts with any form of large language model or chat GPT, I in my mind and with what I carry, sit in front of a computer and type my input. That's one mind. Can you tell me where the second is?

• 3:10:11Speaker 20

  Because even if you're cutting up a book, there's a mind in the book, there's a story, there's an actual thing there. There's a thing that you are interacting with that were thoughts that were produced by someone that you are cutting up. You are not just scraping the toilet bowl of human production.

• 3:10:31Speaker 19

  But even if we're going to be generous and say that these large language models are the ones that are doing the cutout process and you are secondary or tertiary or even further down the line to it, I mean, it doesn't involve. A human intelligence at that point. So just in terms of the Barroshian current, it's just not a third mind. It's the material conditions are such that it is not and cannot be a third mind.

• 3:11:01Speaker 05

  Where I would like to take this discussion is actually to the very next talk that I attended was part of a three-talk series called The Politics of Tarot. And the specific one that I think continued on this line of thought and even stuff like automatic writing was From Icon to Index by Thomas Leek, The Generative Logic of Tarot, in which he discussed, I'll have to check his name later, but discussed an author in the eighties who was trying to use Tarot as a way to remove the human element of writing, tried to create an automatic story using the Tarot archetypes assembled in a randomized shuffling to generate a story based on the linkages between each of the cards

• 3:11:45Speaker 05

  and remove his own agency in directing where the story goes, except for trying to bridge each card from one to another. And the presenter was discussing if this bears any similarity to generative text models. The presenter said, no. The presenter said, no, this actually is not like LLMs, which purely operate on a people-pleasing, probabilistic capacity to follow one word after another in accordance with whatever the prompt of the person who's operating the AI wants it to generate. Though, the presenter stated that this author who was using Tarot probably would have loved using an LLM to try to accomplish this goal of his,

• 3:12:30Speaker 05

  trying to access kind of like a form of automatic writing, similar to like Oshman's bear, but without human input. The shuffling of the cards and forcing the human brain to make connections between these archetypes still contains a creative human process based on randomness in the shuffling of the deck versus the people-pleasing probabilistic generative text that LLMs produce.

• 3:12:55Speaker 05

  This concludes the first episode of my Occulture 2025 coverage. In part two, releasing Sunday night, the panel will discuss digital techno mancy, traditional magical practice, and why people are doing occult practice in 2025. See you on the other side.

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• 3:16:00Speaker 05

  No.

• 3:16:01Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep. It's, it could happen here. Electile disorder.

• 3:16:08Speaker 05

  Executive Disorder, which is our weekly newscast, which we've been doing all year. So we should, we should know what it's called by now.

• 3:16:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's why I'm so good at doing it. Naming it.

• 3:16:20Speaker 17

  Yep.

• 3:16:21Speaker 05

  This show covers what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you and me and everyone else. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stoughton, Mia Wong, and we are covering the week of October 22nd to October 30th.

• 3:16:36Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 3:16:38Speaker 17

  So I think we should start off the bat by the same thing we started off last week with, which is that as you're listening to this-

• 3:16:44Speaker 05

  Happy Halloween!

• 3:16:45Speaker 17

  Yeah, well, that, so on the upside, Halloween, woo, spooky. On the downside, like 40 million people lose, lose their SNAP benefits the next day.

• 3:16:55Speaker 05

  On Saturday.

• 3:16:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but what's spookier than that? Look, one thing you can't say about the government is that they're not failing to celebrate the holiday.

• 3:17:05Speaker 11

  Mm-hmm. I am scared of the consequences.

• 3:17:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. Stock up on the trick-or-treater candy, I guess.

• 3:17:14Robert Evans?

  Steal as much candy as you can out there, people. You're gonna need it to stay alive.

• 3:17:18Speaker 11

  See a group of children, you run past them.

• 3:17:20Robert Evans?

  Kick them. Oh, they're kids, they can't stop you.

• 3:17:22Speaker 11

  Mm-hmm, yep. Hold it above your head, they can't reach it.

• 3:17:25Speaker 05

  No, it is, it is extremely grim. And there seems to be no indication from the Republicans of the Trump administration that they are going to work with Democrats to resolve this without sacrificing healthcare for millions of Americans.

• 3:17:40Speaker 11

  Yeah, so Gavin Newsom, a friend of the show, has deployed the California National Guard to assist food banks in the state.

• 3:17:49Robert Evans?

  Oh my god.

• 3:17:50Speaker 11

  Yeah, like, look, the thing is, when you participate in the largest crackdown on protected First Amendment speech in recent history, you don't get to show up and hand out snacks and feel good. And many food banks, including some in the Bay Area, have refused the help of National Guard members, right? Because they have this very obvious concern that some people might be reluctant to go to places where the soldiers who were standing right next to all the different immigration agents in LA are now working. And so this will have the opposite of a positive effect in those instances, right? People are afraid to go to food banks and going to remain hungry. The consequences of this will be negative. Like, the issue, I don't think, is a lack

• 3:18:32Speaker 11

  of person power. The issue is a lack of funding. The state has mobilized $80 million in funds, but millions of Californians will be going hungry. And because of the failure of state authorities to stop federal authorities deploying the National Guard to LA and to other areas where immigration enforcement was happening, this stunt that Newsom is going for could have very negative consequences for food banks and for Californians who are hungry. Something sick and cool you can do, if you have the means and the time, is to pick up food from food banks for people who need it. A lot of people might be concerned.

• 3:19:09Speaker 05

  One of the biggest problems is how much food banks get food also through these programs.

• 3:19:14Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, food banks themselves are going to be struggling right now. Like, I actually did a thread on Blue Sky.

• 3:19:23Speaker 05

  Were you gonna say lib footer and then corrected to Blue Sky?

• 3:19:27Speaker 11

  I was gonna say libsky. Yeah, yeah. I fact-checked myself. It's Blue Wave Sky. There you go.

• 3:19:35Speaker 05

  You cannot get that past me. I could pick up on what you were doing immediately.

• 3:19:40Speaker 11

  Garrett and Davis, like a viper struck, yeah, the core of my thought process. Yeah, so if you're on Skeeter, then you can find the thread I made. I'll link it in the show notes with food banks that are looking for donations. And you can also use that to find a food bank in your area via. Interested in that, but yeah, this is a serious problem. This is the should be the biggest news story. I'm thinking particularly of those folks in Alaska, right, who found themselves as climate refugees due to this storm, right, which flooded their villages and now not only facing the loss of their villages and their homes, but also all their cashed food. These are people who often would have hunted or fished or relied on

• 3:20:23Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 3:20:24Speaker 11

  um storing food for the winter and now finding themselves unable to access

• 3:20:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:29Speaker 11

  federal benefits.

• 3:20:30Robert Evans?

  Doing the thing that like, there's a representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana made a tweet today blaming SNAP recipients for not stockpiling a month's worth of food.

• 3:20:41Speaker 11

  What the fu- does he understand how this works?

• 3:20:43Robert Evans?

  He said, "Try to get your head wrapped around how many pantries you can stock with forty two hundred dollars, which is what people get on average per year," he says, "with SNAP benefits, uh, in properly shopped groceries. Any American who's been receiving forty two hundred dollars per year of free groceries and does not have at least one month of grocery stock should never again receive SNAP because wow, stop smoking crack."

• 3:21:02Speaker 11

  That's inhumane.

• 3:21:03Robert Evans?

  "Dealing with the shit that they talk about is almost pointless because they're all liars." Uh, but like

• 3:21:08Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:21:10Robert Evans?

  As like what you said, like, uh, people are on SNAP for a wide variety of reasons. Uh, they're largely employed. They're just not getting enough money to actually like survive and feed their family. And like the forty two hundred dollars a year for a family is not in fact enough to stockpile a huge quantity of food.

• 3:21:31Speaker 11

  No, it's not like, it's remarkable how detached the people who make our laws are from

• 3:21:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:37Speaker 11

  the working class experience.

• 3:21:38Speaker 17

  There is no way that guy knows how much a banana costs. No way. Zero.

• 3:21:43Robert Evans?

  He has no idea. That man isn't shopped for himself in fucking twenty years.

• 3:21:47Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, that guy does not know, uh, how much it costs to buy

• 3:21:50Robert Evans?

  No.

• 3:21:50Speaker 11

  a mac and cheese for your kids.

• 3:21:52Robert Evans?

  And obviously, you know, we hear, we talk about storing food, about canning your own food, and there are things you can do even on a budget when you don't have much money to build a stockpile. And, and that's why I encourage people to pay attention to things like prices at the grocery store when things are a lot cheaper because they're in season and learn how to do things like pressure can, right, and pickle different foods and whatnot, because there's, there are ways that you can And this is why, right? It's not because you should be doing that or you're irresponsible. It's because we, even when it comes to the social safety net, you know, that we have, what little of one that we have, you can't rely on it because at any given point, it could become a fucking, fucking football for Democrats and Republicans to fight over

• 3:22:36Robert Evans?

  and go away, right? Like, none of this stuff is reliable, which is why people ought to, if it's at all possible, be doing stuff like that, right? Not because they should have to do that, but because you cannot rely on the government, right? And I don't say that as like a critique of people or to like shit on people. It's just like, it's a, it's a fact. It's a fact that people need to increasingly accept because this is not going to be getting better in the long run. Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about Graham Plathner. All right. Oh, God. All right, let's do it. So. Talking about a touch politicians. Couple of weeks ago, James brought up Graham Plathner, who is running for Congress in Maine, and some ads that he had put out, which were really, and I, and I still think

• 3:23:19Robert Evans?

  are really good ads, not good ads in terms of, they, they were effective objectively. He raised a lot of money. He was leading in the polls prior to us. We'll talk about a bunch of scandals coming out. He's no longer leading, but he was doing very well for a while. So his, his campaign, the strategy that he was following, which was largely a mix of talking about and really pushing investments in social programs and particularly healthcare and attacking the billionaire class in very stark terms, talking about the need to effectively get, get rid of that as a group of people, like tax them out of existence. That's a popular, you know, and, and a good thing to campaign on. And the success that he had early on is, is evidence that there's a lot of legs to talking about

• 3:24:04Robert Evans?

  that kind of stuff in the way that he did. And he talked about it in a very combative way, right? This guy was a former Marine. Yeah. Some sort of fisherman, I think, uh, whatever kind of, he's like, what's this? Oyster farmer. I think it's an oyster farmer or some shit, whatever. They have up that nonsense state. Um, sorry, Maineites. And they're called maniacs, technically. I think they're called Mainers. They can't be right, Garrison. So he was coming across as, as a very like, blue collar guy, right? Like a very, and kind of crude, but crude in a like, I'm a straight talker sort of guy. And that worked. That was a, that was a good. Yeah. Campaign. And we, we highlighted that because I think it, it struck, you know, James is the one who brought it to our attention, but I think it struck all of us as a, oh yeah, this is a guy who is kind of. Doing, talking to voters in a way that we wish more Democrats were, right?

• 3:24:49Robert Evans?

  And then in the last couple of weeks, oh God, so many scams come out about this guy. The most well-known of them is that for the last 20 years of his life, he has had a Totenkopf tattooed over his pectoral. That is the Death's Head. Now, it dates back before the Nazis. It was a, I don't know if this was the very first use of it, but the very first prominent use of it in military history was as the insignia for a unit called the Death's Head Hossars, which was a, an elite German cavalry unit. Where, I mean, I'm sure, I think they did still exist in World War I, but they were, that was well past their prime. And it was then adopted by the SS. And it was, it was worn by a number, by a lot of guys in the SS, but it was specifically

• 3:25:33Robert Evans?

  the insignia of a unit called the Totenkopf SS, which existed to guard concentration camps and death camps. So having one tattooed on you, bad.

• 3:25:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, not cool.

• 3:25:43Robert Evans?

  Plattner has said, basically, I, it was a dumb tattoo I got when I was young and just joined in the Marine Corps, and I didn't know what it meant. And I am willing to believe that like a 19-year-old who joins the Marines would make a bad tattoo decision. Cause I have a lot of friends that were in the Marines, and they all have bad tattoos. You're right. None of them have Death Heads.

• 3:26:07Speaker 05

  Also, you got it while in like Croatia, while drunk with other Marines.

• 3:26:11Robert Evans?

  And, right. And he was, he was hammered.

• 3:26:14Speaker 05

  And yeah, the probability of walking into a tattoo shop in Croatia and coming out with a Nazi tattoo is extremely high.

• 3:26:19Robert Evans?

  Sure. Yeah, it's, it's not, it's not low. Yeah, yeah, they're on the flash seat for Friday the 13th.

• 3:26:25Speaker 05

  They probably are.

• 3:26:28Robert Evans?

  If it had just come out that he'd had this for some period of time, being like, yeah, I got like, I was hammered in Croatia and I got a fucked up tattoo and realized it and got it covered, I'd have been like, not, not a story. Right? Like man gets bad tattoo is dumb kid. But number one, he kept it to, he got it covered in like the last week or so. Yeah. Let me tell you, that was a real piece of art that he covered it with. Which is a wild choice to just keep it for that long. But also, he claimed, I had no idea until it like came out as a story. Cause I forget what outlet, but some news outlet found out that he had it and was going to publish it.

• 3:27:05Speaker 11

  I think his team told Pod Save America when he went on the Pod Save America pod.

• 3:27:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, but he had heard that there was opposition.

• 3:27:14Speaker 11

  Research, yeah.

• 3:27:15Speaker 17

  Yeah, because he had sent out to like another thing that he went on, like a picture of him with his shirt off. And they were like, wait, what? Like.

• 3:27:25Robert Evans?

  There were a few of them floating around, huh?

• 3:27:27Speaker 11

  If you've lived that kind of life, there's gonna be pictures of you with the shirt off, you know, like.

• 3:27:32Robert Evans?

  The refusing to acknowledge, yeah, I knew earlier in my life that it was a death's head. And like, there's reports from people who knew him that he called it a toten cough and joked about it.

• 3:27:44Speaker 11

  I didn't know that.

• 3:27:45Robert Evans?

  Now, let me be clear, I don't actually think Graham is a secret Nazi sleeper agent. I really don't. I think he's a guy with really questionable judgment, which is reason, you know, to be very critical of his campaign. And, uh, yeah, I take a lot of issue with how he's responded to this because rather than, again, just kind of doing a mea culpa, he's gone on the, this is my enemies in the Democratic Party. Trying to silence me thing. And a very weird coalition has propped up kind of around him, trying to argue that this is a circular firing squad kind of deal. Like there was a Jacobin article being like, it's fucked up that people are going after Graham and the Pod Save guys are defending him.

• 3:28:28Robert Evans?

  Like, it is a weird coalition, uh, that's circling around this fella.

• 3:28:32Speaker 05

  What do you think the Joe Rogan of the left meant? Vibes, essays?

• 3:28:38Speaker 11

  We wanted a guy who took loads of steroids and didn't have problematic opinions.

• 3:28:43Robert Evans?

  I'm never gonna say this in any other instance about Joe Rogan, but he wouldn't have gotten that tattoo, cause he knows what a death's head is.

• 3:28:51Speaker 05

  I don't know if he knew in like 2007 or what I I think there's a very strong alternate world where 2007 Joe Rogan is traveling in Croatia.

• 3:29:00Robert Evans?

  Joe Rogan gets a toten cop.

• 3:29:02Speaker 05

  Accidentally gets a toten cop tattoo.

• 3:29:04Robert Evans?

  It's not impossible. You're right. You're right. I guess I'm just assuming he's watched enough World War II documentaries to know.

• 3:29:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, but watching those while like smoking weed. So he doesn't remember anything.

• 3:29:16Robert Evans?

  That's fair. These are fair points you're making, Garrison. So a couple of surprising things about this, and this is not the only scandal that's kind of come out about him recently, but it number one, it did not immediately take a strong hit to his polling. This seems to be primarily just because a lot of voters aren't aware of it because in polls where they at where they inform people that he had a Nazi tattoo, his support drops dramatically by like 30 points. That said, he was leading until like two or three days ago, I think was the most recent poll that came out that had a main governor Janet Mills in the lead above him. We're not talking about the the main race. This is we're still in the the primary, right? So he's challenging Janet Mills for the primary.

• 3:29:59Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 3:30:00Robert Evans?

  And yeah, at present, according to SoCal Strategies, who did a poll very recently, and this is the most recent poll, Mills has 41% from likely voters and Plattner has 36%. Although about a fifth of respondents are undecided. And yeah, uh, this is a pretty dramatic upset because prior to the whole Nazi tattoo news coming out, Plattner was leading Mills by about 34 points. So this has gone from Plattner looked to have it in the bag to it's pretty close. Mills is ahead, not by a lead that's so commanding that it's a definite thing, you know, a standard polling error could have them basically be neck and neck. And we all should know at this point how frequently that kind of stuff happens.

• 3:30:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, polling, never wrong.

• 3:30:45Robert Evans?

  But um, yeah, so I don't know. It's one of those. Somebody got angry at us on the subreddit being like, I can't believe they're hiding that like this has happened, you know, with this guy that they they endorse. Like, no, we didn't endorse him. And number two, like this, this shit was breaking when we were recording the ED last week. We made like a reference about it, but not much had come out. And there certainly hadn't been time for us to really look into what was going on here. And. It's not, this is a Maine Senate primary. This is not like the very top of our list of crucial things to hit the second it happens. We can wait on something like this to see how stuff's shaking out a little bit. No one's voting yet, so it's not like we're influencing the election by not coming out or whatever.

• 3:31:28Speaker 11

  Yeah, like, we only get to cover so much. We have one hour of like news roundup show a week and the blue sky Twitter drama about Graham Plathner is not as important as the fact that millions of people are losing their food this week.

• 3:31:41Robert Evans?

  Now, uh, one thing that is interesting, and I do think this is an important race just because of kind of what it says about what sort of strategies are working now and igniting the base and what kind of stuff does matter in terms of scandals. I think there are some things that are really relevant here. One thing that is interesting to me is that according to a poll, a very recent poll, the article came out on October 26th, 2025, a majority of young Democrats still back Graham Plathner even after the whole tattoo thing. And this is really interesting to me because the data shows that in general, among likely voters, his, his potential support plummets when people are made aware that he had the tattoo. But young Democrats are by far the group most likely to have become aware of it as

• 3:32:23Robert Evans?

  soon as the story broke because young people are much more online than older people. And among young people, he's still well ahead, which I really just do think speaks more than anything to the strength of

• 3:32:34Speaker 05

  It's the rhetoric. He has been using

• 3:32:36Robert Evans?

  The platform that he came out the gate with. It's, and, and the rhetoric, right? His combative rhetoric is really attractive to young voters especially.

• 3:32:43Speaker 11

  Explain your generation to us, Garrison. Why are you like this?

• 3:32:46Speaker 05

  I mean, there, there, there's a lot of stuff that the Zorong campaign kind of ignited around.

• 3:32:51Speaker 11

  Yeah, no, you're, you're right.

• 3:32:52Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Absolutely.

• 3:32:53Speaker 05

  Rhetoric and then, you know, Sanders and, and AOC had their like anti oligarchy tour, which, I mean, I, we, we don't need to like debate like the use of like that term. But no, there, there is a huge frustration at the geriatric Democratic Party and, and this sort of populist rhetoric is very popular among young people as it, as it has been since like the Sanders campaign in 2016. Like this isn't like new or revolutionary. Information, the fact that that this guy has gotten to this point is has gotten either past scandals or is navigating through it despite his like, you know, very questionable background in military and military private contracting, his like misogynistic Reddit posts, which were unearthed

• 3:33:38Speaker 05

  as as like an attack against him, which I think he actually handled that scandal fairly well, using it as a parallel to chart his like own political journey. So, yeah, I can understand why a whole bunch of young people who are reading about this aren't gonna actually care at all about any of these stories and still vote for him because of what he's saying.

• 3:33:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and I I want to be clear, I didn't bring this up because I think it's bad, even that like, young people are still supporting him. I think this is something that people, especially in the Democratic Party, who care about winning, and I think it's people on the left who are trying to look at what can we do to get more progressive and combative candidates who are going to do something both about the the right and about the billionaire class? What can we do to actually like, win? You should be paying attention to this because this this rhetoric works. Yeah.

• 3:34:31Speaker 05

  And because surely there's one other guy who can say these things.

• 3:34:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's gotta be another guy without a Nazi tattoo who can say this stuff, right?

• 3:34:40Speaker 05

  Surely you can find one person who can use rhetoric, is good on camera, and has not had a toten cuff tattooed on their chest for almost 20 years.

• 3:34:49Speaker 17

  Yeah, and also, I, the most wild part about this, I don't even think is that it's that this guy was in Blackwater, like, so technically it's Constellus, but he calls it Blackwater.

• 3:35:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the other scandal, so please, let's, let's, yeah.

• 3:35:07Speaker 17

  He deployed to Afghanistan for Blackwater in 2018. That was the first Trump administration. No one at any point in this process went, hold on, wait, this guy went to fight in Afghanistan, like, in 2018? Like, they they prosecuted the guys from...

• 3:35:29Robert Evans?

  Nisar Square, yeah.

• 3:35:31Speaker 17

  From the Nisar Square massacre, yeah, after the square, like, those people got prosecuted four years before that, and he joined Blackwater in 2018.

• 3:35:40Robert Evans?

  And to be clear, because this is something James brought up, and we talked about this in our chat previously, he didn't technically join Blackwater, because Blackwater has changed its name, and I think merged with a couple of countries, it was a different name, but, to be fair to Mia, he called it Blackwater, he said, "I worked for Blackwater."

• 3:36:00Speaker 11

  There's a way in which, like, I'm okay with people fucking up if they acknowledge they fucked up, right? Like, I'm okay with him saying, "I did this, and it was wrong, so I left, and I regret doing it."

• 3:36:11Speaker 05

  I mean, that is what he's saying, though. It was specifically after this deployment, that this is where he says that, like, this marked his, like, political, quote-unquote, radicalization, or like, during the path of like, how he viewed his life in politics, specifically was negative experiences during this deployment.

• 3:36:27Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:36:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And I guess that is something I have really complicated opinions on, because I'm not, and I really have a lot of issues with folks on the left who are like, anyone who was ever in the military is forever.

• 3:36:38Speaker 11

  Baby killer.

• 3:36:39Robert Evans?

  Evil, and, like, I think that's deeply, deeply unserious and incredibly counterproductive. And I don't, I think that, like, it's good that someone can do something as fucked up as join Blackwater and realize that they did a horrible thing and change. Maybe doing it in 2018 is too recently for me to want him in Congress as a progressive, I don't know.

• 3:37:06Speaker 17

  Yeah, it was like, that was, it was like a decade after, like, he was one of the, so he wasn't one of the, like, the torture guards, but, like, when he was a Marine, he was like one of the guys who was like, assigned to guard Abu Ghraib?

• 3:37:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:19Speaker 17

  Technically after the torture scandal, but it's like, it took you, it took you, like, a decade after that?

• 3:37:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:26Speaker 17

  To realize that maybe the thing I'm doing is bad, like, I just, I just, oh, God.

• 3:37:29Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, and that's, that's kind of like the, because I don't, you know, I don't think, having been stationed to guard a place where horrible thing, like, war crimes were committed, necessarily damns you forever, because, like, you don't choose where you're stationed to guard. Who knows when he became aware what was going on in the place he was guarding, but at some point, he did, and that wasn't like, the moment where he was like, "Ah, fuck." You know, and I, again, I have a lot of friends, I have friends who were with the very first infantry unit into Iraq, one of whom, as they were invading, was like, you know, this is criminal, guys, right? You know, we're breaking, you know, this is fucked up. You know, this, this war's bullshit. Pat Tillman was saying that, right? Like, during the invasion.

• 3:38:14Speaker 17

  This guy shipped out in 2016.

• 3:38:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:18Speaker 17

  That's, like, it took him, I, I would, I would.

• 3:38:21Robert Evans?

  It took a minute, it took a minute.

• 3:38:22Speaker 17

  Reasonably long time, and also, when you read his interviews about it, he's like, I did it because it was fun, which is just like.

• 3:38:27Robert Evans?

  That's, that's honest.

• 3:38:28Speaker 17

  Yeah, it's honest, it makes me insane.

• 3:38:32Robert Evans?

  Look, I mean, that's, that's why people join the Marines, is they, like, money and/or their adrenaline junkies, right?

• 3:38:39Speaker 11

  I'd rather he was honest about that shit, actually, like, I, I.

• 3:38:42Speaker 17

  Yeah, it was just like distressing.

• 3:38:44Robert Evans?

  I, I, I actually like that, and again, I, I do kind of like, because there's not a, there's not a perfect answer as to like, well, when should you have had a change of heart about something like this? Before you can, like, be trusted as a political leader on the left? And I, I actually don't really know. I think I would be inclined to be like, give him the benefit of the doubt on that stuff more, if it weren't for the Nazi tattoo.

• 3:39:13Speaker 17

  Yeah. It's Nazi tattoo, plus shipped out with blood water 2018.

• 3:39:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Those things together are kind of sketchy.

• 3:39:22Speaker 17

  Maybe do a couple of tours as a dog catcher first, like.

• 3:39:25Robert Evans?

  You know, I, I'm seeing a lot of, because there's a whole lot of like, well, no one else who has a chance of winning in Maine is supporting the progressive policies he is, you know? But you can't have it all be perfect or whatever, he's, you know, we should at least hope that he gets in and he does the things he's saying, and I guess, like, if he does get elected, and it's not the most likely thing right now, but it's certainly not impossible, I guess I hope he does the good stuff he says that he's done. I just have a lot less faith in that, given both what's come out and his reaction to it, right?

• 3:39:58Speaker 11

  It's his reaction to it that was really disqualifying for me, like.

• 3:40:02Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 3:40:02Speaker 11

  There's a world, I guess, I didn't know that. He told people it was a totem cough. That's pretty fucking incriminating, but.

• 3:40:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's reports from people who've said that. It's unclear.

• 3:40:11Robert Evans?

  Okay, there's reports.

• 3:40:12Speaker 11

  Got it.

• 3:40:12Robert Evans?

  We don't know objectively, but people have talked to the press who knew him and said that he described it as a totem cough to them several years ago.

• 3:40:19Speaker 11

  Okay, yeah. If his response had been like, oh, fuck, I didn't know. Let me get that covered up immediately. His response was so bad to defend it and to be like, there's a conspiracy against me.

• 3:40:31Robert Evans?

  It was really bad.

• 3:40:32Speaker 11

  It's that fail. And it also just shows like a lack of judgment and a lack of ability to like be critical of.

• 3:40:38Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 3:40:39Speaker 11

  His own actions, which is worrying.

• 3:40:42Robert Evans?

  It shows the kind of Trumpian fancifulness that really worries me.

• 3:40:47Speaker 11

  Yeah, demagoguery kind of thing.

• 3:40:49Speaker 05

  A lot of populists are like this. Like, this is, this is a part of populism.

• 3:40:54Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:40:55Speaker 05

  I don't think you can fully decouple it. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:40:57Robert Evans?

  That's probably true, Garrison.

• 3:41:00Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:41:01Robert Evans?

  That's probably true, but I, I don't know. I'm not going to tell you how to vote. I've made a habit of never telling people how to vote. So if you're in Maine, enjoy your Mclobster and do whatever your heart tells you is the right thing to do, my friend. But also, please don't eat a Mclobster, though it's clearly poisoned. You know, avoid, avoid a Mclobsters at all costs.

• 3:41:24Speaker 11

  Yeah, buy an oyster instead.

• 3:41:26Speaker 05

  The strongest endorsement Robert Evans can make.

• 3:41:29Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:41:30Speaker 05

  Is it not to buy a Mclobster?

• 3:41:32Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:41:33Robert Evans?

  Avoid a Mclobster at all costs.

• 3:41:35Speaker 11

  Yeah, if you're on the West Coast, avoid shellfishing in some months at all costs because you can get paralytic shellfish poisoning.

• 3:41:41Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, some people, that's just basically getting free muscle relaxers, James.

• 3:41:47Speaker 05

  Let's, let's do an ad break.

• 3:41:49Speaker 11

  For muscle relaxers.

• 3:41:50Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 3:42:04Speaker 05

  All right, we are back.

• 3:42:07Speaker 05

  Can I do my Halloween ice Nazi?

• 3:42:10Speaker 11

  Sure.

• 3:42:11Speaker 05

  Bavino segment? Is that how you say his name? Bavino?

• 3:42:14Speaker 11

  Uh, Gregory Bavino. Yeah, Gregory.

• 3:42:17Speaker 05

  It looks like a Bavino to me.

• 3:42:18Speaker 11

  Sure, why not?

• 3:42:19Speaker 05

  So, we're going to talk about him playing dress up and how Border Patrol disrupted a Halloween parade. So, last weekend, while conducting an immigration enforcement raid, Border Patrol disrupted the route of a children's Halloween parade in Old Irving Park in Chicago, using tear gas and arresting several people, including two US citizens. A crowd gathered around after Border Patrol arrested a 35-year-old construction worker who has lived in Chicago since he was four years old.

• 3:42:49Speaker 05

  Neighborhood residents said that federal agents then deployed tear gas without warning. That following Tuesday, the architect of Operation Midway Blitz, Greg Bavino, appeared in federal court as part of a lawsuit alleging excessive force and violations of a TRO restricting the use of tear gas and crowd control munitions. Bavino seems to be flagrantly violating this TRO as he was photographed personally throwing a tear gas canister into a crowd on October 22nd during a raid on a laundromat and Home Depot. The DHS says that protesters were throwing rocks and Border Patrol issued warnings, though this account is contradicted by video of the incident.

• 3:43:32Speaker 05

  US District Judge Sarah Ellis told the Border Patrol chief, "Kids dressed in Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose an immediate threat to the safety of law enforcement officers. They just don't. And you can't use riot control weapons against them." This TRO requires that crowd controlled munitions may only be used if someone poses an immediate threat to law enforcement with agents instructed to give two verbal warnings before tear gas or pepper spray can be deployed and to wear body cams, badges, or visible IDs. This order was issued on October 9th. And to get an idea of how closely this is being followed, Bavino himself still does not wear a body cam and told Judge Ellis, quote, "I have not received a body worn camera,

• 3:44:17Speaker 05

  nor the training," unquote.

• 3:44:18Speaker 11

  Yeah, so body patrol agents have generally, just to give some context here, not worn body worn cameras for a number of reasons. Firstly, they just don't want to. Secondly, no one is making them. Thirdly, they believe that it is possible for people to detect the Bluetooth signal that the camera gives out and thus find them. This is something that is theoretically possible, as best my research can tell. You can make your own judgment as to which of those factors is weighing most heavily on their choice not to wear them, but they have never been required, like, as a group to wear body worn cameras all the time.

• 3:44:56Robert Evans?

  No.

• 3:44:57Speaker 05

  This judge is trying to force them to. They're just refusing to follow the order, despite Bavino saying that 99% of agents have these cameras, which is bizarrely specific claim.

• 3:45:10Speaker 11

  Yeah, like.

• 3:45:11Speaker 17

  Yeah, is he the 1%? Like, I guess. It's, he's just so obviously lying. It's just, oh, God.

• 3:45:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's just, it's lying. I think that should be enough to say.

• 3:45:26Speaker 11

  Yeah, I don't know if I said they never wear them. To be clear, they have gone forward and back on wearing them, but it was earlier this year, the specific security risk.

• 3:45:36Speaker 05

  They have access to the cameras.

• 3:45:37Speaker 11

  Yes, yes.

• 3:45:38Speaker 05

  They're just refusing to follow this order.

• 3:45:40Speaker 11

  Yep, yep.

• 3:45:41Speaker 05

  Now, the same complaint that alleged that Bavino threw a canister without justification into this crowd also details an incident from the next day, October 23rd, where agents, without wearing identification as required by the order, shot a protester in the neck with a pepper ball from five feet away and, while driving away, pointed a pepper ball Gun and I'm going to read from the complaint quote and then a real gun at declarant Chris Gentry, a combat veteran who was lawfully standing on the side of the road voicing his opposition as agents were driving by in their vehicles. The agent who pointed the real gun at Mr. Gentry's face said, quote, bang, bang, you're dead liberal, unquote.

• 3:46:21Robert Evans?

  Great. Cool. Anyway.

• 3:46:25Speaker 05

  Plaintiff have requested body cam footage of this incident, which has yet to be provided.

• 3:46:30Speaker 17

  Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that they do this every single time there is any kind of protest. They do stuff like this. They've been pointing guns at people the entire time they've been here.

• 3:46:39Speaker 05

  They've been putting a lot of guns the past few months as we have reported.

• 3:46:43Speaker 17

  Yeah, they have.

• 3:46:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, they have killed people.

• 3:46:45Speaker 17

  Two people.

• 3:46:46Speaker 11

  They've shot more than two people. Yeah.

• 3:46:48Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 3:46:49Speaker 05

  Saying something like this is insane.

• 3:46:52Speaker 11

  Yeah, no, yeah, it shows obviously like a complete lack of concern for accountability. Right? No, like, like absolutely no thought that you could be held accountable for this.

• 3:47:01Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 3:47:02Robert Evans?

  No, it also shows a desire to kill liberals.

• 3:47:04Speaker 11

  Yes, yeah.

• 3:47:05Robert Evans?

  Which liberals need to be aware of.

• 3:47:07Speaker 05

  I mean, yeah.

• 3:47:08Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 3:47:09Robert Evans?

  You can't let this organization continue to exist, nor can you let the people doing this stay free if you ever take power again. There has to be accountability and there has to be an end to their ability to the ability of any law enforcement agency to exist, knowing that they are unaccountable and cannot be punished for the violence that they do to civilians.

• 3:47:36Speaker 11

  Yeah, I guess I'll take this point to mention that we have covered CBP and DHS's previous shootings in previous years and that the internal review process they have for those, which has led to a lack of accountability, even when compared to other law enforcement offices.

• 3:47:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:47:54Speaker 05

  During this hearing this last Tuesday, the judge declined to alter the TRO to ban the use of tear gas completely, saying that she believes Bavino, quote, understands where I'm coming from and quote, I don't know that we're gonna see a whole lot of tear gas being deployed over the next week. Unquote.

• 3:48:15Speaker 17

  Cool.

• 3:48:16Speaker 11

  Great.

• 3:48:17Speaker 05

  Amazing, amazing stuff coming out of our judiciary.

• 3:48:20Speaker 11

  Greg's picking up on the vibe, so we should be fine now.

• 3:48:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, this Bovino guy seems incredibly trustworthy. Though Judge Ellis did instruct Bovino to meet with her every weekday evening throughout Operation Midway Blitz till the next hearing in November to provide instant briefings on use of force. Though, just one day later, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Judge Ellis's order requiring these daily reports. In some other Bovino moves.

• 3:48:50Speaker 11

  Bovino's.

• 3:48:51Speaker 05

  Earlier this week, news broke that top ICE field office chiefs are set to be reassigned and replaced by senior Border Patrol and CBP officials with the goal of netting more arrests to boost deportation numbers.

• 3:49:08Speaker 11

  Yep, so the role of Border Patrol generally is to patrol the physical border and to do enforcement in that 100-mile border zone, right? The role of ICE. The majority of ICE agents are not the people that you see out there, jumping out of cars and doing these smash and grabs, right? Majority of ICE agents, people who work in an office, who will check in with migrants through their intensive supervision program, which is one of their "alternatives to detention", right? Both of these agencies are relatively aligned with what I'll call Donald Trump's agenda. But Border Patrol particularly has made a name for itself, like Bovino himself and other Border Patrol chiefs were...

• 3:49:53Speaker 11

  There was a time when it looked like they were going to force Bovino to retire, and that time was 2023, briefing against the Biden administration, right? Bovino has been kind of particularly emblematic of this new Border Patrol approach, and it is particularly BP that has been aligned, just with a lot of things that, you know, they had issues getting people vaccinated, right? Like with this whole kind of political, social milieu that is representative of the modern right. We see with ICE agents, like some of these people, I'm not going to say They joined like looking to help, you know, maybe like make the world a happy place. But like they are, they are reasonable civil servants, right?

• 3:50:35Speaker 11

  Like, like I've talked to plenty of migrants who have gone to there and you'll hear from some of them in a scripted series next month. Gone to their eyes check in to have been like, that was fine. That person was professional. That they seemed genuinely concerned for things I'm facing and, you know, I was not unduly harassed, made to feel uncomfortable, et cetera, et cetera.

• 3:50:52Speaker 05

  Now, the Border Patrol agents are like particularly brutal.

• 3:50:56Speaker 11

  I have not heard that same, that was a reasonable professional.

• 3:50:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:51:00Speaker 11

  About Border Patrol agents from migrants.

• 3:51:02Speaker 05

  Um, yeah.

• 3:51:03Speaker 11

  Border Patrol also has a pretty high churn, right? Uh, you know, so they have a lot of people who have joined since, let's say, the first Trump admin.

• 3:51:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and that may kind of change things because those people are joining specifically because they want to fuck with migrants. And while that's always been a thing for Border Patrol, a lot of people joined Border Patrol because it's the easiest way to become technically a federal agent.

• 3:51:28Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:51:29Robert Evans?

  And it's, it can be a path to becoming a better kind of federal agent.

• 3:51:33Speaker 11

  Sure, you can.

• 3:51:34Robert Evans?

  It's a career thing, which is why, part of why there's so much churn, part of why.

• 3:51:38Speaker 11

  BP, just to characterize, some of the issues the organization has had, right, has consistently offered waivers. The academic qualifications that other agencies would not offer waivers for. They have a problem, a serious problem with sexual assault, not just of migrants, but of women in the Border Patrol. They call the women in the Border Patrol the fierce 5% because this is an agency that has not succeeded in, uh, getting more than 5% of its agents to be women. Uh, like it is an agency that has, I guess, for want of a better term, radicalized, even, even, you know, within DHS agencies.

• 3:52:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, all of the most brutal incidents of use of force in like Portland in 2020, that came from feds was Border Patrol.

• 3:52:18Robert Evans?

  That was BORTAC.

• 3:52:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, BORTAC.

• 3:52:21Speaker 11

  Yeah, I would encourage people, if they want to get a sense of how Border Patrol sees itself, to go to the social media page that Bavino curates and has curated for a while. To look, and again, he was, uh, my understanding, like hemmed up for his social media posts in the Biden administration. He's obviously not being restrained in that way now. Go and look at, uh. I think it's called Border Patrol Special Operations Command or DHS Special Operations Command, which includes BORTAC. Go and look at their pages, right? Like, these guys, they see themselves in the realm of like a military branch or a paramilitary police. Yeah. And that is what they're doing in Chicago. Yeah.

• 3:53:00Speaker 05

  NBC is reporting that the White House has approved the reassignment of at least a dozen directors of ICE field offices, with sources telling Fox News that the cities will include Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Philadelphia, El Paso, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, and New Orleans. This is almost half of the ICE field offices in the country. This turnover is being orchestrated by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and DHS Senior Advisor Corey Lewandowski, with some of the replacements being handpicked by Bavino. This is like Bavino being able to shape ICE how he sees fit, using his Border Patrol, like, background. And these changes are reportedly motivated on differing views on tactics across agency

• 3:53:45Speaker 05

  leadership, with the ICE strategy, like the Tom Homan strategy, of focusing on targeted removal of known criminals or immigrants with pre-existing deportation orders versus the Border Patrol tactic of doing these large sweeps and roundups around places like Home Depot, laundromats, restaurants, neighborhoods, urban centers.

• 3:54:06Speaker 11

  So Bavino, like, has been on this for a minute, right? Like, and I'm now realizing we need to cover his career in more depth. But like, I've seen this, oh, where did Bavino come from stuff. In 2010, when he was at the Blythe Border Patrol Station, I believe, Blythe, California, for those not familiar, Bavino was part of a raid on bus and train stations in Las Vegas, right? Like, these broader kind of dragnet's have been something that he seems to have, that have been a characteristic of his career, right? So that would make sense for him to be the guy advocating for this now.

• 3:54:40Speaker 05

  The official statement made by DHS Assistant Secretary Trish McLaughlin at this point says, quote, "While we have no personnel changes to announce at this time, the Trump administration remains laser-focused on delivering results and removing violent, criminal, illegal aliens from this country." She followed up this statement with a tweet, naming a whole bunch of people involved in all of these news stories, including Bavino, and like praising them for their patriotism. Let's take a look at two pictures of Bavino here. For his courtroom attire. Who wants to describe what Bavino is wearing here? It looks like a statue of Stalin.

• 3:55:17Robert Evans?

  He looks like a guy in the SS is dressing as a guy in the SS for Halloween.

• 3:55:24Speaker 05

  I don't think it's very Stalin. I think it's very German, actually.

• 3:55:28Robert Evans?

  That is an SS-looking coat. I'm sorry.

• 3:55:32Speaker 05

  It's intense. He has the little stars on his collar. And yeah, this like boxy wool trench coat. It's very, with the shaved sides of his head. It's very clear what he is trying to evoke. This is a little bit coy, but like, come on. Come on, dude. And to follow this up, DHS is really pushing Bavino now as like the face of this mass deportation push. And they're making fucking like Fashwave-

• 3:56:03Robert Evans?

  What a face.

• 3:56:04Speaker 05

  Fashwave hype edit reels of- Yeah, show it, guys. It's mad. Of Bavino. And I'll play the whole thing, but really it's the first two seconds that demonstrate what's going on here. This will be linked in the notes.

• 3:56:28Speaker 05

  I didn't realize it was Hamster Dance Coldplay on the soundtrack. Like, I had never listened to that.

• 3:56:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's a choice.

• 3:56:35Speaker 05

  We're not gonna play much of that audio. Garrison, we're gonna play all of that audio. We are not playing 30 seconds of copyrighted audio. But just the first, literally the first two seconds of him doing what is very clearly a C-Kyle and then transferring it into like military hand signals. But like- Come on dude.

• 3:56:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:56:56Speaker 05

  And then throughout throughout this, the rest of the little Fashwave edit, it's like

• 3:57:00Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 3:57:00Speaker 05

  Pictures of him in his like, uh, you know, tactical gear. And then pictures of him in what you, I would describe as an SS inspired military dress uniform with the little, you know, the stars, the trench coat. It's like very clear what he's doing. The DHS Twitter account has been doing these little cute Nazi posts for a long time now. They know what they're doing.

• 3:57:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:24Speaker 05

  But specifically this now being like the, the, the new kind of face of this, of this whole operation, both by playing a hand in restructuring the leadership of ICE and deploying to the forefront of places like Chicago as he leads and orchestrates the mass deportation operation.

• 3:57:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:41Speaker 05

  Like Operation Midway Blitz, like Blitz, really? Blitz?

• 3:57:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:57:45Speaker 05

  Interesting, interesting.

• 3:57:47Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:57:48Speaker 05

  Unfucking believable. That the fact that this guy was not canned by any previous Democrat administration, like, like about, like abolishing ICE is, is obviously like not, not enough here. Cause as we're talking about, the way that like Border Patrol has actually been the ones leading the most brutal of these raids. I, I think like, there is a, a specific focus on like ICE because that's like a safer target, I get like, it feels like, cause like people know what you're talking about.

• 3:58:16Robert Evans?

  All of DHS we need to get rid of.

• 3:58:19Speaker 17

  Yeah. The, the, the, the fact that this guy wasn't fired is, is going to be looked back upon in the same way that like allende promoting Pinochet is looked back on. Just.

• 3:58:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, yeah. What, how else do you describe it?

• 3:58:35Speaker 17

  Yeah. Like if, if there was going to be a free country, all of this shit, all of the DHS agencies, all of this needs to cease to exist as a minimum. And these people need to be like hauled in front of a Nuremberg tribunal. And that's, that's the minimum viable, there might be a democracy after that.

• 3:58:51Robert Evans?

  We need so many Nurembergs. Yeah.

• 3:58:55Speaker 11

  Yeah. And like, it's not, I don't want to, you know, gloat about this. It's not hard to have seen this coming. We have talked about this for years, right? Like,

• 3:59:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:59:05Speaker 11

  This began in the 1990s with Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Hold the Line. We've documented this extensively. We've documented the fact that under the Biden administration, there was virtually no oversight, right? That they were able to detain people outdoors without food, water, or shelter, and deny that those people were detained. This is all stuff that we've covered. If it wasn't in your news diet, then you should question the news sources that you were using. But like, it was very easy to see this coming. And as Mia said, very little was done to prevent it during the last four years.

• 3:59:40Robert Evans?

  Yep. And somewhat more amusing news, during the ongoing trial over the different federal agents deployed to Portland, and the necessity of that federal deployment, and potentially the mobilization of National Guard troops in Oregon being sent to Portland, which is still being fought over in the courts. Portland police were brought up on the stand and testified that during one night out at ICE, federal officers gassed Portland police and fired pepper balls at one officer. And when Portland police confronted federal, not ICE, sorry, but these are, these are federal FPS agents outside of the ICE building.

• 4:00:21Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 4:00:22Robert Evans?

  And when Portland police confronted the FPS agents afterwards, they responded, help or get out of the way. And this is simply, there's no actual, there's no, there's no rules of engagement, right? Rules of engagement for, you know, soldiers and the like are supposed to be. Stuff like, you don't fire until a certain standard of danger exists, right? You don't, you, you, there are rules at which point you are allowed to engage with which kinds of weapons, right? Your ROE may say one thing about using a nightstick or, or mace, and it will say something else about using tear gas or whatever. There's no actual ROE for these guys. They're allowed to just kind of fire whenever they want.

• 4:01:05Robert Evans?

  And they're not well-trained. They're not very good at what they do. Most of them have not actually had the kind of training they've been supposed to have with these weapon systems they're using. And they're just kind of firing willy-nilly, which is why they've been hitting cops repeatedly.

• 4:01:17Speaker 11

  Most FPS agents are contractors. They're not, they're not full-time, they're enforcement officers.

• 4:01:22Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 4:01:23Speaker 11

  Talking of things that it would have been easy to see coming, I want to talk about ICE's facial recognition app. So I've seen a piece in 404 Media. 404 Media is the most annoying outlet to read pieces in because they will send you 17 emails a day. 404 Media suggests that ICE is claiming a facial recognition match in its app Mobile Fortify is a definitive determination of somebody's status. They're quoting here the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Benny G. Thompson as saying, quote, "Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation." He also said that, quote,

• 4:02:06Speaker 11

  "ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a definitive determination of a person's status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship, including a birth certificate, if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in this way, in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant and unconstitutional attack on Americans' rights and freedoms." Thompson is misguided if he thinks that, like, this is new. It is new in that it's that it has impacted US citizens. Yes. This article, for reasons I cannot explain, does not

• 4:02:48Speaker 11

  mention CBP One, right? And this is often the case in immigration reporting that we see now. It's completely lacking in context. The context here is that CBP One is an app developed in the first Trump administration. It's often referred to as a Biden app because the definitive political question of our time is who was president in 2020. There's just no way to know.

• 4:03:11Robert Evans?

  It's impossible to say. You can't, there's no data on anything happening that far back.

• 4:03:16Speaker 11

  Unfortunately, I have a new one, which is more recent, which we're going to talk about next.

• 4:03:20Robert Evans?

  Grok, Grok, is this, is this real?

• 4:03:23Speaker 11

  Yeah, but CBP One was effectively determinative for migrants, right? We've covered this in great detail here. There were some public records about CBP One that I've looked at extensively. It's sort of too long, didn't read version is the app did not work well on Android phones, especially previous generation Android phones, which are very common among people coming from the global south. The facial liveliness scan, so what the facial liveliness scan does is that, let's say, Robert is coming to the US, right? They wanted to check that the phone is being held by Robert, that it's not been held, someone's not holding up a photograph of Robert in front of the camera.

• 4:04:02Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 4:04:03Speaker 11

  So you sort of move it around and it determines that it's a real 3D face, not a photograph. It really struggled with black faces. I've seen this firsthand.

• 4:04:14Robert Evans?

  All this stuff does, it's the same thing with like how there have been like motion activated faucets and stuff that wouldn't recognize dark skin.

• 4:04:23Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a data set that they put in, right? To my understanding, the results of those scans were determinative for migrants, right? It could determine their ability to make an asylum appointment and therefore to enter the US and make a claim for asylum. This caused people to remain in various, very dangerous situations. It has probably led to people dying. It's another example of why we have to pay attention to the border if we want to know what's coming down the pipe domestically. And talking of shit that is coming down the pipe from the border domestically, I want to talk about public lands again because Utah Senator Mike Lee is back on his bullshit. This time he has another bill. People will remember that Mike Lee tried to insert in the budget reconciliation bill,

• 4:05:08Speaker 11

  a massive sell off of public lands, right? And what Lee does is he uses whatever terminology he thinks will make people support this crusade he has against land zone by the public fair if we want to access. The last time he tried to wrap it up in language about affordable housing. If you read the bill, you would have seen that it wasn't going to result in any affordable housing. This time, he's wrapping it up in the language of border security. And this is where I'm, this is where we're going to return to the defining political question of our time, who is president? Because Lee, who introduced the bill in October of 2025, said, and I quote, Biden's open border chaos is destroying Americans' crown jewels.

• 4:05:50Speaker 11

  Families who want to enjoy a safe hike or camp out are instead finding trash piles, burned landscapes, and trails closed because rangers are stuck clearing up the fallout. Cartels are exploiting the disorder, using these lands as cover for their operation. This bill gives land managers and border agents the tools to restore order and protect these places for the people they were meant to serve. Diligent observers will notice that Biden is no longer the president of the United States. And further diligent observers will notice that many people currently working for the federal government on public lands are being laid off or furloughed due to the government shutdown.

• 4:06:29Speaker 11

  What Lee's bill would do is allow DHS to identify illegal roads in public land areas, and then to upgrade them to navigable roads. This is important because the 1964 Wilderness Act doesn't allow motorized access to wilderness areas. And what Lee is proposing is that they would identify these illegal roads within a hundred mile zone. But he is proposing a blanket change to the 1964 Wilderness Act to allow the construction of roads, which would completely change the nature of wilderness in the United States. And like, sometimes a slippery slope argument can also be a fallacy, but in this case, building

• 4:07:12Speaker 11

  roads into the wilderness will permanently change the nature of that wilderness and will lead to other losses of protection on public land. Lee makes the argument that it's important for search and rescue and for border access. There is already mechanized access for search and rescue, right? Like, search and rescue helicopters, for instance, can access wilderness areas, that they have agreements in place with land management agencies, which allow them to do this already when there is a risk to human life. The bill also talks about removing invasive species and reducing fire risk by removing fire fuels down by the border. Again, I'm guessing what this would do would be this, this would, I mean, if you

• 4:07:55Speaker 11

  fire fuels, like, look at the southern border, near where I live, right, like, think of the California sagebrush chaparral, like, clearing fire fuels there would completely change that landscape forever. It would remove much of the value that this wilderness has, not as untouched, right, people have lived in this area for tens of thousands of years and that they have touched that nature and they have lived alongside it and worked with it, but it is an area that is significantly less damaged than most of the United States, right? The bill would also inventory fires and damage to wilderness caused by migrants. I guess this is just an attempt to say another bad thing about migrants. It also prohibits

• 4:08:39Speaker 11

  any housing of migrants on federal lands unless it is in a prison. It's Lee taking this border hawk stuff and strapping it onto this crusade that he has been on for a long time to deprive people in the United States and people visiting the United States of access to their public lands and eventually to sell those lands off to the highest bidder. He introduced it on October 2nd, it's in the committee stage right now. This probably is one of the things that that folks could could call a representative about and suggest it's a very bad idea. Talking of bad ideas, Maduro has announced a formation of an international brigade to defend his incredibly corrupt regime in Venezuela. I say this as someone

• 4:09:22Speaker 11

  who has been to Venezuela and written a PhD about the Spanish Civil War. This is a very bad idea. Don't do this. This is, this is, Maduro does not need your help. Fuck that guy. Talking of things that don't need your help, here are some adverts.

• 4:09:52Speaker 05

  I can't believe you're throwing the People's Republic of Venezuela under the bus like that, as they're facing down war with the United States of America right now.

• 4:10:01Speaker 11

  Standing in the breach against imperialism, yeah, I read all about it.

• 4:10:04Speaker 05

  What happened to #solidarity, James?

• 4:10:07Speaker 11

  Sorry, I read about it on the Gray Zone and I'm changing my opinions, having spent more time than I'm sure half the staff of the Gray Zone in Venezuela.

• 4:10:15Speaker 17

  Speaking of spooky, the shit Trump's getting as part of tariff negotiations.

• 4:10:37Speaker 17

  Alright, so as we talked about last week, Trump has been in East Asia to do a bunch of meetings for conversations already happening, and this is where tariff negotiations have been being handled. This has been being held in South Korea. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung presented Trump with South Korea's highest honor and also gave him a giant golden crown. Have you all seen the giant golden crown?

• 4:11:03Speaker 05

  It's that easy, folks. All you gotta do is all you gotta do is just these little stupid things, and then he loves you.

• 4:11:12Speaker 17

  Giant gilded crown.

• 4:11:14Speaker 11

  I haven't seen the crown. I'm gonna look at the crown right now.

• 4:11:16Speaker 17

  Look up the crown. I am beseeching you all. However big you think this crown is, it is way larger than that.

• 4:11:26Speaker 11

  Oh wow. Yeah, no, it's, uh, Jesus.

• 4:11:32Speaker 17

  It's like the size of a fire hydrant.

• 4:11:34Speaker 11

  Yeah, maybe they directly, uh, they directly took, uh, the one that they took from Prince Andrew for being a nonce and melted it down or something.

• 4:11:45Speaker 17

  It's really something. Now, now, Lee Jae Myung is a name you might recognize because he's the guy who was famous for that video of climbing over the fence to stop the coup last year and one year later he is giving Trump what I think might be the largest crown I have ever seen. Now, this crown is being described as quote "a gilded replica", so I don't know how much of this is actually gold. I suspect it's gold paint or whatever. I don't know. I do not have confirmation on it. But, you know, great, great things happening in, in, in sort of like the revolutionary anti-coup movement, which has ended with giving Trump the giant golden crown. Yeah, and apparently they, and they got like a kind

• 4:12:26Speaker 17

  of favorable, well, sort of okay-ish kind of trade deal out of, out of, out of giving the President of the United States giant golden crown. So, in terms of tariff news, while, while in, in China, Trump had his long-awaited meeting with Xi Jinping, they struck a deal. Trump decreased the, the quote-unquote "fentanyl tariffs" to 10%, which leaves the tariff rate for all Chinese goods at 47%, down from its previous 57%. China has agreed to not do rare earth mineral restrictions that we talked about last week, and has also pledged to buy US soybeans. Again, it's deeply unclear how much of this is actually going to happen.

• 4:13:07Speaker 17

  I think my, my guess is that they probably won't do the harshest of the rare mineral restrictions, but I will believe the soybean purchases when I see it, and I haven't seen it yet. There's also been some interesting news out of the Senate, where there's been a couple of symbolic votes against some sets of tariffs. The Senate voted 50 to 46 to end the state of emergency that supposedly allows Trump to do the Canada tariffs, and also voted to block tariffs against Brazil. The, the four people who voted against both of these, who voted with the Democrats are Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murawski, which it kind of makes sense, because Collins and Murawski are supposed to be the two moderates. Rand Paul is like, just hates tariffs. Yeah.

• 4:13:52Speaker 17

  He's a free-trade hardliner who, whatever I talk about this, I will say, he has had, as much as all of this is his fault, he has had one great light ever, which is I have a trade deficit with my grocery store. It's like, actually really good.

• 4:14:08Speaker 05

  Is he like an Austrian like economist, like libertarian type like I I I know he's like a libertarian guy. I'm just trying to figure out what specific flavor he is.

• 4:14:16Speaker 17

  Yeah, he's he's like an Aus- he's like one of the Austrian like gold standards, but also like those people are still free trade people, like really hardline.

• 4:14:23Speaker 05

  Last time I heard Charlie Kirk talk in person, he was debating like five Austrian economists.

• 4:14:31Speaker 17

  The most annoying people in the entire world.

• 4:14:33Robert Evans?

  Honestly, I I wouldn't wish that on anyone. That sounds like hell. That sounds like, why would you agree to do that? Especially if you're already rich. I don't understand it. I don't understand it.

• 4:14:46Speaker 17

  Now, okay, it's also worth noting, though, that despite these votes, none of this is going to take effect because the House right now effectively does not exist as a legislative body.

• 4:14:55Robert Evans?

  It sure doesn't.

• 4:14:57Speaker 17

  Yeah, it doesn't exist in general because they keep not calling sessions because every time they try to call a session, the Democrats in in the one political theater thing that like is kind of a good idea, but they're still bad at it. They keep being like, you have to release the Epstein files. And the Republicans keep being like, no. So we kind of don't have a House of Representatives.

• 4:15:16Robert Evans?

  I keep thinking about that one scene from Mars Attacks where the president's like, you've still got two out of three branches of government and that ain't bad.

• 4:15:24Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 4:15:27Speaker 05

  We basically have a one branch of government.

• 4:15:29Robert Evans?

  We have one branch of government.

• 4:15:30Speaker 17

  Yeah, we have one branch of government and like.

• 4:15:32Robert Evans?

  But that doesn't work as a Mars Attacks joke.

• 4:15:35Speaker 17

  Yeah, but and and also it's worth noting, the House voted to not allow any tariff legislation until March 2026, a thing that it could apparently do. It is totally normal.

• 4:15:45Robert Evans?

  Sure. Oh, wow. Yeah.

• 4:15:46Speaker 17

  You know, so in speaking of things that are totally normal, we're going to close this with Trump getting mad at Canada because he saw an ad they were running.

• 4:15:54Speaker 05

  Oh, my God. Yeah.

• 4:15:55Speaker 17

  The World Series. That was, oh, God. It was. It was. It was a bunch of clips of Ronald Reagan being like tariffs bad because Reagan Reagan's domestic protectionism took the form of currency devaluations and not tariffs, et cetera, et cetera. But like, yeah, so and and Trump saw this, lost his mind, said that it was AI. There's a whole saga here about him claiming that it was like also unauthorized usage of footage, which is a fiasco. And then also, all of the the tariff negotiations that have been happening to the US and Canada have been called off. And he just put another 10% tariff on them because he was mad about it.

• 4:16:32Speaker 05

  Go Jays.

• 4:16:33Speaker 17

  Which, yeah, totally, you know, I I.

• 4:16:37Speaker 17

  Totally, absolutely a thing that like an elected head of government does and not a a guy who just received a massive golden crown. Aw, Garrison, that's not a Blue Jays hat, but you know.

• 4:16:49Speaker 05

  Um, this is a Blue Jays hat, Mia. How fucking dare you try to, uh, she-splain my own, my own country to myself.

• 4:16:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's Toronto's team, right?

• 4:17:01Speaker 11

  Garrison's wearing a hat for those, uh, who are not working for Cool Zone Media.

• 4:17:06Speaker 05

  Yes, it's the Toronto Blue Jays. Oh my god.

• 4:17:07Speaker 17

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:17:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Toronto Blue Jays. I thought it was the Toronto Blue Jays, yeah.

• 4:17:10Speaker 11

  Yeah, but there's not a J on it. Why?

• 4:17:12Speaker 05

  Well, no, it just has the maple leaf.

• 4:17:14Speaker 11

  But it's only three points. It's not a, not a traditional maple leaf either.

• 4:17:17Speaker 05

  James, are you gonna, are you gonna she-splain my own country to me?

• 4:17:22Speaker 11

  Garrison, when it comes to birds and leaves.

• 4:17:25Speaker 17

  I, I am going to Canada-splain to you. It rocks.

• 4:17:32Speaker 17

  Yeah, but that's fun. That's just how tariff policy is set now is you pissed off the king and he decided to put a tariff. This is...

• 4:17:42Speaker 17

  I don't know. I, I don't really know how to do analysis of the fact that we just have a child king setting tariff policy. It's, it's great.

• 4:17:50Speaker 05

  Look, Garrison, quick fact check. Do you read, can you read this?

• 4:17:53Speaker 17

  Oh wow, it does say Blue Jays.

• 4:17:55Speaker 05

  It does. Do you need to read this? Genuine MLB merchandise, okay?

• 4:18:00Robert Evans?

  Wow, wow. Yeah, they, no one would ever put that in fake MLB merchandise. It simply wouldn't be allowed.

• 4:18:07Speaker 11

  Oh yeah. I've never seen any genuine MLB merchandise in markets in Iraq, for example.

• 4:18:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Hey, I, I'm the owner of a proud Fixin' Gamm shirt that I bought at a market in their mill. Only the finest.

• 4:18:21Speaker 05

  All right, all right, everybody. Okay, I think it's politically important for the Blue Jays to win the World Series and, uh, contribute, uh, to the American century of humiliation.

• 4:18:33Robert Evans?

  James, I, I still have my, uh, my Tumberland boots that I bought in Syria.

• 4:18:39Speaker 11

  I have a 5.1.1 jacket.

• 4:18:42Robert Evans?

  Oh, and I've got I got a great adonis tracksuit when I was in Istanbul.

• 4:18:46Speaker 05

  Do you want to do this bed electric monitoring right now or next week?

• 4:18:50Speaker 11

  Yeah, let's do it now. Let's talk about talking of things which are not as they seem. California Attorney General. Look at that, Garrison. That is why they pay me the median bucks. And California Attorney General Rob Bunter is warning.

• 4:19:05Robert Evans?

  Such a fake ass name. I'm sorry. Sorry.

• 4:19:10Speaker 11

  Garrison is wearing that hat for those not watching this podcast on top of their head in the fashion of affairs. California Attorney General Rob Bunter is warning about election interference by the federal government. The federal government has sent monitors to California, to a number of different counties in California, in order to to monitor the elections that are happening here on the 4th of November. To be clear, federal monitoring is not uncommon. The Biden administration did it in more than 80 places in 2024, for example. But Bunter seems convinced this monitoring is going to lead to election denial, election interference. Here's Gavin Newsom talking on X about this.

• 4:19:51Speaker 21

  So today, the Trump administration announced they're sending election monitors to five specific counties here in the state of California. They have no business doing that. They have no basis to do that. In fact, we have a statewide election for a statewide constitution. This is about voter intimidation. This is about voter suppression, period, full stop. And it's a pattern, isn't it? It's consistent with what they've done with the federalization of the National Guard and the intimidation, the chill that that's created. They'll do that right around Election Day as well. Same thing with ICE and Border Patrol, masked men. Watch that space showing up in and around polling booths and voting places. But this is a bridge too far, and I hope people understand it's a bridge that they're trying to build,

• 4:20:35Speaker 21

  the scaffolding for all across this country in next November's election. They do not believe in fair and free elections. Our republic, our democracy is on the line. We all need to wake up.

• 4:20:48Speaker 11

  I'm actually a lot more concerned with the stuff around, I think he's probably right, that we will see like more federal agents around polling places in election time. What California is doing in response is assigning monitors to monitor the federal monitors, which will be interesting. And it seems unusual, right, for the federal monitors to be monitoring things. One of the things that's on the ballot this year is Prop 50, right? Which would redistrict California. It's gerrymandering, so gerrymandering proposition to-

• 4:21:17Robert Evans?

  It's revenge gerrymandering.

• 4:21:19Speaker 11

  Yes, yeah.

• 4:21:20Robert Evans?

  It's gerrymandering. The bill is specifically, we, not, we're going to do this, but we're going to do this if there's redistricting in Texas.

• 4:21:29Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, it's, yes, it's an attempt to rectify the very obvious gerrymandering in Texas.

• 4:21:35Robert Evans?

  It's kind of mad mutually asserted destruction is applied to gerrymandering.

• 4:21:40Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, neither of these things are great. That's here we are. I think that's all I had on this, actually.

• 4:21:48Robert Evans?

  Cool.

• 4:21:49Speaker 11

  Yep, I think that's-

• 4:21:51Robert Evans?

  That a soad?

• 4:21:52Speaker 11

  That's where we're at.

• 4:21:53Robert Evans?

  All right, everybody. Well, until-

• 4:21:55Speaker 05

  Well, breaking autism news.

• 4:21:58Robert Evans?

  Oh, God.

• 4:21:59Speaker 05

  Texas is suing Tylenol, specifically a pharmaceutical company, Johnson & Johnson, for marketing Tylenol to pregnant women and failing to disclose what Attorney General Ken Paxton calls, quote, "a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders", unquote.

• 4:22:12Speaker 11

  They don't market it to pregnant women, like generally they're on-

• 4:22:16Robert Evans?

  They says, if I'm not mistaken, it says on the bottles, don't take if you're nursing, you're pregnant, probably.

• 4:22:22Speaker 11

  We covered this in a previous episode, but generally drugs are not, very few drugs are marketed to pregnant people, right, be they women or otherwise.

• 4:22:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, the only thing you're supposed to take as a pregnant woman is cocaine. And you got to make sure it's pure.

• 4:22:35Speaker 11

  Non-binary people say you can take anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:22:37Robert Evans?

  Well, if you're not pregnant, it's okay to do whatever.

• 4:22:40Speaker 11

  Yeah, if you are pregnant, not a woman, it's okay. Go right ahead.

• 4:22:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I guess, wait, no, I don't think that that's how it works.

• 4:22:48Speaker 11

  Transvestite, double? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:22:51Robert Evans?

  I think if you have a fetus gestating in you, you're only supposed to do cocaine.

• 4:22:56Speaker 05

  Definitely the least autistic of people, non-binary people. Yeah, definitely. Definitely, they can just take whatever, or do, or do take whatever.

• 4:23:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, too many drugs, like, like they'll, they'll say that you should consult with, with your doctor.

• 4:23:08Speaker 05

  Consult a doctor.

• 4:23:09Speaker 11

  Yeah, and none of them are risk free, but it's, it's, it's a cost benefit analysis, right? We, we covered this.

• 4:23:14Speaker 05

  The autism and Tylenol, like, correlation versus causation based on that one Swedish study.

• 4:23:20Speaker 11

  Swedish study, yeah.

• 4:23:21Speaker 05

  This is, I'm interested to see how Johnson and Johnson argues this in court and if that will have effects across, you know, the, the rest of the Trump administration's anti Tylenol push. If they're able to successfully defend their product against Ken Paxton. So, critical support to Tylenol, I guess.

• 4:23:38Robert Evans?

  Welcome to the resistance, Big Pharma.

• 4:23:41Speaker 11

  Jesus, yeah. If people want to listen to more of that, they can go back and find our previous episode.

• 4:23:47Robert Evans?

  All right, everybody. Until next time, try not to be on a fishing boat anywhere south of the US southern border. It's, it's, it's not safe right now.

• 4:23:59Speaker 05

  Good luck trick or treating, happy Halloween.

• 4:24:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, good luck trick or treating, it's not safe right now.

• 4:24:04Speaker 11

  Oh, yeah, don't be trick or treating in a boat this year.

• 4:24:07Speaker 05

  We reported the news. That sucks.

• 4:24:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 4:24:12Speaker 21

  We reported the news.

• 4:24:17Robert Evans?

  Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

• 4:24:23Speaker 04

  It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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