It Could Happen Here Weekly 10

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here's to the great American settlers. The millions of you
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(00:21):
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I grew up near the banks of the Green River
and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name.

(00:41):
Prosecutors described him as a serial killer survet. But this
podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about
the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked
to go into woods. Listen to The Shadow Girls on
the I Heart Radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcast us What Girls in the Forest,

(01:03):
Our imagination and our family bonds. The forest is closer
than you think. Find a forest near you and discover
the fourth dot Org brought to you by the United
States Fourth Service and the ad council. Hey, everybody, Robert
Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this
is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week
that just happened is here in one convenient and with

(01:27):
somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in
a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening
to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be
nothing new here for you, but you can make your
own decisions. Whats they sing my books? Your grandmother, all

(01:54):
of your grandmother's wow Garrison, my grandmother's dad, so that
there's all facebooking in the grave, I mean, thank god. No.
I think my grandparents briefly got introduced to my Space
before being too sick to use the internet anymore. They
were on a O L for a while though. Oh
that's that's quaint. Yeah, they were on a L for

(02:16):
a while. Um, you know, it's uh, it's what I
don't often say. Thank goodness for Louis body demandship. But
at least it stopped them from from knowing the horrors
that were to come in the digital age. They got
they got right off the bus before things got terrible. Yeah,
that is so friends, Romans countrymen, how do you feel

(02:41):
about meta? Which is totally what we're all gonna be
calling Facebook for now on for forever. My main thought,
honestly is that like the word meta, the past like
two years, the word meta has been ruined, both like
pop culture thinking it's smart and then ship like this
now that once useful concept has now been obliterated and

(03:02):
we can't use it. You can't be meta. And and
the fact that Facebook is attempting to use this as
the name of their company shows that Mark Zuckerberg hasn't
had a conversation on even footing in his entire adult life,
Like everyone is trying to get someone out of him
every time he talks to anybody, so nobody would say, like,
you know, Mark, met is a terrible name for a company.
But anyway, they did that, and they had a big

(03:24):
event about two weeks ago where they got up and
talked for an hour and twenty minutes about the future
of the Internet and what Facebook's vision of the metaverse
was going to be, all this all this very fun stuff. Okay,
so here's the thing. It's a bad idea, and normally,
like bad tech ideas are a dime a dozen, and
we don't cover them on our show because this is
a show. It could happen here about collapse, things falling apart,

(03:45):
and the future and what's going to come next. But
in this case, talking about meta is actually really worthwhile
because meta is one example of how the people who
are kind of in control, or at least in control
of the significant amount of the world that we live in,
particularly the digital spaces that we've all agreed to be
locked into, see the future. I think the thing that

(04:06):
like makes it clear why this is in our wheelhouse
is an article from Wired by Matthew Galt, who's a
buddy of mine. He's a great journalist. Um. And it's
titled Billionaires CVR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social
Change um. And that title does kind of get to
the get to the nut of it. But the quotes
in this thing are fucking wild. So before we get

(04:26):
into Mark Zuckerberg and his vision of the future of
the Internet and of humanity, UM, I want to read
some quotes from John Carmack. Um. So, John Carmack is
the guy. He made Doom right, Like, you can't overstate
the the impact John Carmack had on gaming, Like he
invented the first, like first effectively the first popular first
person shooter. He was the CTO of Oculus for a while. UM,

(04:50):
and he's very familiar with like three D digital spaces, Yes,
and he's he's very bullish on VR. UM and he
gave a quote, well, not gave a code. He talked
to Joe Rogan during an interview in twenty twenty and
he said this. Some people read this the wrong way
and react in correctly to it. The promise of VR
is to make the world you wanted. It is not
possible on earth to give everyone all that they would want.
Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island. People react

(05:13):
negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation.
You have to make decisions about where things go economically.
You can deliver a lot more value to a lot
of people in the digital in the virtual sense. UM.
And that's one of those things that you can see
how a guy like John Carmack, who was again a
smart guy who's been ahead of the curve on a

(05:34):
number of important things, could could convince himself this is true.
This is absurd. And I think what we see in
Facebook's video is going to make clear that it's absurd.
One of the reasons that it's absurd is that UM,
like everything else, the people who are building the metaverse
have done, like what they've done to the Internet. The
Internet before Facebook and Twitter and these like these behemoths,

(05:55):
UM used to be weird in decentralized and primarily not
for profit UM. There was there was a period of
time in which like the idea that you would actually
make money off the Internet, like really out of like
content or whatever was just silly because it was this
it was impossible to monetize. It was this weird, wild,
like creative nonsense pile UM. And you can only kind

(06:15):
of make money around the edges of it, but the
core of it was just just far too strange and
uncontrollable UM, too wild and free. UM. And that's not
the Internet anymore because of the people. Because in large
part of the people who are trying to build these
metaverses and the idea that they would allow poor people
to have the same kind of resources as rich people
in the metaverse. There, they can't let that happen. They're

(06:39):
not the kind of people who would let that happen.
They're going to monetize every aspect of this thing. If
it becomes real, we ever have like an all encompassing metaverse,
every every moment of it and everything you do in it,
everything you have in it is going to cost you money,
probably with some kind of bullshit subscription plus to adding on,
you know, like randomized cashes and other like you know,
lootbox type mechanics. Selling gambling the children is the business

(07:03):
model of the future. By the future, I mean it's
been happening. Yeah, it's the business model they want for now.
I will state I think some sort of persistent virtual
reality thing will probably happen in some ways someday. I
don't think any of these people. Part of why my
thesis of this is none of these people are capable
of making it. It's because they look at this the

(07:23):
same way like shitty app developer, shitty like game developers
for Facebook look at gaming, where it's like everything should
cost money, you should be able to pay to win,
and it's like, well, nobody likes that, like nobody, nobody
likes those games. Those are not the things that are successful.
Like and it is one of the games that comes
up a lot when people talk about the metaverse is
Minecraft and what made Minecraft hugely successful and why you

(07:45):
can kind of plausibly see like, oh, this has elements
of a metaverse where you're everybody's building these gigantic, persistent
things that you can interact with and that you can
make these incredible and people made like works of art
in Minecraft. They did it for free, and they did
it because like nothing costs money really in Minecraft, if
I'm not mistaken, like you can make anything with nothing

(08:05):
just by the game, and then you have the game
and you can build whatever you want. Your equity is effort, right,
like yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's like you know, like
what are my friends like learned computer science? So he
could like, okay, create circuits, right, he like he built
a like functioning computer in this game, just like you
can you can buy like it's it's like, it's pretty.

(08:26):
It's pretty. Yeah. If you're gonna tell me sometime in
the future, virtual reality in the Internet is going to
get like so good and so pervasive that eventually people
will bootstrap together some kind of metaverse. Yeah, maybe like
that that could happen if it comes from like a
cyber like punk aspect, where like emphasis on the punk,
then so I can see this being a thing but

(08:46):
the way tech companies are talking about this, that's not
how people use the Internet currently specifically, like the mainstream people,
there's no way, yeah, and there's there's a few more.
Like one of the things that Matt brings up in
this article is like VR is a way to avoid
radical social change. UM is uh like kind of the
one of the reasons why he's number one, and I

(09:07):
think where we should all be kind of critical about
how realistic it is is kind of the present state
of virtual reality, which is about one point seven percent
of Steam users have a VR headset, Steam being kind
of the largest app to try to monitor like how
many people are using VR right, Like, it's kind of
your best it's figuring out the biggest it's the biggest
PC gaming UM headsets. Sales of VR headsets did go

(09:30):
up about thirty during the pandemic UM, but that was
kind of alongside of surge in video game sales. VR headsets.
We're already we're already boosting, and the pandemic definitely it
empercise that because it's like, Hey, I'm stuck at my house.
What can I do? Well, I'll buy like a two oculus,
so I can you know, walk around and fight Ninja's
in my living room. And VR is like real, like

(09:51):
VRS cool, like it's I have a VR headset for years.
It can do one of the things that um I
talked we're talking about like what takes for technology, new
technology to like go viral, to become like endemic. It
has some of that, which is that as soon as
you put one of these on, most people, unless you're
one of the people that it makes sick. Most people,
if you put them, put them on and you show

(10:12):
them the right thing, they're like, oh, this is actually
way cooler than I thought it was going to be. Yeah. Absolutely,
UM So that is like I'm not I'm not like
has I'm not poo pooing the entire idea of VR.
UM And there's there's there's been some successes on like
Half Life. Alex sold about two million copies, which is
huge for VR, but like also nothing for a video game,

(10:33):
Like that's like for a big for a fucking Half
Life game. That ship, which just it just shows that
it's still like fractional, which I don't think any of
these people are kind of missing UM, but it is
kind of point to again that the degree to which
this technology would have to leap up for anything like
what Facebook where we're about to look like it for
that to actually be popular. There's a difference between developing

(10:55):
VR gaming and developing this metaverse concept which goes way
on VR gaming. Yeah yeah, um, but I so what
I find what I find so like doomed about this
isn't the technology, even though I think it's important to
acknowledge there's a long way to go, just in terms
of like how heavy it is, how much space you need,
how not fully immersive it is. You know it's yeah,

(11:19):
trying to remove lighthouses making it more mobile. Yeah, there's
a lot, there's a lot of stuff that control schemes
are still kind of jank, like, yeah, there's a lot
to be done. But all of that's I mean, think
about the first iPhone, right, it was like a fucking
brick compared to the ship. Today, all of that gets better,
and all the first VR headset compared to the Oculus two,
it's like a massive improvement and basically every way. I

(11:41):
don't think when people criticize this stuff by pointing out
like how primitive VR is today, I don't think that
means anything. Um, it is like worth noting, you know,
it's current level of adoption, but it's not people compare
this to like three D TVs and stuff. It's not
that three D TVs were immediately obviously from the beginning,
nothing but a but a grift um because there's nobody

(12:02):
wanted what really wanted what three dtvs had. Like VR,
people do want what VR does, and eventually the tech
will get there. What's bullshit is the idea. And this
is why I think this article by Galt is so good.
The idea that VR is going to allow the poor
and downtrodden of the world to have a slice of
the good life. And this is something Karmak is particularly
bullish about. Quote not everyone can have a mansion, Not

(12:25):
everyone can have a home theater. These are things we
can simulate to some degree in virtual reality. Now the
simulation is not as good as the real thing. If
you are rich and you have your own home, theater
or mansion or in private island, good for you, You're
probably not the people who are going to benefit the most.
Most of the people in the world lived in cramped
quarters that are not what they would choose if to
be if they had unlimited resources. Incredibly deranged. Yeah, it's

(12:46):
out of its mind, because that's not how VR works.
Like I have Like I can put on my headset
and load up like a nice forest, and it's not
it's not the feeling of being in a fort like, No,
that's not that's not how our senses work. So until
we can hack our own means and the feeling things
we don't actually feel, then it's not a thing. And
we're nowhere close to that level of technology, even just

(13:07):
to the degree that he's talking about, Like, yeah, you
could you if you don't have a big home theater,
you could just like put it on and have a
huge TV. And which is a thing that VR can
do now, Like it's not good. It's like Garrison, you
come over to three times a week and we watch
movies with all of our friends in my living room.
Like the good thing about it, Like it's nice to

(13:27):
have a large screen. I have a big TV, but
like your friends, you're watching them react, like you're eating
food together. You're doing all this stuff that will never
really be possible in VR. I have a lot of
respect for John Karmen. He made Doom right, Like that's
a third of my childhood. Um, he's out of his
mind now if he thinks that that's like what people want,
what poor people want, Like you've been rich for too long, sir,

(13:50):
you don't understand human beings. A particular type of escape,
like using VR as that type of escapism is totally
wrong because like VR can be escapism, but not gonna
trick you into thinking you're living in a mansion. That's
not that's not how VR. It works because you're walking
around a tiny room in your house and you can't
feel anything. You can like walk through cupboards, which is
a great way to play VR games is you can

(14:11):
just like hack it by walking into stuff. And they're
working on so the The article notes that Elon Musk
is working in a brain machine interface called new Link.
Yeah yeah, and who knows what I will say, that's
a little bit like the how how realistic all of
those dreams are um is questionable. That said, something like

(14:33):
what they're claiming it is will eventually be figured out.
It will, and it should it will probably probably should
be destroyed. It probably should be destroyed. Not put the
chip in your brain is really bullish on that technology.
Gabe Newell is the guy we have half life for
like he and he and John Karnack. If there's a
mount rushmore of like gamer dudes, it's they make they

(14:56):
make one of the they make one of the better headsets. Yeah. Again,
like we're about to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who I
do not think as a visionary. Both Karmak and Newell
are visionaries. Doesn't mean they're right, because visionaries are wrong
all of the fucking time. It's part of their job.
But they're both really, really fucking bullish on this Newell
is a big believer in like the promise of kind
of what the neural link, the brain interface technology and

(15:18):
vr uh. He told I g NY were way closer
to the matrix than people realize, which I don't think
is the case. Um. And Newell is the person who
I've just talked about, like how smart he is. He
is even more out of his mind than John Karmack
on this ship um. In an interview with New Zealand's
One News um, he talked about his vision of the

(15:40):
near future, which is a world in which brains and
computers interface, and computers can make changes to the human
brain he called he called the human body a meat peripheral.
Jesus Christ so lost his mind. This is the this
is the thing about like VR, and like the metaverse
in generals is over like emphasizing that we basically just

(16:03):
live in the meat space, and the meat space exists
just to make content for the online which is so
and the online space is the actual real space and
we just have to operate inside our meat space to
make content for that. This is like the way technology
has been progressing, the way tech companies have wanting things
to go, And it's the most dystopian thing that's going
to give so many people like disassociate of mental disorders
because it's not horrible. For like, I'm going to be

(16:25):
super interested to see people of my generation, including myself,
like how we develop mentally the next you know, twenty
years based on how kind of fake our lives have
been because of how much we exist and socialized within
this like false network. It's gonna be interesting to watch.
I I used to be really optimistic about aspects of VR.

(16:46):
I actually when I was in Mosle, I filmed not
that like other people did this before I did, but
I was kind of one of the early people filming
like a a VR documentary of some combat of like
the Battle of mosle Um, aspects of which were aired
as A three sixty and a bunch of different like
TV networks UM, and I had this belief that, like, yeah, VR,

(17:07):
because the visual aspect of VR is so good, you know,
you know, even at that point Seen was already so good.
I disbelieve it, like, well if you could, because the
first time I ever went into a war zone, it
was such an affecting experience, and I thought like, oh
my god, if you could somehow carve out this moment
of experience and like transmitted to other people, maybe that

(17:27):
would mean something. Maybe it would like have an impact
on people. I do think that is possible in the
long Yeah, yeah, I think maybe we'll like we'll see.
The question is like, can you give a ship if
if you feel like horror games, the level of like
anxiety and some degrees trauma of playing like a really
well made horror VR game is incredibly intense, UM, and

(17:48):
that's something that'd be done very well. So I feel
like that type of like surreal experience like a war
zone could actually be carried over to some degree in
VR to like change people's minds on like hey, maybe
war is not good. Yeah, I mean that that's the dream.
I don't know how much I still believe that, but
reading people like Gabe Newell and how they talk about
this technology makes me lose some hope and all the

(18:10):
headsets in. Here's another thing Gabe Newell said in that
a garrison, after calling the human body and meat peripheral.
You're used to experiencing the world through eyes, but eyes
were created by this low cost bidder that didn't care
about failure rates in r m as, and if it
got broken, there was no way to repair anything effectively,
which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but it's

(18:31):
not at all reflective of consumer preferences of the human eye.
No like funck like like they There is some aspects
of trans humanism that I like. I like to change
like body parts at will with like my mind, but

(18:51):
this type of stuff actually want to throw all technology.
I support the idea of, Like, it would be great
if when people lose their eye completely from like shrapnel
or whatever some sort of like degenerative disease, we just
pop new eyes in there. Absolutely we start cloning eyes.
I think that's a great thing. But eyes are amazing,

(19:11):
Like it's the most the most impressive camera ever. We're
nowhere close to replicating the ability. It is not a
low cost bitter. It is like they're imperfect, like everything
that that is part of the human body. But like
the break down said that, he can't monetize it the
same day, right, That's that's his problem. He's also talking
about like well they break down. It's like, motherfucker, have

(19:33):
you used a computer You're gave Newell. I've know you've
used a computer, Like you want to talk about breaking
every computer I've ever owned. I've used Steam before, Like, yeah, Steam, motherfucker.
I like, I would rather have my eyes and I'm
wearing glasses right now, go sucking egg. And it goes
on because he he can't stop ship talking like reality

(19:57):
he talks about like in the in the virtual world
he wants to build, the real world will seem flat, colorless,
blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create
in people's brains. Um And I want you to keep
that in mind, my my, my dear friends and colleagues
as we leap now into the Facebook live stream. First
of all, I think would it be worth like explaining

(20:18):
to and we've we've danced around what the metaverse is.
But for people who are totally unfamiliarly, do you think
it would be worth giving a general explanation? Will that
be covered in the Facebook thing that's kind of covered
in the because because this is Facebook building it. But
I think we should. You're probably right that we should
give a little bit of context about like where they
got this idea, because again Mark Zuckerberg has never had
an original thought. It's not um and and Gave Newell

(20:40):
and and um John Carmack have had original thoughts in
their life, but this is not an original thought from
any of them, all of them, everyone anywhere who talks
about the metaverse um is whether or not they know it.
A fan of Neil Stevenson who wrote who wrote a
book called snow Crash, where the point was that in
the future the world is a dystopian corporate is nightmare.

(21:00):
And because things are, in part because things are so
bad and incredibly highly like advertised and monetized persistent internet
called the metaverse that exists all around us and it's
totally immersive, has come to dominate everyday life. Um and
it's a bad thing. Like snow Crash, He's a story
of like wouldn't this future be horrible? Yeah, it's not like, hey,

(21:22):
this is a cool thing, but these tech guys read
this and are like, oh yeah, that seems like fun.
But you could do that. Neil Stevenson, who was yet
another person I respect, made one crucial flaw, which is
he gave the hero in his book a katana. And
because the hero in his book, um, everyone was like,
wouldn't this be rad if this were the future? Let's
make this be the entire future. It's a real tragic

(21:44):
You need to abolish katanas, like, we would save so
many lives. Honestly, you could probably make a strong case
that the katana has a huge chunk of the cultural
weight that it has because if Neil Stevenson, um, he's
a big part of that, right, you know, you've got
a lot of movies and stuff too. But yeah, but
like the a ton of punk kind of melding. Yeah,
and it's it's a it's a it's a very I mean,

(22:04):
it's it's a bit dated now, but it's still like
a good book to read. Like there's a bunch of
silly stuff like that. It's replicating a lot of other
cyberpunk art, some better, some worse. Yes, every worse cough
cough ready player one, yeah, and every like every not
every cyberpunk sense, because there's people like Corey doctor Oh
who do some really cool shit. Um, but most cyberpunk

(22:24):
senses to some extent um borrowed from from Neil Stevenson's work,
and Facebook's entire idea is based on this. And so
the idea is that it is a persistent, fully immersive
digital world that interacts with the real world. So you
can be in VR hanging out with friends from around
the world and like a fake living room and then
like call someone and see like a video of them

(22:45):
in the real world as they're like walking to a
concert or whatever, and like talk to them and like
make play. Like that's the idea, right. Um. So this video,
this face, it opens with you know, you've got your
your little introduction music and stuff, and then we see
Mark Zuckerberg looking like a fucking gollum. Um. Yeah. And
and the first thing that I really noticed about this

(23:06):
is that he talks about how we're all going to
do this together, meaning invent the technologies and use cases
that are going to make the metaverse worthwhile. Um. And
when he says all of us. This is not an
internal Facebook video. This is a video. The meta video
is heavily angled towards developers UM and investors UM and
it's been viewed by a lot of people, like twelve

(23:26):
million to date. But he's talking about like a big
part of what he's saying is that like the technology
for all of the stuff that we've rendered, because most
of what's rendered in this isn't game footage so to speak,
like it's not a game or whatever. It's here's how
it might look if the technology has ever invented. Nothing,
nothing is like in engine or anything close to it.
It's a it's all speculative. What's interesting about this to

(23:48):
me is that he's he is saying we're going to
build this together and and sort of acknowledging that like
Facebook does not have the capacity to make this thing
they've dreamed about, but Facebook is going to own it.
So he's a lot to like. This is him tacitly
admitting I want to take your surplus value to make
a metaverse that I then control and monetize entirely at
my own discretion, which is cool, it's great, and it's

(24:11):
also like I think, you know, I think if if
you want a sign of where this is actually going
and like the actual creativity behind this. Like okay, again,
everything in that video is a mock up, right. It
looks like dogshit. It's so ugly, it's hideous. It looks
like a fucking Connect game or like a fucking we game,
which is fine, but I don't want to live there,

(24:33):
like it's always weird in cartoony. Um. Yeah, so he
talks about in kind of laying out why he thinks
this is the future. Zuckerberry talks about how text used
to be the basis of everything online, but now like
photos and videos dominate and that's yeah, as that change
happened from like text to video to photos to videos.
The next change, he kind of frames it like the

(24:55):
the the the obvious next evolution, is to what he
calls an embod audied Internet where you're part of the experience.
And that's the metaverse, which again that if you don't
I think that part has some true I agree. I
don't think he's entirely wrong there. Obviously that's not his idea. Um, oh,
running out of time, Okay, thank you for telling me

(25:17):
about the host and because its unlimited minutes. Great thanks zoom. Um.
Speaking of meta verses, UM like, Yeah, I'm gonna I'm
gonna flop onto a share screen and I'm gonna show
you guys a section from this from this video, think
about computers or phones today. Now, since we're doing this

(25:37):
remotely today, I figured let's make this special. So we've
put together something that I think is really going to
give you a feeling for what this future could be like.
We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the
mobile Internet. We'll be able to feel present, like we're
right there with people, no matter how far apart we

(25:59):
actually are. Okay, so I'm pausing it here because I
want you to watch this. The room that Mark Zuckerberget
is in, he's not in the metaverse yet, he's in
like a house. I think it's supposed to be his house.
It is clearly not a place human beings list. It
has been set dressed. Um. One of the ways you
can tell is that all of the books and picture
frames on the bookcase are like the same flat tones

(26:20):
because they're not meant to stand out, They're meant to
blend in and very telling Lee this is what's interesting
to me. As soon as he steps into the frame
where he's going to announce this. The thing that is
directly next to his head is the only thing that's
not like the same kind of baige as everything. It's
a bottle of barbecue sauce that's being used as the
book ind to a bunch of books now Meta. Immediately
after this, like people joked about it online and Meta

(26:42):
started tweeting about it and like trying to make like
jokes about oh, Mark just loves his you know, his
his barbecue so much. Like they tried to turn it
into a meme because they think it's humanizing and and
and kind of one aspect of the meme they were
putting together is that like, oh, he just forgot to
you know, he just he's he's so into barbecue that
he leaves his saucer that was put there on someone's orders,

(27:03):
Like that was it was to create me. We're seeing
we're seeing Marvel dis as well. They're releasing promotional images
specifically designed to be turned into memes, and it doesn't work.
We said's so obvious, like because we'd be like, you know, yeah,
we're not going to use this because it's it's a
it's a dogshit horrible, like horrible cinematography, bad colors, and
it's not a fun meme. But people did follow for

(27:24):
the Mark Zuckerberg thing, Uh like, oh look at the
barbecue thoughts. But yeah, that was intentional to create like
a viral thing to trip. Yeah, anyway, I'm gonna let
Mark continue here after I made my little point. When
I send my parents a video of my kids, they're
gonna feel like they're right in the moment with us,
not peering through a little window. When you play a
game with your friends, you'll feel like you're right there

(27:46):
together in a different worlds, not just on your computer
by yourself. And when you're in a meeting in the metaverse,
it'll feel like you're right in the room together, making
eye contact, having a shared sense of space, and not
just looking at a grid of faces. So that's important
because a big aspect of what he's trying to sell here,
why he's he's trying to convince people that this is

(28:09):
a real thing, is that it's a balm for loneliness. Right. Um,
he is he is, and he's one of people who's
responsible for for pushing our society to such an atomized
and isolated direction. Facebook propaganda has isolated huge numbers of
people from their families. It's um. And of course then
there's just the aspect of it that is the lockdown,
which has isolated people a number of a lot of
which ties back to disinformation spread on Facebook. But like, um,

(28:33):
he's he's, he's selling this, you know, as a this
will make you less lonely, will make you feel like
you're all together. Um, and it's it's He's specifically says
at one point, this isn't about spending more time on screens.
It's about making the time we spend on screens already better. Um,
which is horseshit because, as the Facebook papers make clear,
Facebook has repeatedly refused to do things that would have

(28:54):
reduced the harm of their platform because it would have
reduced the traffic that they've got. And I think those
are the kind of decision you can Yeah, I mean,
and still like technologically we're still not there, Like when
when when you're in VR you even if you're interacting
with other like three D like personas of people specifically,
like vr chat was very popular among like furries, and
I think they are honestly the best example of what

(29:15):
the metaverse could actually be is how furries use vr
chat um. But even still that is very different um
than standing in a room with someone in a first suit, right,
Like it's it's totally it's it's totally different and metaverses
and this type of thing. I don't think we'll actually
solve alienation. I don't think it's because you're not actually

(29:35):
touching anyone, Like it's it's not if you're not. There's
still that that that digital fog between you and everything else.
Do I think there's some elements of it that could
be developed, specifically using a R that would make things
a little bit cool. Yeah, uh, but it's not going
to solve alienation as a concept. In fact, it could
actually make it worse. It could make it worse. Like again,
there's some use cases for I don't know, people who

(29:56):
have like a l S. Maybe you could develop some
sort of rig that would allow them to in ract
like more with with people around them and like that
could be useful for those people. But like, it is
not a societal answer to loneliness. And I think one
thing that makes that clear is you look at their
vision of home spaces. So this is kind of the
center of the of the Metaverse they want to build
is everybody has their little digital home um that you

(30:17):
can set up and you can design to your liking,
and you can buy things like n f T s
to decorate it. This becomes a big part of the
pitch that like n f t s are going to
be in it and like that way you know that
they have at one point, like somebody buys like an
autographed poster for of metaverse concert that's an n f
T and they get to put it in their room
and know that it's the only one of those posters

(30:38):
or something, which is the dumbest thing I can imagine. Um,
maybe it'll work. I don't know. I I don't really
see how that's any different from an n f T
being revolutionary case than like, you know, being able to
buy something in a fucking video game. No, it's it's
the way people already hate to do. Yeah, it's it's
just skins or whatever. Bullshit, cause me stuff I want.

(31:01):
Number One of the things that's in entertaining about this
is how bad a lot of the acting is for
all the money and time they have. Like Mark Zuckerberg
is a ship presenter and and this bit where he
tries to explain why the home space is so cool. Um,
and it shows you like their home spaces. It starts
about four thirty on the video of people at home
when a watch is just a perfect, perfect encapsulation of

(31:22):
like how inhuman this this world they want to build
really feels what even when they try to present it
in its best face? Oh? Hey, Mark, Hey, what's going on?
We're floating in space made this place? That's awesome, right,
it's from the creator I met in l a. Uh,
this place is amazing that you of course it's me,

(31:44):
you know, I had to do the robot. Man. I
thought I was supposed to be the robot. Whoa, I
knew you were luffing. Where is na Let's call her Naomi? Hey?
Should we do it? Really? I'm running late, but you've

(32:04):
got to see what we're checking out. There's an artist
going around so hoped t r pieces for people to fight.
Really street art, that's cool. So I wanted to stop
here because this is also part of like what's it's
this perfect? It's like n FT culture and all this
ship like the street art they show, this is clearly
them trying to be like, here's one of these cool

(32:26):
use cases for how the metaverse is going to interact
with and influence the real world. Like this artist pastes
this art on a wall that when you look at
it in the metaverse or when you you film it
and you send a video to people in the metaverse,
it becomes this big three D thing and it it
just looks like ship. It's just a bunch of like
squiggly lines and stuff like. It's not like there's good graffiti,
especially in San Francisco, there's incredible fucking graffiti. Um, this

(32:49):
is just like nonsense. It looks like it looks like
a fucking n f T. Like it's just this this
kind of shitty. It was obviously designed by a computer,
not an actual person. Yeah, and there's nothing like it
doesn't say any thing. There's nothing cool about it. Um
and they haven't again because Mark Zuckerberg can't conceive of art.
There's nothing about this that like makes me think, oh
what a need futuristic thing, which was like, oh cool,

(33:11):
I can see squiggly lines it has in person and
on my phone. I mean, the big metaverse and like
a R and VR is like you know, making depth
within actually making two D space appear to be three
D space. This still looks too D like it doesn't.
It is not. It's not tricking my brain in any
way whatsoever. Especially with the concept of like filming it
on your phone. We have the technology now like that's

(33:31):
not that's not the metaverse. That's just filming it already
on your little box, as Zuckerberg said, And we have
the technology to do like that a r thing with
fucking um with your Pokemon go did that like five
years ago, and it's not what people want, um well
Pokemon but long time. But the closest we ever got

(33:52):
to world peace and it was a CIA Pokemon goes
like the closest we ever got to like the metaverse,
like realistically, but people don't want People don't want to
like take photos of crappy street art that then becomes
three D but still isn't like I don't know it is.
It is incredibly grim that most of like the case
uses for metaverse stuff. The only thing they can imagine

(34:14):
it being is like fucking meetings. This is like the
biggest thing that they show. He's like, oh, we can
make virtual meetings. They've tried that the video that we
just played. They're all in like this spaceship, and everybody's
three D Like one person, it looks like kind of
a hologram of their real bodies. Some people are just
like three D rendered cartoons of themselves. One person is
a big robot, and they're all like floating in zero

(34:36):
G and playing card sitting at a table and playing
virtual cards, and there's like a bed in the background.
But like you can't go in the bed because it's
not a fake. It's a fake and you're not floating
in zero G because the r will never be able
to trick you into thinking you're sitting in a in
a in your chair in a room with some ship
on your face. You're you're fucking Carl Havoc and trying
to pretend that you're like having a good time playing

(34:58):
cards with your friends. It's like, yeah, if I could
have a space station house where my friends and I
could float around and play cards, that would be sick.
But you're not promising that. Are you doing that? Um?
I mean, like there is there is games that simulate
zero G. They don't trick you. They make you nauseous.
Sometimes it can be fun, but like it's I'm not
going to be in the same way that eating Hawaiian

(35:19):
baby wood row seeds can be fun. Yeah. So he
goes on to talk about the avatars that you'll have,
which are basically he describes them as pro profile pictures,
but much richer because they're live, which I find unsettling
and part by thinking about what will happen when people
die to their digital avatars. But whatever. Um. At this

(35:39):
point he goes on to talking about how people he
thinks people are going to actually use these avatars, and it's, um,
it's very unhinged one for hanging out and maybe the
fantasy one for gaming. You're gonna have a wardrobe of
virtual clothes for different occasions, designed by different creators and
from different apps and experiences. So one of the things

(36:00):
he's talking about that is exciting is that like you'll
be able to have a different avatar for uh, like work,
if you're in a work meeting, or like hanging out
with your friends. Um. And to me, that says, like, oh,
so now I'm going to be expected to like maintain
and keep up an avatar for like my job and
like dress that fucking thing, and then I'll have to
like switch to hang out with people, and like why

(36:22):
why does that what does that provide me being able
to like sit in a room as an avatar that
I don't currently have, like through zoom? Like why? Why? Is?
In what world is that something people want? The only
only good use case for this is Furries. This is
the only way it worked because they that has almost
like a true representation of their own body. What what's

(36:43):
this is going to do for regularly for like people
who are not Furries is it'll pride to people a
lot of weird like dysmorphia. Yeah, or if you're or
if you're trends and you make a female avatar, assuming
like you know, for me, if I was to make
like an avatar that's more feminine, that can be fun
for me. Um, But for a lot of people, these
weird like digital versions of themselves will probably they're just

(37:06):
like Uncanny Valley. It will probably make you feel weird. Yeah. Um.
And he's he's so focused on like this as a
way for people to work together while being remote, which
says a lot like It's seventh, Like like about a
half minute after this point or a minute or so
after this point, he brags that your home space can
even have your own personal office where you work, which

(37:28):
is within the metaverse, within the metaverse, which is really
just like digitally ruin your eyes, where the goggles that
long your eyes get rude because it's blasting light into
your res and it's it's also just like I like
sitting with a laptop, and I have a laptop, and
I have a second screen for my laptop, and I

(37:51):
sit at my comfortable living room table and I write
and browse the Internet and research and stuff. And yeah,
every now and then, like I hunch over too much
in my back gets little bit sore, but like it's not.
It's it's pretty comfortable and I can get up and
move and do stuff in the house, putting a bunch
of ship on me and sitting still and like being
unable to perceive the world around me and locked into

(38:12):
this uncomfortable digital desk because it's later on, whenever they
do there's this mix of you can see the videos
of the technology as it actually exists, and they're aspirational,
and the aspirational version it's like you're in this gorgeous
three dimensional office that looks so you're playing basketball, both
in real life and in the Holygram, which at first
of all just impossible like you're never going to do

(38:32):
never ever going to happen, just physically impossible. But when
you see the clips of like what because they do
have aspects of this built. When you see the clips
of like the workspaces they have built, it's like, oh,
of my screen is the Microsoft word app or excel
um as it or or Outlook as it currently exists,
and it is like the edges of this little VR office.

(38:54):
So all I'm looking at is I'm seeing a full
eye version of like whatever apps i'm you can, yeah,
you can. You can get a air headset, you can
download virtual desktop, you can bring your desktop into your
v into your VR space. It's not useful, like it's
like it's it's it's novel for the first twenty minutes,
and then you get bored of it because you realized
that you can actually see your keyboard so you can't
type his fast. There's a great joke about this in

(39:16):
the last season Community, the best example of the metaverse
where he's like because like the big part of like
Epic Games version of the metaverse is like interacting with
like brands and all your apps within a three three
D digital space, which is what the Dean does. In
community has like run to his email. Yeah, Like this
is a great example of why this technology is never

(39:37):
going to actually catch on for regular people because that's
not how they use the Internet. That you don't want
to traverse a three D digital space to get to
your email. That's that's asinine. Yeah, and it's there's aspects
of it that are asinine, and there's aspects of thus
just impossible. So, like a big thing that he's hitting
on with this is interoperability, which is like you want

(39:58):
to be able to transp travel between different apps, between
different programs that different people have made, and you want
to be able to take like whatever items you buy,
whatever n f t s you have with you. Um,
And he's talking about like this will work in games.
This is a thing that like you've seen people talk
about with like the promise of n f t s
for gaming, Like you could get an item that like
is yours so they can't nerf it or or whatever,

(40:20):
and like it will travel for you from game to game.
There's a developer I follow on on Twitter. He made
the game Audios, which is about like a guy who
disposes of bodies for the mob and tries to quit.
It's a it's a cool games. He's a good developer
doc something or other. He wrote a huge article about
like why none of this n f T s can't
work for gaming? Um. That also hits on like why
what Zuckerberg saying is impossible? Which is that Like, so

(40:42):
you're saying that everyone who makes a game has to
has to build in like a way to handle every
single item that you could possibly get in the metaverse
and everything that you're having, Like it's it's an unthinkable challenge. Um,
it's and and like why and what if a game
shuts down, right, Like are you saying they have to
continue operating the game forever and updating it forever, even

(41:04):
once it's no longer profitable, so that you can keep
using your eye Like no, it's just it's it's functionally impossible. Um,
but it's It's what's interesting to me is he's talking
about all this. He has to know this is impossible
when he does. There's all these scenes, like you said,
where people like playing basketball, and like one of them
is in the real world and one of them is
in VR, but they're both playing in a real world.

(41:25):
And so the person with a with a virtual ball
and It's like, number one, how is the person the
real world? How do they feel that ball? He assist
some vague shit about like haptic feedback, which doesn't work
that way. Maybe there's a way if you're wearing like
a glove, that it could trick you into believing you
were hitting a ball or something. Um like like and
not everyone's wearing headsets like it's we're just We'll get

(41:46):
to that in part two, the headset question. Um, but
what what what's interesting is that like a huge amount
of the coolest stuff, the stuff that you can be like, well,
that would be neat. Yeah. If I could fucking if
I could fucking play pool with my friend in Germany
and it would feel like we were both in the
same room, um, even though only one of us is
standing around a real pool table. Yeah, that would be

(42:06):
an amazing feat of technology. It's never gonna happen. Um,
certainly not in any kind of reasonable time for rame.
Mark knows that all that is going to happen. It
most is like a digital conference suite that like is
damages people's eyes and brains. Um. And he knows that,
but he's angry that Zoom beat him to the to
the punch when the pandemic hit Um and this is

(42:27):
his like, that's kind of one of the sinister things
about it. Um. There's other sinister ship, which we'll talk
about in part two. But you know what, guys, it's
time to end part one. This is enough for part one. Well,
we'll talk more about we'll talk about what's really frightening
about a lot of what Mark's trying to build in
part two, But for right now, I want to talk
about ending the episode, which I guess I just did. Goodbye.

(43:00):
What grows in the forest trees? Sure, No, what else
grows in the forest, Our imagination, our sense of wonder,
and our family bonds grow too, because when we disconnect
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The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest

(43:21):
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(43:41):
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(44:03):
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Make sure to listen to the Black Effect Presents podcast
on I Heart Radio, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcast. Welcome back, It could happen here the show

(44:33):
where we're talking right now about the metaverse that a
bunch of rich people think that you're going to want
to live in once they ruin the regular world. Um uh,
and why it's dogshit and it is dogshit, so it's
just it's just it's just total dogshit. Um. Everything about this,
I don't know, seems like a waking nightmare to be

(44:54):
to me so far if we're actually talking about like
what they are, what they are immediately trying to because
a bunch of this is aspirational nonsense that as we've
stated is like you are never going to play a
perfect game of basketball in a mix of real and
a R courts with your friend in Hong Kong. Like
that's never going to happen. Never. That's not how physics works.
That's not how electronics works. Maybe when we find out

(45:16):
how to literally hack the human brain, we can like
put you into a quasi seizure state that that that
that mimics that. But like the closest, the closest thing
we have to this right now is actually uh VR
board games is the best is the best example of this.
Or you can play with you can play Settlers of
Catan with your friend, a classic across the Yeah, and
there's some cool ship you can do with haptics and

(45:38):
haptic feedback is like the basic example of it is
when you like touch your phone and your phone like
vibrates under your hand to like let you know that
you've you've touched like a command. Yeah, And there's there's
people who think like at some point we would be
we may be able to make using haptic feedback, like
a virtual keyboard that feels like a real keyboard. That
might be possible. That's still that's still like kind of

(46:00):
like the idea of a keyboard that isn't there but
feels like a real keyboard might that that's still on
the fringes of possibility, like this, The fucking ship they're
showing in this video is like nonsense. We will have
laser cannons before we have any of this bullshit, Like
we will be shooting each other in space before we
have this nonsense. Um, And thank god for that because

(46:22):
at least that sounds fun. So the actual center of
what they've built in terms of the products that that
Facebook is launching now for the metaverse, UM, the core
of it is Horizon Home and Horizon Worlds, And I
think Horizon is kind of the brand they're going with
for all of their different like meta programs. UM. Horizon
Home is the home spaces thing that they discussed earlier

(46:42):
where people can like make their own like houses. And
one of the things they don't talk about in this
they keep saying like you can build whatever you want,
you can make it look like anything. They don't say
a word about how like decorating your digital home is
going to be monetized versus how much of it will
be sweat equity. And again, like the smart thing would
be make it all sweat equit, make it like Minecraft,
make people be able to build anything they can conceive

(47:03):
of if they're actually creative enough and spend the time.
They won't do that, um as they talk about in
that like in the video they played like we're like, oh,
this is a cool world. It was made by a developer. Like, yeah,
you're gonna buy the cool ship. Um I don't. I
don't know what you're gonna buy it, And it's gonna
suck because all you can do is sit at a table. Yeah,
and because like you can't go into bed, like you can't,

(47:24):
Like all of this stuff is just cosmetic, like it's
and you're not gonna be tricked into thinking it's real.
I've I've been in cool VR like three D rooms
and like they're cool to look at for like ten minutes. Yeah,
any boring. Yeah, Like it's you're like, oh, yeah, it's
like the real world, but I can't touch anything. And
when they show you the stuff that's closer to real,

(47:45):
like the different like people chatting in the metaverse and whatever,
it doesn't look fun. There's a there's a scene where
they like show people like watching a YouTube video together
in the metaverse, and they're all like these disembodied upper
torsos because of course VR sets can't can't read your eggs,
so it's like a bunch of torsos floating around a
maximized YouTube video window. And it's like, I would rather

(48:06):
just show a friend my phone. I would even rather
text them a video and being in person with somebody
watching on a on a phone or even but even
even if without Like it's the kind I think that
they're expecting that, Like everyone's kind of bummed when they
send a friend video over signal or text and like
wait for them. No, I would rather do that than
this ship. I don't want to hang out as a

(48:28):
bunch of torsos around a YouTube We don't want have
to schedule of a VR session every time I want
to share of YouTube video. No, that sounds horrible, and
it sounds like I would constantly have to be in VR.
Like he talks about how we're not trying to expand
screen time, but like, am I just waiting around in
VR to like show friends? YouTube are really unclear about

(48:48):
how often you need to be in a headset, and
it's it's kind of suspicious. It's almost like they don't
actually plan on doing anything. So I want to play
another video that they claim to be a use case.
And the way this video starts as like, this actual
person is in an actual real world concert for some
guy I've never heard of that Facebook. I think he's
he's some clearly some sort of musician with a following

(49:09):
Facebook hired to do a concert for this video. And
she like calls her friend on the metaverse, and her
friend digitally hops into the concert and they're like, the
digital girl and the real girl are like dancing together
at the show, which I don't know whatever, Like that
is more possible than the basketball shit. Um, I mean yeah,
watching of having a like a VR version of standing

(49:30):
in a room where musician plays. Sure, I mean it's not. Yeah, yeah,
I would debate like whether or not it's doable. But
then after that they see, like during the concert, this
like digital thing pops up. That's like, do you want
to go to a free after party? Um? And first off,
all of these after parties will cost money and they'll
all be dogshit, but um, that's the same with most
real after parties. So I guess that's that's at least

(49:52):
Facebook accurately delivering on the promise of the real world. Um,
but I want to play, Like what happens in this
metaverse after party that these two both hop into digitally
after one of them. So like as this starts, the
lady who was actually at the concert like sits down
at home and gets into the metaverse. Imagine your best

(50:17):
friend is at a concert somewhere across the world. Uh oh,
what if you could be there with her? Yeah? Yeah, real, yeah,
real and clear? How that works? Yeah? Real quick? That

(50:38):
was the first of the concert. See the holographic version.
How the person see that, yeah, is wearing all that
she's dancing? Is everyone wearing VR and seeing the world
through VR? Because I'll tell you about Like right now,
I'm I in our brain put on I put on
an oculus as a joke, and right now I have
it on the pass through, which means I can see

(50:58):
the real world through my It was in the oculus.
And you know what it looks like? Shit, yeah, it's
black and white. It's super grainy. I can't there has
it has no like exposure range. Everything is like it's
it's like you look like you're wearing a sunglasses case
in your look like the world, but like I can't
do anything because it all is like a horrible digital

(51:21):
like like I can't like it's not really like can
do anything. Aspects of this one like at some point
passed through mode will be in color and the latency
will be low enough notice it right, like and there
won't be late and seeing like yeah, but it'll but
it's not gonna be still be with your human eyeball.
It'll it'll still be a thing. So that girl is
going to have to be at a concert dancing, getting

(51:41):
super sweaty and like she's wearing something even if it's
as small as like regular glasses and she's not like
guess better, but it's more to the end. But like,
if people are actually gonnaveloped this technology, the real way
to do it is with a R, not not VR,
because with a R, yeah, you could have put on
like actual glasses and have like a person show up

(52:03):
on the thing and make it look like they're there,
well actually still seeing the real world. That's gonna be
the way to do it. Yeah, And I think that
there's what to do it. Yeah, I think that's what
they're like claiming here, but it's really unclear how it's
all going to interface, how the a R is going
to interface with like the full VR stuff, Like, are
we going to have two separate sets of gear, one
for when we're in the real world and we can't
be fully immersive and one for when we want to

(52:24):
dive into the metaverse to turn it around? Do we
always carry it around wherever we go? Yeah, but I
want to play the section. I sorry, I played the
video where they were at the concert just because it
it looks very silly. I want to play the section
where they're at the after party because it's it's dystopian
as fuck. So here's the all all metaverse after party
that looks like a bunch of fucking connect avatars standing

(52:44):
around and like a room made out of glowing neon
the digital room. Yeah, nobody's drinking, which is the only
good thing to do it in an after party that's
not cocaine. So from from the jump, I'm like, well,
what is the only good thing about an afterparty is
if you want more drugs and all of the drugs
plays are closed, maybe at the end you can hook
up with a digital avatar. Yeah, it's anyway, I'm I'm

(53:07):
just gonna play this dog shit where this is wild?
Is it? Is it? They're just slowly Dancy's a giraffeman.
Check this up charity for charity auction for n f
T party that looks like ship your versions of your

(53:28):
favorite song. Yeah, it looks dog ship. Yeah. So it's
like it's it's a it's a horrible three D chat.
We already have these these already against and they're not
tons of fun on they're fun is when you're in
first suits and you're walking around a fake city destroying it.
That's the only fun way to do this. And the

(53:51):
thing they're showing in this is that like an autographed
poster for the concert um is an n f T
that you can buy for a charity auction, and like
as they're looking at it, the actual musician walks by
and tells them it looks cool, and so they buy
it and they have the musician come in for that
number one to like try to make this kind of like, yeah,
you'll be able to do these digital events where you

(54:11):
can meet actual celebrities, which like, no, I'm sure celebrities
will agree to do q Q and as in the
multiverse like they do anywhere else. But they're not going
to just walk around in some dogshit virtual part because
they have money and they can do actual fun things
in the actual real world. They're gonna be fucking supermodels
while skiing down a mountain in Lake Tahoe because they're rich. Um,
they're going to be like flying in their private jets

(54:34):
or driving in a fucking yacht and eating lobster that's
been tortured. So it tastes better because they're rich, like
they're they're not going to be hanging out in a
digital lobby telling you that a fucking dogshit poster in
FT is cool and that you should buy it. Um,
unless you're a millionaire and they want your money because
they're Nicolas Cage and they have an addiction to buying

(54:56):
Tarannosaurus parts. I don't know, it's it's silly, it's it's iculous. Um. Yeah.
So one of the things that I thought about when
I was watching this is like the concept of metaverse culture. Um,
So like at some point, if this is a thing,
there's going to be like, like, if there ever is
a metaverse, people will develop a culture for it, just
like they've developed a culture for Twitter, a culture for Reddit,

(55:18):
a culture for Facebook, just as there were like internet
culture or fantasy. Yeah, it happens with every community you
make online. Um and and that's the thing, Like there's
no I see no space in this thing that Mark
Zuckerberg has envisioned as he is presenting it for organic
evolution of None of the things that here are gonna

(55:40):
make people want to form a culture around it because
it's all it looks like. It looks like boring yuppie ship,
all of it, but none of it is actually looks
cool or fun, and none of it, none of it
is he's not talking about any of it with like
the there's no there's no openness in it, Like there's
no I don't see where a culture could evolve, and
if one does, it's going to be directly like in

(56:01):
opposition to Facebook moderation. Um like yeah, um well yeah,
And I mean and there's there's an extense to which
like they can't write because like if you actually let
people just like do things, like imagine the griefing that's
going to happen in one of these spaces, right, Like
every person's avatar is going to be like sixteen thousand dogs,

(56:22):
Like this is as literally this all it's gonna be
like this is this is this is what twitch looks like, right,
Like every Twitch chat is a guy posting a hydramate
of dongs. Like it's like none of none of this
can actually work if you let people do literally anything.
If you don't let people do anything, like why would
you're gonna want to do it? Yeah? Yeah, Like how
how are you going to sell them this crap? Like
once upon a time there was a game called Second Life.

(56:42):
I guess it still exists, but we're talking. People talked
about it the way they're talking about the metaverse now,
and that became just like it was never that, but
there was like this beautiful moment where this I think
and she Chung was her name, Um, this like culture writer,
kind of expert lady was like doing a Q and
A and Second Life that was like build as being
this like big event for the platform that was going

(57:05):
to like make people take it seriously. And a bunch
of like users showed up and made a bunch of
floating dicks like float through the room during the interview,
so that like while this person was trying to talk
seriously about Second Life, just like floating cocks we zooming
past her head. The entire time, and it was extremely funny,
and it's it's exactly the kind of thing like, yeah, Mark,
that's what all of this is going to look like.

(57:25):
Any mass event is going people will find a way
to grief it um and that will in fact be
the thing they most want to do. Is that will
be the actual culture part is fucking with Facebook. Yeah,
but you know, but that's the part about that that sucks.
It's like, yeah, you know, it's like you're your anniversal
reality thing, right, So like, okay, what are people going
to do with a virtual reality? It's well, okay, you're
gonna get You're gonna get a bunch of neo Nazis

(57:47):
like figuring out a way to like show you just
like the worst ship you've ever seen in your life.
Like it's it's gonna it's gonna be all the stuff
from the two thousands were like half of the Internet
was just like a video. Why this is the thousand
tends to like half of Twitter is just heading videos.
Now in VR, it's like, yeas in the metaverse, it's
going to be amazing. Some of that's even already happening

(58:07):
in like VR social media apps. I know of a
few specific nazis involved in January six, who networked and
met with people via of specifically VR chat. So like
this is this is already a thing, um and making
it broad and then like this small, you know, because
the VR right now is mostly just a small subsect
of like gaming culture right and people are into it

(58:29):
because there is VR games that are cool, like like
like Beat Saber is fun, right Um. In order for
them to break this through into the mainstream, they need
to make it appealing some way, and the only way
they're making appealing right now is by doing meetings and
like concerts. So the next part I Want to Play
doesn't say a lot about the future marks trying to build,

(58:52):
but it's very funny because it's him sitting down with
a woman who works in his gaming department and she's
walking him through like what games are going to be
integrated into the Metal Verse, And it fucking reads like
and I think you should leave sketch, Like it feels
like a sketch where the joke is that everyone is
awkward and not talking the way human beings talk. And
in case you can't watch this chunk of the video

(59:12):
and it starts at about like nineteen thirty four. Um
in the actual Facebook video, all of the video games
they're talking about, like look, Dogship, they look like the
Kirkland brand of like popular like fighting games and FPS
s and stuff. None of them look very good. Um,
So I'm gonna play a clip from this because it's
very funny. Can bailed out active communities. Beat Saber has

(59:34):
a passionate community who do I and just passed million
dollars and pressed around a great example of the game
that releasing fresh content. They've actually been looking on evolving
the way that you inter wrap with the tracks and
feel the music. The way he's nodding in this, like

(59:55):
his digital avatar looks more like a person. Well here's
some Beat Saber. Yeah, yeah, it looks like regular Beats Saber. Yeah.
But it's it's VR. It's it's already as VR. Yeah,
it's already a VR game. You can't wait to play this,
and you can already play an incredible artists to release
new music cuts all the time. You can do this

(01:00:16):
right now a little more than es been working more
of this metaverse prison Tad, but oh god, every scene
where she's talking to him and he's just like Bobblehead
nodding just a little bit, but not like it's he looks.
Mark actually will benefit from the metaverse, like outside of
a financial thing, because a a sculpted three D representation

(01:00:37):
of him will be a thousand times better. It looks
more human than he looks like more of a person. Yeah,
it's I mean, it's just like he's scripted it badly
and he's a narcissist, so he has to be the
one to present it. Again, am I love beatsaber? Number one?
If Steve Jobs were doing this number one, he wouldn't
because he understood what people wanted from technology. But if
he were doing something like this, he would introduce like

(01:00:59):
little hunks of it and then he would have a
famous person who's charismatic introduced the rest of it, like yeah,
that's like it wouldn't be It wouldn't introduce how I'm
sitting like a bobblehead listening, and he would introduced VR
and a R into a way that actually integrats how
people use the Internet, all right, because there is ways
that there is ways of doing this. It's not this
like super monetized n f T like bullshit holographic fake stuff. Yeah,

(01:01:24):
and there's there's aspects of this, like he goes through
after this, like there's a bunch of gaming stuff, which
is impossible for the reasons we've talked about. Then there's
aspects of it that seemed cool, Like there's a scene
where like an architect gets onto his digital office and
like somebody sends him, uh, schematics to a building they're making,
and he's able to generate a three D and walk
around the building, Like Okay, that actually seems actually, it

(01:01:46):
seems like useful, Like you've developed a use case for
the all of the architects out there. It's it's I'm
still not convinced that CAD would actually be better in
three D than it would be like, sure, it's the bowl.
I I think like it maybe someday, I think it
could be. Like if you are one of the concreasingly
small number of people who can afford to like build

(01:02:08):
a house of your own, I can see why it
would be neat to be like, Okay, well let's do
a three D render of the house and I can
walk through and I could maybe make changes at the
last moment. As I'm kind of experienced that is that
is definitely useful. Where a window is like, yeah, I
can that that seems like something number one technologically you
could do that more or less. Now, um, I don't
think it's it's not gonna be as instantaneous as this,
but if you give it time to render, it could

(01:02:29):
be done. And it it's something that a number of
people might find useful. But again that's a niche product
because like eighteen people in our generation are frying homes.
I mean yeah. And also it's it's it's expensive to
develop because you would have just modeling an actual real
life location is a lot of work. Um Now there
is there is a lot of a lot of technology

(01:02:50):
that's getting way better at it by machine um and
like basically filming a space and and the community can
reconstruct it pretty accurately. Um that that that is a
growing field. But still it is is it's a very
niche you know area at least a yeah, so I
the thing that is so anyway, there's aspects of this
that are ridiculous, aspects of this that seem neat, But

(01:03:12):
the longer you watch it, the thing that comes becomes
really clear is that all he's really advertising is mass surveillance. Yeah,
there's a point in this video where they're showing you
how they can like map a real world location, so
you can be in your actual house, put on your
VR glasses, um, and it can map the your actual
home digitally in real time. And as you and as

(01:03:34):
you pick up real things in your house, you you
see them being picked up in VR and presumably other
people in the VR could see it. Which we are
not quite there yet. I stay pretty in VR technology.
We're getting close to this, but we're not. We're not
quite there. I mean we're we're we're actually we actually
are where what they show in the video. And I'm
gonna play you a second from it because I want
to show you something at least, I mean, like like

(01:03:55):
consumer products. We're not We're not at this point yet. Yeah,
and I want to show you, uh where we are
because this video they're showing like actual footage. So they
have built this thing. But there's a catch and so
I'm just gonna play it right now out the researcher.
So what's critical here is that this is all happening
in real time. So if you I've just paused it,

(01:04:18):
well you've got here. On one side, there's a woman
in a real like house sitting and picking up like
a toy home on her couch, and then on the
left you see the VR version of her house, which
looks close to photo realistic, and like the house that
she's holding in the real world is floating in the
same way that she's holding it, Like her body isn't there,
like the stuff she's interacting with is. But if you
look at the house she's holding, the reason that they're

(01:04:39):
able to do this and it really does work is
it's covered in censors. And and actually every single thing
in the real house is covered in sensors because that's
the only way for this to everything now moving is
covered in sensors. Yeah, yeah, and it it is impressive,
like as a proof of concept, like this, this is here,
we can do this, but like it's still light years
away from practical. And more to the point, when you
look at this, you realize that, like, well, if this

(01:05:01):
is ever going to work, the only way to make
it work is for Facebook, through this service, to map
your entire home in real time, every hour of all day.
And they also go on to talk about like how
you're going to have just your commands and like you'll
be able to like make an expression or like a
hand gesture and that will do things, which means that like,

(01:05:23):
this service isn't just learning what's in your home and
what you do with the things in your home. It's
it's learning your facial expressions and your gestures and like
what they mean and interpreting those at all times. I
can kind of explain where oculus which is over Facebook.
I think they're technically renaming Oculus spring to just calling
it the metic quest. But what wait, wait, wait, the

(01:05:45):
medical quest that that that's that's what they're calling it
instead of instead of oculacies. Um, so where where that
right now? Is basically, uh, the only kind of real
world interactivity that they have for their our headsets. Again
for like the consumer models, I don't know, it's in
length development. Um is hand tracking. This this is the

(01:06:06):
thing they've been working on for a long time. Is
that you put on the headset and the camera like
the cameras and depth sensors built into the headset can
see your hands and like you said, you have like
gesture controls where you can do certain things in your
hand and it will make certain things happen. This is
the only interactivity that that we have. It's okay, it's
not perfect, like it's it is. It is better than

(01:06:26):
a lot of the other hand tracking systems from other companies,
but like it's it's it is very much a work
in progress. UM. And the way to make this work
is by is very good depth sensing cameras, which I
think Apple makes some of the best ones right now
that they put into the iPhone. Uh. The other way
of doing this is with lighthouses. So this is like
separate um separate like uh, separate cameras that you set

(01:06:50):
up around the corners of your house that project different
like wavelengths of light and they get it received back,
so they can map your house UM with not just
cameras but also like in like infrared sensors and that
kind of thing. So these are these are like the
two methods of doing it. Facebook is really trying to
go full on, full on to the everything is built

(01:07:10):
into the headset thing. So no so no, like lighthouses,
everything is just depth depth sensing cameras. So that's why
they're working on hand tracking so much, because that's something
you can actually do. But like, I can't pick up anything, um,
Like the only thing I can pick up is my controllers,
which because they they have censors built in. They can
be rendered in the actual game the same way like
my hand can be. So that that that's where they're at.

(01:07:33):
For that for the consumer products get more than it's
getting developed. Again, where they're at. You think about what
Facebook has already done with the information you provided, and
how so much of their money comes from selling your data. Um.
The only way for this to work that they've they've
passed are always watching everything, every moment of your existence,
including like your micro expressions, which is why I keep

(01:07:55):
my oculence in the tiny little box here. And here's
the thing. If they were to actually develop the technology,
which I don't think is impossible, although it's not particularly close, UM,
it's not going to be cheap to store all that.
So in order to make it a tile outside, well,
it's going to be cloud based. But in order to
make it like cloud isn't free, UM subscription probably, I

(01:08:20):
think you'll pay some, but I think in order to
make it affordable, UM, so that more people are on it,
they're just going to sell your data in a way
that has never been in a and and the government
will have access to it like it is. It's actually
like the thing that he is actually proposing here is
I want to build a machine god that knows your sins,

(01:08:41):
like that knows when your heart rate is elevated, like
before you smile. That can predict like when you're about
to make a gesture or laugh because it is so
accurately mapped your body and motions. Um, it's actually a nightmare.
Like when you really think about what he is trying
to build here and it's like, well, what, what's what

(01:09:01):
what's the actual use case for this? And it's like, well, okay,
so you have you have a bunch of special forces guys,
you put them in a VR thing and then you
know you can you can you can you can have
them drill on knowing exactly where all the rooms in
the houses and where everyone is in where everyone is
in a house any given time. It's like, oh, hey,
this this is gonna be great. This is yeah, it's
it's great. Yeah, it's it's really cool. Um, they have

(01:09:24):
a So there is a little bit here briefly about
where like Mark talks about how the last year or
so has been um fucking uh. The term he uses
is humbling for them. Oh god, yeah, and you you
kind of think that like he's about to say that, like, oh,
because we we made life dramatically worse and our service

(01:09:47):
was integral in several ethnic cleansings and a couple of
civil wars and like hate crimes on a scale that
was unimaginable before it really came into being, or that
we thought had been at least we thought had been
consigned into a century or so ago before Facebook came
into being. But no, that's not why it's humbling. Why
he says it's been humbling is that Facebook has been

(01:10:07):
developing services for other platforms like the App Store, where
they don't have total control, and that sucks. And that's
like the thing that that's the that's him admitting a
little bit that like a big part of this is
they're trying to build a service the entire Internet gets
filtered through that they completely control, so that they are
never in anyone else's wheelhouse, like everything is done through Facebook.
And with Facebook's approval as opposed to them, they want

(01:10:29):
to face Facebook. Facebook is going to become the state. Yeah,
And that's the thing that it says so much about
Mark that he's like, what's humbling, isn't all of the
mistakes I've made it's that periodically I have not had
total control. Um. It's great. Um. He then from immediately
from this says that if we all work at it,

(01:10:49):
all of us, the metaverse can reach a billion people
by the next decade. Um, which is very funny. Um
that he thinks that that's like an enticing fuck thing.
So one of the use cases they try to present
is they have a beauty influencer who like made like
a fucking candle line or something, uh, that she's sold

(01:11:10):
on Instagram and she's she's very successful in Instagram. They
bring this lady in number one. As soon as they
started interviewing her, it's it's it's what I was saying about.
You have a hire a celebrity to do this mark,
you're not charismatic. She's immediately the most engaging person in
the entire presentation because she's a successful in like she's
someone who understands how she appears on camera, how to
make herself seem likable on camera, how to like interact

(01:11:32):
with the world on a camera, and nobody else in
this video understands that. Um, which is just funny. It's
not particularly like say anything other than that, like, you
have professionals do difficult things. Mark, don't don't hire your weird,
gawky engineering staff to like be the faces of this thing.
They're not good at this, and neither are you. I
just want to point out. So he said that, like

(01:11:53):
he can get one billion people the next decade. So
far there's only been sixteen million Vier headsets sold. Ever. Yeah,
so getting that to the point of a billion it
seems like quite quite the challenge. I mean, it is
a challenge, but you could look at like how quickly
smartphones went from Yeah, except smartphones were useful in improving
the world in very obvious ways, whereas the metaverse and

(01:12:15):
even v our in general doesn't improve the world for
most people in obvious ways. Yeah, but that that's kind
of what I'm saying, is that, like the thing that
is stupid and doomed about this isn't like, oh, you
would have to sell so many headsets. If it was
legitimately something every single person wanted on their head, they
would sell a billion. They would sell a billion in
a couple of years, you know. Um, but they haven't
made that. Look like like, so this this beauty influencer

(01:12:38):
thing is an example of them trying to like explain
here's something that people will find cool about the metaverse. Um,
and the way they do it is like talking about
how you can have a digital storefront where like people
can't just buy products, but they can interact with you. Um.
She talks about how it will be good for letting
her interact with their fans, but like bringing them into
my home, which sounds like we love our fans, but like, no,

(01:13:01):
I do not want anyone from adam home. UM. I
barely want my friends in my home half the time.
Absolutely not. Um. They didn't present us with a use
case of how a brand in this case, this candle
company this lady made that's big on Instagram could release
like a new candle flavor and launch a digital experience
with it so you can buy both real and digital products.

(01:13:23):
It's kind of unclear in the video whether or not
you're paying for the digital experience or is it like
free when you buy the candle. Um. Yeah, it's like,
I don't games is like developing. It is like you know,
dropping products at the same time in the real world
in the digital world, but like the digital version is
free because it's like because it's like an ad right,
you could try something out virtually before you buy it physically.

(01:13:44):
And that's what like Epic Games is doing. And honestly,
I think epics version of the Metavors is slightly more hinged.
They understand more what people actually want. Yeah, because like
all the stuff they're trying with Fortnite again, it doesn't
seem fun for me, but at least it's like an
extension of how people use the Internet already has. Facebook's
is not that Yeah. And and Mark never really understood

(01:14:05):
what people wanted. He he accidentally did basically want to
make something else, Like he wanted a place to share
pictures of ladies he thought was hot. Um, and he
accidentally built a thing that like gave people something they
did one, which was a way to stay in contact
with their friends from high school in college as they
grew older, right, Like that was the thing about Facebook
that made it get huge originally. Um. And he hasn't

(01:14:26):
learned anything since he's just been smart. He's he's hired
people who are smart enough to be like, hey, Instagram
is probably going to be a big deal by that,
you know, Um like that that, but I haven't seen
anything that's made me think like Mark gets what people
want and this has just made it clear that like
he absolutely doesn't. So I want to play this video
of like this is the digital experience to go with

(01:14:47):
this fucking candle that they're they're framing is like a
piece of art that everybody's gonna want to interact with
who likes candles. It's it's incredible because it again feels
like a nightmare. I am. I am a big candle fan.
So him here, what iFly effect to transports us something
to magic? It's like a shitty arborretum. I don't do

(01:15:13):
what it has to do with candles. It's Jackie, as
we walked in this amazing world. What I just feel
like this is like endless possibilities of my imaginations. I
can't even begin to imagine. But I don't understand what
has that to do with candles? Yeah, like they have again,
like there's I can walk around, like why can't I

(01:15:34):
can to imagine all the things people are going to
I can walk around digital spaces and my quest it's
again it's fun for like thirty seconds and then you
see everything and you're like, well, I can't touch it
or smell it or actually feel it or do anything.
So I'm gonna go back and have a soda and
I don't know, yeah, play and like read a book
or something. And they've brought in this influencer who like
used one of their other services in a way they

(01:15:55):
hadn't initially intended and was successful in that, which is
not a bad idea in its surface, Like, yeah, bring
in creative people and let them play around and make
something new to show people how exciting this is. Right,
that's the smart thing to do. But all they've presented
is like, look, it's a tiny little weird arboretum. You
can walk around and after buying a candle, and it's like, well,
I like candles, but that's not fun. That doesn't sound

(01:16:18):
like an addition candle. Part of the metaverse is like
making like interactivity more like being able to interact with
with digital things, and like that's not interacting. That's just
walking around like unless I can like take of like
a bazooka and blow up our like the candle. You know,
Like that's like you have to do something like all

(01:16:39):
of the VR games that are fun, like like like
like like a super Hot or something like something that's
about you know, picking up objects in VR and throwing
them at people. That's fun and you like, also, unless
I can pick up this candle and it's all people
with it in the game, I don't see what really
the dry like, what's what's exciting about this? You were
saying something, Chris, Oh, I guess you know that thing

(01:17:00):
I keep coming back to with this is it the
only way this and this literally any of this makes
any sense if it's just like a chip in your
brain just because all of it, all of it is
built around that. But it's but it's not like it
can't be like we don't the technology for that won't
exist for like ages and so there it's like it's
it's like they're they're selling some of it definitely is
headset based, like that arboretum thing, but a lot of it.

(01:17:20):
But even yeah, but like I mean I think even
that right, like okay, so why would you want like yeah,
you're if you're saying, like why would you It's like, Okay,
it's interesting for like ten minutes, right. The only way
that would be like the only way that would be
an actually interesting experience is if you could get all
the false century experience you can smell and feel yeah, right,
and that that's that's that's like, that's that's the thing
where like something only makes sense if it's like a

(01:17:40):
brain ship. Well, I mean there's there's two versions. There's
one it's a brain ship, or two it's a video game.
And at the game is doing the thing where it's
a video game, and that's slightly Mary Yeah, yeah, but
like they don't you know, but they're they're trying to
sell like and I think part of what's going on
here is also just like this is this is designed
to like like this is designed to like trick Silicon

(01:18:02):
Valley investors. Yes, that is like yeah, and those people,
I think are just gonna be like, oh well, we'll
have brain ships eventually, and so we'll just we'll talk
about probably talk about that part more at the end,
because yeah, this is just a scam. This is just
a scam. And it is like again to talk about
like the dystopian aspects of this, Chris, as you brought up.
One of the aspects is that like it's a complete

(01:18:23):
panopticon of perfect surveillance if they actually make this thing,
and number two is the only way to do most
of what they're talking about that's cool is to give
Mark Zuckerberg physical control over human beings brain chemistry on
a global scale, which I think it is a bad idea.
Not Gonn for that. I don't I don't want to
walk around in a weird candle room that badly. Like

(01:18:45):
to your point Chris about like how it's you know,
there's no sensory stuff. Is like like the most popular
VR games, the reason why they work so well, there's
why that they don't, like Break the Uncanny Valley is
because you're in like a barren land, like you know,
thet Saber. You're not in a place you know you're
in the in the game in the face for like
for Super Hot, you're in like whitewashed abstract like concrete spaces, right,

(01:19:07):
so like there's nothing, there is nothing to smell or
feels like you don't feel like you're missing anything because
you're in a very like stripped down version of reality.
There is a really good of your game. I forget
what it's called, but it's it's based on like an
office and you're like fighting robots to break out of
like this capitalist office room. And it's cool because like, yeah,
it's miserable because it's like it's like an office space.
You feel like you're in an office because it's nothing

(01:19:27):
about it's exciting right there. Games that are in like
lush worlds, they feel so much more like disconnected because
you have like a weird like you have, you have
like you have like an uncanny valley thing, but instead
of like a face or a person, it's like an environment.
We're running law on time. I want to move to
something that I think is important here, which is there
is one moment in this video where they try to
address the fact that they've done a tremendous amount of

(01:19:49):
damage to the world and they have repeatedly failed to
like uh anticipate dangers that their services have, so they
need to like deal with that at some point. And
this is like, well, what about if, like what about
bad things that could happen? What if like what about
like unintended things? What about like ways in which this
could be harmful to society that you haven't foreseen. So,
because they're not completely stupid, in order to address that,

(01:20:10):
they bring on a well dressed uh or not well dressed,
but they bring on like a friendly British man who
kind of kind of reads as like a like a
scientific kind of expert guy. They bring on a charming
British person to like talk about how they're going to
not not destroy the world, and this is very telling
so far. It's it's such visionary stuff. But as you

(01:20:31):
mentioned early on, with all big technological advances, there are
inevitably going to be in all sorts of challenges and uncertainties.
And I know you've talked about this a bit already,
but people want to know how we're going to do
all this in a responsible way, and especially that we
play our part in helping to keep people safe and
protect their privacy online. Yeah, that's right, this is incredibly important.

(01:20:53):
The way I look at it is that in the past,
the speed that new technologies emerged sometimes left Polish makers
and regulators playing catch up. So on the one hand,
companies get accused of charging ahead too quickly, and on
the other, tech people feel that progress can't afford to
wait for the slower pace of regulation. And I really
think that it doesn't have to be the case this

(01:21:16):
time around, because we have years until the metaverse we
envision is fully realized. So this is the start of
the journey, not the end. So that's telling uh that
he's like, we don't need to worry about like we
don't need it. Like it'll be it'll get regulated properly,
it'll be safe enough because it's going to take so

(01:21:37):
long to figure all this out that surely we will
anticipate and deal with all of the potentially toxic side
effects of this technology ahead of time. Um. And if
you believe that, I would say, take a look at
Facebook's track record with that kind of thing. Um, But
they are smart and having a charming British man do it,
that's the right guy to have in the only aspect
of good casting in this That is the right guy

(01:21:59):
to have come on and try to allay people's fears
that this will destroy society. You bring you bring a
charming British man in, you know, that's how you do
that kind of thing. Um, that's when I get canceled
for the things I've been doing overseas. Um, I'm gonna
hire a British person to defend myself. Do they make
any more comments about like a R glasses or VR

(01:22:20):
quite a few. I wanted to move on to that. Um,
even though yeah, we're we're so um they talk about
they have a whole section where they're they're talking about
the actual glasses they have. So they announced the number
one they have a project. The goal, as he repeatedly says,
is to make a quote normal, good looking pair of
glasses that do all this stuff, which is yeah, um,

(01:22:41):
and he he does. In order as like a proof
of concept, he shows us these a R ray bands
that actually look legitimately rad They look like normal at
least the privn't touched a pair of these in my hands,
but the the the videos that are supposed to be
these real products show a pair of what looked like
normal ray bands that you can take pictures and videos with,
you can answer phone calls on, you could do like
video phone calls on them. And actually that they seem

(01:23:02):
neat and like they look like normal glasses. Um, and
that is pretty cool. Um. They go kind of pivot
from that to announcing that like they have this new thing,
project nizar Um, which oh I looked up what nazarre
means a little bit ago. It's probably dystopian. Uh No,
I think it was just yeah, uh, it's a town

(01:23:24):
or it's a surf spot, right, it's a place and
I think Portugal where there's like great waves and Mark
Zuckerberg is really into surfing. He plays a surfing game
at one point in this That is one of the
most um embarrassing things. Embarrassing thing because I've seen in
my entire fucking life. Um. But yeah, So Project Nazar
is that they're supposed to be like the first true
like VR glasses. So they do the good thing, which

(01:23:44):
is like, here's the real technology, these ray bands, and look,
these are pretty neat. Obviously that doesn't come close to
what they're promising. Um, and this whole thing where they
talk about what the glasses, which they say they're making
good progress on, are going to do, we don't ever
see any glasses. Yeah, yeah, And and that's because they're
not really close uh to to working yet. The air

(01:24:10):
glasses are gonna be the way to act. Like if
the goal is to integrate digital spaces into the physical space,
I think I think it's a good goal because what
that's gonna do, that's gonna make the digital space less fake, right,
it's injecting that into the actual real world. So I
think that will actually really help with like disassociate of
stuff is because it's actually in it's actually in the
real world as well. I think that's gonna be wonderful

(01:24:31):
when that gets developed. And I think the glasses are
are definitely going to be a thing within the next
ten to twenty years. There is ways of like illuminating
glass on the side to make like like what it
looks like an image. This is definitely gonna be a
thing that's going to be possible. Like surveillance and privacy
is like the big, big fears for that because we're

(01:24:52):
nowhere close to hacking the brain enough to feel sensations.
And like, the only thing I've played a lot of VR,
the only thing that you can feel in VR is fear.
That's the only thing that VR is capable of replicating
as as a feeling. It's like you can feel terrified
and VR that's that's that's it. You can't ever feel
like there's one thing you can feel exhausted game. And

(01:25:14):
I was doing like bow draws for like four hours,
and I was like, we've we've developed the way to
make you frightened and tired. That is best, which is
all by the way, what Twitter does normally. It's true,
all of like all of like the Resident Evil VR games, Yeah,
they're gonna making you tired and terrified and that's kind
of it. So we we have to close out. But
I want to do that by playing Mark Zuckerberg lamenting

(01:25:37):
the Internet that he played a major role in in building,
as a way to talk about why we need a metaverse,
because it's kind of funny because we're allowed to build
and use, are more tightly controlled than ever, and high
taxes on creative new ideas are stifling. This is not
the way that we were met to use technology. The
metaverse gives us an opportunity to well, but it's gonna

(01:26:03):
take all of us creators, developers, companies of all sizes together.
We can finally put people at the center of our
technology and deliver an experience where we are present with
each other. Yeah, what a Google? Like all of that nonsense. Everyone,
you're not You're one of the people who has turned

(01:26:24):
the Internet into an expensive walled garden. It didn't used
to be this way. Then Facebook swooped in, made themselves
for free um like integral to all content, and then
started charging those content creators and like sucking them around
and lying to them, which led to the destruction of
a huge number of websites and a tremendous amount of
digital culture, like your Wyatt feels like a dead waled garden,
and everything you've presented in this video makes the metaverse

(01:26:46):
feel like a dead waled garden. But I want to
play his last lines in the in this video because
this is him kind of summing up his vision for
the future via the Metaverse. And now it is time
to take everything that we have learned and helped build
the next chapter. I am dedicating our energy to this
more than any other company in the world. And if

(01:27:07):
this is the future that you want to see, then
I hope that you will join us, because the future
is going to be beyond anything we can imagine. I
agree with that part mark. The future is going to
be beyond what you can imagine. What a gool, Yeah,
because you have no imagination. It's just it's just using
trendy tech terms to trick investors into giving them billions

(01:27:28):
of dollars. That's like the right, That's that's all it is.
Because all of this, like this, like haptic feedback replicating
like human feelings and stuff, that we're nowhere close to that,
and when we do, it's going to be dystopian. But
we're not close to it, and it's going to be
dystopian or it's going to be better in ways that
like we can't yet conceive of UM and then eventually

(01:27:50):
it will be destroyed for profit if it actually gets
cool like the old Internet was. Yeah, it's yeah, it's
it's yeah. But I think but both this and even
at like a lot of the epic stuff just seems ah,
it's just the new way that tech companies, that's where
they think the money vault is is by using these terms,

(01:28:10):
and they think using these terms is going to get
them lots of extra investor money because the actual technology
is nowhere really close to this and it's not what
people wanted out of the Internet anyway, it absolutely is not.
But I don't know, I think this was important. I think, yeah,
Facebook is important and has a major impact on the
way the Internet is continuing to evolve UM, usually in

(01:28:31):
negative ways. But this is how these people who are
doing a lot of damage view the future. So you
should know what they're looking at and what they anticipate.
But I think I think that there's a kind of
optimistic note to this though, right was just like Okay,
so we've we've reached the point where like even like
Boris Johnson is going like, oh god, climate change is coming, right,

(01:28:52):
and this is the best they've got, right. They have nothing,
They have nothing, And you know what, I think, like,
what are the only ways we can win is if
we're facing a uniquely incompetent ruling class, and if it's
if the rule, if the if the guy were, if
a guy we have to deal with in order to

(01:29:12):
like not drown every single whale and like have half
of the world's city is consumed, but the ocean is
Mark Zuckerberg, like, we got a shot. I think there
are some smarter people that aren't. Yeah, that is not
mind the scenes right, like yeah, um, but I I
don't think I think that's a nice note to end on,

(01:29:34):
because it is. It is worth The nice thing about
this is how clearly they don't understand what the future
is going to look like online. Um, they have ways
in which they're trying to direct the future, and aspects
of that will come true, like the VR will succeed
in some form at some point, and it will be
potentially an unprecedented surveillance breakthrough that has some unsettling implications

(01:29:59):
that ever sets get into help with a lot of
other stuff. I think the move by Twitter to create
like this, like it's called like like Twitter spaces where
it's like this like you know, basically like voice chat room.
Like a lot of people are moving towards this concept
where we try to like inject more like in person
interactivity into this virtual framework right now, this with like
with like a clubhouse last year during during the pandemic

(01:30:20):
where people like watching like Netflix in the quote same room,
right Like, We're seeing people try to do this with
varying mixed success. But this is the way tech is
is inching. So it is a good idea to keep
your eye on it because yeah, it has a lot
of implications for like clevacy and advertising and all that
kind of stuff. We'll continue to cover aspects of this,
talk about the technology, talk about the surveillance implications, talk
about the visions these people have. But I think that

(01:30:42):
this has been these episodes have been useful and like
here's what Mark thinks is coming. Here's what Facebook is
pouring like ten million dollars into it's dumbest shit. Have
a nice day. Raphi is the voice of some of
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(01:31:05):
the man behind baby Bluga? Every human being wants to
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Heart Radio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the I
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(01:31:28):
Colleen with Join me, the host of Eating Wall Broke
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(01:32:31):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows podcast. All right,
well I've done my job for the day. Wow, you
even by our standards. That's a that's an intro. That's

(01:32:54):
actually OK. Thank you. This is of course it could
happen here a show about how things aren't going so great,
kind of falling apart, crumbling a bit, but also maybe
things could be better. That would be nice. Let's try
and do that. Today is one of the maybe things
could be better episodes. And we are talking about the

(01:33:14):
ongoing wave of strikes. We had strike Tober last month
with John Dear strikes and and and strikes uh and
like what a couple of different food companies a bunch
of strikes um. And today we would like to get
an update on all the motherfucker's who were out there
striking for better conditions um and and better treatment um

(01:33:36):
and today for that purpose, we've brought on the great, Kim,
Kelly Kim, you are a journalist who focuses a hell
of a lot on labor. You've been up and down
to some of the coal strikes that have been going on.
You were there for the Amazon attempt to form the
union in um O GS was that Arizona, um Alabama,

(01:33:57):
Alabama UM And you're writing a book on the history
of labor um in the United States. So I'd like
to just kind of turn the floor over to you.
There's a four, there's okay, there's a flour, there's no fire.
Is filthy as it ends up. You know, we're doing
our best, aren't we are? Yeah? You are, we are not.

(01:34:18):
I am. I'm trying to keep up with all this
labor action. It's exciting action, hot labor action, some hot
labor action stories. So as you mentioned, we're just kind
of coasting off of the peak of Strikectober, which was
such a fun thing to kind of see explode in
the mainstream consciousness. Like usually labor stories, they're a big

(01:34:38):
deal to the people that are involved in them and
people in the labor world who are watching and like
rooting for them, but they don't necessarily end up on
like you know, the mainstream like that they're end up
on the TV. They don't end up with like fancy
old guys talking about it on dateline or whatever. But
that's something that happened, and I think there's been a
real shifting consciousness that is the company that And of

(01:35:00):
course you know it's like Striketober is fun. There's all
these these big strikes happen at the same time. But
we of course need to remember that that didn't happen
in a vacuum. There's people on strike now who have
been on strike since before, since before it was cool, right,
since much earlier. Like shout out to the St. Vincent
nurses up in Massachusetts and to the coal miners in
Brooke with Alabama Warrior Men who have both been on

(01:35:22):
strike for over eight months and they kind of right
so literally like they're like they're in the middle of
their tour drives for their children because they've been on
strike for so long, and they kind of got a
little bit left out of the conversation around strike Toober.
And I think that just kind of shows that we
need to be paying attention even when it's not as
flashy or new or exciting. I mean, strikes were was exciting.

(01:35:43):
But you know, there's a lot going on, and one
of the things I think is interesting and important, especially
as we head into strikes giving, which I guess we're
doing strikes giving strike Smiths strike and thank you very
day forth the strike Uli. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it

(01:36:08):
gets worse earlier really until we get to labor day
and by then, yea striker's day. That one works pretty well.
I'm also a fan of striking. Tine's Day, um strike
and tized Day. That's cute. Well, rage baby, keep this going. Yeah,
strike strike, there's a missed opportunity there. Although that that

(01:36:31):
frightens me. Garrison that the band Ween might go on strike,
and I don't know, society we do, we wouldn't have
our we would we would be completely out of Ween.
Our reserves of Ween aren't going to last long if
they stop. Yeah. Yeah, there's been a tragic shortage of
Ween for years now. I don't know that we can
handle a stripe. Please contain you can? Yeah, I mean

(01:36:52):
I realized you were a nerd, Robbert. This is kind
of throw some things into question. Yeah, yeah, I mean,
as a heavy metal dirtbag, I'm like contractually obligated to
make say things like that. But as I was pontificating
a minute ago, right, so as we go into strikes giving,

(01:37:13):
there are still more big strikes on the horizon and
potential big strikes in the horizon. But part of the
story that I think is also very energizing and important
is the organizing that's happening in the new unions that
are hopefully gonna end up being formed, not necessarily as
a result of this wave of attention, but they're kind
of caught up in the tide. I mean, when we
look at the Starbucks workers in Buffalo who have scared

(01:37:35):
the ship out of their employers to the point where
they're flying executives in to follow them around the store
and be like, please don't vote for reunion. We need
all of our billions of dollars we can't share. Or
you know, even workers at wire Cutter who are threatening
to strike on Black Friday and their whole thing is
telling people what's stuff to buy, you know, and McDonald's workers,

(01:37:57):
and I think ten different these a ten different cities,
attendfferent states, ten different locations just went out on like
a one day strike over sexual harassment in the workplace.
Kroger workers are taking a strike authorization vote in Texas.
We have multiple Amazon organizing attempts happening in Staten Island,
and a rerun of the election coming up in Best
for Alabama, and there's just so much happening that, you know,

(01:38:21):
I hope that the novelty idea of the strikes told
we're striketh giving. I hope like that was fun. But
I hope now that people are paying attention, that they
stay interested and realize that, you know, labor stories. Maybe
it's not necessarily always like a big strike or like
a cool picket line to look at, but there's a
lot going on. Like every story is a work story,
every story is a labor story, and people seem like

(01:38:42):
they're finally catching on the fact that, you know, we're
all workers, and wow, cool things happen when we come together. Yeah.
I I hope that too, And I hope that, um,
you know, the word on everybody's lips, who's I don't
coming at this from kind of a little bit of
a more uh, either radical or desperate point of view,
depending on how you want to frame it. Is like

(01:39:04):
general strike, general strike, and you know, there's there's been
some there's been people online who keep saying like, Okay,
well we're all just gonna go on on Black Friday,
everybody general strike, And it's like, yeah, well you don't.
You don't set that up on Twitter. Like the the
unions that are striking now have strike funds and put
a lot of thought into it and have like had
to take there's things you have to do in order

(01:39:25):
to not irresponsibly like just screw over a bunch of
working people. Um, but it is like, I'm a believer
in the potential of something like a general strike to
to force significant concessions. I mean, yeah, I guess I
think if it. I mean it's a huge if because

(01:39:45):
it's never really effectively been Like there's been pieces of
it done like we saw. I think the closest we've
gotten in like my lifetime has been when the the
airline workers threatened to go on strike over the over
the budget thing, and you just saw the federal government go,
oh fuck, nope, you know what, we can actually pass
this thing. I mean, that's the thing like that threat

(01:40:08):
that I think that was Sara Nelson said that even
like hinted towards that in twenty nineteen when the government shutdown,
that's sort of that was a tipping point. I think
that's the first time people, well really was prob the
first time in many people's lifetimes that an actual labor
leader with that platform and even mentioned those words. Because
general like general strikes historically kind of are more situated
than that late nineteenth century early twentieth century like labor

(01:40:32):
swinging its stick around era, and we've been kneecapped so
much that that doesn't feel as as possible. But I
mean the fact that she said, and she was part
of the airline industry. If we're ever going to actually
you know, bring capital to its knees, we're going to
need the transportation workers. We're going to need the dock workers.
We're gonna need to like actually analyze who is moving

(01:40:53):
things around the country, who's making sure things work, and
how can we get them to put down to down
their tools and be like, Okay, we're gonna do something
about this. You know, the whole general strike idea, I mean,
I mean, and arguably like one of the first ones
was you know, in Black Reconstruction, they do the book,
there's a uh, this argument that the first general strike

(01:41:14):
was enslaved enslaved people leaving the plantations and withdrawing their
labor from that situation, like that was the form of striking.
And I think the general strike is kind of a
morphous idea, especially online as more people learn about labor
and learn about it. But there's also like kind of
a specific thing, like you can't just declare like, Okay,

(01:41:35):
we're all not going to go to work tomorrow, like cool,
but there's so much planning that goes into it to
make sure that people are able to do that and
sustain that. And the people that are traditionally you know,
already left out or the most vulnerable and marginalize, like
that their needs are prioritized because the people that can
afford to declare general strike and not show up for

(01:41:56):
a week, like that's all well and good for them,
but what about one else who can barely afford to
go to work at all. Yeah. I've had these arguments
with people online, and it's often like, well, you're saying
we shouldn't be like if we just do it, people
will figure it out, like the infrastructure will be built
after the fact, And I'm like that's I'm glad that
you're in a situation where you feel like you could,

(01:42:17):
you could handle that kind of uncertainty. But like a
single mother of four who relies on her job to
keep them fed and alive, isn't going to be like
someone will figure out how to feed my kids, Like, well,
that's not how people work, you know. Yeah, this is
we're having like a robust commitment to mutual aid and
strike funds and like an actual fabric, like having the

(01:42:39):
fabric of community where you can depend on your neighbors
instead of never talking to them, Like a general strike
would have a huge impact, but on who, Like who
would it hurt more if you didn't plan it properly,
if you didn't have if you didn't have an actual
grassroots network of people ready to help, if you didn't
need to understanding that not everyone can just go run

(01:43:01):
off in the streets. Some people like have mobility issues,
some people have children, some people are older or sicker, Like,
there's so much that goes into it. Yeah, it's like
your car is fucked up and you know you need
to take it in to get some stuff fixed or
it's eventually going to break down entirely. But that doesn't
mean the right solution is just get in there and
start hitting ship with a hammer, like you need to

(01:43:21):
There needs to be like some systemic way you approach
it right, Like there's a proper way to fix an engine, right,
and we can do that, Like we can start building
those networks. We can start you can organize your workplace
and plug into the into like the organized labor frame
or which obviously has many flaws, not as radical as
I would and many other people like it to be,
but they know how to do this ship. Like, there's

(01:43:45):
a lot of different pieces that can be pulled together
in different organizations and populations that need to work together
if we're actually going to accomplish something like this. And
I don't know if people are ready to put in
all that work because it's more fun to tweet. Yeah,
but I'm wondering, as they say in Alabama, bless their hearts.
You're you're spending a tremendous m imman, as you just noted,

(01:44:07):
you're spending a tremendous amount of time on the ground
with a lot of these people talking with them. Are
you are you seeing kind of how how are you
hearing them talk about the other strike efforts you know
in other industries that are going on right now, because
it has been more in the news than it's been
at any point I can recall on the recent past.
And I'm wondering how in places like Bessemer, you know,

(01:44:27):
in places like um you know that coal miners strike
you've been at, like, how are they being are to
what extent are they talking about other strike efforts? Like
is that does that seem to be something that there's
a lot of kind of consciousness and discussion about or
is it just kind of in the background. I mean,
it really depends. I like you said, I've spent I
spent most of my time with the coal miners over
the past years. I've been writing a book and I've
spent my one my one fun thing. But I've been

(01:44:49):
I mean I talked to them every single day, and
I've been to Alabama lots of times, and I you know,
I'm in a group ch out with the wise, Like
I know, I have a decent grass what's going on.
And honestly, the thing about it is that some there
there's some folks who are very engaged and who have
made twitters and they have their Facebook groups and they
do pay attention what's happening. And I do think they
feel that kind of excitement and that widespread sense of solidarity.

(01:45:12):
But one thing that's important to remember, especially for workers
who are already disadvantaged or they're dealing with low wage labor,
is like it's really hard to go on strike. Like
there's a lot of ship they have to figure out,
Like there's kids, there's health issues, there's how am I
going to pay my rent? Like like funds are great,
but they don't cover everything. Like I think that's one

(01:45:32):
of the realities that maybe it gets sort of glossed
over because we're also online and we like to you
and me feels like, oh, everyone's fucking stoked about these strikes.
But for someone in rural Alabama who is just hoping
this strike is over soon so they can go back
to work and have some financial stability, they're not necessarily
reading your tweets or like signing up for webinars or

(01:45:53):
even paying attention to like cool other strike efforts. I'm
sure some some folks are aware and they find have
that time to plug in, but most people just trying
to get by. And these are folks who have spend
like eight hours a day on the picket lines and
there's no cell phone service out where their picket lines
are like, there's only so much that a normal regular

(01:46:14):
worker on the picket line can do to keep up.
And um, you came into this, I think, unlike a
lot of the people who are who are actually striking,
you came into this with a lifelong history of the
like of interest in kind of labor justice movements and whatnot,
which I don't think most people who are in unions

(01:46:34):
necessarily spend a ton of time studying the last hundred
years of labor relations. Um, what has surprised you? Like?
What what have what? What is like been a new
realization that you've gotten since you started covering the stuff
on the ground in this most recent period. So the
thing that's really sticks with me and I'm going back
to my minors again because that's you know, my where

(01:46:54):
where the most familiarity. But something that I think has
so much potential And I'm not going to Tyler's or
how to articulate what that potential is. But so something
I have seen is when this strike began, most not all,
but the majority of the folks involved in this particular strike,
or conservative Christian people who were a lot of voted
for Trump, but a lot of them were like just

(01:47:15):
in that world, maybe not like you know, wild mega people,
but that's just what was the norm where they are
in their community, and they will think about that much.
But there are some people that I've seen, especially those
were involved in the Mutual Aid efforts or have been
who have seen Birmingham DSA come out, who have kind
of taken this kind of like wider review of what's happening,

(01:47:36):
how they fit in. I've seen their politics and their
perspective shift. Like there are some people who are like
straight up socialists now that seven months ago would have
probably spit in your face or at least given you
a hell of a look if you wouldn't even suggested
such a thing. And this is a small sample size,
and this is a unique situation, but I think it

(01:47:56):
really speaks to the potential there to like reach people
who are very ideologically politically different from what we maybe
think of as labor people, as progressive, radical whatever people
on our team, right, But the power of the strike
and the power of labor is that there is so
much there. There's kind of an inherent common ground because

(01:48:18):
so many people, most people, a lot of people, most
people have a job, a lot of people hate their boss.
You can kind of build from that very very low
baseline and find more common ground and kind of you
can you can work towards a better understanding. Like maybe
you're not going to be best friends, but you can
potentially shift someone's harmful worldview by exposing them to new

(01:48:40):
ideas once they trust that you're not just there to
tell them they're wrong and stupid and bad. Were like, look,
we were coming at this like I'm going to talk
to you like a person. I understand we see the
world differently, but like you know, I'm here to support you.
I'm here listening to you. Maybe you could listen to
what I have to say too, Maybe it might change
how you see things. Sometimes it works, Yeah, yeah, um

(01:49:05):
you know what else works? Kim blowing shut up? Well
okay all allegedly um minecraft Yeah. I was gonna say
cap ads, cap ADSMS ADS and services. Um, but I
like your answer better. So let's just let's just let's

(01:49:27):
just roll out with that material support, right. Like another
concrete example there, the Birmingham DSA has been very active
in fundraising and showing up and just providing support for
the miners and then the people in strike and this
is not necessarily a population of people that like the
idea of socialism, whatever idea of it is that they

(01:49:47):
hold because Fox News and russlmbar are big cultural standbys
there like whatever they think socialism is. And then have
a bunch of socialists show up and just practice solidarity
and mutulating actice socialism, and they're like, oh, this, these
guys are great, thank you for coming out things like that,
where it's like, I feel like so much of radical

(01:50:08):
politics in various, you know, various tendencies. There's just like
a branding problem, and there's a propaganda problem on the
right wing, and the maketure he doesn't tell anybody what
anything means. Like, yeah, it's a broader conversation, right, But
I felt for a while like one of the things
that leftist organizers need to get better at doing is

(01:50:29):
being willing to like drop names when they're not productive. Like, Okay,
maybe these people, because of the media environment, they've grown
up and are never gonna want to consider themselves socialists.
But if they are willing to organize together and support
the efforts of other working people to organize together against
the capital holding class, like then Okay, Like what is it?

(01:50:51):
Why do you need them to like start quoting Karl
Marx or is it just cool that you've you've got
them doing what they like? Yeah? I I that makes
a lot of sense to me that, like, yes, some
that you can get a lot of these people on
board with again pretty radical things if you're if you're
kind of approaching it from within their world, from within,
like I'm not trying to talk to you about burning

(01:51:13):
down the system. I'm trying to talk to you about
how you get what you need. And it just so
happens that how you get what you need um is
taking the system on in a very direct way. I Mean,
so many ideas that are painted as radical just like
aren't like that's normal people caring for him, Like it
is like community care and common sense. It's just been

(01:51:34):
politicized to this insane extent. And even it's like I'm
just like even like a lot a lot of the
tenants of mutual aid you can even see pop up
in a lot of like church communities as well, at
least like at least like smaller you know, closer knit
like communities that are actually based around helping each other
at least I was. I've observed that and a lot
of my time traveling across the States. Yeah, absolutely, that's

(01:51:55):
a huge part of it. Like the church is the
only mutual aid option, and so many like smaller and
more ice librural communities or just communities where the church
is a big deal. Like there's always ways to chip
away these institutions and eventually hopefully burned them down right
without alienating people and making them feel like you're coming
in and telling them everything you believe is wrong and

(01:52:16):
actually and making the mistakes. And of these folks, I'm
sure they believe things that are absolute garbage. And I
would never get everybody, you know, like there's you know,
but there's there's Just covering the strike in particular has
really just taught me a lot about the gray areas
in between, not in like I wish you watched a
liberal way, but just in a way of like how

(01:52:37):
do you relate to normal fucking people who see the
world differently but are in ultimately the same struggle as you,
Like maybe I could, I mean going down there. The
only time I've been around that many Trump supporters was
like at protests where I was yelling at them or
like at my family dinners. So I wasn't you know,

(01:52:57):
I wasn't expecting to make friends, but then I did,
and I think hopefully we've we've shifted each other's perspectives
a little bit in a way that's beneficial. I don't know,
it's been, it's been interesting. Yeah, talking to people really
is a lot different than tweeting at them. Yeah, as
a rule, don't tweet would be my recommendation to people. Never. Never. Yeah,

(01:53:22):
talk to your neighbors and be nice to people when
you buy coffee or food from them, and amazed what happens.
And then tell your neighbors, Hey, I'm taking my phone
down to the river to throw it in. Can I
take your phone with me? Can we just all throw
our phones in the river? Um, yeah, if you want to.
If you're going to start at being the weird neighbor,
it's a strong start. We've already killed the water system,

(01:53:45):
so it's fine, Like just right in the river with
the car batteries. You know, there's good for the eels.
The thing I love about our show is just the hope,
is the incredibly hope injected optimism that we start an
end every episode West But no, I mean like I mean, like, yeah,
the more people you know in your community, especially people
who are like working class, you know, when bad stuff

(01:54:07):
starts happening, the more people you know the better because
that's a lot I'm guessing a lot of a lot
of these people who are like you know, like like
like old like old union workers. They have a lot
of like physical skills, like like they they know how
to do a whole bunch of stuff. And it might
be worth getting to know some of those people, even
if you know, depending where you live, like yeah, they

(01:54:29):
they'll probably say something not great at least for you know,
the first bit. But once you know, I have a
lot of family and like a rural area of Alberta,
and like, yeah, my my family is like pretty gay. Um.
So you know, once you're in close to those people, yeah,
they're they're gonna say something that's maybe not great. But
once they get to like know you and really be like, oh,

(01:54:49):
like you're another person. They like people. Actually, you know,
people want to be around other people, and they'll even
change the way they talk to be like oh yeah,
maybe this isn't the best way to hang out around
people because it's going to drive bull away. So yeah,
I'll change the way I say some things, because like
it turns out people actually, like a lot of a
lot of folks just kind of want to make their
lives a bit better and that's really their main focus. Yeah,

(01:55:13):
it's hard to not to do that. And it's it's
it's just this matter of like so much of what um,
so much of what kind of the way that discourse
happens online has poisoned aspects of activism is in like
making it difficult for people to relate in that way

(01:55:34):
without feeling like, well, okay, but if I can't get
them on board with all of these other things, like
I can't talk with them or whatever, like because they're
because they don't agree with likeness and this, like we
can't organize anything like the purity of ideology. Yeah, Like
I feel like most people who aren't terminally online don't
even necessarily have like a specific ideology not yeah, yeah, right,

(01:55:56):
Like there's just stuff that they have learned or they
have decided that is true about the world. They'll just
kind of go with it and they'll interrogated all the time,
and you can like those are people you can talk
to and maybe ship, like I've done it with my dad,
like I've seen it happen with some of these conservative
coal miner folks. Like something as small as being able
to humanize, like like, okay, if you're talking about something,

(01:56:18):
oh like, well the thing you said like that really
upset Joey, and you like Joey, so like maybe think
about that, and they'll probably be chiller because like, oh,
well that's yeah, it's Joey. I can't I don't want
to be a dick to him. If we can just
find a way to enact that on a very broad scale,
life would be a lot better for a lot of people. Yeah,
it's this, it's this dichotomy between a lot people want

(01:56:40):
to own the folks they see as like being against
them or being on the other side. But also people
don't want to be a dick to people that like
they like, you don't want to feel like you're a dick.
So if you if you lean more into the weird
in opposition, then you're going to trigger the well I
wanna to make the person who disagrees with me angry

(01:57:03):
side of the brain. But if you can lean into
the like, hey, like we can get along like and
I and and maybe you don't want to feel like
an asshole. If we get along, then I don't know,
that's a productive place to to continue conversations from and
a good way to shift people, I think. And then
when you're and then when your area floods because of
severe rain and storms, that we have people that can help. Yeah,

(01:57:25):
it's the importance of interacting with people in person, like offline,
which is like obviously more difficult to do because we're
still tried to depend. Yeah, they're like their caveat caveat caveat,
but like it's so much easier to talk to someone
and kind of like see the world you shift, or
even just humanize yourself to someone who is inclined to
not thinking of you as someone worth talking to. Like, yeah,

(01:57:47):
as long as it's not you're not putting yourself in danger,
like there's yeah, obviously I'm a blond lady, you know.
But yeah, still we're not talking about like, oh, you
have to go be friendly to people who want to
murder you because you're trying. No, it's about no, we're
not saying that. But most of these people don't think
that maybe they have some regressive attitude or or they'll

(01:58:08):
use the word gay to mean something, you know, not cool,
and you'd be like, hey, you don't have to to
be like, hey, you know, I'm you know, I'm actually
gay jan or maybe don't hope that maybe you do,
depending on the situation, to be like yeah, maybe maybe
there's other words that we can use for this because
yeah whatever, yeah, And and you can shift people into
a closer alliance, um, just by becoming a human in

(01:58:31):
their eyes and also letting them become a human in
your eyes, um, which is necessary. The other option is
not a pleasant one. So I would prefer the option
where more people grow to see each other as human
and worth supporting. Right, better tactic to me? Yeah, I
know there's this argument where like no one is like
I shouldn't have to educate you, I shouldn't have to

(01:58:53):
put the time into to shift you, and like that
is valid, that's fair, like you shouldn't have to but
ideally no, no, yeah, but if you want to that
change to happen, it's probably not going to happen unless
she puts an effort in because they're probably not done.
They think they're fine, and I don't know, there's a
bunch of ship that you shouldn't have to do that.

(01:59:13):
We're also all gonna have to do like I shouldn't
we I shouldn't have to say, hey, guys, maybe we
don't kill the ocean. Maybe killing the ocean is a
bad idea, like I shouldn't have to No one should
have to say that, but we do not stop, not please.
The fact that you shouldn't have to do something also

(01:59:34):
doesn't mean that like the thing doesn't need to be done.
And obviously I don't think that the primary onus on
speaking to let's say, the kind of increasingly radicalized white,
lower middle and middle class, I don't think that falls
primarily on people of color, on on the l g
BT community. It falls on people like you would make
him you know. Yeah, but it's still has to be done,

(01:59:57):
Like it's a thing that needs to be done. And
I'm not saying, hey, you out there, who you know,
left where you grew up in rural Alabama because someone
was going to fucking murder you and you had to
get to a place where you could not deal with that.
I'm not saying you need to go rolling back to Alabama. Um,
but it's good that people are talking and working with

(02:00:19):
and trying to build connections with folks out there and
change the nature of kind of aspects of the culture
and make things better, because that needs to be done.
We can't just be like, well, fuck some of those people. Yeah,
I mean, get that is definitely easier if you are
like one of the bros. If you are you know,
a bigger sis adjacent dude, that is that is of

(02:00:42):
course going to make the yeah, I mean what you
think about, like that's kind of the tax. That the
right word. But the fact that you do feel comfortable
and you're you're safe and you're not under a threat
in those spaces because of who you are, like as
like a white sister or even a white says lady
like you like the price you pay for that is
making it easier for everyone else to feel that too,

(02:01:04):
like exactly, like that's your job, other people's jobs to survive.
And you can be the one that pushes the boundaries
on these things. So when someone says something not great,
you can kind of call them out in like a
browish way, and they can respond to that a lot
better than, you know than a lot of other people
who they don't know, you know, screaming at them in
a no context scenario, We're like, oh, like, oh, you
don't und like I'm a pretty lady. You don't want

(02:01:26):
to make me upset by being rude, That's exactly, Yeah,
Like you shouldn't. You should see this thing as rude
and not okay, like the amount of men who have
apologized me down there for swearing it's so funny. Yeah, man,
my dude, I live in Philadelphia, but that's cute. But
if I could disharness any of that, like chivalrous whatever,

(02:01:46):
rose patriarchal viewpoint, like hey, apply this to being cool
to my trans friends, are like not being rude to
anyone else, Like sure, I'm down. Yeah, we don't take
kindingly to miss gendering around these parts for a lot
of people at least, Like you know, when I worked
at like smaller workplaces, you know, where it's like a

(02:02:07):
small business where I know the owner. Even if I mean,
if some other employees want to unionize, the prospect is
always kind of more weird or challenging because you know,
it's a smaller business. Maybe it's like connected to like
a larger you know, larger overall industry. You know, Like
when I was like when I when I was like
a park or instructor. Right, I had discussions with other
with other like employees about doing you know, like a
Parker instructors union type thing. But but it's it's it's

(02:02:29):
hard when there's there's like not many of you or
like you know, the owner. What would you say is
like good good ways to at least get that get
that conversation going among other employees and then you know,
like similar similar examples from other stuff for people who
deal with like smaller workplaces that aren't you know, like
a co worker. They're not working for the Amazon or anything.
You know, it's it's more like small local stuff. Right.

(02:02:50):
So like the most important basic building block of all
this is one on one conversation. That's organizing. Right. And
even if you just work with like three or four
other people and maybe unionizing and a formal structure doesn't
necessarily make sense or it seems like it might be
too much of a headache, you're still you know, like
a group of workers coming together. It's still a union.
It doesn't matter what n l r B has to

(02:03:10):
say about it. And you you have shared interests and
share challenges, and there's things that work you probably want
to change so even coming together and discussing that with
your coworkers, Like there's no law that says you have
to be in a union. If you want to get
some ship done, you can march on your boss at
WW style and make them and demand a meeting. You
can make a petition, you can do public pressure campaigns
like all of the things. When all of them, but

(02:03:32):
a lot of the tools that we see organized labor
engaging in and unions engaging in those are those are
available to everyone else too. It's easier if you're within
that framework because you have that firepower behind you and
you have maybe some legal protections, but just as workers,
you know that. I guess it's more like the IWW
solidarity unuse a multiply where like we didn't like we

(02:03:54):
don't need to do no stinke ad badges like we're
a union because we say we're a union, we're going
to take control of things in our own way. Like
you see this in UM. I'm trying to I think
what's it called diversity threast there's a there's a thrift
shop and I think Richmond, Virginia where workers just like
they weren't being treated properly. I think it was like
a like a queer community space that wasn't living up

(02:04:14):
to its values due to actions by management, and so
they just put a letter on the doors that we're
not coming to work until you fix this. Here are
clear demands, here's what we need. Here, you go figure
it out. Like, I don't think they're in a formal union,
but they're acting collectively, and that's something that is totally
available to everyone as long as you're in a workplace.

(02:04:35):
If you're independent contractor like me and probably some of you,
that sucks and it's harder, but you can always find
your people, and you can always there's always options, right,
Like you don't have to just join a union. You
don't have to be a teamster to get shipped done. Yeah.
I think you know, when you were saying that, I
was going through my past experience as a place like that.
I'm like, yeah, we we kind of did do some

(02:04:56):
of that stuff to varying degrees of success. Sometimes it
works out well, sometimes it doesn't work out so well. Um,
but yeah, I mean there was definitely a while where
we did that did definitely makes them make some decent
changes kind of based on on that model. Yeah, it's
kind of a shift of perception where like you were
just doing this because this is because you're a worker,
and like we need to do this. But if you
just take a step back and think of it, it's

(02:05:17):
like this is a labor action. We're a union of workers.
Like even just that little shift where it's like it's
it's always us against them, but look as us as
a little as a group, as a collective against this manager,
against this exploitative practice. I think that has a little
bit of power and a little bit of energy because
your religion now and I'm still I think maybe it

(02:05:38):
makes you feel a little less alone. And also and
like you know, concerned activity is a legally protective regard too,
so like there are some busin pieces of labor law
that are useful in these situations too. If you have
a nerdy friend who would like to read about them
for you. All right, well, I think that's going to

(02:05:59):
do it for us here and it could happen here.
Um until next time, remember um fuck it organized. And
where can people find Kim Kelly online if we want
to send angry tweets? Oh wow, just try me, buddy,
um at grim Kim because my college radio DJ name

(02:06:21):
will never die and uh you can if you are
thus inclined, you can pre order my book. But like
Hell the Untold History of American Labor on the Internet,
hopefully not Amazon, hopefully not. Yeah. I mean, if you do, like,
thank you, But there's other places that are better. You
Do you want people to send you a bunch of
random knives, Kim knives? I mean I wouldn't. We've had

(02:06:45):
a lot of luck with that in the past. I
like nice that, like skincare, I like loose leaf tea,
I contain multitudes. Really, send Kim a loose leaf T
skincare knife, one of those one of those exfoliating knives
with a with a T infuser in the in the hilt.
Somebody make that sounds like that sounds like the next

(02:07:06):
behind the bastards merch, Yeah, the T knife. Yeah, well,
we'll put that out after we get finished where We've
got a very exciting Black Friday product this year, which
is a male to male UH adapter. People say you
shouldn't do it. They say it causes elextrocution and fires
and death. And I think those people are cuts um

(02:07:26):
by our mail to mail adapter show the woke establishment
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(02:07:47):
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(02:08:08):
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(02:10:10):
Robert Evans here, this is it could happen here, the
show about how things are falling apart and how maybe
they could be made a bit better. Uh right, now,
today we're doing an episode that is based on a
I don't know essay Garrison wrote and I edited that
we think you'll find interesting. So here it goes. Green
capitalism promises to deliver us all the same luxuries and

(02:10:33):
commodities that we enjoy today, but without doing net harm
to the biosphere. It's the message liberal elites try to
hold on when they make their case for being better
stewards of the environment than Republicans. This is not untrue,
but it's also not true enough to stop your house
from flooding or your town from being incinerated in a
hell storm. When it comes to the methods green capitalism

(02:10:55):
posits by which we might reverse course without changing the
direction of the ship. One term you'll here often is
energy efficiency. I want to read a statement I found
on white House dot gov, a fact sheet on the
new US government commitment to reduce carbon emissions by fifty
to fifty. I should note that's fifty of the two

(02:11:15):
thousand five levels, which were like fient high or something
like that. Anyway, here's the quote. The United States can
create good paying jobs and cut emissions and energy costs
for families by supporting efficiency upgrades and electrification and buildings.
Through support for job creating retrofit programs and sustainable affordable housing,
wider use of heat pumps and induction stoves, adoption of

(02:11:37):
modern energy codes for new buildings. The United States will
also invest in new technologies to reduce emissions associated with construction,
including for high performance electrified buildings. Now, energy efficiency is
in fact a fine goal, and trying to reduce emissions
is broadly good. But the sad and kind of weird
fact is that increasing efficiency can sometimes mean increasing pollution

(02:11:59):
through what's known as the efficiency paradox, which is of
course the title of the episode, because what you want
you want us to think of a second title, of
a separate title from that. Come on. So, first off,
what does energy efficiency mean? In general terms, energy efficiency
refers to the amount of output that can be produced
with a given input of energy. Output being stuff that

(02:12:22):
energy is used to do like light your house or
wash your clothing, or power your wall mounted twenty volt
vibrator that requires as much electricity as an arc welder
in order to use. Energy savings are the reduction of
energy use without the loss of output produced. Improved energy
efficiency is expected to bring a number of benefits. First
of all, reducing energy usage should result in lower energy bills. Ideally,

(02:12:46):
reduced energy demand also means that energy imports can be decreased.
The International Energy Agency has estimated that strict efficiency policies
could allow the world to achieve more than forty of
the greenhouse gas emissions cuts needed to reach its climate
goals even without new technology, So there is considerable wiggle
room within the existing structures of global society to reduce

(02:13:08):
emissions a lot without fancy space technology. But despite substantial
energy efficiency gains in the past few decades and decreases
an output from places like the United States, we as
a species are using more energy than we have pretty
much forever, and emissions wildly surpass are or the Earth's
ability to handle them. Quoting from the Global Carbon Project quote,

(02:13:30):
global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization. Despite positive progress in
twenty countries whose economies have grown over the last decade
and their emissions have declined, growth and energy used from
fossil fuel sources is still outpacing the rise of low
carbon sources and activities. A robust global economy in sufficient
emission reductions and developed countries and a need for increased
energy use in developing countries where per capita emissions remain

(02:13:53):
far below those of wealthier nations, will continue to put
upward pressure on c O two emissions. They use the
term developing um and developed. We don't prefer those. But
obviously population growth contributes to all that, the growth and
the use of energy and the emissions of carbon um
you know, more people, more cars in the road, whatever,
But it's not really the primary factor that's adding onto

(02:14:16):
the increase in energy use for the human race. We'll
talk about that later, though for now, it's important to
note that the full potential energy savings, like in these
kind of hypotheticals about how much could be saved by
improving efficiency, are usually estimated by assuming that demand for
energy services will remain unchanged after energy efficiency gains. So
when they say that we can get of the greenhouse emissions,

(02:14:37):
gases gas reductions we need by increasing efficiency, they're doing
that assuming that nothing will change about our overall energy
use when we make things more efficient. But time and
time again we see that once products are made more
energy efficient, people often end up consuming, producing, or even
using more of the thing, which makes the potential savings

(02:14:58):
less meaningful in a net result. Doesn't mean that it's
not a net good, but it's not as much as
is often calculated in these climate proposals. You can see
this demonstrated on the job. If you're in say food services,
if you happen to figure out how to do a
task faster, your boss probably isn't gonna let you use
that extra time to just chill out and do stuff
on your phone. Um. What is the phrase, if you

(02:15:19):
can lean, you can clean? Um? So if you do
something faster now, you're just expected to do it faster
all the time and output more total work for your boss.
This is the paradox of efficiency, and it applies to
energy as well. On a societal level. Increased energy efficiency
is a double edged sword, having the potential to help
cut emissions by a significant factor um and having the

(02:15:40):
potential to increase our total energy used depending on what
is made more efficient and how people react to it.
The idea that energy efficiency improvements can actually lead to
more overall energy use goes all the way back to
the start of the Industrial Revolution. In eighteen sixty five,
economist William Stanley Jeevens published a book called The Coal Question,
in which he argued that innovation and efficiency, particularly in

(02:16:03):
the case of the coal powered steam engine, would actually
increase the overall consumption of coal, rather than reducing it
as it had been intended to do. His prediction that
efficiency improvements on steam engines would lead to massive economic
expansion accelerating coal consumption was very much correct. This idea,
then dubbed the Jeevens paradox, is still very much worth

(02:16:23):
considering when we discuss efficiency gains and policies that are
meant to reduce energy consumption and thereby fight climate change.
In modern terms, we describe the process by which potential
energy savings can be cut by greater use of the
energy efficient product as the rebound effect. There are two
different kinds of rebound effects observed, the most obvious of

(02:16:44):
which is dubbed the direct rebound effect. Direct rebounds are
observed when improvements and energy efficiency for a particular energy
service reduces the effective price of that service and thus
provides incentives to increase its demand. This leads to the
overall increased efficiency, not equaling to a reduction energy used
as it as you might think. Direct rebounds are observed

(02:17:06):
when improvements and energy efficiency for a particular energy service
reduces the effective price of that enough that it provides
incentives to increase its demand. You may upgrade to a
more energy efficient appliance, but because of the lower energy costs,
you'll use the appliance more often and thus use more
total energy. Or in some cases, energy efficiency gains are
cut by the fact that more efficient products allow people

(02:17:28):
to use more of that product. For example, someone may
get a more efficient fridge that's also much larger, and
so even though it cools more efficiently, it's also consuming
overall more energy. Transportation has a lot of direct rebounds.
Despite massive fuel efficiency gains in recent years, transportation is
still responsible for twenty of global greenhouse gas emissions. Transportations

(02:17:51):
contribution to global warming is quickly increasing, with travel producing
greater and greater percentages of the planet's carbon footprint. Private
automobile tail pipes will drive this phenomenon for the foreseeable future,
as the number of active vehicles on the road is
projected to grow from seven million in the year two
thousand to two billion by so even though cars are
a lot more efficient, vastly more cars are being used

(02:18:13):
and of course that's not entirely. It doesn't mean that, like,
more efficient cars cause people to buy more cars, but
it does make it more affordable for more people to
own cars and to drive them further, which drives up,
you know, fuel use and drives up emissions. And you
see how the whole problem works. And it's not just cars.
When planes became more fuel efficient, ticket prices decrease and

(02:18:34):
more people started to travel by plane. As cost per
mile dropped, more miles were flown. The fact that airplanes
got more fuel efficient didn't reduce general pollution by the
air travel industry, quite to the contrary. In fact, the
decreased emissions led to an increase in air travel, which
shot a hell of a lot more poison out into
the sky and also gave us eat pray love. So

(02:18:54):
the other kinds of rebounds are indirect rebound effects. This
refers to when energy efficiency leads to monetary savings for
a producer or consumer, who then can spend those extra
savings on other carbon emitting goods and services that otherwise
they couldn't afford. For example, you buy a more fuel
efficient car, you save money on fuel, and you wind
up with extra funds in your bank account that you

(02:19:14):
can use on a vacation, and maybe you take a
flight on that vacation, so in the end you emit
more c O two despite the fact that you're emitting
less c O two through your car. You've got five
bucks extra in the bank and you fly to Mexico
on it. Right, that's an indirect rebound effect. So even
if a product is replaced by a more efficient one
with similar respects, lower energy bills can mean that more

(02:19:34):
consumers will have more money to spend on goods and services.
This is generally seen as desirable from a social and
economic standpoint, and probably from an individual standpoint. Having more
money is always useful UM, but it involves additional energy
consumption means that you're consuming more, you're emitting more UM,
and so the savings and whatnot haven't actually led to

(02:19:54):
a savings in terms of, you know, from an environmental perspective.
An analysis of EU data shows that of twenty nine
EU countries, eleven experienced rebound effects of over fifty percent,
which means more than half of the gains in energy
efficiency were consumed by increases in energy use. Six of
those countries, including Denmark, and Finland reached over rebound effects.

(02:20:16):
This is called a backfire, and it means that in
those six countries, extra energy spending overtook all of the
efficiency gains achieved. Air Conditioning and heating are large contributors
to both direct and indirect rebounds. A rebound effect as
large as sixty percent has been shown in increased improvements
and efficiency in the residential heating sector, which is something
that the White House specifically quote about in their paper.

(02:20:39):
In China, long term rebound effects ranging from forty six
percent to fifty six percent for residential electricity consumption in
Beijing have been estimated. All of this data casts doubt
on the wisdom of relying on energy efficiency policies to
reduce energy demand. I'm gonna quote here from a report
by the Copenhagen School of Energy Infrastructure. In recent decades,
large increases in demand and for energy services have globally

(02:21:01):
driven energy consumption. As a counterbalance, energy efficiency has become
a key energy policy mechanism to tackle higher energy consumption
and emissions, and countries and regions have adopted different targets
and policies to achieve energy and environmental objectives. The main
goals of these policies are to minimize the dependence on
fossil fuels and mitigate local air pollution and g h
G emissions. This has been particularly relevant for the energy

(02:21:24):
intensive sectors. The development and deployment of more efficient technologies
are along with more technology management, the main channel to
achieve these environmental and energy objectives. However, energy efficiency improvements
can lead to changes in the demand for energy services,
changes that offset some of the expected energy savings. Consequently,
forecasts of energy consumption reductions may be overstated. As evidenced

(02:21:46):
by the empirical literature, rebound effects can be a non
negligible issue. Therefore, ignoring them can imply an overestimation of
the benefits coming from energy efficiency improvements. This can in
turn lead to decisions such as the overallocation of public funds.
To In a factive environmental and energy policies, policy makers
need to take rebound effects into account for air quality,
energy security, and climate change policy reasons. A rebound effect

(02:22:09):
different from zero implies that the expected proportional reductions and
emissions from fuel efficiency improvements might not be achieved. Therefore,
the policy goals to reach specific levels of emissions through
fuel efficiency enhancements may need to be adjusted accordingly. Again,
we have nothing against the idea of making more efficient devices.
The point is that energy efficiency can't be pursued in

(02:22:29):
a vacuum. It has to coincide with changes to a
less extract of cancerous mindset regarding the Earth's resources and
carrying capacity. Just telling someone you can drive more for
less money now, or you can afford to keep your
TV on all the time doesn't really help anything. My
fear is that governments and corporations, the neoliberal leviathan as
we've come to call it on this show, will focus

(02:22:51):
almost overwhelmingly on energy efficiency to maintain economic growth and
obscure the overall lack of action on stopping carbon emissions.
Think Joe Biden doing donuts in an electric jeep through
such a lens as the Biden administration. Energy efficiency is
a foil to climate change, is a charade being used
to keep relentless economic growth viewed as a net good.

(02:23:11):
It plays into the myth that will be able to mitigate, adapt,
and survive the effects of climate change with little to
no change to our current lifestyles. What we need to
do is decouple human well being from energy consumption and
consumption in general. To effectively combat climate change. This needs
to happen at such a scale that advocating for individual
changes in lifestyle will never be enough, but that is

(02:23:32):
still a significant part of the puzzle. The trick comes
in getting people to accept the fact that their life
will need to change without them telling them and buying
this product instead of that product. Is how you do it.
That said, populations of people can and do change their
behaviors in pretty profound ways. In nineteen fifty, abortion was
not at all an issue for the religious right. Resistance

(02:23:53):
to abortion might make some Protestants distrust you, because that
was seen as a Catholic concern. Now abortion is the
defining political issue of the ascendant right. Their promise to
destroy it is the rock upon which their titanic power
is based. In a less calamitous sense. Since two thousand seven,
we've gone from a time in which smartphones were expensive
trash for rich people to buy, to today, when they're

(02:24:13):
expensive trash that every human being who can afford to
has to carry at all times because they're so utterly
integrated to our daily life. So yes, people can change.
A bigger challenge, though, will be to change the mindset
of industry, which is not entirely or even often driven
by consumer demand, as we've seen with the release of
papers proving Chevron and other oil and gas companies knew

(02:24:34):
about and deliberately hid research on climate change for decades.
Big capital will put its thumb on the scale every
step of the way. In other words, if you come
at the behemoth that is the integrated industrial economy, you'd
best come correct. How do we do that? Well, if
anybody really knew, they would have, you know, done it
by now. The human infrastructure of extract of capitalism is

(02:24:56):
deep and vast and tightly woven into the structure of
every government with any real power. So with the full
understanding and admission that we aren't claiming to have solutions
to that problem, let's talk about something that will at
least be part of any real solution to the problem.
D growth. This is a term will explain in more
detail later, but we mean it's simply as a holistic

(02:25:17):
approach to encouraging reduction and energy consumption and global environmental justice.
A paper on the j Evens paradox and the link
between innovation, efficiency and sustainability for the Frontiers and Energy
Research concluded quote the jevens paradox entails that sustainability problems
cannot be solved by technological innovations alone. They must be
solved through institutional and behavioral changes. While there are still

(02:25:40):
differences of opinion about the scale every bound effects and
ongoing arguments about the macro and micro and longer and
shorter term consequences of efficiency, our interest in this topic
today is driven by the goal of improving how we
use energy rather than totally overhauling or abandoning efficiency. One
example would be the current fight in Europe over smartphone
chart argers most of the rest of the smartphone industry

(02:26:02):
worldwide has jumped onto USBC is the right kind of
port for charging, et cetera with your device. Before this point,
those of you have been using smartphones for a decade
or we'll remember, there were tons of different charges and
thus a tons of different waste. Every phone had to
come with a new charger. A lot of them wound
up in the trash that has been reduced by everyone
jumping onto USBC. But Apple continues to use their own

(02:26:24):
special charger, and now the EU was promising to make
a law to mandate USBC for charging new phones in
an attempt to reduce waste. This isn't again a bad thing,
but if someone's really concerned with waste among the smartphone industry,
planned obsolescence is the thing to go after. Now, Targeting
planned obsolescence stopping it includes a number of things. And

(02:26:45):
for one thing, you have to fight for the right
to repair devices, which is something that a number of corporations,
not just in the smartphone industry, have lobbied to in
some cases make illegal. More than that, it's stopping somehow
these companies from making the conscious decision to brickle technology
to increase profits, and that aspect of it is the
bigger enemy than even the right to repair. As electronic

(02:27:06):
device has become common and more sectors of daily life
via the Internet of Things, the overall share of global
energy use that goes to making new versions of old
products that could still be working but are designed to
break is is really quite depressing. For one example of
how large it must be, I haven't found any solid
information on the total size of this industry. Things that

(02:27:26):
you have to repeatedly re buy because they're meant to break.
But the mobile phone industry and two thousand nineteen alone
was four point six percent of global GDP, So that's
close to five percent of global GDP just from making
phones that are designed to break so you have to
buy a new phone. This is an example of an
area in which people's perspectives have to be changed, and

(02:27:46):
I think actually that digital fatigue, the fact that we're
also fucking exhausted with these devices these days, may provide
somewhat of an inroad for convincing people that they need
to buy new gadgets less often. But because these gadgets
are so crucial to day life, the industry actually also
has to be forced to change. And again, rite repair
is one part of this, but that doesn't stop Apple

(02:28:07):
from just deciding to throttle their old devices whenever they
need to add a new layer to the money pile.
Our overall point with all this is that solutions to
climate change have to be cultural and not just based
in some version of will invent a better version and
that will solve the problem. Hybrid gas burning cars and
standardized charging chords are nibbling around the edges of the problem.
Relying on technological advances pacifies us in the present, and

(02:28:30):
it reinforces the need for certain types of human material codependence,
and that kind of codependence leads to increased dependency and
more extraction. By no means am I trying to say
that innovation is bad. I love gadgets as much as
the next person. Innovation also has the capacity to heavily
decreased resource extraction. It just has to be tailored with
something more than just will make this device more efficient

(02:28:52):
so we can use it more or sell more of them.
The capitalist mode of mass resource extraction and grind for
efficiency are intertwined, and if we are to limit the
most catastrophic effects of climate change, we as a culture
need to rethink how we view efficiency and energy use.
For the past few hundred years, economic growth has been
the road that has led to our current ecological dilemma.

(02:29:13):
The fantasy of switching over to nuclear and renewable energy
with a perfectly efficient electric grid to just sidestep climate
collapse is it's a fantasy. We missed our chance to
do that. Even if we stop all carbon emissions right now,
all of them, the carbon already in the atmosphere would
push us past two degrees celsius of warming in about
fifty years. So what besides carbon capture can we do

(02:29:36):
about this we as in both you the regular listener
and the goals with power and real influence well. The
two thousand eighteen International Panel and Climate Change Special workport
indicated that in the absence of speculative negative emissions technologies,
the only feasible way to remain within safe carbon budgets
was for high incombinations to actively slow down the pace

(02:29:56):
of material production and consumption. D growth is the planned
reduction of energy use, corporate profits, over production, and excess
consumption designed to bring the economy back into balance with
the living world in a way that reduces inequality while
focusing on human and ecological well being. This isn't just
some sort of utopian Marxist thinking, and in fact, a
lot of Marxists have critiques of deep growth, and deep

(02:30:19):
growth could be applied to a number of different economic
and governmental systems. There are even some weirdo capitalist advocates
of D growth. Discussion about solving climate change can get
into uncomfortable eugenics e territory if you aren't careful, So
I should emphasize here that D growth is primarily about
already wealthy countries limiting their economic growth. When aggregated in

(02:30:40):
terms of income. The richest half of the world, high
and upper middle income countries amid eighty six percent of
global CO two emissions. The bottom half, lower and middle
income countries amid only fourteen percent. With very few exceptions,
the richer than nation is, the more it emits. It's
all part of the resource extraction infinite growth lie we
tell ourselves to keep going. Wealth is so much more

(02:31:03):
of a factor in emissions than population. North America is
home to only five percent of the world population, but
emits nearly eighteen percent of c O two. Asia is
home to sixty percent of the world's population, but amidst
just forty nine percent of c O two. Africa has
sixteen percent of the population but emits just four percent
of its c O two. This is reflected in per

(02:31:23):
capita emissions. The average North American amidst seventeen times more
than the average African. This inequality in global emissions lies
at the heart of why international agreement on climate change
has and continues to be so contentious. The richest countries
in the world are home to half the world population
and emit eighty six percent of c O two. We
want global incomes and living standards, especially for those of

(02:31:46):
the poorest half of the world to rise. The only
way to do that while limiting climate change is to
shrink the emissions of high income countries. Even several billion
additional people in low income nations would leave global emissions
almost unchanged. Three or four billion poor individuals would only
account for a few percent of global CO two. At
the other end of the distribution, however, adding only one

(02:32:07):
billion high income individuals to the wealthiest parts of the
world would increase global emissions by almost a third. A
programmer in the United States has a higher c O
two footprint than fifty farmers in Uganda. A decent chunk
of this is just due to meet consumption. Meet consumption
per capita in the richest fifteen countries is seven hundred
fifty percent higher than in the poorest twenty four countries.

(02:32:28):
Lowering the population of say Uruguay won't do much for emissions.
This is not the case when you talk about wealthy nations.
In fact, if you live and say the United States,
possibly the biggest thing you as an individual could do
to reduce emissions is to have fewer or no children.
It's estimated that dedicated recycling curves about point three metric
tons of CO two emissions per year, while having one

(02:32:51):
fewer child is equivalent to preventing over fifty eight tons
of CO two emissions a year. Better sex, said, and
free access to contraceptives could also go a shockingly long
long way to curbing individual emission In wealthy countries, these
numbers are averaged across a whole nation, and just like
the case in less wealthy countries, the impact on emissions
by having one fewer kid will be far lesser if
your middle class are poor than it would be if

(02:33:13):
your upper middle class are rich. But of course none
of that is going to be enough if industrial production
keeps chugging along and advising people not to have children,
one of the singular driving motivations for human beings across history,
isn't exactly a vote getter of a proposition. De growth
is critical, but the question of how to get there
is thorny as hell. There are a few easy answers.

(02:33:33):
Abolishing planned obsolescence could be pretty easily pitched to the
average person. Cutting down on the number of people who
have to commute could have a significant impact on toxic
car culture, and again you can sell that to people.
The obvious solutions are good places to start, but they
should be seen as opening incisions, meant to clear the
way to make deeper, more expansive cuts, and eventually hw

(02:33:53):
away at the cancer we've planted in the heart of
our civilization. After thirty years, it's time to return to
the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at
the peach pit. On the podcast nine O two one
OMG joined Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch

(02:34:16):
of the hit series Beverly Hills nine O two one oh.
From the very beginning, we get to tell the fans
all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen,
so they know what happened on camera obviously, but we
can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera.
Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've
been wondering about for decades. As nine O two one oh,
super fan and radio host Sissany sits in with Jenny

(02:34:39):
and Tory, two reminisce, reflect and relive each moment, from
Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates,
you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the
entire ten years that we filmed that show, and you
remember absolutely nothing of the ten years that we filmed
that show. Listen to nine O two one OMG on

(02:35:00):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you
get your podcasts. What's Up? Guys have a Shop Aloud
and I am Troy Millions and we are the host
of the Earnier Leisure podcast where we break down business
models and examine the latest trends and finance. We hold
court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest
names of business, sport, and entertainment, from DJ Khaled to
Mark Cuban, Rick Ross and Shaquille O'Neil. I mean our

(02:35:22):
alumni list is expansive. Listen to as our guests reveal
their business models, hardships and triumphs and their respective fields.
The knowledge is in death and the questions are always
delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you
want to know. We talked to the legends of business,
sports and entertainment about how they got their start and
most importantly, how they make their money. Earn your Leisia
is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want

(02:35:43):
to learn about the real estate game, unclears, how the
stock market works. We got you interested in starting a
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about how taxes or credit work. We got it all covered.
The Earnier Leisure podcast is available now. Listen to Earnier
Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network. I hear Radio, Apple,
Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, it's

(02:36:16):
could It's happened? Could hear Robert Evans the podcast that
is now begun. Um This is a show about how
things are falling apart and occasionally how to how to
maybe deal with that, maybe try to steer things in
a better direction. We talked about a bunch of stuff
today we're gonna be talking about more supply line um
um stuff. And and in order to kind of introduce

(02:36:38):
this episode, we wanted to bring in Alexis, who posted
a threat on Twitter about some of their experiences in
the industry in which they work that that we all
found very interesting and so we just wanted to bring
Alexis on and uh and and first off, have you
kind of go over what what you went over in
that threat and then um kind of zero win and
talk about that. So Alexa Is welcome to the show. Hi,

(02:37:01):
thanks for having me. Um, yeah, I'm gonna let you
take it from here and then we'll we'll drill in
once you once you get through your your piece, all right,
So I'm just going to go ahead and read the
thread that I posted and then yeah, we'll go from there.
Uh So, labor shortage, discourse time. I work for a
food manufacturing company, specifically bottling and canning various beverages, and

(02:37:22):
we are desperately understaffed. The wages are competitive, but they
can't keep anyone on after they hire them. Why because
we're short on people. As soon as someone is trained,
they start throwing massive amounts of mandatory over time on
them to try and cover the missing pieces while they
look for more people to hire in. Folks get burned
out and quit. And this is where my hate of
just in time manufacturing comes in. Obviously, in food manufacturing,

(02:37:46):
you can't just stock a warehouse with stuff and let
it sit for a year, But you can keep a
couple of weeks worth stock rotating at all times if
you devote the warehouse space, employees, et cetera to doing so.
This would give you some flex time to train your
new people without having to run everyone into the dirt.
So even with a place that is offering decent money
and benefits, because this is a union shop, we can't

(02:38:07):
keep people because we're making a conscious decision to only
ever have one to two days of stock on hand
to increase profits. Meanwhile, thanks to lean manufacturing, we don't
keep a ton of spare parts for our equipment on hand.
Thanks to the supply chain just disruption, We've got packaging
equipment that's been waiting on replacement parts for six months,
which further fux our productivity doing to downtime, which makes

(02:38:29):
the company's schedule even more overtime to try and make
up for the lost cases from equipment downtime, which burns
out more employees, which puts us in an even deeper
labor hole. I've been warning about just in time being
a time bomb in the making for over a decade now.
When it works perfectly, you're fine. A single interruption causes
cascade effects, and since everyone has been doing the just
in time thing, there's zero slack anywhere in the system.

(02:38:51):
Grocery stores don't have any extrasoda in the back they
get behind demand builds up. Distribution doesn't have any pallets
in the warehouse, ha, what warehouse, so they can't answer
the surgeon demand from grocery stores. Manufacturing doesn't have spare
parts for aging equipment, so we can't boost production. Spare
parts makers don't have stock build up, so on and
on it goes. The actual approximate cause of this is

(02:39:12):
deregulation of capitalism that is incentivized quarterly profits and made
long term thinking an athema to c e O s.
But sure conservatives blame California for not letting old trucks
offload at the ports. That's it, and that's that's the
essence of my threat. I then plug my podcast at
the end. Yeah, so I wanted to I'm curious as
to kind of like, uh to what I'm trying to understand,

(02:39:39):
like what the solution is. Like we've talked a bit about, Okay,
just in time, manufacturing is is problematic for a lot
of reasons. Um, Keeping more like on the shelves is
going to allow you to avoid these crunches, and it's
going to like make supply line issues like the ones
we've experiencing since the start of the COVID pandemic less
severe and less common. Um, but how do you actually

(02:40:00):
how do you actually make that happen because I guess
the traditional free market thing is that like, well, because
this has been such a problem for companies, um, you know,
they'll naturally change the system in order to avoid this
in the future. I don't feel like that's likely to happen, um,
And I'm wondering, like, what do we uh what what
what do you think is the way forward here? Well,

(02:40:21):
because some of the problem is is right now, like
most most companies, you will pay taxes on stuff that
you have stored in a warehouse, things like that. Um,
So no company is going to voluntarily lower their profit
margins if the other companies don't do it themselves as well.
So really there's going to have to be some sort
of forcing of companies to uh have that on hand.

(02:40:46):
And I don't see just being able to write a
law that says, oh, well, you're required to have this
much backstock on hand, as as being a functional way
to work. And really, as I'm sure you know, Robert,
I know you're well aware the capitalism itself is kind
of the problem. But as far as I guess, a
solution to this sort of thing, um, you would have

(02:41:10):
to disincentivize the quarterly profits above all in order to
force companies back into long term thinking. Now, from a
purely like mechanical standpoint, UM, I guess if you if
you did something to incentivize companies having backstock or flex

(02:41:30):
stock on on hand, that might help. But um, I mean,
I'm just I'm just a cog in the machine getting
ground up. So as far as like big solutions, that's
I mean. I've been looking at it ever since I
worked in a freaking casket factory and we started doing
just in time there, And just every time that I've
been in a place, a manufacturing place and seen it happen,

(02:41:52):
I'm just like, oh, this is gonna go wrong because
you can't you can do just in time if all
of your suppliers are local, but have ving it stretched
across the global supply chain, it just it's inevitably going
to collapse in on itself. I'm sorry that I'm not
more helpful. No, no, but I mean this is this
is like the problem because there's a lot of reasons

(02:42:13):
why this supply chain is global. Some of them are
like labor related reasons, some of them are cost cunning,
some of them are just like pure pragmatism. Um, but
it's trying to like I I don't. I feel like
it's it's one thing to say, like, well, part of
the problem is that like all of these different pieces
come from different countries, um. And there's a number of
shady reasons for aspects of that UM. But it makes

(02:42:35):
for greater problems when there's a Pilon shortage and then like, Okay,
well what are we what are we gonna Are you
suggesting that we make everything domestically because I don't feel
like that's a realistic solution, um. Yeah, And it's like
it's just it's I'm trying to get a handle on
There's a couple of angles on this. There's there's what
we think is going to happen, um, and then there's

(02:42:56):
the question of, like, is there a way that the
system as it exists could make this whole thing less vulnerable?
And and a lot of ways that's going to be
separate from the question of what would be better for
everyone to happen, because a lot of what would be
better for everyone to happen is a white A significant
chunk of these things that we have constantly stocked on
the shelves are no longer parts of our life. Right, Um,

(02:43:16):
there's a lot of things that are made that we
do not need and that are there's an environmental cost
and a show social cost and YadA YadA YadA. Um.
But I guess first, I'm kind of curious to drilling in,
Like how realistic do you think it is that the
system as it exists is going to like mitigate this
and come up with better ways to to do this
that render us less vulnerable to the supply crunches? Like

(02:43:39):
is there? I don't see a great financial incentive in
it for them yet, um, because they don't seem to
be hurting, right, Like that's that's the thing. Well actually,
and and again, please keep in mind this is limited
anecdotal evidence. Yeah, because it's gonna be definitely John Deer,
I know, was making record profits before all the this
union stuff happened, but like that's not every one, right.

(02:44:01):
So again, I work for a soda manufacturer. So every
time you're in you know, enjoying your your Schmetzy Schmola
or your or your Schmago whatever whatever, I'm not going
to explain which company I work for because I don't
want to get in trouble. Um, And we're we're actually
a captive bottler, which means that it's a separate company,

(02:44:22):
but we work for the big soda corporation. I think
that in certain instances those things will change, because, for example,
just last week, we had one of our four lines
go down of our production capacity went down because we
had a motor burnout on the rollers that would move
a full palette out to be picked up by a forklift,

(02:44:42):
and there was no replacement motor in stock, and so
we had I think forty eight hours of downtime on this. Now,
all the way up at the top the company executives,
you know, we're one of thirty some plants, they don't
care about why it was down, just that it was down.
So in our position here, um, the people a little

(02:45:06):
higher up the food chain than me are insisting like, hey,
we've been after you guys for months that we need
spares like this. And I think that as that sort
of stuff happens, as it cuts into potential future profits,
you know, it's not dropping their profits, but it's keeping
them from being even higher, maybe certain companies are going
to be like, Okay, maybe we do need a couple

(02:45:27):
more spares on the shelves. As far as on the
production side of it, I don't see that happening. I
think we're still going to be shipping out palettes of
you know, palettes of corn syrup infected carbonated water as
fast as we can make them. Which you and you
were talking about the environmental cost, like you do not
want to know how much water it takes to make

(02:45:49):
a single leader of soda. You really don't um but
on this on the production like input side, I think
that companies are going to start stocking fair parts because
it has been and I still have friends who work
for other companies that I used to work for. It
has been all throughout the system, and I live in

(02:46:09):
the Midwest. Every company is going through this where they're
having huge amounts of downtime because the things as small
as a gasket or an O ring are not on
the shelf, and they're finally companies are finally going to
listen to what their maintenance people have been screaming at them,
that we can't just stagger along and then oh, well

(02:46:29):
it's next day delivery, yeah, and then you freak out
that this line was down for twenty four hours. Now
that it's not even next day delivery, it's next week delivery.
I think that side of it they're going to probably
try and fix. But the other side, shipping to the consumer,
I really don't see that they're going to change that. Yeah,
I mean that makes that makes sense, And we are

(02:46:51):
you are kind of lad thinking about this inevitably to
like two conclusions. One of them is that I have
my I'm sure parts of this The system will adapt,
as it already has been, in fact, which is why I,
like you haven't seen toilet paper run out as bad
as it did at the start of the pandemic. Again, right,
there is a degree to which the system is capable
of adjustment, but kind of in a larger sense, um,

(02:47:15):
this is number one. I'm kind of left with the
feeling that because of the way the system was set
up and the fact that it was disrupted so severely,
it's kind of impossible to get a percent back on track,
especially considering the disruptions are going to continue, not just
waves of COVID, but you know, in natural disasters and whatnot,
shortages of of things like truck drivers, Like these different

(02:47:38):
little hits are going to keep coming, and I just
don't know that wherever going to like catch up everywhere
enough that like shortages of some sort aren't an aspect
of our lives kind of forever. And this is one
of those things that if you've spent a lot of
time outside of the United States, that's something a lot
of people have been dealing with for years. It's just
not something Americans are used to dealing with. And I
think I kind of feel like it's just where it

(02:48:01):
is now. Like I don't feel like every aspect of
our our production and consumption system is going to get
back where it to where it was February. I think
maybe that's never happening again. No, absolutely, it will not
ever happening. You were saying earlier that you know, there's
some practical reasons for the global supply chain. Like one
of the things that we've had such hard time getting

(02:48:23):
in is any of our concentrates that contain real vanilla.
Obviously we can't grow vanilla in the United States. Yeah,
that's the thing you have to I mean, that's part
of why colonialism exists, right, you need to go get vanilla. Yeah.
So yeah, so, like there are certain things that are
going to be stay have to stay global if we're

(02:48:43):
going to continue to make the things that we make
and just from my side of it, being able to see, oh, well,
why can't we get this concentrated in? Oh because it
has vanilla as an ingredient, and there's been a bunch
of draughts and ship and so vanilla is in a crunch,
you know that sort of thing. So I just, um,
you're right in that. Yeah, we're going to have shortages.

(02:49:04):
There's it's you know, and it's not just the mechanical
side on ours. It's like we can't get cans in,
we can't get concentrated in, we can't you know. Whatever
it is that we can't get in is going to
slow us down, and demand will build up. I did
have somebody in that thread respond and say, I don't
see how demand for soda will build up. And I'm like, now,
I have a friend who's like a diet Dr. Pepper fiend,

(02:49:24):
and as soon as diet Dr. Pepper shows up, now
she buys like packs. Demand will absolutely build up for stuff.
When people feel like they're being deprived of something, when
it becomes available, they're going to hoard it as best
they can. Yeah, And that's again with soda, just kind
of an annoyance. Although that can because individual people can

(02:49:46):
react in extreme ways, can snowball. I'm not gonna be
surprised if one of these days we have somebody shoot
up a fucking grocery store because they're whatever was out. Um.
But that's also not a necessity, and I think that,
like the concern is that, especially when you you look
at stuff, like you know, there's a couple of states
that had like their wheat harvest and corn harvest that

(02:50:07):
were like half or less than half of normal in
big chunks of a rack. It was like down by
I think like seventy percent um. Like these massive shortages
of growing basic food stuffs, um. And that's all that's
all tight into this, Like it's not the same business
that you're on, but it's all tied into aspects of this,
and it's all tied into like a lot of our

(02:50:28):
ability to get that food out of the field is
reliant upon different kinds of mechanical harvesting equipment. The materials
to which to like fix and replace it are often
like caught up in this whole just in time problem
because they don't make enough of them and sometimes they
don't have them in stores, and then there's like a
strike at John deer, and so more aren't getting made,
and so there's not what you need to repair the

(02:50:48):
equipment in time to get stuff out of the field everywhere,
and in a year when you already have a reduction
of harvests like that cuts down on it further. Um,
Like I I think, I don't know, it's it's this.
There's always a couple of things to look at, which
is like number one, as we've talked about, like how
is the system going to try to handle this? What
ways are they going to be successful, what ways they're

(02:51:09):
going to fail? What things are you going to have
to endure? And what things? I think what I want
to talk about next is like what things do we
need to change, uh, in order to like as communities
be more resilient to this stuff, which you know has
less to do with soda, which again is not a necessity,
but more to do with figuring out how to anticipate
and endure supply line disruptions right absolutely, And and while

(02:51:33):
I'm currently in soda, I have been in everything from
automotive too, I think, as or casket manufacturer. So you know,
but when I can go through a casket a week,
you know, especially when you're driving your Yeah, when I'm
drunk driving in a boy right right through a trailer park,
I mean you're you're I mean your casket order has
got to be through the roof. It is it is

(02:51:55):
a lot a lot of people. Yeah, I mean I
do actually wonder how um, I mean like, I do
actually wonder how much like the casket industry and something
that has been affected by the by like by the
pandemic with the you know, an influx of dead people,
and how that's how how that's affective. Think that's something
I've been wondering about, but I have not actually spent

(02:52:16):
time looking into. I can't speak to the pandemic specifically.
I quit. I quit the casket industry in two thousand
and eight, but I do recall my boss, the owner
at the time, being very very upset that Hurricane Katrina
had a lower death toll than he anticipated because she
had over ordered the sheet metal to make the caskets,

(02:52:36):
and he was very piste off about adding all that
extra stock because they were just society. Yes, so that's
that's good to hear. Yeah. Great. He was in a
bad mood for like a month after Katrina because it
hadn't reached his expectation. Well, sure, that's a real problem
for for absolutely he's got that's all the sympathy, critical support.

(02:52:58):
I mean, that job was grim. I'm just gonna say
that it sounds like it. I I have a through
a through a loved one, a connection to somebody who
is like works for a company that makes body bags
and was amazing for them. They did incredible in um.

(02:53:19):
I didn't hear any ghoulish stories. It's just like, yeah,
of course you guys made a bunch of extra money. Like,
sounds like that was great for you, putting it, putting
in a mental note to go through a bunch of
the campaign contributions of people who make body bags and
check if they're supporting anti mess Yes, yeah, see if
big corps got into this at all, Yeah, I mean, honestly,

(02:53:40):
the thing that the thing to do is, you know,
I'm not a big fan of the stock market in general,
but next time, the next time that there's a pandemic,
find out which companies make body bags on the stock
market and invest in those as soon as as soon
as the pandemic starts. I mean, I can tell you
what I'm I'm putting money into big corps as soon
as uh as soon as the next pandemic hits, that's
absolutely gonna happen. Y oh boy, all right, yeah that's graam. Yeah,

(02:54:06):
it's fine. There's a reason why after after I started
working there, I immediately told my husband, Hey, make sure
if I die before you, I'm cremated. So yeah, I
don't want to give these monsters any of my mind.
What I what I'm looking into is just full full
body stuffing that people can pose me around it. But
that's a set for topic. Yeah, you talk about that

(02:54:28):
a lot, Garrison. What I did want to mention is like, actually,
when you were talking about how they hire in a
lot of employees and they make them were horrible hours
and then they you know, they quitness is kind of
a constant kind of process, and like this isn't exclusive
to that industry at all. Think one of the worst
offenders of this is actually the Postal Service. UM. I

(02:54:49):
think that the Postal Service has like the lowest employee
satisfaction out of any shipping company. Um And like my, my,
my fault. I worked for the Postal Service for a bit.
And when you first join up, you join as like
you join us a on like a non career employee
path and then you can get promoted to a career
employee path after a few years. But the turnaround for
the non career employee paths is massive, Like local branches

(02:55:12):
can stay after like people who start working at the
Postal Service will end up quitting within the year. Now
that number can be different based on like nationally and
for based on like you know, based on what states
you're in, but but across the board, it's it's always
around at least fifty for employee turnaround for people who
join up the Postal Service on these like a city
carrier assistant positions. It's fascinating, yeah, because because when when

(02:55:36):
you when you're a non career employee path, you have
to work seven days a week and you can be
called into work basically any time, usually working around ten
to twelve hour days. All of the career employees, all
of the sounds like I put you, but like all
of all of like all of like the regular carriers
get to work like their specific route and that's it.
That's their whole day. For the for the people who
are new to the job, they're forced to work tons

(02:55:58):
of routes um fill in whenever someone else can't, and
we constantly be doing over time um and working like
basically NonStop NonStop with only like two like only two
holidays off a year or something. It's it's pretty intense, um,
which is why you know, when the postal service comes
have problems and because and and because there's so few
there's generally not tons of employees. I mean like there

(02:56:21):
is lots like comparedively like like like the Postal Service
is one of the bigger employers in in the whole country.
But for people when when when employees drop off, filling
those positions can be really hard in times of like crisis.
So like you know, last year, when there's all these
problems with the Postal service, all of these kind of
issues around the supply chain and how people treat their workers,
all of them like like you know, compound to create

(02:56:41):
one like much bigger problem which we saw last year
with postal service and like late in like the late summer, UM.
So I just find it interesting how it's like, you know,
the same issues around like how we treat workers is
adding on to this problem of like supply chains and
getting stuff delivered and all this kind of stuff. And
so what what I find interesting there is, so you're
you know, when we're talking about the employee issue, and yeah,

(02:57:04):
it's sure. So I've been Uh, the plant I was
working in, which is twenty minutes from my house, closed down,
and now I'm working ninety miles away literally an hour
and I am i am working four twelves a week,
and I'm crashing at my parents house, which they live
about sixty miles away. So it's a little bit better, Um,

(02:57:25):
but also suck. Yeah, and my parents are hard right
evangelicals who do not agree with you know, so that's fun.
But um, the plant that I was in was a
non union plant and the one I'm in now is
a union plant. And one of the things that I've
noticed that's actually kind of different is for once in

(02:57:46):
the non union plant, things were actually better because what
we could do what what what could be done is
all right, we're all working seven days a week. We
have enough staffing that if nobody calls in, we have
one spare person who normally goes around and gives breaks
and stuff like that. Well we could you know, basically
all take turns taking a day off during that seven
day week. At the union plant that I'm at now,

(02:58:09):
though it's all seniority based, so any time that they
force over time, they go from the bottom of the
seniority list on up. So the people the people who
are being forced into those which I described in the thread,
I think it was it was split off in the thread.
But the people who were being forced to stay over

(02:58:29):
four hours and then come in four hours early, where
you oh, you were working six to two, now you're working,
you know, six to six, and then you're coming in
at two in the morning instead of six in the
morning the next day are always the people who are
the lowest on the seniority list, which is something say

(02:58:50):
the same thing with the postal service. Yeah, yeah, I
mean it's not there's a number of different I mean
I've heard that complaint from a couple of different union
gigs um and it's yeah, it's a problem. Yeah, and
it's that's why we get these new people and they
get trained up and now they're trained and they're signed off,
and then they immediately go from because when you're training,
you're not you can't train on over time or whatever.

(02:59:12):
But now it's oh, okay, well now you're working every weekend.
You're being forced over, you're being forced in early, just NonStop,
and so yeah, they get trained for a month and
then a month after that they quit because they went
from working a relatively sane amount to an absurd amount.

(02:59:33):
We went fifty eight days at one point without a
day off, but my dad went like almost I think
like three hundred days without with without a day off
when he started the Postal Service. A kind of funny
thing is like when you hear the Postal Service talking
with this, like from the in their own reports and
on their own website, what they find a problem with
is not not the turnaround in and of itself, but
how they're basically wasting money on training for people that

(02:59:56):
don't end up working. It's like that is their main
concern is that they're spending all this money on training
for people that don't stick around often. Um, And like, yeah,
well maybe you should address why they don't stick around often.
That's that seems to be kind of the actual issue here. Yeah,
And what I've been pushing for, and I know this
is more on the labor side than on the on
the supply chain side that we were focusing on. I've

(03:00:18):
been pushing for instead of three shifts where we keep
just getting just hammered with this stuff. I want us
to do four shifts, twelve hour days and do like
a two on two off, three on three off type
swing shift where you have like one shift that works.
You know, you work three days one week, four days
the next week, and you work twelve hour days, but

(03:00:40):
really you wind up getting a bunch of days off,
you know, like that's if you're gonna work seven days
a week, that's the best way to do it in
my opinion. I mean, like you know, it's there's a
lot of resistance to what will well, then we have
to hire these extra people. Will you're hiring those people anyway,
and then they're quitting. I mean they're not even getting
your value out of them. Slave driver. I mean, like

(03:01:01):
you said, this is more. This is more than labor
side than the supply chain side. But honestly, these are
these are like the same side, right, because if you
don't have employees like this is you know, this is
a fundamental you know thing, and like how capitalism works, right,
you need to have you know, workers to make there
have be any value at all. Right, So if there's
if there isn't any people to working, then there is
no supply chain, it's gone because if we need people

(03:01:21):
to do it, both on the production side and both
in like the transportation side. That's like you know ups
um usps, you know FedEx, you know, so like the
mail carriers and stuff is very important to all of
this because you you you need in order for for
there to be a supply chain, there needs to be
the chain part right where you carry it from one
place to to another. So it's both, it's both on
the production side and on the transportation side. For how

(03:01:43):
all these problems, you know? Yeah, and one of them,
one of the things that I in the replies to
my thread which I got into was that um part
of the the only slack in just in time manufacturing
the employees. They've pulled all of the slack out of

(03:02:03):
the system on the mechanical side and on the production
side of it, on all the physical side. The only
slack left is people, and they have stretched us all
to the absolute breaking point. Now I'm lucky relatively speaking
in that I'm salary, so like I'm more on the
inventory side of things, so I'm not doing the hourly production,

(03:02:25):
seven day a week thing, like I said, I work
four twelves UM, but I can still you know, and
that that's this job. Every other previous job not the
same thing, but I can still see where they've taken out.
Like once again, we used to have spares on the
shelf so that when something broke down we could fix
the machine and keep running. Now instead of the spare,

(03:02:47):
the spare is people working weekends. That's the spare part.
And that makes total sense, right, You're you're the capitalist.
A better spare that is a part on the shelf
costs you in terms of like you need to have
that space, that's extra rent you're paying. You need to
have bought that part. Having your people just killed themselves

(03:03:07):
is much cheaper. You can sort of misuse the marks here, right,
Or like one of Mark's things is like, okay, well
you know you have you have this increased machinery. You
have this increased machinery, but that means you're producing less
value because you know, you you put more people out
of work. Was like, okay, well what if what if
we just we re extend the work day again and
sort of you know, reverse all of the gains that

(03:03:27):
have been happening. Well, okay, I say, haven't happening. Reverse
all the gains that happened between about nineteen thirty and
like nineteen seventy and just oh well, what if we
just make everyone for a twelve hour days again? And
that that was, you know, one of those The thing
that would struck me both listening to this and reading
the threat was that it's it's not even just wages.
It's just it's it's it's it's just the fundamental power rebalance.

(03:03:51):
And then it's a fundamental power and balance. It's gotten
so bad that even like you know, the the like
sometimes the remains of the union system, it's like it's
not even you know, the the unions like in this
picture case like this is they're not even it's not
even really helping. It's just creating, like you have a
small labor aristocracy that you have everyone else could getting
just like ground down. In this case, it's that we've
got we've got a small core of people who have

(03:04:12):
been there twenty or thirty years. And and whereas before,
maybe even ten years ago, they might have viewed the
union as a vehicle to help everybody, things have gotten
so bad that now it's just okay, I'm going to
use this system as much as I can to cover
my own ass because things have gotten so damn bad.

(03:04:33):
And obviously, you know, Reagan destroying the unions and stuff
like that help with that. But yeah, it's that I
and I feel like the union in my job could
be very helpful, um, but it would require certain people
in it too, instead of looking out for just their
own interest because hey, I've been here twenty five years,

(03:04:54):
so I'm in the clear. Like, actually, go, okay, maybe
I should you know, sacrifice a little bit of of
that power or that privilege to help the people who
are just hiring in so that we can keep them
so that that this doesn't have to keep happening. Yeah,
And it's you know, this is one of the things
that has made the John Dear strike, that made it

(03:05:17):
so powerful, was these those older workers who I mean
that they had a tiered system, right, So you have
workers hired I think before like ninety seven got a
full pension, and then like after ninety seven was like
a third of that, and then workers hired in the
last couple of years weren't getting any pension at all.
And a big part of the strike is like all
of the workers saying that's not acceptable, um, including the
ones who had a full pension, who had some of

(03:05:38):
a pension, like saying that, like the fact that the
newer people are getting screwed over is an acceptable And
I've heard different reasons for why that happened, because this
is this tactic what you're talking about, and kind of
like what happened to John Deer, it was a common tactic.
You know, It's the thing we talked about in colonialism
all the time. You want to divide the population against
you know, it's each other one way or the other.

(03:05:59):
Give them like making make them feel as if their
interests are not necessarily aligned, you know, so the people
who um. And there's reasons I've heard different reasons for
why John Deere was different, including the idea that like
a lot of these are family jobs, so it was
not people. It was people being like, well, my kid's
not gonna get a pension, and that's bullshit. Um anyway, Yeah,
I just it's it's it's important to talk about like

(03:06:21):
that as a problem and also to highlight different strikes
where that seems to have been overcome by the workers,
like this fact that they were attempted to be played
against each other didn't really work out, and where in
my case it very much is like another another example
being so we'll have people who are are lower on
the seniority list, and like let's say, for example, one

(03:06:43):
weekend we're running lines three and five and not the
other two. The newer people might only know stuff online four.
But if the new people don't get scheduled to do something,
even if they're just being forced to sweep the floor,
the people who have the higher seniority will throw a

(03:07:04):
fit saying, well, they're lower seniority, why aren't they in
here as opposed to well, because they can't run that machine,
and then they don't want to train them to run
that machine. It's it's very they've managed to succeed where
the John Deer capitalists might have failed in making this
all about like all right working. And I don't blame
the people who have the higher seniority on this because

(03:07:27):
if my you know, if if you're working, conditions are
hell and you have the option of okay, well, on
a short term scale, I can screw over this other
person and actually see my family once in a while.
Most people are gonna do it, especially if that person
is somebody who just hired in that you don't know,
we'll scre that guy. And that's where once again, if

(03:07:51):
unions were stronger, if they it was more than what
is it right now, like two three of jobs or
a union job, but unions have been so like just
weakened that this sort of situation is allowed to happen.
I guess you could say, and I think, yeah, that
comes back to it, like the solute. The solution to
the supply chain problem isn't really a solute like it's

(03:08:13):
it's it's not it's not a logistical solution. It's not
even really like a capital gain solution, like a tax solution.
The solution is that, you know, you have to fundamentally
change the balance of power between capital and labor. And
you know, I mean that and that and that that
can be like you know, I think things will get
better if it's if it's more unions, but like things
are going to continue to suck until like the capitalists

(03:08:37):
ceased to exist as a class. Yeah, And I think
that's like that that's because yeah, that's always the and
it's one of those like we get we get critiqued
on the internets sometimes because I think people will will say, like, well,
you know, is your only solution to this. You keep
talking about like mutual aid and anarchism, and like, I
just don't feel like that's a big scale solutions. Like yeah,

(03:09:00):
but the current system isn't going to work very well
on a big scale. Part of what we're always talking
about is like how to how to get your how
to get yourself and your people through the situation, because
that's also important, and it's the same thing with like
a union, right unionizing you and your fellow laborers in
your factory, or or making your union more effective and
more able to like advocate for everyone. That's not going

(03:09:21):
to fix the bigger problem. That's not going to deal
with the the issues that like, that's not going to
stop climate change, that's not going to stop supply line
crunches in a grand scale, it's not going to stop
creeping authoritarianism. But it can make life more bearable for
you and the people around you. And that's that's also
part of like getting by in a crumbling world. Absolutely, yeah,

(03:09:41):
and yep, it's it requires a bit of more foresight,
which I think was one of the other purposes behind
working us as many hours as they do, is when
you're so fucking tired all the time from working what
you're working. You don't have time to stop and say
about the larger implications of things. M hm and yeah,

(03:10:05):
and that's part of what they're going for. Yep. Yeah.
So I don't know anyone else get anything. Well, I
guess just the clear solution of this is that I
need to just stuck up on Bang, right. I just
need to buy But I can because I love Bang.
I I can't stop drinking Bang, I will, are you.

(03:10:26):
I'm scared of how much Bag I drink. I will say.
One of one of the wonderful mutual aid solutions is
if you're very, very nice to the syrup mixing people,
they will be kind to you if you are working
a double and they will give you a shot of
the energy drink syrup before it's been mixed. God, oh boy,

(03:10:47):
you should You should not have told Garrison that a problem.
Garrison's going to quit his job podcasting just to be
able to get just gonna drink shooting up Energy Drink
here on out. That's all I'm doing with my time.
I'm I'm leaving, leaving the call right now, finding the
nearest factory, and my second day on the on the

(03:11:12):
job in the soda manufacturing thing, I had a twenty
four pack of energy drink explode all over me change
of clothes, and that's when I learned that caffeine and
touring can soak through your skin. Oh yes, I mean
basically seeing sound. Okay, So I I've just been looking
up inflatable hot tubs and I feel like if I

(03:11:32):
could order enough pure energy drink syrup in an inflatable
hot tub, I could build basically the equivalent of Baron
Harconan's rejuvenation bath, but with like pure bang syrup. That
is that is That is my plan. Just twelve caffeine
and tori. It's just gonna be we're all gonna quit
our jobs. We're just gonna have the same amount of money.
They get slower over time because we're again spending it

(03:11:55):
all on banks. Obviously, you need you need the inside
person to supply you with the sir up. So we'll
just have sort of an Ocean's eleven situations where you
can guys pull up to the loading dock and with
a tanker and I'm just hooking the truck up. You know,
it's gonna be like Scarface, but we're selling Pierre syrup,
and then Garrison loses his mind and winds up in

(03:12:16):
a machine gun fight in a mansion, and instead of
burying his face into a mountain of cocaine, he's instead
got just a little He's just sticking his hand into
a bowl of syrup to absorb the caffeinated nutrients. When
I's when I p it's just gonna be straight syrup.
Now that is yeah. Anyway, Well that's the episode where

(03:12:41):
if people want to find you a lot, where can
they find you? So I host, along with my husband
and our friend Justin, we host a trans comedy and
pop culture podcast where we also interview interesting people. Um
it's called the Violet Wanderers. So you can find us
on Twitter at violet unders or the Violet Wanders dot

(03:13:02):
com or email the Violet Wanders at gmail dot com.
And that's basically that's my Twitter handle. And I just
slowly got sucked into the Twitter hellscape where yeah that happens.
Originally went on just like oh, I'm gonna just promote
my show, and then I started responding to people and
before you know what, I'm writing twenty tweet rants about
just in time on my stupid gay podcast account. I

(03:13:24):
got into Twitter to converse with a young Justice podcast,
and that's why I created my Twitter accounts. And here
I am now So. I was trying to get a
planet Side to Beta Key and I got it. But
the consequences were I am now here. Yeah, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter,
and it's consequences for your You're this, You're such a child.

(03:13:45):
I remember the first Planet Side Betaday, Chris. It was
an age and dreamed of. Oh, Chris, and you all
are welcome to come on the show anytime. I will.
I will bother you to come on my show sometime. Excellent.
Yeah a good plugs plugs probably, yeah? Yeah, Like I said,
the Violet Wanderers were on Apple, were on Spotify, were

(03:14:09):
on podcast Addict, whatever you know, all your major podcast platforms. Uh.
The tagline of the show is made for no one,
so um expect a lot of queer humor, a lot
of me calling my husband a slut, and us talking
about video games, comic books, movies, and then occasionally just

(03:14:30):
randomly interviewing really interesting people who I harassed in the
coming on the show, like which Robert, I know you
know Daniel Harper from I don't speak Germans. He's been
on a few times. Um, we've had him on and
had some fun talking about Nazis, which themes kind of
you know, counterintuitive, but there's a lot of humor that
can be found in Nazis if you know the right

(03:14:52):
places to look. And yeah, I you know what, I
just watched a German language movie about Hitler that was
made in two thousands, Evan by a Jewish German comedian
that includes I've watched a lot of Hitler movies, you know, periodically,
I just get on Netflix and Hulu type and Hitler
just kind of watch whatever is there. This is the
first time I have seen Hitler fucking in a movie.

(03:15:13):
I've never seen anybody who had the courage to do that.
He is just yeah, he's it's it's uncoming as one
ball just swinging in the land. It is. It is
an uncomfortable scene, but not the most uncomfortable scene in
that particular movie. Um, it's quite a film, that's asn't say,
that's pretty amazing. But yeah, come on, come on sometime

(03:15:33):
we'll play around vin Selmageddon, which is a game that
I've created, and uh, you know, if you guys don't
want to kill yourselves afterwards, then Hey, you survived the game.
As long as I can get some syrup out of
the deal, that's that's all I want. I will, I will,
I will smuggle you some syrup out and mail it
to you. Okay, alright, that's that's gonna do it for
all of us here today, that it could happen here
until next time. I don't know. Go go read, Go

(03:15:57):
read The Dawn of Everything. It's good, it's worth reading.
Check it out. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more
episodes every week from now until the heat death of

(03:16:18):
the Universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of
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(03:16:40):
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(03:17:08):
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(03:17:29):
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(03:17:50):
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