It Could Happen Here Weekly 120

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome, We could happen. Wow, Okay, we're just both doing
the intro all right. I wanted to be the intro.

Speaker 4 (00:33):
I was saying that wokness has won the Super Bowl.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Ah, because okay, okay, hold on, this is my this
is this is my moment. I've got the soapbox, this
is it could happen here. Everyone has the Taylor Swift conspiracy.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Wrong.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Taylor Swift is completely uninvolved in the NFL's conspiracy to
make sure Patrick Mahomes wins every fucking game. All of
these fucking all these fucking bogged chuds or fucking Johnny
come Late doesn't care about football fans. Real fans know
if you look at every fourth quarter of every fucking
Chiefs game before Taylor should have got involved. It looks
exactly the same. All right, this has been it can

(01:08):
happen here. We may or may not cut that.

Speaker 4 (01:09):
I can't believe that the liberal Taylor Swift, Joe Biden's
puppet Taylor Swift and Travis Peiser Kelsey stole the Super
Bowl from the good Christian people of San Francisco, the
only bashtate of conservatism left in this country.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
It is so incredibly funny, Like, okay, so it's so
curtly funny to me, A that they're not mad at
Patrick Mahomes and b that somehow okay, the Chiefs, Like,
imagine you're a Chiefs fan, right, you have been for
like thirty years racist, you have been doing a cult

(01:49):
and I quote the Tomahawk chop, like you are the
most racist person in your entire small town. And then
all of these fucking dipshits online, all these fucking right
dipshits immediately and like all of you guys are like
fucking pussy woke libs. And it's just like, like, imagine
being that racist for that long only to be immediately
tossed aside.

Speaker 4 (02:10):
It is kind of baffling that in like the country's
national divorce overwokeness. Somehow the Liberals get to keep football
like this is that's so bizarre that that now football
is seen as like a liberal cuck thing to enjoy
among the largest swaths of of Republicans, at least at

(02:31):
least online Republicans.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
It's really funny, fascinating. This is how we're going to
beat them in the fucking civil war because we're going
to take the college campuses, which means that we're going
to have the only watchable footballs. These bastards are going
to be reduced to watching fucking high school games. Like speaking,
speaking of watching football. Yeah, so the thing this episode
is actually about is if you watch the Super Bowl

(02:54):
or like, God help you, you've tried to use YouTube
without an ad blocker, a thing I do not recommend
at all. You have seen ads for Temu with it's
TMU or Temu Temu. Okay, yeah, it has the absolute
the absolutely oh good god, yeah, this this app This

(03:20):
one This one's bad, folks, This one's I I went
insane and have been spiraling for like two weeks now
writing this, so you know. So it has the absolutely
dog shit tagline shop like a billionaire.

Speaker 4 (03:34):
Wait, that's its tagline. Yeah, oh that's weird.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
It's funny. The everything is they only have one ad, righty,
it's not just super Bowl like it's It's been on
YouTube for like ages. But yeah, so this begs the
obvious question, what on earth is this thing? And the
answer is that Temu is the American version of a
Chinese shopping app called pindu. You will hear people pronouncing

(04:02):
it pin duo duo. That's because they're hacks and frauds.
So but I'm just gonna call it so. The company,
the parent company for both Temu and Pindua Doua, changed
their name to PDD, so I'm just gonna call it
that two. So yeah, PDD is China's worst tech giant.
They have worked multiple of their employees to death. They

(04:23):
probably also use slave labor. Those are unrelated stories. So today,
welcome to the abyss. This is the story of Tamu.
I have stared into it, and now you motherfuckers are
coming with me and staring into it some more.

Speaker 4 (04:36):
Well, it's more like we're listening into it because it
doesn't really have.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
A visual No, no, you're staring into it. Okay, you
you will get visuals. I will say to this bullshit,
I will I will start hallucinating in my office. Yeah.
So Timuo is the American version of PDD. PDD it
roughly translates two together more savings together, so it's like

(05:03):
a co op. Actually, it probably sells stuff from co ops. Okay, huh.
So PDD is the second largest shopping app in China
behind Ali Baba. Alibaba is China's like version of Amazon. Basically,
they're the second largest app. Ali Baba reportedly has eight

(05:27):
hundred and sixty sixty three million users per year. That's
a lot of users. Yeah, that's that's multiple us is.
PDD has been claiming that they have seven hundred and
forty million monthly users. It's unclear if that's exactly true,
but it's probably around there, which again, that is twice
the entire population of the US. So this is a

(05:49):
fucking unbelievably massive company. And to understand what this what
this company is, and how it became probably the worst
of the Chinese tech giants, we have to go back
to the very beginning. And the very beginning is this
guy named Colin Huang. Huang is a weird guy. I
don't know he's he's he's the Chinese version of the

(06:11):
American tech bro. So he's you know, he's he's a
recognizable like asshole who started a giant company, but he's
not exactly the same. So he So he graduates from
like college in China, and in the early two thousands
he goes to the University of Wisconsin to get a
master's degree in computer science, which it like it should

(06:33):
be illegal for anyone to get degrees in computer science.
Terrible stuff, zero out of time. I should know how
to use computers.

Speaker 4 (06:40):
I can't believe you'd be believe in the status legal
system to prevent people from learning.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Fin social sanctions. We're going to make it morally illegal.
You're going to get chased out by people with the
rocks on the street if you try to type something
they get to a computer. So okay. So he's at
the University of Wisconsin, and while he's there, he basically
like posts his way into becoming the pro basically the
protegee of Chinese tech billionaire Duan Youngping. This is an

(07:07):
interesting relationship. Duan is like a very very influential Chinese
tech tech billionaire. He gets every single article calls him
the Warren Buffett of China. I I don't fucking know,
but like you know, for like for examples, like how
big this guy is like Vivo and like the one
plus company the mixed phones, those are both like spin
offs of like things that he built. But yeah, so

(07:29):
you know, so this is this is an interesting relationship
for Huang because and it's also interesting because like the
narrative around Huang and PDDs that they're like these like
hungry upstarts, like clunging their way up from nothing, and
they can like go after Ali Baba and the Chinese
like tech market wars because they're like they're ferocious, they
have like nothing to lose, and like they're rich and
fat Ali Baba and like nah, like this guy has

(07:52):
had the backing of like a bunch of really powerful
Chinese tech guys, like from the absolute beginning. Another part
of like the Huang lore is that Dwan like took
him to this really famous dinner where Warren Buffett was
offering if if you donated like six hundred and twenty
thousand dollars a charity, he would like eat dinner with
you and like talk with you about like finance stuff.

(08:17):
And so Dwan like buys this thing to go to
dinner with Warren Buffett and brings Huang with him, and
he Huang, Who's Who's Huang's the founder of PD again,
so he gives him credit for like this, this like
financial wisdom that he got here. Here's just from an
interview with side Jim. This is a Chinese outlet. What

(08:41):
Buffett said is actually very simple and can be understood
by my mother. Perhaps what this meal meant most to
me was that I realized the power of simplicity and
common sense. Human thoughts are easily polluted. When you make
a judgment on something, you need to understand the backgrounds
and facts. After understanding it, what you need is wisdom,
but whether you have the courage to use reason when

(09:02):
facing facts use common sense to judge. Common sense is
obvious and easy to understand. But our various biases and
personal interests form due to growth and learning blind us.
So this is like entrepreneurial bullshit. But you know this
is apparently this is like a big formative like thing.
Like ah, he like got the wisdom of word Buffett,
and he listened to it. It's just like what there's

(09:27):
the thing I think is more interesting is that he
talks about what in the same interview what Dwan taught him.
Dwan also taught me a common sense thing in business.
Price fluctuates around value. The price will definitely fluctuate, but
as long as your value increases, the final price will
be close to the value. This common sense allows you
to focus on increasing the intrinsic value of the company

(09:47):
and not be overly concerned about price fluctuations in the
capital market. And this, to me is fascinating because the
first half of that is like orthodox Marxist price theory,
like in like in Marxist price theory, right, the whole
thing about it is that price is determined by value.
The value of a commodity is determined by like the
number the amount of labor hour is socially necessary to

(10:09):
produce it, and eventually, like price, sort of like fluctuation,
the price can change. It's not price isn't like identical
to like socially necessarily like labor time, but it like
fluctuates abround it. And so that's like the first part
of it, which is the Marxist thing, except this is
like China, like modern like twenty twenties China. So Marxist
value theory has been degraded to like, make your company

(10:32):
valuable and don't worry about stock prices and market fluctuations.
It'll work out in the end.

Speaker 4 (10:37):
So true, so true, based based.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
I mean, the funny thing is this is actually better,
like you get the advice than like most of the
shit that like American CEOs use. But it's also, oh god,
what has happened to my poor value theory, my beloved,
my beloved theory of how capitalism works has been turned

(11:02):
into this weird tech bullshit, a tragedy. So meanwhile, back
in two thousand and four, Dwan convinces Hwang to turn
down a bunch of these jobs. So he's he's like
a computer science graduate, right, and he's being headhunted by
like a bunch of the sort of like mainstream tech
companies at the times, like Oracle, Microsoft, and they're giving

(11:23):
they want to give him like an enormous amount of money,
but his mentors like, no, no, no, don't take this
tech job, take the Silicon Valley tech job. Join Google.
And so he joins Google. And this is this is
another like very famous things like ah, he wanted to
join the like up and coming hungry tech startup. But
here's the thing, so Google. He joins Google in two
thousand and four, which is kind of early, but Google

(11:45):
also goes public that year, so you know, this is
up working really well for him because he gets a
bunch of stock options that those stock options are worth
millions of dollars. That's a lot of Also, some of
the startup capital for like the later companies he founds
comes from that. And Huang really quickly like works his
way up the ranks. But he so he gets put

(12:07):
in charge of like launching Google in China, and this
is a fiasco, does not work at all. Huang blames
like too much oversight from people at the senior leadership
at Google, which I can get, but I mean it
just doesn't work at all. Like he starts as at
two thousand and six. By twenty ten, Google has pulled
out of China entirely, like they're not they're not trying
to push the fucking search edge because nobody uses it.

(12:30):
So okayv having having like unbelievably bombed out of his
first tech job, he he he does the like entrepreneur thing.
He's he starts like a couple of these like shopping
like online shopping companies they do like fine, and he
sells them, but they don't like do incredible and so okay.

(12:51):
So this is the part that a lot of the
accounts of him leave out, like the sort of like
fawning accounts leave out. Is the next thing that he does,
which is he sets up this like really shit game
studio and they make like a bunch of like absolutely
unbelievably weird and horny mobile games. So they make like
Mafia City, Joy Spade, Texas, Hold'm Poker. They had this

(13:13):
game called Girl ex Battle that is like you assemble
a harem of girlfriends and then have them fight other people.
Instead of like absolutely have you played any of these
Oh no, absolutely not. I refuse. I think I've actually
seen Mafia City ads before, but it's like, like it's
the absolute most dogshit like bargain basement. I guess they're

(13:37):
kind of pre gotcha games.

Speaker 4 (13:38):
I was just wondering how far your dedication to research
went here, but.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
Not far enough. Look, here's the thing, my dedication of
research went exactly far enough that I refuse to install
any of these apps for reasons that we'll get into
next episode. I was like, absolutely not. In fact, this.
Doing this research actually caused me to uninstall chaw Bus,
which is like a Chinese food delivery app, because I
realized that it was constantly running in the background to

(14:03):
like to drive up. It's like user engagement metrics.

Speaker 4 (14:06):
That is completely fair, although if you were even more dedicated,
you could have bought a burner phone to download all
these apps onto and tested on that.

Speaker 3 (14:13):
So that's true, but I no, I refuse to let
that shit connect to my internet. Like, under no circumstances.

Speaker 4 (14:24):
You can go to a Starbucks, you can go to
a see I've just thrown out options here.

Speaker 3 (14:29):
I probably could have done this, but no, absolutely not. Actually, well,
it's actually really hard to download the Chinese version of
this for reasons that we'll get into the next episode.
All right, all right, but okay, So, like he's running
this shitty game company and he has a genuinely brilliant
and terrible insight, which is that she sees how addictive

(14:52):
like mobile gaming and how addictive like micro transactions are,
and he goes, oh shit, what if I put this
in a sh popping gap except that because that's the
reasonable way to explain it. But like, the thing he
actually did was like why are okay? His thought his
actual thought process was why are we not selling game
games are all like advertised in men, right, Like these
the apps that he's making are like weird, horny stuff

(15:15):
for guys. Why are we not making games of women?
Which is reasonable, But then his follow up was, uh,
effectively women be shopping, and he was like, so trying,
and we'll make a shopping thing. It's just like we'll
make we'll make we'll make an app to make shopping
into a game, and so and one of the things
he's he's also been doing one of the like the

(15:36):
kind of like search engine optimization scams, where like he
just keeps making different shopping like shopping websites and hoping
that one of them will like climb in the search rankings.
But eventually he hits on a like a combination of
using the like dog shit like addictive mobile gamification stuff
from his mobile games in a like in an online

(15:57):
shopping app, and he hits on that as the idea
for a new shopping app. And this is what turns
into PDD. Now do you know what didn't turn into
PDD and is in fact better?

Speaker 4 (16:09):
Hopefully these ads that are not for Temo we better
not get a fucking temo ade.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
Hopefully, I it's actually possible. It's oh god, well, careful
what you wish for, and we're back. So PDD doesn't

(16:38):
start in the way that normal tech app things do,
which is to say that PDD starts as an online
fruit vendor. Now, okay, if you know anything like.

Speaker 4 (16:49):
A like a farmer's market online like what what?

Speaker 3 (16:52):
Yeah? Okay, So if you know anything about how like
Amazon worked, right, So Amazon goes from books to a
bunch of stuff to food. PDD does this backwards. They
start in food. Now, this is very weird. And the
reason this works, and the reason that PDD starts as

(17:13):
a marketplace for rural farmers to self roofs and vegetables
like directly to consumers is because unfortunately of the structure
of the Chinese agricultural market, which we have to talk
about a little bit. So something I talked about. God,
I don't know how many years ago this was now,
but like a while back I did an episode about
this company that poisons like three hundred thousand babies by
making poisoned milk in China. And one of the things

(17:36):
though that was a Bassard's episode one of the things
I talked about in that episode was how the Chinese
agricultural market is incredibly fragmented. We don't have time to
do a full history of rural decollectivization here, but the
upshot of it is that it results in a lot
of farmers working really small plots of land who are

(17:56):
forced to sell their goods to a series of middlemen
who make the actual profits. And because these farmers have
like a tiny amount of land and grow stuff on
or they have like two cows, right, they don't have
the financial leverage to negotiate with like the middleman, the
middle bank can just set prices on them. And and
the product of this is you have a really really
fragmented market where there's just like all of these like

(18:18):
unbelievably large numbers of these really small sellers, and part
of and you know, and this and this, this locks
all of these people into the middlemen. The middle man
can set the prices. The middlemen set the prices incredibly low,
and they're locked in because they don't have another distribution
method because the only thing they can do is sell
to these like agricultural midleman companies. The companies like above them,
like your grocery companies are like actual milk company who

(18:40):
packages the milk. They love this stuff because it means
that they don't have to like pay the farmers. They
can just buy like the goods directly. They don't have
to deal with like employment stuff, and they don't have
to deal with quality control too because they can pass
that on to the middlemen. Now, something else we talked
about in our anti work Lying Flat episodes like three
years ago, is that China has these like far like

(19:03):
rural influencers. That was it was like a huge wave
of these people that sort of like image you might
actually have seen you've seen the videos of just like
someone in rural China like cutting wood or something. Oh yeah,
totally totally. Yeah. So those those things, we were like, Okay,
the US catches up the stuff on the Chinese internet

(19:24):
like usually several years after like happened there, and that
makes sense. Yeah. And the next thing in line after
the original sort of ural influencer waves was these like
was this wave of like farmer influencers and these people
they're using like a different Chinese like it's like another
it's like another tich Dot clone basically, and they're doing
the thing that they're doing is okay. So you you know,

(19:47):
you have your regular influencer who's trying to sell you
like the image of rural life, right, and then you
have the farmer influencers who are trying to sell you
the image of rural life and also their potatoes. And
this is this is like the marketing strategy. This is
this is how you can skip the middlemen and like
actually sell your fruit is by becoming an influencer. Which
it's so cursed. It's so cursed. I hate it so much.

Speaker 4 (20:11):
That is kind of dystopian. It's just the constant, the
constant performance.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
Yeah. But the problem is that the alternative to it
is even worse because PDD realizes this and that they're
looking at these markets and they're like, hold on, these
farmers are already selling their goods for like next to nothing.
If we come in, pay them a bit better, use
our text or like our tech money to our text
startup money. They have an enormous amount of tex startup money.
If we use that text startup money to give them rebates,

(20:39):
we can do things that like you know, we can
not charge them commission, right, And if we can do this,
we can turn around and sell these fruits for like
zero dollars. Zero dollars is slight exaggeration, but when I like,
they're selling these fruits for an are unbelievably cheap, Like
we are talking ten mangos for a dollar and thirty
nine cents, which is like a steal, outrageous, right, And

(21:04):
you know this is this is incredibly successful. What they're
doing basically is a giant version of the Amazon gambit. Right,
they're eating shit and taking losses to sell all of
this stuff, although they're losing less money than you'd think,
Like the actual price of these goods is already so low,
and we're gonna come back to that too, because that's
an aspect of what's so messed up about this whole thing.
But you know, so they eat shit that takes some losses,

(21:26):
but they really really quickly build market share. So this
is a very very short smart strategy because it's not
just in the sort of real market. China has a
shit ton of like small and medium sized producers that
make a whole bunch of things, or like guy with
one factory person doing like craft production stuff. And PD's

(21:47):
plan is to pull together all of these sellers like this,
this whole all all of these people from different markets
into just one giant, like one giant like market that
they control now importantly, unlike Amazon, and this is like
ali Baba too, because Ali Baba works on a fairly
similar model to well, okay, in a lot of ways,
is a similar model to Amazon. It's not identical. But

(22:10):
unlike those two companies, PDD doesn't run their own logistics network.
It's all it's all third party. Like the shipping and
all that shit is done by is done through third
party logistics stuff. So like their shipping companies, they don't
own warehouses like that stuff, you know, what they're what
they do instead is they use the shipping companies and
warehouses that were developed in like the earlier parts of

(22:32):
the Chinese tech boom, and they're able to just use
that infrastructure to you know, to to ship all their
stuff around. And this means that the company is extremely
lean in the sense that like they don't have a
lot of physical assets like they know, and this means
they don't have to deal with labor costs or like
the logistics problems of actually having to like you know,
of actually having employees packing boxes and making things they're

(22:55):
just an app. It's it's it's well, they're they're like
the original model of Uber in some sense, right where
like you don't like Uber doesn't fucking own or wasn't
supposed to be owning cars. I mean, I guess Uber's
a bad example because they were trying to do the
automated car thing, but that was a fiasco. But you know,
the thing that PDD makes is just an app, but

(23:15):
it's it's an incredibly addictive app, like it's it's it's
a shopping gotcha game, which is like maybe the worst
sentence in the history of the human language.

Speaker 4 (23:26):
And this was like this was around the time, like
I want to say, like tennish years ago, give or
take a few years, where like micro transactions were becoming massive,
like all, like it took over gaming, It took over
so many parts of just being online, It took over apps,
like it just it just infected everything, and we luckily

(23:47):
kind of pushed back on some some of that. We're
still not all of it, but like there was definitely
some some degree of like, oh well, we are simply
not going to be buying all of these games if
it's just full of like micro transaction bullshit, and then
Fortnite took over and we're back and well again.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
But whatever. Actually, it's it's pretty funny. China kind of recently,
the Chinese government like did a crackdown on like loop
boxes and stuff because they were some of some of
the some of the regulations they put in place a nuts,
but some of it was like you can't sell loop
you can't sell gambling the children. Yeah, and this caused
like it's funny because they're kind of walking it back
now because it hurt their gaming market so much. They're like, well, shit, okay,

(24:27):
we have to we need those kids. Yeah, like that's
the only way to make money. Yeah, but you know,
but but PDDs like brilliant. They're sort of like the
the the absolutely evil shit that they realized is like
we can just we can just do this for shopping.
And so like the moment you log in, right, there's
like these flash deals and there's these group deals and
this is the thing that the group deals are the

(24:49):
thing that that PDD is based around. So the way
it works is you get these group deals and so
you get a link and you send it to people,
and the more people click on the link to buy
the thing, the cheaper it becomes. So, and then you
send the links over we Chat, which is the curve
of like catch all Chinese messenger or like social media
app that everyone uses to like talk to their boomer parents.

(25:10):
And so the thing that your boomer parents are doing
is they're sending these shopping links to each other. And
you know, and the the more like the more people
click on these links, the cheaper the good becomes. So
what was the more people are buying it, the more
people you rope into buying stuff from this app, the
cheaper it is, and the more deals you get, you
get things like they'll just like give you like quote
unquote free money if you spend enough money in like

(25:34):
basically like in the same way that like micro transaction
works right where it's like, you know, in a game,
it's like if you play the x number of games,
will give you like in game currency, whereas this is
just like will literally give you money, you'll like send
things to you. God, that sounds like hell, it's awful.
It's so bad, and very importantly right, it's this giant
loop that it not only gets people to spend money,

(25:55):
but it gets people to bring their friends in because
you have to bring your friends in to get the
group deals, so everything gets cheap and cheaper, and the
tactics they use are absolutely wild. They get in trouble
in twenty twenty one for this promotion called Bargain for
Free Goods, where you'd get a link and the claim
was that if enough people clicked it, you would get
the good for free. And so this guy tried to
do it, but he couldn't. He can only get it

(26:17):
two point nine percent of the cost. So we sued
them for false advertising and the claim got thrown out,
but the company had to pay him like money, so
like this is the kind of shit that they're doing.
WeChat actually like blocked their links for a while because,
you know, cause like some enormous portion of messages suddenly

(26:38):
we're just like these people sending these spam links to
like every single person they know, trying to get them
to buy like a fucking toothbrush so that your toothbrushes
can be cheaper. Right. But eventually we Chat kind of like,
you know, we Chat gives up and they start like
allying more with PDD. I mean, there's a whole there's

(26:58):
a whole complicated story. I'm not gonna get to hear
about like the like China's really really ferocious like tech
company wars because like in the US, you know, like
our tech monopolies are relatively stable, right, Like they've sort
of portioned up the Internet into or and like distribution
and stuff into just like basically like local monopolies, right,
Like like Google is like the only search engine company.

(27:20):
There's there's basically no competition there, right, Like there's some
competition in terms of social media, but even then it's
like and it's not like the Chinese version words like
unbelievably ferocious competition and sometimes they cooperate, but yeah, you know,
it's it's really fierce. And PDDs. You know the thing
that they do, right is they pair this app stuff

(27:41):
with direct to consumer sales, and PDT is really the
pioneers of this. She In and okay, so I I
she In is that fucking fast fashioned clothing company. I
learned today that it is actually pronounced she In because
the name of the thing is she In, like sa

(28:02):
she she and then she's like she's in. Yeah, I
hate it so much. I'm so sad. I I mean
I feel slightly better because like I kept trying to
read it in Chinese. It's like this doesn't make any sense,
Like it's just bafflely it doesn't and it's like, oh no,
it's because it's in English. Yeah, But BDD is the

(28:24):
precursor of Shean's like strategy, right, like they're they're the
originators of this, except they're you know, they're what they're
doing basically, it's it's a fact. It's kind of like
drop shipping, but you know, the sales are being pushed
by these these sort of gamified app stuff, and this
means they have this like real time supply management system
that tells producers like like they can like they go

(28:46):
down and like tell their sellers like what to produce
more of based on like app sales. So you know,
like the way it works is you start off with
a small it's like a small number of things, and
then you get ads to push that those like fucking
toothbrushes or whatever. And then as like sales wramp up,
you ramp up productions. You can ship people more toothbrushes.

(29:07):
Now do you know who else will ship you toothbrushes
that will probably be better quality than the PDD tooth pressure?

Speaker 4 (29:13):
No, we can we can guarantee all of our sponsors
have only the top quality toothbrushes. That is, that is
what we call the cool Zone guarantee. Go do toothbrush
dot com and put in the keyword MIA for a
ten percent off on your TOLF of the lines.

Speaker 3 (29:28):
Please don't do this, So all right, D and D
just it takes rural China by storm. Sure it sounds convenient,

(29:50):
like yeah for some panil and it's really really cheap,
is the thing, right, And the thing about rural China
is you're dealing with a level of poverty that like
is like almost like it's not unimaginable in the US,
but it's like unbelievable, Like it's something that like like

(30:15):
we don't really have it in the same way because okay,
so like an example of the kind of stuff we're
dealing with, right, Like, so, China's GDP per capita in
like the sixties was lower than hades. Right, this is
an unbelievably poor country. And there are there are places
in real China that are still like basically not quite

(30:36):
that poor, but are like unbelievably poor in ways that like,
you know, we're talking about people who are like people
who are doing kind of well in these regions, are
making seven hundred dollars a month. Like that's like on
a good month, right, they're making seven hundred dollars a month,
which is that's eight four hundred dollars a year. And

(30:57):
that's that's that's if you have twelve good months, right,
if you have normal months, it's more like six thousand
dollars a year. And so you know, and when when
when you're in a place where people are using stuff
like this, and again that's someone who like has a
job full time is making like six thousand dollars a year,
and so people use PDD to shop because it's incredibly

(31:19):
cheap and it's also addictive. And when I say cheap,
like we're talking like two dollars for a pair of
jeenes cheap, right, And like that's that's also like cheap
and you on too. It's like unbelievably low prices.

Speaker 4 (31:31):
I mean this, this kind of this kind of reminds
me a little bit of that recent Tucker Carlson. Russia
is great actually media stunt. Oh yeah, look, all of
these groceries only cost one hundred dollars in American currency,
and it's like Yeah, because they're getting paid like two
hundred dollars like a week, like they're not they're not
taking home very much money, so all of the costs

(31:55):
like slide very differently, Like you can't just compare this
one to one.

Speaker 3 (31:58):
Yeah. Also, the thing I will say about PDD is
that their prices are unbelievably low by Chinese standards, like
this is this is also why they look so low
by American standards too, is that these are these are
low by Chinese standards, and because they're so low by
Chinese standards, like people, people buy stuff from it. The
cost of this is that the stuff they're selling is

(32:19):
really cheap. I mean, the other cost is the unbelievable
exploitation of the Chinese working class. But you know, we'll
get to that. We'll get to that next episode. The
main cost of the stuff being cheap is that the
stuff they buy like sucks ass like literally literally this
only the CEO talks about is that their gambit is that, Okay,
we'll ship you ten mangos for for like a dollar

(32:39):
thirty nine. Two of them will be rotten, but that
means you still get eight mangos. That we're still unbelievable,
Like that's the thing, and like, you know, the stuff
that they get like sucks. Here's from the Chinese media
outlet sixth Tone, which has done a lot of good
coverage of PDD. They they used to be better. They're
like the kind of like left like stay media outlet.

(33:02):
They used to be better, and then their staff got
run out because they they went they walked too close
to the line. So but here's here, here's what here's
they've done a lot of they because the most of
the PDD coverage came from before their people got run out.
So quote. Following the I p O, a number of
purchase Series A purchases allegedly bought from PDD we're shared online,

(33:23):
including a hair dryer that broke out in flames after
it was switched on, a power bake. Hey, that also
happens in America. Don't worry.

Speaker 4 (33:34):
I know you're like, I know you're like, oh, I'm
missing out on all these great deals, all these great products.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
Not true. This could also happen in the States.

Speaker 5 (33:41):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
There's another one where they had a power bank and
someone ordered it and they came and it was just
four triple A batteries and a container.

Speaker 4 (33:50):
That's funny. That's good, that's a good bit. That's yeah,
that's pretty good.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
You know, there's stuff like like one of one like
sixth time was interviewing people in real areas you bost off.
They were like, yeah, I brought it. I bought a
fishing rod for like two bucks and it was broken.
I bought a pair of shoes and it literally fell
apart after three days. Sot me.

Speaker 4 (34:09):
I have complicated feelings on this because I think there
is a place for gambling in purchases. If if, for example,
on Amazon, if every fourth product you bought there was
a completely like defective, like purposely like lower quality version,
I think that would be a good for the world.

(34:30):
We would have probably we would have less people using Amazon,
and you would kind of get slightly punished. So I
think this actually could be a good thing if used correctly,
where we where we purposely sabotage every like fourth person
who buys anything online.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
But the problem is that people fucking love gambling like that.
That's that's just gonna make people do more because now
there's more of a downside if we're trying to get
your fucking deal. So I mean, and this is the thing, right,
Like you're rolling the dice every time every time you
take a you.

Speaker 4 (35:02):
Order like an election generator online and they send you
a double a. Oh my god, it'd be so funny funny.

Speaker 3 (35:09):
Well, I mean, now, hey, you too can now shop
on Temu. You too could experience getting shipped just fucking bullshit.

Speaker 4 (35:17):
You order some nice Hawaiian coffee and they send you
some like camameo. Oh god, devastating.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
So this this whole thing of you buy stuff that
sucks or doesn't work. And the fact that PDD starts
in rural China means that, like initially there's this like
real class element about how who uses PDD. It's seen
as like the site for poor and gullible people who
don't care about quality. Yeah, it's like it's the place
where lower class people shop. Yeah sure, yeah, And well

(35:45):
that stops being true kind of because everyone starts using it.
But Comma, the other problem they have is that it
is absolutely rife with kind of fit products. Right after
they go public in twenty eighteen, there's like a Chinese
state investigation into the sale of their kind of fit product,
and pdd's response is like, Wow, we're just a marketplace,
anyone can sell on it. How are we supposed to

(36:05):
control who makes counterfeit stuff? But this is this is
actually like it gets to a kind of like cultural
thing where you know, what is one of the things
that happens in world trying. This happens in a lot
of places where like almost everyone is wearing like clothes
that are like knockoff brand stuff because it's just the
cheapest clothes and like that's that's the kind of clothes
that's being made that you can afford if you're you know,

(36:28):
like you're you're you're you're trying to sort of make
it like in World China, so you get like, you know,
you have like entire villages where you walk in and
everyone's wearing like like niaky and like a dietis or
something like it's like nice. This stuff gets really wild,
really fast. So here's from that that Sedging interview with

(36:50):
Colin Huang again. So here's here's a catching it. It's
a Chinese media outlet, so they're their interviewer. One of
the best selling products on PDD is a bottle of
Affidas priced at twenty seven point eighty on that is
like three almost four dollars with a total of four
point seven million orders sold. Do you think this medicine

(37:12):
might be real? Here's the CEO. First, of all, medicines
are healthcare products sold on pdd's platform must have national
certification marks. Secondly, the gross profit margin of healthcare products
is already extremely high, just like facial mass. Do you
think the two hundred yond facial max is useful? So again, again,

(37:36):
what is happening here is that like they have sold
like one point four point seven million orders of of
like a fake aphrodisiac. And when the CEO is asked
about his response, it's like, well, but who could really
say if any health products work?

Speaker 4 (37:53):
Like, wow, that is a pretty funny bit. I mean,
it sucks that people, the poor people are losing money, but.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
Well, to be fair, be fair, pretty fine if you
are trying to like buy an afrodisiac, I don't really care. Sure,
sure yeah, but like you know, so part of it,
like they're selling like fake hack medicines. This is like
the Chinese version of the American like grift, like right
wing grift like supplement market.

Speaker 4 (38:18):
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's the brain pills to help your
libido or whatever.

Speaker 3 (38:22):
Yeah, but this also gets a lot darker. One of
the there's one of the stories that kind of like
made the rounds of Chinese social media that six Tone
reports on is that people found PDD like advertising like
sleep medicine as date rape drugs. Ah yeah, fucking bleak.

(38:43):
There's like fuck and that's the thing. There's like no
fucking content moderation on this, right, so people just do
that shit and it really sucks. But on their hand,
none of the constant bad press like stop pdd's rise, right,
and now it is time to leave Colin Huang soil.
Until about phil twenty twenty, pdd's rise was synonymous with

(39:05):
its CEO, Colin Huang, But in mid twenty twenty, Huang
resigned as the CEO and kind of like exited public
life effectively, like not entirely. We kind of like he
like took he like he resigned a CEO, and then
twenty twenty one he resigns as like a chairman of
the board and he's like, you know, he's doing this
like philanthropic stuff instead, and he's you know, he's doing
his like post CEO life thing, right, And we've never

(39:29):
gotten a good answer as to why he stepped down,
but I have a theory, and I think my theory's
pretty good. And also it goes into have I, Garrison,
have I explained to you the thing about I don't
remember if I've done it? On this show talked about
the Chinese paid a loan app thing, M I don't think.

(39:50):
So okay, So all right, we are now going to
do We're gonna close this episode out on one of
the most absolutely insane moments of Chinese internet history. So okay.
One of the things that happens in the Chinese tech
market in the late twenty tens and early twenty twenties
is this mass proliferation of app based payda loans. This

(40:11):
is one of the worst things I have ever seen.
What effectively happens is that around like twenty fourteen twenty fifteen,
a bunch of Chinese tech companies, especially like delivery companies
like sort of like China's version of grub, Public, Door,
Dash and Ali Baba, They're like Amazon equivalent, gets in
it too, and these people realize that they can start
their own payment platforms. So basically like all these companies

(40:32):
are making their own version of PayPal. But then they
realize that they can use these platforms to give out
Payda loans so that you can in one app take
out a payday loan to order delivery, or you can
in one app take out a payday loan to buyshit
from Amazon. With the payday loan, ten Cent gets in

(40:52):
on it, so you can buy Mitro transactions with your
payday loans. This, as you might expect, Spiral's out of
control immediate lee on the interest race on these loans
are enormous, and this means that they make an unbelievable
amount of money. And so apps just start like shoveling
these loans in people's faces the momently long onto apps.
But the thing is like this doesn't stop with just

(41:14):
like the big shopping apps right by twenty nineteen. It's
not just you know, like when I say this is
going to apps right like you're fucking Like imagine if
Twitter was trying to offer you bad A loans, like
that's the main point of Oh that that might happen,
but that might actually maybe based on the plans for

(41:35):
the Twitter to become the banking app. Yeah, well that's
actually the funny thing. So so Elon Musk really really
likes China and part of the reason for this is
that you know, a bunch of Tesla factories are in
shing John part of the reason for this, like he's
trying to like recreate the like weed chat environments, but
everyone doesn't, right, Like people don't actually like it. But

(41:56):
the thing is, the other thing that he really loves
is the number of hours that you can get people
to work in China that you can't really in the US.
So we'll get to that fucking next episode. But you know, okay,
so like like your your fucking Twitter is trying to
sell you paid a apps, But then it gets the
point where your fucking flashlight app is trying to sell
you trying to get you to take out payday loans,

(42:17):
like your like photo app, like every fucking app on
your phone is trying to sell you pay loans. That
sounds incredibly annoying. This is and this is one of
these things right that like, okay, like as bad as
like American apps are, right, like as bad as like
the version of capitalism that we have in the American
app ecosystem, Like the wildest shit is always going on

(42:40):
in the Chinese tech market, which is like even more
insane than the American tech market, and this is the thing,
like we don't actually have this here, and I've been
trying to figure out why it never happened here. I
think it has to do it partially with banking regulation
and partially with like the fact that like the actual
American payd a loan companies don't want other companies to
like cut in on their business. Yes, so I think

(43:02):
that's what's happening. But like in China, it's literally like
and this is happening in like like like twenty nineteen,
twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, that this stuff is happening,
so you know, and it's in all and this this
gets I mean, it turns into just a fucking nightmare
because you know, obviously, like this turns into this giant
wave of people who got it in over their heads
and can't pay their loans back because they took out

(43:23):
a payday loan with thirty percent interest. And also, and
this is one of the fun things, companies just straight
up lie about their interest rates. Like there's a lot
of examples of companies saying we have a nine percent
interest rate, and then you know, in the contract it
says nine percent interest rate. And then when they try
to get you to pay it back. It's like thirty percent, right,
Like this is like you know, and so sometimes they're
they're even they're you know, you're getting up to like

(43:43):
one hundred tw hundred percent interest like these like organized
crime levels of interest. And you know, like Alli like
the tech giants are all into it. Ali Baba isn't
quite as big into it as like some of the
other companies, but like they're doing it, like they absolutely
are doing the payd a loan shit. And I mentioned
Alibaba here because in late twenty twenty, Jack Ma who's

(44:03):
the founder of Alli Baba, just like disappears. He's just
gone for like several months, no nobody knows where he is,
and then he reappears in like twenty twenty one, but
he's not doing tech ceo stuff anymore. He's doing like
weird public education tours in like rural China. And this
causes like a huge, a huge like kind of thing

(44:27):
in the American press because what they're reading it as,
and they're kind of right, is that there's this in
twenty twenty one, there's this enormous raft of financial regulations
on tech companies, and this gus interpreted is like a
crackdown on chech companies. Like the CCP is trying to
bring the tech giants in line, like they disappear jack
Ma and you know, one of the and this is

(44:49):
something something that a story that gets lost in this
in the American press is that like one of the
big things they're trying to do is stop is stop
all of these fucking companies. I'm turning their apps to
the pede alone factories. And you know, like I'm I'm
not like a CCP fan, Like it is well known,
Like it's like my dislike of the CCP is so

(45:12):
large that like a non insignificant number of people in
the US think I work for the CIA, right, But
like this is like those fucking tech companies they were
like they were like like on the edge of completely
annihilating the Chinese economy. They were very they got very
very close to just like reducing like enormous swaths of

(45:33):
the entire Chinese population and to like peer at based
debt pionage. It was a fucking disaster. And this is
part this is a big part of why this like
tech crackdown came in because the CCP was like, holy shit,
if you guys do this like you're actually going to
like like you're you're gonna You're gonna fucking nuke the
Chinese economy, like we cannot allow every single fucking app

(45:53):
to be a paid a loan like service and things.
I mean, it's still not great now, but it things
have gotten a lot less bad in the in the
payday loan like thing since then. But you know, again
like it it it had to get bad enough that
your flashlight, we're trying to get your take out of
payday loan for the CCP to actually like go after
their like tech giant darlings. And I think what happened

(46:17):
is that I think what happened is that Colin Huang
like saw which way the wind was blowing, and she
was like, Okay, there's gonna be a giant crackdown now
now two wits credit. This is the only time I
will give PDD credit for anything. PDD actually didn't do
the payday loan shit. I think because Colin Huang was

(46:39):
just slight was like smart enough to be like, this
is a fucking terrible idea, Like if we try to
get our like rural customer base hooked on pay day loans,
all these people are gonna just be completely broke in
like nine months. So PDD doesn't do it, but she
takes this moment like he picks twenty like July twenty
twenty eight, which is like a couple months before Jack

(47:01):
Modest spears, and he just fucking nopes and he's like
I'm out and yeah, like things, you know, and he
picked a good time, and this meant that, like, you know,
he never really faced any consequences for you know, he
wasn't really caught up in the crackdown. He got out fine,
and you know, he picked he picked the right time

(47:21):
to do it, and pdd's future in America was still
ahead of it. But when the Chinese media began to
uncover the dark side of PDD in twenty twenty one,
Colin Kwang was nowhere to be found. And that is
what we're covering tomorrow. We haven't even gotten to the bad.

Speaker 4 (47:37):
Stuff yet, haven't even got to Temu proper.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
Yeah, well the thing about Temu, and we will get
to Timo next episode. But Temu's like a twenty twenty
two thing, right, so it's really reacent. It's only been
around for like two years, which means that if we're
going to talk about this, ninety percent of it is
going to be PDD because PDD is like ninety years old.

(48:02):
But yeah, tune in tomorrow for a bunch of absolutely
harrowing ship. Yeah, this is this is this is it
could happen here.

Speaker 4 (48:10):
We loved so exciting. I love learning about new harrowing ship.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
Welcome to Jacob app and here a podcast featuring a
sound activated strobe light that you can't see because this
is not a visual podcast.

Speaker 4 (48:37):
Unless you have like setasthesia and you could like start
hearing seeing the strobe through our voices, in which case
is good for you.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
Wish that was me? Yeah, So that that's Garrison. I'm
the We're back again. We're back again for a descented
to hell. Yeah. So, so last episode we talked about
Colin Huang and the rise of PDD, which is China's
second largest shopping app and the Chinese version of the app, Temu.
So we're now in the post Colin Wong era, an

(49:10):
era I think actually might be worse than the original era,
which is kind of stunning. But you know, here we are,
here we are, and this era actually starts really well
for PDD. This is like twenty twenty twenty twenty one,
China's lockdowns are actually incredible for PDD because, as we
talked about last episode, pdd's strategy is group shopping, right,

(49:32):
It's about getting a bunch of people to buy things
together to make it cheaper, this thus pulling in more
in our customers. Now China had real lockdowns, and in
a real lockdown, this is increasingly how people got food.
You know, the strictness of the lockdowns very across, like
depending on what province you're in, right, But so like
my family was an inner Mongolia and an inner mongolia

(49:53):
in like the first lockdowns, you could send you could
only send one member of your family outside per week
to like, you know, to go get groceries. Otherwise everyone
else fed all times has to stay indoors. And this
meant that people started pulling together to like all buy
groceries and then sending one person out to like go
pick up the delivery. And this this ingrained PDDs like

(50:15):
fundamental strategy of like buying into the into the consiousness
of the Chinese public because they've just been doing it
for like a year, right, And as twenty twenty, for
a word on PDD like skyrockets. This this is this.
The period from like twenty twenty to like twenty twenty
four has been the period where pdd's grown them most.
I mean, it was already pretty big before then, but

(50:37):
now you know, it's it's now like the main competitor
of Alibaba. It was like the previously unassailable like online
shopping giant. The company grew so much that it forced
the other like shopping companies to get into the fruit
market because it was like clobbering them there so badly.
So yeah, it was wild. But then a bunch of

(50:58):
absolutely terrible stories broke about PDD in both the Chinese
and American press. So we're gonna start with the stuff
that's I guess less bad, and then it's gonna get worse.
So question number one is the PDD at malware. All right,

(51:19):
we're just really jumping right in here. Oh, this is
this is the mild shit, this is the Are we
allout to say this legally? Yeah? It's well, here's the thing.
So Google play removed the app from its play store.
Oh okay, so all right, so so okay, we need
to be very specific about what we're talking. It's too
bad for Google that it's probably too bad for you. Yeah,
so very specifically, this is we're the thing we're talking

(51:41):
about right now is not Temu. We're talking specifically about
the Chinese version of the app, PDD, And this was
released on the Google Play Store in like the mid
twenty the mid early like like I think it's like twenty.

Speaker 5 (51:52):
Twenty one or something.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
And okay, so this again, and to be clear again,
this is not this is specifically the Android version of PDD.
And this is interesting too because so most people in
China like don't use Android for you or sorry, they don't.
They don't. They don't use Google Play right, like they
don't that that's not like the App store where they

(52:16):
get their apps from. So when PDD released, like their
app on the app store, this is this is them
specifically going to the Western market.

Speaker 4 (52:25):
And did they have infrastructure set up in the States
to support this type of like drop shipping or like
how do they.

Speaker 3 (52:32):
Yeah, we'll get into it.

Speaker 4 (52:35):
It was like kind of later a little bit like
gig economy stuff in China, But how how are they
going to.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
Move that FedEx? Okay, yeah, right, well we'll get into
that more later. We're talking about Timmo. This first one
didn't like it didn't have that many users because it
was just like the Chinese app. But like here, okay,
so okay, there's something we also we need to get
out of the way first, which is that there's like
a massive panic in the US about Chinese apps being

(53:02):
like Chinese government trojan horses, like especially TikTok. So unfortunately,
before we start this we have to sort out kind
of or like you have to make a judgment about
what level of apps surveillance is, like the level of
apps are veilance you get in the US because all
of your apps are spying on you, and then what
is like above and beyond the like quote unquote normal

(53:23):
level of spying and like TikTok is TikTok is unbelievably invasive, right,
Like it is true, it's a privacy nightmare, but like
so are most apps, Like TikTok's worse than normal. But
it's not that TikTok is like the Chinese communists. So
this is something we're gonna get into. And this is
this is true with pdu too. The US actually gets
like the stripped down, cucked not as bad version of

(53:44):
Chinese apps like TikTok does not have a bunch of
the like integration stuff that that Doyen, the Chinese like
version of it has. We're like Douyen has this thing
where like I guess Google's kind of doing it now,
but like you can directly, like like an influencer can
hold up a p and you could tap the product
and go buy it. Google is trying to do that now. Yeah,

(54:05):
but China had that, like like Dueyan said that for
like ages, right, It's like so like the versions of
the apps that we get here are actually less bad
than the Chinese ones, which makes the whole panic so
funny to me. It's like no, no, no, like they're sending
you like a better version of the app.

Speaker 4 (54:20):
Like, well, that's because when Uncle Sam calls in our version,
we have to take out all of the maoist influences. Yeah,
I don't know whatever whatever, All.

Speaker 3 (54:32):
Right, all right, so you know, look like so we
have to we have to sort out of the difference
between stuff that's just like the weird moral panic and
what what's actually malware. So CNN did an investigation of
this app. So originally there was a Chinese company that
a Chinese security company was looked at this app and
was like, they're using a bunch of Android exploits, Like

(54:53):
they're like they're using like they're they're they're effectively hacking
your phone, right, They're they're they're they're deploying a bunch
of x of things that are like broken in in
like in Android and allowing you like this like lesson
do stuff and I supposed to be able to do.
And so CNN brought in a bunch of different security
like analysts and like they brought in security companies like

(55:13):
look at it, and here's what they found.

Speaker 4 (55:15):
Well, I don't know if you'd trust this c it EN.
They're literally called the Communist News Network.

Speaker 3 (55:22):
Quote. The app was able to continue running in the
background and prevent itself from being uninstalled, which allowed it
to boost its monthly active rate right hyper on it.
I don't know how pronounce this guy's name. I'm so
sorry this guy. This guy's this guy's name has an
umlot over the oh. I'm an expert at pronouncing foreign names.

Speaker 5 (55:39):
Give it to me.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
It's h y pp umlot o n e n good luck.
You know what.

Speaker 4 (55:46):
I'm just gonna take a I'm gonna.

Speaker 3 (55:49):
Put in I'm so sorry to this guy, who I
think is fine. This guy's security analyst said it also
had the ability to spy on competitors by tracking activity
on other shopping apps and getting in information from them.
He added, Totin, which is like another guy, found PDD
to have exploited about fifty Android system vulnerabilities. Most of
these exploits were tailor made for customized parts known as

(56:12):
original Equipment Manufacturer code, which tends to be audited less
than ASoP, which is like another kind of code and
therefore prone to more vulnerabilities. He said PDD had also
exploited a number of AOSP vulnerabilities, including one that was
flagged by Totioniin to Google in February twenty twenty two.

(56:33):
Google fixed this bug in March. He said, I've never
seen anything like it. It's like super expansive. Serg Totionin,
android security expert, He's like guy said that, sorry, I've
never seen and Android Tracin said, I've never seen anything
like this. It's like super expansive. According to Tosian, the
exploits allowed PDD to access users location, contacts, calendars, notification,

(56:55):
and photo albums without their consents. They were also able
to change systems, setting an access users social media accounts
and chats. He said, Now that is pretty bad. I
will I will mention that like a lot of your
normal apps can also do shit like that. Yeah, like
that's stuff that you can get out of, like Google,
but some of it's not good. The other thing that

(57:16):
they were doing is they're doing these things called privileged
escalation attacks, where they're trying to get like a higher
level of privilege on the system so they can run
code and not supposed to be able to. So you
know how like sometimes when you're running something at a computer,
you have to run it as admin so the thing
actually works.

Speaker 4 (57:32):
Yeah, like Discord, Yeah, I actually Discord. I've been trying
to stream Alan Wake two to my friends and oh
my god, it has been such a nightmare. I'm gonna
personally write the CEO of Discord a letter.

Speaker 3 (57:47):
And yeah. But like so like so there they're like
the way the system security works is there's certain levels
of users that are allowed to do certain things and
certain people who aren't, and this is supposed to stop
people from running malicious code. And so they're doing these
privileged escalation attacks where they're trying to be able to
like do stuff that only admins can do, And so
I showed this to it. So I was trying to

(58:08):
get a gauge on how much of this is real
and how much of this is insane, And so I
showed I showed it to my friend who's a software engineer,
and he was like, what the fuck? So this is
this is very tetfically the privileged escalation attacks on the end,
the attack on the like the original equipment manufacturer code,
like the OEM stuff that's just not normal, Like that
is that is actual malware that is like not that

(58:30):
is not normal app bullshit that like, this thing is
trying to hack your phone. So in twenty twenty three,
the like Google pulled the app from the store because
everyone was like, what the fuck. Wait, this is just
literally malware. I'm gonna I'm gonna so so what were
they trying to do? Here's CNN again. It was in
twenty twenty, according to a current PDD employee, that the
company set up a team of about one hundred engineers

(58:50):
and product managers to dig for vulnerabilities and Android phones,
develop ways to exploit them and turn that into profit.
According to the source who who quested anonymity for feear
of for fear of reprisals, the company only targeted users
in rural areas and smaller towns initially, while of winning
users in megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai. The goal

(59:11):
was to reduce the risk of being exposed, they said.
By collecting expansive data on user activities, the company was
able to create a comprehensive portrait of the users' habits, interests,
and preferences. According to the source, this also allowed it
to improve its machine learning model to offer more personalized
push notifications and ads, attracting users to open the app
and place orders. They said, So this all makes perfect

(59:33):
sense with like how we know that PDD operates right, Like,
you know, they're trying to build detailed profiles or rural
customers they can serve the more efficient ads, and they're
doing it by apparently just straight up running an in
house hacking team. I got pretty large one. Oh so
they supposedly that team got like acted and they don't

(59:55):
do it anymore, but who knows. So, Okay, this is
not even close to the most batshit thing that PDD
gets up to. Okay, we're gonna escalate up the how
weird this stuff is. So. One of the things that
that PDD has a six tone och reporting is that
they have these really strict non compete clauses that prevent

(01:00:15):
people from like so if you if you take a
job here and you get fired or eat, like you leave,
you can't take another job at a tech company for
like two years. This is like fucking like any tech company,
like fucking like, I don't know, they're they're really expensive.
It's like like fucking like setting up your grandma's website
like might get you in trouble. It's like it's it's
a real disaster. We have these in the US too,
and they absolutely suck. So I think there was a

(01:00:37):
ruling about them, an FTC ruling to ban them recently.
Maybe oh no, they're proposed, it hasn't gone through yet
trying to get rid of them. But yeah, there's they're
in the US two. But these ones are really strict
and apparently they're like PDD is really aggressive about it
to the point where like people people will take other
jobs under fake identities and like pdd's hr will like

(01:01:00):
track them down. Oh wow, yeah, like they're they're like
headhunting these people well, like like inverse headhunt, like they're
they're like they're literally just hunting down people trying who
are trying to get like jobs, right, And this apparently
led people to adopt secret identities to like hide, right,
And so this kid is something I I did not
believe the first time I read it, which is that

(01:01:21):
apparently and I originally read this in NIK, which is
usually reliable, but I read this and I was like,
no way. Uh. The thing that they said was that
employees at work, like who work for PDD apparently use
pseudonyms and like never tell each like almost never tell
each other they're actual names. That's I mean, that makes sense.
And apparently also they're banned from like like the information level.

(01:01:44):
Information control was so strict that like you can't you're
not allowed to know what like the structure of another
work group is. And like I read this, I was
like I don't believe this, right, And then I started
running into like other outlets like Financial Times, was like yeah, no, no,
apparently they they talked to they they talked to people
who work for the company. They're like, yeah, everyone uses pseudonyms.
I didn't fucking know anyone's real name or like there
was like one person who's real name that I know wild.

(01:02:06):
I don't know why they do. I've never seen I've
literally never seen this before with any company. It's it's
fucking nuts. I got nothing. Yeah, I do you know who?
No one had this company knows my real name. So
that's true. I do actually operate by a pseudonym. Yeah that.

Speaker 4 (01:02:24):
Is not like a sizable portion of the cool Zone
Media team, but.

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
All of us are fake names. Robert Evans, that's not
Robert Evans, real Robert Evans. It was the producer of
that movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:02:40):
Anyway, do you know who also has trustworthy names that
you can trust these products?

Speaker 6 (01:02:49):
Woo?

Speaker 4 (01:03:01):
So true? Jeff, Wow, that was a really funny joke. Bill, Oh,
we're back.

Speaker 3 (01:03:06):
Sorry.

Speaker 4 (01:03:06):
I was just talking to the two fake fake name
people who are listening in on our call right now.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):
Me I continue. So this is where we get to
the truly bleak stuff. So all right, in twenty twenty one,
one of pdd's employees in shing Juhn just worked worked
a shift, came home, and the distrait up fucking died
in her bed from overwork. This this was a you know,

(01:03:34):
this very quickly turns into a giant media thing because
this woman like she's in she's in really good health,
and she just fucking is worked so hard that she
lays down he her bed dies. Then a worker who
posted a video of an ambulance outside of pdd's headquarters
with the caption another brave warrior of PDD has fallen,

(01:03:55):
which great caption, terrible situation, great caption. He gets fired
for it, and then very quickly like after that, so
they have like a the company has like a Q
and a thing like if effectively, what happens is someone
responds to like one of their social media accounts with
and asks them what do you think of the PDD

(01:04:17):
worker who died after working overtime? Should PDD bear responsibility?
Their corporate account responded and I quote, look at those
in the underclass, who isn't exchanging life for money. I
never thought that this is a problem of capital, but
as a problem of this society. We live in an
era where we spend our whole lives working hard. You

(01:04:39):
can choose a comfortable life if you accept the consequences
of comfortable living. People control how much effort they make.
Everyone does.

Speaker 4 (01:04:48):
I can't believe this people who genuinely like advocate that
China is a like communist country, so strange, that's insane.
They're only talking like God.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
This is this is like this and this is like
and this is like this is one of the things
that like I just like I don't know, like I
just can't fucking get over this ship because like I
have a bunch of fucking family in China, And do
you know do they fucking quote Karl Marx, No, they
quote Steve Jobs because they're all these like fucking insane
entrepreneur bullshit, like like fucking literally like grind set like

(01:05:25):
until you straps. Yeah, it's insane. It's like, no, it's
not your fault that you work too hard. This is
actually labor's fault and not capital like this. This fucking
blew up in the Chinese media when people got like
people got really fucking pissed, and PDD at first was like, no,
this is a fake post. We never did it, and
the people were like, no, no, it's not. This is
we found the post. Right, they take they take it down.

(01:05:47):
People like had saved screenshots, and eventually the company was
forced to admit that it was actually their account, but
then they said that it was a social media contractor
who put it on the corporate account. Quote by mistake.

Speaker 4 (01:05:59):
Oh sure, yeah, that's like that. That's like me when
I search my twin peaks not Safe for work fan
art on the coolest media account. It was a mistake, guys,
didn't didn't didn't mean to post it there. I don't
know how that happened, it got it got past the VODs.

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
I don't know how. Yeah, and you know, people, people
understandably are not happy. Like and then eleven days later,
a PDD employee jumps off a fucking building again, also
because they've been worked so hard. And this this is
where we need to talk about pdd's labor conditions, because

(01:06:38):
they are fucking appalling. Here's sixth Tone. A former PDD
employee who left the company a year ago told sixth
Tone under conditions of anonymity, that excessive work hours are
common practice around eight months after he joined PDD in
early twenty nineteen. He said employees were told they need
to work at least three hundred hours per month, amounting

(01:07:01):
to nearly twelve hours per day, six days a week.
We're gonna get more into that that's a schedule called
nine nine six, where you work from nine am to
nine pm, six days a week. This is incredibly common
and try This is actually a good schedule. In a
lot of Chinese work environments, it can get way worse
than that. Here's another quote from that six Tone article.

(01:07:24):
The company cares a lot about our work hours. It
has become company culture. Even if staff is finished working,
if they'll just stay in the office. I was one
of the lucky ones. I only had to work from
eleven am to ten pm, and my manager was nice
to me. This person added that employees arriving after eleven
am would have their daily wages docked by three hours.

(01:07:47):
It's fucking insane. It's nightmarish. That same worker talked about
how she would like this is a thing that's like
you see this a lot of different accounts, is that
people would just literally break down ryeing at their desks
because they had so they were so overworked. Are these
like office jobs? These are workers workers? These are fucking

(01:08:09):
tech workers, Like right, these are the fucking bougie tech jobs.

Speaker 4 (01:08:13):
They're not like the Chinese because they're getting overworked in
like a factory or like an Amazon warehouse.

Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
Tech workers and this this is the thing about this, right,
is that like we we only we don't like there
hasn't been okay, So the Chinese media, this actually like
becomes a huge thing in the Chinese media, is that
these people are dying. There was another there's also around
the same time, a delivery driver lit himself on fire
like as a protest for like the amount of shit
that he had to deal with. And this was a big,
like a huge thing in the Chinese media. But almost

(01:08:40):
all of the reporting and the coverage and stuff like
that was about the tech workers. But like, fucking so
many people work schedules that are worse than nine ninety six, right,
Like that is a that is a that is a
tech workers schedule. Right, there are a lot of places
where people were fucking way worse shit. The sort of
countervailing force to it is people who, like you know,

(01:09:00):
we talked about this kind of in the Lying Flat episodes.
It's people working for like one day and then eating
just like plain rice with some like whatever fucking the
cheapest thing they can finally they can fucking get out
of it and not working for two more days and
working another day. But like it's it's so bad, like
the little labor conditions are just appalling, And you know,

(01:09:24):
like a bunch of stories sort of started coming out
about how bad PDDs like conditions are. There was one
on we chat that broke that I saw via six
tone about the toilet situation in pdd's largest office building.
So this building has one thousand people per floor, It
has eight total bathrooms per floor. One thousand people. They

(01:09:50):
don't even have one bathroom for every hundred people.

Speaker 4 (01:09:55):
How does this even function? I mean, like I suppose
it just does that people are like pea.

Speaker 3 (01:09:59):
No like people people people fucking like you don't eat
in the morning, or you try to hold out to
lunch when you can run to a different building and
try to use the bathrooms there. But like you know,
if you try to hold it all day, or you
just yeah, where you fucking do that? You go, you go.
You you use your lunch time instead of eating to
fucking go somewhere else. You starve yourself. There are like

(01:10:24):
there's a bunch of reports of guys just like shitting
in urinals because there's literally wasn't time for them to
fucking actually like use a stall, so they're just like
they're they're just like they're they're pooping in urinals. Maybe
the worst picture I've ever seen in my entire life
is this is gonna be the episode are PDD started
installing timers over the toilets to show how long how

(01:10:47):
long people had been there. So there's just like a
like a a fucking clock over you that starts when
you when you fucking close the door to try to
get people to go to the bathroom faster. It is
just appalling the conditions. And again, these are the conditions
of like the office workers. It's apocalyptically bad. So I

(01:11:08):
realized when I was researching this story that I actually
ran into PDD earlier because I so like before I
did this story, I hadn't looked into TEMU at all,
and I realized that I had. I had ran into
PDD earlier when I was tracking the story about uh
tech workers banding together to like basically like on GitHub,
these these office workers, like tech workers like made a

(01:11:28):
giant spreadshet where everyone would document their hours and like
their pay scales and stuff. And it was like, you know,
it was this sort of like you know, it was
it was a thing to like demand better labor conditions. Actually,
i'mretty I'm pretty sure they were actually demanding like the
workplace democracy too. It was pretty wild. But the thing
that you get out of that is that PDD has
the worst the worst hours of any tech company. They are.

(01:11:52):
PDD is so bad that other Chinese tech companies got
worse in order to compete with them. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 4 (01:12:00):
That is the whole hard thing about setting the bar
so low is that it allows other people to lower.

Speaker 3 (01:12:05):
Their own bars. Yeah. Yeah, and it makes just every
everybody worse. Yeah. And again, like I I can't emphasize
enough the extent to which these are the office workers, right, Like,
these are the people who are making the best money
out of this, who are treated better than like the
fucking factory workers and the fucking like people in the

(01:12:26):
rural areas like fucking doing farming.

Speaker 7 (01:12:28):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:12:30):
But again we don't we don't know a huge amount
about what those workers' lives are like because they're not
urban tech workers. And urban tech workers can get their
stories into the press, but like you know, migrant migrant
factory workers, rural workers, there's you know, there's just not
the kind of attention that you can get out of
a big story about like an urban office building, and

(01:12:52):
you know, I mean, these labor conditions are so bad
that people are just straight up fucking dying. And the
Chinese government eventually gets involved, like they're they're, they're, they're
version of the Streame. Court eventually rules that like working
people twelve hours a day, six days a week is illegal,
but it doesn't really matter, like a lot of those
people still have those same schedules. Yeah, and you know,

(01:13:14):
and like this this is not a this is not
a problem that can be solved just by like court rulings. Right,
So yeah, it's it's really fucking bad. We're gonna we're
gonna take an ad break. I don't I don't have
a good transition out of that ship. And we're back.

(01:13:42):
So all of this brings us to Temu And it's
slogan shop like a millionaire.

Speaker 4 (01:13:47):
So, oh god, this the slogan, it's so it like
it evokes like a like a nauseous reaction in me.
It's so it epitomizes everything that is wrong about our
current way of living and the way we idealize the
rich and put them on this like pedestal for how

(01:14:10):
you should live your life. But also knowing that you
will never actually be there. Yeah, this is this is
this is as close as you're going to.

Speaker 3 (01:14:17):
Get, and it's it's it's also a thing where like
it's it's a completely unreal lit like it's if that's
this isn't how fucking billionaires shop like billionaires do? It's
shop like you think those people fucking shop Like, no, no,
they don't. They have they have.

Speaker 4 (01:14:29):
Over over like saving three dollars on on like a mango.

Speaker 3 (01:14:33):
You're like no, yeah, like what the fuck are you
talking about? Yeah? So yeah, like I I hate it.
I hate it so fucking much, you know. So, as
we said, like this is the time of is the
American version of PDD. If you're in the US, you've
probably seen tim owas. Apparently they're not that many of
them in like other countries, Like I have British friends
who are just like, what the fuck are you talking
about me?

Speaker 4 (01:14:53):
And I've never heard of TIMMU. Before the Super Bowl,
for whatever it's worth.

Speaker 3 (01:14:58):
The big play where they were advertising was YouTube. But
if you're watching YouTube without an app blocker, don't I
can I don't know if I can legally recommend you
Probably probably that's on your phone. I can get it.
It's an app. I don't do it. I don't know
if it may be legal, it may not be. I
can't say I will never advocate breaking the law.

Speaker 4 (01:15:19):
No, definitely, buy YouTube. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's definitely the
way to go.

Speaker 3 (01:15:22):
Absolutely. But you know, so like they okay, like most
famously yeah, as you're saying, like, so they spent twenty
seven million dollars buying three Super Bowl ads. It's all
the same ad and it sucked. But you know, okay,
this is only a fraction of their fucking budget.

Speaker 5 (01:15:40):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:15:41):
Here's from the Wall Street Journal quote. Ten MoU's marketing
budget reached one point seven billion dollars in twenty twenty three,
and that figure will grow to nearly three billion in
twenty twenty four. JP Morgan's analyst estimate. Last year, ten
MoU's marketing spending contributed to an average loss of seven
dollars per quarter, according to Goldman Sax estimates. They are

(01:16:01):
buying so many ads they are literally driving other companies
out of the ad market. LIKETCCO has been talking about
how they can't afford to run ads because ads are
getting too expensive. Because they're buying so many fucking ads.
Here's Reuter's quote. US companies dependent on commercial spending or
spending on commercials, not.

Speaker 4 (01:16:22):
Yeah, commercial spending. They are buying commercials, yes, yeah, like Facebook,
they say Meta. I refuse to fucking call that company Beta,
like fuck that shit. Their Facebook are being saved by
Chinese retailers like Temu and she In. They represent ten
per those two companies, just Temu and g In represent
ten percent of Meta's revenue last year. The Facebook owners said.

Speaker 3 (01:16:46):
So Temu is hemorrhaging money right now in order to
do this right, JP Morgan thinks they're losing three billion
a year. But they also project and to be fair,
these projections, these projections are wrong so many of the time,
of so much of the time. But the projecting the
tenet will be making three point five billion a year
in twenty twenty seven. And all of this raises the
question why, and to answer that, we need to get

(01:17:08):
into Chinese development economics. So the Chinese economy has a problem,
and this is a problem that the CCP is known
about for a long time. It's the problem of turning
a sort of like a low on the value chain
like manufacturing economy into a consumption driven economy. Now, the
problem with transitioning into a consumption driven economy is that

(01:17:29):
people don't have enough money to boost consumer demand. The
Marxist way of saying this is that under capitalism, both
output and consumption are double determined by your wage. Right,
Your wage determines both firm output and also how much
you can consume. Right, in non Marxist terms, Oh no,
no one has enough money to buy things. They did

(01:17:50):
you consumer economy by brother in Christ, You set the wages. Okay,
where are the fuck? Yes? Where the fuck are these
people supposed to be getting money from to buy your
shit if you won't give them more money? Like wait, wait, wait,
so you know you can't do this by just making
them like work more hours. You know, you can work

(01:18:11):
people for like twelve fifteen, like twenty hours a day,
but there's only twenty four hours a day. Like, there's
an actual definite there's an actual definite limit to the
amount of exploitation you can do via increasing labor hours.
This is this has always been capitalism's problem, right, Like
the sort of rapacity of capitalism has hit the secular

(01:18:31):
limit of time itself. So the solution to this is
to expand into new markets where consumers have more money,
which is to say the US. So PDD initially targeted
like poor rural Chinese workers, right, and this is kind
of the same group that Temu was targeting in the now.
In the US, their initial base is people who like
buy from dollar stores, but they've been spreading rapidly. Temu

(01:18:51):
has outpaced she In to become the second largest shopping
app in the US. But the important thing really, yeah, yeah,
there's not gonna be on Amazon. Yeah, they're like they're
destroying Shiin, Like wow, yeah, I did not know they
were that popular. Yeah, I mean, like estimates are like, well,
I've seen simens to say they have one hundred million years.
I don't buy that. I've seen that the estimates that

(01:19:12):
I think I'm more reliable of like fifty four million
years in the US. Although well, the thing is we
don't we don't have post super Bowl numbers between fifty
and well, I think I think it's like fifty. I
wouldn't I wouldn't accept one hundred million ones. I think
that's bullshit. We don't have good post super Bowl data yet.
Kind of the issue. But yeah, they're they're they're clobbering people.
But the important thing about specifically the American market for

(01:19:36):
Temu is that like the kind the equivalent person who
shops at a dollar store in the US still has
unfathomably more money than that same person in China, because
partially this is because the strength of the American dollar.
Partially this is because American wages are just like unfathomably
higher than Chinese wages, and that that's that's that's true

(01:19:59):
even if you like, even when you account for like
the relative strength dollar to the yawn. So you know,
the other kind of important thing about Timmy strategy is
that they've been using this kind of like loophole that
will set up a US customs law to allow people
to like bring presents home from countries. So like if
you go to another country and you bring a present home,

(01:20:20):
it's worth less than two hundred dollars, you go through
like an expedited customs thing, and you don't have to
pay tariffs on it.

Speaker 8 (01:20:24):
Yeah, So Timu and like a whole bunch of these
companies just ship every single one of their packages in
quantities where it's like seven hundred and ninety nine dollars,
not eight hundred.

Speaker 3 (01:20:38):
Dollars ye yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's really funny. It's
set off this like a massive intra capitalist war because
like a bunch of like like American right wingers, like
American manufacturers, like the Republican Party are like, we need
to close this gap, but then all of the fucking
shipping companies are like, no, this is a vital part
of the American consumer economy. And there's this like giant
war going on like both in Congress, like like in

(01:21:03):
the press over whether they should where they should close
as loophole now, you know. On the other hand, like
there are real challenges to Temu being the first like
company to break into the like Chinese companies like really
truly break into the American market like she and has
done well, but they haven't like they have they have

(01:21:23):
They're not like a rival for it to Amazon, right,
Like they're not big enough to like knock off one
of the sort of like American tech giants. And Temu's
problem is that. Okay, so if you compare Temu to
to PDD, right, the Chinese version, PDD is supposed to
be about spreading through word of mouth, right, It's it
spreads by like someone in your you know, you as

(01:21:45):
as if someone buying something from PDD taps your entire
friend group and your family to get them to buy
something for cheaper.

Speaker 7 (01:21:51):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:21:51):
But the problem is that.

Speaker 4 (01:21:52):
Like fucking night, I forgot how this whole structure is.

Speaker 3 (01:21:56):
It's so bad. But the thing is, like Americans don't
really do that, like they're been attempts to do like
group on things they never worked. And Americans also don't
group shop right because we're I don't know more weird
b wok.

Speaker 4 (01:22:10):
There's just a fucking this is not a thing but
full full of a lot more like individualistic impulse science.
That is that is kind of a large part of
what the American shopping classes is built off of.

Speaker 3 (01:22:23):
And and this isn't This is an issue for Temu
because like they don't have the word of mouth thing
that drove them in China, so they're relying on just
top down like like massive ad buys and stuff, and
there's kind of a limit. And it's something that that
Temu understands, right, Like this is you know the whole
there's a whole thing in the Chinese tech industry about

(01:22:44):
the power of being able to leverage people's like private networks, right,
Timu understands, but they don't have a way to break
into the American market because it just doesn't work like
the Chinese market. So instead they're like buying three Super
Bowl ads right now. There's another issue, which is that
the goods that they sell suck ass and they break instantly.
You know, that's an issue, but I don't know it's

(01:23:07):
the US. Lots of things suck and break instantly, but
like it is only that's been driving sort of negative
sentiment from people who've used it, is they're like they
buy something and it's just like sucks, and they're you know,
they're unhappy about it. The thing I think is maybe
the biggest problem is that their delivery times are really
long by American standards because they're they're shipping overseas. Temu
had to build an actual logistics infrastructure where PDD like didn't,

(01:23:30):
right because PDD is just using like Chinese versions of
FedEx or whatever, right, And Temu's kind of doing that
but in you know, in order to make it convenient
for Chinese sellers. The way that they the way that
they've sort of like set this up is they have
a warehouse in Guandong, and every seller like ships it
to this warehouse and then Temu deals with getting it

(01:23:51):
shipped overseas. The problem is that this is really slow, right,
It takes like two weeks for things to show up.
And that's not out that's slow by like normal standards,
but this is the US American standards. That is like
a tortoise nightmarishly slow. Because we have gotten used to
a level i'd say gratification, but like, yeah, like this

(01:24:13):
is a level of power that was previously reserved for
like Chinese emperors, and we fucking use it every day
to order fucking nail clippers from Amazon, right, or in.

Speaker 4 (01:24:26):
My case, so a whole bunch of materials to build
a black lodge, which I will then return as soon
as my party is over.

Speaker 3 (01:24:31):
Incredible, you know, And this is this is a This
is also something that's kind of new for Temu because
PDD was built on being able to doing sales or
fast enough they could sell fruit to people. Right, do
you know how hard it is to sell fucking fresh
fruit to people? That's like it legitimately really difficult. Well yeah,
you can't.

Speaker 4 (01:24:50):
You can't ship. You can't have a two week ship
for ca.

Speaker 3 (01:24:56):
But why it is I mean, it doesn't do a
bunch of you have you have to have an actual
logistics infrastructure set up for it, right. You can't just
ship it in like an Amazon bomb.

Speaker 4 (01:25:05):
They have to be they have to be like specifically
ripening along the Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:25:08):
Yeah, yeah, and and and and tims also up to
do that, right. And this is and this is an
issue with all of their stuff because you know, they're
they're trying to do direct to consumer sales. But the
thing is in China it's really fast, and here it's slow.
And the upside for Tamu is that their stuff is
really cheap, right, It's unbelievably cheap. And you know, obviously
they're they're losing money on the sales, and most of

(01:25:29):
the money they're losing on the sales is from their
ad spending, not from the actual sales. And this is
this is where you get into again the really bleak
part about this where Okay, so why are these why
are these prices so low? And part of its tech
money subsidy, but a lot of it is just labor,

(01:25:49):
just pure, pure unrivaled labor exploitation. You know, when with
with the Chinese workers movement, like as like a a
sort of like collective mass movement just completely broken by
Tienamen and then again dream like the crackdowns through the
twenty tens that wiped out whatever sort of like classical

(01:26:09):
workers movement style thing was may have popped up from
the strikes in twenty eleven, Like there's there's no there's
no mass countervailing force in Chinese politics to try to
raise wages, like independent union organizing is illegal. You will
get arrested. The actual unions that exist, like they all
trying of union federation doesn't do shit. We don't really

(01:26:30):
have that kind of like fake union thing here. It's
like it's like a different but you know, like they're
they're I don't know this is this is this is
maybe not the time for me to try to explain
China's union system. Like the unions are fucking bullshit. They
don't do anything. Like if you go to them and
be like my wages are too low, they'll try to
get you to like negotiate with the company directly, right
like like as an individual, and like it's they're nonsense.

(01:26:52):
They're completely useless, and you know the results of this
and the results of just like the incredible poverty of
the Chinese working class and the fact that you know
a lot of Chinese migrant workers, who are people who
actually making these goods. So a lot of some of
its world workers, some of its migrant workers. But a
lot of these people's wages are lower than they otherwise
would be because they're drawing revenue off of like they're off

(01:27:15):
of of of like the plots of land that their
family has, like back in the countryside, when they like
when they they like migrate to another city to find
a job. Yeah, so like all of these factors are
just institutionally like smashing the price of like like like
smashing like wages, and there's no there's no fucking there's
not there's nothing really there to resist them and and

(01:27:36):
act like you know, it's not like the Chinese working
class like completely takes it lying down right, but it's
like the resistant strategies are trying to work as little
as possible. But that doesn't that's you know, and that's
something that can be very effective in the sense of
like you're working a lot less, but it's not something
that drives up like wages. And so when when you're

(01:27:58):
looking at Temu and you're seeing a pair of Janes
for two dollars. Like what you are seeing is the
raw exploitation of the Chinese working class. And this is
also true of like the rest of the fucking shit
you buy from China, right, Like almost all of the
price of like a shirt that you're buying, I mean,
Chinese textile manufacturing is kind of like not what it

(01:28:19):
used to be, right but like you know, but like
you're you're buying like fucking some bullshit from China. Like
if you're buying from like another drop shipping company, right,
like the thing you're actually paying for, you're paying the
drop shipping company. You're not fucking paying the workers. They're
not they're fucking not making shit all like all of
the stuff that's like, I mean, it's not like one
hundred percent, like a huge portion of of the fact

(01:28:41):
that the price is higher on non Temu sites is
just like it's just markups. Because this is this is
just what the Chinese economy is. It's just sort of
like it's you know, it's it's it's it's unbelievable exploitation.
And this brings us to the thing we're gonna today
on which is does Temo use slave labor.

Speaker 8 (01:29:03):
Oh oh okay, And the answer is probably, but it's
hard to tell.

Speaker 3 (01:29:12):
So this has been a big thing because Tim is
one of the companies that the State Department brought up
when they were doing their investigations into like like Sheian
was the other one into like are these companies using
Shing John's slave labor and you know this is labor
from people put in in the fucking camps. I think
the answer is probably because I mean, so the thing

(01:29:35):
is the State Department doesn't have any actual evidence, right,
like they're all and they're they're doing this incredibly what
we'll get into this in a second, Like, you know,
obviously they're doing this because this is like this is
an intra like capitalist feud thing, right. The State Department's
talking about this because they're pissed at China. Yeah, this
is like a nastic project for the United States. Yeah,
but Comma, it's also probably true because these like and

(01:29:58):
and this this is like the thing specifically with with
PDD that we've been talking about is that they don't
intimus Like they don't vet the sellers of stuff, right,
Like we talked about last episode that like people were
selling sleeping pills as date rate drugs, right, they don't
fucking vet it at all. So yeah, probably, like quite possibly. Yeah,
the stuff, the stuff that they're selling from Shing Jun,

(01:30:19):
and they have a pretty large presence there, like was
using sort of like prison slave labor from the camps there. However, Comma,
we can't talk about prison slave labor without talking about
the fact that fucking every goddamn US firm also uses
prison slave labor. Everyone from fucking McDonald's to Starbucks, to
Walgreens to JC Penny, like fucking every every company, every

(01:30:40):
American company you can fucking think of, uses slave labor
or their slave labor in their in their supply chain.
And they're using slave labor because in the US, under
the thirteenth Amendment, slavery is legal as long as the
person as long as the person being enslaved is incarcerated.
So you know, like it doesn't fucking matter, like this
is this is this is the problem. It doesn't matter

(01:31:01):
whether you buy from the US or China. Right, Like,
you're you're getting fucking slave labor. So if you if
you want to not do that, your your your only option.
If if you do not want to, if you do
not want everything you consume, like the food that you eat.
If you don't want, like everything that you use in
your daily life to be the product of unfathomable human exploitation,

(01:31:25):
your only option is to destroy the monstrous economic system
that reduces humans to commodities and tear up the fucking
roots of every single one of these companies from San
Francisco to Shanghai and burn it to the ground. That's
that that those are your options, like, it's not your
individual consumer choice, not gonna make it any better that
That's what I got.

Speaker 4 (01:31:46):
I okay, all right, well god, like was it the
Super Bowl great this year?

Speaker 3 (01:31:52):
Yeah? What a game? What a game?

Speaker 4 (01:31:55):
Almost almost double overtime.

Speaker 3 (01:31:58):
That was crazy. I I don't know. That was the
worst Chiefs team of all time and they nobody could
fucking beat them. We're so dubed. We're going to get
Patrick Mahobe is gonna win like a fucking twelve peet.
It's so over for every other sports team. Better things
aren't possible unless you make them possible.

Speaker 9 (01:32:32):
Hello and welcome to it could happen here. Today's episode
is one that I wanted to tackle for a while,
and there are many different avenues to go about it.
I think today's a little bit more focused, and I
want to talk about food, Palestinian food, to be exact,
and the way that it can be used as resistance

(01:32:54):
as part of a culture that is being eradicated. Essentially,
the appropriate of Palestinian surface culture by Israel has been
happening ever since Israel's inception. Surface culture encompasses tangible and
observable elements that contribute to the distinctive identity of a
cultural group or region. Music, food, dress, and other aspects

(01:33:18):
often define a nation's surface culture. Authentic culture evolves organically
over generations, at least it's supposed to, but Israel has
a sort of top down approach to culture that lacks
genuine identifying characteristics. Throughout its history, Israel has either fabricated, annexed,

(01:33:38):
or reconstructed both surface and deep cultural elements through what
writer Jamal Khanj describes as quote falsehoods, myths, and fables.
Unlike the conventional, slow and organic development of culture, Israeli
surface culture came prepackaged by appropriating those very elements from
the Age Old to Palestinian culture. A prominent aspect of

(01:34:04):
any society's culture is its local cuisine. In nineteen forty eight,
Israel ethnically cleansed Palestine of all non Jewish Palestinians, took
over their land and brazenly claimed Palestinian culinary treasures like hummus, falafe, Babylonus, deabule, salad, coscos,
frikic i, bimjadda, da peda, bread, and many more. They

(01:34:25):
claimed them all as Israeli. All it took was to
identify a Palestinian dish and then add the noun Israeli
before its name. Going through the complete list of pleasiarized
Palestinian cuisine would take me way, way too long, especially
because I feel like Western familiarity with Palestinian cuisine remains

(01:34:45):
somewhat limited. But I do want to explain one example
that clearly shows just how foreign appropriated Palestinian food is
to Israel.

Speaker 3 (01:34:54):
Homos.

Speaker 9 (01:34:56):
The Arabic word humos does not exist in these spoken
Israeli language Hebrew. Pronouncing the word correctly is actually a
bit challenging for most Hebrew speakers because there is no
hard ha in the Hebrew alphabet, and in general, when
Hebrew speakers attempt to enunciate homos or any Arabic word
with the hard ha. They mispronounce it as j in

(01:35:18):
this case homos not homos, and you might have heard
this a lot recently. When it comes to Ramas. The
full name of the dish homos becomes even more challenging
when adding its second part to heini. The h in
tahini is also a hard ha, So own Israeli would
distort the Palestinian dish homos bitahini to horomos bitachini. This

(01:35:43):
is an insult to the Arabic language, culinary etiquette, and
to Arab shifts in the levant kitchen around the world.
To paraphrase Palestinian American comedian Moamer, homos does not exist
in your lexicon. You can't pronounce it, how can it
be your national food. Even more amusing is when an
Israeli writer posited that humost and eggplant babyanuche were quote

(01:36:07):
Israeli foods, because that's how the Spanish Inquisition identified secret
Jews from the food they ate. A similar hypothesis to
this is the argument that foods like homos, fada, felfric, etc.
Were brought by Jews who came from the Arab world.
Of course, the diverse citizenry of the Arab world or
the Muslim slash Arab Spain. It must have had hommost

(01:36:30):
and eggplant in their cultural diet. Jewish citizens cooked and
ate the food because they lived in the culture that
produced the food, not because they created the food for
that culture. Arab Jews also exist, but that would still
make all of this food Arabic.

Speaker 8 (01:36:46):
Food.

Speaker 9 (01:36:47):
Writer Jamad Kanj writes, since Israelis contend that Jews have
the right to claim foods brought with them as Israeli food,
why don't they claim Russian dishes as Israeli food?

Speaker 3 (01:36:58):
Better?

Speaker 9 (01:36:58):
Yet, why don't Is from New York claim American steak
as an Israeli food too? I know it's kind of
said in jest, but he does raise a serious question.
Why does Israel appropriate Palestinian and Arab food but not
food brought in from Russia, Europe, Poland or America. It
is simply because Palestinian food provides the Israeli top down

(01:37:21):
culture with a distinctive surface cultural identity. It also features
atypical exotic culinary dishes to Western kitchens, and this makes
it a lot easier to hoodwink the West regarding the
origin of their made up surface culture. The gall of
claiming Palestinian culinary treasures is not only historically inaccurate, but

(01:37:42):
also offensive and disrespectful. It is quite common for countries
to adopt elements of other cultures, including their cuisine. For example,
American cuisine celebrates a rich tapestry of international dishes like Asian, Italian,
and Mexican food. However, the foods remained appreciated for their origin,
with no real urgency to appropriate them as America's national food.

(01:38:06):
Kanj suggests that unlike Israel, it could be that the
United States does not have the same obsessive need to
fake a culture to justify its existence. In contrast, the
Zionist movement envisioned Israel's survival as being predicated on erasing
the history of the rich heritage of Palestine's culture.

Speaker 3 (01:38:25):
And its people.

Speaker 9 (01:38:27):
And all of this is extremely relevant to what is
happening right now as Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians.
Because genocide and ethnic cleansing isn't just about lives lost.
It's not just about physical death, but the death of
the very idea of a people. Erasing even the memory
of a people and their culture, cuisine, and heritage along

(01:38:50):
with it, it's pretending Palestinians and their culture were never
there to begin with. And this has been a narrative
that Zionists have said since Israel's inception, the land without
people for a people without land. But this appropriation of
food in both the physical and cultural ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
This didn't start on October seventh. The slow ethnic cleansing

(01:39:14):
of Palestine has been going on for over seventy six years,
and the stealing and claiming of Palestinian food as Israeli
is intrinsically a part of that. It brings me to
the topic of today's episode. Today, my guests are Reem
Asial and Jabriel Units. Reim is a multiple award winning
Palestinian Syrian speaker and chef based in Oakland, California, working

(01:39:38):
at the intersection of food, community and social justice. Jabrie
is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist who has worked with
Reim on multiple projects, including a show that we touch
on in this episode. With Food as a Tool, we
talk about utilizing Arab hospitality to build a strong, resilient
community as well as celebrate Palestinian joy. Here it is Hello, everybody,

(01:40:13):
this is Sharen. Welcome to It could happen here today,
we're talking to two people I love and respect very
much about a topic that I think is really underreported on,
and that's food erasure and how it's part of ethnic cleansing.
And I think it's a really important topic to talk
about right now, especially with the genocide happening in Palestine.

(01:40:33):
So let's just jump right in without further ado. Welcome
my guests, Read and Jabidil.

Speaker 1 (01:40:38):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Hey.

Speaker 9 (01:40:43):
Just so our audience can get to know you guys
a little bit better, how about you all introduce yourselves
and like what you do?

Speaker 5 (01:40:47):
And yeah, yeah, ream you want to go first?

Speaker 1 (01:40:52):
Sure. My name is Reem. I am a Bay Area
based Palestinian Syria and chef. I own a restaurant called Reems, California,
and our mission really is to build community across cultures
and experiences through the warmth of Arab bred and hospitality.

Speaker 5 (01:41:13):
Beautiful. Wow, that was so succinct.

Speaker 7 (01:41:16):
My name is thank you for sesay, so.

Speaker 1 (01:41:20):
I've done it a few times, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:41:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:41:22):
My name is jobrel Unis. I'm a filmmaker based in
Pasadena and I am also a Palestinian artist in general.

Speaker 9 (01:41:32):
Yeah, no relation. Both of our last names are Unis,
but that is how we met. A white person said,
you guys have the same last name, you should meet,
and we met. No, we're friends, But I really like
the partnership that you guys have in the collaboration that
you guys, from my perspective, have established. Can you guys
talk about what you've been working on recently together?

Speaker 3 (01:41:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (01:41:53):
Yeah, So we've been working on for the past since
like twenty twenty one or late twenty We've been working
on a documentary series that is named after Reem's cookbook,
which is you should pick it up. It's one of
my favorite cookbooks that I own. It's called Arabia and
it is a documentary series exploring the food ways and

(01:42:17):
diaspora of Arab people across South past Asia North Africa.
And I think the general log line and dream can
dive into a bit more of the general log line
is you can tell this like through telling the story
of the food, you can tell the story of our
people in diaspora. And it underscores a lot of I
think we'll talk about today, which is sort of food identity,

(01:42:39):
identity through food and resilience and through food. But also
I think one thing that's always been really important to
both of us is how much we see the show
as like a celebration of our culture. I feel like
there are so many trauma stories from not only Palestinians
but Arabs in general, and I think something that was

(01:42:59):
really important us as I guess let's talk about all
of it. We're an extremely I think you know, we're
extremely politicized as a people, but also very passionate. But
also let's celebrate all the things we love about ourselves
and love about our culture and the tastes and smells
and sounds and sights. So how would you I feel
like that's sort of the setup, but how would you

(01:43:20):
describe it?

Speaker 1 (01:43:23):
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. And our hope is
that the being able to break down the barriers or
have a lens into our world for the public is
kind of a gateway to understand the context and the

(01:43:43):
politics behind why things are the way they are and
to really fight the dehumanization that Arabs have experienced, particularly
in the West. And so, you know, while this is
a show about food, it's also it's very much a
show about people and how interconnected we are. So yeah,

(01:44:04):
we're really excited to be able to break down some
of those barriers of understanding in a way that could
actually lead to people, you know, fighting anti Arab sentiment
in this country, fighting Islamophobia, all of these things when
they have that kind of lens or that view into
our world.

Speaker 7 (01:44:24):
Yeah, and I mean it's been pretty interesting. I can
I keep vamping a little bit. It's been pretty interesting.
I mean, I think the sort of like thought that
started the show really was why it's so easy? And
I think we'll talk about this later too in depth,
but like, why is it so easy to find so
many different cultures food? You know, like you have I'm

(01:44:48):
going to use Asian food as an example because I
live in the San Gabriel Valley, so it's like all
around me. But you have Korean food and Japanese food,
and so many different types of Chinese food that are
all specifically called what they are and where they're from. Right,
They're all like identified correctly, and that can extend to
the Latin X world and their food, it can extend

(01:45:11):
to European food. It's all very you know, like people
call it what it is, and then you sort of
get to you get to you know, Southwest Asia and
North Africa and suddenly the food stops being called you
know what it is, and starts being called Mediterranean or
starts being called Middle Eastern. And I think that the

(01:45:34):
idea was, like I had gone to Anaheim, where there's
a neighborhood called Little Arabia here, and there was a
Palestinian restaurant.

Speaker 5 (01:45:42):
I was like so excited about it. It was called
the Olive Tree.

Speaker 7 (01:45:44):
It's closed now, but I was like so so excited,
and I got I always get so so excited when
I find a Palestinian restaurant or a yeam any restaurant, and.

Speaker 5 (01:45:57):
You know, I mean many of them.

Speaker 7 (01:45:58):
But I think the reason I get so excited is
because it's so hard to find those places, and I
think there's a reason why. And so, you know, three
and a half years later, the show has sort of
grown from that initial thought and interest and become very
very different, and it's effort to humanize Arabs, which is

(01:46:19):
something I think is you know, it's unfortunate that we
still have to do that, but I think we kind
of do, especially right now. But yeah, we've been pitching
for like, you know, we worked on it together for
a while and then have just been pitching and going
through pitches and talking at different companies and getting a
lot of great feedback and getting some really weird feedback
for the past like few years.

Speaker 9 (01:46:39):
And we can talk about that more if you want,
but well, oh, I'd like to talk about some of
the more interesting feedback, I guess, But I would also
want to ask you, ream, how how did you get
involved in food? Like where did that passion start?

Speaker 1 (01:46:56):
Yeah, I've I would say food has always been in
the backdrop, for better or for worse of my life experiences,
particularly when everything falls apart from me. I grew up
kind of as a whatever. The term I've heard is

(01:47:16):
like the third culture kid, right where the Arab identity
was really strong in our household and that was particularly
through food, but then also and a stranger in a
strange land outside of the home, where it was predominantly
your typical Americana suburban culture. And so I was kind

(01:47:39):
of like, even though food was there, the intertwining with
identity made me like run away from it a lot
because it reminds you of your otherness and also just
the nuances of seeing my mom being a working mom
and struggling in the kitchen. So I was like I'm

(01:48:00):
I'm going to be a feminist and I'm never going
to touch that was like, and then every time, like
you know, and then I did like what the immigrant
child does, like overachiever, like go to college, try to
be the president, and then realize that's not.

Speaker 9 (01:48:15):
What I want to do.

Speaker 1 (01:48:16):
When I spent many years in the nonprofit world, I
was doing organizer work, and while that work was really
rewarding to some extent, it was really draining and not
fulfilling in a deeper spiritual level. And so every time
I would burn out, the food, and particularly the food
of my culture would come back in some shape or form.

(01:48:37):
So I just had this kind of moment in twenty
ten where I was in another bout of burnout and
depression and really questioning everything. And it was a trip
that I took to the Arab world with my father
and seeing particularly bred in these straight corner bakeries be
the anchor for this community that I had, you know,

(01:48:59):
as a kid of diaspora, like really longing to feel
connected to and it was through the food that I
felt connected once again. So my mom did something right.
Look of her the credit for that, But I was like,
I need to explore this more. I need to understand
what is this? And so then food became a source
of healing for me to like come back to my

(01:49:21):
identity and come back to my culture. But then also
just the power of food as a community builder that
like transcends all cultures, Like I really loved that as
a community organizer who had been working with other communities
who struggled just like my own, right, So that's kind
of how I got into food by way of my
love for wanting to belong and my love for connection

(01:49:45):
of community, and then slowly became obsessed with food itself.
I mean, who doesn't love food? But it is a
place of both trauma and healing for me, So it
became kind of a way to transcend that.

Speaker 9 (01:50:00):
No, I think it's a great thing to bring up
how it's a trauma and very healing as well. I
to kind of talk about like the feedback. I know
you've had a restaurant in the Bay Area for a while.
Was it similar when you tried to make the show
come together, Like did you have similar barriers and feedback,
Like were you like familiar with some of the things
that people were saying or was it completely like a

(01:50:23):
new game.

Speaker 3 (01:50:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:50:25):
So the context that I started my restaurant, and I
want to say it was probably much different than even
what it is now today, although certainly there is backlash.
But I would say I was one of the first
few chefs who were saying, nope, I want my food
to be called Arab. And I really wanted to counter

(01:50:46):
these kind of watered down labels of Middle Eastern or
Mediterranean or you know, levantine. To me, those were all
colonial terms and it was like a bad word to
say Arab, and I wanted to reclaim that identity. I
was like, if I'm going to come out, I want
to come out as my whole self and not this person,
this scared person that was stifled all my life. And

(01:51:06):
I understand why the immigrants before me came, you know,
did it that way because they needed to make a living.
And you know, there was a lot of anti Arab sentiment,
especially in the wake of nine to eleven, that that
kind of climate here. And so I had this like
lovely idea that I'm like this generation where I can
like break it down and make it cool. I'm like,

(01:51:28):
I'm going to mainstream it, you know, And I got
pushback actually from my own family, because they had those fears.
They were like just you know, start like don't even
start with like a zacta avduu. Shit, nobody's gonna now
it's like the hot thing. But so that was a
context in which I was opening my business and nobody

(01:51:48):
had done it really before, so I could kind of
create my own rules and people like what is this?
And I still got like a lot of like, oh
is this you know Mediterranean? You know people, it took
a while to train people to say Arab and then
put the layer of Palestinian identity, you know, my Palestinian

(01:52:09):
identity at the time that I was opening my restaurant
was really important. It was you know, I had started
my pop ups on the in the wake of Israel's
second to worst. Now we're seeing the worst of it
incursion on Raz in twenty fourteen, in which they killed
you know, over three thousand Palestinians in one winter, and

(01:52:32):
we were devastated by that. We were devastated about the
state of organizing with Palestinians. And I really wanted to
as I opened my restaurant, not be scared to talk
about my whole self, and so I h so everything
about Reims. Even though we're not like pushing our politics
in your face. Very act of being Palestinian was seen

(01:52:53):
as political, just existing, and we had a mural of
a Palestinian activist who was based in Chicago names Desmoda,
who is deported by the government, as it made an
example of to say, if you're Palestinian and you're outspoken
about Palestine, this is what will happen to you. And
I put her on the wall to remind my community

(01:53:14):
and to remind myself that we don't need to be scared.
And I got a lot of backlash for that, but
I think even in that time, despite the backlash, the
amount of community support, amount of opportunity for people to learn,
was that much greater, and so I ended up getting

(01:53:35):
a lot more positive attention for my vikery overall as
a result of that.

Speaker 7 (01:53:43):
Do you have just a few?

Speaker 1 (01:53:46):
It makes me happy every time I wake up with
a nomination, I'm like, I wonder what the Zionists be thinking.
It gives me a little bit of like hope that
like our success is kind of like what is threatening,
you know, because we are truth We are in the
business of truth telling, and we do it in a
way that's very human, you know, based in our humanity

(01:54:08):
and our dignity, and that our restaurant was really I
think powerful in that way that a simple art piece
or the simple act of making food and calling it
Palestinian was that threatening to the powers.

Speaker 7 (01:54:22):
That be, you know, Like that's such an interesting backdrop
also to talk about the feedback we got from the show,
because like, I think Reem's experience was so was so
visceral in that way, and I mean when she described
as well, and I think you can look it up
and there have been articles on BIS and stuff about

(01:54:43):
it where people can read about her experience and everything
that happened. And you know, I think maybe we undersold
you your intro a little bit raam, like you're a badass,
and you know, the James Beard noms and a lot
of great and awesome press.

Speaker 5 (01:54:56):
But I think what's.

Speaker 7 (01:54:58):
Interesting about the show is with realms, with realms at
the restaurant. You know, it's very specifically Palestinian and Arab food,
and the show, while yeah, it's being made by us
who are Palestinian people, it's not only about Palestine. And

(01:55:20):
that's been something we've sort of had to overcome. Like
the show is about Arabs, and it's about our foods
and food ways, and as much as the food, you know,
the show. As much as the show focuses on Palestine,
it also focuses on Egypt and Yemen and where you know,
I mean the Yemeni coffee tradition is like where Arab

(01:55:42):
coffee kind of came from and started from. And it
also focused on Lebanon and Morocco and Algeria. It's been
an interesting yeah, go ahead, ream, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:55:52):
It was just to that point, like it's it's not
about I mean, first of all, these these these states
are border right or they're colonized states in some shape
or form, and the idea is to fight the tropes
of the Arab as one thing, right, Like it's showing
the breadth and depth of our culture that like we're

(01:56:12):
not Hamat, it's not a monolith, we're not homogeneous. And
even the ethos of Realms kind of is very similar
to that idea that yes, we are Palestinian, but we're
also Syrian, we're also Oakland, we're also California. Like those
things don't need to compete with one another. I hate
you know, like you know, my identity kind of coming

(01:56:36):
on the scene. Yes I'm Arab and yes I'm Palestinian,
but those are political identities. The reason we call our
food Palestinian is to draw attention to the ethnic cleansing
and a rasure of our people. That's why we call
it Palestinian. But it's not. There's there are certain foods
that are not inherent. I mean, they're enjoyed all over
the Arab world and they look different, but you can't

(01:56:56):
like the claiming of ownership of food is. Yeah, So
I think this show is really trying to fight against
that trope of the it's called ada Bia, which is
kind of like a tongue in cheek, like what do
you think of with the Arab woman? And it's like,
let me take all of those stereotypes and like turn
them on their head. It's the same thing with like

(01:57:18):
all of our food ways in our culture. There is
no singular way of what an Arab is. We all
have kind of our unique stories and histories, so when
we choose to call things what they are, there's a
context in a history for that, and that's what we're
trying to share.

Speaker 5 (01:57:35):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 9 (01:57:37):
I think, I mean, I really relate to the idea
of really wanting to be represented with food, Like when
I find a Syrian restaurant, I freak out. Like there's
one alcohol in southern California where it's like my family
and I go there every weekend when I'm down and

(01:57:57):
when I'm visiting my parents. It's just like a place
where we feel like the closest we can get to
home again. And I think it's a really important like
reminder that I don't know food is food can be
really powerful. And before I keep rambling, I'm gonna take
our break and we'll be right back, and we are

(01:58:26):
back reim you mentioned something earlier that I think is
worth touching back on the idea of like existing being
already like a political act. I think that is like
it's a burden for a lot of people of color
and a lot of marginalized communities. And I think hand
in hand with that is the fact that like our
food is also like a political act, like making sure

(01:58:49):
it's couscus not is really cuscus, or whatever it is
that we're trying to fight against. How do you see food?
And especially now, I think people underestimate how many levels
there are of ethnic cleansing because erasing food and appropriating
food is a huge part of that, right, So can
I get your take on that, both of your takes.

Speaker 1 (01:59:11):
You mean, like beyond appropriating, Yeah, I mean I think
food is a tool of it is weaponized historically against people,
I mean most doubtably obviously with seventy five years of
occupation of Palestine. One of the many ways besides the dispossession, killing, expulsion,

(01:59:37):
is to sever us from our food waste. And when
you sever someone from their land that creates the food ways,
you sever them from their culture, from their existence. Then
there's just the most the more immediate way as we're
seeing this genocide unfolds, where you can starve a population
in that and so food then becomes kind of of

(02:00:00):
this powerful tool to break a people, and why we
see people like food become a form of resistance for people.
But even here in our communities, I mean, this is
not unfortunately unique to the Palestinians. You've seen the pillaging
of indigenous folks here in this country the same things,

(02:00:24):
kind of cutting them off from their food ways, their
means of subsistence, of supporting one another, of you know,
being connected to their culture. And now you're seeing in
communities through economic policy, like food deserts and people not
being able to access their food or have sovereignty over
their food production. So it is absolutely a tool and

(02:00:48):
something that we talk about at REAMS a lot that,
like the fight for Palestine is the fight for food
sovereignty everywhere and vice versa.

Speaker 9 (02:00:56):
Right, Well, I'm glad you brought up the idea of
or just the fact that like Israel and the Zionist
regime has like taken Palestinians from their land. And I've
talked about this before on this podcast, but like the
olive tree is a very significant part of Palestinian culture,
and like olive harvesting is a huge part of Palestinian life.

(02:01:18):
And so when you burn down thousands of olive trees,
or when you kick people out of like the art
agriculturally rich parts of the land, you're denying them so
much more than just olives. It's like very deep. And
I think when people that are not as informed about
Palestine question like why is there a watermelon? Like what's
this and what's the olive about? And I think that

(02:01:41):
goes to show how powerful food can be. And just
for those who don't know, the watermelon became an active
or a symbol of resistance because the Palestinian flag was
not allowed to be raised for a while, and it
has the same colors as Palestini flag, and so that's
just like a really beautiful way that food has become
this like powerful symbol. And so I just I just

(02:02:03):
trying to, I don't know, emphasize that a little bit,
I guess, Jabil, what's your take.

Speaker 7 (02:02:09):
Yeah, I mean I think that I think just I'll
speak like a little bit more domestically. I feel like
Reem is so eloquent and talking about historic parts of it,
but I mean even here, like domestically in Los Angeles
or California, I think one of the things and it
kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
One of the things that's one of the things that's
difficult is there are so few identifying parts of or

(02:02:34):
just restaurants in general, like correctly identifying restaurants Syria in
or Lebanese or Palestinian or what have you, and they
hide under these names which when I'm not going to
name like specific restaurants here, but like which when other
restaurants open and maybe they're owned by an Italian person

(02:02:54):
or just other people that aren't Arab, and suddenly they're
taking the food and misappropriating it and calling it. Yeah,
I mean Israeli kuscus or like an Israeli salad or
Israeli falaffl or Hey, here's all this food and it's
shuarma and it's kebabs and it's manyish and we're an

(02:03:16):
Israeli restaurant. Like these are things that are really difficult
because I think, you know, those things tend to be
unfortunately just like more approachable, saying Mediterranean tends to be
more approachable, and what you get ultimately is a population
of I would say a larger population of non Arab
people that don't really understand what they're eating and they're

(02:03:37):
not educated on where it comes from. And just the
amount of people you know, anecdotally that I personally have
met who like don't know that this food is Arab
food or don't know like what where the food comes from,
which is so interesting to me because it's not an
experience that I think many other cultures or ethnicities have.

(02:04:00):
And so yeah, I mean I kind of always joke
that I feel like a really close example is if
you know, somebody started like an American person started making
sushi and they're like, this is American food and it's
just not at the same time. And so I think
that the need to assimilate for generations before reems and

(02:04:23):
I I have an empathy for the want of safety
that they were doing and the want to make a
living and the reasons they did it. I think we
kind of alluded to that earlier. But where it's left
us now is a population of Arabs and diaspora that

(02:04:43):
I think are harmed for it. You know, like we
don't have we don't show up on the census, and
it's all sort of one part. It's all they're all
different parts of the one problem. And I think that
when you take the food and you don't give it
its correct name, and you don't or you give it
the incorrect name, it hurts all of us in ways

(02:05:04):
that like we can't even imagine, whether it's at work
or in diversity and belonging initiatives not including Swannamina people,
or whether it's just in food ways and not being
included or not being included in the census, which leads
to us not having as much community support around our
people are not knowing medical statistics like I think they're

(02:05:27):
all they're symptoms of a bigger issue, and I think
one of the ways you combat that issue is through
knowledge and shared learning and shared experience.

Speaker 5 (02:05:37):
And I think food and.

Speaker 7 (02:05:39):
Food ways are one of the main ways that people
experience and learn about other cultures. And I think if
people look at that in their own lives, you can
apply it to any culture of food that you really
love and maybe it's not your own, and you've learned
something about those people through that, you know. I think

(02:06:01):
the main dishes of any culture, it says a lot
about where that culture has been, where they come from,
what their history is. And I think people being able
to experience those things and go to a Mexican restaurant
and learn about, you know, a certain dish and where
it comes from or why it's there or why it's

(02:06:21):
named something is an experience that allows them to learn
about a culture. And we just don't necessarily have that here.
And then when you add on, you know, misnomers or
incorrect labels, it becomes even more damaging and also just
hurtful and very annoying, Like it's so annoying, and I like,
I don't want to go. I'm sorry, Like there are
restaurants in LA that I like just don't want to

(02:06:43):
go to. And maybe the chefs are really nice and
they might be allies in some ways, or maybe they're not,
but like I would rather give please, Like I would
rather give my money to like an Arab person making
our own food rather than going to experience it.

Speaker 5 (02:07:01):
In a different way, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (02:07:02):
Like I don't.

Speaker 7 (02:07:04):
I don't know, so I think that's kind of like
how I generally feel. And the less professional answer is
I just find it like really annoying. And I'm like,
come on, y'all, there's so many listen, like, we're not
LA's not New York. We have like not as many
Arab places to go. They're sort of few. You have
to seek them out a little bit more here. But

(02:07:24):
I'm like, come on, y'all, we're out here. Yeah, go
find go find us, like, go find give your money
to like this Syrian immigrant who moved here and started
this place that everybody loves.

Speaker 5 (02:07:37):
And you know, I, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 7 (02:07:40):
There are a lot of big restaurants, are very popular
restaurants here, and I'm just like, not a dog. I
don't want to pay I don't want to pay thirty
five dollars for to believe.

Speaker 1 (02:07:48):
Yeah, I think, I mean, I think it's twofold kind
of like who has access to resources versus who doesn't? Right,
who gets highlighted? You know, there's that piece and what's
palatable to the American public and what's not right? Like
I always say, like, for for instance, I think like realms,

(02:08:10):
we kind of we do things a little bit different. Obviously,
we honor tradition, we honor the soul of air cuisine,
but we play around with it. And one could argue,
are we is this like americanizing the food? And we're like, no,
it's just through the lens of a yes for Palestinian

(02:08:32):
Syrian by way of California. But we I think when
we first came on the scene, I mean, there is
something to be said about the privilege that I have
as English speaking, as this generation that can like what
do you call it, translate the foods to a mainstream

(02:08:53):
public in a way that's like really compelling, like a
mediator almost, But that comes from a little bit of
like that people don't they want the food, you know,
and so like I am this palatable character in some ways,
and that's a contradiction that I'm constantly like, I don't
want to be, but it's like, what do you call

(02:09:17):
that the trojan horse? Right? But then once you come
into Reams, it's still it's very warm. I mean, there's nothing.
We're not tricking anyone, right, But we're also truly ourselves
and that's not for everybody. So we don't want to
be a gentrifying space where like, if you're going to
come in here, you have to deal with the community
that we're in just as much as the food that

(02:09:37):
you are obsessed with now, right because either wrote about
it or whatever. So we really and that's not for everybody, right, like,
and that just speaks to a like a bigger problem
of like if you like the people as much as
you like their food, Like our food is not just
for sale. You can't just take some of it and

(02:09:59):
leave the rest of it. And I think that's why
the American public is so comfortable with our foods being
represented by people other than us. We're not we're not
We're never the tellers of our own stories because again,
this dehumanization of Palestinians, and it's particularly interesting now and
I would say, like Reims has always been transparent. But

(02:10:21):
I've heard from counterparts in who are now you know,
like there are other restaurants now coming out. I think
there was even just an article that was released today
on Eater about the Palestinian category on Google, and you know,
people are now calling their restaurants, are maybe leading up

(02:10:42):
to this last four months calling their restaurants Palestinian. And
that was palatable enough. It's like cool, like it's this
culture that's really beautiful. But then when it came down
to it, when we're experiencing a genocide, it made people
feel uncomfortable. So it's like they want to like it
doesn't stop at food, you know, And I think our food,

(02:11:02):
at least for me, and I would say for a
lot of people who get into like expressing their food
ways here in the US, Like you can't just take
some of us our food and then dismiss the rest
of us or dehumanize the rest of us. And so
I think that is the contradiction that we're always dealing with,
is like how can we offer this beautiful culture but

(02:11:25):
not tokenize it so it becomes depoliticized because it is political.
And if you're engaging with Palestinian cuisine and consuming it.
You can't just you can't do it without either you know,
being an active participant one way or the other, right,

(02:11:47):
and what is happening to Palestinians. And so we kind
of pushed the envelope on that, and you know, for
us at Reams, that has yielded a real, ever expanding
community of folks who have really maybe a few years ago,
knew nothing about Palestine. We got to do it in

(02:12:08):
a way that was right. And so we were you know,
we met people where they're at. We bring them along.
It's not like we're like, you know, beating anything over
people's heads, but we're like, this is what it means
to be truly authentically ourselves. This is our story, this
is the history, this is the painful atrocities, And like,
if you're going to eat our food, you have to
engage with that in some way. Like it can't just

(02:12:31):
be comfortable and like it's cool to eat Palestinian food.
I don't want to see our food as a trend, right, Yeah,
So while it's while it's cool to see a lot
of Palestinian restaurants now gaining popularity, and hopefully, you know,
REMS has paid some path for that we got to
make sure that we're doing it in a way that's

(02:12:52):
intentional and responsible so we don't get tokenized.

Speaker 7 (02:12:57):
I think one just like piggyback. One thought, one thought
that you brought up Bream that I thought was really
interesting was like being able to tell our own stories,
and often we're not.

Speaker 4 (02:13:09):
We're not.

Speaker 7 (02:13:10):
And I think that relates to like a lot of
what we've talked about today. But I mean even like
sharing our own experiences, Like you know, I don't think
it's necessarily a choice to be where you you know,
to be who you are. It is what you are,
and I think ultimately there's this real pressure for Arabs

(02:13:32):
and in Palestinians as well, to sort of let other
people tell our story for us, Let other people make
the food, let other people photograph the traumas and the
joy is like if you go to any like art
bookstore and try to find like an Arab photographer photographing
of their own people, whether it's the wars or the

(02:13:53):
joy or art, like, you'll find maybe one, you know,
And I've been to that and said, hey, do you
have any I'm looking for like this, and I want
it from an Arab person, And like the only one
really is sharing a shot. Who's I'm Persian, But I
don't know. I think it's I think it's just really
interesting how I think there's like a real fear about

(02:14:15):
talking about for a lot of us, about talking about
our own experiences publicly. And I think a lot of that,
A lot of that comes from just like being sort
of conditioned in this country to minimize ourselves and minimize
our identity.

Speaker 1 (02:14:31):
And I think essentially, well, there are real retributions for that. Yeah,
we get jailed, we get deported, we get fired from
our jobs. We don't get book deals, we don't get
show deals. Yeah, as we're experiencing. So it's like that's real.

Speaker 7 (02:14:53):
Yeah, And I mean a lot of the a lot
of the stuff we've a lot of the feedback we've
gotten on the show. I mean early on, a couple
of years ago, we started getting feedback that I mean
there were like two or three when we first started pitching,
and I won't call out names, but they were like
major companies, and one of them was we already have

(02:15:14):
like our minority food show. Like that was one of
the literal pieces of feedback. And another one was and
again like I just I know We've talked about Palestine
a lot, but again, like the show is not necessarily
centered around Palestinians. It's just us telling our own stories.
And one of the pieces of feedback we got was

(02:15:37):
they were worried that Reim and I like that our
identities were too inherently political. And it's like, okay, but
there's like nothing we can do about how you perceive us.
What we can control is saying, hey, we want to
make an Arab joy show, and we want to like

(02:15:58):
show off the things we love about our called Sure,
and we want to talk about how great the food tastes,
and talk about stories like immigrant success stories of people
coming to this country. And yeah, we'll talk about the trauma,
and sure, we'll talk about the politics because that's what
we're passionate about. But like to get that feedback even

(02:16:18):
a couple of years ago, when you know, it seemed
like everybody was sort of every culture or people were
getting their turn to sort of shine, was I was like, really,
are we still Are we still here right now?

Speaker 3 (02:16:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (02:16:31):
And yeah, I mean it's gotten it's gotten weirder as
time goes on, and you know, I don't know, no
show exists like this in the way that probably no
restaurant existed like Raim's did when she opened it. And
I think it's going to take like someone who just
really believes and is a champion for.

Speaker 5 (02:16:54):
Arab people.

Speaker 7 (02:16:57):
For us to make something that just shows how much
we love our own peace people, and how excited we
are to be Arab and how excited we are to
be Palestinians, and how fucking awesome our food is and
how great our culture is and how fun and exciting
it is, and all these things that people love and eat.
We just want to show them like where it comes
from and who we are, and in addition to that,

(02:17:19):
show that we're all regionally very different, like we call
in this country. Every type of Arab food is called Mediterranean,
whether it's Moroccan or Lebanese or Egyptian, and they're all
so different, they're all wildly different. Yeah, And I think that, Yeah,
like the fact that we haven't been able to tell

(02:17:40):
this story is wild you know, like the fact that
no one has and we've come really close. We've gotten
into deals before, we've gotten into shopping agreements more recently,
and sort of you know, the outcome felt punitive. After
October seventh. And yeah, I think that ultimately the fact

(02:18:00):
that like we we and it doesn't I you know, truly,
I hope it's main rym but like the fact that
no one has been able to tell this story for
a group of people that is so huge in the
Arab community, in the Muslim community, like that no one
has been able to serve this demographic of people with
a food show is wild and there's so many of

(02:18:26):
us who would be so excited. I would be so excited,
Like I would be bummed that it wasn't me, but
I would be thrilled that.

Speaker 5 (02:18:33):
It happened for the community.

Speaker 7 (02:18:35):
And I don't know if not now when you know,
like the time for the time for equity injustice as always.
And I think that's generally how I sort of feel
about the the show and just being able to like
I just want to tell the story for my community
so badly, And yeah, I mean, I don't know, I

(02:18:57):
feel like I went on a bit of a tangent.
That's kind of where I feel I am right now.

Speaker 1 (02:19:02):
Well, in a time of in a time of genocide
where literally are people and this is not just past that,
it's not you know, there's a regional are the dehumanization
of Arabs is costing us lives. Yeah, so it feels
that much more important.

Speaker 7 (02:19:23):
To do this work now.

Speaker 3 (02:19:24):
Ye.

Speaker 9 (02:19:25):
People are so used to seeing us seeing Arabs like traumatized,
are used to seeing us in pain. They're used to
seeing our countries destroyed and seeing our buildings turn into rubble.
I think so much of our culture is so beautiful,
and so much of it is about food and art
and joy. I think it's really Yeah, I would be

(02:19:49):
so excited for that show too, because I if I
was a little kid watching that, I would have felt
so much better about myself. And to your point a
couple minutes ago, Realm, you were talking about how you're
not exactly a mediator, but growing up, there's almost this
like shame about having like you're not Arab enough, you're
not American enough. You have a foot in both worlds.

(02:20:09):
But it's really a strength, you know, in your experience
and in our experience, Like we can use that foot
in both worlds to our advantage and try to show
the American community how beautiful our community is. And I
don't know, I think it's yeah, I love you guys.

Speaker 1 (02:20:32):
That's what it comes down to it.

Speaker 9 (02:20:34):
Yeah, but I really do appreciate you both doing this work,
and yeah, reminding us that it's Arab culture isn't something
to be feared. I don't know that the humanization has
gotten to a point that it's just really terrifying. And
so I think the fact that even existing is like
political or scary, and yeah, you to your point, everything

(02:20:57):
is so much more digestible for people an Arab or
than Muslim or whatever. Like in La we have a
huge Armenian community and they're really embraced, and I would
love that to happen for us too.

Speaker 1 (02:21:10):
The backlash of being Arab feels very real and visceral
right now, feels like we are in a time of
the years after nine eleven again, and especially with this
upcoming election in twenty twenty four, it's a really, I

(02:21:31):
think a scary time of censorship for Arabs in general
and Muslim communities. Regardless of who the candidate who wins
our political campaign, it's quite clear that the policies towards us,

(02:21:56):
you know, the foreign policy, but also domestically, how that
has translated into hate crimes against Arabs simply for being
Arab is a really scary thing. And so yeah, it's
just a new thing that we're going to have to
navigate in this in this new era.

Speaker 9 (02:22:17):
Yeah, I think on that note, like community is so
important and I'm really grateful to continue to foster the
community around me as well. And I think with food,
with Palestinian culture in general, it relies so much on
us remembering and continuing to talk about it and not
letting anyone forget about it. And so I think food

(02:22:39):
is the same way. It's just reminding everyone this is
where it comes from, this is how important it is,
this is what it means to the culture. You can't
enjoy some of our culture and not all of it,
I guess, And I feel like that happens all the time.
I really appreciate you guys both being on the show
and talking a little bit about your stories, and yeah,
I can't wait to see the show happen day because

(02:23:00):
it will happen awesome.

Speaker 1 (02:23:02):
Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the work that I'm doing,
especially as it relates to food and hospitality. I was
one of the founders of an effort called Hospitality for Humanity,
and you can find us on at Hospitality the.

Speaker 3 (02:23:22):
Number four pal P a L.

Speaker 1 (02:23:25):
You know, we continue to do things at REMS and
you can see us on the socials at REEMS, California,
and then you can obviously follow my whereabouts at rem
dot A seal.

Speaker 5 (02:23:39):
A s Sil.

Speaker 9 (02:23:41):
I could put all your links in the description as well,
but you're real. Do you want to be found on
the internet?

Speaker 3 (02:23:46):
And if so, where.

Speaker 7 (02:23:49):
I don't know how much I want to be found
on the internet.

Speaker 5 (02:23:50):
I will plug that. I think everyone should call.

Speaker 7 (02:23:53):
Their senators and demand a ceasefire immediately, and also consider
donating to one of many nonprofits, but the one that
I have is Gaza Emergency Appeal, and uh, just ask
for a ceasefire as much as possible. But also if somebody.

Speaker 1 (02:24:09):
Demanded, they'll find me.

Speaker 7 (02:24:12):
Demand demanded. Don't ask, sir, please can I have? Can
I have a?

Speaker 1 (02:24:22):
Please?

Speaker 9 (02:24:22):
But no, please, everyone that's listening, keep talking about Palestine,
keep sharing info from Palestinians themselves, and yeah three Palestine.

Speaker 6 (02:24:34):
Yes, Hello, and welcome back to It could happen here.
I am once again your guest host, Molly Conger, and

(02:24:55):
today I'm going to tell you about something that is
happening here. Being my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. You might
have seen the news recently that Patriot Front leader Thomas
Ryan Russou was arrested in Texas on an out of
state felony warrant. On February twenty third, authorities in McLennan County, Texas,
arrested Rousseau and poked him into the county jail. The

(02:25:16):
jail roster lists the offense as burn object to intimidate
OH slash s that OS means out of state, and
it lists Virginia as the state issuing the warrant. And
Rousseau's arrest certainly made a splash when the news hit
Nazi telegram channels lit up with posts about his arrest.
Gab feeds were flooded with hastily made graphics decrying this

(02:25:38):
political persecution. This sudden spike and interest in a little
used Virginia Code section might make you think Rousseau was
the first person to be taken into custody on this charge,
that perhaps he was targeted for arrest in some kind
of grand political plan to take him out of the game.
But he is in fact the eleventh person to be
arrested in just the last year for participating in the

(02:26:01):
Tiki Torch march at the University of Virginia on August eleventh,
twenty seventeen. These cases have been working their way through
the system here for long enough that some of Rousseau's
code defendants have not only already been found guilty, they've
served their time and gotten back out. But with this
sudden surge and interest in this case, I want to
give you all a little background on the other ten.

(02:26:23):
If you'll indulge me for a moment, though, I'd like
to read you something I wrote nearly a year ago,
just as the first cases were being unsealed. There is
no statute of limitations on felonies in Virginia. With that
in mind, here's section eighteen point two Dash four twenty
three point oh one Dash B of the Code of Virginia.

(02:26:44):
Burning object on property of another or a highway or
other public place with intent to intimidate. Any person who,
with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons,
burns an object on a highway or other public place
in a manner having a direct tendency to place another
their person in reasonable fear or apprehension of death or
bodily injury, is guilty of a Class six felony On

(02:27:07):
August eleventh, twenty seventeen, hundreds of torch bearing marchers traversed
the grounds of the University of Virginia. They'd come to
Charllettsville from across the country, taking Friday morning flights or
taking turns at the wheel for cross country drives, and
rented vans with guys they met on message boards. Arriving
early before the big event. The following morning, they gathered

(02:27:27):
at Nameless Field, a grassy acre near the Via tennis
courts with a deceptive name, and distributed tiki torches. Men
with walkie talkies clipped to their belts, some with wired earpieces,
barked orders. Elliot Kleine, an ambitious young white nationalist organizer
calling himself Eli Moseley after the twentieth century British fascist
Oswald Moseley, shouted at the crowd as they formed into

(02:27:49):
a line. Or picking big guys no females. Klein and
his security team would be selecting the biggest marshers to
lay down their torches and keep the perimeter as the
march moved moved through the university grounds, they might need
their hands free. The march wound its way through grounds
up the lawn, then up the steps of the University
of Virginia's iconic rotunda. On the other side of the rotunda,

(02:28:12):
gathered near the statue of Thomas Jefferson, a small group
of anti racist protesters waited. In her testimony during a
later civil trial, one of the women who was terrorized
that night said of the sound of the approaching crowd,
when we heard the roaring, we just linked arms and
held hands and started to sing.

Speaker 4 (02:28:31):
She said.

Speaker 6 (02:28:31):
At first it sounded like thunder, like the earth was growling.
As they grew closer, but before she could see the
light of the torches, she began to make out the
chance hundreds of voices raised in Unison, shouting blood and soil.
Testifying about that night four years later, she said she
could still hear it sometimes in her nightmares, and by

(02:28:55):
the time the small group of mostly students realized the
magnitude and ferocity of the approaching it was too late.
They were surrounded, fully encircled at the base of the
statue by hundreds of torch wielding white supremacists for a
few minutes, minutes that those trapped at the base of
the statue said they believed might be their last, as
they were doused in lighter fluid, maced and punched. There

(02:29:17):
was a melee. The police made no move to intervene,
as streams of pepper spray were let loose and cries
of medic were audible above the roar of you will
not replace us. When the trapped counter protesters were finally
able to flee, stumbling blindly with burning eyes and covering
their heads in a hail storm of fists and torches,
the marchers declared victory. Richard Spencer, an organizer of that

(02:29:40):
weekend's rally, climbed the base of the statue and delivered
a victory speech to the still roaring crowd, now shouting hail, victory,
hail's Spencer, as Spencer told them, we occupy this ground,
we one, that is why don't they cry?

Speaker 1 (02:30:12):
There? All right? All right, all right?

Speaker 8 (02:30:17):
Were these freaks?

Speaker 4 (02:30:19):
We on?

Speaker 6 (02:30:19):
These freaks we are he's.

Speaker 3 (02:30:21):
Brown, We on these one. What in the hell are
we doing out here? What in the hell are we doing?
Risking our lives? Were risking our lives for our people,
for our ancestors, for our future. That's how we're doing.

(02:30:48):
What do you think it? Anti fock can defeat our
wrong do you think it anti focking to feed our group.
They have to because they have to go to fix line.

Speaker 6 (02:31:00):
The marchers dispersed to their various hotels, campgrounds, and Arabian bees.
Spencer later said cheekly that he booked his under the
pseudonym literally Hitler. They had to rest up for the
real battle in the morning, and while they slept, a
young man from Ohio was driving through the night, perhaps
already knowing that his gray Dodge Challenger would be impounded

(02:31:21):
as a murder weapon. Before he slept again, he checked
Twitter and retweeted a post David Duke had tweeted images
of the Torch March celebrating the Altright's success that evening
with the caption our people on the march, will you
be at Unite the Right tomorrow? As he left Ohio
that evening, the young man and the Dodge Challenger got

(02:31:42):
a text from his mother, a text we've all probably
gotten from our mothers. She said, be careful, and James
Alexfield's junior, in one of the last texts he sent
before a lifetime behind bars, replied to his mother with
a photograph of Hitler and the words we are not
the ones who need to be careful. Years later, the

(02:32:06):
word charles Ville has become synonymous with those two fused images,
Fields's mangled challenger and an iconic photo of the crowd
torches and hands the rotunda at their backs. Fields was
convicted both in state and federal court of Heather Hire's
murder and multiple counts of aggravated malicious wounding. Daniel Bordon,
Alex Ramos, Jacob Goodwin, and Tyler Watkins went away for

(02:32:29):
a brutal gang beating of a young black man. Richard Preston,
an imperial wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, did some
time for discharging his firearm in the general direction of
another young black man while shouting die and word. But
all in all, for all the violence of both days,
there was a curious reluctance to bring charges for anything
that didn't rise to the level of attempted murder, and

(02:32:50):
some things that did. There are thousands of photographs videos
from every conceivable angle taken by victims, bystanders, professional photojournalists,
and even the marchers themselves. Their faces are uncovered, their
motives are clear, and the law is fairly straightforward. But
the University of Virginia lies within the jurisdiction of Albemarle County.

(02:33:12):
In twenty seventeen, Apomwalle County Commonweal's attorney, Robert Tracy, chose
not to bring any burning objects cases under Section eighteen
point two Dash four twenty three. He didn't think he
could make a case against the tiki torch mob, or
maybe he didn't want to. The Commonweal's attorney for the
City of Charlesville at the time, Dave Chapman, wrote in
a memo in October of that year that he did
believe the cases could be made, but they weren't his

(02:33:35):
to prosecute. But in Virginia, prosecutors come and go, and
a felony lives forever. In a October twenty nineteen debate
between then sitting Prosecutor Robert Tracy and his challenger, Jim Hinchley,
Tracy again scoffed at the idea of indicting these cases,
even saying that Hindley's belief that it was possible was
a sign he was inexperienced and wrong for the job.

(02:33:58):
A month later, Hine won the election, and now it
seems he's trying to make good on his campaign promise
of proving Robert Tracy wrong. In February twenty twenty three,
the Albumole County Commonwealth' Attorney's office quietly sought and got
indictments under the Burning Object Statute. A grand jury agreed
with Hingeley there was probable cause to believe that objects

(02:34:20):
had been burned with the intent to intimidate. Fugitive warrants
were issued, arrests were made by local police and far
ranging jurisdictions, And now, nearly six years after that hot
night in August, the extraditions are starting. I want to
share with you the stories of the men who carried
torches that night. Some of them are now facing felony

(02:34:40):
charges of Almorole County. Others may come to share that fate.
After the crowd dispersed that night, and after the deadly
rally the next morning, those men went home. Some started businesses,
some died, Some trafficked drugs, beat their wives, choked their girlfriends,
went to grad school, went to prison, started families, ran

(02:35:00):
for office, left the movement, tried to lead the movement,
or just tried to disappear. There are as many stories
as there were flames in the night. When their voices
joined as one shouting Jews will not replace us, then
going their separate ways back to the communities they came from.

(02:35:21):
And now some of them are on their way back,
this time against their will. So I wrote that about
ten months ago, last April, just as the first cases
were unsealed. Obviously a lot's happened since then. But before
I get into a recap of those first ten cases,
let's hear a brief word about some products and services.

(02:35:53):
So if Thomas Rousseau is number eleven on this list
of tiki torch defendants, they were the first ten. The
grand jury that convened in February of last year handed
down the first five indictments. Will Zachary Smith, William Billy Williams,
Tyler Dykes, Dallas, Medina, and William Fears. Will Smith of Nacona,

(02:36:15):
Texas was the first in custody. He was actually already
in custody here in Charlottesville when the first charges were filed.
He had been indicted on a separate felony charge back
in twenty eighteen for pepper spraying the counter protesters that night,
but remained a fugitive until his arrest in January twenty
twenty three. So when the prosecutor brought the torch charges
to the grand jury in February. It was probably an

(02:36:37):
easy first choice. Will Smith pled guilty to the torch
charge in May in a sealed plea deal that dropped
the much more serious pepper spray felony, and was allowed
to return home without being sentenced. Billy Williams traveled here
with will Smith back in twenty seventeen. The pair were
acting as bodyguards for Robert Hasmadore Ray, the Daily Stormer bloger,

(02:37:00):
who is actually also still a wanted fugitive on a
felony charge of pepper spraying those counter protesters that night.
When Billy Williams was extradited from Texas in April of
last year, he was denied bond after some apparent dishonesty
regarding his relationship with Robert Ray. Through his attorney, he

(02:37:21):
denied having had any contact with Ray while he was
a fugitive. He in fact claimed they barely knew each other,
having met only a couple of times. I can tell
you that that's not true. But after claiming that they'd
had no contact in the intervening years, the prosecutor revealed
in the bond hearing that law enforcement partners had shared

(02:37:41):
information with his office that they believe that not only
had they been contact, but that Ray had been living
with Williams living on his property while he was in
hiding as a fugitive. Williams two pled guilty to the
burning object charge in July, receiving an active sentence of
six months but with times and good behavior. He was

(02:38:01):
home barely two weeks after entering his plea, but not
before he missed the birth of his seventh child with
his common law wife. Tyler Diykes was arrested on Saint
Patrick's Day. He'd been out with other members of the
white supremacist group the Southern Son's Active Club, trying to
hang a racist banner from a highway overpass in Savannah, Georgia,
when he was unfortunately bitten by a dog. I do

(02:38:23):
not have information on what came of the dog. I
hope he's okay, concerned about infection though. Tyler Diykes went
to the emergency room to have the wound looked at.
In Georgia, as in most states, emergency rooms contact the
police to report dog bite injuries. An officer was dispatched
to the hospital to take a report from Dikes about
the dog bite incident, which is a fairly routine situation.

(02:38:46):
But somewhere during their interaction in the hospital, the officer
ran Dyke's name to the system and it came back
with a warrant. A panicked Dikes sent his hate group
group chat a quick text arrested by Virginia nuke my account.
In video of the melee the base of the statue
on August eleven, twenty seventeen, Dykes can be seen throwing

(02:39:08):
punches even after everyone else had stopped, and then celebrating
the victory by marching around in a weird, tight little
circle with his right arm extended in a Nazi salute.
Diykes pled guilty to the torch charge in May and
received the same six month act of sentence Williams had
gotten with time served and good behavior. He was released
in July. I wonder if he expected to see his

(02:39:30):
elderly parents waiting for him in the parking lot outside
the album ArHL Charltsville Regional Jail that day, but he
never made it that far. U S Marshals took him
into federal custody before he ever walked outside. He's currently
out on bond awaiting trial on ten counts for his
participation in the January sixth insurrection. Dallas Medina of Ohio
turned himself in in April and was allowed to return

(02:39:51):
home on bond. He had been an active member of
an extremely online group of mass shooting enthusiasts calling themselves
the Bowl Patrol, so named after the bull cut hairstyles
sported by their idol Dylan Roof. After a feud with
Chris the Crying Nazi Catwell ended with Catwell in federal prison.
The group more or less fell apart in twenty twenty.

(02:40:12):
Mendina hasn't appeared in court since his bond hearing in April,
and he doesn't yet have a trial date. William Fiers
was booked into the album L Charlesville Regional Jail in
June after being transferred from the Texas prison where he
was serving a sentence for domestic violence. Just two months
after Unite the Right, William Fears beat and choked his girlfriend.

(02:40:32):
A few days later, he traveled to Florida with his brother,
Colton Fears and their friend Tyler Tenbrink to see Richard
Spencer's speech at the University of Florida. He knew when
he left town for Gainesville that week that his girlfriend
had reported the assault. Having already been to prison for
abducting and stabbing a different ex girlfriend years earlier, he
knew another conviction would put him away for a while,

(02:40:53):
and he wanted one last shot at starting the race
war before they got him. In video from the Torch March,
William Fears can be seen swinging his torch at a
counter protester, screaming Die Commie. Fears remains in custody but
does not yet have a trial date. William's brother, Colton Fears,
joined him at the Albumarl Charlesville Regional Jail in September.

(02:41:15):
I suspect the jail probably kept them separated, but it
still would have been the closest the brothers had been
in years. When the brothers were in Gainesville in October
of twenty seventeen, their friend Tyler Tenbrink shot at a
group of anti fascist counter protesters after Richard Spencer's speech. Thankfully,
no one was injured, but Tenbrink was convicted of attempted
first degree homicide. Colton Fears was driving the car when

(02:41:37):
the men left the scene of the shooting and spent
five years in a Florida prison for accessory after the
fact to attempted first degree homicide. Colton was released in
twenty twenty two and returned home to Texas, where he
was then arrested in August twenty twenty three on the
burning object charge. After pleading guilty in October, he was
allowed to return home prior to sentencing Ryan Roy of

(02:41:59):
Vermont and himself in in May. If you've been reading
the voluminous leagues that seem to be constantly springing forth
from Patriot Front's online comms, you may know him better
as Rex. It looks like he's stayed quite busy in
the years since Unite the Right as a member of
Patriot Front. He is currently home on bond and does
not yet have a trial date. Jamie Troutman of West

(02:42:21):
Virginia turned himself in in October under the pseudonym Altright VA.
Troutman was an active organizer and planner of the Unite
the Right rally. He was present at many of the
precursor events that took place here in Charlesville during the
Summer of Hate, including the two other torch marches smaller
torchlit rallies that were held in downtown Charlottesville in May
and October of that year. Like Dyke's photos show, Troutman

(02:42:44):
was present at the Capitol on January sixth, though in
Troutman's case no charges have been filed. He too is
home on bond with no trial date set. And before
we get to the last two of those first ten cases,
let's hear from someone who has also not been charged
in connection with the mill reactionary attempt to overthrow the
US government these products and services. The final two of

(02:43:17):
these first ten torch cases are the messy ones. So
we've got these four guilty please, and we've got four
cases that are sort of moving along slowly down the
usual path. And then we've got two cases where the
defendants have had some success bogging the cases down with motions.
Jacob Dix of Ohio was arrested in July. Dix is

(02:43:38):
seen in photos and video on the eleventh and twelfth
with two other Ohio men, his roommate Ryan Martin, who
recently passed away, and Daniel Borden, one of the men
convicted of beating a man nearly to death during the
rally on August twelfth. I'm sure we'll learn more about
Dix as his case progresses, but I have found him
in photos with the Traditionalist Worker Party at the Nazi
rally in Pikeville earlier that same summer. In his torch case,

(02:44:02):
he has been granted both a substitute judge and a
special prosecutor based on a sort of nebulous, though very
loudly argued conspiracy theory involving the wife of a judge
who is not even presiding over his case, and a
prosecutor who has a history of expressing anti racist political
views in his personal life. Dix is out on bond.

(02:44:23):
With the recent rule in granting him a special prosecutor,
we may be seeing a trial date get set in
the near future. And finally, Augustus Sole Invictus. Until Rousseau
was arrested last week, the biggest name in this batch
was Augustus Invictus. Even before his name was on the
fliers as a headline speaker at Unite the Right, Invictus

(02:44:43):
was no stranger to the headlines. In twenty sixteen, he
ran for US Senate in Florida as a libertarian. His
campaign was marred by such controversies as his own past
statements on eugenics, A twenty thirteen ritual sacrifice of a goat,
his legal representation of w supremacist militia leader Marcus Faiella,
and numerous police reports from both his wife and his

(02:45:07):
teenage girlfriend alleging domestic violence. In the years since, Invictis
never did become a US senator despite a second attempt,
and never did get convicted of domestic violence despite many,
many more police reports. He's also no longer a pagan.
Asked recently about the goat blood drinking ritual he performed

(02:45:29):
in twenty thirteen, he quipped that he drinks human blood now,
just a little transubstantiation joke about his recent conversion to
traditional Catholicism. Invictus was arrested on the burning object charge
in Florida in June twenty twenty three and held for
a month before being extradited to Virginia and released on bond.
Like Dix, he has been granted a substitute judge. He too,

(02:45:51):
was seeking a special prosecutor, but no ruling was made
at his last hearing. Currently, his case is docketed for
trial next month, but I'm willing to bet that gets postponed.
So that's more or less where we are now. Rousseau
is the eleventh man to be charged in these cases.
We've got four guilty please on the record, leaving him
as one of seven open cases. We can expect to

(02:46:14):
see Rousseau extradited from Texas to Virginia in the near future.
I would say maybe a week or two, although some
of them have been held for up to a month
before a deputy can get down there and bring them back.
Something I was really surprised to learn in all of
this is in most extraditions for state cases like this,
like these are not federal cases. These are local cases.

(02:46:35):
When someone gets extradited long distance, a deputy just flies
down there and then they fly back together on a
commercial airline. It's not like a con air situation. They're
just on an airplane together. So it really depends on
when a deputy can sort of get down there and
get them. So he'll be extradited sometime in the next
few weeks, and then once he's booked into the album

(02:46:56):
RL Charltsville Regional Jail, he'll get an appearance in court.
It's anybody's guest right now who he'll hire to represent him.
Former Proud Boy and current Patriot Front lawyer Jason Lee
van Dyke was thoughtful enough to reply to one of
my tweets about Rousseau's arrest to say that he will
not be taking this case, as much as he would
have loved to try this case, which he said that
he would do a very good job doing and he

(02:47:18):
could definitely do it, and unfortunately he just can't. He
cited the difficulty in finding local council to assist. He's
not admitted to the bar in Virginia, so who would
need someone who is to sort of sponsor him in
and be responsible for him in the case. So he said,
you know, he can't find local council, and also it
would just be two time consuming and too expensive to
try a case in Virginia as he's located in Texas,

(02:47:41):
so it won't be Jason Lee van Dyke, I've been
writing about these cases in my newsletter, The Devil's Advocates.
It's on Ghost, which is like substack, but it's not substack,
it's Ghost, and I'm looking forward to writing some updates
very soon. The finding out for this particular fucking around
has been a long time coming, and I can't help

(02:48:01):
but wonder if these cases had been brought sooner, Patriot
Front might not even exist. You know, I suspect once
Rousseau has gotten a lawyer, he will ask for a
bond hearing. That's probably what's next. It's impossible to know
how much information other law enforcement agencies are interested in
sharing with the local prosecutor, but that kind of information

(02:48:23):
sharing did play a critical role in some of the
other cases. In bond hearings for Billy Williams and Tyler Dikes,
information about the defendant's associations and activities collected by other
local police agencies and federal authorities was what kept them
in custody. In Dikes's case, several police and sheriff's departments
in South Carolina and Georgia shared information that he was

(02:48:46):
a suspect in some like swastika vandalism cases, some flying cases.
It's not clear if the FEDS shared information ahead of
time about the January sixth case, but it is clear
that the prosecutor's office was talking to other law enforcement
agencies who'd been keeping tabs on these guys. And I
think you would be a fool to think the FEDS
don't have some information about Rousseau that might raise a

(02:49:09):
Judge's eyebrow. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Speaker 5 (02:49:27):
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.
I'm Andrew Sage and I run the eature channel Andrewism.
But this is not Andrewism. This is it could happen
here today. I'm with Garrison yet again, and we are
tackling really the genesis of this podcast, everyone's favorite subject, collapse.

Speaker 3 (02:49:51):
Oh wow, yeah, you know, just.

Speaker 5 (02:49:54):
A light topic for your morning or eating commute. I mean,
if it's twenty twenty four and you don't know what
collapse is, allow me to illuminate.

Speaker 4 (02:50:07):
Also, why are you listening to this podcast? It is
ostensibly about collapse.

Speaker 5 (02:50:12):
Indeed, in essence, collapse is the significant loss of an
established level of complexity towards a much simpler state. It
can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and
be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human
extinction or a singular global event. Although the longer the
duration the mod resembles a decline instead of a collapse.

(02:50:36):
So collapse is really a lot of things happen all
of once. People typically decide, you know you're talking about
the climate, talking about resources and the decline of resources,
talking about last extinction, talking about societal unrest and break
down and the inequality, and truly pick your poison, brother,

(02:50:57):
We're talking about you know, the f and increasing global
energy demands to graddingly slow transition to renewables, the destabilization
of our food and water systems. There's no one cause,
but several compounding pressures, as Pablo Serophene and Raphael Stevens
aptly summarize. To maintain itself and avoid financial disorder and

(02:51:19):
social unrest, our industrial capital civilization is forced to accelerate,
to become more complex and to consume ever more energy
its Doasleine expansion has been nurtured by the exceptional availability
though this will not last long of fossil fuels that
are very energy efficient, coupled with her growth economy and
highly unstable levels of debt. But the growth of our

(02:51:42):
industrial civilization today, constrained by geophysical economic limits, has reached
a phase of decreasing returns. Technology, which has long sail
to push these limits back, is less and less able
to ensure this acceleration, and locks in this unsustainable trajectory
by preventing the development of new alternatives sounds familiar.

Speaker 3 (02:52:02):
Well.

Speaker 5 (02:52:02):
At the same time, the sciences of complexity are discovering
that beyond certain thresholds, complex systems, including economies and ecosystems,
suddenly switched to new and unpredictable states of equilibrium and
may even collapse. We are more and more aware that
we have crossed certain boundaries that guarantee the stability of
our living conditions as a society and as a species.

(02:52:24):
The global climate system and many of the planet's ecosystems
and major biochemical cycles have left the zone of stability
that we were familiar with herald in a time of sudden,
large scale disruptions which internally stabilized industrial societies, the rest
of humankind and even other species.

Speaker 3 (02:52:43):
Yes, I agree.

Speaker 5 (02:52:47):
In terms of the hows of collapse, you know, it
might be slow, or it might be quick, It might
be happening now already, or maybe just really kicking off
seriously in their future today, we'll really be talking about
the sort of different ways of conceptualizing collapse, different frame
devices we can use, and addressing the variety of responses

(02:53:09):
that people have to collapse. In a future episode, I
want to take a look at I suppose a more.
This could be like the pessimistic episode in a sense,
and the next one will be a bit more you know,
how not to spiral into despair?

Speaker 4 (02:53:29):
So yeah, how to have a good understanding of the
reality of our crumbling systems, but not just be a
doomer who stays inside and scrolls all the time.

Speaker 3 (02:53:39):
It is just depressed.

Speaker 5 (02:53:41):
Well, but thankfully you have more options than just being
a duma. And we're going to get into all of
those responses very soon. There are quite a few interesting.

Speaker 3 (02:53:48):
Ones, alrighty.

Speaker 5 (02:53:50):
First of all, we need to talk about some different
ways of conceptualizing collapse. For example, we have Dmitry Orlovs
five stages, just like a rule coaster of chaos, which
each stage more intense than the last. First, we have
stage one financial collapse. Everyone losing faith in business as usual,

(02:54:11):
financial institutions going belly up, savings vanish, financial freefall, say
goodbye to your savings, account, loans, pensions. Basically what went
down in Argentina back in two thousand and one. Sounds familiar, Yes, yes, yes,
Next we have commercial collapse. Now it's not just about money,
it's about losing faith in the market. Shall provide commodities

(02:54:35):
end up being hoarded, shopping centers are closing for business,
and we might even bring back barter, and then boom,
we have the next stage, political collapse. Trust in the
government will take care of you crumbles. Governments try to
maintain oiler with curfews and martial law, but local corruption

(02:54:55):
takes over services, the roads un maintained, the rubbish piling up.
All of actually makes a really bold claim here, and
that is that the US might be on this on
the track of these like stages. Like I know, I know,
that sounds like a really like a radical claim to

(02:55:16):
make I.

Speaker 4 (02:55:17):
Feel like everyone listening to this has a decent understanding that, like,
these things aren't just switches that are either on or off.
This is like a sliding scale, and the US is
a decent ways on this scale already. I mean, that's
what That's what the first five episodes of the second

(02:55:38):
season of this show was really all about, specifically in
terms of the climate and how it's not like everything
all falls apart at once. It's that these systems that
we've grown to rely on will slowly crumble away until
they've become basically nothing, or they just become like corporate puppets,
or they've just become like like they're not they're not
actually real anymore in any kind of impactful way. And

(02:56:00):
I mean we saw a little bit of this during COVID,
how many systems that we relied on just weren't really
around anymore or were not actually reliable. And you see
this whenever, like whenever there's a massive amount of wildfires
that takes over a whole region and it displaces hundreds
of thousands of people. Usually the response to that is

(02:56:20):
not the government's going to come in and save everybody.
It's a whole bunch of really poor anarchists set up
a series of tents to give people food and to
get people organized, to find places to sleep, and like
that's the actual response to these crumbling institutions. It's not
just like you know, fallout New Vegas. We're living in
the apocalypse immediately. It's a lot more fuzzy.

Speaker 5 (02:56:46):
Yeah. Yeah, in in a sense, I kind of get
people who wish it was a bit more straightforward and
so sure, you know, because if it's like if it
was like a major event, right like if it was
an innovasion that just happened, I think it's a lot
easier for people to conceptionize something like that and respond

(02:57:06):
to it. And I just mobilize all your efforts and
all your focus is on solved in this issue, because
it's right in front of your face when you're talking
about like geological time scales and multiple decades of you know,
slowly breakdown, and you know, I have all these election cycles,

(02:57:27):
and you have all these tipping points to scientists are
telling you about, and then you know, someday eventually it's
raining during the dry season and dry during the rainy season,
and there's no snow in January.

Speaker 3 (02:57:44):
And.

Speaker 5 (02:57:45):
All that jazz onward the social collapse. This is where,
according to all of faith in your people will take
care of you, disintegrate, civil wars brew, thepopulation becomes a thing,
clans take over like a post apocalyptic drama unfolding. And

(02:58:06):
then the grand finale is cultural collapse, which is a
loss of faith in the goodness of humanity. And as
a result of that loss of faith, kindness, generosity, empathy
all falls out the window. I completely disagree, I think
with all ours solution here. I think that these types
of crisis kind often bring out the best in people.

(02:58:28):
Of course, we also do see the worst in people,
but I don't think it'll ever reach a point where
the bad of people's behavior so vastly outweighs the good
to the point where people just completely lose faith in
our capacity for mutual aid and that kind of thing.
There is, of course, a bonus stage that all are throsen,

(02:58:50):
which is ecological collapse, where reboot in society in an
exhausted environment. It's like good luck with that. You know,
it's very difficult to do. It becomes a sort of
a well that we end up trapped in. So that's
one way of understanding collapse. And there's also C. S.

(02:59:10):
Halling's four phase model of ecological change, and according to him,
all systems go through cycles of four phases. A phase
of growth where the system accumulates matter and energy, a
phase of conservation where the system becomes more and more interconnected,
rigid and therefore vulnerable. A phase of collapse or loosening,
and then a phase of rapid reorganization lead into another

(02:59:32):
phase of growth in often very different conditions. This is
more of a I suppose optimistic I mean I read
it as kind of optimistic because it recognizes that, you know,
some like things break down, and that's it. Like even
in death, there's like a life, and there's like a rebooth,

(02:59:53):
and then there's of course the conditions that rebooth will
be different, but it's not like things completely come to
an end. It suggest that the conditions that growth and
healing might be kick started with would be very different
from the ones that with the conditions that were there originally.

(03:00:16):
Another author's views on the subject, a guy named John
Michael Greer, once said that quote. The difference between my
view and that of many others in the collapse field,
it's a lot of them assume that the first wave
of crisis will be followed by total collapse, and I
argue that it'll be followed by muddying through and partial recovery,

(03:00:36):
then by renewed crisis and so on. Thus, I don't
think it's actually that useful to have a single metric
for what counters collapse, because collapse is a process, not
an event. The collapse of industrial civilization has been underway
for quite some time now and will still be a
going concern for longer than any of us will be alive.
And then there's David Krowitz's sort of choose your own

(03:00:57):
adventure style collapse where we have sort of three options
that we could go down. There's one of linear decline,
there's one of oscillating decline, and there's one of systemic collapse.
For the step, we have linear decline, which is optimistic
in a sense. It's assuming everything will respond proportionally to

(03:01:18):
its causes. So, for instance, if oil consumption goes down,
GDP follows suit. It's a very gradual and controlled decline,
which gives us time to transition to renewable energy and
to change our ways. It's kind of a dream scenario
for some deep growth enthusiasts, So some of those who
champion a transition to a greener future, we kind of

(03:01:41):
want it to be a slow collapse, not a rapid collapse,
because it gives us time to respond and adjust accordingly.
Of course, the other side of that, the catch is
that when it is that slow, it also sort of
gives an excuse for inaction, excuse for delay and putting

(03:02:02):
off and procrastinating on the changes that are necessary. A
more realistic scenario, according to Korwss, oscillating decline, where you
have economic activity bounce in between peaks of recovery and
recession but with an overall downward trend. It's almost like

(03:02:23):
an oil priced roller coaster where the higher prices lead
to recession, then a dipping prices sparks bit of growth.
Both each cycle the system loses a bit more of
its mojo for lack of a better word. The debts
the pile up, the investment possibilities dwindle, and it's kind
of like the catabolic collapse idea that John Michael Career

(03:02:45):
came up with. It's not too fast and so innocence,
it still gives society some room to adapt. And the
last model that Coreres has is the systemic collapse model,
which sees our civilization has a super complex system with
all these intertwined feedback loops, and so by crossing these
invisible change over points and dealing with small disruptions can

(03:03:08):
end up leading to unpredictable changes. It's like a roller
coaster without a clear track, nonlinear, cumulative, and potentially brutal.
You know, it's like no kind of safety approval was
passed on this roller coaster whatsoever, a death trap and
there's no telling where the cart will wear. Of course,

(03:03:31):
really the how of collapse depends on who you ask
but with all these models, they do seem to be
a couple of clear points, best articulated again by Savine
and Stevens. One, the physical growth of our societies will
come to a halt in the near future. Two we
have irreversibly damaged the entire system, at least on the

(03:03:51):
geological scale of human beings. Three we are moving towards
a very unstable, nonlinear future with major disruptions will be
the norm. And four we're now potentially subject to global
systemic collapses. Prospects look bleak to me. They look extra
bleak when you consider that some people are still stuck

(03:04:13):
on the is climate change real? Ha ha ha global
warming and yet it's cold ha ha ha level of discourse.
But for those who are made away of the issues,
I've noticed people adopt a range of responses. I think

(03:04:39):
one of the first responses that I see to collapse
is slumber.

Speaker 1 (03:04:46):
Right.

Speaker 5 (03:04:47):
They catch like a whiff of what's going on and
decide to just turn over and go back to sleep,
To purposefully embrace ignorance, disregard new information, and shun any
under standing of what's going on. Perhaps you know their
God and their fragile sanity, which is understandable, but people

(03:05:08):
sleep in or we need to face these issues is
a disaster waiting to happen. These issues are not going anywhere,
and we really need people to have the courage and
the boldness to face them instead of turning over and
going back to sleep. Similarly to that response, we have
the denial response, where people face with this reality, reject

(03:05:31):
it consciously and construct their own or they stage for
information that comforts them rather than exposes them to the truth.
They construct a media bubble that shields them or a
social circle that could protect them and reaffirm their core beliefs.
Everyone is capable of denying reality, but it's become quite
prevalent in the age of technology, where we can easily
shut out any truths that make us uncomfortable. And then

(03:05:55):
this apathy, you know, like slumber and denial. People respond
with apathy to protect themselves in some way. After all,
if nothing really matters, there's no need to try, no
need to think, no need to bother Jesus, just disconnect
as humans. I think we have a really tough time
responding to non immediate threats. It's been said, as I

(03:06:16):
said earlier, that no climate change isn't happening too quick,
it's happening too slowly. It's not obvious enough. And because
it's not obviously enough, it's very easy for this next
response to be made manifest and it's preoccupation. Of course,
this is more of a fault of the system. But
people these days are all busy, you know, everyone can

(03:06:36):
afford to invest and explore and understand the world's problems,
even if the threat is so existential that their office
busy work or retail servitude would ultimately amount to nothing.
But I'm not talking about those people when I talk
about preoccupation. I'm talking about the people who respond to
the issues of the world by purposefully distracting themselves with
busy work, constructing a convenient excuse to not challenge the

(03:06:58):
structures that they are under, like running away for the
predicaments of collapse. But the prodiccommends of collapse hatches up
to all of us sooner or later. And on the
flip side of the people who busy themselves with busy
work are the people who dive into mind less consumerism,
which is coupled with apathy to some extent. If nothing

(03:07:21):
matters and everything's falling apart, you might as well just indulge, consume,
distract yourself with games, music, party and drugs and drinking.
It's like slumber, except you're aware of the reality and
just plug in your ears to just dance. But at
least for those that plug their ears, they don't face

(03:07:44):
what I've called overwhelment. Some people respond by trying to
wrap their minds around the depth and complexity of collapse
to the point of obsession and just kind of end
up losing their mind together there. I don't think there
is any human mind that can completely consume and comprehend

(03:08:05):
every minued problem we face. I think that's why we
are social species, because we can we can kind of
distribute that understanding of all the various problems so that
no one person has to handle all of it. We
really are going to need to come together to understand collapse,

(03:08:26):
because as individuals, to deal with somethings to a complex, abstract,
far flung and frightening, it's it's frankly, subjecting yourself to
that is almost a form of self torture or self flagellation.
And what we need is the oppositeity, people building each

(03:08:46):
other up and healing our communities and coming together so
we could solve this crisis. Of course, there is such
a thing as being too caught up in that sort
of hope, and a trap that a lot of people

(03:09:08):
fall naturally into, because in a sense we are biologically
predisposed towards optimism. We tend to hold on to hope
in some future outcome they'll just work out, you know.
And it's sort of a blind hope because it can't
adjust to the ever shifting reality. It strips us of
our ability to see clearly and to take realistic and

(03:09:31):
necessary action. We give up our agency and leave things
in the hands of the leaders and the experts. We
stay passive. We waste time, precious time we spend on
real harm reduction, just going with the flow. We prevent
the necessary conversations with the blind hope when we fixate
so much on whether we can fix it or how

(03:09:51):
we can fix it, without considering what we need to do.
If we can't fix it, you know what happens? Then
blind hope manifests in a few different forms. But I
think whatever formant comes into it ultimately and ultimately and
inevitably leads to disappointment, waiting forever for future that won't come,

(03:10:13):
that exists solely in one's mind, irrespective of reality. It's
quite frankly a form of denial. It takes a bit
of a journey to move towards a greater level of
emotional maturity to handle the tough conversations and let go
of the false hopes, like the idea that will somehow

(03:10:36):
reverse all the damage our planet has been dealt with
scot free. But once we have done that, and once
we have strengthened or resolve and strengthen our ability to
process and to engage with the reality of what's happening,
we can take action with knowledge that no, our leader

(03:10:56):
is not going to do anything substantially enough, and no,
this moves far beyond reform. It really is a hard
pill to swallow, but if you can take it, you'll
be better off to resist. We really don't need blind
hope and resistance. I think hope is important. I'm distinguishing

(03:11:17):
it from hope. Blind hope, however, is a distraction and
sort of connected to the blind hope conversation. Are the
people who respond to this crisis with the obsession with
individual change, people who believe with a few tweaks here
and there that we can continue or perpetual growth, we

(03:11:40):
just have to switch to veganism or recycle or cockpool
every once in a while, and that that individual level
action on a large enough scale would resolve the crisis.
They place a lot of stock and blame in individuals entirely,
and they don't engage with the wires structures of society.

(03:12:04):
A lot of liberals, of course, fall into this camp.
And speaking of liberals, we see a very pernicious trend
of progress worship as another response to collapse. The author
Dennis Meadows actually points out a curious trend over the
past four decades. There's a constant shift in justifying why

(03:12:26):
we shouldn't change our behavior. Back in the seventies, critics
were saying, no limits. You know, anyone who thinks they're limits,
they just don't get it. In the eighties they're saying, oh,
actually there are limits, but they are very far away.
We have nothing to worry about, nothing to lose sleep over.
And then in today nineties, the limits are no longer

(03:12:46):
at are no longer is distant. And then the supporters
of growth they chiming with, oh, well, you know the
limits are close, but no worries. You know, the markets
and technology will swoop in and fix everything. And then
you reach into two thousands and it becomes clear that
the tech and the markets might not cut it, and
then a narrative spins again. Regardless of whether not the

(03:13:08):
markets or tech and cut it, we still need to
push for growth because that's the goal and ticket to
the resources we need to tackle lot of problems. It's
basically a game of justification hopscotch. It's almost a cult
of progress that any and all growth is good. That
don't matter the consequences of on our finite earth, we

(03:13:30):
can just expand and expand eternally. A lot of the
responses I get to my discussions of the growth or
post growth or whatever, it's like, yeah, but you can't
do that because then the GP wouldn't grow and wouldn't
elevate people's unders of living. And you know, it's not
fair that global.

Speaker 4 (03:13:50):
Wait Andrew, are you a Malthusian?

Speaker 5 (03:13:57):
Nothing of the sort. Nothing of the sort. But I
think that we should not be fallen into this shrap
of being like, oh, well, you know, it's not fair
that these rich countries they get to reach that level
of development and then we have to, like and then
what we're going to step in and stop other countries
from doing so When it's not that I mean, I'm
speaking from a not rich country. What I'm saying is

(03:14:18):
that the what I say to this equal is that
the path of development these rich countries took it's not sustainable.
It is literally dooming us all. Yes, the entire population
cannot strive for the level of consumption that Americans strive for.
Do I think the development days take place, absolutely, but
not on the trajectory, not following in the footsteps of

(03:14:41):
these rich countries, this global North, and it's like I
see of decimating the world, you know, places like India,
place like the Caribbean, places in Africa. You know, we
do need to, you know, improve housing, and improve access

(03:15:03):
to water, and improve access to education, all these different things.
But chasing after this sort of careless economic growth narrative
and path is just going to accelerate all of our destruction.

(03:15:28):
I agree with the need for reparations from global North
to global South that will allow us to reach the
level of we could reach the quality of life that
I think every human should have access to. But I
don't think that that is the same thing as saying that, oh, well,

(03:15:52):
you know, every country should have their own equivalent of
Britain and the US's Industrial Revolution, And who cares that
that ship has sealed, that window of opportunity has passed.

Speaker 4 (03:16:08):
Yeah, And I think going back to like your series
of episodes on cults, when you're talking about the cult
of progress, I think that is that gets thrown on
as like a very trendy term, but I think it
has a lot of truth in it for this specific reason.
In order to maintain the type of progress that is
necessary to sustain this at this current point, what seems

(03:16:33):
to be a very unsustainable method of interacting with the planet.
You have to rely on growth as this thing that
you can't actually like predict its It's you can't actually
predict a real endpoint for it.

Speaker 3 (03:16:49):
You have to only assume and only hope that it
will get there.

Speaker 4 (03:16:53):
It's this that's why there's this real sense of accelerationism
throughout these whole industries, because people know that if we
continue just doing this way, the planet will not be functional,
at least for us in like one hundred years, probably
you know in much less time as well. But the
reason why they're all continuing is that they have the

(03:17:16):
people have it have this idea in their heads that
if we just if we just keep accelerating, if we
keep going, we have to go faster and faster and faster,
because we'll find something along the way that will magically
fix the problem. Well, if the only way to fix
the problem is to continue accelerating, and we'll find this
thing that doesn't currently exist, but we'll find like this

(03:17:36):
like supernatural device or discovery that allows us to kind
of fix the little problem we've made for ourselves. And
it is a very like religious belief that if if
we just keep going, we'll like get some like deep this,
some like some like deep special insight.

Speaker 5 (03:17:54):
We've reached the point where people are lesterally looking to
have uns like almost in a super natural sense, Yeah,
to find a situation like oh, well, we'll just be
able to keep on going because asteroid mining, We'll just
go one settlement other planets and I'll continue our expansion
endlessly and we could just keep on going.

Speaker 4 (03:18:11):
And you also see this with people like developing AI.
They're like, if we if we get into AI smart enough,
it'll be able to tell us how to fix our problem.
And it is a deeply spiritual drive. It is a
very cultish drive, like we have to keep going, even
though we are currently dooming ourselves by continuing. We have
to continue because that's the only way that we'll get

(03:18:32):
this out of this problem. It's like we can, we can,
we can only dig deeper, like we've gone so far
into the.

Speaker 3 (03:18:38):
Center of the earth.

Speaker 4 (03:18:40):
It's faster, Yeah, it's faster to dig out the other
way than actually try to turn around and fill the
hole again. It is a very cultish spiritual drive to
like continue this, to continue and like explicitly like accelerate
development because we've realized we've done something that's uh from
our current point of view, almost irreparable. But there's this,

(03:19:01):
there is this belief that if we owe that the
only way to fix it is is if we keep going,
then will somehow stumble across the magical the magical thing
that will fix our problem.

Speaker 5 (03:19:22):
I want to talk specifically about the sort of I mean,
I know there are other people in the world who
wards how there's response, in the global South, who will
olds how there's response. But I see a lot of
Americans responding to my like decreath advocacy or whatever saying, well,
what about the global cellth you know, I mean, nevermind,

(03:19:43):
I live in the global South, what about the global cell?
And what really gets me about it is just how
it's almost like a way of comfort in themselves.

Speaker 4 (03:19:57):
Sure it's it's it's using the struggles of marginalize people
to not interrogate your own role in the continuing destruction
and like systemic oppression that produces this great economic and
u and like a difference in quality of life.

Speaker 5 (03:20:15):
Because it's like you have to then you'll have to
confront the fact that maybe your lifestyle and the privilege,
some of the lifestyle and privileges you enjoyed really should
not be enjoyed by anyone ever, Like maybe that level
of the thing was never sustainable in the first place,
and we could have done with less. And I know
it's really I really hate having this kind of conversation

(03:20:39):
on the internet because I think it's very difficult to
get into the left of nuances necessary because then I
know people will say, oh, well, I'm from a week
in class background from this and that I've also faced
livel deprivation. I get all that, but then there are
other things where I'm like, you know, can we live
in a world where everyone has access to Amazon one

(03:21:01):
day ship in two day shipping, you know. Can we
live in a world where everyone owns a car, even
if it's an electric car. I think there are certain
standards of I guess lifestyle or milestones of lifestyle that
we've come to accept that I think in retrospect, we

(03:21:24):
will look back and say, Wow, that was an aberration
of human history that we were even maintaining that sort
of infrastructure, even maintaining that level of consumption. You know,
I'm sure a couple of generations online people will look
back and be like, wow, do you tell me nearly
every household had a car and that everybody was just

(03:21:46):
on the roads driving all the time, and we built
our cities or infrastructure around vehicles when we knew very
early on, when the oil companies knew very early on
that eventually we would run out, we just didn't care.

(03:22:06):
I'm kind of all over the place with this, but
you're gonna say something, well.

Speaker 4 (03:22:09):
I was also gonna mention like in these in these
sorts of discussions, it also can be often overlooked that
just because you live in the United States or in
any other kind of big place, that doesn't mean like
it's that's not The United States isn't one place. There
is a difference between living and like a five thousand
dollars apartment in a downtown like city center, versus living

(03:22:34):
on the outskirts of town in like a house that's
falling apart right or living on the street, or or
living in the middle of Utah versus living on the
coast like there's or living in like a montane like there's.
There is such a large difference even for people in
the States, for like many many like not everyone is

(03:22:55):
able to live in this like very are arguably very
very unsustainable, very like hyper hyper modernity. Way there is
there is, there's millions of people that of course, like no,
I'm not saying that against your point. I'm saying, like
this is this is also part of the problem. Like
we have we have tricked ourselves into thinking that if

(03:23:18):
you if you live in the United States, that must
mean you are like you are one of the elite few.
But there's millions of people who are living in like
the like some of the most some of the harshest
conditions in the world, even in the richest country in
the world, like it is is anti.

Speaker 5 (03:23:38):
Growth is not coming to take from one's meager lifestyle
if one lives in those circumstances, you know, deep growth
is really coming after those on the other end of
that spectrum of life style.

Speaker 4 (03:23:52):
No, if if any, it would be, and it would
be a greater equalizer between people living in countries.

Speaker 5 (03:24:00):
Of your standard of living.

Speaker 4 (03:24:01):
Yes, as as as well as looking at you know,
quote unquote like the global South or quote unquote like
third world countries, like there is there's this idea of
like I think we've had someone on this show to
talk about this before, Joey, like the fourth World, like
you're you were living in third world conditions but.

Speaker 3 (03:24:19):
In a first world country.

Speaker 4 (03:24:21):
And how all of these, all of these types of
these all of these types of systemic inequality and differences
and uh like a cost of living, living conditions, they
all they all come by in together in really Gaussian
fuzzy ways, even if you live in the United States, Canada, England,
like Germany, wherever, and and and it produces this extremely

(03:24:45):
extremely bizarre.

Speaker 3 (03:24:46):
Mishmash of of.

Speaker 5 (03:24:50):
Circumstances.

Speaker 4 (03:24:51):
Of circumstances. Yeah, you can you can walk by someone
who's driving like a five hundred thousand dollars car. Meanwhile
you are literally being forced to live on the street
like that is that is so that is such a
bizarre dichotomy.

Speaker 5 (03:25:06):
The few times I've been to the US seeing that dichotomy,
like in real something else. I mean, of course there's
an incoming equality, and there's vastest parties in wealth and
turned out as well. You know, there are people who
you know live on the streets and their people who
you know go to yacht parties every weekend. What I

(03:25:27):
want people to recognize is the way that these elites
get you to advocate against your own interests is through
that sort of and connect you to their culture progress
and get you invested in their culture progress. Hook you
in is through that sort of temporarily embarrassed to millionaire mantra.
They hook you in by saying, yeah, they're coming for

(03:25:50):
our stuff. Eventually you get to my level too, and
then you wouldn't want people to take your stuff away either,
you know, like my tech development is gonna right, We're
going to bring all of us up, you know, and
you shouldn't let these people stop you. Rather than no, well,
obviously these rush guys are going to get brought down

(03:26:11):
a peg, but by bringing them down a peg, everybody
will have a better quality of life. But instead of
recognizing that, they deceive people with this techno opim, they
bring people into this trap of capitalist realism that either

(03:26:34):
you live in the deprivation of the worst of the
worst of people's livelihoods and the capitalism, or you live
in the excess of the best of the best of
people's lives and the capitalism. And there's nothing beyond those
two options. And so obviously the de growth people want
you to be living in the former option, and you
should oppose them because of that. Another response I see

(03:26:57):
is that there are a lot of people who are
just completely like have complete faith in our leaders, who
believe that, you know, once we get just the right
people in office, things will work out. The truth is,
of course, the system corrupts even the best of intentions.
Politicians are a class and to themselves, and their actions

(03:27:19):
reflect ultimately their own interests and the interests of their backers.
Nation states, governments, rulers. Is their job, it's in their
job description to maintain structures that ultimately harm humanity, and
there's only so much they can do to affect the
status cho placing our salvation in their hands. It's an
exercise in futility, invest in your future and the confines

(03:27:42):
the electoralism is a waste of time, but it also
demonstrates whoy effectively mass media and schooling has broken down
and limited our imagination. I like to call that status realism,
the idea that there's no alternative to this hierarchy of
rulers and rule, that people just need to submit to
the wills and whims of others rather than organizing for

(03:28:03):
themselves in their communities. There's, of course, the response of
apocalypse worship rather classic response around those who end up
obsessing over collapse and honestly that the worshippers of the
apocalypse are also houl to a form of blind hope.
You know, the accelerationists, doomsday preppers, cultists, extreme survivalists, zombie

(03:28:25):
video game enthusiasts, believers in the end times. They all
seem to have a whole so they seem to have
a real excitement for collapse, or they fixate really heavily
on the ideal version of the end of the world,
like they can't wait for the world to end. They
embrace the sort of we're all on our own mantra,

(03:28:48):
barricade themselves, bunker down, stockpile weapons and essentials. They get
en up for a violent future because they anticipate that
others will react to the situation similarly to how they
intend to react. So they're taken like a page from
ad Max and like, yeah, I'm going to be immortant Joe,

(03:29:10):
so I don't end up a thrall of immortant Joe.

Speaker 4 (03:29:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:29:16):
I mean, if it's not obvious, the people who respond
in this way freak me out, you know, those who
look at what's going on and instead of resisting or
trying to change the circumstances, they just accept it as
things going according to schedule of prophecy, or they try
to make it worse. I don't know if you've seen
Leave the World.

Speaker 3 (03:29:36):
Behind, Oh my god, yes, horrible.

Speaker 5 (03:29:42):
Yeah, I'm sure you remember that one character and that
prepper and his whole response to the crisis before him
completing that a selfishness.

Speaker 4 (03:29:55):
Which is a betrayal to his character inspiration in the
movie Tremors, which showed the correct way to be a prepper,
which is to actually help the people in your community.

Speaker 5 (03:30:06):
I actually haven't seen that movie. That it's my list.

Speaker 4 (03:30:09):
It's what it is a it is an old movie
about a worm that takes over a small town. It's
pretty silly, but it does.

Speaker 3 (03:30:20):
I don't think so.

Speaker 5 (03:30:21):
No, it sounds like something Stephen King would write.

Speaker 4 (03:30:24):
It's it's not really a horror. It's more of like
a comedy thriller.

Speaker 5 (03:30:28):
Like it's a comedy.

Speaker 4 (03:30:31):
Okay, it's not a comedy, but it is a nately
funny situation. Also because it's like filmed in the eighties
or nineties, like it it just the way it's age
just makes it more funny.

Speaker 3 (03:30:43):
But it is also a good movie.

Speaker 4 (03:30:46):
And and uh yeah after after this, I mean it's
it's kind of like what if like an earthquake or
a tornado hits this small town, except this is more
like adversarial. It's like this like worm is like like
like causing like the towns buildings like cave in because
it's like digging underground. And we see we see this fantastic,

(03:31:07):
fantastic prepper character is able to help everybody out because
he is he is prepared for such a scenario.

Speaker 5 (03:31:17):
How kind of film? Yes, unlike unlike that through schebag
and and leave the world behind. Yes, we'll talk about
that movie after. Yeah. I mean, the last response I
really wanted to cover was despair, pessimism, seeing the worst,
expecting the worst, living and utter defeat, weighing down actual

(03:31:40):
efforts with pessimism jumping into my comment section to be
more in our fate. I mean, according to those in despair,
there's nothing that we can do to affect our future,
and in my eyes, those on this dumor pillar just
as misguided as those who are hyped up with blind opium.

(03:32:03):
I think it's okay to admit that we don't know
what's going to happen. You know, I don't claim to
your profit. I don't think anybody should. The IPCC reports,
for example, are a consensus of scientists and their understanding
of the situation. Some scientists are going to be more
conservative in their report in their reporting, others are a

(03:32:25):
bit more catastrophes. But either way, I really don't think
we need to get into the weeds of just how
bad it is or exactly how it's going to happen,
but matters that things need to change some way, somehow.
I think it's important to try and understand as much
as the situation as you could not to the point
of obsession. To take note of how we respond to

(03:32:49):
the issue, To look at the various responses I covered
and see if you fit into any of those camps,
and to recognize that the worst case scenario is far
from inevitable. My advice is ready to prepare for the
worst in whatever way you can, and put hope and
build for the best. Build community, build connections, build your skills,

(03:33:15):
build your strengths, and push in any way that you
can in whatever's fare you find yourself for meaningful change.
Because say it with me now, it could happen here.

Speaker 3 (03:33:35):
It certainly could.

Speaker 5 (03:33:37):
That's it for me. I'm on YouTube andwism, I'm on
patureon dot com, slash saint tu. That's it. We'll power
to all the people. Peace.

Speaker 3 (03:33:52):
Hey.

Speaker 2 (03:33:52):
We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 4 (03:33:58):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 9 (03:34:00):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It could happen here. Updated
monthly at coolzonemedia dot com. Slash Sources thanks for listening.

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