It Could Happen Here Weekly 13

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

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
The Gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves
around underworld, the criminals and entertainers, to victims, crime and
law enforcement. We cover all facets of the game. Gangster
Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify promotilist of activities. We just discussed
the ramifications and repercussions of these activities. Because at the
Wall she played gamester games. You are ultimately rewarded with

(00:23):
Gangster Prizes. Our Heart Radios number one for podcasts, but
don't take our award for it. Find Against the Chronicles
podcast and my Heart Radio app or wherever you get
your podcast. It's time to gear up for the NFL postseason.
Head over to NFL shop dot com today for the
largest assortment of officially licensed gear. NFL Shop is your

(00:47):
destination for jerseys, t shirts, headwear and more. Oh yes,
we come back after the game for the best selection
of NFL gear anywhere. Rep your team pride with aisles
fit for the whole family. To shop now, go to
NFL shop dot com. Hi. I'm Robert sex Reese, host

(01:08):
of The Doctor sex re Show, and every episode I
listened to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues
and yes I despise every minute of it, and she
she made mistakes too everyone at her wedding. But hell
is real. We're all trapped here and there's nothing any
of us can do about it. So join me. Won't you?

(01:28):
Listen to the Doctor Sex re Show every Tuesday on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you
get your podcast. 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

(01:50):
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. Robert doing the
run so we can start the badcast. Um, I think
we should just start the podcast with you asking, Robert,
do you want to grunt? So we can start the podcast.

(02:10):
Um that that seems avant garde. I don't know what
I want guard means, but this is it could happen here,
a podcast about how things are falling apart and how
maybe maybe they don't always need to be falling apart.
Maybe we could do better. Uh. Speaking of doing better,
you know one thing that sometimes helps us do better
getting getting in the face of people fucking shut up

(02:30):
and being like, hey, that's not that's not cool. Don't
be doing that, Garrison, that's your leading. Take it from here. Yeah. Hi,
So we I've been I've been trying to keep better,
a better job of like following ecological defense movements happening
both in the States and in other countries. I know

(02:51):
there was there was a big one up in Canada recently.
There was a huge one in Germany too, just the
other day. Um, I know, the the one, the one
in Canada. There's a uh the uh, I forget, I
forget what the actual indigenous group is called. Um maybe
maybe someone else. So the the um house on Sauti

(03:16):
Um yeah, the people who who who took back their
land and blocked the road off and now the to
and the wet suit end. Oh yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yes,
thank you. Um there we go. Yeah, basically taking their
land back, blocking off the road. And now our SAP
is getting called in and we'll see how that develops.

(03:37):
And in Guatemala there's protests against Canadian mining um in
maya indigenous community that have have have gotten pretty heavily
militarized at this point. There's fun, there's a lot of stuff.
There's a lot of stuff off on psychological defense side
of things, um, including including in you know, the Pacific

(03:58):
Northwest here with all of with all of the forests
and and as such in this area and part of
this kind of exploration into into ecological defense. I wanted
to talk with some people who are a little little
bit more well versed in this type of thing than
I am. So I've there's the two people have agreed

(04:19):
to talk with us, um salmon cat put both people
who work who work on the kind of thing from
like an activism standpoint. Um, Yeah, say hi, Hello, hey y'all.
So very very thankful that they are going to be
talking with us today. So I thought we could we
could probably just start by kind of discussing what forest

(04:42):
defense is and how it kind of has a history
specifically in this area, but but kind of more broadly,
like if if people listened to the Earth First episodes,
you know, that kind of that covered like anti pipeline stuff,
but we didn't really get much into like forest defense,
and you know, like the traditional like tree sits and
that kind of thing. UM. So so yeah, what's what's

(05:02):
up with defending the forest? What's what's what's going on
with that? Um? Yeah, thanks for that great intro. UM.
I mean, forest defense is I think probably the most
characteristic UM type of direct action in this bioregion. And
here we're talking from Cascadia right now. I actually moved
out here from the East Coast ten years ago specifically

(05:23):
to get involved with forest defense because this place has
an incredibly rich history UM of people basically just throwing down,
risking life and limb to stop jain saws from taking
down some of the oldest and most special forests out here. UM.
And so i'd say, you know, for forest defense, direct
action is in a lot of ways rooted right here
UM in this bioregion. And obviously, UM, like all kinds

(05:47):
of movements, things have changed over the course of time.
UM back in the eighties. UM, when in seventies, when
forest defense was really really kicking up and stopping old
growth logging, specifically out here, when it was kind of
like rampant old growth UM clear cutting. UM, it really
took the shape of trying to focusing on ecology, focusing
on the integrity of these ecosystems and basically like doing

(06:10):
everything possible to stop the chainsaws. And Um, Now, obviously
a lot has changed. We have the Northwest Forest Plan
and some policies which are doing better to kind of
like protect old places and old forests. But at the
same time, the same ship is happening. Um. You know,
the timber industry is great at using euphemisms to kind
of cover up it's clear cutting anyways, and finding policy

(06:34):
loopholes to target some incredible places. And now I think, um,
where we're at with like the direct action movement is
we're in the context of climate change, So we're not
just defending forests for the stake of these like incredible
ecological strongholds, but we're also defending them because we recognize
that forest defense is climate defense. This is a like
environmental justice issue, it's a human issue, it's a community issue. UM.

(06:56):
And so now direct action I think, is you know,
happening not just the name of our forests, but in
the name of our communities in our future. UM. But
it's just as rich um now as it has ever been,
and especially right now and especially since which I know
we'll get into people have been throwing down all over
this fire region to protect what's left of our forests. Yeah,

(07:19):
and I think it's it's good to get into kind
of why how the fires have impacted this because one
of the shady things that has been done is we
had I think most people in the country are where
Oregon had unprecedented wildfires this year, and we had unprecedented
wildfires last year, and we're going to have unprecedented wildfires
every year for a while. Um And whenever these fires

(07:42):
run through, they don't like destroy every tree in their wake,
but they char them. And logging companies then come in
under the guise of like, well, we have to make
this area safe so that like the fires don't burn
here next year. So we've got to cut down all
of these trees, um and and clear cut this part
of area of public four. So, like, as you're driving
around in forests that you used to be able to

(08:04):
do stuff, and you'll find areas that are just like
blocked off because mining companies are coming or logging companies
are coming through and clear cutting all of these trees
that could very easily recover from the fire, um or
that weren't even burned by it, but we're just like
in this area that they said, Okay, well we have
to clear this out in order to make it safe.
And it's kind of this way to like back door

(08:24):
and the guys of fire protection like expand logging. Yeah,
and just to add to that to the logging companies
love to say that the reasons we have increased wildfires
because there's an overgrowth in the forest because of the
Northwest Forest plant, because there's more protections for the forest.
Fires are happening worse because we're not getting there bogging

(08:44):
the forest and removing all the fuel. M hm. So
we have like this two part thing that like Kat
just mentioned, where like, on the one hand, companies are like,
we need to log more to prevent wildfire, which is
bullshit and we can talk about why. And on the
other hand, after fires burned through an yeah, they're like,
we need to log because we need to help the
forest recover ecologically. Also, we need to salvage all of

(09:06):
the timber before it rots and goes bad, and like
all of these reasons and so basically it's just like
fire has become the excuse to just like log preemptively
and log after the fact, and yeah, it's a total
total ship show. Yeah. I mean I think this this
kind of falls into capitalists trying to use climate change

(09:27):
is just another way to find things to extract and
things to grow on. Right, It's they're they're going to
try to find their own way to sneak in when
all of this you know, ecological disaster is happening to
you know, sell you whatever green safe product is going
to help against the collapse, or you know, package things
in a way that makes it seem like it's solving
this you know problem, but it's actually it's part of

(09:49):
it's part of the same thing industry from the yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Right,
it's it's you see this in every single industry, and
it's always it's it's gonna be like this because this
is the only way that capitalism knows how to address
this issue is by just turning it into another turning
it into another thing to consume, another thing to sell
in package. Pretty pretty grib yeah. And there's I mean,

(10:12):
there's cascading effects too, because they cut down these trees
under the guise of making it safe for the next
fire season, but which also makes a big chunk of
land a lot more vulnerable to like mud slides and
the torrential raining that we're having right now. Um, and
it's also going to get more common, because that's how
fucking climate change works. It's it's just like the comprehensive

(10:34):
fury comprehensive. And let us be clear too, that logging
doesn't actually work to prevent wildfire, you know, even you know,
they say that it does, but the kind of logging
that they do in the name of wildfire prevention just
looks like clear cuts. And we have a pretty robust
body of science now showing that those kinds of activities

(10:55):
actually make fire hazard more severe for local communities. So
that's like one of the things they're doing. And we've
been calling it just gaslighting, like they're gaslighting all of
us by saying, you know, there's nothing to see here,
there's nothing to see here. We're taking care of you all,
you know, we're barely logging at all. And then we've
got community members on the ground, um, despite the closure

(11:15):
orders who are like, actually there's a lot to see here,
and you all are like completely devastating the landscape and
further harming our communities. Um. So yeah, it's total gaslighting. Yeah,
an Oregon has both in terms of like watching fires
and watching logging some like rules that are not in
place in other areas, especially for like even for for

(11:37):
press and the like. Like it's it's actually hard to
get in to look at this stuff, um without you know,
breaking some sort of law technically, which is not at
all shady. Um. Yeah, yeah, I feel like that's another
important thing. And maybe cat can jump onto is just
um basically, I mean, I think what people aren't understanding

(11:58):
is that after the fire, the these federal forest managers
closed gates and essentially are converting public land into private
land by you know, using the threat of violence to
kick people out if they go onto their public land.
And since and they say until at least the only

(12:21):
folks allowed behind these gates are cops and loggers. And
so this is like literally, um, you know, the enclosure
of our public lands and like the privatization of our
public lands so that cops and loggers can do whatever
the hell they want. Yep. And it's the kind of
thing I mean, it's the kind of thing that people
if you're if you're if the if the Bundy's and

(12:44):
that group actually meant the stuff they were saying, like
the rhetoric they were putting out, it's the kind of
thing they would be piste off about. Two, Because you're right,
it is the enclosure of public land by the government
UM and corporations without any kind of consent from the
people who are supposed to be the collective owners of
that land. It's it's a again something that a lot

(13:06):
of people should be angry about, who aren't angry about
because there's been this huge propaganda campaign in the Northwest
about timber unity and the like and like supporting the
timber industry UM by destroying like the single greatest gift
this entire part of the world has. Uh, it's it's
pretty frustrating. Ye. Anyway, I have to we have to

(13:28):
actually have a quick break so I can go watch
my soccer game at the Timber Stadium. Uh, completely unrelated.
So I'm gonna drive out to Wheeler, Oregon myself. But
we all have different things to do during the break, um.
But also in the break, I guess we could probably
do an AD break here because why not? All right, Yeah,
everybody loves ads and we're back still talking about force defense.

(13:51):
I wonder there's something that people should probably know before
we go further about the way that that Oregon works.
So for a while, Oregon is a place where you
can't get elected, um in a lot of parts of
a lot of populated parts of Oregon if you're a Republican.
So the Republicans just plain ice um and and pretend

(14:11):
and like throw out some some social justice e language
while while still doing all of the extract of stuff
they were going to do anyway. And that's the story
with like Ted Wheeler, um and his family. So Ted
Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, comes from timber money.
His father was a major Republican donor. Not that the
Democrats don't have a lot of extractive history behind them,
but like it's it's very obvious what's happening with the

(14:32):
Wheelers where um, they were huge Republican donors and huge
backers of the right, and then Oregon had this kind
of switch politically, um, And so Ted Wheeler just started
throwing out nice social justicey language. But the the whole
you know, he's he's I'm sure going to make a
run for governor at some point in the near future.
And you've got this like this dressed up very extractive

(14:59):
logging industry and politicians that always find a way to
kind of make it seem palatable to the liberal majority.
Um that. And they've gotten pretty good at that because
it doesn't I don't know, I think maybe we're coming
to the end of this period, but like I haven't,
I haven't seen up until this last year a lot
of widespread kind of outrage about the clear cutting um.

(15:22):
And they also hide it pretty well. Like if you're
driving through these beautiful public forests in Oregon, the areas
that are right along the road will generally be pristine
and you'll see old growth and everything. But sometimes you
can see as you like turn a corner or something
that like, oh, that old growth only goes back a
couple of couple of dozen yards and then it's a
clear cut um and they'll they'll they'll hide it so

(15:44):
that it's it's not as obvious because they know what
upsets people. So there's this there's this kind of surprisingly
um surprisingly thorough campaign to do as much of this
as possible without upsetting people UM which which means there's
a potential to upset people, which means there's a potential
to actually stop this if enough people get upset. But

(16:08):
it's you know, you're you're you're going against folks who
have thought a lot about how to do this in
a way that isn't going to upset the apple cart.
So how do you upset the apple cart? I guess
that is what I'm asking. Well, I think one way
that we upset the apple cart is by bringing people
out to these places. And you know, in the action

(16:29):
that happened on Tuesday that looked like disrupting and disobeying
a federal closure order in order to bring people out
to these places. Um, you know, basically metaphorically walking behind
what you were describing the beauty strip along the highway
and seeing what's behind it. Um. And you know, as
we were saying earlier, unfortunately, because of all these federal
closure orders after the fire, that looks like risking um,

(16:53):
you know, repercussion, state repression, arrest even um, in order
to just lay eyes on it. But that is the
way that we check the apple cart. We get people
to see these places so that it cuts through the
gas lighting that the industry is doing and people can
literally viscerally feel and see the damage. Um. And there's
no way to convince them that that's okay. Once they

(17:14):
see it, and how do you do go about like
finding people to bring into this, convincing people to come
Like what does kind of that effort look like? You
want to answer this one cat, You did a ton
of recruitment, Yeah, totally. Um. I think a big part
of it is getting them while they're young. UM. I
think that like young people right now are already pretty radicalized,

(17:36):
um compared to ten years or so, probably because of
I think George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and social
the use of social media and those movements. Um. So
I I am a college student and we're seeing like
so many people coming in and ready to throw down,
like they just cannot wait to get involved, and we'll
kind of just show up to anything. Um. So. I
think that that's like a major tactic for sure. UM.

(17:58):
And then also making sure it when you have like
a an action that you're recruiting people for that it's
I'm very easy to plug in. It's like very accessible,
um and kind of just like having it organized very
well so it's not daunting to come in. Do you
want to add to that, Sam, Well, just to like
share a little more about like how we did that
with this particular action. That happened on Tuesday. UM. Basically,

(18:23):
you know, we it was a Tuesday, brainy, freezing middle
of the forest planning this action, did not think and
behind a federal closure order. So everyone on site risking
arrest um and planning this action, it felt like we
would be lucky as ship if we got ten people

(18:43):
out there. UM. But I will say, UM, it was
easy as ship to get fifty people out there. And
that's because people care. UM. And you know, I think
we did. In terms of organizing strategy, we use the
affinity group model, and so we had a core you know,
there was a core group of organizers, and those organizers
recruited through affinity groups and their affinity groups and UM.

(19:05):
That helped to keep kind of information secure and UM,
you know, everything tightly organized. But UM, people want. People
were really desiring to get together and do something. Especially
in the past couple of years of COVID, people are
just like eager to do something. UM. And on top
of that, you know, we we promised that this isn't
just an opportunity to potentially get arrested, but this is

(19:28):
an educational opportunity and a movement building opportunities. So while
the road was blocked with a slash pile and a
fire truck. There were workshops going on, There were hikes
going on in the forest that's supposed to be cut UM.
There was discussions about know your rights trainings and affinity groups.
We had UM a band um playing on top of

(19:48):
a fire truck, and there was a dance party and basically,
you know, we're like building community and solidarity UM in
a positive way while sucking shut up. I think that's
the key. And I mean, where do you uh, how
do how do you have like what is the let
me think of a way to phrase this. What is

(20:11):
kind of the next step here because they haven't started
logging this area yet, but they're kind of doing like
the pre prep work. Um, what do you what do
you think actually can be done to to halt it?
Like is it is it a problem? Like because it
seems to me that it's there's got to be like
a mix of tactics there to actually get them to stop.

(20:31):
And you're dealing with a number of different UM threats,
including not just at the state level, but these federal
closure orders. Like what is I don't know what what
does the path forward look like to you? Yeah? So
there's a preliminary injunction being forth by some nonprofits, and
so this is a really good example of different tactics

(20:52):
coming in and so UM, the preliminary injunction is basically
to state that what they're doing before service is doing
is illegal. UM. But before that that can be passed,
they can come in at any point and log the area.
And so that's where direct action comes in to slow
them down and halt them as much as possible until
the courts can process that injunction. And that feels really

(21:13):
huge to Like what Kat just said is like where
is the place of direct action in forest defense? This
is like the golden moment for direct action while there's
like an open legal case that we're waiting on a
judge to settle, and the timber industry is like coming
in ready to moot out the case by logging before
it can even be decided. And like to just add
a little bit more backstory to on, like, another reason

(21:35):
why people are so pissed about this um is that
you know, this watershed has been I think like beloved
and also embattled since the eighties, Like the infamous Easter
massacre logging event happened in the same watershed where could
eye Yeah, no, totally um it. A timber company was

(22:00):
planning to clear cut log old growth forest out there
and started moving on it on Easter UM in the snow,
and a bunch of badass direct action activists set up
a five tiered blockade on a logging road to hold
off the logging and successfully did for um days and
days until a bunch of them, I think over a

(22:22):
dozen folks got arrested, thrown in jail and the forest
was clear cut. UM. So hence you know the Eastern
massacre name UM. But a ton of folks who you
know still work in force events in the spy A region.
We're there and remember that story and we're with us
um when we were out there this week telling that story.
And you know since then, between and now, people have

(22:44):
been showing up again and again and again in this
watershed because it is so special to try and fight
off logging, and myself and Cat have been a part
of efforts over the past handful of years to um
fight off a number of logging projects out there. We
were successful in doing that. We actually snacked the forest
services grubby hands off of a bunch of oil growth
because our scrappy friends spent days exploring this watershed and

(23:08):
documenting doing like site specific science, citizen science documentation and
giving it to the Forest Service. And we fought them
and one and protected a bunch of the forest. And
then the fires came through and they closed the gates
and they secretly changed all of these contracts to include
clear cut logging. And so that is why there is
an open lawsuit because we believe it's illegal what they're doing.

(23:30):
It's sketchy and illegal, Yeah, but it does it does
illustrate like kind of the depth of the fight necessary,
not just in forest defense, but at all efforts of
kind of resisting the extract of industries that are driving
a lot of climate change. It's it's not enough, it's
never enough to win the first victory. They're going to
find some way to to to swoop around to the

(23:51):
flanks and try to take it away from you, like
they're doing right now. Um, which is exhausting. Um, it
seems exhausting, but it doesn't mean it. You can ignore it.
It's fucking exhausting. Yeah. I always say it's like our forests,
our federal management agencies, they suffer from this powerful amnesia
where they just like keep coming back with the same

(24:12):
bullshit proposals, but like our movement does not suffer from that,
and we are just like building power and getting stronger
and getting more successful. So like when people left on Tuesday, UM,
there was a promise that people will be back if
logging happens, and we're very sure that that would be
the case. And if if people are in the Cascadian

(24:33):
bioregion and are like, well this sounds pretty sweet. I wanna,
I wanna, I wanna keep keep some trees where they
are as opposed to putting them on the back of
a truck to drive somewhere else. How could they get involved?
Where where might they reach out to? Well, there's a

(24:54):
few different groups who were a part of this, UM
definitely UM, the Portland Rising Tide, Cascadia Forest Defenders, UM
CAT can talk about Climate Justice League and UM maybe
the action that you all put on yesterday as a
follow up, and like how folks can get involved with
that UM But basically, yeah, you can follow us on Twitter,
UM and Instagram and and please, UM, you know, keep

(25:15):
a lookout because we will be we'll be getting it
out far and wide. If there's a call for folks
to get out there again. Yeah, and Climate Justice League
is an organ UM at the University of Oregon and
people are free to just join the organization. Community members
are also involved. UM. But we did put on an
event yesterday where Tyler Ferres of Ferris Logging or First

(25:39):
Timber UM, who is actually the company that bought the
rights to Brighton Bush, which was the area where we
did UM the action on Tuesday, he was giving a
speech at the University of Oregon UM to talk about
post fire logging, which was just like crazy timing. They
kind of just like put it in our lap, and
so we recruited from that action or like let's just

(26:00):
drop the hell out of this UM talk, and so
we like showed up and kind of tried to sneak in.
They were having zoom issues, which like luckily distracted them
from the fact that there was like forty or fifty
like pretty punk anarchy looking kids in the room. UM.
But we like let him go on for a little
bit and then we started to ask him questions that

(26:21):
he obviously didn't know the answer to. UM. We kept
like asking questions about you know, the science says this,
but you're stating this where you getting your science from.
And he kept saying things like, well, that's more of
a political question and the statistics don't really back up
what you're saying, um. And then yeah, we just chanted
and made him really nervous. Yeah. And as a heads up,

(26:41):
if you're if you're looking to win an argument on
a zoom call, you can just say, uh, the statistics
don't back you up without citing statistics. It's it's it's
really the easiest way to do that. I guess it'll
kind of curious for like you guys said, you've you've
prevented you know, some of the stuff in the past
by doing stuff like documentation, um. And you know when

(27:03):
when when that kind of thing becomes not enough. You
know that this this area does have a rich history
of kind of direct action stuff to protect forests with
a get also like a mixed success, like by no
means does direct action always always work to do anything?
Right now, we still have the line three pipeline, we
still have all of these things that direct action has

(27:24):
tried to prevent. But it turns out a lot of
the kind of direct action that's associated with these types
of like ecological things is kind of more performative than
anything else, you know, like it is kind of like
a tree set is about gaining media media like publicity,
because they're gonna get you down right like eventually, and
it's and it's and it's gonna be painful because like

(27:46):
you're not going to be sitting up there for years
to to to to to to prevent the treat from
being logged. So how close do you think we are
into to like reaching that kind of territory like it
was in like the nineties and eighties where it is
like a lot of lot of people like blocking off
roads and doing and doing that kind of thing. You know,
more like you know what what it crosses into that

(28:07):
it's more like autonomous. It's not it's not like led
by a single organization by any means. See, it's more
it's more decentralized. But did you see that kind of
happening soon? And you know, how, how how do you
think we can balance out direct action with like other
like thoughtful means of trying to draw attention to these
things and maybe actually and and other things like actually

(28:28):
physically physically preventing the logging of certain areas. That's such
a good question And UM, I'm really thankful that we're
talking about strategy because um, kind of, like I mentioned,
I moved out here like ten years ago to do
forest defense work and have seen so many instances in
where people are trying to do direct action in a

(28:48):
in a time and space where it doesn't make sense, UM,
where it's like basically slated too. It's going to lose
because it's just impossible too. As you said, you know,
hold this blockade for weeks and weeks and weeks and
the snow um indefinitely, you know, as we you know,
as they continue to try to log indefinitely. So there's
definitely a sweet spot for where um, the sort of

(29:08):
kind of the sort of direct action that we're talking about,
like blockading, where that is most useful. And that sweet
spot is definitely when there is another decisive move, like
another like legal victory that's waiting in the wings or um.
You know, we won one in Washington without a legal
victory because we shamed the ship out of the Department
of Natural Resources in the Seattle Times and they were

(29:31):
like WHOA, We're sorry, um, And so direct action held
off something until we were able to sufficiently shame them
and deter them, but typically they don't shame well, um
and so typically, um, you know, we need illegal there
needs to be a legal element um backing it up.
So direct action is a time buyer. But that said,
like obviously, blockading things is not the only type of

(29:53):
direct action, and part of the rich history of force
events in the Spire region is other kinds of more
um necess fairly you know, discrete kinds of direct action
that obviously you know, I'm um not a part of
speaking on this radio show, but um, what would publicly,
um you know say like those things probably need to happen,
and I hope they have what what what? What I

(30:14):
could say is that I've I've seen these things happening
in other places, like in like in the Atlanta Defending
Forest movement right now, I have I I have seen
evidence that individuals not associated with any group are putting
spikes and trees, and that is that is that is
something that is happening, right, And all that takes is
one person, right, It's that's not like a group of

(30:36):
twenty people going into the forest to do that. That's
the one person in an afternoon, right. So those are
the types of like single person direct actions, which again, yeah,
any type of direct action is going to be scary,
right You're you're once you start doing that, that is
you know, that introduces certain things that will is is
kind of is kind of more frightening to you as
a person. Um. But but it's it is something that

(30:58):
is happening in other places, is um. And it has
showed to at the very least upset the people who
are wanting logging to happen. Generally, they're not thrilled when
they when they find when when they find these things um. Yeah, yeah,
because like it's like it's I mean, I think like
when it comes down to it, it's like about knowing
what your goal is with this tactic. Like on you know,

(31:21):
in in the action that happened this past week, there
was an understanding that the goal was to you know,
shine a light on this thing that's happening in secrecy,
shame the Forest Service, and build movement movement building so
that we're ready when people need to throw down for
real and and and that might happen soon. We weren't

(31:42):
trying to hold the space for weeks and weeks and weeks. Um.
That wasn't the goal. So like going in being like,
what kind of an action are we trying to do?
What are we trying to complish? Are we trying to
be decisive? Are we trying to like shape the conditions
necessary for success and like culture build, or were trying
like what are we actually trying to do? And then
like coming away with that, having having that clear having
a clear sense of that beforehand, I think really really

(32:04):
is crucial because I've definitely observed direct actions where that
is not the case, and people have not thought those
things through and it becomes the kind of unfun version
of chaos, um where you know, things, things don't really
get done, and you're just kind of sitting around and
everyone's kind of slightly miserable because again you're in a
freezing forest, um, and no one really knows what the

(32:26):
hell they're doing. Um. So definitely having those kind of
things thoughts through beforehand is extremely useful when you're deciding
to trudge your way into some cold, dark woods. Yeah,
we're going for a chaotic good, not chaotic evil. Yeah, well,
a little bit of chaotic. Well, it depends, it depends
what it depends what we mean by evil evil evil

(32:48):
to some people, we we yeah, anyway, Um, and any
other kind of historical notes on forest defense or any
other kind of random, random tidbits you like to mention
before before we close out. The one thing that I
feel like it's super important to say to people is
that forest defense is not just about protecting forests. It's

(33:10):
about protecting all of us. We know now like forest defenses,
climate defense. Our forests are our best natural tool for
fighting climate change. And also like we need them here.
Most of Oregon get their drinking water from forest and
water sheds, like they literally are sustaining all of us.
And so yeah, we hope folks join, like not just

(33:31):
for the sake of like being you know, hippie tree huggers,
even though you know some of us are, but also
because like we need to survive as a people and
as a planet, and um forests our best way to
do that. It's it's the cheapest most advanced form of
carbon capture we have yet. So yeah, it seems seems
kind of asinine to chop that all down to build

(33:52):
some shitty sheds. M hmm, all right, well that's a Swede. Hi.
I'm Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're the
hosts of the science podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

(34:13):
where every week we get to explore some of the
weirdest questions in the universe, like if sci fi teleportation
was possible, how would it square with the multitudes of
organisms that inhabit our human bodies? Can we find evidence
of emotions in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish? How
would an interplanetary civilization function just free will exist? Stuff

(34:34):
to Blow Your Mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels,
and the wonders of techno history. Basically, this show is
the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If
anybody ever told you you ask the weirdest questions, it
is time to come join us in the place where
you belong. The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast new

(34:56):
episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday, with bonus episodes on
sat Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. After thirty years, it's time to return to
the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at
the peach pit. On the podcast nine O two one
OMG joined Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch

(35:18):
of the hit series Beverly Hills nine O two one oh.
From the very beginning, we get to tell the fans
all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen,
so they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we
can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera.
Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've
been wondering about for decades. As nine O two one
oh super fan and radio host Sissany sits in with

(35:41):
Jenny and Tory, two reminisce, reflect and relive each moment,
from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates,
you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the
entire ten years that we filmed that show, and you
remember absolutely nothing of the ten years that we film
that show. Listen to nine O two one OMG on

(36:03):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. I'm Jake Halbern, host of Deep Cover.
Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the
mob run Chicago. We controlled the courts, we controlled absolutely everything.
He bribed judges and even helped a hit man walk
free until one day when he started talking with the

(36:26):
FBI and promised that he could take the mob down.
I've spent the past year trying to figure out why
he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective,
Bob was too good to be true. There's got to
be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust the guy.
He looks like a little scum, big layer, stool pidging.
He looked like what he was or at. I can

(36:46):
say with all certainty I think he's a hero because
he didn't have to do what he did, and he
did it anyway. The moment I put the wire around
the first time, my life was over. If it ever
got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen
to the cover on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. It's it could Happen here,

(37:16):
the podcast that occasionally has ads from Washington State Highway Patrol.
On a completely unrelated note, Garrison, you want to talk
about the Washington State Highway Patrol today, I sure would
love to talk about our our good friends at the
Washington State Patrol um because yeah, they just they've've they've
come up on my radar in a in an unrelated matter,

(37:39):
and now we're gonna talking about So now we're talking
about them. Yeah, so this is the show about things
falling apart and kind of part of societal and political
stuff kind of crumbling. Usually that gets related to some
type of law enforcement agency more often than not. And uh,
in terms of like tensions rising in stuff, there's a
lot of you know, force gets force gets exerted via

(38:02):
law enforcement and uh, one such law enforcement Yeah. Well,
and one such agency that does this is called the
Washington State Patrol. UM. So they were I I don't know,
I I just discovered them recently. UM. So they were
founded exactly one hundred years ago. UM. And they were
originally called the Washington State Highway Patrol UM. Now they're

(38:26):
just the Washington State Patrol. They were moved Highway, but
they still do the same thing. They're basically glorified traffic
cops um who operate all around all around Washington State. UM.
And we're gonna talk about some of the ways that
they've been making things worse within the past decade. UM.
I'm since they have a one hundred year history, I'm

(38:48):
sure we can find lots of historical examples. UM, but
we're we're gonna we're gonna do stuff that's more that
is more recent, because this is you know, generally trying
to keep things around the current, the current crumbling. Um.
And because we're gonna talk about police, the first the
first thing we're gonna be discussing, oddly enough, is a

(39:08):
racism um because I know, Um, when you think of
Washington State Patrol, that's you know, it's it's kind of
shocking that they might have a race issue. Um. So, Anyway,
twelve years ago, researchers working with working with Washington State
Patrol found that troopers were searching drivers from minority communities,

(39:29):
particularly um local Native American tribes, at a much higher
rate than than white people. And they recommend an additional study,
which the Washington State Patrol declined to UH to investigate further.
They they're like, no, um, no, no more studies. So meanwhile,

(39:49):
since then, the troopers have continued to continue to search
Native Americans at a at a rate much higher more
than five times than that of of of white people
in the area. Yeah, so but there are five times
as the popular there, there's five times as many Indigenous
people in Washington as white people right there, there's not.
Oh yeah, ok. So an analysis by Investigate West showed

(40:16):
that the Patrol continued to do searches at a much
elevated rates for for black people, Latino, Pacific Islanders, and
natives within Washington State. UM. And yet when when troopers
did decide to search white motorists, they were more likely
to find drugs in contraband. UM. Which is something to
Washington State Patrol actually acknowledges is that when when they

(40:38):
search people of minority communities, they are less likely to
find to find illegal things. Yeah. I mean that's yeah
nationwide and very very robust data. So UM, government records
obtained via like from information requests and various other you
know of public records searches UM also show that there

(41:03):
there there is a state law that Washington State Patrol
is supposed to collect and report semi annually to the
Criminal Justice Training Commission in Washington. UM about you know,
race and ethnicity data of motorists is tapped by troopers.
But uh so this is supposed supposed happen semi annually,
but the agency report of those findings only three times
in the past fifteen years. Which isn't sounds kind of

(41:26):
like the Portland police not doing the things that federally
they're supposed to do because they're so violent. Yeah, being
out of compliance with a bunch of federal rags three
three times, three times in fifteen years is not semi annually.
Based on what I know, the term semi annually to
semi decade. So yeah, UM based on responses for over

(41:49):
thirty public records requests UM from from three different agencies
looking looking at Washington State Patrol and more than like
fifty interviews with current and formal law enforcement officials and
people with experience in interacting with Washington State Patrol UM
and also data from millions of traffic stops that all
this was looked at in total, examined about eight million
traffic stops from two US and nine to US in fifteen.

(42:10):
This is what Investigate West was doing UM, which was
which was the most recent data available, and the analysis
found that UH it focused on twenty incidents of what
researchers called like high discretion searches. That's when troopers had
the most like personal leeway to decide whether or not
to pull over and search a vehicle. UM. Black drivers
were twice as likely to be searched as white drivers,

(42:31):
and Latino specific calendars were eight percent more likely to
be searched. Of of these incidents where officers had discretion
and like they could choose whether or not to pull
someone over. Um, so it wasn't like it wasn't like
they were like obviously speeding or doing you know, like
like you know, like like regular like actually observable traffic violations.
This is when like people could choose when they investigate.
West thing got published, they contact Washington State Patrol and

(42:54):
the spokesperson said that, uh, here's here's here's the quote
that Ray Sprace was not the only factor when troopers
decided whom to search, and that's partially because blacks, Native
Americans and Latinos are more more more likely to be
searched regardless of how much discretion troopers have, which that
doesn't really make very much sense. Um, I don't know

(43:15):
what person, I don't know. What they mean is they're
more likely to be searching regardless what the who was
that bad checking the copy? Which is weird because later
on the spokesperson said that, um, we're same guy, we're

(43:37):
in the Basically we're agrees that we're in a basic
agreement that minorities are searched at higher rates, but we
find less contraband so um. And he also he also
noted that complaints about like a racial bias encounted for
little more than ten percent of all complaints of the
state patrol filed last year. So I guess he thinks

(44:01):
that's a good He thinks that's a good stat Yeah, yeah, um.
And another kind of not great thing is that uh.
The analysis found that not only are Native Americans more
likely to be searched, but all of the most of
those searches happen always that like the edges of reservations UM.
The analysis found that the two highest concentration of searches

(44:23):
in Native Americans by state troopers are on the US
nineties seven, where it encounters um a reservation at ol
Mac about about a mile from its intersection at a
state wrote one fifty five, which is and more than
one thirty miles south of of the same when the
same highway enters another reservation. So nearly one third of

(44:46):
high discretions of high discretion searches. So when troopers can
decide whether or not to pull someone over like like
they they they have more discretion whether they can. So
one third of those happened on these two stretches of
highway right on the edges of these reservations, Like they're
patrolling outside these reservations to specifically do this. Um there
was I saw an interview on this topic that we

(45:08):
talked that talked to Native Americans in this area and
they're like, yeah, every time we leave the reservation, we
get pulled over. But then we watched tons of white
motorists go by and no one cares, like and like
and they're like you're doing like they're just speeding by,
it doesn't matter. Um so yeah, that is. That is
the first first you know, unsurprising tidbit about Uh, some

(45:30):
an organization who started as a highway patrol is, yeah,
they're gonna pull people over who are not white more often.
That is that's pretty not not super shocko yeah, and
then makes a public statement like l o O yeah
yeah that that does. That does sound a lot like
with the Washington State Patrol. Uh sounds like, um so

(45:54):
we're gonna So that that was that was the first
obvious thing. Uh. This next her it's a little bit
more fun. Um so in in two thousand nine, the
Washington State Patrol made made the decision to fire eight troopers,
which is you know, pretty pretty rare um And the
reason why they got fired is because they used fake

(46:16):
diplomas to claim pay raises. Yeah, so there was there
was this whole scheme about getting fake diplomas to get
the troopers more money, like like like individual people that
there's this whole, this whole operation going on. It resulted
in the in in eight in eight people getting fired.
So troopers can can boost their pay about two percent

(46:37):
by earning a two a two year degree or four
percent with a four year degree. And there was this
group of of a troopers who just uh started just
forging diplomas see Garrison. This is a separate conversation. But
they didn't need to forge diplomas. They could have just
become doctors of of of of magic, like like that's

(47:01):
what I've tried to do religious PhD. Yeah. So there's
all sorts of fake diploma mills come on Washington State
Highway Patrol. This this is pretty funny. So so the
investigation began after federal agents shut down a diploma mill

(47:21):
in the Spokane. Criminal charges were not filed, but the
Patrol to decide to fire these eight troopers. Yeah, so
that is one of the more funny things we'll be
talking about today. And I think it's time for an
ad break. So yeah, speaking of funny, here's these ads
that may or may not be the people we're talking about.
Rob No unrelated, unrelated. Uh We're back, which is also unrelated. Yeah.

(47:48):
Another thing that's putting pretty common around police is that
the past few years, they generally don't think COVID is
really real or that it is the past few years.
Now that Robert, we're less than a month away from two. Yeah,
I hate that. It's like it's it's like it's almost two.

(48:11):
Almost ten percent of your entire life has been COVID.
I'm not going to think about math um. So generally
they don't think COVID is real. And also they think
vaccines are the mark of Satan or something. Well obviously
they are. But yeah, so in in in mid October
this this past October, Washington Tate Patrol announced that one

(48:32):
hundred and twenty seven of its employees lost their job
after the state's COVID nineteen vaccine mandate deadline of October eighteen.
So unlike the Portland Police Bureau who who the port
who port and many other cities where city officials caved
to the demands of the police that vaccine mandates not
be not be extended towards police, Uh, this did not

(48:54):
happen in Washington and they actually got it enforced. So
over a hundred UH patrol employees quit quit their job,
including a sixty four commissioned officers. It was like six
sixty seven troopers, six sergeants and one captain. Um. Yeah,
So you know, Washington State Patrol has about two thousand

(49:16):
personnel within like between like eight districts. Um. So losing
like a hundred and twenty seven of them is not
a it's not an insignificant loss. Um. And it's it's
been a it's it has been been trying to hire
a lot more people in the in the past. In
the past like a few months, because of this, they've
been they've been trying to do a lot more recruitment,

(49:38):
which is why they're Um. I've heard from other people
that they are putting uh advertisements out on the internet
to become a Washington State trooper. This is something I've
I've heard from from people online when I've been doing
all of this uh deep deep extensive research. So yeah,
they are, they are, they are recruiting. Uh So, if

(49:58):
you uh want to be h Washington Patrol officer, don't don't.
Actually that's a bad idea. Um, don't do that. Yeah,
I mean us act. You want to like really funk
with people who live on a reservation if that's if
that's your goal, it's Washington State Highway Patrol is your
your dream career? Or have another option for you. You

(50:19):
could also just get COVID and die. Well, yeah, that
is an option. That's an option to thing I think
might be freedom is what makes this nation great. Uh
so I think you know of the choice. Anyway, continue Harrison.
I'm gonna send a picture inside our group chat first
because we're gonna were gonna be talking about one one

(50:41):
specific evil dude. Next, I'm setting a picture in the
group chat that I want you to look at first,
just so you get a sense of who we're talking about.
Oh based, okay, I'm I'm excited. Yeah all right. Oh no,
oh no, the boat I really brings it all together.
Oh no, you said bow tie, which does not make

(51:04):
me optimistic. Robert no, but is wrong with it? Who? Yeah,
who puts a bow tie on a uniform? Like, guys,
I found a better quality image. Um, good god, there
we go, the same image better He looks like Tucker
Carlson and the Starship Troopers universe when he gets drafted.

(51:25):
So this is the next guy we're talking about. Um,
somehow feels like I hate crime towards the Weasley family.
So yeah, it feels like a hate crime towards the
guy based off Tucker Carlson in Starship Troopers. So this
would be a big fan of ron Ron Weasley's family.
This this is This is Sean carr Um, a former

(51:48):
Washington State Patrol a sergeant um who resigned for reasons.
We will discuss fun. That's exciting. Yeah yeah anyway. Um.
So in twos and fifteen and Associated Press investigation uncovered
about a thousand officers in the United States who lost
their badges over a six year period for sex crimes

(52:10):
or misconduct such as like, uh, this is this is
a quote here which I disagree with framing here, but
this is this is a quote propositioning citizens or having
consensual but prohibited on duty intercourse, which is uh, pretty bullshit.
Way to frame that because basically you're it's it's police
raping people. M and police officers being accused of like

(52:34):
using their power over people to rape them is extremely common. Yeah,
and it's often just like yeah, well the person said okay,
And it's like, well they said okay to a person
with a gun in the legal power to murder anyone
they want or put them into jail. Like like there's
a lot of scent. Yeah, you know, I would argue
you can't consent, uh to sex with a police officer

(52:54):
who's on duty in a uniform because it's they have
the power to murder anybody they want or who just
arrest you. Like, like, it's a lot of stuff. So
like there was a studied at least a few years
ago that an analyzed data of like a five hundred
and fifty arrest cases from the years of two US
and five, two US and seven just this is just
two years and uh and a four hundred officers employed

(53:17):
by like three d and twenty non non federal law
enforcement agencies located throughout a forty three states. Um and
findings indicated that a police sexual misconduct includes a serious
forms of sex with related crimes and the victims of
sex related crimes by police are typically younger than eighteen
years old. UM, so it's it happens a lot with miners.

(53:41):
So there's a lot like like more like a ridiculously
common like if you if you google is which I
honestly don't recommend, but you can find like dozens of
stories coming out like basically every like not you'll find
at least one new story every month of a kid
getting raped by police. It happened pretty commonly. So over

(54:02):
the past ten years in the Washington State Patrol, they've
investigated and confirmed four cases of what they call sex
on duty um according to the agency. And this is
including including Shawn Carr now Sean Car's cases particularly sensitive
for the agency because he was married to the uh

(54:23):
the daughter of the Washington State Patrol chief UM and
and Shaun Carr was also himself a sergeant, so he
was connected to like the big leagues at the Washington
State Patrol. So Car met a civilian woman who also
works at Washington State Patrol but as like you know,
like has like an office job, so they isn't isn't
a trooper. Um. They met in twelve and struck up

(54:45):
an online friendship, and a few months later they both
of them told investigators that the relationship did turn sexual.
Um Car admitted to six sexual encounters for the next
like five years with the woman, of five of which
happened when he was on duty and like on state
property or driving a vehicle or while in uniform. UM
but the woman recalled as many as as twenty and

(55:06):
all but one of them were when he was on
duty and well. And so the woman said that most
of their encounters were were what she would describe as consensual,
but she described three incidents where Car did uh pushed
the boundary and she she she has described being raped
by him multiple times. UM, so there was there was

(55:28):
an incident. I think the first one happened in the
beginning of UH with inside his patrol car in a
church parking lot. UH. The woman had recently started dating
another man, and Carr wanted to know who it was.
When she wouldn't say so, he uh he grabbed her
arm hard enough to leave bruises, and the woman said

(55:49):
that Car made her pick from two options, give up
the name of the man or give Car oral sex.
Um Car later told investigators that he said this in
a quote joking context. Oh that's you know, I was thinking,
because that's almost exactly my my tight five for my
stand up set. I mean, some some comedians for some

(56:11):
reason do like making jokes like that and not not
not great usually not great to normalize that kind of thing.
So um. The woman said that she did like like
s his his like commands and she's which she said,
we're like very much not done consent. Yeah, and she
said it's very much not consensual. Um. She she told
investigators that he raped me on the side of the road. Um.

(56:33):
And if and if it was anyone else besides car,
she she she she said she would have called nine
one one. Um. So the second time happened when a
car backed her into a corner of a highway away
station and forced her to have sex with him. Um.
She called it a coerced Car said that consent was mutual.
So despite the sexual assaults, uh, and and and like

(56:57):
and you know and and like assaults you know, like
you know, crapping someone's army hard to believe a bruise,
she said. The woman said she kept in touch with
Car because she was going through a difficult time in
her life and she needed somebody to talk to. Complicated,
that's yeah, that this is even like people who are
imbutive can also be emotionally supportive sometimes, Like that's one

(57:18):
of the things about abuse. That's such a real, real motherfucker.
It's not simple. So yeah, Car Car may not have
gotten in trouble had the woman not confided in another
patrol employee after she left her job. UM. Then the
other other patrol employee mentioned the situation to someone higher up,
triggering an investigation. UM. And then in twenty nineteen, the
woman formally reported Car to uh TO to like the

(57:41):
patrol Office of Professional Standards. So records store that the
patrol of pretty quickly confiscated cars, badge, and gun and
placed him on home assignment, where he remained until he
and he resigned voluntarily. UM. The patrol gave gave the
case to the Sheriff's office to investigate because of the
criminal nature of the allegations. So Car's personal file includes

(58:03):
other on job violations, including using a taser on a
drunk driving suspect. He was handcuffed, and records show that
in February, Car was accused of frequenting a coffee stand
and making unwanted advances on an employee by waiting near
her car until her shift ended and making derogatory comments
about her boyfriend. UM. So she was also stalking this barista,

(58:29):
is what it sounds like. Um? Yeah, yeah, that's that
is what that sounds like. Terrifying. So yeah, so car
after the woman told investigators that she was raped after UM,
the the county sheriffes recommended hard to be filed. But

(58:49):
she wasn't willing to. Um. She wasn't willing to testify.
She did not want to. She did not want to
do that. Um. But but she she didn't tell prosecutors
that she did have one wish that that car again,
the son in law of the state patrol chief be
be not not allowed to police again. UM. Yeah, that's
a pretty reasonable request. Car of obviously denied all the

(59:11):
accusations of non consensual sex and assault, but you know,
it did admit to a to a consensual sexual relationship
on duty um, as well as other you know, like
patrol regulation violations. UM. He he resigned in July before
the patrol could decide whether or not to fire him. Um.

(59:34):
And then the state went about trying to strip him
of his law enforcement cert of occasion requirement to carry
a gun and badge and be hired as law enforcement
in Washington. Getting de certified forms conduct by the Criminal
Justice Training Center in Washington is very hard. Very few
people have actually been decertified. Yeah, And to to be certified,

(59:57):
the panel must be a panel must be convinced that
on duty behavior rose to the level of official misconduct
and constituted a crime committed under the color of authority
as a peace officer. That's the that's the color of
authorities an interesting way to phrase that. Cars attorneys argued

(01:00:17):
that the state failed to make to meet this high
bar and there was quote no legal basis to decertified car. Meanwhile,
the c j a t S the Criminal Justice Training
Center alleged his behavior did constitute official misconduct and failure
of duty, but without actually they didn't actually include the
sexual assault allegations. Instead, it contended that he used state

(01:00:40):
resources for his own benefit or neglected to do his
duties when he was engaged in sexual activity on duty,
So they didn't actually include sexual assault or anything in this.
They just said you were basically like you were because
you were doing because you were having like sexual activity
on duty. You weren't doing your job and that's the

(01:01:01):
reason that we want to decertify you. Um. So the
date of Washington has about eleven thousand certified officers at
any given time UM and since to us in three
they've decertified like two hundred and thirty and at least
four of them for on duty sex and one of
those cases was overturned on appeal um. But in one

(01:01:21):
around mid May, the c j TC in its final
order said that Cars constituted UH crimes of of failure
of duty and official misconduct by, among other things, quote,
intentionally choosing to pursue his own sexual gratification rather than
using his on duty time to perform his lawful responsibilities
as a peace officer. So he he did get decertified,

(01:01:43):
but again not actually discussing the actual like assaults and rapes. Um. Yeah.
So the the the sheriff County Prosecutor's office designed declined
to pursue charges on the case last year when the
woman was willing to testify, but the deputy prosecuting attorney

(01:02:04):
UM did say that she she believed they just happened,
like like she she believes this that the stuff happened,
but because of the lack of evidence due to time
passing and the woman not wanting to testify. There it's
hard to prove guilt in court, so they're not going
to pursue these charges at the moment. Yeah. So that
that is UH, that is Shawn car So that yeah,

(01:02:26):
he is not not not allowed to police as of
That is a cursory glance at stuff in the Washington
State Patrol. Oh, I guess one of the one other
thing I found out today is that so Washington State
Patrol has a has a psychologist for UM recruitings. Basically
for if you want to join the patrol, you have

(01:02:48):
to go like through like a psychological screening. Sure, that
makes sense. And he just just resigned because he was
he was he was probably going to get fired. Um.
This is after Stale Times and Public Radio Northwest News
Network UH published a peace show showing that since UH

(01:03:10):
the psychological screenings rejected where is it? UH rejected of
white candidates over the past four years. Um, but the
psychologists that they hired h rejected of black candidates, of
Hispanic candidates, and forty one percent of Asian candidates. So again,
I'm not pro people being police in general, but there

(01:03:33):
is a clear disparity on who they are wanting to
become police, like who like who are they They're letting
in a lot more white candidates than they are letting
in candidates of color. Um so this this uh, this
psychologist screener is is no longer on the job as
of like a few days ago. Um. Yeah, so just

(01:03:55):
another another level of stuff because yeah, you know, there's
they want there to be more white officers than anything else.
Um so yeah, that is that is the Washington State Patrol.
I guess the one other thing I want to do
is I'm gonna again send in the group chat. Their
their current logo, their current logo current you're smirking. I

(01:04:19):
hate it when you do this. I'm afraid. I don't know,
soph Maybe it'll be fine. It's actually it's it's it's
kind of fun. That's their logo. That is their current logo.
They design it in like paint, Yes, they probably they
probably did design it in MS paint. Oh man, Yeah,

(01:04:42):
that that looks like it belongs in an angel Fire website.
Gar So do you know what angel Fire was not?
Oh my god, you fucking teenagers. Um yeah, that looks
like it belongs in an angel I will I will
let all of the other people who feel very old
right now know that it looks like something you'd see
in an angel Fire website. Like shittlely animated blinking across

(01:05:03):
the screen. No, like it looks like something from a
ninety nineties website. All right, well, now I'm both angry
about the police and I feel a thousand years old.
So this is good? What a good? What a good?
What a good feeling? Well that that wraps that. That
wraps it up for today. Um and hey again, I

(01:05:23):
have heard that they are recruiting and they should have
a new psychological screener soon. So great, there we go.
I'm imagining the primary psychological screening is you're white, right,
that's that's that is what it used to be. I mean,
I'm imagining that's what it's going to be. Still probably
maybe not. All right, Well, this has been a great time.

(01:05:46):
I'm sure everybody's feeling good. Uh, goodbye, get out of
my house. A chain of teens from foster care is
a topic not enough people know about, and we're here
to change that. I'm April Denuity, host of the new
podcast Navigating Adoption, presented by adopt us Kids. Each episode

(01:06:10):
brings you compelling, real life adoption stories told by the
families that lived them, with commentary from experts. Visit adopt
us Kids dot org, slash podcast, or subscribe to Navigating Adoption,
presented by adopt us Kids, brought to you by the U.
S Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children
and Families, and the Council. Here's to the great American settlers.

(01:06:32):
The millions of you has settled for unsatisfying jobs because
they pay the bills, and you just kind of fell
into it, and you know, it's like totally fine, just
another few decades or so and then you can enjoy yourself.
Of course, there is something else you could do. If
you've got something to say. You could, I don't know,

(01:06:56):
startup podcast with speaker from my heart and east your
creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about
stuff you love and maybe even earn enough money to
one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and
walk off into the sunset. Hey, I'm no settler. I'm

(01:07:17):
an explorer spreaker dot com. That's spr e a k
E R hustle on over today. I'm Colleen with join
me the host of Eating Wall Broke podcast, while I
eat a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers and

(01:07:39):
celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke.
Today I have the lovely aj Crimson, the official Princess
of comfin Asia. Kiddingk and Asia. This is the professor.
We're here on Eating Wall Broken. Today, I'm gonna break
down my meal that got me through the time when
I was broken. Listen to Eating Wall Broke on the
I Heart Radio app, on apple Pie podcast or wherever

(01:08:00):
you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Hudcast. This is
a crypto podcast where we talk about the best n
f T investments and how you can get rich. To bro,
if you just accept the wave of the future and

(01:08:22):
decentralize your finance and invest in a bank that can
take all of your money overnight and disappear because it
was really just being run by a guy in Macedonia
and he it was just a rugpole the entire time,
and you lose your life savings and you have no
recourse and that's the fucking future of investments. Bro. Hey, bro,

(01:08:43):
you're fired. Yeah, that's fair. This is it could happen
here podcast about how things are bad sometimes a podcast
about how to make them less bad. Today we're talking
about the former how things are bad, and we're talking
about financialization, um, and specifically the financialization of like human

(01:09:03):
beings and the endeavor to create art. Uh and so
art art is a broad broad term. I mean, I
said the endeavor to I'm sure they all want to
be creating art. Well, this won't make any sense to
people yet, so I'm gonna I'm gonna give a brief overview.
There's an article in the Atlantic that dropped on November
twenty nine called what Happens when You're the Investment. It's

(01:09:25):
by Rex Wouldbury Um, who I hate um. So as
a note, okay, let let me just get the the
the nut of the article is, and that there's been
a couple of other articles on this guy. Um. His
name is Alex mass mesh Um and he is a

(01:09:45):
French kid, I think, who decided to tokenize himself. And
what that means is so like you've got the etherory
and blockchain right. He basically he's he's putting he's carving
up aspects of his like potential future earnings, and he's
putting those on the Ethereum blockchain as like tokens that

(01:10:06):
people can buy. And the idea is that this kid
had wanted to like start a business and be an entrepreneur,
but he didn't have any money. So using like on
the ether blockchain, he turned himself into tokens basically like
his potential future earnings and his time. And basically people
are able to buy up coins effectively, I mean not coins,

(01:10:27):
but tokens shares. Yeah, yeah, dollar sign Alex is like
the name of the token, which basically shares they're buying.
He's turned himself essentially into a publicly traded company kind
of um. And holders of his coins are like, he's
splitting up fifteen percent of his income for the next
three years basically among people who like hold his coins.

(01:10:48):
And he raised like twenty grand this way. Um. And
it's not just like it's not just his future earnings
that are being kind of tokenized. You can also use
tokens to like buy retweets from him, or one on
one conversations or and here's a line, I love an
introduction to someone in his network. And and it's the
overall idea because there's you can find some other good
articles good as an interesting word to use. You can

(01:11:11):
find other interesting, fascinating articles about this this idea, which
is like human beings tokenizing their future earning potential um
in order to raise money um and and it's uh
the way this is usually sold as a good thing.
In fact, I should probably just read a quote from

(01:11:32):
this Atlantic article to give you an idea of how
uh mass measure is, or of how um um the
art the author of the article, Rex good Wouldbury, is
is trying to sell this ship. We all have the
slightly annoying friend who insists that she knew about so
and so before they were even famous. When it comes
to Taylor Swift, I'm that friend, and I'm more than

(01:11:52):
slightly annoying about it. I was a Taylor fan in
her pre fearless full on country days, years before Conway
interrupted her on stage at the v m AS. But
in our constructive fandom, I'm treated no differently than a
fan who discovered Swift on SNL a few weeks back.
This would be different, though. If Taylor had done what
mass Measure did and turned herself into an investment, she
could have issued a social token, whereas non fungible tokens

(01:12:14):
or n f t s are so called because of
the uniqueness of a digital asset. Social tokens are fungible.
In other words, each Alex token is interchangeable with every
other Alex token, just like a dollar bill can be
traded for any other dollar bill. Say Taylor issued had
issued her own token, Let's call it a dollar signs swift,
and say she had sold dollar signed swift to her
biggest fans. Yeah, say I was one such fan. Over time,

(01:12:36):
as Taylor's popularity grew, the value of the Swift token
would have appreciated. As an early believer, I would have
shared in the financial upside of her growing fame. The
Swift token I had brought for a hundred dollars in
two thousand seven might be worth a hundred thousand dollars today.
The Taylor Swift mini economy would serve both the singer
and early fans like me. As an artist, Taylor could
have funded her work by selling dollar signs or Swift tokens.

(01:12:57):
She might not have needed to sell ownership of her
master and she might not have been forced to re
record her albums to take back control over her art.
Taylor's fans, for their part, would have been rewarded for
a decade of patronage. We're all evangelists for our favorite artists,
yet we capture little of the value that we helped create.
And then there's a lot that like I find unsettling. There.
One of them is the idea that like, yeah, the

(01:13:19):
fact that I was a fan of someone earlier means
I should get some sort of reward for it, Like
I should be treated differently because I liked it earlier,
which you might recognize like the thing that everybody has
been shipping on for like fandoms for years now, like
it's been a it's been a huge thing, where like, yeah,
you're being an asshole if you're if you're talking about
like if you think you have some additional ownership of
Star Wars because you watched it ten years before the

(01:13:41):
fans today and so you like different stuff in it,
Like that's we all recognize that as like toxic um.
But the the whole argument of this article is that like, no,
this is how the entire future of creativity should work.
We find unsettling. And it also it also ties into
like a really concerning development in paras social relationships of

(01:14:02):
like to like invest in someone to buy a conversation
with them in like this really weird way um and
the fact that young artists are going to be pressured
into this kind of thing is really scary. Yeah, because
there's like one of the things mass Measure did as
like um uh as an experiment, was like allow people

(01:14:22):
who had bought his tokens to make life decisions for him,
like tell him when to wake up in the morning
and whether or not to eat red meat and stuff
like that. And he stated that like, well, none of
this is binding, right, Like I'll I might do what
they say, but like I'm not going to do anything
crazy or whatever. But also this is like the first
iteration of this um. And I like this Atlantic article,

(01:14:45):
which I think is unhinged for reasons we'll get into,
but it's purely talking about like, look at this incredibly
successful person. I imagine if they've gotten to be incredibly
successful using this method instead, and it might have like
spared them this thing. But when I keep thinking about
is like, Okay, well, the vast majority of people like
there's no reason to invest in them, Like yeah, maybe

(01:15:06):
if you come out with a great song or a
great video, like yeah, you could get investments and I'm
sure that could work out. I'm sure, like Taylor Swift
is a successful enough person, I'm sure she could have
found a way to succeed under that system too. But
what I think will be much more common because there's
no real reason to anticipate that the average person will
have an earnings potential. If you give them twenty grand,

(01:15:26):
that's greater than twenty grand. Um. The most likely thing
is that like people just buy shares and poor people
to make them do fucked up ship. Yeah, it's gonna
be how would you not? How would that not be
where it goes? That's that that's the only way that
this is going to get like used on a large scale.
People just selling themselves. People are people are kind of

(01:15:49):
use the Ether blockchain to like crowdfund and crowd uh
cast a new jackass basically, Like it's going it's not
going to be like a thousand Taylor Swift's all token
izing themselves. It's going to be like millions of people
in the global self issuing tokens to like vote on
whether they roll down the hill in a barrel or

(01:16:11):
in like a fucking porta potti. Like it's just it's
a nightmare to me to contemplate people actually adopting this.
You know, there's there's a lot of really like the
thing I think is the most incredible part about this
is that like, okay, so like it basically doesn't matter
what like economic theory you used to look at it.

(01:16:34):
It's like every single one of them tells you something
just like absolutely fucked about it, and like, you know,
because because I mean they're there, there's there's there's some
extent to which I look at this and it's like,
this isn't that much different than the fact, you know,
it's like okay, so you're paying someone to do whatever
you want, but like, okay, like that's not that much
different than just a job, right, Like it's it's not

(01:16:56):
it's not inherently that much different than the fact that
everyone is to just do wage labor. But also, like
there's one was interesting things to me that I thought
about this when I was what I was reading this
was so, do you just know what capitalization is? Yeah? Yeah,

(01:17:16):
so this is this is just capitalizing a person, right,
Like it's literally taking a person public effect putting turning
them into like a tradeable share and that's like an investment. Yeah,
I mean this is all one of the things that
like a Forbes article I found point is like this
is another kind of unregulated securities training. Yeah yeah, yeah.
But what's what's interesting to me about it is that like, okay,

(01:17:38):
so you know this is also already how accounting wise,
every corporation sees a person, right like every every every
every person in the asset book is you know, yeah,
you know, like a wage is just capitalization, right, It's
like how much will you pay now for this much money? Later?
You could, but it's like people are doing it to
themselves now, which just like this, Yeah, you could argue

(01:17:59):
that like elements of this or how like banks treat
you when you get a mortgage, right, um, like, but
but also that's much more rigorous and limited, like it
has like regulations and it has rules for how those
things work. It's not some like twelve year old getting
like like going on to coin base and buying part

(01:18:21):
of you as a joke with your with like his
dad's money, right, like, because it's like yeah, because what
if it's like there's no law against a seventeen year
old I guess if maybe their parents may need to consent,
but there's no law against the seventeen year old getting
a facial tattoo of like the doors of a concentration
camp on their face. But what if some kid tokenizes

(01:18:42):
himself for forty grands so he can drop an EP
and that's what like a bunch of four channers who
buy up his his shares want him to do um.
And maybe the fucking kid does that because he knows
it's going to get him, because his brain is not
done and he knows it's going to get him. A
bunch of fucking social media cloud. Yeah, Like it's there's
a lot of and there's no way to regulate that. Like,

(01:19:04):
it's just an inherently toxic proposition that I don't think
the government would. I don't know what side of this
the government would even step in on. Like what is
the regulation of people deciding I'm letting random strangers who
pay me money vote on what I do with my life.
What do you ever think? It reminds me of a
lot is like the micro lending stuff from the nineties,

(01:19:24):
where it was like, oh, well, we'll like empower these
people by we'll go in and uh, We're going to
give them like a small amount of money and they
have to pay back, and it was like you know,
and and all of the same stuff that you're reading,
all the arguments about why this is a good thing
are exactly the same as the micro lending ones and
that stuff. You know. There there were two ways it
turned out. One was basically you get the scenario where

(01:19:48):
both sides are scamming each other, where you know, all
the people who are getting these micro loanchers, they're just
taking the money and walking right like that's you know,
the their their their things. Oh this is I can
just get money like this and we can just keep
I just keep paying it back. And so I'm scamming them.
But then on the other side you have these people
who are like, oh cool, I can give this person
this loan and turn them into a debt peon and

(01:20:09):
it and you know, and and the the the really
depressing side about it is so that the people who
couldn't get away, like I mean, we're literally reduced the
debt pions and you know, I mean there's a huge
wave of suicides in Indias. Probably don't say example, is
a wave of suicide is people drinking past a side
because they couldn't pay off these loans and so and
And the thing that's different about this is that like

(01:20:30):
I mean, a you're doing it to yourself. But then
be again, there's no regulation, but that also means there
isn't any way to force someone to do what you
say you're going to do. It's unclear how it's going
to be enforced. And the other thing that is clear
is like what does losses look like? Like what what
happens when someone like you cannot make back on like

(01:20:53):
an investment, but if the investment is a person, how
does that work? And if someone's contractually obligated to give
us and share their income, what happens when there's not
enough income for that? Like like you know, so those
types of things. Yeah, I mean there's no answer to that. Uh,
And there's nobody like the money that's going to be
whatever made in this is going to be made before

(01:21:16):
anyone steps into to try to answer that if anyone
ever does, like, um, it's it's gonna be the next
because I think we're I think we're heading for a
crash with with n f T s. Like there was
just an article today about how what is of nfc
T trading is done by like ten percent of people,
which further back because the allegations of n f t

(01:21:37):
S is that most of what's happening isn't people actually
buying them. It's people like the same person using multiple
wallets basically trying to jack up the perceived value by
throwing a bunch of other Internet money that they already have.
So these these whales who have like a bunch of
crypto gaming the system, and we've seen some of them,
and the biggest n f t S salever, it was
like half a billion dollars and it was a guy

(01:21:57):
selling it to himself and then transferring it back into
another wallet to try to make it look like it
was worth half a billion dollars even though no one
had actually really paid that for it. Um so I
and I think you know that. And kind of what
we've seen with the regulations the government's financed for n
f t s, I think that's a problem for them
in the near future. And I wouldn't be surprised to

(01:22:19):
see this takeoff next, especially given like the creator economy
that we're seeing on like the kind of that TikTok, yeah, TikTok,
Like I wouldn't be surprised if you saw a rash
of big TikTok stars tokenizing themselves and like I'm not
even sure, I'm I'm I'm sure it would be a
mix of the person making the tokens being the one

(01:22:40):
doing the scam and the person receiving or the people
buying the tokens being the one doing. Like, I'm sure
it would be a mix of different kinds of exploitation.
But it's not gonna be good, I mean, And and
just like a, it's gonna make like I don't know,
fifty people super rich when they when they first start
trying it, right like that that is that is like
when this happens, like when a TikTok star with million followers,

(01:23:03):
when they do this, they will make boatloads of money.
It's just unclear what happens after that. Yeah, well Fleet
of Mexico. Yeah, I mean, that would be the smart thing.
That would be the smart thing to YEA. In this
Forbes article I found, which is a thousand times better
than the Atlantic article, Like even though it's written by
someone I think who's also into crypto, it's just it

(01:23:25):
actually it asks some of these questions we've been talking
about um and it cites David Hoffman, who's the CEO
of a of a token ized real estate platform, um
on what he sees as some of the problems, Like
what he, as a guy who's supports aspects of this
kind of thing, sees is the problems with this and uh,

(01:23:46):
it's yeah one sec um Hoffman re returning to his
core problem with the personal token model model. Hoffman re
emphasized that the assurances and utility that come with some
of these tokens don't exist, for with with certain kinds
of tokens don't exist for like these personal tokens, how
risky this investment is is completely defined by the individual.

(01:24:07):
In his disclaimer, he's and he's talking about one of
the guys who's token himself, this guy named Kerman. In
his disclaimer, he says this is a highly risky investment
and that you could lose all your money, which is
a terrible thing to say, because with personal tokens, the
issuer is in complete control over exactly how risky the
investment actually is. It's largely up to them whether there
are risks or not, which is like a kind of
illegal securities trading that I don't think we've ever anyone's

(01:24:30):
ever done. Um, Like it's this It's this fascinating new
con where you're literally the you're you're doing securities trading,
but instead of it being over a company, it's just
you and technically there's no consequences if you just take
the money and run, Like, I don't know what kind

(01:24:52):
of contract, Like, you couldn't have a contract that says
that you could say, they're that you're obligated to pay
out your future earnings. You couldn't have to work like
that's not enforceable. You can't like contractually obligate someone two
to like work, like you're allowed to quit a job.

(01:25:13):
I mean, I guess you could put penalties in it,
but I don't, like, none of the current ones have anything,
I mean, or they could go to The other option
is is that they could go to jail for fraud
if they try to if they try to not follow
through on the investment. If you say, like, yeah, I
I invested in you and you said that you would
do these things, you didn't do them, Now you can
go to prison. That is the other Yeah, and I

(01:25:36):
think that will at some point, like there will be
scams and some of that will come in, but like,
none of these current ones, none of them are saying,
here's my specific I'm going to make this special. It's
not like like if you like with a Patreon, right,
You're you're paying a little bit at a time on
an ongoing basis for a very clear product. Generally, this
is so far These aren't that. They're just like, I'm

(01:25:57):
gonna try to do something that makes money and if
it does, you get a cut of it. And that's
it's so much like there's nothing that's stopping mass metch
from saying like, hey, my my and my attempt didn't work.
Uh so we're done. No no money for anybody like that,
and I you're not. There's no accounting requirements, there's no
there's a bunch of ways in which it's sucked up
from a financial except it's not it's not his, it's

(01:26:21):
not it's not you're not investing in his business. You're
nesting in him. So even even if even if he
takes another job, they're still it seems to be contractually
obligated to still get that of his income. Yes, and
I think that's that's the area in which I think
it would be abusive for the person being token ized,
because most people aren't gonna like most people don't make

(01:26:43):
that much money, so they raise someone manages to like
raise five or ten grand and then just winds up
for years giving a cut of their income that winds
up being more than they got initially to a bunch
of like it's almost like a like a payday loan
that you've blocked. Yeah, you know, Okay, so this is
this is what I'm thinking about, because so there's I

(01:27:04):
don't know if I talked about this on the show,
but there's a thing in China where they've been kind
of cracking down it now for funding like nineteen like
literally every single app like had a like had a
pet a loan thing in it, so like like your
flashlight app would have would offer you a pet a loan,
and it was basically it was yeah, they were They
were originally tied in with like people who buy um,

(01:27:27):
you know. I was originally tied in with like like
the the services that like their version of Amazon for example,
would like, oh, hey, we'll give you a loan so
you can buy this, you can order fried chicken. And
I was always wondering when this would come to the US,
and I think it might never hope, I mean hopefully
it never does, and I think it might not just
because of how like powerful our petty a loan industry is.

(01:27:49):
But it's like we've we've now invented it seems like
it's gonna happen, but like dumber, like our our version
of it is like this thing which is just you know,
it's what what if? What if paid a loans but
on the blockchain? Except you know, I mean when I
guess this is the everything you know that that we've've
been getting at is that the difference between this being

(01:28:12):
a paid a loan and this being you scammed a
bunch of people is what the enforcement mechanism looks like.
And you know this this this comes back to some
other things I think you're interesting about. This. One is
that you know, so the whole theine n f T
drift right is based on convincing people that there's value

(01:28:33):
in ownership, right there, Like ownership itself has inherently has value.
And yeah, but but this this is not that this
is this is you know, this is going back to
know your value value is built on labor, right, Well, yeah,
it's like labor and like like personhood, like like you
as a personal brand is the thing that they're trying

(01:28:54):
to get at. But but the thing, the thing that's
missing here, though, is that in order for like, you know,
in order for like labor to produce value right in
this way, there has to be like there has to
be a way for you to force them to pay
you like you need you need coercion for it. And
if there's no coercion, then you know, you just take
a bunch of money and leave. And and that that

(01:29:15):
I think is like this, this is going to be
the battle over like, if this becomes a thing, it's
going to be you know, the people who buy these
things are gonna wind up like trying to you know,
I think they're gonna be the ones you try to
put your regulation because they're gonna you know, they're gonna
go in. They're gonna be I want to get my
money back, And that could end really really really badly

(01:29:37):
if you know, I mean, it probably will. I Like,
I don't know how popular I think this will be
because I think that I hope that this is a
maybe if there'd never been like a Patreon or something.
But the actual use case of this seems to already
be well served by the existing capitalist infrastructure, Like people

(01:29:59):
I think more people wanted back a creator's Patreon than
they want to like own pieces of a person's time
and earning potential like that. That seems like a more
niche and weird desire to people than just like, oh yeah,
these guys make a video I like every week, so
I'll throw them three dollars. Well, I think I think
the difference though, is that pitch your on money gets

(01:30:19):
you money for normal people. This gets you money from
like tech bros. And that. Yeah, that's always yeah, it's
it's a grift designed to And I want to dive
back into this Atlantic article because it's so bad in
such a comprehensive way that I think it deserves analysis.
That's what what put a pin in what you said.
But I want to start with, like how the person
writing this, this Rex motherfucker, like his his concept of

(01:30:44):
the the history of the Internet, um, because it's completely wrong. Quote.
We're on the precipice of the third era of the Web.
The Web's first era was about information flowing freely. Think
Google giving you access to the world's knowledge. Most of
us were passive consumers in this era. The second era
was the social web Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, people began to
create their own content, and that content became the lifeblood

(01:31:06):
of the big platforms. We became active participants, but the
platforms devoured all the profits. The promise of the Internet
and the Internet was to erase the gatekeepers. Instead of
waiting for a record label to sign you, you could
share your music on Spotify. Instead of asking a publication
to share your words. You could tweet, instead of being
tapped by a studio execut you could become a YouTuber.
What happened is that these platforms became the new gatekeepers.

(01:31:29):
The third era of the web is about writing the ship.
Social capital becomes economic capital. Value no longer accumulates to
brokers and intermediaries. That's number one, completely wrong. But one thing, Yeah,
the first era of the Internet, I would say, was
about the idea that information should flow freely. And Google
came in like a decade or more into that period.

(01:31:51):
Like I had been on the Internet five years before
Google hopped into that ship, and Google was actually the
start of of the end of that period um And
it's it's the idea that, like the social Web, was
people creating their own content. Most of the social Web's
initial capital and like all of its initial money came

(01:32:11):
from taking content that people were being paid to make
on legacy platforms that had existed before social media, taking
that content, putting it on social media, and then monetizing
that without paying money back to the people had made
the content. The money in social media did not initially
come from people making their own content, and the way

(01:32:31):
that they mean it, like yeah, you at college humor
or whatever, we're making your own content and sharing it
on social media. But you've been doing that before social media.
Social media just actually made it less profitable eventually, Like
the way he summarizes this is so wrong because what
the social web actually did. And the other thing I'd
argue is that the first era of the Internet, the

(01:32:52):
like early days when things are happening on like forums
and and weird little angel fire websites and like even
my space. Um would I think is kind of my
Space kind of straddles the first in second eras UH,
that was fundamentally much more an era of people creating
their own content. Because the the lifeblood of UH social

(01:33:13):
media today isn't people really making their own content, it's
people reacting to content that other people made. UM. And again,
it just shows the fact that he's he's summarizing it
this way in a way that I think is so
wrong and inaccurate to how things actually developed. Uh. Is
characteristic of his attitude towards this stuff where he's kind
of seeing the only real meaningful evolutions in in in

(01:33:36):
the Internet through the corporations that monetized it, um, which
is just telling of like how this guy actually sees
the way the Internet has developed. And you will not
be surprised to know, Uh, this motherfucker is an investor
at Index Ventures. Um. Yeah, like he's he's he's a
guy who's business is capitalizing things, um. And so that's

(01:33:59):
the only way he sees the development of the Internet,
even though that's not the accurate way of looking at
how the Internet evolved. And I think I think that
there's one more really important thing that he leaves out here,
which is that because you know, like we're talking, oh,
this is the third age of the Internet, Like, no,
the third day of the Internet started, like I don't know,
the mid early mid tends. When I would say when
gamer Gate hit is when I would I would I mean,

(01:34:22):
it's going to be a little off, I depend it
depends what it depends what you mean by age. So
one of my friends worst in advertising, and he was
talking about this where you know, can we can we
can talk about like gammer Gate in the sort of
fascist Miles. But there was something else happening back end,
which was the Internet of things stuff and the Internet
things stuff like you know, like nobody it's kind of
a I don't know, like I think we mostly think

(01:34:43):
about it is like it's kind of a joke or
like it just sucks. But really what it was was
that that that was the period in which people figured
out that the thing that the actual money and to
be made on the Internet was some selling people's personal
information and that and the and and the Internet things
like just dramatic, like just indescribably increased the amount of
data that you could extract from people. And that that

(01:35:03):
was that's the actual that was the actual change of
like like that that that's that's that's the thirty of
the Internet, and that the earth the Internet will last
basically for everyone until we destroy it, which is that
you know, the commodity is just all of all of
the information about who you are, where you go, like
what you buy, who you talk to, that just being

(01:35:23):
sold off to two advertisers, is you know the thing
that he's very very carefully not talking about and instead
focusing on, Oh, it was users creating content. And it's like, no,
they the Internet just they they sold spying on the
entire world. Yeah, And I think there's there's two good

(01:35:44):
ways to to divide the Internet into ages, and the
ages would be slightly different each way. One is kind
of how you're doing it is the way in which
it was monetized, Right, That's that's that's one way too.
And and then if that's the case, it's going to
start with it was not at all. It was an
entirely public project and everybody on it was on it
like a university, and like people did not pay to
access it. Other than that you had to be at

(01:36:05):
an institution or a university. And then like we get
to the kind of the dot the era before the
dot com boom and of the dot com boom, and
then like the early pre social Internet stuff like something
awful and like having stumbled upon and and whatnot, and
like those sending traffic to sites like where I used
to wear, cracked and um, and then kind of the

(01:36:26):
social media, which is the start of as you said,
like the data being monitored monetize like individuals data being
the thing either that's being directly monetized or it's being
used to deliver like targeted adds to you. Um. And
then there's like if you think about it in terms
of content, it's it starts like for the first era
wouldn't even involve Google because it would be like the

(01:36:46):
start of us neet up to eternal September in nine
and then you know on from there. Um. But either way,
this guy doesn't like everything he says about the history
of the Internet is dumb. It's just a very simplified
version and you don't actually look at like the interocking systems. Um.
Because I mean, yeah, I don't know why he describes
it this way, because it is it is like it's

(01:37:10):
accurate if you squint and don't think about it. Um.
But it's weird because like this article is like it's
for tech bros. So I don't know why he describes
it this way because I feel like he could describe
it a lot more accurately, um if you if you
wanted to, Well, it's something I'm gonna get into. I'm
gonna say this point like twice Episode'm gonna get into
the neoliberalism episodes, and I'm writing, but one of one

(01:37:31):
of the key features of neoliberalisms that they lie, is
that the neo liberals have to have two versions of
what they believe. They have the version that they tell
everyone else, which is completely a lie and is not
what they believe at all. And then it has they
have the version that they tell to each other, which
is what they actually believe, and they completely they contradict
each other completely. They mostly believe things. Everything they say
in public is just a complete lie. And that I
think that's what he's doing here, which is that this

(01:37:52):
that like that history of the Internet is the one
you sell the public consumption, because yeah, that that's that's
that's the lie you tell people to take money from them.
And then he has a thing that he believes but
which he will not ever tell you because you know,
if if if he tells you what like he actually
wanted to do, you would run screaming from the room.
And you can you can read between what he wants
you to believe. I think is made very clear by

(01:38:15):
how he divides. By the fact that when he starts
like dividing up the ages of the Internet. He says,
the first one is the time in which people wanted
information to be free. And what he's kind of saying
by doing that is thaying like that was an infant
stage of the Internet, and obviously the natural evolution of
the Internet is for every single thing on it to
become monetized. And because I also believe the Internet should

(01:38:36):
be every aspect of our lives, like this is a
megaverse guy or a metaverse guy, like I think the
Internet should should be involved in every aspect of life.
That means every aspect of life should be financialized. Um,
and that's extremely radical, but it does not sound that way.
When you describe it that way, people's heads go over it.
But like what he's saying is deeply radical. And I

(01:38:57):
think also, like again you want to talk about like
the first and not just the early age, because the
first people who kind of built the backbone of the
Internet were mostly like very radically anti uh capitalizing on
Like there was this idea that like it absolutely should
be as free as possible. Like Steve Wozniak, the guy
who functionally invented the personal computer, had a background like

(01:39:20):
as a phone freaker, like literally literally robbing phone companies
to get like free phone calls and stuff like these,
Like most of the early Internet pioneers were like some
kind of criminal um and the early ages of like
Internet content being monetized mostly started with people doing ship
for free. Like that was how the people who made
money on it. That's how all of my bosses and

(01:39:41):
that's how fucking I got started. Was like you would
just start making ship and you would put it out
for free, and eventually like that would get enough traffic
that you you you you draw ads to you and whatnot,
and you'd make money. But it was always like all
of the content that that made the Internet, and all
of the content creators who were huge now mostly started
um doing something like even it was just like throwing

(01:40:03):
up videos on YouTube, right or like going on. And
that's that's less the case with the zoomers now because
a lot of them got started on at things like
like Twitch, where the idea is to from the beginning
be trying to monetize yourself and while you're like building
a brand, you're constantly monetized. But that's a really recent change,
and I actually I find it kind of unsettling because

(01:40:23):
that was I don't know, it's a mix because I'm
certainly not of the I'm not of the of the
mind that like, if someone is asking you to do work,
you should be getting paid for it. But if you
are trying to if you are trying to like build
a life as a creator, the best way to do
that creatively is to just make the things that you
think are cool and then make like if if other

(01:40:45):
people like it, you make money. Like better things get
made than that. That like that that is the way
the best art gets made. I think it's a few
things going on here because like the way I think,
like I think actually the reason why he frames it
this way is because he's trying to get back to
his idea of freedom. Right he describes like the golden
age of the Internet being information flowing freely. He thinks

(01:41:06):
that the blockchain is a new version of that, So
that's why he's framing it in this way. The second
thing is in terms of artists and creators, um if
you think about like yeah, like like the when the
early age of what he calls like the of what
we we kind of all been refraininged to it. Like
the second area when like era of like when social
media and like content creation like sites are a thing.
It's like, just use YouTube as an example. Um. Because

(01:41:29):
there was a low saturation and content, it was easier
for someone to rise up and gain a platform. Let's
say someone like Bo Burnham right, who started as just
a kid and now is like a very popular comedian. Um.
But then YouTube instead of backing creators like that, um,
which they did a little bit, but they did not
as much. They instead started, uh. Like the thing that

(01:41:50):
happened was like, uh, YouTube really incentivizing sharing like late
night content and sharing like like TV clips of TV
shows and like using like doing using legacy media on
their platform. And that's the things they really backed. That's
the things they really pushed into your feet. It's like
tonight show clips. UM. So a lot of those original
original content creators kind of got left behind and now

(01:42:12):
are now like just their own are running on their
own personal brands. Some of them use Patreon for example.
But it's also it's impossible to do this now because
there's an oversaturation of content. The only thing that's done
this recently is TikTok because it was a brand new platform.
There was again a new opportunity for a lot of
kids to gain to gain a lot of audiences really quickly.
I mean, I just I to based on what you're saying,

(01:42:33):
I think that like TikTok is the closest to how
cool ship happened on the Internet before everything goes because
because it is like, you're not starting from like everyone starts.
I guess knowing you could make money, but that was
the same way you start because you're like, you're doing
a thing, and if that thing takes off, then there's
ways to monetize and like that. Yeah, I think that's
why probably white bar to white is so popular. Generally,

(01:42:55):
growth on TikTok is pretty Uh, it's pretty organic. It's
not it's not it's not boosted by big brands, uh,
the same way stuff like YouTube is. And now it's
probably gonna be edging in that direction, but it's it's
it's it's not, it's it's not there yet. So and
his argument in this is to get back to just
being like a small content creator getting your stuff seen.

(01:43:15):
His solution to this problem of like YouTube and stuff
backing like these large like light night shows and backing
like these large like corporately funded things. His solution is
that if you're a small. If you're a small content creator,
you should sell yourself as an asset to other people
on the internet. Right, So, because like his his idea
is that he wants to get rid of the gate
keepers of the Internet and go back to how the

(01:43:36):
Internet was. But his solution for doing that is just
by selling you as a person brand to other people
on the internet who are like tech bro investors. So
that that's why it's framed this specific way. So I
think when we're all like talking about like, why does
he describe it this way? What's all this weird stuff
going on, it's because that's how he's rationalized in his brain,

(01:43:56):
is for how what he thinks being a free artist is,
and he thinks this is going to be the new
method to get there. There's another important sort of macro
thing to think about this year, which is that the
underlying basis of all of this right is the assumption
that everyone is an entrepreneur. Is that you know, like
every everyone is doing all of their stuff at all

(01:44:17):
times because they want, you know, in order to be
a business owner. And this has been like you know, this,
this has been the great ideological victory of the right
in the last fifty years. Is that they convinced everyone
that like every single person is you know, like you're
I mean, it's not even temporary embarrassed Millonary syndrome. Is
like even people who are working jobs, right, like working

(01:44:38):
wage labor jobs, think of themselves as you know, content creators.
And a content creator, you know, is a small business owner.
And this has an immensely coercive while I'll a coerse
or two, but a corrosive effect on you know, anyone
working together to do something because you know, oh, you're
not you're not you're not a worker, You're just like
you're a content creator. You're you know, you're a small
business owner. You're like you know, you what and and

(01:45:02):
and that's you know this, this is a very long
running thing that much of incredibly powerful people have been
trying to do really since like i mean arguably like
the thirties. But the complete success of that and the
way that you know, they're they're they're selling exactly the
same thing that they were selling in like the eighties,

(01:45:22):
but now it's this like you know, you're trying to
get people to do it to themselves. And also they
throw all of this like sort of nonsense tech jargon
at you to get you to sort of like stop
looking at the fact that this is just sort of
you know, this is this is this is just the new,
even worse version of everyone being a worker who thinks

(01:45:43):
that they're like, you know, also going to be ample
this owner someday. Yeah. I don't know, I don't have
anything else really to say about it other than this,
but like, I mean, this was a good amount to say.
I just think this is so. I think it's such
an example of kind of the way in which the
worst people in the world are trying to steer the internet, um,

(01:46:03):
and by steering the Internet, steer the soul of like
the human race. Um. Like this is a vision of
the future this guy is sharing and this article that
isn't isn't positioning itself as radical, but includes some like
deeply radical ideas about how the world should go. And
by the way, I should also note that he's also
just like blatantly wrong every time he brings up a number,

(01:46:25):
um like he taught he He points out in this
article that forty six million Americans own cryptocurrency. The real
number is more likely about one million. Kind of it
at most, like by every credible. I have no idea
where he's getting forty six million Americans own cryptocurrency. And again,
the stat just came out, and that's part of his
argument is that like, obviously people love the blockchain and

(01:46:47):
these tokens, and like this is this is inevitably going
to get more and more popular, um and when again,
the reality is that every real thing that's happening on
the on the blockchain is pretty much versions of a
security scam that the government has just announced they're going
to finally start regulating. But yeah, I wanna so that
the stet. The study that just came out today was
that analysis of six point one million trades of like

(01:47:10):
four point seven million in f T s. It shows
that the top ten percent of traders were responsible for
of trading um, which again is more evidence that all
that's happening is people boosting prices. Also, the average, the
vast majority like more n f T sales are for
less than two hundred dollars. Some of them are for
just pennies. Like what the stuff that you're hearing about

(01:47:32):
is all ridiculous outliers, and its outliers specifically because people
are pumping stuff up in order to try to call
on someone. Um. And that's the whole basis of this
guy's the structural argument, the reason that he's attempting to
argue that like there's actually desire here and that this is,
in fact, the future of the Internet is based entirely

(01:47:52):
upon like numbers that are either bad or he's or
he's deliberately using he's deliberately lying about the numbers, because
there is no credible number evidence I've ever heard that
forty six million Americans currently owned cryptocurrency or even have
ever owned cryptocurrency. Yeah, and I think the other kind
of nail on the coffin for this idea, and why

(01:48:12):
I don't think it's going to catch on the same
way these guys think it think it does. And this
is something he acknowledges in the article is like not
a lot of people know how the stockic change works,
like very like he he says, I think it's like
I don't know, like he I forget that what number
he says, but um, but he he says, like not
not tons of people actually use or know what the
stockic stockic changes. Um. And the reason why Patreon was

(01:48:35):
so successful and why it's so useful for content creators
is because it's a very intuitive system. It's very clear
how it works, it's clear what you're doing. There's no
really questions about where your money is going or what's
happening this. I don't think this is ever I don't
think this whole personal investment thing is ever going to
actually go off because people don't understand what the blockchain
is and it's too much work to explain it to them. Um.
And just because of how much work it is to

(01:48:57):
wrap your mind around, like, so where is my money going?
What do I have to set up? How does that work?
That's way too much of a headache. Because in order
for this to actually work, you need this to break
out of the tech bro bubble or else this is
just gonna be this small tech bro thing of people
handing over the same one hundred dollars to all their
friends in a circle, um, which is what it is currently.
And I in order to break out of that circle,

(01:49:18):
they need to get you know, your grandmother to learn
what crypto is and how blockchains work. And that's not
gonna happen. Um. So I think that is the one
other nail in the coffin for this type of idea
is like, Patreon is easy, Patreon makes sense. This thing
it is not nearly as intuitive for supporting a YouTuber
you like, yeah, oh, okay, cool. I actually found evidence

(01:49:39):
on where that forty six million Americans number comes from. Yeah,
so basically number one. I found like a fucking crypto
news source pointing out that, like when people started tweeting
that forty six million Americans is based on a study
we'll talk about a second, but like when people started
tweeting about this, like the immediate response in the bitcoin
subreddit was like, well, that's not fucking possible. Uh, Like

(01:50:01):
one of the people in the bitcoin subred it said,
sounds very high. I don't know a single person who
owns it. And this says woman, six or seven people
own it. Yeah, And and it comes from a study
conducted in January by the New York Digital Investment Group
surveying a thousand participants with incomes over fifty dollars, so

(01:50:23):
that that seems valid. Wait, they just said it's over
fifty This okay, this method, Yeah, this this method. You
will get a few like Pew released to studies suggesting
that like Americans have used cryptocurrency at some point and
like all of what's coming out as kind of sketchy,
all of the data, there's like reasons to be kind

(01:50:44):
of unsettled about it. But also like one of the
things that you studies showed is that the vast majority
of Americans have heard of cryptocurrency, uh, and most haven't
used it, Like the vast majority have not chosen to
get involved. Like, however accurate you think this is. Like,
there's another article coming out that says that came out
and I guess May of this year. That's said that's

(01:51:05):
based on a Gemini study, which is Gemini is a
crypto exchange that over fifty million Americans are likely to
buy crypto in the next year. Um, which doesn't seem
to have happened. Uh, Like I I just don't see.
There's all sorts of like weird little studies commissioned to
buy weird little groups, but it really doesn't. It seems
like it's it's again kind of part of the grift.

(01:51:28):
Like I'm not seeing a lot of rigor in any
of this. Um anyway, whatever, We've talked enough about this ship.
I just I think we all as soon as we
read the article, we're so like appalled by it that
what we should. Probably we talk about this for forty
five minutes. Yeah. I'm Ev Rodsky, author of the New

(01:51:54):
York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space,
activists on the gender division of labor, a turn and
family mediator. And I'm doctor adding A Rutcar, a Harvard
physician and medical correspondent with an expertise and the science
of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited
to share our podcast Time Out, a production of I
Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes

(01:52:18):
it so hard for women to treat their time with
the value it deserves. So take this time out with us.
Listen to Time Out, a fair Play podcast on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Raffie is the voice of some of the
happiest songs of our generation, Babyga, so who is the

(01:52:41):
man behind Baby Bluga. Every human being wants to feel respected.
When we start with young, all good things can grow
from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, New Dad and host
of Finding Raffie, a new podcast from my Heart Radio
and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio
app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Robert

(01:53:04):
sex Reese, host of The Doctor Sex re Show, and
every episode I listened to people talk about their sex
and intimacy issues, and yes, I despise every minute of it.
And she she made mistakes too, everyone at her wedding.
But hell is real. We're all trapped here and there's
nothing any of us can do about it. So join me,

(01:53:25):
won't you Listen to The Doctor Sex re Show every
Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or
wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to It Could Happen Here,
a podcast about how society is following apart and about
how to put it back together again. I'm your host,

(01:53:46):
Christopher Long and Today and for the next few days,
we're doing something a bit different. We're going to take
a deep dive to some of the people who got
us into the mess we're in today. Now, when we've
talked about our enemies and it Could Happen here, we've
mostly focus on fascism, and for good reason. But for
the next few days we're focusing on a different enemy.

(01:54:06):
Don't worry, the Nazis will show up. That enemy is neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is the single most successful political movement of the
twenty twenty For centuries, no other political movement in human
history has directly controlled so much of the globe. It
is outmaneuvered, outlasted, or simply destroyed every ideology that sought
to oppose it, and has reigned virtually unchallenged for fifty years.

(01:54:30):
After exploded on the political scene in Chili, their victory
has been so total that even the earthWhile opponents, have
adopted its core principles. Margaret Thatcher famously bragged that her
proudest accomplishment was creating Tony Blair, basking in the irony
that neoliberalism would be implemented across the globe, in large
part by labor and socialist parties. Today, even erstwhile communist

(01:54:50):
countries maintained so called special economic zones with the laws
of neoliberalism are allowed to run rampant in exchange for
GDP increases, and their communist supporters. The West have come
to belief that capitalism is a far more powerful engine
of economic development and the state planning advocated by their forebearers,
thus internalizing the greatest principle of neoliberalism, even as they

(01:55:11):
claim to oppose it. All of this, of course, raises
two questions, what actually is neoliberalism and how did it
come to rule the world today. We're going to try
to answer the first question by looking back at the
original neoliberals and examining what they believed, because it's not
what you think. There are many places you can begin

(01:55:32):
the story of neoliberalism. I'm choosing to start in France
ninety Now, the nineteen thirties are a bad time to
be a free trade market liberal. And just to clear
this up, early liberal in the European context, which is
where a lot of the beginning of the story takes place,
does not mean the same thing as it does in
the American context. European liberalism up to this point is
about free trade markets, individual liberty and rights, etcetera, etcetera.

(01:55:55):
But it's anti state interference. To be somewhat reductive, It's
kind of closer to what conservatism is in the US,
but it's not identical. So there that in mind. As
the story goes on, Dirty sold the rise of fascism,
social democracy, and communism, each with his own form of
government spending and economic planning, which liberals absolutely detested. Now,

(01:56:17):
the vent and thirties have been full of liberals gathering
and try to figure out what to do next. And
in ninety seven Walture Littman, an American writer who would
become most famous for inventing the term Cold War, wrote
a book called an Inquiry into the Principles of the
Good Society, which argue that totalitarianism is a product of
not having individual private property at the state needs to

(01:56:37):
be limited to a ministering justice and not you know,
giving people things that they need. And so a lot
of liberals read this and go, oh, cool, we should
organize a conference to talk about this book and our ideas.
And the product is in Ete thirty Littman Colloquium. Now
a bunch of extremely important near liberals show up at
this conference, including one Friedrich August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises,

(01:57:00):
Wilhelm rope Key, and Alexander Rousto, and they start talking
about the need for a new kind of liberalism to
oppose communism, Keynesianism, fascism, and what they call Manchester or
Las Fair liberalism, in which the state didn't defeat at
all in political life and let the economy run an autopilot. Now,
the German sociologist Alexander Rousta, who we're going to talk

(01:57:22):
about more in a second comes up with the term
need of liberalism to define the new set of principles
that they're trying to develop, and they think the new
liberalism should prioritize the price mechanism, free enterprise, the system
of competition, and importantly, a strong and impartial state. Now,
this is the origin of new liberalism as a term,

(01:57:43):
and it's important to understand two things from the outset,
because the new liberals are going to spend the next
fifty years lying about this. One near liberalism favors a
strong state to make the market work, and too near
liberalism is not the same thing as classical liberalism. Now,
new liberals essentially invented the whole I make classic a

(01:58:04):
liberal thing in the fifties. But if you read the
original stuff that they wrote, if you if you go
back to nties, if you go back to nineteen thrties,
and you read what they write, the neo liberals are
extremely clear that they are not classical liberals and that
in fact their political project is different from the twentieth
century nineteenth century liberal project. In which the state is
supposed to be a night watchman and not actually interfere

(01:58:25):
in the markets at all. The neoliberals, originally before they
you know, start lying about their actual origins, reject this
principle and come to believe that in fact, a strong
state is necessary to ensure that markets work. So now
you have lenar liberalism as a thing. But nothing really
happens much until after World War Two because dal were

(01:58:47):
too Almost everyone is just doing state economic planning, and so,
you know, all of these people rambling off to the
side about how, oh, the market is the most efficient
way to plan a system. Nobody listens to them because
they're fighting a war, and the way you fight wars
is doing state planning. And after a world war to
the situation for new liberals is even worse because having

(01:59:08):
gone through the experience of entire society is turning their
entire economies and systems into planning agencies in order to
you know, mobilize the total war effort. People after the
war come back and go, oh, hey, we can do
this to other parts of the economy. So this means
that everyone and this is not just the communist states,
this is you know, this is Britain is doing Kanesianism,

(01:59:30):
They're doing planning, they're doing state welfare programs, and the
New Deal is spreading also across the globe. Now, in
response to all of this, hik and his allies do
two things. The first is found in the Chicago School
of Economics, and the second is to assemble the avengers
of taking food from children the mont Peleion Society. The

(01:59:53):
mont Peleion Society is the central neoliberal institution, which is
a weird thing because in a lot of ways it's
essentially just a closeted debate society intended to allow Neiler
both to work out their political principles behind closed doors. Now,
at this first meeting in n a lot of the
people from the Littmann Colloquium are there, but unfortunately some

(02:00:14):
of the French members of the Colloquium and some of
the people from Germany had collaborated with the Nazis, so
they were out. And this meant that Hiaka to find
new people to bring in. And the mont Peleion Society's
first meeting is the first time you actually have all
three major schools of neo liberal thought in the same
place at the same time. Arguing with each other, and

(02:00:36):
they can't agree on shit. The only thing they can
actually agree on is to look into more stuff and
to get a sense of how far away from modern
neoliberalism the arguments that are being had at the Montpellion
Society are. The Montpellion Society has only ever once actually
released a single statement stating its principles. And this statement

(02:00:59):
was the only thing that be agreed on at the
first meeting of the Montpellion Society. And I'm just going
to read it. This is what they agreed to research.
One the analysis and explanation of the present crisis so
as to reflect its essential moral and economic origins. Two
the redefinition of the state's functions so as to distinguish
more clearly between the totalitarian and liberal order. Three methods

(02:01:22):
of re establishing the rule of law and assuring its
developments that individuals and groups are not in a position
to encroach upon the freedom of others and private property
rights are not allowed to become a basis of predatory power.
Four the possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not
inimical to initiative and the functioning of the market. Five

(02:01:43):
Methods of combating the misuse of history for the furtherance
of creeds hostiles of liberty. Six, the problem of creating
an international order conductive to safeguarding of peace and liberty
and permitting the establishment of harmonious international economic relations. You know,
just by looking at this you can immediate least see
signs of how far things are going to move. I mean,

(02:02:04):
you know what one of one of the things that
they're talking about is again they're trying to research whether
or not it's possible to just give people things without
the markets, and it's it's it's not just the sort
of left quote unquote wing of the neoliberals who are
arguing about this. Hyak In, in probably his most famous book,
The Road to Serve Them, i mean explicitly says, yeah,
you should just give people food and housing and stuff

(02:02:27):
outside of the market. And you know, like today, if
literally anyone who says this will be accused of socialism.
This is the neoliberal This is you know, a large
part of the neoliberal position in now I've mentioned briefly
that there are three schools of neoliberalism, and we're going
to spend some time looking at them because people have

(02:02:47):
a tendency to look at neoliberalism and assume that, oh,
it's it's it's just the Chicago School of Economics, you know,
which is the neo classical schools most familes members Melton Friedman.
And it's true that that's Chicago's wool are neoliberals. But
and and this is critical, there's other intellectual schools involved
in here. And it's not just it's not just economists.

(02:03:09):
Neoliberalism from the beginning is a multi disciplinary international project.
You have lawyers, you have political scientists, you have journalists,
you have philosophers, you have anthropologists. And the product of
this is something is an ideology and a philosophy that
is much deeper, much richer, and much more dangerous than
just Chicago School alone. The second of the major schools

(02:03:30):
is the Austrian School, which is led by Ludovine Musas
and Hyak and maybe most importantly but least well known,
the third school that we're actually going to be talking
about today is the German Ordo Liberals, led by Alexander Rousteau,
who again invented determina liberalism, and Wilheim Ropek, who almost
no one has ever heard of, but are incredibly important

(02:03:52):
and I'm gonna I'm gonna insert a disclaimer here before
I get yelled at by by nerds. Yes, I'm aware
of the public choice theories at the Virginia School. I
am also aware of at a group of the Dealer
building is called the Geneva School, even though they're just
regular or to liberals. And there's also the rump of
the neo institutionalists. Um, I don't care about them because
they're not irrelevant to this story. Please do not you
yell at me on Twitter. Now, these people have wildly

(02:04:16):
divergent beliefs, and so I'm gonna do my best to
do one sentence summaries of what these people believe. So
the Chicago School of Neo classical Economics, humans are all knowing,
calculating gods, rationally optimizing their behavior to get the most
out of every single human interaction they engage in to
maximize the utility the product of this infinite freedom to

(02:04:39):
choose economic equilibrium. The Austrian school, humans are pig, ignorant
fox you know literally nothing and therefore mostly made to
bow down to the everag changing disequilibrium of the market,
which is the only thing that can actually process information
order liberalism. The markets won't create or balance itself because
these uncultured proletarian swine keep asking for raises instead of

(02:05:00):
focusing on the magic of the families. So we have
to use the state and laws to force people and
companies to do competition. And these are obviously some what
comical summaries of it, but these are very very different
conceptions of what it is to be a human, of
whether the market occurs naturally or not, of what the

(02:05:23):
market actually is. Is it a product? Is is it
an object in and of itself? Is it a product?
Is it just an inevitable product of humans doing whatever
humans do? And this is part of the reason why
it's always almost impossible to get the original neoliberal s
degree into anything. But this is actually one of the
strength of the neoliberal project. The project only works because

(02:05:45):
it uses the products of all three branches. You have
neo classical attacks on the welfare state, Austrian attacks on
sexual planning and order, liberal theories of the state, and
sort of cultural on the non economic nature of markets.
And you know, when one school essentially fails as an
explanation for something, they can jomp to another school and
this gives them a very wide range of ability to

(02:06:07):
move between crises and moved between people attacking any of
the individual schools because they can simply pull out another
set of theories. So I'm going to talk a little
bit more about each of the schools, and we're gonna
start with the Chicago School because again it's the most famous,
and because I think there's a there's another very interesting
story here into how the Chicago School change from much origins.

(02:06:31):
So one of the people who was supposed to be
a founding member of the Chicago School was a manner
in Henry Simmons, and Simmons is unlike the rest of
the Chicago School because he actually believes in things. So
I'm going to read a couple of quotes from him. Thus,
the great enemy of democracy is monopoly in all its forms,
gigantic corporate trade associations and other agencies of price control,

(02:06:54):
trade unions, or in general organization and concentration of power
within functional classes. Here's another one. A monopolist is an
implicit thief because this possession of market power leads the
exchange of commodities at prices that do not reflect underlying
social scarcities. And you know, you can see this sort
of on one of one of the classic neliberal arguments,

(02:07:15):
which is that okay, so you have you have, you
have the market, the market is efficient, and trade unions
get in the way of the market because the monopoly.
But Simmons has what kind of looks like from from
our prospective of left wink critique of of monopolies, which is, yeah, okay,
giant corp monopolies are thieves because they use their market
power to rob people by charging higher prices, and it's

(02:07:38):
it's I genuinely can't say how differently things would have
gone if Simmons had actually been around to see the
Chicago's go through, because he commits suicide in neteen forty six,
and unlike every single other person who was going to
be involved with the Chicago School from the beginning until now,
Simmons had a genuine commitment to democracy and monopoly principles.

(02:08:01):
But unfortunately he's he dies in next four six and
by the by, the Trogol School is really up and
running in the fifties. Almost everyone involved in it is
overtly pro monopoly, pro cooperation and are you know that
they set up an anti trust school. But the thing
that the anti trust School is arguing is that monopolies
are actually essentially impossible because competition will just take care
of everything, and if you try to stop monopolies from happening,

(02:08:22):
it will interfere in the economy. Now, this is this
is the line that Milton Friedman takes, and it's also
the line of the Vulcar Fund, who are a sort
of I guess you could call him a charitable organization,
but it's basically a billionaire slush funds that funds the school,
and they've had real fights with Simmons because Simmons is like, well, okay,

(02:08:43):
monopolies are bad. At Vulcars like, well, we're a monopoly,
so you guys need to actually work for us. And
by the time Freedman essentially takes over the Chicago School
and uh night take it over, they're not just intellectual mercenaries.
They're extremely proud of the fact that they are in
fact pure intellectual mercenary acts with absolutely dogsheit economics. If
you've ever read just a or you know, if you've

(02:09:05):
ever been forced to take an economics class, you took microeconomics.
That's basically just what Chicogoic School believes. It's everyone's a
rational actor. Every every human being spends all of their
time trying to calculate the maximum utility of anything that
they do. Everything is a market. Everything functions by supply
and demand. Markets are perfectly efficient if you just let

(02:09:25):
them alone and don't interfere with them. Everything the state
does interfered with the markets, et cetera, excepted. This is
this is the thing that is sort of classically understood
to be neoliberalisms core content. But it's extremely important to
understand that these are not the only neoliberals, and in fact,
not only are these not the only neoliberals, this set

(02:09:46):
of political principles, to a large extent, is not what
the neoliberals actually believe. This kind of stuff is essentially
what they feed the roots. Small state tax is bad,
regulation bad. Everything is a market and has always been
a market, and all human interactions will in nevitably produce markets.
But to understand what new liberals actually believe, we need

(02:10:06):
to talk about the order liberals. Now, the two most
important order liberals are Wilheim rope K and W. W. Roustau,
who were both exilis during the Nazi regime. Now, a
lot of the other Order Liberals who stayed in Nazi
Germany collaborated with the Nazi regime, which is something that's
kind of just overlooked and brush to the side when
people are right about them. But grope Key and Rosseau's

(02:10:28):
status as people who you know, fled the Nazis gives
them a kind of social cache that their colleagues don't have,
and they become extremely important. Now. In some ways, the
Order Liberals could be considered the left wing of of
the neoliberals. They are significantly less harsh on the welfare
state than other forms of neoliberalism, and this is in

(02:10:50):
large part because the Order Liberals are the first new
liberals to ever actually hold any power. And I think
people most people tend to think that the first time
the liberalism was ever implemented was Chile, but that's not
really true. The Order Liberals are actually very powerful in
in nineteen fifties Germany. Now, the problem they face is
that the left is powerful enough in Germany that they

(02:11:13):
cannot actually just completely eliminate the welfare states. So their
solution is to create this thing called the social markets,
and the Order Liberals get accused of like being crypto
socialists by a lot of the other Neil liberals, but
that's not really what's going on. The very important thing
about the Order Liberals is that, unlike the Chicago School,
they're not economists both Rocke and Rousto or social scientists.

(02:11:37):
Russo's a sociologist, and they argue that the state and
the market alone cannot maintain market society because market society
produces dislocation, you know, produces atomization, It destroys social cohesion,
and this means that you need a social, political, and
sort of cultural framework to maintain it. And their major

(02:11:59):
focus is on providing stability and security for the working
class and a new sense of sort of identity and
cultural caotiation, because I think if the working class is
essentially left to itself, it will create massification, cultural decay,
and eventually the working class return into the proletariat, and
that will give these either communism or fascism. The Order

(02:12:19):
liberals believe that there's there's there's a kind of natural
hierarchical order that they're trying to preserve. That this is
essentially what order means. It means literally order which accords
with the essence of humans. This means an order in
which proportioned measure and balance exists. Now they have a
few ways that they're going to do this rope case
obsessed with something called structural policy. And structural policy is

(02:12:42):
basically the argument that the conditions from markets have to
be specifically created, and again they're not just economic positions
of social conditions. And this is fused with Risteau's vital politique,
which is essentially about that the power of anthropological and
human aspects of culture and politics be on the forces
of production that they think are vital sort of the

(02:13:05):
functioning of society. And part of what they're doing here
is that they want to give some people a cultural
thing to focus on, so they stopped talking about like
wages and welfare and who owns production. But the combination
of vital politic and structural policy gets you order liberalism.
So nominally they focus on individuals, but really what they're
focusing on as the family as this quote unquote decentralized

(02:13:26):
engine of economic capitalism with small businesses and hopefully small
family farms as a sort of a political social support
base for capitalism, which they're they're they're going to promote
and set against the radicalism of the sort of industrial proletariat.
And this this sort of middle class that they're aspiring
to build is extremely important for a number of reasons.
Partially is a way to diffuse working class tension, Partially

(02:13:49):
as a way to sort of offers work or something
inspired to and partly as a way to fuse the
sort of traditional natural hierarchy with conceptions and meritocracy. Now
group in particular also begins to look for systems outside
of just the democratic state to sort of create this
legal apparatus that the neoliberals want to use to impose markets.

(02:14:13):
And this is extremely important because a lot of where
neoliberalism whys are coming from is not from national governments.
It's from the sort of international bureaucracy. It's from the
I m F. It's from the World Bank, it's from
the World Trade Organization. And those groups are controlled by
by neoliberal lawyers. And Rock is the person who essentially
first has this idea. Now, the goal of using these

(02:14:37):
international legal institutions as a way of creating law, the
laws to sort of enforce neoliberalism, is using it as
a way to sort of get around democracy. And I'm
going to read this quote from Rock, because oh boy,
does he absolutely not believe in freedom and democracy and
the way that he and everyone else talks about publicly.

(02:14:58):
It is possible that in opinion of the strong state,
I am even more fascist, fascististure than you yourself, because
I would indeed like to see all economic policy decisions
concentrated in the hand of a fully independent and vigorous state,
weakened by no pluralist authorities of a corporative kind. I
see the strength of the state in the intensity, not extensiveness,

(02:15:21):
of its economic policies. How the constitutional legal structure of
such a state should be designed as a question in
and of itself, for which I have no patent receipt
to offer. I share your opinion that the old formulas
of parliamentary democracy have proven themselves useless. People must get
used to the fact that there is also a presidential
authoritarian even yes, horrible thing to say, dictatorial democracy. So

(02:15:46):
what he's saying there is that he's he's he's he's
sending a letter to one of you his friends, and
he's going, yeah, I'm I'm even more fascist than you are.
I think that democracy is actually a threat to the market,
and that in order to avoid authoritarian democracy, we should
in fact, concentrate all economic decision making power in a
in the hands of a narrow elite in a strong state,

(02:16:06):
which is, you know, the opposite of everything that near
liberals open the claim to be supporting, but behind closed doors.
And we will get into more of this in a second.
This is what they actually believe. Now. Rok is somewhat
unique among neo liberals in that he is racist by
neoliberal standards. He's just enormously incredibly racist. So for example,

(02:16:27):
he's he's a massive apartheid dude. And again I need
to point this out. Ka is one of the things,
is one of the most important neoliberals. He's one of
the founding members of the Mompellion Society, although he gets
kicked out for well, he eventually leaves because of some
disputes he as with Hyak. But you know, I'm gonna
read some of the things that he says about South

(02:16:49):
Africa because they're horrible. Quote the South African negro is
not only a man of an utterly different race, but
at the same time stems from a completely different type
and level of realization. He also calls ending apartheid quote
national suicide. And you know, so she starts saying this stuff,
and the other neoliberals are like, dude, what the fuck?

(02:17:09):
So that the o liberal he needs newspaper like he
wrote for for thirty years, which is like what's and
published a bunch of students going stop this. This is
you cannot seriously be supporting a parteid like this. And
his response in the newspaper is called the n ZZ
and his response is quote these n z Z near
intellectuals will not be satisfied until they let a real

(02:17:30):
cannibals speak. Now Roque is one of his friends, another
MPs member named Hundled. So Hayak looks at ropek support
for apartheid and is like what the fuck? Like no,
absolutely not, Like this is horrible. Why why are you
doing this? You know? To too high? X credit that
this This is the extent of the credit I will
give Hiek in this episode, is that he looks at

(02:17:51):
just the open overt racism of Rocaine is like no.
And when when he does this Roque's friends Hundled said,
is that Hyatt quote now advocates one man, one vote
in race mixing. Now, you can see a lot of
things here about okay that are extremely scary. And one

(02:18:11):
of those things is that the language that she's speaking
this uh, the West is committing national suicide, uh, clash
of civilizations, race war stuff. You know, this is this
is essentially the the I mean literally, the national suicide
thing is what white nationalists say today. And Ropek is

(02:18:32):
in a lot of ways of right nationalist. He's just
sort of a German one. But what's what's really scary
about rope Ka is that she's not sort of bound
by by the sort of strictures of of of a
neo classic cogo neo classical economists. For example, he won't
propose that like the dating market, like like dating should
be on market, and that rich like men should be

(02:18:53):
able to like I go on an app and like
like every every every single time of person gets into
a relationship, it should just be entirely based on market
exchange and stuff like that, because you know, he doesn't
think like an economist. He thinks about cultural factors, he
thinks about sort of social factors. But he also he's
cracked the code for how neliberalism is going to be implemented.

(02:19:16):
The way you do neoliberalism is near liberalism plus racism
and he realizes that you need you know, neoliberalisms, actual
sort of policies right will cause atomization, will cause social dislocation,
will cause that the existing social structures to society sort
of implode. And he realizes that in order to get

(02:19:37):
this to work, you need you need a spiritual base,
You need some kind of new thing that you can
use to to to sort of bring all these people together.
And he picks Catholicism, which doesn't work because I mean,
there's never reason for this, but you know, partially it's
too early. Partially it's because he picks Catholicism and not evangelicalism.

(02:19:58):
But this is how the new liberals are eventually going
to take power by you know, aligning themselves with the
evangelicals who promised to solve the atomization they're creating with
you know, religion and family in the patriarchy. And he
figures this out in like the sixties, but was just
you know, like twenty years before the rest of the

(02:20:18):
levels figured out. Now there's the he also, Okay, has
like a bunch of very similar stuff that he thinks
about this about Rhodesia, but interestingly, he has more support
for his positions on Rhodesia than he does for his
positions in South Africa. And now I'm gonna we're gonna
jump back to Chicago School. We're gonna read some Milton
Friedman stuff about Rhodesia, because dear God, quote majority rule

(02:20:44):
for Rhodesia today is a euphemism for a black minority government,
which would almost surely mean both the eviction or exodus
of most of the whites and also a jurastically lower
living level and opportunity for the black masses of Rhodesia.
Here's another one where he's describing this system of one person,
one vote, quote, a system of highly weighted voting in

(02:21:05):
which special interests of far greater role to play than
does the general interest. Yeah, so that's the decryption of
what democracy is. In contrast, he thinks the market economy
is quote a system of effective proportional representation. Now Freedman
also thinks that, you know, so, so there's there's a blockade,
like an economic blockade of Rhodesia going on because their Rhodesia,

(02:21:29):
and they are maybe the worst people ever. That's plic
only only in bild exaggeration. Yeah, it's just you know,
absolutely fanatical, like what the promises government. And Freedman also
calls the isolation of Rhodesia quote the suicide of the West.
And you know he's doing this on racial lines, but

(02:21:51):
he's also doing this along the lines of this argument
that democracy itself is actually bad, and this is the
place that he can express it because you know, he
can leverage racism to get away with it. And I'm
going to read another freedoman quote because I think it's
it's important to understand what the neoliberals actually think about democracy. Quote.

(02:22:16):
This was sometimes admitted by members of Mount Pelion in public,
but only when they felt that their program was in
the sense, let's be clear, I don't believe in democracy
in one sense. You don't believe in democracy. Nobody believes
in democracy. You will find it hard to find anybody
who will say that if democracy is interpreted as a
majority rule, you will find it hard to find anybody

(02:22:36):
who will say that of the people believe the other
pcent of people should be shot, that's an appropriate exercise
of democracy. But I believe is not a democracy but
an individual freedom in a society in which individuals corroperate
with one another. So he's he's making a sort of
what's in some ways a kind of anarcristy argument against democracy,

(02:22:57):
which is that like, yeah, okay, so if you interpret
democracy is premature at the rule that a majority can
just do a terrible thing the minority. But you know
what the neo lipperals actually mean by this is that
of the population could, for example, I don't know, take
money from the rich small part of the of the
population and distributed around, and they think that is totalitarianism,

(02:23:18):
and in order to stop that from happening, they are
in fact absolutely imperfectly willing to just back dictatorships. And
you know that's in essence what they what they what
they actually want is a state, the sole function of
which essentially is to ensure that nobody ever does this.
And you know, if you can do this instead of
a democratic framework, fine, but if you can't, well, I

(02:23:39):
don't know, it's time for a coup. We're gonna turn
to the two Hyak in the Austrians, because Hyak also
is known as this sort of like as a libertarian,
as a person who sort of believes in spontaneous order
and like thinks that you should you should only have
sort of small, decentralized political institutions. Uh. And so we're

(02:24:01):
gonna watch Hyak quote a bunch of stuff from and
agree with a bunch of stuff from Carl Schmidt, which
is again incredible because Hyak elsewhere described Schmidt as quote, uh,
the Nazis chief jurist, which is true. But here here
are some other things that Hyak has said about Karl Schmidt. Quote.

(02:24:22):
The weakness of the governments of an omnipotent democracy was
very clearly seen by the extraordinary German student of politics,
Carl Schmidt, who in the nineteen twenties probably understood the
character of the developing form of government better than most people.
And you know, Hyak believes a lot of the same
things that Schmick does. So you know, one of them
things that Schmidt is like big on is that liberalism

(02:24:42):
and democracy are opposite things. And Hyak also believes this.
And okay, so so I'm gonna read I'm gonna read
some Schmitt and the we're gonna read some Hyak, and
they're gonna be saying the same thing. So here, Schmidt,
only a strong state can preserve and enhance a free markets.
Only a strong state can generate generate genuine d centralization
and bring about free and autonomous domains. Here's Hyak. If

(02:25:05):
we proceed on the assumption that only the exercise this
is of freedom that the majority will are important, we
would be certain to create a stadiant society with all
the characteristics of un freedom. So what Hi what Hyak? Yeah,
Schmidt is saying that only a strong state can support
a free market and uncentralization. Hyak is saying if you
let a democracy exist that has majority rule, it will

(02:25:29):
create un freedom. Now we will get into this more
when we talk about like Chile, because oh boy, is
there some other ship that Hiak cassity with that? But
most neoliberals hate democracy, no about it. What they say
in public, and and this is the other important thing here,
neo liberals lie, they like constantly. They lie to the
point where sorting out their actual beliefs becomes almost impossible,

(02:25:52):
and even their intellectual enemies believe the lies that they tell. Well,
most people think the neo libbals believe is that, you know,
they want a small government in liberty and un regulated
market that will occur naturally through spontaneous order, because it's
human nature to what the truck and barter and rationally
calculate things, and the neoliberals don't believe any of this.
This is just what they tell to the groups. What
they actually want is a large and powerful surveillance in

(02:26:14):
legal state, in a massive bureaucracy to enforce essentially pro
corporate policies. At gunpoint, um, I'm gonna read close up
this episode by by reading a list of things that
Philip Morowski is an economical story to studies neoliberalism, whose
work I've used a lot for for these episodes, wrote
about the the sort of the the sort of eleven

(02:26:36):
principles of what new liberals actually believe. One. Free markets
do not occur naturally. They must be actively constructed through
political organizing too. The market is an information processor and
the most efficient one possible, more efficient than any government
or any single human being could be. Truth can only
be validated by the market. Three. Market society is, and

(02:26:57):
therefore should be, the natural and inexorable date of human kind.
The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy this date,
but to take control of it and to redefine its
structure and function in order to create and maintain the
market friendly culture. Five. There is no contradiction between public politics,
citizen and private market, entrepreneur consumer, because the latter does
and should eclipse the former. Six. The most important virtue,

(02:27:21):
more important then justice or anything else, is freedom, defined
negatively as freedom to choose, most importantly defined as the
freedom to acquiesce to the imperatives of the market. Seven.
Capital has a natural right to flow freely across national borders.
A inequality of resources, income, wealth, and even political rights
is a good thing. It promotes productivity because people envy

(02:27:43):
the rich and emulate them. People who complain about inequality
are either sore looters or old foggies who need to
get hip to the way things work nowadays. Nine Corporations
could do no wrong. By definition, competition will take care
of all problems, including any tendency monopoly. Ten. The markets
engineered and promote it by neoliberal experts can always provide
a solution to the problems seemingly endlessly caused by the

(02:28:04):
market in the first place. There's always an app for that.
Eleven there's no difference between is and should be free markets.
Both should be normatively and are positively the most efficient
economic system and the most just way of doing politics,
and the most sympirically true description of human behavior and
the most ethical and moral way to live, which in
turn explains, justifies and justifies why their versions of free

(02:28:28):
markets should be and as neoliberals build more and more power,
increasingly are universal. Yeah, we we we we We've read
a long list of things. But essentially the point of
this is that the liberals want to transform everything into
the market because they think the market is a more
efficient way of doing things, in a better and more
moral and more just way of doing things than anything

(02:28:48):
else you can possibly imagine, including you know, things like
democracy and you know, and any problem the system like
produces will be solved by the system. Now, this is
this is an increase credibly radical political program in a
lot of ways in that it will you know, you
can you can you can argue whether it's a radical
or reactionary program. I mean, I think I think it's

(02:29:09):
a it's a deeply reactionary one in some ways, but
it is a is a program that is vastly different
than anything else that has come before it. Now, the challenge,
of course, was getting anyone else to agree to this,
and the answer is that it's really hard to It
is extremely hard to convince people that you know, everyone
should bow down to the market, etcetera, etcetera. And so

(02:29:29):
the only way they can actually do this is by lying. Now,
as as Morowski describes, the neoliberals operate an incredibly sophisticated
intellectual and political network that forms a sort of a
choice good doll with Montpellar ownciety at Et Center and
an ever expanding group of more and less specialized think
tanks the shell layers. So it is where that they

(02:29:50):
mirror the vanguard structure and sort of front group networks
of their communist opponents, but they have significantly better financial backing.
And this means that you know, they can run the
American Enterprise Institute and uh, you know, with with with
copious amounts of coke money, they can run this entire
enormous network of think tanks that allows them to sort
of act as a government in waiting. And the other

(02:30:11):
thing that they're going to attempt to do is take
over the global regulatory bureaucracy, the I m F, the
World Bank, eventually weld trade organizations and force people to
do this at gunpoints by using those organizations. Now, all
they needed was a crisis that they could use to
implement their policies, and next week we're going to look

(02:30:31):
at the crisis that gave them exactly what they wanted.
This has been nick It Happen Here. Find us on
Instagram and on Twitter at Happened Here pod. Find the
rest of our stuff that cools um and goodbye. The

(02:30:52):
Gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around
Underworld and criminals, the entertainers to BIS crime law enforcement.
We cover all facets of the game. Gainst The Chronicles
podcast doesn't glorify promotilstit of the activities. We just discussed
the ramifications and repercussions of these activities because at the
Wall she played gamester games. You are ultimately rewarded with

(02:31:13):
Gangster Prizes. Our Heart Radios number one for podcasts, but
don't take our award for it. Find Against the Chronicles
podcast and I Heart Radio app or wherever you get
your podcast. Make sure to check out Drink Champs, your
number one music podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Host N O. R E and d J E. F
N sat down with artists and icon Yea, which Vulture

(02:31:36):
called one of most significant interviews. I literally had to
go like Thanos and I don't want to have to
be the villain. But when I went and did the
Donda thing, he returned and everybody had to sit back
and watch the real leader. Check out Drink Champs, Conversation
with Yea and many more legendary artists each and every
Friday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or

(02:31:58):
wherever you listen to your favorite show. What I mean,
that's that's all I got today. Who's Who's taken over?
Come on? It's me? I guess it's me? All right,

(02:32:21):
Well then, what what show is this? And what do
we do? This is it could happen here. We talk
about things being bad and also what you can do
about them, But this is a this is a things
are bad episode and not at what you can do
about the episode specifically. This is part two of what
I guess you could call our mini series on neoliberalism.

(02:32:43):
And so you know, yesterday we talked a lot about
who the originally liberals are. They have a bit of
power in Germany in the fifties, but for the fifties
and sixties up to the seventies, they're kind of nobody's there.
You know, they're they're there. They have a couple of
think tanks, but they're kind of they're kind of just
siloed off in the corner and they yell at people,
and people kind of ignore them. And what they're waiting for, essentially,

(02:33:06):
is the right crisis, and in the nineteen seventies they
finally find that crisis. Now, I think it's kind of
hard to remember in a lot of ways because of
how the eighties went, But in the in the early
nineteen seventies, things are not looking good for capitalism. I mean,
you have so you know, I and I end wins
this election nineteen seventy We'll talk about what happened there

(02:33:29):
in another episode. But you know, it's it's not just
that in nineteen nineteen seventy four, Well, so to the
whole early nineteen seventies, am we called Carbrial is just
absolutely annihilating the Portuguese army, and he, you know, he wins.
He finds one of the like one of history's greatest
guerrilla wars, and this basically destroys the entire Portuguese state

(02:33:51):
and caused the Carnathan Carnation Revolution. The Portuguese colonies get free,
the Dirt takes part in Methiopia, and then nineteen seventy five,
the North Vietnam wins of the like the war in Vietnam,
and now you know, the product of this is that
Cambodia falls, Loos falls. There's now there's five social estates
in Eastern East Asia, in Southeast Asia and Yea also Mongolea,
but nobody really cares about them. And as as all

(02:34:13):
of this is happening, as these sort of as the
anti colonial armies are sort of marching their way through
the world, there's an enormous economic crisis. And yeah, I
mean there's a lot of things happening at the same time.
One of the ones I think is probably the thing,
the thing that people remember the most is there's just
unbelievable inflation, and you know, and and economic growth starts

(02:34:34):
to slowed down. Although so something I think that we
do need to keep in mind is that when I
say economic growth slows, so economic growth from like six
seven nine is um from two thousand and two thousand seven,
it was two point three percent in the US. And
so you know, when when when I say there's an

(02:34:55):
economic crisis going on here, like economic growth in the
seventies is better than any decades since, but it's still
considered the crisis decade because there's much of inflation, and
you know, everyone has their own theory as to why
this is happening, because the sort of Keynesians who who
have been in power, whose thing is, oh, well, we
can you know, if if there's everyn economic crisis, we

(02:35:16):
can sort of we can spend money, and that you know,
then the government spending money will drag everyone out of
the crisis. But in Keynsian theory, like there's not supposed
to be inflation, if like if if unemployment is increasing
and there's an economic crisis, there's not supposed to inflation,
and suddenly there's both. So the Kensians have nothing, and
they're sort of just running around like just with basically
like checking to their head cut off and going, oh god,

(02:35:37):
we have no idea what's happening. We don't know what's happening.
And so into this gap steps a bunch of weirdos.
And so I'm just gonna I'm gonna go through a
few of the theories as to why this crisis happened,
because I don't know, and I think there's elements of
truth in most of the stories ish kind of but

(02:35:57):
you know, it's this is extremely complicated and there's still
no consensus on it. So I'm gonna start with the
most crank, which is so so the run Paul people.
The whole thing is, yeah, every everything went to ship
has been shipped ever since because the US abandon the
gold standard, and like they're right into the extent that

(02:36:20):
this happens. So basically, Nixon has been trying to pay
for the Vietnam War and he can't. And you know,
the the US dollar has been pegged to a certain
amount of gold, right, and you can do this thing
where if you get it, you have an American dollar,
you can exchange it for that amount of gold. And
so travels the goal just it's like, okay, we're just
gonna we're gonna take all of this gold. And so
he does in the US starts running out of gold
and so bye bye by In the early seventies, Nixon

(02:36:42):
is like, fuck this, you can't actually exchange dollars for
gold anymore. And now every single libertarian starts every rant
with fiat currency. But you know this, this this does
have an effect on the economy, which we'll talk about
more in the bit um. There's you know it, but
there's there's a lot of other explanations for this, um

(02:37:03):
the modern monetary three people if you listen to them,
and also Peter Thiel. Weirdly, I will argue, oh, it's
all because of the oil shock, because oil prices increased,
neoliberals will spend neo liberal essentially, they blame too much
government spending welfare programs and then wages being too high,
and also band monetary policy. There's like an entire there's

(02:37:29):
there's like seventeen different Marxist explanations for it, some of
which are I'll talk about like one and a half
of them, um that are more plausible. One one of
the explanations has to do with how essentially, so the
other thing that's happening in the sixte seventies is that
minorities and women are entering the workplace and are you know,

(02:37:52):
actually demanding to be paid the wages that white men
have been being paid, and corporations essentially just can't afford this,
and so you know that they have two choices. It's
either we pay these people actual wages or we just
murder everyone, and they took the second one. So it's
something that that has also been happening through this whole
period is that profit rates and manufacturing just keep collapsing.

(02:38:14):
And there there's there's a whole thing here about some
marketis theory stuff. But the thing that's important is that
that and this this has also happened in the seventies.
Eventually you hit a point where manufacturing growth become zero sum.
And you know, so you can have manufacturing growth in
one country, but you can't have it in another because
at a certain point you're producing too much stuff and

(02:38:37):
people start getting kicked out of the labor process. And
this has a bunch of effects. One is it it
means you get a bunch of people who are employed.
And to it means that there's just a bunch of
money floating around that nobody can actually invest in places.
And this is you know, like all of the weird
stuff the Saudias do. It is just basically from this

(02:38:58):
this money. There's a whole this, this whole piles of
oil money that are just sitting around that nobody canfst
in anything. And that's going to cause you know that
that that that that's that's that's going to cause a
lot of stuff down the road. But for now, yeah,
we'll talk about the dead crisis and causes sort of
next episode, but for now, I'm going to try to

(02:39:20):
pull all of these together and like have something, have
a coherent thing that makes sense, which is essentially but
by the end of the seventies profit rate or declining,
and then Nixon pulls, you know, Nick Nixon pulls the
dollar off the gold standard, and this causes the value
the dollars just plunge. And this this is the thing
that sets off the nine oil crisis. So the ny

(02:39:43):
SA oil crisis is weird because it's not an oil crisis.
Every everyone looks at the Griber crisis and it goes, oh,
it's an oil crisis. The crisis because there wasn't enough oil,
and it's it's not it's nothing to do with that
is literally nothing to do a supply of oil at all.
What actually happens is that so you have OPEC, right
or because this sort of is the Alliance of Oil
Producing Cartels UM and they have this extremely complicated system

(02:40:06):
where they they sell oil to oil companies and then
the oil companies sell the oil, did they refine it
and sell it to you, And they have this incredibly
convoluted tax structured on it and eventually, so the oil
companies are having like the price of oil starts to rise,

(02:40:26):
and the oil companies are basically just taking it all
of the profit from this, and so OPEC goes, Okay,
you guys are gonna pay taxes, and the oil companies
just refused, and so OPEC just unilaterally, just you know,
OPEC just unilaterally is like, Okay, you guys are gonna
pay taxes, and we're gonna make you pay taxes by
by just increasing the price that we sell you oil at.

(02:40:47):
And this gets remembered as like OPEC increasing the price
of oil, even though it was literally just them saying
you're gonna pay taxes. Now, this is the part that's
very weird, which is that, Okay, so if you heard
you two heard of the oil crisis, like the story yeah, yeah,
I mean I are the way it's always gone in textbooks,

(02:41:10):
as you talk about like the stagflation of the seventies
and the fucking you know, lines of cars at gas
stations going back blocks because OPEC factory. And yeah, that's
how it's always framed, is that like there's this big
political crisis over OPEC that led the gas supply getting throttled.
And it came at a time when the economy had
already slowed down and everything got terrible. And then a

(02:41:32):
few years later we got RoboCop. Yeah, well we did
get a pop. But the important thing about the story
is that every single thing about that story is wrong,
every part of it. Well, I mean there were lines
at gas station. Yeah, I mean there are lines of
gas stations, but the lines at the gas stations have
literally nothing to do with OPEC, which is nothing. So
on October six, the era members of of OPEC are like, fucket,

(02:41:58):
we're gonna make the oil companies pay more for oil.
And then the rest of the rest of ope that
follows them. Now two days later is it Yeah, the
next day there is a completely unrelated thing to all
of this, which is that while while this is going on,
the Jan Kapoor War starts, and so Egypt and Syria
attack Israel, um the basical attack the Israel occupation forces

(02:42:20):
in their country, and the war is going really badly
for them there, I mean it's it's I mean, it's
not going it's not going as badly as like the
previous wars had gone for the air powers, but it's
not going great. And so on October six, Arab oil
producing countries declare if they're they're cutting the amount of
oil they export by five percent per month until Israel
returns his territories. It occupies sixty seven and they haven't

(02:42:42):
embargo on the US. But and this is the very
important part. This has nothing to do with OPEC. This
is not Opaq at all. It's not this. This is
this is this is just a couple of random Arab
countries are like, we're going to do this, and you know,
and I think when I think it's interesting about Robert
we're talking about, is is OPEC factory? You know? Is
how this gets remembered and this this is one of

(02:43:03):
the things that that neoliberals used to sort of push
their model of the world right, which is that everything
functions office supply and demands and oh look, hey the
Arabs cut the supply of oil and that's why the
prices rose. But it's just it's just wrong, it's empirically wrong.
The price cut happens, I mean, the price increases happened
the day before the the oil the price increases the

(02:43:26):
day before the embargo, and the embargo and the oil price.
People are different groups. They have nothing to do with
each other. But you know this, this gets sort of
systemed like this, this is this is how it's it's remembered.
And and you know, it's not even just how to remembered,
like like the Encyclopedia Britannica has the dates and which
all of this stuff happens wrong, they have the sequence
of events wrong, like all of the most of the

(02:43:47):
people who write about this remember this whole thing wrong.
And and this is this is part of the sort
of an enormous propaganda effort that and neo liberals are
able to do at this moment, which is they convince
everyone that, oh, yeah, the price increases and the gagsly
the gas shortages are are are about OPEC. But again,
also like the the US only imports like seven percent
of its oil from from the countries who are doing

(02:44:09):
the embargo at this point. So the actual thing that's
going on has to do with prices. It's a weird thing,
as with price controls and gas companies are hoarding gas
because they don't want to sell at a price control
levels and stuff like that. But you know, the oil
price increases, you know, they yeah like it, it is bad,
Like the price of oil does go up and there
are shortages, but it has nothing to do with like

(02:44:32):
there's nothing to do with the embargo, has nothing to
do with, you know, like the supply of oil going down.
It's just companies didn't want to pay taxes and so
they started hoarding the oil instead of selling it, and
they passed the price the tax increase onto the consumers
instead of paying it. And as we talked about before,
once this sort of like tax increase goes in that OPEC,
well some of the open countries want to do goes

(02:44:53):
into place, like the price of oil does increase, and
this does funck the economy even more. But the economy
hadn't really even sort of a mess before this, and
it has one other very important effective that you know
this is you know, I guess, I guess. The theme
of this episode is that the oil and bargo matters,
but the oil and bargo matters because people think it matters,

(02:45:13):
not because they did anything and the other. So it
matters in the US because everyone thinks that, oh, the
scary Arab nations are coming for us. But it matters
in the rest of the world because everyone else looks
at this and goes, wait, hold on, you can actually
use commodities. Essentially, you can use commodity prices like countries
that like have raw you know, commodities can use this

(02:45:40):
control to actually go fight you know, to like to
go fight the West, to go fight the capitalists and
go like you know, get money for themselves. And this
leads us into something Robert Garrison to have you three
you ever heard of the G seventy seven. Uh that
like the seventy seven countries that have the most money. Well,

(02:46:02):
that that's the that's the G seven. Well yeah, but
I was, I was seven might be just a longer list.
So yeah. So so this is this is the other
thing from this period that just is completely lost as
almost completely lost to history, and seventy seven is actually
still around. But what they are was so in the sixties,

(02:46:22):
you know, you have all of these countries that have
recently gained independence, and all these countries have getting dependence
um from their sort of colonial overlords, and they start
to band together into basically a voting block in the
U N And also this is the other the other
weird part about the story is that so in the
niteen seventies and sixties seventies, particularly the UN actually matters

(02:46:43):
like it's it's it's it's a thing that people There
was that like twenties years after World War Two, where
people were maybe I mean a good example of the
degree to which the u N actually used to be
meaningful is watched the first Street Fighter movie. Um, because
the good guys and that are clearly based off the
u N. And nobody thinks it's ridiculous that the United

(02:47:05):
Nations are actually doing something. Um, it's fine to have
Jean Claude van dam And be the leader of the
United Nations fist fighting a guy that that makes total
sense in the nineteen nineties and you know, and so
and part of talk about this war next episode. But basically, so,
the reason the UN is a joke right now is
because of what the US was doing to stop the

(02:47:26):
G seventy seven from doing anything. I mean, I would
argue that fail massive failures in Rwanda and uh Bosnia
had a huge impact on that. A couple of genocides
go down and people are like, well, what are these
guys doing? But yeah, yeah, yeah, well this is this
is this is how they got dysfunctional to the point
where you can get that yeah, which is so so okay,
So you have you know, and a bunch of coaches

(02:47:49):
that call themselves, you know, the term they used for
themselves is the third world. And they come together the
form of this group and it's it's it's a really
weird ideological mixed bag. Like I mean, you have you know,
have you have like actual socialists like tensan years and
Michael Borele and Jamaica. You've also got like Gaddaffi and
the Bathists and like was a socialist come on Paradise

(02:48:16):
ka Libya, you know, okay, my, my, my, my, My
most contrarian hot take is that Salak Jaded was like
actually kind of an mL who was that he was?
He was briefly the Bathist in charge of Syria and
then he got overthrown by but both of them, there's
there's definite like actual like Marxist, you know, Linen, there's

(02:48:38):
something like especially in the old school Bathists, like there
were aspects of that, there was socialism kind of within it.
It just it would be nonsense like for example, called
Saddam Hussein's both yeah yeah, and you know, and you
can't see like this this is this is this is
this is a real grab back and you have. There's
also just a bunch of random Latin American countries, like

(02:48:58):
none of whom you can call socialist. And then there's
also Saudi Arabia and Thailand are in this group. To
get a sense of how fractus this is, India and
Pakistan are also both part of this and they fight
too full scale wars while they're both in the g
seventies seven. Actually that's not true. There's two full scale
wars and then there's like another half war they fight
in the nineties. This yeah, like all all the people

(02:49:20):
in this thing are fighting, are literally fighting wars against
each other. It's kind of a mess, and you know,
it's fun. It's fun in in the mid sixties and
until nineteen seventy four, it's kind of their Their whole
thing is we have moral authority, like where you know,
like where you know where we're like we we we
we have the authority of all of these nations have
colonized us for a long time, and we're going to

(02:49:41):
use that. But in the seventies, you know that the
oil embarker happens, and a lot like most I think
all most of the OPEC states are are are are
in um are are are in the G seventy seven,
and they look at they look at the oil and
bargo and they look at OPEC raising prices and they go, wait,

(02:50:05):
we can do this too. In the OPEC states are like, oh, hey,
we can use this to push the hord. You know,
we can use like push the whole power of like
of the Third World. And they they they're planned to
do this is something called the New International Economic Order,
which is also something that no one has ever heard of,
that is extremely important that has just the spoiler alert

(02:50:27):
is that this this movement gets crushed so thoroughly that
nobody knows what the New Economic Order is and the
Third World is now slur. But you know, the thing
that they're trying to do is create a never It
calls the New International Economic Order a trade union of
the poor, and so it's it's this thing they're trying
to get passed through the U N that would you know,

(02:50:48):
just designed to sort of ensure the economic sovereignty of
these developing nations. Um and I'm going to read a
list of the stuff that's in here. Um So A
an absolute right of states to control the extraction and
marketing of their domestic natural resources be the establishment and
recognition of state man managed resource cartels to stabilize and

(02:51:09):
raise commodity prices. See the Regulation of transnational Corporations D
No strings attached technology transfers from north to south e.
The granting of preferential trade preferences to countries in the
south and f forgiveness for for certain debts that states
in the south oh to the north. So this is

(02:51:30):
like the act. This thing, if the international Economic Order
had ever been implemented at all, it would have completely
reversed the basically completely reverse the balance of economic power,
shifting it basically from countries like the US, like you know,
Western Europe, like Japan that are these giant manufacturing powerhouses,

(02:51:50):
two countries that produce you know, raw materials, and there
would have you know, and the ever thing that would
have happened from this is you have these the no strings,
You have a debt really for the global South and
also these technology transfers. And the plan is basically too
create a bunch of mini opex for just not even

(02:52:11):
mini opus, create opex basically for every commodity. So you know,
you have like an opaque, but it's for like box
site or like copper, and you know they would use
they would you know, you have all these opex and
each one of them uses their power and they all
cooperate to to to make sure that there's a stable
price for for all of these commodities. And another part

(02:52:32):
of this is that it's supposed to basically enshrine the
right of countries to be able to just like nationalized
resource companies. So you know, you have like a British
oil company. I was like, well, we just take it
out now it's ours. And the threat of this is
great enough that if you read conservatives in the era,
they will say things like the Soviet Union is no
longer a threat. The greatest danger to the West today

(02:52:53):
is the yeah, yeah, and this is this, Yeah, it's
it's these these people are enormous past. Yeah. No, no
one even remembers this anymore. And and it's it's because
largely it's because of how just unbelievably badly these guys
got stopped. Um, you know. And one of the other
things that happens out of the product of this is
this is where the G seven comes from. And it's

(02:53:13):
originally and I think there's another thing. Yeah, the other
funny part around this. So the G seven is originally
a secret alliance, like through this whole through the whole seventies,
nobody knows G seven exists. It's basically it starts as
this like secret meeting of a bunch of finance ministers.
Eventually they they add UH, Canada and I think Japan too,
and it goes up to seven members and you know,
and they have a couple of things they're trying to

(02:53:35):
deal with. They're trying to deal with the economic collapse.
But one of the big things, like one of the
biggest things they're dealing with is the G seventy seven
and OPEK and this this the result of this is
this these enormous series of fights in UH implausibly the
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which is I
think this this is this is the last time ever

(02:53:56):
that the fate of the entire world would be decided
in a battle in like a sub committee of the
U N And there's there's years and years and years
of negotiations between well, the the G seven hasn't like
openly to clear itself to G seven. It's sort of
just it's basically the rich European countries so it's Canada, France, Germany, Italy,

(02:54:18):
the UK, the US and Japan like for form this
alliance and are like locked in together in order to
stop the G seven from seventy seven from doing anything.
And this is this is the this is the other.
The other crisis that the neoliberals are responding to is
it's it's not just and in many ways this is
the one that scares them more because you know, it's

(02:54:41):
not just that there's an economic crisis. It's not just
that like capitalists are afraid because of losing money. It's
if this stuff goes through, the entire balance of power
in the entire global economy is going to change, and
it's it's going to swing into the favor of a
bunch of non Western countries and probably more most importantly,
from the liberal They're going to enshrine the right of

(02:55:02):
states to take things away from corporations and regulate them.
And this is just absolutely completely unacceptable to both the
neoliberals and just every single other organization that's even tangentially
involved with sort of the Western nations. So the neo liberals,
I talked about this a bit in in the last episode,

(02:55:24):
which is that they they've been working on a strategy
in order to take power that doesn't rely on states,
and so what they've been doing for about twenty years
is essentially infiltrating and working their way up through it
like takes basically basically taking over uh, the International Monetary
Fund in the World Bank who in this period and

(02:55:48):
this is everything I think it is very weird and
hard to remember, which is that the i m F
and the World Bank, like there was a time when
they weren't completely evil, Like like the i m F
was basically set up to make sure that countries wouldn't
just run out of money, right it was supposed to
give people like yeah, and the World Bank, and it's
it's turned into sort of this like international debt system

(02:56:09):
for horror countries where they're always and being forced into
austerity measures in the like yeah, yeah, and and that.
But that that didn't used to be true. It used
to be you know, the the i m F had
a bunch of Kandians in it and sit same with
the World Bank, and both both the i m F
and the World Bank's leadership for a lot of this
period wanted to negotiate and you know, and I think

(02:56:32):
this is this, this is this is this is where
we're gonna leave it here with basically, the the the
entire world is an imp apocal crisis. There is the
all the economies are collapsing, the sort of the the
armies of of the anti colonial like world are moving,
and the G seventy seven looks like it's it's literally

(02:56:52):
on the verge of of you know, completely restructuring the
economic system in a way that actually would have been
slightly more fair and jazz than but the system that
existed then, which was also infinitely more just and fair
of the system that exist now. And next episode we're
going to talk about how this all fell apart and
how there was a choice in the seventies between either

(02:57:15):
corporations can make money or people can have things. And
the product of what the new Liberals are going to
do in the next episode is that they are going
to their solution to this problem is to tell the
entire wretched of the earth to each it and die.
And yeah, that's that's that's the episode. It's yeah, yeah, history. Yeah,

(02:57:41):
it's it's a time. Um okay, uh, well we got
any we got any any plugables? What do we what
do we do. At the end of episodes, Sophie, where
are we? Thank you? Are we? Thank you for listening.
We'll be back on a day at a time. Maybe

(02:58:01):
we're not hearing you, Sophie, I think you're muted. I'm
not muted. I'm not muted. Oh, there we go. I'm
not muted. I haven't remuted the whole time. We didn't
hear you. That's so weird. I said, we'll be back
on a day or a time, and yeah, at some

(02:58:23):
point we'll be back. Find us then, uh, and find
us tomorrow unless this comes out on Friday, in which
case is going to Friday. Eat with your family. The
ones who this is dropping on. Adopt a cat, Adopt
two cats, maybe four cats. Adopt four cats. Yeah, get
a number of cats greater than the number you have

(02:58:44):
and put them in your house. We'll see you one Monday. Hey,
we'll be act Monday, with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen.

(02:59:05):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
you can find sources for it could happen here. Updated
monthly at cool Zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks
for listening. Give us the oper attention. We need everything

(02:59:26):
you've got fast. Waiting on Reparations would be the podcast.
Tune in every Thursday politics and wordplay. We fight for
the people because they got us in the worst way.
From the Hill Cooper, the Bombay to cant from the
left on Clave to what the neo kanz. Every Thursday
the heading conversation to break us off with some break
because we're waiting. Listen to Waiting on Reparations on the

(02:59:49):
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get
your podcasts. Mama, what does the chicken say? Uh? What giraffe?
Rarely giraffe? Giraffe. You're not gonna get it all right.

(03:00:09):
Just make sure you know the big stuff, like making
sure your kids are buckled correctly in the right seat
for their agent's eyes. Get it right. Visits n h
s A dot gov slash The Right Seat brought to
you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In the
ad Council, Raffie is the voice of some of the
happiest songs of our generation Baby Lugga? So who is

(03:00:32):
the man behind Baby Bluga? Every human being wants to
feel respected. When we start with young children, all good
things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, Comedian, new
dad and host of Finding Raffie, a new podcast from
My Heart Radio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the
I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.