It Could Happen Here Weekly 66

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compiletion episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. It could happen here it

(00:29):
being the future and here being to you. Um this well,
last week when you hear this, but this week when
we're recording this, because we're recording this in the past
for you. Garrison Davis, intrepid correspondent and myself, Garrison Davis's boss,
went to c e S, the Consumer Electronics Show in

(00:54):
in order to explore the future, uh and and in
keeping with our guide both to the future which we
cover here and collapse because the tech industry is falling apart. Um.
I think this was a pretty interesting time to be
at c E S. I did an episode last week
where I kind of talked preliminary about some preliminaries, you know.
I went to an event called CS Unveiled where some

(01:15):
of the more prominent products were there. But we've we've
since spent three days walking around the convention floor, probably
around thirty miles on foot something like that. My legs
and back are falling apart. Yeah, we've turned you into
an old man. Um, but we have we have learned
what the future is going to be. Uh and I
am I'm boy howdy. I'm excited to tell the folks

(01:38):
what they can expect. Garrison, where do you? Where do
you think we should start? Let's start with some of
the more COLLAPSEI type things revolving around crypto, because crypto
was kind of Crypto was kind of like the white
elephant in the c e s because this is happening
right after the FTX fiasco, so it's it's kind of

(01:59):
it's kind of weird. It was we saw it printed
the word crypto and web three point oh printed on
more stuff than I heard people talk about. Yeah, people
are People were not talking about it the way I
think they would have been. Definitely definitely last even even
like a few months ago. M hm. And that was
really interesting. Um. We did sit in at one crypto

(02:21):
industry event where it was a group of like French regulators,
UM and French crypto business people talking about what they
felt like regulations were basically in the in the wake
of the FTX collapse, what kind of regulations did they
think would make crypto work? And you might have got
more than I did, Garrison, because they couldn't get their

(02:41):
microphones to work. Their microphone stopped working, then they're backup
microphone stopped working, and then they got a third backup mike,
which is a little tiny lav mike that they had
to finish the speaking into a tiny little lava lier mike.
And you were amplifying it and sending hain ful feedback
into everyone's ears. And look, they're gonna be defending the

(03:04):
traditional financial system. But I will bet you when a
bunch of Goldman Sachs bankers get up on stage, microphones work. Yeah.
I mean that was just the one thing in a
long line of crypto and metaverse kind of fiascos that
we ran into at ces WE the first night we
got here, we were going to be going to a

(03:25):
crypto happy hour UM that was supposed to be held
at a bar called The Nerd on Fremont Street. You've
never been to Fremont Street Fremont Street is old Las Vegas,
so it's the worst part of town. Um, there's a gigantic,
fucking football field, long l c D screen above you
that plays animated versions of God Bless America. How do

(03:46):
you feel about Fremont Street? Here? Nightmare? Horrible, the cigar chy,
The smell walking back to the car was something. I
don't think I'll ever forget that smell. By the way, folks,
one of the things you're going to get from this
is a travelogue of young Garrison's first trip to Las Vegas. Yeah, um,
it's been a real one. So we get to Freemont Street.

(04:08):
Nobody is in the nerd. Um No, the nerd is
completely empty. It's a it's a bowling alley bar, which
sounds like a great idea, but it was completely deserted.
There was there was not a single soul and I
poked my head in. It was all under harsh purple
light and completely empty. And this is this is like
off off a Freemont Street, so like there's there were

(04:29):
plenty of people around on street and the music music
was blaring both inside and outside. Completely dead. Um. So
once this so we we saw this being empty, so
we checked the email for the crypto party again and
they said there there there was another location list, which
there's obviously just to clarify, there was the party invitation

(04:51):
thing that you would click in the list of c
S parties, and it had one invitation, one location, and
then there was also what you got emailed, which was
a secon separate location. There was zero indication as to
which was accurate. So we decided to go to the
other location listed because no one was at this one,
which was which was called the go to bar. Yes,

(05:13):
immediately immediately upon pulling up, we got great impressions. Uh yeah,
it was the hole in the wall, a little box,
uh window list box, windows box. All of the letters
were coming off of the science. It was impossible to
tell what they had, and they were descending in an
almost artful manner. It's like there's a photo on my Twitter.

(05:36):
We'll probably use it to headline this episode. It's beautiful.
It's like, I don't know if someone could have intentionally
intentionally placed those as well as they were. It was.
It was a perfect microcosm of this entire thing. Um,
we went inside, very nice people. The person there said
that the party wasn't happening here anymore, but that this

(05:57):
bar is the Crypto guys the usual hang out spot,
which was a glorious sentence to here, not a big
money location. And look, I I've drink, I've drinking a
lot of dive bars. I have both been poor and
in need of alcohol for much of my life. This is, um,
this is a classic dive bar. This is really really

(06:19):
And by that I mean not the kind of like
like trying to play it being a dive bar so
that people feel like they're getting the dive bar. I
mean like you will get tetanus from the bathroom dive bar.
It was great. Just the fact that that the person
like running the bar referred to this as their regular hangouts,
referred to this as the Crypto guys regular hangout spot,

(06:41):
is just warm into my heart. My biggest regret from
this trip is that we didn't stay for karaoke, but yeah,
we had other plans. Yeah, so that probably leads us
into meta There's not a lot else to say about
Christ was the which is the other kind of like
but both like Crypto n f T s a metaverse.
We're all kind of trying to piggyback off each other.

(07:02):
And I think metaverse has survived the best out of
those three US. It's doing better than Crypto and n
f t S, which isn't saying much UM but but
even still, I think there was a slight It was
weird some people were trying to emphasize that the metaverse aspects.
Some people were trying to empasize just the VR aspect. Yeah,
the UM there. I saw metaverse and meta around, but

(07:23):
when I would go to the company's advertising various VR products,
they would usually were focused more often on other applications
for VR tech technology, Like I kind of get the
feeling again, a lot of them ordered stuff with Meta
on it before it became clear what a disaster it was,
and there's some backing for this. So for one week
we went and we saw UM Magic Leap, which is

(07:46):
a company that makes VR headsets and VR programs. Um
They have had pretty disastrous sales to the consumer market,
even though they's a very good product because it's really
high end and people aren't willing to spend hours on
a headset, and kind of prior to CE S sort
of reoriented themselves trying to sell to enterprise and and
trying to like move units uh, in like an industrial

(08:10):
capacity for people doing like training, and it's one of
those things one of the things you can do with
VR as you can sit a guy down, um and
have someone remotely explained to him how to fix or
repair something if he's less anyway, So they were showcasing
a lot of that as opposed to games. And certainly
no one tried to make me hop and do a
fucking Horizon Worlds or even VR chat. There wasn't much

(08:33):
in terms of like trying to advertise their their their
software hardware for building like virtual concerts I probably have
a lot of It was way more enterprise and like
you know, workplace training, and a lot a lot more
very like practical applications were gaming or gaming, but like
in terms of like what the like the high end

(08:54):
you know, expensive, big big VR producers were. Therefore, they
were definitely pivoting or at least at least showcasing the
applications that were more for enterprise. Yeah, and that that's
what I found really interesting because I probably had a
dozen different VR headsets on my head at some point.
Uh And and not once was I dropped into like

(09:15):
the kind of metaverse type thing that Facebook is and
again none of their products were on display. Um. Meta
Facebook was not here at all. There was another company
called Meta that I think that's some kind of machining,
which was funny because the Meta booth was just some
completely different company. Yeah. Um. But in terms of circling

(09:35):
back to the collapse aspect of the Metaverse, so Night
one was this failed crypto party where we went to
two locations and they were at neither one of them.
They weren't Night too. We signed up for an invite
to a metaverse party, and I can't tell you how
excited we were for this Metaverse. We were actually very well.
For one thing, legs are now in the Metaverse, and

(09:57):
Garrison's never experienced legs, so I was really cited for
them to see that. Yeah, I only had the quest
one which did which did not include legs. I was
also psyched to maybe make a big red robot friend,
like in that horrible video that Mark Zuckerberg made where
his friends are playing poker on a spaceship. So the
party on the invite that we request, like, you couldn't

(10:17):
just show up, you need you need to request an
invite and like get a ticket, and we got four tickets.
We got four tickets to this Metaverse party. It was
first for it first said it was at the Palazzo
um about Polazzo being part of the Venetian And about
two hours before the party they said it was no
longer at the Polazzo and instead where we were supposed
to meet them at the uh at that at the

(10:39):
fountain at the fountains outside of the Blaggio, which one
of the big famous Vegas landmarks and quite far away
from the Venetian. Yeah, because um the Venetians where half
of CS was taking. The other half was in the
Las Vegas Convention Center. So we make our our jaunty
walk over to to Blaggio. We get there and we

(11:02):
realized that we have to do we have to use
this application on our phones for the for the Metaverse
party thing to work. It's like this a R application
that and they did tell you if you have a
VR headset you should bring it. Yeah, I think one
person did at least, and bringing a charged phone, bring
a charge phone, bring your headphones. So we all, you know,

(11:23):
open up this QR code or whatever or link to
try to get this software working. And around twenty people
there are all are all met with perpetual loading screens.
Now a few people did have I saw one or
two people that this was working for. Mine loaded just
the VR avatars of people, but it was on like

(11:45):
a gray background. But it didn't look any of the
background or any of the the way it was supposed
to look. Because one guy had it more or less working.
I think it was basically it was a video like
a live feed of the Bellagio Fountain in front of
us because as his like camera scanned over it, it's
using the phone camera all of the different like a
bunch of different awkwardly jerking avatars kind of crudely dancing. Yeah,

(12:09):
in front of it. They did have legs ringing endorsement. Yeah,
it was. It was It was supposed to be that
it was supposed to be. This this a r animated
experience thing sinc to the Blagio Fountain and to Viva
las Vegas, and that was what it was supposed to be.
The thing is only one or two people it was
working for. Everyone else had these loading screens or had

(12:31):
just the just had the avatars popped in with none
of the other features working um as before the Pelagio founded.
Like just like the guy the guy who was Reviva
before the final Viva, the guy running this party left.
He was gone quite rapidly. He exited the premises. He

(12:54):
took advantage of the pact fact that people were confused
and trying to figure out what was happening, and he escaped.
So we have all like twenty people not sure what
to do, and then we get we get an email
like ten minutes later saying that thank you for coming
to the show of I hope you enjoy your time
at beer Park, which is across the street. Your Park

(13:17):
is a place, by the way. I know it's it
seems like a joke name, but it's quite large business.
So we were told that the party had a reservation
at beer Park and that we were all going to
go over to beer Park and you know, by the way,
the people heading up there. It's not just like pieces
of ship like us. There's like some serious industry people,
like people who are including like the CEO of arguably

(13:38):
the most prominent virtual reality game company. Yeah there was
the CEO or whatever, the CEO. Yeah, you like, there
was people who who have been involved in very popular
VR games, who are industry industry entrepreneurs, engineers. Yeah, and
other other other like VR enthusiasts and then also people
like us, I assume who just wanted to watch it
crash and burn, which it did. It was just there

(13:59):
to be the sickos in the window laughing. Yes, So
we're told they have that. They were told that they
have the reservation for beer Park. Like, okay, well, the
a R technology didn't work. That's that's a bummer. You know,
it would not happen. It's not the first failed demo
I've seen. It's stuff happens. Maybe they didn't test it

(14:19):
for how many people was there? They thought too many? Yeah,
like who like actually who knows? Um, but at least
we can hang out with people. But so but the guy,
the guy running the party laughs, so he's just gone, uh.
But everyone else makes make you know, like you know,
like a dozen or a dozens of people make our
way over to beer Park and we're told that there

(14:41):
is in fact no reservation for this party. But he
has called them. They don't know what we're talking about.
Could we please get out of the way. So we
start our way to have this staircase and that we
then we that we stop halfway down because someone at
beer Park says, there is like there's a bar in
the very back of of of and they're not selling

(15:01):
alcohol there, but you guys can stand around and buy
from other places. We can stand there. As they figured
out what's going on, we later learn that the that
the guy who's who's running the party, who's who did
not show up, uh, did have a did have a
reservation for six people at one table. Yeah, Garrison, that
man hung himself at Circus Circus within thirty minutes of

(15:23):
the show. I do know. He actually made his way
over to beer Park at some point, but he did
not go to where everyone else was going. He was
at the other side of the bar, but he was
not talking to anyone else from the party. So that was.
That was the second party we went to, which was
of a similar level of competency. So that is that

(15:47):
is the crypto and people did show up for the
second part. So I'm gonna have to give it to
the metaverse. I mean, they change locations three times from
the Plaza to the Blagia Fountain to be a park
um with you know, variety of issues along the way.
In terms of the VR stuff, we actually got to try,
so Robert tried like I think three or four different

(16:08):
haptic feedbacks. I tried every haptic product I could find,
and haptic again, for the folks who don't know this,
whenever you like touch your phone and it like buzzes
like let you know that you're you're typing or whatever. Um,
that's haptic feedback, And that's kind of the crudest form
of it. But the idea and the hope of the
people kind of playing with the technologies that you can
find ways to basically like simulate a keyboard so that

(16:31):
you would be able to touch type in a keyboard
that's not really there because you know, you would be
wearing a glove or something that would simulate the feeling
so well. And so this is a key part of
when you think about, like what would it take to
go from where VR is now, which is a pretty
visually immersive and can be a pretty auditorially immersive experience,
but that leaves the rest of your body isn't there, yeah,

(16:54):
um to something that is kind of more like a
holidack where you feel and and like can you know
even people have talked about like smell eVision and stuff,
which um is a little further behind, but like it's
something that's actually engaging the entirety of your of your
physical person at the very at least not being able
to like walk through walls, or at least more of

(17:17):
your physical person than just your head and eyes and ears. UM.
So that's that's the goal. So the first one I
tried was the tax suit, which basically feels like and
I wrote this was in the last episode. It feels
like having much of in sixty four bumble packs on
your body. It does not mimic the feeling of hugging
or touching a human being. Another one that we tried,

(17:37):
I tried one that was just gloves that did a
pretty good job of and and the tax suit gloves
did a pretty good job of mimicking keyboards UM, which
is kind of interesting. I don't think it would allow
me to touch type, but it was it was neat
to see that kind of developing a little bit. UM.
Then we tried one by O W O. It's like
big capital O S little W We're just going to

(17:58):
call it oh oh oh um. And that was like
a full body um suit, where it's basically it's like
a skin tight like a workout shirt UM with a
bunch of e G pads underneath it, so the e
G pads make direct connection to your skin. And then
if you have ever engaged in the kind of kinky
sex play that involves like a violet wand, which is

(18:20):
a device that erotically electrocutes you or your partner, you
can also like drawing each other with it. Or if
you've ever used like any of those fake sex cattle
prods they used to sell them at the kink dot
Com arena in that old Castle in San Francisco, if
you ever used any of those, it's like that, So
you're just like getting zapped a bunch all over your body.
And on the low settings it's kind of like a

(18:43):
nicer massage gun thing, and on the higher settings it's
actually really cruciating. It's actually I tried this one today.
I put on the little skin tight and jumper thing,
and even just during the calibration settings, it was really
fascinating because it's even though the electrodes are only on
like a few of your muscle sections that the current

(19:04):
runs through, and it doesn't really it doesn't necessarily have
like you know, like a taser shocky feeling. It just
it just is like muscle pain it's involuntarily contracting your muscle. Yeah,
so it's it's it's not just like static e shocky stuff.
Um there was you know, get you know. The cool
thing about this is that it can simulate you know,

(19:26):
an entry round and an exit wound. So Robert was
playing the popular VR game Pistol Whip where you get
shot by dudes and you do like a John Wick
thing basically, and you can feel you know, like bullet
goes in, bullet goes out. Yeah and yeah. So it's
not just like a rumbull pack type things actually depth
to the feeling. And one of the things they simulated
it was really cool is getting stabbed and then having

(19:47):
the knife twist was the worst with the worst feeling
for me is like honestly like getting shot in like
the Chester shoulders. It was. It was painful, but it
wasn't necessary. It wasn't like painful on like a bad way.
He was like, Oh, I'm playing a game and this
is this, this is a published and it's it hurts,
but it's kind of fun. The stabbing was awful. I
would seek to avoid it. It was very painful because

(20:07):
all the all the stuff like below my chest was
way more uncomfortable and painful versus like chest and arms
was kind of was kind of fun. Yeah, And I
don't know again whether or not you find this appealing
will have to do with the way that you like
to do your video games. But what I will say
is that from a perspective of just like enjoying a
an FPS type game, it it is the first time

(20:30):
I've been playing a game that's had some sort of
feedback when you're hit that actually is negative reinforcement, like
you do not want to get hit um and you
actually kind of dread getting hit. It. Actually it makes
the game a lot more immersive. Yeah, and like this
that's that's that that's like a bullshit phrase people use
for like this is immersive, Like no, this actually like

(20:52):
this actually introducing consequence thought. I think that they put
into something like how do we simulate a knife wound?
How do we actually do like a through and through gunshot?
And and it all so makes your makes your VR
body feel more connected to your actual body, yeah, which
is something that usually doesn't happen. Yeah, you feel a
sense of like defensiveness towards your person um and it
like when I was trying to like dodge the bullets

(21:12):
and ship like I actually felt it didn't just kind
of feel like I was playing a game, Like my
body felt more on the line, which was Which is
interesting because this is purely we're talking about this kind
of in the context of stuff that matters, and the
stuff that matters here, not that gaming doesn't matter, but
the stuff that actually matters here is the ability of

(21:33):
people to simulate accurately life in a digital form. Because
if that can be done, then a lot of other
weird things are possible, many of which you're good, some
of what you're bad, many of what you're bad. Um,
I mean, I think the next the next day we're
talking about has a bit more packed complication. And because
that's what I want to say, all the only application

(21:53):
I saw for this was in gaming. This does not
I didn't see like a metaverse application of this, Like
this is not going to help in Zuckerberg, Like you
don't want to unless you can get mugged in the
metaverse and some some asshole ten you're will lock up
to you with a knife and stab you. Well, you know,
that's a good point when we're talking about is it

(22:13):
possible that people will be living increasing quantity like portions
of their life in persistent digital environments. One thing I
would not want to have as a suit like this
because people will find ways to access it well. And
we've talked to we've talked to some people who program
for these things, who are like other versions of them,
but the metaverse actually at the Metaverse party, they funk

(22:35):
up and it's like getting electrocuted. You can't take it
off yourself. It's a serious problem. There is a competing
model to the Obo suit called the Tesla Suit, not
not made by Elon Musk's Tesla, different company, but similar
similar degrees of care towards safety. Maybe I mean it
is this is the most high end haptic suit that
does this electro shock thing. Um And he said that

(22:57):
he has watched demos where people have been in the
suit and the suit like glitches and all of the
things turn on and like at full capacity, which means
you're you you're get You're not only in extruciating pain,
you also you also just like can't move your body,
like you're stuck frozen in horrible pain until someone turns

(23:17):
the suit off. So like there is there is this
type of like logistical problems with with these sort of
things as well, and it's one of those. Like the
first that I had when using that thing was like,
this is kind of neat, uh, this what makes this
actually would make certain video games better. And the second
thought I had was, I would only ever want to
have this on if I was playing a video game

(23:39):
that was not connected to the Internet, because the instant
I would never want to invocage in a multiplayer game
where I could be that it would be horrible constantly. Bet.
I mean obviously, like you you can have lower settings
on these things to make it not painful at all,
and you do get to pick that. But I I
tried to go as far as I could. But in

(23:59):
terms of practical applications beyond just gaming, the next haptic
suit that we tried, this company is working with governments.
Haptics is the is the is the company. We know
that they do the thing where they like remove our
um and they have they have military contracts. We we

(24:20):
we saw we saw army people testing it out, two
employees of the United States Army, but they already are
working with law enforcement UM well and you know industrial
government training video of Jeff Bezos us with their products
to like wirelessly control a robot that's like based off
of human hands in order to do that. But they
work with governments, they work with businesses, corporations. This is

(24:42):
this isn't really a consumer thing at this point because
the full suit, I think they said the next it's
going to be like eighty thou dollars. No, No, the
the gloves are four thousand, the gloves and battery pack.
The next full suit that they're doing, it's gonna be
eighty thou dollars or four months subscription. But that's for
their suit that's not even released yet. That is their

(25:04):
next model. Yeah, not a consumer Like theoretically, if you're
willing to pay the monthly fee, you could have this thing, um,
but that's not the intent. But I think what's interesting
about it is this is kind of where all of
the technology is going and and the main difference is
that the haptics that we had used on us in

(25:25):
the lower end gaming products, where again they're basically just
kind of like shocking you a bunch in specific ways
or just like vibrating, yeah, or just like vibrating, whereas
this suit used air prect is like pneumatic, so it
was basically you have these gloves on, and the gloves
are much more cumbersome than the other gloves. Um. You
have these gloves on and they're like blowing air onto

(25:48):
you parts of your hand. It's it's it's compressed air
that that that feeds into these little sensor things that
actually go in they they make contact with your again
and so you're the feeling is is real um in
a way that the other haptic stuff isn't UM. And

(26:10):
it doesn't. First off, it does not actually it does
not feel like you're getting pots of air blown on
your hands. No, it does not. M One of the
things that they did in there is they simulated holding
your hand under a leak with drops of I think
it was oil in that, but like drops of a
liquid coming down on your hand, and it felt like
having water cup pour onto your hands without wetness, which
is an odd feeling. UM. But the they had like

(26:32):
a bonzaiet tree which kind of felt like it felt
like a prickly almost yeah, it felt it felt like
it felt like a prickly plant. Running your hands through
both plants. If you'd closed your eyes and you'd run
your hands through both plants, they would feel like different
plants um, And one thing you could do is you
could grab the vine with leaves on it and pull

(26:54):
your hand down. The leaves would come off the way
they would in a real vine and felt it. You
can feel it. And then you're hand is full of
leaves at the end and you feel them too as
they like slide off of your hand, which is a
kind of fidelity I didn't really realize was possible at
the moment um. There was other stuff that really there
was some stuff that worked better than like the turning
wheels and stuff was kind of like whatever. Um, the

(27:16):
knobs and buttons weren't great. I actually thought that the
weak point was turning knobs. It just felt kind of
shocky um. But the straw. There was one where the rope. Yeah,
there was a rope hanging from the ceiling, so you
could like pull it to like it was kind of
like attached to you were on basically like a fake
airship in this guy, so it's kind of like attached

(27:37):
to a horn. So you could pull the rope and
then you could the way you can grab a rope
and pull it down hand over hand. You could pull
it and it felt like it felt just like pulling
a rope through your hand like it was like if
if I was if I had no near perfect fidelity,
if I had no like visual sensory perception, I would

(27:58):
think I am pulling a rope through my hand. It
felt perfect. And there there were there was a moment
where I was at a desk and I had to
open it, and so I like, I pull like and
normally in VR, if you're like opening a desk or something,
you just kind of like grab and pull in the
right area and it opens the drawer. This I I
felt like there was a big metal kind of like

(28:20):
hook thing that glast that you get your hand up
into pull. So I pull it out and I feel
my hand inside that thing as I pull it. And
then at a certain point I stuck my hand into
the drawer to push it open the rest of the way,
which I do on real drawers when they get stuck.
And it worked the same way that it does in
a real drawer, and it it felt like one I mean.
And the other thing that was impressive about that is

(28:42):
that even just I I instinctually picked up a mug
by putting like half my hand inside the mug and
holding onto the other side, which you can't really you
can't do that if you're using VR controllers, and you
can't even do that if you're doing like hand tracking,
It just it just doesn't work. But that you you
put your hand in pinch both sides of the mug
and picked it up and like just that by itself,

(29:03):
like as you're like feeling the mug in your hands,
like extremely impressive right now, which kind of sounds silly
because you're talking about like the mechanics of grabbing a mug,
but it's it's actually also talking the capacity for mimicking
reality with close to perfect fidelity, which um I would
not have guessed walking into the show you could do

(29:25):
the things that we're doing. Yeah, and and we talked.
We talked to one of the products managers they're they're
talking where they were speaking about how how they're using
this for workplace training, but also even even talking about
how you don't want to just use this tech for
workplace training because then people will get too used to
doing it in VR and then when they actually go

(29:47):
into the real world will actually be completely lost because
it's not close enough to to the VR. So they
actually talked about how you know VR it can only
do so much you want to you want to use
you know, VR training as a supplemental thing for also
in person training and kind of go back and forth
so that you actually stay grounded in what you're gonna
be actually doing. But then you can also use the
VR as an assistant, so you can you know, train

(30:08):
it on, you can train on your own, but also
you get to apply it to the real world so
you don't get stuck just doing the stuff in the
in the digital world, which I thought was an interesting
comment from the person who's like trying to sell the technology. Yeah, yeah, which, yeah,
And that was kind of the thing. One of the
neat things about c E S. So most of the
people you encounter and and CS for those of you
have never been to a trade show, it's rooms that

(30:28):
are bigger than you ever thought. Rooms could be filled
with thousands of booths, and some of the booths contain
earth movers by the company CAT that are like the
size of a mansion in terms of their actual like mass,
and some of the booths are crazy person sitting with
his homemade air conditioner and his cut open gloves explaining

(30:50):
to you the new way he's figured out how to
make air condition your coils. Um, and so you get
this mix of At the big corporate booths, a lot
of the time, like p are people who are hired
to sell a line and don't know what they're talking
about and they're just trying to hype a product. And
then inventors uh and people who like have are actually
have actually made the thing in front of you and

(31:11):
are very excited about it and are kind of incapable
of bullshitting you. Sometimes they believe irrationally in their products,
but they don't they're not pr people. UM. And yeah,
I got that that feeling from the from the haptic people.
We should move on from metaverse, so I want to
talk about some of the other since we're doing the good.

(31:32):
The other products we saw or things that we saw
in mentions. We saw that that I made me kind
of hopeful about aspects of the future. So we we
saw some a R glasses and again VR is immersive.
A R is just kind of putting an overlay from
the digital world on the regular ship. You're wearing glasses
and you're seeing something that a computer is showing you. Um.

(31:54):
One of the things that we saw that I was
most impressed by was by a company called zis v
U z I x UM, and it was there Zander glasses,
Zander with an X, like the guy from Buffy. UM.
And these are glasses that are designed to provide real
time captioning those with hearing loss. So you are wearing
them and you are conversing with people all around you,

(32:16):
and you see every word that's being set around you,
including the words you say on screen in front of
you live caption ing. UM. And it worked extremely I
didn't see it miss or funk up any words. It's
not like punctuated or anything. But it was perfectly easy
to follow. And it works for all of the voices
around you. UM to the extent that I could tell.

(32:38):
And I'm not hard of hearing in a way that
I need captioning glasses, but I think that if you are,
this is kind of a miracle product. It worked incredibly
well as far as I could tell. And UM, I
think a good amount of thought from what they said,
at least it seems like a good amount of thought
went into the fact that if you are acting as
someone's ears, you have a responsibility to take care of

(33:00):
their privacy. UM. Because all of it was local. None
of it was going into the cloud. There's no appar
ap it doesn't touch your fucking phone. It's just it's
just the glasses. It's that's all it is. There's no Internet,
there's no apps, just the glasses. So that was one
of the coolest things that I think we saw there
and was just also a fairly rare, legitimate example of

(33:23):
a need being met through fascinating technology that I think
could really improve people's lives. Yeah. One of the pair
of air glasses I tried was by ant Reality Optics.
They had a few different models. They're the ones that
make the actual lenses. They had models that were that
you could switch between A R and VR. It was

(33:43):
actually pretty impressive how there. They look pretty much like
regular glasses. Um, the specific A R and VR ones
look a little bit funky, but they're not. They're not
completely ridiculous. But you could with a button you could
switch between having like the A our path through mode too.
It's like you can see you see the A R
screen and then but you also see the world around you.

(34:06):
Then you can hit to the VR mode and it
blacks out the real world and you just see the
VR stuff and that that was. That was pretty impressive.
They also had a full frame A R glasses that
again looked look look relatively normal in terms of like,
you know, this is the regular pair of glasses. And
but this was the only pair of air glasses I

(34:28):
saw at the show that had the A R going
over the course of like the entire lens. All the
other ones had like a little box that they operated
in in some cases up your vision when you didn't
have yeah, and it's like hard to it's hard for
your eye. Yeah, and it's hard it's hard for your
eye to know what to focus on. Um. But this

(34:48):
the A R was was over. There was was across
the entirety of the lens, and that one was was
very nice to uh to test out. Now. I think
one of the things that we're kind of talking around
here is the fact that if you've paid attention to this,
you'll note that none of the really cool stuff we're
talking about is made by a giant tech Companacebook, Yeah, Facebook,

(35:11):
Matter or like Samsung, Panasonic, um LG. We went to
those booths. Those are the largest boosts at the show.
They're fucking massively million dollar booths. God knows how much money.
UM Panasonic spent had one of the largest boosts at
the show, which had probably was tens of millions of dollars.
It is not cheap to get the list state in
the LBCC. They had like the third largest booth in

(35:34):
the entire show. Massive. They didn't really have any of
the problem. They didn't have any products Panasonic makes things. No,
they had like they had like two cameras and like
maybe like ten lenses, but like not not multiple ones
of those, just those the only two cameras and like
ten lenses. That that's all they had for this massive,

(35:57):
massive booths, some fucking TVs and the displays and like
like not not not displaces for sale. It was like
just like like projected displays of people using their stuff.
Like they didn't they didn't have anything to show at all.
But they did have They did have a breakdancing stage

(36:18):
and they brought up DJ Funky and his Breakdancing Crew,
which I swear were pulled right out of Times Square
in two thousand and three um and just thrust into
into into our reality. It was deeply awk because it's
these very like clearly people who spend most of their
time doing breakdancing shows out in public in streets and

(36:41):
crowded cities, and a bunch of confused Japanese businessmen just
like staring back at them, and they're being like, come on,
come on, make some noise. And the Japanese businessmen are
continuing to do not want to make any noise. Don't
understand why this is being asked of them. Um. It
was extremely funny. Um, but uh yeah. And and that

(37:05):
was one of kind of the takeaways for me was
the lack of ideas from big tech. Most of what
the big companies were showing was like either a million
different cars and you know, our technologies, this car technology,
and I'm sure they're all great cars. Cars were very popular.
That that was one of the bigger trends we saw

(37:28):
was how much people were pushing their EV cars, which
is I think if you want to read something about that,
it's bad news for Tesla. I also don't think it's
good news for the rest of us, because just replacing
all of the cars on the road with e V
cars does not solve many of the fundamental problems that
we have, including even emissions because even yeah, it's not
easy to make that a lot of that electricities generated

(37:50):
and like yeah, some of them look neat. There were
a lot of e bikes, a lot of a lot
of e bikes which all look neat, And of course
that's going to be a huge thing, a big, a
big imputu for the e bikes right now is that
Ukrainians have been using them very effectively in combination with
drones to murder Russian soldiers, and the U. S Military
is actually put in large orders for e bikes as

(38:11):
a result of that, So I suspect you're going to
see a lot more ebikes geared towards military applications too
in the near future. But like what most of the
big companies had were like TVs, like like they fucking Samsung,
like Samsung and LG mostly big TVs, and like LG
had one that it was like stored in a little

(38:31):
box where it was all rolled up and it was
like when you press a button, kind of like the
you ever had a hotel that has automatic blackout curtains
that kind of works that way, um, but which is
like conceptually like, oh, neat, you've developed a TV that
can fold and put itself away, But also is this
really better than my current TV in a way that's

(38:51):
going to alter my life? Is this Like yeah, there isn't.
There's not much in terms of actual new innovation. Like
they were trying to make their transparent TVs seem really
cool and new, but like that's not new tech either.
It's just that people don't really like using them outside
of like the corporate space. Yeah, transparent TVs are neat
for if you're decorating a space, if you're doing like
a lobby. Likes room because it's a worse experience. But

(39:15):
but like so like I I think out of all
the big companies, LG had the best booth experience. Um
I walked through Samsung after waiting in a massive line
and all it looked half like a hospital and half
like an Ikea where you're walking through and they're kind
of showing you all their different like smart appliance products,
but nothing is like actually new or innovative. It's all

(39:36):
it's all the same ship you can find it at
like the best Buy. It's not it's not cool or interesting.
You're just waiting in line to walk through these little
Ikea homes that that, and they show you how you
can now use you can now use like Microsoft teams
from your television and you're like, oh, a lot of
people bragging about their Microsoft Teams integration. Look, you and

(39:57):
I both have to use Teams for work sometimes always
the worst part of my day. But but now, but now, Robert,
with with your new rollable TV, you too can use
Microsoft Teams. Finally, a rollable TV that automatically takes me
into my team's room. So would you bootop Microsoft Teams?
And you and you don't want to be there? When
I first when I first on Firefox and it says

(40:18):
this browser is not supported, You're going to have to
use another browser? Does start Microsoft Teams. You probably wouldn't
run into that issue. If you had your rollerble TV
that was a smart TV, they could connect it directly
to Microsoft Teams. Yeah. Um, I hate it. The Samsung
booth was horrible. Sony mostly had PlayStations, which is fine,
that's their people love them stations, and Masonic was a

(40:42):
complete bust. LG at least had some interesting stuff, like
they had this one projection powered TV extension room where
you have you have an image or a three D
a three D like a three D video file of
the of the thing on the television that then projects
out into the entirety of the room at least that

(41:05):
was cool and new, So there was there was no
stated release date for this, no stated price point complication
because honestly, what what movies are going to work in that? Now?
The answer is that what you want to do is
you wanna combine that kind of drawing AI and use
it so you can run a movie through it and
it will finish the rest of the scenes. So, for example,

(41:25):
you could put on Boogie Nights that opening scene where
it's that one long shot as they go through it's
just all around you, but everyone looks a little wrong
and their hands are tweaked and fucked up, and we
have mid Journey continuing up the movie to fill the
Lord of the Rings. When you look to your right,
one of the elves has hands that just curl up
in himself and then you just take a shipload of

(41:48):
acid and permanently damage your brain. I think the funniest
thing at the l G Booth though all the despite
being corny, was still miles miles better than anything else
in Panasonic or inside Samsung was the Home of the
Future was. They had three different Home of the Futures,
which was mostly talking about how do you smart appliances
and how to integrate them with your phone or whatever.

(42:08):
That that was most of what they were talking about.
But they had three actors in each of the home,
actual ass human being who are kind of kind of
doing like a kind of doing a presentation, kind of
doing a fourth wall breaking performance. It's a it was
a weird it was a weird mix of the mom
kept emphasizing that she was almost criminally incompetent at cooking

(42:31):
and thus had to be taught by a robot how
to make pasta. But like they're talking about like their
kids and my husband, and it's like it's a weird
performance art thing. But honestly, that way of presenting their
products was much more enjoyable to watch than walking through
the Samsung booth who didn't have any of that you
were just walking through like it's despite being silly, it

(42:51):
was still much much more enjoyable. Yeah, and so I
have been attending c e s since two thousand ten,
not every year, but all and I try to hit
it every couple of years just to kind of keep
abreast of what's not just like what's possible, because you
always see some exciting new stuff that you wouldn't have
guessed was a thing, but also to just kind of
get an eye for how the tech industry is talking

(43:14):
about itself to itself. Um. And the thing that struck
me most was how completely out of the driver's seat
the big tech companies were, um and not even really
even not even trying. Google's big Box was not in
the main convention center their main booth. They had it
outside the convention center. And it does not seem to

(43:36):
be a focus of much coverage, right people, people are
not do not care. It's just more phones and it's
like Razors. They're right, the company makes gaming laptops, and
they make perfectly fine gaming laptops. But it's also just like, well,
now I can see what the new sixteen inch Razor
looks like. It looks like a Razor laptop. Um, you know,
I can go to Lenovo and see what they had

(43:56):
actually a couple of cool laptop Leniva. I was bummed
because they took away the laptop clit. They did take
the clitter iss off of the laptop, which is a shame.
Although they have a semi clitterest button on the side
of the phone. It's red like the old Anyway, whatever, um,
look up Lenovo clitter iss or just type clitterus into

(44:18):
red tube. Um don't, well, I don't know, whatever, it's
your life. Uh So the Lenovo has like I mean,
there's some like, oh, here's a laptop with two screens
that doesn't completely suck. Um, you know, here's a laptop
that is in a slightly better form factor, but it's
there's kind of they've given up the idea that like, um,

(44:40):
there's anything kind of but iterative, Like here's TVs that
are slightly better than your current TV, but not in
a way that you can notice. And that's most of
like the products there, which is like, well, on paper,
this is slightly better than the thing I have, but
I don't think I would actually notice a difference in
And when you're seeing that from the companies that are
put spinning thirty million twenty, you have a many fucking

(45:01):
millions of dollars to be at C E S and
have god knows how many billions that they put into
R and D when that's what they're bringing to the table.
And there's just like three nerds in a tiny booth
in a corner of a room that have a device
that like is capable of reading all of the speech
around you and translating and like captioning it live. Or

(45:21):
there's those I mean that little not a massive company,
although not you know, clearly a decent amount of backing
doing that kind of ship with happticks like that's all
of the that's the I think that the main takeaway
to me is like there's big tech um seems to
have entirely given up driving the conversation about what the
future is going to look like. Even I don't take

(45:44):
as a bad thing. Actually, even we went to the
John Dear booth and they had this, They had this
u AI assisted way to scan your crops and locate
where weeds are, and another kind of Amazon like one
of those gigantic um uh irrigation to drive it around.

(46:06):
It's like a hundred yards long, and it waters and
sprays pesticide. But it's it's the AI power thing that
recognizes things that are not crops and tries to remove them.
The case and point being like trying to spray pesticides
just on the weeds and not on the rest of
the crops. And it can it can go. It can
do this while operating at twelve hours an hour. This
this the person we talked to, They just started working

(46:29):
for John Deer because this technology was developed at a
different company that John Deer just bought. Like John Deere
didn't make this, other companies did, and then they just
bought it. I think that's just another interesting these case
of like that was just another small, random company who
was doing you know, innovative farming technology that then you know,
another big company with money just decided to buy and
be like, hey, this is our thing now, And I

(46:51):
think I want to We'll do another part where we
talk about the dark side. We'll talk about Palinteer, who
was there and who we got to chat with. We'll
talk about Valence, We'll talk more about John Deer, because
there's some some bleak ship in the John Deer stuff too. Um.
But I think this is the stuff that I found
broadly optimistic, even the ship that didn't work, because what
didn't work is like big tech, and I kind of

(47:13):
like the fact that big tech it seems stumbling and
crypto those particulars that didn't work. What I like is
the fact I like to see big tech stumbling out
the gate and a bunch of weirdos um putting some
cool shit out there, and that actually makes me more
hopeful of like a future where technology makes things more accessible.

(47:35):
And uh, I get to wear motorized Exo skeletons. Oh,
let's end on the Exo skeleton. So we got to
finally try the motorized Exo skeleton, which is supposed to
basically increase your lifting capacity by sixty or seventy pounds. Um.
It's like a backpack you were in your back with
a chest piece and hooks around your hips and stuff. Uh,
and it works when you're like carrying loads and moving

(47:56):
and squatting. You don't have to move the way you
normal due to protect your lower back, which is kind
of harder on your knees. If you've ever liked done
cattle bell spots or dead lifts, um, when you when
you first put it on and they had you bend
over and then stand back up. The first thing we
did that, it was you kind of felt like you're
getting launched in there. Yeah yeah, because it's pushing up

(48:17):
with you, it's assisting you. Yeah, but you can move
like springs in your step as you're running. It worked
really well. It was very cool. I want to and
I was kind of shocked at how this is from
a German biotics German German biotics um, which is the
name of the company, and it was a really awesome
first off shout out the folks were fans, so that

(48:38):
was nice um, but it was really cool product for like,
the price point was surprisingly like we're not talking Toyota
factories can afford them. We're talking like if you are
if you work in like a mid like a small
automotive company or whatever, like you could afford one of
these suits. They're not they're sub tin k so they're

(49:00):
not cheap, but they're not like the kind of thing
that only a multi billion dollar corporation could have access
and it will actually improve the lives of workers. You
can rent them for two fifty bucks a month, which
is again very because it would allow you to work
lifting and hauling ship all day or do stuff like
on a farm like bail hay and huck hey up
without straining your knees and back, which you know, we

(49:23):
talk a lot about like the kind of devices oftentimes,
the kind of devices that make work more that are
like marketed to companies in this may make work more efficient,
but they don't try to they try to trying to
increase productivity, Yeah, by just doing more numbers, but not
actually improving the experience for the worker. Like. The human
side of this is that, well, maybe a bunch of
people who ruin their backs and knees working in factories

(49:46):
every day won't and that would be nice to uh
and and it seems like it works really well. Um.
So if you are currently working a job or run
a company and your employees are destroying their backs and knees,
maybe reach out to the German biotics guys. Um. Also,
it does seem like I could rent or purchase one

(50:06):
and then combine my plate carrier with the chest rig
purchased extra thigh and shoulder armor and have what is
effectively powered armor without straining my body. I can't say
any reason why that wouldn't work Garrison. Um, So come
back next week where I will have recreated space marine
power armor. Um, and soon after that gone mad with

(50:30):
power and take over Circus Circus finally finally take over Garrison.
Why don't we end this by so Circus Circus most
beautiful place in the Las Vegas Strip if you've never been,
if you've ever read the book Feared Loathing, in Las Vegas.
You're watched the movie it's where Hunter Thompson starts hallucinating. Um. Now,
the thing about Circus Circus is that it's a clown

(50:50):
them to casino and it's supposed to be a circus
themed casino. There's a lot of clouds, but there is
a lot of cleans in their branding and that it was.
It's like one of the oldest casinos on the strip,
so everything is faded. They have not repainted it in
a very long time. It is the outside as a
shade of like move that you only get when the

(51:12):
sun has deeply damaged your building. You cannot purposely produce
set color. No man cannot create it, even with all
of our talents. Um. And it's it's just I perfectly
put Garrison up there because it's where I used to
stay on the strip and it's one of the worst
places in the world. I love it very much. UM.
Tell the people how you found Circus Circus gear. I mean,

(51:34):
initially I wanted I wanted more theming on the inside.
I think it's it's a bummer that clowns have gotten
such a bad rap in the past twenty years that
I feel like they've kind of taken a back pedal
off the clown theming. Yeah, it's cowardice because with without
the clown, without the clown theming, it's just kind of
dingy and depressing, where instead could be surreal and uncomfortable.

(51:55):
And I would prefer it to be surreal and uncomfortable.
That just did you depressing? See, this is why I
wanted to support you in your dream of sitting in
dark corners of Circus Surcus wearing your clown costume. I
brought a clown costume you could give. I mean, you
might get stabbed. I still I still have one more night.
That's right. Yesterday, yesterday, after I said to my hotel,

(52:17):
there was a Las Vegas police officer what time of
day am? A Las Vegas Plue officer was walking the
hallway in the very top floor where I'm staying. And
then then I go downstairs and there's a whole team
of police sweeping the ground at seven am. Probably just
a murder um. So this has been it could happen here.

(52:40):
Reporting from C E. S. We'll be back probably tomorrow
to talk about the dark, horrifying things that we saw
that made us deeply uncomfortable. And then we'll probably have
like in an audio documentary on the way as well,
using audio that we recorded at CES so that will
be integrated at some point in the future. Will continue
to inform you of the future that is mercilessly rushing

(53:02):
towards you and cannot be stopped and will inevitably crush
you and everything and everyone you love. But in this
episode in a good way, so true, So be happy. Ah,

(53:28):
welcome back to it could happen me All that's horrible.
You didn't like that, Garrison, Well, they can all be winners. Uh.
This is part I Guess three of our coverage of
the Consumer Electronics Show and what the tech industry has

(53:49):
in store for all of us in the future. UM.
Last episode we talked about the stuff we saw at
c e S that was both cool and optimistic and
spoke to some some potentially positive trends in tech, and
today we're going to get back to what we do best,
which is making you feel bad. But first I want

(54:10):
to open this up a little bit with Garrison. You're
a Canadian. You're you're you're You're a very young Canadian
twenty years old, grew up in a cult and now
you have just seen Las Vegas, Nevada for the first time.
Did it change your life? Um, I mean I guess so,
I guess. I guess it did change my life in

(54:31):
in my perception of what Las Vegas is and my
desire to never return of But yeah, I mean we
we've been able to spend probably around half our time
at CES, the other half just uh so soaking in
the impeccable vibes of Las Vegas, Nevada. Yeah, I've been.

(54:51):
I've been tour guiding you around, uh soberly and safely.
We went to the Venetian and the Palaza. We took
a very expensive gondola, right, that was an expensive gondola. Right,
got to see the beautiful blue skies of Venice and
all their four corners. Your reaction to seeing inside the

(55:12):
Vinea if you've never been the Venetian, the interior of it,
it's this massive casino, as they all are. They're all
like small towns inside buildings massive, and the Venetian is
like a replica of the city of Venice with a
fake sky. And that is one giant mall. I believe
it's the second largest hotel in the world. Yeah, it is.

(55:33):
Unbelievably large, uh, incredibly expensive, and the fidelity of like
the fakeness of all of these things that are based
on real stuff is is quite high to it's it's
a whole thing. Yeah, it's it's really interesting because some
of the most impactful stuff is all of like the
fake storefronts inside because in many ways they're kind of

(55:56):
just all glorified malls, um and glorified our aids, all
slot machines. And it's funny because, like, you know, they
make all of these facades on the inside, they have
they have the ceiling painted to look like the sky,
but it's it's it's just it's so dark in there,
like it's so like it's you see blue skies above you,

(56:18):
but there's like no light anywhere, no light anywhere. There's
no clocks in the rooms. No, you never know what
time it is. You never see the outdoors. You're all
isolated in these little corridors leading from one shop to
another with slot machines all along the way. You're flying
back soon, are you looking forward to not being in
a maze of lights designed to bewilder and and slowly

(56:40):
damage you enough that you sit down at a craps table,
very excited to see a real tree it's not a
palm tree. Very excited to like touch grass because there's
no grass in Las Vegas. No, it's actually I think
illegal in a lot of parts of the city to
have like a grass lawn, which is so one of
the things. So obviously Vegas is in an objective sense,

(57:01):
incredibly wasteful. A huge amount of resources get poured into
what is effectively just for gaming. But um, the other thing,
like another thing that you have to hold in your
mind when you recognize that, is that of all of
the states in the Southwest utilizing the very limited water
resources there. If I'm not mistaken, because it was just
reading an article about this, Nevada is the one state
that has reduced its water usage while it's grown by

(57:23):
like three quarters of a million people. Um, so it
contains multitudes. And also Nevada, like Vegas, is where the
I'm spacing on the name right now. But basically you
have all of these different states in the Southwest that
are all kind of coming together to try to figure
out how to deal with the fact that uh lake

(57:43):
meat water levels are getting lower in the Colorado River
is disappearing in some areas, and it is the only
thing that makes life out here possible on the scale
that it currently exists on um And a couple of
months before c e S they had their big meeting
in Las Vegas in order to talk about how to
try and deal with the calamitous water situation. So it

(58:04):
is very much this city that is like filled with
simulacra of the past um which it uses to try
to hack your brain to get you to stay up
for four days in a row, gambling and spending tens
of thousands of dollars. And it also because it's the
best place to hold a convention, and in a very
technical sense, like it is the most prepared for a

(58:25):
large convention. They they this city can handle a hundred
and fifty two hundred thousand people coming in overnight and
needing places to stay and needing infrastructure in order. So
it's also where a lot of things about the future
get decided, which is when you spend enough time walking.
It's kind of horrified the fact that important decisions get

(58:46):
made in this in this realm of in this place
that's designed to be mind altering. Yeah, it is, it is.
It is crafted. We're not like joking about this. There
are no clocks in the hotel rooms, like the casinos
are crafted to damage your perception of time. Um so
I don't know that somebody should maybe look into that.
It's I do like when you're talking about like meat.
Just a great example of the overall vibes of Las

(59:09):
Vegas is as as lake meat is drying up, we
keep finding bodies inside the lake like bodies have been
there a long time, bodies of people who had alternate
ideas about how Vegas should look. I mean a lot
of them were probably yeah, well, walk walk to the Venetian,
walked through Caesar's Palace. Uh, they had they had some
nice vapor wave lieds displays outside. Briefly went into the

(59:34):
Paris one, which was honestly, I think they Paris handled
the handled the fake sky the worst, because not only
was this the sky painted ceiling so low, the the
bottom part of the Eiffel Tower just stops where the
ceiling stops. That they didn't even try. They don't even
try to continue the illusion. It's just just as a
is a hard stop. Um. We wrote a roller coaster.

(59:58):
We we went to New York. We we went to
the Little blurry for me because you were so drunk.
But I just bought. I dumped the the attempt at
like buying drinks from places and just got a handle
of Woodford Reserve, which allegedly you can mix into one
of the th HC Pina coladas that they have, and

(01:00:19):
allegedly it's pretty good time. We we went to Rainforest Cafe.
I unfortunately bought. You got sicker than I did eating
Rainforest Cafe. The I I bought, I bought this volcano
cake and it was quite regrettable. Um. And then we
walked over to the New York themed casino inside Las Vegas.
So if you want a city themed casino inside the

(01:00:40):
city that you're in, you can go there. Just pretty
different city creating microcostums within microcostums. You're just like the nesting,
nesting all the way down. And I, in an effort
to make both me and Robert vomit, we went on
a roller coaster we've barely survived. That did feel like
a very dangerous roller that was we were so close

(01:01:03):
to vomiting everywhere. Just yeah, it was a good time.
That was pretty fun. I felt great so that I
just felt people would enjoy your your your first Vegas experience,
and of course you stayed at Circus Circus, which we
just walked through earlier today, one last time, one final,
one final debt to see a family of four with
thirty eight thousand dollars. I mentioned losing that Circus Circus, unbelieve,

(01:01:29):
the worst casino in the world. I think, in order
to segue into our next topic. It's pretty I think
Las Vegas is probably one of the most heavily surveilled
cities in the United States. It would be hard to
find one with more, especially when you're on the Strip.
Obviously there's a lot of lots of I have family
who live here and they can go years without visiting
the fucking strip because it's terrible. Um. But another another

(01:01:52):
and so kind of in a similar sense. At CES,
there was a lot of stuff about surveillance, a lot
of stuff about, uh, you know, collect different new innovative
ways to collect data on you and your and your
appliances and what's in your home. Um, do we want
to stalk start by talking about the the almdipure of

(01:02:15):
of surveillance tech. Yeah. Um, there was actually just an
article in the Washington Post about this about how unsafe
quite a bit of it is. And one of the
things that you may have caught in some of your news,
because this was probably one of the more viral stories,
is that there was a lot of piss based technology,
a lot of p analyzation. Vivu had a thing there

(01:02:35):
was there was at least three different p test kits
that were on the show floor. I think some of
them won't some some of the CS Innovation Awards where
basically you can analyze what's in your urine. Yeah, and
these are always framed as like it can let you
give you confirmation if you have a U t I,
it can help people who have all these different illnesses,
it can help diabetics UM. And I'm sure there's a

(01:02:58):
degree to which that's true. But I asked the Vivu
lady and I didn't speak with the There was another
called um you scan by with things and and you
you scans urine sensor analyzes hormone levels in urine. That's interesting, Yeah,
which is is why it won some awards and also
why a bunch of folks, including Consumer Reports UM put

(01:03:21):
out like a warning about it, saying like we shouldn't
be celebrating this. This is an incredibly dangerous product because
it all is going to your phone, the data is
being collected digitally, and if, for example, you are in
a state that heavily restricts women's access to reproductive healthcare, uh,
there is literally nothing stopping the law enforcement or the
government of those states from demanding all of that data

(01:03:45):
be handed over, potentially even in real time. There's absolutely
nothing stopping that. And the company has already said they'll
comply with law enforcement with government requests, um. And there's
they don't have any kind of plan for the fact
that they are creating a way to surveile people's bodies
um for the government. Um. And when I talked to
the one of the representatives of Vivu, which is another

(01:04:07):
one of these urine companies that I don't believe detect
your hormone levels, but but does is generating a lot
of data about your body, a lot of biometric data.
And the most she would give me is that the
data is encrypted, which great, that that's a fancy word
for saying, yeah, we have it. We are. We are
sitting here right after one of the most damaging data

(01:04:32):
hacks of all time, which has h it was was
last pass it was one of the massive password collecting
apps where you basically like centralize all your passwords behind
one and remember and like it. A lot of people
are exposed as a result of that, And um, I
just think that, like the this show, such a massive

(01:04:55):
part of it was we have we are debuting devices
that will allow you to monitor front parts of your
body at all times and get real time biometric data
your body in your house and centralizing all this data
about you were talking about ring in one place, because
that's the same thing with like smart homes and smart
appliances were very popular. Smart cars were a very big thing.
Um We're talking about like smart cities were another big

(01:05:17):
thing for just other ways to centralize all of the
data about what you own, where it is, um and
how to effectively provide advertising to get you to buy more.
There's an attempt being made by Republicans in Oklahoma right
now to make it criminal two do gender transition if
you are under twenty six years of age. There's no
reason why a product like this couldn't be used to

(01:05:39):
determine whether or not somebody is illegally taking hormones in
a state where they are attempting to restrict trans people
like it's this is all We're not just being like
fuddy duddies. These are all very serious implications and there's
zero thought, zero evidence of thought being given to it
with any of the biometric companies. Now, one of the
reasons we talked about that those smart glass um that

(01:06:01):
are for people who are hearing impaired that caption conversations
live around them. One of the reasons I was impressed
by that is that it's all a closed loop. None
of it goes to your smartphone, none of it's broadcast wirely, wirelessly. Um.
It is all on device and none of it is
stored anywhere. And when they said that, that was part
of what convinced me these people understand the responsibility they

(01:06:22):
have delivering a healthcare product. We should move on to
the other part of the Panopticon that we saw and
talk about Ring. Yeah, the ring booth was one of
the more terrifyingly dystopian bits. And it's you know, and
it's describe it for our listeners, well, I mean it's
they basically made like a white Pickett house. Um. And

(01:06:44):
you know, again cs these are massive, massive buildings, and
so they do people can construct a full house in
there and you did, so like you know, there's fake
fake green grass, a nice little fence, this perfect little
ideal at home. And the massive, massive sign above was
like you know, ring keeping, like keeping keeping your neighborhood.
Say if you know like all of all of all

(01:07:05):
of that that type of messaging. UM. The in the
model home they had there was like a dozen cameras
on you know, every all all around the sides, and
multiple cameras on the doors. There's a doorbell camera, peephole camera,
camera on the fence, and one door with three cameras
on the door itself. And I mean ring zoned by Amazon,

(01:07:27):
there was you know, Alexa Alexa assisted ring cameras um
all of the day that gets gets used by law enforcement.
A ring partners like directly with law enforcement to make
data like immediately available and make feeds immediately available. And
the probably the still least thing we saw at the
ring booth was this home security tiny little drone ye

(01:07:50):
so basically they've built and it's weird because the so
the box it comes in looks like a fucking um
de humidifier that I used to have or humidifier that
I used to have in my house it's almost identical. Um,
but it's like this little plastic box and a drone
can take off and fly out of it. Uh. And

(01:08:11):
the drone trains itself on your house, so it knows
how to get around and if somebody it thinks somebody's
breaking in, a person who is effectively like works for Ring,
like an actual human beings sitting in a call center somewhere,
takes control of the drone and can confront someone in
your house. Which I guess there's a potential security benefit there,

(01:08:35):
But also, you are signing up to allow Amazon to
have a random person travel around your home at any
hour of the night in a in a thing they control,
in a little flying machine that they control, and that
I cannot put myself in. That I get, obviously, I
get wanting to have cameras. I don't think it's unreasonable

(01:08:57):
to have security cameras on your home. I even understand
how some people who are not as privacy conscious as
I am could be like, yeah, I don't care if
it's connected to the internet. Um, even though that's not
a thing I like, I can't put myself in the
head of somebody who would want that thing in their house. Yeah,
It's bizarre because obviously there's niche. Like again, they're like
health related. Maybe if you've got like an illness or something,
you might want something like that. Like I can understand

(01:09:18):
how very specific purpose driven needs, but like as a
normal person wanting an Amazon employee to be able to
wander around your home, it seems weird to me. I
mean that's obviously can also all that data getting used
to Amazon can scan your entire house, figera what what
products you buy, you know, what what non Amazon things

(01:09:39):
are inside your home, what types of trends that you're using,
and all that can get used to help get you
to buy more things. That the the one of the
morin Cities parts of like all of the marketing and
some of like the some of like the video commercials
for Ring that we saw, you know, playing on these giant,
giant screens inside is they're they're really trying to also
push the they're trying to push in a normalize using

(01:10:02):
Ring as a part of your everyday life, but for
non security means, like you know, when you're leaving your
grandma's house, you say goodbye to her in her little
ring camera. You know, when you when you're getting to
your friend's house, you do a little funny pranks in
front of their ring camera. It's like it's all these
different ways to make rings seem like this fun and
normal thing to like play with your friends and your
family social, when in reality, look again, security cameras are

(01:10:28):
inherently anti social. It doesn't mean that there aren't good
reasons to have one. And as someone who's been burglarized,
I do understand that, Um it's not bad, but it's
anti social because you are surveilling people because you're worried
about what they might do. That is that is a
fundamentally anti social thing. And so the attempt to like
turn that, the attempt to kind of like merge that

(01:10:49):
into normal family life and to make it like friendly,
is really bad. Yeah. I think that we briefly stopped
by the A d T Booth and this is kind
of this This is kind of similar to the little
drone that we just talked about, but a little bit
more ridiculous. Um, they have at the A d T
booth this home security robot, like six six ft tall

(01:11:14):
robot with uh with like a like like an like
a lc D little face with this big smile on
it and and it's powered or not powered. It is
controlled by you, the owner, by wearing an Oculus headset,
and it has it has rolling feet so it can

(01:11:34):
move around by rolling. But it's like six ft tall.
It has two arms, massive smiling face. And if if
you have you know, your headset with you and you
think someone's breaking into your home, you can put this
on and control this robot to like chase them out.
And I was overhearing that a d T guys talking
about it, and they're like, yeah, this is even. This
is even just like a great deterrence. Like imagine you're

(01:11:57):
if someone's breaking into your home and then they see
a massive smile like robot rolling towards you. I would
run away very quickly, like like like what this This
thing has to cost like tens of tens of thousands
of dollars, and like this is what you're doing to
feel like you're really just spend that much money to

(01:12:17):
to create this sense of safety. Really really, this is
this is what you're doing. You're you're you're getting a
robot that gets powered by a Facebook headset so you
can walk around your house in a rolling robot to
make sure no one's gonna come you know, take random
shipped from your house. Yeah, when like number one, Um,

(01:12:38):
anyone who would do that is the kind of person
that needs to be have things taken from them. Um.
But number two like if you're actually concerned for your
actual safety, and again I think that's perfectly valid. Um.
None of these drones, this robot of security theater, it's
not theater. It's easy to to like damage, it's easy.

(01:13:01):
You can knockna it's it's a three wheels you knock
it over. It can't get up, put on block so
that you're completely covered, knock it over, and then proceed
to rob the house. It's not useful. It's it's it's
just a security alarm at that point. It's it's it's
wild and like and people will find ways to hack
them and stuff. You know, you can't hack a well
trained guard dog, which also will cost you tens of

(01:13:22):
thousands of dollars less, and we'll love you like a
Doberman pincher will kill your enemies if they break into
your home, and loves you like the same way. You know,
there was people getting into Alexa machines. A few years
ago there was Alexa Alexa machines listening and sending info
when they weren't supposed to do. There was a mass
there was a pretty big incident actually in Portland a

(01:13:43):
few years ago of of Alexa listening in too when
it was wasn't supposed to and and and like listening
to different conversations and trying trying to finish conversational cues. Um.
You know, it's only a matter of time before someone
figures out how to control, how to remotely control one
of these A D T robots and you have something
like rolling around in your house that you don't control anymore.
Like it's yeah, there are it's there are always vulnerabilities

(01:14:06):
in these things and they always get hacked. Um. And
more to the point, like well, if you have some
sort of security drone like your ring drone, there's no
way like again, Amazon would comply with law enforcement requests.
There's nothing that says law enforcement, if it was part
of an investigation, could not use this technology to surveil
you in real time. UM. So I don't like that. UM,

(01:14:31):
not my favorite. And while we're when we're talking about surveillance, Uh,
we can't ignore our good friends at palent here. Now,
if you haven't been paying attention to the surveillance industry.
Palent Here is a company that exists to collect data
and build machine solutions and machine learning solutions UM to

(01:14:53):
surveil people and to help equipment like drones, targeting and
whatnot work better. They're an intelligence company. There's like lots
of systems. They do systems. It's not like they make
a single product. They help build systems to collect data
and enable governments and militaries to make decisions off of
that data. That is like the thing that they do

(01:15:13):
primarily systems analysts tracking. I mean, like what one of
the one of the things we saw was them you know,
analyzing homes to data around like water conservation. Right there,
they're trying to put a variety of their usage not
just kill brown people, but but they do a lot
of the primary the center of their booth was this
massive military truck with a huge armored box on the

(01:15:35):
back that was filled with computers specifically to collect data
and to um like do command and control for drone
fleets in theater um And one of the things you
know when you see a vehicle of that size and
it was very massive, is that well, this is not
this is intended either to be very far back from

(01:15:55):
the front, which which mitigates some of the uses of it,
or it is intended to be used in an area
in which the enemy does not have air power. Um.
But so again the kind of places where you're just
bombing them, right, like theaters like Yemen where the rebels
have minimal ability to do something like bomb a gigantic

(01:16:15):
truck that's a target. Um, but you have kind of
unrestricted ability to do stuff like drone strike school buses,
which has happened repeatedly there. Um. We had a couple
of conversations with the good people at Palanteer. Uh they
were I don't I think we kind of figured out
they were primarily they're looking for talent, because they were

(01:16:37):
looking for people to recruit, looking for different things to
integrate into their systems. Yeah, they would not show much
of what they had. Everything inside the van itself was
uh classified. Here would you hear me my phone? Find
that person's name? But everything in there was was classified
whenever we started talking, especially the first time we were there,

(01:16:58):
because I started asking some pretty specific questions about what
was actually in that and how it worked and how
it was different from current drone command and control solutions.
And there was a very specific woman with Palenteer who,
no matter who I was talking to, would come up
behind me and kind of direct conversation. And I think
also was there to listen to the answers that were

(01:17:18):
being provided to me and stop people from saying things
on her team if they weren't supposed to say them. Um.
There were a couple of occasions in which I asked, Hey,
can we check this thing out on the inside, and
we were told no, it was classified. No one else
could get in. You have to you have to gain
permission from the army. Yeah. I definitely saw some individuals exited,

(01:17:43):
but they were Palenteer people. But then the next day
we came back UM, and I watched a woman exit
the vehicle UM and a man from Palenteer with her,
but the woman was not from Palenteer. Now, people wear
badges at c e s, so their names are on
display and what they do was on display. Although it's
easy to look this person up, and I saw she
had a badge as a speaker. Her name was Mary

(01:18:06):
or sorry, her name was Melody Hildebrand. UM, So I
I googled Melody Hildebrand because I wanted to know she
does not work for Palenteer. What is she doing inside
Palentteer's giant class classified robot murder box? Uh Melody is
the president of Blockchain Creative Labs and the chief information
security officer for the Fox company, for the you know

(01:18:28):
that Fox corporation. So it looked like by the way
her her Twitter says, uh c I s O Fox
Web three Engineering, cybersecurity, former war gamer, lover of farm animals,
so that's cool. Um. And yeah, over here we've got
her retweeting a post about and a rill, which is UM.

(01:18:50):
One of the Peter Teel companies, like Palenteer, is raising
one point four eight billion in their Series E funding. UM.
This new funding will enable us to accelerate R and
DED and bring new cutting edge autonomous defense capabilities to market.
Now I don't know, I wonder what they mean by
the word defense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's also pro n

(01:19:12):
f T. So that's good. I'm gonna I'm gonna tweet
to her in a little bit. Um. But no, it
was it was very clear that there was you know,
there was pr people on the ground to make sure
that the line of questioning if they were too if
people were asking questions about their surveillance tech, about this
big Titan truck, which is what it's called Titan um
that there's only very very specific answers, and like they

(01:19:35):
were not there to talk to journalists. They were not
there to talk to media. They were there to recruit
people to you know, become more capable at their surveillance tech.
That's that was very clear. Uh. They were also right
across the street, right across the hall from the Fantastic
Robos and Transformers robots. So on the on one side

(01:19:56):
you have a fun optimist Prime robot that transforms, the
other side you have the rolling metal deathcage. So that
was that was that was most of Palentteer. They had
this um sky box, which was this box that had
like encrypted communications technology, uh, drones and drone drone piloting
technology and like um, you know, a military computer that

(01:20:20):
all in this little tiny box that they can drop
into people who are you know, basically drop into people
who are in trouble. Yeah, they were, they were. They
were building it as basically number one. It would be
for it could be for special forces teams. It has
like a laptop in there, it has potentially several drones
in there, um and it has like a bunch of
specially modified field cameras you could set up surveillance on

(01:20:43):
an area um and and those cameras kind of work
with a machine learning algorithm to do stuff like try
and identify where landmines are. And again like these are
the stuff that's problematic primarily about palanteers. It's it's data collecting,
its surveillance, and the fact that we know that drone
warfare is generally pretty fucked up and has an extremely

(01:21:04):
high civilian casualty rate and is used in a lot
of theaters obviously, not in a lot of theaters where
they are primarily just massacring people either fighting for their
freedom or trying to survive. This is the problem with it. Obviously,
all of this tech will also be used in generally
positive things, like, for example, dropping a box like this
into the hands of some Ukrainian special forces guys to

(01:21:26):
to integrate them into a more advanced command and control
networks so they have better access to tactical data like
is not a thing. I don't specifically have a problem
with that application. The problem is more broadly palent heer Um.
Do you want to do do you want to briefly
explain in case people are not Lord of the Rings fans.

(01:21:47):
So again, these are all companies owned by Peter Thiel,
who is a self described fascist, believes in ending democracy,
believes that democracy and freedom are not compatible because freedom
he defined mind specifically as the ability of people with
lots of money to not have any kind of restrictions
on their behavior or what they can compel other people
to do. Peter Teal owns Palenteer and andy rill Um.

(01:22:11):
The Palanteer Palenteer both of those are names from Lord
of the Rings, and in Lord of the Rings, the
Palenteer was an orb given by the Big Bad Guy
Sawon to one of his lackeys, a wizard named Saramon,
so that he could surveil any part of Middle Earth
he wanted in order to send his armies to crush
the free peoples of the world. Like that is that

(01:22:33):
is literally what this company is named after. It is
the bad guy surveillance tech to use the Orokai against
the free people of Middle Earth. It is it is
specifically something that only evil people use. Um, It's it's
pretty cool that the whole company is named after. And
there were all these very nice, polite people in uh

(01:22:55):
Patagonia style vests with Palenteer logos stick on them, standing around. UM.
Happy to answer any of your questions. Uh. Anyway, I'm
I'm curious as to why Melody Hildebrandt was inside there.
What the chief information security officer of Fox would want
to do with one of those vans. That is curious.
That is curious, she's on Twitter. I did reach out

(01:23:19):
to her, but we that We also saw a few
of the robot dogs. We saw the Boston the Dynamics one,
which was very impressive and how it moves. Um. Then
we saw one much more cheaper um uh model of
of a robot dog that had not as great mobility,
but it seemed to be more more suited towards the

(01:23:39):
types of the types of style of dogs that were
that we've seen law enforcements start to buy. Um, the
cheaper ones with less flexibility, more mounts to attach you know,
things to the top of the robot which you don't
really see you with the Boston Dynamics ones. They do
not like mounting extra things on. But the the other
robot dog we saw had this little arm that it

(01:24:00):
was that it was that that had attached to the
top that was in the robotics section, pretty close to Palentteer.
That one was much less impressive than because we saw
both robot dogs and these are if you've see video
of a robot dog that people are freaking about out
about online, these are those robot dogs. UM. The one
we saw with the arm on, it did not move.

(01:24:21):
It was number one, controlled directly by a guy with
a controller. It was not autonomous and it didn't move
very smoothly. The sitting in front of the Boston Dynamic
Spot spot and watching it move was really surre It
was number one. We both talked about this Garrison. It's
like watching c g I in real life because it's

(01:24:42):
it's so fine tuned. Yeah, it moves like a living thing,
but clearly is not UM and it moves like a
living thing enough that it is not it's not an
uncanny valley. That's not the right way to describe it now,
because the movements are kind of perfect. It's just not
it's alive. It's almost it's it's not uncanny valley. It's
almost like instead, it's like too perfect. Yeah, it's it's

(01:25:05):
just so fine tuned. It's it was pretty it was
pretty impressive to watch. It was very impressive, and it
it's become obvious to me that like, one of the
things that absolutely is going on at Boston Dynamics is
that they feel there is there is an it is
important to them as a business. Some of this may
just be that they this is a personal challenge for
a lot of these engineering guys, but I suspect they

(01:25:25):
also see this as valuable to their business to replicate
physical emotionality. And when I talk about that, when you like,
watch a dog, right, you can tell a dog's emotions
from the way that the dog moves, because that's how
dogs work. Um, the robot dog expresses physical emotion and
obviously it doesn't feel emotion, but it physically expresses emotion

(01:25:46):
in a similar way to a dog, like curiosity. They're
very good at mimicking a curious dog in the way
it's body language works, which is really wild. Yeah, that
would be one of the things I did not like. Um.
I mean, it's impressive. A lot of this stuff is
objectively impressive. Most of the other robotics we saw there

(01:26:07):
was not that impressive. Like I saw this this robot
bartender that was making boba but it but it didn't
know it didn't know how, or it wasn't able to
actually deliver the boba onto the secondary robot that delivers
the boba. So this this this one robot with arms
made made the drink, a human picked it up, inspected it,
then put it on a secondary robot which then delivered

(01:26:29):
the trick. And I and this technology, I mean I
I was eating at a at a at a Burmese
place in Portland a few months ago where they were
using this same food delivery robot system. It's not it's
not brand new, it's just becoming cheaper and more people
are trying to like make it a thing. And there
was so there was a lot of those types of things,

(01:26:50):
a lot of like R two D two on Jabba's
sale barge, like delivering drinks style style robots that are autonomous,
like they do move themselves around. They they don't need
a remote controller, but they're not that impressive. But that
that that was like the majority of stuff in the
robotics section was that there was a few other kind
of smaller rolling robots that were there assist like elderly people,

(01:27:14):
like if if someone falls down, this kind of goes
around and will help you. And yeah, I don't feel
well that specific stuff. I don't feel like well suited
to describe, like to guess as to how well it
would work. UM. But I think more broadly talking about
autonomous tech because that was one of the biggest product
categories at SEA as it was all over the place. Um,

(01:27:35):
there were a lot of cars and a lot of
companies doing autonomous software and light our solutions for cars.
I consider that all to be vaporware. There's a great
deal of evidence here, but fully autonomous vehicles UM in
the way that some of these companies are advertising is
simply not They simply do do not exist, do not exist,
and will not exist. And we did talk to a
couple of people. So again for the stuff that's very

(01:27:57):
real about autonomous tech, there's things like driver assistance, so
for like truck drivers, to allow them to strain and
stress themselves less while driving and to help um make
certain things like backing up and parking that can be
very difficult in certain environments safer by having more cameras
and machine assistance. That makes sense. And one of the
people who worked at one of those companies said to us, UM, yeah,

(01:28:19):
there's no such thing as autonomous trucks or cars, like,
they don't exist outside of very tightly controlled conditions. All
we are trying to do is make truck driving safer
and less stressful in the driver, which sounds great. Um.
I mean, obviously there's problems with the way the trucking
industry exists outside of that, but that sounds again like

(01:28:40):
one of those products meant to actually mitigate worker fatigue
and discomfort and potentially makes it safer. So I'm on
board with that kind of stuff. But um, other like
an autonomous and smart tech that we like, like like
smart cars, um e V like electronic vehicles and auto
of stuff. There was some stuff at the John Deer

(01:29:02):
booth which it was pushing towards automation like we talked
about in the last episode. And then also they're they're
evy tractor just launched, which so John Deer, if you're
not aware, has had a series of long running legal battles,
particularly with farmers in Ukraine, over the fact that they
do not want it to be possible or legal for

(01:29:22):
you to repair your tractor if you're a farmer. Farmers
have previously in history often repaired and fixed and modified
their vehicles. Um, this is both necessary if a thing breaks,
you can't always get it back to a manufacturing facility
in time. And a lot of farmers in the middle
of nowhere. A lot of farms are in the middle
of nowhere, which is where food comes from. And you
also like, you can't wait, you can't just be like, well,

(01:29:44):
let's just put harvesting off for a week or two.
That that is a problem. Um. John Deere sees that
as a severe threat to their profits, and they have
fought viciously in courts UH to make it, to try
to make it illegal to repair your own devices. Um.
They have lost a lot of those fights in the
United States, and to its credit, the Biden administration has

(01:30:05):
taken a strong stance in favor of the right to repair.
And what we saw from John Deere at this CS
was a bunch of very impressive autonomous products that just
coincidentally will also make it completely impossible to repair your tractors,
like specifically with the new EV tractor that launched. So
much of it is a computer that it is impossible

(01:30:27):
to repair unless you work for John Deere. Like we
when we asked them, like, hey, you know, if if
this thing breaks down. How how would a farmer go
about trying to fix this since it is a lot
of it is like not it's it's it's not like
motors and stuff from like a classic car. It is
it is like it is computer driven. Um, and they're
like they just can't. It's just it's just so complicated

(01:30:50):
that an average person cannot repair this like at all.
It's just it just it's impossible. So that's the way
they are gonna try to it around this, uh, this
right to repair issue. Yeah, we will just and the
and it's being done under the guys of well you
you know, by having this much more advanced we can
use a lot less pesticide, which is better for the soil,

(01:31:11):
better for everything, um, using less carbonius and less carbon
the farmer will have more time because the vehicle can
handle this autonomously. So that's eight hours the farmer you know,
gets to to spend doing something else and um, all
of this stuff that's kind of meant to distract from
like well, I guess yeah, maybe he'll have more time,
but also substantially less autonomy and be completely dependent upon

(01:31:33):
the John Deer Corporation in order to produce the food
that human beings need to survive. UM. I'm also gonna
point it out there and say I started this by
saying that, like, one of the major lawsuits was between
John Deer and a lot of a group of Ukrainian farmers. Um,
the same farmers presumably who were towing a lot of
Russian ordinance away with the John Deer tractors. UM. I

(01:31:54):
don't know that it's that kind of stuff. And one
of the things that I think looking at a lot
of this autonomous tech, some of it's great, some of
it could will save lives. Some of it Rather than
like reducing the need for humans to do work that
it would be good if they didn't have to do,
we'll do just what you recognize, create an even less

(01:32:15):
human job for a human, like taking drinks from a
robot that makes drinks to a robot that carries them
to people. Because we we just couldn't figure out that
interstitial step. So your job as a human being, as
a as a member of of of a species that
spent millions of years evolving to be capable of creating

(01:32:36):
nearly anything, your job will be to take a drink
from one robot and set it down at another I
mean we we The thing is like that we already
had that same idea in factories, Like as as factories
have gone towards being more made by machines, they're still
as factory workers who need to do all this little
in between steps. So we're taking this factory model and
now just applying it to customer service doing the same thing,

(01:32:58):
trying to automize as much as pop simile and then
only rely on humans for all of these little in
between steps that for some reason the robots and all
of the autonomous texts isn't very good at yet or
you know, isn't really focused on completing. And that's that's
the main thing that that humans are going to be
are going to be doing in the in the autonomous
Boba store that's gonna come to your neighborhood in like

(01:33:21):
ten years. Speaking of bad things about the future or
at least the present, let's talk about Elon Musk's celebrity
death tunnel. So, if you're not aware Elon, one of
the companies, actually the company he started that is based
on his own legitimate ideas is the boring company UM,
which makes big tubes underground, uh so that people can

(01:33:43):
drive their individual cars through them and avoid traffic. Now.
Elon Musk is a man who takes his private jet
between airports in the same city in order to avoid traffic.
There is nothing he hates more than the idea of
being a normal person or being at all connected to
the lives of regular people, which is why you get
a private jet UM when you could just like fly

(01:34:04):
first class or something, because even if you're flying for
first class, you're still going to an airport and through
security around like the poor the poors. UM. Elon has
been vociferous about his hatred of of traffic um transit,
but also he hates public transit because you might sit
next to a serial killer. UM. So his solution is

(01:34:24):
dig holes underground and let people drive there. And Uh.
Most of the cities that have attempted to have bording
tunnels completed have been ghosted by the company. It is
kind of a con um. But they did build one
in Las Vegas and Garrison and I used it, uh
and it took us from one side of the convention
center to the other. Um. We potentially, if we had

(01:34:47):
made the most use of this service, we we might
have gotten at a five to seven minutes that we
didn't have to walk just just you and me alone
inside the tesla, not having to be around other people
in in the in the RGB tunnel if you're in
One of the things Lama has literally said is like, well,
if you take public transit, you might sit next to

(01:35:07):
some serial killer. The way this tunnel thing works is
you tell them whether you're going east or west, and
they put you in a tesla that some dude is
driving that you don't know, and then they fill the
tesla with other other people that you also don't know.
You're still sitting next to stranger and you're in this
this tube that is lit up the same way a
pair of like Razor gaming headphones are lit up um

(01:35:30):
and you just slowly stuck in this tunnel with two
random people who you don't know. I horrible, like one
thing I feel like, obviously if you're in like New
York or something or Berlin. I've been in a lot
of cities where I've traveled on the underground, and I
don't feel scared traveling in the underground because those have
existed for a very long time, and so we know

(01:35:52):
what happens when there's floods and when there's fires, and
there's a lot of systems built, which is why you
don't generally hear about a shipload of people dying in
sub way. I used an extremely safe way to travel.
This tunnel is filled with vehicles that take we know
about fifty five gallons of water to put out a
fire when the battery catches fire, and the batteries on

(01:36:12):
Tesla's we also know, catch fire with some regularity. And
you are trapped in a tunnel. Uh, there is sometimes traffic.
Near the end of our ride, we wound up in
a line of like twenty Tesla's and that did not
feel good because you just you can see nothing but
Tesla's ahead of you and behind you, and you're surrounded
entirely by this tight claustrophobic wall with absolutely no emergency

(01:36:36):
exit's visible. So in fire suppression systems visible, I don't
know what they have installed, but you can't see anything.
You cannot see a thing. All you see is the
Razor r GB gaming mouse. And then as as so,
as soon as we got off this this thing that
was supposed to take us to like the central area,
it just took us to the other side of the
convention center in order to actually get to where we

(01:36:56):
needed to go, we just use the monorail, the thing
that's been there for a long time, and it's fine.
And mono rails are also not great ideas for a
lot of reasons. But it got us right to the
other end of the strip very quickly, conveniently, cleanly. It
took cost five dollars um. So good work, Ellen. I
love the tunnel. I hope you're proud, ringing, ringing indoors.

(01:37:19):
I can't wait for there to be tunnels like that
in every city. Don't worry, they want the boring company
is not a real company. Um yeah, anything else care?
I mean we already talked about the digital health stuff,
which was a very big part of the ES. UM. Yeah,

(01:37:40):
that's I think that's most of what we want to
touch on for now. Okay, well that's gonna just about
do it for all of us here at whatever show
this is. UM we will at some point have some
stuff based on Oh yeah, actually, let's let's in by
I went in by talking about Um, I guess another
good thing, but it's a good thing that relates to

(01:38:02):
the bad things. Um. We ran across a booth on
our way out that on the first day I had
seen and I had thought was just UM like a
I had assumed it was like a GPS solution or
something because the company was called off grid UM, and
it's the off grid phone. We talked to the founder

(01:38:22):
of the company, Ben Wilson, who was just a guy who,
as he put it, does not like that. Uh. We
consistently seated more and more control over our data and
over our communications to large companies and governments and whoever
the funk else gets access to these massive and or
massive not anonymous data sets, and wanted to build a

(01:38:46):
thing for himself that could eventually replace his smartphone. UM.
So he and the company he started have produced these
their dumb phones at this moment that context and can
call and do encrypted end to end communication. They also,
if you are off grid, like in the middle of nowhere,
and you and your friends have these, you can communicate
through text through your phone to each other even if

(01:39:06):
there is no network. Right. The phones themselves do like
make a network. They communicate just just to each other,
just to each other. You can do don't connect to
the why their internet? Yeah, which is really cool and
potentially extremely useful. This is this is UM there's a
number of applications that this could have. Garrison you mentioned
that the Atlanta Forest Defense people could benefit from something
like this because it will effectively they're about two hundred

(01:39:27):
bucks apiece. Anyone who can afford a few of these,
you can set up your own secure comms network for
wherever you are and whatever you're doing, and and the other.
The other feature of this is that you can set
it onto something called sheep mode, where basically, if if
if you suspect that that someone who you don't want
to look at your phone, whether that's law enforcement, whether

(01:39:48):
that's other random random other people, you can set it
to this mode that when they when they either seize
or gain gain possession of this device, all of the
the the data is immediately wiped before they can actually
open up the phone. Um and they will open it up,
they will see this fake profile that called the called

(01:40:10):
not fake profile, but like this, this alternate profile called
it called the sheep profile, which shows not not the
stuff that not the stuff that you were using the
food for. You can then just be blank or you
could like stick other numbers in there. You could have
like a series of fake text but and then and
but if you ever regain possession of the phone, you're
able to put in UM a special a special password

(01:40:32):
that will it will send the data. It'll it'll it'll
send the data through encryption back onto this device. So
you still have the things that you would have lost.
And obviously there's a degree of like you would have
to have some trust for the company, yes, which says
like and Ben says, like, we are attempting to do this.
He was very open about the fact that that they

(01:40:54):
have the phones, we saw them, like some of this
stuff is still getting built out. It is it is
is still in development. They're still figuring out but for
ways to keep the servers secure, to protect the servers
from subpoenas from the American government and from other from
other governments, like there's this this is still something that
is being worked on. Uh. It was just one of
the you know, we we see a lot of like
like a lot of lofty promises and very very little

(01:41:17):
thing to show for this. This is one of the
things that had actually you know, just this one guy
that had you know, some pretty some pretty relatable promises
UM and and it's very open about what they have
done and what they haven't done. And what they're trying
to do now. He he he was, he was, He
was not bullshitting. He wasn't trying to over emphasize what
it can do UM or what I can do at
the moment, like it's it's still being worked on. But

(01:41:38):
this is one of the one of the one of
the few, one of the future things that we will
be that we will want to follow up on. And
I think we're going to try to have been on
the show in the near future because they're going to
be doing a Kickstarter to fund one of the next
phases of production of this UM. But you can you
can look them up yourself. You can buy the version
one of their product, which is on sale and functional
now at off grid phone own dot com. Spelled the

(01:42:02):
way you would expect UM. So yeah, check out off
grid phone dot com. We found it interesting, will be
following up on that. Um. Ben gave me very strong
the good kind of libertarian vibes. Reminded me of a
couple of people I've I used to hang out with
in my youth, and it's very much is that kind
of like product of just a cranky guy who knows

(01:42:23):
tech and is angry at all of the data being
sucked up and all of the data that we just
kind of agree together we're going to give away two
unsavory characters because life in the modern world is kind
of impossible if you don't do that. No, I'm like
one of one of the things on his signs was
something along the lines of don't let the pope po

(01:42:45):
look at your phone. So like it's yeah, it is
somebody who gets it. Yeah, yeah, we liked we liked
ben Um. So yeah, that is that is the dark
side of the future of tech, as this year's CES
has unveiled it to us. Um. You know, this is
the also the conclusion of our reporting directly on the
convention itself. We will have some reporting in the future

(01:43:07):
that will be influenced by things we found here that
we're going to continue to look up. But um and
and we should have we should have some of the
audio that we pulled from inside the convention center that
should be edited together sometime in the near future. Talk
to Paler. That'll be fine. Yes, As as a little
kind of documentary, little daily diary of of of what
we were actually doing on the ground. So that's being
worked on. But this is this is as we're recording

(01:43:29):
right now. This is the final day of CES. We
are almost done. We have we are both very sore.
Is surprisingly hard on your body. We have to enter
Eureka Park one more time, but then we will be finished,
and then we'll have to upload this and and edit
edit the rest of the stuff we've made into into
a little piece for you. So that is that that
is still coming, you say, we, which was very generous.

(01:43:50):
You're going to be doing that. Me and Daniels I
will not be editing anything. Um. I don't know how
to anyway. Go to Hell. I love you. Hagel remarks

(01:44:17):
somewhere that all great world historical facts and personages appear,
so to speak twice you forgot to add the first
time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Welcome to Nick.
It happened here the podcast where when we last left
Jayerree Bolsonaro, he had locked himself in the presidential mansion,
turned off the lights, and refused to leave or talk

(01:44:38):
to anyone. Now, Bolsonaro has returned to his ancestral home
hospital in Orlando, where he's been admitted for abdominal pain,
joining me to discuss maybe the first man in history
to be his own Napoleon. The third is James. Hi, man,
this is I'm very much looking forward to this. Oh god.

(01:45:00):
I okay, So for for those of you who I
don't know somehow have missed this. I I woke up
on Sunday and ten minutes later this was happening, and
I was like, well, okay, I guess I'm canceling my
dinner plans were doing this instead. Yeah, I think Marx

(01:45:20):
could have added to that quote and then as fast
again and then for a third time as fast. Yeah.
We really, we really, we really have sort of left
the tragedy cycle and on now just in the forest
over and over and over again. Yeah, we kind of
need a new word for what keeps happening because it's
not it's not really a coup and it's certainly not
a revolution. It's just like an extreme reactionary tantrum. Yeah,

(01:45:42):
I mean, I kind of like storming the capital because
it is what they do. But then yeah, I don't know,
like I'm upset that everyone calls it insurrectionism or insurrectionist
because it's like they're not like insurrectionary reactionary is like
a power. Yeah, It's like, like I think like auto
who is closer. But the problem with COO is that

(01:46:02):
coop implies that the military is actually cooperating, which it isn't. Yeah,
and that's why they always failed. Yeah, we're going to
get into that more in a bit, but yeah, okay, So,
so the thing that has actually happened is on Sunday,
supporters of of UH former former Brazilian president Jay Bilsonaro,

(01:46:23):
who I fled the country to Orlando. I sacked the
Plaza of the Three Powers in Brazil, which is the
home of the basically the buildings are the three branches
of governments, and unlike in the US, they sacked all
of them. They stored their presidential mansion, they stormed Congress,
they stormed the Supreme Court, and then having seized control

(01:46:44):
of the buildings, as cops either sat around joking with him,
which is actively walked them into the building. Like there
is a video of a procession of Bolsonaro supporters with
just like they're they're all walking in a line towards
the plaza and there's just like two cop cars like
in the middle of the thing driving with them like
it's wild. There are cups taking selfies of them, taking

(01:47:06):
selfies yeah, like I that that one that was the
one in particular that was like, I feel like that
goes slightly above and beyond even what was happening with
with the American cops. Like that was some Yeah, yeah,
it's okay. So they get there, they do that, they

(01:47:27):
do the thing where they grab metal stuff and they
break the windows and then they break in and you know,
they they do classic January six stuff. Um, they take pictures.
There's one picture that I found that's I think it's
in the Supreme Court. That's a picture of someone like
you can't see their face. It's just them squatting on

(01:47:48):
a like facing backwards, squatting on it on a filing
cabinet like fully butt out about take a dump. It's wild. Yeah,
it's just what democracy lived like yeah, and shifting on
a finding cabinet and government office. Yeah. Okay, so like
they this this. They don't have a great plan here. Um.

(01:48:11):
The thing that they do is that so they all
do this. They break in, they like break stuff, they
like take random stuff. Um, and then they a whole
bunch of people sit down on the ground and sing
the national anthem, uh, waiting for the army to show up.
Because they think that when the army shows up, the
army is going to join them, and said, the army
shows up and arrest them all. There's some people who

(01:48:32):
try to fight the police. Uh they beat up a
horse cop, which I think is funny because apparently this
is just every single one of these Now someone beats
up a horse cop. Um. But you know, by bye
bye bye. By the end of Sunday, like it's all
over the government forces. We take the plaza. People try
to fight the police, but they lose really badly, and

(01:48:53):
you know, okay, so obviously there's a reason why I
read that versus strategy a second time. Was first line
to start this, like, okay, the January six comparisons start
fast and get harder, which is this happened literally on
January eight, like two days after the American I mean

(01:49:18):
they stowed the Capitol buildings. But this is something I
think it's kind of important to understand. This is an
even worse plan than the January six plan. So the
January six plan, if people remember this, so crucially, January
six happens while Trump is technically still in office, and
what's going on when when they're showing me the capital
in January six, is that Congress is trying to basically

(01:49:39):
pass power to Joe Biden, right, like they're they're they're
doing the vote to proof the ballot totals from the
the electoral College. Blah blah blah blah blah. But okay,
so this means that you know, when when when when when?
On Jay's on January six, right, Congress was actually in session,

(01:50:00):
so the people who were there actually had a thing
they were trying to do to overturn their results, and
there was like there were people they could have harmed.
There was like they had they had like a goal
kind of it was like seth Abramson. But on the
other side, think it was like constitutional fantasy. Yeah, but
lest yeah, but like I can't believe, you know, like

(01:50:20):
this is the thing about about about what's happening Brazil's
like I genuinely cannot believe that I am being made
to defend the planning capacity of the January six crowd,
like genuinely stunning. But the plan for the plan for
January eighth in Brazil was even worse because Okay, the
day they do this on right, Congress is not in session.

(01:50:43):
The Supreme Court is on holiday and Lulu, the actual
president of Brazil has a already taken power and b
is ins apollo. Yeah, no money is there. Literally, they
stored three abandoned buildings. There was nothing there could they
could tried. It's in milligration was like three days before, right.
It's funny. Louva talked about it in this in his

(01:51:05):
speech where part of like in this speech after after
this happens, is he he has this line about how
like all of these people were already in Brazilia, but
they were too cowardly to face the people who were
there for the inauguration, so instead they waited for everyone
to leave, which is true. It's really funny, And this
is kind of what they always do, right, They always

(01:51:25):
kind of take the easy thing and then grandstand like
like it's a big brave thing that they've done. Like
we see this constantly on the right. Yeah, and you know,
I like, I I think I think it's reasonable to
ask what were they actually trying to do? Um? And
I'm I'm gonna read from the Washington Post. The Washington
Post is talking about um some of the previous attempts

(01:51:47):
to do the same thing. Quote one radicalized Bilsonarista named
George Washington Day Olivaria was what, Yeah, all of the
people involved with this are named like George Washington Olivaria.
It's incredible. Do wow did they did they change their
names or is the whole thing just being a lame

(01:52:09):
part of American conservatives. Well, I mean that's that is like,
like it really like there is a lot of truth
to the analysis that like, like Brazilian fascist culture is
just like the fourth time of Facebook meme isn't passed around,
but this time on what'sapp Like it's it's some it's

(01:52:31):
it's somehow more cringe than than the American stuff. Like
it's port of incredible. But here he was, okay, he was, Yeah,
this guy named George Washington Lavaria was arrested and accused
of planting a bomb beneath a bus at the Brazilia airport.
In a statement to police, he said he wanted to
quote begin chaos that would lead to military intervention. So

(01:52:54):
she's trying to do the strategy of tension, right, which
is which is this thing from Italy? Where? Okay, so
you you you have the government running a bunch of
sort of like no, I mean, I don't know, calling
them fake fascist groups is technically correct, but you have that,
you have them running a bunch of terrorist groups and
you know, okay, so they they this is this happening
in like the sixty seventies and yeah, I guess a

(01:53:15):
little bit into the eighties. Is that they're they're doing
all these bombings and stuff, and they're doing all these
terrorist attacks and the goal is to get people to
like sort of trust the government and like allow like
sort of further state of military intervention. But the thing
about that was that crucially the strategy of tension was
a strategy that was done by the government. It doesn't
really work if you're not the government and you are,
in fact that people causing the chaos, and where do

(01:53:37):
you get to military to sort of join you. So
this is a crucial problem for Brazilian fascism because as
much as the sort of the modern fascist movement is
a cultiple scenario, it's really a cult of the military.
Bulsonaro is sort of just the person who embodies the
sort of desire the fascist masses from military rule. But
this means that if the military just refused to do

(01:53:58):
a coup, they have no idea what to do. Yeah,
but they could deploy Baltonara himself. Have you seen that
video of him trying to do press ups to prove
that he's kind of super solidate. Don't worry, you know,
but this is this is sort of this is a
real issue for them. And Okay, so if I am

(01:54:19):
pretty confident that if the military had actually decided to
do a coup, this would have worked, like and I
think they would have pretty trivially just like smashed sort
of the rest of the forces of the state. Lulu
would be in prison. But and this is the thing
that's been the key to everything that's been going on
in Resolve from the beginning. The army does not have
the green light from Washington to do a coup because

(01:54:39):
once again Biden just absolutely hates Baillsonaro, which is like, yeah,
you know this this this is this is a coup
that was planned from Orlando and not Langley. Now we're
on like number four in the last few years that
was planned from Florida, and notably three of the four
of them have failed. And this is on the Carstralia

(01:55:03):
that was much fun. Yeah, well, I mean, I like
to be fair, this is a better plant coup attempt
than the venezuela one that's not hot. That's an extremely bar. Yeah,
the kind of bar that you can get over by tripping.
But you know, we're sold the very early process of
figuring out how exactly who was involved in this and
that like to what extent everyone was coordinating with each

(01:55:23):
other and like you know, i'm actual extent like literally
governors were involved seen to have been involved in this,
but we don't. We don't exactly know yet. Um. What
we do know in terms of it's being planned from
Orlando is that Bolsonaro for literally years has been saying
ship like quote, the patience of the people has run out.
I want to tell those who will make me unelectable

(01:55:44):
in Brazil, only God removes me from power. There are
three options for me jail, death, or victory. And I'm
telling the scandal rules. I will never be imprisoned, evening
literally years and years and years just saying sing like that,
like just over and over and over again. And you know, Okay,
So the other thing that we know right now and

(01:56:05):
this this this is being recorded on what day is
it is the ninth, Yeah, but it's being recorded on
Monday to night. So this is this is the next day. Uh.
If by the time this goes out there's more information,
there will be more information is going on what we
have right now. One of the things that we know
is that the guy who was in charge of security
for the Federal District, which is like the Federal District

(01:56:26):
is basically like what if washing d C Was a state,
but like a tiny one. So the guy who was
in charge of security for that, uh, was a Bulsonaro
supporter who just so happened to be on vacation in Orlando,
where Bulsonaro was staying with an mm A fighter whose
mansion has a Minion Stein room. Uh, he's just coincidentally

(01:56:47):
on afication in Orlando with Paulsonara. Well this is happening,
so you know, Okay, the Brazilian state seems to be
being a lot faster to sort of crack down on
everything that's happening than the American state was. Um that
the guys who was in charge of security, I who
was in who's in Orlando? That the Brazilian federal defender

(01:57:07):
has already asked the Supreme Court to arrest him. Um.
A Supreme Court justice like deposed the governor of the
Federal District for allowing this to happen. So, yeah, it's wild.
The Brazilian Minister of Justice as they've already entedified people
in ten states who helped plan or fund the operation.
They've arrested like well, the Totalsome yesterday said that they

(01:57:29):
arrested four hundred people. I saw somewhere that arrested twelve.
I don't know about that. I could be wrong, but yeah,
there was at least four hundred of people. Um, there's
a huge like there's a huge track down on people
involved in this Lula. It's much better than the January
six response, and like, like part part of what's happening
right is like like Lula literally like basically declared a

(01:57:52):
state of emergency in the federal zone and like God
basically like I guess you called, like he basically sent
in the FEDS and like has like his people now
have direct control over security in the capital because because
because the police there were so unreliable and you know,
and like he's been yeah, theresil states moving very very
fast to sort of stuff better than the US charge

(01:58:17):
and that probably yeah, and and also like Lula, Lula,
unlike Biden, Lula, Lula has like like literally like three
hours like as this was happening, he's making a speech
about like that him vowing to go after everyone who's
involved in this, including Bullsonaro and Um. A Brazilian member
of Congress has formally asked to Foreign Ministry to extradite

(01:58:38):
Bulsonaro to the US. Who knows what's going to happen there, Uh,
there have been there has actually there's been like a
surprising amount of sort of support for that in the US.
And you know, I mean that's everything that's been kind
of interesting for this, like before we take the ad break,
is that like he's gotten Lula is getting support from

(01:58:58):
like everyone, like this is this is one of the
rare we we we we have the great capitalist Triumvirate
of Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and and Macron have all
said that they're backing him, which is wild real international
Lincoln Project vibes. Yeah, it's I mean that that that

(01:59:21):
that that that is. I guess like Hulula is drabroad extent, right,
Like you know, if you go back to a Lula episodes,
like he was close with the Bush administration but also
like close with the World Social Forum people. So he's
he's always kind of like been the guy who straddles
a divide between like, yeah, he's not and he's the

(01:59:42):
guy he straddles a divide between the sort of like
international imperialists and what was the left. Yeah, yeah, So
all right, we're we're gonna we're we're gonna go to ads,
and then when we come back, we're gonna talk more
about how everything is actually sort of gone. All right,

(02:00:02):
we're back. So one of the things I think is
very interesting about this whole thing is that for all
of the sort of planning and organizational capacity that's gone
into building the sort of like transnational fascist movement, the
American right like that that the American Party has been
setting up, uh, the American Right has just actively been
making their allies worse here like their ideas. It's it's

(02:00:24):
sort of incredible, I mean, And this is something I
think that that's genuinely very scary about the Brazilian right
is that their regular combination of tactics are really effective.
Um that you know that they've been able to successfully
wild this combination of sort of electoralism of lawfare sort
of like using the legal system against their political enemies
of the road blockades, mass marches and you know, just
straight up paramilitary death squads of various kinds. You know,

(02:00:46):
you have you have your sort of urban desk squads,
you have these like genocidal logger death squads, and that's
been very effective. And you know, Okay, so like they
lost this one election, but you know, their their position
inside resil in politics is still really strong. They control
a bunch of like governorships, they like Bolsonoo's party and
his coalition like control control the Brazilian parliament. Okay, so

(02:01:10):
you know, like they're in a very strong position. But
then they talked to the Americans and they imputed January
six and stormed the capital, and at least right now,
it looks like it's going really badly for them. Like
even even the sort of like right wing Ali Great
Process turned on them. Globo, which is like it's Brazil's

(02:01:30):
biggest newspaper, well is the biggest new paper. It could
be second biggest, I'm pretty sure's the biggest. It's funded
by like right wing ship at billionaires um. But you know,
their entire front page right now is just them yelling
about the coup and like gleefully reporting them like like
that they had a frit page thing for an individual
sociology professor who stepped off a bus coming back from

(02:01:52):
Brazilian immediately got arrested. Like this is this is the
kind of sort of jubilation that it's really it's kind
of it's kind of amazing too, because like kind of
sociologist is also a bosonarist insurrection rate. Yeah, well okay,
I feel like that. If you're a sociologist, there were
exactly two you have. You have three paths. One has
you become a cop? Two is you is you do

(02:02:14):
the Italian thing and you become the Red Brigades. Yeah,
that was that. That was That was Italy's first sociology department,
by the way, I turned out the Red Brigades or
three you become a Nazi. Those are your three options. Yeah,
there are. Yeah. I've never been unfortunate enough to run
into any of the chad sociologies, to be very right,
they are there. Yeah, we we we stayed away from them.

(02:02:36):
In the anthro department, we're like nope, no, Yeah, I've
taught in sociology before and you definitely do get a
lot of students who are there to be a cop.
I've forgotten about that. Yeah, it sucks. I will say
Brazil has had at least one. I feel like they've
had at least a couple of sociologist presidents. For Fernando

(02:02:56):
Henrique Cardoso was what yeah, what was the sociologist was
presid it for a while and then he got replaced
by Lula Um. This is this has been This has
been a tangent about what happens when you put sociology
professor's lefted out of their cages. Uh so okay, And
you know, I would say this is going back to
global for a second, Like some of the stuff that

(02:03:17):
they're saying is not exactly true. Like they're they're they're
trying to sort of make a separation between the like
extremist Wilsonario eastas and then like the people in Parliament,
and it's like okay, so like yeah, they have this
whole thing about these are streamists with no support in
Parliament and it's like okay, buddy, Like there are literally
people like in Congress who are in Congress because they

(02:03:39):
were elected because they filmed themselves doing right wing trucker borodblocks,
Like you know, okay, like well if one of these
other things, one of the other stories, was them talking,
was them talking about I Brazilian politicians frantically deleting the
social media posts in support of the protests. So okay,
you know it is it is actually true that like

(02:04:03):
a lot of like even both people in both to
know his own party like denounced it. But you know, yeah,
I mean we saw the same ship, right, and then
they'll gradually reimagine it over the next two or three
years to where like that they're they're not denounced again. Well, well,
we'll see what happens, because there is also a chance
here that like everyone who was even intitentially like everyone

(02:04:27):
was like, we'll back out of this. I'm not a
big pro prison guy, but the video of them arriving
in a coach at the jail was pretty immediate. That
was pretty funny. Yeah, So okay, so right now it
looks like this has gone pretty badly for them. Again,
this is this is this is being recorded one day

(02:04:49):
after it happens. So I don't know if if the
army has actually done the coup tomorrow. It's not my fault,
it wasn't out yet. But you know, I think we
should we should ask shoud take a step back and
ask why is this happening, And I think we should
we should ask why did this happen in the same
way in both the US em Brazil and why did

(02:05:12):
it not work? And the answer to this is that
the capital is a trap. What what what the American
and Brazilian right has ran into, sort of ironically, is
the crisis of the century revolutionary movement. So to explain
what I mean here, I'm gonna I'm gonna read a
bit of to our Friends, which is a work produced
in late by the Invisible Committee, which is the pen

(02:05:33):
name of some French anarchists who are most famous of
writing The Coming Insurrection. Um. I'm not normally a huge
fan of their work, but they got they got one
thing very very right, and that's this occupation of the
Kaspa and Tunis, and of the Stagma Square and Athens,
siege of Westminster and London during the student movement of
two thousand and eleven, encirclement of the Parliament in Madrid

(02:05:56):
and September twelve, or in Barcelona on June five, thousand eleven,
riots all around the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, December
four attempt on October fifteenth, thousand eleven, in Lisbon to
invade the Assembly at the REPUBLICA birding of the Bosnian
presidential residents in February. The places of institutional power exert

(02:06:18):
in magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents managed
to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions,
as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin, it's only
to discover empty places that is empty of power and
furnished without any taste. It's not to prevent the people

(02:06:38):
from taking power that they are so fiercely kept from
invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that
power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only
deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets, real
traps revolutionaries. The popular impulse to rush onto the stage
to find out what is happening in the wings is

(02:07:00):
down to be disappointed. If they got inside, even the
most ferbrent conspiracy freaks would find nothing ur cane there.
The truth is that power is simply no longer that
theatrical reality to which maternity accustomed us. Yeah, and gets
very prescient and like, and it's we're raised on these
myths right, both on the left and right, Like on

(02:07:21):
the on the right, like there are these myths of
these American institutions which took great and unique and shining
cities on the hill and on the left, like we're
raised with the storming of the Bastille and stuff like that.
As he's the Winter Palace, right, these moments have kind
of revolutionary change. But yeah, and I want to I
want to specifically, I want to take a second talk
about the Winter Palace because this is actually something that

(02:07:42):
I think sort of worryingly this is uh Nick what
is actually talked about this in one of his podcasts,
which is that like and he's right about this, which
is that like the like there there there are like
you can't actually just store with Winter Palace and take
power right, doesn't work anymore. And but but but I
think it's actually worth like taking like two minutes to
layout why that's true. And it's because the Winter Palace

(02:08:03):
was like a once in like a like like a
once in a century historical moment, and it only worked
because and this is something that I think people forget.
The storming of the Winter Palace was not the thing
that overthrew the Czar that was later. That was that
was the February Revolution. That is a completely given revolution,
the Stormy of the Winter Palace. And the reason why
that worked was that the government that that that the
Polsheviks were overthrowing was Kerensky's government, which is just like

(02:08:24):
really dipshit like interim interim governments that was only supposed
to be their own town election happened and had like
the most fig leaf legitimacy of any government ever. Everyone
hated them, they had no supporters with but and any
of this is why it worked, right because when they
had no power at all, and so when the bull
shwiks rolled in on them, everyone else just stayed home.
And that is not going to work in any modern

(02:08:46):
context unless like I don't know, you're like you're you
two were also like two years in a revolution and
there's like three years into a war. Yeah, there's like
an incredibly fig leave government. Maybe you can pull this off,
but like that that that that is not that is
a absolutely terrible, god awful model for attempting to seize
like any kind of power or bring down any governments.

(02:09:08):
But you know, it's it's become because that because that
became the sort of like mythology of of the Soviet
Union that you know, that was sort of burned, the
sort of false image of that was burned into the
certain memory of of collective memory of the left to
the point where, like, most people don't even remember that
Kerensky was also technically a socialist and that like and
that that's how revolution was a socialist. Like a group

(02:09:32):
of socialists overthrowing another group of socialists, and both of
them have a very tenuous sort of like it's tenuous
and whether they're either of them are socialists at all? Yeah,
and then going on to take power and kill a
bunt too bad of the socialists. Yeah, yeah, okay, so
that aside, you know, this this crisis I was talking about,
like this is the reason why we're here in the
first place. Right, it's in large part because of the

(02:09:52):
failure to overcome the movement of power out of the
sort of palace where people expected to be that in
the two thousand eleven revolutions failed like that that that
that's why we're here in hell world because people people
were sort of unable to figure out a way to
actually bring down our government instead of sort of being
like drawn magnetically into these traps. But those problems sort

(02:10:14):
of like magnetic draw the Capitol building to will be revolutionaries.
This is just as much a problem to the right
as it is the left. And for right now, this
has saved us. It's caused the Brazilian right to abandon
things they were doing that actually, like are genuinely terrifying
and you know, could could have been and have been effective.
Like for example, one of one of the cleanup operations

(02:10:35):
that was happening today was the Brazilian army cleared a
bunch of these people who were trying to do blockades
to state oil facilities, and you know that actually could
have worked, right like that, Yeah, and you know, and
and yeah, we've talked about this before and then the
other and the other sort of bose in our episodes.
But like that, those kind of like trucker blockade things,
blocking highways, blockades like those are tactics that the Brazilian

(02:10:59):
rights sort of natively uses. And there's a world where
the Brazilian fascist sticks to their instincts and instead of
doing this doomed attempt to s from the capital, they
put these same numbers of people into trucks with roadblocks
and burning tires and they try to shut down their
Brazilian economy. You know, in essence, there's a world where
instead of doing it October an impossible like January sixth revolution,

(02:11:21):
where they do an invisible committee one where they realize
the powers and logistics and attempting to shut shut down
its flow is how you do a revolution. And that
is a world that is a lot scarier than the
one that we're in. But and you know, I think
we'll see how this ultimate plays out. But I actually
think the fact that this was planned for Orlando is
like you know, with the help of sort of the

(02:11:43):
usual American generay seth crowd, I think this actually really
really fucked them, like it it really deeply hurt sort
of the Brazilian fascist provement, which is good. Um It
always like when I see the I think about this
recently with like um me and mar and everything else,

(02:12:04):
Like I always come back like marcusa where he talks
about the false choice of masters by slaves and like
how the solution is not this like one big sort
of like like big I didn't want to call it,
like symbolic kind of active violence, but like the great
refusal to participate in these things, which is something that
lots of people have power to do as opposed to

(02:12:25):
doing this stupid ship which centralizes them in one place
to get some all arrested. Well, I mean it's also
likes there's another sort of part of this, which is
that like both in the US and in Brazil, the
right is not very good at fighting the cops. Like
they got that one horse cup pretty good. There's a
couple that like don't get a cold people, but like

(02:12:46):
they're only they only do well when they're really like
when they outnumber the cops like a hundred or one. Yeah,
that is different in Europe. That is a thing that
like like if you look at Whereasov comes from, Asov
comes from right wing football hooligans who like the front
line in the minda and beat the ship into the cops. Yeah.
But but but in the in the US, it's like,

(02:13:06):
I don't know, everyone's just like this doesn't fight the
busy shooting people. Yeah, but there isn't that history of
like like that's not I'm not don't just want to
pick on like where I come from, but like like
crowd violence, like like football hood against like that that
doesn't exist in a meaningful sense in the US, it's
not as commonplace, and there isn't that like institutional memory

(02:13:29):
of fighting riot police that exists all over Europe. Yeah, well,
I think I think the thing is that, like, okay,
American sports fans do fight the cops, but they only
do it once a year, if that like the super Bowl. Yeah, well,
you know, they'll do with the NHL, but things like
it's only it's only like maybe like three cities a

(02:13:50):
year that do it, right, Yeah, and everyone series too.
It's harder because the World Series has this whole sort
of like like that they have the parade, they have
this whole stage managing to people, they get people stop
from writing. So really there's only like two or three
events per year where you can get riots, whereas like
in Europe, any time, yeah, any given Saturday, he could
be throwing down with a cop on a horse. But

(02:14:13):
like it's outside of it. It's gone long beyond that.
Like I remember in like just before this two thousand
eleven moment, like the two the earlier two thousands antig
eight movement, like the institutional knowledge on how to deal
with large volumes of police and still get your point across,
just as we saw in twenty did not exist here
and had to be imported from Hong Kong and other places,

(02:14:34):
badly imported in Yeah, but infographic from Hong Kong. Yeah,
So okay. Having said all of this, this is not
to say that everything is fine. Um, it's not. Uh,
you know. I think something that's that's very important that
I have not seen anyone talk about either in either

(02:14:55):
sort of generosic of January eight, is that the the
reaction to the coup on the left, and this is
as true of the Brazilian left as it was with
the American left. In fact, I think the American lifted
American lefted way worse. In January six was paralysis, right,
even in Brazil, which has these sort of one body
social movements kind of mobilizations took almost a full day
and materialized by the type, you know, by which point

(02:15:16):
the threat already dissipated. So you know, for a for
a full day, the only thing standing between the fascist
and power was their own stupidity. And you know, as
boundless as their stupidity seems like, watching these people like
taking a dump on a cabinet, like with a camera
in front of them, like it's not actually a shield
against fascism, Like every every fascism after Bussolini and even Napoleon.

(02:15:38):
The third who's like the sort of modern prototype of fascism,
has at least one and usually two or three comically
stupid like uprisings and coups that just fail, and they
failed when everyone lasted them, and then number four, they're
suddenly in power and it's like, wow, you can't you
can't actually write these things off because they're funny, because
again they're always funny for the first like two. Then

(02:16:00):
on number three, like all your friends are being bars
into a camp and shot, and it's like wow, yeah,
and like we don't want to be in a place
where like one growing up in the room is all
that's between us and fascism, right like and adult making
a plan, And I think there's there's a specific like
I actually I think social media actually plays a really
big role in this because you know, I can I

(02:16:22):
remember this January six, like there was this kind of
like the way that just turns everyone into a spectator.
Everyone was just like, you know, I think it was
Vicky Ouster, while I think was the first person who
said this was like Twitter twit. Twitter is a machine
that turns action into discourse. Yeah, and so you know what,
while it was going on, right like everyone turned the

(02:16:44):
action of the thing into discourse. Everyone was sort of
like sitting there paralyzed watching it. And that is fatal
like like that if you look at the actual stress
test of the sort of machinery of power, right, like,
it's actually I think it's actually much less of a
big deal that the cops were on their side of
the cops in Responder, because the cops eventually did clear
them out right, it took it took a long time.

(02:17:04):
The cons eventually did it. But I think I think
the thing is actually more dangerous is that like there
was there like there wasn't a response to the left
at all. There's nothing right like there there were there
were rallies in Seal Pollo. Like the next day was
actually funny because both both both the rallies, both like
the people sacking the capital and the people in sal
Polo were both were both singing the national anthem, which

(02:17:25):
is some real fun politics moments. It's another thing to
talk about. Yeah, but yeah, you compare that to Spain,
which somebviously where I'm most familiar with well, like people
immediately got guns Scott in the street and started killing
soldiers when they had much more effective and organized coup, right,
and that coup would have failed where not for fascist

(02:17:45):
intervention from abroad. But yeah, Brazil has powerful unions who
did shit. Yeah, well, and partially I think that's that's
like that has to do with the hollowing out of
the unions and there's there's sort of long story here,
but like you know, and even if you look at
like I think this is this is a sign really
of sort of how actually dynamic the left is because

(02:18:05):
you know, if if if you want to look at
like like a dynamic Latin American left, like they you know,
there there was there was there was a very very
well organized US backed coup against Hugo Chavez. She doesn't one.
I was just one. It was it was just before
I moved there, so I think it would. Ah, there

(02:18:26):
were other coup attempts in Venezuela two that were less
well organized. Yeah, she doesn't too. Yeah, he doesn't too.
And yeah, that one't got far enough that like the
New York Times was like had an article out about
how democracy had been restored to the Cuba to Venezuela
and then you know the thing, the thing that happened
after that, and then there's there's a very famous movie

(02:18:47):
of this from from a filmmaker who was just there.
Is that over over over the next forty seven hours,
like the left mobilized and they put so many people
in the street that like the Coop Water has had
to back down, and Hugo Travis has got to be
president and you know that that's the thing that that's
the thing that a strong left can do, right, they
can actually defeat the military. And yeah, but you know,

(02:19:10):
but this didn't the US just we fell down on
the job. Like there wasn't much of that in Brazil.
Like I like like it, Like it is true, as
Lulu was saying, that they picked a day when everyone
was gone. But it's still, I think really alarming that
just by just by sort of acting first, they have

(02:19:31):
so much of a sort of time advantage, sort of
an advantage of reaction over US. Yeah, that film, by
the way, people want to watch is called The Revolution
Will Not be Televised, which is kind of a great
title to the spectative thing that you were talking about.
And yeah, I watched that bat boy and VHS back
in the day in Caracas. Wow, yeah, good times. So okay, finally,

(02:19:59):
in a broad sense, I want to ask, like, what
are we doing here right? Um, the sort of dominant
mode of quote unquote anti fascism, and this is the
model that's being adopted by Lula and the rest of
the sort of liberal and even sort of moderate conservative
ruling class in Brazil. It's what's been adopted by the
Democrats is their anti fascism is posing their opposition to

(02:20:21):
fascism as a defensive democracy, the rule of law. Mhm.
But yeah, okay, let's look at what's actually happening. These
coups aren't working. That's the sort of actual power. Military
attempts to take power. They're losing every time. But do
you know how the fascists are taking power by democracy?
Their greatest success has been in taking power but just

(02:20:42):
winning elections. Like look look at what happened in India, right,
That is a country that has been like very nearly
totally consumed by fascism, and it was done by just
elections over and over and over again. Hungry. Yeah, even
here on a fundamental level, like what we're seeing right
now out of the sort of broad swath of social

(02:21:02):
sort of liberalism, conservatism and social democracy is an unsustainable strategy,
anti fashion, anti fascism as a pure defensive democracy is
just preserving the machine that will hand the power of
the state over to the fascist of the silver platter.
And you know that like this, this defensive democracy in
the abstract is a death march. Right. You know, if
if you can, you can you can look at the

(02:21:23):
sort of course of of the late nineties, the late century, Right,
why did the bombs fall over Bagdad? Well, protect democracy?
When when the Mexican government was shooting the Zapatistas, they're
protecting democracy. When the cops rated the when the cops
rated the Forest Defenders in Atlanta, Oh, it's because they
were domestic terrorists who are threatening democracy. But what's happened
here is that the threat of fascism has sort of

(02:21:44):
press ganged armies of people who otherwise would be enemies
of sort of capitalist quote unquote democracy into protecting the
very institutions that are inevitably going to bring these people
back into power. And that's really grim because it means
that something has to change or we're just gonna come
back here again and again and again, until eventually enough
of the ruling class flips to back into fascists that

(02:22:04):
they seiz power once and for all. So, you know, something,
we have to do something else that's not just this
that sort of desperate treading water. Yeah, like like fighting
to stand still in this terrible place where people can't
pay their heating bills and feed their families. Yeah, it's
it's pretty dire sucking outlook for us, isn't it. Yeah?

(02:22:26):
But I mean, you know, I would say this like
that there was a vision inw of what that something
else could be, right, Like, it's it's it's not it's
it's it's not like we're in the depths of like
the two thousands where no one has ever seen like
anything that's taking possible, right. Yeah, Like there are a
lot of people probably listening because they saw that vision

(02:22:47):
and it changed who they want to be and how
they want the world to be. And I think that's
really good and uh for me at least, I think
once people around in the streets, which people weren't able
to do in time in Brazil, like, they will tend
to find that salute shann Outside of institutions, that the
response has been almost entirely institutional, at least in here
in this country to a fascist coup because people didn't

(02:23:10):
and people were tired from your industry and they've all
been fucking arrested and half of them have been shot.
And but part of the problem also is just like
there's there's like the US just has a sort of
geographical problem then, and Brazil has this to to some extent,
which is that like, yeah, this is not like Belgium
you can very quickly get people to the capital, like
you can't. You can't actually like it is actually genuinely

(02:23:30):
very hard to get a bunch of people to a
place quickly here, right, which you know is a thing
where we're lucky that yeah, like that the capital kind
of like holding the capital, doesn't you know, it's it's
it's not a thing that actually allows you to sort
of take power. But it's also a real sort of
concern about politics in the US because it can't work

(02:23:51):
the same way it works in a lot of places
that are smaller. Yeah yeah, yeah, like Bolivia for example,
yeah yeah, or even Venet's wait, right, like so much
of the institution almost everything is in Caracas, even though
it's a big country. Yeah, that's that's that's pretty much
all I got. Um, well, we'll see, we'll see if
Bolstaro when when he gets out of the hospital, if

(02:24:14):
he gets out of the hospital, he's returned to his
social home. Yeah, yeah, it's it's always good to see
people with with takes on situation in Brazil who also
think the capital is Rio. That's always a fun thing
that I can see on Twitter Dot. It's okay not
to post you know, this is my okay, I have

(02:24:37):
what what are my rules of thumb about talking about
a place is if if you can't name five cities
in a country, don't talk about it. Yeah, this is
the thing that like so many like people, people people
who get paid to write articles about places like just fail.
People who get this is like like, frankly, you should

(02:24:57):
be able to like like if if I was doing
due diligence, I would I would be learning, I would
be actually learning Portuguese right now instead of like relying
on my Spanish to sort of like power through it.
But you know, like the lowest bar is you should
go the capitol and you should be able to name
five cities in it. And if you can't do that,
like maybe don't post. Yeah, it's fine not to post.

(02:25:18):
In fact, when dealing with coups, maybe consider options that
are not posting. Yeah, and and yeah, go go out
and stop them. M hmm, make friends. Yeah. So this
this is when it could happen. Here. You can find
us in the places on social media. We live in

(02:25:51):
a period of increasing class conflict. During the Trump years,
strike action reached the seventeen year high. Strike surged, increasing
almost over as workers fought back against rising inflation and
the cost of living. Fights over unionization hit sectors previously
thought to be un organizable, as workers declared victory across

(02:26:14):
fast food chains, Starbucks, and Amazon. And this increased strike
activity is taking place against the rising course of revolt.
Tenants are farming unions and launching rent strikes. Riots kick
off in the face of police murdering on average over
three people per day, and kids walk out of school
demanding everything from access to ppe to an end too

(02:26:34):
attacks on queer and trans youth. It's not just that
strikes are increasing, but the logic of the strike to
strike a blow against one's class enemies, to enact a
cost and generalized collective refusal is spreading. As two comes
to a close. The largest strike by education workers across
the University of California system has seen barricades, occupied buildings,

(02:26:58):
and strikers even liberal eating dining halls to feed themselves.
Members of the United Mine Workers have been on the
picket lines for almost two years. In this holiday season,
over one thousand rail workers stunned the brink of crippling
the US economy and an effort to win sickly as
the government rushed to enforce a contract and break the strike.

(02:27:18):
With so many people on the verge of striking, it's
easy to wonder what would happen if a strike across
industries could be organized, a general strike. It's this very
subject that we tackle in today's show. And speaking of strikes,
the producers of it could happen here have walked off
the job and it's going down. It's taken over. Excited

(02:27:38):
to be here, that's right. I g D will be
occupying the means of this production for five shows throughout
the month of January as we address some of the
major issues of today while looking back at recent examples
in history about how the exploiting excluded have attempted to
meet the conditions which miserate our lives head on. Each episode,
of course is going to have special guests and he

(02:28:00):
die from us. Launching the summer of two thousands fifteen,
it's going down as a media platform, radio show, and podcast.
It covers a ton of a social movements from an
anarchist perspective. As a group, we represent folks from across
the US. Tom and myself have been involved in covering
and participating in social struggles for over twenty years. Sophie's

(02:28:21):
a long time educator and community organizer across multiple continents.
Marcella is a writer and comedian. This is Mike Andrews.
Happy to be here. I'm Sophie Marcella and I'm Tom. Yeah,
this is really cool. Thanks to all that it could
happen here people. It's awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to be
here and talk about strikes. It's gonna be a fun time. Yeah,

(02:28:42):
I'm excited about today's topic very much. So, just to
start off, it's interesting, it seems like every few weeks
on social media, every couple of months, whenever there's like
a big issue that comes up or something's going on
in the news cycle, the idea of a general strike
will trend or sort of kind of get out in
the ether as this zeit guys that becomes really popular
and you know, we live in this time and increasing

(02:29:04):
protests and strikes and riots. But it also seems like
the possibility of a general strike seems like very far off,
or the idea of it even being this like trending
thing on social media is sort of like passe are silly.
And also it happens so often and we don't see
it materialized, it can be easy to sort of write

(02:29:26):
it off. Or on the other hand, a lot of
people will say, well, if you want that to happen
instead of just like wishing it to be on social media,
you should just join a union and get involved that way.
It seems that this drive to constantly declared general strikes,
though ambitious, sometimes to the point of, you know, people

(02:29:47):
being able to sort of make fun of it, the
reality is is that the repeated sort of call for
that has normalized that idea and what we're seeing a
lot in specifically in the US, but we're seeing a
lot of people at the workplaces recognized that the business
unions have failed. Right, It's how we got here. I
live in the rest Belt I live in the midst
of the failure of business unions every single day in

(02:30:09):
my life, and that they've also come to understand something
that the autonomous in Italy we're talking about the seventies,
which is that workers already control the means of production.
They're already there. They already run the coffee shop, run
the restaurant, run the warehouse, run the tech company, whatever.
And if they just stop, nobody makes any money. And
you don't need a union in a formal sense to
do that. And so I think a lot of workers

(02:30:31):
that traditionally fell outside of unions are starting to understand
their powers workers outside of that structure, and that is
incredibly important for us going forward. Yeah, I mean, I
think you're totally right. I mean, I don't think quiet
quitting came out of nowhere. And I know it's just
like an idea. I like loud quitting more like I
prefer that. But um, I do think this culture, we're
creating a culture where it is okay to be anti work.

(02:30:52):
It is okay for you to say I hate my
job and I actually don't do anything and I steal
from my boss, and we should normalize that, right, Like
I don't think striking is just this whole thing. And
I do want to say this before I move into that.
Every single time I posted TikTok video, somebody's always like
general strike July. So it's like, yeah, it's definitely on
the internet a lot. But I do think even people
saying that I'm not doing it has an impact because

(02:31:14):
it's like, what is that? Martin Soustri said, you have
to fight the culture, and the culture that we live
in now is a culture that's like obsessed with work
for works sake, and so like maybe part of it
is like, yeah, workers already owns the means of production. Yeah,
I just don't work as hard on your job, you know,
and if your work steal from your boss, it doesn't
have to be like this organizational thing. Because one thing
is that, like you have to realize is that sometimes

(02:31:35):
union work unions work with management. So it's like even
if you're like, yeah, like I want to wait for
my union, it's like what if your union is like
the fertile a union that will go behind your back
and like make decisions. Um. I guess all this to
say is that I think changing the culture is important. Um.
And I think that's happening now. I think I, like
you said at the end of that, just like how

(02:31:57):
something that I think we'll get into a lot more
in this episode is looking at how this life claims
to join the union being the practical thing to do
towards a general strike just isn't accurate at all. And
that when you look back in history at kind of
any of the exciting moments of UM general strikes are
uprising and stuff, it doesn't come from those official channels UM.
And so I'm excited to get into that more. And
I think, Yeah, I like with saying like this thing

(02:32:18):
where it's just become this thing that people will like
say and talk about even if there's not that cultural
memory of like exactly what a general strike means or
what what what's going to happen, there's this idea of
like refusal and of solidarity that is captured just in
the world and just in saying it. But I think
it's really like sewing that energy up and speaking of
cultural memory. Fact, you're dynamite in your pitchforks because it's

(02:32:41):
time for a trip down memory lane. In the early
dred of the United States Group site the Industrial Workers
of the world of the IWW, which advocated for the
abortion of the wage system and capitalism, rejected racist exclusions
of non white workers in the labor movement, and even
engage in shootouts with the KKK popularized the idea of
the general strike in the United States on a large scale,

(02:33:04):
but the idea itself and its application in US history
is much older. Throughout the late eighteen hundreds and early
nineteen hundreds, anarchists, socialists, and everyday members of the working
class all promoted and carried out multiple general strikes as
a means to win political and economic concessions. For some,
the general strike was also a launchpad for revolution, in
which workers could, in theory, seize the means of existence

(02:33:27):
out of the hands of the capital's class and run
society on its own terms. And it's this battle that
thrust millions of everyday working class people directly into conflict
with the American state and its military. In US history,
the first large scale example of a general strike occurred
in the midst of the American Civil War and W. E. B.
Dwo Boys famous book Black Reconstruction, he explains how it

(02:33:48):
was the general strike of the enslaved black proletariat that
brought down the plantation system, not President Lincoln. Er Union bullets.
The Boys argues that just like the black lead insurrections
of today and ferguson him in the Apple, this strike
took bourgeois white society by total surprise, he writes it
in the South newspapers, and ied the very idea that
slaves could ever free themselves, and even claim that they

(02:34:09):
quote did not want to be free, he writes, of
white society in the North. The North shrank at the
very thought of encouraging servile insurrection against the whites. Above all,
it did not propose to interfere with property. Black people
on the whole were considered cowards and inferior beings whose
very presence in America was unfortunate. Only John Brown knew
that revolt would come, and he was dead. So the

(02:34:32):
Boys really painted this picture of this mass care and
society in which slavery is seen as very sad. More
terrifying is the idea of mass black insurrection, which of
course mirrors today's situation. I mean, that's what the suburbs are.
I mean right like that suburbs aren't. It's like for
you to like pretend like all the things that you

(02:34:53):
have are not built on blood. It's for you to
like segment yourself away from the people in society than
give you everything you have, yet you've denied them everything.
See you going you a little home and like drinking
a little tea and like watch your little movies and
just like ignore the fact that you're an asphalt, you
know what I mean, Like just like and even not
even more more than an apple. I was going as
far as saying, I used to say that they're not

(02:35:14):
good or bad people, but like you're acting like a
bad person, Like you don't care about other people because
you've been tricked to think that, like you're getting a
good deal. And it's an interesting point that the Boys
makes about just like. It was only kind of the
radical wing of the abolishnist movement that was talking about
open revolt. There's this early anarchist A lot of people
don't reference a lot, but wis under Spooner. He conspired

(02:35:36):
with John Brown in various plots, and he later became
a member of the First International and a contributor to
early anarchist publications like Liberty. He produced this really early
text which is just fantastic. It's called a Plan for
the Abolish of Slavery, published in eighteen fifty eight. It's
a couple of years before the Civil War. He writes,
Our plan then is to make our war openly or

(02:35:56):
secretly a circumstances may dictate upon the property of the slaveholders.
Burn the master's buildings, kill their cattle and horses, conceal
or destroy farming utensils, abandoned labor in seed time and harvest,
and let the crops perish. Make slavery unprofitable. I love
the line conceal or destroyed that you can destroy them,

(02:36:17):
you can also hide them. This is like a parallel
that we can drawn out to like if you want
to like have solidarity with like like other wage slaves,
is that like do accommodate them and help them steal
from their I mean from their jobs. I mean it's
like these things happened in the past, but these are
tactics that we can still use in the present. There's
echoes of this quote later with Lucy Parsons, right, and

(02:36:39):
you see this during the structure in Our Work at Chicago,
where she gives a speech where she's talking about grabbing
knives and going to the doors of the rich as
a way to make it very very very clear that
they weren't going to be able to live off the
backs of the working class anymore. Right, um, And it's
the sort of idea of direct action, which now, I mean,
if we think about, now, what are politicians doing. They're

(02:37:00):
trying to pass laws to make it a felony to
have home demonstrations, right to like do exactly these kinds
of things, but in much more passive ways. So if
we can really think back, I mean, this is a
tried and true technique that people used in the United
States for a very very long time, and we can
see still how much that terrifies people with power. There's
another awesome quote from Spooner I just want to read
as well, and this I find this one really interesting

(02:37:21):
because he's speaking actually to white people in the South,
especially people that work in the slave patrols. He says,
white rascals of the South, willing tools of the slaveholders.
You who drive slaves to do their labor, hunt them
with dogs, and flogged them for pay without asking any questions.
You are the main pillars of the slave system. That
is the most eloquent way to say exactly that's exactly

(02:37:44):
what I was thinking. I think it's interesting to point out,
as do Boys Rights, and as Frederick Douglas said of
the Civil War, it was started quote in the interests
of slavery on both sides. The South was fighting to
take slavery out of the and the North was fighting
to keep it in. And the mass black exodus did

(02:38:05):
not kick off at the start of the war. He
makes the really important point that Union leaders made it
clear that they did not want to disrupt the plantation system.
At times, generals even offered to put down slave rebellions,
and he says that they even forbade at least in
some instances, union soldiers from singing the song John Brown's Body.
But as the North pushed into the South, the flood

(02:38:27):
of former slaves escaping into Union hands grew and grew.
By eighteen sixty two is the Boys Rights. This was
the beginning of the swarming of increasing numbers no longer
to work on Confederate plantations, a movement that became a
general strike against the slave system. This was not merely
the desire to stop work. It was a strike on
a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was

(02:38:48):
a general strike that involved directly in the end, perhaps
half a million people. They wanted to stop the economy
of the plantation system, and to do that they left
the plantations. It's interest into and the Boys makes this point.
The general strike also encouraged and took place alongside many
poor whites deserting the Confederate army. One thing that's interesting

(02:39:09):
about the Confederate side of the Civil War. You could
get out of fighting if you own slaves, and a
lot of poor whites deserted the Confederate army, which further
crippled it. As the Boys noted, the poor white not
only began to desert and run away, but thousands followed
black people into the northern camps. And just some key
takeaways to like launch into discussion side of this, It's

(02:39:29):
interesting that the wider society, as the Boys notes, before
the Civil War disparaged the possibility of mass collective action.
And I think this really mirrors contemporary conspiracy theories and
narratives around black rebellion today that happened often either in
the midst of the George Flight uprising or afterwards, and
also the mass strike and refusal that happened during the

(02:39:52):
Civil War, which disrupted the economy and made things like
the slave patrols, the policing of the plantation system and
possible that helped bring down the Confederacy obviously, and I
think it's important to ask, as our contemporary society remains
structured around racial capitalism, what might be done in the

(02:40:13):
current system in terms of mass refusal and desertion that
would cause a similar effect. The idea of the widest
society and disparaging mass collective action is because that the
fear is letting us know that we do have mass power,
you know what I mean. It's like it's not a
surprise that people always say that Lincoln freed the slaves,
and Lincoln literally said, if I have had to end

(02:40:35):
slavery to save the Union, I would have ended slavery.
And if I have to keep slavery to save the Union,
I would have kept a slavery, you know what I mean.
So just like this whole idea of like letting black
people know you can't do ship, don't even bother is
because they know that we can't do ship, and we
are doing ship because black people are always rebelling. Um
if you come to flop push you see it in
full color. They realize the governments them and give a

(02:40:56):
funk about them, and they've created their own institutions to
support them. So um yeah, So it's like this whole
idea to let us tell us don't even bother and
and and like criminalizing like the informal sector because it's
like that's a way for us like gain power outside
of like the formal sector, you know what I mean,
and things like that. So I just think it's like
it's like when they tell us don't bother, trying to

(02:41:18):
fight back, like everybody has to suffer, Like that's what
they always say. Everybody suffered, and we all just suffer.
And it's like, no, we don't want to suffering. We're
actually doing things to ease our suffering. And um, I
think this is just like all this is to say
that people who are out there doing stuff keep doing stuff.
And like, if you want to do stuff, do it.
You don't have to be brought of reunion. You don't

(02:41:38):
have to put your job and be an activist. By
the way, paid activists not really activists. You can do
regular ship and your hold that you can do a
free store on the corner of your streets. So people
can have clothes. It's like you could striking from the
economy means like divesting your time and resources, and you
can do it. We can all do it in some
shape or form well, and I think it becomes a
lot more possible today to think about that than it did,

(02:42:01):
say before. Right, So, we had this kind of collapse
of the legitimacy of the American political projects sort of
with the Iraq War, right, we all kind of saw
how badly that can turn out. But what was left
in America to uphold the entire edifice was the idea
that even though things politically were kind of screwed up,

(02:42:21):
at least there's economic success. And then that failed to right.
And so this sort of idea that built up after
World War Two, this kind of concept of, you know,
the labor corporate compromise, the loyal worker that's going to
get provided for for the rest of their life. Not
only did our parents generation find out that that was
a lie, but younger generations don't really buy it at all.

(02:42:45):
And so what you're really seeing is, I think this
kind of breakdown socially of the legitimacy of the idea
of the American dream. Because of all of its problematic
elements and it's impossibility and its absurdity, and kind of
this revival of an idea which existed prior to World
War Two, which was an idea of social revolt, right,

(02:43:07):
and it was something we saw manifest during the Great Depression,
and it's part of the reason why the New Deal exists.
Was a way to put that down, was a way
to prevent workers from feeling like the only thing that
they had in front of them was to take over
their factories and chow up at the doors of the
rich and so on, so and so on. Right. But
that whole idea of the New Deal, that concept that

(02:43:28):
the government was going to take care of you and
the company was going to take care of you, um,
collapsed in the nineties seventies, but the idea that it
existed still holds on in some sectors of the of
America today. I Mean, you see this with the magacrat
out really heavily, the idea that like nothing systematically needs
to change, really we just need better outcomes, and we

(02:43:50):
just need, you know, in their case, Donald Trump, to
pay attention to us and give us the things that
we want. But really, outside of that almost comical patriotism. Um,
you don't really see a out of adherence to that
vision any further. And that makes the idea of mass
refusal not only a lot more possible, but something that's
actively happening currently. Yeah. And the other parts who I

(02:44:10):
want to bring in is that when the New Deal
is caused, it excluded like black people, right, And so
that's one way. It's like it's like this constants like
how white people are like tricked into like submitting to
the system, and it happens so many times, and they
still keep saying, trick us again, trick us again. It's like, yeah,
they're gonna give you ship so you're not upset, and
then they're going to exclude black people because at the
end of the day, black people do all the work

(02:44:31):
that we need to survive as a society. Do we
not remember who the essential workers were? Like who does
the jobs that we need to like live? Like you
know what I mean? So yeah, you could like be
out of work and get your little thing, But as
long as we keep inslating and treating the people who
make the society run, it's fine. Um. And now that's
happening to white people too, and they're like Oh no,
it's not cute, Like it's not fun and quiet quitting,

(02:44:54):
you know what I mean, because like they're we are
like the way black people have been treated is starting
to happen to white people. And it's just like, I, well,
this is what I was going to ask you, how
do we prevent another New Deal situation from happening where
white workers are tricked again? Like because I feel it's coming.
I feel like they're going to find a way out
of this, and like how do we know what if
it's like bullshit? And like how do we call it out?
And how do we call it out? That's what Student

(02:45:15):
unforgiveness was, right, I mean, like, if we really think
about it, the democratic parties been built recently since the
Obama era on this idea of reinstituting elements of the
New Deal without threatening the existence of capitalism. Um very
intentionally right. We saw that the Affordable Care Act as
version of that. Right, So, I mean they are doing
this and I think what's fascinating about this And this

(02:45:36):
is something that radicals in the late sixties pointed out
often about Lyndon Johnson is they said, you know, liberals
voted for Lyndon Johnson, and they put all their hopes
in him, so when he failed them, it didn't have
anything left to do except hit the streets, right, like
there was no other option. And I think what we've
really seen since the Obama era is the collapse of

(02:45:57):
the idea that the way that the Democrats do socialists,
this is in any way going to solve anything. Um,
that's just going to continue to perpetuate the situation of
which we need social assistance, right, as opposed to fundamentally
ending that, which is, you know, the language that they
put forward when they talk about things like justice, which
we all know that they don't really have much adherence to. Right.

(02:46:18):
But I think until the until the Democratic Party gains
legitimacy again, if they ever do, which hopefully they don't,
but if they ever do, yeah, we might be able
to see this kind of use of reformism, this counterinsurgency again, right,
which is really what the New Deal was. But really
until that, I mean we saw in twenty twenty. You know,
when the legitimacy of the group of people who often
relies on that technique falls apart, you get uprisings in

(02:46:40):
the streets, right, And so we're at kind of a
different point I think than than maybe just before the
new Deal kind of came into effect something I want
to go back to that. I think it's what it was.
This is the piece where the quote um it's been
is talking about concealing or like in secret or in
public or whatever. How there's like a of power in

(02:47:00):
terms of like things like general strikes in that sort
of like invisibility or whatever, in the unpredictability in like
not going for like building movements based on like visibility
or public perception or like the media or whatever, but
actually building them in these ways that can't be seen
as much and might be concealed. Um. And also this
thing where people are underestimated, Like it makes me think

(02:47:20):
about the revolution in Haiti in the late seventeen hundreds,
which is you know, a long time ago but still
very relevant um. And just thinking about how the kind
of like colonizes in Paris, like couldn't believe the reports
that were coming out of uprising in Haiti at the
time because they were so racist basically that they didn't
believe that black people there who were say could rise

(02:47:41):
up and could have that like awareness, gumption or whatever. Um.
And that gave them a lot of room. You know,
that was like a position of power for them that like, um,
they were being underestimated like that much. And I think
that's something we see with like even though like the
idea that's gone on from that time really of like
outside agitator and stuff like in any uprising that we see, Um, yeah,

(02:48:06):
that both part people, is that there's something in that
that is also powerful and it gives possibility. Well, speaking
of outside agitators, We're going to take a break and
hear from some of our sponsors right now. In eighteen
sixty five, on paper, the Civil War ended and the
Union was saved. A decade later, the North began pulling

(02:48:30):
out of the South, marking the end to reconstruction efforts
in the beginning of both jem Crow and a reign
of terror and white vigilanism in the form of the
Ku Klux Klan. The eighteen seventies was also a period
of increasing poverty, declining wages, rising homelessness, economic depression, and
exploding class conflict, as the stage was said for the

(02:48:52):
Great Upheaval of eighteen seventy seven, a general strike that
rocked multiple states as workers across lines of color, gender,
professional an age threatened the very core of the capitalist state.
As the decades were on, multiple general strikes followed, as
did a heavy handed government response that evolved to police
and repress the broader population. Wanting to know more about

(02:49:13):
this history of these general strikes in their importance, we
caught up with labor historian and author Robert O. Vetts,
author of One Workers Shot Back and We the Elites.
Ovetts argues that the often violent general strikes of the
late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds showcase the ability
of working people it's not only confront the state and capitalism,
but also organized society on their own terms. Well, general

(02:49:38):
strikes have been a rare occurrence, but a very powerful
example of the way that organized workers and communities can
transform society and hopefully transcend capitalism. I think we have,
in the examples of general strikes in US history, an
example of the potential for getting on capitalism, and so

(02:50:01):
that's what makes them really exciting to to study and
to write about. At A general strike doesn't just happen,
and we don't actually know exactly why general strikes happen,
but we know that they don't just happen they're not spontaneous.
There has to be a groundwork of organizing and engaged
activists and organizers who are working quietly, sometimes for months

(02:50:26):
or years, to to work and organizing their fellow workers
and to build community connections to support their strike actions.
And there also has to be a good communication of
what what the strike is, about what their demands are,
and the ability to communicate and spread information about that strike.
Probably the two most important general strikes in US history

(02:50:51):
where the one in eighteen seventy seven and the one
in nine in Seattle. And the one in eighteen seventy
seven was a general, real strike throughout the railroad industry,
but it also had this extraordinary um microcosmic, if you will,
a general strike that was happening in St. Louis and
East St. Louis. But what was fascinating about that was

(02:51:14):
that the groundwork had been late in eighteen seventy seven,
not by a union actually because the workers had tried
to form a union, but it was sabotaged, it was infiltrated,
and they tried to the the organizers tried to call
off the set date to start the general strike and
the railroad industry, but the workers wan't on strike anyways,

(02:51:34):
and they built their own organization across dozens of different
railroad companies on their own. In St. Louis, however, there
was a new left wing party called the Workingmen's Party
that was formed by various socialists and communists and anarchists
who had taken over the city and for a few
days tried to run it. And that was that was

(02:51:57):
probably closer to what happened in Seattle in nine where
over a hundred local unions actually pressured the Labor Council
to call a general strike, and so that was kind
of built up from below through formal unions. But then
it went far beyond anything that those AFL affiliated unions
were willing to really do. The St. Louis General strike

(02:52:19):
in eighteen seventy seven that I was just mentioning. Uh,
there was a multi racial coalition of worker organizers who
literally took charge of the strike. There had been a
strike committee form and those that strike committee was dominated
by the Workingmen's Party activists, but the workers themselves started

(02:52:41):
to organize outside the confines of the strike coordinating committee
and it was very multiracial. They started marching on one
workplace and another. UH. There was some evidence that there
were some women that were involved in it, so there
were strong ties to the community and various households and neighborhoods.
But they marched on one workplace to another and spread

(02:53:02):
the strike, and within a couple of days much of
the city had been shut down. And the irony of
this was that the strike coordinating Council actually freaked out
about how multi racial of the crowds were that were
shutting down these workplaces and leaving and leaving work um
and internally they became very divided based on their their racism,

(02:53:26):
and there were some members of the coordinating committee that
were extreme racial supremacists and didn't want the strike to continue,
and they debated how to stop the strike, how to
call it off, and but the reality was that they
had lost control of it to the workers outside of
the committee, And when it became clear that the militias

(02:53:48):
were being called into St. Louis to attack the city,
the workers marched on the meeting hall where the strike
coordinating Council was and demanded that they appropriate money to
acquire arms to defend the city. But they refused to
do that, and they eventually tried to call off the strike. UH.

(02:54:08):
So that lasted a few days, and race was a
huge factor in why the strikes spread and how the
workers took over the city, but it was also a
factor in how it was actually killed by those who
were supposedly quote unquote running the actual general stripe. In
the case of Seattle, we don't know as much about
the racial composition of the workers, UM, but we do

(02:54:29):
know that it was very generalized throughout the entire city. UM.
And the reason we know this is because the the
General Strike Committee, which was formed by the Labor Council,
had representatives of every union, and they took care of
many of the reproductive needs of the population. For example,
they kept the hospital running. Uh. They set up free

(02:54:51):
kitchens where people could eat UM. They as well as
setting up and publishing a newspaper that came out every
day during the five days of the strike. So they
took care of also of public safety. UM. So what
was extraordinary about the Seattle General Strike is how it
incorporated many of these issues that we would say is

(02:55:13):
about gender and reproductive needs of the population. They didn't
just shut down the workplace. They actually took over the
city and reorganized society to meet the needs of humanity.
The seventy seven strike actually resulted in what I show
in a lot of detail in my first book, when
workers shot back, how the state and capital reorganized themselves

(02:55:38):
in order to um be able to respond a lot
quicker to self organized workers and strikes, and especially general strikes.
For example, the modern police came into being in many
cities as a result of the eighteen seventy seven strike,
because up until that point, the police were um, if
you will, they were kind of like give workers. They

(02:56:00):
worked on quote unquote tips or bribes. Uh. There were
very few cities that had any municipal police, and if
they did, they had very small forces. And so that
was one reason why the strikes spread so quickly around
the country over that that ten day or so period
in July of eighteen seventy seven. Uh So, modern policing

(02:56:21):
really came into being. Also, as you mentioned, the militias
were transformed into what became the National Guard. The militias
also proved to be undependable because they were mostly composed
of working men, and if they were called out locally,
they knew the strikers, and in fact, some of them
were strikers and didn't even show up for their militia duty.

(02:56:42):
So militias were essentially de emphasized and they were replaced
by a state controlled National Guard UM. As a result
of the passage of a new federal law UH, the
military was also funded on a permanent basis. One reason
why the military was so slow to be UH to
be deployed to put down the strike in eighteen seventy

(02:57:03):
seven was most of the soldiers were out in the
West fighting essentially a genocidal war against the Plans native peoples,
and so there weren't enough military around. And also Congress
hadn't funded the military that you believe it or not,
and so the military was unfunded and undersized. Another consequence
of this was that many corporations started to work together

(02:57:27):
to create their own you could say, mutual aid to
protect one another. They started forming employer groups in order
to be able to respond at a more coordinated method UM.
So you started to see corporations cooperati as a result
of this. In fact, many of the technologies that we
take for granted today were a result of the eighteen
seventy seven railroad strike. For example, UH, the telegraph was

(02:57:49):
installed in many rich people's homes as a way to
be able to contact the police directly. Those lines went
directly to the police UH. The so called patty wagon
UH was also invented as a result of the seven
strike as a weapon against large crowds UM. So there
were a number of m of new technologies that were
implemented UH and became more widespread as results of that strike.

(02:58:14):
In Seattle also UH, the workers were prepared. They had
known their history, and they formed a self defense group
composed primarily of War War one veterans who had just
come back from More one UM and they patrolled the
city and they did things like shutdown bars because they
didn't want UH people to get drunk and start fighting

(02:58:37):
and that would be a justification for the National Guard
to be called in. But the police started to essentially
line up outside the boundaries of the city and they
waited for reinforcements threatenings essentially to invade Seattle before the
general strike was called off. But the workers were prepared.
They did carry out and organized self defense against that eventuality.

(02:59:02):
The Oakland General Strike was part of an extraordinary wave
of post War two strikes that were happening just like
after World War One and Actually, during World War One,
there was a wave of strikes. UH. The same thing
happened when a lot of soldiers started coming back from
War two. Unemployment shot up, women were sent as sent packing. UH,

(02:59:24):
prices exploded, there was a shortage of housing UH, and
workers started to organize and U. During that few year period, UH,
there was a general strike in the steel sector and
Truman threatened to take over some of the larger companies,
and he was repelled by the Supreme Court. But as

(02:59:46):
a consequence of this UH, this upsurge of class struggle UH,
the Congress passed a Staff Hardly Act, which still governs
US today. For workers who started organized in the private sector,
where they're under the National Labor Relations Act. That Taff
Hartley Act was an amendment to that law. One of

(03:00:08):
the most important things it did was a banned so
called secondary strikes, which means that if workers go on
strikes somewhere, workers can't strike in solidarity UM, and particularly
if they have a union contract with their employer, would
be illegal. Now, there are some workers that are exempted

(03:00:29):
from that, for example, transport workers because they're under a
different federal law. They're under the Railway Labor Act. Which
is part of the reason why we almost just saw
rail railroad general strike before the Democrats killed it a
few weeks ago. But the Taffed Hartley Act continues to
serve as a means of suppressing and repressing the ability

(03:00:50):
not only of workers but organized unions in their local workplaces,
but to actually engage in a general strike. So again,
we've been listening to Robert Ovette's author of One Workers
Shot Back and We the Elites just a few key
takeaways from that discussion. We see various examples in these
general strikes of tensions developing between more radical elements and

(03:01:11):
reformist ones that want to contain revolutionary expressions and also
stop workers from really taking over society. We also see
positive examples of these strikes spilling out across lines of race, gender,
and age and profession. One thing we see, of course,
again and again is the state responding to these strikes
with the combination of militia's police and of course the

(03:01:33):
National Guard. And finally, many of these strikes lead to
the passing of legislation, which is interesting because far from
this sort of progressive arc towards justice, instead we see constantly,
again and again the state either reforming itself to become
more oppressive, engage in surveillance, reconstitute the police in a
certain way, reconstitute the military, or sometimes bring the workers

(03:01:57):
into the superstructure of the state and rogers the better man. Yeah,
I totally agree. It's not getting better. They're just being
smart about it. They're like like little like slimy balls.
They're just like reshaping as they need to shape and
form to like get workers. So like when you were
reading that, it felt like a writer's were It felt
like a movie of like how do we control these people?

(03:02:17):
You know what I mean? It felt like it was
like this like checker where they're like, oh, they make
their move, we make their move. And it's like it's
like the state as a tool, and like you see
that because it's like it's a tool of the elite,
and you see that people laws that are passed, and
like when they're passed, like because when black and white
people form them, there's violence, like a lot of state violence,
like extreme state violence, because it's like they want to
remind us like that's bad, you don't do that, and

(03:02:38):
then they'll do stuff to play get workers like white
workers too, Like with a Wagner Act, like with unionization,
like a lot of black people were excluded from that.
Maybe just maybe things aren't getting better like they're telling
you they are, things are just reshaping. That's something else
I'm thinking about as he was talking, and just like
from from that history that it is like we hear
that like the creativity of the state with their oppression
or whatever it's going on, but also how people keep

(03:03:00):
coming back with like new and different things, you know,
like actually takes a lot of repression to stop these things.
Like if you look at what happened STUBBN or whatever,
it's like they kill quite a lot of people to
stop that strike wave and stuff, you know, like it's
really heavy handed. And then but still a lot of
strikes happen after that, and it leads up to Haymarket
in a six or whatever. And I just think, again,

(03:03:22):
again we seem like repression, but then we see it
flowering again. And I think that what we're seeing like
right now maybe is like a sort of creative non union.
That when we're talking at the beginning about people just
saying general strike, general strike, it's like whatever happens next
will be something different. What we're seeing is we're seeing
over this time the mechanism of counterinsurgency get a lot

(03:03:43):
more complex. Right, So in the eighteen seventies, it's let's
get some guns and force everyone to go back to work.
But now it's why don't we get nonprofits to fund these,
you know, public programs. Why don't we have community policing
and copy with cops and and so you saw during
the Georgia a uprising, as you saw a lot of
this like, well, I know that y'all want to cut

(03:04:04):
funding from police departments, but really what you should do
is you should come to our budget meeting and we
could put it in the city budget and we should
talk about it that way. And that was the way
to force the resistance in the streets back into a
mechanism that's able to be more easily controlled. Um. But
we see in like rust belt cities, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, places
like this, the way that the wealthy at this period
of time, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we're

(03:04:27):
already talking about trying to change entire environments. Right, So
like surveillance, nonprofit activity like that changes the whole environments.
It's not just about a single individual objective but it
shapes an entire reality in these rust belt cities during
that period of time. I mean, you have a lot
of like free art museums and stuff like this that
are world class institutions. But if you look at their

(03:04:47):
charters and actually look at them closely, the reason those
institutions exist was to quote inculturate the working class. And
it was all about like Rockefeller very specifically Cleveland money
to these institutions so working class wouldn't kill them, like
wouldn't murder them. And it was in the middle of
really intense anti capitalist activity in those cities, right and

(03:05:08):
so we can watch the development of those techniques right now.
It takes the form of defunding the police campaigns and
things like that as opposed abolitionism. Um it takes the
form of trying to find softer means of policing, like
surveillance as opposed to just having clubs and guns and
stuff um. Or in the case of the Democratic Party
of the Smart Border, when they talked about the smart Border,

(03:05:29):
which is essentially putting a bunch of sensors and cameras
in the desert to try and catch people crossing the border,
that somehow less repressive by shaping the entire space around
surveillance that's somehow less repressive than just having police. And
they use that idea that if they're not in a
uniform and they don't have a weapon right in front
of them or aren't human, that somehow there's some benefit

(03:05:51):
that emerges and somehow the stage is retreating a little
bit when in actuality thinks like body cameras, stuff like
that just increase the ability of the state to have visibility,
just increases the number of cameras on the street, and
increases the ability of the state to control information and
decide what information gets out. Um. These are all things
which have reinforced the power of the state, but they
get portrayed as you know, forms of as reforms that

(03:06:14):
are supposed to solve these huge social problems that people
keep raising up. Well, speaking of things rich people give
us so we won't kill them. We're going to now
here for some from some of our sponsors. So far,
we've talked about general strikes that are largely over a
hundred years old. But now we're going to turn and

(03:06:35):
look at two examples of general strikes that took place
within the last twenty years. In December of two thousand five.
Republicans passed in the House of Representatives. HR four four
three seven, also known as the Border Protection, Anti Terrorism,
and Illegal Immigration Control Act of two thousand five, a

(03:06:56):
proposed piece of legislation that's as jaconian as it sounds. Bill,
as the A. C. L. You wrote, pushed to quote,
militarize the border, give extraordinary powers to low level immigration officials,
allowing law enforcement to expel without hearing anyone believed to
be undocumented and detained non citizens and definitely without meaningful review.

(03:07:18):
The bill also sought to levy criminal penalties against anyone
that engage in assisting someone that was undocumented, which threatened
both employers of undocumented workers, as well as union organizers, teachers, clergy,
and beyond, Foreshadowing the Trump presidency. It also called for
hundreds of miles of border fence and authorized state and

(03:07:38):
local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. As George
Campas wrote in the See Say Poty Insurrection, the bill
would transform almost every person in the United States into
either undocumented violators, police enforcers, or classify them as criminally complicit.
The authoritarian nature of the legislation and the existential threat

(03:08:00):
and represented pushed many a document of workers to take
action and organized on a mass scale. As Kemphus wrote,
starting in March of two thousand, six marches and more
than half a million people overwhelmed the centers of major
cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Dallas halteing business,
while there were literally hundreds of smaller gatherings and many

(03:08:22):
other smaller cities. There were dozens of student walkouts and
high schools around the country, as well as a nationwide
immigrant general strike called for on Maybee that was heated
by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of workers, including truck drivers,
who shut down the port of Los Angeles. Despite a
series of large scale immigration raids aimed at derailing the movement,

(03:08:44):
millions took the streets and carried out strikes, all outside
of the direction of Union in Democratic Party leadership. The
mass protests and strikes helped revive May Day as a
day of labor and worker action in the United States.
Installed for over a decade. Right wing attacks on immigrants
are four four, three seven failed to pass, in large
part due to the mass opposition and faced on the streets.

(03:09:06):
In the spring of two thousand six direct action, as
they say, gets the goods. And what's fascinating about the
two thousand six strike is that it was organized outside
of established unions and political parties, especially Democratic Party, had
a key youth wing to it. We saw lots of
student walkouts. It was able to seriously push back against

(03:09:26):
this draconian wave of anti immigrant legislation, and that worked
for around ten years. And it seems like we don't
reference this strike enough and talk about how important it was.
I was in a junior in high school when kids
were walking out, but this is how I sleep. I was.
I didn't walk out, and I just remember thinking, oh
my god, those kids are so courageous and they're such badasses,

(03:09:49):
and it's so cool that they're doing that, and I
wish that I could. Well that law was like he
should have slave Law Act, like straight up. They were
just trying to like re install slavery among people who
were not out here documented like you know what I mean.
They were trying to create a situation where people were
still working dest bread, they were going to work for
slave wages. And I'll say this about New York City,
there's a huge like immigrant population, a huge undocumented work

(03:10:10):
of population that we didn't even I mean, I didn't
know about until COVID hit. Like, there's a lot of
people who are keeping the economy alive that are not
even counted, and they pay for our existence. As we're
talking about those, two things that always come up for
me from talking about these strikes. First is, you know,
the entire concept of quote immigration reform as it was
being talked about by Republicans at the time and then

(03:10:31):
later accelerated under Trump. This idea of border walls started
with the American Nazi Party, right, Like, this was an
American Nazi Party policy proposal in the nineteen fifties and
sixties that got picked up through white supremacist movements, through
people like George Wallace and sort of imported into the
Republican Party. Yeah, because it's Nazis. I think the other

(03:10:54):
thing that was really inspiring about that movement I was,
you know, out of college at that point watching this happen.
It was one of the first times I saw mass
decentralized action happened across the entire country at that scale
that sort of hit and apex like during these days, right,
the sort of period of time in which people kind

(03:11:15):
of took it upon themselves to shut the whole country down,
And it just shows what can happen when community is
organized as communities of people and not as spectators in
some sort of removed symbolic political action, but actually become
immediate protagonists and what's going on in front of them.
Another thing I think is really interesting about this is
that it was such a massive response and that part
of what the Act was saying was that you could

(03:11:38):
be like prosecutor for assisting someone who's undocumented. That I
think it like goes back to what we've be talking
about with the other strikes stuff, is like the government
is very aware that like solidarity between people is dangerous
basically and tries to letisate it. And we see, you know,
after that strike in you know, the strike way of
in eighteen seventy seven, you start to get all those
anti conspiracy laws and stuff because that's a threat. And

(03:11:59):
I love it in the sense it's like they put
out and it gets like, um, such a massive response
against it that people really like win basically and that
last for like a decade. Yeah. I think that goes
back to the idea of white supremacy historically in the
United States being this system of how people described it,
of carrots and sticks, of offering incentives to be included

(03:12:22):
in this bracket of whiteness, but then also saying, oh,
and if you help that kid at school, we're gonna
throw you in jail along with them, which again is
a good reason to celebrate these strikes because they were
effective in beating back this legislation, but also pointing out
that everyone should have been taking part in these actions. Well, hey,
thanks for tuning in. That's going to wrap up the

(03:12:43):
first episode. We encourage you to follow us going down
on masses on at I g D Underscore News and
we hope you enjoyed us taking over It could happen here.
We're gonna be back tomorrow. We're going to continue to
look at general strikes. We're gonna do a deep dive
into Occupy Oakland that kicked off in two thousand eleven,

(03:13:04):
and we're gonna look at how a citywide general strike
grew out of the Oakland Commune after the police nearly
murdered in Iraq War veteran and thanks for tuning in.

(03:13:31):
Welcome back once again, you're listening to It could happen
here with the crew from It's Going Down Taking Over.
This is our second show and we'll be doing a
total of five episodes throughout the month of January. So
if you like what you here, please let the amazing
folks at cool Zone Media know. Yesterday we began by
looking at general strikes in US history, starting with the
mass plantation strike during the American Civil War. We spoke

(03:13:54):
with labor historian Robert Ovetts about the revolutionary and bloody
history of general strikes in the United States, and we
also looked at the immigrant general strike in two thousand
six that successfully beat back drew Conian legislation that sought
to further militarize the border and attack and documented people.
On today's show, we're going to be looking at a
general strike that was called for by Occupy Oakland, which

(03:14:16):
took place on November two. Occupy Oakland was part of
the much larger occupy movement that beginning New York with
the occupation of Zukkati Park, but was seen as the
radical focal point for the growing struggle, starting as an
occupation on October tent in front of Oakland City Hall
named Oscar Grant Plaza. On October twenty Iraq War veteran

(03:14:36):
Scott Olsen was nearly killed after being shot with a
police projectile during clashes between police and demonstrators as law
enforcement attempted to evict the growing Oakland commune. Following the
Olsen shooting, thousands were occupied Oscar Grant Plaza and the
general strike was called for a week later. Upwards of
one hundred thousand people took part in the strike's associated actions,

(03:14:58):
which included mass marches, a large anti capitalist black block
which broke bank windows, and the shutting down of the
Port of Oakland, with upwards of one thousand people participating.
Well before we hear from our guests on the subject,
I wanted to talk a little bit about the occupy
movement and Occupy Oakland and why it was so important.
The occupy movement itself grew amidst this growing anger over

(03:15:20):
the economic crisis, but also this fading belief and the
hope and change promised by Obama. While naturally it seemed
to kind of sort of come out of nowhere, there
were certainly things that really helped influence it. Naturally, there
was the occupation by Chicago workers at the Republic Windows
and Doors Factory, which signaled a real turning point, as

(03:15:40):
well as the occupation of the Wisconsin State capital in
two thousand eleven against anti union legislation, and all this
was happened against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, and
then in the Bay Area the Oscar Grant rebellion and
riots in two thousand and nine and two thousand ten
kicked off and had a massive impact, centering discussions around
police race and supremacy, as well as the role of

(03:16:02):
rioting and social movements. At the same time, students and
graduate workers occupied college campus buildings in New York and
across California, which really spread the concept of occupying across
the social terrain, as well as slogans like strike, occupied, takeover,
and occupy everything. Now, the explosion of the occupy movement
in the fall of two thousand eleven cannot be overstated.

(03:16:23):
Occupying camments became a focal point for people angry at
the general state of the world to gather discuss an
act and they became a real focal point for encounter.
While some cities saw these encampments come and go pretty quickly,
when he saw concrete projects and organizing come out of them,
people were fighting to resist foreclosures, for instance, in a
lot of cities, and for many people this was where

(03:16:45):
they were introduced to anarchist concepts such as direct action,
horizontal organizing, and consensus decision making, which really brought these
ideas front and center to hundreds of thousands of people
in a real and tangible way. And while a lot
of people on the left from a variety of backgrounds
took part, the real backbone of those involved and occupy
were just everyday people who were new to social movements

(03:17:07):
and became activated by material conditions and just the zeitgeist
of what was happening at the time. Occupy was fascinating
for me, like I was in the Rust Belt at
the time. Still at the occupy, I was part of
the first march of five thousand people there. There may
be like two or three d people at the general
Assembly the night before, So most of the people that

(03:17:28):
showed up were not people currently connected at that point
to any kind of political organizing. They were just people
that showed up because they heard about it on the
internet and they showed up to do the thing. And
that camp alot lasted nine months, but we can start
to see the impacts of that kind of breakdown of
that division between people who declared themselves political and quote
everybody else. When we start to move forward past Occupy,

(03:17:49):
we start to see that manifest during the ground Uprising Ferguson,
We start to see that manifest during the George Floyd Rebellion,
where this kind of division between those that declare themselves
to be iCal agents and those that have not declared
themselves to be so just ceases to really exist. And
it's in those moments where we really actually see uprisings occur.
Occupied pointed out an important thing which is a fallacy

(03:18:11):
in the way that we think, and that we think
that radicals make revolts happen, when in reality, people make
revolts happen, and our job is to antagonize circumstances. And
it's only at the point in which that division breaks
down between quote us and everybody else, that revolts actually occur.
And Occupy it was a really important point in a
trajectory of I think a sector of the American anarchist
movement and a sector of the American political scene starting

(03:18:34):
to really internalize that understanding, starting to really grasp how
different that is from the way that we have been
taught to organize, and we're still seeing the ramifications of
a lot of that work today, many many many years later,
looking at like occupied, looking at any of these big moments.
When we look back, we can see all these things
that like contribute to it, you know. And I think
that this thing that you ASO can see tom of them,

(03:18:57):
like the kind of losing that thing of like professor
active act or like or actor in a situation is
like so important, and I think that that is something
that can really inspire in terms of what's happening in
this moment too, or like how general strikes happen, or
how something that occupy happens. Is that things happen, like
there are sort of moments that are kind of outside

(03:19:17):
of our control. It's not something that can be like
planned for, and if you do all the right things,
then you get a general strike. But you can kind
of like be relating to circumstances and to each other
and then different things happen. Um like thinking about the
George Floyd uprising in twenty like none of us predicted COVID,
you know, and like how that might have contributed to

(03:19:39):
what happened in that or just like all these different
circumstances that come together to make these moments um and
I think that you know, something like what's going on now,
we could look back and look at all these different
things that are happening that then make something big happen,
and we never really know or can control that. A
lot of the striking and occupy it serves the purpose

(03:19:59):
of not us just coming together collectively, but it also
serves as purpose of propaganda, and it just reminds me
of this idea important idea of us occupying public spaces
and the reason why we're not allowed to occupy public
spaces because it's like sort of taking the power. And
when there's lots of us occupied in public spaces, the
media covers it and then it's like, well, what are
these people talking about? What are they doing? And that

(03:20:20):
would then itself also serves as a propaganda mechanism to
like spread, so like I like just like listening to that.
And I remember when again, like occupy was one of
the moments that I was one of the people who
viewed myself as not political, but I cared about what
was happening in the movement because that was the first
time I heard we are I think about moments of
radicalization that I think of this one as being one
of them as a person who's just like recently and

(03:20:41):
as a five years ago recently awoke, Like these are
moments that I remember, like had an impact on me
seeing people on the street taking public spaces, and I
think that perhaps that's something that we should continue to do.
And maybe it's not one of those things where it's
like maybe not as large as occupy, maybe it's not
consistently large, but like maybe we as civilians to just
over public spaces all the time, just as a reminder

(03:21:02):
to ourselves that we do have the power to do that.
Like we can't have a free store here because we
want to. We don't have to ask the government for
permission to do anything, like I think it's a huge
first stop of becoming ungovernable and speaking of things that
belong in a free store. We're now going to hear
from our sponsors. For us to understand how the Oakland
General Strike of took place, we first have to go

(03:21:24):
back to what made Occupy Oakland so important to so
many people just a few short weeks in October. In
the following interview, we speak with it's Going Down. Contributor,
author and translator based in Mexico, Scott Campbell about his
memories of occupy and what set the stage for a
massive strike on November two. We didn't speak with Tova,
who was involved in the Occupy Oakland Labor Solidarity Committee,

(03:21:48):
about Bay Area labor unions becoming involved in the strike.
So to kick things off, Scott tell us about Occupy Oakland,
what it looked like, how life and Oscar Grand Plaza
was organized, and about this living, breathing thing many came
to call the Oakland community. If you were to walk
into Occupy Oakland, I think you'd be overwhelmed. Um. It
was an amazing, vibrant, self managed, auto jestive community where

(03:22:15):
you had folks living there in an Oscar Grant plaza.
You had food, childcare, medical care, libraries, UM, all sorts
of projects UM in a self run sort of directly
democratic assembly based, communally organized space. And it was open

(03:22:35):
to anyone except for police and politicians who wanted to
come and participate in this sort of radical experiment, this
radical form of being with one another outside the constraints
of how society normally constructs us to perform and interact
with one another. And I think what really stuck out
to me the most during this time period was just

(03:22:57):
the the welcoming atmosphere or the sense of potential that
the camp um and the activities based around the camp held,
the openness of people, and really the wide range of
individuals who were participating in collectives who were participating, which certainly,
of course led to differences of opinions at times that

(03:23:17):
made that created some dynamics that were a struggle to
to work through and navigate, but at the same time
really added to a sense of a space that went
beyond a single project, that went beyond a single vision,
but that was horizontal, communal and open in a way
that I had never experienced before and that I have
yet to experience again. It definitely had an organic feel

(03:23:41):
to it of of sort of people coming together, lending
what skills they had, lending what resources they had across
a variety of positions UM that may be broadly categorized
on the left or or post left spectrum, a spectrum
of folks with the spectrum of capacities of needs UM

(03:24:02):
I mean a large number of unhoused neighbors who were
there who brought their own life experiences and their own
knowledge and their own skills to bear on the project,
which I think was a really, I guess, a powerful
learning opportunity for a lot of people who hadn't really
been in direct contact with unhoused folks um and who
were unfamiliar with really perhaps the impetus beyond Occupy Oakland,

(03:24:27):
and beyond occupy the impetus behind Occupy Oakland, and the
impetus behind occupy Wall Street in general, which was of
course the two thousand and eight financial crash and the
Great Depression and the bailout of the banks while people
got fore clothes on their homes, especially people of color
and black folks, which which hit particularly hard in Oakland.
And so we see all these dynamics coming together and
trying to work themselves out organically without being mediated by

(03:24:49):
any one organization or any particular ideology. And it was
a powerful, confusing, messy, lively, beautiful experience. How to categorize
as general assemb it is a great question, I think
for me, how I interpreted it is it added a
structural framework for how to navigate issues that would arise

(03:25:10):
within the camp, within the sort of occupation. For lack
of a better word of Oscar Grand Plaza, facilitating the
day to day functionings of things. In a lot of ways,
was a decision making body. I wouldn't call it a
government as such, because it tried to run on consensus
or modified consensus, and anyone was free to bring proposals

(03:25:31):
to the General Assembly that were free to bring their
ideas for and promote their events and promote their actions
and activities. A lot of decisions were also being made
by people who just showed up to do the work
without necessarily consulting the General Assembly, So you almost had
different tiers of activity and different tiers of organization occurring
in the same space. That seemed, again I go back

(03:25:53):
to this word, that seemed to organically work itself out
most of the time, and within the General Assembly that
was the more formal structure where people came together at
times nightly to discuss issues facing the camp, to discuss
issues with in terms of um dealing with the police
and the city government and eventually the state and federal

(03:26:14):
government as they showed up to determine how to respond
to various acts of aggression and attacks on the camp
and attacks on the space, to figure out how to
better run the space. Even to figure out how to
better run the General Assembly itself was a big question
within the General Assembly. And these were general assemblies that
anyone could participate and you didn't have to show qualifications

(03:26:35):
or necessarily be living in the space. Anyone was free
except for the police and politicians um to come and
speak to the General Assembly. I remember one time gene Quon,
then mayor of Oakland, wanted to come and speak to
the General Assembly, and she was told she could, but
she had to wait her turn, and so she decided
to leave because she didn't want to wait. She didn't
feel like she had to wait. It was really a

(03:26:56):
space of encounter for people to bring up different aspects
that there were concerned in them, that they were working on,
that they wanted to see flourish in the space. The
biggest general Assembly was happened around when to move forward
with the general strike, but there were also general assemblies
on on things like issues around smoking and people's health
and well being in the space, issues around cleanliness, issues
around safety, how to interact with the police, how to

(03:27:18):
interact with the government, do we put forward demands? What
should the name of it be? Is occupied Oakland? The
problematic name. Should we change it to occupied to colonize Oakland?
These were all sorts of issues that were brought forward
to the General Assembly, along with like how do we
meet the material needs of the space, and how do
we handle the supplies that are being brought in and
make sure that they're equally equitably distributed. Who can do

(03:27:40):
what for whom within the space? How do people skills
get the most use out of them. It was a
very much a lively atmosphere. It felt like, I don't know,
I I know the word democracy is contentious. It felt
like a directly democratic process um. But there were also
you know, it's important to recognize that there were some
people who were more skilled and more familiar with how

(03:28:02):
consensus works, who are more familiar with the process that
was behind the running of the General Assembly, which which
has its roots and anarchist practice and anarchist forms of
decision making, and so those folks definitely had a hand
up when it came to making decisions, when it came
to presenting proposals, when it came to even administering and
running the General Assembly itself, those tasks often fell into

(03:28:26):
the lapse of anarchists who I think did a good
job of making sure that these general assemblies ran smoothly
and that they were inclusive and open to all who
wanted to participate, and people could bring their ideas, and
sometimes they got approved, sometimes they got rejected. Even if
they got rejected, some some folks decided they would implement
them anyways, and and that also worked out as well

(03:28:46):
as sometimes creating conflict. The city grew increasingly frustrated with
the encampment as they were they found themselves unable to
make any progress in trying to recuperate, in trying to
gain favor sort of the encampment their own and extension
of the electoral body, right of the electoral body politic. Ultimately,
that's what moved Kwan, the supposedly progressive mayor, more to

(03:29:09):
the side of the police way of seeing things as
force was the only option to deal with these people
who are you know, being unrealistic, were being naive, who
are being entranched in and transigent, and you know, at
the same time, the police along with the city eventually
started building up this narrative of the camp as a
violent and unsafe space where people are being harmed in
a variety of ways. And it was necessary for for

(03:29:32):
public safety's sake to move against the encampment. I was
there the night the encampment was evicted. I think it
was October or early morning October twenty five, around three
am in the morning, three thirty four am, and I
was actually arrested. I was one of I believe eighty
eight plus people were arrested. UM. During the process of
the camps eviction, UM the police came in force. They

(03:29:55):
massed up outside of Oracle Arena and the A Stadium.
It was a massive operation. They came in from all sides.
People upon hearing word that the camp was going to
be evicted, UM set up barricades. They laced the entire
area with string, trying to impede UM the possibility of
the police getting injured. Quickly, there were battles with the

(03:30:16):
police as they tried to make their way into the encampment,
and eventually UM they came in from all sides and
until they took over the encampment and encircled the people
who remained in the camp. I was in jail when
Scott Olsen was shot, but I do recall the prison
guards or the Almeda County sheriffs who were making these

(03:30:36):
comments as we were being released finally after about twenty
four plus hours of being held, saying things like, oh,
go have fun rioting and that sort of thing, and
and we get out there and then hear about all
the events that had happened over the course of the
day that we had been locked up, of these people
of folks in the thousands, just like you said, coming
out to try and retake the space of running battles
in the streets. I have so many friends and comrades

(03:30:58):
who were telling stories about getting tear gassed, geting shot
at with pepper balls, of Scott Wilson's devastating injury of
getting shot in the head. It was violence that occurred
outside the normal narrative of violence deployed by the police
in Oakland, right, and so it made it exceptional, even
though much more brutal violence occurs daily by the police
in Oakland against primary the black black population in Oakland

(03:31:19):
and and other people of color um. But we see
a huge upswelling of outrage at the rate of the
camp Um, outrage at the injury against Scott Wilson, and
this ultimately the attempt to use force to quash a
movement tremendously backfired against both the police and the city

(03:31:39):
government in terms in terms of it building up even
more support for Occupy Oakland and its efforts. I recall
going to the General Assembly when the general strike was
decided to be moved forward, when the proposal was made
to have a general strike in a week, which was
just seemed like a completely impossible notion and completely impractical,

(03:32:00):
but also within the realm of the possible at the
same time, because what had been going on, especially the
response to people in terms of fighting against the police,
in terms of taking back namcmon of basically winning against
the government, winning against the police forces, reclaiming this space,
um taking injuries, supporting one another through that process, it

(03:32:21):
seems possible that we could pull up a general strike
within a week. When it came around, it was clear
that the word had been spread, that that energy that
brought on that impulse to move forward with the general
strike was still there a week later, and I would
say that that day itself was a tremendous success. We
had a hundred thousand people marching on the Port of Oakland,
shutting it down. We had a day's worth of activities,

(03:32:43):
everything that encapsulated Occupy Oakland. I feel like I found
a home UM in particular on that day on November two. Again,
we've been listening to Scott Campbell. Next we'll hear from Tova,
who was involved in the Labor Solidarity Committee of Occupy Oakland,
which worked to bring in labor unions into the organizing
of the general strike. There were just masses of people

(03:33:04):
down there at Oscar Career, at Plaza. Some of them
were working on maintaining or re re establishing the different
services that they had set up. I had been involved
in labor struggles in the past back in Detroit when
I was in the u a w. SO UM volunteered

(03:33:25):
to work on the Labor Solidarity Committee to do the
outreach to get support and participation of various unions, teamsters
who played a very big role in in support UM
for that general strike as well. And that I think
it's the o e A, the Oakland Education Association as

(03:33:47):
a teachers union, and they were very much involved in
So was the s c IU, particularly the sci U,
the City Workers, So the city workers were down there
every day and saw what was going on. UM, and
we're you know, very much involved and affected by it.
You know, the teachers Union had, like you said, been
involved with in support work before all the attacks by

(03:34:11):
the police happened. UH. There was a lot of involvement
beforehand as well, UM one or two Teamsters locals that
were you know, supporting officially. They you know, it wasn't
just their rank and file members, which had been great also,
but you know, the we had support from one or
two Teamsters locals and the i LW is primarily Local ten.

(03:34:35):
The longshoreman whole proposal was to march down to the
port UH and shut down the Port of Oakland. We
had people involved from my LW. You although I'm pretty
sure that the i LW Local ten officially was not
involved in calling for that strike, but there were members

(03:34:56):
who were involved in the i LW organization who were
definitely involved in helping to plant and organize it as well.
The Teamsters added some logistical support in terms of trucking
and supplies and things like that. I think that the
o e A the teachers also in addition to participation,

(03:35:19):
donated supplies and things like that. So there was a
lot of donations from the locals as well. We've been
listening to Tova from the Occupy Oakland Labor Solidarity Committee,
We're now going to take a short break and be
right back. As the Oakland Commune and the Occupy movement
faded into history, it helped inspire and inform a new

(03:35:41):
generation of activists. As under Obama, we saw continued explosions
in Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and later at Standing Rock. By
the time that Trump took office, autonomous resistance movements were
bubbling beneath every surface. As airports were shut down against
the Musli band, r It's broke out against the ault right,

(03:36:02):
and thousands of teachers started striking across Appalachia. Donny Red,
Ben Dennis and omage of the so called Redneck War
of when striking coal miners engaged in grilla warfare with
government troops and the Air Force dropped actual bombs on strikers.
With the current uptick and strikes under Biden continuing into

(03:36:24):
and the economic conditions of porn working people continuing to worsen,
we asked labor reporter and author A Fight Like Hell,
Kim Kelly, just what are the possibilities of mass strike
action in the coming year? You know, I think we're
in this really interesting moment where labor and workers and
unions in general are getting a lot more attention than

(03:36:47):
we're used to, and a lot of that attention is positive,
and we have a lot of these big wins that
we get to celebrate. We get to celebrate, you know,
the workers at Staten Island, Amazon go on toe to
toe of Jeff Bezos and the un election winning. We
get to celebrate this ongoing wave of unionization efforts at
Starbucks across the country, hundreds of Starbucks and unionized. We

(03:37:10):
get to celebrate a lot of big wins. And they
are also a lot of struggles that have been kind
of set to this side, or not gotten as much
attention as they deserve, or kind of written off. I
think that's always the dichotomy of the labor movement in general,
right because it's so big almost everyone is a part
of it, whether or not they like to think of
themselves that way. You know, I've been covering this coal

(03:37:32):
minor strike in Alabama since April one. They're still out there.
They have not gotten very much attention. They're kind of
stuck in a stalemate at the bargaining table because the
bosses want to starve them out. And this is Alabama,
where workers in or outside the prison walls do not
have very many rights, do not have any politicians on

(03:37:53):
their side. They're struggling and they're still out there. And
that's kind of the flip side of these big, energetic,
inspiring moments in labor right where we have these winds,
and we also have folks that are being left a
slog or being ignored entirely, like the folks that we're
going to see very soon in Pennsylvania who are going
to be launching a strike and side the Department of Corrections.

(03:38:17):
I hope that gets a lot of attention. I mean,
we saw a similar effort by a carce rated workers
in Alabama a couple of months ago, and that got
a lot of attention. And I'm really hoping that this
kind of renewed interest in labor and workers rights and
then discussing even topics like prison slavery, in topics like
forced labor, incarcerated work, and different types of work. I

(03:38:38):
really hope that benefits these workers as they embark on
their action. But we'll see, you know, like I am
very interested to see perhaps the limits of this public
support for labor actions. Is it easier to support a
barista than it is to support a coal miner and
incarcerated worker. There's all these different pieces that go into

(03:39:00):
this moment. And I love being possy. I love seeing
workers win and workers organized and strike and protest, and
I also like keeping an eye out for the folks
who aren't getting as much intention and aren' getting as
much support and thinking about why that is. So it's
kind of a long, rambly answer to say, I am
cautiously optimistic, and I really hope that all of the

(03:39:22):
people who have thankfully and you know, I'm I'm glad
they're here, who have showed up in the past year
in the media, the political class, whoever, regularly, regular people
who have been paying attention to these these worker actions.
I hope they keep that energy for this year, because
we're going to need it, you know. Started we we've
had a pretty good We're in a decent spot, and

(03:39:46):
I really don't want to see a squander that. See.
I think this moment with the Wildroad workers, I think
that is something that's going to continue to resonate and
reverberate out and I think that's going to have an
impact the next time the Democratic part he says, hey,
where the workers party like, you need to come vote
for us and keep us in power, because well, we're
the only ones who will protect you. Well will you

(03:40:10):
did you? Were you there for us when we needed
you or when we needed your help? No? You know,
it just makes one wonder how much of the pro
union uh sloganeering that that this administration loves to do,
how much of it is pure public relations, how much
of it is actually attached to whatever personal beliefs that

(03:40:34):
Biden has, or if they just think it's politically expedient
to you know, act as though where the we're pro union,
we're pro worker, we're not going to pass any laws,
we're not going to investigate any worker death at Amazon
facilities are elsewhere, we're not going to use our power
to help you. But we're not Republicans, So you know,

(03:40:54):
it's um. I think it's going to be interesting to
see how much the real words strike impacts people, because
I think that the political calculus that the Biden administration
did in choosing to crush the strike inside with the
railroad bosses, I guess they figured, oh, well, it's not
that big of a deal. Maybe not that many people

(03:41:14):
are paying attention. We've got to make sure people get
their Christmas presents on time. But a lot of folks
were watching that. A lot of regular workers were watching
that and thinking, oh so, if we were in that
position at my job, the government would help us either.
I think, you know, a lot of the chatter I
saw from railroad workers, from other workers, just from people
in generals like, oh so, okay, this was the big

(03:41:37):
moment where Biden could have proved he cared about us,
and instead he threw us under the bus straight onto
the railroad tracks. And I don't think that's a surprise
to people that are sort of paying more close attention
to the way the state operates. But I think it
was maybe a revelatory moment for folks who just sort
of assumed, okay, like there's at least a little bit

(03:41:58):
of benevolence at least, you know, democrats are in power.
This guy says, hells unions, that should help us out
a little bit. But seeing what happened there, I think
it's going to be a profoundly disillusioning moment for a
lot of people that maybe had a little bit more
faith in the state or at least assumed it was
sort of looking out for us. And I think that's
gonna have an impact when you know, the Democratic Party

(03:42:19):
comes back knocking on our doors and mostly asking for
a vote in our support, because I mean you, we
had a classic which side are you on moment and
we saw which way they chose to go. We're gonna
see more prolonged strikes, We're going to see more unfair
labor practices, are going to see more organizing. I think
that it is impossible to put this lightning back into

(03:42:41):
a bottle. Right Like, activity and interest in unions and
organizing is, if not skyrocketing, it's had a really nice
little bump over the past few years, a noticeable improvement
and a noticeable amount of new worker workplaces being organized
and going on strike and fighting for their rights. Like,
I don't think that's going away. And two of the

(03:43:03):
aspects of this, this entire scenario that really interests me. First,
the fact that we're seeing so many workers who some
my categories as quote unquote white collar whatever, folks who
work in nonprofits or at book publishers or journalism, other
types of media kind of all of these other types
of jobs that don't fit into that traditional manufacturing or

(03:43:24):
extractive focused many more manual labor oriented jobs that I
think a lot of people associate with the labor movement.
They've been going on strike and they've been making big waves,
whether it's the forty eight thousand grad student workers at
the University of California or harperk HarperCollins Publishing workers currently
still on strike in New York City. I think there's

(03:43:46):
been kind of the shift in understanding of oh, Okay,
you don't need to be a certain type of worker,
or certain type of person, or come from a specific
background in order to organize to join a union. Unions
aren't just for the classic white guy in a hard
hatch like my dad, right like, they're accessible to so
many more of us than perhaps we thought, And I
think that's going to be big because the work has shifted.

(03:44:09):
Work looks different than it did thirty years ago. There's
a lot of different ways to be exploited, and we
know the employers have definitely looked into each and everyone
and taken notes, So we have that happening. I think
that's gonna continue propelling the energy behind this movement. And secondly,
I'm really intrigued by the rise, and that's it's a

(03:44:30):
smaller phenomenon, but it is very much happening, and it
is kind of increasing slowly the exist, this existence of
independent unions, because we saw, of course the Amazon Labor Union.
They're the big ones, They've gotten tons of attention, deservedly so.
But there are also efforts Trader Joe's Trade Jo's United
as an independent union. Chipotle workers formed an independent union.

(03:44:53):
There was an effort here in Philadelphia to form a
Home Depot workers independent union, and that one wasn't successful,
but I'm certain that the organizer has not given up
and they're still going to keep working on that. Like
and I think seeing these independent unions which are not
affiliated with other internationals, are not part of the fl
C oh there literally just d I Y you know.

(03:45:15):
Thence the fact that we're seeing this happen. I think
it just shows the cracks in the current labor movements
as it stands, and especially in the way that power
is concentrated and the way that resources are organized, in
the way that the movement's priorities in terms of public

(03:45:37):
statements and political power are kind of dictated by folks
who tend to be more conservative, and I mean that
in like a Democrat way and not like you know,
Republican chaos, but just more conservative compared to a lot
of the rank and file, like we see with the
railroad workers that rejected rejected that deal that so many

(03:45:58):
of their leaders agreed on. You know, I think there's
more radicalism brewing in the rank and file and more
militancy that and it's it's manifesting in different ways. It's
manifesting and wildcatch strikes or an independent unions, or in
organizing outside of the traditional organized labor structure in general,
like what sex workers and incarcerated workers are doing and
have been doing. I think ultimately the bottom line is

(03:46:19):
that a lot of workers, a lot of people have
realized that they have options, and they're exercising their rights
to organize and to work collectively and to stand with
their fellow workers against the bosses and against capital in
ways that you know, perhaps wouldn't have felt as available
or seemed as possible a few years ago, but now

(03:46:40):
there's so many examples of other workers doing it. Of
course have been there throughout history too, like I read
about my book, but I think we're at this moment
where people realize, Okay, there are a lot of different
ways to do this. I have people with me, we
have problems we need to address. Let's see what works.
You know, it's not just picking up the phone and

(03:47:00):
calling a union organizer, though that works for some folks, too,
is recognizing the problems we face in our workplace, in
our experience, and deciding together what we want to do,
how we want to go forward, and how we're going
to win. Once again, that was Kim Kelly, author of
Philight Hell. Over the past two episodes, we've taken a

(03:47:21):
deep dive into the history of general strikes in the
United States, looking at everything from the mass strike of
Enslave plantation workers during the Civil War all the way
up to current examples during Occupy Oakland. I think one
of the things history has to offer us as a
guide for the present is that these upheavals are made
possible not only by people responding to material conditions, but

(03:47:44):
also learning from struggle. In the instance of the Great Upheaval,
that general strike came after a series of other smaller strikes.
This fall, thousands of prisoners across Alabama organized a general
strike of incarcerated workers, downing their tools and refusing to
work their jobs, bringing the prisons to a grinding halt.
This historic strike comes on the heels of many other

(03:48:06):
prisoner led strike actions in two thousand ten, two thousand sixteen,
in two thousand eighteen, not to mention the fact that
many Alabama prisoners saw themselves as acting in the spirit
of the Great Plantation Strike during the Civil War, as
epitomized by the strike slogan let the crops rought in
the field in my final thoughts, instead of putting our

(03:48:29):
hopes in a call for a general strike going viral,
as the same goes, we have to walk before we
can run. So strengthening our ability to engage in collective
direct action and active refusal, as well as building our
capacity for community self defense and mobilizing against state violence
and oppression and whatever form, will ultimately allow us to

(03:48:49):
expand and grow our ability to do these things in
the future. A lot of times we're told that like
we're powerless and were these passive beings and creatures, and
we have to wait for somebody to order anizes. But
every single day we wake up in the morning and
we make capitalism happen like we do it like all
of us, every single one of us, does it like
this is not like, oh, like this is just something

(03:49:09):
that's happening to us, we're doing to ourselves. We're doing
it to each other. Like these are little things that
we can do, like little acts of resistance. And I'm
all about petty resistance because I do realize that a
lot of people don't have time for the large resistances.
So this is for anybody who's like, yeah, I hate capitalism,
but I just don't have the breath on the space
and the time to necessarily like go out and do things.
If you can't, please do it. You can't like walk

(03:49:30):
the funk out do But if you can't, like there's
still stuff you can do. That's it for me. By
you know which strikes me often about general strikes are
two things. First is that general strikes actually function very
differently than they do in leftist discourse. Like in leftist
discourse it's workers do general strikes. But in reality, if

(03:49:50):
we really look at general strikes, there these moments of convergence. Right,
there's these these sort of points in which distinctions break down, Right,
the distinction between like organizers and everyone else, or the
distinction between workers and non workers completely breakdown. Right, It's
not just railroad workers don't strike in eighteen seventy seven,
is also their families, their neighbors, their whole communities on strike.

(03:50:11):
And this the second thing that that raises often for
me is again this kind of long term cultural implications
of that sort of form of action. So growing up
in a place where you know, strike culture is a thing,
um still where there's still actual union density and people
do walk off the job. Um, you grow up with
that as an idea, right that you don't just walk

(03:50:34):
off the job, But like the restaurant around the corner
also gives out free food, and people bring coffee down
to the picket line, and you know, workers from other
unions show up the block entrances because the judge said
you can, you know, so on so on, and it
becomes this huge community initiative of autonomy and self defense.
And what that creates is a sense in which class

(03:50:55):
struggle is perpetual. Like you understand always when you grow
up in a place like that, But when you go
to work, you're making somebody else money because you've been
told that your whole life right, and that if you
get angry about that, that what you're supposed to do
is organize and go on strike. And that's a very
normal sort of narrative. That was because we all grew
up in families where we were taught to do that.

(03:51:16):
That if the wealthy we're taking advantage of you, you
just leave. Right. That is not a normal thing outside
of the rest of the America, right, Like, people don't
get brought up with that. But I think as we're
starting to see this kind of rise of the idea
of the general strike, and we're starting to understand that
is something that's not just connected to employment, but we
can start to think of general strikes as social strikes

(03:51:38):
and not just economic strikes. We can start to understand like,
even if those may immediately not succeed, the long term
impacts of those over time really create the conditions for
them to succeed later. And if it hadn't been for
that flame staying alive, I think in parts of America,
this wave of worker action wouldn't be happening. There wouldn't

(03:51:58):
be a foundation for it, there wouldn't be a way
on your standard right um. And that's what's so critical
about this moment is I think in some ways we're
almost reviving a thing that my grandparents lived in the
midst of just as a very normal part of their lives.
I think that's like a really important piece about the survival.
And I think that something that feels really important about
general strikes is the idea of like solidarity and that

(03:52:19):
our liberation is collective, you know, that it involves each other.
And I think that, um, I feel like what happened
between like what you're saying some about you, like your
grandparents generation and now is like near liberalism in a
lot of ways, and just like this really strong promotion
of the idea of like individualism and that if you
want to make your life better you have to do
it yourself, and like it's down to you as an individual.

(03:52:42):
But I think it was pretty effective at decimating a
lot of ideas of like solidarity or the idea that
I like, freedom is with each other, um. And I
think that that is starting to fall apart, Like people
are realizing however much they hustle or like have side
hustles or whatever, they're still fucked. And just like I
think that we're seeing like there's sergeants of this idea
of like solidarity and that we have to do together.

(03:53:05):
That is going to do it for us this week.
Thank you so much for tuning in. Check us out
on Macedon at I g D Underscore News, and be
sure to tune in as the workers that It Could
Happen Here into their two day strike and return to
the job. But stay tuned. We'll be back next week
for even more episodes. Until then, Hey, We'll be back

(03:53:29):
Monday with more episodes every week from now until the
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