Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 42

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Take it away, Robert Evans.

Gosh, it could happen here. I did it. Brilliant. Thank you. Yeah, I love that really. Thank you. You're Robert Evans. We also have Christopher Wong, Garrison Davis, and we have Andrew here with us who will be leading this episode.

Hi, Andrew. Hello. Hello, everyone. How is the weather? It's so hot. In Portland, it is cold. Everywhere else in the continental United States, it is a boiling hellstorm. Yes.

Actually, today it's only 84. But yeah, we have three days where it's barely in the 80s, and then it goes back to being like 97 again. Yes. It's very exciting. Same with Los Angeles. I don't understand your temperature measurements. Same with Los Angeles. It's lovely today.

We're lovely for the next couple days. And then we'll be burning. 36 is 97. It's going to be perfect here forever. Climate change is over in Northern Oregon. I have declared it. Well, if you declared it, it must be true. Exactly.

So today, I want to have a bit of a discussion, an open discussion about my favorite kind of discourse, and that is dead discourse. I wanted to talk about a discussion, quote unquote, that people have been having a couple weeks ago about restaurants. Oh, restaurant discourse. This whole idea that people heard about five minutes ago and got super riled up over and sparked a whole bunch of like drama because that's what social media incentivizes. But I figured, you know, we could have a nice round table discussion here about quote unquote restaurant abolition and share our thoughts on the ideas presented in the zine that inspired it. For those who read it, about the restaurants by prologue info. But first of all, I wanted to share a bit about my experience in the food industry. It was quite brief and by brief, I mean like four days.

I was looking at this, this winery slash cafe that was owned and run by this trust fund baby. And it was very clear that she had failed up for most of her life. It was very disorganized and very stressful experience. I quit like a few days after I got it because instead of, you know, making coffees and preparing wines and stuff. I started a job pushing people in an office, which is only marginally better. And I mean, I don't want to speak over like food service people or anything because like my experience was very limited. But in my own limited experience, it sucked. I mean, my blood turned to water trying to keep up with everything.

It was one of those kind of under the table jobs where you don't have a contract or a specific job description. It's just like you're doing everything. So you're sorting and taking out recycling, you're organizing stock, you're making coffee, bus and tables, you're cash and products, you're handling accounting for some reason. Like lady, I just got here, but I'm already doing accounting and so on and so forth. I didn't have an official break either and I wasn't allowed to sit at all. I mean, my boss said that I could stop for lunch when I needed to. But because of this constant like responsibility, she was piling on to me. She never got a chance to take a breather.

The one time I did take a lunch break, she rushed me out to the lunch break because I was taken too long. And she was busy taking care of her other real estate and her only consistent customers were her friends. And yet somehow, you know, she kept the doors open and the lights on because, you know, trust fund, baby. But, yeah, to reiterate, it was a very sucky experience. Hi. What about you all? You all had any? Yeah, I worked at a restaurant for starting when I was in high school.

I was 15 and a half for three or four years part of college. It made me learn a lot about how awful people are, but it was like you did learn how to work in a team and things like that. Helpful skills there. But management was terrible. Not exactly easy work, not exactly fun work. Yeah, it was like, I honestly feel like a lot of people should have to do some type of job like that so that they learn, you know, how to treat people who work in that kind of position. Because mostly my memories of it is terrible, horrible customers who just treated people like scum. Yeah.

But I needed the job. So, yeah. Yeah, my only experience in food service was working at a Sonic. Not for a crazy long time, but it was terrible. And it left me with an abiding like respect for people who have to do that. And we'll talk more about the restaurant thing, but I certainly don't think fast food restaurants are a thing that exists in my ideal future because I don't know how you could possibly operate those without a tremendous amount of human suffering and wasted potential because they're just, they're bad things. Now that said, any utopian society will have a way to acquire Popeyes, but perhaps not at like midnight in every city of the country whenever you want it. My utopian society is a world in which KFC has been abolished and everything else still exists.

Yes, yes. Well, that's the episode everybody. Again, this is It Could Happen Here sponsored by Carl's Jr. I'm perfectly okay with imperialism, but like, I need someone to describe it, you know what I'm saying. Keep the KFC. Andrew, what kind of like, can I ask like what kind of restaurant, I know Robert said his was fast food, mine was very like casual food. What kind of restaurant did you work at? Right, it wasn't, it was like a winery slash cafe.

And it also served food. It was like a touch to a hotel. Oh yeah, and the hotel part of it probably made it even first. Yeah, her parents own the hotel and so she. Oh, yeah. All right, yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah. Chris Garrett, either of you either work in the food service industry at all?

Yeah, I worked at a bakery for like a year and a half, mostly back of the house. But I mean, I would, you know, would end up washing, washing dishes and taking out recycling and all that kind of stuff. But most of my work was designing recipes, because I was more on like the food science angle. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's, I have a complicated feelings on like cafes specifically. I love anarchist cafes and like the idea of an anarchist cafe, I would love to love to like have one at some point. Yes. It's like operated by the workers, wouldn't quote owned by the workers.

With a shooting range out back. But obviously there's guns and buns, we call it guns and buns. You can get a croissant and you can shoot a nine millimeter. If you would have burned my cafe by all means. Guns and buns sounds like a gym or something. If you want. Absolutely right. You're right.

Guns and buns is a breakfast cafe gun range strip club. And apparently a gym. As long as, as long as you fund it, you can even whatever you want. But the people will find it garrison. Obviously the food service industry has. Yes, we'll just make it a cooperative. That makes everything. Sorry, please continue.

Yeah, but like the food service industry has a lot of problems. But if I were, if I were able to go into a bakery, like maybe like two or three times a week to just bake food for people. And that helps me live the rest of the week. I would totally do that. Right. So like, it depends on a lot of factors, but I think it's like there's ideas around like an anarchist cafe, worker owned cafe. That'd be like totally chill to work in it to like be there a few days of the week making food because I enjoy making food. I enjoy baking.

I like food science. But, you know, when you start tying that into labor and exploiting the labor practices and the notion of like having to serve other people, then it gets a little bit more tricky. And, you know, less, less, less good. Less cash money. I understand. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, it was, it was kind of funny about it.

I would say it's like kind of lost much, you know, thought quite a lot, but I just think for a sec. Well, so I mean, one of the things that I have noticed over the years, because I've had a lot of friends work as bartenders, as waiters and waitresses, there are, there's a chunk of people who really like the work. They usually don't like their employer. They often have issues with like their manager or whatever, but like they like their coworkers and they enjoy the act of like doing restaurant stuff. Yeah. And I know that like, so one of the things that I did recreationally for years is I was go to, I would go to these regional Burning Man events. And one of the rules there is like everyone pays the same thing to get in. There's no like get, there's no like talent.

So there's nobody who's like paid to be there as an act. And there's no like exchange of currency allowed, but there are restaurants. There are people who like bake food and give out and like make and give out coffee. There's, there's multiple bars. And a number of the people I knew who were like the most who would spend the most of their time, which is again, totally their own at these events. Volunteering as bartenders were people who worked as bartenders and were like, look, I like serving drinks. I hate a lot of what goes along with being in a bar, but I enjoy making and serving drinks. Absolutely.

There was this one really cool dude out in the middle. He was out because it's a spread out over acres of woodlands. There was just this guy I found one night alone in the woods at like a podium sized little booth lit up bar heat made. And he was like, look, I am a very good bartender. What I do not like is making the same things every night for drunk people who don't know anything about a good mixed drink. So you and I are going to have like a five minute conversation and then I'm going to tell you what I'm going to make you based on like, yeah, and it was fucking dope. Yeah, it was really cool. Like that.

More stuff like that. More like restaurant pop ups that are like those types of things are, are just are divorced from like this notion of like, you know, being served by a lower class member of society. Instead, it's people like sharing actual interests that they have and they're not obligated to be there or else they get, you know, or also not able to pay their rent. Right. There's lots of things like a utopian society where we like, yeah, I would totally be down with doing some kind of, you know, some kind of thing related to giving food to other people or preparing food or, you know, drink like mixed drinks. I like making coffee a lot like espresso and shit. It's like, I can totally see that. But right now, you know, it's just a totally different field by and large for most people in, you know, the food service industry. And it sucks.

And by and large, it really sucks to work in the food service industry. Yeah, the food service industry is one of the most exploitative industries in the country. That said, the idea of gathering in public to consume food and beverages is fundamental to human beings. And we're never not going to have that as societies. So there has to be ways in which to have versions of that. And again, probably not the every 10 minutes, you get the same three fast food restaurants that are open all night. That probably, that definitely does not exist in an ideal society. But in any, any better society, human beings will gather to eat and drink around each other because it's something we've done in every civilization that has ever existed. So, Andrew, do you want to talk a bit more about the actual zine?

Because I feel like a lot of people's discourse around the zine is not about the zine itself. It's about what the title of the zine is. Yeah, people should read the actual zine. If you read it, it makes very reasonable arguments. The title is just intentionally provocative. And what I've realized about intentionally provocative slogans is that the people who, who want to get it, you know, they, they tend to be drawn into those kinds of things. And then there's some people who see something provocative and it kind of shuts them down. Yes, yes.

Some people see it, see something so provocative and see it's like, hmm, I want to learn more. And other people see it and they have that kind of a gut reaction to it. It's like, it's like the backfire effect type thing. Yeah. So, I mean, to get into the kind of the history of it and just the idea of restaurants as the zine explores. According to the discourse, a restaurant is just a place to eat. If you sit down in the middle of a desert with a table and a chair and you eat something that's apparently a restaurant. That's not a restaurant.

That is not a restaurant, but okay. The definition of a restaurant is a place where people pay to sit and eat meals that are cooked and served on the premises. Okay. Commerce is a part of the definition of a restaurant. Why do we universalize and naturalize things that are neither? That is my question. It's like what people do with the state or capitalism with police or gender. I mean, just like those things, the restaurant is an invention.

When it's been crystallized and induced into a mind as something that is eternal, that is natural, that is universal. You know, when Cronk brought his buddy Brock a piece of chicken, that was a restaurant. You know, it's like, we take these things that come from very specific modern capitalist context and we stretch them out over the entire human experience. If you look into the history of restaurants, the first restaurants began to appear in Paris in the 1760s. Even as late as the 1850s, majority of the restaurants in the world were located in Paris. And I mean, for those who know a little bit about history, Paris is kind of an interesting place where a lot of things happen. Especially during that rough time span. There's a lot of stuff going on there.

Exactly. I mean, elsewhere on the world, communal meals were quite common. People cooked communally and they ate communally and there were no restaurants. Specifically, before the invention of restaurants in Paris, around Europe at least, rich people had servants who cooked for them. Travelers had inns where their meal was included with the price of the room and they ate for the innkeeper and his family. And peasants, they ate their meals at home. And of course, there were also caterers for events and special occasions and there were taverns and wineries and cafes and bakeries for certain foods and drinks. Of course, later on, all of those things, the taverns, the wineries, the cafes and the bakeries, after restaurants came about, those other institutions that had to shape and bend into the sort of the mold of the restaurant that was established.

Restaurant, based on the name of it, comes from this idea that they were meant to restore health to sick people. Restaurant, restaurant, right? And they used to serve these small meat stews. So by that metric, Taco Bell cannot be a restaurant. I would argue that it is the only restaurant. Well, it's going to restore bowel movement. If you have any kind of blockage, it will restore that. But besides that, I do not think it's going to restore anything otherwise. Yeah, Taco Bell is probably something like a laxatent.

But yeah, so why France? Why Paris? Why restaurants? It kind of occurred after the foodcraft guilds were abolished by the revolution. It was like this attempt to kind of democratize the food industry, you know, liberty, galaté, fraternité, all that jazz. So restaurants and it began springing up because all these former cooks of the now beheaded king and aristocrats, they wanted to work somewhere. Sure, yeah. So, you know, in a restaurant, you could get a meal at any time, the business was open, anyone with money could get a meal. Customers would come and they would eat at individual tables, eat individual plates and bowls of food. They get to choose from another option, a number of options, and they grew in size and complexity as they went along.

They got a fixed menu. And eventually, one beautiful day, we invented the Baconator. Yes. Fun fact, the Baconator was the first burger I had when I went to the US. Wow. I would apologize, but this country's done so much worse than that. 107 fun facts about Andrew. Yeah, you know, it's a little thing to tune in and you get a little new fact that you could, I don't know, add to my Wikipedia page or something.

But yeah. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was mid, honestly. My brother makes better burgers. But that's besides the point. Yeah, nearly every burger that you can get at a fast food restaurant is, is mid. Yeah. TGI Fridays had some good burgers though. TGI is kind of a way to have a burger.

That is the place when you're in a town you've never been before. That's where you want to just show up and get absolutely shithouse drunk until 2am with like a bunch of strangers at the TGI Fridays bar, which is the boulevard of broken dreams. Like it's only people who can't hack it in a regular bar and weirdos traveling through town. I love a TGI Fridays bar. Okay. I was not aware of that stereotype. I mean, there's a TGI here in Trinidad and I mean, last time I knew they had like some kind of karaoke thing going on.

But yeah. It's probably the, the vibe. I haven't been 20 times. Anyway, I think this is enough product placement for one episode. I think we're really shouting out a lot of different places. Speaking of product placement. Here's ads. Sure. Why not? So the growth of the restaurant came the growth of the market with the growth of the restaurant came the growth of the market.

Needs that were, you know, fulfilled either through a direct relationship of domination like between a lord or a king and his servants or a private relationship like within the family. They were now being fulfilled on the open market. What was once a direct oppressive relationship now became the relationship between buyer and seller. Now became an indirect oppressive relationship. Exactly. A diffused oppressive relationship almost. Because no one person I would say could really carry the blame. A similar expansion of the market took place over a century later with the rise of fast food.

Because as the 1950s housewife was on her way out, you know, being undermined and as you know, women started to move into the open labor market. Many of the tasks that were done by women traditionally were being transferred onto the market, not to say that women still don't do the majority of care work in modern society. But as women started moving into the office, into the workplace, things started to shift with regard to eating and eating patterns. Another important point to note is that of course, you know, the whole women moving into the workplace thing is kind of a white woman phenomenon because, you know, people of color, women of color were in workplaces before then in large numbers. Yeah, and there's there's a thing I think it's important to note here too, which is like part of what's happening here is that, like, some of the care labor that white women were doing gets transferred onto non-white women. This is this has been one of the things that like I think we talked about this a long time ago in an interview I did with it with a nurse. But like, like, for example, you see this with health care a lot where like a lot of like union workers get these get, you know, they get really good health care plans from the unions. But those health care plans are basically subsidized by not paying women of color like shit.

And there's this whole sort of like trend around this of sort of like, like you can, you know, if you're rich, if you're rich enough, you can escape housework, but you escape housework by essentially thrusting it on someone on someone else who's like further down the social ladder than you. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like a form of that phenomenon people have been talking about the idea of choice feminism. As in any choice that one's make that woman makes is part of the feminist sort of movement. So I saw some discourse happen recently people are talking about how a woman should have a right. If she's a housewife that she should still be able to, you know, pursue her interest, which is of course agreed. And the solution being proposed to that was that the man, the breadwinner would pay for a domestic servants to come and work for the woman so that she can pursue her other responsibilities, her other interests and desires. And so it's just kind of this. Perfect. What a close.

Exactly. Because then this woman is working away from her family and then, you know, it's just like this is a messed up system. But yes, so as fast food restaurants began to grow rapidly, people began being paid wages for what used to be housework. And of course, as we know, capitalism could not exist without the billions of dollars of unpaid labor that women perform on a daily basis. Modern restaurants emerged in the 19th century under specific conditions. They had to be businessmen with capital to invest in restaurants. They had to be customers who expected to satisfy their need for food on the open market by buying it. And they had to be workers with no way to live, but by working for someone else. As these conditions developed as capitalism developed, so did restaurants. And so at the root of this whole abolished restaurants discourse needs to be an understanding of where restaurants came from, their historical development.

You cannot take them in isolation and project them, like I said, across all of humanity. Because it's only through understanding through its specific circumstances that we can transform it as we transform society as a whole. As we were saying, you know, there's a lot of things that help about restaurants. The way that work comes in, like waves and rushes, a lot of slow time in between, we're either really stressed out, you're really bored. I remember working there at the winery and like for mostly day, I just have to be like shifting around bottles on the shelves. I couldn't sit down and chill or be on my phone or anything. I just had to busy myself until a customer came. And customers never came because it was a failed business, propped up only by her parents money. Did you ever get told the phrase, if you can lean, you can clean?

Not in those exact words. Yes, in those exact words. God, and every fucking manager who says it to you thinks that, like, it's their cool line. Fuck it. Anyway. Yeah. So you have to just, you have this constant thing of trying to look busy while having nothing to do. Where you try not to fall behind because you have 10 things to do. Yeah.

And it's always working harder and faster. And of course, the boss wants to squeeze as much work out in the same number of people out as possible. You know, like he pushing people to these ridiculous extremes, which is why it's a kind of stereotype now of like restaurant workers all being on drugs. You know, there's also this whole inhumanity to like employees being paid in tips. So as far as I know, nowhere is that as severe as it is in the US. But of course around the world, they are tipping cultures of varying degrees. And so when you have that sort of work where you're, you're living your subsistence is so directly tied to like tips. Not only do you have this sort of divide being created between the workers, between like, for example, the waiters who make the tips and the cooks who don't make any tips. And they sort of had to compete against each other because the waiters trying to get as much done as possible so they can make the tips quickly so they can have that, you know, quickly.

So as the cooks, they have no interesting motivation to push themselves harder. I never got tips from baking in the back of the house unless some of the people in front of the house would like share the tips at the end of the day by their own like. Yeah. And I know folks who worked in places where all tips were shared with the kitchen staff and it seemed to be a 5050 breakdown of this is really good and everyone gets paid fairly. And this is actually some scam by management to deny people a bunch of tips by like pooling them and the certain fuckery that gets done. So like, it's like any formulation of this inherently winds up being pretty abusive. Yeah. And dividing, you know.

Another interesting and I mean, as you guys mentioned, stressful component about, you know, this line of work is, of course, the customers. Which customer service people in general tend to eat, you know, whether you're working at a bar or you're working at, you know, a restaurant or even working in like sales and some sort of like retail store. Their whole subreddit is dedicated to how terrible customers are to workers. And so that that sort of dynamic of service, it really changes people. I mean, customers can just as easily be working class as the people working in the restaurant. But there's still that dynamic that's created when you are the one being seated and served on the other person on their feet serving you. Some of the worst customers in America, at least, are working class and poorer folks who it's like their chance to be above somebody like when they go out to a restaurant. So they can be extra shitty. Yeah, that is the thing that happens. Surprisingly, they're even like restaurant workers who treat restaurant workers badly when they go to a restaurant.

Yeah, exactly. It's like someone gets the opportunity to be to to exert the power and they like do it in this short, short, short, short amount of time. But although I will say I'm sure those are also the restaurant workers who treat people badly at the restaurant they work at. Including like some of the workers. Some of the worst things that have ever been said to me were by customers at the restaurant job I had. Yeah, not surprising. No. And I was like, not I was like, I was like in high school, I was a kid. And these are like grownups being horrendous. I think I think it's like, I don't know, like when people talk about this, like when people talk about restaurants, like in the discourse, it's it's in a way that's like it's incredibly abstract and doesn't.

Like it doesn't it doesn't think about the fact that like the relationship between the customer and the people who have to interact with the customer is the host, etc. Like that that is a social relation. And it's a social relation that like that like like the power dynamic inherent to it ascribes sort of different kinds of behavior to the people who are who are like on either side of it. Like it controls like what you have to do as a server, like what the performances you have to give, like the smile you have to put on, which is actually like that's the original thing of what emotional labor is. Right. It's like the labor you have to do to make the person who you're serving like think that you're like happy and enjoying it and like having a good time. But then, you know, on the customer's end, too, it's like you get this sort of, you know, it's like, oh, this is your one chance to be on top of a sort of power relation. Like that, like that, like that specific thing is so fucking evil. It's like there's a story I think about a lot from Britain and Chuang originally was it was about like one of the last emperors of the Tang dynasty.

Like his concubine like loved Lisha and like, okay, I get it. It's Lisha that gets really good. But like leeches grown leeches only grown in this in the South of China. You can't really grow it in the north. It just doesn't like it's too cold. It's too arid. And so in order to get her Lisha like every morning, they would send like the fastest riders like in China would like be sent by horse like to Southern China and then back so that he get the Lisha there in time like for it still to be like ripe and like edible. And, you know, that that's the kind that's the kind of power that used to only literally the emperor of China had this ability, right?

Like the like the emperor of fucking China could get this commodity and like force everyone in a chain to go do something for them. And now like everyone has that like literally everyone has that power. Like every time you use Amazon, you have that power. Every time you go to a restaurant, you have the power to do this. And it turns people into monsters because like that's, you know, like the Chinese emperors are like, these are some of the worst people who've ever lived. Now like everyone, everyone like just like like the fundamental basis of the society is there is a place where you can go and you can become the emperor of fucking China. Maybe there's a problem with the idea of instant gratification being reliant on the exploitation of other people. Yeah. And like, yeah.

That doesn't seem right, Garrison. Oh, yeah. Never mind. Don't worry. Now, watch me as I order next day delivery on a sixteen hundred dollar drone just to just to fuck around in my backyard. Like, yes, it's it's everything is fine in America. I do. I am like of the opinion that the grocery store is like the primary artistic achievement of capitalism as a system. They are objectively marvels and they're they're built on a river of blood deeper and wider than is. It's like it's a hyper object, right? It's like impossible to comprehend the full scale of cruelty that goes into being able to like, well, it is November fourteenth.

I'm going to go get a fresh bag of grapes that have been genetically modified to taste like cotton candy. Yeah. Picked by people making sense an hour in the country that's on the other side of the world. Yes, whose relatives are shot for attempting to scramble over the border. Yeah. Yeah. That the grapes pass through easily. Yes. And I think like that that points to another like, I think part of the dynamics with restaurants that happens, which is that like,

OK, like cooking takes time, right? And the less and less time that you have, the more like the more reliant you become on like on these services. And so you see this with like, you know, like China has like a like a particularly horrible like delivery culture. Like you can like you can have someone deliver food to you like to the train like like a sub like a train will stop at a stop. And you can have someone run a bag of food to you and then like leave. And you just like you go to the next stop and you get off. And that happens because everyone's working 996. And so it's like, OK, you're working 70 working 9am to 9pm, six days a week. And, you know, you literally do not have time to cook because you're working you're working 12 hours a day.

Another good example of this is like restaurant people who work restaurants like line cooks and chefs hardly ever cook for themselves. They always get food from other restaurants because they're cooking eight to 10 hours a day. They're not going to go home then cook for themselves. They they it's like, yeah, it's it is the system almost it makes it makes the things that pop it up become necessary to keep the whole thing going. It's all like balancing super like precariously on its own weight. It's it's equivalent to like if you're in a criminal syndicate making somebody you're working with tangentially shoot a man in the back of the head so that you both have blood on your hands. Like everyone is everyone just by by virtue of existing under it. Like if you're working 60 hours a week as a fucking nurse during covid or as a fucking line cook dealing with this surge of delivery shit.

And then on your way home you just want to pick up some like sushi from a fucking grocery store that requires ingredients from all around the world. And it's made by people who are not getting enough money to make it and is horrible for the environment and the fisheries and all that kind of shit. And but like what are you supposed to do? Like you just you just finished like a 10 hour shift. Like do you not deserve like one one nice thing at the end of the day? Like so it's if you people can't. Like either you become in a like a complete aesthetic right and reject and go kind of Ted K and live in a shack in Montana and reject all of these these kind of modern conveniences. Or you accept that like you're going to spend some time waiting into the river of blood because otherwise the things you have to do to stay alive in this society are completely emotionally unsustainable.

Yeah, this this was the original like before it kind of became this cop out for like just doing whatever you want. Like this was the original. There's no ethical consumption or capitalism about this was about like this specific problem that everything in the society like even even if you're fucking living in the woods in Montana. It's like, yeah, like where did where did where like where did your cabin come from? Like where did your nails come from? Who made the hammer? It's like everyone's like completely dependent for everything on the exploitation of other people. And it is it is a yeah.

The one thing that gives me a little bit of hope is when Andrew was explaining how like restaurants came arise because of people who used to like work for kings and shit who then started working at restaurants because they still want to make food. It was like that evolution taking it to the next step is people who work at restaurants now no longer having to work under capitalist exploitation and realizing, hey, I know how to cook well, I'll just set up like ways to feed the community outside of this system of commerce. Right. That is the next evolution. If you start with the people people cooking for the king, people then cooking in places where you pay to eat in this exploitative system and then people cooking for people so that there's food around in like a community setting. Right. If you if you follow that trajectory, that's actually kind of hopeful. It's almost like we've come full circle.

I mean, in some ways. Yeah. Like right. It's if we just go back to like being. Community. Yeah. Like communicating if there's places around different communities, different towns, different like urban centers that have that have the capacity to feed people who are not able to cook cook cook for themselves that night or that day. That's something that if it's there is ways of setting that up, which I can see being so much better than how restaurants work, you know, maybe maybe people wash their own dishes afterwards.

Maybe people do something to help with like prep or something. Right. There's there's there's ways to make this that gives you the parts of restaurants that are actually really convenient without the exploitation. So that that type of like community cooking is something mean, you know, that's even similar to like how like a good dinner party operates. Just that kind of extended out across, you know, more like a pop up setting and say, hey, yeah, this this month we're using all of these ingredients that are grown in our general local area. Right. We're not getting shipped. We're not getting like strawberries in December shipped from halfway around the world will make stuff that is available as it, you know, as it's grown or we can pickle.

We can store food. Right. And yeah. And maybe we we've we've turned the old defunct Walmart into a grow shelter. So once or twice during the winter, there are some strawberries and everybody comes together and shares this marvel that the community came like worked as a team to ensure would be available. But you can't just go and buy four pounds of strawberries that are produced with their like twice the weight of the strawberries and pesticide in order to keep them alive in fields that were never meant to grow strawberry. Like maybe that's not available all year round. Like, yep.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's get back to the point being raised about about like the ethical consumption of the capitalist on because that's a really important point. The whole purpose of that saying has been bastardized, but it really is crucial to have a nuanced understanding of it. What frustrates me is that it's been taken and it's been turned into this justification. Yeah, it's okay that I buy from Sheehan. It's okay that I buy a $3,000 haul from Sheehan because no ethical consumption of the capitalist on was like with where somebody goes and they engage in something that is not necessity. I mean, look, Andrew, you're talking around my two and a half pound a day veal habit and I don't appreciate it.

Yeah, that sounds like a problem. That's like something Joe Rogan on set, so I eat two and a half pounds of veal every day and that keeps my brain running smoothly. Caveman only a real garrison. It worked out for Jordan Peterson, so I mean. Exactly. It did work for Jordan Peterson. He's doing great. Christ at the mere notion of Antifa.

I would do an impression, but it'll hurt my throat. Thus, I would say. I would say that. As we were saying, you know that the really is is potential. We see even under these conditions that people find ways to survive. You know, they create like these informal work groups that not only able to come together and push back against management, but able to work together to create trust with each other. We have like, for example, waiters who would try to hand the kitchen on a slow day or a cleaner or who might pick up a thing or two, a dishwasher was trying to move up to become like a line cook. All these different workers, they do things certainly to try to undermine the unnatural divisions and hierarchies and between the skill and unskilled in the restaurant setting.

It doesn't always work because there are, you know, settings were in the manager successfully created divisions, you know, whether it be the manager creating a division between. Teen different nationalities of immigrants or, you know, playing upon someone's queer phobia against like queer stuff or someone's biases against. I don't know, I can't think of a third example, but their ways that managers try to like so these divisions between workers. And there are ways that workers try to push back. There are also ways that managers try to do the opposite to create a community within the restaurant that includes themselves. So instead of fostering isolation and prejudice, they create a community that especially in small restaurants that involves them. That talks about that, you know, the boss wants to share with them how difficult it is working and organizing for the business of the restaurant. And they might create like a special kind of restaurant focused on the identity.

So they might create a restaurant for for queer youth, where all the staff are queer, you know, you have a restaurant for, you know, a black owned restaurant where all the workers are black. And try to create a community based on this identity, but it kind of erases the unavoidable class interests between workers and management. It smooths over that dimension. So it becomes more difficult to organize and speak up for your rights because you're aware that the managers are human and they too are struggling. Which kind of brings me to the idea of restaurants with no managers in the idea of cooperatives. The issue with cooperative restaurants is that they basically have to collectively take on the role of managers, managing themselves, creating those pressures and pushing those pressures upon themselves. They enforce the work on each other and they they have to work longer in some cases and work harder in some cases because the structure of a restaurant is designed to make money. And if it is not making money, then everybody loses their job.

So due to this pressure, a boss is in a position where they have to push workers to get as much out to the workers as possible. You raise the boss on the occasion from the equation, but you keep the rest of the concept of a restaurant and the line between worker and boss becomes blurred to the extent where it's almost like that image of a person with a boot on their hand holding a boot on their head. Where this oppression that was once external becomes internalized because that is how a restaurant survives through oppression, through exploitation. It's kind of like with how self-employed people are under capitalism. Yes, you're working for yourself and you have some freedom that regard, but you're still restricted by the broader system. You haven't escaped it. You've just had to navigate it and I have to make quarterly payments to the IRS. Yeah, I mean, I would say I think work for ourselves in some capacity or a certain level of freedom and you still have those pressures and it's just you have to inflict them on yourself. You don't have a break that has been mandated and so, at least in my case, I don't take breaks because that's just how I am.

You work longer hours, you push yourself harder and harder, you work on days when you should be resting and it illustrates the fact that liberation is not to be found under this system. It's something totally new with a totally different metric of success, a totally different metric of sustenance, totally different bare minimum and totally different motivation. It needs to be foundation upon which society is built because it's profiting our work in. Yeah, and I think the reason this debate happens, this whole discourse happened in the first place was just that a lot of it really was just a complete inability to imagine literally any other way of getting food that has not involved you going to a place and telling someone to make it for you. And like that, I don't know, the fact that there have already been sort of seismic shifts in the way that food production happens, I think is evidence like, no, we don't have to do it like that, we just do not. It wasn't like this for most of human history, we could do something better than whatever they were doing before it. Yeah. A lot of people might, you know, wish for like in this.

So there's a shift over into the abolition section of it, the restaurant abolition. A lot of people look to, for example, a union as a path by which in the short term, you know, we make certain gains and belong to we can take over and radically transform it. The difficulty comes in how unions have traditionally operated in the restaurant sphere. They tend to be significantly less successful I mean restaurants usually have very high turnover people in the last couple months. They often employ like a lot of young people who are just looking for part time or temporary employment. A lot of people do work there constantly looking to move on to better things. And so it makes it difficult to create a stable union with a stable membership that can buckle down and really negotiate and push for the interests of the people working because people working are constantly changing. I think one of the really grim things it's led to is that like, like especially when fast food took over, like the major unions that even do exist were just like now, we're just not going to bother even trying to organize these people because they just assumed it was impossible. And so like there are very, very few fast food unions. I mean like I think one of the only like even sort of functional ones is the IWW organized Burgerville, but that's been like it.

Like the big unions, when they've done campaigns for fast food workers, it's like it was like fight for 15 but it's like they're not actually trying to like form unions of these restaurant workers. They're not even trying. They're just trying to they're using them for sort of like lobbying and advocacy. Yeah. And the difficulty also comes when a union is established itself, you know, because a union structurally is not always by all the workers. You know, there's still sort of a hierarchy of bureaucracy that may establish itself and try to maintain itself even if it starts off benignly. You know, just for all of the radical history that unions do have quite a few unions in the United States, particularly in the United States have also been conservative bastions and bastions of different attitudes about like stuff like white supremacy, you know, there's there's a lot. The union movement is as much Blair Mountain as it is trying to stop black people from being able to work on trains, you know, like all of those things are part of the history. Yeah. I mean, I'll speak briefly on like the union situation in the Caribbean, particularly in Trinidad. The trade union movement was intrinsically inextricably tied with the anti colonial movement in the movement for independence. The issue became that the unions became tied up with the political parties that arose after independence and during the process of independence.

What ended up happening with the unions was that they ended up being tied so deeply with the political parties that ended up being that the established unions, you know, the higher ups in those established unions, they have these relationships of favors and obligations with the politicians. A lot of politicians come out of these union movements and end up establishing their own political careers. And because it's also tied up when, you know, workers get into these industries that do have union that have been unionized. There's a very clear separation between the union and the workers, because while the union is able to, you know, push for the workers rights and, you know, they're still separate from the workers, the union still exists as a negotiator between the workers and the management. And so even if the workers wish to go beyond just negotiating, the union exists almost as a release valve for any sort of class antagonist, so any kind of pressure, any kind of real pressure against the status quo. And I mean, it's not just unique to Trinidad or to the Caribbean, I mean, it's globally cross history. You've seen union struggles kind of go for the same sort of dynamic. You know, new generations of workers, they build up the movements, they build up unions, and the unions begin to change. And perhaps new union leaders spring up to replace the old union leaders, when put under the same position and the same pressures, they react in the same way as the bureaucracy ends up being rejuvenated. Unions are reformed and they end up going back to the same old ways that they had been before. And in some cases, the fight to reform the union takes the place of the fight against the boss because of all the bureaucracy and system of obligations and just deeply rooted ideals about place of the union, because while unionizing is a difficult process, union leaders do tend to enjoy certain

benefits from their position. And as we are aware of, you know, certain hierarchies are self-justifying, those at the top tend to want to perpetuate it. It's kind of like, and so this idea that this is kind of an unsettled thought of mine, but it's kind of like the idea of, you know, using the state to establish workers power and then abolishing it afterwards. You know, using union to get some measure of workers power, but then I start expecting this union of a certain structure that exists toward negotiating ends to somehow pushing these sort of more radical directions. And there's a saying that the zine, the writers of the zines say, it's like restaurant unions need there to be restaurants, and we don't. I think that sort of applies more broadly because when we get into the idea of like work abolition, it's just concept of workers are people outside of work, but a worker's union exists within the confines of workers, we understand it. And so I think that's where the difficulty lies. The zine goes on to say later on that every time we attack the system, we don't destroy it. It changes and in turn changes us and the train of the next fight gains are turned against us and we are stuck back in the same situation at work. The bosses try to keep us looking for individual solutions or solutions within an individual workplace or an individual trade, but the only way that we can free ourselves is to broaden and deepen our fight.

We involve workers from other workplaces, other industries and other regions. We attack more and more fundamental things. The desire to destroy restaurants becomes the desire to destroy the conditions that create restaurants. We aren't just fighting for representation in or control over the production process. We're fighting against the act of chopping vegetables or washing dishes or pouring beer or even selling food to other people. It is with the way all of these acts are brought together in a restaurant, separated from other acts, become part of the economy and are used to expand capital. The starting and ending point to this process is the society of capitalists and people forced to work for them. We want to enter this. We want to destroy the production process with something outside and against us. We're fighting for a world where our productive activity fulfills the need and is an expression of our lives and that forced on us in exchange for a wage.

A world where we produce for each other directly and not in order to sell to each other. The struggle of restaurant workers is ultimately for a world without restaurants or workers. I mean, so I think people are still going to call it simultaneously to restaurants, restaurants anyway, probably. But I hope this discussion has caused people to kind of deepen their approach to this issue. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I am Robert Evans and this is a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes how to put them all together. And, you know, today we're actually going to be talking more about the latter, which I know is revolutionary for us. We're usually just kind of like getting way more into the doomer stuff.

But I think there's been more than enough of that, particularly in the wake of several horrific Supreme Court rulings that I don't really need feel the need to go into detail on. But one of the things that has happened in the wake of these rulings is this like kind of liberal reaction to the fact that to the fact and their right to be anger about the fact that they're being essentially governed by a small minority of people who are very densely geographically located in the south. That is where like the bulk of the support for the hard rights policies comes from. And it's led to this like fuck Texas, fuck Florida, fuck these quote unquote like red states, these regressive states, which is this deeply problematic for a number of reasons, including the fact that, you know, if you just want to look at it in terms of party politics, there were more people who voted for a Democrat in Texas in the 2020 election than live in either the state of Oregon or Washington. These are densely populated places with tremendous amount of people who are people of color who are trans who are, you know, in some way threatened by this weird Christofascist bullshit that is increasingly clamping down on the country. And so today I wanted to talk with some folks who live in and around the Dallas, Texas, what we call the DFW area, Dallas, Fort Worth, and who have lately been organizing to kind of both confront this this rising Christofascist like the street aggression portion of it and to provide support in defense for people who are being victimized by it. So I'd like to welcome some representatives of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club to the show. Hey, y'all. Hello. Yeah, do you want to kind of introduce yourselves to start however you'd like to be known on the show?

Yeah, I'm Satan. I'm bubble. Satan and bubble. And I mean, how long have y'all been like doing because there's there's two specific things that kind of, I don't know, I became aware of y'all. And we had some brief interactions or I had some brief interactions with some of your folks in 2021 during the the snow thing that that destroyed everything. And so I've been kind of watching y'all socials ever since. And there were a couple of things recently that struck me as very worth discussing actions that you y'all were a part of one of them was there's a neighborhood in Dallas called Oak Lawn that is kind of colloquially known as the gay neighborhood. It is like the gay neighborhood in Dallas, obviously. And so it's a place that, you know, even before kind of things got a little easier after 20, you know, 14, 2015, it was kind of a safe place and a little bit like of a of a fortress for like people who are not, you know, racist gender, which is and kind of are, you know, for an idea of how aspects of the DFW area could be the town I grew up in Plano had a condoms to go move in. And within like two nights of it, setting up shop in Plano, somebody fired a nine millimeter handgun through the window that it's a place where it could be difficult. And so, obviously, repression and kind of violence and fears of vigilante violence from folks who are queer has is is understandably amped up in the wake of everything that's been happening and y'all carried out an action, where a sizable group of leftists marched armed through the gay neighborhood. The one of the there were a couple of different chance that that I was hearing one of them was about bashing back something like that you want to talk a little bit about like that action and what actually went down.

Sure. So, at the beginning of Pride Month, we had a large group of fascists come to the gay neighborhood. You know, they were shouting groomer, they were telling us the fist of Christ is coming down on you soon, and, you know, making really out there threats. So, we discussed, you know, what we could do to be proactive to make sure that doesn't happen again. And we ended up getting together some groups who were interested in an arm demonstration which even here in Texas is not something you see too often. And we decided to march through the gay neighborhood, you know, I would say a majority of the people that we know are LGBT. And it's our neighborhood. So, you know, we put on this demonstration there. And it was, you know, kind of incredible. We got some looks, but we also got a lot of support. We had a lot of great chance, you know, bottoms tops, we all hate cops. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. He's gay. Yeah, that was the that was the one that was in the video. And so what was the I'm interested in kind of, because I think this is the kind of thing that is potentially very useful. We have seen one of the things that I have personally observed and that has been observed by a number of folks is that when these kind of right wing mobs who primarily want people who cannot defend themselves or don't have the numbers to defend themselves, they want to like beat the shit out of people in a gang, right? Like that's that's the proud boy thing. That's the Patriot prayer thing. That's all these weird little groups, primarily what they want to do. They don't want a fair fight. And when they are confronted with organized people on the left who are armed, that tends to scare the shit out of them. And if I'm not mistaken, during that day where you had those Christian fascists kind of coming after that queer family event, like one of the one of the live streams that one of the right wingers had people

were some of them were like commenting on the fact that there were people leftist open carrying and like how unsettling they found that. So I'm interested in kind of how the idea to we're going to do this, have this kind of a march, you know, through this neighborhood, we're going to make sort of a show of force how that idea kind of came together and then what logistically did y'all like feel the need to set up like I'm going to guess it wasn't as simple as like hey everybody with a gun like come come meet here and we're going to have us a walk. So I'm interested in kind of what the logistics are because I think this is the kind of thing that people other people are going to want like find useful to do like statements of we are here we have the tools to defend ourselves and we're not going to just passively let you run through our neighborhoods fucking with us. I think logistically one of the big things was just making sure that, you know, everyone who was carrying was carrying properly, and then also to protect our own cells making sure that whoever was carrying was also protecting our identity by wearing essentially full black walk, which that in itself sends a message, you know, a bunch of queer people marching through the streets of Dallas and full black walk with guns sends a message like we're not going to take your shit, we're done, you know, you're not going to mess with our bodily autonomy.

That march happened, we had planned it to be on that day originally and that happened to be the day that Roe v. Wade was overturned and it essentially just evolved that morning to a more intersectional bodily autonomy mark. But really logistically it was mostly about protecting ourselves and making sure that people who weren't carrying the firearms were also protected from our firearms. Yeah, I want to dive into that a little bit because that's such an important aspect of it is the insuring say I have seen a lot of marches and I will be honest I have seen a lot of people being armed on on both sides politically who have done things with guns that I would consider reckless. And probably the top moment in my mind is during a big march in Portland, somebody leaned over and a Glock fell out of the front pouch of their hoodie that they were just had loose in there. So obviously it is not as it should not be as simple as like, you know, load up on guns and bring your friends, so to speak. How do you attempt to ensure like how do you actually go about handling the safety aspect is it like are you appointing essentially kind of like range officers before the march we're keeping an eye on shit like what does that actually look like. I want to I want to give two examples for the March we did in the neighborhood. It was different in that it wasn't publicly announced wherein it was going to be.

So it was kind of a by invitation only demonstration so we knew pretty much everybody that was coming, except for people in the neighborhood who kind of joined ad hoc. So that's one way that we've done things. When we do more of like protest security for other actions. You know, there are different people who will feel motivated to bring arms and usually they know what they're doing pretty well in the couple of instances where someone is being unsafe. You know, one of us will just go over there and talk to them, you know, like, hey, you really need a sling for this or you know, don't don't be pointing it in any way at a building. Just little tips like that to, you know, resolve the behavior. So when it actually comes to like, because one of the things like whenever you have sort of a gathering like this is is de escalation and even within people within the March potentially like dispute resolution and that sort of thing. What was the how did you kind of organize for that like what was the planning on that and like.

I think that's a really important question. One of the first things that we decided pretty early on is that we are not there to police any protesters. So, you know, if someone is is doing something illegal and no at no point will we, you know, tell them to stop or try to make them stop. We may move away from the area or something like that, but we're not there to police our people at all. When it comes to like counters coming up and antagonizing, the main thing we do is try to put ourselves between them and any people they're targeting. And you know, we have cameras, we have less than lethal, we have different tools to try to de escalate that. Yeah. And so when it comes to like, I guess, training on that, and did you kind of did you have any sort of like infrastructure, human infrastructure, what not set up prior to this to like make sure people who were like doing de escalation were folks that you knew, you know, had some level of understanding of it or folks that you could trust like how was the actual how do you actually, because I mean, it strikes me that there is a great deal of like trust that's necessary to put together something like this to be able to meet up with folks and like march armed together requires probably a little bit more in the way of trust than, you know, just showing up at a protest.

That's kind of more conventional. Was there sort of some in any kind of like, I don't know, system or or like, yeah, training or whatnot that y'all had for specifically, like how to behave how to de escalate all that kind of stuff or was it just like folks that kind of you knew from from prior events were good at that sort of thing. I mean, as far as our group goes, I can speak to myself personally and say that I trust one of our people with my life. And I think because of that and because we were really the ones putting it on, like, we knew that if something were to go down, one of us would get in the middle of it. And we all trust each other. I think that in any sort of organizing environment, trusting the people that you're working with 100% is one of the most vital things that you can do because they're going to be the ones beside you when a proud boy rolls up. And you want the person beside you to be someone that you can trust. And we do that we do have, you know, we do practice and we do train together. And we also have fun together and having that certain level of trust means the world when you're putting yourself out there in that way.

And how long of the folks that are kind of like, you're, you're more most affiliated with like making this happen, how long have y'all been sort of organizing and doing stuff together. I would say most of us met since 2020. A lot of us met in organizing different facilities during 2020 after the George Floyd protests and then just the boom in mutual aid that happened in DFW after that, whether it was through homeless outreach or, you know, bail bonds or however we met each other, it was mostly through that mutual aid community and getting out in our communities and organizing ourselves and trying to find like-minded people who wanted to see the same change happen. Now, I think one of the, one of the things that's been on my mind a lot lately, and that y'all particularly bring up is the challenges of organizing in parts of the country where not just, you know, the police who are always pretty regressive, but the entire legal structure is set up to, as Florida has increasingly done, as a number of states have done, like punish protests, penalize activism, make things more dangerous for people who are like going out there in public in addition to doing things to try and criminalize, you know, people who are not straight, you know, white Christians. So when you look at like kind of the challenges of organizing in a place where it's more dangerous, and obviously it's not particularly safe to be organizing against, you know, the LAPD, but the court system in California is broadly speaking less stacked against you. So if you had advice to give to people who don't have this group of friends and people they've been organizing with for a couple of years already, but they want to have that, they want to build that in their community, where would you suggest they start?

I always tell people that it starts by showing up to all kinds of events, you know, supporting a broad range of groups, and, you know, if you're at the protests, if you are at the feedings, the distributions, you're going to meet people, and you're going to build trust, mutual trust there, so that, you know, when you want to start a project, you want to start a group, you'll have those people that know you. It is very dangerous. I think it's always important to tell people to watch your OPSEC, you know, don't be resharing all kinds of activist stuff with your personal profile that has your name and your birthday and all of that. But yeah, it really goes to meeting people in person, I think. Yeah, and I mean, that's such a difficult part of it, because I think for a lot of people, particularly who maybe are living in rural areas, who are living kind of outside of places that have well-formed protest communities, social media and the internet is a lifeline for them, and often in a lot of cases, like how they came to a lot of the political beliefs and a desire to do something. You have to actually get face-to-face on the ground with people to actually build the kind of relationships that can lead to the sort of activism that y'all are doing, and that is a tough needle for a lot of people to thread, I think. And, you know, in those more rural communities, if there's not already those systems in place, you know, set up a monthly meal distribution with the local homeless shelter or the local homeless camp.

And if you, you know, can get a few friends, more people will show up, and you can build that community yourself, even where it's not existing already. It's more about just finding those like-minded individuals that are already existing in your community and getting to know your neighbors. Yeah. And to trust your neighbors. I think that's a great, as far as a plan of action goes, as good as you can get for at least starting down that road. Before we kind of move on from this specific action, I did want to talk a little bit about the conversations you had, both with, like, people who lived in Oak Lawn and also with, you know, passers-by. I'm wondering, like, did you have any that particularly surprised you or that particularly stick out to you right now? I personally was a little bit more surprised with the amount of support that we received, just because while Oak Lawn is the neighborhood, it is generally more blue liberal.

Yes. It's very calm, very anti-gun, typically, and to see, you know, people sitting on the patios of the bars, cheering for us while we were walking by, especially as someone who has been, you know, grown up in that area, it meant a lot. You know, it really shows almost like the cultural shift that we're going as far as leftist politics go, if people are going to be supportive of us. That's really interesting to hear. Now, were there, did you have any kind of interactions with sort of, I don't know, people who were more conservative or more on the center-right side of things? I think we had a couple people who were kind of filming and frowning. It's always hard to tell in that case, but no one really said anything to us. That's interesting.

I mean, I just talked. Yeah, and now that kind of brings me to the next topic, which is how did Dallas, how did DPT handle this? We've been hardly out of our cars, but we've had multiple police cars surrounding us while we were just unloading. They were constantly trying to guess where we were going with the march by cutting off streets and trying to like escort us and like, you know, blocking traffic and things like that. But we were there less than five minutes before, I would say, at least four police cars were surrounding us, asking us questions. They were pulling out their guns like we were a threat. Geez. Well, I mean, yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

Did you have any kind of like direct, did they send like the PIOs up to try and, you know, talk with organizers or whatever? So they did right at the beginning. And I think that interaction went really well because they approached us as we were getting ready and they said, you know, what group is this? Who's in charge? Who's leading? What are your plans? And, you know, every single person who was there was disciplined enough to either say nothing or say no plans. There's no group.

There's no leaders. And, you know, after that, they kept their distance. They did not really interfere more. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, that is one of those things that police, I don't know. I've always found it useful to when you have to have an interaction with a police officer and sometimes it is unavoidable. Like you need to kind of focus on like what are the things that they need to hear for this interaction to like end and end, you know, not in them getting violent.

And I think it sounds like, yeah, you all handled it perfectly. Like that was the right way for everyone to react. Like you were, it is Texas, like it's not like it is at all illegal to walk around with guns. So, yeah, I mean, that sounds, that sounds, again, I'm impressed by kind of both the boldness of the action, but also the discipline that was required to actually, that was required like from the ground up, right? Not because like the, there was some sort of like vanguard leadership exerting force downward in order to actually make this work safely and in a way that left, hopefully, and it seems like this is the case, people who live in the area feeling, broadly speaking, pretty good about it. I would say that, you know, since the March in particular, just in DFW in its entirety, the support that we have received has been almost overwhelming. You know, people now recognize the people in Blacklock as being safe and they're going to help us. If I need something, I can go to them and that's the whole purpose of community defense is having, like, my goal would be to have everyone be that person.

Now, the other thing I would wonder, because it's, you know, I've spent a lot of time at Blacklock protests, but generally in Portland, Oregon, where a hot day is like 80 degrees, y'all are in fucking DFW. Those summers are no joke and wearing the gear that y'all are wearing is a potentially dangerous thing, right? Like was there, was it kind of individual or left up to affinity groups to like figure out hydration and stuff or did you have people who were kind of watching folks and reminding them and like trying to ensure that like that part of it was handled? Because that does strike me as a specific risk in this case. Most of us do have at least minor street medic training, as well as our own hydration kits. And we all carry extra electrolytes and things like that for people who may not be part of our group, who may also need assistance. That's a big part of it here in Texas is that's the main risk with protesting in the summer is dehydration, heat exhaustion, heat stroke. You know, we do recommend that the people who are in Blacklock wear, you know, moisture-wicking, loose layers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marino is your friend if you can get it. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, we, all of us are, you know, at least trained enough to recognize those symptoms. We make scenes that we can pass out to people about how to protest safely in the summer, in the heat specifically. That's great. So much more dangerous. Now, one of the things I've been seeing recently, and this is, I'm guessing from a more recent march, was the photo going around that's kind of kind of viral on right-wing social media of it's a black and white photo. There's an individual with a plate carrier and an AR and another individual with like a chest rig and what I think is a Beretta carbine. And both of them are at a reproductive rights march. And there's a mix of really interesting reactions from the right like on this.

And I'm interested in kind of, yeah, your thoughts there. Yeah, so it's been really weird. We try to track whatever's being posted about us. Sometimes it can give us intel on people who might want to target us. But we've been noticing, you know, it's like a solid third of right-wing comments are kind of broadly supportive. I think it really throws them for a loop. You know, we've even seen people saying actually bodily autonomy is a lot like gun rights and things like that. So that's been, it's been really weird. I think being armed might kind of humanize us for some of those people in a way. It's been a weird thing.

I have thought a couple of times that I mean a number of times I talked about this on the first season of it could happen here. I think that there is some like potential to bridge some divides there with kind of the existence of an increasingly prominent left-wing gun culture. I know one of the comments I saw was somebody like going through the gear displayed and being like, actually, no, they're reasonably well set up and like everything seems like this is exactly how you'd, you know, want to have it done. And just people being like actually appreciative. And I guess maybe there's a degree to which like if you're, if you're in that community from a right-wing side but not like a straight up fascist side, maybe there's a potential for like more commonality. And like you said, the idea that like, oh, maybe some of them will actually broaden their support for reproductive rights, you know,

or at least consider it, you know, I don't know, that doesn't strike me as like a negative move. And it is particularly in a place like Texas, you have to try to at least have some sort of common ground with people who are more on the right-wing side of things, because there's so damn many of them. Yeah. So I think it's one of those cases where when ideology gets atomized to just like guns good, you know, that is like a core belief for some people that can draw them to being supportive of pro-choice marches in a weird way. It's kind of a pretty specific kind of brain worms, but we're seeing it a lot. Yeah, I wouldn't like call it necessarily a positive. Like it's an aspect of things that are negative, but it's something that also can be like useful and potentially positive.

Like even though if you get into what's leading someone to like, oh, I reexamined my beliefs on reproductive rights because I saw some people marching with guns. That's not like a sign of a series of thought process that I think is like wildly positive, but at least somebody maybe came around on something. I mean, it's a step in the right direction. It's better than them going the other way. You know, we've been talking about the effects of getting all this right-wing attention, and you know, in a way, that's what we want. We want to advertise that we have strong community defense. And on the flip side, you get all these supportive comments, and hopefully those people don't want to kill me anymore. So it's just a net positive, we think. Yeah, I mean, one of the ways in which these kind of protests can increase security for our community, like one way is that maybe there are people who will get scared off because they don't want to risk like getting shot.

And the other is that maybe some people will reexamine their opinions on that community because it's now more familiar to them because they're probably way too into guns. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about the there was a specific action that kind of the thing that was going around on Twitter was these proud boys trying to get into a believe it was a library and like a line of parents squaring off with them to like stop them. Can we talk a little bit about that? Yeah, that was in McKinney. It was the day after Groovy Wade got overturned and we honestly didn't know what to expect when we got there because it's McKinney. We were like, are we going to be very much so outnumbered in this? When we arrived, there was already about 30 to 40 people who were either parents or friends of the library there in support and maybe only 15 or 20 people in opposition.

So it was, you know, a pretty good welcoming supportive environment. And about 30 minutes after we got there is when the proud boys arrived and we just really only had to tell two people, hey, they're proud boys. And before we could even get over there to like block them off ourselves, there were like 8 to 10 soccer moms in their flip flops, Nike shorts, and handmade signs standing in front of them and blocking them from coming any closer. And of course, they did get closer as people were leaving the library and the event was ending and things like that. But it was one of those things where it just organically happened and it was beautiful. That's awesome. And in a place like McKinney of all places, like I grew up in North Texas, like McKinney is the last place I would expect to find like a soccer mom in Nike shorts, asked like thanking me for bringing my gun to the library.

It was amazing. That's wonderful to hear. I mean, and people who are not in the DFWU area won't understand this, but like, yeah, I spent a significant chunk of my early life in McKinney and I would not have expected that reaction there. Yeah, that's really, really good to hear. And it also is, you know, I obviously have been supportive of a number of tactics to confront fascism, including people showing up in block and stuff and protesting or confronting them physically. I don't think there's any more durable kind of community self-defense than that, than a group of people who are just kind of live in an area and around and curious, realizing there's a threat and immediately acting against it. Like that's such a powerful thing. Yeah, saying, no, not in my neighborhood.

Yeah. And, you know, again, like, we didn't expect to have that reaction, which made it that much better when we saw it. And, you know, having those people for the first time in their life, maybe even come face-to-face, directly with fascists probably has a lasting impact on them as well. Like, I hope that they keep going to more events like that and keep going and protecting their community from these people. Let me ask you, when you have these kind of interactions with folks and when you had these specific interactions with those specific folks, is there kind of, is there sort of an information spreading thing afterwards? Is there like a, hey, here's who we are and like where you can find out more about us? Like kind of attempts to, like, let people know who you are and what you're doing and how they can, you know, follow you and whatnot? Like, is that a part of the activism or was it more just like we're showing up to kind of provide a barrier for these people and like that's not the time or place for that?

It's a little bit of both. A lot of these actions we are invited to, we have kind of made it a point to be known as we are here to help. So a lot of times we will get invited or people will send us an event and we will, we do usually try to get in touch with whoever's organizing the event to make sure that they are comfortable with us, either open carrying or what they prefer to conceal carry and things like that because it is still necessary to be polite. But then also when we do, we always meet people at these actions who are wanting to get more involved than just that one time and we do have ways for them to get involved in their community and learn from us. Now, obviously Dallas is, its nickname for a long time has been the city of hate and it is a place that is, I mean, the city itself is fairly blue, but there is, I mean, even within the Dallas area proper a tremendous amount of people who are like extremely conservative, obviously, I mean, we've, I don't want to be harping on this too much, but is there a degree to which you're concerned about like attempts at infiltration and whatnot or attempts to, yeah, like kind of like, you know, to do sort of the fascist equivalent of what a lot of anti fascists do with right wing groups. There is a lot of concern about that.

We just, you know, we do the best we can, we think we've done a pretty good job already. Clearly, yeah, very careful with, you know, who were, who were in contact with who were working with. We've had to, you know, stop working with abusers a few times. That is a tough one. We don't expand nearly as much as we could. Yeah, given all the people who want to be part of this particular group. We believe more in, you know, many strong groups and try to help people do that. But yeah, it's a tough struggle.

Yeah, I mean, that's a, that's an interesting, because I think maybe the better question for me to ask is, is not like, how do you avoid that? But how do you avoid like, because the, if you look back at the actual history of Co until pro right and the shit that like Hoover and his, his goons were saying to each other, like the goal was not to infiltrate every left wing movement. The goal was to make people be so afraid of infiltration that they weren't able to effectively organize. And so that, that is, I guess, kind of the real trick is this, obviously, there's a degree to which you want to be on your guard. You need to be careful. It's, it's important to be not just ethical, but, but like responsible in your op sec. But you also can't let like fear of that sort of thing happening just because you're, you know, kind of surrounded in a place like North Texas. You can't let that fear stop you from, from trying, right?

I think a big part of that is it goes back to the trust thing. You know, we don't really let people into the closed schools until they've come to a few actions with us. And they've, you know, proven that they're not, you know, filling the beans all over Twitter and things like that. You know, we know who they are and know what they're about. And then we involve them a little bit more. It's all about building that trust with the people you're working with. It just goes right back to that is, you know, trust is built over time. And the longer we all know each other, the more we trust each other. And then, you know, we are able to have those conversations about welcoming more people in and, you know, setting up the processes for that.

Now has just on a logistical standpoint, the kind of notoriety y'all have, have gained because of some of these actions, has it sort of led to like difficulty in terms of we were dealing with like so many, much interest, so many people reaching out to us? Like how do you, how do you actually like organize kind of that? Like how you, how you respond to people when shit goes viral? You know, I know how overwhelming that can be. Yeah, that's been pretty new to us. We've been more used to being kind of your local crew that does things no one ever talks about. And having a larger profile now is a challenge because we do know, you know, attracting a lot more attention.

You know, put some constraints on us. But I think that goes back to why it's important to have a lot of different groups doing a lot of different stuff. You know, you can't just have one group doing all the organizing that needs to be done in an area. It's just a bad idea, you know, if a group gets taken out for a variety of reasons, you don't want everything to fall apart. Yeah. So I guess kind of as we come to probably close to the end of this, were there, were there things that I didn't get into that you wanted to talk to about what y'all are doing and kind of what you want other people to know, particularly folks who, I don't know, we're in Louisville or in, you know, fucking Ida Belle, Oklahoma and kind of want to feel, want to build or at least help to help to protect their community

in a place that there's additional challenges in doing so. Yeah. I've seen that recurring events, no matter what it is, you know, book club distribution, if there's a place that people can find you regularly, that's a great way to have the kind of people you want to meet, you know, just, just walk up and talk to you. For me, what, you know, watching your op sec and also compartmentalizing your information, like if I don't need to know something, I don't want to know it. And that's a good way to stay safe while also, you know, being able to organize and take action. Because, like you said earlier, the most important thing is the will to do something. If you're just, you know, the safest thing you can do is stay in your basement, but then no one will do anything.

Yeah, exactly right. Was there anything else either of you all wanted to get into? I guess I also want to plug passing on training. Whatever skills you have, we've taught medical stuff, how to do an oil change, how to fire, gun stuff, martial arts, you know, unarmed fighting is also important. Share knowledge with each other, you know, make each other more powerful in that way. Yeah, that is a, I think a great line to end on. Thank you everybody else. And yeah, you can check out, actually, you guys want to plug your socials?

You can follow me at bubblebreak on Twitter, and it's kind of out now, but you can follow Enarco Airsoftist. We have training videos on there. Excellent. And then of course, Helmport John Brown Gun Club on pretty much all platforms with separate talks currently. Yeah, I never got into TikTok either. One of these days. All right, everybody, that's the episode. What's inspiring networks of violent accelerationism?

My nihilistic loss of faith in the possibility of human progress. And I don't know, that's probably not a good way to... Yeah, I'd be like that sometimes. Garrison, what are we talking about today? This is it could happen here. Podcast, bad things, world falling apart. There's just been a big shooting in Boston. You probably heard about.

Not Boston. Chicago. Highland Park. I don't know why I said Boston. Suburb of Chicago. Not Boston. Not this. I was thinking about the Boston bombing.

Oh, there we go. It's also not really in Chicago, we should mention. No, it's like 30 miles away, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's a northern suburb. Yeah, it's like... Yeah. Because I've heard a bunch of people say it's like a super rich neighborhood.

And then I've heard other Chicago folks say that like, no, it's like an upper middle class neighborhood that used to be richer. And anyway, whatever. It's not like Chicago. And we'll be talking about it because it's an incident that fits within a pattern of behavior that very few people understand nor really prepared to think about. And part of why is because if you actually understand what's going on with this shooting, there is no political utility in what happened. Yeah. And I mean that in a number of ways, there is no, if you are someone who is supportive of more stringent gun control, there is not political utility in the shooting for a number of reasons, including the fact that Illinois has strict gun laws.

And while a lot of Illinois gun crime has to do with weapons that come in from other states, he bought his legally in the state of Illinois. And even though like this guy was on police radar, he had made threats before they had confiscated all of his knives. And he was still allowed to buy guns. And even though Illinois has a red flag law that very easily, if you can confiscate a man's knives, they could have confiscated his, stopped him from buying guns or whatever. Plenty of laws on the books too have stopped this. And it's useless in a left-right political sense of the word because there are, this guy does not graph onto any of that. I have, I think it is, there's a value in kind of putting out some of the Trump imagery he's put on only because the right has immediately leapt on calling him a transgender anti-fiss shooter. And I guess in terms of a social media thing, sharing him draped in a Trump flag is the quickest way to like rebut that.

But that doesn't mean he's not. It's not useful for actually understanding what's going on. Right. Yeah, so let's, yeah. There's very, this is, it's in a pattern of shootings that are becoming more common the past few years. We saw it at the, there was a school shooting last like October or November that the shooter had a very similar profile. And it's a part of this growing online trend using imagery related to mental illness to encourage and justify mass acts of violence in some rebellion from how our regular society is structured. And how people usually think of reality.

So it's, it's something that we generally people who spend a lot of time researching this, myself included, try to be very careful about how we talk about this. Right. We don't want the wrong things boosted, but also everyone just being in the dark isn't great either. Right. That's, that's frustrating. Right. If people are curious, they're going to start to look stuff up. And it's better that they have someone who knows what they're talking about, explain it to them than then just have them be in the wild west of the internet, on side image boards or forms, learning about these nonsense propaganda styles.

There's, there's a few things that are unique about this guy. I mean, he was not only making the propaganda, but he also did, he also did a violent act. That is actually more unique than usual. Usually the people who are involved in making this type of propaganda that he was making, he made YouTube videos, music, he was, he was very prolific in what he was putting out content wise into the internet. And usually the people who put stuff out in this style of propaganda and this style of like a very, very like meme driven, violent mental illness fetishization subcultures. They, they don't, generally the people who make the stuff don't go out and do the stuff. This is one instance where this did happen. So that's actually unique for a few reasons.

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that, and this is something that has not been discussed nearly as much as I think it ought to have in the wake of the shooting. This guy basically released an ARG at the same time as he carried out his shooting. We're going to, we're going to get to that. In some ways, this is a really good explanation or not explanation. This is a really good example of the post manifesto, like post manifesto terrorism. Yes. There's not, there's not a written manifesto.

It's someone's entire online presence and their entire online documentation is, is that that serves as their manifesto. The whole image of them online, everything they've put out, it represents the thing that they want spread. It's people, these types of people are less likely to write, you know, like a 10 page thing about how, about why they hate X minority. Instead, they're going to leave piles and piles of clues and puzzle pieces, music videos and content that lead people into what they want to project as their mental state to be. It's like everything is an, everything is part of what they want to put out. Yeah. And I think both you can see the act itself, the shooting itself as an attempt to spread the art that he was making and to spread this like profile that he had built. There's a reason why that logo that he had for himself was all over everything.

There's a reason. Pretty unique logo. Very unique logo. He put out some of the videos one from 10 months ago showed the location he's believed to have started shooting from. Yes. It looks like. So he was planning this for a while. And he, I think this was, this was meant both as almost as like an advertising campaign for this guy's EP, if you want to look at it that way.

Yeah. But in a broader sense, like, like it's, it's, it's, it's more circular than that, right? He wasn't just trying to spread his stuff, but he was trying to spread his stuff in this, this imagery and branding that he had created for himself and in order to put other people in that same mind state. It was, it was also very personal to him. He's, I've spent the past few hours watching, watching hours of the stuff that he's put out. And I mean, he's, there's, there's videos that he's animated of him doing a suicide by cop. There's, there's music videos he's made about doing a school shooting. These are, these are ideas and thoughts he's been grappling with for a long time.

And he finally did the thing. He was trying to do a tour currently if he always knew that he was going to do this or if he was actually trying to fight it. Now that's, that's honestly not even worth debating because that's not useful to what's going on. No, cause he did it, right? Yeah. Because, because, because he did it. But we've had, you can see the types of stuff he's been putting out. Like, yes, the, the street that he did the shooting on, he has a long, a long zooming clip of that same street in videos that was posted like over a year ago.

So he's been, he's been thinking in this way for a long time. This isn't like a fast radicalization. This is someone who has been heavily steeped in very, very small niche online subcultures for a long time. I mean, like the guy is 22 years old. He's, he's had his Twitter account since 2011. He's been online so much. It's a deeply online person, deeply alienated, socially isolated, deeply like disassociative. And this is, this is by the way consistent with what his friends have said.

Consistent with what people who knew him and worked with him and put music and albums together with him have, have repeatedly, a number of them at this point come out and said variations of like, yeah, man, he, he got like really weird. Like it was not, not like, and not in the way that like, oh, he got super into Q or like he became a Nazi. But like he got weird in a way I didn't understand and I stopped associating with him. He got, he got detached from parts of like modern reality in ways that are really hard for people to understand. And I think it's, it is important to emphasize just the, the deeply online nature of this. He had, he made a whole music video titled, I rely on the internet that you can't find anywhere. So don't even try to for the love of God. You don't need to.

You don't need to. But like, but it opens, but it opens by him saying, I get mad when other people are more popular than me on the internet. And the mass shooting is in line with this, with this style of thinking, right? He's, he is, he is trying to reify himself into a into a memetic image to spread around the same way. Many mass shooters try to do the same thing, but he is doing this extremely intentionally. He wants to be the thing that represents a very specific idea. And I'm, it's, again, we are always trying to be careful, but like how much we get into this because you don't want to boost the wrong thing. But it's not one of the important to talk about because it's costing a lot of people their lives and no one really knows how to deal with this problem right now.

One of the beautiful things about our current age is that if you are someone like, if you are someone who researches terrorism, extremism, violence, particularly in the American context, although certainly not exclusively Christchurch and all Germany, I don't need to go into it. But if you are someone who focuses on this stuff, you will repeatedly have the experience of encountering a new subculture online or a new trend, a new like species of meme and find yourself wondering like when the first shooting is going to be. I made a significant chunk of my career because I was paying attention to one particular group of folks online when they did their shooting. And I am not primarily, I've not been in the, you know, we've talked a little bit about skits away, which is kind of broadly speaking, the thing that this guy most embodied. Yes. That is, that is the propaganda style, which has a bad name. Yes. We're not saying this because he's schizophrenic.

We're not endorsing its name. This is the style that people who are involved in this online community use. It's about fetishizing parts or fetishizing media-driven aspects of mental illness to encourage violence. It is fetishizing the aesthetics of mental illness. Yes, the aesthetics of mental illness, right? People who are, who actually, you know, deal with mental illnesses are much less likely to commit violent acts. They're actually more likely to be the recipient of violent acts. Yes.

This is extremely documented. This is, like, I think important to actually get people to, like, understand because this is one of the things that, if you look at, like, Tucker Carlson, for example, like how Alex Jones responds to all these shooters, the thing they pivoted, one of the things they pivoted to is, oh, it's because all these people are on antidepressants. And it's like, no. Yeah. No. I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about, so there was, there was this tweet by, I mean, I hate talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene because I think it's useless to talk about her. And it's only gives her inflates the thing that she represents.

But, but she had this tweet about a picture of him that, that, that, that he, that he posted. And she's asking, is he in jail or a rehab center or a psychiatric center in this photo? That's not his bedroom. What drugs are psychiatric drugs or both? It does he use. And the image here is of an image very clearly photoshopped of this person sitting in like, it's sitting in like a mental institution holding a Bible. And it's part of this thing that is like, and fetishizing the aesthetics of mental illness. Right.

It's like, oh, look at me. I'm, I'm so detached from reality. I be, I, I belong inside a mental institution. And the aesthetics of Christian fascism, which is also a weird part of it. There's a photo, one of the like images he posted in 4chan. I think it was fortunate. I may be mistaken about the exact location, but it was like, it was a Catholic saint with like the, the, the sacred heart. Like in her hands with the head replaced by like some anime girl.

I have, I have not seen that yet, but. Yeah. Yeah. This image of that he made of, of inside this, this mental hospital, like that, that is, that is part of the joke to him. Right. Yeah. The joke. Like I don't think he would actually assume that someone would think this is an unphotoshopped image.

I think he would, he would find that hilarious. It's so obvious. Clearly photo, like Marjorie Taylor is just like, just like unable to determine the most basic photoshop. Like you can see the edge marks very clearly. So, but, but this, but like this is part of the joke. Right. And everything, getting into what he actually believes about reality and stuff isn't important because everything about this is, has to do with like post ironic violence and post ironic, like comedy, post ironic, like ideas of reality.

It's the difference between this, what is sincere and what is real and what is ironic and what is fake don't matter. They, as long as they're happening, that's what's happening. So it's all as real as anything else. So getting into specific ideas about what he personally believes doesn't actually matter because one, we don't know if that's genuine at all. He's, he's putting everything out intentionally. And two, it doesn't matter on the actual material circumstances, what are producing effects inside our world right now. Like these types of, like acts of violence. But it's, it's everything is put out.

Should be, they'll seem like contradictory. It'll seem confusing, right? He, he, he opened a video of his that he was doing a live stream. Like I think like over like a year ago. And he, he calls everyone who's watching his live stream. Like he calls them communists. He's like, hey, communists. And it's not because they're actually communists.

It's not because he likes communism. It's not because he's necessarily a fascist either. It's that all these things are so blurred and you use them interchangeably to produce this sense of meaninglessness. And the reaction to this meaningless world that he's constructed for himself and these types of online subcultures try to construct. The only sensible reaction to this meaningless world is for them to do these types of acts of violence. That is, that is the point. So the actual details of what they're saying aren't important because it's all about constructing this world that is utterly meaningless and self-contradictory and confusing and nothing makes sense.

And the only way to respond to that is to get out of it. And that's part of what they're, they're trying to do. And there are, I mean, again, part of the frustrating thing is that there are all of these things that people try to kind of simply affix to this are pieces of it. Yeah. American gun culture, the fetishization of violence as the way to achieve positive ends in our culture is a part of this. It's part of why the natural response to everything is meaningless and confusing is go on a killing spray. Exactly. And likewise, the fact that politics is where it is where you have like this one party that's the Republican Party that is almost entirely dedicated to like owning the libs

and just purely attacking people rather than trying to do anything because their policies have been unmitigated disasters for the country. And the other side just kind of blindly tells people to vote like that hopelessness, that like, that, that kind of nihilistic aggression on the right all feeds into this. And you could say that like a great deal of right wing media, particularly right wing alt media is kind of, forms a heavy component of like the milieu that this guy was radicalized in. Yeah. But it's more like that kind of stuff provided a language for him than it is that that kind of stuff was specifically like his motivating factor. Same thing with like Trumpism, right? Yeah. He engaged with Trumpism only in a way that it helps kind of destabilize things and is this like orbit of chaos, right?

That's why it's into it, right? He was deeply into stuff around conspiracy theories, paranormal, deep nihilism, getting cut off from consensus reality, getting awakened to some like greater truth. Everything that he's actually into is all just to serve to serve those types of means. Politics aren't the core part of that, but it's a reaction to politics. And then he's going to use it as just as just another tool. It's because yeah, many of them are racist. Maybe they can share racist memes, but that's not actually the the the center point of of what's going on. And, you know, in some ways it'd be easier if it would be because that gives you something actually easy to target. Otherwise, right now, you know, when you're trying to address this whole propaganda style that is encouraging these things to happen, it's a harder thing to clamp down on because it's it's in like an endless game of whack-a-mole.

Trying to find out, you know, who is the big people pushing content like this right now in like these weird niche communities? How can we get them taken down? And they just always pop back up, right? It's always it's it's this endless game. So it's hard to target. And that leaves you with the feeling of like hopelessness on how this situation will be solved, which is like also part of the point of why these attacks happen is to is to get that reaction. But it sucks. Like it's it's it's it's always bad to just have the like only thing you think about is like, oh, wow, I don't see a way to solve this.

It's just terrible. But that's part of the intention here. And, man, it's it's not good because, you know, you this this isn't the first shooting that has happened from this skits away aesthetic. There there has been other ones. But these things are normies are going to start hearing more and more about this. And that sucks. It's going to become more of a of a thing that people are going to be aware of, right? As soon as as soon as MPR starts talking about it, you're like, OK, this is this is fully.

This is this is fully escaped the box. It's it's one of those things when because I was just I was saying earlier, like what it's like when you finally when you find yourself staring at something that is going to blow up in a violent way and just not knowing when you are one of a number of folks who I've known who were kind of particularly dealing with this space. And it's been like two years that folks have been saying like there is there will a bit like. And the thing that is most almost as frightening as like anything else is that and then fucking Brett Baer is going to be talking about skits away on the news. Like we're going to have to we're going to have to deal with like Joe Rogan trying to parse this shit out while stoned while stoned. And while talking about the Cali Yuga and we'll talk about the fucking Cali Yuga, which does lead us into the board. And we're going to be talking about the Capyot Club.

So are we going to are we going to segue? So we're going to talk about one thing that dealing with skits. We finished talking about one thing dealing with skits away. And we're going to enter into other thing that the only accurate way I can describe describe this is that my my dives into this into this theory are the equivalent of what it feels like to have a psychotic episode. How you take one meaningless piece of information and project a meeting on to it to make it super important and how that kind of cascades down. Oh boy. So the board, the Board Ape Yacht Club, AKA now I guess the Board Ape Nazi Club, because people online have decided that they're really good at researching Nazis, I guess. Somebody hop into the fucking subreddit and tell us that we we needed to be we needed to be dealing with this.

I was like, like randomly, I like visited some of my friends in Chicago who are like normies and like they were telling me about this video and I was like, oh, no. Yeah, it is. It is again, it is fully escaped the box now. And that's part of the problem. So there is this YouTuber who made a video in partnership with a quote unquote internet artist about how the Board Ape Yacht Club friends of the pod are secretly this Nazi op to troll everyone into spreading esoteric Naziism. That's that's the claim. So first, I'm going to say that the guy who made this video was in partnership with this internet artist who at the same time launched a rival Ape based NFT project and this video served as an ad for his rival Ape NFT project. And to be clear, his Ape NFT project was taking the art that the Board Ape Yacht Club used for their apes, making no changes to it and selling it to people on a different platform, which is like intellectual property theft, right?

Like I never want to be the guy saying the board apes are legally in the right. I know, I know, right? They sure are. I can't believe like we are not defending Board Ape Yacht Club. It's stupid. And I want them to be hit with a brick. We're talking about this because people are appropriating the term, appropriating the almost like the aesthetics of anti-fascist research selling their own products. They are appropriating the aesthetics of anti, of scholarship focused on extremism in order to sell NFTs.

That's what's happening with this, the Board Ape Yacht Club or Nazis video. So, again, so all the information comes from this, from this guy who's a rival, a rival NFT internet artist. Yeah, what's his fucking name? Ryder Rips, I think. Yeah, Ryder Rips. Yeah, because he's being sued now by the Board Apes or whatever and like, good God. And I mean, everything, I'm not, if you watch the video that we're referring to, I'm not disparaging you in case you thought it was convincing. Because I mean, that was part of the editing is it was trying to make it seem convincing.

But every single thing is like cherry picked and squished together to resemble meaning. But once you actually open it up, you're like, oh, this is actually nothing. The whole 30 minute section on the cipher is about them doing ciphers badly to get a result out of the clues that they were given. They're looking for specific results to match whatever they want to see. And everything else is the connections are so tangential. And it's, it's like synchronicity gone bad, right? It's people who take these things and protect meaning onto them when in reality, that's just how everything in the world works. And it's not actually meaningful or important.

You're focusing on it. So you're going to see it everywhere. This is the same thing we were talking about in our food factor is conspiracy video. Yes. Our podcast. Sorry. And it's basically one of the things that has made this, I think, spread so virally is that there's a germ of not truth, but there's there's a single convincing point that it all starts from. And the single convincing point is that the board API club logo was like it very was ripped from that other Nazi logo. Absolutely.

Yeah, it is very much patterned off of like the old SS deaths head. Well, I shouldn't. Yeah, because there's a number of things going on there because the Nazis were really good at graphic design. And because also that's not originally a Nazi thing. It has its origins in a Prussian military unit. And there's a reason why the deaths had went so far. And it is generally like, for example, when you see a death set on an Ukrainian soldier in like Ukraine, that dude's probably got some pretty Nazi fucking beliefs. Yeah.

It's not a, again, so the fact that you see something that looks like it may have an inspiration in that is a worthwhile point to start looking at stuff. Absolutely. But once you go at it with a conclusion in mind, then find things just to back up your own conclusion. That's not how you do good research because, man, like one of the founders is Jewish, not saying Jewish people can't be fascists or whatever. But like half the people who started it are ethnic minorities, they're really bad writers and they put together this thing that's complete nonsense. And people are now assuming it's this mega conspiracy and it's not. It's just bad. And I think part of why people are so, so I think part of why a chunk of the people who hate it want there to be a conspiracy is because this thing has made so much money and it is utterly banal and idiotic.

And it is utterly banal and idiotic. The other thing, a lot of this comes out of and a lot of the strength that kind of this individual, this thing has, this video has, comes out of the fact that years ago, a number of folks, some of whom are present company here, started warning people about the ways in which fascists would hide things like 14s and 88s. Yeah. All of dog whistles, hidden in the tree, all that kind of stuff. And so people started to get primed to the fact that that happens, that the Nazis hide shit and that you should be on the lookout for it. But one of the things that has been forgotten, I think, and kind of the rush to do that for shit like this is that it's not just the fact that they're hiding. Like in the specific case of people who are putting 14s and 88s and shit, when I was discussing that, it was nearly always in the context of like members of Patriot prayer and the Proud Boys and affiliated groups who were beating people in the streets, right? So you're not, you don't just have the imagery.

You have someone going out and doing things that like they are claiming have nothing to do with fascism. But like, no, you can see like signposting this and they're carried. Yeah. If you have an ape that's numbered 1488. Which is a thing in the video. It's because there's like 10,000 of these apes and they're all numbered in numerical order. Yeah. The fact that in a group of a set of 10,000 apes, one of them is a number of 1488 is not Nazi dog whistling.

Even more than it would be satanic dog whistling that there's going to be a 666 in there. Yeah. Just like there's one that's 6969. Just like there's one that's two, three, four, seven, whatever. Yeah. It's like that thing people used to do where like, I don't know if people still do this. But like there were when I was like kid, people would like you get someone who'd like pull out a grid of a city and they start drawing pentagrams on it. Yeah, exactly.

It's like, well, yeah, there's a bunch of random lines. If you can draw anything you want. Yeah. But the other thing that's a really that's a big problem about this is not only it's passing off bad extremism research to sell their own NFT product, which is bad in and of itself. It's also saying the stuff that doesn't need to be said out loudly to a huge audience all while using the fast wave image style. And that sucks because it's talking about things like traditionalism. It's talking about types of esoteric Nazism that usually we don't want to put a giant megaphone on because when people get really into this, you get stuff like the shooting that happened a few days ago. That's that those are the same Internet communities that this stuff is really fostered in.

So we don't like to amplify it because the more people who are in these communities, the more their brains slowly get chipped away at by these people making this making these types of like hypnotic propaganda. So when we have a YouTuber that has a video with millions of views talking about the Caliuga talking about Julius Avola talking about a whole bunch of stuff around like extremely niche occult Nazism. That's not great, especially when they're using the fast wave style of video editing to make it seem really cool and scary. And when they're doing it ultimately to make money in an NFT scheme, right? It's more than just this is not just somebody did research that was like bad. This is somebody crafted a viral thing using the aesthetics of research and dropping some really dangerous shit into the consciousness in an irresponsible way to sell the same eight drawings they were attacking. Extremely frustrating because even the whole cipher section of the video I'll still just reel against because it's about people using a bajillion cipher methodologies to get specific results out of it that they want.

And all the results that get out of it also are like not problematic and are kind of explainable. Like all of them refer to something about monkeys anyway. So even if they are true, it's not it's it doesn't necessarily need to be referencing this obscuring and traditionalism. It's like, oh, no, that's because it's the name of a fucking monkey. And I don't again, I don't have any actual opinion on whether the born apia club has someone working for it that is hiding in secret references. Because honestly, I don't care because all because what it's viewed publicly as is a stupid NFT thing. Yeah, I mean, it's not it's not viewed publicly by people who use it as a secret Nazi conspiracy because if it is, what's the impact? What's what's the impact that it's had?

Like how how would it matter if it's a secret Nazi conspiracy theory? What's it what's it doing? Yeah, it's selling bad pictures of monkeys. When we when we talk about the first wave of this and like the need to explain, you know, the symbols that people were hiding in these like right wing street movements, a bunch of whom wound up feeding into Jan 6th. It's easy to say, well, what the harm was they were going out there were beating people. They were planning terrorist attacks, right? Yeah, yeah, doing doing terrorist attacks. I have I again, I fucking hate these board eight motherfuckers.

I think this is the stupidest fucking I don't know trend I've seen in my entire goddamn life. I cannot point to anything even vaguely Nazi. They have supported or done like among other things. If you want to know if something is a dangerous conspiracy or a stupid grift, one question you should ask yourself. And this isn't always relevant, but one question you should ask yourself is, is Jimmy Fallon involved? Because if Jimmy Fallon is involved, it's probably just a dumb grift. The whole the whole the watching this guy break down how you get secret messages out of these ciphers is it's the same. It's the same thing as like QAnon shit, it's people wanting to get an answer out of numbers and things and then pushing that answer as truth.

Even if it's like not not based in any form of reality. Yeah, it's it's so it's really frustrating to watch people basically start using QAnon style research tactics to justify their hatred of an NFT project, which is like, no, you can just dislike it from being an NFT thing. You don't need to wrap it in a in this package that is just really bad extremism research. Part of one of the things that scares me about this attack and about like what's going to happen kind of in the media after it is that I think kind of inevitably these aesthetics are just going to get co-opted on a wider and wider basis. That's what's happening on Tiktok right now. Is that these these types of fast wave and skit wave aesthetics are just becoming a core part of the zoomer online aesthetic.

And that sucks. The the other point I wanted to mention about the Highland Park thing is like this this guy that did this is such a perfect profile of this type of de-attached like Gen Z. Like almost I like like post politics terrorism. That like he is such a perfect example of someone who's been online since he was a very, very little kid trying to make content online, right? Everyone in Gen Z needs to be performing all of the time, right? Your whole life is a performance for the Internet. He was doing that same thing. He's been making making music and videos and shit since he was since he was like younger than me.

Like he's been doing this for a long, long time. And the types of like, you know, like nested communities that you get like that you like fall into. It's such it's such like a clear example of the very types of things that, you know, me and others have been talking about and warning about for a while. And it's the whole like muddledness of reality that we even get with this like board a Nazi club video, right? They're all part of this the same problem with the Internet. Like our brains weren't designed for this much information coming at us at the same time. We cannot sort it all out. And it's not ideal.

It's not it's not great. I would rather it not be like this. I don't know how to like come at people with a solution to this because this is an unsolved problem. It's like come up with a solution for the fucking the fact that emissions like are not going to be reduced. I know because the world because the world does suck. But yeah, very, very cognizant of video propaganda styles and anyone that uses flashing like classic or Catholic like imagery. Be very, very careful. Be very careful of people who fetishize the aesthetics of mental illness.

Be very careful about about people that you wrap these aesthetics of mental illness in like a very violent package. Because like that's what we get with with with the shooter. He was like doing doing videos about about, you know, these types of mental illness that end with him just like a picture of like a drawing of him holding a gun. You know, way before he bought a gun, he was making art about about this. Yeah, I think the one that stuck out to me most was him repeatedly referring to himself as a sleepwalker. Yeah, which which I don't know. Like obviously that is very much in line with the the schizo wave aesthetic stuff that like you have been talking about. It also kind of makes me think I mean it it it it brought me to thinking about Barbara Tuckman, who is a historian who wrote a book called The Guns of August.

That's a history of World War One that that describes kind of the machinery that got set up and marched everybody into that situation exploding like sleep sleepwalkers, right? Like this system has been set up and the people are kind of so unwilling to see where it's leading that everything's just kind of marching with a with a sense of inevitability towards a worse and a worse end point. And that's what scares me most about this. I've listened to many of his horrible songs and there's lyrics and there's lyrics very similar to that idea about that kind of inevitable like fate driven nature of our current situation and how reality has become so muddled with the internet. And like we there's been an intentional top down effort to destroy any nature of consensus reality and make everything up for debate. There's there is there is facts no longer are a thing like they just don't exist. And this is the world that results from that happening when those people in power who put are pushing for this like you know like Steve Bannon is among you know one of many people who are pushing for this type of world. This is the result that we get and this is the result that they kind of want us to get.

Yeah, I mean, because if everything is true and that's fundamentally like what they're going at for is this idea that like everything's true and nothing is everything. Yeah. And if every like and if you hit that state, you can do anything right like to steal a quote. Who is that was that fucking Crowley? But but like that's very much nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Yeah. That goes all the way back to the assassins.

Yeah. Well, allegedly goes back. Yes. Sure. Sure. But no, but it is like that is that is the thing, right? I mean, even this even the shooter guy had numerous Discordian references in his shit. Yeah, it's all about the same stuff.

It's all it's all dealing with these same problems. Right. Obviously, if, you know, if you deal with disassociation as I sometimes do, if you, you know, like parts about the Discordian aesthetics and like, like the kind of ideas they play with, that does not make you an inherently dangerous person. That's that's not the problem here. Right. Like you get like, I'm, you know, in some ways, but I think about a lot of a lot of these same topics because I look at all of this. I look at all of this research all the time. My brain is in a similar is in a similar place. That's that's that doesn't make you a bad person.

That doesn't make you dangerous. But I think it's important to be cognizant of the type of propaganda that people are pushing the types of propaganda trends and styles that are producing material effects in the world. Like these types of shootings. Yeah. And so I don't know what else to say, honestly, because it's bad. It's a problem. I would say if anyone ever tells you about something they saw on the internet, hit them and run away screaming. That's a good that's a good way to move forward.

And please don't don't start. Other thing is like, you know, we're going to, we're going to the right is going to have two possible reactions to stuff like this, right? They're going to one do a satanic panic and be like, oh, look at these people doing a cult shit. Let's do another. Let's do another satanic panic, which would suck. There's there's that option, obviously, that that would tie into like transphobia. That would tie into a whole bunch of whole bunch of bullshit. The other option is that people start, you know, using mentally ill people as a scapegoat and start saying we should lock up people who deal with mental illness.

Yeah. That would suck wouldn't solve the problem either. Wouldn't do it. Yeah. And like that's the thing I've actually been seeing this in the last really like, probably three months is there's been a bunch of people who've been calling for like bringing like bringing sort of old school asylums back. That's that's exactly what the people the people who make this propaganda. That's exactly what they want.

That's they want you to have that reaction. That would make things so much worse. If you put people like this in an asylum for 10 days, then they get out there. They are so much more likely to do these types of things, not because they're actually like not because like nothing to do with their actual whatever like mental things they have going on. It's because of the aesthetic stylings, right? They want to be a character in a story. If they feel like their life is going in a direction that they are a character in a story, they're getting put in these situations that they have memed about, right? This guy has pictures.

He's photoshopped of himself inside mental institutions, right? It's it's a character in a story. If you do that, you're playing right into their hands. It is that is not what that should not be the focus of what we are doing in like carceral problems are not the solution to these types of things, especially for people who are who are like just making music online. Like what are you going to do fucking arrest people for the like for the music they make? Like that is not the solution. Don't let people turn this into targeting people who have actual like mental like mental things that they deal with. Don't make them the scapegoat of this and be very careful if anyone tries to do any kind of satanic panic nonsense about secret occultists who are trying to alter your kids reality or whatever.

Be very careful because anyone who uses that type of framing for this problem is not genuine. They do not actually care. They are pushing something that they want. Yeah. I mean, and I think one of the reasons why the idea that these people are kind of seeing themselves as part of a narrative is important is because it represents a discontinuity with the way mass shootings have worked for most of the time that people listening to this have been alive in the United States. Prior to a couple of years ago, really 2019 was the big break year for this, the vast majority of mass shooters were also committing suicide. That was part of the goal. Yeah.

That was what happened. And if you are an individual with a gun who has just committed a series of murders, it is very easy to make sure you die in that attack. It's extremely easy. That is why so many of them did it. That has stopped being a given in the way that it used to be, the change I think was Christchurch was the main inflection point for this, but a lot of these guys go down alive. The buffalo shooter taken alive. The last skit to wave shooter from a few months ago was taken in alive. This is intriguing because if I was to watch all this video propaganda beforehand, I would have assumed that this guy wanted to die within the act.

A lot of the stuff was written about him doing this to kind of end his life and escape into whatever is next. That's the kind of feeling I get. That's interesting. A lot of his writing. And yet he didn't. I saw a great deal of the imagery he was putting out, particularly the shit with him in the asylum as kind of evidence of where... It was part of why I suspected like he intended to get taken alive. That is very possible.

Because in some way, I'm not going to speculate further. This is not necessarily the most useful. I'm not going to speculate further, but there's a lot of possible things to think about there, which I will do so because I have all the stuff. Don't look at this stuff because it's forbidden. Don't seek it out because it's forbidden knowledge that they don't want you to see. It's dangerous. That's not the point. The point is it's bad and now it's also hard to find.

Don't watch it. It's not worth watching. I watch a bunch of this stuff in the immediate wake of it. What happened to me was I got a fucking headache. You get a headache. It felt bad. You feel bad. It sucks.

It wastes your time. If you want to get the experience of this without having to do this shit, fucking eat a bunch. Eat a shit ton of candy. And then you'll feel like shit. Watch Pink Floyd's The Wall. Jesus Christ. Yeah, except the thing is if you're eating a bunch of candy or watching The Fucking Wall, that experience before this is actually good. Whereas this is just like it's only the bad parts of that.

I only look at this because it's my fucking job. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, all right, well, you know, I'm gonna say we're probably done here. So I don't know until next time, again, if anyone tries to tell you about something that happened on the Internet, strike them and flee. Remember, run the hide fight from people trying to tell you about things happening on social media. This is the good strategy going forward. All right, podcast. It could happen here.

Podcast about the terrible things that are happening all around the world and the wonderful people who are trying to fix them. What it is today is a podcast with Tarek Lubani of Glia. What really inspired me about this story and made me want to share it with you is that it came out of a really dark place. Tarek was on the ground in Gaza treating gunshot wound victims and a lot of gunshot wound victims. Like I remember reading his field testing of the device and just being appalled by the number of people who have been shot. Lots of them children and some of the reporting he was doing, right? Like, oh, I had this this tourniquet and we were reusing them and they don't work very well on a pediatric application because kids shouldn't be shot, right? But instead of getting down, he was able to make a solution.

And I think that's really important and I really like that even through like this dark and terrible stuff that we've all had to experience and he experienced in Gaza. He was able to see a positive solution, a way to look after people to move forward in this case to prevent death and preserve life. And I think it's easy to focus on the dark stuff. There's enough of it happening. But I think it's important to focus on the great people who are doing great things to protect and care for other people as well. So that's a little bit of what we got today and I hope you enjoy it. So I'm here with Tarek Lubani. He's from Glia.

There a company I came across when I was writing about 3D printed tourniquets. Would you like to introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about Glia and what you do there? Thank you so much for having me. My name is Tarek Lubani as you had mentioned. I'm an emergency physician. In Canada, in a city in Canada called London, and I also work in the Gaza Strip as an emergency physician as well. Glia was really an answer to a problem. The problem being that when I see patients in Gaza, they don't get the same quality of service that I can give to my patients.

Of course, that's multifactorial, but a big part of that has to do with the way in which we as the medical profession. Have medical devices that we don't release, that we don't give access to other people to use. And so Glia's purpose was to take the most medical devices that doctors use, and to make sure that they were accessible and available to doctors all over the world. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's very cool. And you make a number of devices, right? Like I know that I first talked to you about the tourniquet, but you make also a stethoscope, is that right? The stethoscope is the calling card of medicine.

And so it was the first project that we started working on to test out the theory. I mean, we started with the theory that, hey, we can probably make a device that's just as good as a $300 device, but the costs, let's say $3 or even $30. And that was the stethoscope. We tested it, we published the results, we proved it was as good as the gold standard, the Littman cardiology three at the time. And using it both in our own practices, also making it available to other people to make for theirs. Okay, yeah. And so that's what's really interesting about your company as opposed to other companies, right?

You're not necessarily like manufacturing and distributing. You are providing the designs that allow other people to make them, right? And so can you talk about some of the, like, I know that you use 3D printing and I want to talk about that, but also like I remember seeing that the tubing and the stethoscope comes from a Coca-Cola machine, right? So some of those considerations. Yeah, absolutely. The purpose is to make these devices available to other people for the lowest possible, but also like actually be available. It's no good if you can make it for 20 sounds, but the parts that are required are nowhere.

So that's why we went with a basket of items that are more or less universally available and we made the stethoscopes out of that. For example, you can probably get the very specific kind of earpieces that most stethoscopes have, but they are naturally going to be less available and less abundant than if you were to use regular earbuds, the headphones. There are way more headphones out there than there are stethoscopes. Therefore, those parts are more available. Even if, of course, they are less expensive, but even if they were slightly more expensive, it would be worth it. What we really take away is the monopoly and the profit motive. And so by doing that, or rather, let's say the exorbitant profit that medical device companies are making,

and by doing that, we're really able to realize the promise of patents, all of the devices that we make were patented at one point. The promise of patents is that when the patent is over, you'll get a cheap device. But that promise is not realized. The stethoscope is a 300-year-old device, basically, and the fact that it is not available at the highest quality except for $300 is kind of nuts. So that's why we started there and, of course, moved on to more and more complicated devices, much more complicated even than the tourniquet by now. I remember reading, because you kept a blog, I remember, on Medium where you talked about testing the tourniquet when you were in Gaza. Just A, if you read medical literature, this was just the shocking, I remember being absolutely shocked by the number of casualties you were encountering,

and then also you were saying the lack of available tools. So perhaps you could explain a little bit of what you saw there, and how these tourniquets have been able to help you address that massive disparity in access to care. The tourniquet project really started in Gaza because we noticed that after one of the wars, the war in 2014, that we had a particularly high casualty rate, of course, but of that there were many deaths that we would classify as preventable. That's where we felt that had tourniquets been available, those patients likely wouldn't have died. When we started working on it, of course, we knew at some point there'd be another war.

It is very common in Gaza for there to be attacks by the Israelis. We didn't anticipate for it to happen so fast and for it to happen in a way where the tourniquet was so necessary. That, of course, was what's called the Great March of Return, where Palestinians protested en masse, and one of the Israeli responses was to shoot live fire at the protesters, often targeting about 80% of the hits were targeting the arms and the likes, which is where tourniquets are the most effective. So the high number really is owing to the way in which the Israelis decided to deal with this protest and the fact that it was a protest rather than a specific war.

And that meant also that we could predict with the relative degree of accuracy where the injuries would be, which meant that it was even more important to have the right equipment and the right training. It was part of an overall strategy. So of course, it's not like tourniquets were the thing that saved lives. Tourniquets were part of a campaign to train paramedics and to train doctors in how to stop bleeding in these kinds of injuries. And they were one of the most important tools in that campaign, but only part of that campaign. Yeah, of course, of course, you need other tools and obviously the education, and you can't just slap it on and then the person's fine, right?

Obviously, there's a lot of care afterwards, which is important too. Can you maybe talk us through, you talked about the promise of patents, right? And I think this is important in exactly what we're talking about in tourniquets, because it's a little different to medicines, right? It's a little different with medical devices. So there are existing tourniquets on the market, right? And I think the sort of market leading one is the cat. Can you explain why are those not getting to people who need them desperately in these areas?

The problem with the tourniquets that are available right now kind of falls into a few different categories. North American Rescue, the makers of cat have two key patents on the cat. And as far as we can tell, just based on the posture of the company, if anybody else were to make exact cat replicas, they will be sued. The people who are willing to then make exact cat replicas tend to be people who are unaccountable and largely have not much to lose. And so that's why we saw a glut initially, for example, with the Ukraine campaign, of tourniquets that were relatively low quality.

And so you can't just make the device. You also have to know that the device will work, because you don't want to discover that when you put it on an armor leg and then it fails. Gaza is an asset test of all of these things, because not only are devices generally not available or expensive, it's kind of at the bottom of any purchase list, for example. But also in Gaza, there's a complete international blockade, Israeli led, of course, but there are other countries that are contributory. And that blockade means that equipment can't get in so long as the Israelis deem it to be of military value.

This is where things like dual use devices and so on come into play. The tourniquet is a medical device. It can only be a medical device. There is no second use. And so it should be exempt. However, even if the Palestinians could afford 50 US dollars per unit, which would be the cost to get one in, the Israelis won't let them in. So de facto, even though they shouldn't be banned, they are de facto banned.

And that means that not only can we depend on cheap Chinese retailers, let's say, to give us replica tourniquets, we actually have to manufacture them ourselves. When we open sourced our designs, it was with an eye to two things. One, making it available so that the replica makers can make higher quality replicas. They're already making replicas. We may as well give them a legal replica rather than a patent to break busting replica. Not that I think there's anything wrong with that in these cases where there's emergencies, but just the same, Glea's tourniquet doesn't break any patents.

And at the same time, in addition to giving them the ability to make high quality tourniquets, we can also make high quality tourniquets locally and domestically. Because, of course, national liberation, as it were in the medical device space, can't come if you can't make your own devices. We discovered that during COVID. The Palestinians have known that for decades now. And we're kind of rediscovering it in Ukraine where there just aren't enough tourniquets. And so they are forced to improvise or accept tourniquets that they don't want to accept. Right.

Yeah. I think COVID was this great example that we can't continue to rely on the sort of whims of global capital to provide things that we need to survive. I think your manufacturing is fascinating. Because you're using essentially commonly available materials in a 3D printer, is that right? Yeah, that's correct. I mean, we're not against using other things. They just have to be very simple.

For example, our electronics use PCBs. You can't 3D print electronic circuits just yet. So we use PCBs. But when we design our PCBs, there are a couple of ways to design it. You can design an eight layer board that can only be manufactured in one or two places in the world. Or you can design a board that's three times the size but can be manufactured anywhere in the world. And when you're talking about credit card size devices, if it's notebook size instead of credit card size, it doesn't really matter that much. For example, the example I'm thinking of here is an electrocardiogram where we took a device that had failed in the sort of market that the makers open sourced.

And they had intended it to be a fitness device. And then it didn't work. Their company went bankrupt. And so they open sourced it. They looked at their schematics, all of the problems that they had already solved. We said, okay, the problem we're going to solve is to make it so that this can be manufactured in a high school electronics lab. And we were able to achieve that. It was bigger.

It was twice as big. But who cares? The old one was half the size of a credit card. You know, who cares? You make it a little bit bigger, but at the same time, you make it much more accessible. Twice as big, 20 times more accessible. I know some of your stuff like your tourniquets is really, there's not much or any really of a performance trade off from what you've seen, right? Indeed, they might be better for some pediatric applications, if I remember correctly.

That's right. So when you think of the way in which corporate devices are made, they are made to the specifications of particular buyers. And the buyers are the people who have the money. Who's the buyer for tourniquets? When you think about who needs tourniquets consistently, who has money to give you tourniquets, who should you market to? There's only one sane answer, and that is first world militaries, especially occupation militaries or militaries that are engaged in ground level warfare, who are expected to take small arms or IEDs. And so there are not many children who you have to sell to in that particular market. Not many small women or even women at all, they have to sell to in that market.

So I don't think that North American rescues engineers would have any trouble making sure that their tourniquets worked amazingly well for children. But why? Why would they spend one to 20, 30 million dollars doing that work and research when that's not their audience and that's not their buyer? For us, the normal person, the civilian, is the in quotation marks buyer. They're not the ones buying, but they're the ones who are the main consumer. And so they're the ones who we target. In Gaza specifically, 45% of the population is under the age of 14. You'd have to be crazy to go out there and put a tourniquet out that only works on big burly men.

So that's why we were driven to do that. And as for the performance tradeoffs, yeah, you're right. What we learned about spec sheets on lots of these devices is that they're made up. There isn't really a great way to know how well a tourniquet works, unfortunately. There isn't a really great way to know how well a stethoscope works. And so some of the first work we did was actually designing some tests so that we can say, OK, well, here's how you prove that the stethoscope works as well as that stethoscope. Or here's how you prove that this works as well as that. And those testing protocols, we made them open source and easily available too.

For example, if you want to test a stethoscope, you can do that with a pair of headphones, a microphone, and a Hello Kitty balloon. That's how we did it originally. Could we have spent $10,000 making that test? Yeah, we could have. But that wouldn't have helped us in terms of helping other people make stethoscopes wherever they are. Yeah, that's very cool. And then by open sourcing that test, you allow for other people who have ideas or models for their own improvements or different designs so that they can then use that test and continue to improve and share their improvements with others. I do not want to work on stethoscopes anymore. I want people to take it up.

And it doesn't mean that I won't. Of course I will. But my favorite thing is when somebody sends a message and says, hey, I like what you've done. Here's how I think it could be better. I love those messages. I love them. And you know what? Nine out of 10 of those ideas don't work out. They don't pan out.

But 10% like our stethoscope since 2017, all of the improvements have been from other people because we haven't had the time and money to work on it. But we have been open-minded, have incorporated lots of design changes that other people in the community have suggested. That's a good thing. It's good for everybody. Yeah. And I think it does an excellent job at getting the fundamental conceit of our drug and device development model, right? Which isn't true, actually. That there's massive R&D costs and those R&D costs have to be recouped by charging a massive amount for a period of time and making access to that medicine or device a privilege, not a right.

And then eventually the costs will come down. They often don't. And then everyone will have access to the thing. And it's been my experience that it doesn't work that way. But what you've shown is an alternative, right? That people want to help and that there's not a need for this price gouging to facilitate the improvement in this technology. Is that fair? We're not taking a purely altruistic model here.

People are generally improving the stethoscope for their own uses. So there is a self-interested aspect if you want to present it that way. What we realized is that actually the most useful way to develop a device is to make it as good as possible and release it and then have other people who want to improve it have a capacity to share back to you. So as much as I believe in altruism and I do think every time that I've seen people collaborate, I've seen a tremendous amount of it. This more resembles the open-source software model, which is actually the world I came from. I came from the free software model where, yes, you do things just for the fun of it, but also very large corporations are involved. For example, some of the stethoscopes improvements happened because a lab needed to use it for some experiments on animals. And so they made modifications and they fed them back.

Amazing. That's fantastic. But that was totally self-interested that they knew that it would cost them significantly less to build on our work and it would cost them nothing to share back their contributions. So we're not going out there trying to prove that everybody is good at heart, even though I do actually think that's fundamentally true. What we're doing is showing through this model that devices can advance with relatively little upfront costs and with the contribution of many, many members. Yeah, you phrased it really well, I think, that people have the self-interest which also serves other people's interests. I've seen it in all kinds of open-source communities. We've reported before on 3D printed guns, which is obviously a different end of the spectrum, but it's fascinating to see this global exchange.

And I'm sure you have people, you've mentioned that there are people in Myanmar who are printing your tourniquets, right? We were amazed when people from Myanmar had reached out and said that we've seen your tourniquet and we want to implement it. We have a situation that's very similar to Gaza. We thought that's exactly what we want. What they did was two things. One, they took our instructions and they used them, but then they also fed back to us how those instructions were incomplete, how they could be better, and some design changes that made their lives better. Again, amazing. By them using it, by them taking, they also gave.

And that's the sort of relationship, the kind of solidarity that we've seen whenever other people have used our devices. We've noticed that they take, and it's not a problem if people in Myanmar had just taken and not given anything back. That's fine too, because it doesn't take anything away from us to share. This is a kind of sharing where the more you share, the more there's potential for benefit, but there's never a loss. You never lose by sharing. In that sense, we're not also trying to present it as though we need people to share for us to feel that this model works. We don't. But we're already making it anyway. We're already using it anyway. We're sharing and some people help out by contributing back and some people don't. It seems to me to be the most effective way to develop devices for low cost and make sure that they get out to where they need to be.

Yeah, because in the 21st century, people who need them can find them as you've found out, like people across the world. Do you have a sense of where else they're being used? The tourniquets right now are being used in Gaza, in Ukraine, and in Myanmar. If they're being used in other places, we're not really aware of it, but people aren't compelled to make us aware of it. And all three of those locations have moved forward the project tremendously. For example, for Ukraine, the Ukrainian support people weren't really able to contribute so much their own ability to construct and make, but they were able to contribute really important research, financial and testing capabilities. And so, of course, a project like this costs money.

They're like, hey, look, you know, we don't have farms, print farms, but we do have some cash that we want to put into it. And we were able to use that money very, very effectively, more effectively than if they would have bought the pieces, to then create the capacity for them to go and make their own tourniquets. Okay, so yeah, let's talk about that. That's fascinating. And we could maybe contrast it to sort of another model, right? Because I understand you're able to go to Ukraine and help them set up as opposed to, yeah, it would have taken months, I imagine, to do that with, I don't know how they make the cats, but they molded or something, but with a non-open source, non-printed model, to set up a tourniquet factory in Ukraine or Poland would take months, right?

Yes, absolutely. But you're not going to, there's two reasons why North American Rescue, I'll just call them NAR from here on out, won't do that. One of them is that that conflict at some point will end. It's very expensive to set up production lines. And the other thing is the more tourniquets you put into the market, the cheaper tourniquets get. You know, supply and demand, like we learned that one pretty well from capitalism. And so they have an inherent disincentive, whether they recognize it or not, whether it's conscious or not, North American Rescue and all these companies have an inherent disincentive in flooding the market with tourniquets. Whereas we do not.

For us, it's the opposite. We lose pretty much, GLIA loses about $10 to $20 per tourniquet that we manufacture. We have no incentive to keep doing it. We want other people to do it because we want as many tourniquets to be provided as possible. What we do then is we heavily subsidize the tourniquets using our own internal funds and fundraising that we do, with the goal of getting them out there so that deaths can be prevented. And so we want other people producing. When I go there, every tourniquet somebody else makes instead of me is less headache for me,

is less pain for me, and is less financial loss for me and for GLIA, of course. So our incentives are different. They want a shortage consciously or not. And we want an abundance. We want everybody to have a tourniquet in their pocket. That's our goal. Can you talk a little bit about your experiences in Ukraine? You were there pretty recently, right?

Ukraine is a very, very complicated subject when it comes to tourniquets because the tourniquet wasn't this. I'm going to mind my words very carefully. I'm not Ukrainian. I'm not a Ukrainian doctor and my experience there is very limited. I am in solidarity with the medical community in Ukraine. And part of being in solidarity with a medical community is recognizing that even when there are weaknesses, it is not my place to insert myself into their processes. And so the way that the Ukrainians have approached tourniquets is at the outset to ban all 3D printed tourniquets

and to basically make it so that only what they considered to be high quality tourniquets, mainly the CAT and another one or two models, were available in there. This unfortunately created a tremendous shortage. And the other thing that functionally happened was a disconnect between the policymakers within the medical community and the people on the ground. The people on the ground, of course, are doing whatever they can to provide care wherever they can. And the policymakers are a little bit more disconnected from that and so have different considerations. The shortage then creates this difficulty.

There are, of course, 3D printed tourniquets aren't accepted officially in Ukraine, but there are an abundance of 3D printed tourniquets in Ukraine because the people on the ground are accepting them. And what we see is a kind of grassroots experimentation with how it is that we can prevent deaths. The other difficulty is that tourniquets are a tool, and in bad hands this tool isn't going to work, even if it's a great tool. And so one of the things that I realized, and I think everybody at this point, I'm not saying anything that's new or unknown to the community, we all realize that without appropriate training and how to use a tourniquet, they're not going to work.

And so even high quality tourniquets out there in the field are failing because they're being used improperly and causing unnecessary deaths. So I don't know how deep you want to get into that experience in Ukraine, but I think what we can say is that it's important to be in solidarity with that community. And as such, we're providing them all of the experience that we have and all of the capability that we have to produce tourniquets that the Ukrainians themselves, both officially and in the front lines, are able to use and feel are actually safe for their patients. Yeah, yeah, that's a difficult situation. I think obviously a lot of what's happening in Ukraine has been necessarily rushed and somewhat, perhaps chaotic is the wrong word, but it took a while for people to fully understand the necessities of the scale and the scale of the conflict, or perhaps understand this is still the wrong word.

But yeah, to come up with the most of the way to do the least harm, I guess. That's such a great way to frame it. And I think even from your experiences, you see that very often in these situations, that's the name of the game. It's not even doing what you know is best, but rather figuring out what the least worst scenario is. Yeah, so often, I think, and it's very easy, I think, to backseat drive these things from our positions of safety and sort of plenty to say, oh, well, should have done this, should have done that, which I think you did very well to explain that the first and most important thing is to be in solidarity with the people there to hopefully allow their experience to guide us in how we can best help them to prevent death, prevent harm.

And so can you talk about what you were able to do there? What sort of interventions could you make to hopefully help prevent more dying? The main thing that we did in terms of... So I kind of was there with two hats on. One of them was the tourniquet manufacturing hat. And the other one was as an emergency doctor, because remember, fundamentally, what brought me to medical devices in the first place was that I was an emergency doctor having problems actually caring for my patients. As a tourniquet manufacturer, basically it was about engaging with other people who are making and using tourniquets to understand some of the roadblocks and problems.

One of the biggest ones is that there isn't a great way to test units of tourniquets. So traditionally, tourniquets are tested by design. NAR says, here's our design and here's how we tested it. And then we accept that this particular company will make this particular device to this particular standard. But in the Ukraine, especially with the presence of replicas and 3D printed tourniquets, there became a new problem. How do you test each unit rather than a specific line? And working on that, I don't know how into the weeds you want me to get, but working on that is still a problem that is unsolved, but has been one of the biggest issues that we've been dealing with.

On the emergency medicine side, of course, when I provide direct care to patients, I was in a hospital on one of the communities on the front line, on one of the fronts. And so providing direct care became important. And working with the doctors, many of whom didn't really experience that much, have that much experience with trauma patients. So working with them to share our experiences from Gaza in low resource trauma medicine and also to gain from them their experiences, because of course their scenarios and situations are different. It's more artillery based rather than small arms fire or sort of bombing based.

So there are different scenarios. I had a lot to learn from them. I did and I tried to contribute some of our experiences as well. The training, I think, is probably the number one problem right now, but that's my personal opinion as one doctor who is there for a limited period of time. So that individual unit test that you're working towards is, because I know in theory, at least a cat is a single-use device, right? So in theory, if you just slapped it on something that could measure pressure and tighten it, that device is then being used and shouldn't be used again to provide care.

Is that the bottleneck you're running up against, or is it sort of making a way to test things that's replicable and cheap and accessible? Reusability was the number one problem that we tried to tackle in Gaza because we couldn't print tourniquets as fast as they're being used. And so we reuse them up to 10 times. And when I was in the hospital, I walked by this IV pole with a bunch of tourniquets hanging from it, and I instantly recognized what I was looking at.

That was a tourniquet rewashed station in which tourniquets that came off of patients were being rewashed, dried, and then sent back out into the field. Whatever you think the standards are for a tourniquet, when there's this level of shortage, that's what's going to happen. That's what happened in Gaza, and that's what happened in the Ukraine. That's what I saw with my own eyes. Of course, we don't need to stretch that far anymore to recognize this.

What were people doing with N95 masks two years ago in my hospital? We were holding them, storing them, washing them, reusing them. So this is something that we see whenever there's a shortage. And it makes the unit testing that much more important because if you could take an already used tourniquet and assure that it will succeed the next time it's being used, that is so valuable and it cuts down every tourniquet you can reuse as a tourniquet you don't have to import.

You don't have to buy, you don't have to package, you don't have to ship over all of these lines. Yeah, of course. I think we should probably address the ways in which they can fail because I think just people in the United States, in an extremely resource-rich setting, will probably have knowingly or unknowingly acquired tourniquet on Amazon or somewhere else, eBay, that might not be a real one.

So it's real, but it might not be a reliable one. Can you explain how they fail and what the consequences of that failure are? There are two kinds of failures when we talk about tourniquets. One of them is what we would call a technical failure and the other one is a clinical failure. A technical failure is the easiest one for most people to spot. The tourniquet literally breaks in your hand and that's it.

You hear a crack, you see something crack, you see a break, things fall apart, the end. And so one of the things that we want is to minimize these by over-engineering. So for example, the first Glia tourniquet was engineered to spec. You're supposed to be able to turn it three times and so we made it so you could turn it three times. And then what I realized is that even I, who is like super well trained,

I would be in the field running while my eyes were full of tear gas while people are shooting. And I'd forget if I turned it two times, three times. So we started over-engineering the tourniquets. At a certain point, of course, every tourniquet is going to break. You turn it enough times, every tourniquet is going to break. But that's not necessarily going to be the case if you have even a moderate amount of training.

I'm going to turn it four or five times or I'm not going to turn it 20 times. So the technical failures are one kind of failure. The other one is clinical failure. Now, here's something that I wonder if you knew. About 35% of tourniquets from the gold standard company fail. They fail on application. And that number goes up to 50% if you were to check 60 seconds after application.

So what does this tell us? What this tells us is that clinical failure is actually the important marker here because we know tourniquets break and we know tourniquets fail in general, especially tourniquets that have been in some GIs pocket in Afghanistan for six months. Those ones, their failure rate can go even higher. And so what we train people to do is to recognize clinical success. Put on a tourniquet. Did the blood stop?

No. Put on a second tourniquet. Did the blood stop? No. Try a third one if you have them, obviously. And so the routine training involves applying a second tourniquet. And one of the happiest moments for me, I mean, this is obviously bittersweet, but was when I saw a patient who was brought in by a medic who I had been in the training for

and he had applied two tourniquets to a guy who certainly would have died had he not had the tourniquet applied to him. He was exsanguinating so much, injury so severe that he needed a couple of tourniquets to really get it under control. So it's where we have to recognize that there is no magic tool. This is part of an overall program. There's no 3D printer that's going to train people. It's just going to make you stuff. Then you have to do the rest of it. Right.

Yeah, yeah. I think if we should look maybe at the fact that like I live in the United States and you're in Canada. I think there were like three mass shootings yesterday, right? The threat of violence is certainly at a high for recent times and for a more diverse range of people, right? There's always been violence in this country. There's always been violence against certain groups of people disproportionately in this country. But people are probably more concerned with treating gunshot wounds than they would have been 10 years ago. So if someone was looking to make one of your devices, how can they do that and do their best to ensure that they are doing so in a way which gives them the best chance of success?

At the moment, I would say to the individual maker, don't do it. Not for a life-threatening situation. If individual makers want to make tourniquets, then they're going to have to be proficient at three big things. One of them is plastics, 3D printing, ensuring that the quality of the plastic is good. The other one is sewing. That is to say assembling sewed stuff. And the third one is quality assurance because even done perfectly, a certain number of tourniquets aren't going to make it. And that quality assurance is both at the moment of manufacture and then over time.

Because of course, all devices deteriorate over time, but tourniquets have such an important role that you have to check them periodically to make sure everything is okay. So I would say to the individual maker, don't. Or if you do, do it as an exercise rather than as an actual tool. If somebody is in an emergency situation, there's nothing they can do except to do it, then be in touch with us. So for example, there are makers in countries that have been in touch and have said, okay, look, I have to do this because the situation here is bad. We support them as best as we can. We try to send people out to them or we try to have them ship units to us. We try to get them up and going.

GLIA is not a medical device manufacturer. GLIA is an access to medicines, an access to medical devices company. And part of that is making sure that people who are making medical devices are doing to the highest possible quality. So if you are forced to make them be in touch with us, we will help in any way that we can. However, there's another category of people. And that is manufacturers who already know how to make medical devices. To those people, we say, take our stuff. Please use it.

Please. It is there for the taking and it is high quality. It works really well. And if it's missing something, tell us, we'll make it better for you and for us. Yeah, that's great. I think that's really excellent advice and perhaps a good note for us to finish on. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch? If they want to look at some of the devices?

Making a stethoscope, I imagine, could be like a fun project and a lot less potential risk there. So where can they find that stuff? Absolutely. The stethoscope is such a fun project. It's fun because everybody has a heart in general. And you can listen to your family and friends and loved ones. And so one of my favorite things when I'm in practice and I listen, sometimes a patient will be there with their son or daughter or child. And I'll tell the kid, do you want to listen to mommy's heart or daddy's heart?

Oh, it's one of the best things. So the stethoscope is a great, fun, low risk project. Please go ahead and do it. Make it. You can find our stuff anywhere. You can find printable stuff. It's on Thingiverse. It's on printables.

It's basically everywhere. It's either through our GitHub or on the Glia site. So that's glia.org. And if people want to participate, they are very welcome to. We always want need and love help. And of course, it's a community. You can never have too many friends. So we're always looking for more friends and love to see more people.

We have a matter most. Obviously it's not just our devices that are open source. We try to make our entire stack open source so people can join and chat with us and, you know, hang out with people who are doing really, really cool and super impressive stuff. At this point, I love to recognize the fact that I'm one of the least productive, least impressive people at Glia. Really, the work that's happening is amazing.

And it's led by lots of smart, dedicated visionary people. Yeah, that's great to hear. That's really cool that you can work with people as well. So hopefully people do get in touch. I'm sure there'll be someone who's interested in what you're doing or has something to contribute in some fashion. Yeah, thank you so much for giving us some of your evening. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we finish up?

I think the most important thing to say is that there's this mystique that people develop you alluded to it earlier. There's a mystique people develop around medical devices. Medical devices are solutions to problems. And they were made by people like me who don't know what the hell they're doing sometimes. And so let's not, you know, aggrandize or like separate ourselves from the people who are doing this work. Yes, we have to be cautious.

Yes, we have to be rigorous. But at the same time, we can all contribute to be a part of this. Very cool. And can people find you personally anywhere? Do you have social media that people could follow? Yeah, if people look up my name, Tara Klobani, I'm on all the socials, as is Glea as well. So you can contact me or Glea and participate in anything that you want.

And like I said, we always welcome friends. Great, wonderful. Thanks so much, man. Thank you so much. That was such a pleasure. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media.

For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening.