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Yeah, because it feels like prison.

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It's exactly what it does.

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Solitary confinement.

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You had a station.

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You had a square cubicle station moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours.

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Slave wages, slaving conditions leads to injuries and death.

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And that's exactly why they're the number one in their country for injuries.

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You got billionaires breaking federal law every day.

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Every single day a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, our discrimination, our fight for bullshit.

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Whatever the case may be, every day.

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Where's your accountability?

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Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha.

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Welcome or welcome back to chapter 143.

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43, 43 of 3 Books.

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Yes, you are listening to our epic 22-year-long quest to uncover and discuss the 1,000 most formative books in the world.

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We are so pleased, proud, and excited to have Chris Smalls on the show today.

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If you want to skip ahead straight to the conversation, no problem.

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I do that too sometimes on podcasts, but because this show is no ads, no sponsors, no commercials, no interruptions, I also like to have a little entree with you at the beginning and the end where I read a review that came in.

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We talk about a value of the show.

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At the end, we have an after party where I play your phone calls.

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We just hang out.

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It's a vibe here.

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It's a community here.

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We call ourselves three bookers.

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We've got three different clubs, as you know.

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I can talk about more of those at the end of the show, but I always kick it off with a review.

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I read every single review you leave on YouTube, on Apple, on Spotify, and I read one.

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If I read yours, drop me a line, send me your address, I will be sending you a free signed book.

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All right.

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This one comes from Arnie Goldman, who says, It has been a long time since I listened to the 3 Books podcast, and I was delighted to start fresh with Jonathan Franzen.

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So many good moments.

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I appreciate the attention to detail, no commercials, and the delight in reading.

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I love the story about writing itself, the amount of details that Jon puts into his choice of words.

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Both of your mutual love of books and the thoughtful conversation between two intellectuals who appreciate each other.

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Thank you very much, Arnie Goldman.

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I appreciate being called an intellectual.

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I don't know, that's a high bar.

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That's a high bar, but I know what you mean about the pausing before word selection.

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Brené Brown, our guest in Chapter 70, does that really well, too.

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There's just this dramatic pause, and then they kind of always come out with that perfect word choice.

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Jonathan Franzen and Brené Brown, two of the best, two of the best.

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As David Mitchell told us in Chapter 58, you know, sometimes you're looking for the right word, and it's like searching between tall, swaying grasses, just waiting to find that perfect word choice.

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There is joy in perfect word choice.

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Absolutely.

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Now, as you guys know, on threebooks.co slash values, we have a whole bunch of values of the show, and so I want to talk about a different value every time to kick it off.

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One of the values that we haven't spoken about much is wallet, phone, keys, book.

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That's the whole value.

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Just those four words.

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Wallet, phone, keys, book.

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I actually got this on an article written by Ryan Holiday.

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I want to say, and he was our guest in Chapter 28, but I want to say he wrote this article more than 10 years ago, and the point was just that he carries a book everywhere.

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He carries a book everywhere.

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He just folds the top corner.

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He's like, I read a page in line at the coffee shop.

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I read two pages in line at the coffee shop.

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Whatever.

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If you're listening to audiobooks, you can kind of do this easily.

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It's so easy to turn to your phone and scroll.

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That's the tendency.

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That's what the algorithms want.

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That's what they are trying to seduce us to do, but if you have a book with you at all times, it's a little less tempting, right, because you can just kind of fall back into your book, and I love the feeling also at the end of the day, if I'm getting into bed, and I'm excited for the 20 or 30 pages of a book I'm about to read, kind of flipping it back open and saying, oh, I'm on page 81.

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I remember I was on page 74 earlier today.

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Yeah, it's only seven pages, but it adds up, and it helps me kind of keep my reading rate going and feel less bad for falling into the traps of news media and social media, so wallet, phone, keys, book.

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This means always taking a book with you everywhere you go, including potentially to Hackensack, New Jersey, which is where we are going to head down today on a hot, sunny September afternoon.

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A little bit of background here.

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Amazon, okay, you know Amazon is pretty much the largest company in the world if you measure it based on market capitalization, if you measure it based on just the fact that there's three Amazon boxes on everybody's porch every single day, including mine.

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They got a million employees in the US alone, trillions of dollars of revenue kind of go through Amazon, if you include retail, if you include entertainment, Amazon Prime, if you include AWS, all that stuff.

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It's a giant, massive, biggest company in the universe, but have you ever talked to anybody who worked there?

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Have you ever spoken to anybody who worked there?

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I have a bunch of times.

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A friend of mine used to run HR at a warehouse at Amazon.

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He said it was a terrible job.

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He said it was honestly hard for him because all the directives came from algorithms.

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He wasn't able to have kind of meaningful human-to-human conversations, and when there was a giant snowstorm in a crazy warehouse, everybody's pay would get docked because they were all late.

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Well, of course they were all late because there was a giant snowstorm.

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It doesn't matter.

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The ship punishes you either way.

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He didn't find it a good culture fit.

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He left pretty early, but I've talked to other people that work in the warehouses.

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I've talked to the guys delivering packages to my door.

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One day, a truck drove down my street, and like nailed a 50-year-old cherry tree, like crunched the side of the tree.

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A huge limb fell off.

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The driver jumps back in his car, screeches down the street, tosses the branch off at the park, and flies off.

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Of course, the guy had just delivered an Amazon package on my neighbor's porch.

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I saw him.

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The neighbor saw him.

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The dog walker saw him.

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Why'd he flee?

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Well, he'd get punished if he didn't pass the seven-second delivery time that he's allotted to stop and hand up the package.

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Unlike UPS, where you could say, ah, there is a guy that delivered a UPS truck and broke this tree.

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You can't do that.

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As freelance contractors, often, they have seven seconds.

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They're flying around the streets like super dangerously, parking on the sidewalks.

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By the way, City of Toronto came to inspect the tree.

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It's completely dead, and there's no recourse, no accountability.

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I don't necessarily blame the people that work there.

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It's a tough company to work for.

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With efficiency and productivity cranked up to the nines, customers are delighted and happy with the expediency which they get their package.

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But what's going on on the human side of the story, kind of behind the warehouse walls?

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What's going on?

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I want to know.

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And I've been following the story for a while about this guy named Chris Smalls.

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S-M-A-L-L-S.

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Have you heard his name before?

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Chris Smalls had worked at Amazon for five years before he was fired in March 2020 for leading a walkout on a Staten Island warehouse, Amazon warehouse, to protest pandemic working conditions.

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They were all close together.

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They didn't have masks.

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They didn't have PPE.

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So he was protesting that.

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He was immediately fired.

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What he told me is that we all get radicalized at some point in our lives.

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My life changed forever the day I got fired from Amazon.

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Chris used that motivation to work with his former colleagues to try and unionize the warehouse on Staten Island.

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The first attempt failed, but in March 2022, the vote passed, and the warehouse became the very first Amazon warehouse unionized ever in the United States.

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And what are they asking for?

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Well, maybe, like, breaks longer than 15 minutes, you know, shifts shorter than 12 hours.

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Like, they're asking for, like, reasonable, humane conditions, is my understanding of the stuff I'm reading.

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But Amazon has not come to the bargaining table.

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They've refused, and they can kind of appeal and appeal and appeal and kind of carry these appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court.

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So they're pursuing legal action against the National Labor Review Board as we speak right now in 2024.

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Two and a half years later, they still have not recognized the union, even though the union has been formed.

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This you could kind of attribute to potentially labor laws at the highest levels in the country, in the world.

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But what is going on?

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I gotta know what's happening here.

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If I fly down to Hackensack, New Jersey, I spend a hot September day in Chris's brother's backyard.

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He isn't keeping a place now because he's traveling a lot.

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He's got his sunglasses on, his jacket.

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I'm gonna post some pictures on the blog post.

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He talks about why he's been traveling the globe, what happened after the union drive, his experience being under surveillance by Amazon and the police, why the Amazon Labor Union has recently affiliated with the Teamsters.

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Chris calls bullshit on a lot of stuff.

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A lot of what we hear in mainstream media about labor organizing.

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He reports on what people in the streets are saying.

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What's going on as the pitchforks are getting sharpened these days?

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What can we learn from communist and socialist countries?

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Why is the U.S. government reluctant to enforce antitrust regulations?

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And what does fair and dignified work look like in a day and age when AI is taking jobs by the millions at record pace?

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We are having a massive disruption in our labor workforce.

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What does that look like on the ground level?

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Join Chris and me in his backyard.

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Sit with us in the white plastic chairs.

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00:10:11,140 --> 00:10:13,780
The air is going to be sticky from smoke from Chris's joints.

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We're going to talk about how working at Amazon is, in Chris's words, like slavery fast forwarded 400 years into the future.

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00:10:22,020 --> 00:10:24,380
What's going to happen with jobs as automation grows?

144
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Whether unions can still be effective today?

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What political parties represent the working class?

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And of course, Chris Small's three most formative books.

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It's going to be a fun, wide ranging conversation, trying to explore, as we always do, the curiosities that we have that don't always get uncovered with kind of traditional press.

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We are going down to New Jersey, everybody.

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Let's flip the page into chapter 143 now.

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You know, my life changed forever when I got fired from Amazon.

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And one day I went from having a job to not having a job that I had for five years.

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And once again, I'm 30 years old.

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So it's a different feeling, especially during the pandemic when you don't have no other option.

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So you had no choice but to fight.

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You also told me that Malcolm X was a big inspiration to you.

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You wanted to put the autobiography of Malcolm X.

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I told you Angie Thomas picked Humble the Poet and to pick something else.

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I feel like there's an element of him and you, like just like just how you're living.

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Like that book opens with the Ku Klux Klan circling his house when he was a kid growing up, you know, on horseback.

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Like if that's like the opening scene.

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Being demonized, you know, being surveilled, it's not meant for everybody.

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And that's what people don't understand.

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They think because I make it look easy, I make it look cool.

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That shit is sweet, but this is very dangerous.

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Very.

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I go to impoverished neighborhoods.

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I go to autonomous neighborhoods.

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I go to third world countries.

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You know, I'm going with people that are struggling, struggling.

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So it's it's more dangerous than I make it seem.

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What are the dangers?

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And once again, when I was organizing Amazon, I was living in Newark, New Jersey.

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For those who know, Newark, New Jersey is like murder capital.

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Life expectancy for a black man is 25.

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Get shot every day.

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There was a shootout in front of my house.

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Pretty much every other week.

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I lived in the South Ward while I was organizing Amazon.

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I could have died, killed many times.

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And I don't want my kids to ever have to experience that.

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You know, I fight so that not only that I can provide for myself, but provide for them in the midst of fighting for everybody else.

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And that's a huge burden to have to be fighting for everybody else when everybody's fighting against each other, you know.

183
00:13:09,640 --> 00:13:12,480
So Malcolm, what was Malcolm X's movement called?

184
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How does it live today?

185
00:13:14,140 --> 00:13:14,840
And what do you want?

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The Malcolm X movement?

187
00:13:16,180 --> 00:13:17,800
Yeah, like, is it what's his?

188
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He was connected with the Black Panthers at one point.

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Yeah, I mean, he when he when he came up here.

190
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And I mean, like to Harlem and the New York area, New Jersey as well.

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He really started to like build relationships with the community, with the Black community.

192
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And that helped, I think, shaped out what his vision of what society should look like.

193
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And yeah, you know, we all got radicalized at some point in time in my life.

194
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So it was good to see that I had similar things that happened.

195
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Like it happened to me pretty quick.

196
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So that was, you know.

197
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That's the similarities I consider with Malcolm X's.

198
00:14:07,620 --> 00:14:13,040
He felt that his his options in society have ran thin.

199
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He learned his roots.

200
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He learned his culture.

201
00:14:20,320 --> 00:14:27,260
And, you know, he got completely indulged in it and embraced it.

202
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And that's what I had to do at some point.

203
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I had to embrace what was happening to me so that I could continue to, you know, continue to fight.

204
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Otherwise, once again, it ain't meant for everybody.

205
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Talk to me about the surveillance.

206
00:14:44,100 --> 00:14:45,720
First of all, what do you mean when you say surveillance?

207
00:14:46,600 --> 00:14:54,240
Yeah, I mean, when I was fired, there was definitely Black unmarked cars following me at the time coming to my house.

208
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In Newark at the time where Malcolm X also was very fond of.

209
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And also, we had a protest in front of the building.

210
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And, you know, my camera people, they picked up Black cars following me on the way out.

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Camera people?

212
00:15:17,300 --> 00:15:19,840
Yeah, we were shooting the film, the documentary at the time.

213
00:15:20,020 --> 00:15:24,660
So they have footage of the Black cars that were following me that day.

214
00:15:26,520 --> 00:15:34,280
And, yeah, there's every protest I've done in front of Jeff Bezos' house, he hires the entire police department.

215
00:15:34,860 --> 00:15:36,580
They surround us every time.

216
00:15:37,340 --> 00:15:38,420
The whole police department?

217
00:15:38,780 --> 00:15:40,600
Like, the whole city's police department?

218
00:15:41,320 --> 00:15:45,220
Forty cops will be there waiting for us by the time we show up.

219
00:15:45,320 --> 00:15:46,720
They watch my social media.

220
00:15:47,360 --> 00:15:53,640
Anything I tweet, if I tweet right now that I'm going to Jeff Bezos' house, you're going to see 40 cops outside of his house.

221
00:15:54,360 --> 00:15:55,300
And how long?

222
00:15:55,920 --> 00:15:59,740
They'll stay there while I'm protesting the entire time.

223
00:15:59,880 --> 00:16:00,120
Okay.

224
00:16:00,600 --> 00:16:02,300
But you still are allowed to do your protests?

225
00:16:03,240 --> 00:16:03,440
Yeah.

226
00:16:03,660 --> 00:16:04,780
Oh, yeah, we do them, yeah.

227
00:16:05,480 --> 00:16:05,740
Yeah.

228
00:16:05,860 --> 00:16:06,380
What do you say?

229
00:16:07,880 --> 00:16:12,240
Well, yeah, we've done a number of things for COVID safety.

230
00:16:13,160 --> 00:16:22,780
We've done things for the union, Labor Day, May Day, International Workers' Day.

231
00:16:23,660 --> 00:16:26,140
We do all these protests for a number of reasons.

232
00:16:26,600 --> 00:16:29,920
For Poushawn Brown, the worker who died in the warehouse.

233
00:16:31,320 --> 00:16:34,200
There's so many different reasons why we protest in front of his house.

234
00:16:34,420 --> 00:16:35,220
We still do it.

235
00:16:35,440 --> 00:16:41,600
You know, we were just there a few months ago, two months ago, in D.C., at his mansion in D.C., so.

236
00:16:41,760 --> 00:16:42,560
How many people are there?

237
00:16:42,860 --> 00:16:44,200
Oh, it could be hundreds, could be thousands.

238
00:16:44,400 --> 00:16:47,160
You know, I've been in front of small crowds.

239
00:16:47,440 --> 00:16:48,260
What was the last one?

240
00:16:49,180 --> 00:16:52,020
D.C.? 2024?

241
00:16:53,500 --> 00:16:53,840
Oh, no, no.

242
00:16:53,940 --> 00:16:58,280
The last big crowd was London, about a quarter million.

243
00:16:58,500 --> 00:17:00,380
That was the largest crowd I ever spoke to.

244
00:17:00,520 --> 00:17:01,160
And what do you say?

245
00:17:02,360 --> 00:17:03,760
There or in front of his house?

246
00:17:03,859 --> 00:17:05,420
What do you tell people?

247
00:17:06,020 --> 00:17:06,540
What's your view?

248
00:17:07,800 --> 00:17:12,720
Jeff Bezos is tied into everything, every struggle, even the Palestinian struggle, you know?

249
00:17:13,200 --> 00:17:33,720
So, for those, when I went to London, when I went to London, it was about Palestine and about how Amazon supports the Nimbus project, which is $7.2 billion investment into Israel's military and industrial complex.

250
00:17:34,380 --> 00:17:39,560
So, Amazon is directly funding genocide right now.

251
00:17:39,680 --> 00:17:43,480
They're surveilling with the AWS services.

252
00:17:44,220 --> 00:17:48,340
They are invested into Israel's government.

253
00:17:49,260 --> 00:17:51,540
And yeah, they're running their system.

254
00:17:51,840 --> 00:17:52,500
How do you know that?

255
00:17:53,080 --> 00:17:53,760
Oh, it's public.

256
00:17:54,040 --> 00:17:54,800
Where is it public?

257
00:17:55,220 --> 00:17:55,620
Articles.

258
00:17:56,060 --> 00:17:56,680
You can read them up.

259
00:17:56,920 --> 00:17:58,040
Okay, so that's happening.

260
00:17:58,360 --> 00:18:00,940
And then what else do you say at the protest in front of Jeff Bezos' house?

261
00:18:01,400 --> 00:18:02,600
What else are you asking for?

262
00:18:03,220 --> 00:18:04,220
Oh, the bargain with the union.

263
00:18:04,400 --> 00:18:05,860
Of course, that's the number one priority.

264
00:18:06,400 --> 00:18:08,220
Bargaining with the union come to the table.

265
00:18:08,700 --> 00:18:10,980
Do they have to come to the table by any specific time?

266
00:18:12,060 --> 00:18:12,460
Yeah.

267
00:18:12,740 --> 00:18:13,020
When?

268
00:18:14,260 --> 00:18:19,880
With this now slow process in America, it could take anywhere between one to four years.

269
00:18:20,080 --> 00:18:21,360
So, when do they have to come to the table?

270
00:18:21,480 --> 00:18:22,000
Four years?

271
00:18:22,560 --> 00:18:24,180
If it works its way through the appeals court?

272
00:18:24,400 --> 00:18:25,740
If it gets to the Supreme Court.

273
00:18:26,100 --> 00:18:26,400
Okay.

274
00:18:27,240 --> 00:18:30,900
Which is a might because it just got lost in the state court or whatever, right?

275
00:18:31,260 --> 00:18:31,680
Federal.

276
00:18:31,980 --> 00:18:32,680
Federal, okay.

277
00:18:33,260 --> 00:18:34,580
Where does the message go from here?

278
00:18:35,980 --> 00:18:37,100
Oh, we got to get a contract.

279
00:18:37,300 --> 00:18:38,280
That's the number one thing.

280
00:18:38,880 --> 00:18:39,540
We won.

281
00:18:39,660 --> 00:18:40,560
We won our contract.

282
00:18:40,560 --> 00:18:42,140
So, I want to make sure that happens.

283
00:18:42,220 --> 00:18:47,930
That's my number one mission besides everything else.

284
00:18:48,990 --> 00:18:50,090
$30 starting salary.

285
00:18:51,150 --> 00:18:52,030
Starting wage.

286
00:18:52,350 --> 00:18:53,230
Job security.

287
00:18:53,430 --> 00:18:54,270
Better medical leave.

288
00:18:54,390 --> 00:18:55,650
When you say job security, what do you mean?

289
00:18:55,790 --> 00:18:56,590
You can't get fired?

290
00:18:57,570 --> 00:18:58,410
There's a process.

291
00:18:58,630 --> 00:18:59,330
Due process.

292
00:18:59,490 --> 00:19:01,310
Oh, so it's not like just you're out?

293
00:19:01,610 --> 00:19:03,350
Yeah, there's not no text message.

294
00:19:03,450 --> 00:19:04,230
There's not no email.

295
00:19:05,110 --> 00:19:06,890
There's an arbitration with the union.

296
00:19:07,030 --> 00:19:07,570
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

297
00:19:07,610 --> 00:19:08,270
Right, right.

298
00:19:08,330 --> 00:19:09,950
You can say your side of the story.

299
00:19:10,690 --> 00:19:11,750
There's union representation.

300
00:19:11,910 --> 00:19:12,690
The Weingarten right.

301
00:19:12,990 --> 00:19:13,730
Right, right, right.

302
00:19:14,530 --> 00:19:15,210
There's representation.

303
00:19:15,210 --> 00:19:19,510
And then what do you want in terms of sick leave and holidays and all that stuff?

304
00:19:19,790 --> 00:19:20,270
We want it.

305
00:19:20,310 --> 00:19:20,990
We don't have none.

306
00:19:21,130 --> 00:19:21,830
You don't have any holidays?

307
00:19:22,750 --> 00:19:23,330
We have nine.

308
00:19:23,450 --> 00:19:25,210
We have eight holidays that are paid.

309
00:19:25,470 --> 00:19:26,370
One is missing.

310
00:19:26,610 --> 00:19:27,370
That's Juneteenth.

311
00:19:28,150 --> 00:19:30,150
Then we have on sick time.

312
00:19:30,730 --> 00:19:31,570
Eight's not that many.

313
00:19:31,670 --> 00:19:33,050
In Canada, we have like 12 or 13.

314
00:19:33,510 --> 00:19:34,270
Yeah, probably.

315
00:19:34,710 --> 00:19:35,210
You're right.

316
00:19:35,370 --> 00:19:36,770
They don't recognize certain holidays.

317
00:19:37,030 --> 00:19:37,930
We get two days on Easter.

318
00:19:38,130 --> 00:19:39,490
We get family day in February.

319
00:19:39,870 --> 00:19:40,110
Yeah.

320
00:19:40,230 --> 00:19:41,610
We got Christmas and Boxing Day.

321
00:19:41,850 --> 00:19:42,310
Day after.

322
00:19:42,770 --> 00:19:43,390
New Year's Day.

323
00:19:43,770 --> 00:19:45,130
They don't care about none of that.

324
00:19:45,470 --> 00:19:46,750
So we don't have Halloween yet, though.

325
00:19:46,790 --> 00:19:48,770
We're trying to get Halloween like official.

326
00:19:49,690 --> 00:19:53,030
Well, that's the beauty of arguing something like that.

327
00:19:53,070 --> 00:19:56,670
That might be small, but it's actually it matters.

328
00:19:57,430 --> 00:20:00,430
So for for Americans, yeah, we settle for breadcrumbs.

329
00:20:00,550 --> 00:20:02,530
We get eight eight at Amazon.

330
00:20:03,190 --> 00:20:08,910
And once again, they fail to recognize Juneteenth, which has been declared as a federal holiday.

331
00:20:10,290 --> 00:20:12,190
So it doesn't make any sense.

332
00:20:12,390 --> 00:20:14,190
You know, they continue to play in our face.

333
00:20:14,190 --> 00:20:17,490
OK, so you want you want more holidays and how much vacation do you get?

334
00:20:17,670 --> 00:20:18,970
I don't want I want just more.

335
00:20:19,150 --> 00:20:20,350
I want more paid time off.

336
00:20:20,590 --> 00:20:20,950
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

337
00:20:20,990 --> 00:20:22,790
It should be at least 12 days, 13 days.

338
00:20:22,910 --> 00:20:24,030
I mean, that's just getting up to Canada.

339
00:20:24,150 --> 00:20:26,070
We're not even close to Europe.

340
00:20:26,490 --> 00:20:26,750
All right.

341
00:20:26,830 --> 00:20:29,070
You know, these workers deserve that vacation time.

342
00:20:29,190 --> 00:20:29,630
They don't.

343
00:20:29,750 --> 00:20:32,190
We got a new CEO at Walmart from England named Dave Cheesewright.

344
00:20:32,290 --> 00:20:35,390
He was actually our guest on an earlier chapter of the show, 96.

345
00:20:36,110 --> 00:20:39,830
And when he came over from England, he got to the Walmart canned office.

346
00:20:39,910 --> 00:20:40,930
He's like, there's no windows in here.

347
00:20:41,050 --> 00:20:42,330
Everyone's like, yeah, we don't have any windows.

348
00:20:42,330 --> 00:20:43,650
He's like, make some windows.

349
00:20:43,890 --> 00:20:49,250
So he punctured all these holes in the building and the people were so grateful to him because he gave them light.

350
00:20:49,850 --> 00:20:52,950
And he said, oh, well, you got to give people light in like Europe.

351
00:20:53,170 --> 00:20:53,990
You have to.

352
00:20:54,110 --> 00:20:55,850
Yeah, because it's

353
00:20:55,910 --> 00:20:56,990
Just giving people light. Is there windows on the factories?

354
00:20:57,430 --> 00:21:00,570
No, there's only windows in the break area.

355
00:21:00,690 --> 00:21:01,790
You need windows, right?

356
00:21:02,470 --> 00:21:03,790
Yeah, because it feels like prison.

357
00:21:05,410 --> 00:21:06,650
Exactly what it does.

358
00:21:07,570 --> 00:21:08,450
Solitary confinement.

359
00:21:10,270 --> 00:21:17,430
You had a station, you had a square cubicle station moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours.

360
00:21:18,550 --> 00:21:19,330
And then you're not.

361
00:21:20,070 --> 00:21:20,650
Then you have to commute.

362
00:21:20,650 --> 00:21:21,690
Are you allowed to listen to podcasts?

363
00:21:22,790 --> 00:21:24,490
That just now started to happen.

364
00:21:24,770 --> 00:21:26,430
But all the other years, no.

365
00:21:26,810 --> 00:21:27,510
You weren't allowed to.

366
00:21:27,690 --> 00:21:28,710
Are they letting people listen to podcasts now?

367
00:21:29,110 --> 00:21:29,850
I believe so.

368
00:21:29,950 --> 00:21:31,070
They're starting to enroll some.

369
00:21:31,290 --> 00:21:31,730
Oh, that's good.

370
00:21:31,890 --> 00:21:33,050
There's been enough complaints.

371
00:21:33,670 --> 00:21:33,790
Yeah.

372
00:21:33,930 --> 00:21:34,970
Otherwise you go crazy.

373
00:21:35,170 --> 00:21:36,310
It's like, it is like solitary.

374
00:21:36,830 --> 00:21:38,210
Yeah, it's been, it's been crazy.

375
00:21:38,470 --> 00:21:39,150
It's been crazy.

376
00:21:39,150 --> 00:21:40,790
How many people work at Amazon?

377
00:21:42,070 --> 00:21:44,250
A million and a half, I believe.

378
00:21:44,390 --> 00:21:45,430
How many are on your team?

379
00:21:45,970 --> 00:21:46,750
Whatever you call it.

380
00:21:47,250 --> 00:21:50,310
ALU, IBT is almost 8,000.

381
00:21:50,590 --> 00:21:52,910
Okay, so how do you get the other million then on your team?

382
00:21:54,130 --> 00:21:54,650
The Teamsters.

383
00:21:55,130 --> 00:21:56,670
Ah, you're going through the Teamsters.

384
00:21:57,570 --> 00:22:03,430
Not only that, I'm going through the relationships we already established and the relationships I continue to build.

385
00:22:03,590 --> 00:22:04,910
Who does the Teamsters represent?

386
00:22:05,970 --> 00:22:08,810
The Amazon division that they have in California.

387
00:22:09,650 --> 00:22:10,810
Oh, they have a union at Amazon.

388
00:22:11,590 --> 00:22:12,290
No, no, no.

389
00:22:12,290 --> 00:22:15,790
They have a division that's fighting for.

390
00:22:15,810 --> 00:22:16,750
I mean, who else do they represent?

391
00:22:17,830 --> 00:22:18,170
UPS.

392
00:22:18,470 --> 00:22:18,750
On the street.

393
00:22:18,830 --> 00:22:19,750
Oh, they represent UPS.

394
00:22:19,970 --> 00:22:20,130
Yeah.

395
00:22:20,250 --> 00:22:20,810
Oh, that's good.

396
00:22:21,390 --> 00:22:22,850
So UPS, what's the starting wage?

397
00:22:24,630 --> 00:22:25,410
I'm not sure.

398
00:22:25,530 --> 00:22:26,730
Maybe 20, 25.

399
00:22:27,070 --> 00:22:27,710
Yeah, you know what?

400
00:22:27,870 --> 00:22:31,370
David Sedaris always says, I want to work for UPS because they have respectable uniforms.

401
00:22:32,390 --> 00:22:33,610
Just starting with that.

402
00:22:34,430 --> 00:22:34,870
Well, yeah.

403
00:22:34,950 --> 00:22:37,530
I mean, they have a union that fought for a better contract.

404
00:22:37,530 --> 00:22:39,110
And they threatened them with a strike.

405
00:22:39,370 --> 00:22:40,450
That just happened.

406
00:22:41,310 --> 00:22:43,250
And they're going up to $40 an hour.

407
00:22:43,670 --> 00:22:44,030
Oh, really?

408
00:22:44,430 --> 00:22:44,650
Yeah.

409
00:22:44,710 --> 00:22:45,370
Oh, that's big.

410
00:22:45,870 --> 00:22:46,710
Who else do they represent?

411
00:22:49,370 --> 00:22:51,150
Teamsters, actors, everything.

412
00:22:51,310 --> 00:22:51,730
Oh, actors.

413
00:22:52,130 --> 00:22:57,690
Yeah, they got certain times with actors and every industry, pretty much.

414
00:22:57,690 --> 00:22:58,870
They have a little bit of everything.

415
00:22:59,250 --> 00:23:00,070
Actors have the most power.

416
00:23:00,370 --> 00:23:02,010
Truck drivers, a lot of truck drivers.

417
00:23:03,450 --> 00:23:05,350
But yeah, they're pretty militant.

418
00:23:05,350 --> 00:23:08,450
Truck drivers are kind of, isn't that job going away soon?

419
00:23:08,570 --> 00:23:09,150
Like completely?

420
00:23:10,390 --> 00:23:11,430
What are they going to do?

421
00:23:11,550 --> 00:23:12,210
They all are.

422
00:23:12,490 --> 00:23:13,430
And they do the Amazon.

423
00:23:13,650 --> 00:23:17,770
Amazon is taking away jobs from that, too.

424
00:23:17,990 --> 00:23:24,770
That's why they're starting up these little DSPs or third party dispatchers.

425
00:23:25,310 --> 00:23:27,070
What are they asking for for minimum wage?

426
00:23:27,570 --> 00:23:28,790
I don't have to say that.

427
00:23:29,570 --> 00:23:31,710
It's more of what the workers say.

428
00:23:31,790 --> 00:23:35,790
What I do is, I say my piece, but I let the workers speak.

429
00:23:36,010 --> 00:23:36,230
I see.

430
00:23:36,390 --> 00:23:36,750
That's smart.

431
00:23:36,790 --> 00:23:37,790
That's the best part.

432
00:23:37,890 --> 00:23:39,270
That's smart, because you're not a worker anymore.

433
00:23:39,610 --> 00:23:39,730
No.

434
00:23:39,750 --> 00:23:40,870
You were a former worker.

435
00:23:41,170 --> 00:23:41,430
No.

436
00:23:41,570 --> 00:23:44,530
So most of these demonstrations will be bringing Amazon workers up.

437
00:23:44,590 --> 00:23:45,070
Yeah, yeah.

438
00:23:45,290 --> 00:23:46,390
Or a big politician.

439
00:23:46,550 --> 00:23:47,170
You've had Bernie Sanders.

440
00:23:47,350 --> 00:23:48,730
You've had AOC.

441
00:23:48,950 --> 00:23:49,590
Only one time.

442
00:23:50,050 --> 00:23:50,470
You had.

443
00:23:50,930 --> 00:23:53,850
Yeah, they came once, but we've done hundreds.

444
00:23:54,190 --> 00:23:54,390
Yeah.

445
00:23:55,010 --> 00:24:01,170
So there's a lot more happening than you hear about, basically, because I don't hear about any of this stuff when I read the New York Times every day.

446
00:24:01,170 --> 00:24:01,950
CNN.

447
00:24:02,450 --> 00:24:03,390
I'll check Fox News.

448
00:24:03,630 --> 00:24:03,930
I'll check.

449
00:24:04,570 --> 00:24:06,530
Where are you reading your news?

450
00:24:07,530 --> 00:24:08,950
I don't read the news.

451
00:24:09,790 --> 00:24:11,510
I would never read that shit.

452
00:24:12,690 --> 00:24:16,710
Because, you know, I knew what they expect with the New York media.

453
00:24:17,090 --> 00:24:18,670
They love you today, hate you tomorrow.

454
00:24:19,650 --> 00:24:32,770
But when you are deliberately misinforming people by writing negative shit about my union and myself, knowing the truth, then I know that you're a part of.

455
00:24:32,790 --> 00:24:33,490
Who wrote what?

456
00:24:35,150 --> 00:24:36,330
One of their journalists.

457
00:24:36,870 --> 00:24:39,530
You know, they wrote nasty articles about us.

458
00:24:41,230 --> 00:24:47,150
And he got assigned to us after a former journalist that was, you know, at the time.

459
00:24:47,290 --> 00:24:47,790
What paper is this with?

460
00:24:48,050 --> 00:24:48,690
The New York Times.

461
00:24:48,770 --> 00:24:49,330
Oh, New York Times.

462
00:24:49,710 --> 00:24:51,090
You had some negative coverage there.

463
00:24:51,790 --> 00:24:54,610
Yeah, not just them, but they're the leading factor.

464
00:24:54,910 --> 00:24:56,690
It's like, you know, everybody copycats.

465
00:24:57,050 --> 00:24:58,690
But where do you get your news then?

466
00:24:58,810 --> 00:25:00,690
Are you on like secret 4chan channels?

467
00:25:01,010 --> 00:25:02,090
Nah, fuck all of that.

468
00:25:02,250 --> 00:25:03,310
Social media is the same.

469
00:25:03,390 --> 00:25:04,770
Isn't that even worse with the algorithms?

470
00:25:05,130 --> 00:25:07,450
Like, it can feed you a total different echo chamber.

471
00:25:07,690 --> 00:25:08,970
I get my news from the people.

472
00:25:11,350 --> 00:25:13,750
If people tell me what's going on, I know what's going on.

473
00:25:14,870 --> 00:25:16,290
I don't have to watch the news.

474
00:25:17,830 --> 00:25:19,170
And that's the beauty of it.

475
00:25:19,250 --> 00:25:23,030
It's like, I don't need to watch the news because somebody already told me or I'm actually there.

476
00:25:24,250 --> 00:25:24,890
One of the two.

477
00:25:24,890 --> 00:25:27,670
By the time people hear it on the news, I'm already there.

478
00:25:29,410 --> 00:25:31,630
The protests in D.C., I was there.

479
00:25:32,250 --> 00:25:34,290
You know, I don't speak at every event.

480
00:25:34,390 --> 00:25:35,830
Sometimes I just show up to support.

481
00:25:36,750 --> 00:25:39,970
Like yesterday, I wasn't supposed to speak at the Labor Day.

482
00:25:40,110 --> 00:25:41,570
I just showed up to support.

483
00:25:42,490 --> 00:25:44,450
Come to find out the leader of the whole thing.

484
00:25:44,670 --> 00:25:46,290
I spoke at her commencement speech.

485
00:25:46,370 --> 00:25:47,610
She recognized me in the crowd.

486
00:25:48,190 --> 00:25:50,570
So it wasn't even over who I am.

487
00:25:50,790 --> 00:25:52,150
You were called up on stage to speak?

488
00:25:52,430 --> 00:25:52,630
Yeah.

489
00:25:52,710 --> 00:25:53,310
What'd you say?

490
00:25:53,790 --> 00:25:57,270
At the Labor Day 2024, 10,000 people rally.

491
00:25:58,170 --> 00:25:59,890
You get up on stage, what do you say?

492
00:25:59,950 --> 00:26:00,750
How long you talk for?

493
00:26:01,370 --> 00:26:02,210
A few minutes.

494
00:26:02,450 --> 00:26:03,610
And what was your message?

495
00:26:03,930 --> 00:26:10,470
It was basically that, you know, as a union leader, unions have to be out here with the people.

496
00:26:12,210 --> 00:26:20,190
Not at parades in Brooklyn, the West Indian Parade with politicians that don't have the same message as ceasefire.

497
00:26:20,310 --> 00:26:21,610
You can't talk out of both sides.

498
00:26:21,610 --> 00:26:27,330
You're not supporting the Democrats and supporting the ceasefire if they're still funding genocide.

499
00:26:27,710 --> 00:26:29,510
So we can't do that.

500
00:26:30,470 --> 00:26:32,670
And also that, you know, we got a free Palestine.

501
00:26:32,930 --> 00:26:35,350
So it's very simple.

502
00:26:36,590 --> 00:26:53,670
I want people to know that I took a stance with the right side to say that unions need to stand on business and not just follow the sheep mentality because the Democrats ain't giving a shit in return for a very long time.

503
00:26:54,170 --> 00:26:57,090
If they want change, they have to do things differently.

504
00:26:57,230 --> 00:27:00,550
They can't continue to vote for Democrats and we're not seeing no real change.

505
00:27:00,990 --> 00:27:03,570
The Green Party been around decades.

506
00:27:03,750 --> 00:27:04,410
They've been around.

507
00:27:06,710 --> 00:27:09,890
So people got to see through the bullshit and wake up.

508
00:27:10,310 --> 00:27:13,010
There's something else sinister going on here.

509
00:27:14,130 --> 00:27:14,630
There's something.

510
00:27:15,310 --> 00:27:17,430
Kamala Harris wasn't nominated.

511
00:27:17,610 --> 00:27:18,250
She was appointed.

512
00:27:19,390 --> 00:27:20,410
People don't understand that.

513
00:27:20,410 --> 00:27:21,510
They're like, we live in a democracy.

514
00:27:21,670 --> 00:27:22,570
No, we don't.

515
00:27:24,290 --> 00:27:26,670
She got appointed after Joe Biden stepped down.

516
00:27:27,010 --> 00:27:28,410
We didn't have a choice in that.

517
00:27:29,990 --> 00:27:31,490
So what are people talking about?

518
00:27:33,870 --> 00:27:34,670
It's ridiculous.

519
00:27:35,630 --> 00:27:37,150
Yeah, Ralph Nader was on this podcast.

520
00:27:37,270 --> 00:27:41,890
He was saying the mainstream media fall for this trick every time by believing that there's a two party system.

521
00:27:42,030 --> 00:27:44,030
They create one, you know?

522
00:27:44,190 --> 00:27:44,510
Yeah.

523
00:27:44,710 --> 00:27:47,450
Like they create it, you know, whereas he has an independent candidate.

524
00:27:47,530 --> 00:27:49,110
He can't get on the debate stages.

525
00:27:49,110 --> 00:27:55,850
He can't get on to represent his policies about like his whole thing was health and safety, health and safety environment.

526
00:27:56,070 --> 00:28:00,170
Why do you think I haven't been invited back to Congress?

527
00:28:00,710 --> 00:28:03,530
Because what they saw that day, it was like, oh shit.

528
00:28:04,070 --> 00:28:09,510
And real people, you know, my video went crazy viral against Lindsey Graham.

529
00:28:10,290 --> 00:28:11,890
And real people see this.

530
00:28:11,950 --> 00:28:12,910
What'd you say on Lindsey Graham?

531
00:28:13,990 --> 00:28:18,550
That we are the ones, the workers are the ones who make these corporations who they are.

532
00:28:18,550 --> 00:28:20,610
And it's not a left or a right thing.

533
00:28:21,570 --> 00:28:22,590
It's a worker thing.

534
00:28:23,490 --> 00:28:25,370
Hey guys, it's just Neil in my basement here.

535
00:28:25,430 --> 00:28:40,330
I just got to jump in and let you know that there was a Senate Budget Committee meeting in 2022 for the Republican Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, defended corporations who had faced unionization efforts, attacking laws that would prevent them from swaying a union election.

536
00:28:40,590 --> 00:28:43,490
And then the mic got switched over to Chris Smalls, who was testifying there.

537
00:28:43,510 --> 00:28:44,510
He's wearing his Yankees cap.

538
00:28:44,550 --> 00:28:45,690
He's wearing a red vinyl jacket.

539
00:28:45,730 --> 00:28:47,510
He's got big diamond earrings in both ears.

540
00:28:47,510 --> 00:28:50,890
It cuts over to him, and I think I want you to hear what he says.

541
00:28:51,590 --> 00:28:53,930
Well, first of all, I want to address Mr. Graham.

542
00:28:55,370 --> 00:29:11,290
First of all, you know, you sound like you was talking about more of the companies and the businesses in your speech, but you forgot that the people are the ones who make these companies operate.

543
00:29:12,090 --> 00:29:13,170
And that we're not protected.

544
00:29:14,690 --> 00:29:19,810
The process for when we hold these companies accountable is not working for us.

545
00:29:21,550 --> 00:29:25,190
And that's not what, that's the reason why we're here today.

546
00:29:25,370 --> 00:29:30,130
That's the reason why I'm here, to represent the workers who make these companies go.

547
00:29:31,070 --> 00:29:36,950
And I think that it's in your best interest to realize that it's not a left or right thing.

548
00:29:37,070 --> 00:29:38,970
It's not a Democrat or Republican thing.

549
00:29:39,170 --> 00:29:40,390
It's a worker's thing.

550
00:29:40,870 --> 00:29:41,650
It's a worker's issue.

551
00:29:41,650 --> 00:29:50,950
And we're the ones that are suffering and the corporations that you're talking about and the businesses that you're talking about and the warehouses that you're talking about.

552
00:29:51,150 --> 00:29:55,710
So that's the reason why I think I was invited today to speak on that behalf.

553
00:29:55,930 --> 00:30:00,330
And you should listen because we do represent your constituents as well.

554
00:30:01,350 --> 00:30:06,470
So just take that into consideration that the people are the ones that make these corporations go.

555
00:30:06,610 --> 00:30:08,590
It's not the other way around.

556
00:30:09,850 --> 00:30:12,210
When people heard that, they're like, oh shit.

557
00:30:13,650 --> 00:30:14,570
People like that.

558
00:30:14,690 --> 00:30:15,450
We don't need them.

559
00:30:16,330 --> 00:30:18,630
So we can't bring Chris Smalls back anymore.

560
00:30:18,770 --> 00:30:20,830
You know who was sitting right next to me was the teamster's president.

561
00:30:21,170 --> 00:30:21,930
Sean O'Brien, yeah.

562
00:30:22,270 --> 00:30:24,170
What would it take to start a labor party?

563
00:30:25,230 --> 00:30:27,410
Could we not start a labor party then?

564
00:30:28,650 --> 00:30:29,650
To be determined.

565
00:30:30,610 --> 00:30:34,290
It'd be a lot of work, but anything is possible.

566
00:30:34,410 --> 00:30:34,810
I don't know.

567
00:30:35,190 --> 00:30:36,610
There's going to be a lot of laborers.

568
00:30:36,890 --> 00:30:38,050
I mean, AI is taking jobs.

569
00:30:38,050 --> 00:30:44,230
I saw something on Twitter that said, in a year from now, there won't be any call centers.

570
00:30:44,650 --> 00:30:49,710
And it was demonstrating some advanced AI that was like, hey, I'm calling about my flight.

571
00:30:49,810 --> 00:30:50,170
It's delayed.

572
00:30:50,290 --> 00:30:50,890
I'm in Newark.

573
00:30:51,170 --> 00:30:52,710
Help me get home on the earliest flight.

574
00:30:52,810 --> 00:30:53,930
I'm happy to pay up to $500.

575
00:30:54,650 --> 00:30:56,470
And it'll be like, oh, how about this one through Boston?

576
00:30:57,550 --> 00:30:58,810
It's faster and better.

577
00:30:59,650 --> 00:31:02,530
That's like millions and millions and millions of jobs.

578
00:31:02,610 --> 00:31:05,170
They're about to wipe out 50% of American jobs.

579
00:31:07,500 --> 00:31:17,360
These unions, they're about to wake the fuck up, because less than 6%, private sector, less than 10% in the public sector.

580
00:31:17,420 --> 00:31:19,640
Are you for a universal basic income?

581
00:31:19,920 --> 00:31:20,460
Hell yeah.

582
00:31:20,840 --> 00:31:21,660
It works.

583
00:31:25,820 --> 00:31:27,040
We're broke out here.

584
00:31:27,360 --> 00:31:28,300
Like, it don't make sense.

585
00:31:29,340 --> 00:31:32,240
They disrespected us in the pandemic, you know?

586
00:31:32,760 --> 00:31:34,100
You're living with your brother's place.

587
00:31:34,120 --> 00:31:35,140
You don't have a place right now.

588
00:31:35,840 --> 00:31:38,980
No, by choice, but I have my own place.

589
00:31:40,220 --> 00:31:46,500
You know, I just, my life's been on the plane, so it's no point in me paying rent.

590
00:31:46,680 --> 00:31:47,140
Where are you going?

591
00:31:47,220 --> 00:31:47,980
Where are you speaking at?

592
00:31:48,040 --> 00:31:49,940
I saw you were at the Tesla factory in Sweden.

593
00:31:50,180 --> 00:31:50,940
Where else are you going?

594
00:31:51,060 --> 00:31:51,660
I wasn't there.

595
00:31:51,740 --> 00:31:52,500
We were in Norway.

596
00:31:52,780 --> 00:31:53,180
Oh, Norway.

597
00:31:53,280 --> 00:31:53,520
Sorry.

598
00:31:58,300 --> 00:31:59,680
Austria, then Greece.

599
00:31:59,840 --> 00:32:01,100
What are you speaking at in Austria?

600
00:32:02,540 --> 00:32:03,820
Winochi Festival.

601
00:32:04,820 --> 00:32:10,720
Brought together by community organizers and the Australian Trade Union.

602
00:32:11,080 --> 00:32:15,900
You know, they reached out, and they want to bring me out, so.

603
00:32:16,520 --> 00:32:18,600
So then where are you speaking at in the next place?

604
00:32:19,200 --> 00:32:20,260
Oh, Greece, man.

605
00:32:20,380 --> 00:32:23,240
That's going to be a huge event.

606
00:32:23,420 --> 00:32:26,460
It's the 50th anniversary of the Young Communist Party.

607
00:32:26,460 --> 00:32:27,760
The KNE.

608
00:32:28,960 --> 00:32:32,120
It's going to be hundreds of thousands of people there.

609
00:32:32,440 --> 00:32:32,540
Wow.

610
00:32:32,620 --> 00:32:33,480
Where in Greece?

611
00:32:33,960 --> 00:32:34,420
In Athens.

612
00:32:34,680 --> 00:32:35,100
Wow.

613
00:32:35,840 --> 00:32:37,040
Hundreds of thousands.

614
00:32:37,460 --> 00:32:37,620
Yeah.

615
00:32:37,800 --> 00:32:39,000
What's the mission of that group?

616
00:32:40,100 --> 00:32:42,120
Right now, the students are on strike.

617
00:32:42,380 --> 00:32:45,820
Right now, as we speak, because they're trying to privatize the universities.

618
00:32:46,840 --> 00:32:47,680
Same thing, you know?

619
00:32:47,760 --> 00:32:48,160
In Greece.

620
00:32:48,620 --> 00:32:50,640
Yeah, the students are on strikes right now.

621
00:32:52,220 --> 00:32:54,000
You don't hear about that story very much.

622
00:32:54,520 --> 00:32:54,920
Oh, no.

623
00:32:54,920 --> 00:32:57,520
People saw how militant these unions are over there.

624
00:32:57,660 --> 00:32:58,380
Oh, my God.

625
00:33:01,020 --> 00:33:03,500
You talk about the Roman gods and all of that.

626
00:33:03,660 --> 00:33:04,380
Greek gods.

627
00:33:04,820 --> 00:33:08,420
It still exists in people over there because they stick together.

628
00:33:08,860 --> 00:33:12,060
You do hear not that many stories about general strikes, but you do hear that they happen.

629
00:33:12,720 --> 00:33:13,660
Oh, they happen all the time.

630
00:33:13,780 --> 00:33:14,780
But you don't hear about it much.

631
00:33:15,740 --> 00:33:16,240
No, no.

632
00:33:16,420 --> 00:33:19,460
So what do you want people to know about how they do things over there?

633
00:33:19,560 --> 00:33:22,360
What would you say to Americans and Canadians?

634
00:33:22,680 --> 00:33:23,380
That's what I said.

635
00:33:23,380 --> 00:33:26,680
It's not about how much money they have, because we got people power.

636
00:33:27,440 --> 00:33:27,900
That's it.

637
00:33:27,960 --> 00:33:28,680
That's all we need.

638
00:33:28,740 --> 00:33:29,640
People coming together.

639
00:33:29,760 --> 00:33:30,200
That's it.

640
00:33:30,680 --> 00:33:35,080
Locking arm in arm, just taking it to the boss, taking it to the government.

641
00:33:35,700 --> 00:33:39,580
There's nothing that can stop us from getting what we need to get.

642
00:33:40,100 --> 00:33:41,600
Hey, guys, it's just me in my basement again.

643
00:33:41,720 --> 00:33:45,380
I gotta jump in here and explain that I completely messed up this recording.

644
00:33:45,500 --> 00:33:52,480
I recorded an hour and a half with Chris in his backyard, and then we keep hanging out.

645
00:33:52,480 --> 00:33:53,380
He keeps talking.

646
00:33:53,520 --> 00:33:54,780
I realize I wanna get some more of this.

647
00:33:54,900 --> 00:33:59,180
I press record again, and I accidentally record over the first chunk of our conversation.

648
00:33:59,200 --> 00:34:01,360
I didn't realize this till I got home.

649
00:34:01,380 --> 00:34:06,360
I was trying to listen to it, and I was like, oh my gosh, did I just overwrite the first part of the conversation?

650
00:34:08,540 --> 00:34:17,100
So I've kind of re-chopped it and mixed it all back together so that it works as a conversation, but I missed my scene setting.

651
00:34:17,600 --> 00:34:18,560
So I just wanna let you know.

652
00:34:18,679 --> 00:34:22,800
It's like, yeah, I'm taking an Uber like an hour from Newark Airport.

653
00:34:23,280 --> 00:34:25,199
The towns get smaller and smaller.

654
00:34:25,440 --> 00:34:27,080
There's more and more people on the roads.

655
00:34:27,280 --> 00:34:31,560
There's kind of black men with no shirts on like lying on park benches.

656
00:34:32,400 --> 00:34:35,400
There's kind of people out there, dogs in the street.

657
00:34:35,719 --> 00:34:38,440
You can tell the neighborhood's getting kind of rougher and rougher.

658
00:34:39,380 --> 00:34:42,300
I pull up to a house across the street.

659
00:34:42,600 --> 00:34:52,280
There is a guy on his porch, American flags, and I support the police signs all over his lawn.

660
00:34:52,440 --> 00:34:55,460
It was like really covered in American flags and support the police.

661
00:34:55,699 --> 00:34:57,380
I looked at him and I said, hi, nice to meet you.

662
00:34:57,480 --> 00:34:57,820
He said, hi.

663
00:34:58,340 --> 00:35:00,920
I said, mind if I take a couple pictures of the street?

664
00:35:01,040 --> 00:35:02,900
I'm interviewing Chris Smalls across the street.

665
00:35:03,360 --> 00:35:08,280
He's like, you can take a picture, but just so you know, I have a gun on me at all times.

666
00:35:08,960 --> 00:35:09,400
That's what he said.

667
00:35:09,400 --> 00:35:10,520
I'm from Canada, okay?

668
00:35:10,580 --> 00:35:15,200
It's pretty unusual for anyone to say or have, well, you know, has a gun up here.

669
00:35:15,340 --> 00:35:16,140
So it was just, okay, okay.

670
00:35:16,180 --> 00:35:17,640
I'm like, okay, just trying to get my bearings.

671
00:35:17,640 --> 00:35:19,800
You know, my spidey sense is going up a little bit.

672
00:35:20,100 --> 00:35:23,440
I go around the side of this house because I knock on the front door.

673
00:35:23,480 --> 00:35:23,920
Nobody answers.

674
00:35:24,020 --> 00:35:24,780
I go around the side.

675
00:35:25,260 --> 00:35:27,200
There's a kind of a grassy backyard.

676
00:35:27,540 --> 00:35:30,780
There's some kids yelling over like a small chain link fence.

677
00:35:31,220 --> 00:35:34,160
The sun is like blaring down, like it's hot.

678
00:35:34,700 --> 00:35:37,460
Chris has got a baseball hat on.

679
00:35:37,540 --> 00:35:39,000
I can see a lot of smoke coming out of him.

680
00:35:39,020 --> 00:35:41,220
I know he kind of, he's got chain smokes.

681
00:35:41,540 --> 00:35:42,340
I don't know if he chain smokes.

682
00:35:42,520 --> 00:35:44,920
I shouldn't label him as a chain smoker, but he's smoking joints.

683
00:35:45,200 --> 00:35:46,580
He's got a plastic table in front of him.

684
00:35:46,580 --> 00:35:49,560
He's got like big kicks on, and he's texting.

685
00:35:49,760 --> 00:35:52,720
He's got a big red jacket on, and I introduce myself.

686
00:35:52,860 --> 00:35:55,720
I sit down, and then we jump into the conversation.

687
00:35:56,400 --> 00:36:06,160
Let's kind of pick it up again with him talking a little bit about going to Congress, and then we're going to lean in to the first official book about Fidel Castro in just a second.

688
00:36:06,600 --> 00:36:15,280
You know, notoriety and everything, but they got pretty much excluded from the conversation when we was there.

689
00:36:15,280 --> 00:36:26,120
Did they invite you from your perspective as really just to photo op, because otherwise there'd be some actual movement, some change, some laws, some policies, and you're looking for a little more structural changes.

690
00:36:26,120 --> 00:36:32,260
Well, I mean, it would look horrible if they would have had six white union leaders there, and I just beat Amazon.

691
00:36:33,720 --> 00:36:36,100
So for them, they're like, oh, we have to have them.

692
00:36:37,380 --> 00:36:48,960
We have to have them there, and yeah, I think I was thrown in there to make sure that they have black representation.

693
00:36:49,660 --> 00:37:04,220
And so what are, if you were the president, or you have an open dialogue here, you've had conversations with a lot of very senior politicians that people would be very envious of that you could have been talking to Bernie Sanders, you've been talking to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris.

694
00:37:04,340 --> 00:37:08,740
I mean, if they say, okay, Chris, what's the number one thing you need me to fix?

695
00:37:08,780 --> 00:37:12,140
What's the number one or two things you need me to change from the highest possible level?

696
00:37:12,900 --> 00:37:14,960
I've never got that question.

697
00:37:16,300 --> 00:37:18,040
They never said that to me.

698
00:37:18,540 --> 00:37:20,980
What are the things that need to change?

699
00:37:21,580 --> 00:37:22,140
Accountability.

700
00:37:22,600 --> 00:37:23,320
There is none.

701
00:37:24,240 --> 00:37:25,760
You know, what are we talking about?

702
00:37:25,940 --> 00:37:29,820
They don't, you got billionaires breaking federal law every day.

703
00:37:30,680 --> 00:37:39,300
Every single day a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, or discrimination, or fired for bullshit.

704
00:37:39,300 --> 00:37:41,620
Whatever the case may be, every day.

705
00:37:42,280 --> 00:37:43,000
Where's the accountability?

706
00:37:43,420 --> 00:37:44,520
And then where's the antitrust?

707
00:37:44,600 --> 00:37:46,980
You got a company like Amazon owning every fucking thing.

708
00:37:48,060 --> 00:37:49,020
Where's the monopoly?

709
00:37:49,680 --> 00:37:50,500
Where's the antitrust?

710
00:37:51,440 --> 00:37:56,060
So there's, it's, they're talking down the two, no, two sides.

711
00:37:56,420 --> 00:38:07,340
You know, we, they want to be pro-union, but at the same time, they had Jeff Bezos stock parties and Christmas parties, and they're inviting billionaires like Oprah to speak at the DNC.

712
00:38:07,340 --> 00:38:10,800
So it's in plain sight.

713
00:38:11,060 --> 00:38:11,500
Yeah.

714
00:38:11,560 --> 00:38:24,500
It's interesting too, what you're saying, because I was reading up on this and I was trying to, you know, I'm trying to approach this from as open a side as possible, but I did notice Amazon's the most vile, like they have violated the most employment laws of any organization.

715
00:38:25,140 --> 00:38:30,120
I don't know if partly virtue of the size, but they've been found guilty of tremendous amounts of labor laws.

716
00:38:30,120 --> 00:38:32,400
And the safety stuff that I've dug up is shocking.

717
00:38:32,860 --> 00:38:37,680
Like for a retail company to have worse safety standards than almost anybody, it's really surprising.

718
00:38:37,920 --> 00:38:38,580
You know, it's really surprising.

719
00:38:38,660 --> 00:38:45,060
Is that a function of the hours and the job and the pace and the productivity, that whole thing, or there's something else going on from a safety perspective?

720
00:38:45,540 --> 00:38:46,080
Defiant against everything.

721
00:38:46,180 --> 00:38:49,400
To your point, it's like, this is just staring us in plain sight.

722
00:38:49,880 --> 00:38:51,680
You've been very vocal about it.

723
00:38:51,960 --> 00:38:52,900
Hard to be a target.

724
00:38:53,720 --> 00:38:55,040
And so what's happening?

725
00:38:56,180 --> 00:38:58,520
Amazon is the modern day slavery.

726
00:38:58,760 --> 00:38:59,680
That's just what it is.

727
00:39:00,040 --> 00:39:06,920
You know, it's slavery, fast forward 400 years, productivity, calling us pickers.

728
00:39:08,560 --> 00:39:09,740
That's what we're doing.

729
00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:15,160
We're still continuing the process of slavery with some technology involved.

730
00:39:15,620 --> 00:39:16,660
And that's what it is.

731
00:39:19,660 --> 00:39:26,280
slave wages, slaving conditions leads to injuries and death.

732
00:39:26,500 --> 00:39:30,880
And that's exactly why they're the number one in the country for injuries.

733
00:39:31,240 --> 00:39:34,180
And what do you say to people that say, well, hey, this is not slavery.

734
00:39:34,180 --> 00:39:38,940
It's people choosing to apply for jobs and going for raises.

735
00:39:39,240 --> 00:39:40,420
And this is all optional.

736
00:39:41,480 --> 00:39:42,000
Yeah, I know.

737
00:39:42,080 --> 00:39:45,980
You're jumping from one fire into the next, you know, no matter where you work.

738
00:39:47,220 --> 00:39:49,680
So it's not really a choice after a while.

739
00:39:50,860 --> 00:39:52,780
You know, it's a part of our society.

740
00:39:53,020 --> 00:39:55,340
Amazon's only been around for, what, 30 years?

741
00:39:57,280 --> 00:39:58,660
Look at our main streets.

742
00:39:58,820 --> 00:40:00,660
Look at our stores that closed down.

743
00:40:00,780 --> 00:40:02,760
Mom and pop, they're not there anymore because of Amazon.

744
00:40:02,760 --> 00:40:05,580
So we're allowing it.

745
00:40:05,680 --> 00:40:06,620
We're doing it to ourselves.

746
00:40:07,320 --> 00:40:08,840
Me again, jumping in.

747
00:40:08,940 --> 00:40:12,360
Gotta properly explain this book, because that's part of like a cutoff.

748
00:40:12,520 --> 00:40:23,780
So the book is a giant, huge, thick book called Fidel Castro, My Life by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramon Estem, who's a Spanish writer who partnered with him.

749
00:40:23,960 --> 00:40:29,360
This book was originally published in Spanish in 2006 by Random House and published in English in 2008 by Scribner.

750
00:40:29,360 --> 00:40:36,520
And the black cover has a sepia tone photo of Fidel Castro facing the right side of the book, smoking a cigar.

751
00:40:36,760 --> 00:40:41,020
And at the top of the cover are the words Fidel Castro in a little cap, kind of gray serif font.

752
00:40:41,180 --> 00:40:45,160
And below the words, My Life in the same font, but smaller and orange.

753
00:40:45,340 --> 00:40:47,680
Fidel Castro was a Cuban revolutionary and politician.

754
00:40:47,780 --> 00:40:55,120
He was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008, serving as the prime minister from 59 to 76 and president from 76 to 2008.

755
00:40:55,260 --> 00:41:13,500
This is basically the first time near the end of his life where someone does a huge, super long interview and kind of collects from his perspective, this biographical story of his life, the endless kind of attacks he's had and put up with over a hundred kind of assassination attempts.

756
00:41:13,720 --> 00:41:17,080
It's all told in a great detail in this giant, thick book.

757
00:41:17,200 --> 00:41:18,440
And I'll jump back to Chris now.

758
00:41:19,160 --> 00:41:24,940
One thing I noticed on all the comments on YouTube when you're out there and you're on C-SPAN, you're testifying to the Senate.

759
00:41:25,040 --> 00:41:33,660
A lot of people are saying, I commend this guy for looking the way he looks, for dressing the way he dresses, for going to the white house with a gold grill and a do-rag.

760
00:41:33,860 --> 00:41:35,120
And this comes up over and over again.

761
00:41:35,160 --> 00:41:36,980
I can't help but think of it on the Castro cover.

762
00:41:37,120 --> 00:41:39,660
I mean, he's wearing military fatigues, right?

763
00:41:39,680 --> 00:41:41,020
Like this guy's the president.

764
00:41:41,180 --> 00:41:44,940
I mean, he's in charge of the country, but he's, he's, he's like a, he's like a warrior.

765
00:41:45,040 --> 00:41:45,700
He's like a soldier.

766
00:41:45,800 --> 00:41:46,920
He's wearing military garments.

767
00:41:47,700 --> 00:41:53,640
He's, you know, there's a lot about the look and the appearance and people make, people are talking about your appearance a lot.

768
00:41:53,640 --> 00:42:04,200
It comes up in a lot of conversations because you represent something that, I don't know if it's scary for people or if it's just unusual for people, but you, you don't dress up.

769
00:42:04,260 --> 00:42:05,340
You're not wearing a suit or anything.

770
00:42:06,600 --> 00:42:11,400
You can look at pictures 15 years ago, 20 years ago, me and you'll see the same thing.

771
00:42:12,440 --> 00:42:13,260
As is.

772
00:42:14,260 --> 00:42:14,800
Same thing.

773
00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:17,840
People just don't know me.

774
00:42:18,440 --> 00:42:19,000
It's hard.

775
00:42:19,180 --> 00:42:19,420
Yeah.

776
00:42:19,520 --> 00:42:19,760
Yeah.

777
00:42:19,760 --> 00:42:22,860
It's hard to say like, hey, this is me.

778
00:42:22,860 --> 00:42:23,600
It's been me.

779
00:42:23,700 --> 00:42:33,180
But if you've been around me, all my workers, I walked in Amazon like this when I got hired day one, you know, so they knew everybody knew, oh no, that's Chris.

780
00:42:33,260 --> 00:42:36,060
So I don't really have to defend it.

781
00:42:36,080 --> 00:42:39,180
It's just like, whatever, believe what you want to believe.

782
00:42:39,280 --> 00:42:47,400
I know who I am and the people around me know who I am and they don't, you know, they defend me a lot.

783
00:42:47,520 --> 00:42:52,380
You know, people defend me if they see things that are people talk about me.

784
00:42:53,280 --> 00:42:58,460
But then again, you know, you got the ones that obviously, you know, a lot of sheep mentality.

785
00:42:58,460 --> 00:43:02,920
They just take things surface level, judging the book by its cover.

786
00:43:03,080 --> 00:43:05,240
If I dress like a rapper, I must be a gangster.

787
00:43:05,420 --> 00:43:06,680
I must be a gangbanger.

788
00:43:07,560 --> 00:43:13,420
So I'm just breaking down all those stigmas by showing up as it is and continue to talk about the issues.

789
00:43:13,780 --> 00:43:14,000
Yeah.

790
00:43:14,260 --> 00:43:14,540
Yeah.

791
00:43:14,600 --> 00:43:15,280
Talk about the issues.

792
00:43:15,280 --> 00:43:16,180
Talk about the values.

793
00:43:16,580 --> 00:43:24,120
One quote from this book is a quality, quality of life lies in knowledge and culture values are what constitute true quality of life.

794
00:43:24,120 --> 00:43:27,560
The Supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter, and clothing.

795
00:43:28,520 --> 00:43:31,560
I was going to ask like, what's it like working in the Amazon warehouse?

796
00:43:31,880 --> 00:43:33,880
What values are not represented there?

797
00:43:34,380 --> 00:43:42,000
And you can use Amazon or you can use kind of like jobs like this one, you know, and what values do you want people to see?

798
00:43:42,720 --> 00:43:43,200
Yeah.

799
00:43:43,300 --> 00:43:49,080
Well, once again, Amazon for me was not a hard job to do.

800
00:43:49,300 --> 00:43:54,340
It's very tedious assignments, very trainable, very learnable.

801
00:43:55,660 --> 00:43:56,980
Issue was the conditions.

802
00:43:57,620 --> 00:44:02,120
So what values people is they wanted a decent break.

803
00:44:02,180 --> 00:44:03,660
They want a decent bathroom break.

804
00:44:03,700 --> 00:44:10,220
They wanted a decent amount of time to get to their station without being rushed on the clock.

805
00:44:11,380 --> 00:44:13,480
So it was little things like that.

806
00:44:13,480 --> 00:44:15,440
I tried to preserve people's jobs there.

807
00:44:15,520 --> 00:44:16,540
That's all I could do.

808
00:44:17,300 --> 00:44:22,660
Tell them the do's and don'ts, but I had no authority to have them hired or fired.

809
00:44:23,500 --> 00:44:41,260
And that was something I didn't like, you know, the fact that I work with the people 60 hours a week, more time than I spend with my own family to watch good people, good people that I get to know over years and years and years get fired for nothing.

810
00:44:41,260 --> 00:44:45,080
I realized the company didn't value us.

811
00:44:45,640 --> 00:45:08,340
And then when they came after me, I just had enough, you know, my whole life, as you said, other companies, I started to notice like at 30, you know, getting hired at 25, but now I'm, I'm 30 years old when I got fired five years later, it's like, I dealt with it since I was 15.

812
00:45:08,340 --> 00:45:10,900
My first job 16 at Target.

813
00:45:13,360 --> 00:45:24,000
So fighting for 15 years straight in all these different industries, I realized that this pandemic was, was like my breaking point.

814
00:45:24,360 --> 00:45:31,900
So to do, to be defiant against everything and just do what I did was it was not a choice.

815
00:45:31,980 --> 00:45:33,540
It was like, this is it.

816
00:45:34,440 --> 00:45:37,820
This company said, we don't give a fuck about you.

817
00:45:37,820 --> 00:45:44,780
Whether you live or die, whether your family gets sick or not, whether your kids get sick or not, we don't care.

818
00:45:46,900 --> 00:45:53,520
So by them saying that to not just me, to everybody, that just motivated me to fight even harder.

819
00:45:54,500 --> 00:45:56,440
And after you formed the union, what happened?

820
00:45:56,980 --> 00:45:57,280
What happened?

821
00:45:57,360 --> 00:45:58,740
What was the, what was the reaction?

822
00:45:59,700 --> 00:46:03,880
Oh man, we sparked a resurgent all over the world.

823
00:46:03,880 --> 00:46:09,120
We went from having $2 in our bank account to over 300,000 the next day.

824
00:46:09,840 --> 00:46:24,460
And we were able to secure a headquarters, able to start other campaigns across the country that are still going on.

825
00:46:25,180 --> 00:46:29,940
And, and also been able to support movements worldwide that are going on.

826
00:46:29,940 --> 00:46:33,740
The first union in Canada just happened a few, a few months ago.

827
00:46:35,460 --> 00:46:41,260
I've been out there and Vancouver as well, where they filed a few times they're trying to get over the hump.

828
00:46:41,860 --> 00:46:44,780
The one in UK, Coventry, I've been there day one.

829
00:46:46,080 --> 00:46:57,880
So to go see these movements spread worldwide off of the inspiration of our victory, you know, it's over over 30 something campaigns worldwide right now.

830
00:46:57,880 --> 00:47:00,800
And it's more to come in the future.

831
00:47:01,480 --> 00:47:01,840
Yeah.

832
00:47:01,920 --> 00:47:02,260
I love it.

833
00:47:02,300 --> 00:47:04,180
And that looks like you are pulling out a joint.

834
00:47:04,240 --> 00:47:06,840
So I'll let you, you can put the microphone in here if you want.

835
00:47:07,180 --> 00:47:11,940
Like if you don't want to hold you up, we're outside here.

836
00:47:13,040 --> 00:47:13,760
So, okay.

837
00:47:13,800 --> 00:47:15,320
So we talked a little bit about Castro.

838
00:47:15,440 --> 00:47:17,180
We've got a little, it's weird to me.

839
00:47:17,180 --> 00:47:20,140
Cause like I got a trophy from the airport and an Uber, right.

840
00:47:20,140 --> 00:47:27,380
And so, you know, the Uber drivers like following the map and it's clear that, you know, Uber has had like self-driving car research inside.

841
00:47:27,380 --> 00:47:41,380
It's clear that like the direction it's going is the driver, the human, you know, will eventually be replaced by the self-driving car and I, you know, in factories and warehouses, you see that trend as well.

842
00:47:41,500 --> 00:47:43,460
The amount of automation is going up.

843
00:47:43,560 --> 00:47:46,620
There's the delivery is going to, is getting more and more automated.

844
00:47:46,740 --> 00:47:52,220
It seems like there's a real fricture kind of happening in our culture at the highest possible level.

845
00:47:52,260 --> 00:47:56,320
On one hand, you've got, yeah, we're talking about labor and organizing and unions.

846
00:47:56,320 --> 00:48:01,720
And also at the same time, it's like the amount of automation, everybody who's buying stuff, we all want it cheaper.

847
00:48:01,840 --> 00:48:02,600
We want it faster.

848
00:48:02,800 --> 00:48:07,460
And so we're willing to have less humans involved in the delivery of our goods.

849
00:48:07,540 --> 00:48:08,460
You mentioned main street.

850
00:48:08,700 --> 00:48:16,640
Well, but we're ordering off of online, you know, it's us, it's not, you know, like we're not going to mainstream shopping at the hardware store.

851
00:48:16,720 --> 00:48:17,880
They don't have the right screw.

852
00:48:17,960 --> 00:48:19,280
And so we're buying it online.

853
00:48:19,420 --> 00:48:24,720
And so the amount of tension that happens as humans get taken out of the system is just going up.

854
00:48:25,580 --> 00:48:33,540
You know, the humans are being pulled out of the system and we're not even interacting with each other anymore.

855
00:48:33,620 --> 00:48:34,880
You can't even interact with your neighbor.

856
00:48:36,100 --> 00:48:42,400
You know, I grew up when you could borrow sugar from your neighbor, borrow everybody in the village, raise the kids.

857
00:48:42,800 --> 00:48:45,120
My crossing guard would snitch on me.

858
00:48:45,160 --> 00:48:55,700
If I did something, my, you know, my teachers would, you know, walk us through the hood, you know, walk us through McDonald's, walk us to the park.

859
00:48:56,420 --> 00:48:59,140
You know, we used to interact outside with kids.

860
00:48:59,200 --> 00:49:00,560
Kids don't do that no more.

861
00:49:00,860 --> 00:49:06,060
You know, they got iPads and TikTok, you know we grew up in different times.

862
00:49:06,280 --> 00:49:18,860
And when Amazon got into this, you know, one day shipping, same day shipping, you know, same hour, the increase in the productivity, people don't see the behind the scenes.

863
00:49:18,860 --> 00:49:23,280
They don't see that there's 10 people that's going to touch that package before it gets to your door.

864
00:49:24,160 --> 00:49:29,220
The one person who's a picker has to pick this item in less than seven seconds.

865
00:49:29,900 --> 00:49:30,460
Seven seconds.

866
00:49:30,760 --> 00:49:30,980
Yeah.

867
00:49:31,380 --> 00:49:32,860
How are you supposed to get across the place?

868
00:49:33,700 --> 00:49:36,860
It's a robot that brings it to you and it comes to your station.

869
00:49:37,000 --> 00:49:39,540
You have to pick it off the robot and that times you.

870
00:49:40,180 --> 00:49:43,100
They call it a robot to bring it, but they don't have a robot to pick it yet.

871
00:49:43,700 --> 00:49:45,460
That's what they're working on, you know?

872
00:49:45,680 --> 00:49:54,620
And, but for the last 30 years, there's been people picking these items and packing them and the packers have a time.

873
00:49:54,700 --> 00:49:55,340
They have to do it.

874
00:49:56,100 --> 00:49:57,160
You know, everything is timed.

875
00:49:57,480 --> 00:49:58,880
Soon the moment you clock in.

876
00:49:59,140 --> 00:50:04,020
So people don't see that when they order in these packages, they just go on these websites, they fill up their carts.

877
00:50:04,820 --> 00:50:13,560
And then they think these packages magically appear or they see the driver and they think that, you know, his job is this.

878
00:50:13,560 --> 00:50:22,420
He got it made because he has a brand on Amazon, but it's not, you know, he's in terrible conditions and they can be, they can be improved.

879
00:50:22,720 --> 00:50:29,240
And the company has the money to do it, but instead they're, they'd rather give it to the top.

880
00:50:29,520 --> 00:50:36,940
It's almost like the, it's almost like the more separated we are, the more dehumanizing of each other we become.

881
00:50:36,940 --> 00:50:38,360
Because as you said, we don't see it.

882
00:50:38,400 --> 00:50:39,000
We don't see it.

883
00:50:39,020 --> 00:50:39,480
It's true.

884
00:50:39,840 --> 00:50:40,520
We don't see it.

885
00:50:40,520 --> 00:50:50,860
We know from all the research on happiness, that being separated, it's probably why I like doing all these interviews together in person, being separated, doing all this stuff virtually impedes our happiness.

886
00:50:51,000 --> 00:50:52,780
We're not as happy when we're not together.

887
00:50:53,680 --> 00:50:56,820
Being lonely is worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

888
00:50:56,920 --> 00:50:59,380
And one in two American adults now says that they're lonely.

889
00:50:59,480 --> 00:51:00,780
This is the next big epidemic.

890
00:51:01,000 --> 00:51:02,700
Surgeon General's warning us about this.

891
00:51:03,260 --> 00:51:07,940
But of course we don't see it because we're more and more separated.

892
00:51:07,940 --> 00:51:09,080
And so we're more and more separated.

893
00:51:09,220 --> 00:51:11,760
We don't, it's harder and harder to make friends with the crossing guard.

894
00:51:11,800 --> 00:51:14,420
Cause that job's changing every, I got a different crossing guard.

895
00:51:14,460 --> 00:51:15,660
on my corner every two weeks.

896
00:51:16,240 --> 00:51:16,440
Yeah.

897
00:51:16,900 --> 00:51:22,820
Well, it wasn't like, I mean, I go to my town now and still see the same crossing guards from when I was a kid.

898
00:51:22,920 --> 00:51:23,320
No way.

899
00:51:23,700 --> 00:51:23,880
Yeah.

900
00:51:24,160 --> 00:51:24,780
Oh, wow.

901
00:51:25,340 --> 00:51:25,640
Yeah.

902
00:51:26,540 --> 00:51:27,660
You know, and that's,

903
00:51:27,760 --> 00:51:31,140
that's the community, you know, people, you know,

904
00:51:31,140 --> 00:51:35,740
the cost of living has pushed a lot of people out, but, um,

905
00:51:35,740 --> 00:51:40,460
it's good to see that there's still some people there and it's sad to see that

906
00:51:40,460 --> 00:51:45,020
they're still there because, you know, this,

907
00:51:45,160 --> 00:51:49,240
this is not a quality, a quality of life that we deserve,

908
00:51:49,600 --> 00:51:54,040
especially from visiting other countries where they believe, you know, three,

909
00:51:54,260 --> 00:51:55,720
three day, four day work weeks.

910
00:51:56,220 --> 00:52:02,740
And they believe that you should have two month vacation and sick time and free housing and free college.

911
00:52:03,660 --> 00:52:05,040
And we don't do that here.

912
00:52:06,480 --> 00:52:10,980
Hearing you talk like this is sounding to me a little like Jane McAlevey.

913
00:52:11,200 --> 00:52:13,740
I got this book from you called raising expectations.

914
00:52:14,500 --> 00:52:22,180
And then in brackets and raising hell, my decade fighting for the labor movement by Jane McAlevey, M C A L E V E Y.

915
00:52:22,440 --> 00:52:32,480
It's a bright red 2012 book says raising expectations and like an all caps black, like cut and paste stencil font, and then raising hells in brackets afterwards.

916
00:52:32,900 --> 00:52:40,940
Uh, the blurb on the front from Barbara Ehrenreich says who I love, by the way, Barbara Ehrenreich, uh, wrote a book.

917
00:52:41,000 --> 00:52:43,740
I just love on joy dancing in the streets.

918
00:52:43,980 --> 00:52:49,020
The blurb says a breathtaking trip through the union organizing scene of America in the 21st century.

919
00:52:49,140 --> 00:52:53,680
Jane McAlevey lived from 1964 to 2024 dying just a couple of months ago.

920
00:52:54,140 --> 00:53:04,820
She was an American union organizer, author, political commentator, senior policy fellow at the university of California, Berkeley's Institute for research on labor and employment and a columnist at the nation as well as writing for books.

921
00:53:05,580 --> 00:53:06,480
What's this book about?

922
00:53:06,660 --> 00:53:12,940
Well, she's famous and notorious in the American labor movement as the hard charging organizer racked up a string of victories, right?

923
00:53:13,020 --> 00:53:16,880
When people said it wasn't possible, then she was bounced from the movement.

924
00:53:17,220 --> 00:53:23,440
We're going to talk about this, maybe with you a victim of the high level warfare that's been tearing apart organized labor.

925
00:53:23,780 --> 00:53:36,260
And this engrossing funding narrative that reflects the personality of its charismatic wisecracking author McAlevey tells the story of a number of dramatic organizing and contract victories and the unconventional strategies that helped achieve them.

926
00:53:36,760 --> 00:53:44,540
Dewey Decimal as far as one of three, three, 1.880 for social sciences slash economics slash labor economics, slash labor unions.

927
00:53:44,920 --> 00:53:49,940
Chris, can you tell us about your relationship with raising expectations and raising hell?

928
00:53:50,600 --> 00:53:51,080
Yeah.

929
00:53:51,140 --> 00:53:52,480
Rest in peace, Jane McAlevey.

930
00:53:53,980 --> 00:53:54,460
Yeah.

931
00:53:54,580 --> 00:54:01,300
I mean, she was considered the goat for a lot of people.

932
00:54:01,320 --> 00:54:13,020
And respectfully, so I was fortunate enough before she passed to spend a lot of intimate moments with her, you know, right here in New York at our apartment.

933
00:54:13,240 --> 00:54:23,420
I used to go visit her, have dinner with her, you know we used to have very, very in depth conversations about organizing.

934
00:54:23,660 --> 00:54:37,340
And I learned a lot about her, you know, we, we, we, we butted heads a few times and there was some things that came out of media that was misconstrued about our relationship, but we cleared it up.

935
00:54:37,440 --> 00:54:39,780
And then she gave me that book.

936
00:54:40,000 --> 00:54:44,020
I asked her which one of the three, cause she didn't write the fourth one yet.

937
00:54:44,780 --> 00:54:49,760
She was writing it, but I asked her which one of the three is her favorite.

938
00:54:49,980 --> 00:54:55,580
And she signed and gave me a book and she gave me, you know, a copy of that one.

939
00:54:55,580 --> 00:55:04,780
So, you know, I realized we have a lot in common, but we were just two different generations.

940
00:55:05,780 --> 00:55:09,920
and that, you know, that's the beauty of, of organizing face to face.

941
00:55:10,080 --> 00:55:14,380
You know, even when you had disagreements, you can agree on certain things.

942
00:55:14,540 --> 00:55:25,560
And the one story that people don't know is one day she wrote her because Jane McAlevey was a warrior, even with her battling cancer, you would never tell she was a warrior.

943
00:55:25,560 --> 00:55:35,820
Until her last day, she used to ride her bike from New York, from the upper west side to Jersey over here.

944
00:55:37,080 --> 00:55:40,700
And one day her bike broke down.

945
00:55:40,820 --> 00:55:41,740
She crashed her bike.

946
00:55:43,320 --> 00:55:46,120
So she called me up, said, can I come pick her up?

947
00:55:46,460 --> 00:55:51,920
So I picked her up, had the Chuck at the time and took her to the bike shop.

948
00:55:52,080 --> 00:55:53,120
Then I took her home.

949
00:55:53,180 --> 00:56:01,220
And then we, you know, we sat on her balcony and had a good night talking about organizing, talking about, you know, the bigger movement, everything.

950
00:56:02,340 --> 00:56:04,900
And, you know, these are the stories that people would never hear.

951
00:56:05,000 --> 00:56:11,460
But to share that people, I want people to know that I have a great deal of respect for her.

952
00:56:11,800 --> 00:56:42,100
And even though we weren't able to use her tactics during our campaign, well, a lot of it is, you know, she organized in a strategic way that was beneficial for public unions, like nurse, nursing and teachers for us being in the private sector and going up against Amazon.

953
00:56:42,340 --> 00:56:43,260
It was a different monster.

954
00:56:43,660 --> 00:56:47,760
So there were certain tactics that she wanted us to use.

955
00:56:47,900 --> 00:57:01,320
And we tried, we tried to feel them somewhere, you know, getting the majority signatures and the building for just a majority petition, which was a great strategy still is.

956
00:57:01,660 --> 00:57:04,080
But the problem is Amazon's turnover rate.

957
00:57:05,620 --> 00:57:07,060
It wasn't possible.

958
00:57:07,680 --> 00:57:08,800
That was the thing.

959
00:57:08,840 --> 00:57:11,160
You know, we would sign people up, they'd be fired the next day.

960
00:57:11,560 --> 00:57:19,140
So it was certain tactics that she had that just wasn't aligned into the way we needed to be.

961
00:57:20,080 --> 00:57:22,780
And that's when we butted heads a little bit.

962
00:57:23,000 --> 00:57:40,080
But other than that, going up against other unions, going up against politicians, going up against the status quo, standing on business, me and her are aligned on that.

963
00:57:40,400 --> 00:57:51,880
And that's, that's something that and the last thing she said to me was, you need to sign with the team says that was the last her last words to me.

964
00:57:53,640 --> 00:57:58,220
So I want to say thank you because I did.

965
00:57:58,300 --> 00:58:03,080
And I signed the union to the team says before I left my, my post.

966
00:58:03,360 --> 00:58:03,880
Yeah.

967
00:58:03,880 --> 00:58:25,160
So that's the part of the story we haven't got to yet is that the Amazon labor union that you were president of has more recently in 2024 signed on to a larger, I think it's like a, it's a million and a half or 10 and 10 or half million, a million and a half person union called the teamsters union.

968
00:58:26,260 --> 00:58:27,340
Founded by Jimmy Hoffa

969
00:58:27,360 --> 00:58:35,320
I think, yeah, like three generations ago and now, but that's not worker led now, Chris.

970
00:58:36,520 --> 00:58:37,440
Oh, no, no, no.

971
00:58:37,660 --> 00:58:40,860
Am I misunderstanding why she stayed assigned with them?

972
00:58:41,100 --> 00:58:44,360
Cause now you've put the Amazon labor union over, over to the larger union.

973
00:58:44,380 --> 00:58:46,540
I guess it's, I'm assuming it's partly resources.

974
00:58:47,660 --> 00:58:49,340
I didn't sign them over.

975
00:58:49,520 --> 00:58:54,900
I signed an affiliation, meaning that there's an agreement in place.

976
00:58:55,040 --> 00:58:57,800
And in this agreement, we have full jurisdiction.

977
00:58:58,760 --> 00:59:00,500
So we have full autonomy.

978
00:59:02,300 --> 00:59:04,400
So that it's nothing's changed.

979
00:59:04,760 --> 00:59:06,620
We still have our independency.

980
00:59:07,000 --> 00:59:10,140
We still have the same core people.

981
00:59:11,380 --> 00:59:22,640
And, um, our bylaw committee will be able to incorporate policies in the constitution that were aligned the way we organize.

982
00:59:22,980 --> 00:59:23,380
Yeah.

983
00:59:23,580 --> 00:59:24,060
Yeah.

984
00:59:24,120 --> 00:59:24,500
Yeah.

985
00:59:24,600 --> 00:59:25,600
But why did you do it?

986
00:59:25,660 --> 00:59:28,160
Like what, what's the, what were the reasons to, to do this?

987
00:59:28,260 --> 00:59:29,020
We need resources.

988
00:59:29,320 --> 00:59:30,260
We need money.

989
00:59:30,340 --> 00:59:31,540
They have money and resources.

990
00:59:31,840 --> 00:59:42,820
They have, they probably see this as a opportunity to, cause as you've pointed out in other interviews, Amazon does work with the unions and other countries today.

991
00:59:43,480 --> 00:59:43,680
Yeah.

992
00:59:43,920 --> 00:59:44,220
Yeah.

993
00:59:44,280 --> 00:59:44,960
Of course.

994
00:59:46,640 --> 00:59:51,780
France 10 years, decade, you know, Germany.

995
00:59:53,120 --> 00:59:55,740
So yeah, they, they work with other unions.

996
00:59:55,880 --> 01:00:00,600
They have teams as an opportunity to get more support across the country.

997
01:00:00,840 --> 01:00:02,180
Well, yes.

998
01:00:02,200 --> 01:00:07,560
Opportunity for them to get in the warehouse and there's an opportunity for us to get resources.

999
01:00:07,780 --> 01:00:08,100
Yeah.

1000
01:00:08,680 --> 01:00:09,960
Money that we didn't have.

1001
01:00:10,100 --> 01:00:14,700
If you're playing a money game with any big company, you're probably going to, cause they have a lot more money.

1002
01:00:14,840 --> 01:00:19,400
I mean, it's just like, you know, it's kind of like the money doesn't, the money doesn't help.

1003
01:00:20,280 --> 01:00:25,320
I mean, well, the money is not going to determine our, our victory.

1004
01:00:25,520 --> 01:00:25,880
We use it.

1005
01:00:25,900 --> 01:00:26,100
Right.

1006
01:00:26,540 --> 01:00:31,720
It's not a mountain of the amount of money we, we already beat them with less than a hundred thousand.

1007
01:00:32,440 --> 01:00:32,540
Yeah.

1008
01:00:33,600 --> 01:00:34,920
It's the way you use it.

1009
01:00:34,920 --> 01:00:35,220
Right.

1010
01:00:35,480 --> 01:00:35,880
Right.

1011
01:00:35,880 --> 01:00:39,380
If it's done right, correctly.

1012
01:00:40,920 --> 01:00:48,940
And we were able to go on strike and the relationships that I'm building internationally, we could call it international strike.

1013
01:00:50,240 --> 01:00:51,900
We have, we have some leverage.

1014
01:00:52,300 --> 01:00:53,160
International strike.

1015
01:00:53,220 --> 01:00:53,660
What's that?

1016
01:00:54,460 --> 01:00:54,880
Well, yeah.

1017
01:00:54,960 --> 01:00:58,660
Like you mentioned the unions that are unionized against Amazon.

1018
01:00:58,860 --> 01:00:59,640
I met them.

1019
01:00:59,860 --> 01:01:01,620
I flew out there to their country.

1020
01:01:01,840 --> 01:01:11,740
So for me to have these conversations, it's never been done in history to go to communist countries, to sit down with communist unions.

1021
01:01:13,780 --> 01:01:17,380
No, no American union president has ever done this, what I'm doing.

1022
01:01:19,440 --> 01:01:24,580
So I know what I'm doing is a bigger picture that people don't even fathom yet.

1023
01:01:25,440 --> 01:01:27,820
So hopefully it plays out correctly.

1024
01:01:28,920 --> 01:01:31,160
We'll be able to build that relationship.

1025
01:01:32,480 --> 01:01:32,740
Yeah.

1026
01:01:32,920 --> 01:01:33,360
Yeah.

1027
01:01:33,400 --> 01:01:34,160
I hear what you're saying.

1028
01:01:34,220 --> 01:01:40,240
This is partly, you know, what, what Jane talks about with whole worker organizing, right?

1029
01:01:40,300 --> 01:01:47,260
Like on page 14, she writes whole worker organizing begins with the recognition that real people do not live two separate lives.

1030
01:01:47,460 --> 01:01:52,080
One beginning when they arrive at work and punch the clock and another, when they punch out at the end of their shift.

1031
01:01:52,520 --> 01:02:00,260
So, you know, on one hand, we're talking about unions and we're talking about the labor movement in the U S on the other hand, we're talking about bigger picture issues.

1032
01:02:00,780 --> 01:02:04,200
You know, that's partly why I think you don't support either candidate running for president.

1033
01:02:04,200 --> 01:02:17,420
You're really open about that because you don't see either of them addressing some of the bigger issues, the whole worker, the people working three jobs, the people trying to commute to our, you were commuting to two and a half hours each way to get to get to the warehouse every day.

1034
01:02:19,120 --> 01:02:24,380
So what does the whole worker organizing look like to you?

1035
01:02:24,780 --> 01:02:28,000
The whole worker, the whole person, what are some of the big macro issues here?

1036
01:02:28,080 --> 01:02:32,280
Well, that's, that's why we were successful because we had workers.

1037
01:02:32,280 --> 01:02:34,320
It wasn't a third party.

1038
01:02:35,440 --> 01:02:38,640
It wasn't led by union salts.

1039
01:02:39,420 --> 01:02:40,800
It was led by the workers.

1040
01:02:42,000 --> 01:02:59,470
My lead organizers were going on nine years, Derek Palmer, no other union has a organizer that's been at their job to organize against Amazon that long.

1041
01:02:59,590 --> 01:03:03,570
People don't last at Amazon nine days.

1042
01:03:03,570 --> 01:03:14,790
For him to last nine years, if you don't have an, a veteran employee leader organizer like that leading these campaigns, it's going to be very, very difficult there.

1043
01:03:15,130 --> 01:03:15,650
Yeah.

1044
01:03:15,790 --> 01:03:16,470
He's still working there.

1045
01:03:16,550 --> 01:03:17,030
Yeah.

1046
01:03:17,110 --> 01:03:18,890
Nine years now.

1047
01:03:18,890 --> 01:03:22,030
Nine years. And if I didn't get fired nine years, right?

1048
01:03:22,490 --> 01:03:24,570
So we have a different case.

1049
01:03:24,670 --> 01:03:28,070
Sorry to say that you had a case against Amazon for wrongful dismissal.

1050
01:03:28,090 --> 01:03:28,850
What happened with that?

1051
01:03:29,490 --> 01:03:29,910
Yeah.

1052
01:03:29,970 --> 01:03:31,930
Leticia James didn't do shit with it.

1053
01:03:31,930 --> 01:03:34,090
It was just, you know, for show.

1054
01:03:35,150 --> 01:03:35,450
Nothing.

1055
01:03:35,750 --> 01:03:37,530
What was the result of the case?

1056
01:03:38,730 --> 01:03:39,110
Dismissed. Yeah.

1057
01:03:40,130 --> 01:03:41,350
Who's Leticia's James?

1058
01:03:41,610 --> 01:03:43,530
She's the attorney general of New York state.

1059
01:03:43,850 --> 01:03:45,690
Ah, when that that's where it went.

1060
01:03:46,150 --> 01:03:46,350
Yeah.

1061
01:03:46,450 --> 01:03:47,990
And then he dismissed the case.

1062
01:03:48,290 --> 01:03:48,490
Yeah. Cause they were so focused on Trump.

1063
01:03:48,490 --> 01:03:51,490
Pinballing around.

1064
01:03:52,650 --> 01:03:53,130
Yeah.

1065
01:03:53,190 --> 01:03:56,610
I mean, I, I seen how they use our victory.

1066
01:03:56,710 --> 01:03:57,530
They use me.

1067
01:03:57,710 --> 01:03:59,670
I seen how the media did all of that.

1068
01:03:59,670 --> 01:04:03,700
And then I became a union president.

1069
01:04:04,000 --> 01:04:07,700
Now I'm something else, you know, I'm flashy.

1070
01:04:07,960 --> 01:04:08,580
I'm this, I'm that.

1071
01:04:08,640 --> 01:04:09,780
And it's like, what are you talking about?

1072
01:04:09,960 --> 01:04:12,060
I'm just an Amazon worker who got fired.

1073
01:04:13,860 --> 01:04:16,020
Remember the company said they were going to smear me.

1074
01:04:16,100 --> 01:04:17,200
And now you guys are doing it.

1075
01:04:17,260 --> 01:04:20,100
Y'all doing the work for Amazon, which is crazy to me.

1076
01:04:20,960 --> 01:04:23,640
And this is, you know, that's why that's how I think about it.

1077
01:04:23,660 --> 01:04:24,600
It's just ironic.

1078
01:04:25,740 --> 01:04:26,100
Yeah.

1079
01:04:26,100 --> 01:04:31,680
You maintain a sense of groundedness and comfort with your identity.

1080
01:04:31,840 --> 01:04:34,280
That I think would be very hard for me and other people to do.

1081
01:04:34,380 --> 01:04:38,100
I mean, if you're getting kind of pushed around like this in the press so much.

1082
01:04:38,600 --> 01:04:46,840
Yeah, no, because once again, the work speaks for itself, people can look at my Instagram and see what I do every single day, every single week.

1083
01:04:47,000 --> 01:04:49,020
You're posting about it.

1084
01:04:49,060 --> 01:04:55,800
All the time. And people see me, you know, I was just at labor day protest with Palestine.

1085
01:04:55,800 --> 01:04:57,680
Over 10,000 people there.

1086
01:04:58,380 --> 01:05:02,960
Meanwhile, people are attacking, you know, attacking me online for support, for not supporting Kamala Harris.

1087
01:05:03,500 --> 01:05:06,260
I could tell you right now they're delusional.

1088
01:05:07,240 --> 01:05:10,660
I've been at all of these encampments all around the country, all around the world.

1089
01:05:11,900 --> 01:05:13,840
I see what these young people are doing.

1090
01:05:13,960 --> 01:05:18,360
If you think they're going to vote for Kamala Harris, people are crazy.

1091
01:05:19,800 --> 01:05:22,120
So I don't care what the polls say.

1092
01:05:22,740 --> 01:05:25,160
I don't care what these online Twitter bots.

1093
01:05:25,920 --> 01:05:29,940
Our sheep say, because I'm out in the streets.

1094
01:05:30,000 --> 01:05:30,560
What are you seeing?

1095
01:05:32,100 --> 01:05:33,420
What are you seeing in the 10,000?

1096
01:05:33,500 --> 01:05:34,660
I saw you post about yesterday. You said 10,000 people, the largest labor day movement history is not covered at all by any of the main, main newspapers.

1097
01:05:34,740 --> 01:05:48,400
Yeah because they're too busy at the West Indian parade with the politicians and the unions, you know, gaslighting.

1098
01:05:50,500 --> 01:05:55,040
So because they, when they ignore what's going on, I could tell you what I see and what I know.

1099
01:05:55,040 --> 01:06:00,440
I can, I can tell you that they're, they're not going to support Kamala Harris.

1100
01:06:00,560 --> 01:06:15,340
They will either not vote or they're going to vote third party because these other presidential candidates like Jill Stein and Cornell West and Claudia de la Cruz, they're showing up to these same rallies and they got their support.

1101
01:06:18,100 --> 01:06:25,220
So yeah, they may not win, but they building a movement that it's going to take years to build.

1102
01:06:26,840 --> 01:06:27,240
Yeah.

1103
01:06:27,260 --> 01:06:33,280
We had Ralph Nader on the podcast last year and a lot of the ills he talks about is this two party system.

1104
01:06:33,680 --> 01:06:45,940
You know, you end up having a two party system and then as a result, the middle is shown to be unprofitable and a lot of the stuff drops in the middle as he went for president four times as a third party candidate.

1105
01:06:48,320 --> 01:06:48,720
Yeah.

1106
01:06:48,720 --> 01:06:56,320
I mean, it's tough when you're trying to do something, but you know, they have to, they have to build it.

1107
01:06:56,460 --> 01:07:14,500
You know, it was kinda to me late in the game to really be out and open about your candidacy the year of, but they're definitely sparking something that's going to last and carry over into the next election.

1108
01:07:14,740 --> 01:07:17,460
And the Democrats are disconnected.

1109
01:07:17,460 --> 01:07:24,520
So are the Republicans, but the Democrats are too far gone for me, for me to even be quiet about it.

1110
01:07:24,760 --> 01:07:26,780
You know, I met, like you said, I met a lot of them.

1111
01:07:26,860 --> 01:07:30,900
I met the president, I met Kamala and I took away nothing from this conversation.

1112
01:07:31,060 --> 01:07:32,080
Nothing, absolutely nothing.

1113
01:07:33,140 --> 01:07:34,060
People can say what they want.

1114
01:07:34,100 --> 01:07:35,020
I'm talking from experience.

1115
01:07:35,120 --> 01:07:36,440
I'm not talking from my ass.

1116
01:07:36,540 --> 01:07:39,140
You know, I'm not making shit up, you know?

1117
01:07:39,220 --> 01:07:47,440
So people that's online, that's why it doesn't bother me because they have no idea that I've already made my rounds and I'm a very fast learner.

1118
01:07:47,440 --> 01:07:48,800
It only took me one time.

1119
01:07:49,500 --> 01:07:55,020
I don't need to have multiple followups unless I'm trying to inquire about it.

1120
01:07:55,120 --> 01:08:06,620
But for my first conversation, first impressions, everything, and none of the people I met are, are, are doing anything.

1121
01:08:06,760 --> 01:08:16,899
You know, a lot of the stuff you're talking about is the system, the system, you know, it's like the, the larger system at play here that we're, that we're living within both you and me to a lesser extent.

1122
01:08:16,899 --> 01:08:20,359
I'm in Canada, so it's a slightly different system and in every country is a little bit different.

1123
01:08:20,479 --> 01:08:28,300
We've got a lot of listeners for the show around the world, but the third and final book you gave me is kind of about the system, right?

1124
01:08:28,359 --> 01:08:29,100
It's a new book.

1125
01:08:29,439 --> 01:08:29,600
Yeah.

1126
01:08:29,740 --> 01:08:30,859
It just came out in 2023.

1127
01:08:31,160 --> 01:08:35,140
It's called, it's not you, it's capitalism by Malaika Jabali.

1128
01:08:35,260 --> 01:08:37,680
If I said that right, J A B A L I.

1129
01:08:38,020 --> 01:08:54,680
It's a bright blue cover with three emojis on a broken heart, a dollar sign bag on fire and a Brown solidarity fist with pink fingernails with the sub headline, why it's time to break up and how to move on pretty, you know, unconventional kind of book.

1130
01:08:55,760 --> 01:09:00,520
Malaika Jabali is a journalist whose writings appear in the Guardian, Teen Vogue, New Republic, and Essence.

1131
01:09:00,620 --> 01:09:05,359
She's got a JD from Columbia and MS from Columbia university, a school of social work.

1132
01:09:05,359 --> 01:09:12,060
And she's the former co-chair of something called operation power or P O W E R grassroots organization based in Brooklyn.

1133
01:09:12,140 --> 01:09:14,920
Focus on bringing black radical politics to New York city.

1134
01:09:15,359 --> 01:09:16,319
What's this book about?

1135
01:09:16,399 --> 01:09:17,439
It's a guide to socialism.

1136
01:09:17,640 --> 01:09:19,700
That's what it is for budding anti-capitalists.

1137
01:09:20,180 --> 01:09:26,100
He debunks myths centers, forgotten socialists of color have shaped our world and shows socialism is not all marks and Bernie bros.

1138
01:09:26,260 --> 01:09:27,920
It can actually be pretty sexy.

1139
01:09:28,220 --> 01:09:34,700
There are whole, like I've found it fun to flip through because the whole thing is designed like for a short attention spans with infographics and so on.

1140
01:09:34,760 --> 01:09:35,160
That's right.

1141
01:09:35,380 --> 01:09:44,359
She's got like the history of like what happened, what's happening with universal healthcare in the U S and talks about how like we've been talking about this 1914 and now it's, you know, 110 years later and we still don't have it.

1142
01:09:44,359 --> 01:09:46,420
So she's talking about a lot of kind of big picture.

1143
01:09:46,620 --> 01:09:58,840
So social issues that affect the majority, you know you can follow this book on a three, three, 5.43 social sciences, economics, Marxian system slash communism.

1144
01:09:58,840 --> 01:10:01,460
Tell us about your relationship with it's not you.

1145
01:10:01,720 --> 01:10:02,720
It's capitalism.

1146
01:10:03,460 --> 01:10:04,260
by Malaika Jabali.

1147
01:10:04,380 --> 01:10:04,580
Yeah.

1148
01:10:04,600 --> 01:10:05,520
Shout out to Malaika.

1149
01:10:05,780 --> 01:10:05,940
Yeah.

1150
01:10:06,020 --> 01:10:06,880
That's my home girl.

1151
01:10:07,140 --> 01:10:10,720
And she's been a supporter of me for a while for years.

1152
01:10:10,860 --> 01:10:12,860
And I'm, I'm in the book.

1153
01:10:12,860 --> 01:10:15,240
So she interviewed me.

1154
01:10:16,380 --> 01:10:28,120
I want to say even before we, we won, she started interviewing me and yeah, we just stayed in touch, kept in contact.

1155
01:10:28,120 --> 01:10:34,380
And then when she came here to Brooklyn for the book release, I did a book release with her in Brooklyn.

1156
01:10:35,160 --> 01:10:39,820
And that was a, you know, a great experience and she's right.

1157
01:10:39,920 --> 01:10:41,720
You know, we got some people come out for that.

1158
01:10:41,720 --> 01:10:42,260
Oh yeah.

1159
01:10:42,360 --> 01:10:42,600
Yeah.

1160
01:10:42,640 --> 01:10:43,640
Hard to get people to stand up.

1161
01:10:44,020 --> 01:10:46,080
Hard to get people to come out for book book events.

1162
01:10:46,160 --> 01:10:47,680
I'm very familiar with.

1163
01:10:47,880 --> 01:10:48,160
Yeah.

1164
01:10:48,260 --> 01:10:48,440
Yeah.

1165
01:10:48,480 --> 01:10:50,440
I'm very familiar with the half empty bookstore.

1166
01:10:50,800 --> 01:10:51,040
Yeah.

1167
01:10:51,100 --> 01:10:52,280
No, she, she did her thing.

1168
01:10:52,400 --> 01:10:53,620
I mean, it was standing room.

1169
01:10:53,780 --> 01:10:54,320
That's amazing.

1170
01:10:54,540 --> 01:10:54,840
Yeah.

1171
01:10:55,000 --> 01:10:55,760
Standard room only.

1172
01:10:55,880 --> 01:10:56,660
It was, it was great.

1173
01:10:58,540 --> 01:10:58,900
Yeah.

1174
01:10:58,940 --> 01:10:59,460
It was great.

1175
01:10:59,640 --> 01:11:00,480
Great experience.

1176
01:11:02,280 --> 01:11:09,520
And yeah, she motivated me to not only read the book, but also to write, to finish my book, which I did.

1177
01:11:09,520 --> 01:11:12,180
And I was able to finish mine this summer too.

1178
01:11:12,520 --> 01:11:13,860
So you got a book coming out.

1179
01:11:13,980 --> 01:11:14,300
Yeah.

1180
01:11:14,320 --> 01:11:15,100
I've got a book coming out.

1181
01:11:15,160 --> 01:11:15,580
What's it called?

1182
01:11:16,380 --> 01:11:17,420
I don't know yet.

1183
01:11:17,700 --> 01:11:18,800
Title still in progress.

1184
01:11:18,960 --> 01:11:19,560
I think so.

1185
01:11:19,660 --> 01:11:19,820
Yeah.

1186
01:11:19,840 --> 01:11:20,080
Tk.

1187
01:11:20,080 --> 01:11:20,860
As they call it.

1188
01:11:20,900 --> 01:11:21,100
Yeah.

1189
01:11:21,140 --> 01:11:21,900
Publishing terms.

1190
01:11:22,260 --> 01:11:23,280
Is it your memoir?

1191
01:11:25,600 --> 01:11:26,000
Somewhat.

1192
01:11:26,140 --> 01:11:26,400
Yeah.

1193
01:11:26,520 --> 01:11:26,860
Yeah.

1194
01:11:27,320 --> 01:11:30,400
And so if it's not us, that's the problem.

1195
01:11:30,420 --> 01:11:37,980
Or if it, if capitalism has these massive issues that make it the system, you know, that, that, that kind of, you know, we can't thrive.

1196
01:11:38,080 --> 01:11:41,080
Then she's proposing socialism as an alternative.

1197
01:11:42,280 --> 01:11:42,400
Yeah.

1198
01:11:42,480 --> 01:11:43,520
I mean, she's right.

1199
01:11:44,160 --> 01:11:44,900
I've seen it.

1200
01:11:45,460 --> 01:11:46,840
I've seen what socialism do.

1201
01:11:46,940 --> 01:11:55,240
I've seen it from visiting other countries, you know, 70% of Americans don't have passports, you know, they, they gave me a hard time.

1202
01:11:55,920 --> 01:11:59,940
I was 35 when I got my passport, you know, what do you mean?

1203
01:12:00,000 --> 01:12:02,020
Gave you a hard time to get your passport was hard time.

1204
01:12:02,160 --> 01:12:02,520
Yeah.

1205
01:12:02,680 --> 01:12:03,080
Yeah.

1206
01:12:03,780 --> 01:12:04,720
I have no idea.

1207
01:12:05,040 --> 01:12:11,900
What was the, they didn't want me to leave the country, I guess, but for some reason I had to go through an extra process to get my passport.

1208
01:12:13,400 --> 01:12:14,640
And yeah, I did.

1209
01:12:14,800 --> 01:12:18,680
Now you're going to these more social countries, Sweden, Canada, Norway.

1210
01:12:19,500 --> 01:12:19,760
Yeah.

1211
01:12:19,820 --> 01:12:22,460
Cuba, Austria, Cuba, Greece.

1212
01:12:22,600 --> 01:12:25,080
I'm going to Greece in a few weeks.

1213
01:12:25,440 --> 01:12:33,640
I'm seeing what life could be like, meaning that every country has its pros and cons.

1214
01:12:33,720 --> 01:12:36,720
They're not all perfect, but I'll take childcare.

1215
01:12:37,180 --> 01:12:39,080
I'll take free housing.

1216
01:12:40,160 --> 01:12:41,720
I'll take free Medicare.

1217
01:12:42,280 --> 01:12:47,540
I'll, I'll take, you know, being forced to go on vacation.

1218
01:12:48,660 --> 01:12:51,000
I'll take 90% union density.

1219
01:12:51,540 --> 01:12:57,780
I'll take all of that because even with their issues that they have, they, they still have it better off.

1220
01:12:58,500 --> 01:13:05,680
The amount of debt that you are in at a, as a 20 year old in America is ridiculous.

1221
01:13:06,360 --> 01:13:07,680
Just to go to college.

1222
01:13:08,020 --> 01:13:10,180
My first semester was 16,000.

1223
01:13:10,500 --> 01:13:13,640
My second semester, 19,000 out of state tuition.

1224
01:13:14,760 --> 01:13:16,940
So you're in debt in your twenties.

1225
01:13:17,140 --> 01:13:26,980
And then if you get hurt, you know, I played sports, broken finger, jam, bruises, whatever, medical bills, thousands, tens of thousands.

1226
01:13:27,160 --> 01:13:31,760
And then you got the doctor who's a millionaire suing you, assuming the patient.

1227
01:13:31,760 --> 01:13:34,840
So it is insane.

1228
01:13:35,960 --> 01:13:41,360
You know, I'm still paying student debt in my thirties and I dropped out of school.

1229
01:13:41,460 --> 01:13:42,480
I didn't even finish college.

1230
01:13:42,900 --> 01:13:53,020
I dropped out my second semester and I'm still in debt because of interest and years of years of not paying, because I don't have the money.

1231
01:13:53,900 --> 01:13:56,760
It's, it's so hard to get out of that.

1232
01:13:57,260 --> 01:14:01,000
And capitalism has a lot to do with it, has everything to do with it.

1233
01:14:01,840 --> 01:14:05,080
So, yeah, we have to find another way.

1234
01:14:05,220 --> 01:14:09,920
We have to, you know, all this democratic socialist shit doesn't make sense to me.

1235
01:14:09,980 --> 01:14:10,960
You can't play defense.

1236
01:14:11,440 --> 01:14:12,900
You gotta be all the way in.

1237
01:14:14,840 --> 01:14:17,160
And that's what we're not in America.

1238
01:14:17,580 --> 01:14:18,840
Privatizing everything too.

1239
01:14:18,940 --> 01:14:22,500
I mean, you spoken openly about how your dad's been in prison most of your life.

1240
01:14:22,620 --> 01:14:28,400
I always come out sometimes and come back in sometimes, but prisons are getting prisons are turning into a business.

1241
01:14:28,700 --> 01:14:33,860
They are, you know, there's couples and regular, ordinary people owning prisons.

1242
01:14:34,040 --> 01:14:36,500
Now it's, it's, it's a sad thing to see.

1243
01:14:36,980 --> 01:14:41,840
A lot of people would say, Hey, look, there's people coming on rafts from Cuba to here.

1244
01:14:42,020 --> 01:14:43,680
No one's going on a raft from here to Cuba.

1245
01:14:44,120 --> 01:14:54,500
Well, I would say America has a lot to do with that because the embargo that they had for 60 years that don't allow resources to get to the country.

1246
01:14:54,640 --> 01:14:57,060
You know, it's not Cuba's fault.

1247
01:14:57,320 --> 01:15:04,160
A lot of people would say, okay, Sweden, you're putting these up there, but then the taxes, you know, the taxes, Chris, you're doubling, tripling people's taxes.

1248
01:15:04,160 --> 01:15:07,300
If you add free, free college, healthcare.

1249
01:15:08,120 --> 01:15:11,380
I mean, like I said, there's always something to fight for.

1250
01:15:12,760 --> 01:15:15,440
It's, it's, it's always something to fight for.

1251
01:15:15,520 --> 01:15:17,020
And we're too complacent here.

1252
01:15:17,660 --> 01:15:19,700
You know, we're too complacent.

1253
01:15:19,800 --> 01:15:21,960
We allow the government and give you food stamps.

1254
01:15:22,060 --> 01:15:28,320
The government gives you, you know, child support are the government bit gives you tax refunds.

1255
01:15:28,320 --> 01:15:31,300
You know, once a year it's breadcrumbs.

1256
01:15:31,940 --> 01:15:46,960
And as a 36 year old man, I can't live my entire life doing the same thing, like going through the same thing, check the check with this stigma over my head every day.

1257
01:15:46,960 --> 01:15:49,040
As I clock in that, I'm going to lose my job.

1258
01:15:49,300 --> 01:15:50,340
There's no job security.

1259
01:15:50,380 --> 01:15:52,740
You don't even know you walk in as your last day.

1260
01:15:55,520 --> 01:15:57,380
So it's insanity really.

1261
01:15:57,900 --> 01:15:59,640
That adds anxiety.

1262
01:15:59,960 --> 01:16:01,400
This is what fuels mental illness.

1263
01:16:01,440 --> 01:16:03,980
Even just on the half an hour truck up from New Jersey.

1264
01:16:04,100 --> 01:16:04,840
I'm driving by it.

1265
01:16:04,940 --> 01:16:09,620
Endless homeless people, you know, people living with homelessness on the way, you know, you see it in the streets.

1266
01:16:09,620 --> 01:16:13,920
Like there's a real, there's some, you know, Gabor Mate, a former guest on our show.

1267
01:16:14,020 --> 01:16:15,300
We'll call it toxic culture.

1268
01:16:15,500 --> 01:16:17,580
We're living in a toxic culture right now.

1269
01:16:18,080 --> 01:16:19,920
Some of the things you're advocating sound radical.

1270
01:16:20,180 --> 01:16:23,660
Bernie Sanders is very famous for saying, you know, they accused me of being a radical.

1271
01:16:23,680 --> 01:16:26,240
I'll tell you what's radical is having billionaires paying for the election.

1272
01:16:26,240 --> 01:16:28,820
You know, he's, he's really, he's really good at kind of turning that around.

1273
01:16:30,320 --> 01:16:31,840
You're rolling your eyes a bit at me.

1274
01:16:33,200 --> 01:16:38,700
I love Bernie, but you know, you got to call bullshit out when it's bullshit.

1275
01:16:39,180 --> 01:16:44,020
First of all, you went to Ireland and said that genocide makes you queasy.

1276
01:16:44,100 --> 01:16:45,100
He fucked up there.

1277
01:16:46,560 --> 01:16:51,300
And then, you know, once again, what's the, what is that?

1278
01:16:51,320 --> 01:16:52,460
Sorry, what happened in Ireland?

1279
01:16:52,900 --> 01:16:55,780
He went to Ireland, spoke at this.

1280
01:16:55,860 --> 01:17:02,240
I think he might've spoke at Trinity college of all places or wherever he spoke at.

1281
01:17:02,320 --> 01:17:03,280
And it doesn't even matter.

1282
01:17:04,260 --> 01:17:09,220
And he went there and he was addressing Gaza and Palestine.

1283
01:17:09,220 --> 01:17:15,440
And he said that he doesn't want to call it a genocide because genocide makes him queasy.

1284
01:17:16,660 --> 01:17:22,900
And then somebody disrupted the speech and they went at him and say, you're a bullshitter.

1285
01:17:22,900 --> 01:17:23,820
And they called him out.

1286
01:17:23,940 --> 01:17:25,760
And I, I loved it.

1287
01:17:25,840 --> 01:17:30,940
Then he did a, a week later, he did an interview in London trying to clarify what he meant.

1288
01:17:31,340 --> 01:17:32,140
It was bullshit.

1289
01:17:32,260 --> 01:17:34,740
He's doing the same shit that AOC do, play defense.

1290
01:17:35,080 --> 01:17:36,260
Oh, I got to clean up everything.

1291
01:17:36,700 --> 01:17:39,120
So I just don't respect that.

1292
01:17:39,380 --> 01:17:40,600
You know, I don't respect that.

1293
01:17:40,680 --> 01:17:47,620
And I don't respect the fact that you continue to call these CEOs in and give them slaps on the wrist.

1294
01:17:47,760 --> 01:17:48,580
What's the point of that?

1295
01:17:49,400 --> 01:17:50,480
You got to help committee.

1296
01:17:51,760 --> 01:17:54,420
You're sitting on the board as the leader of the health committee.

1297
01:17:55,000 --> 01:18:02,020
I asked him to, I tweeted out bringing Andy Jassy over a year ago, over two years ago now, nothing.

1298
01:18:02,980 --> 01:18:05,560
And then I got his people on the side that want to be in my airline.

1299
01:18:05,720 --> 01:18:07,060
Oh, we got your tweet.

1300
01:18:07,640 --> 01:18:08,900
What the fuck does that mean?

1301
01:18:09,760 --> 01:18:10,780
Are you going to do it?

1302
01:18:11,000 --> 01:18:12,680
You asking him to bring in who?

1303
01:18:13,300 --> 01:18:14,600
The CEO of Amazon.

1304
01:18:15,580 --> 01:18:20,660
He brought in Howard Schultz from Starbucks, but they want to bury our history.

1305
01:18:20,840 --> 01:18:24,120
They want to bury the fact that I was ever staying in my union was ever.

1306
01:18:24,520 --> 01:18:28,720
So they've been putting up Starbucks more than Amazon labor union, which is fine.

1307
01:18:29,020 --> 01:18:39,100
But at the same time, we're talking about warehouse workers compared to coffee makers, baristas, what people are dying in our warehouse.

1308
01:18:40,480 --> 01:18:41,920
And I get it.

1309
01:18:41,980 --> 01:18:42,980
They deserve a union.

1310
01:18:43,020 --> 01:18:48,120
The college kids that make coffee, the young adults that make coffee, they deserve their union.

1311
01:18:48,120 --> 01:18:53,520
But we're talking about Amazon workers that was considered the lifeline in the country.

1312
01:18:53,740 --> 01:18:55,680
And you ain't bringing the CEO yet.

1313
01:18:56,360 --> 01:19:00,920
The leading injury in the country over any industry.

1314
01:19:01,320 --> 01:19:02,820
So it doesn't make any sense to me.

1315
01:19:02,900 --> 01:19:05,560
He's just a lot of gaslighting that goes for all of them.

1316
01:19:05,920 --> 01:19:07,300
What advice would you give people?

1317
01:19:07,660 --> 01:19:10,580
Listen, people listen all over the place.

1318
01:19:10,900 --> 01:19:12,380
People call you an activist.

1319
01:19:12,440 --> 01:19:13,540
They call you a revolutionary.

1320
01:19:14,220 --> 01:19:20,380
Well, I just want to tell people that, you know, we deserve better.

1321
01:19:20,540 --> 01:19:22,240
It's very, it's that simple.

1322
01:19:22,860 --> 01:19:23,960
It's that simple.

1323
01:19:24,400 --> 01:19:36,940
Like Malaika said, we have to break up with capitalism and, you know, breakups hurt, but then time heals all, you know, I can tell you from being a divorced man, it don't matter.

1324
01:19:37,100 --> 01:19:42,540
You, whatever you're going through, you can't allow be complacent.

1325
01:19:42,540 --> 01:19:48,960
You can't just think that one day these politicians are going to wake up and say, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to give the people what they want.

1326
01:19:49,520 --> 01:19:50,560
That'll never happen.

1327
01:19:52,240 --> 01:19:54,760
And all of that, you know, we got to vote, vote, vote.

1328
01:19:55,680 --> 01:20:00,180
When you're voting for breadcrumbs, the time you see anything, you'd be dead.

1329
01:20:00,980 --> 01:20:10,600
If you see it at all, any real change, you shouldn't have to go your whole lifetime, working so hard to get some breadcrumbs when they can be done overnight.

1330
01:20:11,120 --> 01:20:16,820
One man, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world can end homelessness right now and still be rich.

1331
01:20:18,560 --> 01:20:19,740
Doesn't make any sense.

1332
01:20:19,800 --> 01:20:21,360
So we got to make it make sense.

1333
01:20:21,940 --> 01:20:24,160
And we got to fight like hell.

1334
01:20:35,570 --> 01:20:37,430
It's just me in my basement again.

1335
01:20:37,610 --> 01:20:44,370
I'm here with my pile of wires, my laptop screen full open, listening back to that conversation with Chris Smalls.

1336
01:20:44,430 --> 01:20:50,450
You know, I didn't really know what to expect flying down there to hang out with him in his backyard.

1337
01:20:51,670 --> 01:21:03,430
All I knew was that through talking to people who worked with Amazon, the people delivering packages to my house, my friend who worked there and didn't work there after a while, it was like, there's just more to the story that we can hear or see.

1338
01:21:03,570 --> 01:21:14,670
And I wanted to get an on the ground peek from the person who organized the first ever Amazon warehouse union in the United States.

1339
01:21:14,670 --> 01:21:15,850
Ever in history.

1340
01:21:16,050 --> 01:21:17,550
Like that's quite a big feat.

1341
01:21:17,690 --> 01:21:20,710
No wonder Bernie Sanders went over there to give a speech when they did that.

1342
01:21:21,130 --> 01:21:30,790
AOC went over to give a big speech, you know, but the flame seems to be, you know, dying down here because Amazon kind of feel it forever.

1343
01:21:31,010 --> 01:21:35,410
You know, years go by money gets used up.

1344
01:21:36,630 --> 01:21:38,530
Turnover stays really high.

1345
01:21:38,710 --> 01:21:41,910
So the people that even voted are probably no longer there.

1346
01:21:41,970 --> 01:21:44,390
I mean, turnovers in the hundreds of percentage points.

1347
01:21:44,710 --> 01:21:46,890
So you're flipping people over all the time.

1348
01:21:47,490 --> 01:21:56,050
The structural setup isn't one that allows people to come together and argue and make claims for rights.

1349
01:21:56,490 --> 01:21:58,870
You know, where do I personally sit on these issues?

1350
01:21:59,030 --> 01:22:00,850
I think it needs to be better than it is now.

1351
01:22:00,950 --> 01:22:03,370
I mean, here's some quotes from Chris that I completely agree with.

1352
01:22:03,570 --> 01:22:12,810
I would love to actually have three days off and four days on a 10 hour shift or an eight hour shift with an hour lunch.

1353
01:22:13,130 --> 01:22:16,050
I mean, when you hear him say that it doesn't sound crazy at all, does it?

1354
01:22:16,450 --> 01:22:16,590
Right.

1355
01:22:17,910 --> 01:22:20,690
When I talk to people that work at Amazon, they say, yeah, it's a 12 hour shift.

1356
01:22:20,830 --> 01:22:23,610
You get two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute lunch.

1357
01:22:24,070 --> 01:22:27,230
So that means you're working 11 out of the 12 hours.

1358
01:22:27,910 --> 01:22:30,710
And the most time you get off is 30 minutes.

1359
01:22:31,690 --> 01:22:33,270
Then think about what the work is.

1360
01:22:33,310 --> 01:22:34,310
Here's another quote from Chris.

1361
01:22:34,450 --> 01:22:35,590
It feels like prison.

1362
01:22:35,930 --> 01:22:36,970
Exactly what it does.

1363
01:22:37,310 --> 01:22:38,070
Solitary confinement.

1364
01:22:38,070 --> 01:22:43,830
You have a station, you have a square cubicle, you're moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours.

1365
01:22:44,090 --> 01:22:48,530
As he describes it, you know, the robots pick the products off of the shelves, they bring it to you.

1366
01:22:48,850 --> 01:22:56,330
The part that humans are currently doing, at least with Chris's information, it may have changed or may already be changing to entirely robotics.

1367
01:22:56,850 --> 01:23:00,990
But you know, it's like they're just taking the products off of the robot and putting it in a box.

1368
01:23:01,050 --> 01:23:06,210
Like that's like a more complicated, you can imagine like a human hand kind of being required.

1369
01:23:06,530 --> 01:23:06,970
Right.

1370
01:23:07,870 --> 01:23:09,970
He had more controversial statements.

1371
01:23:10,110 --> 01:23:12,530
We got billionaires breaking federal law every day.

1372
01:23:12,790 --> 01:23:18,970
Every single day, a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, for discrimination, for bullshit, whatever the case may be.

1373
01:23:19,130 --> 01:23:19,950
Where's the accountability?

1374
01:23:20,430 --> 01:23:22,470
He says, Amazon is modern day slavery.

1375
01:23:22,690 --> 01:23:23,430
That's what it is.

1376
01:23:23,690 --> 01:23:24,050
Fast forward.

1377
01:23:24,250 --> 01:23:27,550
Fast forward is 400 years productivity calling us pickers.

1378
01:23:27,750 --> 01:23:28,650
That's what we're doing.

1379
01:23:28,890 --> 01:23:31,970
We're still continuing the process of slavery with some technology involved.

1380
01:23:32,090 --> 01:23:32,810
Do you agree with that?

1381
01:23:32,890 --> 01:23:33,450
This is me again.

1382
01:23:33,750 --> 01:23:34,510
Do you agree with that?

1383
01:23:34,590 --> 01:23:35,370
You think that's what it is?

1384
01:23:35,370 --> 01:23:40,910
I mentioned this, uh, afterwards to somebody I met later in the day and they were like, well, this is an optional job.

1385
01:23:41,030 --> 01:23:43,530
Like you, you get, you get, you don't have to work there.

1386
01:23:43,630 --> 01:23:45,010
It's not slavery by definition.

1387
01:23:45,010 --> 01:23:46,910
And, and that's true.

1388
01:23:47,350 --> 01:23:57,310
Um, you know, uh, or are there systemic issues that prevent people that have been historically discriminated against from moving beyond poverty?

1389
01:23:57,410 --> 01:24:00,290
Like is, is this kind of the design of the system, right?

1390
01:24:00,310 --> 01:24:02,490
Like that's kind of what he's arguing for.

1391
01:24:02,490 --> 01:24:08,750
And then it gets even loftier when he says, I met the president, I met Kamala, I took away nothing from this conversation.

1392
01:24:09,050 --> 01:24:14,690
Now, remember we recorded this before the election and he was even saying then like, they're not going to vote for Kamala.

1393
01:24:15,290 --> 01:24:38,330
Um, and you know, what we've seen is a dramatic shift in the, uh, us kind of tilting to the right where, as I speak today, as I record this now in December of 2024, you know, all three elected bodies of government in the U S are one Republican or one way Republican.

1394
01:24:38,530 --> 01:24:40,970
So there's no kind of checks and balances, things can just kind of go through.

1395
01:24:41,010 --> 01:24:47,690
Now I'm not here to, um, kind of espouse political views.

1396
01:24:47,690 --> 01:24:49,890
And at the same time, it is politics.

1397
01:24:49,890 --> 01:24:55,170
Like politics is as Ryan Holiday describes it, all the things that we do together, that's what politics is.

1398
01:24:55,170 --> 01:25:05,590
And so when you see situations and, um, kind of setups that just smell foul and seem foul.

1399
01:25:05,770 --> 01:25:18,570
And when you poke under the roof and you find out this kind of Amazon, uh, union process has been dragged on endlessly and probably will get dragged on endlessly still to the point where it's drowned out.

1400
01:25:18,570 --> 01:25:20,430
Like it's not in the news anymore.

1401
01:25:20,610 --> 01:25:21,950
It's not, you don't hear about anymore.

1402
01:25:22,490 --> 01:25:24,390
These are just really bad jobs.

1403
01:25:24,390 --> 01:25:26,430
I was talking to about a buddy of mine who worked at HR at Amazon.

1404
01:25:26,570 --> 01:25:35,150
He's like, you know, they post for 12 week contract jobs because nobody wants to do a six week contract job, but really it's a six week contract job.

1405
01:25:35,570 --> 01:25:42,270
But then we fire everybody after six weeks because, and he's in Canada, my buddy, he's like in Canada, you can fire people after six weeks is 12, 800 job.

1406
01:25:42,630 --> 01:25:43,490
Then there's no liability.

1407
01:25:44,070 --> 01:25:45,190
There's no repercussions.

1408
01:25:45,370 --> 01:25:47,070
So we post them for six weeks.

1409
01:25:47,130 --> 01:25:47,610
Nobody applies.

1410
01:25:47,690 --> 01:25:48,470
We post them for 12 weeks.

1411
01:25:48,530 --> 01:25:50,490
Everybody applies, but we fire everybody after six weeks.

1412
01:25:50,490 --> 01:25:51,830
And we do that over and over again.

1413
01:25:51,830 --> 01:25:56,010
So that over two or three years, you may have worked at Amazon for six weeks, numerous times.

1414
01:25:56,470 --> 01:25:59,590
Then you become temp.

1415
01:26:00,070 --> 01:26:00,250
Okay.

1416
01:26:00,350 --> 01:26:01,990
Then you become part time.

1417
01:26:02,090 --> 01:26:05,710
And he said to me, this is a guy that used to work in HR at Amazon.

1418
01:26:06,110 --> 01:26:22,170
He said the hallways and the posters internally all advertise that when you start at Amazon, you get benefits, you start with benefits, you get orthodontic care, you get, you know, see the dentist, all that stuff.

1419
01:26:22,410 --> 01:26:26,150
But he's like, the dirty little secret is you don't start full time for like five years.

1420
01:26:26,150 --> 01:26:29,870
Cause you have to be like temp fired five times and seasonal.

1421
01:26:30,090 --> 01:26:30,990
And then you're part time.

1422
01:26:30,990 --> 01:26:35,350
And like, we don't hire anyone to be full time until they've gone through all that stuff.

1423
01:26:35,370 --> 01:26:37,050
So it's years and years and years away.

1424
01:26:37,270 --> 01:26:38,810
But meanwhile, the posters are always set.

1425
01:26:38,970 --> 01:26:43,110
This is just one guy, one story, but I can only share what I know to Chris's point.

1426
01:26:43,170 --> 01:26:44,430
I get my news from the people.

1427
01:26:44,510 --> 01:26:46,330
This is some of the news I've got from the people.

1428
01:26:46,330 --> 01:26:51,770
And when you see the Amazon drivers kind of whipping down your street, driving dangerously recklessly, they're on the sidewalks.

1429
01:26:51,770 --> 01:26:52,310
They shouldn't be.

1430
01:26:52,410 --> 01:26:54,150
They're knocking down trees in my neighborhood.

1431
01:26:54,470 --> 01:26:55,030
They shouldn't be.

1432
01:26:55,110 --> 01:26:55,630
And you talk to them.

1433
01:26:55,950 --> 01:26:59,630
These poor guys are telling me I only have seven seconds to deliver a package.

1434
01:27:00,190 --> 01:27:02,210
Like if I don't, I'm going to get fired.

1435
01:27:02,350 --> 01:27:09,910
Like we've just squeezed capitalism to such a high degree that now we can't pause.

1436
01:27:10,070 --> 01:27:13,890
We can't possibly measure all the societal repercussions and ramifications.

1437
01:27:14,170 --> 01:27:16,070
And that's why conversations like this are super important.

1438
01:27:16,070 --> 01:27:30,570
Thank you so much to Chris Smalls for coming on three books and giving us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 583, Fidel Castro, my life by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramona, R-A-M-O-N-E-T.

1439
01:27:30,890 --> 01:27:34,290
Number 582, raising expectations and raising hell.

1440
01:27:34,770 --> 01:27:38,730
My decade fighting for the labor movement by Jane McAlevey.

1441
01:27:39,530 --> 01:27:43,850
He pronounced her name completely different than me, but he knows her and knew her.

1442
01:27:43,990 --> 01:27:45,790
So I'm going to give him the nod.

1443
01:27:46,410 --> 01:27:49,490
McAlevey that's M-C-A-L-E-V-E-Y.

1444
01:27:50,370 --> 01:27:57,450
A really blistering read a little all over the place, but I did read it and it is fascinating to kind of be in the unions.

1445
01:27:57,750 --> 01:28:03,390
So you see, you see how edgy and how raw and how vicious kind of things are on the front lines and the battleground.

1446
01:28:03,550 --> 01:28:07,070
The book opens with like George W.

1447
01:28:07,130 --> 01:28:15,810
Bush versus Al Gore in Florida and like what the unions were doing on the ground and how they were like, it was like real, like, just like, you know, what did Chris say?

1448
01:28:15,950 --> 01:28:17,350
It's like gladiator stuff.

1449
01:28:17,450 --> 01:28:18,070
That's what he said.

1450
01:28:18,410 --> 01:28:22,350
And number 581, it's not you, it's capitalism by Malaika Jabali.

1451
01:28:22,490 --> 01:28:24,010
J-A-B-A-L-I.

1452
01:28:25,010 --> 01:28:26,330
I did read that book as well.

1453
01:28:27,090 --> 01:28:30,630
I don't as strongly recommend it as Chris did is my personal take.

1454
01:28:30,710 --> 01:28:32,390
It was complicated, hard to read.

1455
01:28:32,870 --> 01:28:39,530
I didn't find it kind of, it didn't have a great through line to me.

1456
01:28:39,590 --> 01:28:39,890
Okay.

1457
01:28:39,890 --> 01:28:40,550
That's just my view.

1458
01:28:40,550 --> 01:28:43,190
Cause you guys have been asking me, Hey Neil, can you give us your view?

1459
01:28:43,450 --> 01:28:46,990
But then the other book that Chris wanted to talk about, we kind of touched on it at the beginning.

1460
01:28:47,250 --> 01:28:49,390
It was the autobiography of Malcolm X.

1461
01:28:49,810 --> 01:28:54,390
So that was actually number 926 on our list from Angie Thomas.

1462
01:28:55,190 --> 01:29:04,230
And then we had two other guests mention it so far, including, I'm going to get these right for you guys.

1463
01:29:06,310 --> 01:29:10,070
Humble the poet in chapter 73.

1464
01:29:10,070 --> 01:29:13,330
And somebody else picked that.

1465
01:29:13,430 --> 01:29:14,550
Cause there's two asterisks on it.

1466
01:29:14,630 --> 01:29:17,250
Or do we already asterisk it for Chris Smalls?

1467
01:29:17,390 --> 01:29:20,370
Anyway, Autobiography of Malcolm X, highly recommended.

1468
01:29:20,930 --> 01:29:22,970
Thank you so much to you for listening.

1469
01:29:23,170 --> 01:29:25,470
Thank you so much to Chris Smalls for coming on the show.

1470
01:29:25,650 --> 01:29:27,630
I really appreciate all of you for being here.

1471
01:29:31,160 --> 01:29:31,960
All right.

1472
01:29:32,220 --> 01:29:33,860
Did you make it past the three second pause?

1473
01:29:34,660 --> 01:29:37,800
If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.

1474
01:29:37,840 --> 01:29:40,380
This is one of three clubs that we have for three bookers out there.

1475
01:29:40,380 --> 01:29:42,900
And of the podcast club are people that hang out at the end of the show.

1476
01:29:42,980 --> 01:29:44,760
We play your voicemails, read your more letters.

1477
01:29:44,900 --> 01:29:46,680
We hang out, we talk about a word of the chapter.

1478
01:29:47,180 --> 01:29:53,380
And there's also the cover to cover club, people listening to every single chapter of the show, all 333, like me from my thirties to my sixties.

1479
01:29:53,480 --> 01:29:54,360
Let me know, drop me a line.

1480
01:29:54,380 --> 01:29:55,620
I'll add you to the FAQ.

1481
01:29:56,360 --> 01:29:59,600
And of course there is the secret club, which I can't say more about.

1482
01:30:00,060 --> 01:30:01,400
Although then you can listen for clues.

1483
01:30:01,480 --> 01:30:06,560
The number one way to find a clue for the secret club is to call our phone number, which is 1 8 3 3 read a lot.

1484
01:30:06,680 --> 01:30:11,680
And with that, as we always do, let's kick off the end of the podcast club by going to the phones.

1485
01:30:14,320 --> 01:30:15,220
Hi Neal.

1486
01:30:15,340 --> 01:30:16,120
This is Claire.

1487
01:30:16,200 --> 01:30:17,560
I'm calling from Nova Scotia.

1488
01:30:17,840 --> 01:30:23,560
I started listening to your podcast years ago when you first began and I was doing a lot of driving then.

1489
01:30:23,640 --> 01:30:24,580
So it was all the time.

1490
01:30:24,600 --> 01:30:28,080
And then I kind of forgot about it for up until now.

1491
01:30:28,160 --> 01:30:38,500
And was on another road trip and picked up where you have now left off, listening to some of the most influential, wonderful, people that I love to read.

1492
01:30:38,800 --> 01:30:40,600
Maria Popova, David Eggers.

1493
01:30:41,040 --> 01:30:42,120
Holy smokes.

1494
01:30:42,600 --> 01:30:47,540
Um, so congrats, uh, at how it's grown and how you've maintained it ad free.

1495
01:30:47,640 --> 01:30:51,120
Thank you so much for what you're doing for the book world and book lovers.

1496
01:30:51,340 --> 01:30:52,960
What a cool, special thing.

1497
01:30:53,180 --> 01:30:55,380
And, um, Oh, I gotta go.

1498
01:30:55,560 --> 01:30:56,520
I just got a paper cut.

1499
01:30:57,000 --> 01:30:57,320
Okay.

1500
01:30:57,400 --> 01:30:57,560
Bye.

1501
01:30:57,580 --> 01:30:57,700
Bye.

1502
01:30:59,440 --> 01:31:00,620
That's a great voicemail.

1503
01:31:00,680 --> 01:31:03,120
Thank you so much, Claire from Nova Scotia.

1504
01:31:03,180 --> 01:31:05,400
First of all, shout out to the comeback listeners.

1505
01:31:06,040 --> 01:31:07,100
I'm a comebacker.

1506
01:31:07,320 --> 01:31:11,860
Like I listened to the Tim Ferriss podcast when it first came out in 2013, 2014.

1507
01:31:13,020 --> 01:31:15,480
And then of course I abandoned it because there's other podcasts.

1508
01:31:16,020 --> 01:31:17,480
And then I occasionally come back to it.

1509
01:31:17,520 --> 01:31:20,180
I think the comeback, listen, I'm going to be here.

1510
01:31:20,320 --> 01:31:21,300
I'm not going anywhere.

1511
01:31:21,780 --> 01:31:22,120
Full moons.

1512
01:31:22,220 --> 01:31:22,660
Keep coming.

1513
01:31:23,020 --> 01:31:23,900
I keep coming too.

1514
01:31:24,260 --> 01:31:25,220
So it's perfect.

1515
01:31:25,320 --> 01:31:27,060
Come back, re reengage.

1516
01:31:27,260 --> 01:31:27,740
It's wonderful.

1517
01:31:27,740 --> 01:31:29,500
And then when you come back, it's kind of fun.

1518
01:31:29,500 --> 01:31:34,320
I think to go to three books.co slash, um, guests.

1519
01:31:34,320 --> 01:31:35,880
That's why I set up because that's gas.

1520
01:31:36,280 --> 01:31:37,260
So you can see, Oh yeah.

1521
01:31:37,300 --> 01:31:38,240
Who's he talked to lately?

1522
01:31:38,600 --> 01:31:40,820
Chapter 81 is with Dave Eggers.

1523
01:31:41,020 --> 01:31:43,600
Chapter at one 38 is with Maria Popova.

1524
01:31:44,240 --> 01:31:52,460
And you know, if you'd like Dave Eggers and Maria Popova, artistic cerebral, well, it's kind of in that worldview.

1525
01:31:52,760 --> 01:31:55,420
I highly recommend the one to one 23, Susie Batisse.

1526
01:31:56,320 --> 01:31:57,860
I think, I think you got to listen to that one.

1527
01:31:57,880 --> 01:32:03,800
That was, that's if you're interested, Mohsin Hamid, man, the way that guy kind of took us into Pakistan was wonderful.

1528
01:32:03,800 --> 01:32:04,540
Chapter 108.

1529
01:32:04,780 --> 01:32:07,300
Anyway, um, never get high off your own supply.

1530
01:32:07,660 --> 01:32:09,060
Uh, really appreciate that.

1531
01:32:09,120 --> 01:32:11,780
And thank you for the shadows of the secret club there at the end.

1532
01:32:11,820 --> 01:32:12,500
All right.

1533
01:32:12,580 --> 01:32:15,140
And now, you know, it's kind of like, do we do another letter?

1534
01:32:15,180 --> 01:32:16,000
Cause we did a lot at the beginning.

1535
01:32:16,000 --> 01:32:16,920
I think we do.

1536
01:32:17,180 --> 01:32:18,120
I think we do another letter.

1537
01:32:18,220 --> 01:32:18,940
It's a different letter.

1538
01:32:19,140 --> 01:32:19,980
It's a different letter.

1539
01:32:20,200 --> 01:32:21,760
It's not about the other letter.

1540
01:32:22,100 --> 01:32:23,080
It's about a different thing.

1541
01:32:23,080 --> 01:32:23,420
Okay.

1542
01:32:23,620 --> 01:32:25,720
So let's see here.

1543
01:32:25,760 --> 01:32:27,780
Let's grab, you know, let's grab a YouTube comment.

1544
01:32:28,420 --> 01:32:32,260
Cause you know, uh, two chapters ago, we talked to Amy Einhorn.

1545
01:32:32,260 --> 01:32:34,800
That was chapter 140, actually three chapters ago.

1546
01:32:35,460 --> 01:32:40,760
Uh, the editor for the book of awesome, as well as a lot of books like the help and big little lies.

1547
01:32:41,040 --> 01:32:49,780
And there was a comment and it came from Zuby and Zuby says, I don't share Philip Ross ideas of the death of the novel.

1548
01:32:50,000 --> 01:32:52,120
Social media hasn't replaced the book.

1549
01:32:52,200 --> 01:33:00,020
It's opened up whole fields of book culture on TikTok, Goodreads, YouTube, Instagram, catering to millions.

1550
01:33:00,020 --> 01:33:06,640
There is something about the form and nature of reading, which I think is perennial, intimate, insular, and original.

1551
01:33:07,500 --> 01:33:09,000
And I replied, I agree.

1552
01:33:09,140 --> 01:33:09,900
And I hope you're right.

1553
01:33:09,960 --> 01:33:10,280
Zuby.

1554
01:33:10,620 --> 01:33:11,540
Yeah, that's nice.

1555
01:33:11,680 --> 01:33:13,380
You know, Philip Roth talks about the death of novel.

1556
01:33:13,460 --> 01:33:29,000
And I think it was Yohan Hari, which, uh, back in chapter one 21, he said like, you know, reading literature is going to go the way of people who are interested in volleyball or people who go to the opera.

1557
01:33:29,000 --> 01:33:30,660
It'll be like a smaller, smaller subset.

1558
01:33:30,800 --> 01:33:32,000
And you do hear about this happening.

1559
01:33:32,140 --> 01:33:35,240
It's like, okay, automatic self-driving cars are coming.

1560
01:33:35,380 --> 01:33:38,280
Well, what's going to happen to people who like driving cars, but they're going to people.

1561
01:33:38,420 --> 01:33:40,320
They're going to become people who like driving horses.

1562
01:33:40,720 --> 01:33:43,240
They're going to go to like the driving track.

1563
01:33:43,320 --> 01:33:44,560
Instead of the horse track, they're good.

1564
01:33:44,820 --> 01:33:47,920
So that's kind of like one view.

1565
01:33:48,260 --> 01:33:55,700
But then the other view, I think espoused by James Daunt chapter 141, is that like books are in a very good place.

1566
01:33:55,880 --> 01:33:57,380
There's more people reading than ever before.

1567
01:33:57,380 --> 01:33:59,480
We've got lines of 400 people at new Barnes and Nobles.

1568
01:33:59,640 --> 01:34:04,540
And like, you know, some of this young fantasy and young adult stuff, it's like really helping breeding take off.

1569
01:34:05,080 --> 01:34:07,500
And books are the antidote to screen culture.

1570
01:34:07,720 --> 01:34:10,160
They're the opposite of endless scrolling.

1571
01:34:10,520 --> 01:34:15,620
They provide like safety, sanctity, intimacy, emotional connection.

1572
01:34:15,880 --> 01:34:25,420
You, you, you find out what hope is and what life feels like you, you live other lives and nothing can replace the experience of being inside someone's mind through a book.

1573
01:34:26,700 --> 01:34:28,500
So which side do you net at on?

1574
01:34:28,640 --> 01:34:31,140
Well, we're going to remain book optimists here.

1575
01:34:31,460 --> 01:34:36,980
We're going to constantly question and examine our relationship with books because that's part of what we do, but we're book optimists.

1576
01:34:37,120 --> 01:34:37,800
We buy books a lot.

1577
01:34:37,880 --> 01:34:38,540
We read books a lot.

1578
01:34:38,580 --> 01:34:39,580
We take books out of the library.

1579
01:34:39,760 --> 01:34:40,380
We share them.

1580
01:34:40,460 --> 01:34:40,840
We swap them.

1581
01:34:40,900 --> 01:34:41,340
We highlight them.

1582
01:34:41,360 --> 01:34:41,860
We cover them.

1583
01:34:42,140 --> 01:34:42,980
I got a book club.

1584
01:34:43,060 --> 01:34:52,240
If you aren't on it yet, Neil's monthly book club at the end of every month, last Saturday morning of every month, I send out a list of every single book I've loved and read over the past month.

1585
01:34:52,320 --> 01:34:52,940
That's all it is.

1586
01:34:52,940 --> 01:34:54,900
It's just a list of books I've read over the last month.

1587
01:34:55,240 --> 01:34:58,080
And in December, I do my very best books I've read all year.

1588
01:34:58,400 --> 01:35:03,080
So if you haven't read that, go to neil.blog. You can read the best books I've read in 2024.

1589
01:35:04,020 --> 01:35:06,400
So yes, thank you for the letter.

1590
01:35:06,560 --> 01:35:18,040
All right, now let's head back to the backyard in Hackensack, New Jersey, and let's pick up a word of the chapter from Chris Smalls directly.

1591
01:35:19,660 --> 01:35:22,040
It feels like prison, solitary confinement.

1592
01:35:22,040 --> 01:35:24,560
We all got radicalized at some point.

1593
01:35:24,840 --> 01:35:27,020
He gets fired in this country for retaliation.

1594
01:35:27,760 --> 01:35:28,400
Where's the monopoly?

1595
01:35:28,940 --> 01:35:30,200
Where's the antitrust?

1596
01:35:30,240 --> 01:35:32,140
My crossing guard with snitch on me.

1597
01:35:32,540 --> 01:35:34,000
I've been at all of these encampments.

1598
01:35:34,360 --> 01:35:36,580
It's the embargo that they had for 60 years.

1599
01:35:37,160 --> 01:35:38,520
You can't be complacent.

1600
01:35:39,140 --> 01:35:42,640
So many good and interesting words said there.

1601
01:35:42,700 --> 01:35:47,480
I was actually going to go with snitch, but unfortunately the word is of unknown origin.

1602
01:35:47,520 --> 01:35:50,660
So we can't really talk about the origin of a word that has unknown origin.

1603
01:35:50,660 --> 01:35:52,900
Why don't we go with monopoly?

1604
01:35:55,760 --> 01:36:05,260
M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y, a noun, which according to Merriam-Webster means exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action.

1605
01:36:05,780 --> 01:36:06,340
Right?

1606
01:36:06,840 --> 01:36:07,340
All right.

1607
01:36:08,360 --> 01:36:17,660
We know what that word means, but mono, as you may know, means one, right?

1608
01:36:18,320 --> 01:36:20,000
Single, right?

1609
01:36:20,420 --> 01:36:21,300
Mono, culture.

1610
01:36:21,720 --> 01:36:23,780
We hear mono in lots of places.

1611
01:36:24,400 --> 01:36:33,400
But what you didn't know, or what I didn't know, I should say, not what you didn't know, what I didn't know is that polin, P-O-L-E-I-N, is from the ancient Greek word for sell.

1612
01:36:33,960 --> 01:36:38,660
So monopoly means single sell, S-E-L-L, not C-E-L-L.

1613
01:36:39,020 --> 01:36:40,660
So single selling is monopoly.

1614
01:36:40,840 --> 01:36:45,580
It's a Greek word, which means from the mid 16th century all the way up is you have a monopoly.

1615
01:36:45,580 --> 01:36:56,440
We're talking about, because it's kind of what Amazon has in certain things, and I remember the day and age when Amazon used to kind of have like low prices on all the back catalog of books.

1616
01:36:56,760 --> 01:37:03,880
And then like literally overnight one day when the stock was kind of like, you know, they'd always reported like, break even, break even, break even.

1617
01:37:03,980 --> 01:37:13,820
But then you remember seeing it, like all the back lists of books kind of went up in price, and then they started reporting a profit, and then there wasn't really many people to compete with them.

1618
01:37:14,320 --> 01:37:19,020
Google has recently been declared a monopoly.

1619
01:37:19,480 --> 01:37:25,220
And so the antitrust commissions are now saying that Google has to sell Chrome because they have a monopoly on search.

1620
01:37:25,800 --> 01:37:28,320
Competition is healthy for customers.

1621
01:37:28,540 --> 01:37:31,440
Monopoly is unhealthy for customers because it leads to price gouging.

1622
01:37:31,520 --> 01:37:37,980
You remember that story about the guy who bought like the AIDS medication and then like changed the price up by like 10,000%?

1623
01:37:38,240 --> 01:37:40,560
Because of course it was the only place to get the medication.

1624
01:37:40,920 --> 01:37:41,880
How do we fight this?

1625
01:37:41,940 --> 01:37:42,940
We have conversations.

1626
01:37:42,940 --> 01:37:44,240
We become aware.

1627
01:37:44,440 --> 01:37:48,020
We send notes and letters to our MPs and our representatives.

1628
01:37:48,440 --> 01:37:52,220
We kind of stay engaged, stay informed, stay connected.

1629
01:37:52,500 --> 01:37:54,260
And Chris Smalls has really helped us stay connected.

1630
01:37:54,400 --> 01:38:16,540
I want to keep staying connected with him, with the movement, with what he's working for in solidarity, which is better working conditions, safer working conditions, windows in the warehouses, longer breaks, less strenuous back-breaking practices that create healthy and happy employees and healthy and happy communities for all of us to live in.

1631
01:38:16,940 --> 01:38:24,000
And, fingers crossed, healthcare for all from your avid Canadian healthcare person.

1632
01:38:24,460 --> 01:38:24,820
All right.

1633
01:38:25,260 --> 01:38:28,560
Thank you all so much for hanging out this whole year.

1634
01:38:29,260 --> 01:38:30,060
Stick around.

1635
01:38:30,700 --> 01:38:32,380
We're on the solstice.

1636
01:38:32,460 --> 01:38:34,260
We're going to put out our annual Best Of.

1637
01:38:34,320 --> 01:38:36,540
That'll be our seventh Best Of ever.

1638
01:38:37,200 --> 01:38:38,680
Stick around for our Best Of.

1639
01:38:38,740 --> 01:38:40,000
Have a wonderful holiday.

1640
01:38:40,000 --> 01:38:45,040
Until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read.

1641
01:38:45,300 --> 01:38:48,900
Keep turning the page, everybody, and I'll see you in 2025.

1642
01:38:49,560 --> 01:38:49,940
Take care.