Yeah, because it feels like prison.
It's exactly what it does.
Solitary confinement.
You had a station.
You had a square cubicle station moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours.
Slave wages, slaving conditions leads to injuries and death.
And that's exactly why they're the number one in their country for injuries.
You got billionaires breaking federal law every day.
Every single day a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, our discrimination, our fight for bullshit.
Whatever the case may be, every day.
Where's your accountability?
Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha.
Welcome or welcome back to chapter 143.
43, 43 of 3 Books.
Yes, you are listening to our epic 22-year-long quest to uncover and discuss the 1,000 most formative books in the world.
We are so pleased, proud, and excited to have Chris Smalls on the show today.
If you want to skip ahead straight to the conversation, no problem.
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.
We talk about a value of the show.
At the end, we have an after party where I play your phone calls.
We just hang out.
It's a vibe here.
It's a community here.
We call ourselves three bookers.
We've got three different clubs, as you know.
I can talk about more of those at the end of the show, but I always kick it off with a review.
I read every single review you leave on YouTube, on Apple, on Spotify, and I read one.
If I read yours, drop me a line, send me your address, I will be sending you a free signed book.
All right.
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.
So many good moments.
I appreciate the attention to detail, no commercials, and the delight in reading.
I love the story about writing itself, the amount of details that Jon puts into his choice of words.
Both of your mutual love of books and the thoughtful conversation between two intellectuals who appreciate each other.
Thank you very much, Arnie Goldman.
I appreciate being called an intellectual.
I don't know, that's a high bar.
That's a high bar, but I know what you mean about the pausing before word selection.
Brené Brown, our guest in Chapter 70, does that really well, too.
There's just this dramatic pause, and then they kind of always come out with that perfect word choice.
Jonathan Franzen and Brené Brown, two of the best, two of the best.
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.
There is joy in perfect word choice.
Absolutely.
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.
One of the values that we haven't spoken about much is wallet, phone, keys, book.
That's the whole value.
Just those four words.
Wallet, phone, keys, book.
I actually got this on an article written by Ryan Holiday.
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.
He carries a book everywhere.
He just folds the top corner.
He's like, I read a page in line at the coffee shop.
I read two pages in line at the coffee shop.
Whatever.
If you're listening to audiobooks, you can kind of do this easily.
It's so easy to turn to your phone and scroll.
That's the tendency.
That's what the algorithms want.
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.
I remember I was on page 74 earlier today.
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.
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.
A little bit of background here.
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.
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.
It's a giant, massive, biggest company in the universe, but have you ever talked to anybody who worked there?
Have you ever spoken to anybody who worked there?
I have a bunch of times.
A friend of mine used to run HR at a warehouse at Amazon.
He said it was a terrible job.
He said it was honestly hard for him because all the directives came from algorithms.
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.
Well, of course they were all late because there was a giant snowstorm.
It doesn't matter.
The ship punishes you either way.
He didn't find it a good culture fit.
He left pretty early, but I've talked to other people that work in the warehouses.
I've talked to the guys delivering packages to my door.
One day, a truck drove down my street, and like nailed a 50-year-old cherry tree, like crunched the side of the tree.
A huge limb fell off.
The driver jumps back in his car, screeches down the street, tosses the branch off at the park, and flies off.
Of course, the guy had just delivered an Amazon package on my neighbor's porch.
I saw him.
The neighbor saw him.
The dog walker saw him.
Why'd he flee?
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.
Unlike UPS, where you could say, ah, there is a guy that delivered a UPS truck and broke this tree.
You can't do that.
As freelance contractors, often, they have seven seconds.
They're flying around the streets like super dangerously, parking on the sidewalks.
By the way, City of Toronto came to inspect the tree.
It's completely dead, and there's no recourse, no accountability.
I don't necessarily blame the people that work there.
It's a tough company to work for.
With efficiency and productivity cranked up to the nines, customers are delighted and happy with the expediency which they get their package.
But what's going on on the human side of the story, kind of behind the warehouse walls?
What's going on?
I want to know.
And I've been following the story for a while about this guy named Chris Smalls.
S-M-A-L-L-S.
Have you heard his name before?
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.
They were all close together.
They didn't have masks.
They didn't have PPE.
So he was protesting that.
He was immediately fired.
What he told me is that we all get radicalized at some point in our lives.
My life changed forever the day I got fired from Amazon.
Chris used that motivation to work with his former colleagues to try and unionize the warehouse on Staten Island.
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.
And what are they asking for?
Well, maybe, like, breaks longer than 15 minutes, you know, shifts shorter than 12 hours.
Like, they're asking for, like, reasonable, humane conditions, is my understanding of the stuff I'm reading.
But Amazon has not come to the bargaining table.
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.
So they're pursuing legal action against the National Labor Review Board as we speak right now in 2024.
Two and a half years later, they still have not recognized the union, even though the union has been formed.
This you could kind of attribute to potentially labor laws at the highest levels in the country, in the world.
But what is going on?
I gotta know what's happening here.
If I fly down to Hackensack, New Jersey, I spend a hot September day in Chris's brother's backyard.
He isn't keeping a place now because he's traveling a lot.
He's got his sunglasses on, his jacket.
I'm gonna post some pictures on the blog post.
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.
Chris calls bullshit on a lot of stuff.
A lot of what we hear in mainstream media about labor organizing.
He reports on what people in the streets are saying.
What's going on as the pitchforks are getting sharpened these days?
What can we learn from communist and socialist countries?
Why is the U.S. government reluctant to enforce antitrust regulations?
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?
We are having a massive disruption in our labor workforce.
What does that look like on the ground level?
Join Chris and me in his backyard.
Sit with us in the white plastic chairs.
The air is going to be sticky from smoke from Chris's joints.
We're going to talk about how working at Amazon is, in Chris's words, like slavery fast forwarded 400 years into the future.
What's going to happen with jobs as automation grows?
Whether unions can still be effective today?
What political parties represent the working class?
And of course, Chris Small's three most formative books.
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.
We are going down to New Jersey, everybody.
Let's flip the page into chapter 143 now.
You know, my life changed forever when I got fired from Amazon.
And one day I went from having a job to not having a job that I had for five years.
And once again, I'm 30 years old.
So it's a different feeling, especially during the pandemic when you don't have no other option.
So you had no choice but to fight.
You also told me that Malcolm X was a big inspiration to you.
You wanted to put the autobiography of Malcolm X.
I told you Angie Thomas picked Humble the Poet and to pick something else.
I feel like there's an element of him and you, like just like just how you're living.
Like that book opens with the Ku Klux Klan circling his house when he was a kid growing up, you know, on horseback.
Like if that's like the opening scene.
Being demonized, you know, being surveilled, it's not meant for everybody.
And that's what people don't understand.
They think because I make it look easy, I make it look cool.
That shit is sweet, but this is very dangerous.
Very.
I go to impoverished neighborhoods.
I go to autonomous neighborhoods.
I go to third world countries.
You know, I'm going with people that are struggling, struggling.
So it's it's more dangerous than I make it seem.
What are the dangers?
And once again, when I was organizing Amazon, I was living in Newark, New Jersey.
For those who know, Newark, New Jersey is like murder capital.
Life expectancy for a black man is 25.
Get shot every day.
There was a shootout in front of my house.
Pretty much every other week.
I lived in the South Ward while I was organizing Amazon.
I could have died, killed many times.
And I don't want my kids to ever have to experience that.
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.
And that's a huge burden to have to be fighting for everybody else when everybody's fighting against each other, you know.
So Malcolm, what was Malcolm X's movement called?
How does it live today?
And what do you want?
The Malcolm X movement?
Yeah, like, is it what's his?
He was connected with the Black Panthers at one point.
Yeah, I mean, he when he when he came up here.
And I mean, like to Harlem and the New York area, New Jersey as well.
He really started to like build relationships with the community, with the Black community.
And that helped, I think, shaped out what his vision of what society should look like.
And yeah, you know, we all got radicalized at some point in time in my life.
So it was good to see that I had similar things that happened.
Like it happened to me pretty quick.
So that was, you know.
That's the similarities I consider with Malcolm X's.
He felt that his his options in society have ran thin.
He learned his roots.
He learned his culture.
And, you know, he got completely indulged in it and embraced it.
And that's what I had to do at some point.
I had to embrace what was happening to me so that I could continue to, you know, continue to fight.
Otherwise, once again, it ain't meant for everybody.
Talk to me about the surveillance.
First of all, what do you mean when you say surveillance?
Yeah, I mean, when I was fired, there was definitely Black unmarked cars following me at the time coming to my house.
In Newark at the time where Malcolm X also was very fond of.
And also, we had a protest in front of the building.
And, you know, my camera people, they picked up Black cars following me on the way out.
Camera people?
Yeah, we were shooting the film, the documentary at the time.
So they have footage of the Black cars that were following me that day.
And, yeah, there's every protest I've done in front of Jeff Bezos' house, he hires the entire police department.
They surround us every time.
The whole police department?
Like, the whole city's police department?
Forty cops will be there waiting for us by the time we show up.
They watch my social media.
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.
And how long?
They'll stay there while I'm protesting the entire time.
Okay.
But you still are allowed to do your protests?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, we do them, yeah.
Yeah.
What do you say?
Well, yeah, we've done a number of things for COVID safety.
We've done things for the union, Labor Day, May Day, International Workers' Day.
We do all these protests for a number of reasons.
For Poushawn Brown, the worker who died in the warehouse.
There's so many different reasons why we protest in front of his house.
We still do it.
You know, we were just there a few months ago, two months ago, in D.C., at his mansion in D.C., so.
How many people are there?
Oh, it could be hundreds, could be thousands.
You know, I've been in front of small crowds.
What was the last one?
D.C.? 2024?
Oh, no, no.
The last big crowd was London, about a quarter million.
That was the largest crowd I ever spoke to.
And what do you say?
There or in front of his house?
What do you tell people?
What's your view?
Jeff Bezos is tied into everything, every struggle, even the Palestinian struggle, you know?
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.
So, Amazon is directly funding genocide right now.
They're surveilling with the AWS services.
They are invested into Israel's government.
And yeah, they're running their system.
How do you know that?
Oh, it's public.
Where is it public?
Articles.
You can read them up.
Okay, so that's happening.
And then what else do you say at the protest in front of Jeff Bezos' house?
What else are you asking for?
Oh, the bargain with the union.
Of course, that's the number one priority.
Bargaining with the union come to the table.
Do they have to come to the table by any specific time?
Yeah.
When?
With this now slow process in America, it could take anywhere between one to four years.
So, when do they have to come to the table?
Four years?
If it works its way through the appeals court?
If it gets to the Supreme Court.
Okay.
Which is a might because it just got lost in the state court or whatever, right?
Federal.
Federal, okay.
Where does the message go from here?
Oh, we got to get a contract.
That's the number one thing.
We won.
We won our contract.
So, I want to make sure that happens.
That's my number one mission besides everything else.
$30 starting salary.
Starting wage.
Job security.
Better medical leave.
When you say job security, what do you mean?
You can't get fired?
There's a process.
Due process.
Oh, so it's not like just you're out?
Yeah, there's not no text message.
There's not no email.
There's an arbitration with the union.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right, right.
You can say your side of the story.
There's union representation.
The Weingarten right.
Right, right, right.
There's representation.
And then what do you want in terms of sick leave and holidays and all that stuff?
We want it.
We don't have none.
You don't have any holidays?
We have nine.
We have eight holidays that are paid.
One is missing.
That's Juneteenth.
Then we have on sick time.
Eight's not that many.
In Canada, we have like 12 or 13.
Yeah, probably.
You're right.
They don't recognize certain holidays.
We get two days on Easter.
We get family day in February.
Yeah.
We got Christmas and Boxing Day.
Day after.
New Year's Day.
They don't care about none of that.
So we don't have Halloween yet, though.
We're trying to get Halloween like official.
Well, that's the beauty of arguing something like that.
That might be small, but it's actually it matters.
So for for Americans, yeah, we settle for breadcrumbs.
We get eight eight at Amazon.
And once again, they fail to recognize Juneteenth, which has been declared as a federal holiday.
So it doesn't make any sense.
You know, they continue to play in our face.
OK, so you want you want more holidays and how much vacation do you get?
I don't want I want just more.
I want more paid time off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It should be at least 12 days, 13 days.
I mean, that's just getting up to Canada.
We're not even close to Europe.
All right.
You know, these workers deserve that vacation time.
They don't.
We got a new CEO at Walmart from England named Dave Cheesewright.
He was actually our guest on an earlier chapter of the show, 96.
And when he came over from England, he got to the Walmart canned office.
He's like, there's no windows in here.
Everyone's like, yeah, we don't have any windows.
He's like, make some windows.
So he punctured all these holes in the building and the people were so grateful to him because he gave them light.
And he said, oh, well, you got to give people light in like Europe.
You have to.
Yeah, because it's
Just giving people light. Is there windows on the factories?
No, there's only windows in the break area.
You need windows, right?
Yeah, because it feels like prison.
Exactly what it does.
Solitary confinement.
You had a station, you had a square cubicle station moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours.
And then you're not.
Then you have to commute.
Are you allowed to listen to podcasts?
That just now started to happen.
But all the other years, no.
You weren't allowed to.
Are they letting people listen to podcasts now?
I believe so.
They're starting to enroll some.
Oh, that's good.
There's been enough complaints.
Yeah.
Otherwise you go crazy.
It's like, it is like solitary.
Yeah, it's been, it's been crazy.
It's been crazy.
How many people work at Amazon?
A million and a half, I believe.
How many are on your team?
Whatever you call it.
ALU, IBT is almost 8,000.
Okay, so how do you get the other million then on your team?
The Teamsters.
Ah, you're going through the Teamsters.
Not only that, I'm going through the relationships we already established and the relationships I continue to build.
Who does the Teamsters represent?
The Amazon division that they have in California.
Oh, they have a union at Amazon.
No, no, no.
They have a division that's fighting for.
I mean, who else do they represent?
UPS.
On the street.
Oh, they represent UPS.
Yeah.
Oh, that's good.
So UPS, what's the starting wage?
I'm not sure.
Maybe 20, 25.
Yeah, you know what?
David Sedaris always says, I want to work for UPS because they have respectable uniforms.
Just starting with that.
Well, yeah.
I mean, they have a union that fought for a better contract.
And they threatened them with a strike.
That just happened.
And they're going up to $40 an hour.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, that's big.
Who else do they represent?
Teamsters, actors, everything.
Oh, actors.
Yeah, they got certain times with actors and every industry, pretty much.
They have a little bit of everything.
Actors have the most power.
Truck drivers, a lot of truck drivers.
But yeah, they're pretty militant.
Truck drivers are kind of, isn't that job going away soon?
Like completely?
What are they going to do?
They all are.
And they do the Amazon.
Amazon is taking away jobs from that, too.
That's why they're starting up these little DSPs or third party dispatchers.
What are they asking for for minimum wage?
I don't have to say that.
It's more of what the workers say.
What I do is, I say my piece, but I let the workers speak.
I see.
That's smart.
That's the best part.
That's smart, because you're not a worker anymore.
No.
You were a former worker.
No.
So most of these demonstrations will be bringing Amazon workers up.
Yeah, yeah.
Or a big politician.
You've had Bernie Sanders.
You've had AOC.
Only one time.
You had.
Yeah, they came once, but we've done hundreds.
Yeah.
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.
CNN.
I'll check Fox News.
I'll check.
Where are you reading your news?
I don't read the news.
I would never read that shit.
Because, you know, I knew what they expect with the New York media.
They love you today, hate you tomorrow.
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.
Who wrote what?
One of their journalists.
You know, they wrote nasty articles about us.
And he got assigned to us after a former journalist that was, you know, at the time.
What paper is this with?
The New York Times.
Oh, New York Times.
You had some negative coverage there.
Yeah, not just them, but they're the leading factor.
It's like, you know, everybody copycats.
But where do you get your news then?
Are you on like secret 4chan channels?
Nah, fuck all of that.
Social media is the same.
Isn't that even worse with the algorithms?
Like, it can feed you a total different echo chamber.
I get my news from the people.
If people tell me what's going on, I know what's going on.
I don't have to watch the news.
And that's the beauty of it.
It's like, I don't need to watch the news because somebody already told me or I'm actually there.
One of the two.
By the time people hear it on the news, I'm already there.
The protests in D.C., I was there.
You know, I don't speak at every event.
Sometimes I just show up to support.
Like yesterday, I wasn't supposed to speak at the Labor Day.
I just showed up to support.
Come to find out the leader of the whole thing.
I spoke at her commencement speech.
She recognized me in the crowd.
So it wasn't even over who I am.
You were called up on stage to speak?
Yeah.
What'd you say?
At the Labor Day 2024, 10,000 people rally.
You get up on stage, what do you say?
How long you talk for?
A few minutes.
And what was your message?
It was basically that, you know, as a union leader, unions have to be out here with the people.
Not at parades in Brooklyn, the West Indian Parade with politicians that don't have the same message as ceasefire.
You can't talk out of both sides.
You're not supporting the Democrats and supporting the ceasefire if they're still funding genocide.
So we can't do that.
And also that, you know, we got a free Palestine.
So it's very simple.
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.
If they want change, they have to do things differently.
They can't continue to vote for Democrats and we're not seeing no real change.
The Green Party been around decades.
They've been around.
So people got to see through the bullshit and wake up.
There's something else sinister going on here.
There's something.
Kamala Harris wasn't nominated.
She was appointed.
People don't understand that.
They're like, we live in a democracy.
No, we don't.
She got appointed after Joe Biden stepped down.
We didn't have a choice in that.
So what are people talking about?
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, Ralph Nader was on this podcast.
He was saying the mainstream media fall for this trick every time by believing that there's a two party system.
They create one, you know?
Yeah.
Like they create it, you know, whereas he has an independent candidate.
He can't get on the debate stages.
He can't get on to represent his policies about like his whole thing was health and safety, health and safety environment.
Why do you think I haven't been invited back to Congress?
Because what they saw that day, it was like, oh shit.
And real people, you know, my video went crazy viral against Lindsey Graham.
And real people see this.
What'd you say on Lindsey Graham?
That we are the ones, the workers are the ones who make these corporations who they are.
And it's not a left or a right thing.
It's a worker thing.
Hey guys, it's just Neil in my basement here.
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.
And then the mic got switched over to Chris Smalls, who was testifying there.
He's wearing his Yankees cap.
He's wearing a red vinyl jacket.
He's got big diamond earrings in both ears.
It cuts over to him, and I think I want you to hear what he says.
Well, first of all, I want to address Mr. Graham.
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.
And that we're not protected.
The process for when we hold these companies accountable is not working for us.
And that's not what, that's the reason why we're here today.
That's the reason why I'm here, to represent the workers who make these companies go.
And I think that it's in your best interest to realize that it's not a left or right thing.
It's not a Democrat or Republican thing.
It's a worker's thing.
It's a worker's issue.
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.
So that's the reason why I think I was invited today to speak on that behalf.
And you should listen because we do represent your constituents as well.
So just take that into consideration that the people are the ones that make these corporations go.
It's not the other way around.
When people heard that, they're like, oh shit.
People like that.
We don't need them.
So we can't bring Chris Smalls back anymore.
You know who was sitting right next to me was the teamster's president.
Sean O'Brien, yeah.
What would it take to start a labor party?
Could we not start a labor party then?
To be determined.
It'd be a lot of work, but anything is possible.
I don't know.
There's going to be a lot of laborers.
I mean, AI is taking jobs.
I saw something on Twitter that said, in a year from now, there won't be any call centers.
And it was demonstrating some advanced AI that was like, hey, I'm calling about my flight.
It's delayed.
I'm in Newark.
Help me get home on the earliest flight.
I'm happy to pay up to $500.
And it'll be like, oh, how about this one through Boston?
It's faster and better.
That's like millions and millions and millions of jobs.
They're about to wipe out 50% of American jobs.
These unions, they're about to wake the fuck up, because less than 6%, private sector, less than 10% in the public sector.
Are you for a universal basic income?
Hell yeah.
It works.
We're broke out here.
Like, it don't make sense.
They disrespected us in the pandemic, you know?
You're living with your brother's place.
You don't have a place right now.
No, by choice, but I have my own place.
You know, I just, my life's been on the plane, so it's no point in me paying rent.
Where are you going?
Where are you speaking at?
I saw you were at the Tesla factory in Sweden.
Where else are you going?
I wasn't there.
We were in Norway.
Oh, Norway.
Sorry.
Austria, then Greece.
What are you speaking at in Austria?
Winochi Festival.
Brought together by community organizers and the Australian Trade Union.
You know, they reached out, and they want to bring me out, so.
So then where are you speaking at in the next place?
Oh, Greece, man.
That's going to be a huge event.
It's the 50th anniversary of the Young Communist Party.
The KNE.
It's going to be hundreds of thousands of people there.
Wow.
Where in Greece?
In Athens.
Wow.
Hundreds of thousands.
Yeah.
What's the mission of that group?
Right now, the students are on strike.
Right now, as we speak, because they're trying to privatize the universities.
Same thing, you know?
In Greece.
Yeah, the students are on strikes right now.
You don't hear about that story very much.
Oh, no.
People saw how militant these unions are over there.
Oh, my God.
You talk about the Roman gods and all of that.
Greek gods.
It still exists in people over there because they stick together.
You do hear not that many stories about general strikes, but you do hear that they happen.
Oh, they happen all the time.
But you don't hear about it much.
No, no.
So what do you want people to know about how they do things over there?
What would you say to Americans and Canadians?
That's what I said.
It's not about how much money they have, because we got people power.
That's it.
That's all we need.
People coming together.
That's it.
Locking arm in arm, just taking it to the boss, taking it to the government.
There's nothing that can stop us from getting what we need to get.
Hey, guys, it's just me in my basement again.
I gotta jump in here and explain that I completely messed up this recording.
I recorded an hour and a half with Chris in his backyard, and then we keep hanging out.
He keeps talking.
I realize I wanna get some more of this.
I press record again, and I accidentally record over the first chunk of our conversation.
I didn't realize this till I got home.
I was trying to listen to it, and I was like, oh my gosh, did I just overwrite the first part of the conversation?
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.
So I just wanna let you know.
It's like, yeah, I'm taking an Uber like an hour from Newark Airport.
The towns get smaller and smaller.
There's more and more people on the roads.
There's kind of black men with no shirts on like lying on park benches.
There's kind of people out there, dogs in the street.
You can tell the neighborhood's getting kind of rougher and rougher.
I pull up to a house across the street.
There is a guy on his porch, American flags, and I support the police signs all over his lawn.
It was like really covered in American flags and support the police.
I looked at him and I said, hi, nice to meet you.
He said, hi.
I said, mind if I take a couple pictures of the street?
I'm interviewing Chris Smalls across the street.
He's like, you can take a picture, but just so you know, I have a gun on me at all times.
That's what he said.
I'm from Canada, okay?
It's pretty unusual for anyone to say or have, well, you know, has a gun up here.
So it was just, okay, okay.
I'm like, okay, just trying to get my bearings.
You know, my spidey sense is going up a little bit.
I go around the side of this house because I knock on the front door.
Nobody answers.
I go around the side.
There's a kind of a grassy backyard.
There's some kids yelling over like a small chain link fence.
The sun is like blaring down, like it's hot.
Chris has got a baseball hat on.
I can see a lot of smoke coming out of him.
I know he kind of, he's got chain smokes.
I don't know if he chain smokes.
I shouldn't label him as a chain smoker, but he's smoking joints.
He's got a plastic table in front of him.
He's got like big kicks on, and he's texting.
He's got a big red jacket on, and I introduce myself.
I sit down, and then we jump into the conversation.
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.
You know, notoriety and everything, but they got pretty much excluded from the conversation when we was there.
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.
Well, I mean, it would look horrible if they would have had six white union leaders there, and I just beat Amazon.
So for them, they're like, oh, we have to have them.
We have to have them there, and yeah, I think I was thrown in there to make sure that they have black representation.
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.
I mean, if they say, okay, Chris, what's the number one thing you need me to fix?
What's the number one or two things you need me to change from the highest possible level?
I've never got that question.
They never said that to me.
What are the things that need to change?
Accountability.
There is none.
You know, what are we talking about?
They don't, you got billionaires breaking federal law every day.
Every single day a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, or discrimination, or fired for bullshit.
Whatever the case may be, every day.
Where's the accountability?
And then where's the antitrust?
You got a company like Amazon owning every fucking thing.
Where's the monopoly?
Where's the antitrust?
So there's, it's, they're talking down the two, no, two sides.
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.
So it's in plain sight.
Yeah.
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.
I don't know if partly virtue of the size, but they've been found guilty of tremendous amounts of labor laws.
And the safety stuff that I've dug up is shocking.
Like for a retail company to have worse safety standards than almost anybody, it's really surprising.
You know, it's really surprising.
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?
Defiant against everything.
To your point, it's like, this is just staring us in plain sight.
You've been very vocal about it.
Hard to be a target.
And so what's happening?
Amazon is the modern day slavery.
That's just what it is.
You know, it's slavery, fast forward 400 years, productivity, calling us pickers.
That's what we're doing.
We're still continuing the process of slavery with some technology involved.
And that's what it is.
slave wages, slaving conditions leads to injuries and death.
And that's exactly why they're the number one in the country for injuries.
And what do you say to people that say, well, hey, this is not slavery.
It's people choosing to apply for jobs and going for raises.
And this is all optional.
Yeah, I know.
You're jumping from one fire into the next, you know, no matter where you work.
So it's not really a choice after a while.
You know, it's a part of our society.
Amazon's only been around for, what, 30 years?
Look at our main streets.
Look at our stores that closed down.
Mom and pop, they're not there anymore because of Amazon.
So we're allowing it.
We're doing it to ourselves.
Me again, jumping in.
Gotta properly explain this book, because that's part of like a cutoff.
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.
This book was originally published in Spanish in 2006 by Random House and published in English in 2008 by Scribner.
And the black cover has a sepia tone photo of Fidel Castro facing the right side of the book, smoking a cigar.
And at the top of the cover are the words Fidel Castro in a little cap, kind of gray serif font.
And below the words, My Life in the same font, but smaller and orange.
Fidel Castro was a Cuban revolutionary and politician.
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.
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.
It's all told in a great detail in this giant, thick book.
And I'll jump back to Chris now.
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.
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.
And this comes up over and over again.
I can't help but think of it on the Castro cover.
I mean, he's wearing military fatigues, right?
Like this guy's the president.
I mean, he's in charge of the country, but he's, he's, he's like a, he's like a warrior.
He's like a soldier.
He's wearing military garments.
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.
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.
You're not wearing a suit or anything.
You can look at pictures 15 years ago, 20 years ago, me and you'll see the same thing.
As is.
Same thing.
People just don't know me.
It's hard.
Yeah.
It's hard to say like, hey, this is me.
It's been me.
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.
So I don't really have to defend it.
It's just like, whatever, believe what you want to believe.
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.
You know, people defend me if they see things that are people talk about me.
But then again, you know, you got the ones that obviously, you know, a lot of sheep mentality.
They just take things surface level, judging the book by its cover.
If I dress like a rapper, I must be a gangster.
I must be a gangbanger.
So I'm just breaking down all those stigmas by showing up as it is and continue to talk about the issues.
Yeah.
Talk about the issues.
Talk about the values.
One quote from this book is a quality, quality of life lies in knowledge and culture values are what constitute true quality of life.
The Supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter, and clothing.
I was going to ask like, what's it like working in the Amazon warehouse?
What values are not represented there?
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?
Yeah.
Well, once again, Amazon for me was not a hard job to do.
It's very tedious assignments, very trainable, very learnable.
Issue was the conditions.
So what values people is they wanted a decent break.
They want a decent bathroom break.
They wanted a decent amount of time to get to their station without being rushed on the clock.
So it was little things like that.
I tried to preserve people's jobs there.
That's all I could do.
Tell them the do's and don'ts, but I had no authority to have them hired or fired.
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.
I realized the company didn't value us.
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.
My first job 16 at Target.
So fighting for 15 years straight in all these different industries, I realized that this pandemic was, was like my breaking point.
So to do, to be defiant against everything and just do what I did was it was not a choice.
It was like, this is it.
This company said, we don't give a fuck about you.
Whether you live or die, whether your family gets sick or not, whether your kids get sick or not, we don't care.
So by them saying that to not just me, to everybody, that just motivated me to fight even harder.
And after you formed the union, what happened?
What happened?
What was the, what was the reaction?
Oh man, we sparked a resurgent all over the world.
We went from having $2 in our bank account to over 300,000 the next day.
And we were able to secure a headquarters, able to start other campaigns across the country that are still going on.
And, and also been able to support movements worldwide that are going on.
The first union in Canada just happened a few, a few months ago.
I've been out there and Vancouver as well, where they filed a few times they're trying to get over the hump.
The one in UK, Coventry, I've been there day one.
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.
And it's more to come in the future.
Yeah.
I love it.
And that looks like you are pulling out a joint.
So I'll let you, you can put the microphone in here if you want.
Like if you don't want to hold you up, we're outside here.
So, okay.
So we talked a little bit about Castro.
We've got a little, it's weird to me.
Cause like I got a trophy from the airport and an Uber, right.
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.
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.
The amount of automation is going up.
There's the delivery is going to, is getting more and more automated.
It seems like there's a real fricture kind of happening in our culture at the highest possible level.
On one hand, you've got, yeah, we're talking about labor and organizing and unions.
And also at the same time, it's like the amount of automation, everybody who's buying stuff, we all want it cheaper.
We want it faster.
And so we're willing to have less humans involved in the delivery of our goods.
You mentioned main street.
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.
They don't have the right screw.
And so we're buying it online.
And so the amount of tension that happens as humans get taken out of the system is just going up.
You know, the humans are being pulled out of the system and we're not even interacting with each other anymore.
You can't even interact with your neighbor.
You know, I grew up when you could borrow sugar from your neighbor, borrow everybody in the village, raise the kids.
My crossing guard would snitch on me.
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.
You know, we used to interact outside with kids.
Kids don't do that no more.
You know, they got iPads and TikTok, you know we grew up in different times.
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.
They don't see that there's 10 people that's going to touch that package before it gets to your door.
The one person who's a picker has to pick this item in less than seven seconds.
Seven seconds.
Yeah.
How are you supposed to get across the place?
It's a robot that brings it to you and it comes to your station.
You have to pick it off the robot and that times you.
They call it a robot to bring it, but they don't have a robot to pick it yet.
That's what they're working on, you know?
And, but for the last 30 years, there's been people picking these items and packing them and the packers have a time.
They have to do it.
You know, everything is timed.
Soon the moment you clock in.
So people don't see that when they order in these packages, they just go on these websites, they fill up their carts.
And then they think these packages magically appear or they see the driver and they think that, you know, his job is this.
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.
And the company has the money to do it, but instead they're, they'd rather give it to the top.
It's almost like the, it's almost like the more separated we are, the more dehumanizing of each other we become.
Because as you said, we don't see it.
We don't see it.
It's true.
We don't see it.
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.
We're not as happy when we're not together.
Being lonely is worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
And one in two American adults now says that they're lonely.
This is the next big epidemic.
Surgeon General's warning us about this.
But of course we don't see it because we're more and more separated.
And so we're more and more separated.
We don't, it's harder and harder to make friends with the crossing guard.
Cause that job's changing every, I got a different crossing guard.
on my corner every two weeks.
Yeah.
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.
No way.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
You know, and that's,
that's the community, you know, people, you know,
the cost of living has pushed a lot of people out, but, um,
it's good to see that there's still some people there and it's sad to see that
they're still there because, you know, this,
this is not a quality, a quality of life that we deserve,
especially from visiting other countries where they believe, you know, three,
three day, four day work weeks.
And they believe that you should have two month vacation and sick time and free housing and free college.
And we don't do that here.
Hearing you talk like this is sounding to me a little like Jane McAlevey.
I got this book from you called raising expectations.
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.
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.
Uh, the blurb on the front from Barbara Ehrenreich says who I love, by the way, Barbara Ehrenreich, uh, wrote a book.
I just love on joy dancing in the streets.
The blurb says a breathtaking trip through the union organizing scene of America in the 21st century.
Jane McAlevey lived from 1964 to 2024 dying just a couple of months ago.
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.
What's this book about?
Well, she's famous and notorious in the American labor movement as the hard charging organizer racked up a string of victories, right?
When people said it wasn't possible, then she was bounced from the movement.
We're going to talk about this, maybe with you a victim of the high level warfare that's been tearing apart organized labor.
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.
Dewey Decimal as far as one of three, three, 1.880 for social sciences slash economics slash labor economics, slash labor unions.
Chris, can you tell us about your relationship with raising expectations and raising hell?
Yeah.
Rest in peace, Jane McAlevey.
Yeah.
I mean, she was considered the goat for a lot of people.
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.
I used to go visit her, have dinner with her, you know we used to have very, very in depth conversations about organizing.
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.
And then she gave me that book.
I asked her which one of the three, cause she didn't write the fourth one yet.
She was writing it, but I asked her which one of the three is her favorite.
And she signed and gave me a book and she gave me, you know, a copy of that one.
So, you know, I realized we have a lot in common, but we were just two different generations.
and that, you know, that's the beauty of, of organizing face to face.
You know, even when you had disagreements, you can agree on certain things.
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.
Until her last day, she used to ride her bike from New York, from the upper west side to Jersey over here.
And one day her bike broke down.
She crashed her bike.
So she called me up, said, can I come pick her up?
So I picked her up, had the Chuck at the time and took her to the bike shop.
Then I took her home.
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.
And, you know, these are the stories that people would never hear.
But to share that people, I want people to know that I have a great deal of respect for her.
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.
It was a different monster.
So there were certain tactics that she wanted us to use.
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.
But the problem is Amazon's turnover rate.
It wasn't possible.
That was the thing.
You know, we would sign people up, they'd be fired the next day.
So it was certain tactics that she had that just wasn't aligned into the way we needed to be.
And that's when we butted heads a little bit.
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.
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.
So I want to say thank you because I did.
And I signed the union to the team says before I left my, my post.
Yeah.
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.
Founded by Jimmy Hoffa
I think, yeah, like three generations ago and now, but that's not worker led now, Chris.
Oh, no, no, no.
Am I misunderstanding why she stayed assigned with them?
Cause now you've put the Amazon labor union over, over to the larger union.
I guess it's, I'm assuming it's partly resources.
I didn't sign them over.
I signed an affiliation, meaning that there's an agreement in place.
And in this agreement, we have full jurisdiction.
So we have full autonomy.
So that it's nothing's changed.
We still have our independency.
We still have the same core people.
And, um, our bylaw committee will be able to incorporate policies in the constitution that were aligned the way we organize.
Yeah.
But why did you do it?
Like what, what's the, what were the reasons to, to do this?
We need resources.
We need money.
They have money and resources.
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.
Yeah.
Of course.
France 10 years, decade, you know, Germany.
So yeah, they, they work with other unions.
They have teams as an opportunity to get more support across the country.
Well, yes.
Opportunity for them to get in the warehouse and there's an opportunity for us to get resources.
Yeah.
Money that we didn't have.
If you're playing a money game with any big company, you're probably going to, cause they have a lot more money.
I mean, it's just like, you know, it's kind of like the money doesn't, the money doesn't help.
I mean, well, the money is not going to determine our, our victory.
We use it.
Right.
It's not a mountain of the amount of money we, we already beat them with less than a hundred thousand.
Yeah.
It's the way you use it.
Right.
If it's done right, correctly.
And we were able to go on strike and the relationships that I'm building internationally, we could call it international strike.
We have, we have some leverage.
International strike.
What's that?
Well, yeah.
Like you mentioned the unions that are unionized against Amazon.
I met them.
I flew out there to their country.
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.
No, no American union president has ever done this, what I'm doing.
So I know what I'm doing is a bigger picture that people don't even fathom yet.
So hopefully it plays out correctly.
We'll be able to build that relationship.
Yeah.
I hear what you're saying.
This is partly, you know, what, what Jane talks about with whole worker organizing, right?
Like on page 14, she writes whole worker organizing begins with the recognition that real people do not live two separate lives.
One beginning when they arrive at work and punch the clock and another, when they punch out at the end of their shift.
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.
You know, that's partly why I think you don't support either candidate running for president.
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.
So what does the whole worker organizing look like to you?
The whole worker, the whole person, what are some of the big macro issues here?
Well, that's, that's why we were successful because we had workers.
It wasn't a third party.
It wasn't led by union salts.
It was led by the workers.
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.
People don't last at Amazon nine days.
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.
Yeah.
He's still working there.
Yeah.
Nine years now.
Nine years. And if I didn't get fired nine years, right?
So we have a different case.
Sorry to say that you had a case against Amazon for wrongful dismissal.
What happened with that?
Yeah.
Leticia James didn't do shit with it.
It was just, you know, for show.
Nothing.
What was the result of the case?
Dismissed. Yeah.
Who's Leticia's James?
She's the attorney general of New York state.
Ah, when that that's where it went.
Yeah.
And then he dismissed the case.
Yeah. Cause they were so focused on Trump.
Pinballing around.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I seen how they use our victory.
They use me.
I seen how the media did all of that.
And then I became a union president.
Now I'm something else, you know, I'm flashy.
I'm this, I'm that.
And it's like, what are you talking about?
I'm just an Amazon worker who got fired.
Remember the company said they were going to smear me.
And now you guys are doing it.
Y'all doing the work for Amazon, which is crazy to me.
And this is, you know, that's why that's how I think about it.
It's just ironic.
Yeah.
You maintain a sense of groundedness and comfort with your identity.
That I think would be very hard for me and other people to do.
I mean, if you're getting kind of pushed around like this in the press so much.
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.
You're posting about it.
All the time. And people see me, you know, I was just at labor day protest with Palestine.
Over 10,000 people there.
Meanwhile, people are attacking, you know, attacking me online for support, for not supporting Kamala Harris.
I could tell you right now they're delusional.
I've been at all of these encampments all around the country, all around the world.
I see what these young people are doing.
If you think they're going to vote for Kamala Harris, people are crazy.
So I don't care what the polls say.
I don't care what these online Twitter bots.
Our sheep say, because I'm out in the streets.
What are you seeing?
What are you seeing in the 10,000?
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.
Yeah because they're too busy at the West Indian parade with the politicians and the unions, you know, gaslighting.
So because they, when they ignore what's going on, I could tell you what I see and what I know.
I can, I can tell you that they're, they're not going to support Kamala Harris.
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.
So yeah, they may not win, but they building a movement that it's going to take years to build.
Yeah.
We had Ralph Nader on the podcast last year and a lot of the ills he talks about is this two party system.
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.
Yeah.
I mean, it's tough when you're trying to do something, but you know, they have to, they have to build it.
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.
And the Democrats are disconnected.
So are the Republicans, but the Democrats are too far gone for me, for me to even be quiet about it.
You know, I met, like you said, I met a lot of them.
I met the president, I met Kamala and I took away nothing from this conversation.
Nothing, absolutely nothing.
People can say what they want.
I'm talking from experience.
I'm not talking from my ass.
You know, I'm not making shit up, you know?
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.
It only took me one time.
I don't need to have multiple followups unless I'm trying to inquire about it.
But for my first conversation, first impressions, everything, and none of the people I met are, are, are doing anything.
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.
I'm in Canada, so it's a slightly different system and in every country is a little bit different.
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?
It's a new book.
Yeah.
It just came out in 2023.
It's called, it's not you, it's capitalism by Malaika Jabali.
If I said that right, J A B A L I.
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.
Malaika Jabali is a journalist whose writings appear in the Guardian, Teen Vogue, New Republic, and Essence.
She's got a JD from Columbia and MS from Columbia university, a school of social work.
And she's the former co-chair of something called operation power or P O W E R grassroots organization based in Brooklyn.
Focus on bringing black radical politics to New York city.
What's this book about?
It's a guide to socialism.
That's what it is for budding anti-capitalists.
He debunks myths centers, forgotten socialists of color have shaped our world and shows socialism is not all marks and Bernie bros.
It can actually be pretty sexy.
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.
That's right.
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.
So she's talking about a lot of kind of big picture.
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.
Tell us about your relationship with it's not you.
It's capitalism.
by Malaika Jabali.
Yeah.
Shout out to Malaika.
Yeah.
That's my home girl.
And she's been a supporter of me for a while for years.
And I'm, I'm in the book.
So she interviewed me.
I want to say even before we, we won, she started interviewing me and yeah, we just stayed in touch, kept in contact.
And then when she came here to Brooklyn for the book release, I did a book release with her in Brooklyn.
And that was a, you know, a great experience and she's right.
You know, we got some people come out for that.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Hard to get people to stand up.
Hard to get people to come out for book book events.
I'm very familiar with.
Yeah.
I'm very familiar with the half empty bookstore.
Yeah.
No, she, she did her thing.
I mean, it was standing room.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Standard room only.
It was, it was great.
Yeah.
It was great.
Great experience.
And yeah, she motivated me to not only read the book, but also to write, to finish my book, which I did.
And I was able to finish mine this summer too.
So you got a book coming out.
Yeah.
I've got a book coming out.
What's it called?
I don't know yet.
Title still in progress.
I think so.
Yeah.
Tk.
As they call it.
Yeah.
Publishing terms.
Is it your memoir?
Somewhat.
Yeah.
And so if it's not us, that's the problem.
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.
Then she's proposing socialism as an alternative.
Yeah.
I mean, she's right.
I've seen it.
I've seen what socialism do.
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.
I was 35 when I got my passport, you know, what do you mean?
Gave you a hard time to get your passport was hard time.
Yeah.
I have no idea.
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.
And yeah, I did.
Now you're going to these more social countries, Sweden, Canada, Norway.
Yeah.
Cuba, Austria, Cuba, Greece.
I'm going to Greece in a few weeks.
I'm seeing what life could be like, meaning that every country has its pros and cons.
They're not all perfect, but I'll take childcare.
I'll take free housing.
I'll take free Medicare.
I'll, I'll take, you know, being forced to go on vacation.
I'll take 90% union density.
I'll take all of that because even with their issues that they have, they, they still have it better off.
The amount of debt that you are in at a, as a 20 year old in America is ridiculous.
Just to go to college.
My first semester was 16,000.
My second semester, 19,000 out of state tuition.
So you're in debt in your twenties.
And then if you get hurt, you know, I played sports, broken finger, jam, bruises, whatever, medical bills, thousands, tens of thousands.
And then you got the doctor who's a millionaire suing you, assuming the patient.
So it is insane.
You know, I'm still paying student debt in my thirties and I dropped out of school.
I didn't even finish college.
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.
It's, it's so hard to get out of that.
And capitalism has a lot to do with it, has everything to do with it.
So, yeah, we have to find another way.
We have to, you know, all this democratic socialist shit doesn't make sense to me.
You can't play defense.
You gotta be all the way in.
And that's what we're not in America.
Privatizing everything too.
I mean, you spoken openly about how your dad's been in prison most of your life.
I always come out sometimes and come back in sometimes, but prisons are getting prisons are turning into a business.
They are, you know, there's couples and regular, ordinary people owning prisons.
Now it's, it's, it's a sad thing to see.
A lot of people would say, Hey, look, there's people coming on rafts from Cuba to here.
No one's going on a raft from here to Cuba.
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.
You know, it's not Cuba's fault.
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.
If you add free, free college, healthcare.
I mean, like I said, there's always something to fight for.
It's, it's, it's always something to fight for.
And we're too complacent here.
You know, we're too complacent.
We allow the government and give you food stamps.
The government gives you, you know, child support are the government bit gives you tax refunds.
You know, once a year it's breadcrumbs.
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.
As I clock in that, I'm going to lose my job.
There's no job security.
You don't even know you walk in as your last day.
So it's insanity really.
That adds anxiety.
This is what fuels mental illness.
Even just on the half an hour truck up from New Jersey.
I'm driving by it.
Endless homeless people, you know, people living with homelessness on the way, you know, you see it in the streets.
Like there's a real, there's some, you know, Gabor Mate, a former guest on our show.
We'll call it toxic culture.
We're living in a toxic culture right now.
Some of the things you're advocating sound radical.
Bernie Sanders is very famous for saying, you know, they accused me of being a radical.
I'll tell you what's radical is having billionaires paying for the election.
You know, he's, he's really, he's really good at kind of turning that around.
You're rolling your eyes a bit at me.
I love Bernie, but you know, you got to call bullshit out when it's bullshit.
First of all, you went to Ireland and said that genocide makes you queasy.
He fucked up there.
And then, you know, once again, what's the, what is that?
Sorry, what happened in Ireland?
He went to Ireland, spoke at this.
I think he might've spoke at Trinity college of all places or wherever he spoke at.
And it doesn't even matter.
And he went there and he was addressing Gaza and Palestine.
And he said that he doesn't want to call it a genocide because genocide makes him queasy.
And then somebody disrupted the speech and they went at him and say, you're a bullshitter.
And they called him out.
And I, I loved it.
Then he did a, a week later, he did an interview in London trying to clarify what he meant.
It was bullshit.
He's doing the same shit that AOC do, play defense.
Oh, I got to clean up everything.
So I just don't respect that.
You know, I don't respect that.
And I don't respect the fact that you continue to call these CEOs in and give them slaps on the wrist.
What's the point of that?
You got to help committee.
You're sitting on the board as the leader of the health committee.
I asked him to, I tweeted out bringing Andy Jassy over a year ago, over two years ago now, nothing.
And then I got his people on the side that want to be in my airline.
Oh, we got your tweet.
What the fuck does that mean?
Are you going to do it?
You asking him to bring in who?
The CEO of Amazon.
He brought in Howard Schultz from Starbucks, but they want to bury our history.
They want to bury the fact that I was ever staying in my union was ever.
So they've been putting up Starbucks more than Amazon labor union, which is fine.
But at the same time, we're talking about warehouse workers compared to coffee makers, baristas, what people are dying in our warehouse.
And I get it.
They deserve a union.
The college kids that make coffee, the young adults that make coffee, they deserve their union.
But we're talking about Amazon workers that was considered the lifeline in the country.
And you ain't bringing the CEO yet.
The leading injury in the country over any industry.
So it doesn't make any sense to me.
He's just a lot of gaslighting that goes for all of them.
What advice would you give people?
Listen, people listen all over the place.
People call you an activist.
They call you a revolutionary.
Well, I just want to tell people that, you know, we deserve better.
It's very, it's that simple.
It's that simple.
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.
You, whatever you're going through, you can't allow be complacent.
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.
That'll never happen.
And all of that, you know, we got to vote, vote, vote.
When you're voting for breadcrumbs, the time you see anything, you'd be dead.
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.
One man, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world can end homelessness right now and still be rich.
Doesn't make any sense.
So we got to make it make sense.
And we got to fight like hell.
It's just me in my basement again.
I'm here with my pile of wires, my laptop screen full open, listening back to that conversation with Chris Smalls.
You know, I didn't really know what to expect flying down there to hang out with him in his backyard.
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.
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.
Ever in history.
Like that's quite a big feat.
No wonder Bernie Sanders went over there to give a speech when they did that.
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.
You know, years go by money gets used up.
Turnover stays really high.
So the people that even voted are probably no longer there.
I mean, turnovers in the hundreds of percentage points.
So you're flipping people over all the time.
The structural setup isn't one that allows people to come together and argue and make claims for rights.
You know, where do I personally sit on these issues?
I think it needs to be better than it is now.
I mean, here's some quotes from Chris that I completely agree with.
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.
I mean, when you hear him say that it doesn't sound crazy at all, does it?
Right.
When I talk to people that work at Amazon, they say, yeah, it's a 12 hour shift.
You get two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute lunch.
So that means you're working 11 out of the 12 hours.
And the most time you get off is 30 minutes.
Then think about what the work is.
Here's another quote from Chris.
It feels like prison.
Exactly what it does.
Solitary confinement.
You have a station, you have a square cubicle, you're moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours.
As he describes it, you know, the robots pick the products off of the shelves, they bring it to you.
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.
But you know, it's like they're just taking the products off of the robot and putting it in a box.
Like that's like a more complicated, you can imagine like a human hand kind of being required.
Right.
He had more controversial statements.
We got billionaires breaking federal law every day.
Every single day, a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, for discrimination, for bullshit, whatever the case may be.
Where's the accountability?
He says, Amazon is modern day slavery.
That's what it is.
Fast forward.
Fast forward is 400 years productivity calling us pickers.
That's what we're doing.
We're still continuing the process of slavery with some technology involved.
Do you agree with that?
This is me again.
Do you agree with that?
You think that's what it is?
I mentioned this, uh, afterwards to somebody I met later in the day and they were like, well, this is an optional job.
Like you, you get, you get, you don't have to work there.
It's not slavery by definition.
And, and that's true.
Um, you know, uh, or are there systemic issues that prevent people that have been historically discriminated against from moving beyond poverty?
Like is, is this kind of the design of the system, right?
Like that's kind of what he's arguing for.
And then it gets even loftier when he says, I met the president, I met Kamala, I took away nothing from this conversation.
Now, remember we recorded this before the election and he was even saying then like, they're not going to vote for Kamala.
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.
So there's no kind of checks and balances, things can just kind of go through.
Now I'm not here to, um, kind of espouse political views.
And at the same time, it is politics.
Like politics is as Ryan Holiday describes it, all the things that we do together, that's what politics is.
And so when you see situations and, um, kind of setups that just smell foul and seem foul.
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.
Like it's not in the news anymore.
It's not, you don't hear about anymore.
These are just really bad jobs.
I was talking to about a buddy of mine who worked at HR at Amazon.
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.
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.
Then there's no liability.
There's no repercussions.
So we post them for six weeks.
Nobody applies.
We post them for 12 weeks.
Everybody applies, but we fire everybody after six weeks.
And we do that over and over again.
So that over two or three years, you may have worked at Amazon for six weeks, numerous times.
Then you become temp.
Okay.
Then you become part time.
And he said to me, this is a guy that used to work in HR at Amazon.
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.
But he's like, the dirty little secret is you don't start full time for like five years.
Cause you have to be like temp fired five times and seasonal.
And then you're part time.
And like, we don't hire anyone to be full time until they've gone through all that stuff.
So it's years and years and years away.
But meanwhile, the posters are always set.
This is just one guy, one story, but I can only share what I know to Chris's point.
I get my news from the people.
This is some of the news I've got from the people.
And when you see the Amazon drivers kind of whipping down your street, driving dangerously recklessly, they're on the sidewalks.
They shouldn't be.
They're knocking down trees in my neighborhood.
They shouldn't be.
And you talk to them.
These poor guys are telling me I only have seven seconds to deliver a package.
Like if I don't, I'm going to get fired.
Like we've just squeezed capitalism to such a high degree that now we can't pause.
We can't possibly measure all the societal repercussions and ramifications.
And that's why conversations like this are super important.
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.
Number 582, raising expectations and raising hell.
My decade fighting for the labor movement by Jane McAlevey.
He pronounced her name completely different than me, but he knows her and knew her.
So I'm going to give him the nod.
McAlevey that's M-C-A-L-E-V-E-Y.
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.
So you see, you see how edgy and how raw and how vicious kind of things are on the front lines and the battleground.
The book opens with like George W.
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?
It's like gladiator stuff.
That's what he said.
And number 581, it's not you, it's capitalism by Malaika Jabali.
J-A-B-A-L-I.
I did read that book as well.
I don't as strongly recommend it as Chris did is my personal take.
It was complicated, hard to read.
I didn't find it kind of, it didn't have a great through line to me.
Okay.
That's just my view.
Cause you guys have been asking me, Hey Neil, can you give us your view?
But then the other book that Chris wanted to talk about, we kind of touched on it at the beginning.
It was the autobiography of Malcolm X.
So that was actually number 926 on our list from Angie Thomas.
And then we had two other guests mention it so far, including, I'm going to get these right for you guys.
Humble the poet in chapter 73.
And somebody else picked that.
Cause there's two asterisks on it.
Or do we already asterisk it for Chris Smalls?
Anyway, Autobiography of Malcolm X, highly recommended.
Thank you so much to you for listening.
Thank you so much to Chris Smalls for coming on the show.
I really appreciate all of you for being here.
All right.
Did you make it past the three second pause?
If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.
This is one of three clubs that we have for three bookers out there.
And of the podcast club are people that hang out at the end of the show.
We play your voicemails, read your more letters.
We hang out, we talk about a word of the chapter.
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.
Let me know, drop me a line.
I'll add you to the FAQ.
And of course there is the secret club, which I can't say more about.
Although then you can listen for clues.
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.
And with that, as we always do, let's kick off the end of the podcast club by going to the phones.
Hi Neal.
This is Claire.
I'm calling from Nova Scotia.
I started listening to your podcast years ago when you first began and I was doing a lot of driving then.
So it was all the time.
And then I kind of forgot about it for up until now.
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.
Maria Popova, David Eggers.
Holy smokes.
Um, so congrats, uh, at how it's grown and how you've maintained it ad free.
Thank you so much for what you're doing for the book world and book lovers.
What a cool, special thing.
And, um, Oh, I gotta go.
I just got a paper cut.
Okay.
Bye.
That's a great voicemail.
Thank you so much, Claire from Nova Scotia.
First of all, shout out to the comeback listeners.
I'm a comebacker.
Like I listened to the Tim Ferriss podcast when it first came out in 2013, 2014.
And then of course I abandoned it because there's other podcasts.
And then I occasionally come back to it.
I think the comeback, listen, I'm going to be here.
I'm not going anywhere.
Full moons.
Keep coming.
I keep coming too.
So it's perfect.
Come back, re reengage.
It's wonderful.
And then when you come back, it's kind of fun.
I think to go to three books.co slash, um, guests.
That's why I set up because that's gas.
So you can see, Oh yeah.
Who's he talked to lately?
Chapter 81 is with Dave Eggers.
Chapter at one 38 is with Maria Popova.
And you know, if you'd like Dave Eggers and Maria Popova, artistic cerebral, well, it's kind of in that worldview.
I highly recommend the one to one 23, Susie Batisse.
I think, I think you got to listen to that one.
That was, that's if you're interested, Mohsin Hamid, man, the way that guy kind of took us into Pakistan was wonderful.
Chapter 108.
Anyway, um, never get high off your own supply.
Uh, really appreciate that.
And thank you for the shadows of the secret club there at the end.
All right.
And now, you know, it's kind of like, do we do another letter?
Cause we did a lot at the beginning.
I think we do.
I think we do another letter.
It's a different letter.
It's not about the other letter.
It's about a different thing.
Okay.
So let's see here.
Let's grab, you know, let's grab a YouTube comment.
Cause you know, uh, two chapters ago, we talked to Amy Einhorn.
That was chapter 140, actually three chapters ago.
Uh, the editor for the book of awesome, as well as a lot of books like the help and big little lies.
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.
Social media hasn't replaced the book.
It's opened up whole fields of book culture on TikTok, Goodreads, YouTube, Instagram, catering to millions.
There is something about the form and nature of reading, which I think is perennial, intimate, insular, and original.
And I replied, I agree.
And I hope you're right.
Zuby.
Yeah, that's nice.
You know, Philip Roth talks about the death of novel.
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.
It'll be like a smaller, smaller subset.
And you do hear about this happening.
It's like, okay, automatic self-driving cars are coming.
Well, what's going to happen to people who like driving cars, but they're going to people.
They're going to become people who like driving horses.
They're going to go to like the driving track.
Instead of the horse track, they're good.
So that's kind of like one view.
But then the other view, I think espoused by James Daunt chapter 141, is that like books are in a very good place.
There's more people reading than ever before.
We've got lines of 400 people at new Barnes and Nobles.
And like, you know, some of this young fantasy and young adult stuff, it's like really helping breeding take off.
And books are the antidote to screen culture.
They're the opposite of endless scrolling.
They provide like safety, sanctity, intimacy, emotional connection.
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.
So which side do you net at on?
Well, we're going to remain book optimists here.
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.
We buy books a lot.
We read books a lot.
We take books out of the library.
We share them.
We swap them.
We highlight them.
We cover them.
I got a book club.
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.
That's all it is.
It's just a list of books I've read over the last month.
And in December, I do my very best books I've read all year.
So if you haven't read that, go to neil.blog. You can read the best books I've read in 2024.
So yes, thank you for the letter.
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.
It feels like prison, solitary confinement.
We all got radicalized at some point.
He gets fired in this country for retaliation.
Where's the monopoly?
Where's the antitrust?
My crossing guard with snitch on me.
I've been at all of these encampments.
It's the embargo that they had for 60 years.
You can't be complacent.
So many good and interesting words said there.
I was actually going to go with snitch, but unfortunately the word is of unknown origin.
So we can't really talk about the origin of a word that has unknown origin.
Why don't we go with monopoly?
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.
Right?
All right.
We know what that word means, but mono, as you may know, means one, right?
Single, right?
Mono, culture.
We hear mono in lots of places.
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.
So monopoly means single sell, S-E-L-L, not C-E-L-L.
So single selling is monopoly.
It's a Greek word, which means from the mid 16th century all the way up is you have a monopoly.
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.
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.
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.
Google has recently been declared a monopoly.
And so the antitrust commissions are now saying that Google has to sell Chrome because they have a monopoly on search.
Competition is healthy for customers.
Monopoly is unhealthy for customers because it leads to price gouging.
You remember that story about the guy who bought like the AIDS medication and then like changed the price up by like 10,000%?
Because of course it was the only place to get the medication.
How do we fight this?
We have conversations.
We become aware.
We send notes and letters to our MPs and our representatives.
We kind of stay engaged, stay informed, stay connected.
And Chris Smalls has really helped us stay connected.
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.
And, fingers crossed, healthcare for all from your avid Canadian healthcare person.
All right.
Thank you all so much for hanging out this whole year.
Stick around.
We're on the solstice.
We're going to put out our annual Best Of.
That'll be our seventh Best Of ever.
Stick around for our Best Of.
Have a wonderful holiday.
Until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read.
Keep turning the page, everybody, and I'll see you in 2025.
Take care.