True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 228: Elong-Elong Marcos
Aired: 2022-05-26
Duration: 01:11:41


=== Monkey Business Tier Blah (14:25) ===

[00:00:00]  Do you see this lesion, Liz?
[00:00:02]  Excuse me?
[00:00:03]  This lesion?
[00:00:03]  I got all these lesions on me right now.
[00:00:06]  It's disgusting.
[00:00:07]  Oh my God.
[00:00:08]  I don't see anything.
[00:00:09]  And now I'm closing my eyes so that I can't see anything in case you accidentally show me a lesion.
[00:00:14]  I mean, you know, you know, you know, I ooze regularly.
[00:00:18]  I'd be oozing.
[00:00:20]  I mean, right now, it looks like I just got out of a damn orange theory class because my shirt is like sticking to my front.
[00:00:26]  You name-checking orange theory, the like fitness, routine fitness class of what, eight years ago?
[00:00:33]  You use TrueNON promo code TrueNON Fit.
[00:00:36]  Okay.
[00:00:37]  And you can get.
[00:00:37]  Yeah.
[00:00:38]  But no, the front of my shirt is just like sticking to me now because of this shit.
[00:00:42]  Yeah, because you're oozing.
[00:00:43]  Yeah, I had an MMF threesome, a monkey, me, and female.
[00:00:49]  Oh, my God.
[00:01:13]  Also, you should have been it should have been monkey me and a female.
[00:01:18]  That's what I said.
[00:01:18]  Oh, that's the exact same thing.
[00:01:20]  I thought you said monkey man.
[00:01:21]  No, no.
[00:01:23]  And then I got distracted thinking about a monkey man.
[00:01:25]  Sorry, no.
[00:01:26]  You think I would tell you?
[00:01:27]  Well, I'm not.
[00:01:28]  I want to make it clear.
[00:01:29]  There was no dude.
[00:01:30]  I mean, the monkey was a male monkey, but it's not like a monkey man.
[00:01:33]  Yeah.
[00:01:34]  Yeah.
[00:01:34]  Do you think that's a real thing, a monkey man?
[00:01:36]  Yeah.
[00:01:36]  What do you think?
[00:01:37]  That's what people are.
[00:01:38]  And like a half kind of thing.
[00:01:40]  I mean, who knows?
[00:01:42]  The union of me and these two freaks that I got down with.
[00:01:45]  Who knows if that's going to happen?
[00:01:46]  I texted you this earlier, but I want to say, I think it's so funny that they tried to make monkeypox like COVID 2.0.
[00:01:52]  No one's bad.
[00:01:52]  And then they were like, oh, my baddest STD.
[00:01:54]  Oops.
[00:01:55]  Yeah.
[00:01:55]  Yeah.
[00:01:57]  I'm not by it.
[00:01:58]  Monkeypox, too.
[00:01:59]  I'm not.
[00:01:59]  Why do they got to call it that?
[00:02:01]  Yeah.
[00:02:01]  Even if it's real and going around.
[00:02:04]  That's a bad name.
[00:02:05]  Yeah.
[00:02:05]  Guess what?
[00:02:06]  Just wear a condom?
[00:02:08]  I don't know.
[00:02:08]  I looked at pictures of it.
[00:02:09]  It looks gross.
[00:02:10]  Just don't get it.
[00:02:11]  Why did you look at pictures of it?
[00:02:12]  Because I want to see what was going on.
[00:02:14]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:15]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:16]  Hi.
[00:02:17]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:18]  My name is Brace.
[00:02:19]  I might have dengue fever, and our producer is Young Chumpy.
[00:02:23]  Dengue.
[00:02:24]  That's kind of fun.
[00:02:24]  Yeah.
[00:02:25]  This is Trunon.
[00:02:26]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:27]  Welcome back.
[00:02:28]  Welcome back.
[00:02:29]  We are back.
[00:02:30]  We took a little bit of a little break.
[00:02:33]  We'll vacate, which we'll, what, we'll talk about a little bit.
[00:02:37]  Yeah, we'll elaborate on that.
[00:02:38]  I don't know if vacay is the word, but yeah, we'll talk about it.
[00:02:42]  Maybe, maybe we will.
[00:02:43]  Maybe we won't.
[00:02:44]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:45]  I know we were investigating the beaches of Cabo San Lucas.
[00:02:52]  Yeah, no, we are we are back and we are, you know, you did an episode while I was uh indisposed with Noah about Elon Musk.
[00:03:01]  Yeah, Noah Colewin from Blowback Podcast.
[00:03:04]  I'm gonna be real with you.
[00:03:05]  I didn't listen to it.
[00:03:06]  I know you didn't.
[00:03:07]  I was on part of it.
[00:03:08]  I did listen to the other parts.
[00:03:09]  I know, I know you didn't.
[00:03:11]  And usually I would say that hurts my feelings.
[00:03:17]  Wow.
[00:03:18]  But it doesn't actually, and I'm okay with it.
[00:03:20]  Okay, good.
[00:03:20]  So the other times when you say stuff like that, you're lying.
[00:03:24]  No, it's called growth, Brace.
[00:03:27]  No, you're right.
[00:03:27]  We did talk about Elon.
[00:03:29]  And as the preeminent number one numero uno A plus tier one, what was it?
[00:03:38]  S tier?
[00:03:40]  Yes.
[00:03:40]  Okay.
[00:03:41]  Top tier haters of Elon number one podcast.
[00:03:46]  That is true or none, right?
[00:03:49]  We got to talk about Elon because he's back in the news.
[00:03:52]  He is.
[00:03:53]  He seems to be more annoying now.
[00:03:58]  Yeah, more than ever.
[00:04:00]  Yeah, this is the thing I don't like about Elon Musk's news cycles.
[00:04:03]  I don't care what he does necessarily or like his business ventures or his political positions or the things that he gets me too'd with.
[00:04:11]  It's more, I just don't like it when he is like available to people to consume.
[00:04:18]  It makes me, I don't, it's there's something about the man that gives me, it's like a, I don't know what it is, but it's like looking at something with a disease.
[00:04:26]  You're like, well, put that in a cage.
[00:04:28]  He needs to be put away.
[00:04:29]  Yeah.
[00:04:29]  Yeah.
[00:04:31]  Elephant man.
[00:04:32]  Yeah.
[00:04:32]  Absolutely, Liz.
[00:04:33]  I think some, I agree with you.
[00:04:34]  I think someone should.
[00:04:37]  So why are we talking about him today?
[00:04:39]  Okay.
[00:04:39]  So a couple things.
[00:04:42]  Well, a lot of things.
[00:04:44]  First, let's start with the big story.
[00:04:46]  So Elon has been basically all over Twitter, right?
[00:04:50]  Because he's, he is always usually all over Twitter, but he's in the process of attempting to buy Twitter.
[00:04:55]  We're going to talk about that in a second.
[00:04:58]  He, while we were gone away, Elon was on a little tweet rampage and basically was attempting to get ahead of what seemed to be a pet, like a, you know, a breaking news story that had yet to be broken.
[00:05:15]  And in like super sly, classic Elon style, he tweeted, political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months.
[00:05:24]  He started blaming a bunch of stuff on our good friends, the Brandon's party, the Demon Rats.
[00:05:31]  And he's saying, you know, in the past, I voted Democrat because they were mostly the kindness party, but they have become the party of division and hate.
[00:05:40]  So I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
[00:05:43]  Now watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.
[00:05:47]  Dot dot dot popcorn emoji.
[00:05:50]  So this is another expert move by one of the grand strategists, son zoos of our time.
[00:05:56]  And I, you know, I'm kind of joking here, but I think it actually was a pretty good move because it's very clear to anybody who knows how lying and trying to get out of things work that this is one of the perfect things that you could put out there.
[00:06:07]  One of the greatest statements a human being could make.
[00:06:10]  And Bruce, you are like, you are a really good liar.
[00:06:14]  Yes.
[00:06:15]  And I switch political parties constantly in order to evade accusations against me.
[00:06:20]  It's worked.
[00:06:21]  I mean, I've, I've, granted, I've had to cycle down.
[00:06:24]  I'm, I'm kind of running on fumes here.
[00:06:26]  Yeah.
[00:06:27]  I've been with LaRouche for like the past six months until another thing happens.
[00:06:30]  You got to go back to Evacuan.
[00:06:32]  Exactly.
[00:06:32]  Well, I unfortunately ran through that one as well when I was caught killing like bees, which I thought we were supposed to do, but now it's like people get mad if you burn down beehives.
[00:06:42]  So whatever.
[00:06:44]  But Elon's thing here was like, you could tell that he was about something bad was about to happen to him.
[00:06:51]  And he starts, I think, I can't remember if it was like right before the article comes out or right after, but he starts commenting on this, like all this Russia gate stuff.
[00:07:00]  Oh my God.
[00:07:01]  You know, he's like talking about how the Democrats are liars.
[00:07:04]  And I think what his strategy here, and of course, we haven't actually gotten to the allegations yet, but I think his strategy here is to frame the upcoming allegations, upcoming at the time, of course, now they're come, and I'm sure there are more to come, as sort of like revenge by the Democratic Party against him.
[00:07:21]  I love this.
[00:07:22]  It's really good.
[00:07:22]  I mean, he's brought Hillary into it a couple of times.
[00:07:25]  Sussman, he is, yeah, he is.
[00:07:28]  Yeah, he's gone full, like post-left.
[00:07:31]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:07:32]  It's pretty spectacular.
[00:07:34]  Yeah, he's just accusing everyone.
[00:07:35]  He's like, oh, they used to be great, but now I don't know.
[00:07:38]  It's so funny.
[00:07:38]  We should say that then, you know, after he tweeted this hours later, the peace drops from Business Insider, our favorite, both business paper and insider paper.
[00:07:51]  Huge bomb, allegations that Elon exposed himself on a private SpaceX jet flight to a flight attendant who he had asked for a full body massage.
[00:08:05]  And full body, to be clear here, the implication is also the body and head of his penis.
[00:08:13]  So yeah, what seems to be the gist of the story here is the woman's friend, which I got to say, friendship's got to be on the rocks after this.
[00:08:22]  The woman's friend says that her friend, who was the flight attendant here, was asked to take massage classes by her superior at SpaceX.
[00:08:33]  Okay.
[00:08:35]  Can I pause for a second?
[00:08:36]  Absolutely.
[00:08:39]  I think that it's grand that we have a podcast where it started that, you know, we're covering this like horrible case with Epstein.
[00:08:48]  A man I want to note also had a predilection for massages.
[00:08:52]  He loved him.
[00:08:53]  And then, you know, some time goes by, whatever.
[00:08:56]  We talk about a lot of things.
[00:08:57]  COVID happens, blah, blah, blah.
[00:08:59]  We're all over the place.
[00:09:00]  We're talking things.
[00:09:00]  We do this big thing on Elon Musk, whatever.
[00:09:03]  We didn't know any of this information when we did that.
[00:09:05]  No, I didn't know.
[00:09:06]  And now you're fucking telling me that we're dealing with another guy who has a thing about massages.
[00:09:12]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:13]  It's another guy who not only has these private jets, but is trying to get a jack off in the air on these private jets.
[00:09:22]  Elon, I mean, that's what he's trying.
[00:09:24]  I mean, maybe he's trying to get full pen or whatever, but he's definitely at least trying to get a jack off here.
[00:09:29]  He, so he, he offers this girl.
[00:09:31]  She kind of like, she sidles up to him and, or not, excuse me.
[00:09:35]  I want to be clear.
[00:09:36]  There's no indications that she sidled up to him.
[00:09:40]  That was totally editorial there.
[00:09:41]  Yeah, hey, the liar in action, right?
[00:09:44]  Exactly.
[00:09:44]  I'm lying right now.
[00:09:45]  This is not lying.
[00:09:46]  According to her friend, you know, she's going to give Elon a massage.
[00:09:51]  He's lying down naked, which by the way, when Bracey gets massaged, I'm wearing my underwear.
[00:09:57]  Yeah, you should, you know, do that.
[00:09:59]  You're a thong.
[00:09:59]  You wear a thong.
[00:10:00]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:01]  And I'm wearing shoes and socks, but nothing else.
[00:10:04]  Full nude except for underwear and usually hiking boots.
[00:10:10]  And so, you know, she goes up to him.
[00:10:12]  He's wearing the towel and he like touches her leg and is like, if you come on, do the South African accent.
[00:10:22]  If you touch my penis, I will give you an Arabian stallion.
[00:10:28]  Yeah.
[00:10:29]  What?
[00:10:30]  That's Biko.
[00:10:31]  I'm doing Steve Biko there.
[00:10:33]  Oh my God.
[00:10:34]  But yeah, so he basically tries to exchange a horse because he knows that she's into horses.
[00:10:43]  Okay, wait, to be clear, what he says is, oh, you know, if you do this, I'll buy you a horse.
[00:10:48]  Yes.
[00:10:49]  Not that there was a horse on the plane or something.
[00:10:51]  No, no horse on the plane.
[00:10:52]  No.
[00:10:52]  That's not Mr. Hansy, not Mr. Hands.
[00:10:57]  And so she refuses and she is cut from the schedule or has her shifts sort of taken down.
[00:11:04]  And then I guess I guess eventually complains and gets a little severance pay.
[00:11:10]  Yeah, 250K in severance.
[00:11:13]  Her friend kind of suggests, because I don't think that Business Insider had any access to anything outside of the front story, that it was all in exchange for her silence.
[00:11:25]  So pretty big story.
[00:11:26]  We were actually, we were both in different parts of the world when it broke.
[00:11:30]  And I have to say, it was like all on the radio and TV where I was, which was pretty, pretty shocking.
[00:11:40]  There was, it's like, it's pretty interesting kind of in the lead up to this story.
[00:11:44]  Was a tweet from a friend of the show, Unusual Whales, which is kind of like a little like stock ticker kind of account.
[00:11:54]  And he tweeted out that there was this large put position taken out on Tesla expiring on the 20th, which the story dropped on the 19th, basically betting about 4 million that the stock would fall around 10%.
[00:12:08]  So a lot of money right when this article hit started flowing into like bearish signals with Tesla and Tesla's stock started to fall.
[00:12:16]  I mean, it had been following kind of in addition, like sort of as a part of all the all the tech stocks that have been kind of falling in the sell-off over the past couple weeks.
[00:12:26]  But someone made off pretty, pretty, pretty good with that Tesla position.
[00:12:36]  I mean, what if it was the friend?
[00:12:38]  Well, someone always knows.
[00:12:39]  Yeah.
[00:12:39]  Or someone Biz Insider.
[00:12:42]  That's why they're called that, right?
[00:12:43]  Business Inside or Trading.
[00:12:46]  Yeah, it's right in the name.
[00:12:48]  I mean, here's the thing about this is, yeah, it is pretty unusual, I feel like, for a story, especially of this nature.
[00:12:54]  You know, Business Insider is not like a two-bit rag or whatever, you know?
[00:12:59]  You know, they seem pretty competent.
[00:13:01]  The guy who wrote this story seems like a veteran newshound.
[00:13:06]  So I'm guessing, and of course, you know, Elon Musk being very litigious, I'm guessing that they had some stuff to back this up.
[00:13:13]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:13:14]  I will say it's pretty unusual for a friend of a victim without the victim to come forward like this.
[00:13:21]  And I guarantee, I mean, I'm sure it's just the best that they could do.
[00:13:24]  You know, obviously there were NDAs signed here.
[00:13:26]  I don't know what the law is.
[00:13:28]  In fact, I kind of do know what the law is around NDAs is that if you've been sexually harassed, I think you actually can't break it.
[00:13:35]  You can break NDAs.
[00:13:37]  Whether that, you know, that's what the law says, whether people actually do that and risk the consequences.
[00:13:43]  Right.
[00:13:43]  It's like the law can say one thing, but it's another if you're actually going to go ahead and have the money to prove it in court, right?
[00:13:48]  Exactly.
[00:13:49]  Because, okay, you break your NDA, but then someone sues you and it costs you like millions of dollars to fucking defend yourself.
[00:13:56]  Yeah.
[00:13:56]  Much more than a 250K payout.
[00:13:59]  I got to say, Elon has seemed pretty plussed or unfazed about this, at least publicly, because he's been making kind of a lot of like Twitter jokes about horses and, you know, even that's just his fucking annoying way.
[00:14:15]  Yeah.
[00:14:15]  He digs in.
[00:14:17]  Yeah.
[00:14:17]  I don't know.
[00:14:18]  I think he did have a freak out because remember he started tweeting about wanting lawyers, wanting all this stuff.
[00:14:22]  He's going to like go crazy litigious.

=== Elon's Twitter Joke Fest (13:50) ===

[00:14:25]  We should mention, I'm going to say, like Tesla, I tweeted something about this.
[00:14:30]  You always know I really, you know, fucking Elon gets under my skin so much.
[00:14:33]  He like forces me to tweet again.
[00:14:36]  And, you know, Tesla like hasn't had general counsel, I think, since 2019, like a real general counsel on the books.
[00:14:44]  And then they have cycled through a shit ton of lawyers.
[00:14:47]  No one wants to work there.
[00:14:49]  Hmm.
[00:14:49]  Can't imagine why.
[00:14:51]  Yeah.
[00:14:51]  And now he's saying, oh, I'm going to like, I need like teams of lawyers DM me your CVs or whatever he's saying.
[00:14:58]  He's like a total psycho.
[00:14:59]  I mean, the man's, the man's a moron.
[00:15:02]  Yeah.
[00:15:03]  I mean, here's the thing.
[00:15:04]  If he does hire a lawyer who DM'd him their CV, isn't that like, can't you like get someone out of being CEO if they're like a little loosey-goosey upstairs?
[00:15:15]  A little light in the old brain loafer?
[00:15:18]  He might be like losing it a little bit too, because Tesla itself is losing a lot of money.
[00:15:23]  And I mentioned that the tech sell-off was hurting everything because Tesla's losing a little money.
[00:15:27]  Tech is losing money.
[00:15:29]  And that means that his Twitter deal is not looking so good right now.
[00:15:35]  We should backtrack on this timeline for a second so I can explain.
[00:15:38]  But, and also, Brace, because you weren't here for that episode and you didn't listen to it.
[00:15:41]  So you don't even fucking know what's going on.
[00:15:43]  That's true.
[00:15:43]  Oh my God.
[00:15:44]  Got you there.
[00:15:45]  So April 13th.
[00:15:48]  Let's backtrack for a second.
[00:15:49]  Okay.
[00:15:49]  April 13th, he sent the board of Twitter a letter saying he's buying the company for $54, $20, $54, 20 cents a share in cash.
[00:16:00]  Now, I want to be clear about something.
[00:16:03]  At the time that he did this, he made a really big deal about bots.
[00:16:09]  You remember those?
[00:16:10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:12]  He made like a huge deal about spam bots.
[00:16:15]  Yeah.
[00:16:15]  And I mean, his whole thing was that he's going to fix Twitter.
[00:16:18]  And that was one of his big problems with it.
[00:16:19]  And, you know, Elon Musk is sort of famous for having like under his, every time he puts out a tweet, underneath his tweet is a guy pretending to be Elon Musk being like, you know, trying to get people to fall for some crypto scam.
[00:16:32]  Yeah, totally.
[00:16:34]  And I mean, he's just like, he talks about that all the time, like before the deal.
[00:16:38]  He's like, we got to fix Twitter.
[00:16:39]  Like you said, we are, he's like, oh, the bots will finally be defeated.
[00:16:43]  Like he's going to war with the bots.
[00:16:44]  He had, remember, we talked about years ago, he had that huge thing with the war on the short guys.
[00:16:50]  Yes.
[00:16:50]  And so he's always had this, you know, kind of like vision of, I think, what these like accounts are and attacking him and, you know, whatever.
[00:17:00]  So he's like literally tweeting before the deal is signed that he was going to defeat the spam bots.
[00:17:05]  Okay.
[00:17:06]  I'm being like really annoying about this, but I want to, I'm, I'm, this is my little annoying moment.
[00:17:12]  So do my.
[00:17:12]  Absolutely.
[00:17:13]  Yeah.
[00:17:13]  Little annoying moment.
[00:17:14]  Yeah.
[00:17:15]  Close attention to those two words.
[00:17:16]  Be nice.
[00:17:17]  Be nice.
[00:17:18]  I am.
[00:17:19]  So, okay, whatever.
[00:17:21]  Him and Twitter agree to a deal.
[00:17:23]  Super stupid.
[00:17:24]  They announce a deal back on April 25th, right?
[00:17:27]  After he had tweeted about taking down the bots.
[00:17:30]  Okay, being annoying.
[00:17:32]  Then last week, he tweets that the deal won't go through because of spam bots.
[00:17:39]  I swear to God.
[00:17:39]  So he says, Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/slash fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.
[00:17:48]  Basically, he said that Twitter had to prove that bots were less than 5% of its users.
[00:17:56]  And he said that he believes that bots make up 20% of all Twitter accounts.
[00:18:01]  And then he went on to say possibly as high as 90%.
[00:18:05]  That's sick.
[00:18:06]  Which is insane and a highly regarded thing, even for Elon Musk to say.
[00:18:12]  What percent are you landing at, Liz?
[00:18:14]  What do you, what do you think?
[00:18:15]  I think Twitter's probably right.
[00:18:16]  Like 6%, 5%.
[00:18:17]  Like, I just to be clear, like, Twitter has had that same, from my understanding and like my memory, Twitter's kind of had that figure in all of its public filings.
[00:18:29]  It said, you know, we think it's around 5%.
[00:18:31]  This is what we could say.
[00:18:32]  It's 5%, whatever.
[00:18:34]  Like, that's not like some new number that Twitter has said.
[00:18:37]  It's been like years of public filings where they've kind of maintained this similar ratio.
[00:18:42]  So, another little just annoying thing that I want to say about this.
[00:18:47]  Okay, well, there's a couple of annoying things I want to say about this, but I got to like put a little like annoying regulator cap on for a second.
[00:18:56]  Like, I'm going to be like Liz Warren, annoying lady for a second, and say that, like, him tweeting that the deal is temporarily on hold is not a thing.
[00:19:07]  That's not a thing.
[00:19:08]  You can't do that.
[00:19:09]  No, he's just tweeting.
[00:19:10]  Like, he's just tweeting.
[00:19:11]  Nothing has been filed with the SEC.
[00:19:13]  The deal is not on hold.
[00:19:15]  Like, this is not a thing.
[00:19:16]  He signed a fucking contract.
[00:19:18]  He signed a contract that is a legal document.
[00:19:20]  This man signed a contract that he's legally bound, right?
[00:19:24]  To he's legally bound to buy Twitter.
[00:19:29]  Sorry.
[00:19:30]  That's just a social construct.
[00:19:31]  I mean, no, like there's nothing in the contract that says that he can walk away from it if bots are more than 5% of account.
[00:19:38]  Like, that's not even a thing.
[00:19:39]  He's tweeted that fucking meme with like the astronaut shooting meme that's like, wait, it was always bots, always was, or whatever.
[00:19:46]  With the like, she's like, shut the fuck up, dude.
[00:19:49]  Like, no.
[00:19:53]  So he tweets this out that this deal.
[00:19:55]  I hate this.
[00:19:56]  I hate this fucking asshole.
[00:19:58]  Liz is visibly mad.
[00:19:59]  I'm so, ah, I can't even get the words out.
[00:20:02]  This man makes me so fucking angry.
[00:20:05]  So he tweets this fucking thing out that deal is on temporarily hold, which is a lie.
[00:20:11]  It's not on hold.
[00:20:12]  Deal is not on hold.
[00:20:14]  Then as he's tweeting that, Twitter stock starts trading down 25%.
[00:20:20]  There we go.
[00:20:22]  This is fucking Musk in action.
[00:20:24]  So in any rational real world, by the, so I know I sound like a fucking annoying, like, everyone's like listening to this.
[00:20:31]  They're like, I'm a communist.
[00:20:32]  The law is a construct.
[00:20:33]  No, it's not, bitch.
[00:20:34]  Okay.
[00:20:34]  Like, in any rational world, this would be deemed securities fraud, right?
[00:20:39]  Like, you he literally just tweeted something fake that tanked the stock price of a fucking company that he is contractually obliged to buy.
[00:20:47]  Yeah.
[00:20:47]  Right.
[00:20:49]  But it's Elon Musk and he's tweeting something.
[00:20:52]  And this is erasing billions of dollars of Twitter market cap as he is attempting to buy it.
[00:20:57]  And this is just fine.
[00:20:59]  This is totally fine.
[00:21:00]  He can do this because no one gives a shit, right?
[00:21:03]  This, like, this is this, it drives me fucking crazy with him.
[00:21:07]  Well, I mean, this is something I've really been thinking about a lot is like, you know, he's a guy who commits a lot of securities fraud, but sometimes to me, he seems like a like a man with insecurities that is a fraud.
[00:21:18]  Oh my God.
[00:21:19]  I hate you so much for that.
[00:21:22]  That was really good.
[00:21:23]  That was really good.
[00:21:25]  I'm using that every episode from now on.
[00:21:27]  Yeah, I mean, but nothing, nothing's going to happen because of that, right?
[00:21:30]  Well, that's the thing.
[00:21:31]  Like, there's literally even also in the fucking contract to buy Twitter, right?
[00:21:37]  There is, they were so smart.
[00:21:39]  They put a little Elon Musk proviso in the acquisition agreement, and it goes like this: notwithstanding the foregoing, the equity investor, Elon Musk, shall be permitted to issue tweets about the merger or the transactions contemplated hereby, so long as, and I'm going to, I have this bolded in our notes here.
[00:21:55]  Tweets do not disparage the company or any of its representatives.
[00:21:59]  Well, he did.
[00:22:00]  I mean, the CEO of the CEO of Twitter put out some like long thread, I believe, talking about their methodology for calculating bots.
[00:22:07]  And then Elon Musk replied with the poo emoji.
[00:22:10]  Oh my God.
[00:22:11]  And so I think that would probably qualify on both counts there, right?
[00:22:14]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:22:15]  And it's like, look, it's the same thing.
[00:22:18]  It's what you just said.
[00:22:19]  Like, this is the fucking, you know, what are they going to do?
[00:22:22]  Sue me conundrum.
[00:22:23]  That is like every single thing that Elon Musk does.
[00:22:27]  And the answer is, no, no, they won't.
[00:22:29]  Like, no one's going to do anything.
[00:22:31]  Yeah.
[00:22:32]  I want to also clear something up, which is that, like, there was, and I saw someone even in our little Patreon comments say this.
[00:22:41]  And so I'm going to like dig at them too.
[00:22:43]  You know who you are.
[00:22:44]  There's this like popular belief that Elon Musk can just walk out of this deal because of the break fee that was negotiated to the contractors, like a billion dollar break fee.
[00:22:54]  And that like basically just his total liability for this deal is capped at a billion dollars if he were to choose to walk away from the deal.
[00:23:02]  And that's not true.
[00:23:04]  Like even the, no, the FT even like wrote an article that basically said that, but that's not true.
[00:23:11]  Like it's again, it's like fun.
[00:23:14]  It's important to be like annoying about this when, because it's fun, but also because this is actually important to understand.
[00:23:20]  Like if everything goes fine, all the financing goes through and everything is good to go, but he just decides to walk away, like he could be out for much more than a billion.
[00:23:32]  He actually would be like, there's a world in which he could be sued by Twitter based on this contract in Delaware court, right?
[00:23:41]  To that he's still obligated to buy the company, that he still has to put up the whatever it is, 27.5 billion.
[00:23:48]  Yeah, they would force him.
[00:23:49]  That would require Twitter to sue him to close the deal rather than allowing him to walk away, right?
[00:23:56]  I love that.
[00:23:56]  Yeah.
[00:23:57]  So you could say like, you know, normal circumstances, there aren't like, you know, when there's mergers or there's buyouts or whatever, they don't just say like buyers don't go like, whoopsies, like, oops, I changed my mind.
[00:24:10]  You know, never mind.
[00:24:10]  Don't want to do it.
[00:24:11]  I'm just going to pay the fee and let me walk on my way.
[00:24:13]  Like companies are like, wait, what?
[00:24:14]  You can't do that.
[00:24:15]  I'm going to sue you.
[00:24:16]  You said you would do this.
[00:24:17]  We have a contract.
[00:24:18]  You're obligated to fulfill the contract.
[00:24:20]  Right.
[00:24:22]  They usually what they would do when they try to walk away is they say, okay, there's something wrong in the filings.
[00:24:27]  There's something I didn't know when I committed to the deal.
[00:24:29]  Like, you know, the financing isn't there or there's all this information.
[00:24:33]  That's what people are trying to say he's doing with the bot stuff.
[00:24:36]  But that's clearly not what he did because he was tweeting about the bots prior to the agreement.
[00:24:41]  Yeah.
[00:24:42]  The man is known about the bots.
[00:24:44]  But I mean, it's, it's weird because like it's, it's very clear that he's trying to do something funky with the deal, right?
[00:24:50]  I don't know what he's trying to do with it, but he's definitely trying to do something funky with it.
[00:24:53]  And he's using the bots as an excuse.
[00:24:55]  Well, that's the thing, right?
[00:24:56]  So what he's trying to do is negotiate a better deal.
[00:24:59]  And he's got leverage over Twitter.
[00:25:00]  And this is what, this is what really fucking makes me mad.
[00:25:03]  Okay.
[00:25:04]  There's so much that makes me mad about Elon, but this is like even more makes me mad, right?
[00:25:08]  Which is that Twitter could let him walk away with just the billion break fee if he wanted to and stay a public company.
[00:25:17]  But I don't think anyone at Twitter wants to do that anymore, right?
[00:25:19]  Because they have probably been like, well, wait, we could just get paid out and we don't have to fucking deal with any of this bullshit anymore.
[00:25:24]  Sounds great.
[00:25:25]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:25:27]  And does Twitter really want to sue Elon in court and force him to phony up the 27 billion?
[00:25:34]  I don't know.
[00:25:35]  So yes, the bot stuff.
[00:25:37]  I mean, him trying to make this whole fucking, this whole fucking scene is that, you know, look, what ask, you know, ask yourself what's changed, right?
[00:25:48]  We said the fucking stock market has tanked.
[00:25:51]  The crypto market has tanked.
[00:25:52]  The entire tech sector has completely tanked.
[00:25:55]  There's been a massive sell-off.
[00:25:56]  Like 54.20 now looks like a really bad price for Twitter.
[00:26:00]  And it is.
[00:26:01]  Yeah.
[00:26:02]  Especially because he helped tank their stock price.
[00:26:05]  Yes.
[00:26:07]  So I don't know.
[00:26:08]  Funny enough, like Twitter has a shh, I think they have their annual shareholder meeting today.
[00:26:12]  It is today.
[00:26:12]  Yeah.
[00:26:13]  Oh, yeah.
[00:26:13]  So that's interesting.
[00:26:16]  So it'll be interesting to see what they do.
[00:26:18]  Basically, like the big problem is now with tech tanking, and there was like even more of a sell-off today.
[00:26:23]  I think, you know, Elon basically is stuck with a bad deal.
[00:26:27]  He's lost a shit ton of money.
[00:26:28]  Even personally, he's lost a shit ton of money.
[00:26:30]  Tesla's losing money.
[00:26:32]  But he can't pull out without triggering the fee or possibly facing, you know, going to Delaware court.
[00:26:37]  But the price is just too high now.
[00:26:39]  So it puts Twitter in this hard place negotiating-wise, right?
[00:26:42]  So they are under pressure to close the deal soon.
[00:26:46]  They don't want, they just want to get it done.
[00:26:49]  Everyone's staring down a bear market.
[00:26:51]  And maybe you do want to negotiate a lower price, right?
[00:26:56]  Yeah.
[00:26:56]  So maybe Elon does get what he wants.
[00:26:58]  I mean, can he negotiate a lower price, you think?
[00:27:01]  Probably.
[00:27:02]  Twitter's in a shit position because they made a fucking deal with the devil.
[00:27:06]  Like they can force Musk to buy the company in court, but that's going to be long and annoying and a pain in the fucking ass for everyone, including you and me having to watch this fucking clown show.
[00:27:15]  Like a Delaware court would 1000% be sympathetic to Twitter in this whole situation because it's so ridiculous.
[00:27:23]  But, you know, insert the like, but at what cost me?
[00:27:26]  Like it would be a disaster for them as a company.
[00:27:29]  It would be a mess.
[00:27:30]  And Elon would be, you know, running his whole circus show.
[00:27:33]  Yeah, no doubt it would fuck with their stock prices more too.
[00:27:35]  And so if they do lose, it's really bad for them.
[00:27:39]  Absolutely.
[00:27:39]  And so it's like, do you let him walk away?
[00:27:41]  Do you negotiate a lower price?
[00:27:42]  Like, it's just one or the other.
[00:27:44]  And so Elon wins again.
[00:27:45]  And like he has broken the law just in these fucking weeks that he signed this contract like several, several times.
[00:27:52]  And like he knows the law doesn't apply to him.
[00:27:55]  And he flaunts it and he doesn't give a fucking shit.
[00:27:58]  There's a contract in place.
[00:28:00]  He's violated it over and over and over and over again.
[00:28:03]  It doesn't fucking matter.
[00:28:04]  Like he'll pay these small fines so that he doesn't have to pay like bigger dues that are due to the SEC.
[00:28:10]  It's like the same thing over again.
[00:28:11]  And like the US government just won't do anything about it.
[00:28:15]  They won't do anything about it.

=== Mall of Asia Mystery (15:17) ===

[00:28:16]  Like I, I just, I, it's fucking shocking that no one has the bowl to stand up to this fucking middling clown.
[00:28:25]  Yeah.
[00:28:26]  I mean, he, it's, it's, uh, I think some, I saw a tweet that he made like a couple of years ago that said the uh the E and SECT stand for Elons, meaning like it stands for suck Elon's cock.
[00:28:37]  Uh, and I gotta- I hate this fucking guy.
[00:28:40]  I think he was right.
[00:28:41]  He is fucking pathetic losers.
[00:28:44]  Everyone's a fucking loser.
[00:28:59]  So Liz, you know me.
[00:29:01]  You know, I love the sun.
[00:29:03]  The sun?
[00:29:04]  Yeah.
[00:29:05]  Oh, yeah.
[00:29:07]  I call it other guy.
[00:29:09]  Yeah.
[00:29:09]  Soul.
[00:29:10]  Yeah, soul maxing.
[00:29:11]  That's you.
[00:29:12]  That's me.
[00:29:13]  And so you know me.
[00:29:14]  You know, I'm like, I got to pop the top, got to pop the pants, got to strap on the hiking boots and just lay on the beach.
[00:29:22]  And, you know, it being May and all, one of the top vacation months, I was like, I'm going to the freaking Philippines.
[00:29:30]  I feel like we should, it's funny because, you know, we were kind of like dancing around where you were because it was funny on the podcast.
[00:29:39]  And I saw a bunch of people were like, oh, Brace is in Ukraine.
[00:29:43]  And I was like, I don't, why would you think that?
[00:29:46]  First of all, I've been to Ukraine.
[00:29:47]  I don't want to go back there.
[00:29:48]  Yeah, you already been there.
[00:29:49]  Also, news flash, not a great time to go.
[00:29:52]  Yeah, I get what's happening there.
[00:29:54]  I don't want to, I'm not trying to do that.
[00:29:57]  That seems scary to me.
[00:29:59]  No, what I wanted to do is they don't have direct flights from Langley, by the way.
[00:30:02]  Exactly.
[00:30:03]  I was, well, actually, they do, but they were full.
[00:30:07]  I was like, you know what?
[00:30:09]  Cebu City, baby.
[00:30:12]  I'm going to get out there, toss on a grass skirt, do hula dancing or hooping, whichever one takes my fancy, and pop on a pair of snorkels and just some fins and get down onto the water there.
[00:30:28]  In my head, it's like indoor snorkeling in the jungle.
[00:30:32]  And so, what we're going to talk about for the next two hours is my relaxing vacation on the beach in the Philippines.
[00:30:38]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:30:39]  I probably had the worst vacation of my life.
[00:30:42]  Oh, my God.
[00:30:43]  Here we go.
[00:30:44]  I go out there and I'm like, you know what?
[00:30:46]  Tiring of the grievances.
[00:30:48]  I haven't been to the beach in years.
[00:30:50]  I cannot wait.
[00:30:52]  Oh, tales in the South Pacific or West Pacific.
[00:30:55]  I'm going to figure out what's up with these Chinese islands with my binoculars from a fishing boat.
[00:31:00]  And you know what?
[00:31:01]  I didn't even get out to Cebu City.
[00:31:04]  I got stuck in Luzon.
[00:31:07]  And when I was there, let me tell you, baby, it's more like Luzer because I couldn't even, I didn't, I didn't get to any of the beaches.
[00:31:13]  I didn't see one fucking beach in the entire time that I was in the fucking Philippines.
[00:31:18]  What's Luzon?
[00:31:20]  All right.
[00:31:21]  So Luzon is one of the three.
[00:31:23]  So the Philippines is made up of like a shit ton of islands.
[00:31:26]  Okay.
[00:31:28]  And Luzon is the biggest motherfucker there.
[00:31:32]  It is, I think, one of the actually the biggest islands in the world.
[00:31:35]  And it is exactly the island.
[00:31:37]  It's the one with Manila on it.
[00:31:39]  Okay.
[00:31:39]  Quezon City.
[00:31:40]  It's like the main, it's not the main one, but it's one of the two big ones that you hear about.
[00:31:44]  Or the famous one.
[00:31:45]  It's the famous one.
[00:31:46]  You hear about Luzon and Mindanao and all these kinds of things.
[00:31:50]  Usually, though, you're on damn trip advisor.
[00:31:52]  You're looking like, where's the coolest fish to see?
[00:31:55]  You know how many fish I saw when I was there, Liz?
[00:31:58]  Zero fishies the entire time.
[00:32:02]  Now, so I get out there and it turns out the election's happening.
[00:32:07]  What a weird coincidence.
[00:32:08]  I know, I know, I know, I know.
[00:32:10]  And so I get to this hotel and I meet all these people.
[00:32:14]  You know, I'm out there at a swinger's resort in Quezon City.
[00:32:20]  Sandals Quezon.
[00:32:21]  Yes.
[00:32:22]  Yeah.
[00:32:22]  No, no, hedonism to Quezon City.
[00:32:25]  Oh, my God.
[00:32:26]  And I meet all these people from what's called the International Observation Mission who are out there to observe the elections and see some of the things that happen around the country during election time.
[00:32:42]  Because if you listen to our last episode, that was our last episode, right?
[00:32:46]  Yeah.
[00:32:46]  Our last episode where we did talk about the election, there are some nasty things that can happen in the country.
[00:32:53]  Yes.
[00:32:53]  During that time period.
[00:32:55]  So I get there.
[00:32:57]  I think I leave on the first and I get there on the third.
[00:33:01]  And I end up staying in Quezon City.
[00:33:04]  And, you know, it's hot there.
[00:33:07]  It's sticky.
[00:33:08]  I get monkeypox immediately.
[00:33:10]  And I'll tell you this.
[00:33:11]  You're just straight oozing.
[00:33:13]  I'm oozing the entire time.
[00:33:14]  And I tell you this, you know, I was like, these people are so friendly.
[00:33:18]  You know, I talked about on this show that I like Filipinos before because they're very goofy.
[00:33:22]  And I got to see the ironic sense of humor that some Filipinos have when they unfortunately put up posters of a person that I was there with saying, communist terrorists, get out of the country with their picture on it.
[00:33:36]  Yeah, which we talked about on this show before, I believe in our episode with Brandon Lee, about red tagging, which is the process that the government uses to basically smear activists.
[00:33:47]  Oh, I see.
[00:33:48]  So their downtown scene is going right-wing too.
[00:33:51]  Exactly.
[00:33:51]  Yes.
[00:33:52]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:53]  They're all into the apes and the NFTs and all that kind of thing.
[00:33:56]  So a little bit of history there is that, you know, the Philippines run by a small group of families.
[00:34:03]  You know, basically since 86, since the Marcos dictatorship ended with the EDSA revolution, there has been a series of pretty corrupt presidents who, you know, from various parties, but really all just kind of the same, the same sort of story of like graft, corruption, violence, et cetera.
[00:34:23]  Since the late 60s, there has also been an insurgency there, or really a civil war between the Communist Party of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front to which they belong, who have been waging war in Countryside.
[00:34:38]  I believe it's one of the longest ongoing insurgencies in the world.
[00:34:42]  You know, it's had highs and lows, but there are, you know, generally thought to be many thousands of guerrillas in the jungle.
[00:34:51]  And really, what that means for a lot of people in urban areas who are, let's say, sympathetic to progressive causes is like we were saying, the government will make a little Facebook post about you and call you a communist terrorist and smear you and then escalate that and then escalate that and escalate that.
[00:35:11]  Until I heard stories about other people who were just there on vacation actually having protests outside of their hotel room by paid, essentially paid protesters calling them communist goons and stuff like that.
[00:35:25]  And I actually, you know, during the first few days I was there, I actually ran into former guest and friend of the show, Bonnie Olagan.
[00:35:31]  What?
[00:35:31]  What a small island.
[00:35:33]  I know.
[00:35:34]  Or should I say a collection of islands?
[00:35:35]  Saw him give a little talk.
[00:35:36]  A fantastic guy.
[00:35:38]  Great hat.
[00:35:39]  Oh, interesting.
[00:35:40]  And I got to say, think of him as a hat guy.
[00:35:43]  Well, I think if you're an older gentleman, particularly a playwright, you are allowed a certain selection of hats that it's actually becomes better for you to be wearing one.
[00:35:52]  There's a certain kind of fedora that really works on an older like intellectual man.
[00:35:58]  This was like one of those kind of cabby hat ones.
[00:36:00]  Oh, okay.
[00:36:00]  That was great.
[00:36:02]  Grayish hair?
[00:36:03]  Yeah, fantastic.
[00:36:04]  Oh, yeah.
[00:36:06]  But yeah, you know, I ended up just at a park in Quezon City.
[00:36:11]  And there was this big wall of martial law victims, including Bonnie's sister.
[00:36:16]  And in front of that, there was a memorial for this woman named Mary Hilau Enriquez, who had been a prisoner under martial law and who ran an organization called Carapatan, who had just passed away, natural causes in America.
[00:36:32]  And, you know, I ended up at a interfaith sort of anti-fraud election thing at the, or in the election thing at the Manila Cathedral, which was right next to a building belonging to something called Comalec, which is the Commission on Elections.
[00:36:46]  And let me tell you, Filipinos, they love their little portmanteaus, portmanteaus, however you pronounce it, because everything there is just like they call press conferences, press cons, which I actually kind of liked.
[00:36:57]  Press cons?
[00:36:58]  Yes.
[00:36:59]  That's a press cons.
[00:37:01]  So, you know, one thing that I think the NCR, which is the national capital region, which encases both Quezon City and a bunch of like sort of outlying urban areas and Manila and a bunch of its outlying urban areas, it's a massive area.
[00:37:17]  One thing that it has in abundance, baby, is shopping malls.
[00:37:21]  Like more malls than you could ever imagine in your entire life.
[00:37:26]  Now, are you pro-mall or anti-mall?
[00:37:29]  You know, before, you know, SF doesn't really have many malls.
[00:37:32]  Yeah, they all got shut down.
[00:37:34]  Yeah.
[00:37:35]  Wait, is Stonstown still around?
[00:37:37]  Yeah, but who the fuck goes to Stonest?
[00:37:38]  Are you so far away?
[00:37:39]  I was a kid.
[00:37:40]  That was my mall when I was a kid, Stonestown.
[00:37:42]  It's just like Stone Town.
[00:37:44]  You might as well, I mean, it's like past Daily City, it feels like I was just in a mall too.
[00:37:49]  I spent some time in a mall, more time than I liked during our vacation time.
[00:37:54]  I gotta say, I didn't spend very much time in the malls because I go to this, one of the biggest ones they have.
[00:38:00]  And in fact, I think it's sort of touted as one of the biggest malls in Asia, whether that's true or not.
[00:38:05]  I don't know, because I didn't even get to go in.
[00:38:07]  I go to the mall of Asia looking to buy some new kids.
[00:38:10]  That's what's called Mall of Asia.
[00:38:12]  I assume it's like some like Mall of America.
[00:38:15]  All the malls out there, by the way, are owned by a company called SM, which stands for Schumart, which I kind of like.
[00:38:22]  Well, anyways, I go down there.
[00:38:23]  It's the seventh, a couple days before the election, and there's a giant bong bong Marcos rally.
[00:38:30]  Now, to be clear, it is illegal for foreigners to attend political rallies.
[00:38:35]  Really?
[00:38:35]  Yes.
[00:38:36]  Yeah.
[00:38:37]  In fact, there's actually quite a few laws.
[00:38:40]  Somehow I believe that that's very selectively enforced.
[00:38:44]  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:38:46]  Well, you know, there's actually quite a few laws, Liz, about foreigners' participation in politics in the Philippines.
[00:38:53]  Yeah, did you figure that?
[00:38:53]  Did you find that while you were there?
[00:38:55]  No, no, I knew that.
[00:38:56]  I knew that prior to going, but you know what?
[00:38:58]  Look at this shirt.
[00:38:59]  I'm a tourist.
[00:39:00]  You know, I was wearing, I was wearing shorts that made me look so.
[00:39:03]  I like that shirt, by the way.
[00:39:04]  I know that you, you bought some Classico style tourism wear.
[00:39:10]  Yes.
[00:39:11]  Yeah.
[00:39:11]  Yes, I did.
[00:39:12]  You're tourist maxing.
[00:39:14]  And, but I think it's like a good vibe on you, actually.
[00:39:18]  I like it.
[00:39:19]  Thank you.
[00:39:19]  Yeah.
[00:39:20]  Well, I go to this bong bong Marcos rally.
[00:39:22]  And this is, mind you, a couple days before the election.
[00:39:25]  This is actually the final night of rallies that any candidate is really having because the next day, I believe, was Sunday.
[00:39:32]  And then everyone takes that day off.
[00:39:33]  And then there's the election day itself.
[00:39:36]  And so I go to this rally.
[00:39:37]  And let me tell you, and you know, people always talk about, oh, this person busts their supporters into the rally and things like that.
[00:39:43]  You know, people always talk about busing in terms of rallies, like it's some sort of like secret thing that you do to sort of pump up your numbers, right?
[00:39:52]  I got to tell you, the traffic getting to this fucking thing, probably two and a half hours stuck in traffic made up solely of buses.
[00:40:03]  It was the most, I've literally, and I'm not exaggerating here, not being hyperbolic.
[00:40:08]  I've never seen so many buses in my life.
[00:40:11]  And so, you know, I finally get to the rally and I'm walking around and, you know, I query a couple of people because there's a lot of people like kind of walking around aimlessly.
[00:40:18]  I'm like, well, what's up?
[00:40:19]  Where'd you get bused in from?
[00:40:20]  And they're like, well, we got 300 bucks, 300 Filipino pesos, which is the equivalent to about, I don't know, like $4 or like, yeah, like $3 or $4 to come from, you know, outlying suburbs and places like that.
[00:40:34]  And you got to go to the rally, you get a little thing punched, and you exchange that when you get home for some money for like $300 to $500.
[00:40:44]  And then you also get a little bit of food money that you can spend at like the Mall of Asia.
[00:40:48]  Unfortunately, a lot of these people really just wanted a ride to the mall.
[00:40:52]  And so about half of the people I saw getting off of the buses were not going to the rally, but were in fact going to Mall of Asia, which was in the opposite direction.
[00:41:00]  It was a pretty good idea.
[00:41:02]  The rally itself was insane because it was like, I've never been to a big music festival, but it was in a giant dirt, like dirt field, essentially.
[00:41:12]  And the stage was so far away.
[00:41:15]  There were so many people.
[00:41:16]  It took me like 40 minutes just to get up as close as I could.
[00:41:20]  And there was just a comedian playing here comes the sun.
[00:41:23]  Oh my God.
[00:41:24]  Because, you know, here comes the sun of the theater over and over and over and making just bad jokes while two helicopters circled low overhead, throwing glitter out the back of them.
[00:41:34]  Oh my God.
[00:41:35]  I can't believe you didn't use your old like punk tactics to get to the front.
[00:41:39]  I tried to get it.
[00:41:39]  I tried to get in the Bomb Bomb Marcos mosh pit.
[00:41:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:42]  You didn't, you didn't get in the pit.
[00:41:43]  You didn't start circling?
[00:41:44]  I tried to, but it was too scary.
[00:41:46]  It looked like it looked like a damn hate breed concert.
[00:41:49]  No, it was just, it was.
[00:41:50]  They should bring that.
[00:41:51]  They actually should not.
[00:41:53]  Yeah.
[00:41:53]  Yeah.
[00:41:53]  Take that out.
[00:41:54]  That's not, no one should do that.
[00:41:56]  No, they should do that.
[00:41:57]  They should do that.
[00:41:58]  Gary.
[00:41:59]  That's MAGA.
[00:42:00]  The real or surreal thing about this was that on the way walking to this rally, which it took about 40 minutes from parking to actually get a ride there.
[00:42:07]  So I got dropped off from just walking to where I got dropped off to the actual like entrance to it.
[00:42:12]  There were sound trucks sort of blasting a song called New Society, which was sort of the theme song to martial law.
[00:42:20]  And it was so just surreal seeing this.
[00:42:23]  Yeah, it was very, very strange sort of seeing this like, you know, the way things used to be and sort of this nostalgia being being weaponized.
[00:42:31]  And I asked a lot of people, I was like, well, what do you like about Bong Bong Marcos?
[00:42:36]  And I got to tell you, I asked dozens of people that during my entire time there.
[00:42:41]  Everyone's kind of just like, I don't know, he seems all right.
[00:42:43]  Like nobody could point to a single thing.
[00:42:46]  You know, we talked about it.
[00:42:47]  He really had no campaign platform.
[00:42:48]  Not a single person would tell me something that they liked, except one guy told me that he had promised to bring rice down to 20, 20 pounds a kilo, and which I've been assured is just a fake thing to say.
[00:43:01]  Like that there's literally no way that can happen.
[00:43:04]  And so really my main thing that I was looking at there as a tourist, of course, was the classic Filipino three traditions of elections, which is guns, goons, and gold.
[00:43:18]  Now, I've seen that with 4Gs, guns, goons, gold, and girls.
[00:43:22]  I got to tell you, zero girls.
[00:43:25]  This is a sexless election for the Philippines, it looked like.
[00:43:29]  You know, there's a lot of stuff that I can't necessarily mention or wouldn't make necessarily make good podcasting material.

=== Vote Buying Scandals (09:24) ===

[00:43:34]  But on election day itself, I actually took an interfaith road trip with a pastor.
[00:43:41]  And his, are you converting to Catholicism?
[00:43:44]  No, no, no.
[00:43:45]  Pastor's pastor's pastor is Protestant.
[00:43:49]  But yes, I am.
[00:43:51]  Although I did spend a lot of time with Catholics there.
[00:43:54]  But yeah, I'm doing it maybe to kind of add to my brand.
[00:43:57]  I took a road trip with a pastor who I guess also a bishop.
[00:44:02]  I don't know how it works there.
[00:44:03]  I guess they elect bishops in the Protestant church.
[00:44:06]  I don't know.
[00:44:06]  I'm familiar with it.
[00:44:08]  Up to a small town in the north of Luzon, well, a town of about 50,000 people, where I actually got to sit in and watch people vote, which wasn't very exciting in and of itself.
[00:44:19]  I didn't see anything crazy go on, but I got to talking to people.
[00:44:22]  And I also sat next to a very good-looking election observer.
[00:44:25]  That's neither here nor there.
[00:44:28]  I was talking to people.
[00:44:28]  I'm like, well, what do you, you know, what's what makes you want to vote for anybody here?
[00:44:33]  Every single person was like, ah, you get $5,000 in the candidate.
[00:44:37]  And I was like, what do you mean?
[00:44:38]  They're like, yeah, if I vote for this candidate, it was a mayoral race, and that's who they're referring to.
[00:44:43]  If I vote for either the mayor or his opponent, their team's going to give me 5,000 pesos.
[00:44:47]  And I was like, well, maybe this guy.
[00:44:49]  Yeah.
[00:44:50]  Yeah.
[00:44:50]  So I was like, maybe it's just one or two people.
[00:44:53]  Every single person I talked to was like, yeah, yeah, they give me 5,000 pesos, which is the equivalent of about $50 U.S., which I got to say, you get me to vote for somebody for 50 bucks.
[00:45:04]  Yeah, that's the classic tactic.
[00:45:07]  Exactly.
[00:45:08]  Yeah.
[00:45:08]  And so that was something, you know, I'd read quite a lot about that before going out there.
[00:45:12]  And as a tourist, it was really illuminating to see how, you know, some of the local political culture in which vote buying was really widespread and rampant.
[00:45:23]  And actually, Liz, during this period, because I'm in a small town, you know, I don't really know that many people except for my man of the cloth I'm there with.
[00:45:31]  I told people that I was a grad student in sociology from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.
[00:45:42]  You were just following in the footsteps of your predecessor, Obama.
[00:45:46]  He was there for undergrad.
[00:45:47]  Exactly.
[00:45:47]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:48]  I used to walk through there sometimes.
[00:45:52]  And so I was like, oh, yeah, it's a college that's like very small.
[00:45:54]  And that, so no one will know someone who goes there.
[00:45:56]  And I got to tell you, if you ever want to ask, just deny any follow-up questions from anybody, tell them that you're a grad student in sociology from Occidental College.
[00:46:05]  Nobody has any more questions after that.
[00:46:07]  Everyone's so sick of talking to sociology majors.
[00:46:09]  They can't take it anyway.
[00:46:12]  Well, I ended up actually hanging out with the mayor that night.
[00:46:16]  And though there were some problems in the town, you had a big sash on that said mayor because that's damn.
[00:46:22]  I know, I know.
[00:46:24]  There's probably like 50 votes you don't have to buy if you just put on a mayor sash.
[00:46:28]  That's what a lot of people don't understand is sash culture, which has disappeared from apparently the Eastern world as well.
[00:46:34]  I mean, that would totally change the political landscape.
[00:46:37]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:46:38]  If, I mean, if baby, also, if every baby had to wear a sash that just said that they're a baby.
[00:46:42]  Yeah, that's a good look.
[00:46:44]  That's a really good look.
[00:46:45]  Yeah.
[00:46:46]  Well, so no, I actually go and hang out with the mayor and the mayor was a little sketched out.
[00:46:52]  There was a bunch of people, members of the military outside with their guns because the mayor's security team had actually been ambushed by his opponent's security team the night before and got in a long gun shootout from their SUVs at each other.
[00:47:08]  Okay.
[00:47:10]  And this was pretty incredible to talk about because people were very nonchalant about it.
[00:47:16]  You know, election violence, especially at the mayoral level, is pretty common.
[00:47:19]  But everybody who I talked to in the town, kind of no matter what side they supported, was like, it was the opponent, like a last ditch sort of like they wanted to get some of their guys shot, actually.
[00:47:32]  Another classico style.
[00:47:33]  Exactly.
[00:47:34]  So it was sort of a false flash.
[00:47:36]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:47:38]  And it was pretty incredible to talk to talk to them about it.
[00:47:43]  And, you know, I asked the mayor, I was like, brother, you know, as a sociology major to mayor, you know, kind of equals here.
[00:47:47]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:47:48]  You buy any votes?
[00:47:49]  And he's like, yeah, dude, I spent so much money on votes.
[00:47:53]  Too much.
[00:47:53]  The whole budget went to vote buying.
[00:47:55]  He actually.
[00:47:56]  And you were like, brother, I got a sash I got to show you.
[00:47:59]  He was actually complaining about having to spend too much money on votes.
[00:48:02]  And I was like, I pitched it to them.
[00:48:04]  I'm like, listen, if you really want to guarantee that you get in, you know, if you, because both he and his opponent were paying $5,000, it's kind of the going rate in the town.
[00:48:12]  I was like, why don't you pay $5,500?
[00:48:14]  Oh, yeah.
[00:48:15]  And just kind of cut him out there.
[00:48:17]  Yeah.
[00:48:18]  Started a little price war.
[00:48:20]  Well, but that could also then, you know, could start a little spiral.
[00:48:23]  Exactly.
[00:48:24]  I know.
[00:48:24]  And then, you know, who wins?
[00:48:26]  The people.
[00:48:27]  Well, that's what I said, too.
[00:48:29]  And I actually asked several people throughout my time there.
[00:48:31]  I'm like, well, what's to stop someone from getting money from everybody?
[00:48:34]  And my only response that I got from people was Filipinos are honorable.
[00:48:39]  Well, okay.
[00:48:40]  Which I suggest not being.
[00:48:44]  Yeah.
[00:48:44]  Here's my circumstance.
[00:48:47]  Brace, can you run for mayor?
[00:48:49]  So, of course, I immediately started out.
[00:48:51]  I calculated how much it was cost to run for mayor in a medium-sized town.
[00:48:56]  Potentially with a loan, like, yeah, I could.
[00:48:58]  I think it's illegal for foreigners to do it, though.
[00:49:01]  Okay.
[00:49:02]  Could I get a puppet mayor?
[00:49:03]  Yes.
[00:49:04]  That's the next question we have there.
[00:49:06]  And that is, of course, that is a conversation that will just be between me and the mayor.
[00:49:10]  And the puppet.
[00:49:11]  Yeah.
[00:49:12]  He eventually did win his election.
[00:49:14]  And in fact, I had a really surreal conversation with a fast-talking Filipino American woman in the town who was working for the opponents campaign.
[00:49:23]  And I asked her about the gunfight.
[00:49:24]  I asked her about the vote buying.
[00:49:25]  She, of course, said about the gunfight, the truth will come out, which means that she has to think of an excuse for why the planet.
[00:49:32]  She says that the truth will come out.
[00:49:35]  Here's my thing.
[00:49:35]  Anyone ever tells you the truth will come out?
[00:49:38]  They literally can't think of a lie.
[00:49:40]  They can't think of a lie yet.
[00:49:41]  They are lying.
[00:49:42]  It's a lie.
[00:49:43]  They can't think of what the lie is.
[00:49:44]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:49:44]  They're paving the way for a better lie that they haven't come up with yet.
[00:49:49]  The truth will come out.
[00:49:50]  It's also just a goofy thing to say.
[00:49:52]  It's like, what are you?
[00:49:53]  Like a wizard?
[00:49:54]  Who says that?
[00:49:55]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:49:56]  The truth will come out.
[00:49:57]  You know, it's something I really noticed during this election and, you know, in the days afterwards of talking to people is that like the, you know, political parties, anything to do with ideology, all that stuff was really for almost nobody I talked to.
[00:50:11]  And I talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of people during my time there.
[00:50:15]  Nobody gave a shit.
[00:50:16]  Yeah.
[00:50:17]  It was all based on like either personality or sort of like a tree of corruption and graft and who's getting money from who.
[00:50:27]  And then at the end, at the bottom of that period is the pyramid is the voters who might get directly paid themselves.
[00:50:32]  Right.
[00:50:34]  You know, something I, you know, we talked about in the in the last episode about the Philippines is how many people are related.
[00:50:39]  Well, I'm here in this small town and I'm talking to my buddy, the pastor.
[00:50:42]  I'm like, well, who are these two candidates?
[00:50:44]  He's like, well, the mayor is my cousin and the opponent is my other cousin.
[00:50:51]  And every single person, bar none.
[00:50:55]  And I'm not shitting you.
[00:50:56]  Literally every single person I spoke to in this town, after I'd be done talking to him, be like, that's my cousin.
[00:51:02]  It's just like one of those liberal definitions of cousin or is it like we're going to third.
[00:51:07]  We're talking third cousins here.
[00:51:08]  I don't know.
[00:51:09]  I feel like when you drop, that's my cousin and you're referring to a third cousin, brother, that's not your cousin.
[00:51:15]  My cousin thing is, can you have sex with them legally?
[00:51:19]  I don't like that as any kind of because if any kind of marker for anything, that should not be your sort of, you know, test test case.
[00:51:29]  Don't use that.
[00:51:30]  Well, you know, in talking to the mayor, too, I was like, well, who are you for in the in the presidential election?
[00:51:35]  He tells me, well, officially, I'm a BBM mayor.
[00:51:37]  I'm a bong bong mark.
[00:51:38]  I think I'm endorsing.
[00:51:39]  I'm not going to say that because.
[00:51:41]  But he's like, but actually, I'm voting personally for Lenny Robredo.
[00:51:47]  But if I, if I, you know, Bong Bong's going to win.
[00:51:50]  And if I don't endorse him, we might not get funding.
[00:51:55]  So why are they voting for Lenny then?
[00:51:58]  Because he personally, I mean, Lenny wasn't going to win, but I mean, honestly, the reason he told me is because Lenny's a vice presidential candidate was from the same town.
[00:52:05]  His mother was from that town.
[00:52:06]  So this is the honorable thing they're talking about.
[00:52:09]  Yes, exactly.
[00:52:10]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:52:11]  So that was, that was, that's kind of it for the, for the gold stuff, you know, like that, that there was, there was so much of this everywhere I talked to.
[00:52:21]  And just in terms of vote buying and the amount of money that was just spent by some of these candidates, I heard astronomical amounts going out for like a for a congressional campaign or for a senatorial campaign.
[00:52:33]  And so many of these actually revolved around vote buying.
[00:52:36]  There was a place in Manila where there was just a guy in a bathroom and you went up to him with your phone and you scanned a QR code and you got paid in their version of Venmo.
[00:52:47]  So he's just buying votes from a bathroom.
[00:52:50]  As somebody who also just came back from the periphery, I got to say QR codes fucking everywhere.
[00:52:54]  Everywhere.
[00:52:55]  Yeah.
[00:52:55]  They're everywhere.
[00:52:56]  They've penetrated.
[00:52:58]  Yeah.

=== QR Codes and Violence (03:49) ===

[00:52:59]  They've penetrated the entire world.
[00:53:01]  Horrific.
[00:53:02]  One of the worst side effects of these horrible, horrible consultants going around to like a shit ton of third world countries selling everyone on QR codes like I fucking hate you so much.
[00:53:12]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:53:12]  So the, you know, to get to the beginning of our 3Gs, the guns, you know, we already talked about these election day violence or, you know, election prior, election night Eve violence in the town that I was in.
[00:53:24]  But, you know, usually elections in the Philippines are just sort of notoriously violent.
[00:53:30]  Around 50 people were killed in violence directly related to elections in 2016.
[00:53:35]  A little over half of that in 2019, I think half because it was the midterms.
[00:53:39]  So there was just less people running for stuff.
[00:53:42]  Sure.
[00:53:42]  Dozens and dozens injured.
[00:53:44]  You know, I had some friends that were in other parts of the country and they told me that, you know, they saw people being beaten with sticks, that there were people killed in sites that they were taking vacation in.
[00:53:56]  You know, it was just, it's a really, you know, it's, it's crazy because guns are actually very expensive in the Philippines.
[00:54:03]  And so a lot of these sort of like local oligarchs or local politicians will have what's called PAGs, private armed groups, which are their security team.
[00:54:13]  And they just essentially send them out to shoot people that they disagree with.
[00:54:19]  You know, one woman that I spoke to, you know, I spent a little time on the periphery of the periphery in a relocatee area, which is where they had taken a bunch of people who lived in the slums in Manila and the government put them on trucks and then made them live outside of Manila.
[00:54:35]  Okay.
[00:54:36]  And in sort of like concrete, little small concrete houses.
[00:54:41]  Not houses.
[00:54:42]  I mean, I don't know, the one room places.
[00:54:44]  Yeah, But, you know, I was speaking to this woman who belonged to the National Federation of Peasant Women.
[00:54:51]  She's 62 years old.
[00:54:53]  I'm having lunch with her.
[00:54:54]  And she said that she was out documenting some peasant huts getting burned down on public land.
[00:55:00]  Or it's like public land, but that peasants have been allowed to farm on for like decades.
[00:55:05]  And, you know, they're very poor rice farmers.
[00:55:07]  They live in shacks.
[00:55:08]  And she's sort of taking pictures of these people that are coming to harass them, goons.
[00:55:15]  And And she says that, you know, about 30 people belonging to a guy named Greggie Areneta, who is a very part of a very, very, very wealthy family in the Philippines, came down there with ski masks and guns in order to burn down these peasant huts.
[00:55:31]  And they immediately opened fire on her and, of course, the people that live there.
[00:55:36]  They make them all lie down face down in the dirt.
[00:55:39]  I mean, this is a 62-year-old woman we're talking here about here, and several other old people too.
[00:55:44]  They fire off guns next to their heads to deafen them.
[00:55:47]  They beat some of them.
[00:55:48]  And then they take all of their food, all extra clothing, their cell phones, her camera, her notepads, of course, and basically everything they have on them, except like, you know, their immediate clothing.
[00:56:01]  And then they burn down these peasants' huts.
[00:56:04]  Now, these goons belong to Greggie Arenetta.
[00:56:09]  And in fact, Greggie Areneta is now the brother-in-law to the president of Bong Bong Marcos.
[00:56:15]  And so it's just, it was really illustrative to see how this kind of like chain of goons go like, you know, this guy is like one of the wealthy.
[00:56:22]  I mean, he owns every Taco Bell in the Philippines.
[00:56:26]  There's a stadium named after his family.
[00:56:28]  And yet here he has 30 guys in ski masks beating up old women and firing off 45.
[00:56:33]  She told me it was a 45 next to her fucking head.
[00:56:36]  I mean, yeah, it was just astounding.
[00:56:37]  You know, talking to some people about the violence they've been subjected to, you know, it was really like, you know, in this, in this slum that I stayed in for a while, you know, I was hanging out with this guy.

=== Congressional Crackdown (06:15) ===

[00:56:48]  I was talking to him.
[00:56:49]  In the 80s, he had been a striker at the, I believe it was called the Artex Textile Corporation.
[00:56:56]  And I looked this up.
[00:56:57]  This, you know, this corroborated this.
[00:56:59]  And they were on strike and I think 84 and police just opened fire on him and his co-workers with a machine gun, kill five of his coworkers, shoot 94 more, but don't kill them.
[00:57:10]  And he gets out of there.
[00:57:12]  And now he's kind of an, oh, he's retired now and he's fucking staying in this, you know, he's a relocatee, staying in this slum.
[00:57:18]  And then when Duterte, you know, opens up the drug war and all these extra killings, he says that one night police came in and just shot like 30 people.
[00:57:27]  You know, a guy told me that his neighbor was shot going to get a bottle of water at the Sariasari store.
[00:57:32]  None of these people were drug dealers or anything like this.
[00:57:34]  They were just people, people that the government didn't like because they were in peasants.
[00:57:40]  Classic tactic.
[00:57:41]  Exactly.
[00:57:43]  You know, there was also a ton of red tagging by these goons.
[00:57:46]  You know, I already mentioned it, you know, before talking about a friend of mine, but even Lenny Robredo, who is a liberal through and through.
[00:57:55]  This is like calling Hillary Clinton a communist.
[00:57:57]  Girl boss.
[00:57:58]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:57:59]  Yeah.
[00:57:59]  The future.
[00:58:00]  She literally, there were shirts.
[00:58:01]  I went to a, I went to a, well, I was just in a neighborhood and there was a Lenny Robredo rally.
[00:58:06]  There was people in like the future is female shirts everywhere.
[00:58:09]  And I was like, fuck, this is like, I feel like I'm in a time machine.
[00:58:13]  Yeah, I saw, I saw that vibe.
[00:58:16]  Yeah, very much so.
[00:58:17]  The like liberal progressivism in the periphery is very much like going into a time machine to 2010, 2020.
[00:58:24]  Yeah, it's really pretty weird.
[00:58:27]  And they couldn't use the glass ceiling thing because there has been women presidents in the Philippines before.
[00:58:33]  So they're kind of just like, oh, I guess we're all going to have another one now.
[00:58:37]  The future is really female this time.
[00:58:39]  Exactly.
[00:58:41]  But even her supporters, who are not exactly communist, were red-tagged.
[00:58:48]  There are left-wing parties in Congress there.
[00:58:54]  Particularly, there is like a coalition of them that several different parties.
[00:58:59]  I mean, there's, I think, 600-something actual party lists there, but I think 137 ran in this last election.
[00:59:07]  There were all these flyers that got spread around saying all the progressive parties were not only affiliated to the Communist Party, but were actually disqualified from the election.
[00:59:17]  So even though you're going to see them on your ballot, you actually, even if you're going to vote for them, you shouldn't vote for them because your vote will not be counted then.
[00:59:23]  And they were actually passing out these flyers all over, like every, not every single one, but quite a few polling precincts throughout Luzon.
[00:59:32]  I don't know about other islands.
[00:59:34]  The police were sending text messages to people saying the same thing.
[00:59:38]  And these are government agencies that are doing this to actual political parties that have politicians in office.
[00:59:44]  People showed me text messages that they got from the PNP.
[00:59:48]  And we talked about in the Brandon episode about NTF-LCAC, which is the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, which is quite a mouthful.
[01:00:01]  They are literally an official government agency from the government, funded by the government.
[01:00:09]  And they red tagged all these political parties.
[01:00:11]  They red tagged individuals who are part of these political parties.
[01:00:15]  And then Duterte himself, whose daughter, of course, is running for vice president, spread these lies in official speeches and things like this.
[01:00:25]  The left-wing parties got, of course, significantly less votes than last election.
[01:00:28]  They previously got the maximum amount of representatives allowed to them under the political system there.
[01:00:34]  This time they got, I believe, half of that.
[01:00:36]  And on the official government agency NTF LCAC Facebook page, it says the NTF-LCAC would like to thank and congratulate the Filipino people for voting out the CPP-NPA NDF party list.
[01:00:50]  Now, it stands for Communist Party of the Philippines, New People's Army, National Democratic Front party lists, Bayan Muna and Anak Powas out of Congress.
[01:00:59]  Now, Anak Powis is just the political party of the trade union KMU.
[01:01:05]  The expulsion, particularly of Bayan Muna, is of notable worth because for 21 years they formidably sat in Congress, garnering the allowable maximum seats while using the three, while using the immense powers of Congress to destroy our people and our country and wasting the precious time of our real representatives in Congress with their filibustering and their constant obstruction.
[01:01:23]  The filibuster.
[01:01:24]  I know.
[01:01:25]  Yes.
[01:01:26]  Which, by the way, if you've seen Congress out there, important legislative work meant to move our country forward and ease the burdens of the most marginalized among us.
[01:01:35]  We applaud the Filipino people for closing ranks behind our president, chair of the NTF, LCAC, and heeding his call to defend and protect our country from these ruthless urban operatives of Joma Sisan, who is the leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines, CPP, NPA, NDF, by fully using the power of your vote.
[01:01:52]  We are saddened, however, that while all CPP, NPA, NDF party list groups registered a drastic reduction in the number of votes, Cabatan Party List, which is another progressive party, managed an increase to half a million votes.
[01:02:04]  We attribute these votes to the treachery of Lenny Robredo, who colluded with the CPP, NPA, NDF, and who have co-opted Robredo followers in the youth sector and are now being radicalized and targeted for recruitment into this communist terrorist organization.
[01:02:17]  It goes on to talk about Robredo allying with the Communist Party, which is not true.
[01:02:23]  Very much not true.
[01:02:24]  And it was just sort of incredible seeing this from an, you know, this is an official government agency that is basically involved in shutting down, which these are, by the way, legal political parties that may have progressive views on the Chinese Revolution and possibly about the future of Philippine society, but are legal under the law.
[01:02:42]  And that really just like, yeah, it was kind of incredible to see.
[01:02:47]  There were stickers I would see that were like anti-communist stickers.
[01:02:51]  They were red tagging posters that I saw just red tagging the political parties.
[01:02:56]  Any Anak Pawis like flyers I saw, people would spray paint, the government would spray paint NPA or NDF or CPP over.

=== Repression On Trial (03:18) ===

[01:03:04]  I mean, it was really just repression on a scale that I had not seen before.
[01:03:12]  There were some not fun instances to, I mean, there's a lot of shit that went down there.
[01:03:17]  I don't even know how much to talk about here because there'll be a report that's coming out pretty soon, and although one has already come out.
[01:03:26]  But I had to leave a hotel because there was someone from the military looking at us and all these kind of things.
[01:03:33]  I had to wear a disguise a couple of times, which was just a tourist.
[01:03:39]  I know.
[01:03:40]  Well, I mean, here's the thing.
[01:03:41]  I look too much like a tourist.
[01:03:43]  I was wearing, you know, me.
[01:03:45]  I was, I got, I got my, what no, Crocs are cool now.
[01:03:47]  What's an uncool shoe?
[01:03:49]  Uggs.
[01:03:50]  No, those are cool now.
[01:03:51]  I'm wearing, well, I'm still, I'm wearing Uggs in 150-degree heat.
[01:03:56]  Sweating into the fur.
[01:03:58]  Oh, they are.
[01:03:59]  They still, there's an audible squish every time I walk.
[01:04:04]  Are there those mini?
[01:04:04]  You have the mini uggs that like the micro yeah, the micro ugs that go below no, they're below your ankle really.
[01:04:11]  Yeah, they got micros.
[01:04:12]  Now those are just slippers.
[01:04:15]  Well, they're ugs um, but you know one one one thing, I, you know I, I saw it.
[01:04:20]  There is, you know, the really the repression is real.
[01:04:22]  You know, I was at one point I was in this slum called Tondo and I gotta tell you baby, this is the worst slum I ever seen in my life, like it's built right outside of the port, like literally right outside across, like not even across the street, and right next to the port and it is like a hive, like a warren of of sort of like winding little footpaths, whole thing is wet as he can be.
[01:04:46]  Uh and I, I talked to these uh, talked to these dock workers who had been fired.
[01:04:50]  They were members of the KMU, the UH, First OF MAY Union, it's called.
[01:04:54]  But uh and uh, you know, I talked to these guys and you know they'd been dock workers, some of them, for decades um, and about two years ago they found out that the company that they're, the doc that they work for, contracted through for employment because, you know, we talked about contractualization in the last episode being a huge thing.
[01:05:12]  There now right, uh had been stealing all of their social security money, all of their health care money, in fact, every single like takeout of their paycheck and not giving it to the like.
[01:05:22]  So they had basically collected actually no social security.
[01:05:24]  Yeah, and uh and the company had stolen all of it.
[01:05:28]  And they sue with the help of some um, progressive lawyer associations.
[01:05:32]  They uh, they sue the uh, the company and the company that was contracting and win.
[01:05:39]  The company appeals.
[01:05:40]  They win that again.
[01:05:41]  In fact, I believe they take it almost to the Supreme, OR they do take it to the Supreme Court and win there.
[01:05:45]  And then the Department OF Labor says, well, there's actually no way we can enforce this.
[01:05:48]  So unfortunately, all 370 of you who got fired for complaining about this are still fired and they don't have to pay anything back.
[01:05:55]  What?
[01:05:56]  Yeah oh, my god.
[01:05:58]  So I mean, it was just, you know, and I asked them how much they make.
[01:06:01]  They made prior to getting fired.
[01:06:02]  They made 500 pesos a day, which is about ten dollars.
[01:06:05]  Yeah um, I mean, it's really just the the, the amiseration uh was intense in almost every place I went to.
[01:06:12]  You know, I stayed with some peasants.
[01:06:14]  Um, you know I I, and it's like shacks and just the I I, I don't know it's it's, it's rough.

=== Life in Deranged Societies (05:19) ===

[01:06:22]  You know, and and I talked to some people out there i'm like listen, the political system here is deranged.
[01:06:27]  It makes no Fucking sense.
[01:06:28]  The way society is structured here is insane.
[01:06:32]  And I would talk to people and they'd be like, Yeah, this is like, I know I live here.
[01:06:35]  Like, this is crazy to me, too.
[01:06:37]  Like, I don't think this is normal.
[01:06:38]  And I've lived in this my whole life.
[01:06:40]  Um, and so you know, it's, it's kind of to me, it's no wonder that people uh, you know, there's a sizable amount of the population that want to, you know, maybe have a new form of government there and are willing to go to great lengths to get that, because the the amount of um just nepotism and family ties and just these like small group of very wealthy people who directly control the country in ways that makes all of the like uh, corruption.
[01:07:08]  You know it's America hides it way better.
[01:07:11]  Basically, it's very similar in many respects um, but it's really just naked in in in large parts of the Philippines and people are, people are well aware of it um and, and really they're they're yeah, it's uh, I guess it's no one I hear, I heard from a lot of people out there is that, like you know, the government wants to stomp out NPAS.
[01:07:29]  You know they want to destroy the NEW People's ARMY and they haven't been able to for decades and decades and decades, no matter what they do um, because they don't realize that it's the government themselves that creates NPAS, like as corrupt as the government gets as much graft as there is, as people's lives get worse and worse and worse.
[01:07:45]  you know, of course, you know, you create the conditions for your own removal, essentially.
[01:08:13]  Anyways, there is a report from the, if you're in the International Observation Mission, coming out soon, which I met some of those people.
[01:08:23]  They were very friendly and uh, and if that's out by the time this episode's out, i'll link in the description, if not, i'll link in the next one.
[01:08:30]  But uh yeah, I gotta say worse, didn't see a beach, didn't see a any a grain of sand.
[01:08:36]  You sent me a photo of you wearing like white linen pants, though I did buy with some like sea.
[01:08:41]  There was like a seascape that I went to the sea and took.
[01:08:46]  There was no beach.
[01:08:48]  Was it like a rock situation?
[01:08:49]  Or was it a rock situation?
[01:08:50]  Oh yeah, classic Classic rock situation.
[01:08:53]  I don't like the rock situation.
[01:08:54]  Yeah.
[01:08:56]  What's up?
[01:08:56]  Just put sand there.
[01:08:57]  There's plenty on the ocean floor.
[01:09:00]  I got to say, I got really distracted when you were talking because I started thinking about how about the baby wearing the sash.
[01:09:09]  And then I was like, and then I was like, oh, that would be so fucked up if the baby and the mayor switched sashes.
[01:09:16]  For a day.
[01:09:18]  And just imagining a mayor with a huge sash that said baby.
[01:09:21]  I could not stop laughing.
[01:09:22]  But then get this.
[01:09:24]  Tiny mayor.
[01:09:26]  I was about to say, yeah.
[01:09:28]  The baby would be a mayor and who knows what kind of chaos.
[01:09:30]  Yeah, that baby gets awful.
[01:09:33]  Dude, could you check this out?
[01:09:34]  Picture this for a second.
[01:09:35]  Hasbalah in a sash.
[01:09:36]  Yeah.
[01:09:37]  Oh, damn.
[01:09:38]  Oh, that'd be good.
[01:09:39]  Just that says maybe this little guy.
[01:09:41]  Would it say baby or mayor?
[01:09:45]  It should say his name.
[01:09:46]  It should just say Hasbalah.
[01:09:47]  Yeah, that's a good title.
[01:09:48]  Yeah.
[01:09:49]  You know, it's not.
[01:09:50]  He's just the latest Hasbalah.
[01:09:53]  Stretching back to Friday.
[01:09:54]  Actually, when you open him up, there's the next one comes out.
[01:09:57]  Whoa, that's a good one.
[01:09:57]  Like a little Russian dollar.
[01:09:59]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:10:00]  There's actually infinite ones inside of him.
[01:10:03]  But yeah, I gotta say, I'm more tired and exhausted than before I left.
[01:10:08]  Yeah.
[01:10:08]  Well, that's the kind of vacation you take, though.
[01:10:12]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:13]  I got a student capo.
[01:10:17]  Yeah, I don't know about that.
[01:10:18]  Yeah, that seems weird.
[01:10:21]  On that note, we're back, everyone.
[01:10:24]  We'll see you very soon.
[01:10:25]  I'm Liz.
[01:10:26]  I have Nengay Fever.
[01:10:28]  My name is Brace.
[01:10:30]  And of course, we have our Lesion covered, can't think of an alliteration there, but producer named Young Chomsky, or as they call him now at the hospital ward, Mr. Boyles.
[01:10:44]  And that would be a bad sash.
[01:10:46]  Mr. Sassin said, Mr. Boyles?
[01:10:52]  You are getting zero pussy at the mayoral reception for that.
[01:10:55]  Mr. Boyles sounds like the principal on like an 80s teen sitcom.
[01:11:01]  Yeah.
[01:11:02]  He's like, he calls, he calls to Panga and he's like, hey, can you lance this?
[01:11:07]  Can you lance this?
[01:11:08]  I have a signal so excited.
[01:11:11]  I'm so scared.
[01:11:13]  Does everyone remember that one?
[01:11:15]  No, I actually.
[01:11:15]  The Riddlin episode of Save by the Bell.
[01:11:17]  Come on.
[01:11:20]  Yeah, man.
[01:11:21]  Huh.
[01:11:22]  They've been putting kids on speed for decades.
[01:11:25]  Wow.
[01:11:25]  Yeah.
[01:11:27]  Yeah.
[01:11:27]  Well, speaking of, I got to go crush some up and sell it to some people in elementary school to help them make more TikToks.
[01:11:36]  Well, on that note, this has been TrueNON, and we will see you next time.
[01:11:40]  Bye bye.