It Could Happen Here Weekly 138
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

This is It Could Happen Here. We're talking about the June presidential debate starring Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which was by far the worst presidential debate I've ever seen in my entire life. There's no competition. There's no competition. Like, I remember the days when we laughed at George W. Bush fucking up at a debate. He would clean up with either of these guys. He would be sashaying across the floor. Yeah.

You can drop Sarah Palin in here. Yeah. And she fucking owned them. Sarah Palin comes out of this looking like Bob fucking Hope. So, I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Robert Evans and James Stout. Let's get into it. I guess, who do you think, quote unquote, won the debate? Yeah.

I can tell you who fucking lost, Garrison. It's fucking all of us. I mean, I will, I'll go into this later. I'm not sure it matters, but if the debate matters, Trump won. Totally. If the debate matters, Trump won. Yeah, agreed. That was my same thought as well. He definitely was a much better debater and had much better like political rhetoric. He,

He could form complete sentences, which is something you could not say of Joe Biden. And that's not hyperbole. I actually argue with the first two thirds of your analysis there, because I don't think in argument terms, if we're looking at this as a debate,

Trump repeat like if I were scoring this the way you would a competition, Trump repeatedly followed Biden on these like Biden would goad him with shit. Like what he said, what Trump said after Charlottesville, all like Trump's height and him lying about it, fucking golf scores. And Trump always took the bait. Why I think Trump won is that this is not going to get consumed easily.

As a debate, people are going to look at this and like look at the whole sweep of how they both did. Sure. Which Biden would still very likely lose. But it's less clear. This is going to get cut up a million ways on TikTok. And Trump's just got a lot more ammo out of this fucker. Yeah. The very first thing I noticed is that both of them looked barely awake. Yeah. As soon as he went on screen. Yeah.

And so I did get a debate bingo. I almost got two. I almost got three. I was very proud of that. I guess, I don't know. We can go over some of what they talked about because, yeah, why not? Do you want to hear Jill Biden's review? Just get that out of the way real quick. Oh, did Jill give it? Jill's or Joe's? Jill, okay, sure. Dr. Jill Biden. Such a great job. You answered every question.

Fantastic. That's amazing stuff. Yeah, he did answer them coherently. Not so much. We we had we had an inject bleach reference from Biden very early on. And that was that was one of his better ploys. Unfortunately, he followed it up by mumbling incoherently for like 40 seconds. Yes, but I was glad to hear it dropped. Yeah, he was well, he just did not work.

He executed poorly. Look, here's what I'll say. I've said this about Joe for a while. If you were looking at this man, not as the president, but as like a relative, you would say, well, he's doing, you know, Uncle Joe's doing okay for 82. You know? Like he's still most, he's 86. He'll be 86 if he does a second term at the end of it. But like, if he were a regular person, you would say, Uncle Joe's doing okay for 82. Maybe we should take the keys.

You know, maybe he doesn't need to be in a home. You know, that would not be the right call at this moment. But maybe he shouldn't have. He shouldn't be driving, you know? Yeah.

So one of the smart things I think Trump did very early on is that he attacked the vaccine mandate, but not the vaccine. Yeah. That was one of the more subtle moves that he did that I think he pulled off very well. Yeah, Joe just gave it up. Yeah. One of the reoccurring trends with Trump is that he really loved to call the United States a third world nation and say, we...

We are now an uncivilized nation. That was like one of the many things Trump kept going back to. Because Trump really did just have like five things he just kept talking about over and over and over again. He mostly ignored the actual questions from moderators. The moderators themselves did a really bad job

Both with the questions they had and also like actually controlling the candidates and keeping them on topic. But in general, I think the questions they did were just kind of bizarre. Thermal Nation was a very common refrain from Trump. I think one thing that like Trump did badly more than Biden, or like you can see how Biden's team prepped him on it and then he screwed the pooch on it. But like,

Biden would say these things that he knew would trigger Trump, like his weight and his height, right? Or they're very good people on both sides. And Trump completely fell for that hook, line, and thinker. You can tell Trump has been obsessing over the little things that people say about how he handled stuff like the alt-right and whatnot. He's very angry about some of that, which is interesting to me. Because it wasn't the smart move. The smart move was like, as Gara noted, Trump very...

I think intelligently pivoted on the on the vaccine issue to like still being able to take credit for it with some audiences while also making it clear that his issue was the mandates. Whenever Trump was on the economy, I think even though I don't agree that he was the better president for the economy, I think that he performed strongly on stage.

He spent a lot of time in the weeds. If we're going to use golf metaphors, he kept like knocking shit into the sand dunes and having to like... Thank you for raising golf, Robert. It's a very important national issue. You're welcome. Because this had the longest golf digression of any presidential event I've ever seen. It had like a two minute argument over whether they could play golf against each other and who would win. And whose handicap was what in the 80s?

what I saw in this is you've got two men who are not at, are past their prime. And, uh,

the thing, the reason why this in large part went Trump's way is that Biden has never been a good public speaker. It has never been his strength. He has a speech impediment, right? That he, he worked and got over much of his career, but when you are older, you have less control over everything and we can see it coming back, right? There's no, there ought not be any shame in that, but also it does affect the way people think. This is a horrible country full of terrible people. People do not forgive a speech impediment, right? But more to the point,

The thing that Biden is showing his age in most all, as we all do, it's the shit that we're bad at, we get a lot worse at, right? And you can kind of hide how much you've aged when you're doing something that is clearly your talent. My grandpa, fairly late in his Parkinson's journey,

could still gut and clean and catch a fish really well. It wasn't until pretty advanced that he lost that ability. And it was almost like you could see some of that skill return to him. And Trump is a talker. Trump is a charismatic guy. He is good at working a crowd. You can tell he is falling off in his inability to... The fact that he keeps falling for all of these very obvious traps, Joe would say. And he spent a lot of time in the weeds.

but he still sounds a lot stronger. And this is entirely a contest of who can look best on camera, right? And yeah, of course, Trump's going to win. I think the first really big topic that they started to argue back and forth on was abortion. It started by Trump saying that he is pro the abortion pill and he's pro the Supreme Court's recent ruling, which he kind of mischaracterized, but that's still an interesting thing coming from Trump saying that he's

He's okay with the abortion pill. He even brought up being okay with a nine-month abortion if it's for the life of the mother, which was interesting to me. But then they spent a long time arguing over whether Roe v. Wade means that you can kill babies after birth. Exactly. Yes, right. After birth.

And that was an interesting – I don't think that interaction – I don't know how much it's going to matter, but it didn't come off well for Trump because he –

As the current president, we all know this, but this did not come off well for Trump. They were basically just arguing back and forth over whether Biden wants to kill babies post-birth, which is just a ridiculous thing to argue about. It was a shameful chain of arguments, right? George Bush would have insinuated the same thing, but done it in a way that left everyone feeling less gross. And that's why he did so many terrible things. Yeah.

It's just interesting that we've stripped so much of the shellac off of it. And now they are just because in George W. Bush's day, we were still the Republicans were still calling Democrats baby killers. There was just it's interesting how much of the sheen is gone. Maybe some of that's not bad. There's a little more class.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, maybe it's not all bad that we're not pretending anymore. Right? Like there's no pretending on this stage. Both men are clearly not doing well. The system itself is not pretending, right? Like we just got a couple of fucking idiots and we don't install one of them. Like, like something I will never pretend to do is, is dislike our products and services that support this podcast. I love them. I would never pretend otherwise. So go listen to these ads.

Okay, we are back. Yeah. Yeah, still here. We are. I don't know. I feel good. I feel good about America today. You think so? You think we're heading in the right direction? You know, it's not that we're heading in the right direction. We've never been heading in a very good direction. The driver has always been drunk, right?

And finally, 45 minutes into the drive, he just was like, look, man, I'm not doing great right now. And I'm not going to get this car back home unless you bust open the center console where I keep a handle of bourbon. And you're scared of the driver because he has a gun and you don't know what he'll do with it. You're not even sure if he can really see you. And anyway, that's how it feels to watch this election. Let's talk about.

Immigration, one of the other main topics in this debate And that went bad for Biden Trump had a fantastic line saying Border Patrol endorsed me for president, but I won't say that Amazing stuff They both claimed Border Patrol endorsed them too? Yeah, the Border Patrol itself doesn't make endorsements, right? But the Border Patrol Union, which is one of the worst accounts on Twitter Did clarify that they endorsed Trump

So there was a lot of bad stuff with abortion. I mean, James, do you have any thoughts overall in the abortion discourse? The immigration discourse?

Yes. Wow. That was a real Biden moment for you, Gare. Garrison. Yeah, Garrison Davis, elderly member of the podcast team. Somebody get Garrison his pep pills. Oh, God, I wish. Yeah, they're fogging the air in Atlanta tonight. All right. The discourse over abortion. Jesus Christ, how really am I supposed to get this?

Well, they're bringing abortions with them, Garrison, don't worry. There's a pretty great Onion headline. Report, uh-oh, they're about to talk about black people. Oh, God. Yeah. Another fine moment of this debate. The fucking black jobs thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk immigration. Let's talk immigration. Just real quick. Donald Trump kept throwing out this 18 million number.

Fuck knows where that comes from. Yeah, that was just all the numbers were nonsense. Like fully from the rectum to the debate stage. But look,

Border Patrol have reported 9.6 encounters. I've beaten this horse to death, but an encounter does not represent a unique individual. People go and come back when they get deported back. Very common. Both of them. What I actually want to focus on is the way that Jake Tapper framed that question because it was fucking atrocious. He didn't frame it in a way in which either of them, if they had wanted to, could offer a reasonable, compassionate stance on immigration. It was posited as a terrible thing.

And yeah, fuck CNN. I know next time you come DMing me asking me for the scummy, scummy shit. Yeah, it was for the record. Jake Tapper should be hit in the head with a with a I don't know, truck or something. But podcaster Robert Evans threatens violence against CNN anchor Jake Tapper. In a way, he supported violence against me. So I think I have that right. That is true.

He's a dog shit journalist, and this was the worst moderated debate because Trump is just lying. Everything he says is absolutely full of shit, and half of the shit that Biden says, it's hard to tell what he was even trying to say, and there was no attempt to make it – they treated this like Werner Herzog would have filmed it, right? Yeah.

But they're too... Herzog would have done this way because, like, my job is not to interfere here. My job is to let this unfold, right? I don't need... Now, Herzog would interfere if that would have made it a better story, but he loves collapse. See, but Herzog's an artist. These people are journalists. Yeah, these people are journalists, and your job was to attempt to both hold them accountable to some standard of reality and also...

to attempt to present this in a way that's intelligible, right? And you failed on both accounts. You did bad jobs as journalists. No, I think for me, the best and worst line of the debate in terms of like, oh, wow, we're really in it, is Trump saying that migrants are taking black jobs, which is...

One of the most loaded statements I've ever heard, because for one, it's weird on the migrant thing. That's really your main concern. Black jobs. What is a black job? What do you think he's implying there? Well, I think we all know what he's implying. We all know what he's implying there. He's talking about farm work. He's talking about working in the fields. Low-skill jobs is what he is talking about. Yes, that's how he sees this. But where I think that came from...

My suspicion is that because the Trump campaign is still consistently extremely weak with black voters, right? They've actually made a lot of inroads with Hispanic voters. Not according to Trump in this debate. Yeah. They are still – based on all of the polling I've seen, they are about as bad with black voters as they were in 2020. That really has not moved. What you have seen on that is not really based in much of the way of evidence, at least in terms of what polling can show us.

They know this is a weakness, and it's one that they see as a significant strategic weakness. So at some point,

Trump had a meeting with his campaign prep staff, and one of the things they wrote on a billboard as they were spitballing ideas to get black voters was migrants taking black jobs, question mark. And that stayed in Trump's head. Totally. They had a million better ways to phrase it, but when the moment came up, that's how he fucking ran. That is exactly what happened. It just, yes, totally. It also displays a...

somehow extremely anti-immigrant and extremely racist at all at the same time. Coming from like opposite directions. It's quite something. Uh, one of the, another, another great line was human trafficking in women. Just another, another wonderful human trafficking in women. I'm glad, I'm glad that women do make the human list though. Like that feels like progress. Garrison. We're, we did it, Joe. Anything else on the, uh, immigration front? I mean, it,

It was as bad as we would expect. Honestly, I thought that Biden would try to go further on the right on immigration than what he ended up doing. Not saying he did well on immigration, but I expected Biden to kind of push a little bit more. He's not comfortable with it, clearly, because he got so much of his win on highlighting the obvious inhumanity of Trump's border policy. And

He obviously has adopted a policy that's very similar. Yeah. I mean, he tried to hit him on the separation of families. Families are still fucking separated. Like I've literally seen that this week. Well, I just don't think he's I don't think he's comfortable fighting Trump on this because I don't really think he has a great feeling about their their where they're separate.

on the matter, right? So he's not comfortable with that line of argument. The way he is, like Biden's best moment was attacking him for like being shitty to dead soldiers. And I was shocked that Trump-

followed him on that fucking rabbit hole. They talked about that for so long. It was a huge, it was as big as the economy. They talked about like veterans for so long and just like weird circles. That was an interesting one. A few other just fun lines that were thrown in, Biden calling them the Paris Peace Accords. Very cool.

Funny stuff. Biden saying that Trump has the mortals of an alley cat. That's a great line. That was a good line. That's a great line. That was again, this was number one, he didn't slur any of his words. I'm not saying that to be shitty, but it affects his performance. He was very clear in the cleanup of like, he's a bad person, which he is. That's a strong thing to hit him on. And I hope...

Again, we'll talk more about like, will this matter? But I hope strategically what the dims realize is that like that is a thing to keep hitting him on because it actually matters in terms of like how voters think of the guys. It's a way to actually hurt Trump because he is a really obviously shitty person. One other thing Trump did in terms of, you know, this whole black jobs thing is Trump did hammer Biden on super predators.

Yeah, that was interesting to see. I feel like Trump actually did an okay job there. It's not me endorsing Trump's behavior, but that was a good move for him in this moment. No, an interesting one, too. I was kind of surprised that he went for it, because that's like, yeah, that was surprising. Do you know what isn't surprising, Robert? How much we love the sponsors of this podcast, who are, you know...

I often think of the president as like a father, you know, or like my father during different times, right? Trump is like my father that time he brought home the movie Event Horizon, thinking it would be like a fun little science fiction romp. And Biden is like my dad,

When he snuck in the South Park movie, but he had not gotten the right language version, so we couldn't actually watch it. Right? They're different eras of everyone's dad. I don't know. These sponsors are our father.

Anyway, we're back. So one thing that I'm looking forward to is that if Trump does get elected, he will settle the Ukraine war as president-elect. So that's great news for all of us. I'm excited. Before he's even inaugurated, he's going to crack that down. That was really the...

Yeah, it's interesting to see him kind of adopt the whole Ukraine is cooked, they've lost all of their young men line. That's not a great thing to hear in terms of like, it's exactly what Putin wants, it's exactly what Russia wants, it's...

Not accurate to like what we've actually seen on the ground, which is another Russian offensive completely stall out because despite what was supposed to be like an overwhelming advantage in theater and artillery. But I don't think it matters. I don't think that shit's going to move the election. At the end of the day, I can bitch about like U.S. policy in Eastern Europe, but nobody votes based on that. I do, but nobody else does. Right.

Like, and I barely do. Like, it's just not, it's not a needle mover in the same way that fucking inflation or the economy or crime or the border is. Trump was harping on it because he's just trying to blame all of these new conflicts on Biden, being like, all these things happened since Biden was president. If I was president, this wouldn't have happened, you know, magically, right? And that's a very easy move for Trump, is to bring up all of the bad things that have happened since Biden took office and say, this is Biden's fault.

We have that with Ukraine. They talked about Ukraine for like a really – It was a shocking amount of the debate. A decent amount of the time, like way, way longer than they talked about Israel and Palestine, which is kind of surprising to me. Now, I can understand how both of them would want to just avoid talking about that, but I'm surprised like the moderators like let that happen, I guess. Yeah.

I don't think, I mean, the moderators let everything happen. I think who I put, who I am surprised about was Trump because he kept going back to Ukraine, which is not a strong issue for him. Now, Israel-Palestine really isn't either. Most Americans don't like what Israel is doing. There's even a lot of

like question about that on the Republican side. So his choices are either be all fucking genocide about it and alienate a lot of moderates or kind of hedge it and just try to attack Biden for his performance, which is what he did, which is what he did. Yeah. He didn't do much of it compared to getting drawn again and again into arguments over NATO. I was really surprised that he kept following Joe back to fucking NATO. It was really weird.

Yeah, that was a bizarre choice for him, like when he had a million other faces. His, Trump's response on Palestine, I want to talk about. Oh, that was bleak. Absolutely. That was one of the worst moments in this country's entire history. Yeah, that really set a new low for me. And we've got like, what, eight, seven to eight genocides. So, you know, pretty bad moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a country built on genocide, but that one, that one was pretty, pretty bad. Yeah. So,

Basically, Trump was harping on Biden for not being pro-genocide enough and said something that I really never, I did not see coming. He said that Biden has become like a Palestinian, a bad Palestinian. Yeah, a bad Palestinian because he doesn't do bad enough things. What was the exact line that followed that?

So Trump says, quote, he's become like a Palestinian, but a bad Palestinian because they don't like him very much. There you go. Thank you. We needed the whole thought. He's a weak one. Yeah, the Palestinians don't like him and I hate the Palestinians, but you should be liked by your own people. I'm trying to put together the logic here.

It was really bad, but basically using Palestinian as an insult to Biden, that's not great. Trump also had a line how, quote, the Palestinians and everyone are rioting right now. Yeah. Who was he talking about? Because the country's been pretty chill, actually. I think he's referring to the campus protests, just calling everyone at those protests Palestinians, which is a really interesting political move, actually. Yeah, and a dangerous one, potentially. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. We knock on wood whenever we may have wood. That's a good Trump line. That's a good Trump line. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And James, James was giving him shit for that earlier. But this is this is you and your ivory tower. A lot of people don't have wood. You know, Ben Shapiro could only afford one board. That's right. Yeah. Ben Shapiro only got wood once. Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, small amount of wood at that.

He was lucky enough to find it. We can't all. And he put his wood in a little bag. So this was a bit on health care, right? I think that one went straight over Garrison. It did. Yeah, he was talking about being healthy. And he was like, yeah, I'm still healthy. You know, knock on wood. We all knock on wood where we find wood or something like that. But he was being like- Whenever we have wood.

He was kind of trying to... Actually, this may be a little bit of like a fuck up by him because he was hitting Biden pretty successfully in Biden's age. But then he dropped a line so baffling that it focused attention where I was like, what do you mean by this? They were talking about...

Yeah, they're talking about being in good health and that's where they got into the little golf argument. And then Trump's weight. Who would play golf better? And yeah, if Trump could carry his own golf clubs. A really good line was, we bought a certain dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a borderline. We bought a certain dog. You wouldn't believe it. We bought a certain dog that can sniff fentanyl?

And then he just kept talking about machines that could sniff fentanyl. Biden's talking about these machines that they have to supposedly detect fentanyl at the border, which they've spent millions of dollars on. But they've been doing this since the Trump administration. This is not a new thing. It was in his border bill. But it's nothing compared to we bought a certain dog. Oh, God. Have you guys seen the dark Brandon secret sauce?

No. Robert, share this immediately. Yeah, yeah. I've just shared it. Apparently he's lost Jeff Tiedrich, which is a bad omen. So there's a post that Joe made right before the debate would have started that I'm just going to send to the chat while I describe it to the listener. It's Joe with like a can in his hand and it's a can, like a beer can, but of water. You sent a link to x.com slash home.

God damn it. One sec. I'm on the Joe Biden water.

No, so he's got a can of this. It's like a water in a beer can. And it's called Zero Malarkey Biden. And it's got a dark branded image with a laser eyes. Get real, Jack. It's just water. And then Biden's actual tweet says, I don't know what they've got these performance enhancers, but I'm feeling pretty jacked up. Try it for yourself, folks. And for $4.60, you can get

a what looks like one can of biden water the seek i'm on the website now the secret to a good debate performance staying hydrated well same performance enhancers joe biden took before going on stage

We need to get the company card out. Guys, I'm going to get wrecked because he looked fucked up. I've got some experience with performance enhancing device drug users in my career. I miss having a good GHB hookup. I feel like that would get me on Joe's level, right? I think only a brain injury could get you on Joe's level right now, Robert. That's why I brought up GHB.

The last topic I want to discuss in terms of what was talked about at the debate is January 6th. And Trump kind of tried to avoid the question over whether he would concede the election, saying that he would only if it was a fair election. Only if it was a fair election. But...

Trump's line on January 6th. Let me tell you about January 6th. We had great borders on January 6th. That whole spiel. We had a great economy on January 6th. It is very funny. I should post some pictures I took. I took them just after January 6th. I took them the week of Biden's election of the border wall just stopping in random places. They got to a certain level of construction and just stopped. Like we...

I found Trump's direction here kind of interesting. He tried to kind of really avoid talking about his own opinions on the actual Capitol insurrection. His very first reaction was to say, no, well, the rest of the country was doing so much better because I was the president. The moderators kind of forced him to talk a little bit about it, but he really avoided it as much as he could, which is, you know, he doesn't want to alienate his base. He also doesn't want to like, you know, be too pro J6 and scare away like

So he was really skirting that line. It's just weird because moderators were so much stronger on this question during the debate primaries for the GOP, which Trump wasn't even present for. They really harped on this here. And on this, they did not care at all. They really did not push Trump on J6 whatsoever. And it was kind of pathetic. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah, no, it was. It was terrible. The moderators, they didn't moderate at all. They just asked some questions and then let it fucking rip.

I think let's just move on to finally talking about like the debate in general. I think the GOP will probably be pretty happy with Trump's performance here. Yeah, he did what he needed to. They're going to call us a dub. I think the Democrats are probably kind of scrambling right now trying to figure out what the next move is. I hope it's possible for someone to be like, we got time. Throw Pritzker in. Throw fucking Whitmer in. You know, either of them, right? I honestly... You know, you know, Robert?

This is how Bernie can still win. He's too fucking old. Bring it back. Why the fuck not? I will say, I think he probably, based on the last time I saw him speak, I think he probably would have done better than Joe did in this, but not if he had a cold, right? That's the thing. I believe Joe has a cold, and that's why he sounded like shit. But you know what? A strong young person with a cold could pull it together for an hour. He could.

He could lock down. He could lock down. This is...

we shouldn't have to explain like it's not i don't give a shit old people shouldn't be the fucking president they shouldn't old people should not be the fucking president it passed us past the point at which i feel like if somebody like if i was if we were helping you move and i was like carrying something heavy i turned around i slapped you in the face with like a board or something or a piece of furniture if i have to be worried that your skull is gonna crack you shouldn't be the fucking president you

You should be able to like, I should feel confident that you can jumpstart a car without blowing up my battery. You know, like I don't feel that for either of these men. They both look unwell.

Yeah, if you let these people go into a supermarket, they would be lost. Yeah, it's not good. It's so... I know a lot of people make jokes about this, right? People love joking about how old they are, how incoherent they are. No, it's not funny. I was shocked. I was shocked at how bad Biden did this debate. He looked so bad. He looked so bad. It was one of his worst public speaking outings in a long time. Look, I...

Yeah, I am not competent to diagnose shit, but I lived with my grandfather for the last 10 years as he died of Parkinson's and...

It's there's a shuffle you get to recognize, right? Like, I don't know if it's Parkinson's, but he's not a well old man. He's a sick old man and he shouldn't be president. There is. There is a reason I put candidate collapses on stage on my bingo card, which we did not get. But we sure got close. We should be close. Very close. I filled out almost all my bingo card. It was and I did not pick easy ones, too. You can you can check me on this. You can check you can check the card on Twitter.

And yeah, I was...

I just felt really bad. I feel terrible. I wanted to ask half that debate, Gare, how do you feel about getting your citizenship? You jazzed? Well. This is a great, proud time. Proud time to become an American. It is better than, it's better than only having a green card. Yeah, it's true. Let me tell you, as someone who recently upgraded to American status, it is, at least it's a little bit less concerning with the shit that Trump is saying. Yeah. Yeah.

Or Biden. Well, any final thoughts? I hope Gavin Newsom

doesn't pull out a way to become the president because i don't want him to be the president he is going to be the my prediction is he will be the 2028 nominee he's a very good chance really it's between this the smart option based on where we stand now for now or for 2028 is pritzker i think whitmer would also be a great pick pritzker is really good with conservatives and he's really good with conservatives without like folding completely on shit

Whereas Whitmer has some weakness just because of how much time has been directed in attacking her over like the COVID 2020 shit. But either of them, I think, are strong candidates who are a lot better than Gavin Newsom. But you are right. He's going to be a strong candidate in 2028.

Well, I think that does it for me, at least, here on It Could Happen Here. Let's talk real briefly. Do we think the debate matters? Do we think that this is a thing that is going to turn an election? Yes, I think it actually does. I think this could actually hurt some voter enthusiasm. I think people who are maybe looking at Biden and being like, yeah, probably. If he keeps performing like this, people might just not vote for him.

Some of them might move over to Trump if they're weird independents. Many of them just might not vote at all. I think if Biden shows that he is just...

kind of a bumbling, like incompetent old man, that's not going to help an already kind of dire situation in terms of voter enthusiasm and possible voter turnout. So yeah, I think this actually does have a decent chance to hurt Biden. I don't think the debates will necessarily hurt Trump. I don't think they'll necessarily help Trump like majorly, but I think they can subtract support away from Biden.

See, that's where I don't have a strong feeling on which way this is going to land in either case. But some of the data we're seeing, particularly how well Trump performs relative to Biden on voters who are not sure they're going to vote, right? I think this might be the first election where a higher turnout would be bad for Biden.

But I also don't know. I think if any, if this depresses, I think you are right that if this depresses turnout, it's going to be worse. It's going to be Biden turnout, right? Although, I mean, yeah.

I just don't know. It's hard to say. I don't want to do – the easy thing would be to just pick a lane and stay in it. But if it comes to my honest opinion, I still have no fucking clue how this is going to go because at no point has this election been about do you think Joe Biden will be a good president. It's been about are you scared of Donald Trump, right?

I don't know that you're less scared. I think the worry for Biden is that people are now more scared that he is going to sleepwalk his way through a nuclear war as opposed to Trump at least being lucid for it. But I just don't know how that's going to actually shake out in the long run. God bless the USA. We're doing great. The conventions are going to be great. Yeah.

Stay tuned. He could be dead in a week. That really is like the wild card. He could be dead tonight. I wouldn't be surprised at all. It kind of exists in the back of my brain all the time. It's like either one of these guys, especially Biden, could just like not exist tomorrow. Like he could just, he could get a little too stressed out and just kind of fall over.

I mean, they could meaningfully make the argument tomorrow that like there's been a significant decline in his health and he is not physically capable of being president because that's what we saw. Yeah, he doesn't. He looks bad. Like if he was not involved, I don't think they will. If the things whatever things you consider worst. And for me with Biden, it's the border in Palestine. But if whatever things you consider worst about Biden weren't a thing.

I would purely be like, for this man's health and safety, get him out of this job. Get him somewhere comfortable. Let him enjoy his final years. Don't make him do this. Yeah. Anyway. It's not right. I don't know. Fuck.

part of me wants to read this Jeff T. Rich tweet to finish. At a certain point, we're all complicit in elder abuse, but I guess they, but we are for both of them. Yeah. Like in some ways, in some ways, the American system is pushing these two sick old men towards a disastrous. That's also why I can't trust anything they say on social security. Cause they clearly have a vested interest. Uh,

I can't see. I will say we saw the president of Bolivia face down a coup yesterday. I think that that would not be possible for either of these men in 2025. God. All right. I want to go cry and go to sleep. Oh, yeah. It's bad. That's good. Have a good cry. Make some friends, guys. I'm going to keep drinking. Do a little mutual aid. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to buy some of the Biden water with company money.

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Hello, welcome to Eat Could Happen Here. We're doing it again. Several months back, I did an episode about corn, which I personally think was a huge hit. And I did that episode with the intention of making this food series, Eat Could Happen Here, into an actual series about food and not just a silly one-off pun. In all honesty, though, I wrote and recorded that corn episode before October 7th, even though we ended up releasing it afterwards around Thanksgiving. Because...

Since October 7th, there have been much more pressing things I need people to know about and learn about and keep talking about, namely the genocide happening in Palestine. And I will keep talking about it because we all have to keep talking about it. But I'm learning that in between my episodes where I talk about the most horrific things I've ever seen or read about or heard about, my brain needs to go into silly mode or else I will simply eject myself into outer space. And one of those silly things I've decided will be the how did we get here of food.

which I personally find very fascinating, as is the history of all things is very fascinating, namely the history of how Palestine has been illegally occupied by a settler colony ethnostate for nearly a century of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and how no one had any right to claim land as their own that was already inhabited by indigenous people. But I digress. We have other episodes about that, and we will continue to have episodes about it. But today, we are going to be talking about something which, in comparison, is objectively kind of stupid.

We're going to be talking about sea urchins.

I want to blame and or give credit to James Stout for suggesting this topic very enthusiastically when I mentioned wanting to do an episode about food. And because I personally don't believe I've ever had sea urchin, or maybe my brain has deleted that memory to make room for the worst things I've ever seen, I've brought James here today to walk along, or dare I say, swim along with us on this sea urchin journey and to impart on us his never-ending knowledge on basically everything. So welcome, James.

Thank you, Shireen. That was a very nice intro. It's the truth. You suggested this very, very enthusiastically. I did suggest enthusiastically. I was referring to the never-ending knowledge on nearly everything part. Well, genuinely, anything I bring up, you have a story about, which I find very impressive. So it's just the truth. You know a lot of things in that brain versus me. I delete things pretty fast.

I have deleted some shit. I don't suggest banging your brain into your skull if you want to retain information. That's something I've done a little bit too much in my life. Oh, yeah. I think that's wise. But anyway, the sea urchin.

Maybe y'all know it as uni. But actually, the sea urchin and uni are not synonymous words, and they do not mean the same thing. Uni is actually only a small part of the sea urchin, the edible part, and we will get into exactly what it is later on. But its flavor seems to be quite distinct. In 2014,

In 2016, Nestle described uni as one of the top 10 food trends due to its unique flavor. Some people describe the taste as rich and complex. Others describe it as having a rich, buttery flavor that is often compared to that of foie gras. Is that right? Magic, yeah. Thank you for taking my French lessons. Thank you.

It has a slightly sweet and briny taste that is unique to sea urchin. James, how would you describe it as someone who has had sea urchin? Yeah, it's like ocean butter, I think. It's got a butteriness, but also like a briny kind of essence of the sea flavor.

Everything tastes good when you're sitting on the rocks eating it. This is a thing I like to do. Refreshing or something. Yeah, and it's nice to get your own food, isn't it? It's nice to go to the bottom of the ocean and grab a sea urchin and then bring it back up and eat him. Know that you're also helping to preserve the kelp. It has a little aura around it, which we're going to talk about, I'm sure. I think ocean butter... I've never really been one to...

bring it home. I know people do pasta sauces with it. Yeah. But I'm not a big pasta sauce maker, so I'll just normally crack them open or, you know, get some friends around, open them up, and then you get one, you get a nice shell, and you kind of, you keep that one nice, and you do like a little, uh,

little kind of salsa or something in there with the uni, or you just put the uni in there and people dip into it. It's a nice little presentation. What a whole new world. I had no idea. Yeah. See, you'll have to come down, Shireen, and I'll pick on an uni. We'll do a live podcast, everyone. You know, I don't know...

After learning about them, they might be too cute for me to eat, but I guess we'll just keep talking about them. This is going to make me sad if that's the case. There's just one that I keep thinking about called the sea potato, which we'll get into later. But it's so cute. I can't stop thinking about the sea potato. But anyway...

We'll get into that in a second. According to Food and Life magazine, uni is complicated. They say, if you know uni, there's a chance you love it. There's also a chance you took one look at this creamy yellow seafood and decided it would never enter your mouth.

In the same article I found, they say that some people say it's sweet and buttery with icy cold raw uni and sushi as their preferred method to enjoy it. And apparently it also tastes delicious when it's lightly cooked or steamed. And some say, as you just said, kind of, that the flavor evokes a dip in cool salt water. So, yeah. Yeah.

Very, very poetic there. But again, maybe the most popular way y'all have seen sea urchin is being served as sushi. Uni. Uni sushi is a delicacy that has gained popularity around the world. And the dish consists of the sea urchin being raw and with rice. Sushi. Wow. A cute little bite. But the history of our little sea urchin is a humble one. And its journey to become a global delicacy has been slow and steady.

We're going to take a look at the history of the sea urchin as a food source and its cultural significance. So are you ready? Buckle up. Here we go. Okay, I'm buckled. The sea urchin has its roots in Japan, where it has been enjoyed for centuries. The first known mention of sea urchin as a food source dates back to the Edo period, spanning between 1603 and 1868. During this period, the sea urchin was consumed by the samurai class.

The sea urchin has other cultural significances. In Japan, the sea urchin is associated with the ocean and is considered a symbol of good luck and prosperity. It's also believed to have a number of health benefits, including improved skin health and increased fertility. However, it wasn't until the 20th century that the sea urchin became popular as a sushi ingredient.

Sea urchin was used and is still used today in Japanese cuisine more broadly. It's used in soups and rice bowls, and it's often served in traditional kaiseki meals. A kaiseki meal is basically a traditional multi-course Japanese dinner.

This term, fun fact, also refers to the collection of skills and techniques that allow the preparation of such meals. In addition to the sea urchin being an ingredient in Japanese cuisine, the harvesting and processing of sea urchin is an important industry in many coastal regions of Japan.

So even though it's served raw, usually as sushi, as James said, it's used in a variety of ways, like in sauces, pastas, and on bread for centuries. Modern day chefs are even transforming it now into foam and mousse. Mousse! Yeah, I ain't got time for that shit. I hate it.

I'm sure it looks pretty. It looks great. It's very orange. If you've not seen it, I mean, get on Google, unless you're driving, and look for a picture of it. Maybe I'll post one. Maybe we'll use it as a thumbnail for this episode. I mean, I did watch the harvesting. I had never seen it being harvested before, so I saw that. But the color is...

Like crazy from the jump. Like as soon as you crack it open, it's just like this crazy bright color. I never. Yeah. I mean, they're purple. The ones that the ones you're getting in California are purple. There are reds and purples, but you want to be hitting the purples. Yeah. If you're diving in California. So will your foot. Your foot will be purple if you stand on one. It is a bad day if you stand on the sea urchin because the spine can go in and then break. I've done that a couple of times. Yeah.

Yeah, you gotta, yeah. Don't be doing that and then getting infections. Learn from my mistakes. Yeah, please do. But when it does come to sushi, the sea urchin was considered a cheap and plentiful ingredient for a long time. And it was often used in sushi rolls alongside other more expensive ingredients just to fill out the roll. However, as the taste for sea urchin grew, sushi chefs began to showcase it as a standalone ingredient, hard-launched as an ingredient everyone liked.

Today, it's enjoyed around the world, as I said, and considered a delicacy. It's often served in high-end restaurants, and it can get to be quite expensive because of its rarity and the difficulty of sourcing high-quality sea urchin. Because, as with many things, sea urchin is safe to eat as long as it is prepared properly. It's important to ensure the urchin is fresh and has been handled and stored correctly. Let's get a little bit more scientific. I'm going to mispronounce a bunch of stuff coming up, so oops!

Sea urchins are globe-shaped little creatures that live on the ocean floor. Sea urchins belong to a group of marine invertebrates called echinoderms, which means spiky-skinned. Animals in this group also include sea cucumbers, sea lilies, brittle stars, and starfish, aka sea stars.

Those are some of my favorite little underwater creatures. Yeah, what a cute little group. I love it. Yeah, I'd love to see a sea cucumber just kuking along. Or a starfish, you know, who doesn't love to see a starfish? Yeah. Leave them alone. Don't touch the starfish. Yeah, please just leave them be. They didn't do anything to you. They just want to live and chill. Yeah, they're vibing down there. They're the biggest chillers, you know? Yeah, they did nothing wrong. I will stab you if you mess with a starfish.

I respect that. The spherical shells of sea urchins are called tests, and they're made up of plates and movable spines that protect them from predators. Sea urchins can be found in all of the Earth's oceans, and they first appeared as a species around 450 million years ago. One of the groups present in our oceans today, Bacchus,

a word I will mispronounce right now, but it was the first to evolve. It was the Sidaeirodea. Let's go with that. It starts with a C. You can look it up if you want. But it appeared about 268 million years ago. These primitive sea urchins, they often have stubby, rounded-off spines.

A second group of sea urchins are called Echinodia, and they evolved a little later, and they include the spiky creatures you probably are more familiar with. This subclass is known as the, quote, modern sea urchin.

The most recognizable sea urchins are round, often brightly colored and covered in these sharp-looking spines. In fact, urchin comes from an old word for hedgehog, and because they look like hedgehogs with their little spiky armors. Fun. Cute. I love a hedgehog. Hedgehog is one of my favorite animals. They're the urchins of the land. They look like them. They're not, though, because they're not destroying the ecosystem. They're...

I didn't mean it completely literally. They look like little urchins, but they're all burned or done. Yeah, they kind of do. There's one that visits my dad pretty often. It lives by his house and he sends me videos of it. That's cute. Yeah, I think he gives it like a dog food. We used to give them milk when I was a kid. Another example of me saying literally anything in James' face.

Sorry. No, don't apologize. It's great. I want people to know that you shouldn't give them bread and milk, that you should instead give them wet dog food. Okay, good to know. Did not know that. Yeah, so if you come across one. They're illegal in California, though. I'm doing it again. Sorry. You're doing it again. I learned so much with every conversation I have.

But back to the species of sea urchins. There are over 1,000 species of sea urchins, and they have varying characteristics. They inhabit a wide range of depth zones in all climates across the world's oceans, and only 18 of them are actually edible.

It's interesting. Most modern sea urchins are round, as I said, but about a quarter of them have modified that body plan massively. For example, there are sea urchins who evolved into a flatter shape and have smaller spines that adapted to life burrowing in the sand.

you can get really weird shapes of these deep sea urchins with strange bodies that don't look like anything else. We don't know much about these deep sea urchins yet because they're very hard to reach and they're very fragile. And this makes it very difficult for people to study them on the surface. I think this is a great, if you are a billionaire and you are listening to this podcast, you could have a sea urchin species named after you. All you need to do is create a submarine, fill it with other wealthy people, and then take it to the bottom of the ocean to study sea urchins.

You know what else should go into the bottom of the ocean? Is it the products and services to support this show, Shireen? Yes. How unkind of you. It's not hedgehogs. They don't belong there. No. Leave them out of this. Hopefully it's a hedgehog advert. Fuck the police. Get a hedgehog in California. ACAB. And we're back.

I had just talked about some irregular shaped sea urchins before the break, and an example of this kind of sea urchin is actually the sand dollar. Sand dollars are much flatter than other urchins, and this is an adaptation that just better suited their environment.

Like most echnoderms, sea urchins have an internal skeleton called a test. A sea urchin's test is made up of a type of calcium carbonate called sterium, which is a porous structure that holds the urchin together like jigsaw pieces cemented in place. Sea urchin tests have five symmetrical parts arranged around a central point, like segments of an orange. And this shape isn't always obvious from the living creature, but it can be seen on their skeleton when it's dried.

Yeah. I found this next bit kind of cute and funny and a little sad, but sea urchins can't swim. They live and move along the seafloor, favoring hard surfaces like coral and rocks. They have appendages called tube feet, and they often have suckers at the tips of these feet.

The sea urchin uses the hydraulic pressure of water moving in and out of their little tube feet to move about slowly. They can also propel themselves with their spines. That's pretty impressive because they don't have brains. And that's another fun fact. That was kind of sad. They're still cute though.

Some sea urchins also have these pincer-like organs that look like little jaws called pedicelariae. These are mostly used for self-defense or to remove debris from the animal. And some of the pedicelariae in sea urchins are venomous. Urchins primarily feed on algae and kelp, but they are also omnivorous scavengers that will feed on animal matter. Their main diet, then, is algae, but they can also eat animals too, like sea cucumbers, their own kind, as well as mussels and sponges.

So as sea urchins move about on their tube feet, they scrape algae into their mouth. Their unique chewing organ, or the mouth part of the sea urchin, is called Aristotle's lantern. It includes complex jaws as well as five self-sharpening teeth.

If something nutritious lands on a sea urchin's body out of reach of their Aristotle's lantern, they'll use their tube feet to pass the food into the mouth. A sea urchin's mouth is actually on the underside of its body, whereas its anus is on the top. And so they scrape up food from the ocean floor and it makes sense that the mouth is on the underside. And then when they poop, they excrete waste from the top of their body. I thought that's a funny little creature. Yeah.

It's all we are, everything living, it turns out, the longer, like, all living things are just tubes, right? Yeah. Like, food goes in one end and the rest, waste comes out the other. That is very true. Tubes with legs. Yeah. It's my philosophical insight. And the video I did see of the harvesting, actually, you cut it from the mouth, the underside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going in the base there, into the Aristotle's lantern, which I didn't know it was called. Isn't that interesting? I think that's a very... It's very fascinating, yeah. Aristotle's lantern. Yeah. Why? Why?

That's a good question. Ask Aristotle, I guess.

Maybe you're asking yourself, maybe not, but I'm going to tell you anyway. How do these sea urchins reproduce? Most sea urchins reproduce by females releasing eggs directly into the water, and then these are fertilized by sperm. Some species' females hold eggs in their spines to better protect them. Most sea urchins will release millions of eggs at one time and live in huge colonies to increase the chances of reproductive success. There are also more solitary species, however.

As I mentioned earlier, there are some species that are in fact poisonous. A lot of them are tropical. They have venom in their spines, and if you're unlucky enough to step on a venomous urchin, the toxins can enter the body through the puncture wound. Some sea urchins' venoms can cause really gross symptoms like nausea and vomiting, breathing difficulties. But even the most venomous sea urchin has only been linked to one reported human death. So you'll most likely be fine.

It's going to suck. I have no doubt. It's probably one of those things. I guarantee this is one of the things that people will tell you, you need all your friends to piss on you. It seems like with, no, just like, if that's your thing, get after it. Why do people say that? I don't know. I don't know. It just may be like, maybe someone said it and no one has like felt the need to contradict it because obviously like there are very few medical treatments that should involve pissing. No, I think so. Oh, okay.

That's such a weird trend. Some guy just like was trolling someone and then it became a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like jellyfish stings, right? People do it. Or like, yeah, someone was at the beach the other day and someone got whacked by a stingray. Yeah. And someone was like, piss on it. Everyone knows to do that or thinks to do that. It's like a thing. Yeah, don't. It's a good way to get banned from the beach for life. Yeah.

There are children there. Just put it in hot water if it's a stingray sting. That's really funny. Have a few beers and go to sleep. Good to know. Good to know. The most venomous, most toxic sea urchin is actually called the flower urchin. It's scientific name, which I was going to say, but I'm not. But it basically translates into poison breath.

So, as I mentioned, in my opinion, the cutest sea urchin is called the sea potato. The sea potato is covered in short beige little spines that give it a furry appearance, and it's quite distinct from its other sharper-spined cousins. These sea urchins burrow into the seafloor, and their fuzzy spines trap air, preventing the urchin from suffocating under the sand. Sea potatoes are also known as heart urchins due to the shape of their test.

You can find them, apparently, in waters around the UK. James? Okay, I'm going to look up a sea potato right now and see if I've run into one of these guys. Oh yeah, these little chaps. Yeah, this is a little fluffer. Yeah.

It's a little floof. Yeah, and you can find them when they're dried out too. They kind of look, I guess, to the, you know, they look a bit like a sand dollar, right? That's sort of a thicker sand dollar. They've got some height to them. Yeah, they're more round versus flat. Yeah, down in Cornwall. Yeah, they can get washed up on the beach sometimes. Not entirely potato looking, if we're honest.

Yeah, I can see the pasting similarity to Potato, I suppose. Yeah, I think they're cute. Yeah, they do look... When you see them when they look really fluffy, yeah, it does look like a beaver or something. Wait, how big have you seen them? Can you show me with your hand? Yeah, like a hand size, you know? Oh! Like a sort of... James is using both hands to make a circle. Yeah, like if you were doing the hand heart.

very millennial of you yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah we do have the heart test yeah if you're a millennial you could go up to them and do that i bet and put it on your instagram in a millennial way and uh yeah and only james will know what you're talking about yeah well there's thousands of people in this podcast shireen all your friends will think you're cool tell them i tell them i told you got it you heard it here first sea urchins cool

The physiology of a sea urchin is actually pretty significant. As I mentioned earlier, there's only one part that is edible, which is the uni. When it comes to consumption, they're harvested for their gonads, and the gonad is essentially a sex gland or reproductive organ that produces the sex hormones of an organism. So the gonads or reproductive organs are the edible part of the sea urchin, and that is known as uni rather than the sea urchin as a whole.

Sometimes uni is mistakenly billed as roe, which are fish eggs, but it's not that. It's the reproductive organ. And each sea urchin usually produces five gonads, or uni quote-unquote tongues, that slip out with a spoon. And these gonads are sometimes bright yellow to orange lobes, and they're apparently stockpiles of sugars, amino acids, and salts, a trifecta of sweet, salty, and umami.

And that's why I guess it's been dubbed as the butter of the sea or something like that. And they're also similar to oysters in the fact that they can vary from flavor depending on the species and the diet of the organism. Urchin lovers, for example, prize Hokkaido uni because of its umami intensive flavor, which is developed because of the urchin's diet of the Hokkaido macroalgae kombu, aka the kelp.

The green, red, and purple species have the highest demand globally because their lobes tend to be larger and more visually appetizing. 99% of sea urchins are wild and harvested either by diving or drags. Yeah.

If you are buying your sea urchins, I don't know where you would buy them even, but if you want to get the dived ones, I'm not sure if you could get dragneted stuff in the US, but it's very damaging to the ocean floor. Any of this stuff, right? Scallops, et cetera. You want it hand-dived. Better yet, just go and get it yourself if you're able to, if you're close by the ocean. But yeah, don't be buying dragneted stuff.

There are several species of note, and I mentioned some of them earlier, but others include the Murasaki, aka Purple Uni, and that uni fetches the highest price because of its large tongues and sweet flavor. Another species worth mentioning is the smaller Bafun Uni, B-A-F-U-N, Bafun, but its name literally translates to horse shit because of the way that these round, brownish little creatures cluster on the ocean floor.

A little note here that I didn't know about until reading about this, and maybe someone else out there didn't know this either. Again, I learned English as a second language, so maybe it's obvious, but this word sea urchin is similar to the word fish in that sea urchin can be both singular and plural. I didn't know that. So if you hear me using both interchangeably, that's why. Cute little word.

I mentioned this earlier, but freshness is the key to good uni. It should be firm and bright-colored without any signs of seepage and ideally still tiled or crisscrossed in its original packaging. Once it's harvested, it begins to melt, and its flavor can turn unforgettably bitter and off. In the best of worlds, uni is cleaned, iced, and shipped before it can spoil.

but it can also be treated with additives, including alum, to keep it firm. These chemicals may contribute to an off flavor if the uni gets old. Some sushi chefs prefer ensui uni, which is shipped in a brine that mimics the salinity of seawater.

The global and domestic market for sea urchin and uni is extensive. The greatest consumption of sea urchin occurs in Japan, France, and Korea. Japanese consumption, however, wins by a landslide. The country consumes about 80 to 90% of the current global supply. Sea urchin is a traditional staple in Japanese cuisine.

Japan was the largest global harvester of sea urchins until the 1980s, but high demand and a decrease of domestic supply forced Japan to look abroad. From the 1980s to 1994, the U.S., particularly Maine, was the largest exporter of green sea urchin. Today, it's Chile, which exports Chilean red urchin and accounts for 50% of global landings.

Overall global supply has decreased over the last 20 years because of storms, decreasing kelp beds, invasive species, and overfishing. In 1995, for example, the global landings totaled to 120,000 tons. In 2017, it had decreased to 75,000.

America has two major uni fisheries. On the west coast, Santa Barbara uni comes from the giant red sea urchin, and it's noted for its large size, coarse texture, and brightly sweet flavor. Back east, Maine uni comes from the longer spiked green sea urchin. In North America in general, the main sources of sea urchin come from the Canadian Maritime, Maine, and the Pacific coast from British Columbia to California.

So green sea urchins are harvested from the Atlantic, while the red and purple urchins are harvested from the Pacific. These days, domestic supply stays domestic to meet the growing demand in ethnic markets. Domestic supply is also supplemented by imported product, mostly from Chile, during the summer months. Fun fact, in New Zealand, kina urchins have long been part of the traditional Maori diet.

So, sea urchins have long been fished and harvested everywhere where there's basically a coast, from Peru to Italy and Korea.

Reading about Korea and sea urchin harvesting is what led me to learn about the haenyeo, who are female divers in the South Korean province of Jeju, where for centuries, these specially trained female divers have collected sea urchins for generations. And traditionally, girls start as young as 11 to train to dive for urchins.

Their livelihood consists of harvesting a variety of mollusks, seaweed, and other sea life from the ocean. The hainyu are also known for their independent spirit and determination, and they are representative of the semi-matriarchal family structure of the province of Jeju. Another fun fact. I love a fun fact. You know what else loves a fun fact? Is it the sea potato? It's the ads. It's the sweet potato. Oh, the sea potato!

Every time I think of a sea potato, you're nice. I'm going to get you like a plushie. Okay, here are some ads. And we're back. So we're wrapping up this odyssey of going into sea urchins and this swimming journey we've had with James. It's not just humans who have found a way to get past the sea urchin's spiky exterior and eat its sex organs. Their predators include a wide variety of fish, starfish, crabs, and sea otters.

Sea otters lie on their backs with sea urchins on their chest, and they whack them with a rock to eat what's inside. Yeah, it's a cute thing to see.

I love sea otters. They are so cute. They are adorable. Lying on their backs. Little guys. Go-to position. They keep a little stone with them. Yeah, it's a little pocket. Like it's a little EDC. Yeah, so cute. So cute. But sea urchins are actually not just used by people solely in cuisine. Perhaps because of their mysterious shapes, fossils of sea urchin tests have also been historically used as protective amulets to ward off evil.

Apparently, in southern England, James, some sea urchin fossils were traditionally thought to be thunderbolts frozen in rock, and these thunderstorms were thought to protect a house from being struck by lightning. Oh, interesting. I'm teaching you about your culture. Yeah, that's right. Thanks, Shireen. Inhabiting the persona of a white guy there.

And as James mentioned at the top, climate change is, of course, affecting sea urchins and climate change is affecting everything. Sea urchins are sensitive to changes in their environment. They can act as an early warning system for potential problems in their ecosystem, as well as rising temperatures. Ocean acidification and rising temperatures are probably the biggest long-term threat to sea urchins as a whole.

Increasing ocean acidification increases the rate at which calcium carbonate dissolves. So as things get more acidic, it will likely become harder and harder for sea urchins to accumulate enough calcium carbonate to make a solid test, and their tests will then get thinner and weaker. Experiments in labs have shown that this can happen even with very minor increases in acidification.

Sea urchins in this way can help illustrate why it's so important to protect the balance of nature in our already threatened ocean ecosystems.

That's the sea urchin. Yeah, if you live in like northern or central California, as the water gets hotter, the kelp begins to die and the dead little pieces of kelp are fed upon by the sea urchins. And so the sea urchin population has like ballooned and they're taking over the kelp. You get what are called like barrens, urchin barrens, where it used to be like a kelp forest or anything. If you've never dived in a kelp forest, you should dive in a kelp forest.

I mean, don't fucking just do it if you don't know what you're doing, cause you'll die, but you know, provided you're capable of free diving or scuba diving, but now they're gone. Right. And it's just beds of urchins, which is really sad because the kelp obviously is a sustaining part of that whole ecosystem. Yeah. Be nice to the oceans.

Please be nice to the oceans. You can gather them without even diving. You can gather them in the intertidal there. Don't be like getting cliffed out, right? Don't go to a place where there is no beach or high tide and then hang around there until the tide gets high because

gonna have to swim then so don't don't be doing that be sensible respect the ocean yeah i love a sea urchin um well i'll put a picture of one i love to i love to show them this is my this is my weird like uh toxic trait yeah yeah my toxic trait yeah my toxic trait is showing children sea urchin um like i like to show them the sea potato

Yeah, well, I'm in California now. Oh, you mean in person? You mean in person? Yeah, I'm not just walking up to kids and whacking out my iPhone, Shereen. I'm not weird. No. If I'm gathering sea urchins on a free dive, then I'll come back into the beach, right? I have a little bodyboard and I have a bag on it. Put the urchins in there. I'm sure kids love that.

I remember going to those aquariums where you stick your hand in the water as a child. You don't know any better. And the little starfish and everything, that was the most interesting part. So I'm sure the kids...

Love that shit. Kids love a creature. Yeah. Did you learn anything about sea urchins? I learned a lot, yeah. I learned an awful lot about it. I didn't know anything about these. I'm excited about these Korean ladies. Probably going to Google that later. Yeah. I feel like they deserve more of a deep dive. Pun intended. Magic, Shireen. Incredible. Maybe that'll be my next podcast series. I'll be there. I've contrived ways to free dive. I went free diving a lot in the Marshall Islands. Sick, so...

I'm stoked for iHeartRadio to pay for me to go freediving somewhere else. Advocate for that. Let's petition. Get a letter. Get the union involved. Anyway, that's this episode of Eat Could Happen Here. And until next time, important pickup alert. We're back. James alerted me to a fact that was too important to not include in this episode. James, what did I miss?

What you missed, Shireen, was the eighth wonder of the world, which is sea urchins wearing little hats.

That's right, folks. See urchins wearing little hats. This is where we fact check all our reporting in order to bring you the cutting edge shit. Professional journalism. So what are we talking about? We talked about tube feet, right? Urchins move using their little tube feet and they contract small muscles that force water into the tube foot to take each step.

And the end of each tube foot is very, very sticky. They used to be described as suction cups, but now researchers are thinking of them more as like a bioadhesive rather than a suction that sticks to things, including the floor. And they use these sticky tube feet to pick up and hold onto rocks, shells, golf balls, and other little treasures. Treasures including tiny hats.

Behavioral ecologists call urchin hats, quote unquote, covering behavior. They don't call the hats that, but they call the act of them covering themselves covering behavior. That name is related to the first and most prevalent hypothesis about this phenomena, that the urchins are covering themselves to provide shelter from light, predators, or maybe even both.

There are experiments which confirm the light hypothesis. Researchers in Ireland found that when the urchins were exposed to the full spectrum of UV light, they would pick up their little hats and or move to a shady corner of their tanks in order to avoid harmful UV radiation.

Around the same time of these findings, another scientist in California was studying the covering behavior of Pacific rose flower urchins. The rose urchin study wasn't conducted in a lab. Instead, the urchin behavior was observed in their natural habitat. And what they found was that the sample site with the greatest wave energy had the most covering behavior among the urchins. So what is it? Sun

Sun safety? Or is it like a protective gear like seatbelts or knee pads? Are they protecting themselves from currents and wave damage instead of floating away? Or are they afraid of the sun?

Researchers have tested several factors simultaneously to trace the covering behavior to its source. In the lab, green urchins were exposed to common predators, wave surges, and algae blades, as well as sunlight. And as it turns out, predators were a bust. Their presence had no significant impact on the rate of covering behavior. So it's not necessarily camouflaged for all urchins. And similarly to how sea stars can regenerate lost arms,

Urchins are also constantly regenerating lost and broken spines, but this regeneration takes energy. And so, for some urchins, it might be a safer bet, particularly for a small urchin who is vulnerable to dislodgement and damage, to pick up some extra weight and put on a little sun protection at the same time.

And of course, because humans are humans, once 3D printing came along, people started making sea urchins tiny little urchin hats, which is why I keep calling them hats. Because now they are hats and people have them in aquariums or in their personal urchin tank. Because sure enough, these urchins will skitter along and pick these hats up and put them on their head, which we now know is actually their butt. But they put them on the top of themselves. Not all urchins wear hats though. Right? A little ass hat. That's funny. Yeah.

Urchin Ass Hat. What a great band. That's a great band name. Yeah, yeah. If you are listening and in need of a sort of like a... You're welcome. Yeah, like Blink-182, that kind of music. I think that's what I associate with Urchin Ass Hat. I agree. Urchin Ass Hat. Not all urchins wear hats, and a Canadian study found that smaller urchins are the ones that are more likely to cover up.

And the logic behind their covering behavior, it seems to depend, as I said, on the species of urchin and the environment they inhabit. So out in more tropical regions, the collector urchin, as it's called, it may be protecting itself from the sun. And these urchins can be found in shallow waters off of Hawaii, the Indo-Pacific, in the Bahamas. And this is where they're exposed to a lot of sunlight.

Meanwhile, researchers think that the green sea urchin uses its adornments to weigh itself down. And this species tends to live in the shallow waters of the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, where it gets constantly battered by waves. Wherever there's a lot of wave activity, the urchin heavily covers up the top and the sides of its body with whatever it can find, which helps make it heavy enough to avoid getting swept away.

And then further south, Antarctic urchins have been found to cover themselves as a way to avoid predators. Their main predators are king crabs and sea anemones, and researchers found that they were more likely to put on coverings when predators were around.

In a lab experiment, another species of urchin was more likely to survive being exposed to a predator if it was given shells to cover itself. So these decorations may be a type of camouflage to keep some urchins from being found and eaten, not necessarily all urchins. And then there's the kina, a large urchin found in New Zealand.

This urchin seems to use the items that it collected as a food source. Researchers found that this species was covering itself even in the dark, which suggested that it wasn't trying to protect itself from sunlight. And its predators don't rely on sight to find their prey, so camouflaging itself would be pointless. In a field study, they found that these urchins were carrying algae, aka a source of their little urchin food. And so they're basically carrying around like

a snack bag or a fridge for themselves, which can be helpful because these urchins might not always have a lot of algae around for grazing. So now you know about little hats and the little things that urchins do to cover themselves and collect things. I didn't realize that it was more than just covering their little ass hats or ass heads, rather. But yeah, I thought it was really interesting and good on James to remind us to talk about

urchin hats yeah great many things that i've learned recently i've got a tiktok account so i'm learning a lot oh yeah no it's not like i'm not i'm not tiktoking and i just want to be extremely clear about this i i got it because lots of the folks in myanmar use tiktok to oh nice to communicate with the world so i've been tiktoking and i've learned a lot learning a lot about taylor swift and olivia rodrigo and urchin that's not necessary

Thank you, James, for joining me on this swimming journey of urchin facts and things. When you suggested talking about sea urchins, I did not expect them to be so cute and so interesting. So thank you for that. And if you have an urchin around, go get a little hat.

Be its little buddy. Get them on Etsy. I've just been looking. Oh no. Go on Etsy. Get a Viking helmet. I think those ones are the most hardcore. That's funny. Anyway, okay. That's now the end of this episode. So you're welcome for this update and bye. Bye.

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Book on the app and you get double points. Sounds like it's time I tried Cheapo Air. Call Cheapo Air at 855-247-3279 or visit CheapoAir.com slash podcast. They say every dog has its day, but when your Lulu and your parents drive a Toyota Camry, every day is your day. The roomy rear seat is the perfect way to get to the dog parlor. Oh, that's the vet's office. Woof, woof, woof.

It's okay, Lulu. We can go to the park after this. That's a relief. You were so good in there. Let's get you a treat, too. Backseat besties. It's a Camry vibe. The all-new, all-hybrid Camry. Toyota, let's go places. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is droning under the oppression of whoever keeps changing the stupid Zoom interface. It's different every time. It always gets worse. It never gets better. Please stop.

Weird trads for Zoom. Zoom layout. Just get it one time, put the recording thing on the stupid panel on the bottom and then never change it. It simply never gets better. Yeah, this is Mia who's extremely annoyed at Zoom. With me is James. Yep, also extremely annoyed at Zoom. Hi, just in solidarity with Mia. Fuck him.

Yeah, and also extremely annoyed right now is the man stages the world's worst coup, asked to report to prison. I don't think we can call it the world's worst coup, Mia. That's a bold claim. You're forgetting Silvercorp. No, okay. Here's the thing about Silvercorp, right? The guys who defeated Silvercorp had guns.

Yeah, but Silvercorp didn't. They had BB guns. Yeah, but here's the thing, right? They, they, those guys, again, those guys did not have real guns defeated by guys with guns. These guys had guns. They had a lot of guns. They were defeated by...

People with flags? Yeah. And a guy standing in a doorway being like, no, you can't come in. Go home. Report directly to jail. I genuinely believe this is the worst coup I've ever seen in my entire life. And we lived in the Venezuela one. I distinctly remember stepping out of a post office and checking my phone and getting 18 messages from my friends that said, what do you know about the coup in Turkey? Yeah.

That was a terrible coup. That was it. They could have just saved us all this trouble. A shot aired and went down from a jet fighter, but they didn't. You know, there's been plenty of bad ones. There was that coup recently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a fiasco. Hilariously, this coup in Bolivia we're covering today happened exactly one year and three days after the March of the Wagner Corps. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that one. What a thing.

Wow. Yeah. Everyone's trying it, guys. If you believe you can achieve, give it a go. Do a coup if you want to. Why not? Donald Trump, he tried one. Didn't work very well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we really, I mean, also, I mean, we can't forget January 9th. Even the, I don't, because January 6th was already farce, but like we forgot the farcest farce version of it in Brazil. Yeah. It wasn't even there. Yeah. Yeah. The old building coup.

Yeah, lots of very stupid coups. But this is probably the worst one. So we're going to be explaining sort of what happened. But the thing about this coup is that in order to understand what's happening with this coup, we have to get through, I think, a part of Bolivian history that has not been really well understood or talked about on the left, which is effectively what happened in Bolivia before.

after the coup in 2019 um i i think i think people sort of know that there was a coup and that it got overturned but comma that was sort of the point at which which the the the sort of anglo media and like the sort of press that hits the left here kind of just took off so you have your sort of 2019 coup the place where sort of everything getting lost kind of starts is that

So there's this coup. The left sort of response to the coup is not very strong because the sort of social movements have been hollowed out by the sort of incorporation into the Bolivian state. So they sort of just don't have the juice to really kind of, you know, roll this coup back. This is basically the 2019 coup, not the 2024 coup.

Yeah, and you know, the thing about the 2019 coup that makes it very different from this one is that that one was, you know, there was a broad base of support for this, right, in this sort of, in this sort of like far right out of Santa Cruz and also out of sort of like more moderate center right.

So, you know, there are sort of large street movements in favor of this. This is not true of the most recent one. Yeah, absolutely not. Yeah, but, you know, by 2020, as 2020 is sort of progressing, A, Anya's coup government is a fiasco. Their management of COVID is just terrible. Enormous numbers of deaths. I mean, actually, I mean, not by American standards, I guess, but, you know, really, really mismanaged. I mean,

I have friends there who are talking about how if you were going to the hospital and you needed to use a piece of medical equipment, you had to buy the medical equipment or a part to fix a machine and show up to the hospital with the part because they couldn't order it.

Yeah, I've seen that in a few places in the world. It's never a good time. Yeah, it's not good. It was a real shit show. And by sort of, I think about September, early September of 2020, the left has sort of gotten its shit together. And there are this massive set of roadblocks. Bolivian social politics tends to sort of be about roadblocks because...

you know, country, a lot of mountains, a lot of roads you can very easily block off and then prevent anything from, you know, for example, entering a city. Yep. Good idea. So they're, they're able to just basically shut down the bloomin' economy. The government is once again on the verge of collapse. And once again, and we'll get to the sort of first time this happened, but, uh, Eva Morales once again sort of pulls the supporters off of the barricade so he can go win an election rather than, you know, attempt to just bring down the sort of coup government. Yeah.

So, you know, that eventually happens. The government is forced to hold elections because, you know, they've lost control of the country. And the MAS takes, you know, wins this election by overwhelming margins. The MAS is Eva Morales' party. It's the sort of like party of the Bolivian left. But yeah, the guy who comes to power is Louis Arce. He's an interesting figure because he is kind of...

We're going to get more into sort of what the MAS is in a bit, but he is from a kind of right wing of the party that's not talked about very much. Yeah, he is a, you know, he's not a guy who comes from the social movements in the way that sort of Morales did. Like he was, even Morales was a guy from the, he was like the president of the Coca-Cola Union.

Arce is a banker. He's an economist and a banker. He comes out of the Central Bank of Bolivia. And he had been kind of the guy running Bolivian economic policy, but he is from the developmentalist wing of the party, which means he is effectively from the wing of the party that are the kind of like center-left capitalists that...

the social movements kind of allied themselves to under more allies in order to do this sort of national economic development policy. So these are a lot of, these are a lot of mining sector guys. These are a very specific sort of cadre of, of these like central bank guys, you know, and I, and I think this is the part, the thing about the NAS that's kind of relevant here is that it usually also has a base support among people you wouldn't expect. I mean, there's a lot of small business owners who support them because they're

The MAS really did, for most of the time they've been in power, preside over astonishing economic growth. They did this by marrying these social movements to this national bourgeoisie developmentalist faction. Yeah. And the other thing that the MAS does in the period between when they come back to power in late 2020, 2021, and now, is they actually go after the people who did the coup, right? Yeah.

onions who was the previous president is just in prison for helping you do the coup um the the other big person who's been arrested is luis fernando camacho who is a man who in in 100 complete seriousness calls himself macho camacho so that's that's kind of an indication it's a good sign yeah that that's an indication of who this guy is which is he is a

really fanatical, really fanatical Christian nationalist. He's playing a very similar role to... Actually, I think even in a lot of ways, he's played a more radical role to what Bolsonaro played in Brazil, where Camacho in Bolivia is this kind of... He's the guy who's rallied both evangelicalism and Catholicism, although it's... He rallied both of them into this virulent... And specifically in...

Bolivia anti-indigenous sort of political force. The 2019 coup is seen in very, very explicitly is seen in religious terms. Both Agnes and Camacho talk about how like the word of God is back in the capital and the, we all put like all of this sort of indigenous, various indigenous stuff is just never going to come back again.

So Camacho gets arrested in 2022 for, you know, doing this coup. And this sets off... So he, by the way, is the governor of the state of Santa Cruz. And this sets off a bunch of, like, a right-wing general strike, a bunch of riots. Like, hundreds of people are injured in street fighting between his sort of fanatics and everyone else in the country. It does an enormous amount of economic damage. It sets off sort of roadblocks. The government...

I mean, Camacho, I think, also is still in prison, but it kind of, you know, the government's kind of forced to make concessions to these people. So, you know, the whole the whole sort of Arcee government is kind of on shaky footing from the beginning. And all of this is before the Bolivian economy really hits the shit. But before before we get to the Bolivian economy, do you know what else hits the shit?

Oh, is it the meal kit preparation delivery service that we are not allowed to mention for legal reasons? Yes, it is. Yes. Yeah. Yes. You'll be pooping your brains out. Don't do it. We are back. So let's talk about the other thing that's happening in Bolivia. Well, okay. I see other thing. One of the four other things that's been happening in Bolivia.

And that is the real sort of collapse of the Bolivian economy. So the Bolivian economy, Bolivia has been kind of different from the rest of the sort of kind of left wing pink tide governments that were elected in the sort of 2000s.

era of sort of anti-globalization politics um most of those countries economies imploded a long time ago like venezuela is sort of obviously the most famous case but all of these economies fell apart because these were all economies based on the commodity boom we've talked about this in some of our brazil episodes but the the very short version is that a lot of a lot of uh countries that produce sort of primary commodities so like you know your copper your sort of uh your natural gas um

I mean, things like soybeans, too, kind of fall in this category. So you're sort of mining stuff or some of your farming stuff. All of these sort of industrial input, primary commodity stuff all got massive price spikes in the early 2000s because the Chinese economy had integrated into the rest of the world economy fully by joining the World Trade Organization.

And this set off this massive industrialization boom in China. And, you know, the Chinese, the levels of sort of demand that this induces is unbelievable because Chinese economic growth in that period is unreal. And it's economic growth that is unreal in a country with a billion people in it. So this produced a kind of shock of demand for all of these sort of mineral resources that was not entirely unprecedented, but

enormously large and also allowed all of these sort of social democratic economies to you know kind of paper over the inherent contradictions of their base being both capitalist and also a bunch of like unions by they're just sort of being enough state revenue from all of these all of these exports to just kind of buy everyone off paper everything yeah the clientelism

Yeah, yeah. And that stops working when the economy goes under. But Bolivia's economy does a lot better than the rest of the economies in the region. There are a lot of reasons for this. Part of it is that, you know, Arce, who is running the economy of Bolivia in the sort of the period, like post-2008 period, when everyone else's economies are collapsing, he is genuinely doing some pretty interesting macroeconomic stuff. Also, the other thing that's going on is that Bolivia...

Main export and people. OK, so people in the US tend to think of Bolivia as a country that produces lithium. That's not true. That might be true. Maybe 30 years in the future. That will be Bolivia's primary export. But Bolivia's primary export for the last two decades has been natural gas and natural gas prices didn't quite do the same thing that sort of oil prices did that kind of imploded the Venezuelan economy. Yeah.

And so through sort of like economic management and these sort of political alliances and...

the high price in natural gas, the Bolivian economy had sort of been fine. Unfortunately, what's happening right now is that Bolivia is running out of natural gas. And because it's running out of natural gas, and also because their economy is an export-based economy based on natural gas- Not so good. Not such good vibes. Yeah, it's very bad. The entire economy is falling apart because this is a very, very classic kind of economic crisis. The economic crises are having

I'm not saying it described as a balance of payments crisis, but that's what it is, which is that the Bolivian economy works on buying things with American dollars. So, you know, like a lot of the businesses in the country involved are sort of import businesses, right? You know, I mean, I know people who run businesses like this in Bolivia where, you know, you're importing goods.

shoes or like motors yeah stuff like that and you buy them with american dollars and you sell them in bolivia but the thing is this requires a constant supply of american dollars to go buy good manufactured goods from other places because bolivia's manufacturing economy is effectively is a joke and this is something that was true of all of these economies i mean bolivia never they kind of tried to industrialize in the 70s but they never got as far along with it as a country like brazil or a country like venezuela did in the 70s

And the other thing about all these sort of pink tie governments is they all took power in economies that have been completely deindustrialized by neoliberalism, right? We talked about this with Brazil. Brazil went from a country that was a

Kind of like effectively a first, not quite a first, maybe a second, a second tier, a large, a powerful second tier industrial power to a country whose economy is almost entirely based on sort of primary commodity production and farming bullshit. So they've, they've moved down the, they've moved down the value chain. They're manufacturing less stuff. They're producing shit that's on the bottom. They're getting less value from value added bullshit moving up the chain.

And this is also the problem with the Bolivian economy. And because the natural gas is drying up, they don't have enough dollars coming into the economy for people to use to buy things. And the Bolivian currency is also pegged to the dollar, right? So there's supposed to be an official exchange rate at which X amount of money is worth X amount of dollars. And that's all falling apart. People are sort of running around in the streets trying to find people who will exchange money

like their currency for dollars um this is this is you know so this is this is a classic sort of balance of payments yeah well it's kind of kind of a balance but they're having a giant dollar shortage this is really really messing up no i mean not just the economy but the entire political system is really kind of coming apart under this now okay i i talked about

Things kind of coming apart. There is another thing that is coming apart in Bolivia, which is the M.A.S. is shattering. Yes, shattering. It's splintering into. So what is the M.A.S.? So the M.A.S. is this part. Oh, OK. So it has a slightly weirder history, which is that the M.A.S. was a completely random, actually kind of kind of right wing political party. But importantly, it had electoral status and.

So it's a party that was taken over by the social movements at the end of the sort of stuff we're going to get to in order to be able to run candidates for office. But this means that because, again, because it was literally an existing legal registered party that was taken over from the outside and because of how it emerged, it's always been seen as sort of a movement party, right? It's supposed to be like the assembly of Bolivia's sort of left-wing social movements, right?

And these left-wing social movements are the movements that – emerge isn't quite the right word, but they're the movements that solidified and began to sort of exert their power from 2000 to 2006 in this enormous sequence of social uprising against sort of Bolivian neoliberalism. The most famous of these are the water and gas wars, which are these fights against water privatization and the sort of gas line and –

this alliance of peasant unions, sort of the traditional sort of urban, urban sort of proletariat, like traditional sort of like urban left these, these new street movements, coca growers, unions, miners, unions, and a whole array of indigenous groups that we frankly do not have time to get into here because the politics there are extremely, the philosophy is extremely complicated. I don't know if I've talked about this on this show before, but one of the, I mean,

I mean, we're talking about like, they have like philosophical constructs that I don't understand. It's this philosophical construct that's like a dialectic, but there's three parts of it and it doesn't resolve. They just all kind of grind in tension with each other, right? So like, okay, we're not really going to get into that. It's outside the scope of the show. If you're more interested in this...

Read Rhythms of the Pachacuti or get a doctorate, I guess. Yeah, return to grad school. Your options are limited. But, you know, there's this coalition of all of these kinds of unions, these rural unions, urban unions, urban street movements, rural street movements, gather together, gather their strength, set up a million roadblocks and just smash the neoliberal right. They are... Bolivia's right is...

basically completely destroyed from the period of 2006 until 2019. That was the first time they ever took power. They did it in a coup and they held power for about one year before they were kicked out of power again. So they basically completely reshaped

All of politics in Bolivia, the those the second round of roadblocks very nearly destroyed the Bolivian state until, as I sort of alluded to earlier, even where allies pulled supporters off the barricade in order to get an election 2006. And this is this is the election the MAS won. And to understand the kind of seismic change of this, right, the MAS is the first party in the history of Bolivia to win a majority of the seats in the parliament by itself.

First party ever. It completely destroyed the existing sort of political system. And again, this was supposed to be a sort of new kind of party, right? The theory of the MAS is the organization of the social movements. Former vice president and sometimes Marxist Garcia Linera described it as, quote, there's a dialectical relationship between the social movements and the party. Now, this is a lie or more precisely...

If this is a dialectic, it is not a Hegelian or Marxist dialectic where the sublation of two parts creates a concrete totality or a hole that is neither of the things that was before it. This is a Maoist dialectic where two sides face off each other with each other. One of them hits the other side of the head with a hammer until it dies. It's just a conflict. It,

It's just there are two people and they both want to control the thing. Yeah, they're fighting each other. It's a fight. That's what ends up happening, right? So the social movements and the indigenous movements in particular have been fracturing for a decade.

There were a whole series of large fights, even in the early 2010s, over the MAS doing these infrastructure things that everyone else in the country was like, why are you building a road through indigenous land? There's these huge fights. Many such cases. Yeah. This is the kind of hollowing out and the kind of conflict that had led...

to the social movements being completely unable to overturn the coup in 2019 and it taking them until the end of 2020 to really pull their shit together and, you know, overturn the coup. And you know what else overturns coups? That's a hefty promise. Is it arming the working class, man? It is arming the working class. We are sponsored by, yeah, arm the entire working class.

we're back so okay so now we get to the present split in the social movements um what has happened now is that you know arce and and evan morales had always kind of gotten along usually but once you know arce took power he instead of he didn't want to sort of just be a proxy for even morales he had his own sort of actually like not great agenda either as sort of

more technocratic agenda although you know you have to sort of ask evil like you're the one who brought these people into the party like i don't know what you were expecting um yeah you brought these people in that they weren't going to govern as governed as a sort of center-left technocratic capitalist government you know you could have seen this coming but they they have been increasingly fighting and the two the two sides are now implacably hostile they are

Arce and Evo fucking hate each other, and this divide has split every single social movement in Bolivia, from the Landless Workers Movement to the Cocoa Growers to the Indigenous Federations to the fucking Urban Trade Unions to the Miners' Unions. Every one of these organizations either has officially split into two factions, that's one's an Evo faction and one's an Arce faction, or they are in the middle of the fight where, you know, both sides are still fighting for control over their union federation.

And this is not a clean left-right split, which is... I mean, that was kind of what I was expecting-ish when this fight started, that I was sort of expecting that this was going to end up as a fight between sort of, you know, the left, the social movements, and the sort of center-right base. But that's not really what happens. It is kind of...

a left-right split, but it's also a split over the person of Evo himself. And because it's partially a split over Evo himself, there's a lot of more left-wing groups that are kind of backing Arce because they don't want even more allies to come back into power and re-solidify his control over all of these social movements, and they're angry at him for a whole series of attempts to co-opt their movements together.

It's also, you know, it's also, it's also split about sort of how autonomous a social movement should be. It should be able to be from government policy. It's, it's, it's,

You know, it's kind of external to this, but one of the other things that's going on is that Evo has been really unpopular with a lot of feminist groups in Bolivia for a very long time for a lot of reasons, including, I mean, you know, one of the big ones is Bolivia's horrific femicide crisis, which the MAS has been in power for almost 20 years and has done jack shit to actually, like, deal with, right? Yeah.

So there are all of these sort of fractures breaking out. Partially also it's a war for control of the MAS between the Coca-Gurus unions and the miners' unions. So this is a shit show. It is a complete fiasco. And the thing that makes it more of a fiasco is we talked about this sort of with – we did an episode about –

Kind of what's been happening with the, with the sort of pink tide governments a while back. And, you know, one of the things you talked about in that episode was Ecuador where Ecuador has this left wing base that should win every single election until the end of time. And they don't because they're constantly fighting each other. And this is effectively the beginning of, hopefully it doesn't turn into that, but I mean the MAS, if it is, if it is even sort of United is an unprecedented Bolivian political juggernaut, it should win every election ever.

I mean, not until the end of time. They probably should only win... I don't know. They have demographic issues, but...

Right now. Yeah. But, you know, they should still be winning effectively every every election. And they're not. And the reason that they're not is because of this shit or losing. They might not because of because of all of these all all of these splits. And these are very these this isn't a these are very, very serious political splits. I mean, one of the miners workers meetings very famously, the two sides broke into into fistfights. I think 140 people were injured.

So, you know, this is this is these are these are very serious fights. There's also a whole disaster right now over who actually is the candidate of the MAS because Evo held this Congress of the MAS. It was his supporters that Arce was not at. And they said that because he didn't because Arce didn't show up, he was kicked out of the party. Classic. So there's this whole thing. So he's technically been expelled, but like the courts got the electoral courts are now involved because the electoral courts have to decide who

what like you know they have to figure out what what candidate their party's running so it's this it's a complete catastrophe and in the midst of this complete catastrophe there is the worst coup of the 21st century so let's get into finally this coup so

So this coup is run by a guy named Juan Jose Zuniga. He's the commander of the Bolivian army. He is handpicked by Arce to run the army to be the guy who... Yes, he's the Arce dude. Yeah, and this is, you know, this has sort of shades of the fact that Pinochet was sort of elevated by Allende and the Social Democrats, but...

It reminds me of Franco as well, like getting promoted above his peers. Yeah, those were tragedy, this is farce. So what happens is that on Tuesday of last week, Zuniga goes on TV and says, I am going to... Ivo Morales cannot be allowed to take power again. I will stop him from taking power again.

And Arce is like, dude, what the fuck? And just immediately fires him because, you know, you can't do that? Yeah, like almost every country with a codified constitution has prohibitions on its military intervening and its politics, right? Like it's the basics of democracy. Bolivia has had a series of military governments and military coups across the 20th century.

Including the... God, the fucking cocaine coup that I've talked about at length in our World of the Communist League episodes that ends with Klaus Barbie fucking running around. This is a country that has had...

Military Q is quite literally staffed by actual Nazis, right? Yeah. So, you know, this is a place that takes the threat of a military Q very, very seriously. There hasn't been one, blessedly, in a long time, but there's a lot of people who were fucking alive for the last one, and, you know, and so this is...

you know, people are extremely unhappy. Even people who I think in theory would be okay with, you know, the government being deposed, like absolutely under no circumstances want the fucking military running the country. Because again, everyone fucking remembers how bad that shit was.

But what appears to have happened is that Zeninka realizes that... So he's just been fired, right? Which means that he has a very short time window in which he can try to pull some shit. Which means that whatever he may have been planning, I don't know what his actual plans were. He may have been actually planning a coup. He may not have been until here, which is to be like, well, I guess we have to do it now. Yeah.

If he was planning, he wasn't planning very well. Yeah, yeah. What results from this very... I think results from this very short timetable is the worst coup I've ever seen. So what appears to have happened is that on Wednesday, he gathers the troops that he's able to gather, which is not that... I mean, we're talking like 100 guys...

Maybe? It was not a, you know, they had a decent number of armored vehicles, but it was not like a lot of troops. No, it does not appear that he even had the support of a lot of troops, right? Yeah, a lot of the army suits are kind of been sitting there going, what the fuck is going on? But it was, you know, I was watching the videos or like the live streams from journalists on the ground of these troops and they're just worth it, many of them.

No, there really weren't. Like, it was... The whole thing was just really fucking shocking. Like, shockingly bad. They didn't even surround the building. They just went up to one door. Yeah, so what happens is they use an armored vehicle to ram the door of the presidential palace, and they try to take control of it. But the thing is, right...

Um, Arce isn't in the presidential palace. He and his cabinet are in the next building over. So they've taken the wrong building. Um, first off, so things are going great. And again, this, this is not a sort of, you know, this is not a coup that follows a standard coup repertoire of, uh,

Sees the president, sees the radio station, sees the airport, sees the trains, right? Yeah. And have control over the military barracks, which is your sort of basic five-step plan to how to do a coup. We'll be doing that episode soon, by the way. Yeah, yeah. Given today's Supreme Court, we're in the clear now. Oh, yeah, yeah. We're in the clear, yeah. The five-step plan to do a coup. But, you know, so they don't even see it at part one. So they're kind of just kind of milling around...

the front of the presidential palace and trying to get into the next building where the president actually is. It's also the demands are also very weird. Zuniga claims that he's not overthrowing the government. He claims that he's still loyal to Arce, but he's going to form a new cabinet.

Useful. That's how you normally do that. Yeah, so he's yelling about the economic crisis, says he's going to "restore democracy" and "release political prisoners"?

Which I kind of get. Okay, so the political prisoners thing, I think, is about the people who've been arrested for doing a 2019 coup. I have no idea what restored democracy means. I don't know if he had any idea what he meant by restored democracy. Something was happening. But the thing is, the other thing about this coup is that it has no backing at all. I mean, it doesn't even have backing the army, but it has no, it doesn't even have backing among the right. Both Macho Camacho and Janine Añez, who are the people who did like the last one,

Both condemned the coup. So people she is trying to break out of prison condemned the coup. Right. This is going nowhere. Worst coup I've ever seen.

So meanwhile, Arsaid and his cabinet are in the next building over appointing a new commander of the army so that the new commander of the army can go outside and order the troops to go back to their barracks. Outstanding. This is kind of what's happening. But also, meanwhile, outside, so these troops have taken over the square in front of the presidential palace. And they have sort of successfully managed to take over the square.

with a bunch of sort of military police and riot gear, but there's a sort of crowd who's come to yell at the army, right? And it's just very weird spectacle because there's all these soldiers who all have long guns, right? Being protected by a light of cops with riot shields? Yeah, yeah. So weird. If you open up on the crowd, like, you don't have enough numbers to not get stoned to death. Every single one of you is going to be individually executed. So they're all...

by people who don't have guns. And, and that's the thing that, that, that, you know, and when I say executed, I mean like they're, they're going to get executed by the government that that's assuming they live long enough and are not just beaten to death by the crowd, which is also a real possibility. Um,

But, you know, so this crowd is sort of approaching a lot of riot police are getting tear gassed a bit. But this is and I kind of emphasize this enough. This is not a kind of normal, like highly organized Bolivian mass protest where, you know, all of the union unions call a general strike in the middle of this. But again, this whole thing lasts maybe two and a half hours.

So there's not time to do the actual kind of sort of roadblocks and stuff like that. There's not time to actually do the organization that you would need to do to overturn this coup. This coup falls apart so fast that people don't have time to make protest signs. All they have are flags. They do not have time to write signs out. That is, they don't have time to come up with chants.

I was watching the funniest part about this whole thing. So I was watching a live stream of the protesters and the protesters had gotten this kind of I guess you call it sort of a kind of metal gate, I guess. It was this big sort of it almost looked like, you know, how you get those white shelves that have like metal bars. And it was kind of like that, like crosshatched. It was, you know, it was pretty big, bigger than a person. And it's like three people are like carrying in front of them, like going to the police line, presumably to use it as a battering ram.

But the troops run away so fast that these guys couldn't get their gate up to the police line fast enough to use it. That's how you know it's gone well. It was staggering. It was amazing. So, you know, the entire coup calls apart. Zuniga gets arrested on live TV. He's giving a press conference and they just like arrest him. Amazing.

At the end of this, as it's falling apart, the one genuinely masterful stroke that Zuniga pulls in this entire... I mean, amidst just a cavalcade of failure, the one actual genius line that he does, as he's sort of being arrested, he says it's in prison too, he claims that he's been ordered by Arce to do this in order to bolster Arce's poll numbers, which are dog shit. No! It's fake news, yeah. Yeah. Now...

Okay, this whole scheme begs the question, what was Arce supposed to get out of this? Sorry, not Arce, Zuniga. What does he get out of it, right? Because he's just going to prison. It's like, why would he do it if it was just under orders from the president? Because this is a lose-lose for him, right?

So none of it makes any sense, but comma, this is immediately picked up by Morales supporters. You fucking hate or say, and they all immediately begin sort of repeating this. And now this has become sort of the official line. I mean, even Morales has been on TV and on social media, just saying, yeah, this was, this was a fake coup. This was a coup that are say did against himself to help us pull numbers. Um,

And this is, you know, this is a this has turned into a real thing. And there's a lot of people who are sort of like, I don't know, the whole crew was really weird. Right. And there's a lot of people who believe this because they're, you know, I mean, either because they want to believe it or because, you know, I mean, it does look weird or because they're fucking just hate our say from the beginning. Right.

This is all, you know, as funny as it sort of is, this has had a sort of catastrophic effect on sort of just regular Bolivian people because people are fucking terrified.

They're terrified that this is the beginning of the army coming back into politics, they're terrified that someone else is going to do a coup. I mean, even Morales has been saying for a very long time, actually both of them have been trading accusations that the other one is going to do a coup against them. Yeah, they've been banging the coup drum for a little while. Yeah, everyone has sort of been claiming that there's going to be coups happening. And all of this is creating this sort of cauldron of things that are extremely bad for the Bolivian left.

the economic boom that wielded the coalition together is over um it's not clear anyone can bring it back because again this is a this is a natural gas based thing right yeah and the other problem that they have is you know the problem that all social democracies have which is that they've created a middle class base of small business owners and people with middle class salaries and professional jobs and we talked about this in the brazilian context and this is something that garcia lanera has talked about too which is that

Well, he doesn't say it in these words because he's a coward and a capitalist, but social democracy produces its own gravediggers by creating a middle class that despises them and then eventually destroys everything the social Democrats fought to create. And that is very possible that what we are in right now is the opening stages of of this entire political project coming apart.

Yeah, I fucking hope it doesn't. And I hope that, you know, but again, like the only the only actual way to resolve the inherent sort of political and social contradictions of attempting to have a sort of left wing socialist political base and a capitalist government is to eliminate the capitalist state. Yeah. So either either you do that or you get another one of these shitty fucking cues. Yeah, you're just constantly vulnerable to this shit, right? Like at any point. Yeah.

Yeah, you're creating the conditions which we need to these games. And we've already seen the coup that's capable of knocking them out of power, right? It's the coup that actually has sort of a mass backing from the right. And this was not that coup. This was the comedian's coup. This was the Joker coup. This was the worst coup anyone's ever seen. Yeah, but, you know, the next one might not be. Yes, and that's quite serious. Yeah.

Yeah, so until then, hopefully we don't reach there, but until then, this has been NakedAp and here. Yeah, you too can overturn a coup by yelling not even particularly menacing at a bunch of troops. Yeah, practice. Practice at home in case you ever need to do it.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History.

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