Caller 4

Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend.

Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend.

I think it's the Prison Break one still. Prison Break one's very good.

Well, I think if you put Partagas in the CIA, he is mostly the same guy.

So, I think the other thing that's really important about Cyril's character is, like, if you remember him in, like, the very beginning of season one, right? He has, like, when he, like, goes home, like, he has, like, a stormtrooper, like, figurine.

And he has, you know, and he's, like, tailoring his own uniform because he has this conception of... of himself as this, like, you know, as, like, this, like, this brave cop, as this, like, sort of, like, this, like, this very specific kind of, like, fascist bureaucrat with a gun. This, like, platonic figure. Yeah. And the thing is, Deirdre Miro is that actual person.

And this is a tension that is kind of worked out over season one of like, Dejah Miro is a character who in a conventional show is a hero, right? Like she is like the cop that's willing to work outside of the restrictions of the thing in order to get the job done. Yeah. And you get to see what that actually is in real life, which is she's just fucking torturing people.

And, you know, she's torturing people and when she gets offered a chance to do the genocide in order to do her advancement, she gets that. And I think part of what's going on with Cyril is like, Cyril's whole thing is that he has been trying to be this cop And then he has this moment where he's like, oh, shit, none of that's, like, real.

The actual thing that it means to be this cop isn't just this, isn't this, like, I dress up in my clan's clothes. And he gets this in season one, too, where he, like, actually goes into the field and it's just, like, everyone's fucking dying around him and he's shell-shocked and things are exploding.

And it's like he's getting that here again where it's, like, his, like, thing where he's been cultivating this, like, intelligence person. And then he sees it and it just, like... Mm-hmm. it just sort of, it, it, it rips away the facade.

That's like, that is the facade of how, like on a kind of macro level, like how we, how film and television and how American media thinks about like spies and thinks about cops. Sure.

And, and you see that the actual brutal reality of it, which is like through, through the eyes of this person who, who, who like through, through, through this sort of like media stuff has always wanted to become this person is like, oh, you're just doing a genocide. The one part of being a cop that I can do is like choking my partner. Mm-hmm.

That's what happened with the TIE Fighter.

And it's like, right down to just the micro dynamics of how the crowd is interacting with the riot shields.

I also really like that... Okay, so the challenge that Gilroy has here is we have to introduce the concept of kettling to the average Star Wars watcher. And with the average Star Wars watcher, you can't be like, okay, the police are going to form a wall. You have to physically make walls come in around the thing. Like...

There's also elements that I heard a friend of the show, Emmy, who's great, talking about like the Tlatelolco massacre, which is like that massacre in 1968 in a square in the middle of Mexico City, which is this massacre where there's like these giant student, the 68th student protests are happening and they just like put snipers on the roofs and shoot everyone.

And I think, so when I saw this, like I thought it was going to be a lot more of just like a straight massacre. Everyone dies. And it kind of turns into a shootout. And I wasn't sure how that was going to play. Although, I think it is also worth remembering that, like, also a lot of the sort of famous historical massacres aren't, like, some people do shoot back. Yes.

Like, this is the thing at Tiananmen. Like, some of the students, like, take workers from soldiers that they fought and, like, shoot. Well, yeah, this is more the workers. By the time they get into the square with the students, like, those people don't have guns. Some of the workers, like, try to fight back and just get massacred.

But it seems to have been really effective in just like conveying that like, yeah, this shit happens constantly.

Yeah, there's another example of this is like the Red Summer, which is like a whole bunch of like anti anti black race riots in the US. And it's it's another one of things. It's like, yeah, it's remembered as like a bunch of white supremacists just murdered a bunch of black people. And that's true. But also people fought back. Like, people had guns, people fought back, people resisted them.

And, you know, a lot of people fucking died. And also, people in these situations fight back. And it's good.

yeah and that's like that's like the other thing i want to mention about this episode about the way luthan operates is that because the way luthan operates is by fucking not telling anyone anything and by manipulating people and by spying on them and by like having this whole network of double agents and like people who doesn't like the problem with operating like that and this is the problem that he's running into here is like mon mothma does not fucking trust him because the thing that she learned when luthan comes to tell her like hey the the you can't go with bale's team

Yeah, Bale's team is going to kill you. She's like, you fucking, you've had my own aide spying on me for two years? My own assistant. What the fuck? Yeah, like, it's like, this is like a persistent problem with, like, you start to see this. Have we seen Vel, like, not working with him anymore? I think we have in these episodes.

Yeah. And this is the thing about this. You get to watch everyone... People are walking away from Luthien. Yeah, you get to watch everyone who Luthien had worked with. Everyone walks away from him because they're like, this guy keeps being an asshole and he keeps hiding things from people and he keeps manipulating everyone.

And it's like, he's doing... And this is also... This is the kind of person...

also that you run into where it's like they're doing really important work and also interpersonally they're impossible to fucking work with and like like and you can you can watch it even Cassie is dealing with this having like real political ramifications yeah where it's just like no this guy has been just like jerking our chain around and like lying to us and manipulating us for so long that all of the relationships that

he needs are breaking down and it's no longer a position where because he's the guy with the money and the arms and the coordination everyone has to work with him they now have a choice to like go do literally anything else and everyone keeps walking away and it like almost gets Mon Mothma killed because she's so pissed at him that he's been like having her spied on but it

Yeah. And it's like, I don't know if I can do this.

And it's also like, it's interesting too, because it's like the second person she's seen shot in this episode, right? Because like, there's also like the first ISB agent who they have shot, but it's like. She doesn't know the person. That's not someone she knows, right? No, it's just like some cop.

Yeah. And she's just watching her just like, yep, nope. And the way Andor just instantly is like, yeah, nope, fuck, dead. Immediate.

And she's like, holy shit, what have I gotten myself into?

Yeah. Don't talk to cops. It's very easy to not talk to cops. I'm doing it right now. Uh huh. That's what you think. Trivially easy.

Yeah, there's been some blowing up. Yeah, so let's talk about this. We are thankfully no longer on Nuclear War Watch. Yeah. Which is great. Nuke Watch, put on pause. It's all cool.

Yeah. Foreign politics, so much of it is just so unbelievably stupid. Like it is just like weird nationalist masculinity bullshit where it's like, OK, so we killed some of your people and then you're going to kill some of our people. And then we can both agree that we like retaliated. Neither of us back down and then we'll do a ceasefire.

So the good news here is that we did actually get a ceasefire. The ceasefire was holding and has continued to hold. This is not like a kind of like Israel-Palestine ceasefire where the Israelis immediately just start like shooting everyone an instant later. This is actually holding. It's good. It will probably continue to hold.

We got some more details from Reuters who talked to a bunch of officials. from different camps um but we know now uh we're gonna do a longer episode about this next week tuesday yeah all the wars on tuesday probably tuesday unless like i don't know like some other shit happens who knows i i don't want to ever promise an episode's going on a day because tuesday or wednesday you

It's like we could wake up and Trump has declared that his meme coin is now the official currency of the United States or something. Who knows? Tuesday or Wednesday, we'll say. Yeah. So what seems to have happened that really escalated everything is that India fired on a critical Pakistani airbase. And Pakistan was like, all right, got to go fucking sicko mode now.

And so they do their retaliation. India appears to not have understood exactly how pissed off Pakistan was going to be about them hitting this airbase, which also like you would. I don't know what their military planning is like. You would assume countries normally love it when you hit their airbases.

What are we doing here? What are we doing here? But the thing that does seem to have worked is that Marco Rubio seems to have actually been able to kind of pass information along between them. Vance was also sort of involved. It seemed mostly like Rubio was able to pass a thing to the Pakistani government being like, hey, the Indians are going to stop.

And the Pakistani government was like, yeah, this is... Yeah, right. Right, but fuck this.

Yeah. And I think this was this was we were talking about this last week, like the best case scenario for this is actually kind of better than the best case scenario I was thinking of. I mean, not this is like none of this is a good outcome, but the outcome here of like it's like a very abbreviated version of like an Israel Iran thing where they shoot each other a few times and then stop. Yeah.

Hopefully this will continue to hold and hopefully both sides will not take this. This is something that they were talking about. One of the experts that we're just talking to was talking about was like, hopefully both sides don't see this as a like, oh, we can have conflict between two nuclear armed powers. It'll be OK. Hopefully both sides are going to be like this was very dumb.

But right now it seems to be over. The ceasefire is holding. Hopefully more people don't die.

You know what else is funny? Products and services.

Nice one, yeah. That's why they pay me the mediocre bucks.

That never was in the cards. This is a temple to the defeat of the international workers movement.

Oh, my God.

Oh, man. Oh, good Lord. Oh, good Lord. Okay, I'm putting you in the chat.

I'm so angry.

I do also love that Trump isn't making the same argument that Clinton supporters used to, which is like, well, you can take money from a thing without being influenced by it. And like the New York Times is making this argument. They're like, well, just because people are gay. Are you spending $1 million to have dinner at a crypto thing with Trump?

Doesn't mean that he's actually being influenced by the money, so you can't call it bribery. And I was like, this is great society. We love this. We love this. Just give the president the fancy. Quid pro quat?

Okay, so where are we at with the tariff tariffs? So there were actual negotiations between the U.S. and China, and so they agreed to a 90-day pause on the 145% tariff and the 120% tariff that China had imposed on retaliation. However, comma, there's still 30% blanket tariffs on all Chinese goods, which is in and of itself a loan enough to cause a recession? Oh!

Everyone seems to have forgotten this. China is back down to 10% across the board on all U.S. goods. Now, again, this is a 90-day pause, which has been like... This is just the way that all this functions now. Nothing ever ends. It just gets kicked off down the road for 90 days.

So we'll be back here in 90... Okay, we'll be back in the crisis zone a bit before that because we're still on the other 90-day countdown, which is the Liberation Day tariff one for every single country on Earth. Honestly...

No, I think there is. I think it's Navarro. Because Navarro actually wants all of these tariffs. And that's the driving thing behind this. Trump kind of wants these tariffs, but there's not enough of him there psychologically to push it unless Navarro is doing it.

But the reason these are taking the form of pauses is because Trump actually wants them until he can negotiate his big shiny deal or whatever the fuck that can't happen structurally for reasons we'll get into.

No, but also the auto tariffs got paused and then those came off and went into effect. So some of these have happened. Absolutely.

i really think it the actual thing it comes down to is like will navarro be the last person in the room with trump or will it be one of his other cabinet people who don't support this stuff and i think it's just a coin flip basically as to like who rap fucks the other one successfully as to whether like all this stuff happens and there's still like more tariffs that are like floating in the air that we haven't heard anything about from last week wild wild tariffs frolicking in in the woods yeah

I want to actually explain what the fuck is going on with the Chinese tariffs, though, because the reporting on it has been really bad, and no one has any idea what the fuck is going on. So, okay, on the one hand, there is still the 30% across the board on all Chinese goods.

However, the fee for small packages, right, which is the stuff that was in the de minimis exemption that we talked about getting reduced. So that tariff is at 54% or a $100 flat fee for the package. What qualifies as a small package? Value. I think it's like sub $800. Okay. Roughly. So...

Yeah, and they also still have to go through, like, actual full customs, which the packages from De Minimis, like, weren't going through, right? Okay. So this is still lethal to, like, Tamu and Shien and, like, all of the companies that have been relying on this stuff.

It's still lethal to, like, vast quantities of, like, parts of the supply chain that we haven't even seen yet that were getting, like, the one kind of screw that they need in cheap Chinese packages because you could just do that... And so that's what's still in effect right now, and as best I can tell, there hasn't actually been any negotiation.

It's also unclear whether the Chinese government knew that those were going to go back into effect, because Trump did this whole thing of like, ah, the tariffs are over, blah, blah, blah, blah, ignore the 30% tariff on all goods. And then the next day, he was like, oh yeah, no, but the small package one's still there.

And that rate's also changed, so it's also possible by tomorrow the rates are different, because the dominant feature of all of this, structurally, is just complete chaos. It's just chaos. Nobody has any idea what the fuck is happening.

And this is just a complete fiasco for literally everyone because the shifts in tariff rates that are happening on a day-by-day basis are shifts large enough to shift the entire structure of the global economy. And they're just happening every day. And that's the thing that's fucking the economy almost as much as the actual tariffs.

It's just the chaos and the uncertainty and the inability to do any kind of even the short-term planning that businesses usually do. it's also worth noting that like, there's no actual trade deal, right? Like there isn't actually a US China trade deal. There's just, they both agreed to like back off for a while while they do negotiations.

There's also no structural way to actually like resolve the problem that Trump sees here, which is that Like Trump and Navarro and the hardliners don't want there to be a U.S. trade deficit with China. And that's not a thing that could be solved.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, and this has been playing out in other negotiations to the U.S. has been in negotiations with India. Trump just like came out and straight up lied and said that India had agreed to get rid of all their tariffs. Yeah. And India was like, no, we didn't. What the fuck are you talking about? Art of the deal. Yeah.

So, you know, this is all turned into just an utter fiasco. Meanwhile, we're starting to see signs that, yeah, the price increases that we all knew were coming are coming. Walmart is doing massive price increases. A bunch of other companies are considering them. They're probably going to start very soon.

I want to read this quote from an economist named Marcus Nolan that NBC talked to, who was a senior institute for the Pearson Institute for International Economics. He said, quote, I think we're in for a lot more turbulence and a lot more back and forth than the market seems to grasp. Which I'm glad someone else is finally fucking saying this because like, yeah, no shit.

And part of what's going on here too is the market is just incredibly easy to manipulate because people running the markets are very stupid. And the moment they realize like you can just very, very easily make an unhinged amount of money by being like the tariffs are going to go into effect and then betting against the market.

There's been so much like insider stories of like insider trading from this stuff. And I don't think that's like the major thing going on, but it's also like it's just such an easy grift to pull if you know what's going to happen.

Like, I could have made a bunch of money if I'd been willing to be like, hey, friends, give me a bunch of money to put into the stock market and let me short a bunch of shit the day before the Liberation Day tariffs or whatever.

Well, I will, I will fucking, I will throw darts at a dartboard and then throw the dartboard at a larger dartboard and I will outperform Jim Cramer.

It's such a powerful investment strategy. Never been defeated. Okay, so the one last thing I want to talk about, which is not quite tariff, but is econ related, is that there are, per the Financial Times, there is a plan in the Trump administration to roll back a bunch of the rules about leverage ratios that were imposed on banks after 2008. And so, okay, Mia, what the fuck is a leverage ratio?

Thank you.

No, I was trying to figure out how to write part two of it, but then you just brought up Archimedes. I was trying to remember Archimedes' name, but I couldn't do it. Yeah. So, okay. So basically, basically what this is, is that so banks have just like a bunch of unbelievably risky assets. And this is a requirement that they actually have assets that are safe. Yeah.

So they have the assets that are risky go under. They don't get fucking nuked like everyone did in 2008.

Now, this is worth noting because one of the other kind of stories that's kind of flown under the radar is that in the past couple of years, a bunch of banks and a bunch of investment firms have been getting back to literally the exact types of extremely risky mortgage-backed securities that caused the 2008 financial collapse. It's literally the same people.

They're bringing them back to do the same thing again. They've also been doing it with auto loans. which is great. And in the middle of this, the Trump administration wants to roll back a bunch of the protections that have been maintaining this very, very precarious balance that the banking system has been in to not really collapse for the past decade and a half. So that's going to be fun.

The rumor is it's going to happen over the summer. If he does this over the summer, right as everything kicks off, it's going to be a trip. Do you know what else is a trip?

It does go on for like four more sentences. There's so much more.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that I forgot to write an introduction for. I'm your host, Mia Wong. And we are, well, okay, we're not taking a break from the horrors because this is also still a podcast about the horrors and what you can do about it. But, you know, I am transgender.

One of the ways that we have been, like, depersonified via transgender is through a, you know, a massive attack on trans, like trans women in sports. And this has led to, you know, like the acceleration of the broad scale attack on all of us being able to exist as people.

And with me to talk about this is someone who has written a book that is about this and also kind of not about this in a lot of ways. And that is Victoria Zeller, who is a writer, author, writes about the Buffalo Bills for our friends over at Defector sometimes. And is the author of a new book, One of the Boys, out today when you're listening to this? Wow. Crazy. Wild. Yeah.

Yeah, it has synced up like this completely on purpose. We were 100% planning this from the beginning. Hello, thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. So you would think that the question that your book, One of the Boys, asks is, what if a trans girl played football? But the actual and more important question it asks is, what if a poster could write fiction?

And the answer is that it fucking rips. Thank you. This book rules. Genuinely, I think this is the best written group chats I've ever read in a book. It riffs. It's so good.

and that is who I am. Yeah, and this book rips.

That sounds like a fun thing going on where it basically has the football iceberg where you can come into this knowing zero ball, and you will get stuff out of it, and you can come into this where I am knowing a sum ball, and you will get stuff out of this, and then the unhinged people who have 16 different PFF tabs pinned to their bookmarks will be like, holy shit, the world building. Yeah.

Yeah, so I think, okay, we're going to get more into the politics of this in a second. But first, I want to ask one ball question, since I have now introduced my audience to the fact that I talk about football by managing to get a rant about the Sean Watson on here for like 10 minutes. The Sean Watson trade.

But, okay, my one ball question for this was, how happy did it make you when you figured out a way to write a football team that does not use the forward pass? Oh, man. Uh, it's...

Yeah, it's one of the things I love about your writing is that you are very much just like an old school, like traditionalist football pound the rock. Like none of this, like none of none of this fucking RPO bullshit person, which is which is also I don't know.

It's just very funny that you have like you have like the football personality of like an extremely cranky, like 75 year old like coach from like the 70s.

Okay, we're going to get more into the class dynamics of football in a second, but the place I kind of want to start in terms of, like, you know, talking about the parts of it that aren't just ball is... So, in a lot of ways, this is a book about scriptlessness, which is something that I think... I don't know.

We've been seeing a sort of resurgence of trans... Well, not resurgence, but a kind of like surgence? Emergence?

There we go. There we go. There we go. Yeah, of trans literature. And I think this is a very interesting angle to take on it. And it's... You know, when I say scriptlessness, it's about the ways in which trans women in particular don't have, you know, sort of examples and paths to like follow, right?

There's not like a, you're supposed to go from A to B to C. This is like what you're doing with your life. And you have to just figure it out because suddenly you're you and you just have to, you know, there's no rails, there's no guides, you just have to do it. I think the Zapatista line about it is the road is made by walking.

Can you talk about how, like, having to just figure this shit out influenced the way that you write Grace and the way that you sort of write this book?

Yeah, and I think there's a bunch of levels that this stuff sort of operates on, and I think it's very, like... I don't know, like, a lot of being trans, and I say this at least for me, I don't know, like, maybe this is for other people, is just, like, having no idea what the fuck you're doing and just, you know, waking up one day and realizing, like, Shit.

Wait, what the fuck do you mean I'm doing this? And it's like, you know, I can think about this, like, doing this job. It's like, wait, what the fuck? I'm a trans podcaster? Like, what? Like, how? Like, I can't even do my makeup well. Like, what the fuck are we doing here? Yep.

I think that like another thing that I've talked about this a lot in the show is it's also just like how kind of like normal the trans girls who just like suddenly something blows up and they're like internet famous or whatever the fuck are that they're just like some kid until like, yeah, you know, there's just like an explosion and everyone is suddenly interested in every intimate detail of your life and is trying to deconstruct it in order to destroy you.

Speaking of unfair, we have to go to ads. When we come back... That's one of my better pivots. I'm proud of that one. When we come back, we're going to talk about masculinity. We are back. So... One of the Boys is weirdly the second football-involved book about a trans woman that I've read in the last year.

And I think it's fascinating because in the pure archetypal sense from structuralist anthropology, it is like a pure structural inversion of Alison Greaves' How to Fly. Because How to Fly is, this is also a good book, but How to Fly is about a girl getting force-femmed to escape masculine violence by becoming a cheerleader.

And One of the Boys is about a trans woman going back into a hyper-masculine space to become a football player. It's like they're just literally perfect structural versions of each other. And so I wanted to ask you about how are you thinking about doing this thing, right?

Which is going back into these hyper-masculine spaces that a lot of people come out of pre-transition, you know, when you were sort of writing this. Because this is not a thing that people tended to write when they're writing about transfems.

So I want to ask a bit more just digging into sort of the masculinity aspect specifically, because one of the things I think is, I don't know, there's a part of being a trans femme that isn't super well understood outside of it, which is sort of... A lot of trans women have a phase where you really try to be a man, right?

Yeah.

Um, yeah. And, and, you know, so like, and like, that's the thing that has a lot of complicated social ripples where like this, this process of like, like doing this, you know, sometimes it's like your final time. Sometimes it's just, it's just what you're doing to try to get by. It's like trying to force yourself to be a man, um,

And, like, do this masculinity in a way that's, like, really shit because you're trying to, like, reconcile it with yourself. Yes. So, this is, like, a thing that a lot of, like, trans femmes experience. I think it's written interestingly in this book. I was wondering...

I don't know, like, the way you talk about being in this, in, like, fitting into these spaces is as, like, okay, well, I figured out how to, like, do the performance okay, and then it was sort of fine, so I'm wondering, like, this is almost universally seen as, like, this is, like, a form of structural violence that's been enacted on you, that you sort of have to, like, do this, but there's also a kind of, I don't know, a kind of complicated dynamic of, like,

These people are still like your friends and you like them. I guess I want to know sort of how you've been thinking about like that specific angle and like this sort of process of fitting in and becoming and also just this sort of unbecoming you have to do to like become yourself. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it's, it's political in the sense that like, you know, that we were talking about sort of scriptlessness earlier. Right. And I think one of the, one of the sort of alienating factors about being trans is that like, especially if you're like kind of alone and you're like, you know, like you're like the only trans femme that you're spending time with. Right. Right.

This is just true for a lot of things. A lot of how oppression functions and a lot of how violence functions is by convincing you that you're the only person who's ever gone through this.

And there are always going to be unique aspects of it, but one of the ways that alienation is maintained is by convincing you that no one else can understand the thing that's happening to you because no one else has ever done it. And it turns out, no, actually, this is something that all of us have gone through and...

When you sort of start to realize this and the kind of solidarity that it can be built based on this collective well of experience we've all gone through and how it can be, you know, changed by actual actions of a bunch of people working together. It changes things.

I think it is in a lot of ways political in the sense that like in order to have politics, you have to have sort of like collective assemblages of people who fucking understand each other and who understand that they're not alone and that they can do things. Totally. And this is part of how you get to that.

Yeah. And I guess I want to kind of move into the more directly political realm. One of the things that's interesting about this book is that, like... Grace, and this is something that, like, my brain has been so melted by having been, like, da politics kid since I was, like, 15.

Because I was, like, my high school was, like, interrupted in the middle of it by me trying to overthrow the Turkish government. And so, like, my brain is so melted. We'll get Erdogan one day. We already can't go there for our coverage of Kurdish guerrilla movements. Very good stuff. You'll find many, many such things, I think.

But one of the interesting parts about this is that Greece is not political, right? And most of the people...

in this aren't and there's kind of a divide between the politics knowers who are like the more uh you know like okay yeah like we are we are like the queer kids we are like the activist kids and then like the you know like the ballplayers and then grace sort of fits more into the like not even more into like grace isn't like a politics person grace is a like hey like transphobia is bad we shouldn't do that but also like just wants to fucking go kick a go kick a rock in between two posts

So, yeah, can you talk about, like, how you sort of decided to make her just be, like, a kid who doesn't follow politics?

Yep. God, my brain's doing the Trump line in many cases. I have no idea what they're doing. Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ, my brain's so broken. Okay. Speaking of things being broken, the products and services that support this podcast, unrelated statements. We are back. Okay, so having now gotten like many far into this interview without directly being like, here's the football politics.

Let's talk about the politics of football because one of the things I think is fascinating about, you know, the way that you're sort of talking about this and the way that Grace like runs into this and the way that this is just like a thing that happens in the US, which is that like giant portions of the entire US economy are

And, like, structural elements of the U.S., like, education system from, like, the ground up, and, like, all of these sort of contracting services, and, like, massive portions of, like, how every single part of the education system from, like, fucking, like, middle school through college... are all bent around this game. Yep.

And I think one of the things that happens there is that, like, the kind of, like, default ambient politics in it is very conservative, and I think in ways that, you know, are very easy to understand, and that when people tend to talk about this, they immediately go like, well, yeah, so, like, you know, like, the left is talking about football.

It's like, you're talking about the militarism, which is like, yeah, I mean, they're fucking flying jets over games. Like, we're not even in wars anymore, right? in terms of, like, U.S. ground troops deployed. Like, why the fuck are there troops showing up on the field? There's, like, the cult of masculinity stuff.

There's... You know, I mean, like, there's been some engagement now with the racial politics of it with Kaepernick. People realize, like, holy shit, wait, there's been, like, stuff happening here for ages. And, you know, and you get sort of the masculinity politics. But there's...

I think a lot of stuff here that we don't talk about on the left in terms of, like, the class dynamics of this and the way that football... I mean, just, like, functions in a lot of very, very weird ways in terms of, like, sucking together this weird pool of a bunch of, like, non-white working class kids and, like...

I don't know, fucking... See, if I knew ball, I could pull an example off the top of my head of, like, some quarterback prospect whose family had spent, like, $2 million on, like, personal trainers for him.

Yeah. And it's also weird because, like, you know, so, like, I don't know. I refuse to watch college football. Like, I draw the line there. Like, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this. They can't make me watch, like, fucking Colorado State or whatever the fuck.

But, like, one of the things that you get in the NFL, too, is it's, like, on the one hand, like, you have all of this really, really conservative shit, right? Like, every fucking... Everything is God. Like...

Every single time someone holds a thing in front of a player, there's, like, at least three lines of, like, all of this is possible because of God, and, like, someone's, like, it's, like, the only place you see people regularly saying Christ is King where they're not also, like, holding an AR to, like, a non-white person's head.

You know, so there's all of this, like, really, really conservative religious shit. But then also there's, like, a union? Yeah. Yes. That everyone's in, and it's like a large... I mean, it's not that powerful, and there's weirdness there, too. Yeah. You get to see all of the really interesting dynamics of unions that you don't really get outside of. I guess SAG kind of has this...

But it's this union in this place where, one, the owners have like an unbelievable amount of control, which is a hideous amount of power. And they can churn through people really quickly. They have, you know, these are some of the richest people in the world.

And then also, secondly, there's this like marketization force that's happening where, you know, you get to see in miniature the way that capitalism has like moved to sort of deal with unions, deal with sort of the class movements of the 20th century, which is that, like, they're also trying to turn all of these kids, like, into entrepreneurs.

Yeah. Also, shout-outs to the PA for backing our unionization attempt here. Thanks for that. I don't know if it mattered, but it meant a lot to me.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I was thinking about the kind of, like, this is my way of kind of bringing it back to transgender, but, like, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot in terms of... I mean, just like what I do, right?

But also just like the way that capitalism has been moving in the last like few decades is it's increasingly about, you know, because like, okay, so capitalism's fundamental basis has always been like you sell your labor, right? But now it's been increasingly transforming into like you're selling like the image of yourself. You're selling your identity. You're selling like...

You're selling your personality. You're selling as much of life. And this is what name image likeness is, right? It's like, we're not going to pay you for your labor, which is you playing football. We're going to pay you for this nebulous image of yourself. So you get all these people who are... You're forced to turn all of yourself into an object for consumption.

And I think that's the thing with...

Fucking I don't know that's what I'm doing on this show right to a large extent like I am like the Asian transgender and like yeah obviously like all of this is like research but it's also you know this is what like brand and identity is and this has had these like seismic impacts on the entire global economy like I talked about this in episode on when I talked about TAMU but like TAMU is literally the product of this happening with Chinese farmers.

where, like, Chinese farmers were doing this, like, farm social media thing. And someone was like, holy shit, what if we, like, they'd become these things where they were selling food, but they were also just selling, like, the identity brand of, like, themselves as farmers.

And Temu was like, well, PDD, which is the Chinese company, was like, what if we just brought all of these things together in one spot so you could just do direct-to-consumer sales through it? And now that's, like, the entire fucking economy is just this morass of, like, selling every single part of yourself. And I don't know, like, I'm wondering...

How much of yourself do you have to leave in a book like this? And how much of it can you keep away from the market?

There's a really great essay about this by a friend of mine named Rosemary Ho, who's an absolutely brilliant writer, who wrote about... She's writing about Zadie Smith, And one of the things that she talks about is the way that people just assume that Zadie Smith's politics are just didactically coming out of the mouth of a character. It's like, well, no. That's not how any of this shit works.

and there's like i i don't know this is also just like this is a way you can just completely lose your mind i don't know if i've ever actually talked about this on this show weirdly one of the people whose career trajectory is the most similar to mine is this asian american writer named wesley yang who was like this guy who got brought in to write about like i think it was columbine it's like some mass shooting that was like a korean kid did and his friends were like hey you're asian write about this oh god um

And he, you know, for a bit, he was, like, he was, like, duh, like, he was, like, he was, like, the guy who was, like, the big, like, Asian American, like, this is, like, the literary thinker. He was, like, interviewing Aaron Schwartz. He was doing, like, profiles of a bunch of, like, interesting people. And then he just became this, like, incredibly...

boring, bog-standard reactionary, and he became a very common kind of person who you experience on the right.

Someone whose understanding of race comes from watching sports, where there are black players in basketball, and there's a bunch of them, and because of that, this means that actually black people are over-represented, and as a class, they're privileged or whatever the fuck, because there's just a bunch of black basketball players. Mm-hmm.

And I don't know, I think it's like, there's a really interesting intersection here of like the way that people understand politics as just like politics are just like the thing that I see on my screen when I'm watching football and how, how we have to sort of like just deal with that shit and deal with the sort of micro identity formation that is real, but also isn't like a depiction of what the world is.

Yeah.

So one of the interesting things in this book is that the right-wing media, right-wing football media, kind of isn't in it that much, really, which I think is fascinating. And I wonder how much of this is just that this was kind of

a book that was originally being written before, like, Aaron Rodgers was going on Pat McAfee's show in front of, like, half a million people every single day and, like, screaming about trans people. Mm-hmm.

Oh, my fucking God. Yeah.

So one final ball question on behalf of my beloved and accursed Seattle Seahawks. Okay, so... But think about Sam Darnold, who's now our quarterback after they traded my beloved Gino Smith for a fucking third-round pick.

Okay, so, like, is the thing that's going to happen this season not just by week five, Abe Lucas goes down for the 12 millionth time, whatever child they drag out of a kindergarten to try to block the Neil Hunter gets liquefied in 10 milliseconds, and Sam Darnold just, like, starts seeing the ghosts of men who haven't been born yet? Like, isn't this just what's going to fucking happen?

Why did they build this team like this? Sigh.

I thought they were going to win 11 games last season. They should have. So we lost to the fucking Giants.

It's true, it's true, but also, like, god fucking damn it.

Like he would literally, if you had put it behind last year's Seahawks offensive line, he literally would have died by about week eight. Like he just like straight up would have died on the field.

We'll have Abe Lucas for three weeks, and then we won't have Abe Lucas. And then... Yeah.

My cope last year was that JSN Metcalf and Lockett was the most underrated receiver trio in the league. Yep. And this year, it's like... All right, we get six games of Cooper Cup, and then we get fifth rounders.

No. Oh, God. So that's unfortunate. Yeah, so this has been the football section of this podcast. Yeah. So, Victoria, do you have anything else that you want to say before we head out? And where should people buy your book from?

Hell yeah.

Yeah, okay. I realized I had an actual final question that I wanted to ask that I forgot to do before we started the outro, so I apologize. So the odds here are much, much higher than they are in most places that there's going to be some queer kids who fucking play ball to some extent listening to it. I'm throwing something from your book at you, which is... I know.

What would you say to the kiddos who are going through it?

No, and it's, like, yeah, it's not... If you were, like, a little-ass kid... A, I am so sorry for how much I swear on this show. B... Like, it is not up to you right now to save the world. That is the job of fucking everyone else who listens to this show.

Like, if you want there to be more queer athletes, if you want trans kids to be able to be kids, that shit's on you, all of the rest of you who listen to this show. If you are also, you know, like, the fucking one bazillion trans people who listen to this show, this is, like, a bit less on you than it is on fucking everyone else, but...

Yeah, but the best time to have started organizing was like five years ago. The second best time is right now. And the best time after that is tomorrow. So go fucking build a world where trans kids can be kids and ball out. Let kids like me hoop. Let them hoop.

Yeah. Well, and it's not just working together, too. It's the command structure. Totally. The organization structure is becoming increasingly centralized in a way that it hasn't been. Well, it's the... Previous to this has been like the centralizing thing has been like Luthan kind of being an asshole to everyone but like moving stuff between them and now it's like Or Saw Gerrera, right?

Yeah, yeah, right. But I mean like between all of the different networks, the central figure has been Luthan. And now it's like, no, we have this place where we're developing a chain of command and we're developing these sort of like Totally. What are going to become increasingly rigid like hierarchies in this whole thing.

it's very it's very 70s italy like because there's these bombings happening because there's all this weird shit because nobody knows exactly who's doing what everyone is like kind of become conspiracy brained and like half the conspiracies are true but not the ones people think are the ones that are true and it's just like the information space has become so messy when you're dealing with such a combination of like of like of these attacks and of these like

different kinds of above and below ground organizations where nobody knows exactly, no one's exactly talking to each other. And yeah, it just gets so messy so quickly.

Yeah, it's like 1820s, kind of like... Or even like Ireland, right? Yeah, yeah. And like, you know, I can give a speech here about where this is going and about how Sinn Féin's like tragedy against immigrants and trans people, but it's also like, that's just like not what's happening right now. This is like 1820, not like 1920.

The force is fake. It's a psyop. It's just the alien God thing in the black holes.

Yeah, it's very much like faith healer coded. It's like, oh, God, no, I'm not going to see the faith healer. Come on.

Yeah, if you pay us an unbelievably large amount of money, Garrison and I will have our six-hour argument we have every time about the Force in Star Wars. We will debate the Force. I do also like that it's not...

Yeah, but it's also, like, not clear that it's, like... She's just a girl. Yeah, yeah, but it's not a hundred... His back seems to feel better. Yeah, no, yeah, totally. Yeah, but also, like, that's the thing. Like, it's not like a thing like, okay, this is like a Jedi, right? They're using the Force, and you can tell they're using the Force.

This is a lot more kind of, like, nebulous, and it's not 100% clear if it's happening or if it's everyone is, like, just thinks that it's happening or, like, what's... You know, it's very...

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

Hey, ladies. I've been dating this older guy recently. for about a year and a half now. He is 37 and I'm 28. And I've said, I love you to him. And his response was, you've told me that already. His response was not, I love you too. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me. Let me bow down to you and kiss your feet. which is what I really was expecting.

I totally thought he would say it back. It's been a while. We've gone to funerals together. So, like, how long is too long to wait until... Wait, I'm obsessed with her.

Hi, I am so grateful. I'm full of gratitude to be here with you guys today and talk about my regret. Mine's a little bit different than the other guests. Mine is financial. I have always been a big dreamer. And chased after my dreams. I'm an interior designer. I'm an entrepreneur. I've done all the things. I started a non-profit business.

Um, and I'm proud of the work that I've done because it always holds compassion, all the things that I want to do. I want to help other people. And so I guess my biggest regret is looking back and thinking, why didn't I go the corporate route? Why didn't I get the 401k? You know, why didn't I do all of those things that I feel like I was supposed to do and

And be a little bit more stable in my life being a single mom and just moving forward, not having the regrets of all the things that I've tried to do because of my big grandiose dreams, you know. So that's where I'm at.

Well, yeah, no, I don't think I would have fit in there. But, you know, I think taking risk part, because I've done so much work, the taking risk part I do love. I just feel the failure, you know, like why didn't my big dreams that I've wanted to do just blossom into what I want?

I just would like to know how to move forward and not allow these worries to weigh down on my soul and to continue... on my path and my goals.

Yes, absolutely. It sounds reasonable to me. I don't ever want to not be a risk taker. I've done so much work around my personal growth and my spiritual growth that... I still have it in me to want to save the world and be an Oprah a little bit, maybe like a mini Oprah or something. Really have the compassion to want to help people. So there's that.

Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to have this opportunity with y'all. I appreciate it more than you'll ever know. I love it that you called us y'all. Thank you so much. No, I did.

You know, sometimes you land on hard times, man, and you're just trying to get, you know, food to eat and a place to sleep or whatever. And I'm like, you know, I got a five-gallon bucket of pickles, and I'm stealing bananas from the 7-Eleven, man. I'm going in there, and I'm pocketing these fucking bananas from the 7-Eleven.

How long can I last is what I'm thinking. I was just like, Could I last two months on a five-gallon bucket of pickles and stealing bananas from 7-Eleven? Because I'm eating bananas and pickles. That's all I'm fucking eating. That's all I got to eat, man. That's all I got to live upon. Live upon, man!

You know, the world is a cruel place. The world is a cruel fucking place, man. And I realize that, man, when you're eating pickles and bananas just to survive.