Part One: Pirates, Libertalia, and the Betsimisaraka Confederation

Margaret tells Molly Crabapple a story about the legends and reality of pirate utopia in Madagascar

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Did Cool Stuff your weekly reminder that there's sometimes two
things that are, if not good, at least interesting. I'm
your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is a
guest who also researches deep, weird historical subjects, often the
same ones that I do. Molly Krabapple, Hi.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hey, please to be here.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
How are you doing?

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Slightly tired but very good. I was in the research
minds again today.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh good. I love those minds. I left them about
thirty minutes before recording started. Sophie gets my scripts shortly
before I record and can tell how I'm doing based
on how shortly before we record scripts come along. But Mollie,

(00:55):
I was trying to figure out one sentence version of you,
and I came up with a conflict journalist and artist
and all around cool person who's researching a book about
the Jewish Labor Bund, which has been on the show
multiple times. Not you, you haven't been on the show before,
but the Jewish Labor Bund has. How's that for a description?

Speaker 3 (01:10):
I like that description? And I can't even tell you
how much my heart soared when I listened to all
of your episodes about like my gangster King Bernard Goldstein
and other Jewish labor and stuff. So I'm so happy
to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yeah, I am excited to have you, and I'm excited
to have you to talk about the Betsimisarik Confederation. You
ever heard of the bet Semisarik Confederation?

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Never? In my life?

Speaker 2 (01:35):
I sure as hell hadn't either, Sophia, You ever heard
of it?

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Nope?

Speaker 2 (01:39):
I'm pretty excited to talk about them because it talks
about a whole bunch of stuff that we like talking
about on this show. Yeay, okay, So that was a
real thing that happened, right, that confederation. But I had
heard of something called Libertalia, a thing that never happened.
You ever heard about the pirate utopia Libertalia?

Speaker 3 (01:57):
I feel like in my youthful days trolling anarchist bookstores,
I saw like cultural signifiers pointing towards this.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah. That's uh, That's where I came up with it
too originally.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's like some well patched jackets involved
with this, perhaps a crime think pamphlet.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Oh yeah no. And I'm going to talk about a
friend of mineho war patch pants. He told me about
it real soon, because Pirate Utopia's on Madagascar is what
we're talking about this week, and we're talking about how
most of what we know about it is lies really cool,
but there's a bunch of true stuff that's even more interesting,

(02:37):
which is like my favorite kind of cool people who
did cool stuff story.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
Oh my god, this is fucking amazing. Go On, go on.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
This week, we're going to talk about pirates Madagascar, synthesis
between indigenous and foreign criminal ideas of liberty and pirates,
which I already said, but I'm going to say twice
because it's it's fun. We talk a lot on the
show about various experiments with like free horizontal societies that
have been tried over the years. We've talked a lot
about the republican and anarchist Spain. We've talked about the

(03:08):
horizontal peasants in Ukraine and Manchuria. We've talked about various
maroon communities of you know, indigenous folks and runaway enslave
people in the Americas, and we'll keep talking about all
of those things. We also once did a couple episodes
about societies that should have been free but weren't, like
the Golden Age of pirates. The goal of those episodes

(03:29):
that people can go back and listen to if they
want to hear all about it is to explode kind
of a couple layers of myth making about pirates. I'm
kind of curious, like coming into it, because there's all
of these different versions of pirates. Where do you land on, like,
you know, Jolly Roger, European and Caribbean pirates.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
I think the pirates that I was always most interested
in were the pirates that were like the guy that
they based Jack Sparrow on, who were essentially poor Europeans
whose ships were taken over by pirates from algiers and
who were given the choice of whether like to convert
to Islam and piracy or to become galley slaves, and

(04:09):
they obviously chose to convert to Islam and piracy. So
I always thought the Muslim pirates were the shit. And
in fact, the first free Muslim in New York City
ever was the son of a pirate.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
Oh shit, we're going to talk about New York City
mostly in bad ways in this episode.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Actually we're very evil city, I mean, with who have
done many bad things. Why we're so rich?

Speaker 2 (04:35):
You know that New York City was the had the
second largest concentration of enslaved people during the colonial period.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
I did.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
I didn't until I researched this. It makes sense that
you did. You live in New York City. We always
think of like the North as the place where there
was no slavery, and to be fair, the North like
fought a whole war and like died a lot to
end slavery. I'm not trying to specifically come for the
North here. But so there's all of these myths about pirates, right,
and there's all these different layers to it, and there

(05:03):
is a lot of truth behind a lot of it too.
There's these ideas that pirates were wonderful democrats and a
truly a galitarian society. Then there was another set of
myths that they were like, no, they were all petty
tyrannies of this or that captain, and anyone who says
they were democrats is a liar, and everything was violence
and bad. And the truth, as best as I can
sort out, is that it's messier than either of those.

(05:27):
I've been arguing that Golden Age pirates, often way more
than I actually expected, did live free in a galitarian
short lives. So they were a galitarian within themselves, but
they also practiced conscription and slavery and physical and sexual violence,
and their moral world only applied internally. Externally, anything goes.

(05:49):
The really magical thing about pirates from this point of
view isn't that they were like somehow precursors to good
republican societies, although it turns out they actually did influence
the later literal republics. And I had no idea, But
they lived these brief, beautiful, strange, terrible lives outside the
logic of capitalism in the state, and they did a

(06:12):
strange and romantic mixture of both good and evil with
their short lives. They freed some slaves, they conscripted others,
and then they sold others further along the way. You know.
So the myth making around Golden Age pirates is nearly
as old as pirates themselves. There's one major book about
pirates from the Golden Age of Piracy, from which, like

(06:33):
almost everything that isn't you know, actual anthropology and stuff
are like main source. And this Golden Age of piracy
really only lasted from like seventeen fifteen to seventeen twenty six.
Although if you feel like being like real generous, you
can do sixteen fifties to seventeen thirties.

Speaker 3 (06:48):
You know, it's like nine years. Nine years was all
it lasted.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, Like, I mean there's versions of it, depends on
where you want to draw the start in the close
of it, but like, yeah, most of the like we're
gonna talk about some pirates who were like the most
famous pirate in history in the following reason and they
like did piracy for two years or got shot in
the belly and died on their second raid. You know,
it wasn't a good way to live a very long

(07:14):
time to declare war against the entire world. Who would
have known?

Speaker 3 (07:17):
Who would have known? They were here for a good time,
not a long time.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, that is that is the true pirate motto. And
I was like this idea that like because the Jolly Roger,
as much as it was like a skull and crossbones,
sometimes a lot of them used hourglasses, and I love
that the part of the point of the hourglass wasn't
like your time is up. It was kind of like
our time is running out, so you should be afraid

(07:42):
of us because we don't give a shit.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Wow the other stuff too, right, when like old timey
pirates will like curse and blaspheme and stuff like these
days someone's saying, goddamn, it is like not a real
big deal, right, It was a kind of a big
deal because you're this is like pre Enlightenment or like
just around the start of the Enlightenment. You know, they're
all like saying, we are hell bound. They like meant it.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
They didn't care. Yeah, they were like Milton Satan or something.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, no I And so it's it's funny because then
also a lot of the myths that sprung up around
them were like they literally worshiped Satan. They kind of
might have my kids, like my God, some of them, right,
or like but another pirate like maybe got killed by
his own crew for worshiping Satan. It's like or that's
all shit to sell books, and no one fucking knows,

(08:34):
and it's so weird and cool and interesting. I'm completely
offscript at this point. Oh fuck, Okay, sorry, no, no, no,
it's not your fault. I just I'm really interested in
that stuff. Okay. So the one book that most shit
is based on from seventeen twenty four, and it's called
A General History of the Pirates by Captain Charles Johnson,

(08:55):
there is no such name this man, it's a pseudonym.
It is generally accepted that this book was written by
Daniel Dafoe, although more recent he's the guy who wrote
Robinson Crusoe, but more recent scholarship suggests it might have
been a publisher named a Nathaniel mist. Basically, it was
just like, ah, we need to book about pirates to
sell to people. Can you write about pirates? Yeah, I

(09:15):
get write about pirates. You know. This book two volumes.
It's a list of pirate captains and their adventures. Most
of the stories are more or less true, or at
least they describe people who actually existed, and there seems
to be some real scholarship. But then a second volume
was released and it contains three pirates who probably didn't
exist at all. One was William Lewis, who is openly

(09:39):
in league with the devil and so this is like
where you get like, you know, maybe it's a myth
making right, And he's the one who got killed by
his own crew. Then his quartermaster succeeded him. John Cornelius
also probably didn't exist, because this whole devilship probably didn't.
But most important to our story was a pirate who
loomed large in my early life as an anarchist trap

(10:01):
A famous Captain James Mission, or just Captain Mission he's
usually called, was a good last name, although might be
a little on the nose if this was whole thing
was made up to tell a moral tale. One of
my best friends when I was a young wanderer was
this tiny Irish American man named Dark Star, who proudly

(10:22):
announced that he weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, he had
snake bite piercings. He scowled all of the time, and
he was utterly and fully committed to a life of
piracy in classic form. He did not live a very
long time. He wrote freight trains. He lived in a van.
He fucked dudes for money to get gas, or he
would just steal money or gas as needed. He burned

(10:43):
every American flag he could find. His so many stories
about being like and then we stole all these American
flags and I had to hide in a dumpster from
the cops for six hours. And this kind of man.
He also wrote short stories about animals living in happy
anarchist societies, and he wrote a zene call Irish for Punks,
which was full of ideas about how to cuss in Irish.

(11:04):
When I was twenty and he was twenty one, he
died drinking and driving stolen photocopies of anarchizines splayed out
across the freeway. Don't drink and dive or drink and die.
Don't drink and drive or you will die. It's bad.
Don't do it. Before he died, he told me a
lot about pirates. He was obsessed with pirates. He used

(11:28):
to draw lox's over his eyes when he would write
letters to me, And he told me about Captain Mission.
As Darkstar had it, Captain Mission was like the original anarchist.
He and his crew attacked slave ships, freeing the slaves
and killing the slavers before establishing an anti racist colony
on Madagascar called Libertalia, which was ruled by direct democracy,

(11:51):
and they lived in a socialist economy nearly a century
before anyone was calling anything socialism. This story is too
good to be true, and it's not true. Captain Mission
was invented by the author of the Pirate Book. Almost certainly.
I'd always assumed he'd been invented whole cloth, either to
sell more books, because like, uh, throw this little interesting

(12:14):
guy in there, right, or to get across some political ideas,
a mission as it were, right, Captain Mission is clearly
an important part of the book. Captain Mission's chapter is
more than fourteen thousand words long, which is real long
for people who are listening and they don't think in
terms of words like my weird writer brain is poisoned

(12:34):
to do. That's twice as long as this week's script.
So a bunch of words. It's also clearly important to
the author. It is the first chapter of the second volume.
And it turns out he did base it on fact.
He just based it on the less interesting part of
the story. And this sounds like an ad transition, but

(12:57):
it Isn't you know what else was both real and
imagine somehow both at once.

Speaker 3 (13:02):
The monetary system that we use.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
Oh that's true. Also the libertarian socialist pirate communities on Madagascar,
which inasmuch as they existed, were less colonies of like
white and black pirates from elsewhere and more complicated societies
built from indigenous Malagassi political traditions interacting with pirates.

Speaker 3 (13:27):
So the pirates were showing up running away from the
crown and all the people they stole from landing in
this place where well, I've read my David Graber where
there was a super developed form of democracy and like
learning it from the Malagasy and that sounds like a
very nice fairy tale too, So there must be something
more complicated than that.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Okay, so interesting one. David Graber is the main source
for this episode. Fuck yes, two No, Actually, oh, the
ways in which it's different from that are so interesting
because egalitarian traditions were coming from a lot of the
Malagasy methods of how people were living there, but they
were not any way democratic. The pirates actually brought the democracy.

(14:07):
But oh, you're gonna like it. This is gonna be
a good Okay.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
I cannot wait. I cannot wait, I cannot wait.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
So Madagascar, Madagascar is a big fucking island off the
coast of Southeast Africa. It is almost as big as Texas.
Even if you're bad at geography, especially African geography, like
the average American, I think there's a good chance that
people know where Madagascar.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
Is, the giant island off of the coast.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah. I feel like if you handed the average non
Africa geography know where, they'd probably figure out. Egypt, South
Africa and Madagascar.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
Maybe I'm wrong, and yeah, I think you might be overestimating.
I think probably only Madagascar fair enough.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
There's a lot of things that know anyway, I'm not
great at geography, but I know way more than that.
I'm proud to say because I worked at it. This
is not what anyone is here to hear about it.
Geography Understanding Madagascar is fascinating for a thousand reasons. There's
a ton of biodiversity there, especially endemic plants and animals,
like stuff that doesn't appear anywhere else. There are a

(15:12):
fuck ton of endemic species of lemurs. I spent way
too long in the time I had to write this
script just looking at pictures of different kinds of lemurs.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
Was there a lemur pirate intersection?

Speaker 2 (15:23):
No, I just was reading about Madagascar and I got
distracted by pictures of lemurs. This is the way my
brain works. Also, there's an animal called a fossa, which
is like a giant mongoose that looks like a puma
and eats lemurs. They're pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
Right now, I'm in my head, I'm drawing pirate lemurs.
I'm sorry. This is what happens when you get an
artist on the show.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
No, yeah, no, you know what, you can just to
draw pirate lemurs and it'll be great. There's also huge
bats there, and there's an animal called the satanic leaf
tailed gecko.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
What the fuck?

Speaker 1 (15:57):
I want one.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
They're so cute.

Speaker 4 (15:59):
I want one.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
They really are little satanic leaf tail gekos.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
Is it big or little? Is it a tiny thing
or a large?

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (16:05):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
I didn't get a good picture for scale, but has
a leaf tail and it's like dragon demon looking. They're
so good.

Speaker 3 (16:12):
This is of course, this became pirate Island, and look
at the visuals that you have.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
No, I know right, folks have lived on Madagascar for
around two thousand years. It actually is one of the
like more recently populated large land masses.

Speaker 4 (16:24):
I'm sorry, I have to pause for a second so
I can show you guys this gecko.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
Because it's actually really terrifying. Look at this guy.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
What the fuck man? That was what the Satan pirate
was worshiping that the crew killed him for They It
was definitely yeah yeah, because look at those eyes.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
One of those was hanging out on his shoulder just
talking to him.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
And I don't change my statement. I want one. I
want this guy with this crazy giant red eyeballs.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Yeah. Oh oh they're tiny.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
They're tiny. Well they're geckos, their finger ge goos.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
That one's like finger nail. That might be a baby.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
That might be a baby. But yeah, anyways, I just
thought everybody should know that. And if you're listening, please
please google Satanic leaf tailed gecko. You will enjoy it. Yeah,
oh my god, what a delightful creature.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
I know. No, you're right, this is what the guy
was worshiping. Like one of them was hanging out on
his shoulder, and people were like, I just can't handle it.
It's too much for me.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
He had a pinky gecko and it was hanging out
on his pinky. He was talking to it. He was
asking whether or not they should do missions, and the
crew tore him into pieces over it.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Thunder Yeah, that tracks, and I would read the your
graphic novel about it. So folks have lived there for
about two thousand years, coming from all over the place,
coming from the east, the north, and the west, from
Indonesia and Swanna and East Africa, including most likely many Jews.
Were actually an important part of the sort of cultural

(17:49):
makeup of Madagascar for a long time. These groups actually
just lived in different places, and then around the turn
of the first millennia you start getting a synthesis culture
that what's now the Malagassy culture. The island was under
Arab influence and slavers from the Ottoman Empire lived on
the west coast of it for a long ass time,
doing a fair amount of integrating into the local population

(18:12):
or at least making all alliances and such with them.
They stayed apart, but they weren't like, they weren't what
the Europeans are about to do basically.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
And so were they they enslaving Malagasy people or were
they using it as a base to take slaves from
other parts of the continent.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
So they were buying, So slavery and in Madagascar was
actually kind of interesting when we talk about it a
little bit. Basically, whenever different groups would fight, they would
take captives from each other, and then those would they
would turn around and sell them to the Ottomans, who
would then sell them off the island. So they weren't
necessarily like raiding for slaves, but they were instead buying

(18:49):
them from people there. And yeah, they absolutely were enslaving
people on the island and shipping them away. Portugal and
France tried to set up settlements too, starting the fifteen hundreds,
but they were messy assholes about it, and they all
got run off by the locals and or like just killed.

Speaker 3 (19:07):
Were what were they doing?

Speaker 2 (19:08):
So basically Europeans were just seen as violent savages.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Like I mean, for good reason.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Absolutely they were accurately seen as what they were. And
they would show up and basically just like take whatever
they wanted and rob people and just like try to
like crush entire villages and just be like whatever, it's
ours now. And they would be like incredibly racist about stuff,
and they would like it was just like the Ottoman
Empire showed up as slavers and stead up like slave

(19:36):
trade places, and they were by far the lesser evil.
That's how bad the Europeans were. Basically the tracks the tracks. Yeah,
And so you know, these legal settlements would just go around,
and I'm comparing that to the pirates who were gonna
come later, who actually were much more polite. The legal
settlements would run around and rob locals and capture slaves

(19:58):
and shit, and were far too racist to consider that
are integrating with the locals at all. Later European settlements
did start sticking around pirate settlements. Not everyone, not all
the pirates were European, right, but they were kind of
more in the European sphere of influence. Basically, the pirates

(20:18):
ironically were a lot less likely to steal ship from
their neighbors and or steal their neighbors themselves because.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
They didn't have like a base that they could run
to and you know, take all of their loot off to,
because they actually had to make themselves not hated in
order to use the island as a base.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
I think. So, I mean, they kind of just like
came in less cocky, right, and with a lot less assumptions,
and also just kind of like I think that there
was honestly different ethics. Like it's so hard because, for
very understandable reasons, we look at slavery as like one
of those things where like all slavery is bad, right,
because it is, but not all slavery is the same.

(20:57):
And I think that understanding slavery outside of the United
States requires understanding to some level that like different ways
that slavery worked at different times in different places, you know,
And so like I think the pirates were like, why
would we steal from our poor neighbors? Honestly, I mean, well,
we'll talk about what the pirates are doing in slavery.

(21:18):
It's actually really complicated and interesting. But one of the
largest distinct ethno groups in modern Madagascar is in fact
the Zono Malata, where the descendants of Malagasy and European
pirate ancestors. And they're going to come up a bunch
in this week's story because also the other thing that
the pirates were doing was like marrying into the culture.

(21:39):
And there's kind of this like there's a lot of
places like this in the world, and I'm assuming that
because I can I know about it with Ireland and
now Madagascar, and so therefore I'm making rude assumptions about
the entire world where prior to like settler colonialism, people
would show up places and either maybe stay a little
bit different and have their port or kind of just
like marry in and then sort of dissipate into the

(22:00):
culture and like do some kind of synthetic thing, you know.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
I mean, I mean, I feel like that's most of
the history of India, you know.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
I believe it.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
I mean, that's that's what people do, right, Like they move,
they go to places, they become other things when they're there.
And it's really the Setler colonialism that takes like these
super defined identities and defines you as like the indigenous
people to be exploited or the elite British or French
or whatever to do the exploiting. Whereas like previously, even

(22:32):
sometimes you have people show up and sometimes they'd even
be bastards and criminals, but there are also could be
bastards and criminals that integrated into your society somehow.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, totally and you know, joined Malagasy society. Like again
not any perfect way, and we're going to talk about
some of the imperfect parts of it. But do you
know what doesn't integrate well into society and sticks.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
Out Satanic leaf tails get goos.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
That's right, they are. This podcast is brought to you
by Satanic not the concept of Satanic leaf tailed get goes,
but a specific one named Lucifer who has been talking
to me and giving me information that is the sponsor
of this show and also whoever else gave us money?
Now iber Beck, So okay, the Libertalius story, the idea

(23:27):
of this like perfect little utopian pirate community. I don't
know too many authors who could have convinced me there
was anything to that story at all, because I had
wanted to believe it's so bad when I was younger
that I like mourned its falseness and moved on, didn't
really want to look back. But there is an author
that I trust, the author that brought me back there,

(23:48):
whose name you've already mentioned.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
David Graeber.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
Yeah, here's my little aside about David Graeber. I think
David Graber is going to be considered one of the
greatest thinkers of the early twenty five century. He wrote
books that were at once accessible to the public while
also pushing anthropological and political science forward. His writing has
been one of the primary things that shifted how I
view politics and economics. I honestly think he is as

(24:14):
important of an economic thinker as Marx if we let
him be, if people listen to what he has to say.
He wrote a book called Debt, The First five thousand
Years into History of Money that contains an awful lot
of bombshells that destroy the way that people normally talk
about money. For example, barter didn't precede money. Barter is

(24:35):
what people who are used to money use when there
suddenly isn't any money anymore. He also, alongside another anthropologist
named David Wengrow, wrote a book called The Dawn of Everything.
This book pulls the rug out from underneath a wide
swath of modern Western thought, including the idea that the
Enlightenment came primarily from European minds or I mean the

(24:59):
go ahead, No.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
I mean that book. It basically is this complete subversion
right of everything that we're taught. We're taught that the
Enlightenment is just sort of this like neat progression of
European history. Born in Europe, raised in Europe, gifted to America,
you know, from the Europeans. And he's like, no, fuck,
that the Enlightenment actually comes from indigenous intellectuals in North

(25:26):
America and Europeans like taking seriously what they were.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Saying, yeah, and then turning around and using it to
do absolutely awful things, because the Enlightenment mostly did bad stuff,
but the concepts of it absolutely One of the things
that I've run across by doing research on the show
is I've been thinking even about how, like, you know,
my own political ideology, anarchism comes from the people who
are calling themselves that it first or like enlightenment political

(25:52):
thinkers from Western Europe, right, or actually a lot of
them are from Russia. And yet what I've been learning
by doing the show and learning more about out all
of these different things is that anarchists were actually specifically
drawing from indigenous communities all over the world very consciously,
and indigenous anarchists in various places were informing people, whether
it was like in Siberia, in Ukraine and Ireland and Mexico. Oh,

(26:17):
and a lot of ideas coming from like Korea and
places like that. Right, those are the places I personally
run across it in my research for this show, and
so I'm just like more and more, I'm like, oh,
all this shit comes from elsewhere, you know.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
So basically what you're telling me is you had these
Russian radicals that were getting exiled to Siberia and they
were meeting indigenous folks and they were listening to them
and learning from them.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, and they were like, oh, there's the rules. What
if we all treat each other as equals? Doesn't that
sound nice?

Speaker 4 (26:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (26:44):
But also like, let's not credit these people when we
write our pamphlets. About it.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Well, I actually think some of them did, and they did,
I think so, And like, I think that it goes
through this process of like the original of that gets dissolved.
And part of it is because anarchists are so internationalist
in the late like nineteenth early twentieth century, where they
would refuse to credit anything as like coming from this
or that place, right, because you'd have like indigenous Mexican

(27:09):
anarchists who wouldn't necessarily identify as indigenous because they're like, oh,
we're internationalists. And also, of course, because Mexico's indigenous, the
structure of whiteness and indigeneity is different in Mexico than
it is like in the United States.

Speaker 5 (27:21):
Right.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
But I think about how like, oh, man, there's a tangent.
But I think how like twentieth century anarchist history books
don't talk about the women, right, right, But then if
you actually read the people that those books are about,
those people did write about the women because the women
were just as involved as everyone turns out. And so
it's this like process of like stripping away.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah, exactly, No, No, I totally get it. I mean
when I was writing about the boon do it was
the same thing when you go through these like biographical dictionaries,
it's like thirty percent women. And they're not just like
making food and educating the kids. They're throwing bombs, they're
running self defense groups. They're riling up, you know, when
the battleship Potempkin is there. But somehow, through this process

(28:05):
of people writing histories and then people writing the histories
in English instead of in Yiddish or whatever, the women
just kind of get filtered out and made into a footnote.
And I feel like so much of the work of
what you're doing, it's this act of necromancy right where
you're taking those people back from being lost in the
dust of the archive.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
Hell yeah, and I will take that as an honor, Okay.
So Graeber is one of the authors who has done
more to popularize this idea, this idea that the Enlightenment
doesn't just come from the West, right, And this book
also downe of Everything, destroys linear concepts of progress. It
shows that societies have done just about everything, They've tried

(28:42):
just about everything. So many things are possible, so many
different things have been done, and most of what we
assume about the development of human society is wrong. And
this isn't necessarily all of his or the other David's research,
as much as like kind of catching up the rest
of us on what anthropologists have been realizing for a while.
I'll know. And Graver was also an anarchist. His other

(29:04):
claim to fame was heavily influencing the occupy movement of
twenty eleven. Framing things around the ninety nine percent against
like the one percenter seems to have been his idea.
I met him once. We have an awful lot of
friends in common, and we also had some frenemies in common,
but I'm not Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
I met him a few times also, and one of
my sort of fond memories of him was him taking
me around these like flea markets in London, and there
was this book of Edmund Dulac fairy Tales, and I
was looking at it lustfully, but I had no cash,
and he just like he just bought it for me.
He was like, I like to just I like to
give gifts. And then he he showed me all of

(29:42):
these these beautiful costumes that he had in his place
because he loved to play dress up.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
Also, Oh that's cool, I genuinely think. Okay, So he
died suddenly in twenty twenty of Pancreatis. His wife lays
the blame at COVID's feet, and that seems completely possible,
and I think we he really lost something he was
I believe fifty nine when he died.

Speaker 3 (30:03):
I would have given anything to have him now talking
about the shit with Israel and the genocide.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
Oh no, yeah, Like I just honestly, like, I never really,
like gave much credence to the idea of a public
intellectual until kind of seeing the impact that he was
able to have. And David Graeber did a lot of
anthropological research on Madagascar specifically, and one of his last books,

(30:27):
probably the last book of his to be published in English.
This book was first published in French in twenty nineteen
and then in English in twenty twenty three, three years
after his death. I phrased it that way because I
don't know how to pronounce post hum humorously, honestly.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
Posthumously humously, I think.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
Yeah, nope, and maybe it's not. And if you're listening,
don't tell me. I don't want to, because I could
look it up if I really cared, but I don't.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
And so it's also my one it's my lys favorite
word to say.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
I know right, it's no good. This book is called
Pirate Enlightenment or the Real Libertalia, and more than anything
else is it's my primary source for this particular episode,
because frankly, I am not aware of other sources worth
taking seriously on this topic, because all the rest are
random myths and lies. But first, back to pirates, and

(31:19):
by that I mean back to ads. The lead tailed
gecko has told me to sell. You all should give
me things. Just leave things out under a linden tree
and I will come and pick them up.

Speaker 4 (31:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Also, here's other ads.

Speaker 4 (31:43):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
I don't think I could recognize the indantry.

Speaker 3 (31:48):
I feel like it's something from old songs. I don't
think I could recognize it either.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Maybe they only have them in England. Again, if you
are listening and you know the answer, don't tell me.
I could look it up if I wanted to know.
Why am I complaining about people? Anyway? Whatever pirates, Europe
was doing some wild expansion throughout the seventeenth century. They're
off conquering and colonizing willy nilly. By the end of
the seventeenth century, he star again the Enlightenment and well,

(32:15):
here's the part of the script that it does the
thing we already talked about. So now I have to
figure out where to skip ahead to. But I'm going
to actually skip to a David Graeber quote specifically on
this idea. The European Enlightenment was, more than anything else,
an age of intellectual synthesis. Were previously intellectual backwaters like
England and France that suddenly found themselves at the center

(32:36):
of global empires and exposed for them startling new ideas
were trying to integrate, for instance, ideas of individualism and
liberty drawn from the Americas, a new conception of the
bureaucratic nation state largely inspired by China, African contract theories,
and economic and social theories originally developed in medieval Islam.

(32:56):
And what does that have to do with pirates? Well,
all of these wild ideas you can't play around with
them in an existing monarchy, very easily, right.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
No, you can't play around with ideas and monarchies. The
monarch tends to cut off your head for that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
No, like classically not a popular thing to do around this,
you know, in the middle of the seventeenth century and
all the like, people who are like, what if there's
no such thing as sin and we can do polyamory
and they were like, We're going to drill holes through
your tongue. Those are the ranters. We did an episode
about them. Nice Nice, So at the colonial fringes in
the desolated lands of genocide and extermination, you could play

(33:32):
around with these ideas, so, you know, go to murder
all the people in North America who gave you these ideas,
and then you can play around with them. What could
go wrong? The pirates, viewed within this framework are among
the people playing around with enlightenment ideas. They had direct democracies.
In case I don't think I like cover this too clearly,

(33:54):
like the average pirate ship in the oldie Golden Age,
pirates elected their captains and the only two official posts
was captain and quartermaster. Most decisions were made at assemblies.
The quartermaster was actually in charge of the assemblies. In
a lot of ways, the captain resembles what would be
called anthropologically a war chief, someone who's in charge only

(34:14):
during times of war. Most decisions were democratically made except
during the middle of a fight. On pirate ships. That
is the big reveal that I suspected a lot of
people listening already.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
Know, so they were actually doing the kind of assemblies
that I feel like we were trying to do an
Occupy Wall Street that people were trying to do in
all of the Occupy the Squares type rebellions that happened
in twenty eleven, but they were working.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
Okay, but even wilder than that. Yeah, the Pirate ones
were mostly I believe, majority vote, but the Malagasy ones
that we're going to talk about in a little bit
were consensus. Holy fuck, and Graber is one of the
primary people who helped set up Occupy Wall Street. Occupy
Wall Street owsen in in credible amount directly to the

(35:02):
Malagasy like culture of consensus decision making at assembly.

Speaker 3 (35:07):
This is amazing. I yeah, you blew my mind. Like
I obviously I knew David helped set up Occupy, but
I okay, my mind is blown. My mind is blown
by this.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
And there is there is a previous history of consensus
decision making on the left in the United States, coming
from the anti nuke movement, right, But like you know,
I think that this is still a valid thread to
be drawn because he had been doing a lot of
this anthropological research before Occupy Wall Street. I think he
did it when he was just getting when he was
in school, actually, some of his earlier research on this.

(35:41):
And so these pirates they're setting up direct democracies and
they have social contracts that are one hundred years ahead
of their time, and it helped. I'm sure that any
given ship was full of people from all over the world.
There was escaped slaves and indigenous people and Arabic people
and all kinds of white people from different countries. So
of course they tried some shit together. And also pirates

(36:04):
like to spin their own legends. They had to write
the fear of the black flag is a fundamental part
of their economic and military strategy. They don't want to fight,
they want people to surrender, and so they spread legends.
And one of the legends, ironically, they both would spread
their legend about like, oh, man, our guy black Beard,

(36:26):
he's gonna fucking flay you, right, because you want everyone
to think that, so you surrender when you see fucking
black Beard.

Speaker 3 (36:32):
And then you don't lose half your crew.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, Like getting into gunfights is always a
bad idea, Like you.

Speaker 3 (36:40):
Know, yeah, I know, it's much better to be so
scary that the other person doesn't fuck with you in
the first place.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
Yeah, that has actually literally been my strategy. Is like
when I was like a street kid, people don't know
what to make of me. I'm not particularly large, but
I'm strange looking, and it's kept me safe. Another legend
that they would spread is kind of this the story
of their democracy. So in a way that I didn't
really realize, pirates themselves kind of influenced probably the creation

(37:12):
of modern democratic states were both better and worse.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
So they were spreading the story of the democracy so
that when they got onto some ship that is filled
with poor press ganged British guys who are like literally
having their teeth fall out of scurvy, the poor press
ganged British guys won't fight them because they think that
they can join up with the pirates and have a
better life.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Is that that the strategy, So that's my read on it.
I'm not one hundred percent certain. I'm kind of conjecturing.
I've read that they would spread this thing, the legend
of their democracy, and I reached a kind of similar
conclusion because actually one of the main ways that new
pirates crews would form was direct mutiny. It wouldn't even
be that a lot of crews would form, like you

(37:55):
were talking about, where pirates would show up and be like, hey,
you want to be pirates or you want to die,
It's easy choice, you know. And other times people would
be like, hey, we fucking hate our captain, We're not
even getting paid. Let's have a mutiny. And then once
you have a mutiny, you're like, well, if we go
to any civilized port, we're now dead, right right, you know,
so I guess we're fucking pirates now, and so you

(38:15):
can have this like cultural spread if people have these ideas.
I could know more about this than I do. I'm
a little bit conjecturing here.

Speaker 3 (38:23):
And by civilized port you mean like ports of European christiandom.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
I am also under the impression to include like places
in South Asia, and I'm not. I couldn't tell you
one one or the other about how the Ottomans were
treating pirates at this time, because obviously, like pirate versus
privateer is like such a funny distinction, right, privateer as
an official charter to go around and do piracy and

(38:48):
a pirate doesn't. And so a pirate is like an
the enemy of all nations. I don't know my inference,
and I have one reason to draw this, which has
to do with a later thing that involves some some
folks in South Asia being real mad at the pirates.
Is that enemy of all nations? Like meant everywhere that
considered itself civilized, which I would assume would mean Swanna,

(39:09):
Western Europe and South Asia and presumably East Asia, but
I know way less about East Asian piracy. That's my
best guess.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
There was an amazing woman pirate from China. Yeah, yeah,
who needs an episode like most successful pirate of all time?

Speaker 2 (39:24):
No exactly. That's literally why I don't know as much
about it yet is that I'm planning to do a
whole episodes about her.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
Fuck yes, fuck yes.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
And then these pirates, they're trying out all these different ideas,
according to both legend and anthropology alike, they would try
out new social forms on various islands like Libertalia, the
Legend of Libertalia. Honestly, it's kind of a bummer of
a story. All of these pirates, none of them indigenous

(39:51):
to Madagascar, show up and create this racially diverse democratic
utopia based on private property and it's sort of like
a proto USA, but less immediately racist than the USA.
But it's also kind of involve in the slave trade,
so it's not really all that much better. And then
all of a sudden they're killed by indigenous people for
no reason. That's the story.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
Reason never, no, no reason at all.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah. David Graeber writes about this quote, it would appear
likely that there was no captain mission or a settlement
called Libertalia, but there most certainly were pirate settlements on
the Malagasy coast, and what's more, they were the place
for radical social experiments. Pirates did experiment with new forms
of governance and property arrangements. What's more, so did members

(40:35):
of the surrounding Malagassy communities into which they married, many
of whom had lived in their settlements, sailed in their
ships and formed blood brotherhood pacts, and spent many hours
in political conversation with them. Which is to say Libertalia
isn't real. Instead, the thing that happened is so much

(40:57):
more interesting. There was, however, a direct inspiration for the
Libertalia story, so in a way, there kind of was
a Libertalia. There was this pirate utopian an island and
it was destroyed by the locals. And it was destroyed
by the locals for a good reason. What was that slavery?

Speaker 3 (41:15):
Shockingly, when you break into people's houses and drag them
off screaming to do the shit work on the other
side of the ocean, they don't like you, and then
they kick you out.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
I know, who would have known?

Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah, shocker, shocker.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
An awful lot of early Golden Age pirates actually spent
their time in the Indian Ocean, not the Caribbean. The
Caribbean kind of comes a little bit later. It comes
both before and later, but the main Golden Age we
talked about is in the Caribbean, whereas like a couple
decades earlier, it's in the Indian Ocean. Trade was richer
over in the Indian Ocean at the time. Europe was
really only just starting to not be a backwater and

(41:50):
these pirates needed a home base, and Madagascar was perfect.
The East India Company didn't claim it, and neither did
the British Royal African Company, which was running slavery. They
especially settled on the northeast of the island, away from
the Malagasy kingdoms elsewhere on the island, not that there
weren't people there, but there was like some larger political
institutions elsewhere. In particular, they settled on an island called

(42:13):
Nosey Boraja from sixteen ninety one to sixteen ninety nine.
For eight years there was a pirate community there. The
population of pirates and locals alike that would ebb and
flow from like thirty to one thousand. It seemed like
pirates would take some time away from the ocean there.
Some would smuggle themselves back into the regular world on

(42:34):
passing merchant ships. Some would live on the island permanently.
Mostly they would like move to the mainland and get married.
But we'll get to that. And so these pirates, they're
robbing the shit out of ships in the Indian Ocean,
and they needed somewhere to fence their stolen goods. And
that's where these pirate islands historically come in. This or
that merchant will set themselves up on an island, they'll

(42:55):
build a fortress, they will declare themselves the pirate king,
and then they will fence stole and goods to and
also corrupt but ostensibly above board merchant.

Speaker 3 (43:04):
So are these merchants the only people declaring themselves pirate
kings because the pirate ship captains were not declaring themselves
pirate kings. Was pirate Kings only a marketing thing?

Speaker 2 (43:14):
Okay, so I believe that it was only a marketing thing. However,
I believe that mostly these merchants were calling themselves pirate kings.
But occasionally other pirate captains would get called pirate kings
or call themselves pirate kings or whatever. But it largely
was a marketing thing. This idea of like the charismatic

(43:36):
leader of all the pirates type thing was a marketing
ploy like, don't fuck with us, y'all got kings, we
got a king. Don't worry, you can't fuck with us.
We got a king, you know. And the above board
merchants who would show up on Madagascar or to this
island off Madagascar were slavers from New York City. That's

(43:57):
the big above ground organization.

Speaker 3 (43:59):
Oh New York City, Oh New York Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
Who Yeah, I'm gonna go down a rabbit hole in
a second. You might know more about them, but I'm
a find out.

Speaker 3 (44:06):
Okay, no, no, tell me, I bet you do, go
down the rabbit hole.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
So basically, these merchants from New York would send out
ships with gunpowder and supplies. And this is like the
fucking opposite side of the world, right when I picture
places that are far from New York City, Mattagascar is
one of the first places I would think of as
being far from Every hemisphere is different here. But on
the other hand, people are coming around the so whatever anyway,
So they would send out ships with gunpowder and supplies

(44:34):
and all the like live off of this stuff, you know,
stuff from New York City, and they would bring back
treasure to sell and then kind of their their cover
story is this slavery. The people on the Pirate Island
are like less excited about the slavery, but they're still
okay with it, and whereas New York City is like
they're okay with the fencing stolen goods, but they're like

(44:55):
more into it for the slavery because.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
The slavery is respectable in America and the fence and
goods might get you in trouble with the Western power
who those goods were stolen from.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
I think so, and we'll talk about why in a
little bit. But a decent chunk of New York City's
slave population was Malagassy.

Speaker 3 (45:15):
Holy fuck, I had no idea.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
And you want to know how we learned how we
know that there's a bunch of enslave Malagassy folks and
old new and like colonial New York. How because of
a side tangent called the Conspiracy of seventeen forty one.
You ever heard of this?

Speaker 3 (45:32):
Okay? So I had heard of. I don't know if
this is the Conspiracy of seventeen forty one, but I
had heard of a bunch of enslaved people in New
York basically got together and planned like a big ass
armed revolt that took a ton of firepower to put down.
But I do not know if that was seventeen forty
one or one of many other times that enslaved people
decided to kick out their enslavers and get free.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Try and do some shit. Yeah, I think that might
have been a different one, but I'm not sure. This
one seems to be one of the more talked about one.
But that's less because of like shit that actually went down,
and more about the way that, like the trials and
stuff worked. And I was reading that, like for like
twenty years before this, there was like a new slaver
vault in New York City every like two years or so.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
Understandable.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
Yeah, in seventeen forty one, black slaves, freed black people
and Irish indentured servants conspired to burn down New York City,
and the Irish indentured servants they were suspected of being
Catholic spies. Like literally they got killed for being undercover priests.

(46:34):
Because the fuck did you know that in the year
seventeen hundred they passed laws where you got life in
prison if you were a Catholic priest in New York
What the fuck?

Speaker 3 (46:44):
I had no idea.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
No, I had no idea either, Holy fuck man. Yeah,
And so a bunch of people realizing that they're all
on the same like that their class interests actually align,
even though some of them are free and some of
them aren't, and some you know, they tried to have
a big old revolt. Probably probably why. Probably so a

(47:06):
bunch of stuff did burn. But the way that this
conspiracy was like persecuted was Salem witch trial. Basically shit Jesus.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
So these secret evil spies for the pope are going
around doing their like crazy ass Catholic things and like
making enslaved people not like being beaten and raped and
like and now we're going to like put rocks on
people's chests. Until they came in to say that like
the devil made them think that it's bad to be

(47:38):
a slave.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Not the furthest from that, and like stop giving the
pope so much credit, you know, not you, but the
authorities basically they started getting people to crack and then
name names. And these names were like there's no real
particular reason to believe that they're reliable, and so it's
like hard to know if this conspiracy happened, but it

(47:59):
was kind of this ass panic around this stuff happening,
and a lot of people were arrested. I didn't write
down the numbers, and the low hundreds I think, and
several dozen people were killed by the authorities, and specifically
enslave people were either hanged or fucking burned at the stake.

Speaker 3 (48:17):
The fuck fucking new.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Well Irish people were hanged.

Speaker 3 (48:23):
They had to like racially stratify executions fucking people.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
Oh yeah, yeah, come on, like which is always funny too, right,
because it's like like overall the history of like Irish's
whiteness in America is very complicated, and people make sweeping generalizations.
The Irish have always had it better than black people
in the United States, but were also criminalized. It just
was a racial category below white and above black, you know,

(48:47):
but it was above black, so they didn't get burned
at the steak. I guess there also were fewer of them,
so it could be that they just like didn't get lucky.
And when the I don't know whatever, I found a
book about This'm probably gon do the episodes about it.

Speaker 3 (49:02):
You have to do an episode about this. I would
listen to the shit out of this episode.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
Yeah, because I only know like the surface level stuff
about this so far. But back to our pirate haven
that is not so great On Wednesday, you're gonna have
to wait to find out. Here's a hint. They're all
gonna die and they're all gonna have deserved it. Oh
you gotta wait ti Wednesday to find out what happened.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
Oh no, So the man in the patch pants was wrong.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
He was wrong. Unfortunately, often people who die at the
age of twenty one haven't yet been able to develop
more complex historical analyses. But you know, his heart was
in the right place. Also, I think he'd like the
real version so much more so if you're listening Dark Star,
you'll like it. But do you have anything you want

(49:48):
to plug?

Speaker 3 (49:50):
Well, I am working on a book about the Jewish
labor boond, but it's gonna come out so far in
the future, probably next fall, that I'm just gonna ask
you to cherish our open your hearts for it eventually
being published, you know, believe in it like tinker Bell.

Speaker 5 (50:06):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (50:06):
And other than that, I'm illustrating a children's book about
someone who is the exact opposite of a pirate. She
is Queen nor Jahan of India, the first female sovereign
of the Mughal Empire. Whoa, And she killed tigers and
rode war elephants into battle and whoa. Yes, I know,
like no kings, no gods, no masters, but like so interesting.

(50:27):
Yeah you have to fucking you have to love a
fucking Mughal empress.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Yeah fuck yeah. Well the Mughal Empire is going to
be in part two of this.

Speaker 3 (50:34):
Actually, oh my god, amazing.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
I just don't know a ton about them, so I
can't provide like broader context around them yet, you know, so,
but you do. And people can check out Molly's existing stuff,
including a ton of art that's like, Actually, what I
mostly personally know you for is that your art was
just like often everywhere in different like political spaces and
stuff like that. It's really beautiful art. People should check

(50:56):
it out.

Speaker 3 (50:57):
Thank you. Yeah, you can go to mollikrabapple dot com
and check out my work, or you can go to Instagram,
where I feel like I'm hopping like Pavlov's dog to
show like my process of painting. And I'm always drawing many, many,
many many things because that's how I interface with the
world because I can't do it normally fair enough.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
I hide and research things. But I guess you also
do that if you want to follow me. I'm also
on Instagram. I'm on substack. I write about a lot
of stuff on there. I usually kind of go in
deeper or a little bit more like personal on topics
I cover here on this show. Everything that's more political
is free. Everything that's like super personal. You can subscribe

(51:41):
and then you can read my tour diaries. Oh, I'm
on tour right now, that's the thing I'm supposed to plug.
Oh fine, I am like currently on book tour, and
by that I mean I came home two days ago
and I leave tomorrow to continue on and I'll be
gone for six weeks further on tour. So if you
live across the north and middle of the United States,
I will probably come vaguely near you. And then eventually

(52:03):
I will plan the rest of the tour where I'll
go down through California and out east and go everywhere
with me and my dog and my truck. And it's
supposed to be my van, but my van broke down.
I've already complained about this in other podcasts a bunch
of times. My transmission died. I'm really frustrated by it.
But I have a truck, so I'll travel in the truck.
And yesterday, and this is completely totally of interest to everyone,

(52:24):
I got a truck cap on my truck by myself,
and it is the most physical feat thing I've ever
done in my life. And it took so many ratchet straps.

Speaker 3 (52:32):
What's a truck cap.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
Oh, it's the thing on the back of a pickup
truck that makes it like covered, you know.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
Oh cool, that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (52:38):
They're very heavy and I had taken it off because
I needed my truck to like move mulch and stuff,
and so just like under some trees in my yard
was my old truck cap from when I try used
to travel more in my truck, which I'm gonna do again.
And this is a totally related Sophia. Anything you want to.

Speaker 4 (52:53):
Plug, there's anything specific I want to plug from all
of our stuff.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Zone Media, well, there's cooler.

Speaker 4 (53:01):
Zone Media and the Android version is coming very soon.
I actually have a meeting about that tomorrow that I
think is me being like, yes, please fucking do it,
and then I want to plug. Ed to Trund's Better
Offline just got a nice little write up in Vulture
and Ed Ed worked very hard on that show. So
if you're interested in tech stuff, Ed.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
I increasingly feel like I would be better Offline.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
Oh yeah, I'm interested in the way that I am
interested in looking at any mortal enemies, which I feel
like Ed is really good at covering it like that.

Speaker 1 (53:33):
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
If you want to hear someone scream at people who
are terrible, but like in a really comforting way, it's
a good show for it, exactly, all right. Also, a
good show is part two with this on Wednesday, I'll
talk to you all.

Speaker 5 (53:46):
That Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
You get your podcasts. H