The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Speaker 1:

A few weeks ago, the US State Department released this video over X.

Speaker 2:

It’s 1823. The map of the Americas is being redrawn. Spain has spent centuries amassing a new world empire stretching from Patagonia to California. Now their grip was slipping fast.

Speaker 1:

The video is narrated by Kevin Marino Cabrera, the US ambassador to Panama, and it’s highly polished with images, map graphics, animations, and dramatic music.

Speaker 2:

Monroe then declared a decree to Congress, among the boldest diplomatic statements in American history.

Speaker 3:

The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

Speaker 1:

The text of the post reads, “The Monroe Doctrine has shaped US foreign policy for over two centuries. American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Speaker 2:

But these were defensive applications, keeping European powers out, not asserting American control over the hemisphere’s affairs. That changed in 1895 when Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the doctrine, declaring that the United States was practically sovereign over the Western hemisphere and demanded for its submit to American arbitration. He had redefined the doctrine. It was no longer just a warning. It was now a claim to regional primacy.

Speaker 1:

The video is remarkable because it doesn’t mince words or attempt to paint a rosy picture of the United States. In five minutes and 31 seconds, it just lays out the justification for the US imperialism that has cast a shadow over the region for the last two centuries up until today.

Speaker 2:

Three years later, war with Spain erupted and when the smoke cleared, it transformed the hemisphere. The United States expelled Spain from Cuba, seized Puerto Rico, and stepped into the world stage as a genuine imperial power with dominance over the Caribbean. Just four years later, that dominance was tested again. German and British warships sailed into Venezuelan waters and blockaded its ports over unpaid debts. Roosevelt intervened and declared if a Latin American nation fell into chaos or instability, the US would step it and manage it. The doctrine has started as a shield. Roosevelt had just turned it into a mandate.

Speaker 1:

This was all a good thing, the video seems to say. A natural course of history that the US should be proud of and the rest of the region should just accept. And all this backstory is a lengthy setup for the video to then make the case that Trump’s actions in Latin America are nothing more than a continuation of the same model of imperialist intervention that the US has carried out since its inception, or at least since the beginning of the 20th century when Roosevelt declared his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Speaker 2:

Fast-forward to the modern era where the doctrine has found its latest champion in President Trump. Through the execution of Operation Absolute Resolve, the United States seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, transporting him to American soil to answer for charges of narcoterrorism. This calculated maneuver delivered a resident signal across the hemisphere, punctuated by President Trump’s own declaration.

Speaker 4:

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Speaker 1:

It’s a fascinating piece of propaganda that tries to place Trump’s actions as the logical next step in the long trajectory of US imperialism in the region.

Speaker 2:

Over two centuries, Monroe’s declaration had shaped US foreign policy across administrations and throughout fundamentally different geopolitical eras. Well, began as a warning to European powers evolved into a framework for regional dominance, one that remains the cornerstone of American strategy in the hemisphere today.

Speaker 5:

What is extraordinary about that video is that it says what has never really been said about the Monroe Doctrine by US officials, which is that the Monroe doctrine has served as a pretext for US intervention in the region and is essentially there to ensure that the US has a great deal of political influence and economic influence over the entire Latin America and Caribbean.

Speaker 1:

That is Alexander Main. I reached out to him to get his take on this video. He’s an old friend and the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC.

Speaker 2:

When Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba in 1962, Kennedy didn’t need to invent a new framework. He simply invoked the doctrine. The weapons had to go.

Speaker 5:

This video is saying that there is such a thing as the US Empire, something that most US officials have never wanted to publicly recognize and saying that that is a good thing and that more needs to be done to ensure that the US can be an effective empire over the entire Western hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Key to this video, Alex says, is the idea that brute military force must be deployed to achieve this imperialistic doctrine. And right now that is being done under the pretext of a new sort of war on terror. There’s no clear definition of exactly who or what narco-terrorist is, but that might be part of the point. Alex says that much like the Cold War’s fight against communism, the vague image of the narco-terrorist boogeyman allows US authorities and their allies to go after left-leaning opponents with force.

Speaker 5:

We’re seeing something similar now, and I think this is really what the US is going to be relying on under the Trump administration. They’re going to be relying more and more on military action and the threat of military action in order to advance this vision of complete political domination over the region.

Speaker 1:

In Brazil, high stakes elections are coming up in October. Advisors for leftist president Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva saw the timing and content of this video as a direct threat against the president’s reelection campaign, a sign that the Trump administration has its sights on Latin America’s largest country. According to Brazilian columnist Valdo Cruz, Lulu’s advisors compared Trump’s foreign policy team led by Cuban American Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Madagascar Penguins piloting Air Force One. It’s a reference to the Madagascar cartoon.

Speaker 6:

Attention, this is your captain speaking. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we’ll be landing immediately. Bad news is we’re crash landing.

Speaker 1:

That is where we are at, a new definitive Monroe doctrine for the Western hemisphere, and it’s being fueled by brute US military force in the region as we have already seen unfold in unprecedented terms over the last year. And the Trump administration isn’t just using those actions and threats abroad. They’re now going after progressive individuals and groups in the United States accusing them of being pawns of foreign nations. People have even been subpoenaed.

Speaker 7:

There’s nothing organic about it. It is funded, it is organized, and Cuba is a part of that network and in some cases a critical part of that network.

Speaker 1:

It’s like something out of the McCarthy era or the Cold War. It’s a fabricated witch hunt. And as we will look at today, it’s being supported by artificial intelligence, but people across Latin America are also organizing against the threats. All of that in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast’s Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance and my new series, The Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better.

Invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow: Trump’s attack, episode 13, American Dominance.

Okay, let me just first say that I’m so excited to be diving back into this season of Under the Shadow. If you have been following this podcast, you’ll know that I was largely absent this summer. I was busy cranking out my podcast about Trump’s attack on free speech rights today in the United States. It’s called The Battle for Free Speech. It’s now out completely. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I’ll add a link in the show notes. In July, we shared an episode from that podcast on the Under the Shadow feed about the battle underway in Brazil right now ahead of the general election in October. I think it’s really good. Before that, my last Under the Shadow episode was about Honduras Gate back in May, so it’s been a while. Today, I want to catch up on several important developments related to US intervention and the pushback against it in the region, including the latest boat strikes, the State Department’s war on Cuba, and the recent Pan-American Congress in Uruguay.

These all fall under the rubric of where we started at the top with the video about the Dunro Doctrine and Trump’s promise that American dominance in the Western hemisphere will “never be questioned again.” In this episode, I’ll look at ways that this is unfolding, both abroad and inside the United States, and also how progressive leaders in the region are very much continuing to question American dominance and organizing against Trump’s rhetoric and threats. Okay, we begin in the abnormally warm waters of the Caribbean and Pacific oceans.

These waters have been central to Trump’s military attack on the region, and this week marks a sad anniversary.

Speaker 8:

When you come out and when you leave the room, you’ll see that we just over the last few minutes literally shot out a boat, a drug carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat, and you’ll be seeing that and you’ll be reading about that. It just happened moments ago.

Speaker 1:

On September 2nd, 2025, one year ago this week, Donald Trump announced the first airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean. Trump said the boat allegedly carried drugs off the coast of Venezuela. He later posted on True Social a video of the airstrike, black and white labeled unclassified. A missile hits the boat and it explodes. The White House said without providing evidence that it killed 11 alleged narco terrorists. If you remember, this is where I began this podcast series, because for me, it marked a clear break with the decades of US foreign policy in the region. The US attack on that boat in early September was the very first time the United States had launched a unilateral airstrike or carried out a deadly military operation on its own in Latin America in nearly four decades, not since the 1989 invasion of Panama. According to Trump’s national security strategy published in December 2025, his administration was planning to ramp up US intervention in the Americas with his new Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

He has made good on that promise. With the US invasion of Venezuela, the oil blockade of Cuba, the shield of the America’s initiative and the boat strikes, the administration labeled those strikes Operation Southern Spear. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Fox News Live to gush about the boat strike.

Speaker 9:

So we’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate, and it’s important for the American people to protect our homeland and protect our hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Hegseth was right about one thing. That strike was just the beginning. They’ve been ongoing since last year. There was a two-month lull, which miraculously coincided with the World Cup competition in the United States and Trump’s grand 4th of July 250th anniversary celebration. But in recent weeks, the US military has kickstarted the strikes again. This news report is from August 26th this year.

Speaker 10:

The human rights groups are condemning the latest round of US military attacks on a high speed boat in the Caribbean, which the Pentagon says killed four narco-terrorists. This is now the second strike this week as the White House targets vessels accused of transporting deadly drugs into the US for the past year.

Speaker 1:

But the whole justification for the first strike last September and everyone sense that they’re fighting drug trafficking is just false. This has never been about fighting drug trafficking. Most of the cocaine trafficked into the United States doesn’t come from Venezuela and it doesn’t travel across the Caribbean, but the Pacific. Fentanyl’s the same thing. It’s not made in nor trafficked from Venezuela despite Trump’s discourse.

Trump’s campaign has been about sending a message, even if it means carrying out extra judicial killings in international waters against innocent people, because it’s become clear that many of the boats they’ve hit haven’t been operated by narco terrorists, but fishermen. And contrary to Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s claims, other Trump administration officials admit that the strikes haven’t decreased the amount of drugs being run into the United States. In late July, the Washington Post reported that both Pentagon and DEA officials had said the boat strikes hadn’t impacted the supply of cocaine in the United States. Drug traffickers just developed new strategies. They were taking different routes, bigger boats, or relying more on planes from clandestine airstrips. One DEA official who asked to remain anonymous told the Post, “When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side. They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” Nevertheless, the boat strikes have continued.

Welcome to the closing session, hosted by the Secretary of War and Chairman of the America’s Counter-Cartel Coalition, the Honorable Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth spoke about this during a Counter-Cartel Coalition conference in Panama City on August 12th.

Speaker 9:

We have knocked the narco terrorists and the maritime domain on their heels. We forced them to adjust their tactics, techniques, and procedures, their TTPs, and operate outside of their comfort zones. We are retaking the open seas and our maritime borders. This is a bad time to get in a drug boat in the Western Hemisphere.

Speaker 11:

In one year now, at least 68 publicly acknowledged strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels right in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, extraditionally killing over 228 civilians.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston is the director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. He also runs SIEPR’s US Escalation in Latin America Tracker, which he has updated almost daily since last year. I just want to pause here for a moment to underscore that number. More than 228 civilians, and that is a number that’s likely to only continue to grow. Just to put that into context, before the September 11th attacks, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terror attack in the history of the United States.

Speaker 12:

If it seemed like war yesterday, the reinforcement showed up tonight. At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the federal office building, and in its shadow, the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close why they call it terror.

Speaker 1:

168 people were killed in that bombing on the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building. It shocked the nation. Yet the United States has unleashed a round of terror attacks over the last year in international waters in the Caribbean and Pacific, which have killed far more people than the second most deadly terror attack in the history of the US. In fact, the US drug boat terror campaign is deadlier than both the Oklahoma City bombing and the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting combined. Now, it might seem strange that I’m making this comparison. The US government has carried out the boat strikes, individual perpetrators carried out these other attacks, but I think it’s an important comparison to make. All are acts of terror, all are illegitimate uses of violence without any legal founding. The US boat strikes aren’t operations against enemy combatants in a time of war. The US government hasn’t carried out a trial against the victims or offered any proof that the people killed in these raids are actually drug traffickers.

Their actions are illegal under international law, and the result in all cases is the same, the extra judicial killing of innocent people, which undermines the basis of the rule of law in the United States, the United Nations, and most democratic countries around the world, that you are innocent until proven guilty. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

What is the sort of takeaway after a year? I mean, this is an assault on the rule of law. This is assault on international law. And I think you can see over the course of the year how these strikes serve this broader purpose of normalizing, rationalizing and sort of gaining at least some public acceptance of just the sort of trampling of international law. And now we have transitioned, or at least the US is saying they’re transitioning from these boat strikes to land strikes. It’s there. We’ve already seen, in fact, some strikes on land in Ecuador, or hitting a dairy farm, reports of torture of the farm workers who were there. And so you can see how this can extend and expand. You can see how the erosion of international law comes right back here to home, and you have ICE agents killing US citizens in the streets with impunity, and these things are connected.

These developments are connected, and they certainly mutually reinforce each other through this administration’s policies.

Speaker 1:

Ecuador has been collaborating with the US military under the Counter Cartel Coalition, which I looked at in episode eight of this series, and not just on that dairy farm strike. The United States has also taken some concerning actions against boats off the Ecuadorian coast.

Speaker 11:

This started earlier this year, the bombing of at least three fishing vessels off the coast of Ecuador, which took place in a very different manner than these other boat strikes we were talking about where SOUTCOM was posting smut on the internet about them blowing up boats. These ones were totally unacknowledged, and the reports that we’ve had from investigative outlets that have looked into it, local press in Ecuador, human rights organizations, et cetera, one of the boats first off is still missing and all the crew members are still missing.

Speaker 1:

People from some of those boats were killed and others have been returned to the country, but that was only after being abducted on the high seas.

Speaker 11:

Onto a nondescript boat in the middle of the ocean with gringo looking guys with US flags on their uniforms and being taken to El Salvador of all places before facing torture and abuse and then eventually being released back to Ecuador where they face no charges, it should be noted. And you mentioned in each of these cases, the reporting indicates that Ecuador and Coast Guards actually stopped the vessels and cleared them prior to them being bombed, right? Obviously, there’s been reporting, the Washington Post reported a few weeks ago that this was part of a clandestine CIA operation. The New York Times has come out with reports suggesting that the potential involvement of private military contractors. So there’s tremendous questions that remain exactly about who is responsible, who is involved, why this was happening. But what seems quite clear is that US intelligence is operating out of El Salvador, a CIA base that was white active during the Dirty Wars in the ’80s.

Speaker 1:

Jack here is referring to what we learned from reporting in the Washington Post in mid-August, which broke the news that a covert CIA program based in El Salvador was likely behind the Ecuadorian boat attacks. According to the Post, a plane operating out of El Salvador’s small Ilopango International Airport was likely responsible for the attacks during the 1980s. This airport was also a launching pad for US operations in nearby Nicaragua.

Speaker 11:

This didn’t come out of nowhere, right? I mean, it is really based in the past, and a lot of the people who are involved in this are really rooted in those previous episodes of right-wing dictatorship and US interventionism in the region. And so in a lot of ways, it is a return to that earlier period.

Speaker 1:

There is another country in the region whose conflict with the United States hearkens back to US intervention of the past, Cuba. So back in episode seven, we looked in depth into the US actions against Cuba, and in particular, the devastating oil blockade which is strangling the country, and it’s still ongoing. The situation in the country has only deteriorated. It’s ironic because the United States brags about how they’re sending aid to the country, and yet the US is solely to blame for the crisis. The US government could fix the problem almost overnight by just lifting the embargo, both the oil blockade and the larger embargo that the US has had in place in some shape or form for more than 65 years. Belly of the Beast is a Cuban investigative journalism outlet based in Havana. I spoke with Belly of the Beast Liz Fernandez in my previous Cuba episode of this series.

A couple of weeks ago, they released this great video report titled Helping Cuba While Destroying Its Economy. The word helping is in quotes. Here’s a clip. It starts with Belly of the Beast journalist Johan Rodriguez standing on a Cuban street.

Speaker 13:

Good news for us here in Cuba. The United States is here to help.

Speaker 1:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears on screen. In Spanish, he says, “I want to tell you that we in the United States offer to help you not only alleviate the current crisis, but also to build a better future.”

Speaker 13:

A better future deliver in cardboard boxes.

Speaker 10:

This is the first of a hundred million dollar humanitarian aid package promised by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Speaker 13:

The US government is donating 700 boxes of food and hygiene products. Each one is supposed to last 10 days. That’s nice, although it might be even nicer if they had simply lifted the oil blockade.

Speaker 1:

The video cuts to numerous Cubans who are suffering. “They give us 20, 24 hours without electricity,” says one elderly resident. “It’s the whole day cooking with coals, “says a woman. “I haven’t had water for three and a half months,” says another woman.

Speaker 13:

The boxes of aid are welcome because people here are desperate. If someone breaks your legs and offers you an aspirin, you’ll take aspirin, but when you wear soft, your legs are still broken.

Speaker 1:

That is the state in Cuba right now, a country on life support. The United States could fix it, but it doesn’t want to. It wants the people to suffer an indirect way to try and force regime change, or at least that has been the stated policy since the beginning of the embargo in the 1960s. And the Trump administration is blatant about its motives. On July 20th, the US State Department released a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. It essentially accused Cuba of infiltrating the US left over the last half century and being behind a host of progressive organizing, everything from Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests to pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses and “the rise of Antifa.” It’s incredible because it makes the United States look like it’s in the crosshairs of this tiny Caribbean country, the US, a country that is nearly 90 times larger than Cuba and has a GDP that is more than 300 times the size of the islands.

The report makes no mention of the countless US attempts to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro, undo the Cuban Revolution, and above all, the decades long US blockade on the country. Instead, the document paints the United States as the victim of a Cuban plot to overthrow US capitalism and Western society.

The summary for the report reads, “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never at root a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself, waged in part via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” Let me just repeat that. Persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. I’m not exactly sure what that inheritance is, but the report paints activist and leftist organizations in the United States as willing pawns in Cuba’s evil plans to subvert the United States. The document reads, “Through its cultivation of American activists, its infiltration of American universities, its sprawling influence and espionage networks, and its position as the spiritual hub of the Third World Revolution, becoming a pilgrimage destination for generations of new left activists and intellectuals, Cuba has played an instrumental role in shaping America’s radical left from the 1960s through to today.” It singles out organizations like the Vencerimos Brigade, Pastors for Peace and the Anti-War Group Code Pink as essentially Cuban front groups.

It’s a ridiculous claim because these are solidarity organizations that literally carry humanitarian aid to countries harmed by US policies. And this idea in the Cuban report assumes that everyone in the United States should just be on board with US administrations that punish other countries and peoples for not bowing to Uncle Sam. The document also accuses the New York Political Education and Community Center at the People’s Forum and the National Lawyers Guild of being influenced by Cuba. The document states, “From its very first years of existence, the National Lawyers Guild operated as a defacto communist front group designed to organize and agitate for revolution in the United States. It’s interesting that the document also spends three and a half pages discussing the Democratic socialists of America’s support for Cuba. At a time when DSA is growing and actually winning primaries ahead of the US November midterm elections, it’s clear that Marco Rubio’s State Department is interested in doing all it can to paint that group as Cuban influenced.

The document sums up all of this by saying, “These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Too bad that statement is not only totally conspiratorial, it is also not based on reality.

Speaker 14:

And it was shocking on every page to see the way in which the State Department’s report was reiterating the same claims, and many of them very fraudulent claims, that had been leveled against American solidarity activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker 1:

Bailey of the Beast recently interviewed historian Tayshon Latner about this report in his 2018 book, Cuban Revolution in America. Latner writes about how generations of activists in the United States have found inspiration in Cuba, but he says that if State Department officials were reading his book, they completely missed the point and blew it out of context.

Speaker 14:

But in reading Rubio’s report, it was enormously clear that they were reiterating, you could almost say regurgitating the same claims and some of the same material that had been circulating in the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI and the CIA both produced copious reports that claimed to, let’s not say prove, because I don’t know if even they themselves would’ve used that terminology, but they tried to demonstrate a linkage between American solidarity movements and the Cuban revolution.

Speaker 1:

That is what they’re doing now. Even before the report came out, the Trump administration was already investigating activists for traveling to Cuba in March for the Nuestra America convoy. Their solidarity groups brought 20 tons of humanitarian aid to the Caribbean Island. In May, roughly 40 US activists were subpoenaed, including progressive influencer Hassan Peiker and Code Pink founder Mydia Benjamin, who I’ve spoken with in this podcast. In the days following this Cuba Reports release, several groups that were mentioned in the document were also subpoenaed to testify before Congress, including the People’s Forum, Breakthrough News, and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Speaker 5:

Are you agents of foreign influence?

Speaker 7:

I’m an agent of my own conscience.

Speaker 1:

Manolo de Los Santos is the director of the People’s Forum. He responded to the Trump administration’s allegations against his organization on MS Now in late July.

Speaker 7:

I’ve been moved constantly by the belief that the United States has to do better and that we can change the reality in this country. If we were to accept what this committee is demanding from us, it essentially would be to accept that people in the United States have no right to protest, no right to organize, no right to express their differences with the US government. The Trump administration is mired in a series of failures. It has been incapable of convincing the American people that deporting millions of immigrants is the right thing to do. And therefore it goes after the people who organize the defense of immigrant families. The fact that we stand with the Palestinian people, that we say no to a blockade against Cuba, these are not fringe positions. These are the positions of majority of Americans right now. It’s our consciousness that’s moving us to say that these things are wrong in our society.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

Yeah, it’s a great example of our interventionist foreign policy blowing back at home and seeing these connections. I mean, this is pretty clearly for the Trump administration, part of going after its domestic opposition ahead of midterm elections, consolidating its own political power, but of course at the same time, justifying its illegal blockade and siege of Cuba in doing so.

Speaker 1:

Here’s the thing. I read through the report shortly after it was released and one thing stood out for me above everything else. It was like the report was grasping at straws, like it was trying to string together a random hodgepodge of people and groups to make the case that Cuba had infiltrated the United States and was responsible for leftist descent going back decades. It seemed like it was generated with artificial intelligence. So I tested it. I ran it through some of those sites online where you can see how much a document was likely created using AI. One of the results came back with a 96% chance that it was made with artificial intelligence. ChatGPT told me the likelihood that “AI was substantially involved in producing or editing this report was high, roughly 80 to 90%.” Now, I’m not saying that it was completely AI generated.

I don’t believe that, but the State Department did likely use substantial artificial intelligence in research gathering, writing, and editing. Okay, you might be saying so what? A lot of people are using artificial intelligence today. Well, here’s the problem. AI we know has the tendency not to argue with us, but to give us back what we want to hear. It helps us to find information that will support our beliefs or our objective regardless of if they’re based on fact or not. It’s called AI bias. And look, it’s one thing if AI is being used to write an email to a friend or to help me pick out my clothes. I think I look good in blue. Thank you. Those have very little, if any, geopolitical implications. It’s another entirely, however, if you’re using this to develop an official government document that will guide public policy and which will be used to attack your political opponents, that is dangerous and it means that AI is being weaponized to benefit a certain political class and silence dissent.

In other words, government censorship. There has been limited discussion about the possibility that Marco Rubio’s Cuba document was likely created with the help of AI, and I wanted to get a deeper sense of the implications. What does that actually mean? So I reached out to Tal Hagen.

Speaker 15:

There we go.

Speaker 1:

All right, fantastic. Okay, so Tal, this is what I’m trying to figure out today. You might remember him from my episode about disinformation and deep fakes on Venezuela earlier this year. He is an online AI watchdog. He’s now the director of Otis, which provides human-run intelligence services. Anyway, he’s an expert on artificial intelligence, and I wanted to get his analysis of what it means when AI is being used to develop policy like this. And let me just say that I didn’t ask him specifically about the Cuba document because I wanted his objective opinion about the concerns over the use of AI in these circumstances. Because we know that if you go on a ChatGPT and you’re chatting with ChatGP and you’re saying, oftentimes it’s going to give you back what you want. Do we see the same thing in reports and documents where if you’re looking for something, if you’re trying to find something, the document that is produced through AI has the possibility of also giving you what you’re looking for because you’re asking it to go out there and find stuff that would make your statement true.

That make sense?

Speaker 15:

Yeah. At the end of the day, something that we need to understand with AI is that AI always agrees with us. It always wants to give you a simple, fast answer as quick as it doesn’t argue with you.

Speaker 1:

Tao says that you can test this by asking AI something in two different ways. One where you’re trying to get it to agree with you about something and the other where you’re playing a devil’s advocate and you’re trying to get it to agree with you about the exact opposite thing. Depending on how you phrase your question, you can get either result.

Speaker 15:

But AI almost always will give you what you want.

Speaker 1:

But Tao says that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue or false.

Speaker 15:

For example, maybe I’ve collected all the evidence and then I’ve asked AI to compile that into a comprehensive report for me. It’s still my information. I just asked AI to help me build it. So it’s not an AI made report, it’s an AI enhanced report. So that also complicates things because just because it was AI generated doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

Speaker 1:

It also doesn’t mean that it was. For instance, Tao says, “It all depends on the input or information that you give the AI tool.”

Speaker 15:

Sometimes it also has access to the web, but it doesn’t actually understand what’s true, what’s false, and especially in evolving crises when things are just happening right now, whatever is on the web, that becomes the truth. And I’ve seen AI mess this up a lot. And so the bias is from what information you even provided in those documentations because when you provide me with documentation, I will ask you, “How do you know this is true? How do you know this is true? Where’s this from?” The AI doesn’t ask you that. It just assumes that everything you’ve given it is correct. It doesn’t start refuting your sources.

Speaker 1:

Tao says many officials and government departments, not just in the United States, are now using AI.

Speaker 15:

A lot of the governments, agencies, and individuals are using AI now to craft their official responses. We know there was some government official on Twitter who put out a post and he accidentally left in the prompt of making it sound better.

Speaker 6:

Madam Speaker, another concern relates to expectations.

Speaker 1:

There was also this Canadian politician who read an AI prompt in the New Brunswick legislature.

Speaker 6:

Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points. Madam Speaker –

Speaker 15:

The US government released photos of their war room and you could see them using AI, like writing different types of prompts.

Speaker 1:

Should we be concerned about governments, entities that are creating policy and an increasing use of AI and what that might mean for the policies that they’re creating?

Speaker 15:

Even when you’re writing in the Chachemia and you’re creating what you want or you’re creating a policy decision with AI, you are creating the report. But the problem is that your critical thinking skills are diluted because you are asking AI simple questions, you’re asking it to do the heavy labor. And if you say, “Find me an issue, find me an issue and then solve that issue,” you’re not the one solving that issue and it’s solving an issue just based on general information from the public. The problem with AI when it’s used by many different individuals is it replaces your own critical thinking where you no longer are researching the work, you are just editing it.That’s essentially what it becomes. You become an editor, you stop being a researcher. And so instead of you looking at all these different sources, trying to understand what the truth is here, what’s the facts and what’s the narrative being driven, you’re allowing the AI to just compile random pieces of information through its token generation and that’s the result that you’re

Speaker 4:

Getting. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 15:

It’s why we like things that rhyme. The reason that a lot of political slogans are rhymes is because things that sound good are right. If it sounds good, it’s right. It’s why when you look at the comment section of a right-wing activist or a left-wing activist, all of its supporters say, “This sounds amazing. This is so good because they’re hearing what they want to hear.” And so even though the policy that they’re writing or they’re talking about might be complete and utter bullshit, it sounds good, but it’s not based on factual information. The same thing is happening with AI where it sounds good to the user, but they don’t actually know what it’s based on. And so they’re essentially being driven by just a random algorithm.

Speaker 1:

In other words, ask AI to give you a report that says Cuba has infiltrated the US left and is behind protest movements in the United States going back decades and it will do your bidding. We can’t know for sure, but that likely sums up Marco Rubio’s Cuba report. With or without AI, this Cuba report is a dangerous weapon that is now being deployed against progressives and opponents of the Trump administration. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

I mean, I think just about everybody who read it laughed, but it is serious because this is about justifying war crimes. I mean, what we’re doing to Cuba right now is an active war. It is illegal and is an act of war. And yet here we are justifying it and at the same time sort of demonizing the opposition, the domestic opposition to those very actions.

Speaker 1:

The opposition to Trump’s policies has also been organizing abroad. On August 21st, 150 leaders from 15 countries from across the hemisphere and Europe met in Montevideo Uruguay for this year’s Pan-American Congress. It’s an event founded three years ago with the stated goal of fostering “solidarity among peoples and sovereignty among nations.” It’s been an important event for organizing the left in the region. The first two summits were held in Columbia and Mexico, both then countries run by progressive governments. SIEPR’s Alex Main, who I spoke with at the top, attended the conference.

Speaker 5:

The bulk of the people that were there are lawmakers who are doing their best to try to push forward progressive policies despite often being the minority and despite dealing with increasingly authoritarian right-wing governments. So they had a lot to share.

Speaker 16:

Good afternoon everybody. I’m Congresswoman Primila Jayapal. I represent the great state of Washington in the United States. I’m the first Indian American woman in the United States Congress. We are here, my esteemed colleague, Chuy Garcia and I, because we want to be very clear about two things. Number one, we oppose the Trump administration’s Don Roe foreign policy doctrine. We oppose the unilateral executive actions that Donald Trump has been taking without our congressional authority for both strikes, extra judicial killings in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. We oppose the use of military might, of economic tariffs to try to bully and coerce nations into actions that do not benefit the people of those sovereign nations. And we oppose the election interference of the United States in other nations’ elections.

Speaker 1:

Talk of President Donald Trump’s onslaught on the region was front and center, as were discussions about how to push back. Uruguayan Congresswoman Ines Cortez spoke to the press.

Speaker 16:

She said,

Speaker 1:

“Above all, the issue that cuts across the different workshops and debates is the current situation in which we still have the United States interfering in the local politics of each of our countries more than ever.”.

The former Honduran Minister of Defense and the former presidential candidate for Honduras’ leftist Libre Party, Rixi Moncada, said they must stand for national sovereignty and a multipolar world. She said, “The United States is a military technological and financial power, but the world is no longer unipolar. China, India, Brazil, Russia, the BRICS, they’re all participating in defining the new international order. Multipolarity is a reality and our stance must not be to trade one form of subordination for another. The Latin American dilemma is not Washington versus Beijing. We want relations with all the nations and peoples of the planet to engage with everyone, to submit to no one. There were also discussions among progressive leaders from Trump allied countries where democracy is being rolled back and there’s a breakdown of the rule of law and respect for institutions. Alex Main said the meeting went a long way in helping to build solidarity between progressive leaders from across the region and leftist leaders in the United States.

Speaker 5:

For instance, in Ecuador, and we’re beginning to see this in Columbia and also in Honduras, both those countries of course are now governed by right-wing governments since quite recently. So yeah, I think it was important for the US delegates to be hearing from these other countries in the region. They’re all impacted in different ways by the Trump administration’s policy, by the so-called Don Roe doctrine, which is really very heavily interventionist. And they heard about US electoral interference. They heard about the US support for the expansion of militarization in the region and this pretext of a war on so-called narco-terrorism to, in a lot of places, bend the laws or declare sort of states of emergency and deploy the military and engage in egregious violations of human rights. So there was a lot to take away for these US delegates.

Speaker 1:

Alex explained that on top of the Congress people who were in attendance, you had staffers for Senator Bernie Sanders and Chicago Congressman Jonathan Jackson, as well as a number of delegates who won primaries and who will likely be elected to Congress in November.

Speaker 5:

Three of them belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America, the other one supported by the Democratic Socialists of America. I think it was very productive, and I think certainly the US delegates left Montevideo with commitments to themselves to do a lot more on Latin America that is of course suffering a new era of extremely aggressive interventionism from the current Trump administration.

Speaker 1:

But it wasn’t all about the United States. Alex says there were meetings about the impact of artificial intelligence on these countries, a session about green industrial development, multilateralism, and of course, democracy, peace, and security.

Speaker 5:

That is what was kind of important about these sessions is that there was a lot of information sharing, experience sharing, and people talking about various policy ideas that can be implemented sometimes at the congressional level. But also, the pendulum is bound to swing back in the other direction in spite of the best efforts of the Trump administration and some of the other more authoritarian governments in the region.

I absolutely came away with a sense of hope from the conference in Montevideo because one, you had a lot of strong leaders from the region that despite the rise of authoritarianism everywhere are not giving up. In fact, they are optimistic about the future and about returning to power. They know it’s in many cases going to be a tough process because in some instances, democracy, the rule of law and so on have to be reestablished. So it’s going to take very strong people’s movements to do that, but they really seem up to the task. And what was also very encouraging was just the amount of young leaders from the region, a new generation of progressive leaders that have very big plans for their countries and for the region, and in particular for regional integration between Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Speaker 1:

The final declaration referenced Simon Bolivar’s historic Panama Congress, which took place 200 years ago this year. It read, “Today, August 23rd, we therefore unite to combat the renewed doctrine of domination in all its forms, defending the rights and freedoms won across centuries of struggle for self-determination, collaborate from respective legislatures to advance our own vision of hemispheric cooperation based on solidarity between peoples and sovereignty among nations. They plan to meet again in Brazil next year.” Hi folks, that is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. I’m now getting back on track and I will be bringing you much more in the coming weeks, both about Trump’s shadow looming over the upcoming Brazilian elections and the shocking revelations in the wake of the arrest of Argentine right-wing election fixer Fernando Serimedo. If you can’t wait for my reporting on Brazil, I’ve just released a 10-minute video from Sao Paulo.

I’ll add a link in the show notes. Also, please check out Belly of the Beasts reporting. They are so, so good at what they do. Many thanks to the team for allowing me to use clips from their footage. I’ve added links in the show notes. In the meantime, as always, you can find me on Patreon, that’s patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there exclusively for my supporters. As always, if you’re looking for more information, news, and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band Monte Perdido.

You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the shadows of co-production of The Real News and NACLA, it’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. The script was edited by Heather Geis. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. An updated version will be made available as soon as possible.

Michael Fox: Okay. Max, can you hear me?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, brother, you’re coming in loud and clear on this.

Michael Fox: All right, fantastic. Max, I want to tell you a story. It’s a tale of two countries, the United States and Brazil. They are the two countries with the largest populations and the largest economies in the Western hemisphere. Brazil is about the size of the lower 48 of the United States. And politically in both countries, something very similar has happened in recent years. In both countries, far right presidents come to power. In both those countries, the president spends several years unraveling democratic institutions and public policy. Then both those presidents run for reelection. Both the presidents lie about their country’s voting systems in order to undermine the elections and whip up their base. Both those presidents lose their reelections. They both claim fraud and then they both try to carry out a coup to stay in power. But that is where these two paths diverge. In the United States, President Donald Trump continues to peddle his lies about the election.
He creates his own social media platform and uses it to push his agenda. He returns to power in 2025. You know the story. In Brazil, however, the country’s supreme electoral court blocks former President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years because of the lies he told about the country’s electoral system. It is not censorship. It’s a different interpretation of free speech, one that says the right to free expression must be balanced within the other rights in the country and the country’s democratic system. To quote Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Bolsonaro is basically being punished by something that he said about the electoral system.

Michael Fox: I’ve been speaking lately with Fabio de Sae Silva. He’s a Brazilian legal expert and an associate professor of international studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: And in the United States saying things, propagating lies and misinformation about the electoral system, I don’t think it would be punishable at all under any circumstance because of how strong the protection to free speech rights is in the United States. And in the past, I think a lot of people though of this as an advantage of the United States in comparison to other societies. But I think more recently there has been a rethinking of this and there has been an understanding that it’s not that other countries lack free speech rights. It’s just that they have other rights that they balance free speech rights against. And in the case of Brazil, because we all understood in the 2018 election that misinformation was a serious threat to democracy, the legal system began to offer a response.

Michael Fox: In 2023, Bolsonado was banned from running again. And if you’ve been following news on Brazil, you know that he was later sentenced to 27 years in jail. He’s currently under house arrest because of health issues. He was sentenced for his participation in a plot to carry out a coup and overturn his 2022 electoral loss and to even assassinate leftist President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In other words, in the United States, Trump is allowed to say what he wants, disparage the electoral system, create his own social media platform, spread as many lies as he likes, and he is awarded for it by being allowed to run again and win reelection where he is now presiding over an assault on free speech rights, the likes of which we have not seen in modern day history in the United States. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Bolsonado is banned from running and he is in jail.
And here’s the point. The roots of all of this, the roots of this difference are the two countries’ vision and interpretation of free speech.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: All these things that Bolsonado has been accused of at the center of them was speech because what the federal police points to in their investigation is that the attempted coup involved promoting publicly and even internationally this idea that the Brazilian elections had been defrauded. They associated with the attempt to co-ops the military to take over and nullify the elections basically. And also including maybe some more unorthodox activities such as assassinating the elected president and some judges. But just to stay in the first component of this criminal enterprise, it is something that involves limitations to speech in Brazilian law.

Michael Fox: In past episodes, we’ve been looking at the attacks on free speech in the United States. Today we look at how another country, Brazil, has pushed back on the fascist and far right wave with its own interpretation of free speech. And here’s the thing, Brazil’s understanding of free speech, as we will look at throughout this episode, is pretty similar to most of the rest of the world. The United States is the outlier, but Trump far right activists and owners of big tech platforms are trying to change that in order to push their absolutest interpretation of free speech abroad and undermine Brazilian democracy in the process. All of that in a minute. This is the Battle for Free Speech, a multi-part narrative podcast brought to you by The Real News. In this series, we take you on a journey to understand the important role free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today.
I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and I’m so excited to be joined today by Max Alvarez. He’s the editor-in-chief and co-executive director of The Real News and the host of the Working People Podcast. Max, seriously, thank you so much for joining me.

Maximillian Alvarez: So grateful to be here, brother, and grateful for all the incredible work that you and Marc and the whole team have been doing on this very, very necessary podcast. And also I’m just like a massive fan as you know of Under the Shadow and everything else that you do. So I’m very excited to finally be on one of the podcasts I’m going to be listening to from you.

Michael Fox: Aw, thanks Max. And in particular, I’m really excited to speak with you today because you are on the front lines of standing up for free speech, but also the working class and also covering the rise of the right. So you kind of straddle all of these things at the same time, which we’re going to be digging into today. All right. We are going to begin on our journey here. Let me just say this before we get started. So far in this podcast, we’ve looked back on the attacks on free speech and press freedoms today. Under the Trump administration, we’ve looked at movements using free speech to stand up for their rights. Today we’re going to look at how Trump and the far right are trying to push a US definition of free speech abroad in order to lift their agenda internationally and so much more.
I got into this a little bit in the beginning. Today’s episode is going to focus completely on Brazil and the role the United States is playing in the country. And today’s episode is a joint collaboration together with my podcasts, Under the Shadow and Brazil on Fire. Because as you will see, there are connections throughout. If you haven’t heard those, I suggest you go check them out.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh my God. If you haven’t heard those, I envy you because you have a feast in front of you. Under the shadow, Brazil on Fire. They are so good and so essential. And they’re award winning contributions that I guarantee if you’re listening to this, you are going to love them. So go check them out. And I don’t say that just as a collaborator with Mike on producing these series, but as a devoted listener who always learns a lot from them.

Michael Fox: Thanks, Max. Three things to say before we get started. If you have been listening to this podcast series, The Battle for Free Speech, you know how this works. I go out, I do a ton of reporting. I bring that back to discuss it here. Two, I love time travel. I often say that podcasting for me is the closest thing we have to actually traveling in time. So my goal here is to take you to another time and place and I’m glad you’re along for the ride, Max. And three, I know Brazil well. My wife is Brazilian. I’ve lived here for years. I’m here now. And I say this so that you know that everything that we’re digging into today isn’t just based on my interviews for this podcast, but on my on the ground reporting on this over the last decade. And I seriously have been wanting to do an episode like this for a very long time, so I’m super excited.
Okay. Max, are you ready?

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s do it, baby.

Michael Fox: Okay, here we go. I want to begin exactly one year ago today, July 9th, 2025. US President Donald Trump writes a letter to Brazilian President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In the letter, he announces that he’s levying a 50% tariff on all Brazilian goods. Among the reasons for this new tariff is the country’s legal case against Trump ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting to carry out a coup amid the 2022 elections. He also chastises Brazil for allegedly violating free speech rights. In the letter, Trump denounces Brazil’s insidious attacks on free elections and the fundamental free speech rights of Americans. He also criticizes the Brazilian Supreme Court’s secret and unlawful censorship orders to US social media platforms. It’s incredible to see the Trump administration lecturing anyone on free speech, but that is how our most basic right is being weaponized today. Anyway, moving on. A few weeks after that letter, the US Embassy in Brazil releases a fact sheet explaining Trump’s new tariffs.

Artur Romeu: It was like a one and a half page document.

Michael Fox: And I spoke with Arturo Romeo about this. He’s a Brazilian journalist and the director of Reporters Without Borders for Latin America. And he says he’s reading this and they mention free speech, free expression or censorship like 10 times. It’s only a page and a half, but the entire thing, it gets into just repeating this line basically saying that the United States is tariffing Brazil because it was promoting censorship.

Artur Romeu: Free speech is being weaponized against freedom off expression.

Michael Fox: He describes this as the United States trying to make it look like a free speech champion.

Artur Romeu: But actually what your distorted vision of free speech is doing is fragmenting the diferent ideas behind what freedom of expression really is and mostly the social and collective dimension of freedom of expression. You are only saying that people should say whatever they want without any kind of interference. You are basically ignoring completely the fact that people live in a society and part of the freedom of expression right is related to receive pluralistic, diverse, reliable information.

Michael Fox: And I should just pause here to say that internationally, and this is really important, especially for our US audience. Internationally, many definitions of free speech include the right to receive reliable or truthful information. And that’s key because in the United States, that clearly is not part of the equation. Anyway, this is a really important distinction between how free speech is generally understood in the United States and elsewhere around the world. I got into this a bunch in the last episode. If you haven’t heard that, you can go back and check it out now, but the idea is this. In the US, your right to free speech is generally seen as absolute. In other words, you can pretty much say what you want without repercussions regardless of how bad it is or racist or homophobic or discriminatory. In every other country in the world, every one, your free speech rights are seen as balanced with other rights.
So your right to free speech isn’t more important than my right not to be harmed. For instance –

Brian Mier: The view followed in Germany, France, and especially for the case of this conversation, Brazil said according to the Constitution, all human rights are equally important.

Michael Fox: Brian Mier is a correspondent for a Telesur who’s lived in Brazil for more than 30 years. And I spoke with him about this. You

Brian Mier: Can’t say that one human right is more important than another human right. So you can’t have one human right that’s absolutist in its nature, free speech, that would enable someone to limit or deny other people’s human rights.

Michael Fox: For instance, in Brazil or in Germany, Nazism is a crime. It’s illegal to be a Nazi or to spread Nazi propaganda.

Brian Mier: Because it damages the peace of mind, the freedom to come and go as they please, the freedom to interact with the public of certain minority groups in Brazil, mainly Afro-Brazilians, Northeasterners, but also Jewish people as well. So in Brazil, this is called the harmony of rights according to the Brazilian Constitution. All rights are equally important. Freedom of a speech is a very important right, but it can’t be used to trample over some other group of people’s rights.

Michael Fox: That’s the idea and this distinction is really important. And let me just say that as I touched on last time, in the United States, we also had this kind of balancing definition of free speech until roughly the Cold War in the 1960s. And that’s when our current day libertarian absolutist view of free speech really took hold. What’s interesting is that we don’t even really realize this. We don’t know this past, right? And yet our definition now of free speech, absolutist definition within the United States is now being weaponized by Trump and his far right supporters and far right allies abroad to push their agenda as we will look into throughout this podcast. Before we move on, Max, do you see this? Have you been seeing this battle over free speech? And do you think that people understand this within the United States, understand how free speech kind of is being weaponized and this interpretation of free speech is being weaponized?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yes. And I would say that we are not only aware of the hypocrisy of these people using free speech to take our free speech away or to impose their will on Brazil or other countries because that’s what we’ve come to realize our country does. That’s as American as apple pie. That’s in fact what most of the world knows America to be. They don’t know it anymore as the America my parents knew it to be. And my dad came to this country for, his family came to this country for. So the world today does not know us as that. They know us as the place that the most powerful country and military empire in the world that has been going around the world undemocratically overthrowing democratically elected leaders, undemocratically invading other countries and bombing other countries and torturing people in the name of democracy and saying like, we’re spreading democracy to you, you’re welcome.
And now smash cut to 2026 these sort of fascist posters of Donald Trump are draping Washington DC and everything that we’re talking about on this series unfolding before our eyes. And I don’t think a lot of us know what free speech means in this context. And I think that is why the takeaway for this discussion and any discussion that we have about it is like, well, what are we going to fight for it to be?

Michael Fox: Yeah. Max, I really appreciate you wrapping in this question of how the United States has justified interventions abroad in the name of democracy and how what we’re seeing now is the justification for the tariffs in the name of free speech, which I think is a great connection. In order to understand all of this, Trump’s letter in particular, his pushback on Brazil and Trump’s rationale for imposing these tariffs, we need to back up a little bit. So we’re going to go back in time. We’re jumping in the time machine, Max. Here we go.

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s go.

Michael Fox: The year is 2018. It’s the lead up to Brazil’s huge presidential elections. Former President Lula was the front runner, but he was jailed on trumped up charges of corruption. Bolsonaro is the Trump outsider candidate, longtime congressman, former captain under the Brazilian military dictatorship, something he is still vocally proud of. And he’s surging in the polls because of a slew of fake news and disinformation, the likes of which the country has never seen. Just one example. I was covering the election for numerous outlets and I went to this press conference for the then leftist candidate, Fernando Adaji. And in this press conference, it was just a couple of days before the first round vote and he had called it because his workers’ party had created a WhatsApp hotline to receive complaints of false or misleading news and memes being spread. They said that within 24 hours they’d received 15,000 messages.
24 hours, 15,000 messages. The day before I spoke with this street artist who told me, “Our election will not be decided by the candidate’s proposals or their speeches. It’ll be decided by the lies spread online. The Brazilian elections will be decided by the ability of some groups to push fake news and the ability of us, the voters, to discern what is and what is not real.” And that is exactly what happened. The voters could not discern. Most but not all of the fake news or misleading news were being pushed by Bolsonaro’s allies and supporters. The country was overwhelmed and unprepared for the disinformation campaign and so was the Supreme Electoral Court, which oversees the elections.
They were able to request that dozens of posts be taken down, but they just didn’t have the breadth of being able to handle a barrage of posts like this. In the end, the result. This is Bolsonaro’s, Brazil. The world’s fourth largest democracy has voted on a new president. Bolsonaro won the election with roughly 55% of the vote. I was covering the election outside of his home that night in Rio de Janeiro. And then Bolsonaro came into power and proceeded to run the country into the ground like I detailed in depth in Brazil on Fire, my podcast. He guided social programs, privatized state businesses, denied the COVID pandemic, pushed unproven drugs, attacked universities, much of which we saw under Trump in the United States as well. But in Brazil, and this is the reason why I’m bringing all this up now, the courts learned their lesson.

Fernando Paulino: Joseph’s system learned to create and to stimulate some vaccines for this information and misinformation during the electoral periods.

Michael Fox: Fernando Paulino is a communications professor at the University of Brazilia. He’s also the president of the Latin American Communication Researchers Association and a fan of heavy metal rock music, Max. In particular, he likes stuff from Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Sipultra, who he said stand for free speech. And I think that’s like, I’m sorry for the aside, but I think it’s really cool because in our conversation we got into some of these questions about how this heavy metal music has stood up for free speech in time. Anyway, he says that the

Fernando Paulino: Judicial system using the constitutional principles established some procedures to avoid misinformation information during the campaign and also before the campaign because Jaibosonaro tried to disseminate misinformations information or in other words, fake news against the political and electoral system.

Michael Fox: The other thing that came out of the 2018 election was they created Brazil, the Brazilian courts created a precedent for making it illegal to promote conspiracy theories about the safety of the electoral system. And this is key. I spoke with Professor Fabio de Saisilva.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Because there was one candidate who started spreading videos, fake videos of Bambagi trying to vote for Bosona and the vote going for Adat at the time. And there was a case that was filed against him by the public prosecutor’s office for violating electoral laws. And that case got up to the Superior Electoral Court where the justices on that court ruled that if you spread conspiracy theories about the safety of our electoral mechanisms, you’re violating the law and you can even lose your seat if you have been elected.

Michael Fox: Let me just pause here to explain why this is so important for Brazil because I think a lot of people in the United States might not get this. Brazil, if you remember, is a country that returned to democracy again in just 1985. For the 21 years prior to this, from 1964 until 1985, it was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that censored speech disappeared and killed hundreds and imprisoned and tortured thousands. That was not long ago. My wife was born under the dictatorship. For Brazilians, the right to free speech and every other right for that matter fall under the umbrella of their democracy. The democracy is most important. That’s what comes first. And that’s codified into their laws. It’s codified into their constitution. As Brian Meir mentioned earlier, their right to free speech doesn’t trump their right to free and fair elections. Okay, just want to say that fast-forward to the 2022 vote.

Speaker: Their politics couldn’t be more different, but both of Brazil’s main presidential candidates have gone into overdrive online.

Michael Fox: Campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation. You’ve got Bolsonado running for reelection against President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva, who is now out of jail clearly. And so campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation in particular on behalf of Bolsonado, but the Supreme Electoral Council’s ready. They demand flag posts must be taken down within two hours and then just one hour when it got close to the election. Bolsonado tries to raise doubts about the country’s electoral system. Fabio de Saisilva says that the discourse was central to Bolsonado’s attempt to cause disruption in the country and to maybe open the space for military intervention.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: So it was very central to Bolsonago’s speech as well as to the activity of his supporters on social media. And what the Lula candidacy did and the public prosecutor’s office sometimes did was to take those cases to court saying, “We have a law that says that you can’t say those things and these people are saying those things.” And so what Mogayas did, he was presiding over the Superior Electoral Court, was to just try those cases and enforce the decisions sending communications to social media platforms, ordering the social media platforms to remove those forms of content. And so there were some profiles that were taken down during the elections for spreading that conspiracy theory all based on Brazilian law, just as he took down some posts against Bosonago by the Lula campaign that violated other aspects of Brazilian law. So that was happening on both sides.
The only difference was that the Bosonago campaign was using this to victimize itself and to say that it was being persecuted by this censorship judge.

Michael Fox: So later on when you hear that, and we’re going to be talking about it in this episode, but from the United States and from elsewhere, you hear people talking about this censorship judge or censorship that’s been happening.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: That accounts for a large number of the cases involving guys and this accusation of censorship.

Michael Fox: Because there are measures in place to stop fake news and disinformation from being spread and trying to roll that back amid this electoral moment. Max, let’s stop your pause really quick. I mean, is this all making sense? Do you have any questions?

Maximillian Alvarez: Sadly, it is making sense. I mean both in terms of why these things happened the way that they did and why they didn’t happen the same way here in the United States. I
Mean, because you talked about where the roads really diverged in the past five to six years especially with how we dealt with these attempted coups. Donald Trump is not in jail. Donald Trump was not barred from running for president. In fact, he used the presidency to outrun the legal system and proving that actually power wins over principle in America and has now thus taken all of our institutions to serve his will. But I think in terms of why we didn’t do that, I mean the answers are very complex, but I think what folks just need to know is that should we have a more stringent, robust kind of understanding of the people’s right to truthful information and the harm, the social harm, the harm to our society and our democracy and not our health and safety by treating lies and truth as having equal standing.
That problem that really showed the differences in how America and the USA and Brazil have treated this question in much deeper ways.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. Absolutely. Max, I want to bring in an important figure here. His name is Aleshande de Morais.
Fabio de Saisilva just mentioned him. He’s a member of the Brazilian Supreme Court and he presided over the Supreme Electoral Court during the 2022 elections. As you will hear today, he has been a major thorn in the side of Bolshonato and his supporters for years, but he’s not necessarily left wing. He’s a bit of a wild card. He was appointed by Michelle Temmer, who was the right wing president back in 2017. Bolsonado supporters understandably hate him. After President Lula, he’s pretty much public enemy number one for the right and they’ve actually compared him to Superman’s archenemy Lex Luther. I know you like that reference, Max. He kind of does actually look like him, which is the reason why they make this comparison. Mordaise is the top person who they have accused of censorship in recent years. Trump and his supporters have joined the campaign because Aleshander Morais has been the top Supreme Court judge in Brazil to push back on Bolsonaro’s measures during his presidency and the fake news over the last eight years and the power of US social media companies in Brazil, which we’ll get into in a second.
But as Fabio Desai Silva says, he didn’t ever do it alone.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: He was backed, for the most part, he was backed by two courts because he sat on the superior electoral court where he handled some cases that had to do with speech and he sits on the Supreme Court where he handled other of such cases. And like I said, he was for the most part backed by if not all the other justices in those courts by the vast majority of those justices.

Michael Fox: But he was always the most visible figure, Lex Luther, but a good guy if you like democracy. Anyway, he was also the judge charged with investigating what would become known as Bolshonato’s hate cabinet. And this is crazy, Max. I don’t know if you remember hearing about this, but imagine if you will, a troll farm inside the White House with connections to right-wing influencers within the United States who used their power, influence and social media prominence to attack political opponents. This is what you had in Bolshinado’s government.

Maximillian Alvarez: Wait, that’s what we got now, baby.

Michael Fox: That’s what we have now. Okay, true. But this is an actual entity. It’s like its own little office within Brazilia. Fabio de Sali Silva, talk to me about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: As far as we know, it was a relatively well organized and hierarchical structure where you had people whose job was to produce content. You had people then outside of the presidency, big influencers whose job was to disseminate the content.

Michael Fox: This is all coordinated so they would target someone and say, “We want to take this person out. ” And it wasn’t always someone on the left. In many cases, it was a bolsonado supporter who split with bolsonado or criticized bolsonado for some reason. And they say, “This is the enemy of the day.” And everyone would just pile on posting whatever they could about that person to intimidate them and make them stop criticizing bolsonada or whatever. And when you say it’s what we have now, in many ways it’s true because there is no doubt in my mind that this tactic is influenced not just by… It didn’t just come out of thin air in Brazil. Clearly the far right is organizing when it has to do with tactics and things like this.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. And Bolsonaro is like government. It was like sort of a department within a government that was still trying to present itself as a government. In the United States, it’s Trump. And so the fish drops from the head down. So it’s just like Trump is the megaphone who owns his own social media platform who is sicking his entire government apparatus and his billionaire oligarch network to gobble up all the legacy media, destroy the ones that he doesn’t like, yada, yada, yada.

Michael Fox: So Ali Shander de Morais is the point person for the investigations. He coordinates this together with the federal police and they work to undo this and they do an incredible job at it. So they issue search and seizure warrants, arrest warrants. Some Bolsonaro influencers went to jail, others had their social media accounts blocked. And this is just another example of why Morais is so hated by Bolsonaro and his people. Anyway, 2022. Lulu wins the elections, but then Bolsonaro supporters hit the streets.

Maximillian Alvarez: The president’s office may have conceded a feat, but many of J. Bolsonaro’s millions of supporters have not

Michael Fox: They’re spurred on by Bolsonaro’s claims of fraud in the elections. They block roads across the country. They set up vigils in front of military barracks all across Brazil demanding that the military rise up to overturn the results and they stay there for more than two months and then on January 8th, 2023. Balsinado supporters invade the Brazilian Congress and Supreme Court. They attacked the buildings causing more than $3 million in damage in a copycat performance of January 6th, 2021, Washington.
I should probably also say that the police response, because we’re talking about free speech right now, but I should probably say that the police response to the Bolsonaro protests before January 8th was initially pretty lenient, like far more lenient than you would see in the United States if thousands of people decided to block roads all across the country and then set up vigils in front of military barracks, you probably wouldn’t see that like, “Okay, you can stay there.” But in Brazil, they basically let him do what they needed to do. But after January 8th, when it was clear that an attempted coup was underway, the response was far quicker than in the wake of January 6th in the United States.
They did away with the encampments. Hundreds were arrested in Brazilia. The Supreme Court would convict more than 1,400 people for their involved in the Capitol invasion in Brazilia. Hundreds are still in jail. I mention this all because like in the United States, many of the claims that Brazil has been imprisoning political opposition come from the legal response to the country’s capital invasion. In other words, some of the people that they call political prisoners are those people who are in jail or who were in jail or who were convicted by the Supreme Court for their role in the Capitol invasion. But again, this comes back to the idea of the importance of democracy in Brazil and particular Brazil’s interpretation of free speech. The point is here, you have a right to protest. You have a right to speak. You even have a right to protest for months.
You just don’t have a right to try to overthrow the country and don’t mess with the country’s democracy. June 30th, 2023, six months after Brazil’s capital invasion. The Supreme Electoral Court bans Bolsonaro from running for political office for eight years for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Five judges agreed that he used government channels and social media to spread misinformation about Brazil’s elections.
The ruling focused on this meeting that Bolsonaro held a few months before the election, where he told foreign ambassadors that the country’s electoral voting system was rigged and the elections could be manipulated. Of course, this was despite the fact that Brazil’s electoral system had long been internationally recognized as safe and secure. Brazilians celebrated the ruling across the country. It was the first time a Brazilian president had been borrowed from holding public office for election violations. Bolsonaro denounced the judgment against him calling it politically motivated. Max, can you ever imagine something like this happening in the United States?

Maximillian Alvarez: Now, no, but I think a lot of us had still had lingering hope that our institutions would hold and that we would prove ourselves capable of this as well, but we didn’t.

Michael Fox: So I just want to focus on this point I made at the very beginning of the episode right now to kind of tie this into where we were at the beginning. Remember how I mentioned that the two paths diverge between the United States and Brazil. Clearly I’m generalizing, but in many ways, this is one of those moments where you can really tell the difference. Bolsonaro is blocked from holding electoral office. Meanwhile, in the United States, Trump continues being Trump. It

Donald Trump [Recording]: Is great to be your president. It is great.

Michael Fox: In Brazil, something else is happening at the same time Bolsonaro is banned from holding office. There is a nationwide debate over a new bill that would regulate social media platforms as if they were television or radio. Tech platforms push back with all of their might. Telegram, for instance, sends millions of Brazilians a message telling them that if Brazil passes the law, it will “end freedom of expression.” Congressional leaders attack the message on the floor of the lower house. The head of the government coalition of the Senate, Randolph Rodriguez, told press, “To the heads of the big tech companies and their shareholders, Brazil will not be no man’s land. It’s a threat against Brazilian democracy. We need regulation. The big tech companies say they are tech companies, but more and more they’re acting like communication companies and our telecommunication sector has been regulated since 1964. Social media is the same.
Brazil had suddenly become the battleground over the power of tech companies to remain unregulated and free to push their agenda. At the time I sat down with David Nemer. He’s a Brazilian University of Virginia communications professor who studied social media platforms for years. And he told me that these platforms, as we’ve looked at in this podcast, they are not neutral.

David Nemer: These platforms are not just publishers. They are part of the message as well in curating the message.

Michael Fox: And this bill is really just about bringing transparency from big techs.

David Nemer: In terms of access to the algorithm, access to reports about the algorithm, understanding how these platforms behave. So we have a more transparent way of understanding how these platforms, like the role of these platforms in everyday life. This is why the big techs are playing hardball in Brazil because they know that if Brazil pisses this bell, then it sets the precedent and the other countries will follow as well.

Michael Fox: Sxzo that was enough for these tech firms to fight tooth and nail and the bill stalled in Congress. Max Brazilian lawmakers, they want to regulate the social media platform, say its censorship. Where do you stand on this? Do we need regulations for tech firms and social media platforms?

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, absolutely. And when I say yes, we need regulation. I don’t want the current powers that be being the ones who to regulate it, nor do I want the ones who are in power before to be the ones regulating it. So do I think they need to be regulated? Yes. Do I think we need a better system of regulation and a better sort of societal understanding of what the hell regulation is and is for? Yes. But right now that ain’t going to happen in this country where the worst parts of capitalism will kill the best parts of democracy. Any semblance of an understanding of free speech that we have had as Americans that gets that free speech is important for a healthy democratic society has been eroded by this sort of individualistic consumer capitalist model of free speech for me is the only thing that matters.
Like my rights and my ability to say whatever I want whenever I want is the only point of free speech and no one can take that away. But it’s like Margaret Thatcher saying society doesn’t exist. There’s only a collection of individuals in pursuit of their own self-interest.
That’s what they have tried to make true in America. Out of the same country that birthed so many incredible contributions to democratic history, that same country has been overtaken by this democracy killing capitalist serving system.

Michael Fox: Well, no, and it’s interesting that you mentioned Margaret Thatcher because I got into this a little bit several episodes ago. We don’t think that, for instance, a financial system can be completely unregulated. You have to have rules. It can’t just be a free for all. There have to be certain rules or else what happens? You have massive monopolies. You have massive corporations with huge power, which we do right now, but still there needs to be regulations and all these things. And it works the same way with social media platforms and with communications. That’s why we have communications, telecommunications laws. That’s why TV and radio are regulated. Newspapers are regulated. The way that most people get their news nowadays is through social media. There has to be some form of regulation. It can’t just be a free for all, but these companies are using the discourse of free speech in order to push their vision for the world and really sell their agenda, really push their bottom line, their profit margin.
They don’t want to be regulated because they’re a business. And of course, now they’re in cahoots with Trump even more.

Maximillian Alvarez: America is the land of deregulation. And so when we say we need to regulate these companies and that we live in a more deregulated kind of society, I don’t know if people outside of America fully grasp how deregulated we are. I mean, look at the way that big tech has forced AI into our lives with like no regulations whatsoever. And look at the effects that it’s having on our society, on our politics, on our children, on our sense of truth. I mean, it’s such a big world changing technology that has been allowed to just kind of flood every device that we use and change society however it’s going to under a system where the companies that own and invest in these technologies are consolidating power and collaborating with state power to ultimately, like you said, serve their agenda. And their agenda is basically continue to twist and bend and force the world to be something that continuously delivers more and more power and wealth to them at our expense.

Michael Fox: So I want to underline something here that underscores the question at the heart of this debate and I think is really important. All of these tech companies are from abroad. None of them are in Brazil, mostly from the United States, but not all. And they’re all pushing their corporate agenda, wrapped in the discourse of free speech, but they’re companies. They’re concerned with profit like you were just talking about Max and yet they’re actually attacking the sovereignty of foreign countries in the name of free speech. There’s something just so wrong with this, but because of the way that this discourse kind of permeates into the mainstream or the way that it’s covered and the way that they sell it, that’s not the way that people read this. It’s usually seen, oh, well, Brazil is censoring speech, whatever else. But here’s the thing, Max, Brazil’s battle with the tech platforms is just heating up.
Fast forward one year August, 2024. Brazil’s dispute with tech billionaire Elon Musk is heating up. One of Brazil’s. Elon Musk. Richest man on earth, owner of Tesla SpaceX, old buddy of Trump’s, or I guess frenemy now perhaps. Of course, he ran Doge, Department of Government Efficiency in the first 120 days of Trump’s second term. Remember that he bought Twitter in 2022 and transformed it into X. So in August, 2024, he begins to butt heads with our friend, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Aleshandre Morais, who we introduced earlier. Mordais orders X to take down a number of users on Musk’s platform who are actively sharing fake news online and who in some cases are wanted by the Brazilian judiciary. They are all supporters of far right President Bolsonaro and here’s just one example of someone Morais ordered to be taken offline. Alen Lopez Do Santos. He’s a Brazilian blogger who fled to the United States after being under investigation in two Supreme Court inquiries for threatening justices, spreading false content online and financing anti-Democratic acts.
Musk refuses Mordeise’s order. He calls it censorship. His app X still works in the country, but he pulls his team out of Brazil so they can’t face reprisals from the Brazilian judiciary. In response on August 30th

Speaker: A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has ordered the immediate suspension of the social media platform X in Brazil, meaning people there can no longer acces or use it. Ex-owner Elon Musk failed to meet a deadline set by the court to name a new legal representative in the country. The Brazilian court and –

Michael Fox: Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes. I spoke with Fabio de Saisilv about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Elon Musk is a businessman and like all businessmen, he doesn’t want to see his business regulated and this is what the Brazilian judiciary is doing indirectly to the extent that Mr. Musk’s platform is hosting speech that’s contrary to Brazilian law in different ways and the judiciary is pushing back against that.

Michael Fox: Again, these are corporations pushing their bottom line and Musk is also a free speed absolutist aligned with the far right. Aleshandani Morais pushes back defending his opinion. He says basically. Spread hate, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. David Nemer.

Donald Trump [Recording]: The Brazilian politicians have very specific interest in keeping Twitter the way it is. They prevail because of misinformation. They prevail because of hate speech that they promote and in Brazil, that’s not allowed. So they need a platform to create that sort of engagement and build their base. So it’s like a win-win situation for both of them.

Michael Fox: X was blocked for 40 days until the company finally gave in. Musk paid the fines and began taking down the accounts ordered removed by Morais. So in the end, X did everything that Morais wanted them to, but Musk created this whole problem for himself in the meantime and actually convinced thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of Brazilians that they should move to other platforms because during those 40 days, they couldn’t use Twitter. So a bunch of people started moving to Blue Sky or Mastodon or other places. Max, did you see this unfolding? Do you remember watching this?

Maximillian Alvarez: Not only do I remember watching it, I mean, I’ve lived through it and I’ve tried to navigate a media organization through it. Musk buying Twitter was a seismic change to our industry, the entire kind of way that our public discourse operated and who participated in it, right? I mean, the Twitter of old was in no way perfect. None of these platforms are, but it was a space where politicians, corporations, journalists, artists like public figures of all sorts kind of had access to each other in a way that they never had before and it is not that after Musk bought it. And I would actually just push back when you called Elon Musk a free speech absolutist, he is absolutely not a free speech absolutist. I mean, I think so many people on the right, particularly people in power on the right, like Musk embodies what in the internet age has come to be known as Wilhoit’s law, which boils down to this quote, which was actually left in a comment section on the internet, but it so succinctly articulated this problem that it’s become a meme in and of itself.
But Wilhoit’s law states that conservatism consists of exactly one proposition to which there must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside outgroups whom the law binds but does not protect. I think this applies not just to kind of like how people like Elon Musk see free speech. It’s always free speech for me and the people who agree with me and not for thee. Musk has censored plenty of people on X. Totally. Musk artificially alters the algorithm so that it’s artificially like visibilizing certain views over others.That’s the way that this stuff operates. And then you add on top of that, like you said, just the bare fact of these people are businessmen and capitalists whose primary goal is to get more money and power for themselves.

Michael Fox: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s so important because what we often see is so – called self-described free speech absolutists use that discourse to say that, “Oh, I believe in free speech for everybody and it’s part of this image,” which is exactly what Musk is. When he bought then Twitter, now X, his whole thing was, “Oh, I believe in free speech and everyone should have it. ” But in the end of the day, what they’re actually doing is canceling and censoring people that don’t believe in their viewpoint.

Maximillian Alvarez: And this is, again, the continuing line of how the sort of media ecosystem in America, it’s not just Musk and X. This is why the freaking Ellison family who just acquired Warner Brothers also has control of CBS and a controlling stake in the American owned TikTok. This is why Silicon Valley oligarch and Trump advisor Mark and Dreesen is the primary backer of Substack. This is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, right? This is why Mark Zuckerberg controls not just Facebook but Instagram and WhatsApp and threads and so much more. You can subvert the sort of democratic principles of a healthy public sphere in which truth wins out through debate, inquiry and honest, open discussion by buying all of the platforms and networks and artificially imposing your designs and desires on the discourse and subject everyone else who depends on it for their information.That’s kind of how things work in this country.

Michael Fox: And here’s the thing, it’s not just the tech platforms. Far right activists have also been pushing their agenda of free speech absolutism or quote free speech absoluism and using it to cry censorship against Brazil. Here’s an example. The

Speaker: Hearing of the subcommittee will come to order and I want to welcome our very distinguished witnesses and –

Michael Fox: May 7th, 2024. Republican leaders held a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It’s titled Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy Freedom and the Rule of Law. The hearing was chaired by New Jersey Republican Representative Chris Smith. He kicked off the meeting.

US Rep. Chris Smith: Since late 2022, Brazilians have been subject to grave human rights violations committed by Brazilian officials on a vast scale. Documented right violations in Brazil include the political abuse of legal procedures to persecute political opposition, including jailing opposition figures on sparious charges, violations of freedom of speech and media freedom, including persecution of journalists, the silencing of opposition media, banning individuals from social media, thinly veiled censorship laws claiming to fight disinformation and many violations of rule of law and judicial malfeasance.

Michael Fox: If you heard what he was saying, you would imagine that the country had been taken over by a tinpot dictatorship and not just saved from an attempted coup. Among the individuals invited to speak are Paolo Figueredo, the son of the former Brazilian dictator, Christopher Favlotsky, the Canadian founder of the video platform, Rumble, considered the right-wing YouTube. And unsurprisingly, they painted a terribly disturbing vision of Brazil as if the country had fallen into an authoritarian censorship regime.

Donald Trump [Recording]: There’s one single name behind every one of these decisions. That’s Alexander DeMaris. Remember this name. He’s the defacto dictator of Brazil.

Michael Fox: Rumble will never back down from our mission. We are the tip of the spear in this fight and we relish that. We urge everyone, especially the US State Department to join us. The other person invited to speak at the hearing, the only legal expert invited, in fact, Brazilian University of Oklahoma Professor Fabio Desai Silva. Remember, I’ve been speaking with him throughout the episode.

Speaker: In your assessment, how high was the risk of the coup succeeding had then President Bolsonaro managed to gain the support of these branches of the armed forces?

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Thank you, Congresswoman. It was very high. I believe when you draft a decree outlining what’s going to happen once the military take over, which in some versions of this drafting even included the arrest of Justice Mogais. I think you’re trying to anticipate what you’re going to do when push comes to shove.

Michael Fox: And Fabio told me that he was there to basically clarify that in Brazil

Fabio de Sa e Silva: It has been a violation of the law to articulate speech that’s intended to undermine confidence, public confidence in the electoral system if you don’t have any proof of that as well as to, as I was mentioning before, pit the military against civilian power and incentivize the military to take over because of the history of the country. So one of the reasons why I was there was precisely to share my knowledge of Brazilian law and to show to the people in Congress that You cannot say that the Brazilian judiciary is abusing its powers because it’s holding people accountable for committing those violations of the law. And even if in the United States, these things would not be necessarily a crime or could not be criminalized. In Brazil, it’s been well established in Brazilian law that you can’t do those things. You can’t convey those messages, especially if you are in office sitting in the president’s office and therefore having all that attention at your disposal as the chief executive in the country.

Michael Fox: So that was 2024 and that’s happening on Capitol Hill Max. These are the debates that are happening in Washington, which are then pushing this image that there is censorship happening in Brazil. And it’s the same thing we’ve seen from Trump time and time again and his people is that if you repeat a lie long enough, then it becomes truth. But the threats from Washington and Silicon Valley are ongoing.

Speaker: Also developing this morning, the Trump administration placing sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over concerns of human rights violations and politicized prosecutions.

Michael Fox: Just last year, alongside the 50% tariff on Brazil that Trump levied that we started this episode, the United States also issued sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alice Andre Morais and his wife.

Speaker: Well, look, Muris is an activist judge that abused his authority by engaging in a targeted and politically motivated effort designed to silence political critics through the issuance of secret orders, compelling online platforms, including US social media companies, banning the accounts of individuals for posting protected speech. The actions taken by Muris impact US persons and companies and the United States did not tolerate maligned foreign actors who abuse their positions of authority to undermine freedom of expression of American citizens.

Michael Fox: Mordeise called the sanctions illegal and deplorable. He said the court would not quote bow to cowardly and fruitless threats and that he would ignore the sanctions. The sanctions were later dropped in December of last year, shortly after Trump also removed the 50% tariff he levied on Brazil. But the thing is, is here again, it’s the use of this vision of literally fake news and a false narrative to spread these lies in order to undermine a Democratic country, Brian Meir.

Brian Mier: The American far right supported by these crypto fascist libertarians in Silicon Valley like Elon Musk has teamed up through Steve Bannon, the point man between the US far right and the Brazilian far right and the bolsonaros and their allies to try and force a change in Brazilian laws citing free speech absolutism to legalize Nazis in Brazil and other hate groups and to undo the hate speech legislation and things like that. And the reason the Silicon Valley tech fascist social media companies are interested in this is that it’s to eliminate any kind of liability for their platforms being used to disseminate hate speech. And so they’re interested in weakening Brazil’s regulatory atmosphere so that they can’t be held liable for crimes, currently crimes committed on their platforms by Brazilians.

Michael Fox: And the problem, Max, is that this is not the end of what the far right and the US campaign is planning against the government in Brazil. There are high stakes elections happening again this October. President Lula will be running against him is Bolsonaro’s senator son Flavia Bolsonaro.

Speaker: At the end of this last year, my father gave me the greatest mission of my life to run for president in his place in October 2026 elections.

Michael Fox: Flavio recently wrote to Marco Rubio and told him that if he won, he would be willing to place a transition team at the disposal of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Trump is considering new tariffs on Brazil over the country’s financial system of payments and the US government has placed Brazil’s two largest gangs on the US foreign terrorist list. So it all is clearly leading up to the October vote. It’s clear that Trump and his people will be pulling out all the stops to influence the elections in the same way they’ve done all across so many other countries in Latin America. Brazil at this point is one of only a handful of countries still on the left in Latin America. All of the others have fallen to Trump’s sphere of influence and many are concerned that the US pressure is going to only get worse in the coming months and it will likely be using free speech as a weapon, using it in absolute free speech terms.
Brian Meir told me that they’ve been successful in Brazil with that language because it’s become a rallying cry for the far right.

Brian Mier: And so free speech is one of those things. It’s on their list of things that weaponizing anti-corruption, rhetoric against leftist politicians. And this take of free speech is definitely a weaponization of the concept of free speech.

Michael Fox: But he says it’s not necessarily an end in itself. It’s just a tactic for the far right to achieve its goals.

Brian Mier: That’s what it really comes down to. I don’t even know how much these tech fascists even believe in their own ideology. It’s just being spread around because the end goal from a business standpoint is to have total regulatory liberty or freedom. I feel bad calling it freedom, but total deregulation so that they can’t have any kind of scrutiny. They can’t be punished in any way for collectively brainwashing large segments of the population to supporting them and their goals.

Michael Fox: This is a really useful tool, this kind of absolutist free speech framework. And we’ve seen over these platforms, speech has become privatized. It’s not about our right to speak freely. What these tech platforms and absolutist free speeches are pushing is the censorship of other viewpoints of free speech in the name of their vision of free speech. It’s again, like I’ve talked about so oftentimes in this podcast, censorship in the name of free speech.

Maximillian Alvarez: So like the very reality of the world that we live in today kind of proves that free speech needs to mean more than just like my ability to say what I want when I want.
It’s much more complicated than that. These big tech oligarchs and the platforms that they own, the oligarchs who own the legacy media that we still have, they are proving that you can accomplish censorship in a number of ways while still sort of ostensibly bearing the flag of freedom of speech.

Michael Fox: Yes, absolutely. Max, I want to close on a couple of thoughts here that I think are really important for this discussion and also that shine a little bit of positive light on things that were where they are right now despite everything. First, in Brazil, according to recent surveys, roughly 60% of Brazilians are in favor of some form of social media regulation. According to a Nexus poll from this time last year, 80% of Brazilians believe social media companies should take more responsibility for the content they publish online. 60% of those surveys say they believed digital platforms should remove more posts than they do and 60% of Brazilians said that regulating these platforms is essential to tackling anti-democratic content and hate speech. There is a 2014 Brazilian law titled the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, which was really important when it came out and it can be used to hold companies accountable in some cases, in particular when they don’t apply with court orders to remove content, but that doesn’t specifically regulate tech companies or apply in other cases, but that’s one thing that can be used and is used.
The other thing that people are thinking about is how to democratize this space in particularly around what we want, public policy. So I spoke with Fernando Paulino. He’s a communications professor from the University of Brazilia. He’s the guy we heard up from up top and I love how he says this, Max. He said we should be thinking in terms not of freedom but of fairness.

Fernando Paulino: It’s important to establish these parameters, especially during electoral periods to organize fair competition. I think maybe we need to use this word as well, maybe the society needs more fair, more accountable, more equal principles to defend and promote democracy

Michael Fox: We talk about free and fair elections, but oftentimes there’s so many barriers to actually holding those elections, but the same thing works within the communication sphere in which in social media. How do we create equal principles to defend and promote democracy and to replace the authoritarian push that we’ve seen recently? And I think what’s important about this is also to look at something that Brazil’s been really successful at over the last 30, 40 years since democratization. Like I’ve mentioned in this episode, Brazilians really care about their democracy. And so one of the things that they’ve done really well since the end of the dictatorship is pushed to try and incorporate all sectors of society in the decision making of public policies

Fernando Paulino: To involve social organizations, universities, researchers, to expand the debate about communication and democracy. And I think especially in terms of the social media regulation and the internet context right now, this debate expanded a lot with more people involved in this discussion.

Michael Fox: And I think this is really, really important because what Trump and Silicon Valley tech moguls are largely demanding is corporate free speech, not free speech for everybody. They want speech that can be decided behind closed doors. They want speech where there’s hidden algorithms in which nobody knows what they are and they’re decided by Musk or some high end people within these social media firms. That is not free. That does not create a free media. That doesn’t create free speech. It’s the exact opposite. And so what Fernando talks about is the need for diversity when we build public policies around things like social media, online speech and regulations.
We need to think about how do we make these decisions in which more people are included, other voices are included, and not just rich powerful men from Silicon Valley. I think this is really important as we’re looking forward and trying to grapple with these questions, free speech, the whole idea of free speech is it has to be at the root of our democracy. And if it is leading us in the direction of less speech, if it is leading us in the direction not of democracy, but of authoritarianism, if it’s leading us in the direction of a space where less people have a voice and less people have the ability for their speech to be heard, then something is drastically wrong. And this goes back a little bit, Max, to what I was talking about in the last episode with Maryanne Franks.

Speaker: The First Amendment’s one job is to keep us from becoming a totalitarian society. That’s its primary job. Everything else is secondary. And if your free speech doctrine, if your free speech law isn’t keeping us from sliding into fascism, but is instead accelerating our path to fascism, then it’s not working.

Michael Fox: And I think we need to look at what do we want from our free speech? What do we want of our media sphere? And this is something that people in Brazil are trying to grapple with. When they weren’t able to pass the social media regulation law, then they started to piecemeal things. And so they started to look at, okay, well, let’s pass a law having to do with children and social media. Let’s look at this other case. And so they’re looking at how to break this apart and pass these smaller laws in order to still get in the direction they want to get into. We need to understand speech within democracy. And if that is being undermined as it clearly is right now and when countries like the United States are using the discourse of free speech to attack and undermine the Democratic principles of a foreign sovereign nation, we absolutely have a problem and we need to understand it like that.

Maximillian Alvarez: Mike, you said earlier that Brazilians are very proud of their democracy. I don’t think a lot of Americans are anymore. I think that we grew up to feel proud about it, but like right now there’s so little to be proud about. But also like I remember growing up again in the ’90s and early aughts and sort of being berated by older generations of how we didn’t know what these freedoms meant. We didn’t know what it meant to sacrifice and die for our country and the freedom of speech and freedom of religion and yada, yada, yada. And that was the sort of message that we got, but simultaneous with you should be grateful for all the rights that you have and go live the best life that you can with them. And like now is the moment where we got to fight for something and it’s not just something we got to fight for everything.
Everything that we hold dear is at risk of going away. Democracy and all the people who fought for that idea over the centuries is at risk and we are now the ones who have to pick up that fight. And I don’t know about you, brother, but like I’m ready to rumble. Like I said, I ain’t going down without a fight and I’m not giving up on these principles. This is too beautiful of a country. This is too important of an idea and people’s lives are worth too much to just give up on so that Jeff Bezos can have three more yachts and Elon Musk can have another trillion dollars and a space rocket to Mars. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is unacceptable and I will not accept it. Neither will you and neither should anyone listening to this.

Michael Fox: Max, thank you so much for joining me, man. I really appreciate it. It’s been fantastic.

Maximillian Alvarez: Thanks for having me, brother. Sorry I talked so much.

Michael Fox: Folks, that is all for now. Thanks for listening. Next time we hop across the pond to Europe to take a deep look at their definition of free speech, how countries there are fighting disinformation and also grappling with these same questions of social media. That’s next time on The Battle for Free Speech. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor. Go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. This podcast is now on Blue Sky, not X. Just search for the Battle for Free Speech. If you’d like to find out more about the Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox, or you can follow the link in the show notes.
There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. I’m adding links to all the people who I spoke with today in the show notes. A huge thanks and shout out to Max Alvarez. You can find his Working People Podcast wherever you listen. Also, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of the Real News. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez.

Jules Taylor:

And I’m Jules Taylor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So you guys all know Jules as the producer of this podcast, but let me tell you something about brother Jules here. Jules is a renaissance man. He is a podcaster himself, as many of you know. He’s a writer, a music producer, a poet, and a brilliant musician in his own right. And he does all the music for working people as well. And that’s why I really, really wanted us to host this episode together because today we’re actually going to be talking about the work that goes into being a professional musician and the realities of working and trying to make a living in the music industry today. And that industry looks a lot different than the music industry that we grew up with. Those 20th century days of vinyl records and tape decks and CDs and tower records and MTV, man, those have gone away and given way to this 21st century age of MP3s and music streaming, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, Ticketmaster, et cetera, et cetera.

You guys know what I’m talking about. And I love music just about every single kind, and I always have. And I need music to live. And life itself would be so much less, I don’t know, magical to me if I lived in a world without music. And my playlists and my mix tapes are, and have always been, I think of Frankenstein’s mix of just the cheesiest pop, the hardest hip hop and gangster rap, the most classic Motown, the rock and roll, indie, ’80s, ’90s, early aughts, Broadway soundtracks, movie soundtracks. Just like me, my playlists contain multitudes, baby, but I can’t read music for shit and I can’t play an instrument to save my life. So my understanding can really only go so far here, but I’ve always been and continue to be in just total awe of musical people. And Jules, you are a very musical person.

You live this, you breathe this. And we’re going to dig into this more with our guests today, but by way of, I guess, introducing the conversation, if you had two minutes, how would you sum up your entry into the world of music and the good, bad, and ugly parts of your life as a working musician today?

Jules Taylor:

So hey Max, glad to see you, buddy. Man, thank you so much for the invite to co-host this conversation I’m really excited to be a part of. And I guess the short and simple of why I decided to make Go Music is that I consider myself to be, to a certain extent, largely unemployable. And I sort of just dreaded the thought of having to maintain a consistent nine to five, but I knew music was something that I could wake up early if I needed to, but something I would wake up for anytime I could be a part of it. And so in some ways it’s the only thing that I can do, but in other ways it’s also led me to everything else that I do, whether that’s studio work or live sound and eventually things like photography and shooting music videos and podcasting, flying drones and everything that it all kind of just comes back to the central urge of wanting to figure out how to make a living out of taking a guitar on stage and just playing original and covers and seeing how to make a go of that.

Somewhere in there I decided to challenge myself, see if I could actually make a living out of it. And that’s ended up why I produced podcasts too. So many gigs come out of needing other gigs to support the music.

It’s something that benefits you to help support it in some ways. I mean, it’s like a dream, hope and a prayer, but somehow you’re like, “Hey, but I ended up with seven career paths.” So anyway, but that’s how I got into this stuff, man.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about this more, right? Because I know I have so many questions and I’m sure our listeners have so many questions. What is it actually like and what does it actually take to make a living as a working musician today? What does the music industry as it exists today take from musicians and take from the rest of us? And what are we getting in return? Is that bargain worth it anymore? And how do the working and living conditions of music makers and all these moneymaking schemes of the music industry, how do all those shape the actual music that we make and consume and listen to and dance to and think to and live to? How do they shape the ways that we relate to music itself? So this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and I am just beyond excited and really, really grateful to be talking with all four members of Veteran Chicago Rock Band, The Empty Pockets.

So they’re here with us now to dig into all this. And thank you all so much for joining us on the show today. And Jules, thank you so much for co-hosting this man. So let’s go around the table and have y’all introduce yourselves and your band to our listeners.

Josh Solomon:

Max, Jules, thank you so much for having us. That was so many insightful things you guys said already. I’m Josh. I’m the guitar player of the Empty Pockets and I started this band with Nate 20 years ago. Our singer and keyboard player, Erica, is my wife, and I have made a full-time living humbly, a humble full-time living in music and the arts for well over 20 years.

Adam Balasco:

Hi, I’m Adam. I play drums with the Empty Pockets, but also as a working band, I do a lot. We all do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with music. So I do customer service and shipping and we do warehousing. We load our own gear. We do a lot of work outside of just our instruments somewhat, unfortunately. I think we’ll get into that at some point probably, but yes, drums.

Erika Brett:

Yes, we are all Renaissance people, as you said early in this broadcast. I’m Erika. I play keyboards, so Oregon, roads, piano. And yeah, I’ve been a full-time musician for almost 20 years, maybe longer than 20 years. And my big role with the band is graphic design, merchandise development, and social media promotions and marketing. We all have a lot of hats.

Nate Bellon:

Hey, I’m Nate. I play the bass. This is one of my hats. We have a lot of roles and one of my roles is physical maintenance. And so Josh and I actually built the studio room that we’re in, and we have built this room out over 15 years or 16 years quite physically. We literally have done all of the work or very close to all of the work. And it’s just one of the things that you end up doing to become and maintain your status as a professional musician.

Erika Brett:

You’re also the vehicle guy.

Nate Bellon:

Well, that’s true. Yeah. It’s

Josh Solomon:

A physical thing. Yeah,

Nate Bellon:

Physical

Josh Solomon:

Stuff. Nate’s very mechanical.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, let’s not sell him short. We call that the getaway guy.

Erika Brett:

Nate’s perfect for that.

Jules Taylor:

Well, Josh, Erica, Nate and Adam, Matt, it’s so cool to be talking with y’all. And I think it’s funny how immediately in this conversation, there’s a sort of vibe of anything we have to do to keep doing what we’re doing. I mean, that’s kind of the credo around that I think of from time to time. But I guess I have a very broad question and in that broadness, I’d like to invite you to get as specific as you’d like, but said very plainly, how are y’all making this work today in today’s touring climate? So rarely do we get to speak to a band that has been together as long as y’all have. And so in this shared experience of performing, how are y’all contending with this changing landscape? Where have you had to pivot? Not just in rising gas prices and inflation and the evermore difficult task of convincing folks to put pants on and leave the house, but also in the merch game.

I mean, selling your music and physical media at shows has morphed into this sort of t-shirt and trinket hustle at times. So basically the odds of an independent band being successful in air quotes, however we define that, if I’m going to use the word successful in terms of carving out a meter existence, those odds are ever more stacked against us. And so what are you doing differently today compared to say maybe 2005 and where are y’all finding the most success?

Josh Solomon:

It’s Josh here and I’m 41, so 2005, 2006, I’m 20, 21 years old, totally delusional with no perspective on. How do I totally put it? Every time we go to a town, a fan says to me, “Oh, you got to come play in this place.” We’re in a 200 seat venue. Every time a fan is like, “You got to come play this little place in my town.” I look it up. That place he’s talking about every time is 2000 seats. People have zero concept. We’re like a 200 seat theater band. People have zero concept of the amount of things between us and the eras tour. And I think from my perspective, and I’d love to hear what you guys have to say too, to answer even just a part of that question is we’ve doubled down on physical media so hard and we talk to and collect, and this is working increasingly better, I think as a portion of the population feels more and more left out by the commoditization of music.

When you put music on a streaming platform and it’s the same every single song ever made on every streaming platform, which is different than movies and TV, that becomes a water tap and it’s just a price race to the bottom. So we basically, while we put our music on those services from our perspective, that’s like a token.

Erika Brett:

Yeah. We used to kind of be waiting for our prints to come, as some people say.

Josh Solomon:

Attracting an

Erika Brett:

A&R ride. Yeah. We had a song that some radio people were like, “This could be a hit.” And then you’re waiting for that to be the case. Now that wasn’t the case for us, but we were able to, over the course of the last 20 years, but really over the last kind of how you described 10 years, diversify our income streams. We went from playing whatever gig we could get to becoming a backing band for artists with large followings and then opening for those artists to gain awareness and gain more fans and also prioritizing an e-commerce strategy, which is what Josh was talking about, our physical products. And so we’ve moved away from streaming. Streaming is great and we also listen to music there, but for our business, we are directing people to physical products and shows.

Josh Solomon:

Jules, you had mentioned one of the reasons we all get into this is because I just don’t want to go to a nine to five every day. I want to do something different every day. So a couple of years ago, this studio needed repainted. And one of the ways you stay a full-time musician is you don’t hire a painter. You buy some paint and you paint the studio. So I found myself and Adam and Nate here. And Adam, do you remember what you said as we were painting it?

Adam Balasco:

Yeah. I always say I like any job, manual labor, whatever the hardest thing you’re imagining is weefing today, right now. I like that for one day, three days. I’m outside, I’m up on a roof, it’s cool.

A week. Turning anything into a career is so daunting. But yeah, that is how we save money and kind of stay afloat is like we painted that. You were talking about building this studio and then I was like, oh yeah. And then it’s white now because we painted. We painted it and stuff like that is how we’ve kind of taken. And we’re not waiting for that lottery ticket. We would love our song to go crazy on the radio or streaming or whatever. We’re not waiting for that lottery ticket. We’re acquiring fans one at a time and we’re doing all the work or we like to think we’re doing all the work ourselves and we’re desperate in a sense. And

Josh Solomon:

We’re doing it all. Jewels had the same attitude as us in terms of, I don’t want to be a painter for a living. I don’t want to look down the barrel of that. I’m impressed with somebody who can do that. I know some amazing house painters, but I’m not above painting. I’m not above doing some electric.

Erika Brett:

Well, and the thing with owning an arts business of any kind too is that you are going to inevitably become a Renaissance person. You’re going to have to learn about lighting so that you can make videos that resonate. You’re going to have to learn about editing. You’re going to have to learn all of these things about vehicle repair.

Josh Solomon:

The myth goes that when the Rolling Stones got to Chess Records here in Chicago, Muddy Waters was painting the wall. That’s the myth that when the Rolling Stones got to chess in the early ’60s that Muddy Waters was painting. So it’s not new at all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s interesting to me too, because so much of what you guys are saying, even as a self-professed non-musical person or non-musician, so much of what you’re talking about resonates with my own experience as a creative and a creator in media spaces and just that need to kind of adapt to an ecosystem that’s always changing. And there’s always opportunity in that as well as a whole host of new threats and stressors to deal with. It’s wild, man. We’re talking on a podcast I made because I was like, people aren’t reading my articles anymore. And that kind of process has sort of led me to get into audio reporting and now video reporting and any and all of the above I love to do, but there also comes a price with being able to make a living doing what you love. And I wanted to kind of talk about that too, because I can’t speak from your guys’ and Jules’ vantage point.

That is your art. That is still different from the reporting that I do. The two very much intersect. I bring a lot of my artistic heart and spirit into the work that I do, but I know just by being privileged enough to get paid to do that for a living, that it really changes my relationship to the thing I’m doing, to the ways I feel about doing it. And the love when it becomes a job takes on all of that baggage from all the unloving parts of life. So how does that affect you guys as musicians and the music that you make?

Josh Solomon:

Man, what a great question. There’s so many pieces of that. One that comes right to mind to me, and I want Nate to speak on this and Adam as well, is they both had children and we’re on the road and our dreams are kind of coming true. We’re at the London Palladium, it’s sold out, but a month into a tour doing something you love too, there’s an element of, do I love this the same amount today? And I don’t know, Nate, what do you think about, you had to leave your son at home for the first time pretty recently.

Nate Bellon:

Yeah. So my kid had just been born and then we went on tour in the UK for a month and we were in Amsterdam and all over the UK. We took the Chunnel twice. So there was a bunch of stuff where I was like, this is cool. I should be ever present in this moment. And also it’s hard because I wasn’t seeing my newborn kid and my wife and you try and balance that emotionally and then you get to play shows. So I get that sweet juice that I need in order to make it through the next couple of days.

Josh Solomon:

Jules definitely knows this feeling too. When you’re on tour, there’s the same amount of time in every day when you’re at home, except the part that you’re leading towards is like an hour and a half and the rest of the day is leading towards that moment or coming away from that moment. And it is an exhilarating but strange experience.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. And then you get to figure out that an hour is just a completely useless denomination of time. It’s just not enough to dig into anything. It’s not enough to really relax if you need to, but you have an hour before this one critical thing happens before you have another hour or something. But yeah, I totally understand that, man. Being away from home, it’s difficult to, especially with the sort of constraints that a lean and mean tour might have on its subjects, being away from home, being somewhat restricted in that sense, and being torn between these beautiful things you’re experiencing on tour while also having the regret of having to leave. I got a buddy of mine who plays guitar with Playboy Cardy. The guy is on tour with that guy playing arenas. And even he the other day texted me, he’s like, “My wife’s due in 12 weeks and I leave for tour in 13 weeks or something crazy like that.” But I wonder also, you guys also seem like you’re very chummy, right?

You’ve been together a long time, but I would say that touring and these moments also kind of create friction amongst band members and inevitably you end up with some comical story at some point. Do you guys have a singular story you could pick out of some sort of tense moment that resulted in something hilarious?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And remember, this is a worker and labor focused show. So we’re really talking about, give us a worker’s eye view into the labor of having to go on tour with each other and deal with everything you’re dealing with.

Adam Balasco:

Well, I don’t know. No funny stories immediately come to mind. I’m sure they exist, but being in a band is like doing a group project with your immediate family, which is horrible at times and also amazing. And it’s hard to communicate the band dynamic because it’s like I deeply love these people and we live in a van and sometimes an Airbnb or a hotel. So it’s like –

Josh Solomon:

There’s an interesting balance there too, and I think a lot of small businesses have this balance, like where to put your office, how nice of a neighborhood to put it in, that type of thing. For us, it’s like how much to spend on a hotel, how much to spend because there’s a balance between sustainability, vibe, morale. Man, we’ve cheaped out a couple times and checked into a hotel and you’re only there for 12 hours and it’s just crushing your spirit.

Erika Brett:

Bloody hand prints. Oh my God. Oh my God, you guys.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, what motels are you guys staying at?

Nate Bellon:

Was that the Bay Bries Inn?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I was going to say the Bates Motel, man.

Josh Solomon:

Yeah.

Erika Brett:

We’ve got some horror stories for

Josh Solomon:

Sure. And in terms of from a worker perspective, there’s nothing reasonable or OSHA friendly about how a band operates at our level at all, right? It’s like in the band at 7:00 AM, maybe stop for a lunch. We have a tour manager who does most of our driving. Then before that, it must have been really unsafe.

Adam Balasco:

Definitely.

Josh Solomon:

It

Adam Balasco:

Was just us.

Josh Solomon:

It was just us. And you go to an interview, you load in. The days are 14 and 15 hours. I always call on tour a processing deficit. You can’t even go through what you did today before you get tomorrow. And we’ve learned a lot about how to plan better, about how to demand more. I like to say a gig is legitimate when they offer you a meal. Sometimes you go to a gig and you’re there from 4:00 PM to 1:0 AM and you’re like, “Is there anything to eat around here?” And they’re not like, “Not within two miles.” Who

Erika Brett:

Wants to help with that? Why?

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. Yeah. Or the green room plate of mac and cheese. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a testament every time I talk to musicians, you can tell who’s really giving it a go because they have all of the ingredients for the recipe. They have all the social media, all the marketing. They actually have the website, the domain, the EPK, the video, the bio written by a third party that you probably paid someone for. All of these different things, this elaborate recipe that just equates out to a starting point, right? Yeah. It’s

Josh Solomon:

So depressing. It’s a starting point.

Jules Taylor:

It’s all a starting point. Yeah. Tell me. You

Josh Solomon:

Were using it as a metaphor, but just to exemplify, we’re the empty pockets. We take that seriously. We write about labor issues. Our next album is called Dear Billionaires. And to that effect, especially when we open for someone on a tour, back them up, there’s an elaborate rider in that deli tray and chips, whatever, all this food, fruit. We have permanent coolers. We never leave a venue without as much food and ingredients. We have banned salt and pepper. We literally stop at a picnic table on the side of the road and unpack our coolers, and that’s mostly lunch. And we’ve really embraced that. And

Erika Brett:

We really have to be thrifty in every part of what we do. Not only have the margins gotten worse, like you were saying everywhere, in hotels, gas, food, all the things that make our engine run, but I was watching the Today Show this morning. It happened to be on, and they’re giving financial advice. And without a steady paycheck, none of those things work for us. We can’t go to a financial planner in the same way somebody with a 401k or just even a regular paycheck can. We really have to take saving money and spending it carefully very seriously.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. It’s just a testament in so many ways whenever I talk to any musician who’s making this go and making it work is that you don’t really need the bosses because the workers can do anything under any conditions with any circumstances that come up on the road with unsure pay and just questionable sleeping conditions. It’s like where there is determination and this deep written desire to create music and to do this as a main vocation, as a focus, as a primary way of living your life. It’s just a testament to the incredible sort of willpower that comes from artists who will do anything to continue being able to create art. And so I’m not worried about a dictatorship of the proletariat at all because have you seen some of the musicians we talk to people?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, that’s what I wanted to ask about actually, is because music, as far as any of us, and I say us as musical and non-musical people, but living in America, having the culture industry that we have, music was as much a potential career path as being a famous actor or a famous athlete. I mean, there is a sort of level of super stardom that was selectively occupied by people like us, it seemed, growing up. And it was possible to play music that was so good that reached so many people that you could make not just a living, but a superstar’s living. And you could have all the security you could ever need and the fight from your humble beginnings and insecurities would all be worth it if you made it to that star echelon. I mean, same thing goes for the way I thought about being a professional basketball player with my brothers for many years growing up, or even people now who are in the media and see the media as the only path for success in journalism or in the media is the superstar path where you’re getting paid so much and you have such a far reach that you’re Joe Rogan and you can kind of have that echelon that none of us are ever going to ever reach.

But I say that all to say, obviously there’s always going to be a lot of folks who still look at these industries and vocations and arts and sports this way, but I think the veil’s been lifted for a lot of us and we’re like, “That ain’t happening. I ain’t making it and no one else is making it in today’s economy in that kind of direction.” And there is a lot to be mourned about that, but I think there’s also something that’s very liberating when we are not pursuing our passions out of a place of desperation or out of desires for lavish, luxurious, ridiculous wealth. And that struck me in something that I’d heard y’all, Josh and everyone with the empty pockets is not something that you’ve been aiming for, but you want to make a good middle class living. And so I wanted to kind of meditate on that.

Once we sort of recalibrate our visions, our imaginations and our hopes for what we want to do with this, what does that give you back that a career trying to make it in a Spotify age as a superstar would take from you otherwise?

Josh Solomon:

Yeah, totally agree, man. I like to think of it also, it’s like becoming an astronaut to say, “Oh, I’m going to go have John Mayer’s career or I’m going to go have Taylor Swift’s career.” It’s absurd. More than ever, and I think it’s good, the niche-ification of taste has made it so there are even fewer superstars than there used to be. There are very, very few superstars. Like I said, when I was in my 20s, I had these delusions and I let those go and I discovered about myself. And I think you guys would agree that more than the massive success, because for the most part there are exceptions, that comes with chains, with you were successful in this lane and now you have to deliver this thing. Brilliant people like that guy Larry, the cable guy, his persona, you’re stuck there. You have to deliver your thing.

What I want more than anything else, which we have a lot of, is freedom. We make enough money to get by, but we can do whatever we want. Our biggest constraint artistically is ourselves. That’s what keeps me going.

Nate Bellon:

Jules, you had mentioned it previously, the changing landscape of the music industry. And I think one of the things, because we started as a band in 2006, so the music industry was literally falling apart or had already fallen apart and some of the gatekeepers or higher ups hadn’t admitted it to themselves. The nature of the landscape was changing. And so we found that certain people that we would hire in positions, that’s their mindset. Let’s get you to superstardom level. And I feel like going through that cycle a couple of two, three times, we were able to not only learn, but then solidify both in our minds and then out wow later, here’s what we consider success.

Josh Solomon:

It’s such a good point.

Nate Bellon:

If we can just do that, we’re a success.

Josh Solomon:

And philosophically, when Eric and I met before we got married, one of our first dates, we went on and on to each other about scale. And Adam feels passionately about this as well. There are certain things in the world that need scale, right? We shouldn’t do small businesses to get to the moon. I get that. We need a certain amount of scale to make computer chips, but that doesn’t mean every burger joint and coffee shop and bookstore needs to be scaled. And there’s an element, okay, we have economies of scale on one side, but there’s an element of massive inefficiency. And what we found, and we keep finding in entertainment in general, is that the basic strategy to make someone a superstar is brutal Millions on raw awareness. Blanket,

Erika Brett:

Blanket marketing.

Josh Solomon:

That’s why people get annoyed about hit songs because they’re hearing a song over and over again that’s not even meant for them. Nobody wrote Espresso for me. There was, but why did I hear it a hundred times? I wasn’t interested. I gave zero indication of the choices I made in my life.

Erika Brett:

Sabrina, it’s for me. It’s for me.

Josh Solomon:

And we have the ability with technology to target so accurately now. So the major labels, including big movies, Marvel movies and stuff, they’re all still doing this super inefficient. And we’ve decided the opposite. We want to build our small business and keep building it, getting razor focused. We get new fans every day and we’re trying to maximize their fandom of us and their value to us, but without worrying about getting to 10 million people a year.

Erika Brett:

What I think you guys will appreciate is that we are a band and yes, we’re making music, but we took e-commerce strategies that are not based on music, that were based on books or smaller items. And we kind of did our own authentic application of that for our career. And that has allowed us to expand our audience and find our audience through advertising, targeted ads and word of mouth.

Josh Solomon:

Touring is about 40% of our revenue. It’s something like that. A lot of our revenue is physical music and a lot of that is shipped from here. I’m talking about vinyl, talking about CDs. Not as many for us. It’s a different type of band, not as many t-shirts for us. So I’d love to do more shirts. And that’s all about just using classic commerce, e-commerce and marketing logic to build a fan base in the same way that a book company or a razor company would build their fan base.

Jules Taylor:

I love that y’all brought up Sabrina Carpenter because she was not on my radar. And then this last album dropped and her marketing was all over the place. And I just slowly got initiated into the house tour track and the one where talks about maybe it’s slow or whatever, but now I know her lyrics. I know her visual signature. And it’s funny. Come on,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. Manchild is a bop. The

Jules Taylor:

Whole album is great.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Manchild is such a bop. It’s such a bop. Men today need to hear it. It is an anthem for the ages. That and Olivia Dean’s Man I Need are two of the most essential songs that every fucking man who is alive today needs to hear. And I don’t think it’s an accident that our zeitgeist is producing such desperate, beautiful please from women for men to fucking be better. And I think it’s through music where a lot of men learn that kind of thing. And I think that’s a good thing. I don’t mean to stand on a soapbox here, but I didn’t realize I was going to defend Sabrina Carpenter so virulently, but you guys stirred me up, baby.

Josh Solomon:

And this newer album is fantastic and there are all these, you’re right, that thread is all around music. Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo has that same vibe. Maybe men will listen. I don’t know.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They will. And I think there’s honestly, and I’m just speaking personally here and then we’ll kind of bring things around the final turn here because I can’t keep you guys for too long, although I could talk to you for hours. I think I had reached a state of exhaustion recently and it felt like almost a decade long period of cultural exhaustion. And I don’t think I’m alone. I think a lot of us felt that and we receded into it, especially with COVID. We watched the same series that we already had seen, movies we already knew, songs we already had on our playlist. I know for myself as a lifelong lover of art and culture and new things, I really retreated. And I think part of it, not all of it, was fueled by the sort of feeling that it’s like nothing’s good anymore or the quality of everything is sucking just a little bit more each time and I’m not participating in it damn. I’m going to hang on to the things I know are good and just listen to those for the rest of my life. So that’s the kind of petulant place that I was in as a modern music listener. And again, I feel like I’ve talked to a lot of people who felt that same way. And I think that actually the Spotify algorithms and stuff sort of reinforce that sense of just playing the hits or trapping us in these silos, these cultural silos, instead of getting to explore and experience and find bands like yours that we would like but have no idea exist.

And I know that people are looking for that, they’re hungry for that. And I am so goddamn grateful when I hear it coming out of my speakers. And I guess to just tie a bow on the point, I’ve been hearing that of late with some songs that have given me some hope in pop culture of late. And I think a lot of it goes back to Olivia Dean, Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter and the somber. I think there’s a lot of necessary cultural discussion that is happening in and through those songs that needs to be had and isn’t happening in enough places. So I thank music for that. And I wanted to sort of bring us back around to that sort of beautiful, necessary part of what music is for all of us and what we look to music for. And I wanted to ask y’all, all of you, Jules, you’re included in this.

I’m roping you into our final round, but let’s start with what is your least favorite part about being a working musician and what is your favorite part that makes that and everything else worth it?

Adam Balasco:

I’ll start and say my least favorite part of being a working musician is that it made music work. And this was alluded to earlier, but I leave here a lot of times and I put a baseball game on or sports talk radio on or something like that because this saps a little bit of my musical energy. And so anyone who has a nine to five job and you get a pizza and some beer on a Friday night, you play music with your friends, know that I am so jealous of that. And the magic in that is a little bit lost, I will say. We’re

Josh Solomon:

Almost chasing that vibe.

Adam Balasco:

Yes. And paradoxically, and I love paradoxes, again, the strength, the weakness, the pro, the con. I always say we are band. We’re arts kids. We all committed to being artists. We’re artists. And the irony is we ran headfirst into running our own small business. And I was playing around with spreadsheets and exporting CSVs this morning as Ari was doing her design work as Nate is patching a hole in the- The

Erika Brett:

Asphalt.

Adam Balasco:

In the asphalt in the parking lot. And Josh literally has his hands on all of that stuff. And to me, it’s both. I like that. I like doing the spreadsheets, but also we do this, we do the drums and stuff so, so much less. It’s like a fraction of what we do is play music. Mostly we’re running a small business.

Josh Solomon:

What a great answer. I think my least favorite part or one of my least favorite parts is feeling like I’m getting in the way or looking down on or condescending in any way to the hobby musician. So it’s a similar thing to you and while not getting invited into the hobby musician world anymore, both the combinations. So it’s really similar to what you’re saying. You know what I mean? And when I do get invited to the dudes who didn’t great musicians who now do other stuff, maybe it’s just in my head, but I feel a little bit like I’m intruding. I don’t love to do. Erica is such a great singer and she doesn’t love to do karaoke and everybody goes crazy, but it feels like, am I intruding on this space? The paradox.

Nate Bellon:

Yeah. The least favorite part for me I think is early mornings, late nights while you’re chugging it out on tour. And sometimes those can become never ending based on the schedule. I don’t deal well with life without my, I don’t know, 10 hours of beauty sleep. You don’t get this good looking without a lot of sleep is what I’m saying. And so everybody out in audio land, I’m gorgeous.

Adam Balasco:

Very attractive mate’s very good.

Nate Bellon:

I’ve been compared to the Greek gods of old. And so the early mornings, late nights, it just kills you after a while. Every one of us, if we’re out for long enough, you get sick. And then you’re spreading sickness around the van because you’re all just sitting in a dumb van for hours. I don’t like that part, but it all pays off because while you’re on the road, you get the purest of the sweet juice, which is you’re playing music live and you all enter this flow state together and you’re creating art that may never exist again in this moment. Worth all of that early morning, late night stuff.

Adam Balasco:

And let me just cut off Erica really quick because we’ll get to Erica. Nate went there. So let me just say in case my wife listens to this, I miss my wife and children when I’m on a road. It’s the real answer. Sorry, Erica, go ahead.

Erika Brett:

Good job band. Good job. Mine is similar to dates whereas he was talking about late night, early mornings. What we do, the travel and the carrying of equipment and gear and bags that we do is hard on the body. And we went in age order in this wrap up and I’m the oldest. And as we get older, taking care of your body has become much bigger of a priority. And it turns out it serves the music part a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. You need to be in good health. You need to be in good shape. That’s

Josh Solomon:

Such a labor issue across the board.

Erika Brett:

You

Josh Solomon:

Have to take care of your body to keep being whatever profession it is you are.

Erika Brett:

And I had to do a lot of doctoring personally. I have a lot of chronic health stuff, so it’s been a lot to navigate. You come home from tour and you’re rushing appointments in and you’re trying to do things that you can apply on the road. So it is really difficult. But that being said, it’s led me on a path to be stronger physically, mentally. And the best part is being on stage, connecting to my best friends up there, the new friends in the audience, and feeling this cosmic moment that we share and no one can take away from us no matter what happens. It’s a radical act of joy and in a time where there’s fascism coming our direction in many ways, what we can do is create and give and be with one another and love one another.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well said.

Jules Taylor:

Excellent. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Beautifully, beautifully put.

Jules Taylor:

Man, well, to follow all that up, man, I guess my least favorite thing about being a professional musician is that everyone sees the work as play and then. So one instance of this is that I think of myself somewhat like a carpenter in the sense that I have a truck and I have all of my tools in it. And I drive around and it’s a beat up vehicle that takes me from contract to contract where I unload my stuff and I plug in and I do what I do. Right. But if I get pulled over, I’m not a worker all of a sudden. I’m a long-haired guy that probably has some weed in the car and I ain’t out doing shit. I’m out playing is what I’m doing, not working. And the whole small business thing behind stuff, man, it gets rolled real fast being the envy of every married guy being like, “Oh, you have so much freedom and you just go play music.” And it’s like, “No, man, I have bills, dude.

This is work.” But not only that, it’s like, “You must have so much fun doing this.” I was like, “Oh, you think I have fun trying to write heartfelt poetry?” I take this work more seriously than anything else in my life to where this pen and paper has ruined me. Putting pen to paper to put down some sort of heartfelt poetry that can also be abide by attaching melody to where I can go out and project that into the world for that singular cosmic moment that I live for, that is work. And people somehow think I’m enjoying the process at times. So yeah, it’s a weird paradox, man, because it’s like you’ll always be a disappointment to your parents who wanted you to become a doctor, but somehow you have to hold the knowledge of a doctor and train yourself physically to get to this apex of performance and you’re 40 now.

And you do this and somehow there’s still people that look at you and they’re like, “I don’t really understand what this guy does.”

Josh Solomon:

So spot on, Jules.

Erika Brett:

Someone said that to me in a mall once. You’re still doing that?

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. But it goes like, “Oh, you’re still doing the photography thing?” “What do you mean I’m still doing the photography thing? “That’s a vocation. It’s a career path. It’s a form of art. Yeah, I don’t know, man. But when you do have a choice in this world of pouring over Excel sheets or breathing in toxic chemicals, it’s like I’d rather the Excel sheets be my Excel sheets. I’d rather all this stuff be for me and that’s where I’ll work 80 hours for myself so I don’t have to work 40 for somebody else. Yes.

Adam Balasco:

Give me some toxic chemicals with those excels.

Josh Solomon:

I want to do it for myself.

Erika Brett:

You could talk about the baseball card gum that he ate that was like 10 years old.

Josh Solomon:

Great point, Jules.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Amen. Sadly, if you listen to a lot of the interviews we do on this show now, you’ll realize that we’re all getting blasted with toxic chemicals, whether we ask for it or not, but we’re all going to be part of the fight to stop it. And we all got to be part of the, I think, solution to our own critiques of the culture industry and the music industry especially. And I would say the same is true for media and journalism. You are right to not like a lot of the things that are unlikable, but if you want the things you like to continue to exist and flourish and give you what you get out of them, you got to support them. I mean, that’s true whether you’re talking about this podcast, The Real News Network, Jewels’ musical work, The Empty Pockets is musical work, independent creators everywhere.

If we don’t have your guys’ support, there is a very real chance that we’ll go away or stop being able to do what we do, even though we love what we do and we love doing it for you and for anyone who will ever hear it, see it, learn from it, get something from it. We’re in it to win it, baby, but we need you guys to be part of it. We do it for you, but we can’t do it without you. And so ending on that note, I wanted to just say that for any journalists and media makers and people who are interested in making a career out of that, since it’s the one part of this discussion I can speak on, the advice I tend to give people is that don’t commit yourself to doing this for a living, commit yourself to doing it to fight for life and follow where that leads you.

And in fact, it may be right and good and better for you to have multiple sources of income so that you don’t have to make the object of your devotion and your skill serve all these other ends, which means you’re not going to be able to do it the way that you want to. The work is going to suffer, you are going to suffer, but there are still some pathways available to come join me at the table of the suffering and do this work professionally. But they are so few and far between and the ecosystem is changing so much. So I can’t in good conscience advise anyone or coach anyone on that. I can just tell you that I am what I did to get where I am, what I think we all need to do to do the work that needs to be done, but the future is never assured and we don’t know what the landscape is going to look like in the coming years.

So that would be my central advice is you got to make a living however you can. And if you’re committed to this, do it, but don’t make it all dependent on your ability to make a living from it because that may actually be more of a devil’s bargain than you’re looking for, and it may take the love of this from you. So just be very mindful of that. And now to all the musicians, the artists, the creators who have been listening to you brilliant people talk about your working lives for the past hour, I wanted to kind of give y’all the last word on that, like any sort of advice you would give to other working artists out there or other folks who want to make a living making art. And also please tell our good listeners where they can find more of you and your art.

Jules Taylor:

And the new album.

Josh Solomon:

We’re the empty pockets everywhere at theemptypockets on Instagram, theemptypockets.com. And we have a new album out on Friday, October 23rd called Dear Billionaires. It’s our musical letter to the 3,600 billionaires in the world. I would say to all musicians aspiring of any kind, I increasingly agree with you, Max, and I have met more musicians, younger people that are saying, “I’m going to commit my life to music, but not commit my financial earning to that.” And I think there’s a lot to be said there. And I think it’s worth saying from our perspective, we are a very middle class band and yet still, I can think of dozens of times where we were so lucky where I look back and I think, oh my God, that happened and that happened. And then we toured the UK three times or that one thing got us 200 gigs.

So you got to be there. You can make your own luck, but still nobody’s getting anywhere on their own. A ton of people have helped us and we’ve gotten very lucky.

Adam Balasco:

I would tell artists, anyone trying to make it have realistic expectations. And I think for a lot of people that means coming to grips with you’re going to make $20,000 or something like that. You’re going to have to live on that if you want to be an artist for a good amount of time. And the harsh reality is, well, I think it’s kind of, again, paradox is uplifting and it’s harsh. A lot of people, I would say your art is fine. There’s great art everywhere that you’ve never heard of or seen. There’s great artists everywhere. A lot of people, if you really want to make it work, if you’re committed, you need to kind of treat it like a small business or something and treat yourself as an artist like a small business. And we don’t want to do that. We hate pricing of our artwork out.

It’s hard, it’s tough. But that’s the reality is good art’s everywhere. If you really want to make it a business, make it a business. Good luck. Stuff.

Erika Brett:

Yeah. I would say to piggyback off that, that balance is really important. Commercialize what you can so that you can keep making art, but don’t lose the joy if you can’t.

Josh Solomon:

Or find the perfect balance.

Erika Brett:

Or find the perfect balance. And I also agree that artists need support and that could change the world.

Nate Bellon:

And let’s not forget, the album comes out October 23rd.

Erika Brett:

You can reorder it now.

Nate Bellon:

If you want to pre-order from us, you can go to our website, pre-order it there. I have also been telling people to go to their local record store that they like to go to and request the album, pre-order it through them. Keeps the local economy going. We love local record stores. We want to build relationships with them. And we also want you to spend your money at a local record store.

Josh Solomon:

And we can say exclusively here, we haven’t said this publicly at all, we are going to be releasing a special variant pricing. So I want to make it clear, the physical CD is exactly the same. It’s not signed, it’s not deluxe, but we’re going to sell it to billionaires. If you are a billionaire, you can get our album, which we’re selling for $20 for $285,000. So that’s going to be on our website next month, and I’m pretty sure some billionaires are going to want that. They know they’re superior, and so they know they need a superior version, which is actually the same, but costs $285,000.

Nate Bellon:

I would welcome billionaires of all stripes to go ahead and take advantage of that billionaire pricing. And we handle all the packages. So if we see any billionaires buying the regular, we’re going to see that and we’re billing you. I’m not sending that

Josh Solomon:

To you, Elon Musk.

Nate Bellon:

No way. Jamie Pritzker, come on, man. What are you doing? The right version. We have a billionaire version for a reason. And to all the musicians out there, I would say continue to practice your dream, go after it, but also diversify your skillset as much as you can because you never know, A, what skill is going to become handy at a gig, on the road, dealing with merchandise or recording people, dealing with people inside the business. Diversify your skillset as much as you can and get ready to make a lot of bean recipes for 10 or 15 years. You can live on a lot of beans. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to make it just beans.

Erika Brett:

Yeah, be a learner. Be a learner and eat your beans.

Nate Bellon:

Eat your beans.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank all of our guests from the great Chicago rock band, The Empty Pockets, Josh Solomon, Nate Bellin, Adam Belasco, and Erica Brett. You can go learn more about the Empty Pockets and you can check out more of their music. Just use the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you guys for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network, and it’s brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the one, the only, the great Jules Taylor. And man, Jules, thank you so much for doing this episode with me, brother.

I though that was awesome.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. I always love talking to musicians in the sense that they have their ear to the ground for alternatives to wage slavery in this cursed system, man. And so however they can gain traction, however they can get ahead, however they can make things work, it’s not so much a picking of the brain of music theory or what music you’re listening to that happens within conversations with musicians. It’s more like, “How are you doing this? What are you doing? What’s working for you?” So it was really great to hear that from a band that 20 years, that’s a long time to be together. So definitely some cool advice in there and some really cool moments as well. I really appreciated being a part of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, man. It was great. We got to do more like this. And before we wrap this thing up, I wanted to ask where can people find more of your music?

Jules Taylor:

You can search my name on any of the streaming things or you just go to my website, which is julestaylormusic.com.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.