 So, the next talk is Mike Bonanno of the Yes-Men, and I think we'll just allow him to get started right away. Mike, please go. Thank you so much, and hello, everybody. It's so good to be here participating in the chaos. I can say that I've intended to for years, but finally, maybe due to the pandemic, I'm finally here, so it's great to be here after observing from afar for about 25 years. Anyway, I was told that the other day that I'm getting kind of old and that the Yes-Men are elderly now, and so a lot of people wouldn't know very much about the types of things or what we had been doing, and I'll admit I've forgotten most of it myself, so I looked through the archives for something that would introduce what we do a little bit. And I found this picture that you see here where I'm holding up an Exxon mobile business card, and then Andy, who's the guy that I work with at the Yes-Men, the co-founder of the group, is there holding a national petroleum council card, and this is from an event that we were at in, I think, 2009 or so, where we went to a conference in Calgary, Alberta, representing these two companies. We've been weaseling our way into events, conferences, and sometimes online types of venues for over two decades now, and representing people in power, and we do one of two things. Either we do something satirical and funny in front of an audience that usually thinks we are the most powerful people in the room, or we do something that is more utopian, where we announce the reality that we might like to see, like in our wildest dreams, what we might think Exxon mobile might say if they suddenly turned around and stopped being some of the world's largest climate criminals and had a kind of reckoning and woke up and decided to fight climate change. So anyway, there's been a lot of things that have happened over the last two decades in terms of the media landscape and the sort of flexibility of reality that have made our tactics more or less useful. Also, who's in power politically makes a difference because the types of things that we do, this kind of mischief, we find works pretty well when there's people who are movable, who's in office. Whereas if you have a total despotic tyrant, then you have to go to more tactical methods instead of the types of things that we do that are all about pushing political leaders to change or about sort of bolstering a movement, like creating some exciting, fun, entertaining media that shows us all that the people that we're fighting are actually really fallible and no different than you and I, despite the kind of power that they hold. So I'm going to go ahead and play a little video clip here. Hopefully it works. This is a video clip from our second, third Yes, Men film. We don't usually get arrested, but ever since the 1990s, Mike and I have been dressing up in second hand suits and impersonating big and powerful people. Hello. This is Reggie Lamprey Pauling. I'm from the Yes, Bush can campaign. Hi. This is Jennifer and Spratch from the WTO. My name is Francisco Guerrero. My name is Fred. I'm from Palo Burton. We weasel our way onto center stage. At least for a little while. When you're not even on the directory up, you're not even listed. How you don't even have a phone number. It's come to that, hasn't it? Perhaps what an elaborate one. For the first time, Dow is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe for the prank, which briefly knocked 3% of Dow shares. When the juke is up, it makes the news. It's a group of pranksters who call themselves the Yes, Men. An activist group called Yes, Men. It's not the way most people protest, but it's our way to say no to corporate greed. Oh, whoops. OK, so. I just want to give a little bit of backstory. We've made three films, three feature docs in the last 15 years. We release one, it seems, every five years. That's kind of a compilation of a bunch of the antics that we've the exploits, whatever you want to call them. But a lot of people ask, well, how do you start doing this? What why, you know, not in addition to why, how? And it all kind of happened by accident. I just wanted to start out by showing you the World Trade Organization headquarters in Geneva. This is obviously a pretty large building in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. And how did we get our first major kind of exploit like this was when we when we actually impersonated the WTO. And so, you know, this is their headquarters. This at the time was our headquarters. You can see this little hot here is where we lived. This is a meeting of the OMSA, the WTO. And of course, this is the kind of meeting that we used to have. And so people would say, well, how did you end up representing the WTO on television, you know, on stage at business meetings? Here we are standing with several dignitaries in Australia after a trade conference there. And the answer was is is actually way simpler than it needs to be. Like a lot of things with social engineering. It's actually a lot dumber and less technical than people imagine. This is Andy at a computer. That that thing down there, that's called that's called a computer. There's a television in the background, a CRT. We had put up a website called GWBush.com that was meant to be a satirical website for George Bush, who at the time was running for president. He wasn't president yet. But you can see that his banner for his website said valuable said education values, responsibility is the banner on the bottom. And then our banner at the top said valuable, educated, prosperous. These are subtle differences, but they're differences that make a big difference in English because they're. And of course, in this one, instead of sitting with his wife smiling in front of the Texas State Capitol, he's pointing his finger at black people. So it was meant to be satirical. But it turned out a lot of people took it seriously anyway. And it got a lot of press coverage. This is some old an old Netscape window, browser window here. And then, sorry, it got a lot of press coverage and actually George Bush denounced it at several. Press conferences and he made a famous quote at the time, although he made tons of famous gas and at this press conference, he said about us, there ought to be limits to freedom. That was what he was suggesting when when they asked what they should do about us for making this website that looked like hasn't made fun of them. We put up a website at gath.org, which a lot of people associated with the World Trade Organization, because GAT, the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was the predecessor organization to the WTO and the predecessor, the previously existing agreement. So we have that website. This is actually Bretton Woods, where they first set up the GAT, I believe in 1946. And then, of course, the WTO building that you've already seen on the shores of Geneva. Now, in the early 1990s, the mid late 1990s, there was a big global movement against neoliberalization and neoliberal policies. And the WTO is a big focus of that. And Andy and I were participating. This is one of the marches that you see of people mostly in the global south who were rebelling against the free market ideologies that were really hurting the poorest of people in many of those countries. And of course, there were protests like the famous Battle of Seattle, which was famous because it shut down the city of Seattle during an OMC meeting. And this is a great picture of what it's like to be to be there at that event. It was, but unfortunately, we couldn't be there. Me and Andy couldn't be there to experience this wonderful feeling of tear gas. And so feeling left out, we put up a fake website for the WTO. And again, it's a satirical website, but it's at GAT.org. And unlike the WTO's website that the WTO's website was very hard to find out how to talk to anybody there. Although they emphasize their transparency as an organization, they were very hard to actually speak to. And since their web page had literally thousands of pages of documents, legal documents that you needed to be a lawyer to understand, ultimately, it wasn't very transparent. And so our website, on the other hand, GAT.org, was very easy to hit the contact button and get in touch with what a lot of people turned out to think was the WTO. Now, that became news. And the WTO is an issue to press release saying warning fake WTO website. And so since they had actually then sent this press release to their entire mailing list, the Google algorithm, which was fairly new at the time, ranked our website very high in the rankings just below theirs, actually, without any warnings about it being fake. So many people would go to their real WTO website, would fail to be able to get in touch with them, and then instead would actually come to our website. And on our website, we posted these alerts like fake WTO website misleading the public just to make sure that people knew that we had that we existed. We wanted to help them help the WTO do this work of warning people about the fakes, the sort of hall of mirrors. So once again, the word deplorable gets used in reference to us. This here is the then director general of the WTO, whose name happened to be Mike Moore. And he was from New Zealand, very different. He's a former prime minister of New Zealand, very different prime minister than they have now, really. But he held a press conference where he announced that he deplored the fake website and said that they undermine the transparency. And so, of course, we published this on our fake website as well. And then immediately it gets picked up and widely, widely picked up by the press. So without actually going to Seattle, we managed to actually engage the WTO and to get them to talk to us, to address us and then to get several rounds of media attention that we used to try to redirect traffic to what was happening in Seattle, to what was happening on the ground with the movement. And actually, this for us, we'd been doing things like this before, but for us, this was like a really big win because we realized, wow, this took very little work. It was a lot of fun. And with absolutely no power, you know, you remember what our office looked like compared to the WTOs. We were able to sort of do these moves that would throw a mark on us. It was a much heavier opponent, like Judo moves. And so anyway, we got into it. So many people then were mistaking our website for theirs thanks to the sort of internet being so new and the, you know, the, I mean, the web, the World Wide Web and the way search engines worked that we got a lot of email from people, questions like, could you advise me of the relationship of Gibraltar to the WTO? And this is the Treasury Department of the Isle of Man asking us this question. So, you know, it's fun. It's entertaining. This is another question might be, I would like to interview a WTO spokesperson on South America's new technology sector. By the way, on the relationship of Gibraltar to the WTO, we explained in detail how Gibraltar was a rock south of Spain, a really big rock in the basically in between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. And the WTO was this, you know, human construction, imagination, organization, very different thing. So we could, we became experts basically very quickly overnight. It was a lot of fun. And then finally, we were so good at it, so good at being the WTO that we started to get invitations. Can the Director General Mike Moore address our conference in Salzburg was a question we got. And well, this is Mike Moore. This is what he looks like. And we realized, damn, we can't, we can't possibly be that guy. You know, this is a problem. We can't send him either. So we wrote to them and we said, well, we can't send you Director General Mike Moore, but we would very much like to send a substitute. And that's when they embraced the idea of Andreas Bickelbauer, Dr. Andreas Bickelbauer, which is a name we got out of the Vienna phone book, actually a friend of ours Hans of Uber Morgan had sort of sponsored our trip by leaving some cash on the table of his apartment and leaving us the keys. So when we, when we arrived in Vienna with our new thrift store suits, we were immediately ready to go to this conference as the World Trade Organization. So that's sort of how it happened in the beginning. This adventure in mischief, which is now last of 20 years doing these things in person was something that just almost sort of like occurred spontaneously. But then once we are onto that and into that, it became quite energizing and addictive sport thing that we've got a sport code that launched us onto the 20 years of fun and excitement. And we haven't quite landed yet, but I'm worried about that landing because it could could be a rough one. So I want to just frame what we're doing a little more. You know, some of you probably recognize this guy. This is Santa Claus. This is an actual photograph of Santa Claus emerging from a chimney looking at a photographer who happens to be crouched in this room in somebody's house. They both had to break in in order to do this. And so my point here is that, you know, we love mischief. We love mischief and we actually even love trespass. We love breaking in. We love breaking and entering the stories of crossing borders, crossing boundaries, changing shape, putting on disguises, the masquerade. These are the stories that really carry us through history. You know, they're there. There's some of our oldest stories and this season with Christmas is no exception. Now the stories have been hijacked and manipulated in a number of ways, just as all information and stories are in our culture and, you know, Santa Claus's reckless break-ins in order to leave gifts have become something hijacked by capitalism or in part created by capitalism. But the fact that we want to lean on this idea of him trespassing, I think, is really important. It's a key to something. So remember, don't tell anybody though as Santa Claus would do. So we have this, this history, we see it fitting into something that's sort of common to all cultures. And this is the idea of the trickster. This is often a deity or sometimes it's actually based on a real historical figure that's more recent. But all cultures have these, I won't say all, but nearly all cultures have these trickster characters. There's a few listed on this sort of cartoon image here, coca-pally of the Hopi or the Zuni, which is, you know, in the United States in the North America, original people in North America, Anansi, the spider of West Africa, the Raven in the Pacific Northwest. It goes on and on because they're everywhere. Everybody has these and it doesn't take too much digging to find out about your own trickster character in your culture. And since we're kind of in, I think mostly in Germany right now, and actually my mother is Dutch, so I'm going to stick with, I'm going to go with Reynard the Fox or the Fox as a character, as a trickster character. And so we're going to look at a little bit more history through the fox's lens to frame the types of things that we're doing through the eyes of the trickster. Jesus, another trickster. And I'm, you know, I'm not a big fan, although I am a fan of some of his original tactics. You know, he rode in on this donkey and this is an actual photograph of him because, you know, somebody had a time machine and went back and got this shot of him riding a donkey into Bethlehem. And, you know, this is like nobody rides a donkey or into Jerusalem. Nobody rides a donkey. It didn't make sense. He did it because he knew that people would talk about it. It was a symbolic action that was meant to project a kind of humility and and make people tell stories about what happened. So the idea was to propagate this myth, which of course worked so well that now we have, you know, we have Christianity. But here's Nasseruddin riding a donkey backwards a century later. And again, an original photo. This is a sort of a wise sage coming from out of Turkey and part of Islamic tradition. And again, all these stories though are stories of a kind of wisdom. And these are sort of the reason I say they're tricksters is that they were fighting larger powers. I mean, you know, Jesus was fighting the Romans. Jesus was leading a movement of liberation at the time. It became something entirely different. But, you know, we see the same thing. You have this this version of the trickster that's Nasseruddin is like a wise man is usually about telling a story where through cleverness and sometimes agility, a character can outwit others who have more power. We would otherwise exercise power over them. I mean, there are good tricksters and bad. But, you know, we like to focus on the idea of the good trickster, which is those who are fighting power instead of those who are serving power. So here's another example. A modest proposal. This is a pamphlet published by Jonathan Swift at where he suggested that the Irish eat their babies in order to solve the hunger problem in Ireland, because of course, the potato famine was not a famine that was caused by lack of food in that country. It was caused by lack of money. As most famines are, the British were still shipping grains out of Ireland because they made money when people were starving to death because the potato crops had failed. So this is a comment on that. Well, why don't the Irish just eat their own babies and then it's become one of the most famous examples of English satire in history and English language, that is. This is the 1700s. So the whole point here is that this pamphlet, like a lot of the sort of hacking techniques that we end up using now, this pamphlet was like disguising itself as something else when it was first published. Okay, I'm going to skip ahead. These are a few pictures of the women's movement, but I want to get through this stuff quickly. The whole purpose here is to show you that again, this obsession with stories with infiltrating, with causing trouble, which they did, is something that's constant and has continued to happen. I'm showing that low power, but I'm a power problem. I'm going to have to go and get another power supply because this one is not working. But this is a group called Climate Rush that was that was repeating those actions. So I'm going to run off and get another power supply. I will be back in just a moment. I'm going to leave you with a picture of Gandhi's salt march. Now, just a minute. This is actually Srimati Naidu who is leading one of the salt marches. They'll be right back. I will use this interruption to remind you that you can ask questions at the hashtag rc311 spelled out as a word on Twitter and Mastodon and also on the ISE. And now we all sing some songs together and wait. Hey, everybody. Sorry. They're good. Welcome back. Thank you. That's not the thing that I expected to stop working. Never had a power supply to stop in the middle. Okay. Well, anyway, I was also going to say that a lot of the stuff that we get inspiration from comes from principles of nonviolence going where you're not supposed to go crossing borders. This is again trickster tactics. So the tactics of civil disobedience are the same kind of tactics that we use when we infiltrate and do something in a business meeting. You know, it's doing something illegal something that it is illegal, but might of course have just ends in mind or might even be the right thing to do. So the salt march in India during the Indian independence movement was where, you know, people marched to the sea and made salt, which was illegal because it was being taxed by the British. And it's one of the ways that the British crown was suppressing the local populations and preventing India from having autonomy and from being able to break the yoke of colonialism. So again, the idea was to try to cross those boundaries and to do in a way that was visible to the world. Another example is the bus protests in the United States during the civil rights movement. This is a woman actually wet well before Rosa Parks who's this this photo here is of there was this woman whose last name is Morgan who this is over a decade earlier who was riding on the bus and refused to give up her seat. And so there are many, many people doing these sorts of tactics which were really about crossing these borders, crossing these boundaries. All right, I'm going to move ahead here through a few more slides of occupations, things like the American Indian movement that was sorry. This is Indians of all tribes occupying Alcatraz saying this is the space is ours. This is after the prison had left the island. This is just off the coast of San Francisco in 1971. And again, it's standing rocks, same kinds of tactics, occupation, refusing to move, then getting moved by the authorities in a display of violence that shows really that that should in theory at least be embarrassing for those wielding power when they claim to be benevolent. Billboard alteration and other simple transgression, you know, it's just like going up there and changing a billboard street signs. You can change the street signs to Malcolm X Street, which is something that in the early 90s. I was doing in Portland, Oregon, and this was in protest of them not naming a street from Martin Luther King. Sometimes it's as simple as changing an existing sign like Holly weed. I show this because it's a successful campaign. You know, weed is now pretty much legal in, well, it's legal in California and it will be soon probably in most of the United States, if not all and things like banner hangs again, going where you're not supposed to getting your message there. If you don't have the money for banner, you can draw it on a beach. You can put on a costume like Super Barrio in Mexico City. This is after the earthquake in 1987. This guy showed up wearing a wrestling outfit and demanded rights for the poor people in Mexico and the neighborhoods that weren't being repaired by the government. And people loved him so much and the media loved him so much that when he started to challenge political leaders to wrestling matches, they kind of had to show up and talk to him. Otherwise it would be very embarrassing. So this is an example of using some kind of flamboyant tactic in plain sight to go places you're not allowed to go. And then again, the masked man, the identity here for the Sapatistas is sort of the flip side of that is the obscured identity, you know, wearing a mask because you have to because you're actually participating in an arm rebellion. But also this movement of the Sapatistas was really thinking very much about their media image and about presenting their revolution to the world and having it exist on a global stage. Oh, and here's Comandante Ramona, who's the leader of the Sapatistas with subcomandante Marcos. And again, thinking about who is in charge here. It's this is this under five foot tall indigenous elder who is running the Sapatista revolution at the time in 1994. Just one or two more slides here of other things to put it all in context. Here's a group called the space hijackers with one of their tanks. They had as few they bought a few tanks. It turns out that in the UK, it's not that hard to buy them and they dressed as the sort of comic riot police and this was sort of the clown car that distracted the real riot police who followed them and then let their other tank roll right into the largest arms show in the world in London. So sometimes these plots involve decoys involve many layers in order to access these venues. Oh, this is a picture of a teddy bear catapults. The fun thing about this, this is at the FTA a protest in in Quebec City in Canada. And the fun thing about this is that it created a dilemma for the police because the world leaders are meeting inside the fortress city. Literally it's the only fortress city in North America. Europe has a lot of them, but this is at the top of the hill. There's a fort in Quebec and that's where they were meeting. And of course the anti-globalization activists surrounded it and laid siege to it and one group built this hilarious catapult and were flinging teddy bears in and the police were faced with the decision. Do we arrest? Do we stop the teddy bears from being flung in and we arrest the catapult and then look ridiculous walking away with it or do we let them keep flinging neither option was a good one. They arrested the activists and they then, you know, then there's this hilarious picture of them hauling around a catapult with teddy bears. If you can't make a catapult, you don't have the means maybe you have some bread and you can strap it to your head like at the in the Egyptian recent revolution in the Arab Spring where people were strapping all kinds of things to their heads to make a statement about the violence that was being perpetrated against them because of course the state was saying that they were creating the violence and the activists were saying now we're we don't even have helmets. You're just you're we're going to just strap whatever we have to our head and it became a hilarious living mean where people are walking around of all kinds of crazy makeshift helmets. One more image the flying penis that attack the area Kasparov and I think what became a very popular viral video for its moment and you can look this up. But this is also a warning because this phallus which is flying it's like an RC helicopter with a dildo attached to it and this thing which was flown against Kasparov who was at the time the strongest that opposition candidate to Putin could very well be the KGB's flying phallus. So everybody uses these tactics and I say that because you know it was it became a really popular and embarrassing video that was against Kasparov it was and so you know who knows who was was behind it was at the controls. So to go back to what we do with the yes man we are not beneath a few phallic metaphors ourselves because it works really well when you're trying to impersonate people in power. This is an example of one time when we went to a conference in Finland representing the WTO and announced that the WTO solution to the problem of sweatshops was this thing called the employee visualization appendage which was a three foot long phallus that had a kind of heads up display on it that allowed you to give to see your remote workers anywhere in the world and give them electric shock. And of course the audience loved it because because we were they thought we were the most powerful people in the room at the beginning of the talk we were wearing business seats and we made a breakaway business that I could tear off of Andy in one quick movement and then this three foot long inflatable phallus was instantly deployed with a CO2 cartridge so inflated in a matter of maybe a second and a half. And this is a story from from the newspaper of the second largest daily in Finland that sort of explains a little bit about about the WTO's plans. So I don't know how well you could see those videos that can I get a little feedback on that? Can everybody tell me how easy it was to see some of the video? It looked okay. The sound was great. The video was very stuttery but you could do it. Okay, so I'll show a little bit more video. I'm going to actually show I'm going to skip this one. This is this is a time that we this is probably the most famous of the things that we've done. It's in our second film which is called the Yes Men. Are the Yes Men fix the world and you can find that it's on the wherever YouTube other places while sharing. And this is where Andy was representing the he was representing Dow Chemical on a live television broadcast on the 20th anniversary of the Bopalt catastrophe. And as Dow Chemical he took responsibility for the disaster and offered to pay back the victims and meet their demands and clean up the plant site. So sometimes we use that tactic where we if we're given enough power and we have the right platform. It's incredibly useful to announce a sort of utopian solution or to announce that the company that you're targeting is meeting the demands that activists have been asking for for years because then it puts the company in a real dilemma. They have no good choice. They either have to say that wasn't us and we are not fixing the problem that we created or if they ignore it then they have this disinformation out there in the universe and meaning that they have to they have to act. So I'm going to I'm going to skip that and I'm going to go to this which is a more slightly more recent thing. This is also pretty old though. This is I think in our last yes man moving called the yes men are revolting. And what we're doing here is creating a replica of the stage at the tooth that Copenhagen climate conference. So this is 2009 the cup 15 and the reason we just wanted to create and something that looked enough like it so that we could make Internet videos to embed in our fake website that would allow us to make announcements as the cup 15 that would I mean as the official climate conference on behalf of Canada and Uganda and I'm going to play a little video here. Thank you. Well while Terry was looking through those documents the world was laughing at Canada because of another one it surfaced as a press release or so everyone believed but soon it was clear Canada had been punked Leslie McKinnon reports. There was this demo inside Parliament 20 years of protesters who caused a minor stir then this Greenpeace caper but that got mostly reported as a breach of security story. Neither managed to get Canada's climate policy as much attention and Copenhagen as today's multi layered folks. The day began with this press release announcing the astonishing news that Canada was suddenly doubling its emissions cuts to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. And that it would generously pony up 13 billion dollars to be allocated to the African countries for emissions reduction. Then there was this article about it on what looked like the Wall Street Journal's website. Then this a news conference apartedly by the Ugandan delegate posted on what looked like the Copenhagen conference website. It looked amazingly real until the speaker compared Canada's oil reserves to a loaded gun. But a press release from Environment Canada followed that seemingly deplored the spoof releases and false hopes. This turned out to be a hoax. In fact, it was all a hoax. It's not a game. It's a serious issue. You're playing games. I'm not playing games. However, truth can be stranger than fiction. This is the Prime Minister spokesman blaming the stunt on Stephen Gilboe of the Environment Group Equitair. And I want an apology. And this is also the real thing. So I was in the plenary session at the time that this happened and I really can't comment any further. Why is it a hoax that Canada is going to do the right thing? This environmentalist thinks the whole elaborate joke. I had nothing to do with this one but I'm really happy that they did it. As to who pulled this off. There are reports tonight. It's a group of pranksters who call themselves the yes men. They say they'll have a press conference tomorrow. If you can believe that. Leslie McKinnon, CBT news Ottawa. Well on climate related stunt is one of many that have happened lately. Okay. So just to wrap that little thing up. You can see here that we're just in a basement. Basically these microphones are just made out of pipe cleaners and electrical tape. We printed out a bunch of you know, we had to make our own teleprompter print out a bunch of the logos and put paste them up on the wall. We use the reverse shots of the audience for the videos from other videos that we found already on their website and it created this kind of illusion where we could do both the big conference room and the press briefing room fairly easily. So we made several videos and then eventually we had the press conference the next day, which highlighted mostly the position of the Ugandan participants in this project in particular could Dili Chandia who's there sitting in the middle in that red suit. So I just wanted to show that because it's really interesting. That's again, it's 10 years old and it was effective at the moment at that moment and there weren't a lot of people talking about fake news at that time. But something that people are really concerned about now is whether these tactics work anymore and I think it just depends on the context. We found that sometimes they work really well. In fact, we had a successful action a few weeks ago that got a lot of attention for the Bank of England's fiscal policy, but they don't really work very well against the rogue head of state like Donald Trump or something like there's no amount of satire or kind of like utopian thinking that can that can work on that on that kind of wild card. So just to end the talking part or the ranting part this here we have an image of Renard the fox, which is of course something I'd like to leave you with and I think getting in touch with all of our trickster roots is a good thing to do because when we find the roots we also find we have common ground with everybody else who has trickster characters in their cultural histories and this is remember Confused only confused from below. This is one of our primary tenets of confusion is and we've started school called the trickster Academy. We can talk about that later. Okay, I'm going to stop sharing and all right here in person. I think I'm back. Great. All right. It took so long. I just that's okay. You had a lot of interesting stuff to say. I got ambitious with and saying things and I think the phrase the KGB is flying fellas as one for the ages. Yeah. Yeah, I mean maybe the fellas people are listen are here now and can come forward and ask a question or tell us who they are but as far as I know. Nobody knows it could still be the KGB. All right. We have the first questions questions. Why are you guys always such assholes? Yeah, yeah, that's that's a really good question. We are always such assholes because we don't care about what people think about us. I was once at a party where me and my brother had built this giant tower of chairs chairs in in the swimming pool because it was like this fancy place. We didn't get to go to fancy places like that and we dive off the giant tower of chairs. It was great fun. We thought we knew how to have a party but apparently people were really offended and then somebody lost their golden necklace in the pool and so we of course were swimming and we went and founded for the guy and he was so excited and so overjoyed. He said I don't care what everybody else thinks you guys are okay. So I've always remembered that word of wisdom and I thought okay, our goal is not to make friends with people. Our goal is to get to that place. In fact, we can be the fall guy for a big organization that's worried about the reputation. So like if the Sierra Club big environmental organization wants to use the kind of tactics that we do but is worried that their membership will get to be. Unpleased then they can get in touch with us and we'll do it for them. So that's how you finance working on the Yasmin full time. I actually finance it by working at a university. So I'm I still teach at university but Jacques more than I has financed it through things like that and and some of the actions quite a few of the actions have been financed by by large NGOs like the green pieces of the world. Nice so people on the internet want to know if you've ever had to go to jail for your actions. I've never had to go to jail for these kinds of actions. Are you went to jail for unrelated reasons? I went I went to jail for ice skating once I was just like come on New York City like just you know I highly recommend ice skating on Prospect Park Lake. It was originally built for ice skating. You know there's pictures of hundreds of people doing it in the 19th century. But if you do it now you get arrested and they actually take you in overnight. So you get to spend a night in jail which by the way is a very it's not exclusive but it's expensive. It costs the taxpayers one thousand seven hundred dollars per night. It's a pretty good hotel for this kind of money. Yes. Yes. You could it's like a five star. So did you did you read any book about social engineering or did you just wing it until you figured out all the tricks? It was sort of yeah it was like reverse engineering the social engineering for us because it was figuring it out as we went but then starting to discover the world of people doing things and yeah reading about it. So and there are so many people doing so many amazing things. I mean I'm loving following some of these people now on even YouTubers who do stuff like this is so yeah it's but there are a few books I'm reading a great book about early con men right now that's really fun. It's like a can't remember the title. I'd have to grab it to read the title but yeah constantly constant education and also I think it's necessary also to always have innovation you know but but ultimately it seems like it does boil down to something to one thing and that is understanding what somebody wants right like if you know who you're talking to and you know what they want then you can build a world that delivers it to them or that seems to deliver to them the thing that they desire and that is that usually works really well you know it's it's even on people who are expecting it. All right the next one is a trivia question which I really enjoy as a concept. What are the top three most impactful events in world history that you can summarize in the fewest words possible sounds like a game show. I like it top three few words in human history in the world history in the world history. So I guess it can include geological events before humans. Yeah I kind of want to say you know Big Bang even though I don't know that's what I've been told I don't totally really understand it but Big Bang how many words in my life. I think as few as possible Big Bang asteroid Anthropocene very good. I'm sure you won whatever the game was. I feel like I won I feel great about that answer. How did you guys come up with the human candle idea and maybe explain the human candle idea. So the human candle idea was actually this goes back to the very first slide thanks for the callback when I'm holding up the business card that says Exxon we were at a conference representing Exxon Mobile in Calgary Alberta at the Stampede grounds which is where they have the largest rodeo in the world and they also have Canada's largest oil conference and we had convinced them to host us by telling them that Lee Raymond who is the seat the former CEO of Exxon Mobile would go to their conference so I claimed I was from a PR agency got in touch with the people running the conference I had a domain name that looked like Helen Nolton their Burson Mars teller I can't remember who one of the big PR companies that tends to do this kind of high level you know bullshitting and so I promise them that Lee Raymond had a very important announcement to make that would really put their conference on the map and of course they were excited about it but then this is the tricky part at that point I had to tell them that you know they had to keep it secret until just before the announcement because what he was going to say had such repercussions for the global economy that they could very well be breaking various kinds of SEC that's like stock market laws if they didn't embargo the information so this is important you're part of a web of you know you're part of a bubble of secrecy we have to maintain the secret because as soon as people know that he's going to make a big announcement they're going to freak out because he had a new position with the government and so they bought it and in fact this is one of those counterintuitive things where you would think that telling them that you have this great honeypot for their conference this guy who other people are going to register to see at their conference you think that that then when you tell them that they can't tell anyone that it would be immediately blow you up but it doesn't because they feel like they're on the inside of something big then and so they kept the secret and then what we decided we're going to announce was that Exxon mobile had a climate change solution which was to turn the humans who die as a result of climate change into a new biofuel called Vivoleum and so we had an animated thing it's in her second movie the yes man fixed the world but that idea came from us thinking about what is the logical extension of Exxon mobiles climate policy because at the time it had just been revealed that Exxon mobile had done all of this very shady suppression of knowledge about the about climate change Exxon mobile had scientists working for them in the seventies that knew that climate change was a huge problem and they had decided to suppress the information themselves and then they went on a protracted campaign of suppressing the information at the federal level in the United States and at the global level so they became the target and this announcement became the what we're going to do and then of course when we're at the conference at the very last minute Lee Raymond the former CEO of Exxon mobile who's now has a federal position with the US government doesn't show up and a substitute takes his place on the stage and that's yeah so what did I answer the question I can't remember I think someone wanted to know how you came up with the idea but yeah that was difficult to answer right yeah I think it was really just shooting the shit as they say with with some friends and as I as I remember was a guy called Bob Oster tag who worked with us for a while who is actually a more of like a musician and a you know anyway he he was the one I think who who really pushed that idea forward and it turned out to be a really fun one I mean it's basically a direct callback to the Jonathan Swift stuff right so you're really very into people's people's bodies it is it's a classic I mean babies people eating them cannibalism I mean these are like you know they they they hit you they hit you right where right where you feel it yeah alright another question is do you worry at all that your campaigns you wrote trust in the media or do you just think that they should maybe pay us some more attention yeah no we don't worry about that at all I mean it's it's weird because for a while there was something to worry about there because people's you know trust in the media I mean the now it's just a it's just a weird landscape totally bizarre I mean in terms of what people believe or don't believe one of the things that we do all the time though is reveal our hoaxes immediately after we perpetrate them and so the result is that there's actually more information as opposed to you know what we see as fake news which is people who are perpetrating a hoax and they mean for it to exist for eternity ideally like if you create a falsehood and you're not revealing it that's the type of thing that the advertising in this industry PR agencies have done governments have done for centuries but our types of hoaxes are meant to be revealed right away alright I have a mysterious question yes oh okay now I understand what are your thoughts about the orange man and I've just realized that that's Donald Trump oh you know I don't know if I would have gotten this unrelated orange person if you know any yeah I mean it's confusing for me because an orange man I start thinking about Poland and about there's all kinds of orange people here and there but orange movements anyway the orange man oh god no all right so the Dutch national football team what's your opinion that's different orange men right yes the Dutch football I yeah I have to have to be a fan because my mother's Dutch what can I say go and also it's like a tiny country and I like a kind of an underdog that's still out like this really ridiculously well I mean I don't know I don't know I'm not football is awesome yes why not nothing that wrong with it is there a reason you don't have a bulb in your socket on your ceiling oh yeah it's because I moved it to here nice this is my studio lighting and I got rid of that one and I created this yeah it looks great I also have all the lights pointed at me now thanks for that question I like it oh yeah that's interesting can we trace the lineage of the tie rubber ducks and the Chinese umbrellas back to that taped bread I think it's about just how much yes yes definitely I don't know actually if anybody can do that do let me know the empty bulb though I'm putting my finger on right now here reminds me though that this is like another you know I remember the CIA sabotage manual that they were dropping on El Salvador actually on Nicaragua sorry where they were encouraging people to like sabotage everywhere because at the time it was you know communist and so the idea was that if if people broke everything then the country would come to a standstill so they suggested things like taking the light bulb out and putting a coin in there and putting light bulb back in so I I don't know you know everybody uses these tactics it's again thinking about about the CIA fine penis you know now it's the CIA yeah CIA sabotage manuals maybe one last question do you have any project in the pipeline I mean I assume you don't want to talk about them but you can you know we have a movie about walls that we're working on but it's it took we took a hiatus you know with covid and we have a whole bunch of other things that are in the works some of them we're doing independently not as the yes man but I'm doing stuff and Andy is doing stuff and um yeah we're also always trying to recalibrate because you know the the terrain is changing so quickly and it's such a strange and interesting moments particularly in the United States but also all over the world yeah there's a I mean there's many questions are along the lines of like how do you feel about satire in this year when it's just seems like afternoons is satire right or at least it feels just completely unhinged right yeah and I don't think a lot of times it doesn't I don't think satire about Donald Trump works I didn't even think that any of the stuff that was on Saturday night live was funny you know where they impersonate the people in the administration is just like worse versions of the real thing that's really funny if you could actually laugh about it if it wasn't real I mean it must have been the same like looking at Hitler in the in the 30s you know like you you probably look at that and think this can't be real but you know it's here's this crazy looking guy doing saying crazy shit and so then what do you do and I think that you you choose different tactics for a while but you find it seems like the funniest thing to do for him or to just pretend he's giving a coherent speech right totally yeah I mean it's like he keeps outdoing himself what happened in the final weeks of the campaign and just after with Giuliani and the the four seasons total landscaping and the face melting off and the I mean there were so many things where you just like the levels of crazy theater were man I yeah anyway I mean you could definitely just claim that as a yes man stunt definitely definitely there was a stroke of genius that yes all right maybe a last question do you have any any things that failed spectacularly that you are yes reveal to the yes we have many things that failed spectacularly and there's some of them that you can read about on the yes man website which is at the yes man org and one in particular that I recommend reading about that we documented at least in text is an event where we impersonated a group called the international web police claimed to be securing the internet this is back in the late 90s or around 2002 or something anyway it was a it was a funny event and yes I won't I'm not going to get into here but it amuses me just to think about it all right thank you very much some of you from my screen all right now you know there you are well thank you thank you I think we will go offline at some random point now good bye internet good bye