Ken Sim (with Dan Boeckner)

Speaker 1 You know what would be a good idea would be to start the podcast by saying what it is, who's on it, and what it's about. Hey, what?

Speaker 2 Crazy.

Speaker 2 I've been doing this for like eight years. Let's see if I'm finally good at it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 No, this seems stupid.

Speaker 1 It's giving me anxiety. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Holy stomach. I'm sorry.
I have a profound like status anxiety, so I don't want to sort of like impose by telling you what the podcast is called or what it's about or who's on it.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh. Hey, what do you want it to be about? How can I

Speaker 2 whatever you want? It'll be about that.

Speaker 1 Hey, umphy, it's no gods, no mares. Um, did we do something wrong? Is everything okay?

Speaker 1 Because like, I just, you know, I always you didn't say anything, but, you know, I was worried, so I just wanted to check in and make sure that we didn't say or do anything that made you feel sort of bad in any way.

Speaker 1 Hey, where are you going? Come social. Come back, please.
We can change what the podcast is about. If you want it to be about something that isn't about mayors, just come back, please.
Please, please.

Speaker 3 It's about ethics and video game journalism.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 I just got my early birthday present from my wife, and it is a synthesizer. So I will be talking about that only for the next hour and a half.
Oh, Maddie, what?

Speaker 3 Can I ask what synth you got?

Speaker 1 It's a micro Korg. Yes.
I'm excited to learn on it because I don't know shit about synths and I haven't learned a new instrument in like 20 years.

Speaker 1 Is it? No gods. No mares.
It's about how weird mayors are.

Speaker 1 It's me, November, November Kelly. It's Riley.

Speaker 1 I'm the mayor of this episode.

Speaker 1 You are the mayor of this episode. Well, the thing is, I'm your press secretary.
And please,

Speaker 1 Madam Mayor, please go ahead and take over the episode and introduce our guest.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, Press Secretary, November.

Speaker 2 Yes, there were some hecklers, of course, appeared to do a traditional protest of the mayoral address, which is to sidetrack it about synthesizers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I hate when Kamala goes to stuff and gets heckled by people loudly talking about their new synthesizer.

Speaker 1 Corey.

Speaker 2 No, no.

Speaker 2 It's no gods, no mayors. Word here today talking about Ken Sim.
Now, you may think, hey, Riley, I thought you said you were going to do the second cast.

Speaker 1 I will in a moment.

Speaker 1 I have to address this first.

Speaker 3 That's fine. That don't matter.

Speaker 1 I thought

Speaker 3 you'll say, hey, I'm shit. I'm a dog.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 You know, normally I'm having a great time with my friends, but there's just also, I keep hearing this like noise on the call. I don't know what that's about.

Speaker 1 Who can say what it is?

Speaker 2 Probably a synthesizer.

Speaker 1 It's a howling. It's a plaintive howling.

Speaker 2 No, you thought I was going to do episode two of the Miami trilogy, Joe Carolo.

Speaker 2 The Mayor Taculus, however, said, hey, Riley, your friend and ours, Dan Bechner, is available to guest on the show next Friday. So why don't you do a Vancouver Mayor

Speaker 2 to take advantage of his knowledge of sociopathic BC liberal boomers.

Speaker 3 So Dan, welcome to the show. Thank you.
Hi. Hello.

Speaker 3 And thank you for ignoring me at first, like we talked about before.

Speaker 1 Of course, of course, now we're not.

Speaker 3 Riley and I actually talked about this before, and he was like, I'm going to introduce you normally. And I was like, oh, but what if?

Speaker 1 And I'm just designing that. I'm just throwing this out there.
What if you like ignored me?

Speaker 1 Like just as a joke. You know? Oh,

Speaker 2 that'd be so old. I'd hate that.

Speaker 1 All right. Perfect.
Now, now we've managed that. Now we can get back to talking about this microcorg shit.
Yes. Okay.

Speaker 3 Is it the microcore 2 or is it the original microcore?

Speaker 1 It's the newer. It's the newer one.

Speaker 3 It's got the sampling technology, right?

Speaker 1 Hold on, hold on.

Speaker 2 You're like, get the Ryan police. This protest has gotten out of hand.

Speaker 1 MicroCorg. How do you, Maddie?

Speaker 3 How do you find the O, how do you find the OLED, the OLED screen on it? Because I've heard a lot of different, you know, I've heard a lot of different things about it.

Speaker 1 It seems, I got it literally yesterday and I've just been goofing around with it. I know next to nothing about synthesizers.

Speaker 1 Like, I know how to play the piano a little bit, so that's why I wanted to get into it. So I actually don't, I can't tell you any hard opinions on the thing yet.

Speaker 1 I'm very pleased with the beeps and boops so far. I've gotten to play with it for like 20 minutes.
But yeah.

Speaker 2 So I'm going to say, what if we do a sequel to this episode that's called, how's the corg?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think what I can do, I realize my mixer is a second line in and maybe next time i'll just plug the corg into my mixer and you'll listen to me play it while you're recording yeah oh my goodness

Speaker 1 it's just me sampling the horrible things that they say

Speaker 2 uh okay so here's the thing here's the thing dan yes you've lived in many places yes and one of those places has included british columbia yeah uh where you grew up in cowichin lake But you've also lived in a variety of houses.

Speaker 1 Lydia Tara asked interview question.

Speaker 1 In various states of repair. She's got the whole biography in there, doesn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And you have become very familiar with British Columbian boomers as a specific subgroup of person. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I can really quickly explain before we move forward what, you know, the contours of British Columbia boomer. And basically what you have to imagine is it's 1974.
You're a guy.

Speaker 3 You pay the equivalent of $150,000 in today's money, which is about $50 some odd thousand dollars, and you get a house.

Speaker 3 And then you do nothing, and then you wake up in the year 2021, and your house is worth $2.5 million.

Speaker 3 But you're still a hoser, but you feel like you're part of the upper class. So there's an internal sort of war going on between your inherent hoserness.

Speaker 3 and your feeling of achievement, which you've done nothing for. So.

Speaker 1 Now, just to explain something for me for the record, and I remind you, you are under oath. Could you explain this concept of hoseness to me?

Speaker 3 Hoserness. November,

Speaker 3 have you seen Trailer Park Boys?

Speaker 1 Only little clips on Twitter. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 3 I think Trailer Park Boys is the greatest sort of ethnographic study of hoserdom in Canada. But a hoser is like, you know, just like a well-meaning oath.

Speaker 1 This explains Riley's sort of passion for the oath. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yes.
They're oaths, modern oaths.

Speaker 2 And so basically, municipal politics in British Columbia, especially Vancouver Island, has become this strange thing where it has all of the elements of San Francisco, like NIMBYism and sort of paranoias about the homeless, but they also never ditched the hippiness that San Francisco did ditch to do that.

Speaker 2 So it's like they're Gary Tan, but wearing a tie-dye shirt and, you know, doing

Speaker 2 fucking, yeah, doing hair.

Speaker 1 You know what this is? You know what this, this combination of like kind of hippiness, social like weirdness and sort of like deep boomer conservatism is? You know where else I recognize this?

Speaker 1 This is Austin, Texas.

Speaker 3 Amen. Amen.
That's right. Austin, Texas definitely has these contours.
And it's like, like rightly said, it's like. hippiness inherent boomer conservatism.

Speaker 3 Like there, these are people who who did a negative growth from, you know, they didn't just do a no growth, they did a reverse growth.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 3 one more flavor, which is like, you know, you've got a hippie conservative who's also very worried about Chinese 5G towers beaming

Speaker 1 CCP propaganda into their friends.

Speaker 1 There's bits of this in like Oakland as well, as I understand it, that got like priced out of SF. Like,

Speaker 1 the guy who

Speaker 1 owned the warehouse where the ghost ship fire was was one of these guys, basically, right? Like, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Okay, we're locked in on a type of guy that I know well and hate and have hated for a long time. Okay.

Speaker 2 So basically, and that's reflected in the municipal politics up and down the province because people are like, no, you need to, it's A, you need to like reflect my strange paranoias that like homeless people are going to attack me like Knight of the Living Dead, even though I live in Cowichin Lake.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Two, you need to make sure no one ever builds anything. And three, also the people who think that are getting elected to these positions.
It's like, I'll give an example.

Speaker 2 In late 1990s, Bob Cross was mayor of Victoria, which is the main city on Vancouver Island.

Speaker 2 And he created this law where if you're ever found with any drug at all, you must stay out of downtown Victoria forever. So this one, like, so you guys get caught with marijuana.

Speaker 2 And then like, they'd be like, okay, well, we caught you with marijuana, which is illegal, you know, at this point. And then they'd be like, okay, so you can never enter Victoria.

Speaker 1 You have been banished. You have been exiled.
You know, we brought back ancient Greek ostracism.

Speaker 3 Exactly. It's like, yeah, medieval shunning.

Speaker 3 And, you know, they called it red zoning.

Speaker 3 The problem with it was,

Speaker 3 among other things, besides the fact that it's like, you know,

Speaker 3 anti-civil rights,

Speaker 3 is that

Speaker 3 all the services are downtown. There is nothing in the periphery of Victoria in the late 1990s.
So you

Speaker 3 really like, if you had any kind of mental health issues or you needed to check in with a social worker, or even if you had to check in with a parole officer,

Speaker 3 if you were red zoned, you couldn't do any of that stuff.

Speaker 1 Jesus.

Speaker 1 That's like outlawry. You're just condemned to like live in a sea cave

Speaker 1 until you die, you know, or someone hunts you. Yeah.
And this was when, like,

Speaker 1 I assume no later than the sort of like 1790s, right?

Speaker 1 No, this

Speaker 1 remember.

Speaker 3 This is a, this would have been 1993 through 1999.

Speaker 1 Okay, sure.

Speaker 3 Repealed in 2002, I think.

Speaker 1 To be fair, that kind of period of like sort of late grunge probably would go pretty well in a sea cave in Vancouver Island, but like, aside from that, horrible. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But I also want to talk about another specific mayor before we get to Ken Sim, our main event, which is the Penticton British Columbia Mayor, John Vasilaki.

Speaker 3 Oh, I fucking love this guy.

Speaker 1 Town with a name that sounds like some kind of like joint disorder. That was the name of the town.
That was the town? Yeah, Penticton. Penticton.

Speaker 3 Penticton. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Ah, Doc, you got to help me. The Penticton's really bad this month, you know? It's not going to fit.

Speaker 1 Either that or it's the drug you take for the joint disorder. You know, like, oh, my grandma's on Penticton for her arthritis.

Speaker 2 Okay, Nova, there are so many grandmas who are on Penticton and being driven crazy by it, like just by living there.

Speaker 2 So, no, John Vasilaki has been ordered to pay $14,000 in damages. This is from CBC.

Speaker 2 Before being found liable for the battery of his brother Nicholas during a family confrontation in June 2020, Nicolas Vasilakis, who spells his surname differently than John because they hate each other, is suing his brother for $35,000 in damages for assault.

Speaker 2 The decision describes how a protactive disagreement over jewels and coins belonging to their ailing mother.

Speaker 1 My mother's jewels and

Speaker 1 coins.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm sorry. Did you mean the Penticton rubies?

Speaker 2 In a daring heist, these two Greek men stole the Penticton rubies.

Speaker 2 So John, 76, was sitting mayor on June 14th, 2020, when he left a profanity-laced voicemail on his sister Athena DeMostin's phone, threatening her and Nicholas, 76 at the time, with death.

Speaker 1 Two 76-year-old men, which would kind of imply twins, no?

Speaker 1 Greek Greek men.

Speaker 1 Two 76-year-old Greek twins in a fistfight over

Speaker 1 God only knows what in the way of jewels and jewels and treasures. I'm looking at a map of where Penticton is, and it's like spanning two lakes.

Speaker 1 Like it's just a weird little strip of land across a big body of water. So this is very dramatic in my mind.
They're like sparring.

Speaker 1 at midnight and it's raining and they're on a bridge and one of them is a bag of jewels and one of them is a bag of coins firing cannons at each other for

Speaker 1 speed from shitty speed boats just and the thing is the knowledge that's accumulated in canada of canada in my head is such that it's causing me profound psychic damage to know that of these two 76 year old greek canadian men i could break up that fight by going hey remember mr dress up

Speaker 1 it's it's time for the tickle trunk it's time for the trick the tickle trunk boys and by that moment they have both hopped into their triremes on separate lakes and gone in opposite directions.

Speaker 2 This town ain't big enough for the two of us.

Speaker 1 But no,

Speaker 2 they're the last Greek-Canadian samurai dueling on the bridge.

Speaker 1 I loved that movie. Tom Cruise's accent in it, diabolical.

Speaker 2 So the message was not listened to until after the fistfight took place.

Speaker 2 After leaving the message, John went to Demosthen's home where he pushed him into a kitchen, where he shoved Athena Demostin to a kitchen kitchen countertop and shoved Nicholas onto a couch.

Speaker 1 Okay, sorry, that's slightly funnier.

Speaker 2 When Demosthen intervened, the situation de-escalated, and John left the house, but not before saying to his elderly mother, who was lying on the couch, Greek words that translate as roughly the following.

Speaker 2 May you not die until I step on your chest 40 times.

Speaker 1 Just a couple of things here.

Speaker 1 The construction here, the passive voice of like Greek words that translated to, or the voicemail was not listened to until after the fight had started. This is weirdly Alice Monroe, actually.

Speaker 1 This is, there's a little bit like, I know I'm just welding Canadian stuff together in my head, but like,

Speaker 1 that's very lyrical, you know? Like,

Speaker 1 there's something there, I think.

Speaker 1 The authors that you put in Canada to write Canlet are instead writing local news articles about Greek men fighting each other and cursing their mothers.

Speaker 2 So, but it is a little really, what I think is really funny is that this is also like the culmination of many other legal battles between the brothers.

Speaker 3 Years, years and years of legal battles, a lot of which center around something called the wine cellar bar and grill, which

Speaker 3 so like many, like many

Speaker 3 boomer conflicts in British Columbia, this this started as a property dispute over rent because there's the bar and then there's a rental income property with like four units above.

Speaker 2 So in her decision, Hardwick noted that it was significant to the claim of physical harm that Nicholas did not seek medical attention and only took a Tylenol in the aftermath.

Speaker 2 She also noted that Nicholas commenced the legal action 15 months after the incident and only after John filed a lawsuit in 2021 that named Nicholas and two nephews.

Speaker 1 Getting extremely delayed onset shoved onto couch syndrome symptoms.

Speaker 2 He's just like walking in an airport or whatever and just stumbles onto

Speaker 1 the thing. Here's the thing.
Here's a little personal injury tip for you, the listener. From me, a real lawyer, brackets, no, I'm not.

Speaker 1 When something happens to you and someone like assaults you, you just keep that in your back pocket until the next time you feel bad, whenever that is. It could be two minutes, could be 20 years.

Speaker 1 And then you go, this is a direct result of your conduct in, I don't know, lightly brushing past my arm or something. And you take them to the fucking cleaners.

Speaker 3 Amen.

Speaker 2 So, so this is, so basically what happened is that you're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 That's the pendictin way. The pendictin way is to store it up.
They send one of yours to the couch. You send one of theirs to the kitchen cabinet.

Speaker 3 It's like the code duello, but code Penticton.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's fun.

Speaker 2 Okay, so basically, the personal injury lawsuit was only filed after John filed a lawsuit that named Nicholas and two nephews as defendants in a battle over the rental income of this jointly owned property next to the cellar wine bar.

Speaker 2 The action was never heard because John successfully filed to discontinue the claim one week before it went to trial. John Vassiliki was mayor of Penticton for four years.

Speaker 1 Incredible. There's a little

Speaker 3 backstory, just like a little extra color for John's tenure as mayor. So, you know, he owns this rental property downtown.
He owns Penticton's fan.

Speaker 1 Sorry.

Speaker 3 Oh, Penticton's fanciest wine bar where you can get a cheesecake that's sitting on top of another cheesecake.

Speaker 1 Oh, that seems like a beautiful place place to celebrate like a 20th wedding anniversary where I'm deeply unhappy. Question.

Speaker 1 Is there anything between the cheesecakes? Are they just stacked on top of each other?

Speaker 3 Cheesecakes are touching each other, which makes a difference.

Speaker 1 I'm now opening welcome to the wine cell, to the cellar, wine bar and kitchen, Penticton. Permanently closed.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, it looks, oh, it looks terrible. It's very contemporary modern in a way that makes me feel depressed.

Speaker 3 Yes. Yeah.
It's super depressing.

Speaker 1 So, so, so you know, during his tenure as a- Cheeseplate makes me want to shoot myself through the roof of the mouth.

Speaker 1 Wait, wait, wait. On the bottom of this website, there is in cursive, in a cursive font, experience the difference, but experience is misspelled.
So it says experian the difference.

Speaker 1 No, it's about the credit rating.

Speaker 2 It's about the credit rating agency.

Speaker 1 I believe Experian would be a beautiful name for a girl. Experian the difference.

Speaker 3 So, so he's, he, oh, he's a big mayor. He's the mayor.
He's a big downtown business owner and a landlord.

Speaker 1 I'm so sorry to keep interrupting.

Speaker 1 I just need all of you and the listeners to go into their internet web browsers of some kind and put in thesellawinebar kitchen.com/slash desserts. Oh, I'm there.

Speaker 1 I'm already looking at that cake, baby. It looks bad.

Speaker 1 What a JPEG. What a beautiful JPEG.
It's like, this is the best photo you could get of this cheesecake slice. And

Speaker 1 the whipped cream is like melted.

Speaker 1 And it's the only thing on there. It looks like somebody coughed a raspberry onto it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Awful.

Speaker 1 Fantastic.

Speaker 2 Look, what do you want them to do?

Speaker 1 Try again?

Speaker 1 Their dessert menu has their logo, which is a wine glass that looks like it's shattering and melting from someone coming at it to it.

Speaker 3 That's because you're throwing it at your brother.

Speaker 1 Okay, they do serve it Malobota, which is cool, though. That's cool.
As someone that lives in a Greek neighborhood, that's a delicious apple cake.

Speaker 1 I support all the people wanting to serve Greek desserts, absolutely.

Speaker 3 Oh, man, this is not good to look at with my eyes.

Speaker 1 It's really bad.

Speaker 1 Why is the manch that's in the whipped cream been sugared?

Speaker 1 That's great.

Speaker 1 It's great.

Speaker 2 Well, unfortunately, the cellar is being redeveloped into the White Raven Pub.

Speaker 3 Oh, Jesus, Christian.

Speaker 2 With new owners and past staff staying on.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, like, one thing that happened, one big thing that happened when Shan was mayor was that Pentecton got into a battle with the province of British Columbia over this, the people of Pentecton wanted to close a homeless shelter because Pentecton, not unlike everywhere else in British Columbia, is dealing with housing bubble and a lack of services.

Speaker 3 So you've got a lot of unhoused people and there are not a lot of jobs left. So the city was under John's guidance was basically like, you know what? Fuck the province.

Speaker 3 We are voting to close down the homeless shelter in the middle of winter.

Speaker 1 Jesus. Yeah.

Speaker 1 In canada cool in canada in the in the middle of bc which is very cold so uh the pro the province basically had the discipline the town and they got in this huge battle and at one point there was a news report about a quote bucket of dog feces that was thrown at the homeless shelter and john was one of the people who was investigated so oh my lord again he is such a perfect bc boomer being the cop who gets put on the bucket of dog feces investigation, you know, like, and the thing is, we've seen multiple Canadian cops be detailed to mayor investigation task forces before.

Speaker 1 This is somehow not the only one, but it is one of the worst ones.

Speaker 2 I mean, it is very funny to be the like the sort of dog shit Serpico and you realize it goes all the way to the top in Pentecton.

Speaker 1 I'm not, I'm not Photoshopping the hat for dog shit Serpico.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, and also John Vasilaki, like, he seems to hate Penticton as well because he was interviewed

Speaker 2 in an Okanagan Valley newspaper being like, and saying, I believe Penticton's best days have passed long ago.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 All these fucking assholes are like this. All of them.
All of these crusty boomers that get elected to positions of power.

Speaker 3 There's kind of an Eddington thing going on with them where they're like, they don't want to govern. They hate the government, but they need to be in power, you know?

Speaker 3 Like, and then when they get there, they don't know what to do.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, besides assaulting family members over jewels and throwing dog shit at a homeless shelter.

Speaker 1 And coins. Allegedly.
Jewels and coins, allegedly.

Speaker 1 Real kind of like pirate treasure hours. Yes.

Speaker 2 So he claims that everything went bad for Penticton in the whole Okanagan Valley, which is Canada's other worst wine country.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize you weren't going to be getting into like winnology beefs here.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, it is definitely worse.

Speaker 1 It's no Niagara Escarpment is what you're saying.

Speaker 2 It's not.

Speaker 2 Niagara Escarpment is definitely better than the Okanagan Valley. I will die on that hill.

Speaker 1 I thought it was a valley or an escarpment.

Speaker 1 God damn it. God damn it.

Speaker 1 Weird escarpment to die on.

Speaker 3 It doesn't matter. It's the tear warrant.

Speaker 1 That's new twisted bio going begging. Weird escarpment to die on.

Speaker 2 They clearly hate the place they live, but are very paranoid about it being ruined by the wrong kinds of people.

Speaker 1 Settlercolonialism.txt.

Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

Speaker 2 So keep that in mind when we talk about Ken Sim. So Ken Sim is our main mayor for the day.
Although, John Vasilakis,

Speaker 1 what a beautiful mayor.

Speaker 1 A little subsidiary mayor in lieu of a mayoral roundup. A little mayor's bouche.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think that was the municipal roundup. Can we just get some belated municipal roundup music?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Manny, plug in that microchord.

Speaker 1 Oh god, it's all the way over there. I gotta, I don't know where the cords are.

Speaker 2 Sam, could you please play the um municipal roundup theme music, but backwards?

Speaker 1 So you know that it's basically don't make him do that. That's gonna sound awful.

Speaker 1 What if it sounds funny? Okay, sure, but I'm willing to find out at the listener's expense. Yeah, by the way, I need these people to keep paying me forever.

Speaker 2 We're talking about Ken Sim. Ken Sim is the currently sitting mayor of Vancouver.

Speaker 1 Is this the first time we've done a currently enmayered man? Yeah, we've done Eric Adams a couple of times, of course. But

Speaker 1 we've mostly avoided it

Speaker 1 as a going concern. Because the story of Ken Sim is not finished yet, you know.
That's right.

Speaker 3 The future is unwritten for young Ken.

Speaker 2 Yeah, his sash is not yet complete.

Speaker 1 He's still feeling the rain on his skin.

Speaker 2 So, Ken Sim is an odd character. He's the current mayor of Vancouver.
He has been since 2022. And he's very much one of these, I am not a politician, mayors.

Speaker 2 He's a businessman, and he's finally figured out a way to make government better, which is to govern without ideology and instead to run the city like a business. We've never heard of that before.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I see here on his Wikipedia page that he represents a municipal political party, which is just a better city Vancouver, which

Speaker 1 I love a municipal issue party. I actually don't.
They're all terrible. ABCB, baby.

Speaker 2 So all of the major political parties in Vancouver are exclusively municipal.

Speaker 1 Okay, perfect. Incredible.
All politics should be like this.

Speaker 2 Because Vancouver is a fucked up place that's full of this kind of person. Like the John Vasilakis person and the

Speaker 2 people who are trying to appeal to him. Because Vancouver is like, it's a city that's impossible to live in because there are very few jobs and everything costs a trillion dollars.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Basically, my experience in Vancouver when I was there a couple of years ago was just like mostly gigantic empty glass buildings with illegal Airbnbs in them and restaurants and nothing else.

Speaker 3 Correct. It was kind of insane.

Speaker 1 Isn't a bunch of it made out of like engineered wood that's going to burn down in a few years as well? Maybe. I wouldn't be surprised.

Speaker 3 I had not heard that, but that wouldn't be surprising. I mean, the first wave of condominiums that they built after Expo 86, Expo 86 was like the turning point for Vancouver.

Speaker 3 That was Vancouver's stepping onto the world stage.

Speaker 3 And the condos that they built afterwards that started fueling the real estate bubble there, because it is, I think, the fourth most unaffordable city on the planet to live in.

Speaker 1 Jesus.

Speaker 3 And it was really like for Canada, the canary in the coal mine for the current like housing apocalypse. But the first condos that they built were super poor construction.

Speaker 3 And there was a, you know, like news cycle after news cycle about leaky condos, but they just kept going. So maybe they started using engineered wood.

Speaker 1 Who knows? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I really like the idea of someone who is like a sort of conde-nas traveler kind of person, like a business class or first-class kind of like tourist, but whose only source of information on which places in the world are good is which cities are the most expensive to live in and being like.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Vancouver's the fourth classiest city in the world. Has to be.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Hey, like my aunt and uncle live in Vancouver and they've just been living there. Oh,

Speaker 1 They must be making pretty good money to do that.

Speaker 2 But they're doing the thing that Dan said, which is they just happened to own a house there back when it was normal.

Speaker 2 And now they're just like, they've been completely blindsided by like wealth that it's impossible to really cash in on because it's hard to actually sell the house because it's worth so much, even though it's like a completely normal fucking bungalow.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, just a small background on Vancouver, like not unlike San Francisco, it was like a port terminus on the gold rush.

Speaker 3 And it was a kind of, I even remember when I was a kid, it was like a kind of a grimy, rough and tumble resource extraction community, you know, or city.

Speaker 3 It had a, it had the port, it's got some sawmills, it's got cool harbor. And, you know, over the, after the real estate boom, there was kind of an attempt to paint it in a different light.

Speaker 3 It's Hollywood North. It's this, it's that.
But that spirit of a town where you can go out for a drink and get stabbed by like a psychotic gold miner is still, is still bubbling under the surface.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, of the little bit echoes of the Soapy Smith episode. Except they were mining silver.

Speaker 2 So the other thing is Vancouver has probably the, again, because it has such an insane housing crisis, has, I think, probably the worst, like, has the largest unhoused population in Canada as a percentage of its inhabitants.

Speaker 2 It has a decades-long

Speaker 2 sort of like opioid death.

Speaker 1 It's almost as if making all the housing too expensive would make a bunch of people homeless.

Speaker 3 That's crazy talk.

Speaker 1 Okay. Well, okay, easy fix.
Run the city like a business.

Speaker 1 Someone has to. Yeah.
Have we thought of it? No, I actually didn't. I should have done.

Speaker 2 So, so, so basically, this is, but this is the situation we're going into, right? Which is there's not a lot of things happening economically because things are getting so expensive.

Speaker 2 Or like, there are, but not to support that level of price.

Speaker 1 Just city kind of pricing itself to death. Yes.

Speaker 2 Genuinely, yes. That's how I think in Vancouver.
And part of the symptoms of that is like more and more people are forced into homelessness.

Speaker 1 It just kind of becomes like a kind of environmental fact, like gravity or air, you know, or like oxygen content in the atmosphere is like, oh yeah, to be in Vancouver costs you $3,500 a second.

Speaker 3 Kind of. That's actually the best description of it.
It is just so expensive to live within the city limits. Like,

Speaker 3 and,

Speaker 3 you know, this sort of blast radius of greed stretches, you know, 100 kilometers east, it stretches to the island, it stretches south and north, you know? So sick.

Speaker 1 I kind of want to see it. Like, I'm excited to go to a live show there and pay $85 for a beer, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So basically, the other thing is Vancouver has a neighborhood called the downtown east side that is like the subject of infinite moral panics in British Columbia.

Speaker 2 It's just like, oh, if you go to the downtown east side, you're going to get killed 30 times by like a homeless drug addict, basically, is the story.

Speaker 2 And that's a story that's been told for a long time, but just keep that in your mind as sort of the context for the city where we're going to talk about what Ken Sim came, started governing in 2022, trying to run it like a business.

Speaker 2 So Sim's parents, they moved with their children from Hong Kong in 67. His dad, Francis, was a banker who spoke five languages, but none of them were English.

Speaker 2 And so when they came to Vancouver, he just bounced from job to job. They moved frequently.
They didn't have a stable life.

Speaker 2 He grew up and got a business degree, which is financed by working part-time at like a Wendy's as a janitor and so on.

Speaker 2 He becomes an accountant, then he becomes a banker, has a kid relatively early on, and then basically says, huh, I'll never see my kids if I stay a banker. And my wife,

Speaker 2 when she was pregnant, had a lot of trouble getting home care nursing.

Speaker 2 So he founded a home care nursing company called Nurse Next Door, which made them all mega millionaires many times over because like Nurse Next Door basically is just a profiteer from the collapse of the British Columbia provincial healthcare system.

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a privatized social service. Gotcha.
Correct. Yes.

Speaker 2 He privatized a social service and then became like, got like $100 million from it.

Speaker 1 That seems like a good thing that you can do

Speaker 1 in like morally,

Speaker 1 financially, all of that.

Speaker 1 No downsides for anyone, I'm sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I even have in my notes here, this would be very familiar to anyone who's been looking at healthcare privatization in the UK, where like Richard Branson suddenly runs all of the mental health in Berkshire or whatever.

Speaker 2 It's the same thing.

Speaker 2 But he steps back from running it in 2011, where he just stops being the day-to-day direct CEO and just joins the board of directors and just like makes money from it passively.

Speaker 2 In 2014, he's interviewed about his success and he says, you don't get your identity from your title or your financial net worth. You get your identity from how people interact with you.

Speaker 1 That's so true.

Speaker 2 It was a really depressing time for me. I'd been feeling empty for about six months.
I wonder why. But then, but But then I received some advice from my mentor, the founder of Lululemon, Chip Wilson.

Speaker 2 Oh my gosh. Now, yeah.

Speaker 1 Here's the evil man. Yeah.
The evil man.

Speaker 1 The Ann Rand guy. Yeah.
Remember how

Speaker 2 Gavin Newsom had the Gettys?

Speaker 1 Oh my God. Yes.
Yeah. He was kind of their Renfield.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Ken Sim has Chip Wilson.

Speaker 1 Oh my God. Being the Lululemon Renfield? I'm afraid.

Speaker 1 Being the kind of

Speaker 1 thrall to the yoga pants vampire? Yeah, he's the ego work.

Speaker 1 By the way, so you know, on the show, I've talked before in my, in a previous life, when I was working in engineering, I ended up in the 9-11 pit alone.

Speaker 1 So another, another Maddie goes to a site visit as an engineer story is one time I was renovating a store in Manhattan and it was currently a Lululemon. It was closing.

Speaker 1 It was getting turned into something else.

Speaker 1 And I went in the back to like take some measurements and they had this fucked up wall with portraits of every single person that worked there and it was rankings and every day they'd like the manager would go rank the employees that day

Speaker 1 just a truly like a truly evil and if you're not familiar they have like anne rand quotes on the bags and stuff are they being ranked by like uh how good they were doing their job or like bmi i don't know but it all it all seemed very sinister doing doing like astronaut candidate shit for for like to work in a lulu lamin i mean also like my my my least favorite lulu lamin fact is why is it called that?

Speaker 1 Ask Chip Wilson about it.

Speaker 3 Don't ask Chip Wilson.

Speaker 1 Does Ken Sim not take issue with that? Possibly.

Speaker 1 I mean, you might hope so.

Speaker 3 I think the muddy makes the racism pill a little easier to swallow.

Speaker 1 And I bet Redenfield has some issues with how Dracula's running things. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I wish the master would give me more flies.

Speaker 1 I wish I got a little more PTO, master. Like, I'm sure he's got some problems, but it's like, well, I work for Dracula, so there's not much to do about it.

Speaker 3 It comes with the territory on that grain.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm lucky to have this job, you know? Like, you know how many people interviewed for this?

Speaker 2 Yeah. It'd be really funny if Igor, instead of saying it's a living, said it's a dying.
And then they could do like a little den and a den and a dump bump.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that'd be pretty funny.

Speaker 1 Where's that from? Like the Halloween episode of Mr. Dresser?

Speaker 1 God damn it. Fuck off.

Speaker 1 Listen, if you want to teach me me about another presumably less embarrassing Canadian kids' TV program, I'll reference that instead, but I'm going with the one I have.

Speaker 1 Opening the terrifying tickle trunk.

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 3 So you guys need to do an Edison Twins episode, and I'll just leave it at that.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to rock it up real quick. What's the Edison Twins?

Speaker 1 All right, all right.

Speaker 2 So when you go, so basically, he also starts a chain of bagel shops just because he's like, I'm so bored.

Speaker 1 I'm going to start a chain of bagel salt shops called Rosemary Rock rock salt classic vancouver bagel being rich on accident but through having done some extremely evil stuff basically inadvertently and then going just kind of casting around for stuff to do where you're in the one city where you're like one of the like 10 people in the city where everything is incredibly expensive where that doesn't mean anything to you where you're just like you're having the like millionaire or billionaire like hit in the back of the head sort of like cognitive impairment where you're like oh yeah 85 for a beer sure whatever like is card okay?

Speaker 1 And yeah, no wonder you're bored, you know, like, because

Speaker 1 you don't have all of the texture of that has just been sanded off for you.

Speaker 1 You're not, you're not thinking like, hey, a guy just charged me $15,000 to walk down the street, a thing which I assume regularly happens in Vancouver. That's not bothering you.

Speaker 1 You're just like, oh yeah, the walking fee, of course. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 Well, I pay the walking fee. And then I actually own several of the walking fee collectors.
So I'm up on walking fee mostly.

Speaker 2 The other thing about Chip Wilson, though, is that he gets Ken Sim into the Landmark Forum. This is our first Landmark Forum mayor.

Speaker 1 God.

Speaker 2 Now, for those of you who might not know what the Landmark Forum is, it's basically something between like management training and Jonestown.

Speaker 1 Sort of getting a sort of a Christmas adventure vibe.

Speaker 3 We need to give a little background for Landmark because it's interesting. Landmark came out of

Speaker 3 the post-hippie, post-political action hippie movement in California, where basically they were confronted with the full force of the state and said, you know what? What if we looked inward?

Speaker 3 That surely will change politics if we work on ourselves. So it comes from the same sort of line of thinking as Synanon, but Landmark famously.
Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Or like SCP. Okay.

Speaker 3 So that's right, Matt. So like Landmark was S.

Speaker 3 It is kind kind of, let's see,

Speaker 3 it's a more corporate friendly version of Est where there was a big split in Est in the 1970s. And whoever started Landmark saw the writing on the wall and was like, we can take this, get rid of the

Speaker 3 screaming and pushing people into walls and breaking down their ego and just take all the positive self-help stuff and charge corporations to do retreats.

Speaker 1 So I mean, to be fair, it was a reasonable question. If you were a sort of executive in a company that bought into this stuff, to be like, I work for Xerox.
Why am I being put in a stress position?

Speaker 1 Why am I being welded into

Speaker 1 a 55-gallon oil drum? To make you better at selling Xerox machines. Exactly.

Speaker 1 I guess you really have to really want the thing. And you're never going to be able to hear that Rudyard Kipling poem the same way ever again.

Speaker 1 Landmark has sometimes been described as a cult. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The two things I know about Landmark is that one, Lulule Lemon, Lululemon. Lululemon is a landmark company.
And two,

Speaker 1 one time a friend of mine had to rescue his parents from going to them meetings.

Speaker 1 And what they did was during the meetings, they move, you're free to leave at any time, but they do move card tables with people trying to sign you up for it in front of the door to leave.

Speaker 3 Of course.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, so it's only, it's, you can leave. It's just difficult and sort of anxiety.
You just have to ask someone to move an entire table, but it's fine. You can leave whatever you want.

Speaker 3 I think this is important to know about Ken Sims' mindset as we go into his tenure as mayor.

Speaker 3 But one thing that carried over from S into Landmark is that one of their core tenets is when you are looking at your own life and you were thinking about, oh, you know, like this happened to me, which is why I'm like this or why it's difficult for me to do that.

Speaker 3 Whose fault do you think that is, guys?

Speaker 1 This is, this is too weird. Just give me the give me the old one where they like whip your balls or whatever.
Like something, something more annoying. Put me in the drum.

Speaker 3 It's your fault.

Speaker 3 Everything, everything is your fault. And you have the power to change it.
And that is the transformative engine of landmarks.

Speaker 3 So, you know, if you take somebody who's already rich and you shove all that shit into their head and they look at a homeless apocalypse in Vancouver, they're going to be like, you know what these people need?

Speaker 3 Landmark.

Speaker 2 There is so much landmark also that happens in everything Ken Sin can get it into, right? Like he tries to even get it in when he becomes mayor.

Speaker 2 He tries to like smuggle elements of of it into Vancouver City Hall by the back door.

Speaker 2 Like he says, he always calls employees like city associates because he wants to say, well, everyone has the power to make the city. You know, like it's, it's these kinds of things sneak in.

Speaker 2 But this is, this is him talking about Landmark and how his experience at the Landmark Forum prompted him to run for mayor.

Speaker 2 So this is a long quote from the Georgia Strait, which interviewed Sim about the Landmark Forum and his relationship with Chip Wilson.

Speaker 2 So this businessman has no political experience, yet he's taken the audacious step of seeking the top job at Vancouver City Hall. This is in 2018 when he first ran.

Speaker 2 He credits his communications training to the Landmark Forum for giving him the confidence to succeed. He said, well, my experience at Landmark is that you have to have authentic conversations.

Speaker 1 If you want to vote against this guy, you're going to have to get through this card table.

Speaker 2 My experience at Landmark, you know, it's like you can vote no, but the voting no button, you have to like step on, there's a floor that's all like cute cats and you have to step on all of them.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I just really like the idea that Landmark is primarily a sort of like card table barricade training organization. And that's the one trick in the book.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Look, it worked once. We just kept doubling down.

Speaker 2 So he said, well, my experience at Landmark is you have to have authentic conversations. You have to play big.
I'm a great example of that.

Speaker 2 I could have talked myself out of running for mayor, but I didn't. When asked if he sends his employees to Landmark, Sim replied, if they want to, absolutely.
It's covered by the company.

Speaker 2 We pay for it in addition to a bunch of other things. He also spoke very positively about Rockefeller habits, which have have been the subject of self-help books by Vern Harnish.

Speaker 1 Oh, Lord.

Speaker 2 He loves self-help books. He's the most self-help person.

Speaker 1 This guy's a hustling.

Speaker 1 I mean, this sort of translation from

Speaker 1 like hippie dropout shit into self-help stuff in like the 70s and 80s is like, to me, one of the greatest untold stories in like American or I guess Canadian history.

Speaker 1 Because they all turned into like Silicon Valley guys too, right?

Speaker 3 Like they're all ex-hippies and like it's like these people ended up destroying society after like 1969 didn't work it's it's kind of astonishing yeah i mean none more none more than like people like stuart brand you know who had the i i believe it was like the whole earth catalog you know which was uh which was basically like you would order this thing and it'd be like here's how to grow tomatoes and build a sauna and then a bunch of uh a bunch of want ads for people who were like i need to live on a commune uh and that and that guy was the was kind of the face of the uh privatization of the internet.

Speaker 3 You know, he was like, this is going to help us. This is going to save us.
We got to do it.

Speaker 1 In a very real sense, the one guy who understood the direction that sort of like hippie culture was going was Charles Manson. Exactly.

Speaker 1 We salute you, Chuck. Yeah, sure.
But how is committing these murders making me a more effective business executive?

Speaker 2 Well, your name's out there. People are talking about you.

Speaker 1 I'm exercising the power of positive thinking, and they've given me this knife.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 key thing to do when you're planning a sort of horrific multiple cult murder is get that card table in early, block the exits. That's right.

Speaker 3 Block the exits.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 you want to write pigs on the wall in blood as many times as possible, even if your arms get tired.

Speaker 1 And then you just fold that card table back up, take it home. There's no evidence.

Speaker 3 Visualize success.

Speaker 1 The cop staring at the door like, how do I keep it in there? Just leave, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like killing someone on an icicle that melts. It's the perfect crime.

Speaker 1 Take the card table with you.

Speaker 1 Just like actively stabbing you and being like, listen, you can leave at any time. You're completely free to leave if you want to.
But you do have to, I'm going to have to move the table, though.

Speaker 1 You're going to ask me to move the table and I'm busy right now. I'm killing you.

Speaker 2 God damn episode.

Speaker 1 There's something that just catches the one who's not, the ones who aren't mayor.

Speaker 1 You can never guess what it's going to be. It's the beauty of the card table.
Who could have guessed?

Speaker 2 So we have sessions on radical candor and we bring in guest speakers at Nurse Next Door.

Speaker 1 Sessions on radical candor is the Scientology thing about like give us your black male material though, right? Like it just absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So he says, I actually want to applaud the people working at City Hall with a flawed system. It would be incredibly frustrating.

Speaker 2 I'm thankful they're sticking it out until things change and I'm in charge. Sim doesn't refer to city employees as staff.
He prefers the term city team members.

Speaker 2 They asked Sim if he would like the people who worked at City Hall to attend the landmark forum. He did not respond directly, merely saying he would love city team members to have real conversations.

Speaker 2 And of course the best system for having a real conversation is this one that i've been into you know so i would love for our city our city team members to not be afraid it sounds like there's a little bit of fear at city hall right now and it's been politicized city hall's been politicized and we've got to change that we got to change that someone who works at city hall should be able to actually work there and not worry what a politician thinks and do what's right for the city it shouldn't be based on ideology it should be based on what's right for the city No one should ever be afraid to work at the city based on their views.

Speaker 1 What is the kind of supposed culture of fear in Vancouver City Hall that he's going to sort of like wellness his way out of?

Speaker 3 I think what he's talking about is that if you want to work for the city and you believe, for instance, that homeless people should be rounded up in a giant butterfly net and thrown into a giant Vitamix and turned into fertilizer, that you shouldn't be afraid that people will get mad at you for that.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 That too can be radical candor as well. Yeah.
Like you can have those kind of like open, honest conversations about what flavor of malt do you think homeless people should be turned into, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I also got to mention that Landmark has been sued by Scientology several times because Scientology considers it a squirrel, which is like their word.

Speaker 1 Getting sued for Scientology, by Scientology for biting Scientology.

Speaker 3 Yes, they consider it a stolen tech. And

Speaker 3 there are a bunch of different organizations. Landmark being the key one in the 2000s.

Speaker 1 They were really going after landmark so fantastic yeah okay just like what what your actual cult being like actually i think your song sounds a lot like the chords in my song exactly so ken gets into politics in 2018 and he joins a party called the non-partisan association now here's just really really really embarrassing it's like we got tom cruise on this side And then, and you're sort of like, as Pepsi, okay, you've got Ken Sim and the Lululemon guy.

Speaker 1 And Gary Tan.

Speaker 1 It's like if you're going to be a cult slave for somebody, being Tom Cruise's slave is at least, at least it's Tom Cruise, right? Like he's in movies and stuff.

Speaker 1 If you're working sort of like 20-hour days,

Speaker 1 like scrubbing boots or whatever for the Lululemon guy,

Speaker 1 that's a separate degradation on top of the slavery. Yeah, like if I'm Tom Cruise's slave, I'm in an airplane hangar and some days I get to see an airplane take off and that's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 If I'm a slave to the Lululemon guy, what I'm seeing someone fold some pants. It's like, what's the point of of that?

Speaker 1 Plus, like, every time Tom Cruise does a Mission Impossible movie, there's a chance that

Speaker 1 your owner might die, which is so like you're

Speaker 1 kind of on tender hooks for that. Because what if he falls off the fucking plane?

Speaker 1 And then every time he doesn't, you get a little kind of like boost of reassurance that maybe he actually is just a kind of like ascended Setan or whatever, and he is better than you.

Speaker 1 And the plane goes up, and you look at the exit of the airplane hangar that you have to scrub boots in, and you realize you could, you could leave, but what's that in the way?

Speaker 1 The widest, the widest card. this was l ron hubbard's card table

Speaker 1 so it's bowing in the middle because it's so long

Speaker 1 the scene from the master where he goes to confront philip seymour hoffman in england and he's just got the like very ornate english card table set up in front of the door are you an animal freddy are you an animal while he sings in the hole of slowboat to china it's a good movie it's a good movie i want to fold i want to fold you on a slowboat to china yeah

Speaker 2 so so the Ken Sim joins his first political party in 2018, the Non-Partisan Association. Now, Maddie in November.

Speaker 2 I want you to guess for me. Okay.
When was the Non-Partisan Association founded?

Speaker 1 He ran on it in 2022, you said?

Speaker 1 That's an interesting

Speaker 1 question.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. Well,

Speaker 1 you've just told me

Speaker 1 I was going to go in a different direction and say like 1868.

Speaker 2 He joined it in 2018. When was it founded?

Speaker 1 I would say it was founded in 1867 when Gassy Jack Deaton, a Yorkshire seaman, steamboat captain and barkeep, arrived to open the first saloon in Vancouver.

Speaker 3 Oh, Gassy Jack.

Speaker 2 Okay, so. You're a mean one, Gassy.

Speaker 2 Whenever I hear something like the non-partisan association, I always think, oh, a political party that was invented in 2012

Speaker 2 by local businessmen in order to try to run the city like a business.

Speaker 1 I'm closer to being right, aren't I? It was the steamboat man.

Speaker 2 It is the major, or was for like a century, the major local political force in Vancouver. It was started in 1937.

Speaker 1 The Vancouver Machine?

Speaker 2 That's the Vancouver Machine is a non-partisan association of like businessmen who think that they know best.

Speaker 1 It was founded to challenge the Democratic Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. I know we live, we live on top of the ruins of like every socialist project, but Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 I can't believe that sounds so partisan to me.

Speaker 1 No, it's non-partisan. It's right there in the name.

Speaker 1 Okay. Okay, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 One of these guys is like Catholic. So it's non-partisan.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 In March 2018, right, Sim gets a call from Greg Baker, who's the president of the NPA at the time, a high school acquaintance, but like on behalf of Chip Wilson, who basically runs the thing.

Speaker 2 And he says, I hadn't spoken to Greg in maybe 30 years. So I guess he was calling about one thing.

Speaker 2 Wilson said in Vancouver magazine of his pet mayor, quote, we should be so thankful to get somebody that's run a profitable business and understands organizational structures.

Speaker 2 To have someone someone like Ken, who has all that, knows how to motivate people, is a dream come true.

Speaker 1 So he said, Yeah, you should see it as like welding people into oil drums technique. It's crazy.

Speaker 2 Sim said, this is deeply personal. I'm not a career politician.
I'm just a concerned resident who believes that Vancouver has a brighter future ahead for all of us.

Speaker 1 Why does everything he says make me feel like I am a cow being led up a ramp into a slaughterhouse? Why is this motherfucker's dialogue written by Temple Grandin?

Speaker 1 I feel like I'm being put at my ease. Like,

Speaker 1 I'm concerned by this. Yeah, just look, just look right here while I put this cylinder against your forehead.
It's not a big deal. It'll be

Speaker 1 never mind the bolt gun.

Speaker 2 Look right here while I put this very relaxing cylinder against your forehead.

Speaker 1 It's going to help you.

Speaker 2 It cures headaches.

Speaker 1 It feels quite cool, doesn't it? What did you say?

Speaker 1 You'll find escape is quite impossible as I block the exits with several card tables.

Speaker 2 So Sim is the father of four boys, and he says, look, my children don't see a future for themselves in Vancouver.

Speaker 2 So when he announces candidacy, he then said, I was born and raised here, and those that know me know that I've always been deeply passionate about this city, its residents, and the issues that impact us.

Speaker 1 His four boys,

Speaker 1 I'm presuming here, don't see a future for themselves in Vancouver, in his telling, not because of the walking fees or the kind of air-breathing fees, but because they might see a homeless guy.

Speaker 1 Correct. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 By the way,

Speaker 2 when he does become mayor, he says, now my boys do see a future for themselves in Vancouver. This is when he announces that he wants to get Vancouver into Bitcoin in 2020.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, so far, so Californian, in the sense that this has a kind of shared West Coast thing of like, we're going to use very kind of like reassuring language and then also sort of like text the police chief in a way that is later subpoenaed to be like, hey, I saw a homeless guy from the window of this restaurant.

Speaker 1 Please kill. Yeah.

Speaker 2 This is exactly correct. This is like a West.

Speaker 2 I I think that it's like, I always say that North America culturally goes in vertical slices rather than just so much like between the US and Canada, or at least like it had for a long time that sort of changed.

Speaker 1 There is definitely, it strikes me, a shared kind of BC California

Speaker 1 commonality there.

Speaker 2 100%.

Speaker 2 And because when his four boys do say that they finally can imagine a future in Vancouver, they all want to get into decentralized finance.

Speaker 1 This being Canada, this was, of course, called something like the four boys scandal.

Speaker 1 And like every newspaper has a headline that's like, interview with the four boys, and it's capitalized, like you're supposed to know who this is, and this isn't a silly thing to say.

Speaker 3 Two Michaels, four, four.

Speaker 1 There we go. I was going to say, they're all named Michael.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 These are the four Michaels, not to be confused with the brave two Michaels.

Speaker 2 Doubled the Michael budget.

Speaker 1 Do the Michaels ever get returned? Yeah, the Michaels are back. Okay, the Michaels.
Okay, just, I don't want to derail us completely. I just was just curious why I had you guys on the line here.

Speaker 3 Nanny, would you believe that so the Michaels turned on each other in court. And one of the Michaels, Michael,

Speaker 1 the Michaels broke up.

Speaker 3 Yeah, one of the Michaels was like, actually, this guy is a fucking spy and he recruited me.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 3 they turned on each other in court. And then the one who got accused of being the spy master, who worked for General Affairs Canada,

Speaker 1 now has a job

Speaker 3 being like, China is dangerous. And I would know because they put me in jail, but not for spying.

Speaker 1 I would know. I'm one of the Michaels.
Yeah, a nation lends its thanks to at least one Michael, probably the Michael who works for the Michael Institute,

Speaker 1 which is a think tank that exists to warn you about China and is definitely not a kind of jobs program for a former CSAS guy. A jobs program for Michaels.

Speaker 2 Michaels divided against themselves cannot stand.

Speaker 1 It turned brother against brother, Michael against Michael.

Speaker 1 Four boys, all alike in dignity.

Speaker 1 I'm going to use documentary banjo over the like, dearest Martha, the weather here is intolerable, and we have been engaged in trench combat with my fellow Michaels.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'm placing a card table between us and the Michaels bit. I need to, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 We got to move.

Speaker 1 We got to move on.

Speaker 2 So, Sim positioned himself as fiscally responsible but socially progressive, arguing, quote, City Hall is being run based on ideology, and that's not right.

Speaker 2 He then said immediately, I will be the most business-friendly mayor of Vancouver has ever seen.

Speaker 1 Bright primary colors, but in a soft way, lots of curved walls so you can't see around like harsh corners.

Speaker 1 You know, like,

Speaker 1 I feel good about this guy, and I believe him that he's going to be socially liberal in a way that I care about. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So he lost by 900 votes in 2018. And he says, I didn't lose, I learned.
And that's a big distinction. You lose if you quit, and I don't quit.

Speaker 1 Also, the funny thing is, that's apathetic. All right, I know exactly the kind of guy he is after saying, I didn't didn't lose, I learned.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, he's a stupid.

Speaker 1 He's a classic stupid.

Speaker 1 He's a classic stupid.

Speaker 2 So after the election loss, the NPA goes kind of crazy because the rebel media does entryism on it.

Speaker 2 So basically, like the Vancouver version of the Conservative Party gets taken over by Ezra Levant, essentially.

Speaker 2 And then Ken leaves because the NPA is taken over by like a local political party whose primary concern is like transphobia. Yes.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And immigrants. Yeah.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Very, very original guys. Yeah.
All right. Ken Sim,

Speaker 1 less transphobic than expected, but perhaps only in the sense that trans women are easier to get into cults.

Speaker 2 So I think he basically leaves the NPA just because he's set up to be the golden boy of a different kind of political tendency. Like all of his wealthy backers still like the NPA.

Speaker 2 It's just that's not how he markets himself.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So this is from a Global Mail article from the Time.

Speaker 2 In a board election two weeks ago, several people with apparent conservative partisan backgrounds were elected directors of the NPA, including one who worked until 2017 with Rebel Media.

Speaker 1 They're going to have to call her the PA at this point.

Speaker 2 The president of the BC Conservative Party, which is to the right of the Federal Conservative Party, and two who are linked to socially conservative movements that oppose sexual orientation and gender-inclusive policies that have become hot-button topics for BC school boards.

Speaker 2 So they've gotten consumed by like culture war stuff.

Speaker 2 And the NPA is now like eating itself from within. It still is.

Speaker 3 And let's just say that

Speaker 3 also the reason that people in British boomers in British Columbia got consumed by the culture war is because the same organizations that are backing the BC Conservative Party are also backing op-ed columnists who are publishing, hey,

Speaker 3 have you guys heard about this bathroom, these bathroom sitcos for years?

Speaker 3 So they really like set the stage for it.

Speaker 3 It's like a totally manufactured panic.

Speaker 2 There's only one British Columbia opinion columnist I want to hear from, and that's the man who decides what's a beef and what's a bouquet.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Nanaimo news.

Speaker 1 Sorry?

Speaker 3 I can explain this quickly, but so there is a there is a town on Vancouver Island called Nanaimo that is basically like a tiny microcosm of all of the political tensions and social problems and material problems that happen in Vancouver, including a massively outsized unhoused population and a real estate bubble.

Speaker 3 And that newspaper publishes something called beefs and bouquets, which boomers love to write into.

Speaker 3 So if you want to give somebody a bouquet, you can be like, ah, bouquet to the officer who came and clubbed the vagrant who was on my lawn.

Speaker 3 And you can send a beef to like the mayor being like,

Speaker 3 it's bad that you're allowing the one world government into Nanaimo and you should be killed with an assault rifle.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 It's the Ken Brockman cheers and jeers. Yes.
Right. Yeah.
Yes, but in a much, much stranger vernacular. Yeah.
Yeah. The opposite of the opposite of a bouquet of flowers, of course, is a beef.
A beef.

Speaker 1 That's a big side of beef. Yeah.
A side of beef. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So after stepping away from the NPA, Sim creates a party called A Better City Vancouver and brings within three current city councilors, one of whom is called Rebecca Bly, who is a fellow landmark forum person.

Speaker 2 So the party positions itself as a modern inclusive party with supporters from across the political spectrum.

Speaker 2 He runs against this guy, Kennedy Stewart, Stewart, a liberal technocrat who's overseeing multiple overlapping crises and finds himself unable to deal with them.

Speaker 1 I'm seeing double here, two liberal technocrats.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know what this is? This is like, what if Andrew Yang actually managed to get elected?

Speaker 3 Holy shit.

Speaker 1 Kind of, right? Kind of wait, dude.

Speaker 2 Yeah, kind of. Yeah.
So, how does he get elected? It tells a story of an embattled police department that's been completely defunded, beset on all sides by dangerous homeless people.

Speaker 1 Every day, a VPD officer is

Speaker 1 like hit with a mortar round, fired by a homeless person and killed.

Speaker 3 I'm going to jump in here and just give a little background on the VPD very quickly. So this is the same

Speaker 3 police force that during the 1990s, late 1990s, when I lived in Vancouver,

Speaker 3 stymied an RCMP investigation into the largest mass murder of mostly Indigenous women in Canada's history, not done by the government. So like the VPD basically.

Speaker 1 How bad do you have to be into murdering Indigenous Indigenous women to be too into murdering Indigenous women for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, one of the biggest enthusiasts of that activity in Canadian history?

Speaker 3 That's what I'm saying, November. And yeah, the VPD actively tried to destroy a lot of their evidence that they had gathered and just like stymie the Fed from coming in.
So that's the VPD. This is...

Speaker 1 This is, I'm getting the sort of sense there of like, you know, when the British Army sent

Speaker 1 like officers to help the like white Russian, like anti-Soviet forces in the Russian Civil War, and they went, hey, these guys are too anti-Semitic for us.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 So the campaign focuses particularly on random stranger attacks, right? Where it's like, Sims, like, you could be attacked by any random stranger if you're walking around anywhere in Vancouver.

Speaker 2 It's the most dangerous place in the world.

Speaker 1 It's a healthy, healthy way to think about life and to go through stuff. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 And he, so his signature campaign promise was 100/100, which was 100 new police officers and 100 mental health nurses.

Speaker 1 Oh, so it's balanced. You know, it's neither left nor right.

Speaker 3 The mental health nurses are for the police officers to.

Speaker 2 So 104 officers are hired. These are mostly positions vacant from previous years.
10 nurses were hired. And they weren't even nurses.
They were just like mental offices.

Speaker 1 Well, it's kind of like, well, think about this. There's a lot of cop movies.
People want to drive the fast car with the lights and the sirens and stuff.

Speaker 1 People don't want to be nurses because this is not as fun.

Speaker 2 Chip Wilson actually funds a cop movie, a documentary called Vancouver is Dying, that basically says any that the policies to like not have drug users kill themselves through safe supply and stuff is creating rampant violence that a defunded police department is unable to combat.

Speaker 2 And by the way, just so you know how in the pocket of Chip Wilson Ken Sim is, Ken Sim declared October 3rd, 2024 as Chip Wilson Day in Vancouver.

Speaker 1 Hey, hey, everybody. Today is Ask Chip Wilson why he named his company that day.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 We've created a special holiday for the master.

Speaker 1 Walking down the hill from Dracula's castle and addressing all the peasants, like, guys, you're never going to believe what holiday this is. I think it's really funny.

Speaker 1 I'm now picturing him in my head because

Speaker 1 I don't think of this guy based on the kind of West Coast culture and the kind of technocracy thing as being like a suit and tie kind of mayor, but more of like a

Speaker 1 vest or like open like collared shirt kind of mare patagonia yeah but what i'm what i'm now picturing with that is a pair of like pleated dress yoga pants

Speaker 1 he's in a formal lululemon uniform it's got epaulets he's he's wearing he's wearing the pleated the pleated yoga pants and um you know the like orthopaedic oxfords that biden used to wear with the sneaker sole yeah those as well yeah

Speaker 1 and that's how everyone in business is going to dress in like 2050. it's going to be terrible it's going to make you want to kill yourself he's got a blazer made of yoga pant material with epaulettes.

Speaker 1 He's wearing a little hat. It's the Lou Lemon Praetorian guard outfit and you can't get it and you can't buy it online.

Speaker 2 So when he's elected mayor, he immediately starts, again, like doing all the things that you would expect him to do. He tries to slash spending.

Speaker 2 He tries to like take away like grants from like the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. Like a business.
He like closes safe supply.

Speaker 2 He promises never to raise taxes and raise his property taxes every year.

Speaker 1 Turning homeless guy into mailbox shit. Yeah, sure.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 But also, he does a lot of weird stuff because he's so landmark foreign-brained.

Speaker 2 Like, he'd be getting interviewed by a journalist, and he would just, like, get changed in front of the journalist who's interviewing him.

Speaker 1 He's got to get out of his, like, sort of number one Lululemon uniform and into his number two Lululemon uniform.

Speaker 2 Well, he's got to get out from his dress Lululemon blues into his mess wear.

Speaker 2 So he also, he famously converted the conference room in City Hall into a personal gym.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I believe when we started the podcast, we received 45,000 emails a day being like, did you know Ken Sim turned the part of City Hall into a gym in an email to us? Like every day for months.

Speaker 1 So now you've addressed that.

Speaker 2 So Green Party counselor Pete Fry happened to peek into the room, which had, this is a quote from Press, which had previously used for meeting delegations to City Hall and found it had been converted into a gym with a Peloton and a weight bench.

Speaker 1 Weird. I think he was like trying to weld himself inside an oil drum in there.

Speaker 1 He was getting into an oil drum and he placed a card table on top of it.

Speaker 2 That's Houdini. That's landmark Houdini.
How will I get out of this one?

Speaker 1 Just like, oh,

Speaker 1 I could get out of the oil drum, but like, it's going to push the card table off. It's going to make a noise.

Speaker 2 So the previous room is part of what's known as the mayor's suite, according to this statement. And it was turned into a gym with equipment that Sim says he purchased with his own money.

Speaker 1 It's part of the mayor's quarters.

Speaker 1 And as by virtue of his rank, he's entitled to have a kind of Lululemon sea org with a bunch of like naval sort of inflected uniforms and a bunch of sort of like he's he's he's actually allowed to have kind of cult slaves.

Speaker 1 It's in the charter about the steamship guy.

Speaker 2 He says health and well-being are crucial and this setup allows me to stay focused and energized against a demanding schedule. He is a stupid.

Speaker 1 Getting a kind of like the Vancouver Museum and Archives mixes up an original letter by Gassy steamboat guy and like one of the Zodiac letters from Zodiac that they had for some reason.

Speaker 1 And the founding charter of Vancouver just becomes about acquiring slaves to serve you in the afterlife

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 people don't know this but every west coast city has a zodiac

Speaker 1 yeah the stephen the stephen finch of vancouver zodiac movie is a very different time but it's not necessarily a worse one yeah i'm seattle zodiac i'm a little bit more laid back

Speaker 1 yeah i'm the i'm the portland zodiac and i'm actually like a stripper on the weekend i i don't like that the portland zodiac was played by fred armiston i don't think that was appropriate the san diego zodiac movie has has a lot of Blinkwin82 on the soundtrack, and I don't love it.

Speaker 2 I'm the Orange County Zodiac. No, I'm the Orange County Zodiac.
No, I'm the Orange County Zodiac.

Speaker 1 When you say every West Coast city, does Ensenada have a Zodiac? I actually don't answer that. Yes, it does.

Speaker 2 Wait, wouldn't that mean that like Anchorage has a Zodiac and it's Sarah Patelic position?

Speaker 1 Anchorage did have a Zodiac, and it was that guy who, like the RCMP, loved murdering indigenous women. So, yeah.
Oh, no.

Speaker 2 I thought I was going to say something fun. It was a callback to the mattress episode.
Turns out it wasn't. No, sorry.

Speaker 1 Sorry. Same with the Ensenada one is realizing you know too much about like murders, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So anyway, the other thing is he is, that's like, that's a stupid opinion to be like having a gym in my office is, you know what else it was funny?

Speaker 2 It was a, it was reported in the news when he was finally forced to close his office gym, Mayor N's controversial health initiative.

Speaker 1 I mean, the health initiative was his health, but you can't say that's not the health initiative. I didn't say mayor's health initiative.
I said mayor's health initiative.

Speaker 1 The mayoral test on physical fitness.

Speaker 3 It's because he was losing ranking on the big board that Chip Wilson has in his fucking castle. It's like, I got to get my fucking BMI down for the master, otherwise he's going to put me in the pit.

Speaker 1 The Renfield board. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All my Renfields.

Speaker 2 He is a classic stupid. Like, he has a countdown clock that tracks hours, days, like from the game show and seconds until the next election.

Speaker 2 So it's like 717 days, 10 hours, 35 minutes, and 38 seconds. I have that for two reasons.
One, that bookmarks the date of the election.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 And second reason?

Speaker 2 Second reason, we're running at 100 miles an hour. And there are a lot of politicians who believe you need to slow down and save stuff and save stuff for the future.
We're not doing that.

Speaker 2 It's like, yeah, a lot of politicians are like, I'll never govern.

Speaker 1 Whereas we, we're governing.

Speaker 3 That clock is connected directly to his central nervous system via like tiny monofilament wires. And if he loses the election, Chip Wilson's going to press a big button that disintegrates him.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's doing neuromancer shit. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 So he's also deeply evil, of course.

Speaker 1 No, what? This guy?

Speaker 2 So the moment they got in. He's even fine until just now.
They eliminated the city's renter's office. They abandoned Vancouver's living wage certification as an employer.
Yes.

Speaker 2 He takes, like I mentioned, he takes away like arts grants, like art therapy for drug users and stuff, takes that away and says it's a privilege, not a right to be able to do business with the city of Vancouver.

Speaker 2 And that's the type of culture you want to lead here while I'm in office.

Speaker 1 This is so Gavin Newsome again.

Speaker 1 It's so

Speaker 1 Californian. It's so West Coast.
It's so how much teeth grinding, ostensible wokeness can I bolster this sort of like raid on everything that makes my city livable with? Oh,

Speaker 2 wait till you hear what I have to say next, November.

Speaker 1 Oh, is it about the wokeness? Is it about my wokeness?

Speaker 2 Hold on to something. Genuinely hold on to something.
Okay. All of you listening,

Speaker 2 grab on to something sturdy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, brace positions. Okay.
I'm putting my head between myself.

Speaker 2 This is when he's justifying clearing hundreds, thousands of people out of an encampment in East Hastings.

Speaker 2 Things have reached a turning point in the encampment zone.

Speaker 2 Every day, city officials are hearing new and sometimes horrific stories regarding theft, vandalism, and violence against women, many of them BIPOC.

Speaker 1 You sick motherfucker.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Sorry.

Speaker 1 I'm buying a gun and renting a car.

Speaker 1 I mean, listen, I've been building this one up through the, you know, sort of disgust for VPD and also disgust for this guy over lesser stuff. But like, there's the,

Speaker 1 this is your kind of like best option as far as technocracy goes is guy who is going to cynically leverage any identity he can find into uh legitimizing, like bulldozing a homeless encounter. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hey, dude, just just a quick question.

Speaker 1 Does anyone have any data about like vulnerability of women and girls, some of them BIPOC, to becoming unhoused?

Speaker 2 Oh, thank you for asking, November.

Speaker 2 Yeah, an unhoused person is a middle-aged white man with a beard who either has a top hat with the top popped off and tells charming stories, which is the good kind of homeless person who travels through town and then leaves.

Speaker 1 Sure. You're hobo, if you will.

Speaker 1 Sort of a 19th century Krusty.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then the other type of homeless person is also a middle-aged white man, but who has a beard, carries a weapon, and is sort of ranting and raving at you and will attack you as a random stranger.

Speaker 1 I'm sick of being abused and victimized and oppressed by these homeless people who have had it too good for too long.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what I hate is when I see one of the violent, bad kind of homeless people on the street and the cops roll by and he puts a barrel on over what he's wearing already to trick the cops into thinking that he's a friendly like fun kind.

Speaker 3 Sometimes they'll have like a ukulele or a banjo or a guitar with them because

Speaker 3 you've got your singing hobo and then you've got your stabbing hobo.

Speaker 1 Never see a hobo with a cork.

Speaker 1 The other thing that strikes me is

Speaker 1 if I'm being sort of like abused for my BIPOCness or whatever.

Speaker 1 or like abused as a woman and girls

Speaker 1 by a homeless person, what I want then is to obviously have that person sort of like beaten and tortured in some way, but ideally I want that done by a very like woke institution that's going to respect my pronouns and my identity and all of that, which is why I put that trust in the Vancouver Police Department.

Speaker 3 I just got to add, November, would you believe that in Nanaimo, the small town that has all the problems of Vancouver,

Speaker 3 one of the key reasons that they did not provide, the city did not provide temporary shelters after they bulldozed the homeless community was they were like we got to look out for the women and the girls women protecting women and girls is so important we've got to protect the women and the girls so we cannot we cannot build temporary shelters because we have no way of separating these two groups out from each other so we're just going to let them sleep on the street and get arrested yeah yeah well because that's you know then the police can protect the women and girls

Speaker 2 they love doing that they love to do it i guess if you can't do any of that i suppose one of the better things to do would be to build lots of supportive housing so that people can at least go live in it.

Speaker 2 But of the hundreds of people that were cleared away, only 18 were given supportive housing.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, those were the 18 who passed the kind of basic level of wokeness test.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Those are the 18 like singin' ones.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But then immediately after, the ABC banned the construction of new supportive housing in Vancouver.

Speaker 1 The wokeness test that you've got to do to get into supported housing. It's like, guess my pronouns.
And it's kind of a Kobe Yashi Maru, right?

Speaker 1 Because like, if you get them wrong, then you fail, but like, obviously, if you get them right, you've also just assumed them. So, really, we can kind of get you coming and going on that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you need to be like a Zen master where you have to just like absorb and reflect the question, yeah.

Speaker 1 You have to accept like not like not knowing, but also not do that in a way that's disrespectful. And that's when I start throwing out the Polaroids and the what ethnicity is this person questions.

Speaker 1 That's that's what that's when I get the calipers out. Uh,

Speaker 2 you start fossying the Polaroids at them like fucking ninja stars.

Speaker 2 So Chip Wilson commented on

Speaker 2 the clearances because he owns a company called Low Tide Project.

Speaker 2 So he argues that, quote, the move to clean up the East Side has been Sim's best so far.

Speaker 2 I think the issue is that there's too many people who are making salaries running charities dependent on the East Side staying exactly how it is. Sim echoed this language.

Speaker 2 For too long, he said, multiple levels of government have enabled and encouraged the concentration of supportive housing, shelter spaces, and dozens of social service nonprofit organizations in this neighborhood.

Speaker 1 It's all this bootstrapped, like learned helplessness shit that we know.

Speaker 3 It goes back to fucking Landmark. This makes me so fucking crazy.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 I grew up there and

Speaker 3 they've been trying to hone this fucking bullshit philosophy for as long as I've been alive. And Kevin and Sim has somehow managed to do it with the help of Landmark, which is that

Speaker 3 there's like a homelessness industrial complex that is somehow wrapped up.

Speaker 1 Big hobo. I mean, the thing is, right, like,

Speaker 1 I know that like I, the thing doesn't stand up by its own logic as kind of like table card table stakes at this point.

Speaker 1 But like, if you're supposed to be a technocracy guy, if you're supposed to be a technocrat, if you're supposed to be a data guy, does none of the kind of like decades of data?

Speaker 1 showing that your shit of like, you know, self-reliance, whatever, does not work and Big Hobo, the Hobo Industrial Complex, does. Is that just all Big Hobo's numbers to you?

Speaker 1 Or like, does that just not matter?

Speaker 2 Well, what Sim says is he says the poverty industrial complex has not only blocked local businesses from thriving, but has also created conditions that degrade the health and well-being of our most vulnerable community members.

Speaker 2 Then a confidential memo was leaked regarding Sim's plan for invigorating the downtown east side, which included a reunification roundtable with First Nations and other Indigenous groups to relocate them from the downtown east side to their home communities.

Speaker 3 Where are those home communities? That's the other thing. It's just like the province has allowed smaller towns in British Columbia to just wither and die.

Speaker 3 Like basically after the privatization of the logging industry,

Speaker 3 a lot of towns like my hometown, there's nowhere for people to go back to. There's no services.
There's nothing. So they have to go to the big city, you know?

Speaker 1 Well, exactly. If you're like a kind of internal refugee from Satellite colonialism, right?

Speaker 1 If you're like, if you came to sort of like the worst part of Vancouver to be homeless and sort of like live this kind of miserable existence being sort of like having the shit kicked out of you by the cops and the mayor all the time.

Speaker 1 How much worse was it where you came from that you chose that, you know?

Speaker 3 Sorry, there's the precedent in Canada for this too, which is just basically,

Speaker 3 you know, like taking the Inuit population who are traditionally like hunter-gatherer, nomadic, that go where the animals are and being like, hey, you're going to live in the northernmost part of Canada and you're going to stay there.

Speaker 3 You're not going to move around. Here's a bunch of rifles.
Good luck.

Speaker 1 You know, it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 After all this, the next thing Ken Sim does in public is he gets up on stage at the Catsolano Street Party, shotguns a beer, and then says this shows how much he wanted Vancouver to be a city with swag.

Speaker 1 I hate this guy.

Speaker 1 For real, like straight up.

Speaker 1 It's getting harder for me to do jokes about him because I hate him that much.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's going to get a big excavator and he's going to get, he's going to steal some of the swag emeralds from under Manhattan and he's going to start putting them under Vancouver.

Speaker 1 You know what those swag emeralds are as Pentict? That's right.

Speaker 2 Oh, totally.

Speaker 3 He'll have to battle two Greek brothers for them.

Speaker 1 Two Greek brothers and then their Greek mom.

Speaker 1 So he also, and their nephews.

Speaker 1 So he also

Speaker 2 completely eliminated this Vancouver Parks Board, which is one of these things that prevents like over construction in green spaces and stuff, which was considered just a total coup d'état by like Chip Wilson's real estate company.

Speaker 2 By 2024, you know, Vancouverites really don't like him, and he ends up at the last refuge of the scoundrel, which is Bitcoin.

Speaker 2 He passes a motion directing staff to convert the city's financial reserves into Bitcoin to accept cryptocurrency, a portion of them,

Speaker 2 to accept cryptocurrency for payments.

Speaker 1 He starts going because all of them would be like too obviously financially suicidal to be like, oh, yeah, the city of Vancouver needs a bailout from the provincial and federal government because it got wiped out when Valve changed the economy on Counter-Strike skin.

Speaker 1 Correct.

Speaker 2 So he also starts going on podcasts where he goes on a cryptocurrency talk show called Coin Stories.

Speaker 1 He says, Ken Sim, come on the show. I want to yell at you for about an hour.

Speaker 2 It would be irresponsible for the city of Vancouver to not look at the merits of adding Bitcoin to the city's strategic reserves. He explains the motivation was personal, like I said earlier.

Speaker 2 From a purely selfish perspective, I want my boys to continue to live here because two of my sons are interested in pursuing careers in cryptocurrency.

Speaker 1 I don't give a fuck about you or your boys. You're off to the business.
Fuck you and your stupid boys.

Speaker 2 So, but it's happening now, by way of concluding, is that ABC Vancouver's unprecedented clean sweep in 2022 has steadily been eroded. He's lost six counselors.

Speaker 2 He's lost six counselors to defections. He's lost a bunch of by-elections.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he lost Casey Blay, didn't he?

Speaker 1 He lost that one lesbian landmark.

Speaker 2 Rebecca Bly, and he did. He lost her.

Speaker 2 When he decided to not construct any new supportive housing in Vancouver, that was too far for Rebecca Bly, who said, hey, I don't agree.

Speaker 2 And so then the ABC released a statement saying, time and again, Councillor Bly has shown she's not a core fit with the ABC Vancouver.

Speaker 2 Rather than working to find common ground and advanced solutions, she's a suppressive party. She's chosen to put her own views ahead of the collective work of the team.

Speaker 2 And so now Rebecca Bly is running against Ken Sim to be mayor as part of a party, I believe, called Vancouver Votes or something like that.

Speaker 3 Alien versus fucking predator.

Speaker 1 Fuck the the most generic names like yeah it's it's the election is happening party vancouver votes yeah i sure hope it does uh so i i'm actually gonna i'm gonna check that what it what it is now uh vote vancouver

Speaker 2 that's the same that's exactly she's actually running against the vancouver votes party uh so ken ken sim by way of by way of wrapping up ken sim said you know There may have been some micro mistakes along the way.

Speaker 1 Don't you mean micro learnings?

Speaker 2 But I think the big one is that we did not communicate the need for property tax increases effectively.

Speaker 2 However, in an interview a few days before the recording of this episode, he did say that as a result of his term, Vancouver's, quote, swagger factor has gone up over the last three years with more activity and vibrancy in the city.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Is it swaggy to effectively run a bunch of homeless people out of town?

Speaker 3 They're not running them out of town.

Speaker 3 Let me talk about this new swag a little bit here.

Speaker 3 This is really like the terminus of

Speaker 3 Sim's tenure as mayor, is that all of these forces combined have somehow managed to convince the British Columbia NDP party to get on board with a conservative idea that was floated by Gary Tan, the Y combinator, San Francisco guy, who's got deep ties to Vancouver.

Speaker 3 And British Columbia is now going to force severely addicted and mentally ill people into what they call involuntary care, which means trying to open up decommissioned mental hospitals.

Speaker 3 And if they pick you up on the street, basically tying you to a bed. So that's where we're at.

Speaker 1 Going to the fucking Ken Sim gulag because

Speaker 1 your top hat was not sort of jaunty enough.

Speaker 2 Honestly, like... The thing about British Columbia is that British Columbia is a dark and evil place.

Speaker 1 Amen, bro.

Speaker 1 So I'm learning. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, I know a bit about kind of American settler colonialism, but like really in Canada, it feels like weirdly in some ways closer to the surface. And I'm not sure how to account for that.

Speaker 1 Oh, it absolutely is.

Speaker 3 100%. Less people.
It is.

Speaker 2 And yeah, and we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're better.

Speaker 1 Anyway, anyway, look. You've tricked many Americans into thinking you're better.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So look, here's the thing. Ken Sim, I hope you lose.

Speaker 2 I hope Vote Vancouver secures all 19 council seats that once belonged to ABC.

Speaker 2 But this was my mayor. Thank you very much, Dan, for helping me bring a little bit of those Vancouver vibes to the pod.
Thanks for watching.

Speaker 1 No problem, Dan. No problem.
Anything you'd like to plug, Dave?

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, I can plug a couple of things. First thing, I would plug Sean Warr, a Canadian...

Speaker 3 uh politician who got elected to city council um he's part of a left-wing coalition of progressive electors and um Sean,

Speaker 3 I don't want to say Wolf Parade playing in Vancouver helped him get elected, but he did open for us. So, you know.

Speaker 3 So support Sean if you live in the Vancouver.

Speaker 1 Would you say he's your sort of your Renfield?

Speaker 3 I would say I've got, you know, I wouldn't say he's a Renfield, but I've got a picture of him on a board, and it's got a number on it.

Speaker 1 You know, and I'm sure.

Speaker 1 And he knows what the number is.

Speaker 3 If you're listening to this, Sean, I'm watching you. I am.
And you're doing a good job so far. Also, I guess, what else can I plug? I have a Patreon where I put

Speaker 3 songs up and videos explaining albums that I've made and occasionally watch horror movies. So if you want to help me out, go over there and subscribe.

Speaker 1 Beautiful. I'll link it in the show notes.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 This was a free episode, by the way.

Speaker 2 This was a free episode. So check out our Patreon for another mayor.
Yeah. Who's mayor next week?

Speaker 1 Whose turn is it? November Calius. I have an answer for you.

Speaker 1 I have a beautiful, beautiful answer for you. So my mayor is going to be, I'm staying on the West Coast, Hiram Gill, mayor of Seattle, Washington.

Speaker 1 So we're finally going to find out about the Seattle Zodiac. Oh, this is, you know,

Speaker 1 I've got a book about early Seattle that I should read to bone up. It's called The Sons of the Prophets.
That's very...

Speaker 1 Let's go.

Speaker 1 Staying with my kind of old-timey Western nonsense. Hell yes.
All right.

Speaker 2 Well, check that out on the bonus feed next week. But until then, keep those sashes clean and stay municipal.

Speaker 1 We're not, we're not doing that. Are you trying to do that?

Speaker 1 I apologize for that right now.

Speaker 1 Hey, can you

Speaker 1 take that again on something better?

Speaker 2 No, I really have to go. I have dinner in three minutes and I have a chair for you.

Speaker 1 I'm hurling card tables out of the way. Okay.
Well, until next time, Riley has dinner in three minutes. Trap him in a riff right now, guys.

Speaker 1 Talk about the card.

Speaker 1 Okay. Bye.

Speaker 2 Bye, bye, bye. No, don't.
Hey, get that card table out of here.

Speaker 1 What are you doing? Get that card table out of the Maz's office.

Speaker 1 Bye. Bye.

Speaker 2 Mr. Gorbachev, remove this card table.

Speaker 1 What office?

Speaker 1 Okay, bye, bye, bye.

Speaker 1 Wait, that was Ken Lou Reagan said that.

Speaker 1 Bye.